Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions (Studies in Critical Social Sciences, 156) 9789004360365, 9789004400283, 9004360360

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Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions

Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor David Fasenfest (soas University of London) Editorial Board Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Duke University) Chris Chase-Dunn (University of California-Riverside) William Carroll (University of Victoria) Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney) Kimberle W. Crenshaw (University of California, LA, and Columbia University) Raju Das (York University) Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University) Karin Gottschall (University of Bremen) Alfredo Saad-Filho (King’s College London) Chizuko Ueno (University of Tokyo) Sylvia Walby (Lancaster University)

VOLUME 156

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss

Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions Prospects for a Critical Sociology Edited by

Tamás Demeter

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: By Iván Szelényi; modified by Deodáth Zuh. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Demeter, Tamás, editor. Title: Intellectuals, inequalities and transitions : prospects for a critical sociology / edited by Tamás Demeter. Description: Boston : Brill, 2020. | Series: Studies in critical social sciences, 1573-4234 ; Volume 156 | Includes index. | Summary: "This volume is devoted to the central themes in Iván Szelényi's sociological oeuvre comprising of empirical explorations and their theoretical refinement in the last 50 years. The contributors have been asked to take interpretive and critical stances on his work, and to clarify the relevance of his insights. Iván Szelényi has been asked to write a concluding chapter, and respond to the present reflections on his work. The ensuing volume discusses Szelényi's captivating scholarship as being grounded in a complex program for the political economy of socialisms and post-socialist capitalisms, and introduces him as a neoclassical sociologist whose research projects continue to investigate inequalities created by the interaction of markets and redistributive structures in various societies. Contributors include: Dorothee Bohle, Tamás Demeter, Gil Eyal, Béla Greskovits, Michael Kennedy, Tamás Kolosi, Karmo Kroos, Victor Nee, David Ost, Iván Szelényi, Bruce Western"-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019040119 (print) | LCCN 2019040120 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004360365 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004400283 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Critical theory. | Economic policy. | Szelényi, Iván--Political and social views. Classification: LCC HM480 .I58 2020 (print) | LCC HM480 (ebook) | DDC 142--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040119 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040120

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1573-4234 ISBN 978-90-04-36036-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-40028-3 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Preface  VII Acknowledgement  IX List of Figures and Tables  X Notes on Contributors  XI 1

Futures Present: On the Concepts of “Intellectuals” and “Intelligentsia” in Iván Szelényi’s Oeuvre  1 Gil Eyal

2

Normative Frames and Systemic Imperatives: Gouldner, Szelényi and New Class Fracture  35 Michael D. Kennedy

3

New Class Theory as Sociology of Knowledge  52 Tamás Demeter

4

How to Become a Dominant or Even Iconic Central and East European Sociologist  69 Karmo Kroos

5

Inequality and Transitions: Human Frailty in a Sample of Prisoners  128 Bruce Western

6

Neoclassical Sociology Meets Polanyian Political Economy  146 Dorothee Bohle and Béla Greskovits

7

Mechanisms of Institutional Change  166 Victor Nee

8

Transitions and Structural Distortions  185 Tamás Kolosi

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9

The Ouvrierist Szelényi and the Missing Sociology of Labor  207 David Ost

10

Auto-critical Reflection on Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions   227 Iván Szelényi Name Index  253 Subject Index  255

Preface This volume is dedicated to the central themes in Iván Szelényi’s rich sociological oeuvre, in particular how they have been explored empirically and refined theoretically over the course of the past 50 years. The contributors were asked to take an interpretive and critical stance on his work, and to clarify the relevance of his theoretical and empirical insights. Iván Szelényi himself was asked to write a concluding chapter and to respond to the reflections contained in the present volume. In doing so, Szelényi has also provided concise summaries of the chapters, which is why we have opted not to include an additional overview in this introduction. Instead, we would like to outline the motivation for selecting the three focal points that determine the structure of this volume: intellectuals, inequalities and transitions. Although Szelényi’s work sprang from his empirical research in socialist societies, particularly Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s, it has always had a potentially much broader scope. As his subsequent impact testified, Szelényi not only helped to mitigate a lack of awareness about Eastern Europe in Western academia, but also acted as a rich source of conceptual and theoretical inspiration for sociological research on a global scale. Szelényi’s work, however, has not been a purely scholarly enterprise: he is a proponent of “critical sociology”—a sociology that not only improves society’s self-knowledge, but also c­ontributes to social reform by explaining and understanding non-­ transparent s­ ocial processes and structures, and by delineating the prospects for social improvement. The problem of intellectuals and their structural position inspired Szelényi’s most influential contribution to social theory: his version of a new class theory. His book The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, written together with George Konrad, offered an analysis of socialist societies based on a revised concept of class. It focused on the exercise of power over the distribution of economic surplus in society—a structurally necessary position in socialist economies characterized by central planning. This insight provided a critical perspective for unmasking socialist societies as class societies, despite all the ideological efforts to conceal their true nature. Szelényi, however, did not disguise his sympathies for new class projects: in his later work he offered detailed reconstructions of their history and analyzed their future potential for refinement. In his subsequent work, Szelényi revised and extended the theoretical framework of his new class theory in order to lay the conceptual groundwork for an analysis of social change in Eastern Europe. In their empirical work,

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Szelényi and his collaborators have shed light on how inequalities are produced and reproduced in a variety of socialisms and post-socialist capitalisms. Given Szelényi’s initial empirical interest in socialist urbanization and housing policy, his Hungarian research group studied the transition from totalitarian to bureaucratic socialism, before tracing the path of intellectuals to the helm of yet another iteration, namely that of rational redistributive socialism. With the assistance of another group of Hungarian researchers, Szelényi then identified market socialism as the fourth model of socialist regimes, in which the production of inequalities was no longer exclusively a matter of various redistributive practices, but partly a function of market relations, as manifested in the growth of agricultural family “businesses” in the socialist countryside. The construction of these four models of socialist regimes and the accompanying empirical analyses owe a great deal to one of the central methodological tenets of classical sociology, Max Weber’s program of conducting social research via ideal types. Together with his international collaborators, Szelényi pursued this line of investigation to study further transitions, this time among a variety of postsocialist capitalisms. First, they construed two ideal types, political and managerial post-socialist capitalism, and found that the latter offered a more ­relevant interpretive framework for the political economy of several “transition” countries in Central Europe in the 1990s. In addition, the models of neo-­ patrimonial and neo-prebendal post-socialist capitalism were successfully ­applied in the study of “transitions” further to the east, as well as for the purposes of explaining recent developments across the post-socialist world in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In studying these various transitions, Szelényi’s prime empirical focus has always been on the collective actors whose structural position is defined by their active participation in the (re)production of inequalities in the framework of a particular type of regime: socialist bureaucrats, socialist intellectuals, socialist entrepreneurs, neoliberal intellectuals, post-socialist manager entrepreneurs, the post-socialist grand bourgeoisie, neo-patrimonial and neoprebendal entrepreneurs, and of course, the political classes of a variety of ­socialisms and capitalisms. In addition to his emphasis on groups that are “positively privileged” by either redistribution or the market, Szelényi has also investigated the fate of those on the margins of society: groups that are “negatively privileged” along one or several of the chief dimensions of social inequality, such as ethnicity, poverty or gender. Ultimately, Szelényi’s captivating empirical and theoretical scholarship is grounded in a complex investigation of the political economy of socialisms and post-socialist capitalisms. This makes him a neoclassical sociologist whose research projects continue to highlight the inequalities created by the interaction of markets and redistributive structures in societies around the world.

Acknowledgement I am grateful to Katalin Füzér for her contribution to the editorial work on this collection and to the Preface and to Nóra Schultz for compiling the ­index. I am also grateful to the University of Pécs, Hungary, for supporting the conference, “Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions: Themes from Iván Szelényi,” which was held from October 15th to 17th, 2015. This volume contributes to the research project of the “Morals and Science” Research Group supported by the “Lendület” Programme of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Figures and Tables Figures 1.1

Frequency of the appearance of “public intellectual” in Google Books from 1980 to 2000  6 1.2 Schematic model of the intellectual field and intellectual trajectories  11 6.1 The Polanyian triad  155 7.1 The relationship between h and t when c = 3, l = 0 and f(b) is uniform  171 7.2 The relationship between c and t when h = 6.02, l = 0 and f(b) is uniform  171 7.3 The relationship between l and t when h = 6.02, c = 3 and f(b) is uniform  172 7.4 Reaching local tipping points  175 7.5 Network sequence trajectories of rational capitalist firms  177 7.6 Network sequence trajectories of traditional kin-based firms  178 7.7 Network sequence trajectories of hybrid non-kin firms  179

Tables 4.1 6.1 6.2 6.3 8.1 8.2 8.3

Szelényi’s publications categorized by research program  102 Marketization and social protection in East Central Europe: 1989–1995/1998  156 Marketization and social protection in East Central Europe: 1999–2006/2007  157 Average DNWs (days not worked, standardized for employment levels) in old, and new former socialist EU member states  158 Hungary’s social structure in comparison (%), 2002  198 Inequality indexes in comparison (%), 2014  199 Material deprivation indicators in comparison, 2014  200

Notes on Contributors Dorothee Bohle holds a Chair in Social and Political Change at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the European University Institute, Florence. Previously, she was a professor at Central European University, Budapest. Her research occupies the intersection between comparative politics and political economy, with a special focus on East Central Europe. She is the author of Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery (Cornell University Press, 2012, together with Béla Greskovits), which won the Stein Rokkan Prize in Comparative Research, and of Europe’s New Periphery: Poland’s Transformation and Transnational Integration (in German, Münster, 2002). Her publications have also appeared in ­Comparative Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, West ­European Politics, Journal of Democracy, European Journal of Sociology, and Review of International Political Economy, among others. Her current work looks at the policy and political responses to the Great Recession in a number of European peripheral countries. Tamás Demeter is the leader of the Morals and Science “Lendület” Research Group at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Professor at the Sociology Department of the University of Pécs. He has published widely on the sociological tradition of Hungarian philosophy and the historical-sociological context of early modern science and philosophy, most recently on "Hume on the Social Construction of Mathematical Knowledge", Synthese 196(9), 3615-3631. He is the author of David Hume and the Culture of Scottish Newtonianism: Methodology and Ideology in Enlightenment Inquiry (Brill, 2016), and co-editor with Kathryn Murphy and Claus Zittel of Conflicting Values of Inquiry: Ideologies of Epistemology in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2015). Gil Eyal is Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He is the author of (with Brendan Hart, Emine Onculer, Neta Oren and Natasha Rossi) The Autism ­Matrix: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic (Polity Press, June 2010); The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State (Stanford University Press, 2006); The Origins of Post-Communist Elites: From the Prague Spring to the Break-Up of Czechoslovakia (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and (with Iván Szelényi and Eleanor Townsley) of Making

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­ apitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-­ C Communist Central Europe (Verso, 1998). He is also the author of (with Larissa Buchholz) “From the Sociology of Intellectuals to the Sociology of Interventions,” Annual Review of Sociology, 36 (2010), 117–137; and “For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic,” AJS 118(4), 863–907. Béla Greskovits is University Professor at the Department of International Relations and the Department of Political Science at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. His research interests are the political economy of East-Central European capitalism, comparative economic development, social movements, and democratization. His articles appeared in Studies in Comparative and International Development, Labor History, Orbis, West European Politics, Competition and Change, Journal of Democracy, European Journal of Sociology, Global Policy, and Transfer: European Review of Labor and Research. His latest book Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery (Cornell University Press, 2012), written together with Dorothee Bohle, was awarded the 2013 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. Michael D. Kennedy is Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Throughout his career, Kennedy has addressed East European social movements, and systemic change. For the last 15 years, he has also worked in the sociology of public knowledge, global transformations, and cultural politics, focusing most recently on social movements, universities, and solidarity within and across nations. His book, Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities and Publics in Transformation (Stanford University Press, 2015) addresses those themes with extensions found here. Recent political transformations within the USA and across the world have moved him toward a more knowledge-focused cultural and public sociology, but in the coming decade, he will also research projections of identity and transformations of human and social capacity. Tamás Kolosi is founder and President of TÁRKI, the first private applied social science institute of the former socialist block (1985), Professor Emeritus at the Sociology Institute, Faculty of Social Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His research interests include social stratification, regime change and methodology. He was a guest professor at several Universities in Germany and ­participated in a number of international comparative research projects. Since 1990, he has also played important role in the Hungarian publishing industry.

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Karmo Kroos is Lecturer of Research Methods at Estonian Business School, Tallinn, Estonia. In addition to interest in research methods, including mixed and unconventional research methods, his research interests include the sociology of sociology, sociology of intellectuals and sociology of science. The contribution to this edited volume is based on his doctoral dissertation, Iván Szelényi’s Reflexive Sociology of Intellectuals: A Critical Meta-theory Analysis of Szelényi’s Work on the Relationship between Knowledge and Power. Victor Nee is the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor at Cornell University, and Director of the Economic Sociology Lab. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University. His books (co-authored) include The New Institutionalism in Sociology (Russell Sage Foundation, 1998; winner of the James Coleman Book Award, American Sociological Association, R&S), Remaking the American Mainstream (Harvard University Press, 2003; winner of the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, Eastern Sociological Society; and the Thomas and Znanieki Best Book Award, American Sociological Association, IM), Capitalism from Below (Harvard University Press, 2012; 2013 winner of the George R. Terry Best Book Award, Academy of Management). David Ost is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, and a frequent visiting professor in Poland. He has written widely on East European politics and society, with a focus on political economy, democratization, capitalism and labor. His books include Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics (Temple University Press, 1990), Workers After Workers’ States (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001), and The Defeat of Solidarity (Cornell University Press, 2005); and he is the editor of “Class After Communism,” a special issue of Eastern European Politics and Societies (2015). His ­articles have appeared in many scholarly and popular journals, such as East ­European Politics and Society, European Journal of Social Theory, Politics and Society, Theory and Society, European Journal of Industrial Relations, The Nation, Dissent, Telos, and Tikkun, and he is on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals in the US and Poland. Iván Szelényi is William Graham Sumner Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Yale University; and Max Weber Emeritus Professor of Social Sciences and Foundation Dean of Social Sciences at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an ordinary member of the

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Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He holds honorary degrees from Corvinus University, Budapest, Flinders University of South Australia–­Adelaide, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen–Nürnberg, Central European University, Budapest, and the European University Institute, Firenze. He is former President of the Hungarian Sociological Association and former Vice-President of the American Sociological Association. He is a recipient of the Luckmann Distinguished Teaching award from UCLA and the Széchenyi Prize, granted by the President of the Hungarian Republic, as well as an Honorary Citizen of the City of Budapest. He is author/co-author of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), Urban Inequalities under State Socialism (Oxford University Press, 1983), Socialist Entrepreneurs (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), Making Capitalism Without Capitalists (Verso, 1998) and Patterns of Exclusion (East European Monographs, 2006). Bruce Western is Professor of Sociology and co-director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University. His research examines trends in American economic inequality and the growth of the US penal population. These topics are joined by an interest in the shifting landscape of American poverty over the last 40 years. He is the author of Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2007) and served as Vice-Chair of a consensus panel of the National Academy of Sciences on the causes and consequences of high rates of incarceration in the United States. His new book is entitled Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison (Russell Sage Foundation, 2018).

Chapter 1

Futures Present: On the Concepts of “Intellectuals” and “Intelligentsia” in Iván Szelényi’s Oeuvre Gil Eyal The core problematic of Iván Szelényi’s work has been an interrogation of the social role of knowledge and of the (wo)men of knowledge in Central European societies. This investigation has simultaneously focused on “intellectuals” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1979) or the “intelligentsia” (Szelényi, 1982), terms which are, perhaps confusingly, used somewhat interchangeably. This chapter aims to critically reconstruct this problematic by means of a brief and admittedly schematic “conceptual history” (Begriffsgeschichte; Koselleck, 2004) of these two key terms—“intellectuals” and “intelligentsia”—with which Szelényi’s work has grappled over the last five decades. Let us begin with the concept of “intellectuals,” which is overall less relevant to Szelényi’s work. In fact, the title characters of Konrad and Szelényi’s The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power are peculiarly miscast, as the book really focused on “the intelligentsia on the road to class power.” “Marginal intellectuals” did make a cameo appearance in the narrative of the book, but only as one (especially unruly) fraction of the intelligentsia, in addition to serving as a device by which the authors positioned themselves reflexively within the story they were telling. One other reason why Szelényi has frequently used the term “intellectuals” has to do with the fact that “intelligentsia” has a specific meaning in the Eastern European context that cannot in good conscience be extended to an analysis of Western European and Anglo-American societies. In seeking to extend the analysis of the relations between knowledge and power beyond the Eastern European context, Szelényi has therefore made use of other terms, such as “new class” (King and Szelényi, 2004), or Bildungsbürgertum (Eyal, Szelényi and Townsley, 1998), but has also occasionally resorted to writing about “the intellectuals” in a manner similar to Gouldner (1979). Yet, in all these examples, the terms have been used to identify a group that is much broader than what are commonly understood to be “intellectuals.” To summarize in advance the argument of this chapter, the concept of “intellectuals,” recently and somewhat redundantly rebranded as “public intellectuals,” is too narrow and too freighted with historical meaning—in terms of decline and betrayal—to guide research on the role of knowledge and the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004400283_002

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knowledgeable in public affairs. While we should not abandon the term “intellectual” altogether, it currently hides more than it reveals. If we want to know who intervenes in public affairs, in what way and with what aims, we should not predetermine the answer in advance, as the concept of the “public intellectual” does. This would be a futile exercise. Instead, we should extract the enduring, fruitful and “rational core” of this concept, which is not a social type, but the move, the form of travel, by which knowledge is made the basis for intervening in public affairs, while discarding any extraneous and polemical baggage. Such a reconstruction of the concept of intellectuals yields an analytical framework for approaching the question of how interventions in public affairs are currently crafted, which also multiplies the relevant agencies, modes and targets of intervention. While the ironic dimension of Szelényi’s research program has kept it relatively immune to the self-aggrandizement of “intellectuals,” it has nevertheless been thoroughly infected by the historical meaning built into the concept of “intelligentsia.” This concept comes freighted with historical meanings of development and pre-figuration, a class in the making that stands for an emergent order. To put it in a nutshell, while “intellectuals” are congenitally in statu moriendi, the “intelligentsia” is always in statu nascendi and pre-figures what is yet to come. Once again, the rational core should be extracted from this concept, and the polemical baggage discarded. The enduring and fruitful core of the concept, as foreshadowed in Konrad and Szelényi’s (1979) analysis, is the claim to represent the future, to make the future present and pertinent for contemporary struggles. The analytical object is thus reconstructed from the “intelligentsia” as a class or a social substance, into a relational field of struggles between different strategies for making the future present, and for carving social positions from which the future could be made to count in present struggles. 1

On Scholarly Habitus

Before proceeding to a brief conceptual history of the term “intellectuals,” the debt that this part of the chapter owes to Szelényi must first be noted. The ironic dimension of Szelényi’s research program has not only made it immune to the fascination exercised by intellectuals on the gullible, but has also provided me with the wherewithal to relativize and ultimately reject it. This debt exists not necessarily at the level of theory, concepts or theses; it’s not about who’s right or wrong, but about scholarly habitus, and matters of taste and distaste. It pays homage to Szelényi as an intellectual gourmand from whom I

On the Concepts of “Intellectuals” and “Intelligentsia”

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learned how to “consume” theory. The most important thing that one absorbs when working with a true mentor such as Szelényi takes place at this level of habitus, like a trained gut reaction, so to speak. Countless times I have observed how students flocked to Szelényi because they were fascinated with intellectuals; because they wanted to become a little more like intellectuals themselves by studying them; or because they wanted to immerse themselves in a world populated by intellectuals (and never have to leave). This is a wellknown maturational disease. Once they had encountered Szelényi, he administered his ironic cure. Most survived it and absorbed a healthy measure of skepticism and realism that inoculated them as they went on their different ways. They came in as “critical critics” and left as good empiricists. I also absorbed this habit of mind from Szelenyi, which is also a bodily habit, a certain suspicion and even distaste for the self-aggrandizing posture of would-be public intellectuals. At the same time, however, this habit of mind and of body necessarily must become reflexive, by turning its gaze, or better still its goût (its discriminating appetite), upon itself to recognize the no less distasteful ressentiment of the dusty, reclusive, world-fearing scholar against the flashy orator in the public square. Ironic distaste could not be a justification for ­recoiling from involvement, from intervening in public affairs when such an intervention is so clearly necessary. And anybody who knows Szelényi knows that he does not recoil from involvement when it is the call of the day, whether it be in Budapest or in Abu Dhabi. Hence the question emerges: how to intervene without being a “public intellectual”? The first part of this chapter is an attempt to give conceptual shape to this question, to this habitus, this matter of taste; a somewhat different conceptual shape than Szelényi gave to it in the past, but nonetheless one that remains oriented towards the oppositions of his scholarly habitus. 2

Intellectuals First and Last

The idea of the “intellectual” has a long and ambiguous pedigree. As Charle (1998) put it, the idea is “essentially historical” and constitutes a category of historical memory. It is not a concept that can be picked up ready-made and used for analytical purposes. The term can, of course, be used for practical and strategic purposes, but this requires an awareness of the long history of its uses and abuses, and of the set of mechanisms and assumptions that are activated every time it is deployed. These are mechanisms of defamation and celebration, of self-definition and counter-definition—in short, of boundary work (Gieryn, 1999) and classificatory

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struggle (Bourdieu, 1990). It is instructive to know that the term intellectuel was first coined during the Dreyfus affair—not for analytical or diagnostic purposes, but as a political insult. “To be ‘intellectuel’ meant to be ‘dreyfusard,’ that is a person who pretends to uphold things that the majority of the French refuse” (Charle, 1998). The insult, however, was embraced by those it targeted, and turned into a mobilizing device, a rallying call designed to bring into being and demarcate the boundaries of the category thus named (Bauman, 1987, pp. 2–8). Those who issued the call—Zola, Clemenceau, Anatole France, Poincaré, Durkheim—considered themselves to be its best representatives and addressed themselves to the like-minded. The laudatory term they invented continues to be worn as a badge of honor today, just as its original derogatory meaning is still activated at times. The later career of the concept involved a continuous tangle between those who wanted to adapt it to changing historical circumstances, by giving it objective analytical meaning and extending it to wider circles of the educated (i.e., a meaning similar to “intelligentsia”) and those who sought to redraw the boundary between who does and does not count as a “true” intellectual based on the traditional meaning, namely the preserved historical memory of the intellectuels. This boundary work often took the form of accusations that the intellectuals had betrayed their “true” mission (Benda, 1927/1928), and ultimately ­informed a problematic of allegiance that pervaded all later attempts to endow the concept with objective analytical meaning. As this problematic has been described elsewhere (Eyal and Buchholz, 2010), and given that the second part of the chapter will pick up the thread regarding the “intelligentsia,” only its most distinctive characteristics shall be noted here. The shared question behind all these approaches has been about a social type and its ultimate interests: Who are the intellectuals and to whom or to what do they owe allegiance? This includes accusations of partisanship and betrayal à la Benda (1927/1928); distinctions between “traditional” and “organic” intellectuals (Gramsci, 1971, 1995); diagnoses of decline due to the rise of corporations and bureaucracies (Coser, 1965/1970; Mills, 1944/1963); and investigations into the radical potential of intellectuals (Gouldner, 1979). All of these were part of a debate about whether intellectuals owe allegiance to truth (Mills, 1944/1963), universal values (Benda, 1927/1928), the sacred (Shils, 1958/1972), ideas (Coser, 1965/1970) or material interests (Chomsky, 1969; Brecht, 1973), indeed to their own material interests as a “new class” (King and Szelényi, 2004). This political and ethical problematic of allegiance predates the empirical puzzles about the class position of intellectuals or the intelligentsia. It was the foundation upon which they were formulated.

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However many attempts there were to objectively settle this debate about allegiance, they ultimately all foundered on a constitutive ambivalence: since any definition of intellectuals is a self-definition (Bauman, 1987), any diagnostic claim implied ipso facto where the theorist’s allegiance lay. The most objective definition functioned also as a declaration of values; the claim to rise above sectarian interests functioned as an attempt to mobilize a segment of the educated, to which the theorist attempted to give shape and purpose; the claim to expose ulterior motives and secret allegiances functioned as an assertion of one’s true mission as an intellectual. Nothing was more symptomatic of this phenomenon than Gouldner’s (1979) wager that the intellectuals are “our best card in history.” Gouldner, an otherwise careful thinker, never clarified who the “we” of this assertion were and how “we” could be meaningfully ­distinguished from “them,” namely the intellectuals who were supposedly “our” best hope. Put differently, was his wager a diagnosis or a rallying call, designed to bring into being the very category thus named and thereby turning it into the agent of his value commitments? The same ambiguity pervaded the original formulation of the term “intellectuals” during the Dreyfus Affair: it was a ­mobilizing device in the course of a political struggle and a rallying call ­designed to conjure the very category it was naming, while also serving as a strategy for making claims on behalf of Reason in political struggles (Bauman, 1987). It should be noted, however, that Gouldner sought to “escape forward” from this ambivalence, by projecting into the future the coincidence between the theorist’s value commitments and the intellectuals’ class allegiances. To say that the intellectuals are “our best card in history” was to place a bet on this card and to wager that it would prove to be a winning one in the future. Unfortunately for Gouldner’s wager, Brint (1985) disproved it fairly conclusively and demonstrated that the desired coincidence simply had not taken place. There is, however, another way to attempt to circumvent the ambiguity of allegiance, to escape not forward, but backward, namely by projecting the coincidence between the theorist’s value commitments and the allegiances imputed to intellectuals into the past, into a “golden age” of intellectual activity that has since declined and degenerated. The opposition between these two views sums up, in a sense, the argument of this chapter. Theories of the intelligentsia and the “new class” seek to escape forward from the ambiguity of allegiance, while theories of intellectuals represent an escape backwards. The problematic splits into two meta-narratives: a romance of self-discovery and triumph through struggle (White, 1973), or a satire of complicity, betrayal and decline (though there are some hybrid forms).

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The Curious Incident of the “Public Intellectual” at the Fin de Siècle

Only when taking into account this history of the term “intellectual” can one understand the current popularity enjoyed by the concept of the public intellectual. The term “public intellectual” is, first of all, very recent. As can be seen in Figure 1.1, it hardly existed before 1987. The little uptick in 1987 marks the publication of Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals, a book that bemoaned the disappearance of intellectuals while at the same time creating something completely new, namely the conjunction “public intellectual.” As can be seen in Figure 1.1, from the moment Jacoby announced their disappearance, the chatter about public intellectuals took off and never let up.1 Second, the term “public intellectual” is also very peculiar. In fact, it is strikingly redundant. Intellectuals have always been understood—and understand themselves—as those who in their writing and speaking appeal to a broad public. We therefore have a small mystery here, a curious incident of the dog public intellectual 0.00001100% 0.00001000% 0.00000900% 0.00000800% 0.00000700% 0.00000600% 0.00000500% 0.00000400% 0.00000300% 0.00000200% 0.00000100% 0.00000000% 1980

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Figure 1.1 Frequency of the appearance of “public intellectual” in Google Books from 1980 to 2000 Source: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=public+ intellectual&year_start=1980&year_end=2000&corpus=0& smoothing=0 (last accessed June 18, 2012) 1 For the sake of comparison, the term “intellectuals” without any qualifiers entered English language discussions during the first decade of the 20th century (following the Dreyfus affair), then enjoyed a steady climb and peaked around 1970. Discussions of “intellectuals” then declined up until 1985, when they picked up again and returned to their 1970 levels around 1995, no doubt due to the coining of the term “public intellectual.” A similar search on jstor found that the conjunction “public intellectual” appeared in the title of 67 articles, the first of which dates from 1988 and is a review of Jacoby’s book. It had never been used in the title of an article before.

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(not) barking in the night: how is it that the addition of a redundant qualifier works to resuscitate and energize a moribund concept pronounced to be on  the wane? X+0=X2? What exactly is achieved by adding the qualifier “public”? The answer is boundary work. The addition of the adjective “public” redraws the boundary between who is, and who is not, a “true” intellectual in a very specific way, excluding academics from the category, and especially excluding experts who are understood to be confined to narrow technical pursuits. Adding the qualifier “public” is boundary work meant to signal that true intellectuals are not experts and academics: they are not entangled in mundane t­ echnical affairs or confined to their ivory tower. They address a broad public, owing allegiance only to truth and universal values. Since this term first appeared in a book titled The Last Intellectuals, which belongs to the venerable genre of jeremiads (a mixture of lament and accusation) about the decline of true intellectuals and the betrayal of their original mission (Posner, 2001), it activated not only boundary work from experts, but also an entire satirical narrative. The latter derived from the historical memory of the intellectuels—focused on decline, the “endangered species,” the threat of betrayal (by turning expert) or extinction (at the hand of a society of expertise)—and consequently provoked a debate about whether public intellectuals are disappearing, or on the contrary, reappearing on the web and in the blogosphere (Donatich, 2001; Fuller, 2004; Kellner, 1997). It is a curious fact, to which I will return later, that the very historical moment when “public intellectuals” suddenly came into vogue was also the moment when discussion of “the new class” abruptly ended. The concept of the “new class” achieved momentary fame in the 1970s, when it was used by critics from both the left and the right to identify an ascendant class composed of experts, technocrats, professionals and academics, who were seen as challenging both the capitalist class in the West, and the ruling bureaucracy in the East (Bell, 1973; Bruce-Briggs, 1979; Gouldner, 1979; Konrad and Szelényi, 1979; Walker, 1979). Yet, just as the discourse of “public intellectuals” redrew the internal boundary by harking back to the historical memory of an age of true intellectuals, now bemoaned as “the last intellectuals,” it also marked the moment, in the mid-1980s, when the concept of the “new class” ceased to attract the attention and imagination of social scientists, having since almost completely disappeared from public debate. The scholarly habitus outlined above leads to the conclusion that this was altogether unhealthy—“Bad air, bad air,” as Nietzsche would say. The concept of the “public intellectual” has turned bemoaning and nostalgia into a principle of discourse multiplication. It leads us into a blind alley where nothing but echoes of the historical memory of the intellectuels reverberate between the

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walls. We need to retrace our steps back to a particular junction where this boundary work between intellectuals and experts was questioned,2 and pick an alternative path from there. 4

From Intellectuals to Interventions

Fortunately, this junction can be located in the not too distant past. It is represented by Foucault’s (2000) distinction between universal and specific intellectuals. While the “universal” intellectual fits the mold of what is meant by “public intellectual”—the prototype is represented by the engaged man of letters (e.g., Zola or Sartre) who speaks in the name of truth and universal values—the “specific” intellectual is an expert. Foucault’s example of a “specific intellectual” is Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, according to Foucault, was an individual whose narrow technical work as an expert acquired universal dimensions when it threatened the whole human species with extinction, and who consequently felt compelled to intervene in public affairs. Oppenheimer did not start out as the independent, engaged critic that he came to embody later. He began as an expert working in the service of the American government, first on the Manhattan project, and then as Chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission (aec). It was from this position that he lobbied for international arms control, i.e., that he began to intervene in public affairs. Eventually, his activism led to the revocation of his security clearance in 1954, during the ­heyday of McCarthyism, and he became a bona fide dissident intellectual. Foucault (2000) concluded, therefore, that there is no reason to draw a strong distinction between intellectuals and experts: “the intellectual is simply the person who uses his knowledge, his competence and his relation to truth in the field of political struggles” (p. 128). Put differently, what is common to all those who may be termed “specific intellectuals” is not that they correspond to a specific social type (since experts come in many different forms and shapes— later there would be also lay experts, autodidacts, etc.), but rather the movement by which their local and technical knowledge acquires a more general and public value and becomes the basis for intervention in public affairs. What 2 Of course, “new class” theories also questioned the boundary work between experts and intellectuals, but they did so by totalizing and effacing the distinction between the two, and without engaging in the work of reconstruction necessary to convert the enduring element in the concept of “intellectuals” into present-day research problems and strategies. For this work, Foucault offered a much better starting point (Eyal and Buchholz 2010, 119).

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is interesting about Oppenheimer is not merely his end point as a dissident intellectual, but the movement that took him from technical concerns and government service to increasingly independent intervention in public affairs. A movement, it is important to note, that did not owe its momentum solely to Oppenheimer himself, thus repudiating the myth of the public intellectual as author and first mover. What Foucault did, therefore, was not to add another type, but to draw analytical attention to the enduring element in the c­ oncept of the “intellectual,” the part that is indifferent to boundary work and classificatory struggles, and that could serve as a basis for reconstructing the concept. This reconstruction, however, remains limited as long as it focuses on the intellectual as a single individual. As mentioned, Oppenheimer’s movement did not owe its momentum solely to him, nor was he alone among the “concerned nuclear scientists” and associated groupings. This was Bourdieu’s (1992/1996) criticism of Foucault. In contemporary conditions, he noted, the agency of public intervention is most often a “collective intellectual”: a group of experts working together. The same message emerged from the literature on “epistemic communities” (Haas, 1992). The resulting analytical framework is designed for analyzing a movement, not a social type or a group. More precisely, it is designed for analyzing the propensity and capability for traveling from the local to the public, and for what happens along the journey. Since I’ve already discussed this elsewhere (Buchholz and Eyal, 2010; Eyal, 2013), a brief summary shall suffice here, under three headings: agencies, modes and targets of intervention. 4.1 Agencies of Intervention The first question is “who is moving?” When analysis is focused on “public intellectuals,” it tends to privilege the actions and pronouncements of a few prominent figures, thereby inevitably resulting in boundary work, hagiography or a narrative of decline and betrayal. If, on the other hand, we analyze the movement by which knowledge acquires value as intervention in public affairs, the frame is broadened considerably by including additional categories of relevant actors and, even more importantly, by describing the intervening actor itself as internally multiple, an assemblage composed of heterogeneous elements. First, Foucault’s “specific intellectuals” need not only be glamorous and well-known individuals, such as Oppenheimer, but can come from the ranks of more “gray” practitioners, who often work away from the spotlight enjoyed by prominent figures. Yet, arguably, the public impact of their work is often no less profound. It is a commonplace that economists wield enormous public influence today. If we want to analyze their footprint in the public sphere,

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­ owever, it is not enough to focus on a few famous commentators, such as Paul h Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz. Few would recognize the names of the economists who designed the indicator of aggregate productivity trends. Number crunchers bent over reams of data seem far removed from the image of the engaged or celebrity intellectual—though Nate Silver, the recently crowned “public statistician” (Scheiber, 2012), may yet upend this stereotype. Nevertheless, as Block and Burns (1986) showed, such obscure economists profoundly shaped the public discussions and the political struggle over labor issues in the US during a crucial period. These specific intellectuals could also be “lay experts,” such as Act-Up aids activists (Epstein, 1995) or the parents of autistic Children (Eyal et al., 2010) who have turned themselves into experts, fundamentally changing the discourse and policy about developmental disabilities. Such “lay experts” or “experience-based experts” (Collins and Evans, 2007) exemplify even more dramatically this move from local knowledge to public intervention. Nor should we ignore the main new entry into this category, namely the newly minted cohorts of science writers in the mold of Malcolm Gladwell. Some are autodidacts, while others are more formally educated and may even come from the ranks of practitioners (e.g., Atul Gawande), but all have honed a particular skill by which they take the local expert knowledge produced in laboratories and  surveys and transform it into beautifully crafted stories circulating in the  ­public sphere, thereby turning the technical into the meaningful and debatable. While additional categories could be enumerated, the point is clear: there is no one specific social category of intellectuals. To avoid taking sides in border wars, we are much better served by taking account of all the actors making credible claims to represent publicly relevant knowledge and engage with public affairs. And we need to consider them not in isolation or serially, but rather relationally as interdependent and competing in a common “intellectual field,” where who counts as an intellectual and how to legitimately intervene in public affairs are objects of classificatory struggles (Bourdieu, 1990). Rather than limiting the analysis to a specific social type, this type of relational analysis directs attention to the factors structuring the intellectual field—the distribution of symbolic capital, the degree of independence from external political demands, and the degree of specialization (Sapiro, 2009). Field analysis replaces social types with intersections of these factors. For example, as shown in Figure 1.2, a region with a high degree of symbolic capital and autonomy but weak specialization and generosity (a region roughly corresponding to that where internationally acclaimed literary figures may be found), is likely to correlate with a mode of intervention in public affairs that approximates the ­ideal, typical “public intellectual” (Sapiro, 2009)—Günther Grass, Orhan Pamuk, etc.

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Amartya Sen

Control over demand Symbolic Capital ++ Autonomy

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Young Richard Dawkins

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the globe and mail

Figure 1.2 Schematic model of the intellectual field and intellectual trajectories Created by author from photos in public domain (Google).

Yet, field analysis is also concerned with the independent effect of trajectories and the construction of specific agencies of intervention. Intersections of factors specify positions, so to speak, but these positions could be occupied by different actors embarking on different trajectories, each subtly modifying the meaning of the position by constructing a somewhat different agency of intervention (e.g., Richard Dawkins’s move into the “public intellectual” region entails the construction of a different agency of intervention than that of Naomi Klein’s). This concept of “agency of intervention” seeks to emphasize that the answer to “who is moving?” should not be conflated with this or that concrete individual (or social type) because, as noted above in the case of Oppenheimer, the momentum of their movement is often not of their own doing. Similarly, travelers are modified by the journey, by the distance traversed and the obstacles encountered, while their movement also modifies the region in which they move in characteristic ways. If repeated and stabilized, this interplay between how actors are catapulted towards intervention, adapt themselves to the road, yet also cause adaptations all around their paths, can be termed “agency of intervention.” The need to distinguish between concrete individuals and agencies of intervention­is clearest when it comes to collective agencies of intervention.

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The concept of intellectual field also permits us to analyze groups, collectives, networks, even organizations, as participating in the struggle over how to legitimately intervene in public affairs (Bourdieu, 1992/1996). The propensity to craft a collective agency of intervention may also be correlated with the region of the intellectual field one occupies. Sapiro (2009) argued that “collective intellectuals” abound where the degree of specialization is high while symbolic capital is low. Although these may not be the necessary conditions, they certainly provide a suggestive starting point for analysis.3 Thinking in terms of agencies of intervention, however, not merely broadens the scope of relevant actors from a few prominent individuals to ­collectives or even (God forbid!) to think tanks, but also focuses attention on everything that needs to be in place for the movement from the local to the public sphere to take place. In short, the agency of intervention does not reside in an individual or even a group of individuals, but takes the form of a distributed agency that also includes the necessary equipment, institutional and spatial arrangements, concepts, etc. The focus is not on the movement of an individual, but of a statement or performance, and the conditions that allow it to circulate in the public sphere. This is most obvious when intervention takes the form of an index number such as the Human Development Index (hdi; Eyal and Levy, 2013). The collective in question is a network composed not only of individuals from different disciplines, but also of armies of research assistants, the machinery of the UN Development Program, computers, data sets, significance tests, books, etc. In this vein, even Paul Krugman writing his op-eds is an agency of intervention that is not identical with the flesh-and blood individual. Research assistants, no doubt, are necessary to fact-check the arguments or even to read and summarize the relevant literature. An editor makes sure that the text is crisp and logically consistent. The formidable machinery of The New York Times distributes the text in the public sphere. The author, Paul Krugman, adds the “author function,” the brand name (which immediately conjures a familiar face because his photograph has been circulated) that gives the statements their value as public interventions. But once again, the function is not a

3 In fact, the activity of designing and compiling economic indicators can also be considered as a form of public intervention (Eyal and Levy, 2013). For example, the individuals who joined together to develop the Human Development Index (hdi) as an alternative to gdp were by no means low on symbolic capital. The group was led by a former Pakistani government minister of high stature, and included the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. It seems that in this case the mode of intervention—compiling an aggregate index—as well as the public sphere it targeted, namely the international system of national accounts (sna), were more important determinants of the type of agency than the factors identified by Sapiro.

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property of the individual himself, but of a whole network of relations and of accumulated “symbolic capital.” 4.2 Modes of Intervention The second question is how agencies intervene in public affairs. What modes of intervention are characteristic of different agencies? Here, once again, the term “intellectuals” or “public intellectual” narrows our vision and forestalls a broader investigation. When the term “intellectuals” was first invented, it was in response to a protest letter published in a daily newspaper. The letter was collectively drafted and signed by several prominent academics, men of letters, artists and journalists, who demanded a new trial for Captain Dreyfus (Charle, 1998). From then on, when the term “intellectuals” was used, it conjured not only a specific social type that intervened in public affairs, but also the specific mode, media and manner of such interventions. Put differently, one of the reasons why the term “public intellectual” functions as boundary work from experts is that it references a restricted set of means (as well as a “style”) by which intervention in public affairs could take place: the manifesto, the signed petition or protest letter, the polemical op-ed piece (and now the blog), the samizdat text, the gesture of “revelation,” prophesying, “speaking truth to power,” etc. (Gouldner, 1975–1976; Bauman, 1987; Sapiro, 2009). As is evident in this short list of means of intervention, there is an intimate link between intellectuals and the concept of opinion. Intellectuals, in the classical sense of the term—which the discourse about “public intellectuals” seeks to re-inscribe—intervene by making their opinion known and by seeking to influence the opinions of others or the “public opinion.” This is part of the boundary work that aims to distinguish intellectuals from experts. Opinions, as the etymology of the term indicates,4 are distinct from knowledge and expertise in three ways: firstly, they are based on belief or conjecture without much support—relying only on “the force of the better argument,” namely the rhetoric employed. Secondly, opinions indicate a preference, the choice to ­believe one thing and not another—or, more flatteringly, to “take a position.” Finally, opinions are couched in terms that are immediately accessible to laypeople; opinions thus clarify, while expertise obfuscates. Opinions have the power to clarify not only because they are accessible, but also because they are 4 Etymologically, our modern day usage of “opinion” derives from the 14th century Old French term opinion meaning “judgments founded upon probabilities,” which is itself derived from the 13th century Latin terms opinionem (“fancy, belief, what one thinks; appreciation, esteem”) and opinari (“to think, judge, suppose, opine”), the root of which is pie “to choose.”

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rhetorical and one-sided, and it is when they clash that clarity emerges. As John Milton wrote in Areopagitica, his 1644 polemical tract against censorship and in defense of free speech, “Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.” Yet this boundary work between intellectuals who make their opinions public and experts who provide technical assessments, between polemics and controversies (Chateauraynaud and Torny, 1999), is untenable. In contemporary conditions, when technical matters of concern are at the core of political struggles (global warming, economic restructuring, genetically modified foods—the list could be continued indefinitely), there is also an irreducibly technical dimension to public polemics, just as there is an irreducibly rhetorical dimension to technical controversies (Latour, 1987; Latour and Weibel, 2005). Consequently, relying on “opinion” as a way to conceptualize what it means to intervene in public affairs appears too restricted, especially if we take into account the interventions made by experts and collectives of practitioners. The focus on opinion seems precisely calculated to exclude technical ­expertise and its evident capacity to produce significant political effects, for example by mobilizing robust and lasting “truth effects” in the form of reports, technical documents, expert testimony, even an experimental demonstration (properly publicized); or in the format of numbers, figures, graphs and formulas, i.e., a “politics of measurement” conducted by modifying how matters of public concern are quantified, measured and represented (Porter, 1995; Breslau, 1998, pp. 39–40; Alonso and Star, 1987; Block and Burns, 1986). Instead of the restricted means of intervention indexed by opinion, analysis should utilize a broad repertoire of formats or modes of intervention, all of which involve some hybridization of opinion and the technical armature of expertise. This hybridization is quite obvious in the case of technical products that are submitted to some kind of adversarial procedure or forum: expert testimony in court; “position papers” (that quintessential product of think tanks); expert committees assembled by regulatory agencies; and consensus documents produced by panels such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc). In all these cases, the adversarial procedure or forum does the work of analysis for us, so to speak, since it operates to expose the irreducible rhetorical dimension of technical knowledge, and thus its nature as a form of public intervention. These examples, however, should merely serve to remind us that often the most efficacious interventions either come black-boxed as charts, figures, numbers and other technical devices, or take the form of counter-strategies that aim to open up these black boxes and make the technical public and political, and to this end need to be armed with similar technical tools.

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A good example is the design of economic indicators. The attempts by the US think tanks Redefining Progress and the New Economics Foundation to design and calculate alternatives to the gross domestic product (gdp)5 involve opening up the gdp black box, a technically detailed critique of how gdp is compiled and measured, and a no less spirited and “opinionated” critique of the assumptions and presuppositions (read: “opinions”) upon which it is based (Eyal and Levy, 2013). Moreover, to the extent that these alternative indicators are employed by international, governmental and non-governmental organizations to assess policy, or even to completely revise the System of National Accounts (sna; see Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi, 2009), they constitute a formidable intervention in public affairs. 4.3 Targets of Intervention The final question to be asked is where intervention takes place. The concept of “intellectuals” carries with it a certain normative (Habermasian) vision of the “public sphere” as its target, which is typically understood as a sphere of public opinion, an agora populated by reasonable citizens who, when presented with conflicting opinions, are capable of adjudicating between them based on the force of the better argument. As argued above, the concept of opinion is too narrow to capture the broad repertoire of contemporary modes of intervention in public affairs. Similar considerations apply when it comes to characterizing the target of public intervention. Modern-day politics, the public affairs wherein intervention should take place, is increasingly about technical affairs about which “the public”—understood as laypeople who follow the news and possess similar capacities for critical reasoning—is ignorant. While this is an inescapable fact, the conclusion that should be drawn from it is less clear. Walter Lippman (1922, 1927) concluded that the public is a “phantom,” and that the only way to reconstitute the public sphere is through mediation by knowledgeable observers, who will act as honest brokers and guide the individualized and disorganized phantom public through expert controversies. This was, of course, a self-serving conclusion. Lippman wrote a syndicated column entitled Today and Tomorrow, carried by more than 200 newspapers and reaching an audience of more than 10 million readers (Goodwin, 2013). He clearly consid�ered himself to be the model for the part of “honest broker.” For this reason, we should not accord Lippman’s conclusion too much authority. Yet, his vision of a mediated (and mediatized) public sphere has, to 5 The “Genuine Progress Indicator” (gpi) and the “Happy Planet Index” (hpi), respectively: http://neweconomics.org/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genuine_progress_indicator; http://happyplanetindex.org/.

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some extent, become reality, though in a way of which he probably would not have approved. The main reason why the concept of “public intellectual” often comes coupled with a narrative of decline and betrayal, especially in the US, is because the task of guiding, mediating, influencing, orchestrating and even creating public opinion has become the business of think tanks, and they are much better at this task than intellectuals, even syndicated ones. It is not a coincidence that the concept of the “public intellectual” was coined in the mid-1980s, a time marked by the ascendency of second-generation think tanks in the American polity, which have professionalized the work of producing opinions and individuals who present an opinionated posture for a living— pundits, columnists, commentators, “talking heads”6—as well as the work of orchestrating and generating “public opinion” using modern public-relations techniques. And just as professional politicians have crowded out the amateur politicians, these organizations collectively crowd out, speak over, or buffer the interventions of independent intellectuals (Medvetz, 2012). If you want to influence public opinion, therefore, simply form a think tank! It is possible, however, to draw a different conclusion from the increasingly technical nature of matters of public concern. Inspired by the contributors to Making Things Public (Latour and Weibel, 2005), it could be argued that the concept of the “public sphere” is misleading in several respects when it comes to characterizing the targets of public intervention, and that we need to conceptualize these differently. First, the concept of “public sphere” suggests a semi-permanent arena where robust, uninterrupted conversation takes place among an already constituted social community. This is why contributions in this vein often bemoan the public’s indifference and passivity. The arena—if it exists—is already occupied by think tanks and by mediatized discussion. In contrast, Marres (2005) suggested, following Dewey, that “publics” in the plural do not exist prior to being affected and mobilized by a specific matter of concern. They are provisional communities formed in response to issues of concern that existing institutions and procedures are unable to handle. It follows that we should not think of the public sphere as a pre-existing arena, a wide agora that one need only step into to be elevated into public existence. We should think about it as something that flickers in and out of existence, depending on whether “issues spark publics into being” (Marres, 2005, p. 213), and perhaps—if we need to stick with spatial metaphors—as a set of tunnels that are often exceedingly narrow and always in the process of gumming up if they are not being used. 6 In a play on the old Weberian distinction, it could be said that intellectuals live for opinion, while pundits (and think tanks) live of opinion.

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In short, in true Kantian fashion, we should never think of the public sphere as a given, but always as a task (with the implication that just as historical conditions change, so does the task; you cannot hope to excavate today’s public sphere with the tools of yesteryear). The second point has already been made, but it bears repeating. Concerning technical matters of public concern, intervention can only be efficacious if it is equipped with the armor of expertise, namely the relevant techniques, instruments, demonstrations, figures, charts and numbers. Hence, it cannot be a public sphere merely of opinion.7 Moreover, it can be argued that we have much less to fear from the perceived imbalance between experts and laypeople, which so worried Habermas and which led Lippman (1927) to declare the public a “phantom.” Regarding newly emerging technical matters of public concern, it is often the case that nobody is an expert and everybody is ignorant. Intervention in public affairs then becomes partly a matter of creating or assembling expertise where none existed before. This is done by collectives composed of laypeople, activists and experts who educate themselves about a technical matter of public concern, and equip themselves with the knowledge and the technical means to craft an intervention (Callon, 2005). Not only do these collectives proliferate today in the sphere of patient activism (Epstein, 1995; Rabeharisoa and Callon, 2004; Eyal et al., 2010), but they are also predominant in environmental politics or the field of “green economics.” Finally, the concept of the “public sphere” is typically contrasted with that of the “state.” The public sphere of free discussion and opinion formation begins where the state—with its chains of command and obedience, its use of technical discourse as ideology—ends. We should also get rid of this type of boundary work. Instead, we should think of the public sphere, or spheres, not as lying outside the state, but within its boundaries, among fuzzy and thick interfaces where expertise and the state interpenetrate and blend into each other (Mitchell, 1991; Rose, 1992). This is no doubt why Dewey (1927) argued that the formation of a public involves “the discovery of the state” (Marres, 2005, p. 213)—namely, what is it? What should it do? What should/could it be? These interfaces between expertise and the state constitute multiple public spheres of sorts, i.e., targets of public intervention that are directly continuous with the work of experts, given that there are already established ports into the Leviathan, so to speak; institutionalized conduits already exist through which particular types of expertise are permanently connected to the state. A good 7 This observation is closely related to Posner’s (2001, p. 72) argument that the production and circulation of public intellectual commentary suffers from a “market failure” due to low barriers to entry and poor quality control that fail to encourage market exit.

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example is the aforementioned sna. Compiled on the basis of data collected by state agencies (the Department of Commerce in the US), the sna is definitely a part of the state, yet it is also an integral part of economic expertise. The latter not only supplies the tools for analyzing these data, but also uses the “accounts” as measures of the underlying variables of general equilibrium models. Through the sna, the state has been “governmentalized” (Foucault, 1991) and economic expertise has come to occupy a permanent role in the government of the economy. Only on the basis of this permanent port or interface—within its volume, as it were—could the construction of alternative economic indicators become a form of public intervention, more precisely a form of “discovery of the state.” Thus, to intervene in public affairs means to travel along “the frail conduits through which truths and proofs are allowed to enter the sphere of politics” (Latour, 2005, p. 19), to re-open these tunnels where they have gummed up, and to plug into the body of the Leviathan by means of these pre-existing ports. To do so, it is impossible—as an institutionalized matter of course—to rely on opinion alone, and one must rather come equipped with charts, statistics, experiments and calculations. Ultimately, the new face of public intervention in the 21st century will belong to collectives of experts, laypeople and activists, equipped with technical tools, who forge new types of expertise and plug into pre-existing ports in the body of the Leviathan. 5

The Intelligentsia as a “New Class”

Like “intellectuals,” the concept of the “intelligentsia” has a long and ambiguous pedigree. It is “essentially historical,” but not in the same way as “intellectuals.” It is not a category of historical memory, but of teleological anticipation. According to Malia (1960), the term “intelligentsia” was introduced into the Russian language in the 1860s. It literally meant “discernment, understanding, intelligence” and was essentially used to characterize the members of this category as the intelligenty, “the intelligent or intellectual ones.” While superficially similar, therefore, to the meaning of “intellectuals,” from its inception the term aimed to capture a much broader group. Two characteristics of the early usage of the term are especially noteworthy: first, it was often used to describe a generational phenomenon. The intelligenty were the “sons” of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, or they were “conscience-stricken noblemen” of a younger generation (Mikhailovsky), or they were the sons of the clergy (Berdiaev) bringing an orthodox zeal to secular politics. Second, the term was often used to underline the intelligentsia’s novelty, the fact that it did not fit within the estate

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s­ ystem codified by Peter the Great. While the membership of the intelligentsia by no means corresponded to the category of raznochintsy (literally, “people of no estate in particular,” i.e., the “miscellaneous” category of Peter’s system), the fact that the members of the intelligentsia themselves (under Alexander ii) thought of themselves as raznochintsy and in reality were recruited from all social classes, underlines that “one of the primary characteristics of the intelligenty, then, was that they could no longer fit into the official estate system” (Malia, 1960, p. 446). From its earliest beginnings, therefore, the category of the “intelligentsia” was freighted with the historical meaning of development and pre-figuration. It stood for those who no longer fit within the old order, and whose worldview and mode of social existence pre-figured the outlines of a new order. This interpretation is confirmed by the rapidity with which Bakunin, in his polemic against Marx, linked the new concept with the idea of a “new class,” a “new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars,” poised to establish the reign of “scientific intelligence.” Bakunin was writing in 1870, only a few years after the term “intelligentsia” was coined (King and Szelényi, 2004, p. xiii, p .23). By the early 20th century, his diagnosis was elaborated and improved by Machajski, who considered the “intellectual workers” to be a neo-bourgeois class pre-figuring a state capitalist system (King and Szelényi 2004, p. xiii, pp. 24–29). In response, one could say, the communist regimes were forced to include the intelligentsia in official classifications as one of the genuine socialist classes—not pre-figuring a new order, but of a piece with the existing one. 6

The “Socially Unattached Intelligentsia”

The intellectual history of Eastern Europe is replete with attempts, from the 19th century onwards, to name and represent the intelligentsia as a social class that pre-figures an emerging new order. As with the concept of “intellectuals,” the full story cannot be told in the framework of this article. Instead, I will provide only three “snapshots” (or in modern parlance, “screen captures”), three moments that highlight significant aspects of this conceptual history and that could assist us in reconstructing the concept in more productive fashion. It may seem strange to begin with Mannheim’s (1929/1936) concept of the “socially unattached intelligentsia” (pp. 154–155). After all, this would seem to run counter to the argument of this article, since Mannheim (1929/1936) famously declared that the intelligentsia was not a class, but an “unanchored, relatively classless stratum” and warned that “a sociology which is oriented only with reference to socio–economic classes will never adequately u ­ nderstand

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this phenomenon” (pp. 154–155). In reality, however, Mannheim’s concept (adapted from Alfred Weber) echoed the same historical meaning of the intelligentsia noted above. First, by “unanchored, classless stratum” he meant specifically that the intelligentsia was recruited from all classes, and that, like the raznochintsy, its members were not too firmly rooted in the present social order. While there may have been some lingering attachment to their class of ­origin, or a voluntary attachment to other classes as “organic intellectuals,” ultimately the members of the intelligentsia were held together by “one unifying sociological bond […] namely education” (Mannheim, 1929/1936, p. 158). The bond provided by a common educational heritage tended “to suppress differences of birth, status, profession and wealth and to unite the individual educated people on the basis of the education they received” (Mannheim, 1929/1936, p. 155). One can definitely fault Mannheim for failing to recognize the significance of the generational transmission of educational advantage (i.e., “cultural capital”) in transforming this “classless stratum” into a “socially rigidly defined class,” not unlike a priesthood (1929/1936, p. 156), or the much better historical analogue of the Chinese literati—Mannheim should have been familiar with Max Weber’s (1946, pp. 416–444) analysis of this group, which is shot through with implicit and explicit comparisons to the German professoriate and bureaucracy. But this astonishing oversight by one of the great sociological thinkers of the interwar years can also be explained in light  of  the extraordinary hopes that Mannheim placed in the intelligentsia,  and which harked back to the historical meaning of the concept as pre-figuration. Mannheim’s (1929/1936) discussion of the “sociological problem of the intelligentsia” was motivated by the quest for a social actor capable of transcending the ideological fault lines of the interwar years, one who would be able to represent the “historical totality” that “is always too comprehensive to be grasped by any one of the individual points of view which emerge out of it” (p. 151). Mannheim’s perspectivism did not allow him to opt for the Marxian solution, itself deriving from Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave, nor for a positivist solution. Instead of searching for the One True Perspective, he ingeniously suggested that the solution lay in collecting all perspectives and placing them in relation to one another (this was the meaning of his “relationism”), so that each reveals the partiality of the others, thereby facilitating a process of dynamic synthesis. This is why he was interested in the intelligentsia. Only a “relatively classless stratum which is not too firmly situated in the social order,” he thought, would be capable of this task. First, because only such a stratum would represent within itself all perspectives (by virtue of the diverse class origins as well as the voluntary affiliation as organic intellectuals):

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We owe the possibility of mutual interpenetration and understanding of existent currents of thought to the presence of such a relatively unattached middle stratum which is open to the constant influx of individuals from the most diverse social classes and groups with all possible points of view. Only under such conditions can the incessantly fresh and broadening synthesis, to which we have referred, arise. mannheim, 1929/1936, p. 161

Second, and more importantly, the dynamic synthesis of perspectives is made possible by the fact that the members of this stratum are determined not just by the imprint of their own class affinity, but also by “this intellectual medium which contains all the contradictory points of view” (Mannheim, 1929/1936, p. 161). Put differently, education is a medium through which the struggle between perspectives is refracted as through a prism and analyzed into its constituent parts, which are thereby rendered comparable and capable of being synthesized. Education “preserves the multiplicity of the component elements in all their variety by creating a homogenous medium within which the conflicting parties can measure their strength,” and which, therefore, “subsumes in itself all those interests with which social life is permeated” (Mannheim, 1929/1936, pp. 156–157). Hence, a “tendency towards dynamic synthesis” develops within this stratum (Mannheim, 1929/1936, p. 157). The product of education is an individual formed by the “influence of opposing tendencies in social reality,” who thereby becomes “oriented towards the whole” (Mannheim, 1929/1936, pp. 155–156). Refracted through this medium, the interplay of ideological differences becomes incorporated in the individual as a capacity for reflexivity and scrutiny of “one’s own social moorings,” which is the first step towards the “discovery of the position from which a total perspective would be possible” (Mannheim, 1929/1936, pp. 160–161). Ultimately, so Mannheim (1929/1936) hoped, this would make it possible to turn politics into a science. At this point, the intelligentsia would not merely pre-figure a new stage of ­society, but would become the instrument by which the “new order” would “permeate the broadest ranges of social life” and the mechanism by which scientific politics would determine “what is no longer necessary and what is not yet possible” (Mannheim, 1929/1936, p. 154). The aim of this careful parsing of Mannheim’s argument was not only to show its continuity with the historical meaning of the intelligentsia as a group unmoored from the old order and pre-figuring a new one; there is also a somewhat different lesson to be learnt from it. Mannheim’s insistence that the ­intelligentsia was a classless stratum has often been read as the worst kind of apologetics, but if one is attuned to the nuances of his argument, especially his

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depiction of the intelligentsia as a medium that contains within itself, in refracted form, all social and ideological cleavages, one cannot but appreciate how this idea anticipates Bourdieu’s concept of “field.” Mannheim’s (1929/1936) relationism, we could say, has been upgraded by Bourdieu (1990, 1975) with structuralist tools, yet with a very similar aim. Mannheim’s quest for “scientific politics” is matched by Bourdieu’s insistence on the objectivity of field analysis, at which he indeed arrived by juxtaposing all perspectives in relation to one another (by “correspondence analysis”). Mannheim’s “dynamic synthesis” as performed by the intelligentsia-qua-medium is matched by Bourdieu’s (1975) claim that the tendency towards increased homogeneity between competitors in the scientific field is the key “social condition of the progress of reason.” A contemporary reconstruction of the concept of “intelligentsia” should therefore build upon this hidden link between Mannheim and Bourdieu, and replace the idea of a group, class or stratum with the concept of field, provided that it resists the temptation to derive a tendency towards “synthesis” (or the progress of reason) from the play of opposing perspectives in this field. Elsewhere, I have criticized Bourdieu’s analysis of science as not sufficiently relational, and as resorting instead to an “ideal type” (Eyal 2012). The same caution applies here. 7

The Intelligentsia and the Bureaucracy

The second snapshot is provided by Djilas in The New Class (1957). Famously, he construed “the new class” as composed of bureaucrats and managers who held administrative decision-making power and were thus the rulers of socialist society. Much like the regime’s official classification of the intelligentsia as one of the genuine socialist classes, for Djilas the bureaucracy did not prefigure a new order, but held the reins of the existing one. Djilas reserved the term “intelligentsia,” however, or more precisely that of the “critical intelligentsia,” for intellectuals who did not possess decision-making power, and whose powerlessness permitted them to think critically and resist the regime. Djilas’s formulation thus resisted the official classification of the intelligentsia as one of the genuine socialist classes. He drew a sharp line within this classification between the orthodox and the heterodox, the defenders of order and those who sought to undermine it; those who served power and preserved the status quo, and those who could not find their place within it. Obviously, some ­experts, scholars and scientists took bureaucratic positions and served the ­regime, but in Djilas’s formulation this meant that they forfeited their membership in the intelligentsia, became bureaucrats, and lost their capacity for critical thinking.

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In other words, Djilas’s reinvention of the “new class” as bureaucracy demonstrates that the official classification was not able to eradicate the radical meaning of intelligentsia as pre-figuration. The move to comprehend the intelligentsia within the official classification of the present order immediately led to a counter-move that opened up a debate about the boundary between the intelligentsia and the bureaucracy: how does one draw the line where the intelligentsia ends, and the bureaucracy begins? Are the many professionals and technocrats serving as state and party officials essentially bureaucrats, or members of the intelligentsia? Or was the boundary between them disappearing as a “new class” emerged that pre-figured a new stage of socialist society? (see Eyal, 2003, pp. 6–10). The inadequacy of Djilas’s formulation, pointed out by many critics, became evident over time. It was a good enough approximation, maybe, for the first few years of socialism in East Central Europe, but as time passed, it became clear that the bureaucracy was drawing more and more on particular types of recruits, no longer peasant boys ready to sing in the choir, but professionals, technical experts and intellectuals. There were systematic patterns of interand intra-generational mobility, which made the intelligentsia the main social pool from which the bureaucracy was recruited (Eyal and Townsley, 1995). In light of this systematic intercourse, the boundary between the intelligentsia and the bureaucracy began to seem less and less significant. In a sense, Djilas’s formulation stumbled over the same obstacle as Mannheim’s, namely the phenomenon of pervasive inter-generational transmission of educational advantage, the accumulation, transmission and conversion of cultural capital into positions of economic, administrative and political decision-making. Yet, they each stumbled over it differently, in diametrically opposed and telltale ways: while Mannheim, in order to imbue the intelligentsia with the fullest and most far-reaching meaning of pre-figuration, had to overlook the tendency towards exclusion, boundary-drawing and distinction inherent in cultural capital, Djilas, on the other hand, overlooked the opposite tendency towards usurpation, boundary-shifting and transformation. The lesson to be drawn from this second snapshot for a contemporary reconstruction of the concept of “intelligentsia” is to focus on the classificatory struggles within the field, the fights over internal boundaries, over who counts as a genuine member of the intelligentsia and who doesn’t, over the criteria of judgment and the principles by which worth is allocated. One of the distinct advantages of the concept of “field” is that it is far more careful in its treatment of boundaries than class concepts. In one sense, fields have no boundaries. Like magnetic force fields, the lines of force can be traced as far as the analysis requires, and they merely get weaker as the distance grows. On the other hand, boundaries are often what are at stake in the classificatory struggles treated by

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field analysis. Boundaries are all-important, but they are not imposed ex ante by the sociologist, who is interested precisely in how actors draw and contest boundaries. The analytical object is thus reconstructed from the “intelligentsia” as a class and a social substance into a relational field of classificatory struggles. Struggles over what? Over class, of course, i.e., over the boundaries of the classification (Are experts included? Are bureaucrats included? Who is not included?), as well as over the symbolic center of the classification, the “prototype” of intellectual work, as we shall see in a moment. 8

Teleology Squared

The third snapshot is offered by Konrad and Szelényi’s (1979) The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. Like all third moments, it was a synthesis of the thesis and antithesis that came before it. The great virtue of their intervention was to recover the underlying historical meaning of the intelligentsia— pre-figuration and teleological anticipation—which, as we saw, lay at the heart of Mannheim’s concept, while transforming it into an analysis of what makes the intelligentsia a “new class,” in the Djilasian sense, a new ruling class in statu nascendi. In their formulation, it was no longer the bureaucracy who constituted the “new class,” but the intelligentsia. The key protagonist in their ­romance of self-discovery was not the bureaucrat, but the expert claiming to possess teleological knowledge, knowledge of the future or of society’s ultimate ends. The “new class” came into being because, on the one hand, socialism created a new position from which class power, i.e., the power to control and appropriate the social surplus, could be exercised; this was the position of the central planner in a redistributive system. On the other hand, socialism encouraged and accelerated the emergence of a social actor—the intelligentsia— who could lay a legitimate claim to occupying this position, by virtue of its claim to possess teleological knowledge. The “new class” was the product of elective affinity between the socialist mode of economic integration and the knowledge claims of the intelligentsia. This meant that the “new class” was composed of the intelligentsia, to the extent that it was able to colonize the institutions of central planning and thereby transform socialism into a system of rational redistribution. The theory thus postulated a certain “merger” between the intelligentsia and the top echelons of the bureaucracy, a gradual erasing of the boundary. Class formation took the form of a Hegelian-Marxian “overcoming” (Aufhebung), in which the bureaucracy was to be gradually tamed and civilized “from within,” and then incorporated, overcome and preserved within the new hegemony of teleological knowledge (Konrad and

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Szelényi, 1979, p. xiv). This was teleology squared: the intelligentsia not only represented an emergent future order; it was not only on its “road to class power,” but this class power itself was rooted in teleological knowledge. And there was, of course, a lurking sense of self-reference. Konrad and Szelényi offered a prognosis that a class was emerging whose power was dependent on its claim to offer prognoses. Self-reference is not necessarily a problem. On the contrary, it is to Konrad and Szelényi’s credit that their question—“what makes us intellectuals?”—did not beat around the bush like Gouldner’s wager, and that they also offered an incisive analysis of the position and strategies of “marginal intellectuals” among whom they clearly counted themselves (1979, pp. 234–252). Nor is it necessarily a problem that their prediction was wrong and that the “counteroffensive” of the elite (1979, pp. 215–219) proved much more destructive than they could foresee at the time. To paraphrase Szelényi: history is a moving target, and all sociologists are poor marksmen. Nor should much credit be given to the criticisms that were formulated right after Konrad and Szelényi’s text was unearthed (literally), translated and published. One especially persistent counter-argument was that they were mistaken in their interpretation of reform communism, of events such as the Prague Spring of 1968. These should be understood, the critics argued, not as evidence that the intelligentsia was “on the road to class power,” but as evidence for the “revolt of the intellectuals,” their irrepressible tendency—even when shortly in power themselves—to “think otherwise” and to dissent (Frentzel-Zagorska and Zagorski, 1989; Karabel, 1995). To put it in a nutshell, the critics returned to Djilas’s formulation. They replaced the master narrative of the “intelligentsia” with the master ­narrative of the “intellectuals.” Committed to truth above all, the critical ­intellectuals who led the revolt were predictably naïve and predictably quickly removed, returning to their natural role as dissidents “speaking truth to power.” Indeed, this critique was formulated at exactly the same time as the trope of “public intellectuals” took hold in the West and partook of the same impulse to reassert the boundary work separating intellectuals from experts. This critique is not very convincing, and as an account of the moment of reform communism it appears extremely partial and one-sided. We know, in fact, that the authors of these critiques were talking to dissident intellectuals and in many respects channeled the dissidents’ own retrospective assessment of the reforms, their retelling of their own trajectories, and their discursive strategy in a struggle over the interpretation of the past. In short, they do not offer us a synthesis, but a one-sided “perspective,” in the Mannheimian sense. Yet, precisely for this reason, precisely due to this one-sidedness, the critique is useful—as Mannheim anticipated—because it reveals the partiality inherent

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in Konrad and Szelényi’s perspective and allows us to understand their work as participants in a classificatory struggle over making the future present. In a retrospective account, King and Szelényi (2004, pp. 99–106) have stepped back from the thesis of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power: “If there ever was a class project of intellectuals under East European Socialism,” they wrote (clearly distancing themselves from the full-blown thesis by using the conditional), “it certainly did not last very long, and by the time it was possible to identify this process, the transformation of the bureaucratic ruling estate into a dominant class was already in the process of disintegration.” The intelligentsia, as mentioned earlier, is always in statu nascendi, always prefiguring what is yet to come, but is never quite there. Konrad and Szelényi (1979) wrote their book in 1974, six years after Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia and put an end to the reforms across the Soviet Block. Did the owl of Minerva take flight at dusk to visit them at their hideaway in Csobánka? It appears wiser to opt for a less emplotted interpretation (i.e., one less dictated by the Romantic narrative of self-discovery): Konrad and Szelényi’s text reflected not the ascendency of the teleological redistributor, but the increased contestation around it, and the process of fragmentation. There was, indeed, a certain fraction of the technocracy that attempted to occupy and rationalize the position of the central planner, on the basis of its claim to “scientific”—that is, objective and transcendent—teleological knowledge (Richta’s Civilization on the Crossroads being an excellent example). Yet, this strategy was only one of many competing claims. By no means were the reform economists, for example, all of the same mind regarding central planning, and many sought to significantly modify, even radically challenge, the role of the central planner. Konrad and Szelényi (1979) argued that the reforms—from those of Khrushchev in the 1950s to the Hungarian “new economic mechanism” and the proposals of Czechoslovak economists during the Prague Spring—did not “­dispute the logic of redistribution,” but merely sought “to secure more autonomy, and more power, for various sectors of the intellectual class within a more widely extended process of redistribution” (p. 202). However, this is debatable, as the status of central planning was an ambiguous and contested matter among the reformers. Most reform scenarios began with a critique of “bureaucratic centralism,” and moved from it to suggest the introduction of markets, supervised and coordinated by a “planning center” that would not engage in issuing directives, but in long-term indicative planning. The real significance of these suggestions was open-ended and a matter of struggle. While Konrad and Szelényi interpreted them as merely rationalizing redistribution and cementing ­further the alliance between the ruling elite and the technocracy, it is also possible to see these ideas as indicating a lack of fit, unanticipated by Konrad

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and ­Szelényi, between teleology and redistribution, a fissure opening up within the figure of the teleological redistributor and pulling it apart. The ­economists who opted for purely strategic, long-term, indicative planning over directive planning were distancing themselves from redistributive decisions, and no doubt also sought to insulate themselves from immediate responsibility for their consequences. It was boundary work between the “bureaucratic” and “technocratic” aspects of planning, thus indicating not a convergence of the intellectual class around redistribution, but intensified classificatory struggle over the role of the economic expert. To preserve their teleological claim, the economists limited their involvement in redistribution by, for example, developing an argument in favor of relative enterprise autonomy. The ambiguities inherent in the reform of central planning appear with particular clarity in what was perhaps the most important scientific teleological discourse of the day, namely cybernetics. Cybernetics had many adherents among the 1968 Czechoslovak reformers, a fact that Konrad and Szelényi cite as evidence for the teleological claim of the intelligentsia. Yet, there is a built-in indecision in cybernetics with respect to the position of the planning center (Galison, 1994): is it “outside” the system, so to speak, as an authoritative design for how it functions (see Lange, 1967); or is it “inside” the system, as a feedback loop mechanism influenced by all the other components of the system (see Markus et al., 1991; Komarek, 1990)? Is it transcendent or immanent? While Konrad and Szelényi’s argument implicitly relied on the first interpretation, after 1968, reform communism actually settled on the second. In the discourse and practice of “prognostics,” the planning center was conceptualized as inside the system, thereby ceding the overall direction of the latter to the political center. As such, technocrats still claimed to engage in planning, but in a way that was detached from the power to make redistributive decisions. To preserve their teleological claim, the prognosticators replaced transcendence with immanence.8 9

Futures Present

Indeed, Konrad and Szelényi’s argument itself may be taken as evidence of this increased contestation and fragmentation. They asked, “What makes us intellectuals?” This is not the question of an ascendant class. This is not the sort of question one asks if the answer is obvious and well-established. This is a question one asks when the answer has been destabilized; when it is no longer clear 8 For the full argument, see Eyal (2003, pp. 104–110).

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who are the legitimate experts. Their question indexed a field of competing and conflicting claims, not an emergent “synthesis.” What was their own account if not a challenge, offered from the “margins” (and they indeed identified themselves with the “marginal intellectuals”), to the transcendent teleological claim? In fact, they were well aware that their own interpretation of the reforms could not stand “outside” the historical narrative they were relating. What role did they play in their own narrative? They attempted to answer this question in the last few pages of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. They arrived at a paradox, and ultimately at a position not altogether different from the prognosticators. The intelligentsia, they wrote, “can make its class power secure only if it refuses to formulate its class consciousness” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1979, p. 249). What, then, was the status of their own text, which so clearly formulated this class consciousness? It was written from the margins because “those whom the elite has driven into marginality are the only ones in a position to recognize the class character of the intelligentsia” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1979, p. 249). And it was a form of “immanent structural analysis” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1979, p. 251) because any transcendent criticism would have been immediately co-opted to serve as class ideology of the intelligentsia. Hence, their paradoxical formulation: “In our day only that which is immanent can be transcendent, but only that which transcends the existing order can be immanent” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1979, p. 250). The fissure within the teleological redistributor appears here in a different way than with the economists, but it is nonetheless evident. What they meant by this paradoxical formulation was a sort of Mannheimian “synthesis.” To the extent that their text could have made the intelligentsia conscious of itself, it would have provoked an immediate antithesis and then a synthesis: If individual intellectuals openly enunciated the legitimating principle of the redistributive intelligentsia’s class power, their own logic would drive them (or others) on to enunciate the alternative legitimating principle of the owners of labor power and to a more mature and rational form of redistribution which would make possible the establishment of organs of worker self-management at every level. konrad and szelényi, 1979, p. 249

The marginal intellectuals, as the bearers of this synthesis, would “take up their position between the technocracy and the working class, becoming the organic intelligentsia of both, so that the one and the other can derive their own

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ideologies from the immanent critical activity of that intelligentsia” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1979, p. 252). This needs to be countered, first, with the argument that the marginal intellectuals were by no means alone in formulating a vision of workers’ councils and self-management of enterprises. This was certainly an important component of the plans of the Czechoslovak reformers in 1968 (Šik, 1972). The fact that they were obviously meant to secure workers’ support for the reforms, which at first was not forthcoming, does not mean that one can ignore proposals favoring workers’ autonomy as merely cynical ploys. The second point ­follows from the first. We should resist the temptation to derive a tendency towards “synthesis” from the play of opposing perspectives. Proposals for ­enterprise autonomy, indicative planning or workers’ self-management were ­perspectives, not pre-figurations, while Konrad and Szelényi’s Zen paradox of immanent transcendence was not a synthesis, but a claim to make the future present, to identify within the present moment the actors and tendencies that were harbingers of things to come. This is the final lesson I would like to draw from this third snapshot.9 This chapter has argued that a contemporary reconstruction of the concept of “intelligentsia” should replace it with the concept of field, provided that it resists the temptation to derive a tendency towards “synthesis” from the play of opposing perspectives in this field, and that it attends to the classificatory struggles within the field over internal and external boundaries, over criteria of judgment and worth. But what kind of field? As noted above, the concept of the intelligentsia has always been freighted with the historical meaning 9 The idea of the second Bildungsbürgertum, formulated in Eyal, Szelényi and Townsley (1998), perhaps could have provided a fourth snapshot, but it introduces further complications and hence was excluded from this chapter. In some respects, this idea was in line with the historical meaning of the “intelligentsia” as pre-figuration because the cultural bourgeoisie prefigured an emergent capitalist order and was poised to build a new civilization in its own image. In other respects, it diverged from this narrative. It was a “second” Bildungsbürgertum, i.e., the concept was oriented to the glories and travails of an earlier era, now repeated in a new fashion, and not to the contours of a new order. Arguably, the authors were participating in a struggle not over making futures present, but over the interpretation of the past. More importantly, the Bildungsbürgertum was transitional. Its aim was to usher in a new “capitalism without capitalists,” to build the necessary institutions, but then to step aside and let the new capitalists, whether national or foreign, entrepreneurial, recombinant or state-sponsored, take over. The Bildungsbürgertum was not the protagonist of a romance of self-discovery, but a “vanishing mediator” (Jameson, 1973), i.e., “a catalytic agent which permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms” (p. 78)—in other words, between socialism and capitalism.

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of p ­ re-figuring the outlines of a new order. It should be replaced, therefore, with the concept of a field of struggle, not between different interpretations of the past, but between different strategies for making the future present, strategies that typically involve carving social positions from which the future could be made to count in present struggles—these range from the technical forms of planning, modeling, simulation, prognostics and risk analysis, to the speculative format of futurology, the hype of ted talks, etc. Critical theory used to count among the protagonists in this field, and it probably could never in good consciences completely avoid playing a role in these struggles. Yet by formulating, as clearly as possible, the concept of this field as an object of empirical analysis, it should avoid the temptation to derive a synthesis from the play of opposing strategies, a temptation that is constantly present in the concepts of “intelligentsia” or “new class.” References Alonso, William, and Paul Star (1987). The Politics of Numbers. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Bauman, Zygmunt (1987). Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bell, Daniel (1973). The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books. Benda, Julien (1928). The Treason of the Intellectuals. New York, NY: William Morrow. (Original work published in 1927) Block, Fred, and Gene A. Burns (1986). “Productivity as a Social Problem: The Uses and Misuses of Social Indicators.” American Sociological Review, 51(6), 767–780. doi:10.2307/2095366. Bourdieu, Pierre (1996). The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published in 1992) Bourdieu, Pierre (1975). “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason.” Social Science Information, 14(6), 19–47, doi:10.1177/053901847501400602. Bourdieu, Pierre (1990). In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brecht, Bertolt (1973). “Intellectuals and Class Struggle.” New German Critique, 1, 19–21, doi:10.2307/487627. Breslau, Daniel (1998). In Search of the Unequivocal: The Political Economy of Measurement in US Labor Market Policy. London, UK: Praeger. Brint, Steven (1985). “‘New Class’ and Cumulative Trend Explanations of the Liberal Political Attitudes of Professionals.” American Journal of Sociology, 90(1), 30–71, doi: 10.1086/228047.

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Bruce-Briggs, Barry (ed.) (1979). The New Class? New York, NY: McGraw Hill. Callon, Michel (2005). “Disabled Persons of All Countries, Unite!” In Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 308–313. Charle, Christophe (1998). “The Intellectuals After the Dreyfus Affair: Uses and Blindness of Historical Memory.” Paper presented at the conference on Reintegrating European Cultures, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, retrieved May 11, 2012, from http://www.unc.edu/depts/europe/conferences/ACLS98/charle.html. Chateauraynaud, Francis, and Didier Torny (1999). Les sombres précurseurs. Paris, France: EHESS. Chomsky, Noam (1969). American Power and the New Mandarins. New York, NY: Pantheon. Collins, H.M., and Robert Evans (2007). Rethinking Expertise. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Coser, Lewis A. (1965). Men of Ideas: A Sociologist’s View. New York, NY: Free Press. Dewey, John (1927). The Public and Its Problems. Athens: Ohio University Press. Djilas, Milovan (1957). The New Class. New York, NY: Praeger. Donatich, John (2001, February 12). “The Future of the Public Intellectual: A Forum.” The Nation, retrieved February 20, 2013, from https://www.thenation.com/article/ future-public-intellectual-forum/. Epstein, Steven (1995). “The Construction of Lay Expertise: AIDS Activism and the Forging of Credibility in the Reform of Clinical Trials.” Science, Technology and Human Values, 20, 408–437. Eyal, Gil (2003). The Origins of Post-Communist Elites: From the Prague Spring to the Break-Up of Czechoslovakia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eyal, Gil (2013). “Plugging into the Body of the Leviathan: Proposal for a New Sociology of Public Interventions.” Middle East—Topics & Arguments, 1, 13–24, doi:10.17192/ meta.2013.1.1033. Eyal, Gil (2012). “Spaces between Fields.” In Phil Gorski (ed.), Pierre Bourdieu and Historical Analysis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 159–182. Eyal, Gil, and Larissa Buchholz (2010). “From the Sociology of Intellectuals to the Sociology of Interventions.” Annual Review of Sociology, 36(1), 117–137, doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102625. Eyal, Gil, Brendan Hart, Emine Onculer, Neta Oren and Natasha Rossi (2010). The ­Autism Matrix: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic. London, UK: Polity Press. Eyal, Gil, and Moran Levy (2013). “Economic Indicators as Public Interventions.” History of Political Economy, 45(5), 220–253, doi:10.1215/00182702-2311007. Eyal, Gil, Iván Szelényi and Eleanor Townsley (1998). Making Capitalism Without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe. London, UK: Verso.

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Eyal, Gil, and Eleanor Townsley (1995). “The Social Composition of the Communist Nomenklatura: A Comparison of Russia, Poland and Hungary.” Theory and Society, 24(5), 723–750, doi:10.1007/bf00993404. Foucault, Michel (1991). “Governmentality.” In Collin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel (2000). “Truth and Power.” In Paul Rabinow and James D. Faubion (eds.), Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 3: Power. New York, NY: New Press, 111–133. Frentzel-Zagorska, Janina, and Krzysztof Zagorski (1989). “East European Intellectuals on the Road to Dissent.” Politics and Society, 17(1), 89–113, doi:10.1177/003232928 901700104. Fuller, Steve (2004). “Intellectuals: An Endangered Species in the 21st Century?” Economy and Society. 33(4), 463–483, doi:10.1080/0308514042000285242. Galison, Peter (1994). “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry, 21(1), 228–266, doi:10.1086/448747. Gieryn, Thomas F. (1999). Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Goodwin, Craufurd (2013). “Walter Lippmann: The Making of a Public Economist.” History of Political Economy, 45(5), 92–113, doi:10.1215/00182702-2310962. Gouldner, Alvin W. (1975–1976). “Prologue to a Theory of Revolutionary Intellectuals.” Telos, 26, 3–36, doi:10.3817/1275026003. Gouldner, Alvin W. (1979). The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. New York, NY: Seabury Press. Gramsci, Antonio (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1929– 35). In Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds.). New York, NY: International Publisher. Gramsci, Antonio (1995). Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks. In Derek Boothman (ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haas, Peter M. (1992). “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy.” International Organization, 46(1), 1–35, doi:10.1017/s0020818300001442. Jacoby, Russell (1987). The Last Intellectuals. New York, NY: Basic Books. Jameson, Frederic (1973). “The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber.” New German Critique, 1, 52–89, doi:10.2307/487627. Karabel, Jerome (1995). “The Revolt of the Intellectuals: The Prague Spring and the Politics of Reform Communism.” Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change, 18, 93–143. Kellner, Douglas (1997). “Intellectuals, the New Public Spheres, and Techno-Politics.” New Political Science, 41–42, 169–188.

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King, Lawrence P., and Iván Szelényi (2004). Theories of the New Class: Intellectuals and Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Komarek, Valtr (1990). “Treatise: Prognostic Self-Analysis of Czechoslovak Society.” Eastern European Economics, 28(4), 7–23, doi:10.1080/00128775.1990.11648442. Konrad, George, and Iván Szelényi (1979). The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Koselleck, Reinhart (2004). Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lange, Oskar (1967). “The Computer and the Market,” in C. H. Feinstein, ed., Socialism, Capitalism, and Economic Growth: Essays Presented to Maurice Dobb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 158–161. Latour, Bruno (2005). “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public.” In Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 14–41. Latour, Bruno (1987). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel (eds.). Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Lippman, Walter (1922). Public Opinion. New York, NY: Free Press. Lippman, Walter (1927). The Phantom Public. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Malia, Martin (1960). “What is the Intelligentsia?” Daedalus, 89(3), 441–458. Mannheim, Karl (1936). Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace. Markus, Jozef a Kolektiv (1991). Slovensko na Prelome Tretieho Tisicrocia. Bratislava, Czechoslovakia: VEDA. Marres, Noortje (2005). “Issues Spark a Public into Being: A Key but Often Forgotten Point of the Lippmann-Dewey Debate.” In Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 208–217. Medvetz, Tom (2012). The Rise of Think Tanks in America: Merchants of Policy and Power. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Mills, C. Wright (1963). “The Social Role of the Intellectual.” In Irving L. Horowitz (ed.), Power, Politics and People: The Collected Papers of C. Wright Mills, New York, NY: Ballantine, 292–304. (Original work published in 1944) Mitchell, Timothy (1991). “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and their Critics.” American Political Science Review, 85(1), 77–96, doi:10.1017/s0003055 400271451. Porter, Theodore (1995). Trust in Numbers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Posner, Richard A. (2001). Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Rabeharisoa, Vololona, and Michel Callon (2004). “Patients and Scientists in French Muscular Dystrophy Research.” In Sheila Jasanoff (ed.), States of Knowledge: The CoProduction of Science and Social Order. London, UK: Routledge, 142–160. Richta, Radovan et al. (1969). Civilization at the Crossroads. Prague, Czechoslovakia: International Arts and Sciences Press. Rose, Nikolas (1992). “Engineering the Human Soul: Analyzing Psychological Expertise.” Science in Context, 5(2), 351–369, doi:10.1017/s0269889700001228. Sapiro, Giselle (2009). “Modèles d’intervention politique des intellectuels. Le cas ­français.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 176–177(1–2), 8–31, doi:10.3917/ arss.176.0008. Scheiber, Noam (2012, November 2). “Known Unknowns.” [Review of the book The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver]. New York Times Sunday Book Review, retrieved on February 21, 2013, from https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/books/review/the-signaland-the-noise-by-nate-silver. Shils, Edward Albert (1972). The Intellectuals and the Powers, and Other Essays. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published in 1958). Šik, Ota (1972). Czechoslovakia: The Bureaucratic Economy. White Plains, NY: IAS Press. Stiglitz, Joseph E., Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi (2009). “Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.” Retrieved on February 21, 2013, from http://www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/documents/rapport _anglais.pdf. Szelényi, Iván (1982). “The Intelligentsia in the Class Structure of State-Socialist Societies.” American Journal of Sociology, 88, 287–326, doi:10.1086/649259. Walker, Pat (ed.) (1979). Between Labor and Capital. Hassocks, UK: Harvester. Weber, Max (1946). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. In Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. White, Hayden (1973). Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chapter 2

Normative Frames and Systemic Imperatives: Gouldner, Szelényi and New Class Fracture Michael D. Kennedy Together1 with his co-authors, Iván Szelényi has done as much as anyone to identify the class distinctions of intellectuals, and to identify the systemic and cultural foundations of their coherence through communist rule and its aftermath. The qualities of intellectuality in the 21st century have, however, shaken the confidence of most analysts. Instead of class, we find networks and fields organizing our knowledgeable interventions, with no mutually intelligible culture of critical or other discourse underlying and thus justifying the class ­distinction. The rise of Trump and other authoritarians may, however, provide for the return of a class in statu nascendi, or at least intellectuality as cultural disposition. Sociologists dedicated to internationalism in America identify Iván Szelényi as one of their principal intellectual inspirations (Kennedy and Centeno, 2007). Indeed, as much as any figure in 20th/21st century sociology, Iván Szelényi has not only embodied the distinction of intellectuals, but also identified it. At least my work in the sociology of intellectuality has been indebted to Szelényi’s scholarship on this subject more than to anyone else’s. This chapter will briefly elaborate the ways in which Iván Szelényi has moved my own thinking about intellectuals and their culture and class. This will be followed by outlining some of the systemic qualities of, and intellectual responses to, the times in which we live, culminating in the crisis/opportunity for intellectuality around the election of Trump as President of the United States. 1

The Power of Iván Szelényi’s Intellectuals

In my first book (Kennedy, 1991), I used Konrad and Szelényi (1979) to depart from the dominant nationalist framework used in explaining the rise of 1 Revised paper based on a presentation at the conference “Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions: Themes from Szelényi,” in Pécs, Hungary, October 2015. http://szociologia.btk .pte.hu/ivan-Szelényi-intellectuals-inequalities-and-transitions. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004400283_003

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Solidarność in Poland in 1980–81 in order to account for the formation of the greatest social movement of the 20th century (Kubik, 2009) in terms of class alliances. Rather than presume a national basis for the alliance between professionals, intelligentsia and workers, I explored both how systemic conditions and strategic action minimized the apparent significance of class divisions for the nation. This class alliance not only laid the foundation for communism’s end (Kennedy, 2002), but the dynamics of that transformation also led to the decline of labor as a social force and to the ascendance of neoliberalism as a reigning ideology.2 Some even argue that communism’s end laid the groundwork for the fourth new class project of the East Central European intelligentsia. Of course, this reference invokes the work conducted by Szelényi together with Gil Eyal and Eleanor Townsley (1998) to characterize the postcommunist system. While many other dimensions of that work deserve mention, two aspects should be highlighted in particular. First, Eyal et al. characterized ­postcommunist capitalism according to the qualities of the intelligentsia that created it. They especially emphasized the character of relations within this class and the individual adaptations of elites with different forms of capital to form an alliance that enabled the rise of a hegemonic managerial bloc (Kennedy, 2002). While this kind of capital-based argument is useful, the turn taken by Szelényi and his co-authors to elevate irony in their characterization of this class is even more interesting. They also identified it as a method for critical social science. During the symposium organized around the 25th anniversary of the publication of Konrad and Szelényi in English, irony was blasting. In that symposium’s subsequent publication in Theory and Society, I wrote, During the symposium, [Szelényi] pointed out that our recognition of irony was quite appropriate. In fact, he said, he and his coauthors had recently written a paper on how irony lies as the epistemological foundation of his oeuvre, but the mainstream sociology journal to which it was initially submitted declined to publish it. A journal more accustomed to critical theory’s elaboration published it subsequently [Eyal, Szelényi and Townsley, 2003]. It’s tough to capture in print the audience’s reception of this fine point, but most appreciated how irony might be used to illuminate irony’s own place in professional social science. However, the irony

2 See David Ost (2005), The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe and my own take on his work in “Anger and Solidarity in Transition Culture” (Kennedy, 2007).

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at work in Thesis Eleven didn’t have the same critical power as I found in The Intellectuals. [Szélenyi] and his 2003 colleagues put irony in the place of socialism’s counterculture.3 While they acknowledged humor’s importance, the main place irony occupied was in absolution from responsibility for identifying a positive normative standpoint from which to develop critical sociology. In this, socialism’s demise and globalization’s hegemony become almost a relief for critical intellectuals, released from the obligatory defense or critique of societies made in the name of their allegiance. Nonetheless, irony’s revival is especially apparent in the assessment of the fourth new class project. Reflecting on Making Capitalism without Capitalists, [Szelényi] and his colleagues find intellectuals to be a particularly flawed class. While Gouldner [1979] may have evaluated their flaws in terms of their distance from universality, the intellectuals’ flaw in Eyal et al. [2003] comes in their failure to hold onto power once they get it. Using their capacity for rational discourse as the means by which they construct capitalism,4 much as they once constructed socialism, this East European intelligentsia loses its distinction, or its power, as soon as it has the capacity to realize it. kennedy, 2005, p. 10

Szelényi and his co-authors were right in signifying the critical place of irony in their articulation of intellectual distinction. But that was more than a decade ago. The power of irony has remained relevant mostly for those who find their greatest comfort in the café, and worse, as a justification for keeping a distance from the implications of addressing intellectual responsibility itself, especially in these times in which we live. The foundational question of my last book was as follows: “Who is intellectually responsible and why?” (Kennedy, 2015b, p. xviii). In preparation for a talk in Singapore about Globalizing Knowledge, Hiro Saito helped me recognize a more adequate, if less parsimonious, question for my life’s work: how do intellectuals mobilize institutions and networks to engage issues in a more globally responsible fashion (Kennedy, 2015c)? Irony might be that vehicle, but it may not suffice today. However, extending Iván Szelényi can help.

3 Zygmunt Bauman (1976) famously identified the place of irony. 4 Charles Derber, William A. Schwartz and Yale Magrass’s (1990) work Power in the Highest Degree: Professionals and the Rise of a New Mandarin Order might therefore provide a better foundation for argument with their emphasis on the culture of rational discourse.

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Although I have never been Szelényi’s student, he has been most generous with me in the times we have visited one another—in Los Angeles, Budapest, Ann Arbor, New Haven and Abu Dhabi, and at various conferences. I once interviewed him formally, where I asked him explicitly to mark his position. It’s hard to know whether a position he articulated 20 years ago still looks familiar, but I think it does. I draw on my own summary from 10 years ago: [Szelényi] has identified himself as Weberian, on the one hand emphasizing that our conceptual tools are always inadequate before the complexities of reality, thereby only capturing that which our values lead us to recognize as important to address. He also self-identifies as populist, in preferring the viewpoint on reality that is from the bottom, from the underdog. Although he has focused on elites and intellectuals, his interpretation of them rarely squares simply with their own self-understanding, and is more likely to be something plausible according to those who are the beneficiaries, or victims, of their power. kennedy, 2005, p. 10

We can see this disposition again in his recent account (Szelényi, 2015) of the triple crisis of sociology. There, he recommends that we “return to the classical tradition of Marx and Weber when sociology asked the great questions and was in its reflexive, interpretative mode a serious challenge to economics (and the just-born political sciences). Why not a left-leaning, critical, neo-classical sociology?” (Szelényi, 2015). That might be the answer, but it also presumes a time in which truthfulness matters. And given the times in which we live, this is in doubt. Ironically, this may once again open up the question of whether intellectuals are a class in statu nascendi. But before we consider that question, we need to articulate the qualities of the historical time and place in which we live. 2

Marking Historical Time

For those who have been shaped by the conflicts and contradictions that animate the places once ruled by communists, historical time has obvious demarcations. From the collapse of empires through World War i and the interwar period, through World War ii, the era of communist rule and its end, periods are not hard to identify. World historic transformations tended to resonate regionally, but after 1989, that synchronicity suffered. Yet it has returned with a

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vengeance with the election of Donald J. Trump as US President. Let us, however, begin with the outlines of transition culture after 1989. In Cultural Formations of Postcommunism (Kennedy, 2002), I argued that the focus on the goals of transition in terms of markets, democracy and national independence overlooked one of the most important qualities of the end of communism—namely the peaceful nature of the transition in the communist world’s northern European rim. The Polish Round Table negotiations of 1989, for example, should be studied not only in terms of who won and who lost, but also how they structured radical but peaceful change.5 While this argument improperly masked the development of a more violent culture on the Polish streets, outside politics per se,6 it did highlight the unacknowledged assumption that enabled transition culture as such: that of broad geopolitical peace under Western military hegemony. In the century’s first decade, I proposed the following as the foundation of transition culture, but the extent to which it holds true only became readily evident after Putin’s rise to power: First, the Soviet Union had to be ‘willing’ to allow the transformations within Eastern Europe. Second, domestic actors with control over the means of violence within these countries had to eschew violence, or be prevented from using it. Finally, those who wished to launch transition had themselves not only to resist temptations to use violence, but also to be wary of provocations that would justify state violence. Transition depended on peaceful change, and the perception that this peace was in the interests of all nations. With this vision, it could avoid the cycles of violence likely to be found with the exercise of force. Of course there were some regions in the 1990s that were embedded in violence. Both the Caucasus and the Balkans had violent contest built into their transformations, and thus never simply fit into the story of 5 For attempts by the University of Michigan to assess this significance, see http://www.umich .edu/~iinet/PolishRoundTable/. 6 Together with Lucyna Kirwil, I made this argument first in “What Have We Learned from the Study of Social Change in Poland?” (Kennedy and Kirwil, 2004). With an increase in Poland’s total number of crimes, and a dramatic increase in violent crime generally and juvenile and female violent crime in particular, it was wrong to say that the transition, especially after 1989, was peaceful. The violence averted in the negotiated revolution was instead found in the violence of civil society itself, where citizens preyed on other citizens at unprecedented levels. For further elaboration, see “Changes in the Structure of Crime during the Transition Period in Poland” (Kirwil, 2004).

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transition. The passions, loyalties, and legal contests of wartime and postwar postcommunist social change can’t be addressed adequately within the framework favored by transition culture, one that minimizes attention to the cultural politics of power and change. But these war stories were critical for the cultural politics of transition itself. War was a ‘danger’ that might be identified for those, especially in ethnically mixed areas, who didn’t take the path of transition, and instead, took the path of nationalism. War could be treated as an anomaly, something that normal Western societies did not undertake. It was contrary to the trend toward integrated and peaceful globalized economy. But when the West became directly involved in military action against Serbia, that presumption could be challenged. The West erased the possibility of constructing itself as an integrated and simply transcendent party in the ­unfolding of global change. Regardless of whether one believed that intervention to be the first war launched in the name of human rights or not, the use of force to establish change fundamentally changed the conditions of transition culture. The cultural contest over the exercise of force came to the fore, first of all with naming the quality of power associated with the military power of the United States. Transition culture now, instead of dealing with the decentered power relations of globalization, had to contend with questions of American militarism and imperialism. kennedy, 2008, p. 195

This transformation from transition culture to imperial contest could be felt acutely in the postcommunist region itself, with the difference most evident between those countries that acceded to the European Union and those that only remained in its neighborhood. For the Northern Rim, this shift was less important, especially if contrasted with the financial crisis of 2008. Neoliberalism was identified as a problem before 2008 by many on the more critical left, but its embrace by both the moderate left and the right laid the foundation for the expression of intellectual responsibility after the financial crisis: exaggerating more of the same. Summarizing the final substantive chapter of Globalizing Knowledge (Ken�nedy, 2015b), the explicit governance of global, regional and national systems came to be increasingly at odds with their legitimations and everyday practice. This, in turn, led a growing number of actors to reject those everyday terms of governance and embrace new subjectivities based on their alienation from the system. Anarchist sensibilities were one expression of this, but so, too, were proto-fascist or fascist movements. However, most intellectuals and the movements with which they identified assumed that the struggle would

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be about democratizing governance and increasing systemic coherence and responsibility. As such, intellectual responsibility was not expressed with any sense of class coherence, but rather with the plurality marked by those who emphasize professional diversity and the sociology of interventions.7 They, both the ­intellectuals and their analysts, were wrong. Had we been more attentive to ­transformations in East and Central European publics and polities and their neighborhoods, we might have been more aware of this problem. After all, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine anticipated the times in which we now live across Europe and North America.8 3

From the Truthfulness of Transition to Information War

20th century transition culture treated Western approaches to elections, information and media as far from perfect, but more than adequate, in dealing with the cultural infrastructure of democratic governance. This assumption already appeared inadequate as Russia, after 1999, no longer accepted American hegemony. But since 2014, this inadequacy has turned into catastrophe in the face of Ukraine’s war-ravaged transition. In Globalizing Knowledge (Kennedy, 2015a), I presented the Ukrainian struggle on the Maidan as another instance of the expression of transition culture, albeit at a much more geopolitically contested time. Whether the voices were secular or religious, the West seemed to recognize the emancipatory praxis of civil society on the Maidan, and the coherence of intellectual responsibility in its expression. The following reflection by a Russian Orthodox priest illustrates this especially well: The Maidan is giving or has given birth to a community which represents a classic instance of the civil society, almost its pure substance. This community identifies itself on the basis of shared values, including dignity, 7 This is an invitation to Gil Eyal to help clarify whether this concern can be found in the shift to interventions and away from intellectuals. For an earlier statement, see Gil Eyal and Larissa Buchholz (2010), “From the Sociology of Intellectuals to the Sociology of Interventions.” 8 I developed this argument long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it’s also easy to ­exaggerate the difference between the geopolitics of the 1990s and those of the 21st century. Tolstrup (2014) offers an important corrective with his comparison between domestic developments and external influence by Russia and the EU (and the US occasionally) on democratization in Moldova, Belarus and Ukraine at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. See also my review of this volume (Kennedy, 2015d).

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honesty, non-violence, solidarity, and readiness for self-sacrifice. Civil society in the form currently present at the Maidan can hardly be found even in Europe, where for the most part people nowadays are united on the basis of common interests, but not common values. I cannot personally imagine any contemporary European country where people would be freezing and risk being beaten or even killed for 24 hours a day for weeks, for the sake of values that seem quite abstract. The Ukrainian Maidan that gathered ‘for the sake of Europe,’ has become more European than Europe and its politicians. The Ukrainians see how the European politicians betray the European Maidan, but they do not betray the European values they stand for. The Ukrainian Maidan actually brings back to many Europeans confidence about Europe; it cures what can be called ‘the European fatigue’. archimandrite kirill, 2013

For many on that square, and in Europe, Maidan represented a quest for truthfulness that reinvigorated the meaning of transition and of Europe, and, one might argue, the expression of intellectual responsibility itself. There was vigorous debate about how much the far right animated that public square, but this was itself a meaningful expression of democratic culture. However, when Russia invaded Crimea, lent its support to the so-called People’s Republics in Luhansk and Donetsk, and engaged in increasingly bellicose nuclear saber rattling, this more or less intellectual debate was changed into a clash of world systemic epistemologies. Every war brings with it disinformation and propaganda, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine saw an astonishing degree of both. In this sense, it was not a matter of selective information; it was a matter of filling the airwaves and social media with active disinformation. Information Warfare informs the crisis, as Russia made substantial investments in trying to get its viewpoint across.9 But this was not just a viewpoint. Russian strategy deliberately distorted information and misrepresented it in order to advance a political position and to create a political reaction. When Europeans declared in response that the battle for Ukraine is a battle for Europe, they also fueled the imagination that this is a battle of world systems, where one simply has to decide whether Europe is better than Russia, or vice versa. Ideology infected and supplanted the arc of transition culture 9 As illustrated by Gareth Harding (2015) in “Russia: Half-Hearted EU Propaganda No Match for Robust Policies.”

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t­oward truthfulness as cultural disposition. Framing transition culture as a battle of world systems even distorted our capacity to have a meaningful debate within the West. The most egregious example of this distortion was evident in the amount of disinformation that went into the question of whether the loss of Crimea, and the establishment of the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, was brought about by Ukrainian Russians, by Russian volunteers or by Russian regular soldiers. Few who had access to reliable information doubted extensive Russian involvement (Luhn, 2015).10 While we might have developed more nuanced insights at the time, the pattern was clear. There was a systematic misrepresentation of Russia’s role in providing weapons and soldiers so as to destabilize Ukraine. Russia invaded Ukraine, and Russia fought to make Ukraine relatively invisible in Western debates by replacing the question of Ukrainian wishes with one of peace among contending world powers. Consider, for example, how the American journal, Foreign Affairs, framed the debate: “The West provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Russia’s near abroad by expanding nato and the EU after the Cold War. How much do you agree? How confident are you?” (Foreign Affairs, 2014). It’s worth reviewing the whole issue, but just consider Masha Gessen’s reply: I am taken aback by the question, which uses Kremlin terminology. What the hell is ‘near abroad’? Ukraine is a sovereign country as separate from Russia as, say, Finland. Incidentally, if Finland chose to join nato I bet we would be talking about it in terms of Finland’s choice, and not nato’s expansionism. And we have the 45 million people of the sovereign state of Ukraine who sought the support and protection of Western powers, which have failed to protect them from Russian aggression. Foreign Affairs, 2014

Whether or not one agrees with Gessen’s position, it was the one that took the question and the power of information warfare most seriously. By contrast, those who agreed with the statement considered information warfare to be incidental and irrelevant, and in that way elevated any Russian viewpoint to a reasonable one. John Mearsheimer, a leading voice of Realist persuasion, epitomized this position:

10

See Alec Luhn (2015), “Russian Soldiers Have given Up Pretending They Are Not Fighting in Ukraine.”

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Russian leaders and elites made it clear from the mid-1990s forward that they viewed nato expansion as a serious threat and a violation of a tacit bargain made at the end of the Cold War. Putin and other Russian leaders were especially exercised when nato announced in April 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually join nato; they warned it would lead to a crisis. Indeed, it helped cause the Russia-Georgia War in August 2007–08. Yet Western leaders foolishly continued to pursue nato and EU expansion, and that eventually led to the present crisis. Foreign Affairs, 2014

Foreign Affairs presented this as a simple debate, with reasonable positions equally distributed. But this is a big step away from the position that transition culture represented in theory, if not always in practice. It was a big step toward a measure of dissimulation undergirding the global culture that appears to be the successor of transition culture. It was also a step toward realism in national cultures where the power to declare something as true replaced the truthfulness of knowledge itself. 4

Intellectuality in the Time of Trump Truth

As most in my position, I did not expect that Trump would win the US presidency. I also did not expect the British to vote for Brexit. Although Trump and Brexit could be linked to the political practice evident in Putin’s Russia, I thought such “Übermensch Escapism” (Kennedy, 2015a) would never seduce democratic publics. I was mistaken and I was not alone. From Putin to Erdogan, from Kaczyński to Orbán, from Brexit to Trump, an alternative to convention is being proffered, one that elevates the fantasy of a nation over the truth of intellectuality. The hubris of the democratic West lay in its confidence that Putin was a Russian exception. Why? We applied conventional democratic, and knowledgeable, expectations to public preferences. We thought publics would heed intellectuals and opinion leaders regarding the dangers of such radical departures from past wisdom, failing to recognize the depths of alienation from the existing system felt by many. We also failed to recognize the power of fantasy. Feeling rather like Cassandra, I argued in the summer of 2016 that fantasy […] needs neither coherence nor evidence to realize its power, for it is not designed to reflect or operate on reality. It is designed to constitute a

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r­ eality that even its believers know is not real, but nonetheless has an effect that satisfies a desire that cannot be expressed openly. […] Putin blazed the trail, constituting the fantasy of a Great Russia at risk of destruction, finding evidence of that threat in democracy’s spread in Ukraine, and creating a war that demands even more authoritarian leadership at home. Erdogan followed suit, finding the perfect opportunity in a bungled and possibly planted coup to impose a new order on Turkey, to impose the fantasy of a Turkey unbridled by expectations of Western allies and cosmopolitan intellectuals. Trump and his promoters took note and whipped up desire by positing threats (immigrants, Muslims, crooked politicians) to an order that might only be fulfilled if a strong man leads. Those who embrace this fantasy find enjoyment not only in hating those threats, but finally being allowed to say it publicly. […] [Trump’s] effect is realized through a celebrity culture that not only seeks salvation in the strong man, the superman, the Übermensch; it finds in the fantasy of beautiful blonde adult children and the ex-model wife an escapism that appeals to those who feel abandoned by policy wonks, free traders, movement activists, academics, and conventional politicians [Kennedy, 2015a]. They can escape the world in which women and people of color threaten their imagined place and find themselves in the fantasy Trump embodies. These people, in their alienation from the world that exists, enjoy Trump. kennedy, 2016

By trying to counter these fantasies with facts and fear with reason, intellectuals missed the point. They thought this was an argument about reasoned pathways rather than projections of grievance. They—we—were wrong, as Trump’s election confirmed. However, in that election we may also find the greatest conditions for the reconstruction of intellectuality, for under his rule, knowledge has been a casualty. Craig Calhoun interpreted the first near year of the Trump Presidency as an attack on knowledge itself. As he put it, Trump is resolutely against knowledge. It’s not just that he doesn’t have much, or that too much of what he thinks is true is really false. The very idea of knowledge seems to make him uncomfortable. He takes the notion that he can’t make up whatever truth he wants as a personal affront, a limit to his autonomy, and an insult to his narcissistic ego. He believes in being smart—and brags frequently about his IQ. I’m sure he believes in

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information, preferably insider information about stock trades, real estate opportunities, or what his enemies are up to. He just doesn’t believe in knowledge. calhoun, 2017

Calhoun is not alone. One of the best expressions of this popular intellectual resistance to Trump’s regime was the “March for Science.” Posing as a politically neutral project, dependent on scholarly expertise and designed to elevate evidentiary reason over partisan positions, the protest was even able to mobilize non-partisan associations. It enabled my own Brown University to ­celebrate the mobilization’s embrace of truth and ridicule of concepts like “alternative facts.”11 But this only serves to signal the problem. Trump’s supporters used the political inflections of the protest to diminish its larger point by claiming science to be with them.12 It’s not just an information war. This war is about truthfulness and knowledge, and perhaps even about the foundation for resurrecting intellectuals as a class in statu nascendi, or at least about intellectuality as culture in that condition. Before considering this potential, we need to acknowledge that there are some intellectuals who have been drawn to Trump’s promise, who in turn have tried to construct an ideology around his leadership. The most obvious element in this is the elevation of a certain kind of populist nationalism that found no simple home in either the Republican or the Democratic Party. It brings together economic nationalism and opposition to free trade with an expression of “America First” that evokes white supremacy, but nonetheless displays tokens of diversity in its visual politics. It declares a truthfulness that defies political correctness, implying a commitment to free speech even while it rides a wave of white nationalism that is also able to seduce intellectuals.13 Ron Radosh (2017) summarizes one strain of this intellectual support thus: The Claremont consensus (to put a name on this strain of thought) holds that beneath the veneer of constitutional democracy, we are actually governed by a soft despotism of permanent experts, bureaucrats, pundits, and academics who ignore the majority of the American people. This elite has encouraged a divisive social transformation of the country, has led us into disastrous wars, and has created a deepening economic crisis 11 12 13

See also Jackson Wells (2017), “Rhode Island March for Science to Take Place April 22.” See Allum Bokhari (2017), “5 Scientific Facts the ‘March for Science’ Has Yet to Acknowledge.” See Kelefa Sanneh (2017), “Intellectuals for Trump.”

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for the middle class. Anyone—anyone—who could challenge this elite’s power was therefore a godsend. One might pursue interesting comparisons with Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind, and the seduction of Stalinism for intellectuals,14 but the far more striking development in the transformation of America’s intellectual class has been the relative unanimity of intellectuals’ opposition to Trump. Conservative intellectuals like George Will (2017) are among those leading the way, even in the liberal media, by denouncing Trump’s danger to the Constitution. While there may still be commentators who simply enjoy hating on those who oppose Trump, they are mostly fulfilling their fantasy. In doing so, however, they are being implicated in a system where appeals to reason and evidence are being replaced with the weaponizing of information and truth. In terms of old, they are betraying their class interest. Thanks to the alternative that Trump and his supporters and enablers have brought to the US, our democracy is becoming a society that resembles Putin’s construction, or rather deconstruction, of Ukraine. But this may, in fact, enable the restoration of intellectuality. 5

Intellectuality on the Road to Cultural Power

I don’t believe that Trump will complete his first term. He will resign, or be impeached, for the legitimation crisis facing him is only accumulating (Kennedy, 2017). But then I didn’t believe he would be elected either. Should Trump, and the system he is breeding, continue, the conditions favoring the ascent of intellectuals are great. There is nothing that could unite this group better than such brazen assaults on knowledge, on science and on truthfulness. But for that to develop, intellectuals need to do more than recognize their positionality. During the conference on which this volume is based, Karl Ulrich Mayer proposed that Szelényi has developed one of the last projects through which societal analysis as class analysis can explain systems of domination and exploitation as well as directions of social change. No longer, Mayer argued, can one derive change from understanding the relationships between collective actors representing broad social groups. I think that this is quite right for intellectuals in statu nascendi in the usa. 14

See Peter Beinart (2016), “Why Are Some Conservative Thinkers Falling for Trump?”

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Of course one might, following Konrad and Szelényi, propose that Trump and those of his ilk are creating a system animated by a deep contradiction. This is not the contradiction that motivated their book about communist rule, in which the superior teleological knowledge of the Party and its intellectuals was at odds with a legitimating principle organized around the actual production of value. We could, however, identify a new Trumpist contradiction. Trumpism’s contradiction is between those with power and those who know better. And therein lies the contest, and why one might imagine intellectuality on the road to cultural power. But it’s not only a matter of contending structural logics. It’s also a matter, as the fantasy of Trump et al. demonstrated, of cultural representations and projections. Intellectuals in the US, and elsewhere, lost cultural authority because their leading and legitimating edges were implicated in the reproduction of a neoliberal political economy that oversaw the growing destruction of life chances for significant sectors of the public in North America and the European Union. Neoliberalism helped to buttress its own authority by enriching the leading universities where the children of the elite could secure their education and cultural capital. At the same time, the scale and complexity of the problems facing places, nations and the planet itself served to justify increasing investments in such knowledge, with the promise that only this kind of learnedness might save everyday people from the ravages of capitalism, state brutality and biospheric destruction. While some might still make the case that globalization has led to improvements overall, there are enough people who have been ravaged by its excesses. They fall prey to the fantasy of Übermensch Escapism, brought to you by Trump, Putin, et al. Taking this lesson to heart, then, is not a question of pursuing the project Mayer identified for Iván Szelényi. It’s not just a matter of expressing an alternative legitimating principle that science and intellectuality represent to what Trump et al. bring. Reason and evidence are not enough. For Trump’s and others’ fantasies to be undone, for knowledge to be defended, it can no longer exist on its own terms, by speaking truth to power. Intellectuality must find a way to restore, or even extend, its own power—by identifying with the popular classes in ways that neoliberalism has erased from their imagination—as well as its sense of intellectual responsibility. Intellectuals must recognize what truthfulness means under conditions where information is weaponized. If we want knowledge to remain critical, intellectuality must find its road to cultural power. To realize this, I propose one simple question. How do we elevate the currency of public knowledge or the power of evidentiary reason in public discourse? That is the key question I would wish to

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see addressed in future explorations of the Szelényi sociology of intellectuality. This, it seems to me, is what intellectual responsibility now demands. References Archimandrite Kirill (2013, December 14). “The Theology of Maidan.” Pravmir.com, retrieved April 7, 2019, from http://www.pravmir.com/the-theology-of-the-maidan/. Bauman, Zygmunt (1976). Socialism, the Active Utopia. London, UK: Allen & Unwin. Beinart, Peter (2016, September). “Trump’s Intellectuals.” The Atlantic, retrieved April 7, 2019, from www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/trumps-intellectuals /492752/. Bokhari, Allum (2017, April 23). “5 Scientific Facts the ‘Science March’ Has Yet to Acknowledge.” Breitbart, retrieved April 7, 2019, from www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/ 04/23/5-scientific-facts-the-science-march-refuses-to-acknowledge/. Calhoun, Craig (2017, November 9). “The Big Picture: Trump’s Attack on Knowledge.” Public Books, retrieved April 7, 2019, from www.publicbooks.org/the-big-picturetrumps-attack-on-knowledge/. Derber, Charles, William A. Schwartz and Yale Magrass (1990). Power in the Highest Degree: Professionals and the Rise of a New Mandarin Order. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Eyal, Gil, and Larissa Buchholz (2010). “From the Sociology of Intellectuals to the Sociology of Interventions.” Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 36(1), 117–137, doi:10.1146/ annurev.soc.012809.102625. Eyal, Gil, Iván Szelényi and Eleanor Townsley (2003). “On Irony: An Invitation to Neoclassical Sociology.” Thesis Eleven, 73(1), 5–41, doi:10.1177/0725513603073001002. Eyal, Gil, Iván Szelényi and Eleanor Townsley (1998). Making Capitalism without Capitalists: The New Ruling Elites in Eastern Europe. London, UK: Verso. Gouldner, Alvin Ward (1979). The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and a Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligensia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era. New York, NY: Seabury Press. Harding, Gareth (2015, March 23). “Russia: Half-Hearted EU Propaganda No Match for Robust Policies.” EUobserver, retrieved April 7, 2019, from http://euobserver.com/ opinion/128101. Kennedy, Michael D. (2007). “Anger and Solidarity in Transition Culture.” Labor History, 48(1), 81–88, doi:10.1080/00236560601091167. Kennedy, Michael D. (2002). Cultural Formations of Postcommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Nation, and War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Kennedy, Michael D. (2015a). “European Referendum, Übermensch Escapism, and Anglo-American-European Solidarity.” Queries, 8, 66. Kennedy, Michael D. (2008). “From Transition to Hegemony: Extending the Cultural Politics of Military Alliances and Energy Security.” In Mitchell A. Orenstein et al. (eds.), Transnational Actors in Central and East European Transitions. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 188–212. Kennedy, Michael D. (2015b). Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities, and Publics in Transformation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kennedy, Michael D. (2015c). “Globalizing Knowledge Meets in Singapore” [PDF document]. Presented at Singapore Management University, retrieved April 7, 2019, from https://www.smu.edu.sg/sites/default/files/socsc/pdf/Michael_Kennedy__Globalizing_Knowledge_Meets_in_Singapore.pdf. Kennedy, Michael D. (2016) “Ideology in the Time of Trump.” RI Future, retrieved April 7, 2019, from www.rifuture.org/ideology-in-the-time-of-trump/. Kennedy, Michael D. (2017). “The Impending Legitimation Crisis in Trump’s America.” RI Future, retrieved April 7, 2019, from www.rifuture.org/the-impending-legitimationcrisis-in-trumps-america/. Kennedy, Michael D. (2005). “The Ironies of Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power.” Theory and Society, 34, 24–33. Kennedy, Michael D. (1991). Professionals, Power and Solidarity in Poland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kennedy, Michael D. (2015d). [Review of the book Russia vs. the EU: The Competition for Influence in Post-Soviet States, by Jakob Tolstrup.] Perspectives on Politics, 13(1), 263–264, doi:10.1017/S1537592714003995. Kennedy, Michael D., and Michael A. Centeno (2007). “Internationalism and Global Transformations in American Sociology.” In Craig J. Calhoun (ed.), Sociology in America: A History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 666–712. Kennedy, Michael D., and Lucyna Kirwil (2004). “What Have We Learned from the Study of Social Change in Poland?” International Journal of Sociology, 34(3), 3–14, doi:10.1080/00207659.2004.11043134. Kirwil, Lucyna (2004). “Changes in the Structure of Crime during the Transition Period in Poland.” International Journal of Sociology, 34(3), 48–82, doi:10.1080/00207659.20 04.11043137. Konrad, George, and Iván Szelényi (1979). The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. Brighton, UK: Harvester Press. Kubik, Jan (2009). “Solidarność.” In Immanuel Ness (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500—Present. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 3072–3080. Luhn, Alec (2015, March 31). “Russian Soldiers Have Given up Pretending They Are Not Fighting in Ukraine.” VICE News, retrieved April 7, 2019, from https://news.vice.

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com/en_us/article/438kv3/russian-soldiers-have-given-up-pretendingthey-are-not-fighting-in-ukraine. Ost, David (2005). The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Radosh, Ronald (2017, May 22). “The Madness of the Trumpist Intellectuals.” The Daily Beast, retrieved April 7, 2019, from www.thedailybeast.com/the-madness-of-thetrumpist-intellectuals. Sanneh, Kelefa (2017, January 1). “Intellectuals for Trump: A Rogue Group of Conservative Thinkers Tries to Build a Governing Ideology around a President-Elect Who Disdains Ideology.” The New Yorker, retrieved April 7, 2019, from www.newyorker .com/magazine/2017/01/09/intellectuals-for-trump. Szelényi, Iván (2015, April 20). “The Triple Crisis of Sociology.” Contexts, American Sociological Association, retrieved April 7, 2019, from http://contexts.org/blog/thetriple-crisis-of-sociology/. Tolstrup, Jakob (2014). Russia vs. the EU: the Competition for Influence in Post-Soviet States. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Wells, Jackson (2017, April 21). “Rhode Island March for Science to Take Place April 22.” Brown Daily Herald, retrieved April 7, 2019, from www.browndailyherald.com/2017/ 04/21/rhode-island-march-science-take-place-april-22/. Will, George F. (2017, May 3). “Trump Has a Dangerous Disability.” The Washington Post, retrieved April 7, 2019, from www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-adangerous-disability/2017/05/03/56ca6118-2f6b-11e7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story. html?utm_term=.bcdfab8b6d28. “Who Is at Fault in Ukraine? Foreign Affairs’ Brain Trust Weighs In” (2014, November 9). Foreign Affairs, retrieved April 7, 2019, from www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russiafsu/2014-11-09/who-fault-ukraine.

Chapter 3

New Class Theory as Sociology of Knowledge Tamás Demeter 1 Introduction One important lesson of 20th-century Hungarian intellectual history is that in this local context philosophical and sociological theories developed hand in hand. Indeed, it is hardly possible to draw sharp boundaries between the two disciplines in this regard. György Lukács’s History of the Development of Modern Drama (1911) can naturally be identified as “the classical work, actually the starting point, of Hungarian cultural sociology inspired by a philosophy of history” (Nyíri, 1980, p. 162). The sociology of drama that Lukács put forward was based on philosophical aesthetics and a substantive philosophy of history (Fehér, 1977): he produced, as it were, a case study in sociology and literary his�tory to illustrate his philosophical insights. It is hard to overestimate the significance of this work both in the context of Lukács’s later development and in terms of the subsequent inspiration it provided, directly or indirectly, for the development of a distinctive sociological tradition in Hungarian philosophy (see Demeter, 2008). To adapt Dostoevsky’s bon mot about the importance of Gogol’s famous short story to the present purpose: Lukács’s work on drama was The Overcoat out of which all Hungarian sociologically inspired philosophy came. Probably the most enduring contribution that this tradition could offer to sociological theory is in the field of sociology of knowledge. Important classics of this discipline, Lukács, Karl (Károly) Mannheim and Michael (Mihály) Polányi, among others, developed and refined their first theoretical insights concerning the influence of social position, values and interests on the processes of knowledge production based on their Hungarian and, more broadly, Central European experience. As Zsolt Papp (1980) aptly pointed out, the fundamental feature of this experience is that the existence and development of social structures, the dynamics of the public sphere and the public discourse resist rational reconstruction (p. 55). As the commitment to a free market, of both ideas and commodities, has never been widespread, decisions and interpretations remained a monopoly of privileged groups and institutions. Consequently, there was no effective feedback on the outcomes, and no room for ­subjecting social authorities to rational and public examination. Without free competition

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004400283_004

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in argumentative discourse, the authorities were never exposed to effective pressure for a rational justification of their actions; instead, they justified themselves by traditions, historic rights, integrative symbols, ideologies, etc. This environment did not facilitate taking a rational course of action, and created an overwhelming experience of the unreliability and even the superfluity of reason. This diagnosis certainly held true throughout the 20th century, and it was as valid in the second half as it had been in the first. One can find this experience lurking in the background of George Konrad and Iván Szelényi’s The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (1979), probably the most influential work of Hungarian social theory in the second half of the century. The then-existing social structures and institutions in Hungary portrayed themselves as the means of sustaining a classless society, and at the same time resisted a rational discourse about the means and ends for reaching this desired state of affairs. In this setting, the justification for political action came from an ideology, “scientific socialism,” which shed a deceiving light of apparent rationality on decisions and interpretations, while eradicating the space of rational, let alone public discourse. There is no better illustration of this phenomenon than the fate of Konrad and Szelényi’s book in Hungary. Given the commonalities of experience and direct intellectual influences, Konrad’s and Szelényi’s book finds its natural place in this Hungarian tradition. This chapter will try to situate Szelényi’s version of “new class theory” in the context of sociology of knowledge by contextualizing his work with reference to that of his Hungarian predecessors. In his various works, Szelényi has also explored these connections to some extent, but his primary aim has been to situate his version in relation to different theories of the new class and to political “new class projects” (see King and Szelényi, 2004). Consequently, he set his focus on the sociology of actors, i.e., of intellectuals, and this is the context in which he has read and criticized Lukács’s and Mannheim’s accounts. While focusing on the same Hungarian tradition, the emphasis in the present chapter will be on the sociology of knowledge as represented by these actors. Within this tradition, three main contexts for reconstructing the sociological concept of knowledge can be identified, ranging from the non-Marxist theories of the young Lukács and Mannheim, through Lukács’s Marxist contribution to the sociology of knowledge, to Szelényi’s version of a post-Marxist sociology of knowledge. In what follows, this chapter will examine how the relevant knowledge was categorized, and by what theoretical means it was characterized as embedded in its sociological environment at each of these different stages.

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A Romantic Stance

In their early writings, both Lukács and Mannheim explored the social and philosophical characteristics of various forms of knowledge. The main fields of Lukács’s interest were aesthetics and the representation of knowledge in aesthetic form. He explored the nature of knowledge as fossilized in modern ­drama and the novel, and the interconnections among the social–historical conditions in which this knowledge had manifested in various ways. Mannheim’s interest had a much broader scope: it extended to the most general problems of interpreting works of cultural production and the limits and conditions under which various forms of philosophical and historical knowledge are possible. Both Lukács and Mannheim were highly sensitive to the problems and prospects of sociological methods in intellectual history, and the lessons they might offer for a general sociology of knowledge. But they did not advocate these methods as the exclusive path to successful interpretive practices. They both situated sociological understanding in the context of non-sociological interpretation while granting significant room for immanent or purely aesthetic approaches to the intellectual content of any work—from philosophical tracts to cathedrals. The enterprise they undertook can be interpreted as a form of “sociological Kantianism” (see Demeter, 2012): they searched for a priori conditions of pos�sibility in the context of which various forms of knowledge, in the broadest possible sense of the term, could have emerged. “Intuition” (Anschauung) is a basic concept of Kantian epistemology. Space and time are a priori intuitions that provide the a priori form of possible human experience, since only something that has been presented to us in space and/or time can be an object of cognition. Space and time are, therefore, a priori conditions for the possibility of human knowledge: our knowledge must conform to them. Phenomena, the objects of possible experience, are accessible to human cognition in no other way but in space and time—and conversely, these a priori intuitions cannot be known independently of any spatial and temporal phenomena. The concept of “worldview” (Weltanschauung) and its relatives play a similarly central role in the emergence of the sociological tradition of Hungarian philosophy. In the young Lukács’s and Mannheim’s epistemology, “Weltanschauung” is used to refer to a priori conditions of possibility for cognition and intellectual production in the broadest possible sense. But unlike the Kantian concept of intuition, Weltanschauung is a historical a priori condition. Space and time are universal forms of human experience, characteristic of human beings in general: they are, for human beings, the same everywhere and at all times. Weltanschauung, albeit a universal condition, may differ historically,

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s­ ociologically and geographically. Different Weltanschauungen can be characteristic of different groups or generations living in different social circumstances that provide different experiences. Therefore, while space and time are the same for all of us, we can still have different worldviews. Although Lukács’s and Mannheim’s theories of knowledge are reminiscent of Kantian themes, they also have close connections to a “romantic” outlook, as reflected in their fundamentally irrationalistic approach to the individual’s relation to the world. This feature is mainly due to the way they construe the content of Weltanschauung, a construal that presupposes an affective and unreflective stance toward the world, which in the first instance consists of raw feelings. This stance is in sharp contrast to more rationalistic interpretations of the concept, in which the individual’s relation to the world is logically and conceptually structured and is therefore directly accessible to the interpreter’s rational reconstruction (Geuss, 1981). Lukács’s and Mannheim’s romantic stance is the cornerstone of a sociology of knowledge that understands intellectual phenomena not as arising directly from social or economic relations or simply as a reflection thereof. Instead, they trace the outcome of intellectual production back to a worldview that is subjectively rooted in the totality of the affective responses of subjects to the world surrounding them. This totality is conditioned by social and economic circumstances, but these are only distantly relevant for the purpose of interpretation: what really matters is rooted in a subjective and fundamentally ­affective Weltanschauung and its relation to intellectual production and reception. And this is the source of Lukács’s main objection to Marxist methods, which he kept repeating in his early writings: Marxist theories all too hastily establish direct links between socio–economic factors and works of intellectual production. As an alternative view, he emphasized that cultural ­production is embedded in the context of a worldview, namely of “life as subject matter” (Lukács, 1978, p. 21), and the interconnections between that worldview and cultural production. What is especially important for our present purposes is that the influence of social and economic conditions on the evolution of Weltanschauung is manifested generally: it permeates all the spheres of life and thought. Therefore, the options for representing and understanding the world that are possible in a given age depend on the Weltanschauung, as conditioned by social and economic circumstances: whether representing nature by mathematical means can satisfy explanatory needs, and what sort of cognitive needs it can fulfill, depends on the way people look at their world, which in turn depends on their complex sociological status. However, social and economic circumstances play only an indirect role here, as the focus of sociological u ­ nderstanding

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for Lukács was always set on Weltanschauung: it provides the direct context for understanding and representations, and it explains why a given kind of representation is legitimate, desirable, satisfactory, etc. Sociological relations provide a distant framework for the explanation of why Weltanschauung evolves the way it does. The trouble is due to the fact that Weltanschauung is not even conceptual in nature. The foundation of the young Lukács’s and Mannheim’s methods of writing intellectual history is summarized in the “sociological assumption” that there is such a thing as a spirit or mood of an age, and that any specific style of intellectual production springs from this spirit, which is a “form of experiencing the world that strives for expression” (Lukács, 1977, p. 404). Hence the central question for both is one of style, and not one about the sociological explanation of particular contents, works of art or scientific theories. As Lukács (1977) put it when writing about the theory of literary history, style is sociological in the sense that it provides a permanent solution to the problem of representation: it is a sustainable way of giving form to the material available for representation (p. 405). Not content but style, i.e., the permanent common features of various kinds of representations, is the central concern of this sociology of knowledge: certain general insights that answer the question of why in this way, and why in this form, various contents are expressed under given social circumstances. The form, of course, influences the content, but Lukács and Mannheim were most concerned about style and not about content. The concept of a “style of thought” is frequently used in intellectual history and the history of science (see Gelfert, 2012; Zittel, 2012). For Lukács, “style” meant a “form of experiencing” the world, and when Mannheim (1986) defined his concept of a “style of thought,” he proceeded along a similar path, based on a specific “mind set” (p. 191n5). Neither Lukács’s “form of experiencing” nor Mannheim’s “mind set” has a conceptual structure, and both refer to a disposition to perceive the world in a particular way. These ways of perceiving are to be revealed in the background of cultural production—from cathedrals to scientific theories. A style of thought gives form to this unstructured perception, and the former is thus an intellectual and conceptualized expression of the latter. A style of thought is not a property of individuals; it is rather a social and historical phenomenon of which individual thinking cannot be independent. Instead, a style of thought is part of the conditions within which individual thinking and expression are possible (Mannheim, 1986, pp. 50–51). In this sense, a style of thought sets the limits of thinking and expression, but also renders both possible, in so far as it provides a conceptual framework for grasping, in a specific way, the experiences characteristic of a given age. This perspective may seem to invite an interpretation of the works of cultural production exclusively within a sociological context. The fact that for

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Mannheim (1986), styles of thought were reflected even in ideas that have no direct social relevance may further reinforce this impression (p. 58). It seems natural then that the meaning of these ideas is to be interpreted ­sociologically. However, Mannheim did not attribute an absolute status to the s­ ociological perspective, as is obvious from his pronouncement on early Romanticism as an “immanent ideological” phenomenon (1986, p. 58)—i.e. one that is devoid of sociological influences. This would mean understanding early Romanticism as a reaction to the Enlightenment tendency to rationalize everything— or at least to the effort to represent everything as rational. Such a sociological interpretation of Romanticism does not make immanent interpretation illegitimate—and this is a lesson that Mannheim (1980) generalized to other cultural phenomena that are subject to interpretation. The concept of style thus understood can be extended beyond the limits of literary and artistic representation; indeed it can be generalized as an overarching category of the sociology of knowledge. This is what Mannheim did when he interpreted conservatism as a style of thought that does not necessarily entail a political commitment. This style of thought can be revealed in the background of various theoretical positions, a “style” that is highly similar to Lukács’s concept of a style in literary history (see Mannheim, 1986, p. 191n5). Such a sociology of knowledge is thus focused on understanding the style underlying the common features of various objectifications and representations, the key element of which is a given way of perceiving the world—that is, a worldview which specifies a relation to the world and provides the conditions for the possibility of its expression. This is the most general foundation upon which the young Lukács’s and Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge is built. 3

A Marxist Stance

History and Class Consciousness (1923) documented Lukács’s Marxist turn, which should not come as a surprise after the already critical orientation of his earlier work. The essays collected in this volume were Janus-faced: they were works in social theory offering conceptual and methodological resources for the study of society, and at the same time they were also contributions to political pamphletry serving the purposes of the communist political and revolutionary agenda. His social theory focused on the all-pervasive phenomena of “reification” (Verdinglichung) in bourgeois societies. Reification is the product of commodity form becoming the universal form of products and relationships due to the mode of capitalist production. Commodity form subsumes economic activities, social phenomena and personal interactions in general, and as a consequence it alienates human beings from their very humanity.

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This problem can be adequately addressed only by the methods of “orthodox Marxism,” i.e., by grasping social–historical processes in their dialectical unity. Bourgeois social science misrepresents social reality as consisting of ­partial systems (economics, the state, politics, law, etc.) with their distinctive ­internal logic. These partial systems are taken to come about as natural and necessary products of historical development, such as the division of labor. Despite the repeated crises in partial systems, bourgeois social science represents the system as a whole as being devoid of intrinsic antagonisms: the crises in any of them are treated as arising from the internal logic of a given partial system, and not from the system as a whole. Studying society through partial systems as naturally given thus disguises the possibility of, as well as the need for, changing the system as a whole, and thereby serves as an effective ideological tool for maintaining bourgeois domination. From a Marxist angle, however, the existence of partial systems is both a symptom and a driving force of reification: partial systems emerge due to the capitalist mode of production, and they treat people not as human beings, but as standardized units devoid of personal characteristics. In order to abolish the consequences of reification, we need to understand the complex antagonistic relations of bourgeois societies as essentially dialectical, and as parts of a ­historical totality. These separations then prove to be mere (but necessary) appearances bound to the capitalist mode of production. The resulting knowledge of the real tendencies of social development can yield more than a purely cognitive benefit: by revealing historical necessity, it also reveals the path to abolishing social antagonisms and their inhuman consequences. Therefore, the product of Lukács’s Marxism is a social theory inseparable from political activity: the knowledge of social reality gained by Marxist methods brings with it a necessity to change this reality. This necessity is not only moral but epistemic: an adequate knowledge of society also entails knowledge of its future devoid of the consequences of reification. People in possession of this knowledge who do not further the cause of social change are therefore immoral. Adequate knowledge of socio–historical reality is possible only from the position of the proletariat. Bourgeois thought is bound by its direct interests in maintaining the existing social structure, and also by its outlook, which represents existing social relations as natural and necessary. The proletariat, ­however, is in a privileged epistemological position because its class interests coincide with the objective tendencies of the development of productive forces. They both drive toward the abolition of class society. Hence, the primary task of the proletariat is to recognize this coincidence by the methods of dialectical materialism, which will lead to an adequate understanding of its position in the process of social production. This recognition reveals the ­proletarian

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class consciousness, i.e., the form of consciousness required for historically necessary and—given the class position of the proletariat—politically rational action. Acquiring adequate class consciousness is the crucial outcome of this process. It is required for the transformation of society because the proletariat can turn into a ruling class if it is capable of organizing society according to its own class consciousness—just as the bourgeoisie was able to do. This capacity depends upon the extent to which a class has the potential to penetrate (“durchdringen)” all phenomena in accordance with its real historical interests (Lukács, 1968, p. 241)—i.e., to what extent a class is able to represent the world in categories that are adequate for its historical mission, and to act accordingly. As history has testified, the bourgeoisie has this potential, and dialectical materialism points the way for the proletariat to follow in its footsteps. Lukács’s “class consciousness” seems to have inherited some crucial features of the Weltanschauung of his youth. At the beginning of History and Class Consciousness, he quoted Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: “theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses” (Lukács, 1968, p. 172). This dictum clearly states that under certain social conditions, ideas are not mere epiphenomena of social processes, as the base-superstructure dichotomy suggests, but can function directly as productive forces. This implies a mutual dependence between ideas and social circumstances: sociological factors can play a limiting and inspiring (i.e., causal) role in the process of intellectual production, but a similar role can be ascribed to ideas in the development of productive forces. Ideologies, for example, can function as organizing principles of societies, as guides for setting up institutions and for regulating social and everyday activities in general. Ideologies influence the way people create the sphere of potential actions and the attached system of rewards and punishments, and thereby give form to the perception of individual interest in a given social setting. It is not only in social science that the bourgeois potential to represent phenomena in accordance with its own class interests is reflected. Lukács drew attention to the set of conditions that explained the success of early modern mathematical natural philosophies, namely bourgeois economic conditions and their formative influence on representing phenomena of nature and society.1 He emphasized the tendency of capitalism to produce a social structure that fits conveniently with the outlook of the modern mathematical–natural sciences: due to the centrality of mathematical representation, the sciences 1 For Hessen’s and Grossman’s classic contemporary studies, see Freudenthal and MacLaughlin (2009).

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reduce phenomena to numerical relations. It is part of the “essence of capitalism,” as Lukács (1968) put it, that it “produces” phenomena in this manner (p. 176). The capitalist mode of production brings with it an economic way of viewing things of which mathematical, natural philosophy is a natural consequence: it represents and processes nature in categories that reflect reification. The perception of life under these circumstances is congenial to representing everything in the form of abstract quantities and as mechanical ingredients of rationalized processes (Lukács, 1968, pp. 349–350). This explains why and how medieval science gave way to modern science. The latter is distinguished by a set of features that reflect this way of looking: the search for qualitatively homogeneous laws replaces qualitative classification; instead of transcendent connections, the emphasis is on establishing ­immanent causal processes and numerical categories and relations, with a special regard for the value of exactness in their measurement (Lukács, 1968, pp. 288–290). If seen through these categories, the order of nature and society seems to be eternally fixed and immune to historical change, a representation that matches both the class interests and the natural perspective of the bourgeoisie in conserving property relations and power structures. It is due to their influence on the relevant institutions that the ruling classes can realize the potential to penetrate phenomena in accordance with their own class interests— and the rise of the bourgeoisie thus facilitated the proliferation and wide acceptance of the new knowledge.2 It is a corollary of the ability to penetrate phenomena that even fundamental categories such as “nature”—despite their representation as eternal categories in modern science and philosophy—are historically contingent. As Lukács (1968) put it, “Nature is a societal category” (p. 410). He then clarified that what counts as nature—what this category means, what the relation of human beings to the set of phenomena called “nature” is, and how human beings confront nature—depends on social influences, since its very content changes in response to the practical needs and experiences of those putting “nature” to theoretical use. One could therefore conclude that the concept of “nature,” and arguably many other concepts belonging to the same family, is socially constructed. Therefore, in Lukács’s account, the causal influence of social factors extends beyond the sphere of ideology, i.e., beyond the selection and dissemination of ideas capable of ideological service in art, philosophy, law, politics and religion. Science, too, is prey to and a product of the social relations within which 2 Much of the subsequent history of science can be made out to be consistent with Lukács’s overall picture. See for example Shapin (1981).

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it is produced, as society has a formative role to play in the emergence and development of methods and concepts in science. The way people perceive the categories and processes of social reality influences how they perceive reality in general—and consequently, how they produce knowledge in general. The fundamental categories of understanding nature and society result from a dynamic historical process, and thus the knowledge one can gain of these phenomena is inevitably prone to social and ideological influences. 4

A Post-Marxist Stance

In the background of their sociology of intellectuals, Konrad and Szelényi also developed a post-Marxist sociology of knowledge, which was further refined in Szelényi’s subsequent work (most importantly in King and Szelényi, 2004; and Eyal, Szelényi and Townsley, 1998). Post-Marxism in this context designates as a stance that relies crucially on Marxist concepts, but put to revisionary uses in ways that are different from the orthodoxy and aspirations of theoretical and/ or political Marxists. The post-Marxist character of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power is primarily reflected in the reformulation of the concept of class. Konrad and Szelényi revised this central concept by distancing it from the received Marxist definition, which grasps the class structure of capitalist societies in terms of property relations. Instead, they proposed a definition in terms of power over the surplus of economic production. Their emphasis on influence in the redistributive process as the criterion of class membership offered a possibility to understand socialist societies as class societies—and at the same time created a useful conceptual tool for analyzing societies integrated by the mechanisms of the market economy. This understanding of “class” certainly did not coincide with mainstream Marxist theoretical and political aspirations or the self-images of then-existing socialisms, not least because this conceptual revision allowed for the extension of Marxian conflict analysis to purportedly classless socialist societies. On the face of it, this new class theory looked like a social theory founded on the concept of economic integration, and thus it seemed to be continuous with central Marxist doctrines: the distinction it drew between market-­ integrated and redistributive economies seemed to echo the Marxist thesis concerning the primacy of the economic base in understanding social development. However, given the fact that redistributive economies crucially depend upon a specific type of knowledge that Szelényi called teleological knowledge, this social theory can be interpreted by focusing on this type of knowledge, rather than on the mechanisms of economic integration, so that

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the dogma of base and superstructure does not seem to be lurking behind this account. The redistributive function (i.e., the class position) is intrinsically connected to this kind of knowledge, which Szelényi (1979) defined as knowledge “necessary for a rational, socially just and economically efficient ­allocation of surplus” (p. 62). This knowledge provides the foundations of structurally indispensable central planning in socialist economies, and those possessing it can put forward claims to redistributive power: the power to determine what goals to pursue and how to achieve them through the allocation of resources (Szelényi, 1982, pp. 306–307). This allocation is justified as “rational” because it is founded on the knowledge of social and economic processes accumulated by those claiming redistributive power.3 This purported rationality is not merely instrumental but substantive, in the sense that it aims not only to find the most efficient relation of means to particular ends, but also claims to be effective in relation to the ends themselves. This rationality is structurally indispensable in redistributive economies for sustaining the economic process: social and economic ends are determined as the result of rational deliberation based on the knowledge of socio–economic processes and their underlying nature. The indispensability of this knowledge and rationality prove to be a fertile foundation of claims to political power, as well as of its reality, in redistributive economies. In socialist societies the ruling representation of the political system insists that this power is being exercised only in the interest of the proletariat (or eventually society as a whole), yet in reality it turns out to be the foundation of class domination of a new class, the “knowledge class.” As Szelényi (1983) has shown, this power is effectively exploited in line with the class interests of intellectuals—despite the official ideology announcing the abolition of the class society. Understanding socialist societies in these terms calls for a sociology of teleological knowledge that situates its position, production and significance in these societies. And indeed, such an account can be found in the works of Szelényi and his several co-authors. Accordingly, the production of teleological knowledge is motivated by interests—i.e., the interests of a class whose members occupy a redistributive position, and thus have an influence on social development. This highlights a peculiar dialectic of teleological knowledge. On the one hand, the production of teleological knowledge depends on interests 3 “Rationalist” would be a much better term here. Redistributive economies are certainly founded on knowledge claims that insist on their own rationality. However, Hayek (1949) and the tradition he invoked in support of his views has argued plausibly against the rationality, and indeed, the possibility of such knowledge. Against this background it is more plausible to argue that redistributors are merely invoking rationality rather than practicing it.

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specified by the structural position of the knowledge class and its constituent groups, the intellectuals and technocrats. These groups represent different kinds of knowledge and occupy different and changing structural positions in relation to each other and to the bureaucracy. On the other hand, social structure itself depends on the knowledge, or more generally the representations, produced by different groups within the knowledge class, and how they are put to use. This is due to teleological knowledge being dispersed among the ­members of these groups, whose relative strength and relation to the party bureaucracy influence the course of social development. This dialectic drives the dynamics of socialist societies and determines the prospects of social and economic progress. The traces of this dialectic can be seen in the transformations of the interrelations between the bureaucracy, the technocracy and the intellectuals—a dynamic that was very pronounced in the social history of socialist societies in the second half of the 20th century (see Szelényi, 1987). In this context, the production of teleological knowledge can be seen as conditioned by the structural position. In this sense, the structural position, and the interests arising from it, is a causally significant factor in producing teleological knowledge. The core concepts of Szelényi’s above-quoted definition, “rationality,” “social justice” and “efficiency,” are in constant need of interpretation, and no one is in a better position to clarify them, and also to apply them case by case, than members of the knowledge class—subject to their own interests. Teleological knowledge thus produced can offer rational legitimacy, supply theories and concepts, assess the significance of data, and offer arguments for orienting and justifying policy decisions on a broader scale—in short, it can make the social world purposive and meaningful. Which output of teleological knowledge production is put to use depends on the internal power relations of the knowledge class—relations that play an effective role in the selection and application of ideas that are suited to teleological service in a given political constellation. However, the production of teleological knowledge can also be seen as independent from the structural position. Szelényi and Martin (1987) criticized Bourdieu’s economic reductionism and were inclined to entertain the idea that cultural production is at least potentially free from economic determination. To put it in Marxian terms: the relation of productive forces and the ­production of ideas can have significant encounters, even if they are largely independent processes. Ideas can be turned into teleological knowledge in a Darwinian, evolutionary way, as G.A. Cohen (1978) suggested: “thought-systems are produced in comparative independence from social constraint, but persist and gain social life following a filtration process which selects those well adapted for ideological service” (p. 291). Ideas, just like mutations in the n ­ atural

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world, emerge, and depending on the social circumstances, they are sometimes selected for teleological service. From this angle, teleological knowledge as such is not necessarily produced; rather, teleological interpretation can be assigned to this or that piece of knowledge production. In this sense, the teleological character of a given piece of knowledge is not part of its intrinsic ­nature, but is instead ascribed to it from the outside, depending again on socio–­ political circumstances. Thus conceived, knowledge production arises from institutionalized meaning-making practices (see Small, 2014), whose products can be put to teleological service independently of their genesis and intrinsic meaning. This interpretation releases teleological knowledge from the structural position, so that it can also serve analytical purposes outside the context of redistributive economies. Although the concept itself originated in the study of ­redistributive economies, teleological knowledge is not particular to socialist societies, even if it has a radically different sociological character in redistributive and market economies. In redistributive economies, it is structurally necessary because redistributive system requires this form of knowledge in order to function. In market economies, social and economic processes do not ­presuppose teleological knowledge because they are not subject to central planning and coordination. The proper area of teleological knowledge is thus reduced to the realm of politics: it is not required for keeping the economic system running, but for resolving government and policy issues. Due to this structural difference, the content of teleological knowledge is also different in scope and orientation, and in times of transitions it cannot necessarily be easily converted into the new structure (see Eyal, Szelényi and Townsley, 1998). The transition from redistribution to market integrated economies leaves the knowledge class with a radically different position: in market economies, there is no structural place for teleological intellectuals comparable to that of socialist societies. In order to apply “teleological knowledge” in the context of market economies, the term has to be released from the corset of redistributive processes, for which Katherine Verdery (1991) has offered a helpful formulation: teleological knowledge is “the knowledge necessary to setting and implementing goals for society, knowledge of the laws of social development and of the path to realizing progress” (p. 87). Setting goals is not always explicit, and teleological significance can arise from apparently non-teleological knowledge: interpretation can elevate pieces of descriptive knowledge to the status of teleological knowledge. Understood in this way, teleological knowledge turns out to be ideology in a post-Marxist, “emancipatory” sense (Márkus 1995), which puts the emphasis on the meaning-giving function of ideology, rather than on its role in

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disguising the existing power structures. In this sense, ideologies can function as organizing principles of societies, as guides for setting up institutions and regulating social and everyday activities in general. Ideologies influence how people create the sphere of potential actions and the system of rewards and punishments attached to it, and thereby give rise to the perception of individual interest in a given social setting. This knowledge is also produced by intellectuals, but in market economies the monopoly to exploit it for political purposes does not belong to the intellectuals themselves; it is divided among the members of a political community. Under these circumstances, the political power of intellectuals assumes a radically different character: it consists in the production of representations, maybe with a hope that they are selected for ideological service, in the emancipatory sense. Intellectuals can thereby retain political influence due to their power over representations, goals, values and the language used for describing the social world. However, this is power over symbols, and not over the allocation of surplus, and consequently, the relevant knowledge is not sufficient for establishing the class power of the intellectuals in market economies. 5 Conclusion By sketching three crucial stages in the development of Hungarian contributions to the sociology of knowledge, this chapter attempted to show how Szelényi’s account finds its natural place in this intellectual tradition. Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness inherited the idealism so characteristic to the young Lukács and Mannheim. In their accounts, they both agreed that social progress crucially depends on intellectual factors, although they conceptualized these driving forces in divergent ways. Abandoning his earlier reconstructive and reflective stance, the Marxist Lukács became a prophet of social revolution preaching the unity of theory and practice. For him, true knowledge of society brought with it an imperative and the drive to change it. In his work, Szelényi drew heavily on this Hungarian tradition, while distancing himself from its sociological visions. Szelényi’s account of “teleological knowledge” seems to be indebted to the view that ideas are moving forces of social development, even if they are themselves socially conditioned. Even if Szelényi (King and Szelényi, 2004) pro�claimed that Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness provided only “a sloppy sociology of knowledge,” the kind of knowledge he ascribed to intellectuals seems to have similar characteristics to Szelényi’s teleological knowledge (p. 36). In their own self-image, Szelényi’s rational redistributors equipped

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with teleological knowledge play a social role similar to that of Lukács’s social revolutionaries: they plan the way forward for society and allocate resources accordingly. Szelényi’s account showed, however, that these social revolutionaries are not larger-than-life heroes. They tend to be self-interested actors ­capable of being organized as a class, if only they were able to acquire the necessary class consciousness—the lack of which also diverted Lukács’s social revolutionaries from the rational path of action. Arguably, the fin-de-siècle social and political crises and the communist takeover in 1919 provided the experience that was conceptualized in Lukács’s and Mannheim’s theories. Szelényi’s portrayals of the intellectuals’ place in redistributive and subsequently market-integrated societies similarly reflected the formative experiences he acquired in his native country. One central lesson that can be learned from their theories is that the local Central European experience has proven to be a theoretically fertile ground for understanding social development on a global scale.4 References Cohen, G.A. (1978). Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Congdon, Lee (1995). Exile and Social Thought. Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919–1933. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Demeter, Tamás (2008). “The Sociological Tradition of Hungarian Philosophy.” Studies in East European Thought, 60(1–2), 1–16, doi:10.1007/s11212-008-9043-1. Demeter, Tamás (2012). “Weltanschauung as a Priori: Sociology of Knowledge from a ‘Romantic’ Stance.” Studies in East European Thought, 64(1–2), 39–53, doi:10.1007/ s11212-008-9043-1. Eyal, Gil, Iván Szelényi and Eleanor Townsley (1998). Making Capitalism without Capitalists: The New Ruling Elites in Eastern Europe. London, UK: Verso. Fehér, Ferenc (1977). “Die Geschichtsphilosophie des Dramas, die Metaphysik der Tragödie und die Utopie des untragischen Dramas. Scheidewege der Dramentheorie des jungen Lukács.” In Ágnes Heller et al. (eds.), Die Seele und das Leben: Studien zum frühen Lukács. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 7–53. Freudenthal, Gideon, and Peter McLaughlin (eds.) (2009). The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution: Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.

4 For a good introduction to the Hungarian contribution, see Congdon (1995).

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Gelfert, Axel (2012). “Art History, the Problem of Style, and Arnold Hauser’s Contribution to the History and Sociology of Knowledge.” Studies in East European Thought, 64(1–2), 121–142, doi:10.1007/s11212-012-9163-5. Geuss, Raymond (1981). “Ideology.” In Terry Eagleton (ed.), Ideology. London, UK: Longman. Hayek, Friedrich August (1949). “The Intellectuals and Socialism.” University of Chicago Law Review, 16(3), 417–433, doi:10.2307/1597903. King, Lawrence P., and Iván Szelényi (2004). Theories of the New Class, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lukács, Georg (1968). Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (2nd ed.). Darmstadt, ­Germany: Luchterhand. Lukács, György (1977). “Megjegyzések az irodalomtörténet elméletéhez” [Remarks on the Theory of Literary History]. In Ifjúkori művek. Budapest, Hungary: Magvető. Lukács, György (1978). A modern dráma fejlődésének története [A History of the Evolution of Modern Drama]. Budapest, Hungary: Magvető. Mannheim, Karl (1986). Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge. London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mannheim, Karl (1980). Strukturen des Denkens. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp. Márkus, György (1995). “On Ideology-Critique—Critically.” Thesis Eleven, 43(1), 66–99, doi:10.1177/072551369504300106. Martin, Bill, and Iván Szelényi (1987). “Beyond Cultural Capital: Toward a Theory of Symbolic Domination.” In Ron Eyerman and Lennart G. Svennson (eds.), Intellectuals, Universities and the State in Western Societies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nyíri, János Kristóf (1980). A Monarchia szellemi életéről. Budapest, Hungary: Kossuth. Papp, Zsolt (1980). A válság filozófiájától a “konszenzus” szociológiájáig. Budapest, ­Hungary: Kossuth. Shapin, Steven (1981). “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clark Disputes.” Isis, 72(2), 187–215, doi:10.1086/352718. Szelényi, Iván (1979). “The Position of the Intelligentsia in the Class Structure of State Socialist Societies.” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 10(1), 51–76, doi:10.1080/ 03017607908413241. Szelényi, Iván (1987). “The Prospects and Limits of the East European New Class Project: An Auto-Critical Reflection on The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power.” Politics and Society, 15(2), 103–144, doi:10.1177/003232928701500201. Szelényi, Iván (1983). Urban Inequalities Under State Socialism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Szelényi, Iván (1982). “The Intelligentsia in the Class Structure of State-Socialist Societies.” American Journal of Sociology, 88, 287–326, doi:10.1086/64925.

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Verdery, Katherine (1991). National Ideology Under Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zittel, Claus (2012). “Ludwik Fleck and the Concept of Style in the Natural Sciences.” Studies in East European Thought, 64(1–2), 53–79, doi:10.1007/s11212-012-9160-8.

Chapter 4

How to Become a Dominant or Even Iconic Central and East European Sociologist Karmo Kroos 1 Introduction Iván Szelényi has had an outstanding academic career. Following his emigration from Hungary and a short stay in England in 1975, he found himself working for and, in fact, developing and leading the sociology departments of some of the most prestigious Australian and US universities. More particularly, after a brief stint as visiting professor at the University of Kent (1975), he helped to build up the sociology department at Flinders University in South Australia (1976–1980) and then moved to the US where he held an impressive list of senior academic positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1981–1986), the Graduate School of City University of New York (1986–1988), the University of California, LA (1988–1999), Yale University (1999–2010), and New York University Abu Dhabi (2010–2014). Furthermore, he has served on the boards of the following professional associations: The Hungarian Sociological Association (as President), the American Sociological Association (as Vice President), the Society for Comparative Social Research (as Executive Director), the Social Science Research Council, the Joint Committee on Eastern Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and the Research Committee on the Sociology of Urban and Regional Development. In addition to publishing in the top journals himself, he has served on the editorial boards of the following publications: the American Journal of ­Sociology, the American Sociological Review, the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, Eastern European Politics and Societies, the European Sociological Review, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, the Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Social Forces, Sociological Forum, Szociologia, Szociologiai Szemle, Theory and Society, and Telos. Among many other distinctions, he is also a Corresponding Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (since 1990) and an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 2000).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004400283_005

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Szelényi has made a lasting contribution to the sociology of intellectuals (see Kurzman and Owens, 2002; Eyal and Buchholz, 2010). The argument put forward in The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power has been especially praised. For instance, one review of cee sociology has called it “the best-known Hungarian social science book before 1990” (Némedi and Róbert, 2003, p. 83).1 In even more glorifying tones, Michael (2000) has noted that Konrad and Szelényi’s analysis has not just become “by now very familiar to critics on the Left and on the Right,” but “has been widely influential” (p. 4). More specifically, he noted that [i]f one were to construct a genealogy of critiques of intellectuals and power in recent decades, Konrad and Szelényi precede and influence Foucault, Gouldner, Ross, and Boggs (to choose only a few familiar names). The influence of their work may also be traced in the works of Zygmunt Bauman, Edward Said, and Gaytri Spivat.2 michael, 2000, pp. 4–5

The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power seems to have opened the doors of the academic world (including those of some of the most august institutions) for Szelényi, making him one of the most distinguished scholars of and from contemporary Eastern Europe. It also ushered in a much larger research program of studying the link between knowledge and power—as well as in Szelényi’s distinctive reflexive sociology of intellectuals, which unmasked both the redistributive injustice of the socialist system and how capitalism was made without capitalists in the post-communist system. The fields on which he has left his mark include urban research, the role and position of intellectuals under socialism, the study of socialist entrepreneurs and elites during transition, and social stratification at both the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy under post-communism. He laid the foundations for his international career with his new urban sociology (see Milicevic, 2001), achieved his breakthrough with his internal critique of the socialist power structure (see Arato, 1983, 1993, Ch. 5), and consolidated his influence with his study of the socialist social 1 One overview of Central and East European sociology even called it “probably the most famous contribution of Hungarian sociology to world sociological literature” (Wysienska and Szmatka, 2000, p. 2117). 2 He went on to state that “Bauman, for example, offers an elegant rephrasing of Konrad and Szelényi’s crucial criticism as the point of departure in an important essay on postmodernity” (Michael, 2000, p. 5). The essay in question is “Legislators and Interpreters: Culture as the Ideology of Intellectuals,” which was published in the book Intimations of Postmodernity (see Bauman, 1992, Ch. 1).

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structure (see Kolosi, 1988) and mixed economy (see Stark, 1989). Moreover, his lasting legacy was assured by comparative stratification research,3 which emerged from the international data collection project “Social Stratification in Eastern Europe after 1989” that he led together with Donald Treiman (see Treiman and Szelényi, 1993). Consistency in putting forward impressive scholarship over several decades earned him wide recognition among stratification and transition scholars (see Treiman and Ganzeboom, 2000), and at the peak of his career, he was widely considered to have dominated post-communist elite studies with his Pareto-inspired distinction between new and old elites (Bozóki, 1999, 2003). Although the impetus he gave to the development of Market Transition Theory4 hasn’t been fully credited yet, he wrote himself into the cee sociology “Hall of Fame,” if such a thing ever existed, with his preparatory work on the topic.5 It is therefore not surprising that in 1989, Szelényi was asked to explore the “intellectual-knowledge-power relations” of the era’s “great transformations” for the Russell Sage Conference on Social Theory at the University of Chicago, chaired by Bourdieu and Coleman (see Szelényi, 1991). Likewise, it speaks for itself that extracts from The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power and from his essay “The Third Way” were reprinted alongside contributions from Kołakowski, Kundera, Havel, Kornai, Pope John Paul ii, Michnik, Kis and others in a collection of the most important intellectual contributions on the study of Eastern Europe since 1945 (see Stokes, 1991; Konrad and Szelényi, 1991). In addition, extracts from Making Capitalism Without Capitalists and the essays “Three Waves of New Class Theories” and “Intellectuals and Domination in Post-Communist Transition” (see Eyal et al. 2001a, 2001b, 2008, 2008b; Szelényi 1994) are the only readings from East European sociology that were included in the reader on Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective. Meanwhile, the fact that Szelényi and his co-authors were asked to 3 See, for instance, Eyal et al. (1998) and Szelényi et al. (1987). 4 Market Transition Theory received an impressive amount of attention among transition scholars, many of whom attempted to test it empirically and thus contributed to the Market Transition Debate. There have also been a number of attempts to synthesize the lessons learned in conceptual terms (see Nee and Stark, 1989; Szelényi and Kostello, 1996), as well as classical literature overviews and vote counting (see Nee and Matthews, 1996; Cao and Nee, 2000), in addition to statistical meta-analyses (see Verhoeven et al., 2005) that have given inconclusive answers to the basic questions related to theory. 5 Although the theory was formulated by Nee (1989), its three thesis statements—the “market power,” “market incentive” and “market opportunity” theses—are based on Szelényi’s three most important monographs: Urban Inequalities Under State Socialism (see Szelényi, 1983), The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (see Konrad and Szelényi, 1979) and Socialist ­Entrepreneurs (see Szelényi, 1988).

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write the chapter on (post-)socialist economic systems in both e­ ditions of The Handbook of ­Economic Sociology (see Szelényi et al., 1994; King and Szelényi, 2005) speaks volumes about the recognition that he has earned among sociologists more generally. It would thus not be an overstatement to say that he has become an iconic cee sociologist. To shed some light on the background of Szelényi’s scholarship and explain how he became a dominant, if not iconic, cee sociologist under challenging circumstances, this chapter will discuss the following dimensions of his scholarship in more detail: the topic selection, the intellectual context, intellectual rivalry, international (scholarly) interest in his research, the effective dissemination thereof, the number of his graduate students, as well as their research excellence and scholarly success.6 2

How to Become Dominant or Even Iconic

2.1 Topic Selection Regarding the question of uniqueness, some commentators, including Arato (1987), have found Konrad and Szelényi’s The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power truly original (p. 594). Compared to Djilas’s (1957) The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, Bence and Kis’s (Rakovski’s, 1978)7 Towards an East European Marxism, or Voslensky’s (1984) Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class, An Insider’s Report, Konrad and Szelényi’s argument may appear less unique, but it would be difficult to argue—given the circumstances under which it was written—that it was not brave, or that it did not present a thoughtprovoking and intriguing analysis. Szelényi and his co-authors later posited—in a manner that recalled Kołakowski (1969) and Dahrendorf (1969)—that the role of intellectuals is to play the part of the clown. According to this line of reasoning, intellectuals should provide internal criticism of the regime and speak truth to power from their quasi-privileged position (see Szelényi, 2012a; Durst, 2015, p. 128). Indeed, his view of intellectuals as the modern equivalent of court jesters distinguishes Szelényi’s position from contributions to the sociology of intellectuals that were inspired by structural-functionalist and conflict theories, as well as from the few attempts to combine these two. His path to understanding of the role 6 The title of the paper and the sub-sections are adopted from Lamont’s (1987) analysis of Derrida and Bartmanski’s (2012) discussion of Malinowski and Foucault. In more general terms a similar study “How to be and Academic Superhero” has recently been put forward by Hay (2017). 7 “Rakovski” was the pseudonym under which Bence and Kis published some of their works.

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of intellectuals in society (and possibly also in its evolution) thus seems to have emerged in response to Djilas, in parallel to Bence and Kis, before Voslensky and independently from Kołakowski or Dahrendorf, even if similar elements can be identified in their various approaches and arguments (Kroos, 2018). It is important to emphasize that the ideas that led Konrad and Szelényi to write The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power were possible only during the post-Stalinist era of relaxed ideological control. While it took some time for Lukács to be rehabilitated during the de-Stalinization process and for his ideas to become acceptable again (see Pike, 1988), limited artistic and intellectual freedom of expression was eventually granted as the socialist regime moved from charismatic legitimization to goal-rational legitimization (see Becskehazi and Kuczi, 1994, pp. 40–43). If one accepts the thesis of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, it could even be argued that the socialist system managed to co-opt intellectuals by supporting their artistic and intellectual ego projects in exchange for political loyalty. The price paid by artists and intellectuals was the avoidance of certain taboo topics. According to Alexander Szalai, there were three such taboos in Hungarian social sciences, sociology included,8 namely: (i) questioning the validity of Marxism, (ii) questioning the socialist character of Hungarian society, and (iii) criticizing the Soviet Union.9 This is how Andorka (1993, p. 80), Berend (2009, pp. 189–190) and Tökés (1996, p. 16) summarized the essence of the policy developed and implemented by the Hungarian Communist Party under the leadership of György Aczél, who, as Secretary of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, was responsible for ideology and cultural policy until the end of the 1970s. They noted that the control over intellectual and cultural activities consisted of the “three Ts”: “supported” (támogatott) were Marxist and socialist works; “forbidden” (tiltott) were openly anti-Marxist and antisocialist works; while the rest was mostly “tolerated” (tűrt). The willingness of Konrad and, more reluctantly, of Szelényi, to violate this unwritten code of conduct and turn the politics of intellectual expression and

8 Andorka mentioned this in several publications. While writing in one paper (“Hungarian Sociology in the Face of the Political, Economic and Social Transition”) that Szalai made this point at the end of 1970s (Andorka, 1991, p. 467), elsewhere (“Institutional Changes and Intellectual Trends in Some Hungarian Social Sciences”), he claimed that Szalai had made this comment in an interview to an American newspaper around 1980 (Andorka, 1993, p. 80). 9 Julian Schöpflin (1979, p. 100), George Schöpflin (1990, p. 96), as well as Szelényi et al. (1995, p. 703) listed only the “leading role of the party” and the “alliance with the Soviet Union” among the taboos. Yet, according to Hegedüs (1981), the three taboos included the (1) second economy, (2) the discrimination against the Roma, and (3) poverty (pp. 135–136).

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the game of institutionalized co-optation under Kadarism into the subject of their critical sociology was therefore rather brave. While this led to a clash with the regime and to Szelényi’s emigration, it also “boosted” his international scholarly career. Furthermore, as evident in the evolution of his sociology of intellectuals (see Kroos, 2018), Szelényi has remained faithful to his analysis of the position of intellectuals, broadly speaking, and has frequently returned to the discussion of their role, ever since his first hesitant identification of the phenomenon in the context of urban and regional research. While Szelényi (2002) stated that his research has largely centered on one theme, namely “the Grand Narrative of social structure and social change under socialism and ­post-communism,” (p. 42), his central research topic can be more narrowly classified as the reflexive sociology of intellectuals. Indeed, this is the recurrent theme to which he has returned time and again, sometimes more directly and sometimes less so, across 14 different research programs. While some may interpret this in negative terms as repetitive, Kis (1999) has pointed out in a different context that “[s]erious thinkers tend to have a single central concern that determines the entirety of their work” (p. 290). This definitely applies to Szelényi and his reflexive sociology of intellectuals. 2.2 Intellectual Context Szelényi did not develop this reflexive sociology of intellectuals in an intellectual vacuum. As explained in more detail elsewhere (see Kroos, 2018), the first and the second Budapest School played a large part in his development and probably also in his success abroad. While Polányi’s impact on Szelényi is well known, in many ways it has been Szelény’s lifework to finalize the job initiated by Hegedüs,10 though it cannot be emphasized enough that the thesis for The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power came from Bibó (see Bibó, 2015), with whom Szelényi had become friends. Various narratives about the re-establishment of sociology in Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s and the subsequent development of the discipline have been put forward. Their authors have generally pointed out that it was hardly 10

A more detailed discussion on the impact of the disciplinary context can be found in my Ph.D. dissertation (Kroos, 2018, Ch. 4.3). In addition to Hegedüs (1977, Part i), one can also look to Hegedüs and Márkus (1972) for an example of well-informed theoretical analysis, while Hegedüs (1977, Part ii) epitomized the empirical research tradition that Szelényi left behind, especially chapters 11 and 12 on “The Growth of the New Administrative Apparatus and Professional Management in Rural Society,” and “The Spread of New Technical Knowledge in Socialist Agriculture.” For Szelényi’s own comments on the impact of Hegedüs on his work, see Szelényi (2000, 2010).

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possible11 to study sociology in Hungary before 1972.12 Without going into the details of Szelényi’s training, it suffices to state that he received his first (MA) degree in economics in 1960 from the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest, where he attended the “Foreign Trade Faculty” (Lakatos, 2009, p. 950). Immediately after graduating, he went to work for the Hungarian Central Statistical Office as a research fellow for four years. Before joining the ­Institute of Sociology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (mta) in the mid1960s,13 he received a Ford Scholarship to spend one semester each at Columbia University in New York and at the University of California in Berkeley in 1964–65 (Szelényi, 2010, p. 31). Having been thus indoctrinated by (what he himself has called) “American empiricism,” he embarked on his academic career—first in the foreign literature section of the Library of the Central Statistics Office, then as a research fellow at the mta Institute (initially on a part-time contract), before serving as Scientific Secretary (from 1967) and finally (between 1970 and 1975) as Head of the Department of Regional Sociology (Szelényi, 2000, 2014).14 Szelényi’s first degree and hence his background in economics seem to have played a role in his academic development, which left a mark on his later research program in more ways than one. First, the research activities (connected to urban and regional planning) that he had to undertake at the mta institute required an academic background closer to economics than sociology, and it is plausible that this allowed him to develop his understanding and i­nterests in 11 12

13

14

According to Radio Free Europe (1977, p. 7) this was only possible between 1946 and 1949. As Némedi and Róbert (2002, pp. 437–438) explained, despite three attempts to establish sociology departments at university level in order to educate future sociologists, it was not until 1963 that a research group (and later an institute) of sociology was first created within the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. According to his personal CV (Szelényi, 2014), this happened in 1965. According to Szelényi (1987, p. 117), however, it happened two years earlier—in 1963. As he (2000) explained, the difference in dates may come from the fact that when the Sociological Research Group at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was set up on March 15, 1963, it was a small venture and that “[t]here were at that time about a dozen young men and women—just like me—who began to read sociological literature and train ourselves as sociologists. We were also dreaming about a research job in the Academy of Sciences, which at that time was a prestigious position.” As a result, he initially “got a part-time position and had to wait for years to be appointed full time.” Although he also worked at the Karl Marx University of Economics, as confirmed by its then rector in his memoirs (see Berend, 2009, pp. 233–234), as well as at the Party school of Marxism-Leninism, he confessed indirectly in his own reflections (see Szelényi, 2012a) that these episodes are not mentioned in the CV. It is noticeable that he has relabeled his alma mater, which also happened to be his former employer, in his résumé (see Szelényi, 2014) and in the “Preface” to the English translation of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (Szelényi, 1979b, p. xix), simply as “University of Economics in Budapest.”

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political economy. As he noted when explaining one of the crucial turning points in his intellectual development, I hold a degree in economics from Karl Marx University of Budapest, have worked for ten years with the scientifically best trained regional planners in Hungary and have myself been teaching planners and economists. […] I know a lot about ‘optimal allocation’ of resources in space, by planned development of ‘growth centers,’ etc. szelényi, 1980a, p. 130

Second, it is difficult to imagine that he would have been able to conceive of the dictatorship of the proletariat in East European state socialism as a myth— which is one of the main theses of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, and indeed key to his understanding of the socialist (economic) system—had he not first become acquainted with Karl Polányi’s three models of economic integration (reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange). To read Polányi, or even more importantly, to be inspired by the founding father of what is now known as economic sociology or institutional economics, requires an interest in issues related to political economy.15 Third, one can probably read more into Szelényi’s final words in the preface to the English translation of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power than he intended; nevertheless, they, too, indicate the possible role of economics in his academic development in general, and in writing The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power in particular. As he himself put it, I would like to express my thanks to my former students at the University of Economics in Budapest for their encouragement, intellectual stimulus, and friendship during those most difficult years when I was working on the early versions and the final draft of this manuscript. szelényi, 1979b, p. xix

Unlike some other Hungarian sociologists, including László Bertalan and László Csontos, who, according to Csontos (1999), had adopted the rationalchoice paradigm by 1970, and despite his studies in economics (which should have made the paradigm both acceptable and relatively easy for him to follow), 15

If this sounds like an overstatement, it should be remembered how rarely one encounters scholars with orthodox training in either economics or sociology who have not developed a distrustful or biased attitude towards the other discipline.

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Szelényi took a different theoretical and methodological approach. Instead, he tapped into the Hungarian socio–intellectual tradition founded by Karl Mannheim, Karl Polányi, Arnold Hauser and György Lukács. Although these eminent intellectuals had escaped Hungary and helped to establish sociology as a discipline in their new homelands, they left behind an intellectual heritage that allowed sociologists to flourish in Budapest. More particularly, while the first attempt to establish a world-class sociology school in Budapest (Mannheim held the inaugural sociology chair at the University in Budapest during the first communist regime in 1919) was short-lived for political reasons, they nevertheless established an intellectual tradition that had a lasting impact on Hungarian sociology. The second attempt had a similar fate, as the members of Lukács’s circle were marginalized, eventually opted for emigration and ended up in Australia by 1978. Prior to that, however, Mária Márkus acted as the middleperson between the Budapest School and the newly established “sociology group” at the mta. According to Szelényi (2010), she linked the two so effectively that (world-class) sociology could be revived in Budapest. More specifically, Szelényi (2000) has claimed that: Just 2–3 years after its birth, the new Hungarian sociology constituted the intellectually most exciting ‘scientific field’ and it attracted the attention and even admiration of leading social scientist from all over the world. Parsons, Etzioni, Polányi, Elihu Katz, Herbert Gans, Ferrarotti and many other leading sociologists of the time visited Hungary and were impressed. I acted as the translator for Talcott Parsons. When he departed, he wrote a letter to me and expressed his astonishment and admiration for the quality of ideas he found in Hungary. (He was careful enough to put in the letter: I don’t mean your own work, I mean the work of your institute…. Just to make sure I don’t start applying for jobs with his letters of thanks…).16 (p. 3) As is well known, Hegedüs, the key person in the re-establishment of Hungarian sociology in the 1960s, happened to be a former Stalinist prime minister of Hungary. He had educated himself in sociological literature during his 16

Contrary to Némedi and Róbert (2002), Szelényi (2000) portrayed András Hegedüs as the founding father of Hungarian sociology whom colleagues did not like but learned to respect. Discussing his legacy, Szelényi (2000) has stated that “he created single handedly the new Hungarian sociology and it would have been better for the profession if sociology in Hungary had remained on the road opened up by Hegedüs” (p. 5).

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­ ost-1956 exile in Moscow. Upon his return, he made a major career change p (see Rézler, 2000)17 to become the leader of the newly created sociological research group at the mta. Despite his fast career track in the Party hierarchy and subsequent self-criticism, which made him acceptable to the establishment and to critical reform Marxists alike, Némedi (2009) stressed that Hegedüs had to compete with Szalai, Erdei, Cseh-Szombathy and Andorka to have his vision of sociology adopted in Hungary (pp. 16–18). While Szalai and Erdei were sympathetic to the ideas of Hungarian sociography, and CsehSzombathy and Andorka favored Western empirical sociology, it was Hegedüs who found the middle ground. More specifically, Hegedüs (1976)18 explained in his seminal paper “The Self-Criticism of a Socialist Society: A Reality and Necessity” that sociology ought to have two simultaneous functions: to be manipulative as well as self-critical. While the former would offer information and knowledge (to policy makers), the latter would provide analytical feedback. He further stressed that this dual critical–analytical function, which ­included the aim to discredit existing social forms, was a historical necessity. In other words, he found a way to exploit Marxism as a method of social criticism19 by showing how sociology can serve social progress, rather than being a “revolt of the intellectuals.” Furthermore, Hegedüs was almost solely responsible for defining the key debates during the socialist era. According to Szelényi, he not only knew “how to navigate in turbulent waters” (2010, p. 27), but was able to frame the public debate around the following research topics: social structure,20 bureaucratization under socialism, and alienation in work (Szelényi, 2000). By being “a real 17

18 19

20

According to Szelényi (2000), Hegedüs was merely considered for the position of VicePresident of the Hungarian Central Statistics Office, which he apparently then declined. Yet, according to the records of Radio Free Europe (1965) “[h]e returned [from Moscow] in the autumn of 1958 and, after several minor jobs, was appointed deputy head of the Central Statistical Bureau” (p. 1). The article was originally published in Hungarian in the July 1967 issue of Kortárs, the journal of the Hungarian Writers’ Association. As Mária Márkus (2000) reflected: “András Hegedüs had a clear vision of what sociology meant for him and he formulated it on various occasions. He was primarily and above all interested in a critical investigation of social reality. This, however, under the circumstances of the time, necessarily involved an open contestation of the politically sanctioned tenets of official ideology. For these reasons alone his sociology could hardly ­remain within the narrowly conceived professional boundaries. As a matter of fact, many investigations of the latter type were, with relative ease, accepted and even coopted by the regime under the familiar slogan: ‘we do still have some deficiencies’” (p. 2). On this point, see also Kolosi and Szelényi (1993, pp. 148–153).

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agenda setter” (Szelényi, 2010, p. 28), he merged these issues into a coherent research agenda for critical social science,21 which, in turn, defined the topics of the most important debates in Hungarian sociology. In short, “he created single handedly the new Hungarian sociology” (Szelényi, 2000, p. 6). Therefore, he later equated Hegedüs’s impact with that of Ossowski—arguing, for instance, that without the two, there could have been no Zsuzsa Ferge, Rudolf Andorka, István Kemerny, Pavel Machonin or Wlodzimierz Weselowski (Szelényi, 2010, p. 28). Although Mária Márkus (2000) similarly confirmed that it was possible to undertake sociological research in Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s without becoming co-opted by the regime (p. 3), “the new sociology” re-established and developed at the time was not without its internal critics. Bence (1992), for instance, was critical of the “academic entrepreneurs” who undertook expensive sociological surveys, but lacked a genuine interest in social theory (pp. 331–332). While he avoided mentioning any names, one may suspect that he had the followers of Hegedüs in mind. Indeed, given the earlier clash between Hegedüs (1977) and Bence and Kis (1980, pp. 293–297), he may have been talking about those scholars who were willing to do policy-oriented empirical research, on the one hand, but at best to hint at taboo topics, on the other. As Szelényi was subject to these somewhat contradictory developments within the newly established discipline, it is not easy to comprehend their precise impact on him. On the one hand, given the fact that he avoided confrontation with such eminent Hungarian empirical sociologists as Andorka, Kolosi, Cseh-Szombathy and Ferge, and made a point of stating that he had emerged from the same empirical tradition (see Kolosi and Szelényi, 1993, pp. 150–152; Szelényi, 2012a; Lakatos, 2009, p. 951), one gets the impression that he still sees himself as a representative of that tradition. On the other hand, given the research topics, the methodology and the political implications of Szelényi’s works, as well as the fact that he has been very diplomatic in his criticism of ­Hegedüs (see Szelényi, 2000, 2010), he appears to be closer to the approach of Hegedüs than to any of the other sociologists who matured under the latter’s leadership of the sociological research group at the mta. This suggests that ­Szelényi should not just be seen as a member of the “Hegedüs group” 21

On the one hand, Szelényi (2010) emphasized that Hegedüs differed from Lukács and his school by lacking the proper training and knowledge in classical and contemporary philosophy (p. 27). On the other hand, he added that Mária Márkus “was the bridge between Lukács and Hegedüs, between ‘theory and praxis’ to put it somewhat simply” (p. 27). For examples, see Hegedüs et al. (1976), Hegedüs and Márkus (1971/1972, 1973, 1974, 1979), Hegedüs and Vajda (1976), as well as Lukács et al. (1975).

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(cf. C.A., 1974, p. 1),22 but as one of Hegedüs’s most promising followers (Robinson, 1974, p. 6). Yet there have also been other, more ideologically oriented intellectuals who left a mark on Szelényi and his sociology of the well-educated, among them Bibó, Haraszti and Konrad. Starting with the first, he reflected: I can recall three events which put me on the road to write the book on intellectuals. First, during the early 1960s I worked in the library of the Central Statistical Office, and Istvan Bibo, a cabinet minister from the 1956 Imre Nagy government, an old left-populist theorist and arguably the best Hungarian political philosopher of all time, just came out of jail and became my colleague and friend. In one conversation, he told me: ‘the biggest lie of socialism is that it is the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is rather the dictatorship of the intelligentsia.’ This shook me and made me think. szelényi, 2002, p. 47

Indeed, these words can be compared to Bibó’s own ideas, which have recently been made accessible in English: However odd, the fact is that a dictatorship of the intelligentsia develops under existing socialism the same way as in the world of technocracy, and this is the case even though men with a working-class background exercise their intellectual dictatorial power, as what matters is not working-class origin but that an intellectual function wields a dictatorial or oppressive superiority over non-intellectuals. bibó, 2015, p. 433

22

While Lengyel (2001) argued that Hegedüs did not create a school (p. 194), and M. Márkus (2000) added in her obituary that the time was not yet ripe for discussing and fully comprehending his legacy, it can certainly be implied that he did forge a “school.” The aim of this chapter is not to go into the details of the local socio–cultural, political, economic and personal issues surrounding Hegedüs—a task which became easier following the publication of his autobiography (Hegedüs, 1988) as well as of his Moscow correspondence between 1956–58 (Hegedüs, 2010). In other words, some 15 years after the passing of Hegedüs, it can be argued that he established the critical tradition in Hungarian sociology of which Szelényi is probably the most important exponent. Indeed, he can be seen as the central figure, next to Lukács, in the creation of such a school, together with Mária Márkus. Its emergence has been captured by external observers of Hungarian sociology, including C.A. (1974) and Lantz (1972), and was exemplified in the breakthrough foreignlanguage publications of the time: Lukács et al. (1975), Hegedüs and Márkus (1974), and Hegedüs and Vajda (1976). For additional comments, see Andras (1976), Robinson (1967, 1969) and Szelényi (2000, 2010).

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Although this left-populism was also supported by Haraszti and Konrad, Szelényi has had a complicated relationship with both. On the one hand, he has praised Haraszti for his role in the formation of a dissident opposition even at the cost of personal marginalization (2010, p. 33). On the other hand, he has also upbraided Haraszti for his earlier involvement in the “Maoist conspiracy” and his long road to dissidence (King and Szelényi, 2004, p. 94, 113). While trying to defend him against political prosecution, Szelényi stated at Haraszti’s trial (which was engineered on the basis of his samizdat publication Workers in a Worker’s State: Piece-Rates in Hungary), that “[t]he book contains nothing new from a scientific point of view; the phenomena he analyses have been written about in sociological publications. But it is a very interesting literarysociographical document, and his findings coincide with past sociological ­experience in Hungary” (Szelényi as cited in Schöpflin, 1974, p. 83). Soon afterwards, Szelényi (1977) added that he regarded Haraszti’s book “as an important contribution,” describing it further as a powerful critical analysis written consciously from the point of view of the working class, even if it does not contribute a great deal—due to its sociographical, descriptive nature—to class theory of State socialism, it is a precious document on East European class relations. (p. 66) Not before long, he reflected on the book again, stating that it documented working-class struggles well (Szelényi, 1981, p. 204) and that he now found it “powerful,” since it “offers convincing [empirical] evidence” (Szelényi, 1982, p. S320). Finally, King and Szelényi (2004) have expressed their respect for Haraszti’s work as “sociological research,” notably for documenting the distinction made on the shop floor by blue-collar workers between “us,” the people who actually do the work, and the white collar “they,” who supervise (p. 185). That same year (1973), soon after the trial of Miklos Haraszti for Workers in a Worker’s State, Konrad and Szelényi took the courageous decision to write up their own sociological observations in more theoretical language. As Szelényi (2010) has reflected, [w]e locked ourselves up with Konrád in a ‘secret location,’ in the house of a parish priest outside Budapest, and began to write The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. The political police allowed us to complete the manuscript, but once it was completed a copy was confiscated and it was our turn to be prosecuted. We spent a week in jail in October 1974 and were offered emigration. (p. 33)

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While this is the description of events that Szelényi has continued to repeat, sometimes adding that “[t]he rest of the story is not very exciting and not very dramatic either,” he has nevertheless also claimed that “Konrad changed his mind” about emigration after initially deciding to accept it, unlike Szelényi and Szentjóby, who did emigrate (see Szelényi, 1979b, p. xviii).23 That being said, one still gets the impression from Szelényi’s reluctance to write his own autobiography, or to comment on Konrad’ autobiographical novel, that this is not the complete story. While he admitted during a private conversation in New York City on February 11, 2012 that he had been thinking a lot about a possible autobiography and was willing to be cruel to himself, he had been postponing the task because he was “not yet ready to hurt others.”24 It is up to the individuals involved to disclose the full details if and when the time is right, and to native Hungarian researchers to verify the information presented in Konrad’s autobiographical novel A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life (Konrad, 2002), as well as that available in court records. To sum up, there is no doubt that the intellectual context has had an important impact on Szelényi and his sociology of intellectuals. Indeed, the academic environment during his formative years in Hungary shaped Szelényi’s ­professional life and scholarship in fundamental ways. The long tradition of Hungarian sociology and sociography and the impossibility of studying sociology directly, which “forced” him to become acquainted with political economy and historical materialism and pushed him into empiricism, were all important aspects in Szelényi’s intellectual development. While Hungarian sociology rapidly fell into “mediocrity and boredom” after the replacement of Hegedüs, according to Szelényi (2000, p. 3), the same cannot be said about his own academic career, which only advanced in international terms after his emigration.

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Tamás Szentjóby is an avant-garde poet and a friend of Konrad and Szelényi. Because of his background as a photographer, he was allegedly asked to make the copy of the manuscript of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power that the political police found during the search of Szelényi’s flat (Szelényi, 1979b, p. xvii). Although Szelényi (2018) has recently put forward an “intellectual autobiography,” he actually wrote the original version for the introduction of a collection of his essays that was published in Bulgarian. Organized both along thematical and chronological lines to mark the different stages of his intellectual development and academic career, it contextualizes the selected papers rather well. Given the background and purpose of the document, one should not be surprised that it does not discuss the above-mentioned issues of a more sensitive nature.

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2.3 Intellectual Rivalry Intellectual competition tends to be good for the advancement of academic research. As the rivalry between (Konrad and) Szelényi, and (Bence and) Kis has unfortunately been hidden and the public debate thereof suppressed, it can only be discerned between the lines (at least by non-Hungarian speakers). Nevertheless, as I noted elsewhere in a discussion devoted to Szelényi’s autocritical reflections (see Kroos, 2018), he wrote The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power together with Konrad only after he had secured his position in the field and was ready to burn bridges. It seems that he understood well what Bourdieu has taught us: in order to criticize the field, you have to be established in it. In other words, you must have the necessary credentials and capital before you can put forward your criticism. The fact that Szelényi had not defended his Ph.D. at the time of the Prague Spring and also had dependents helps to explain his desire to stay out of trouble and to make his career. Once he had received his degree and realized that the changed leadership of the Institute of Sociology at the mta was blocking his career (if one interprets Bence and Kis’s comments correctly), he became willing to enter a collision course with the regime. It was only then that he co-authored the provocative book that would not only change his academic career, but make a major contribution to the sociology of intellectuals. While Szelényi has evaded engaging in any debates with Bence and Kis (as well as with Konrad), he came closest to doing so in his paper on “Socialist Opposition in Eastern Europe—Dilemmas and Prospects.” Given the fact that Szelényi’s direct references to Bence and Kis are limited to three entries in the endnotes of the paper,25 it requires some effort to realize that much of the article was an indirect response to their work (and to that of similar authors). Nevertheless, it remains unclear who was replying to whom and in what order. Should one read the chapter “The Intellectuals” in Bence and Kis’s Towards an East European Marxism (which has no references) as a response to Konrád and Szelényi’s book, or the other way around—or are Szelényi’s reflections on the

25

The endnotes contain one reference to Bence et al. and two to Rakovski. In the former case, Szelényi (1979a, p. 197) referred to the manuscript of Hogyan lehetséges kritikai gazdaságtan? [How Could a Critical Economic Theory Be Possible?] (Bence, Kis and Márkus, 1992), unpublished at the time and still available only in Hungarian. In the latter case, he referred to the French version of “Marxism and the Analysis of Soviet Societies” published in 1974 (Szelényi, 1979a, p. 190, 196).

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New Left and the possibilities of forming a new opposition a response to Bence and Kis’s (Rakovski’s) essay “Marxism and the Analysis of Soviet Societies”?26 What is clear is that Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978) discredited the concept used by the empirically oriented “academic Sovietologists” and “the official Soviet sociologists,” who defined the intelligentsia on the basis of vocational training (p. 43). Furthermore, Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978) argued against defining intellectuals “as a smaller group whose members do intellectual work without taking part in the execution of management and organizational tasks,” as that would make, for instance, a literature teacher who has stopped following new developments also an intellectual (p. 43). Instead, Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978) offered the following definition: intellectuals make up “[t]he ­social group which is capable of forming an autonomous ideology” (p. 43). That is, they are “the sub-group of intellectual workers whose members are in regular contact with the process of cultural and scientific creation”—and “regular contact” in this context does not imply “creation,” since it is enough if they follow the scientific or cultural production in the field (Rakovski, 1978, p. 43). To avoid any direct confrontation with Bence and Kis, who had lost their academic posts by that time and were able to publish only in unofficial ­publications, Szelényi (1979a) excused himself in the first page of “Socialist ­Opposition in Eastern Europe,” for “not [having] had a chance to conduct systematic research in samizdat archives” (p. 187). While he tried to avoid any discussion of who is a “real” socialist and who is not (Szelényi, 1979a, p. 188), it is clear that he counted himself among the former. Moreover, he also seemed to criticize intellectuals such as Haraszti, Bence, Kis, Konrad and others for engaging in activities like the European Peace Movement: One obviously would expect that those dissenting or marginal intellectuals who are sincerely dedicated to socialist values will be more sensitive to these issues, but there is no direct correspondence between the values held by the ideologues and the sociological consequences of their ideologies. Critics and socialist beliefs often oppose East European state ­socialism on general humanitarian or libertarian grounds. They attack totalitarianism and police oppression, they demand freedom of speech and assembly and the abolition of censorship, and they fight for civil rights. They are socialist in their values, but their critique of Soviet-type societies is not specifically socialist and it will be shared by non-socialists, Christians or ­bourgeois liberals. In this paper, I am searching for such a specifically socialist critical 26

Although related issues were raised by Bence and Kis also in Towards an East European Marxism, Szelényi (1979a) referred only to the French version of the above-mentioned essay (p. 192).

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theory of East European socialism which does not propose to provide remedies for all human injustice and suffering, but which pursues general libertarian goals by aiming first at the emancipation of the working class. The libertarian socialist dissidents will become the ideologues of a ‘socialist opposition’ only when they ­develop a specific strategy for the emancipation of the working class, that is, when they become the ideologues of the East European workers’ movement. szelényi, 1979a, p. 188

The puzzle that Szelényi (1979a) identified is that if there are intellectuals with socialist beliefs who are prepared to ‘marginalise’ themselves into the existentially insecure position of ‘dissidents’ and to spend their lives on the borderline of mental asylums, jails, voluntary or enforced exile, there is a significant spontaneous movement of workers’ resistance and discontent. Why do they not meet? (p. 189) Unlike in some other writings, in which he has painted the regime’s repressive actions against the intelligentsia in slightly more dramatic terms, he now argued that “few political trials have been staged against intellectuals” (Szelényi, 1979a, p. 189). Furthermore, he added that even if convicted, “most sentences are relatively mild” (Szelényi, 1979a, p. 189). Although he did not name anyone personally, it must have been rather disturbing for those intellectuals who had lost their jobs and livelihoods in Hungary and elsewhere in cee to read these self-reflexive lines, which he wrote in the safety of Australia and partly on the basis of his and Konrad’s experience: “[n]owadays the lives of dissenting intellectuals are not threatened anymore and the worst that they can expect is a few years in jail or probably just a one-way visa to West Germany or England” (Szelényi, 1979a, p. 189). While Szelényi would soon distance himself from the neo-Leninist agenda of bringing class consciousness to the working class from above (see Szelényi, 1980a), in the above-cited paper on the socialist opposition in Eastern Europe he tried to make the point that “[p]olitical and police oppression do not explain why the dissidents do not choose to become the ‘organic intellectuals’ of the working class” (1979a, p. 190). Nevertheless, his argument went further. Relying on the French version of Bence and Kis’s (Rakovski’s) essay “Marxism and the Analysis of Soviet Societies,” he agreed with the argument that workers are badly organized,27 but disagreed with the claim that “intellectual dissidents” 27 In Towards an East European Marxism, Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978) asked even more directly why dissident movements in cee “are isolated intellectual movements which

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cannot perform their task as “ideologues” under these structural conditions. Quite the opposite, he wrote—repeating the argument of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power—for the first time in history, intellectuals were being offered the “dominating class position” (Szelényi, 1979a, p. 190). He combined this with the arguments of police oppression and the lack of organization of the working class to explain the delay in “the emergence of working class ideologues and ideologies” (Szelényi, 1979a, p. 190). Between the lines, however, he seemed to blame the humanist Marxists for devoting themselves to an abstract philosophical program, rather than a political program of intellectual leadership for the working class. Bence and Kis, however, did not leave the issue unchallenged. Without naming Szelényi personally, they stated in Towards an East European Marxism that “[e]ven those people who have criticized the policies of the apparatus in the name of the working class have in fact addressed themselves to the apparatus and not to the working class itself” (Rakovski, 1978, p. 105). Add to this the following statement by Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978), and it would appear that the contrast between them, on the one hand, and Szelényi, on the other, could not be greater: One may ask why the Soviet intelligentsia has not made contact with the working class, but that is not the right question. The question which in fact corresponds to the situation in Soviet-type societies is as follows: why is the intelligentsia—which does not constitute an autonomous class—able to create its own ideology and its own culture, and even its own counter-culture and embryonic counter-institutions, while the basic class are unable even in this very restricted sense to form themselves a class a particular entity? (pp. 42–43)

have no contact with the broad social strata most seriously affected by the reproduction capitalist structures, especially the working class” (p. 42). Foreshadowing the argument of contradictory class locations made famous later by Wright, and argumentative method of “mirrored oppositions” identified by Stark (1986), Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978) argued that “In capitalist societies, the intelligentsia is only a heterogeneous mass in a field of action dominated by the two basic classes; it does not appear as an independent force in social conflicts, but is divided between the two poles. In a Soviet-type society (which is built of quite different elements from those in capitalism, so its ruling class evidently could not be described as bourgeois), on the other hand, class structure lies within the confines of an institutional system which by its very nature prevents social classes from becoming an independent political force, that is to say, from seeing themselves as particular classes in terms of an articulate ideology and form setting up specific organizations to advance their interests” (p. 42).

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If the statement above can be seen as reflection on the ideas that Bence and Kis raised in the introduction and conclusion of Towards an East European Marxism (see Rakovski, 1978, Ch. 1 & 5), the two central topics addressed by Szelényi in “Socialist Opposition in Eastern Europe” relate to the rest of the book. More specifically, Szelényi organized most of the discussion around two topics in Hungarian economics and politics in the 1960s and 1970s: economic selfmanagement­vs. centralized redistributive power, and political self-determination vs. the hegemony of the Party vanguard, which relate to Bence and Kis’s (Rakovski’s) chapters on “‘Market Socialism’ in Retrospect” and the “Two Systems in Action.” Both Szelényi and Bence and Kis took Hegedüs’s paper on “Optimization and Humanization”28 as the starting point for their discussions on the controversies around “new economic reform.” Szelényi (1979a) explicitly did so in his essay—stating that Hegedüs’s article not only launched the attack against economic reforms, but also articulated a powerful and highly influential criticism from the point of view of “humanistic Marxism” (p. 194). He interpreted this as “a reaction against what one might call ‘Stalinist structuralism,’” which despite its creativeness, fairly soon became “a theoretical dead-end street” (Szelényi, 1979a, p. 195). In addition to taking up the discussion on the “mixed economy” and usevalue, his recommendation was to investigate the origin of inequalities— in much the same way that he presented in The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, in Urban Inequalities Under State Socialism, and in “Social Inequalities in State Socialist Redistributive Economies.” In this context, Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978) also asked a question that is typical of political economy: “Who has an interest in economic reform?” (pp. 20). Their answer was that economic reform is in the interest of the decision makers at both the enterprise and the national level—reasoning that the former would be empowered by the market system, and the latter by changes in the power structure, which, in the context of the Stalinist command economy, pushed the economists “outside the political élite” (Rakovski, 1978, p. 21). Nevertheless, the difference between the positions of Bence and Kis and Szelényi was more fundamental, which became apparent in their views on the renaissance of Marxism in cee. Bence and Kis saw the return to the original works of (the early) Marx, Lenin and Lukács as a way to radically break away 28

The paper is only available in Hungarian (see Hegedüs, 1965). In English, Hegedüs and Márkus (1971/1972) discussed closely related issues in the paper “The Role of Values in the Long Range Planning of Distribution and Consumption.” Additional insights were presented by Hegedüs (1968, 1969) as well as by Hegedüs and Márkus (1973) in various followup papers. In German, the evolution of Hegedüs’s ideas on the topic can be observed in the collected papers published in Hegedüs and Vajda (1976).

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from anything that ideologically justified the use of terror by the Stalinist regime. Contradicting the approach taken by Djilas, as well as that of Konrad and Szelényi, Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978) claimed that it was not in the interest of any group in the ruling class to reveal the class base, and that the power structure of the Stalinist era determined the precise route taken by this new Marxism, which had reacquired a social content (p. 131). At no point was there any support for a radical criticism that would try to understand the specifics of Stalinist policy by way of the relations between the apparatus and the basic social classes. No one even suggested that the historical direction of Stalinist policy was an extension of the power of the apparatus to all classes and all spheres of social life. But if no such idea was put forward, it was not simply because public discussion of such ideas would have exhausted the political tolerance of the new ruling stratum in its struggle to consolidate power; Marxists who were fighting to end the system of terror themselves felt that to reveal the class antagonisms of Soviet-type societies would only help the conservative and restorationist forces. Szelényi agreed with this only partly. He accepted that humanistic Marxism offered dissident intellectuals an opportunity to test the limits of the regime’s tolerance (Szelényi, 1979a, pp. 195–196). At the same time, he argued that this approach soon led to “a theoretical dead-end street”29 because it was incapable of confronting the complexities of the post-1968 socialist societies (Szelényi, 1979a, p. 195). Yet, he did not specify what these complexities were. It thus remains unclear whether he was referring to the general political context that followed the Prague Spring, or more specifically to the regime’s intervention in personnel issues at the Academy of Sciences. Nonetheless, it can be deduced from the other reflections (see Szelényi, 1987, pp. 106–107, 2010, p. 30) discussed below, that 1966–68 was a troubled time for Lukács and his disciples. On the one hand, Lukács reportedly coined the famous slogan, “Even the worst socialism is better than the best capitalism” around this time, and Hegedüs (1965) published his article on “Optimization and Humanization” (which put “renaissance” Marxism on a collision course with both the economic reformers and the regime). But on the other hand, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the ussr (with some help from Hungary) changed the context dramatically, even if not overnight. When the topic came up in the interview, Szelényi explained that my friends, who were Communist and before were kind of ideological critics of the regime, they had a better understanding of the importance 29

Although Szelényi made no references to Mária Márkus (1976), this calls to mind the title of her essay “Women and Work: Emancipation at a Dead End”—or perhaps he was already anticipating the radical break that Kis would later make with Marxism.

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of ‘68. I remember conversations with Ágnes Heller and she said: Now this is really the end. Now things will not be the same after the Prague Spring was crushed. And I asked her: What’s the big deal? I mean, Kronstadt—you didn’t get it after Kronstadt that the regime is not what it pretends to be? What about Berlin 1953—you didn’t get it? What about Hungary 1956—why did you not get it? Right. You needed the invasion of Czechoslovakia? I mean, this is, in fact, the less bloody intervention than the previous ones, if anything, right? It is communism with a human face in contrast with the previous ones, right? No, no—she said, that is different: Now we really…the course is lost. I did not really understand it. But it was true. I mean that was the beginning of the end. What was probably the 1956 for the Western Left, was 1968 for the kind of New Left—technocratic, lefty, intellectuals—in Eastern Europe. They lost faith in the system. You know, more the kind of humanistic social scientific intellectuals. I think the proper technocrats were still hoping—market socialism or fixing the system. After all, you know, the so called New Economic Mechanism was put into place in Hungary in 1968. szelényi, 2012a

The statements of Bence and Kis corroborate this. Referring to the institutional structure and the mechanisms that were put in place by the Stalinist and postStalinist regimes to control cultural and academic work,30 Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978) stated that “[u]nder such circumstances, not one group of the intelligentsia could think of creating its own group identity” (p. 50). Nonetheless, they explained that even under the conditions set by the official ideology, some groups of the intelligentsia were able to do meaningful work. Without naming the Budapest School directly, they argued, for instance, that [t]he extremely small number of intellectuals who in the darkest years of Stalinism tried to defend their cultural and scientific values were restricted to the use of a highly ambiguous tactic. In accepting unreservedly the general slogans of the official ideology, they so to speak ‘deepened’ them at the same time… rakovski, 1978, p. 50

According to Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978), this highly dubious “double game” allowed the innovative intelligentsia to eliminate the old guard even in the 30

For further details, see the chapter devoted to the analysis of the socio–cultural and political context in my Ph.D. dissertation.

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social sciences where the regime still exercised stricter ideological prohibitions and controls (pp. 51–52). While this describes the background of the post-Stalinism era before 1968, a time that Bence and Kis called the “transitional period,” what followed, according to them, was a “time for disillusion” (Rakovski, 1978, p. 53). Without directly mentioning the Prague Spring, Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978) described the period as follows: Once the division in the ruling class had been overcome (the definite date for the East European countries as a whole was the end of the 1960s) it was time for disillusion. The new élite in power will only tolerate autonomy to the extent that the unified hierarchical system of institutions is not threatened with disintegration. It is clear now that we are not heading towards the institutionalisation of cultural and scientific freedoms, and that public debates are no longer permitted to continue even at the level which they had reached during the years of destalinisation. (p. 53) In alignment with the argument presented by Konrad and Szelényi in The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, Bence and Kis also outlined the compromises that most intellectuals were willing to make in the post-Stalinist era, and why only a minority was willing to deviate from this path: The majority of intellectuals themselves also accept this new balance of power in the post-Stalinist system. Like the workers and enterprise-level management, the intellectuals also have a positive interest in maintaining the central apparatus’s mediation. If they renounce those freedoms which are incompatible with the survival of the unified ruling system, in exchange they get not only the comfort and status symbols of the intellectuals’ way of life and consumer patterns, but even some very real cultural freedoms as well. They can continue with their creative activities within the limits laid down by the official taboos, and if they are skillful in maneuvering they can even push back slightly the limits to their margins of action. And yet it is precisely this situation which produces the minority of intellectuals who depart consciously from the official institutional framework of culture and science. At first the ‘primitive accumulation’ of nonconformism takes place: unless they fall rapidly in line, the leading intellectuals who used to attack Stalinism under the protection of the supreme power find themselves marginalised. rakovski, 1978, p. 55

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This recalls the discussion in Konrad and Szelényi’s (1979, Ch. 13) concluding chapter, titled “The Role of the Marginal Intelligentsia in the Formation of an Intellectual Class, in Articulating Workers’ Interests, and in Developing a Critical Social Consciousness.” Under the first sub-heading (“New Opportunities for the Intellectuals in the Era of Compromise: Marginality Freely Chosen”), they argued that intellectuals may feel a strong attraction to deviate. Not only did this allow them to stop wasting their time on obscure and “trivial side projects” with little relevance to their true career objectives, but they also took the road to dissent voluntarily, for the sake of academic freedom and recognition—and not for political power (Konrad and Szelényi, 1979, pp. 235–236). On the point of not wasting time, they argued that marginal intellectuals feel little urge to play at political parties again, to attend party meetings and practice criticism and self-criticism, to submit to sectarian discipline; they have no motive to lay violent siege to the stronghold of power when its gates stand open before them and they can saunter in at any time if they will only accept its discipline as binding on themselves. konrad and szelényi, 1979, p. 239

Regarding the point of academic recognition, Konrad and Szelényi (1979) professed that the intellectual who sets out to explore the reservation of ideological taboos is drawn to forbidden territory not so much by an indomitable heroism which shrinks from no danger as by the prospect of an easy bag, and by the reward not only of the abstract joy of intellectual discovery but of domestic and even international acclaim for his original achievement. (p. 238) When the topic came up in the interview, Szelényi further explained that “I was just very scared, you know, I did not want to go to jail. But at the same time, you know I knew this is probably the best book I can write in my life and I just wanted to do it. And I think the idea was like curiosity…” (2012a). This confession reinforces the idea put forward by Konrad and Szelényi that the party a­ pparatus had difficulties understanding the nature and motives of the intellectuals who, at the expense of marginalizing themselves, did not aspire to power, but to academic recognition at home and abroad. As they put it, “[t]here are many roads leading out of marginality, but none of them leads to political power” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1979, pp. 239–240).

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Given the fact that Kis not only went into politics, but also helped to create and lead the Liberal Party, and that Szelényi has argued in his follow-up publications that intellectuals emerged as the prime candidates for power in the transition from communism to capitalism, one might have expected him to return to this statement to reassess it properly. More than anybody else, the political involvement and writings of Kis would have given him plenty of food for thought and material to comment on. While he made some scattered comments about Kis, they were issued in passing and did not go into any detail.31 In other words, Szelényi did not take up the example of Kis directly, even if he may have occasionally hinted at it. Furthermore, in the same concluding chapter, Konrad and Szelényi (1979, Ch. 13) also contrasted the theoretical and tactical differences of the NeoMarxist Budapest School with the kind of critical–empirical scholarship that they represented, under the heading “Two Types of Marginal Intellectuals: ­Teleological and Empirical Revisionists.” Having pointed out that the former relied on the early works of Marx to emphasize the role of values in their philosophical-anthropological opposition against “Stalinism, with its vulgar historiosophic determinism, and the technocratic economism and revisionism of the post-Stalin era” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1979, pp. 242), they explained the limited success, if not the failure, of this approach as follows: The demands of these teleological critics for a renewal of the elite do not enjoy much popularity in Eastern European political and bureaucratic circles. But it does not take much theoretical acuteness on the part of the ruling elite’s ideologists to see that in vulgarized form these demands, critical overtones and all, can be used to keep the technocrats in check and even to force them back from their current positions. Crudely oversimplified, these abstract arguments can be used to demand a closer integration of politics and economics, with politics in command, and to strengthen the position of the redistributors generally and of the ruling elite specifically. We have here, in other words, an ideology of the intellectual class which is able to envisage the class rule of the intelligentsia only in terms of the stable hegemony of an intellectual elite. The ruling elite has dealt its teleological critics a double blow: Angered at their demand that it renew itself, it has driven them into marginality, while at the 31

For instance, Szelényi (1987) stated that Bence and Kis co-authored the influential Towards and East European Marxism “after they began to abandon Marxism” (p. 108), and he later described Kis in an endnote as “one of the noblest characters of the Central European liberal intelligentsia” (Szelényi, 2011a, p. 181).

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same time using bits and pieces of their ideology, if only in a rather primitive form, to defend its own very real existence and interests. From this teleological critique, in other words, it has fashioned the tools of an immanent apologetics. This development has driven the teleological critics into an everdeepening theoretical crisis. They have tried to defend themselves against the elite’s co-optation of their ideas by formulating their values in increasingly abstract and—one might almost say—elegiac terms. konrad and szelényi, 1979, pp. 242–243

While this statement may have been a fairly accurate assessment regarding the works of the Budapest School, it would be a mistake to expect its younger members, such as Bence and Kis, to accept this without a fight. Without mentioning anyone personally, Bence and Kis spelled out how a (social) scientist’s career evolved under the politically controlled conditions of the post-Stalinist regime in Hungary. At the beginning of an academic career (or artistic/literary life), an aspiring young scholar would follow the calling of the profession—it is “only the deliberate careerists who try to brush up their scientific performance with the aid of the official ideology” already at university and during their postgraduate studies (Rakovski, 1978, p. 57). Most, however, would find that it was possible to start a career without the official ideology—relying just on the skills and knowledge of the discipline: But at the age of thirty or so one encounters the necessity to choose. In order to continue rising the academic ladder, the researcher must orientate his thinking towards the central topics and intensify his publishing activity, and this makes it inevitable that he will make considerable ideological concessions and play an active political role. At this point, prudent nonconformists take the route towards internal marginalization. The majority, on the other hand, try to make a rational compromise. But in order to do so, they need extraordinary ability and good luck. In most cases, the compromise leads either towards pure careerism, or to c­onfrontation with the management apparatus and probably to marginalisation. rakovski, 1978, p. 57

To complicate matters further, Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978) also drew attention to the internal rivalry among young scholars, explaining it as follows: “What makes it extremely difficult to maneuver is the competition between researchers who are not determined non-conformists but try to preserve their

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autonomy” (pp. 57–58). Once again, without mentioning any names, they noted that [e]ach of them wants to pay the lowest price possible for increasing his opportunities for research. But in doing so, he threatens to make the situation of the others worse, because he irritates the sensitivities of officialdom by his behavior, which is not conformist enough. rakovski, 1978, pp. 57–58

Although it is very plausible that Bence and Kis were referring to (Konrad and) Szelényi, this is not actually documented. For instance, in the discussion on the point at which the decision between integration and marginalization had to be made, they explained that apart from conscious careerists, all intellectuals go through the experiences of frustration which lead the nonconformists deliberately to choose marginalization. For every writer, it is an abnegation to admit that because the canons of socialist realism have become less strict, this still does not mean that there is freedom for creativity. Every sociologist […] meets insurmountable barriers as soon as he enters a sphere which is ‘delicate’ from the standpoint of the official ideology or when he tries to make independent generalizations which are impossible to camouflage with the phrases of that ideology. rakovski, 1978, pp. 64–65

Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978) repeatedly pointed out that “the established intelligentsia has no interest in seeing this éducation sentimentale lead to nonconformism on a massive scale” (p. 65). They also added an explanation for the mixed emotions and icy response that Konrad and Szelényi’s critical work on intellectuals generated among some fellow intellectuals, noting that even if the established intelligentsia indirectly provided protection for such nonconformist intellectuals, their “direct attitude towards them is none the less hostile” (Rakovski, 1978, p. 65). This is probably due to the conservative nature of academia which “does not recognize itself in ideological utterances which put a question mark over the whole present institutional framework of society” (Rakovski, 1978, p. 65)—a statement that summarizes the skeptical views of the established intelligentsia towards Konrad and Szelényi’s The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. Responding in equally discreet fashion, Szelényi avoided naming anyone personally in the crucial parts of his publications. Nevertheless, “Socialist

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­ pposition in Eastern Europe” can be seen as a reply to the opening chapter of O Towards East European Marxism (the title of which is identical to that of the book), which discussed the theoretical challenges of applying (the three different conceptions of) Marxism to the ussr and to cee. More clearly than Bence and Kis, Szelényi was skeptical of the Western schools of Marxism and insisted, as mentioned above, on the need to develop a critical theory of socialist societies in Eastern Europe. He emphasized that this would have to be, following Hegedüs,32 “a self-critical exercise” (Szelényi, 1979a, p. 191). As the conceptualizations of Eastern Europe offered in the West were deficient and inapplicable to the realities of actually existing socialism, they could not simply be borrowed. Szelényi was already flirting here with the idea of the “method of mirrored comparisons,”33 which he later identified as an important component of his methodology, noting that “[t]he pattern is somehow the opposite of the western capitalist one” (Szelényi, 1979a, p. 199). In other words, Szelényi (1979a) reasoned that “the more traditional Marxist approach to problems of political economy and class analysis did not seem to be as irrelevant as one might have thought through the prism of humanistic Marxism” (p. 196). Unlike Bence and Kis, he maintained that [t]he socialist theory I expect to emerge from Eastern Europe in the next decade […] will be such an immanent critique of the Marxist-Leninist theory of socialism, probably remaining in the broadly defined value system and scientific methodology of Marxism, which aims to transcend both state socialism and capitalism in order to further advance the cause of the emancipation of the working class. szelényi, 1979a, p. 192

He consequently suggested, in line with what he had first indicated in the “Notes on the ‘Budapest School’” (Szelényi, 1977), that the works of Bence-Kis and Konrad-Szelényi were trying to develop the same kind of critical political economy of State socialism.34 Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978), on the other hand, argued that 32 33 34

For more details, see Hegedüs (1976) and the explanation put forward by Robinson (1967). In Stark’s (1986) original formulation, this approach was labeled “mirrored oppositions.” In a footnote, he even argued that the analysis put forward by Bence et al. in the then unpublished manuscript of Hogyan lehetséges kritikai gazdaságtan? [How Could a ­Critical Economic Theory Be Possible?, published in 1992] represented “an especially significant work,” (Szelényi, 1979a, p. 208) not least because it clarified the “sociological ­significance of the commodity form vs. the use value form of products” (Szelényi, 1979a, p. 197).

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even the most naïve representatives of the Marxism of the thaw know that the social consequences of what were known as theoretical errors could not be got rid of simply by means of an ideological purge, by changes in the political objectives and the removal of the diehard Stalinists. (p. 134) Correspondingly, Bence and Kis stressed that a critique of the Stalinist ideology could only emerge after the heroic first steps taken by humanist Marxism, which had de-Stalinized socialist society. Writing about this type of scholar, Bence and Kis (Rakovski, 1978) noted that “[i]t is precisely the abstract nature of his philosophy of praxis, which has sprung from the Marxism of thaw, that enables it to make a more radical critique of Soviet-type societies” (p. 135). What they seemed to imply is that scholars such as Konrad and Szelényi, who radicalized the analysis of the position of intellectuals in the class structure of socialist society, could do so only thanks to the intellectual achievements of the Budapest School and the political tolerance that it carved out for them. Once again, without mentioning anyone by name, Bence and Kis warned that deviance from humanistic Marxism, which ignored or entered into a collision course with the unwritten rules of the regime, could also put the intellectuals at risk. They explained that [f]or the intellectuals, ‘marxism’ is the name given to the limits which are imposed on their free creative work. It is possible to do something within the limits, and one can even gradually extend them: but one cannot go beyond them. Experience demonstrates that every initiative in this direction has provoked a tightening of the rope. The abstract radicalism of philosophers who dare to explore the forbidden areas of Marxism leads only to risk and danger for the vast majority of intellectuals. rakovski, 1978, p. 137

Moreover, on the last page of Towards an East European Marxism, Bence and Kis also emphasized that “[t]he ruling class answers radical political conclusions with repression, even when they are abstract. And those who do not bow to this repression must either emigrate or go underground” (Rakovski, 1978, p. 138)—the former being true of Szelényi and the latter of Kis himself. To sum up, Szelényi’s reflections in “Socialist Opposition in Eastern Europe” should be read as a response to Towards an East European Marxism, in which Bence and Kis, writing under the pseudonym Rakovski, had voiced their critique of and challenges to The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. Although this probably represents the most important debate in which Szelényi has ever

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taken part, it is remarkable that he understated its significance by deliberately choosing not to refer to Bence and Kis (Rakovski) directly, and by replying to them only indirectly. Likewise, Bence and Kis were equally discreet and avoided mentioning any names when discussing (Konrad and) Szelényi. As a result, not only the debate but also both parties in it have received less attention than they deserve for their contributions. This is true of both Towards an East European Marxism and “Socialist Opposition in Eastern Europe.” Even though Szelényi (1979a) declared that “[i]n societies which are dominated by holistic ideologies even dissent has to fit into a broadly defined ­ideological frame, has to operate within the value system and with the conventional terminology of the Doctrine” (p. 188), there is little that (Konrad-) Szelényi and Bence-Kis agreed upon, as presented above. From a conceptual point of view, it is interesting to note that for Konrad and Szelényi, intellectuals were essentially selfish careerists—strategic actors who do not mind making compromises with the regime for personal gain and political power—while in Bence and Kis intellectuals appeared as altruistic do-gooders. This is not to say that Bence and Kis were ignorant of the fact that there were careerists who aspired to political power; instead, they emphasized the institutional constraints within which the better educated had to operate. To put it differently, for Konrad and Szelényi intellectuals were careerists and opportunists under the state socialist redistributive system, while for Bence and Kis they were clever players of a double game within the boundaries of the official ­Marxist-Leninist ideology. The former type use their education and scientific knowledge to improve their living standards, whereas the latter type are interested in the ­improvement of humanity, in general, and the lives of people in socialist societies, in particular. 2.4 International (Scholarly) Interest in Szelényi’s Research Szelényi’s scholarly success was dependent on international interest in the topics of his research and in the results thereof. In this instance, it is fair to say that his dissident background seems to have worked for rather than against him in the West. It should be emphasized, however, that Szelényi’s relationship with Marxism is much more complex than the (typical) story of an East ­European social scientist who completed the mandatory classes in MarxismLeninism as part of his education and learned the rules of the survival game, including expected references to the “classics.” My analysis of his own autocritical reflections and of the reception of his scholarship (see Kroos, 2018) has shown that he was reluctant to adopt Marxism when it was expected, and then discovered the power and potential of Marxist-inspired critical analysis when it was no longer mandatory.

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Brodersen’s insights may help to explain this paradox. As he suggested in more general terms, it can be argued that Szelényi’s academic success in the West owes something to the interest in the Soviet system produced by the Cold War between the two super powers that emerged after the Second World War. More specifically, Brodersen (1967) explained that [w]hen I say Soviet social science, I refer to the total body of propositions in the various disciplines, a body that is in Western terms a hybrid of fact and doctrine, with the second always the core of the whole. This means that in dealing with Soviet social science we shall, whether we like it or not, have to deal with the doctrine called Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. There is considerable reluctance in the West, and especially in the United States, to spend time and brain power on understanding communist doctrine. The highbrows dismiss it as ‘intellectual fabrications’ hardly worth the candle. The lowbrows reject it as the devil’s own work, and brand as a traitor anyone who tries to understand what it is about. Even among special students of Soviet affairs there are some who ignore the communist doctrine. Another and more general bias, among American social and political scientists, seems to operate against the economic and historical approach to society, in favor of psychological-behavioral approach, hardly an adequate tool in dealing with this particular subject matter. If Western social science is to relate itself meaningfully to its Soviet counterpart, it will have to master communist doctrine—that is to say, devote serious study to it and produce an adequate number of specialists who, without being ‘believers,’ know and understand it from within. There is merit in the idea once suggested by an American social scientist, that every university in this country ought to have on its teaching staff at least one first-rate specialist in Marxism, one who, without fear of suspicion, would teach the new generation how to master intellectually the doctrine that is the heart of communist power. Only with this knowledge can the West hope to master it, or indeed survive it politically. (p. 256) Konrad and Szelényi’s provocative argument probably helped to cultivate the message that the Western Left does not really understand the nature of Soviettype societies. Having attracted considerable foreign media attention in the mid-1970s before his emigration, Szelényi first had the luck to be hired by Flinders University in Australia, before being offered a position by the University of Wisconsin-Madison soon after the English-language publication of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. As he reflected in one of our interviews, there were high hopes for cross-fertilization between his work and that of Erik

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Olin Wright when he joined the department at the University of Wisconsin. In other words, the book seems to have generated some interest in hiring a scholar with cee origins who (as opposed to a Western Sovietologist) would not only offer insider’s knowledge, but also a critical and provocative viewpoint. The fact that Gouldner’s The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class appeared in the same year as the English translation of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power and the various counter-arguments put forward by neoconservative right-wing scholars (cf. Bruce-Briggs 1979) helped to generate debates on the topic along both East–West and Left–Right lines. Szelényi’s international career was facilitated by Hegedüs, Musil and Pahl. This is clear from his beautifully written obituaries of András Hegedüs (see Szelényi, 2000), Jiří Musil (see Szelényi, 2012b) and Ray Pahl (see Szelényi, 2011b).35 All three described the formative years in Szelényi’s academic career when both he and the recently re-established discipline of sociology in cee were still young. Szelényi (2012b) has basically confirmed that while Hegedüs pushed him towards become an urban sociologist and sent him to Prague to learn more about the subject in 1963, it was Musil who taught him his first real lessons on sociology, right before the academic year he spent at Columbia University and the University of California in Berkeley (p. 1157). It was also Musil who introduced him to his good friend Ray Pahl, whose work would become one of the foundations for his research on urban classes and who changed the entire course of his academic career in exile, as will be pointed out below. In an indirect way, Szelényi’s reflection on Musil has told the story of what could have been his (not too exiting and professionally successful) life history had he not had the company of critical intellectuals and the courage to seek new perspectives outside urban sociology and Hungary. We are told that after the Prague Spring of 1968, Musil had the chance to “stay in England where he had many friends and good job prospects,” but that he instead opted to return to his gloomy but beloved Prague, where the hopes for socialism with a more human face had just been dashed, with the sole prospect of conducting research under strict political control that would not be very exciting. For this reason, Szelényi (2012b) concluded the obituary on a critical note, while trying not to sound too smug or snobbish: “I do not know whether Jiří Musil was a great sociologist. By all likelihood, he was not (neither am I)—only time can tell” (p. 1163).

35

Additional reflections of the same kind can be found in the obituary of Rudolf Andorka (see Szelényi, 1997) and in his review of the autobiography of János Kornai (see Szelényi, 2009).

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His farewell to Ray Pahl (Szelényi, 2011b) meanwhile gives us additional information about the friendship between Szelényi, Musil and Pahl during the formative years of the establishment of the new critical urban sociology.36 In passing, Szelényi mentioned that “Jirí [Musil] wrote a wonderful paper distinguishing between sociology for planning and sociology of planning”—an idea that sounds very similar to what Kolosi and Szelényi (1993), in their review of Hungarian sociology, associated with Szelényi’s introduction to the book Social Planning and Sociology, which was published in Hungarian in 1973. While Kolosi and Szelényi (1993) presented this as a decisive step by Szelényi on his road to marginalization and the writing of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, in his obituary of Pahl (Szelényi, 2011b), we learn that there was a period after the publication of Szelényi’s paper on regional planning, co-authored with Konrad in 1971, when his passport and research funding were revoked and he could not travel or do empirical research for a number of years. Unfortunately, he has not publicly reflected on the effect that these administrative measures had on him and the extent to which they trigged his eventual decision to become marginalized. Instead, he has repeated the by now all too familiar story of the urban planners who were anti-communist or neutral in their political views, but who became enamored of the idea of “scientific socialism.” In addition, he has also provided some personal details that help us to understand the impact of his brief period of imprisonment, which followed the writing of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. As he recalled, I decided to take the more attractive offer, emigration instead of jail. I was married and had three children, aged 14, 11 and 8 and now I had an exit visa (the Hungarian authorities did not give me a passport, just a one-way exit visa, so technically they expelled me) and I received immigration permits from Germany, France, England and the usa, but did not have any job offers anywhere. The person who helped me out was Ray Pahl. szelényi, 2011b

Indeed, one can learn from this reflection on Pahl that without him, Szelényi’s emigration to the West on his meager life-savings—equal to “something like 30 British Pounds”—as well as his first academic shelter as “Visiting Research

36

While Szelényi mentioned Manuel Castells and his contribution to the new sub-field in passing, much more about the latter’s role in its formation can be found in Milicevic’s (2001) paper titled “Radical Intellectuals: What Happened to the New Urban Sociology?”

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­ rofessor” at the University of Kent and his introduction to the Western acaP demic labor market would have been very difficult, if not impossible.37 In addition to these three scholars, Szelényi’s friendship with Burawoy, which goes back to the beginning of Szelényi’s career in Hungary, also had an important role to play in his internationalization. In fact, Burawoy, together with Skocpol, happened to guest-edit the 1982 Supplement to the American Journal of Sociology (titled “Marxist Inquiries—Studies of Labor, Class and States”), for which one of Szelényi’s best articles of all times, “The Intelligentsia in the Class Structure of State-Socialist Societies,” was selected, from among the many that were submitted by Marxist scholars. Having his article accepted not only helped to establish his name among the American critical sociologists, but being published in the ajs, especially in this important supplement, must have opened a few doors for him.38 2.5 Effective Dissemination Today, the dissemination of scholarly output is both much easier and more difficult than it used to be. Although international travel and access to literature through electronic databases are now commonplace, sociologists hardly gather any more at the same large international conferences or read the same (limited set) of journals. While Szelényi was quite internationally oriented already before he left Hungary, this naturally intensified after emigration (in order to survive in the very competitive academic labor market). In this context, it should not come as a surprise that while his research has focused on intellectuals within the social structures and changes in cee, an examination of his “invisible college” indicates that he has primarily been writing to his colleagues within American academic sociology. Although he has not abandoned the East European audience—attracting not only readers and followers, but also benefiting from their insights and feedback—he has aimed to have his writings published in the leading sociology journals and by highly regarded academic publishing houses. Over the course of his career, he has focused on five major themes, organized into 14 research programs, across a total of 128 publications,39 including seven monographs (Table 4.1). 37 38 39

Pahl’s direct involvement and support were also behind Szelényi’s appointment to the editorial board (and to his almost becoming the first editor-in-chief) of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. As early as 1969, Szelényi had published a co-authored paper with Litwak in the American Sociological Review, but his role and contribution to it are not very easy to detect. This includes only Szelényi’s publications in English and excludes duplications in different languages, 11 publications and documents related to his teaching and research policy, 25 relevant non-English publications, and 16 interviews and conversations.

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Table 4.1  Szelényi’s publications categorized by research program

Major period/theme

1. Early reform socialism

Research program

1.1. Socialist redistributive system 1.2. The structural position of intellectuals in the state-socialist societies 2. Late reform socialism/ 2.1. Analysis based on researching the socialist mixed system rural economy 2.2. Analysis based on researching the housing economy and urban sociology 3. Emergent post3.1. Alternatives and opportunities communism 3.2. The emerging post-communist political system 3.3. Emerging post-communist property relations 3.4. The emerging post-communist stratification system at the top of the social hierarchy 3.5. The emerging post-communist stratification system at the bottom of the social hierarchy 4. Szelényi’s own synthesis of 4.1. Particularities of the socialist intellectuals under (post-) system communism 4.2. Particularities of postcommunisms 5. Szelényi’s own (meta5.1. Szelényi’s synthesis of New Class analytical) reflections theory 5.2. Szelényi’s reflections on his reflexive and ironic sociology of intellectuals 5.3. Szelényi’s suppressed political views Total

Number of publications 18 7

3 6 8 5 6 11

8

6 19 11 15

5 128

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The wide international dissemination—with translations into German, French, Spanish and Japanese—of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power was accompanied by an impressive list of published reviews.40 What the authors, reviewers and other commentators failed to identify, however, is the role of Arato as translator. He not only understood Hungarian, but also the content of the book and its background, which must have enormously benefited the quality of the translation. After all, the book was not only written in samizdat style, but also used both uncommon terminology as well as elaborately structured sentences (which Szelényi privately ascribed to the writing skills of Konrad). It must also have helped the dissemination that Arato sat on the board of the journal Telos, which published one of the chapters before the book itself came out (see Konrad and Szelényi 1978, 1979) and in which Szelényi would soon publish his review of Gouldner’s The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (see Szelényi, 1980b), before joining the editorial board himself in 1981. The Number of Graduate Students, Their Research Excellence and Academic Success In his monumental contribution The Sociology of Philosophers, Collins (1998) went much further than the traditional sociology of intellectuals, knowledge or ideas. While the traditional approach, as represented, for instance, by Shils (1970), analyzed the history of sociologists—their careers, as well as their success or failure to leave a mark on the history of sociology—Collins placed a particularly strong emphasis on the followers. Based on this logic, Szelényi’s success can be explained (and reaches iconic status) through an analysis of the number of Ph.D. students that he has supervised and how well they have fared in academia after graduation. The number of his graduate students, their research excellence and their academic success more broadly have had an impact on Szelényi’s scholarly achievements. According to the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (Abstracts 2.6

40

These include, in alphabetical order, those put forward by Biggart (1980), Bokina (1979), Chapman (1980), Connell (1981), Dubar (1982), Flenley (1981), Furåker (1982), Gouldner (1980), Hollander (1980), Lasky (1979), Lavoie (1980), Nove (1980), Sandall (1983), Snelgrove (1979), Walzer (1980), and Wesson (1980). As argued above, the reception was then reinforced by comparisons with Gouldner’s The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class and more substantive analyses like those put forward by Arato (1983, 1993 Ch. 5) and Böröcz (1991), the critique by Frentzel-Zagórska and Zagórski (1989), reflections put forward by Verdery et al. (2005) and the attempts to evaluate the work empirically by Böröcz and Southworth (1996), Eyal (2000, 2003), Gazsó (1992), Hanley (2003), Kennedy (1990, 1991), Szonja Szelényi (1987, 1992, 1998) as well as Walder (1995).

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& Index) database, Szelényi had supervised 29 Ph.D. dissertations and served on one dissertation committee as of March 17, 2017 (see Appendix). This information is not complete because it does not include, for instance, the dissertations supervised in Hungary (e.g. Durst, 2006), all the committees that he has served (e.g. Ost, 1986; Hamm, 2012) or the students he has influenced without serving as official advisor or committee member (see Balázs Szelényi, 1998; Szonja Szelényi, 1988). Nonetheless, the list is impressive and includes, among others, William “Bill” Craig Martin, Bruce Western, Katherine Beckett, Eleanor Townsley, Matthew McKeever, Lawrence King, Éva Fodor, Eric Hanley, Gil Eyal, Eric Kostello, John Southworth, Christy Glass and Katarzyna Wilk. Szelényi has co-authored relevant publications on the sociology of intellectuals with most of them, and they by now have embarked on outstanding academic careers of their own. It seems that he has been an excellent teacher, adviser, source of inspiration, fundraiser and networker for the next generation of sociologists of intellectuals, scholars of transition, stratification and elites. Therefore, it would not be an overstatement to argue that his students will keep his brand of reflexive and ironic sociology of intellectuals alive for the decades to come, while taking it beyond his own research agenda. 3 Conclusion In The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, Gouldner (1970) raised the issue of why the work of some sociologists attracts wide attention and is highly regarded while for no apparent reason that of another equally good scholar is ignored (p. 26, 490). In a similar vein, Lamont (1987), Bartmanski (2012) and Hay (2017) examined how to become a dominant and iconic social thinker or even an “academic superhero.” To answer this question in the case of Szelényi, this chapter discussed several aspects of his extraordinarily successful sociological career in the East and West, at the center of which has stood his reflexive sociology of intellectuals. More specifically, it discussed the following dimensions of his career and scholarship: topic selection, intellectual context, intellectual rivalry, international (scholarly) interest in the research, effective dissemination, and finally the number of graduate students, their research excellence and academic success. Regarding the topic selection, Szelényi’s example shows that scholars should identify and formulate a path-breaking research topic and be willing to take risks—for instance, by raising critical questions on issues that are widely seen or treated as taboos within a tightly controlled ideological, political or academic context. This is exactly what Szelényi did together with Konrad, first in

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their research on socialist public housing and more decisively in The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. This generated a research agenda on the position and role of intellectuals in socialist societies and how they evolve that has dominated Szelényi’s entire research career. In terms of the intellectual context, this chapter has shown that Szelényi did not develop the ideas that laid the foundation for his international career in a vacuum. It was rather the more relaxed post-Stalinist era which, on the one hand, inspired him, and on the other generated the environment under which such ideas could be formulated. More specifically, there is no doubt that the reform era of the 1960s was important for the development of Hungarian sociology and Szelényi’s place therein. In fact, the Hungarian political context of the 1960s and 1970s had an impact that extended far beyond the immediate possibilities of conducting sociology at the time. It is not an overstatement to say that it largely shaped his qualities as a sociologist: It taught him to maneuver the socialist system where social sciences, in general, and sociology, in particular, were politicized, and thereby also prepared him well for departmental politics (even at leading US universities). Furthermore, Szelényi’s example not only shows that it pays off to take risks by pointing out the contradictions between the prevailing understanding of society and the social reality on the ground—he also criticized the functioning principles of the ideological superstructure of reform-socialism where intellectuals arguably enjoyed a considerably better life compared to ordinary ­citizens in exchange for their loyalty towards the establishment. While The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power received a great deal of international ­attention, and there was even a small East-West exchange of ideas, it did not develop into a major scholarly debate, as Gouldner passed away a few years after publishing The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. Unfortunately, Szelényi also avoided any direct confrontation or dialogue with most of his critics, though he did respond to Bence and Kis (writing under the pseudonym Rakovski) who seem to have been irritated by the provocative message of the book that he co-authored with Konrad. As shown above, this coded exchange of ideas represents the most interesting intellectual rivalry of his career. The lesson learned from all this is that it is possible to have an impressive international academic career even without being associated with a major academic debate. Szelényi’s example shows that intellectual rivalries can remain hidden to a large extent. Given the fact that he could not develop his exchange of ideas with Gouldner into a proper debate, the intellectual rivalry with Bence and Kis turned into one of the most interesting (and probably also the most important) debates of his career. It is therefore surprising that this rivalry is

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still largely unknown or at least unexplored in English-language publications. Perhaps the discussion above has helped to draw some attention to it. One can only imagine what the impact of this exchange of ideas on his recognition and citations might have been if it had been more public and hence widely known. The international (scholarly) interest in Szelényi’s research meanwhile was clearly facilitated by the publication of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. While it marginalized him in Hungary, it also offered him the opportunity to emigrate and embark on his international academic career. As shown above, he followed the lead of Hegedüs and secured an interest in his scholarship both prior to and following his emigration by addressing issues of social importance. While the precise topics varied from the distribution of public housing to stratification at the top of the social hierarchy, he almost always had something interesting to say about intellectuals, broadly defined. His long and productive publishing record can thus be framed as an evolution of his sociology of intellectuals, marked by different research programs and moments in cee socio–economic and political history. Although recent history may have pushed the study of the post-communist transition to the margins, this does not diminish the lasting conceptual and empirical contribution he made to this field. In this context, there is surprisingly little recognition of the fact that the thesis statements of Szelényi’s three most important monographs—Urban Inequalities Under State Socialism, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power and Socialist Entrepreneurs—formed the foundation of Market Transition Theory. More specifically, these works supplied the theses of “market power,” “market incentive” and “market opportunity,” which shaped the Market Transition Debate that emerged from the large number of conceptual and empirical ­investigations on the subject. Szelényi deserves more credit for providing the inspiration for this theory, especially given that these three books form the foundation of his lifework, which he (2002, p. 42) himself has called a “Grand Narrative of social structure and social change under socialism and post-communism.” It should not come as a surprise that publishing in English became essential in academia after the Second World War. Since then, the effective dissemination of scholarly output has become much easier and more difficult at the same time. Szelényi’s success at disseminating his findings shows how important it is for academics to select their media of communication carefully. One example of this is his excellent article on “The Intelligentsia in the Class Structure of State-Socialist Societies,” which he submitted to the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) for its 1982 supplement titled “Marxist Inquiries: Studies of Labor, Class and States,” guest-edited by Burawoy and Skocpol. Not only was it

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s­ elected from among the many submissions by Marxist scholars, but it also continued to build on the research program established by his previous publications, including The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. Having his article accepted by one of the flagship journals of the discipline thus helped to establish his name among American critical sociologists. Furthermore, Szelényi’s academic career also demonstrates that it is useful to be a capable university administrator and journal editor with some charismatic qualities, both in order to attract colleagues to collaborate and entice students to become disciples. He has not only supervised a long list of Ph.D. dissertations, but has, in fact, mentored an impressive number of scholars, many of whom have embarked on remarkable academic careers themselves. That is, besides his contributions on topics of considerable social importance, he has also been adept at academic administration and mentorship. These skills have not only ensured the effective dissemination of his output among professional American sociologists, but have also enabled him to find collaborators, obtain funding and attract promising doctoral students. Indeed, he has inspired and sponsored the next generation of outstanding sociologists, who in many ways follow his stated research agenda. This is the story of Szelényi’s successful academic career. This chapter aimed to provide some insights into the (un)written rules of the game in the academic fields in which he has been active, both in the East and the West. It demonstrated that even scholars who received their social science training in the academic context of actually existing socialism can earn an iconic reputation if they make their choices carefully and skillfully. Nevertheless, one should not expect to find all the relevant details of the field as understood by Bourdieu (2004, Part iii and 2008) in his sociology of sociology in this particular discussion. Such an analysis can only be undertaken by the author and thus by Szelényi himself, not least because it is difficult, if not impossible, for outsiders to know all the details and interpret them correctly. Hopefully, Szelényi will find the time and motivation to write this auto-critical and reflexive biography. In the meantime, and based on the available information, this chapter aimed to show how to become a dominant or even iconic cee sociologist using the example of Iván Szelényi.

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Appendix:  Doctoral dissertations advised by Szelényi in the US Name

Title

University

Year Subject/

Identifier/keyword

classification

Current position & institution

Nam,

From

Sunghee

overurbaniza- Wisconsin

The Univ. of 1988 Social structure; Urban planning;

California State

tion to

Area planning &

Univ. Channel

development

Islands

Madison

decentraliza-

Social sciences

tion: An

Lecturer,

Camarillo

analysis of South Korean urbanization, 1960–1980 Martin,

From class

The Univ. of 1988 Social structure

William

challenge to

Wisconsin

Social sciences

Professor (till 2016) Univ. of

Craig

comfortable

Madison

Queensland

collaboration? Understanding recent fluctuations in the politics of the educated middle class Zadoro-

Paths of

The Univ. of 1990 Labor relations;

znyj,

professional-

Wisconsin

Nursing; Women’s environmental

Professor, Univ.

Maria

ization and

Madison

studies; History;

sciences; Social

of Queensland

Labor unions

sciences;

unionization: The collec-

Health and

Associate

Nurses

tivemobility projects of U.S. registered nurses, 1965–85 Yang,

The dynamics Univ. of

Kai-yun

of the socialist California, reform economics:

Los Angeles

1992 Social structure;

Social sciences;

Economic history Reform

Associate Professor, Tunghai Univ. (1999 information)

How to become a Dominant or Even Iconic CEE SOCIOLOGIST

Name

Title

University

Year Subject/

Identifier/keyword

classification

109 Current position & institution

From perfecting economic mechanisms to transforming socialist institutions Wang,

Class,

Univ. of

Wen-

ideology, and California,

Minority & ethnic

California State

chang

migration

groups; Sociology

Univ.,

Los Angeles

1993 Social structure;

Social sciences

decisions:

Professor,

Northridge

Brain drain from socialist China to the United States Western,

Unionization Univ. of

Bruce

trends in

California,

Prichart

postwar

Los Angeles

1993 Labor relations;

Social sciences

Social structure

Guggenheim Professor, Harvard Univ.

capitalism: A comparative study of working class organization Beckett,

The politics of University

1994 Sociology

Social sciences

Katherine law and order: of

of Washington

The state and California, the wars

Los Angeles

against crime and drugs, 1964 to the present Cho,

Enterprise

Young-

unionism and California,

Hoon

the development of the

Univ. of Los Angeles

Professor, Univ.

1994 Labor relations;

Social sciences;

Welfare

Unemployment insurance

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Appendix:  Doctoral dissertations advised by Szelényi in the US (cont.) Name

Title

University

Year Subject/

Identifier/keyword

classification

Current position & institution

Japanese welfare state Hytrek,

The politics of Univ. of

Gary J.

social

California,

1996 Social structure;

Social sciences;

Professor,

Latin American

Trujillo, Rafael;

California State

development Los Angeles

history; Labor

Political economy

Univ., Long

in Costa Rica

economics

Beach

and the Dominican Republic: Social agents, the state and the international political economy Townsley, Academics

Univ. of

Eleanor R. and the

California,

1996 Social research;

Social sciences;

Professor,

Social structure;

Education; Liberal;

Mount Holyoke

United States Los Angeles

American

1960s; Politics

College

government

history; Political

in the 1960s:

science;

Professional-

Education history;

ization and

Educational

perceptions of

sociology;

power

Higher Social sciences

Professor,

education McKeever, Secondary Matthew

Univ. of

economies of California,

Raymond capitalist and Los Angeles state socialist societies: A study of the informal economy of

1996 Economics; Political science;

Haverford

Social structure

College

111

How to become a Dominant or Even Iconic CEE SOCIOLOGIST

Name

Title

University

Year Subject/

Identifier/keyword

classification

Current position & institution

South Africa and the second economy of Hungary King,

Pathways

Univ. of

1997 Social structure;

Social sciences

Professor,

Lawrence from

California,

Economics;

Cambridge

Peter

Los Angeles

Political science

Univ.

socialism to capitalism: The transformation of firms in post. CommunistHungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia

Fodor, Éva Power, patriarchy,

Univ. of California,

1997 Social structure;

Social sciences;

Associate

Women’s studies; Austria; Hungary

Professor & the

and paternal- Los Angeles

European history;

Pro-Rector for

ism: An

Political science

the Social

examination

Sciences and

of the

Humanities

gendered

Central

nature of state

European Univ.

socialist authority Hanley,

Capitalism

Univ. of

Social sciences;

Associate

Eric

from below:

California,

1997 Sociology; Economics;

Czech Republic;

Professor, The

The emer-

Los Angeles

Political science

Hungary; Poland;

Univ. of Kansas

gence of a

Slovakia;

propertied

Private sector

middle class

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Kroos

Appendix: Doctoral dissertations advised by Szelényi in the US (cont.) Name

Title

University

Year Subject/

Identifier/keyword

classification

Current position & institution

in post-Communist Eastern Europe Eyal, Gil

The breakup

Univ. of

1997 Minority & ethnic Social

Professor &

of Czechoslo- California,

groups; Sociology; sciences;

Chair, Columbia

vakia: A

Political science

Univ.

Los Angeles

Czech

sociological

Republic; Slovak

explanation

Federal Republic; Nationalism

Yoo, Yong Politicians,

Univ. of

Ki

institutions,

California,

Economics;

China; Economic

and enter-

Los Angeles

Social structure;

policy; Small

Political science

business

prises:

1997 Sociology;

Social sciences;

Patterns of enterprise development in South Korea and Taiwan, 1967–1975 Schatz,

Delayed

Sara

transitions to California, democracy:

Univ. of

1999 Sociology; Social structure

Los Angeles

The case of

Social sciences;

Assistant

Democratization;

Professor,

Economic develop-

Ohio State

ment; Mexico

Univ.

Mexico Pope, Lisa A ghost in the Univ. of Lynne

city: Return

California,

migratory

Los Angeles

experiences and constructions of identity in post socialist Hungary

2001 Cultural anthropology

Social sciences; Hungary; Identity; Post socialist; Return migration

How to become a Dominant or Even Iconic CEE SOCIOLOGIST

Name

Title

University

Year Subject/

Identifier/keyword

classification

113 Current position & institution

Kostello,

Inequality,

Univ. of

Health and

Executive

Eric

economic

California,

Social research;

environmental

Director

Charles

growth and

Los Angeles

Environmental

sciences; Social

Frank N. Magid

science

sciences;

Associates UC

tal

Economic growth;

Berkeley

degradation

Environmental

environmen-

2001 Social structure;

degradation; Social inequality South-

How Russian

Univ. of

worth,

industry

California,

Caleb John

2001 Labor relations;

Social sciences;

Associate

Labor economics; Bashkortostan;

Professor, Univ.

works: Worker Los Angeles

Social structure;

Economic develop-

of Oregon

and firm

Organizational

ment; Industry;

survival

behavior;

Russian; Worker

strategies in

Comparative

six enterprises

analysis; Studies

in Bashkortostan Zhang,

Economic

Univ. of

Qian

rewards to

California,

Forrest

2004 Families & family Social sciences;

Associate

life;

China; Economic

Professor,

political office Los Angeles

Personal

rewards; Market

School of Social

holding in a

relationships;

transition; Political

Sciences,

marketizing

Sociology; Social

officeholding; Rural

Singapore

economy: The

structure

communities;

case of rural

Stratification

China Domin-

The evolution Yale Univ.

Social sciences;

Head of

ion,

of the

2005 Sociology

European parlia-

Strategic

Stefano

European

ment; Membership; Programming,

Parliament:

Powers

Europe Division,

Structures,

Office of the

powers, and

Directorate

membership

General of Programmes of the Council of Europe

114

Kroos

Appendix: Doctoral dissertations advised by Szelényi in the US (cont.) Name

Title

University

Year Subject/

Identifier/keyword

classification

Current position & institution

Glass,

Gender and

Yale Univ.

Christy M. work during

2005 Sociology; Social structure

Social sciences;

Professor, Utah

Bulgaria; Gender;

State Univ.

the market

Hungary; Market

transition:

transition; Poland;

The case of

Russia; Work

Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Russia Bastholm Solidarity in

Yale Univ.

2007 European history; Social sciences; Sociology

Chief Technical

Jensen,

action: A

Collective action;

Advisor, Conflict

Mette

comparative

Denmark; Holo-

& Fragile States

analysis of

caust; Nazi occupied; Ministry of

collective

Netherlands; Rescue Foreign Affairs

rescue efforts

efforts; Social

in Nazi

networks

of Denmark

occupied Denmark and the Netherlands Wilk,

A multilevel

Katarzyna analysis of attitudes

Yale Univ.

2008 Political

Social sciences;

Managing

science;

Attitudes toward the Director, High

Sociology

EU; European

toward the EU

Union; European

in Old and

integration; Gender;

NewMember

Generation; New

States: Effects

Member States; Old

of class,

Member States;

generation

Postcommunist;

and gender

Postcommunist transition

Values, Poland

How to become a Dominant or Even Iconic CEE SOCIOLOGIST

Name

Title

University

Year Subject/

Identifier/keyword

classification

115 Current position & institution

Martinez Religion,

Yale Univ.

Hardigree, spirituality,

2008 Religion; Sociology

Philosophy, religion and theology; Social

Molly

and commu-

sciences;

Anna

nity service: A

Community service;

study on

Faith based; Faith

faith—based

based

organizations

initiative; Faith

and the role of

based

locale in

organizations;

religious

Locale; Organiza-

expression

tional development; Secularization theory; Sociology of religion; Spirituality

Herzog,

The loss of

Yale Univ.

2009 Law; International Social sciences;

Ben

citizenship:

law; Social

Canada; Citizenship; Ben-Gurion

The regula-

structure

Dual citizenship;

University of

tion of loyalty

Expatriation;

the Negev

in “immigra-

Immigration; Israel;

tion

Loyalty; United

countries” Bougda-

Lecturer,

Ethnicity and Yale Univ.

eva, Saglar mortality in

States 2010 Ethnic studies; Demography

Social sciences; Caucasus; Ethnicity;

Russia:

Growth trajectory;

Socialism,

Mortality; Muslim;

breakdown,

Russia; Socialism;

and Russia’s

Transition

return to the growth trajectory

116

Kroos

Appendix: Doctoral dissertations advised by Szelényi in the US (cont.) Name

Title

University

Year Subject/

Identifier/keyword

classification

Current position & institution

Pan, Zi

Temporal and Yale Univ.

2010 Area planning and Social sciences;

regional

development;

Capitalism; China

variation in

Economic theory; Model; Economic

the develop-

Social structure

growth; Foreign

mental

direct investment;

consequences

Pathways to

of foreign

capitalism;

capital

Post Communist;

penetration in

Post Communism;

transitional

Transitional

economies

economies

diverging in trajectories to capitalism Source: All information, except “Current position & institution,” based on the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (Abstracts & Index) database (17.03.2017)

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Stark, David (1986). “Rethinking Internal Labor Markets: New Insights from a Comparative Perspective.” American Sociological Review, 51(4), 492–504, doi:10.2307/ 2095583. Stark, David (1989). “Entrepreneurs on the Road to Post-Communism” [review of the book Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary, by Iván Szelényi]. Contemporary Sociology, 18(5), 671–674, doi:10.2307/2073277. Stokes, Gale (1991). “The Clerks.” In Gale Stokes (ed.) From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 137–138. Szelényi, Balázs A. (1998). “German Burghers in Sixteenth to Nineteenth Century Hungary: A Study of a Substitute Middle Class” (Ph.D. dissertation). University of California, Los Angeles. Szelényi, Iván (1977). “Notes on the ‘Budapest School’.” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 8(1), 61-67, doi:10.1080/03017607708413215. Szelényi, Iván (1979a). “Socialist Opposition in Eastern Europe: Dilemmas and Prospects.” In Rudolf L. Tökés (ed.), Opposition in Eastern Europe. London, UK: Macmillan, 187–208. Szelényi, Iván (1979b). “Preface.” In George Konrad and Iván Szelényi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power: A Sociological Study of the Role of the Intelligentsia in Socialism. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, xiii–xix. Szelényi, Iván (1980a). “Whose Alternative?” New German Critique, 20, 117–134, doi:10.2307/487709. Szelényi, Iván (1980b). [Review of the book The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, by Alvin Gouldner]. Telos, 1980(45), 189–192, doi:10.3817/0980045189. Szelényi, Iván (1981). “Urban Development and Regional Management in Eastern Europe.” Theory and Society, 10(2), 169–205, doi:10.1007/BF00139891. Szelényi, Iván (1982). “The Intelligentsia in the Class Structure of State-Socialist Societies.” American Journal of Sociology, 88(Supplement), S287–S326, doi:10.1086/649259. Szelényi, Iván (1983). Urban Inequalities Under State Socialism. Oxford, UK: University of Oxford Press. Szelényi, Iván (1987). “The Prospects and Limits of the East European New Class Project: An Auto-Critical Reflection on The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power.” Politics and Society, 15(2), 103–144, doi:10.1177/003232928701500201. Szelényi, Iván (in collaboration with Róbert Manchin, Pál Juhász, Bálint Magyar and Bill Martin) (1988). Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Szelényi, Iván (1991). “Intellectuals and the Politics of Knowledge (Abstract).” In Pierre Bourdieu, and James S. Coleman (eds.), Social Theory for a Changing Society. Boulder, CO: Westview, 362–364.

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Chapter 5

Inequality and Transitions: Human Frailty in a Sample of Prisoners Bruce Western Men and women who are incarcerated in the United States have very poor physical and mental health. Mental illness, drug addiction and physical disability are strongly co-occurring and are often closely related to the criminal involvement that occasions incarceration. The physical and mental infirmity of the prison population reveals the penal system as a social policy instrument of last resort for America’s poor. In the absence of robust supports for treatment, the mentally ill, addicted and disabled who are poor are at high risk of arrest and imprisonment. The poor mental and physical condition of the prison population creates fundamental challenges for the progressive project of rehabilitation. In this challenging social domain, human dignity should be a goal for public policy even in cases where sobriety, wellness and criminal desistance may be elusive. Throughout his long career, Iván Szelényi has made important contributions to urban sociology, the study of inequalities under state socialism, the macrosociology of market transition, the sociology of intellectuals, and to the study of social outsiders—the Roma community in Eastern Europe, and Asian guest workers in Abu Dhabi. In all these research programs, Iván pursued an interest in how seismic shifts in social organization affected social inequality and the lives of the most disadvantaged. This was a critical project as much as it was scientific. He worried that the socialization of housing under Hungarian state socialism was not egalitarian, but had in fact benefited party cadres. He found that the emergence of state socialism was not a true worker’s revolution, but had created new class divisions that transferred power to an ascendant educational elite. When state socialism was eclipsed by the transition to a market society, the prosperity of capitalism was not distributed to all, and the Roma especially fell more deeply into poverty. For Szelényi, sociology has above all been a tool for critical analysis—for scrutinizing triumphal ideologies and subjecting them to a rigorous empirical test. He has been unflinching in his perspective, even when the consequences were dire. The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power was written under the shadow of state surveillance, in the wake of the Prague Spring (Konrad and

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Szelényi, 1979). Both Szélenyi and his co-author, George Konrad, spent time in jail as they considered their futures—either as sociologists abroad, or in other lines of work at home in Budapest. By moving first to England, then Australia, and finally to the United States, Szelényi was able to continue his work, analyzing the inequalities that emerged in great cities, as well as the epochal transformations of economy and society that unfolded in the late postwar period. Szelényi was my first and greatest teacher, initially at the Graduate Center in New York in 1987 and 1988, and then at ucla from 1988 to 1993. With Szelényi as your teacher, you wrestled with two problems: those of sociological analysis, and the challenges of being a professor, an intellectual. The great analytical challenge of sociology, in Szelényi’s perspective, is to see in the small details of everyday life the great historical forces of social change. The small village outside Budapest, where he and Konrad wrote through the day and buried their manuscript at night in case the security forces called, also became the site of a case study in social reproduction through the eras of imperialism, socialism and post-socialism (Ladányi and Szelényi, 2006). Budapest was a beloved hometown with its squares, restaurants and opera house. It was also a living record of the path followed by Eastern Europe through two world wars and decades of Soviet domination (Szelényi, 1983). The great forces of social change were imprinted on everyday life. Being Szelényi’s student also meant learning how to be an intellectual. He managed to walk a line, not unlike Weber, between political advocacy and scholasticism. As intellectuals, Szelényi’s students learned that we have an obligation to avoid ideological bias in sociological analysis, and that we must also work on morally urgent problems that are important in the world. These can be cross-cutting pressures, but we should try our best to stay upright in the face of them. The present chapter is in some ways remote from Szelényi’s sociology and yet completely steeped in it. It will examine the mental and physical infirmity of a sample of men and women who were incarcerated in US prisons. The problems of crime, incarceration and health are among the few topics to which Szelényi has not made an extensive contribution. Still, this is a story about poverty and powerlessness in the context of seismic social change—the emergence of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration is a key feature of America’s unusual form of neoliberalism, in which the welfare state is rolled back, and state power is expanded through punitive crime policy. The new Democratic Party of Bill Clinton had its role in this political project, providing the impetus for the elimination of cash transfers to the poor and a massive program of prison construction (on the New Social Democrats of the 1990s, see Ladányi and Szelényi, 1997).

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Intellectuals, through their hubris, also had a role in this drama. Policy analysts like James Q. Wilson at Harvard and John DiIulio at Princeton assured policymakers that prisons could effectively deal with the problem of crime by taking dangerous criminals off the street. The lived experience of mass incarceration, however, begins with the welfare state. American public policy efforts to help the most disadvantaged focus on unmarried mothers and their children. The single men and women who fill the nation’s prisons have often slipped through the holes in the safety net and at different points in their lives found themselves on the street, desperate, and often quite alone. More than just poor and out of work, these men and women embody vulnerability, struggling with problems of mental illness, drug addiction and physical disability. Poor mental and physical health and addiction are markers of human frailty that add decisively to the insult of poverty. The disadvantage of the frail has a physical reality that can bear a stigma and limit the capacity for normal life. In the current policy environment, human frailty gives poverty an edge that makes incarceration likely, and social integration after prison more challenging. It is human frailty that reveals our prisons not just as crime-control institutions, but as social policy instruments of last resort (Western, 2018). A significant fraction of medical and psychiatric care for the most marginal members of society has somehow fallen on an institution designed for the purpose of confinement and community separation. Human frailty in prison is typically not just one problem, but the accumulation of many interrelated problems. A close look at the mental and physical health of the re-entry study respondents suggests the monumental challenge of treatment, of restoring people to health. The details of human frailty as they are imprinted on individual lives illustrate the deep ethical challenges faced not just by our prisons, but by a community that, to be deserving of the name, must recognize the humanity of all its members. Aman is a young man, born in the Caribbean, whose lyrical speech is rich in the tangentiality and derailment that neuro-psychiatrists associate with schizophrenia (see Kuperberg and Caplan, 2003). We first interviewed Aman at Bridgewater State Hospital, a Department of Correction facility for psychiatric patients who are serving criminal sentences or who are civilly committed to state custody. Bridgewater was a troubled facility. In 1967, the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, as it was called, was featured in the documentary film, Titicut Follies, an exposé of the cruel and brutal conditions in US mental institutions. Intermittently in the news, Bridgewater again made headlines four decades later when an inmate died while being strapped to a bed after assaulting a ­correctional officer. During our fieldwork, the institution’s use of physical r­estraints and

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solitary confinement came under scrutiny and the corrections commissioner resigned in response to criticism of the slow pace of reform. Few places face sterner challenges than facilities for psychiatric patients serving criminal sentences. They are closed worlds that are missing much of the inmate society that usually contributes to order and humane treatment in prison. In 2012, when we conducted our first interview with Aman, he was a few weeks away from release from Bridgewater to the secure psychiatric wards that Massachusetts maintains at a community hospital in Boston. Aman had spent his early childhood in the Caribbean. In his idyllic description, as a young boy he had running races with his father and ate Chinese food when he made the honor roll. In the third grade, he left the Caribbean with his mother for the African-American section of Dorchester in inner-city Boston. As best we could piece it together, Aman got involved in street life early, getting in fights in the housing projects of Charlestown. He told us he was involved in gangs and was stabbed at three different times during his teenage years. He caught his first case, for marijuana possession, at age 14 and did three months of juvenile probation. Gang life was a recurring theme throughout our interviews. When asked if he was married, Aman replied he had been in a “gang marriage,” but he refused to elaborate. After his release from prison he was stopped by police for flashing gang signs. And at his transitional housing shelter, he got into a fight as part of an initiation ritual for a gang he started there. Another drug case at 16 had him returning to his native home for a year to live with his father in a deal struck with a juvenile court judge. During that year away, Aman worked for a while, but was fired over an argument with his boss. He went back to school on his return to Boston, but as he told us, he preferred cutting class, getting drunk, getting high with his friends and talking to girls. “I just like freedom,” he said, “freedom for everybody.” He stopped going to school in the 11th grade. Before his arrest on a firearms charge the following year at age 20, Aman was in the mental health system for Boston’s homeless population, although he was also periodically living with his mother. In males, the peak period of onset of schizophrenia is between the ages of 15 and 24. Rates of schizophrenia are high among Afro-Caribbeans, and childhood adversity and adolescent marijuana use are also risk factors (Eaton, Chen, and Bromet, 2011). Schizophrenia is often treated with anti-psychotic drugs that help regulate brain functioning, but have the side effects of drowsiness, muscle spasms and weight gain. After being charged for the firearms offense, Aman did time in county jails before being sent to Bridgewater pending a competency hearing. Bridgewater could also better treat his diagnosis for schizophrenia, and we believe that it was there that he began treatment with antipsychotic drugs. We don’t

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have much information about his county incarceration, but at Bridgewater Aman told us that he kept mostly to himself, talking only to staff and his social ­worker. While at the state hospital, he was assaulted by one inmate and gave up his canteen money to another “to slap a guy in the yard.” Altogether, he was incarcerated for 18 months—the mandatory minimum sentence for his offense. After Bridgewater, we interviewed Aman in the secure psychiatric ward of the community hospital. He moved slowly down the corridors when we met him and he spoke just above a whisper throughout the interviews. He was taking antipsychotic medication and sometimes seemed sedated. “It’s supposed to keep you calm,” he said about the drugs, “but I don’t want to keep taking it.” His mother visited him each morning in his first week at the new hospital. He told us that they would talk about his future, the importance of finishing high school, and she would braid his hair. Over the next few months, Aman received a new diagnosis—paranoia—which required a change in medication; he got into a fight and was moved to a different floor with older patients, and he also worked briefly, he said, in the hospital store in the lobby. In June, after seven months at the hospital, Aman entered transitional housing operated by the state’s Department of Mental Health. From the housing shelter, he moved back into his mother’s small walk-up apartment in Dorchester to live with her, her boyfriend, and his older cousin. Our final interview with Aman, the first outside of an institutional setting, took place at his mother’s apartment. In the year after his release from Bridgewater, Aman had no significant employment and lived off public assistance and his mother’s financial support. He had stopped taking medication, but his slow and circuitous speech was much the same as it was in hospital. He talked to his mother each day about his plans and his progress. We reflected on the year he had been out from Bridgewater and asked him why he continued to participate in the study. “I just want friends like yourselves to come by,” he said, smiling. The theme of belonging rounded out the interview. When asked about the biggest challenge since release from prison, Aman said: – Wanting progression in life, wanting things to happen, to be complete, wanting overall respect as a young man … who is slow. Respect whoever I’m with. Want that togetherness. Stuff like that. That intimacy, that belonging, you know, like belong to each other. – Interviewer: And what’s been most helpful in order for you to stay out of prison? – I don’t know. Just wanting more, wanting more out of life, wanting to see flowers blossom. I’m tired of calling them flowers, I just want to say blossom and people know what I’m talking about, or bloom and people know what it really is. And that’s anybody.

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The prevalence of severe mental illness—schizophrenia or bipolar disorder— in the re-entry study (8.2 percent) was about four times the rate estimated for the general population (2.2 percent; Kessler et al., 1994). In Aman’s case, gang involvement also appeared to draw him into violence, yielding an adolescence filled with fighting, guns and institutionalization. The interviews offered little perspective on how the onset of schizophrenia unfolded in this context, but at some point in late adolescence, Aman began to acquire the vulnerability and social detachment that accompanies mental illness. From a family too poor for private treatment, he contended with the deeply challenged state institutions that lie at the intersection of criminal justice and mental health, sometimes slipping more to one side than the other. Policy solutions are not easy in this area where psychosis may be connected to involvement in serious violence. In his final interview, Aman talked to us about his desire for acceptance and social belonging. Here he described rather plainly the necessary goal of a social policy fully infused with the humanity of those it must serve. At our first interview in prison, Eddie told us that his biggest challenge would be staying clean and sober. Now in his mid-40s, Eddie had been incarcerated for three-quarters of his adult life. Qualified as a master carpenter, he had little trouble finding employment, but had only worked a total of three or four years over the last 25. He had used drugs since he was 11, first trying marijuana and then alcohol and cocaine at age 13. Eddie’s mother was an alcoholic, though she hadn’t touched a drink in 30 years when we met her. Alcoholism and its accompanying chaos ran deep on her side of the family. Eddie’s own childhood was stormy, roiled by his mother’s addiction, his father’s violent discipline, schoolyard fights, car accidents, drugs and alcohol. Personable and handsome, Eddie had served in the military and enjoyed many of the welfare benefits reserved for veterans. Immediately after prison, he stayed in a homeless shelter, but later moved into an apartment in the Boston suburbs with a Veteran’s Administration housing voucher. When veterans move out of the shelter into independent housing, the benefit pays the first and last month’s rent as well as the security deposit. The VA shows what a more robust social policy regime might look like for single people without children. For the men in the VA shelter, veterans’ benefits for housing, income support, health care, training and education are vastly better than what they would receive as homeless civilians. Still, VA benefits often fail to reverse the years of self-destruction and incarceration common among the older respondents with military service. But they afford a measure of dignity, and at least enabled the struggle for redemption, if not redemption itself. Eddie started smoking crack in the 1980s after hearing a lot of talk about the drug while he was in the service. “That’s all I heard for three years in the military […] was crack, crack, crack. And like a fool I tried it. And it does what it does. It destroyed my life.”

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Shortly after using crack for the first time, Eddie went on a bender drinking and smoking for days at a time. Hurtling through his newfound addiction, he decided to rob one of his drug dealers. Fleeing the scene, he ran into the police who had been called to a domestic disturbance across the street. “If that hadn’t happened,” he says, “who knows, I mightn’t have survived that night.” After incarceration for that first robbery, Eddie returned to prison a few more times, on each occasion at the apex of sleepless sprees of crack and alcohol. When we talked to Eddie a week after his release, he had just served five years for another robbery. He was released in mid-winter and heavy snow had kept cars and people off the street. He took long walks on his own, sometimes riding the T (the subway), getting out randomly to wander around the city. He was unusual among the respondents for reporting no close friends either in prison or on the outside. His mother was his closest confidante, but even she had dropped out of his life for a few years, frustrated by his repeated incarcerations and struggles with addiction. He was clean that first week, he told us, but it was difficult to stay drug free. We met again a few weeks later, two months after his release. Eddie had found a temporary job doing food service, working 30 to 40 hours each week and making $500. Although the job kept him busy and paid reasonably well, he worried that a co-worker had looked up his prison record. Her small talk often turned to prison topics, hinting that she knew his secret. At two months out, Eddie had started using, going out on Friday nights at the end of the working week. He took a strict approach, leaving the shelter with just $200 in cash “having a few drinks, doing a little coke, and calling it a night.” In the past, he told us, he’d go out for days on end, whereas for now, he was maintaining his discipline. The truth is, he said, “I enjoy it.” Over the next few months we checked in with Eddie by phone. By now it was summer and he’d been out five months. He had found a job doing carpentry that was steady and paid well. He found the position by cold calling dozens of building contractors in the area. He was also feeling optimistic about his housing, developing a plan with a VA case manager for finding an apartment in the surrounding suburbs, distant from the street-corner dealing of downtown. A few months later, we met for the six-month interview. Things had taken a turn for the worse. At our meeting, Eddie’s hands were scratched and scabbed and he had a scrape on the side of his face. He had been in a fight and his biggest challenge now, he said, was “trying to stop his progressive use of drugs and alcohol.” No longer working, he had fallen into a daily routine that revolved around his addiction. Up at 11 o’clock in the morning, he would hit the streets by four in the afternoon, drinking and smoking crack until seven the next

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morning. His largest expense these days was his drug habit, which was costing him hundreds of dollars a night. Eddie was good-looking and well-spoken. In the afternoon, he would dress up in a white shirt and pressed pants before walking over to the well-heeled parts of the downtown area. On the way, he’d steal a parking ticket off a car windshield and then approach office workers smoking cigarettes outside the bars, during the downtown happy hour. Flashing the ticket, he would explain his car had been towed and he was $12 short “and people literally throw me $20 bills all day long.” This was hard to do sober, so the night began with a pint of whisky to get his nerve up. “With a good pint in me it’s like I lose any sense of consciousness or awareness, or any sense of shame or embarrassment and I’m just able to do it.” He told us that the scam earned around $800 a night. How much went on drugs we asked? “Every penny,” he said. Eddie was determined not to go back to jail and had turned to the street scam as a safe way to make money. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “I’m scared to death to go back to jail. I will not steal, rob, I will not do anything illegal.” The con was illegal, he quickly acknowledged, but it was not violent, and each night’s string of petty frauds seemed to pose little risk of getting caught. While the scam may have been safe, doing drugs was not. Homeless crack users who scored on the street were necessarily opportunistic. Eddie talked about where he would get high: – All over the city. Bathrooms, restrooms… I’ll go into a restaurant, nice restaurant, use the bathroom. Smoke. Then leave. Alleyways, doorways, just whatever. You’d just would never notice, you’d never really think what I was up to. – Interviewer: Around here? – Right in the downtown area. There’s a couple of people that have places but then you have to split everything with them… They’re very lively [places], very, um, unpredictable. As Eddie described it to us, the world of crack users was secretive and violent: – It’s definitely insanity, it’s definitely insanity, it’s just, it’s just a bunch of real slimeball people, man, and I’m definitely setting myself up for some type of incident […] Just being around a lot of violence. Not being involved in it, but seeing a lot of fights, seeing a lot of people getting ripped off. You know, just being there and getting high in the middle of all that, it’s not a good scene. In fact, he had been in a fight the night before, sucker punched at three in the morning by another user who tried to steal his drugs. At the end of these nights, fighting or not, he said he feels beat up and that his muscles ache.

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Eddie had been stopped three or four times by police while on his slowmotion bender, but had not been arrested. Dealers would keep the crack sealed in plastic in their mouths. After the purchase, the crack would be taken from the dealer’s mouth and immediately concealed in the buyer’s mouth. If stopped by police, the evidence would be swallowed. The shelter for homeless veterans had a curfew and Eddie had worked out a plan to stay out all night. Residents could sign out in the evenings if they were working. Employment was monitored and managed with a case worker who received the worksheets signed in the log books. Eddie would sign a worksheet in the afternoon, allowing him to break curfew that night. When he returned the following morning, he’d simply remove the sheet before the log book was sent over to the case managers. Residents of the shelter also did periodic drug tests, but these were also easy to beat. Cocaine stays in your system for three days, Eddie explained, and by delaying for, say, a doctor’s appointment or job interview, you could lay off for a few days and then test clean. During this time, Eddie shrank from the supportive relationships in his life. He was talking to his mother less and less. When he went missing for days at a time she worried that he was getting into trouble. He continued meeting with a therapist, but their sessions focused on his depression and post-traumatic stress, pointedly neglecting his spiraling drug use. After the six-month interview, Eddie did leave the shelter and moved into independent housing. Our final interview was conducted in his small tidy apartment in the outskirts of Boston. At that point, things were going well, and moving out of the city had provided welcome separation from the drug scene of downtown. Several months later, though, Eddie was arrested again and returned to prison. Eddie’s addiction was sustained by a range of deceptions, the largest crossing the line into illegality. These deceptions stretched from lying to counselors and family, to manipulating paperwork, to street cons, and destroying drug evidence when confronted by police. Although the penal framework does not cause the deceits that often accompany addiction, it does little to mitigate them. A criminal record is hidden from co-workers. A drug test is manipulated. And when gripped by addiction, the fear of re-incarceration produced not sobriety, but non-violent street scams instead of robberies. Over Eddie’s long career as a crack addict, drug laws got tougher and the Massachusetts imprisonment rate doubled. As generous as the VA benefits were, public spending on social support was dwarfed by the hundreds of ­thousands of dollars spent on Eddie’s incarceration.1 He was undeterred by 1 The average cost of incarceration is approximately $50,000 for a prison bed per year, so Eddie’s 22 years of incarceration cost $1.1 million dollars.

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America’s massive experiment in punitive drug policy. He enjoyed smoking crack and drinking, but at some point these habits would swallow him up. There was little deterrence in America’s war on drugs, but long prison sentences did provide Eddie with the chance to get clean, often for years at a time. Here again, we see the prison forced into an ill-suited role. In the absence of policy measures for incorrigible addiction, our poorest addicts are institutionalized and sobriety is enforced, often imperfectly, with little preparation for release. Over half the re-entry sample (54 percent) reported a history of problems with drugs or alcohol. These figures are in line with national statistics that show both the great prevalence of addiction in prison and a high rate of intoxication while committing crime (Mumola and Karberg, 2006). Among our older respondents, over the age of 45, 23 out of 30 reported a history of drug problems. Like Eddie, respondents with drug problems had violent and chaotic childhoods. These men and women were much more likely to have grown up amid alcoholism and drug abuse and to have been exposed to family violence, mental illness and sexual abuse. Many reflected on wasted lives and the pain and disappointment they brought to their families. Many, like Eddie, were socially isolated with few if any friends that were anchored in the mainstream of social life. Family bonds were often frayed by lifetimes of addiction, but many of the parents we spoke to revealed a weary mix of love and resignation. When we asked Eddie’s mother why she had agreed to an interview, she told us, – Well I just thought that there may be something that I could say today that may be of help as far as Eddie goes or maybe someone else. These guys don’t know where to turn for help… AJ had blackouts as a child that were never properly explained, and at age seven he was diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder and a learning disability. Around the age of eight, he was taking medications, but stopped after a while because they made him feel slow. The family home ran on conflict. AJ’s father could be violent, and once AJ found him in the kitchen kicking his sister, Kate, who lay on the ground. AJ grabbed his father and threw him across the room, allowing Kate to escape. That was the first time she ran away from home. Years later, AJ would be allowed out of prison to visit his father who was dying in hospital, though he told us that he had to go alone and was not allowed to be with his family before his father passed away. Kate was AJ’s closest sibling— Irish twins, 13 months apart—but even she wears a scar on her forehead from the door AJ slammed on her, knocking her unconscious when they were both children. Kate was to be a critical source of support, housing AJ continuously since his release from prison. Growing up in the largely white towns just north of the Charles River, AJ first got in serious trouble when he was 12. He tried to stab a bus driver on the

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way to school and spent time in juvenile detention at the Department of Youth Services. He was in and out of dys throughout his teenage years and tells us that he received most of his schooling while institutionalized. When out in the community, he attended school, but was expelled several times. He dropped out in the eighth grade and was one of the few white respondents to neither finish high school nor earn a ged. By the time he was 14, AJ was running with a street gang in East Cambridge. At 16, he was arrested for a stabbing and held in detention for a year, then tried as an adult when he turned 17. AJ has a slim build and wears glasses on his boyish face. Going into adult incarceration at 17 years old, he told us he looked just 14. – I ain’t gonna lie, I think I was scared… I knew it’s a bit different in dys but then when I got there it’s like—so I’m from Cambridge, East Cambridge, so it was a lot of older dudes from East Cambridge and everybody sits together… But I remember when I was 17, I went in there. Couple days later they came and grab me up ‘cause they thought I wasn’t 17’ cause I looked so young at the time… So they had to put me in the infirmary, lock me up, figure out really my birthday, and I was really 17. – Interviewer: And did you ever get a hard time because you looked so young? – No, I got a hard time tryin’ to buy cigarettes. Damn I was old enough to freakin’ be locked up in an adult jail but I wasn’t old enough to buy cigarettes. In our conversations, AJ told us that he could explode into violence, and this had happened both as a teenager and as an adult, on the street and in prison. In prison, he had spent long periods in solitary confinement for fighting. In maximum security, on his third conviction, AJ beat an inmate so seriously that he was sent to hospital. AJ spent 13 months in solitary confinement in his last term of incarceration. “This last bid broke me,” he said. Kate visited him every other Saturday. She told us that he would sometimes black out, and several men were needed to restrain him. His transition from prison to community was difficult and the adjustment to social life in free society went slowly. At our first interview just before his release, he was anxious about housing. His prison program officer worked attentively to relieve his agitation and ensure him that he had a place to stay in the city shelter system. After release, he quickly left the homeless shelter for the calm and fami­ liarity of Kate’s place. Honoring a promise to her mother to take care of him, she took AJ into the small apartment she shared with her 14-year old son. In the year after prison, the newly-constructed family moved through a couple of low-income apartments financed by Kate’s Section 8 housing voucher. Life on the outside was challenging. Crowds of people would bring on anxiety attacks that would surface for months after his release. His anxiety at crowds presented itself early, going out with Kate and her girlfriends:

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– The day I got out I went to the clubs that night. So it was like I had my back against the wall all night. I had a good time, but at the same time it was wicked bad… It’s just being around too many people like I start to like, I feel like everybody’s just, I don’t know. I get wicked anxiety attacks being around and then people bumpin’ into me. Then I get aggravated real quick, so it’s like… – Interviewer: Was that something you experienced before you went to prison? – It’s always been like that. The more time I do in prison the more I get all… Confronted with anxiety attacks in crowded places, Medicaid enrolment and getting health care became critical. About seven weeks out of prison, at one of our phone check-ins, AJ shared some good news: “Did I tell you? I’m on my meds now. I got a doctor. I can go out and be around people.” Many of our respondents expressed anxiety at dealing with crowds immediately after release, but most regained their confidence after a few weeks. Six months after getting out, AJ still spoke of his difficulties with the transition from prison and the enclosed, busy places of free society: – Things ain’t going too quick [in prison]. I’m not surrounded with too many people. I could always, you know, lock it in if I want, stay in my cell… Things wasn’t hard you know? It was just easy. “But,” he added to avoid any misunderstanding, “I take this out here any day.” Still, anxiety mounted in crowds: – Sometimes it gets hard. Like a few times I got into situations on the trains. I got anxiety attacks and it’s so crowded … and that pisses me off… I hold it down… I think like they’re tryin ‘to get me some times’ cause I get wicked anxiety attacks like they’re looking at me funny or whatever. I can’t. It’s a little difficult. But if I take my meds it’s alright. In fact, AJ calmed his anxiety with a mixture of anti-anxiety medications and marijuana. He smoked marijuana several times a day and was an enthusiastic proponent of the drug’s healing properties. Besides Kate, AJ spent time with a boyhood friend, Dan, who gave him a little construction work and took him fishing. Smoking marijuana was an important part of both activities. If AJ had to confront crowds on the train or going into town, he would rely on the additional fortification of his medication. More often, he would stay in his room with his door locked, seldom venturing out to socialize. AJ’s drug use—legal and illegal—helped manage a mental health problem aggravated by a long history of incarceration. The use of drugs to cope with mental illness was common across the re-entry sample. One indication is given by the close correlation in the survey data between mental illness and drug addiction. Of the 54 respondents who reported a mental health diagnosis, 40 also reported a history of heavy drug or alcohol use. AJ connected his anxiety

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to his experience of incarceration, and his most recent period of solitary confinement in particular. We heard similar reports from respondents with diagnoses of anxiety or post-traumatic stress. Altogether, 25 out of 122 respondents said they were diagnosed with ptsd, anxiety, or both. Among these respondents, 79 percent reported that they found prison stressful, compared to 47 percent of respondents with neither anxiety nor ptsd. While these data cannot distinguish cause and effect, individual cases and the sample as a whole reveal the close connections between anxiety, post-traumatic stress, drug use, and a stressful experience of incarceration. Carla has had a turbulent life. The daughter of working class parents—her father was a security guard and her mother cleaned houses—in a family with seven siblings, she wrestled with violence, addiction, mental illness and disability. In the year after her release from prison, she suffered from a number of debilitating physical problems. Her life, it seemed, was not dominated by one particular challenge, but the confluence of many. Carla had a quick temper as a child. This got her into fights at school and arguments at home with her mother. At school, Carla was suspended a few times for fighting, and she’d “even beat up the boys,” she said. Carla’s mother was a Cape Verdean immigrant and a strict disciplinarian who readily used physical punishment to try and keep her daughter in line. While Carla expressed her aggravation, her mother was clearly the most significant source of support in her life, taking custody of Carla’s three children from birth and providing her with a place to stay after prison. With friction in the childhood home and trouble at school, Carla was a runaway in her teenage years. Her first appearance in a juvenile court came at age 14, charged with possession and assault and battery. Her sister tells us that she got into a lot of trouble around that time, committing robberies and using drugs. When we asked Carla if drug or alcohol addiction had ever been a problem, she replied “All the time.” Although she smoked marijuana and drank in high school, she didn’t try heroin until her 20s. She described her introduction to the drug this way: – I was stressed out, depressed. I don’t know. Me and my boyfriend broke up and my cousin introduced me into it. I was in pain and I didn’t want to feel it and she said try this, and I did and the pain went away. So every time I had problems, I’d do it and it got to where I couldn’t deal with my problems, I had to get high. Carla’s unsettled and often-violent life continued with her heroin addiction. In the six months before her last incarceration, she was using heroin and cocaine daily, moving house frequently and rooming with her “drug friends.” During this time, she was making money by “hustling, selling drugs and doing dates.”

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A drug charge ultimately sent Carla to mci Framingham, the Massachusetts women’s prison, a facility that, in her words, she had already been to many times. Many of the problems Carla had faced on the outside followed her into Framingham. She witnessed drug use numerous times and got into fights with other inmates. One year out of prison, Carla told us about her last fight: – The last fight I had was in jail, right before I got out. A girl ran her mouth and I choked her. – Interviewer: Why did you stop fighting? – I’m just tired of it… I’m afraid I’m going to hurt somebody. I get so angry and I black out. I can’t control my anger sometimes. In prison, Carla also received treatment for a variety of health problems. She saw a doctor and a dentist, received counseling and also spent time in a detox program. Hepatitis C, arthritis in her hands, back pain (the result of an assault), and a heart condition were all monitored or medicated at the prison. The biggest challenge, she told us just before her release, is staying clean and sober. If she can do that, she said, “everything else falls into place.” In the year following her release from Framingham, Carla reported to us that she did remain largely drug-free. Her first two months after incarceration seemed the brightest. She was attending an addiction-recovery program, a course on religion at the University of Massachusetts, and a ged class where she spoke enthusiastically about her women’s literature reading list. She seemed to embrace this project in self-improvement in the months immediately after incarceration. At the two-month interview, Carla told us that she got “client of the week” in her recovery program. “Always being on time. No dirty urines. Participates in class. All that. I got a certificate.” We also spoke about the possibility of continuing classes after getting her ged, though she would ultimately struggle with the quantitative portion of the exam. As the year wore on, a variety of physical and mental health problems came to dominate her re-entry. At each interview, we asked respondents about their biggest challenges. A week after prison release, Carla talked about staying away from old associates, getting her benefits, and dealing with her children. For the remainder of our meetings—at two months, six months, and 12 months after release—Carla’s biggest problems related to her health and physical disability. Many of the physical problems she first described in prison appeared to deteriorate in the course of the year. Her hands became swollen and painful, despite treatment with arthritis medication. Her back pain limited her mobility and she worried that treatment with painkillers might trigger a relapse to heroin use. Indeed, she told us that she failed one drug test for probation after taking a pain pill from a friend that turned out to be morphine. By her final

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interview, a year after prison release, Carla was wearing a back brace and moved gingerly around her house. Her disability had prevented her from working, and she was now taking seven different medications. The progressive effects of chronic pain had dulled her mood, and Carla was also dealing with diagnoses of depression and, more recently, bipolar disorder. In many interviews, we had seen her moods swing from bright and optimistic to tearful and regretful. At least some of this appeared to run in the family. Her sister told us that there was a family history of depression and that other family members had struggled with explosive moods, alcoholism and heroin use. Looking back on her year out from prison, Carla had succeeded in her main goal to stay clean. Her sister reported that she had made real changes in her life. Her relationship with her mother was argumentative, but less volatile. Carla’s ged courses also impressed her sister; they were the only formal education she could ever remember Carla attending. Things had not fallen into place as she had hoped. Physical disability—in part aggravated by decades of heroin use and the life that it produces for a poor single woman—wore down Carla’s enthusiasm for the project of re-entry and self-improvement. Chronic pain dulled her mood and fed her depression. She hadn’t worked in the entire year out, and at age 43 she was significantly supported by her mother, who was also supporting two of her three children. The correlated adversity of mental illness, drug use, and disability characterize the re-entry study sample as a whole. Respondents with histories of addiction and mental illness reported worse physical health, both in prison and over the year after release. 51 out of the 55 reported cases of back pain, arthritis or physical disability were found among respondents with addiction or mental health problems. One third of the sample with no mental illness or addiction reported just four cases of these chronic conditions. Carla’s life history illustrates the great difficulty in separating cause and effect. Her explosive temper and wide swings in mood seemed to find some relief in heroin. Heroin addiction and her ready use of violence, however, exposed her and others to physical risk, which contributed to her back problems and limited her ability to work and move around freely. The limiting effects of physical disability and its relationship to self-destructive drug use and mental illness challenge how we think about the willpower and capacity of people who go to prison. Much of the agency, the will to change, that even our most humane rehabilitative programs ask of people in prison, is compromised by precisely the physical and mental difficulties that placed them at risk of incarceration in the first place. This is a profound paradox for even the most progressive visions of imprisonment and corrections.

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People who go to prison are much more likely to have problems with addiction, mental health and physical disability than the general population. In the re-entry study sample, two-thirds had histories of mental illness or addiction. A third of the sample reported serious back pain, arthritis, or some other disability. These vulnerabilities of mind and body are co-occurring. Addicts are often struggling with and attempting to relieve anxiety, post-traumatic stress or other mental illness. Drugs and alcohol can provide a refuge from chronic pain. Physical disability is wearing, feeding depression and other emotional problems. Human frailty is also persistent, sustained over the life course, and often rooted in family history. Students of poverty and inequality often point to the poor schooling and bad work histories of disadvantaged men and women with high risks of incarceration. However, disadvantage often runs much deeper than school failure and unemployment. In many cases it has a physical reality that limits a person’s capacity to think clearly, without pain, and to bring energy to daily affairs. Human frailty is marginalizing, even within marginal communities. Addicts find themselves in the company of other addicts to buy and use drugs. Those with physical and mental health problems spend disproportionate amounts of time in community health clinics and other institutional settings for low-­ income people. The bodily reality of mental illness, addiction, and physical disability does not just create risk factors for crime and incarceration, but also for manifestations of failures of support. Only a fraction of those with mental and physical problems wind up going to prison. What distinguishes the respondents in the re-entry study are gaps in family assistance and the absence of institutional help. In many cases, schools had few tools to deal with serious behavioral or learning problems, besides suspension or expulsion. The slide into heroin or crack addiction faced no serious alternative to the criminal justice system. Chronic pain could go untreated for years, and marijuana or heroin would fill the gap. As a mostly male population without custody of children, the incarcerated are ripe for slipping through a safety net that focuses its limited resources on poor unmarried mothers and their children. In this context, the prison becomes the backstop of the American welfare state. The illegal and often violent consequences of untreated addiction and mental illness lead to arrests and incarceration. While incarcerated, some respondents often stayed sober, and received medical and mental health care. For others, prison was stressful and traumatic. These two very different experiences of incarceration point to a deep contradiction in the institution. Prisons bring together a large group of frequently very troubled people for the purpose of penal confinement. Still, the institution bears some imprint of the rehabilitative project in

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its programs and services for medical and psychiatric care. The dual functions of punishment and rehabilitation unevenly shape the experience of those who are incarcerated. The liberal vision of correctional policy emphasizes the project of rehabilitation. Programs in prison might develop skills in social interaction, improve education, and promote sobriety. Re-entry programs in the community might provide transitional assistance for housing and employment. Some of these programs have been positively evaluated, reducing re-arrest rates or, more rarely, increasing employment. Those that staff the programs will say that interventions are effective only when clients really want to change. Scholars also find successful returns from incarceration among people who understand themselves to be deliberately engaged in a project of life transformation (Maruna, 2000). The fundamental importance of human frailty creates two kinds of challenges for the project of rehabilitation. A desire to change one’s life is only imperfectly distributed across the population. Self-destructive motivation and behavior is closely tied to the problem of serious addiction and some kinds of mental illness. Yet public policy cannot neglect those who are stubbornly inclined to harm themselves and who, as a result, often pose a threat to others. Second, the rehabilitative project often assumes a level of agency and willpower that may be unrealistic, not because people are unwilling, but because they lack the physical and mental capacity to effectively intervene in their own lives. For these people, rehabilitative programs are often too little, too late. How should we think about this problem as a matter of public policy? For the most fundamentally disadvantaged—whose deepest problems are inscri­ bed on their bodies and minds—stable housing, employment, and a ­functional family life may be out of reach. In these cases, human dignity can be respect­ed by enabling the effort to struggle for it. This sometimes means providing programs even when the outcome is uncertain. In these cases, the struggle itself is intrinsically meaningful. It is meaningful for clients who might envision a better future, and it is meaningful for a community that has done something more than abandon the weakest among them. This analysis aims to provide what Iván Szelényi has called a “sociology from below” of, perhaps, “actually existing” incarceration, and not the sanitized ­picture of imprisonment presented by the various philosophies of punishment (Szelényi, 1980). For the philosophies of punishment, humans are put in cages as retribution to return to them the injuries they have inflicted on their victims, or to deter or incapacitate them from future crime. These ethical justifications abstract away from the social conditions of deep poverty in which

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America’s criminal justice system operates. They abstract away from the human frailty that accompanies that poverty and complicates the moral equation. Szelényi’s sociology has a twofold contribution here: to shed light on a type of social disadvantage that was previously obscured, and to reaffirm the human dignity of the powerless whose moral standing was erased in the eyes of authorities. References Eaton, William W., Chuan-Yu Chen and Evelyn J. Bromet (2011). “Epidemiology of Schizophrenia.” In Ming T. Tsuang, Mauricio Tohen and Peter B. Jones (eds.), Textbook of Psychiatric Epidemiology (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Wiley, 263–287. Kessler, Ronald C., Katherine A. McGonagle, Shanyang Zhao, Christopher B. Nelson, Michael Hughes, Suzann Eshleman, Hans-Ulrich Wittchen and Kenneth S. Kendler (1994). “Lifetime and 12-Month Prevalence of DSM-iii-R Psychiatric Disorders in the United States Results From the National Comorbidity Survey.” Archive of General Psychiatry, 51(1), 8–19, doi:10.1001/archpsyc.1994.03950010008002. Konrad, George, and Iván Szelényi (1979). The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Kuperberg, Gina R., and David Caplan (2003). “Language Dysfunction in Schizophrenia.” In Randolph B. Schiffer, Stephen M. Rao, and Barry S. Fogel (eds.), Neuropsychiatry (2nd ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 444–466. Ladányi, János, and Iván Szelényi (1997). “The New Social Democrats.” Social Research 64(4), 1531–1547. Ladányi, János, and Iván Szelényi (2006). Patterns of Exclusion: Constructing Gypsy Ethnicity and the Making of an Underclass in Transitional Societies of Europe (East European Monographs no. dclxxvi, Boulder, CO). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Maruna, Shad (2000). Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Mumola, Christopher J., and Jennifer C. Karberg (2006). “Drug Use and Dependence, State and Federal Prisoners, 2004.” Bureau of Justice Statistics NCJ 213530. Szelényi, Iván (1983). Urban Inequalities Under State Socialism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Szelényi, Iván (1980). “Whose Alternative?” New German Critique, 20, 117–134, doi:10.2307/487709. Western, Bruce (2018). Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

Chapter 6

Neoclassical Sociology Meets Polanyian Political Economy Dorothee Bohle and Béla Greskovits 1 Introduction In this chapter, we seek to identify similarities and differences between the path-breaking neoclassical sociology of Iván Szelényi and his collaborators Gil Eyal and Eleanor Townsley, and a Polanyian political economy of postsocialist capitalist varieties.1 Although Making Capitalism Without Capitalists does not make direct references to Karl Polanyi’s work, in the book we have found many traces of intellectual affinity, which suggest that such comparison might be fruitful for a better understanding of the complementarity and specificity of these theories, and help the dialogue between scholars writing in both traditions. This is the more likely because one of Szelényi’s influential earlier studies had explicitly relied on certain Polanyian concepts. Indeed, one of us had read about Polanyi’s social theory for the first time as a university student in the 1970s in a samizdat copy of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (Konrad and Szelényi, 1979).2 In their famous book, Szelényi and his friend and ­co-author 1 We presented an earlier version of this chapter at the international conference “Intellectuals, Inequalities, and Transitions,” organized by the Doctoral School of Demography and Sociology at the University of Pécs, October 15–17, 2015. Our comparison focuses on Eyal, Szelényi and Townsley (1998), Making Capitalism Without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe. An important extension of neoclassical sociology (not discussed here), is King (2002) “Postcommunist Divergence: A Comparative Analysis of the Transition to Capitalism in Poland and Russia.” King’s study also considers the characteristic linkages between the international and the Polish and Russian economies. Our discussion of the Polanyian approach is based on Polanyi (1957), The Great Transformation: The ­Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, and on its application to the varieties of capitalism after socialism in Bohle and Greskovits (2012), Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery. 2 To continue the personal comment, Béla Greskovits’s first encounter with Polanyi in the Konrad-Szelényi samizdat later resulted in his first-ever academic publication, “Ellentmondásos értékek és értékes ellentmondások Polányi Károly elméleti rendszerében [Contradictory Values and Valuable Contradictions in Karl Polányi’s Theoretical Framework]” (Greskovits, 1982). This article was based on a close reading of what had been available in Hungary at that time of Polanyi’s work (The Great Transformation was only published years after the collapse of the Kádár regime). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004400283_007

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George Konrad applied Polanyi’s redistributive form of economic integration to the analysis of “institutions of social reproduction and social authority” (with an emphasis on the latter) in various state-socialist systems. They argued that “rational redistribution,” whether in its pure form or superimposed either on limited market exchange or on the still widespread traditional forms of redistribution (which were characteristic of the Stalinist, reformed post-Stalinist, and the Chinese systems) opened up better or worse opportunities for intellectuals to start their long march towards becoming a class with power (Konrad and Szelényi, 1979, pp. 47–60). Twenty-five years later, as Michael Burawoy (2001) put it, “Szelényi and his collaborators are returning to the thesis of intellectuals on the road to class power, only now intellectuals realize their mission after rather than during the period of state socialism” (1105). Hence our intuition: If Polanyi’s ideas were helpful in theorizing the influence of intellectuals as planners, reformers, or dissident critics of varieties of state-socialism, it is all the more logical to expect that his work remains relevant for Szelényi and his co-authors’ research program on the varieties of capitalism, and the role of intellectuals in advocating for and making market societies. After all, while Polanyi himself, apart from sporadic reflections, never offered an in-depth analysis of the socialist system, he developed a fully-fledged theory of the logic and prospects of capitalism and the obstacles it encountered. In the next section of this chapter, we will first situate neoclassical sociology within the field of comparing capitalisms after socialism, then briefly summarize its findings and contributions, and finally review some of the criticism it provoked. The third section focuses on the similarities and differences between Szelényi’s and Polanyi’s theories. We demonstrate that despite a shared interest in capitalism’s conflict-ridden dynamics, key institutions, and the role of agency and ideologies in making capitalism, the attention of both scholars to particular conflicts, institutions, actors and ideas points to markedly different theoretical identities. The fourth section traces these differences to the dissimilar focus, logics, and temporal context of their theories, and suggests possible ways for bridging the gap. The final section concludes this discussion. 2

Capitalism “without Adjectives” versus Capitalist Varieties

It was not before the late 1990s that the diversity of postsocialist capitalism became a major issue for East Europeanists.3 Before that time, discussions had 3 The following, admittedly only partial, review of a few selected debates draws heavily on Bohle and Greskovits (2012), pp. 7–9.

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been dominated by the essential problem of the road toward a market economy “without adjectives.” Jeffrey Sachs (1990) prominently found the debates on “whether to aim for Swedish-style social democracy or Thatcherite liberalism” premature, on the grounds that “Sweden and Britain alike have nearly complete private ownership, private financial markets and active labor markets. Eastern Europe today has none of these institutions; for it, the alternative models of Western Europe are almost identical” (p. 19). The architect of Czech ­capitalism, Václav Klaus (1990), categorically rejected the idea of varieties of postsocialist capitalism altogether: Putting adjectives in front of the term ‘market economy’ is useless. A market economy is a real market economy and obeys market laws and nothing else. […] In my intensive comparative studies of economic systems, I have not found any distinction between various types of a market economy. There is only one model. There is only one serious economic science for which Nobel Prizes are awarded. (pp. 15–16) In the views of neoliberal policy makers and their advisers, the agenda of crafting capitalism entailed, first and foremost, market reforms that were radical rather than piecemeal, and encompassing rather than partial. According to some of the earliest visions, once the breakthrough was achieved through a critical mass of liberalization, deregulation and privatization, the task of system reproduction could be left largely to market mechanisms. Free markets were seen as guarantors of efficiency and innovation, and the resulting economic growth and rising living standards were expected to buttress the legitimacy of the nascent system. Similarly, priority was given to laying the legal– institutional foundations of the market economy over the task of selecting its capitalist actors. As for the latter, ultimately it was expected that competition would decide the proportions in which the managers of former state enterprises, old or new domestic entrepreneurs, or foreign investors would become members of the new propertied class. Szelényi and his co-authors were among the first to offer an alternative to the neoliberal dogma of a single model of capitalism in the making.4 In contrast to the neoliberals, they saw their task in doing precisely what the former passionately rejected, namely to conceptualize the “adjectives” of the market economy by opening the black box of the diverse origins and identity of wouldbe capitalists. Moving into this theoretical niche was all the more timely as the 4 Another important contribution to neoclassical sociology not discussed here was made by David Stark and László Bruszt (1998) in Post-Socialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe.

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rush to free markets was soon followed by the creation of new capitalists, which became the preeminent political rather than merely economic issue for the transformative elites. Along these lines, the neoclassical sociologists’ most inspiring suggestion was to perceive the new capitalism “as a variety of possible destinations […] a world of socioeconomic systems with a great diversity of class relations and institutional arrangements” (Eyal et al., 1998, pp. 4–5). They identified a concrete dividing line between East Central Europe on the one hand, where the creation of free-market institutions outpaced the emergence of a private propertied class and a managers’ “capitalism without capitalists” thus came into ­existence, and Russia, Bulgaria and Romania on the other, where new nomenclature “capitalists” expropriated state property “without capitalism,” that is, well before all the core institutions of a market economy were put in place. Concerning the origins of the new systems, neoclassical sociology established a plausible link between the varieties of state socialism and the varieties of what came in their wake. For Szelényi and his co-authors, this link was elite class formation. In essence, they viewed the postsocialist transformation as a  process replete with conflicts and compromises, in the course of which ­bureaucrats, technocrats, managers, and humanistic and social science intellectuals used their inherited skills and systemic positions to forge varied coalitions to mark and define the character of the new order. Yet, no matter how varied the configurations of the new power blocs were, all of these coalitions were elite alliances for making capitalism “from above.” In contrast, private propertied groups were relatively insignificant at this historical juncture of transformation. This is how all the postsocialist variants differed from “the classical, West European path of ‘capitalists before capitalism’” (Eyal et al., p. 4). While neoclassical sociology thus set a new agenda for inquiring into the worlds of capitalism after socialism, the debate on the need for theories of capitalism “without adjectives” was far from over. Amidst their controversy with neoliberal advocates of “monocapitalism,” the proponents of varieties of capitalism were also challenged from the opposite corner. One example is Michael Burawoy’s incisive criticism. Irony of ironies, this prominent Marxist sociologist seems to have shared the neoliberals’ contention in one respect, namely that the notion of capitalism without adjectives must have analytical primacy over the notion of capitalist varieties. According to Burawoy (2001), in Szelényi and his co-authors’ “‘comparative capitalisms,’ capitalism drops out of the picture,” and he therefore argued that unless they propose a theory of the unity within which such diversity can be fruitfully conceived, their concept of capitalist varieties remains at best partial. It goes without saying that the theory of capitalism without adjectives that Burawoy missed was fundamentally different from the neoliberal model of the

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single market economy that “obeys market laws and nothing else,” as Klaus put it. Instead, Burawoy (2001) criticized neoclassical sociologists for their narrow focus on the systemic role of elites, and for downplaying the role of the working class, and the salience of conflicts between capital and labor, in shaping the dynamics of all their capitalist varieties (pp. 1101–1102). That “middle-of-the-road” concepts, to which neoclassical sociology arguably belongs, are criticized from diametrically opposite viewpoints is a recurrent phenomenon in the history of ideas. This recalls the case of the decline of the “old” development economics due to the combined attacks of orthodox “monoeconomics” and neo-Marxist theories of unequal exchange, dependency and underdevelopment, so vividly analyzed by Albert Hirschman (1981). Closer to our subject, Eyal, Szelényi and Townsley followed the rise and demise of reform-socialist ideas. Reform or market socialism was first attacked by the critical Western left for betraying the cause of “true socialism,” and after the collapse of state socialism, by both Western advisers and the critical intellectuals turned neoliberals of the East, this time for its promise of a Third Way that in the eyes of critics would lead nowhere other than to the Third World (see also Bohle and Neunhoeffer, 2005). Szelényi and his collaborators tried to pre-empt some of the anticipated criticism. For example, they were aware that our readers may dismiss us as elitists, arguing that we ignore society. Against such criticism, we would emphasize that our analytical focus on the top of society is justified by strong historical reasons. We think that the capitalism which is being made in Central Europe is being made from above. eyal et al., 1998, pp. 159–160

Predictably, however, their Marxist critic Burawoy felt that the vague reference to historical reasons falls short of justifying the fact that in neoclassical sociology workers, and subaltern classes more generally, are denied agency in shaping their future. Moreover, even if readers accept (as we certainly do) that postsocialist capitalism was essentially made from above, they might still wonder (as we also do) whether the analytic focus on the “top” should necessarily lead to the exclusion of any influence from the “bottom.” After all, it is difficult to imagine how elites that systematically disregard society’s simultaneous “desire for opportunity […] and need for security” could build viable capitalist systems (Streeck, 2010, p. 18). By the mid-1990s, even the neoliberal architects of East European capitalism had discovered society, and its ability to impose constraints, in one way or another, on elite-crafted capitalism. Witnessing that East European electorates brought back to power Communist

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successor p ­ arties, which increased social outlays, but typically did not stop market reforms, Sachs (1995) noted that “Generally speaking, most East Europeans want both a market economy and the security of an extensive social security net” (p. 2). This seems to be the right place to suggest that a dialogue with Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, and with recent region-specific work in the Polanyian tradition of political economy, can help the followers of neoclassical sociology to bring society back in. Such a dialogue can be constructive for the following reasons. Arguably, there is an intellectual affinity between the studies of Szelényi and his collaborators and followers and the Polanyian legacy. Due to Polanyi’s unique visionary account of capitalism, which is open to thinking about capitalist varieties, as well as to his interest in the historical dynamics of change, and his attention to actors, institutions and ideas simultaneously, his theory is similar enough to the framework of neoclassical sociologists to help the latter develop their concepts without losing their own theoretical identity. Conversely, the differences between Polanyian political economy and neoclassical sociology are significant enough to put in sharp relief potential biases and shortcomings in both, and thus point to the areas where authors in both traditions could learn from each other. 3

Similarities and Differences between Intellectual Kins

The key argument of the research program of neoclassical sociology is “that the formation of capitalist classes—bourgeoisies—is deeply consequential for the type of capitalism that will develop in any particular time and place” (Eyal et al., 1998, p. 188) Consequently, class formation is operationalized in terms of “agents” (class fractions and alliances), institutional “positions,” and the “spirit” (consciousness and habitus) of would-be capitalists—a task mastered in a conceptually nuanced and empirically rich way in Making Capitalism Without Capitalists. In Central Europe, the power bloc of formative agents included (alliances among) technocrats, managers and critical intellectuals, sharing a monetarist ideology and a belief in civil society, propagated by a “second Bildungsbürgertum.” Motivated by spirit and habitus, these fractions aligned and struggled (with each other as well as with other elite contenders) to establish the institutions of markets and property in the contexts of diffuse property relations and a fluid political sphere (Eyal et al., 1998, pp. 188–189). At a first look, the building blocks of this analytical framework seem akin to how Polanyi characterized his famous “movement” of the market system. For Polanyi, too, the process of capitalist expansion was kept in motion and marked by the social situation and ideology of its agents, “the trading classes,” who had

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a specific institutional aim, “the self-regulating market,” and were imbued by the spirit of economic liberalism, which materialized in their striving for laissez-faire and free trade (Polanyi, 1957, p. 132). There are, of course, some differences between these frameworks. First, exhibiting the classic West European type of “capitalists before capitalism,” the main agents of the movement are the propertied middle classes. That being said, not all of Polanyi’s liberals are men of commerce motivated by pure material greed. Rather, utilitarian intellectuals were oftentimes also visionary idealists. In a way that is reminiscent of the purificatory educational aspirations of Szelényi and his co-authors’ second Bildungsbürgertum, The Great Transformation presents economic liberalism as a “creed,” that is, as “a veritable faith in man’s secular salvation through a self-regulating market” (Polanyi, 1957, p. 135). For its preachers, “laissez-faire was not a method to achieve a thing, it was the thing to be achieved” (Polanyi, 1957, p. 139). A second difference is that, compared to Central European “capitalism from above,” the Polanyian movement had deeper roots “below” the state. Yet, according to Polanyi, even the West European pro-capitalist social forces (­notably those of England as the frontrunner and those of Germany as the latecomer) had always relied on the backing of the state: “Just as cotton manufactures— the leading free trade industry—were created by the help of protective tariffs, export bounties, and indirect wage subsidies, laissez faire itself was enforced by the state” (Polanyi, 1957, p. 139). This leaves the question unanswered to which extent the ideal types of capitalism from above and from below reflect real-world differences in kind or only in degree. Finally, in comparison with the neoclassical sociologists’ elaborate concept on the varied class configurations and conflicts and compromises within the power bloc, the camp of Polanyian movement seems to be under-theorized, as it appears to be conspicuously homogenous and free of internal conflicts. This, however, leads us to a more fundamental distinction between the two frameworks, which dwarfs all the above nuances, namely the fact that neoclassical sociology and Polanyian political economy capture the conflict-prone dynamics of capitalist society by prioritizing different struggles—intra-class versus inter-class, respectively.5

5 Burawoy (2001) made a similar point. However, the Polanyian approach allows us to paint a more up-to-date canvas of conflicts and resistance, frequently led by non-working class agents imbued by a different spirit and habitus than the organized working class, as it is conceived in Marxist terms. Hence the reason for our preference for a Polanyian rather than a Marxist approach to bringing society back in.

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Szelényi and his collaborators present class formation in post-communist Central Europe as a highly “contested terrain” (Eyal et al., 1998, p. 159). Yet, notwithstanding the fights within their power bloc, all the not-yet-capitalist participants in this contest shared a fundamental preference for and faith in the new system in the making. In this sense, their internal conflicts were less about aims and more about means, while external challengers barely appeared on their horizon. Conversely, despite their shared purpose, interest and spirit, the agents of the Polanyian movement never could feel unchallenged because the continuous expansion of the market “was met by a countermovement checking the expansion in definite directions” (Polanyi, 1957, p. 132). Much like the movement, the countermovement had its own agents, “the working and the landed classes,” the institutional aim to protect society through “protective legislation, restrictive associations, and other means of intervention,” and was driven by the communitarian spirit of socialism or nationalism (Polanyi, 1957, p. 132). To put the above in simple terms, while Polanyi (1957) held that “[f]or a century the dynamics of modern society was governed by a double movement,” that is, by the conflict-ridden interaction between the friends and enemies of market society, in the perspective of neoclassical sociology capitalism after socialism appears to result solely from a “single movement” of its friends, as it were (p. 130). However, while it is self-evident that a pro-market movement is a necessary condition for building capitalism (no bourgeoisie = no capitalism, so to speak), the big question is whether this is also a sufficient condition. The issue at stake is system reproduction. To become “consequential for the type of capitalism that will develop,” as Eyal et al. put it, any bourgeoisie involved in its birth—whether endowed with economic or cultural capital—must also be able to reproduce the nascent system. According to Polanyi’s conceptual historical account, the movement of selfregulating markets alone could not lead to any viable social order. Indeed, the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself. polanyi, 1957, p. 3

An inspiring paradoxical argument follows from this: the capitalism that for a century survived its own deleterious impact on the “social fabric” could only be reproduced due to the involuntary and unintended contributions of both its

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friends and its enemies, which entailed instituting markets and social protection, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in sequence, as it was the case.6 Polanyi’s thoughts on the defining institutions of capitalism appear with remarkable clarity already in the first outline of his book. Referring to the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century, he wrote: There was hardly a political or economic institution, a characteristic stress or strain, in this period, which was not either part of the self-regulation of the market mechanism, or of the protective arrangements against the dangers of such a mechanism, or, finally which was not a direct consequence of their interaction. polanyi, 1941, p. 37

As virtually all of the capitalist order is absorbed or influenced by the institutions of self-regulating markets and social protection, these areas are of key importance for understanding the system, while their conflicting interplay gives shape to a third building block, namely political institutions. Political institutions—and prominently, the elected “popular government”—are viewed by Polanyi both as arenas for the agents of double movement to fight out their conflicts, and as organs checking, coordinating and possibly moderating their interaction. The importance of political coordination is further emphasized by the notion that, just like unregulated market mechanisms, social protection (especially its ill-conceived or excessive forms) could also hamper capitalist reproduction, whenever it “impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way” (Polanyi, 1957, pp. 3–4). This is why we interpret Polanyi’s notion of capitalism as a political theory, in the sense that the coordination capacity of the political sphere is key to the system’s reproduction. Figure 6.1 below illustrates the Polanyian triad of the key agents, roles and institutions on which the viability of capitalism ultimately hinges.

6 In the wake of the recent Great Recession, the Polanyian paradox was invoked by Wolfgang Streeck (2014), who argued that the main reason for the demise of contemporary global capitalism—reminiscent of a Pyrrhic victory—is that it defeated all of its adversaries, who had previously contributed to its viability by checking and correcting its excesses. 7 Memorandum concerning the plan for a book on the “Origins of the Cataclysm. A Political and Economic Inquiry,” p. 3. Emphasis in the original. The typed manuscript is kept at the Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York, and is dated 1941 by Richard Swedberg who shared a photocopy with us.

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Political coordination

Capitalist expansion (movement)

Social self-protection (countermovement)

Figure 6.1 The Polanyian triad Source: Bohle and Greskovits, 2012.

Consistent with Polanyi’s theory of capitalism tout court, the system’s v­ arieties can then be conceptualized and empirically substantiated by their ­distinctive actors, as well as their “spirit” and key institutions, which differ in degree and/ or kind, on each of the triad’s dimensions.8 To return to our comparison, Szelényi and his collaborators’ notion of capitalism, similar to Polanyi’s theory, is essentially political, in that the new system is created by alliances of technocrats, bureaucrats, intellectuals and managers, acting mostly from above, from the political and policy headquarters of transformative states. However, in the perspective of neoclassical sociology, the role of the political sphere appears to be limited to creating ­markets and propertied classes. The task of coordination of marketization and social protection is absent, since the countermovement pursuing the latter remains under the radar screen of this concept. Whether this lack is due to the specific postsocialist reality, or rather to the theoretical lens through 8 See Bohle and Greskovits (2012) for a detailed conceptual elaboration and empirical grounding of the Polanyian perspective on postsocialist varieties of capitalism.

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Table 6.1  Marketization and social protection in East Central Europe: 1989–1995/1998

Baltic states Visegrád states Slovenia Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania

Level of marketization (average of the ebrd’s 8 transition indexes from 1989–1998, % of the possible maximum)

Total expenditure on social protection (% of gdp, 1989–1995 averages)

54 64 59 50

15.5 21.1 24.6 15.5 (Bulgaria and Romania)

Source: bohle and greskovits, Capitalist Diversity, 2012, p. 26, 35.

which Eyal, S­ zelényi and Townsley viewed their subject (an issue to which we shall return ­below), our earlier question remains: how could any capitalism survive if it is built merely by a “single movement,” which captures the state to advance marketization and privatization, but ignores society’s need for protection against or compensation for the implied material and status losses? In Table 6.1, we present some empirical data in support of our brief answer below. Rather than explaining the details of and reasons for the sub-regional differences, we merely seek to call attention to the main message of these statistics: During the period covered by Making Capitalism Without Capitalists, the East Central European architects of postsocialist capitalism pursued marketization and social protection simultaneously, albeit with different vigor, and in distinct proportions and forms. Consequently, they also appear to have taken cognizance of the imperative of society’s need for protection (we shall elaborate on this in more detail in the following section). No less important, in light of this data, the East Central European capitalist democracies continued to pursue these contradictory social objectives in the next decade as well. This helped the reproduction of capitalism and its Polanyian types, termed and analyzed in Bohle and Greskovits (2012) as neoliberalism, embedded neoliberalism, and neocorporatism (Table 6.2). All this leads us to offer a possible explanation for the main differences we observed between the neoclassical sociologists’ and the Polanyian varieties of capitalism.

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Table 6.2  Marketization and social protection in East Central Europe: 1999–2006/2007

Baltic states Visegrád states Slovenia Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania

Level of marketization (average of the ebrd’s 8 transition indexes from 1989–1998, % of the possible maximum)

Total expenditure on social protection (% of gdp, 1999–2006 averages)

84 87 79 78

13.7 19.7 23.8 14.6 (Bulgaria and Romania)

Source: bohle and greskovits, Capitalist Diversity, 2012, p. 26, 35.

4

Politics and the Economy during the Breakthrough and Consolidation of Postsocialist Capitalism

We suggest that Szelényi and his co-authors’ preoccupation with the top rather than the bottom of society can be traced above all to their interest in the ­making of new propertied classes. Their subject naturally also defined the ­short-term temporal context of their inquiry. Yet, the breakthrough years represented a very special period in socio–economic and political terms alike, which is important for grasping why neoclassical sociologists focused on the movement but not on the countermovement. As to Burawoy’s contention that Szelényi and his collaborators ignored the working class and capital-labor conflicts, their neglect might partially be explained by the fact that in the hard times of the 1990s, the countermovements of organized labor were weak.9 Authors in the literature on the resistance of organized labor to the capitalist transformation share the view that this was limited.10 The comparative data on strike intensity also suggests that those interested in the countermovements of organized labor across Europe have to study the West or the South of Europe, not the East. Indeed, by the 2000s, the resistance of organized labor to East Central European capitalism became even more sporadic (Table 6.3). 9 10

Yet, it is fair to recall that Burawoy (2001) refers to the Russian, and not to the Central European case to challenge neoclassical sociology. This point has also been made by Greskovits (1998).

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Table 6.3  Average dnws (days not worked, standardized for employment levels) in old, and new former socialist EU member states

Period/

1990–1999

2000–2008

Countries Old EU member states; simple average dnws of 14 countries Former socialist candidates/new EU member states; simple average dnws of 6 (in 2000–2008, 7) countries

83.5

50.9

29.6

8.2

Source: Authors’ calculation based on kurt vandaele, “Sustaining or Abandoning ‘Social Peace’? Strike Developments and Trends in Europe Since the 1990s.” Working Paper 2011/5. (Brussels: European Trade Union Institute (etui), 2011), 15. Table 2.

How about a different kind of countermovement, which uses the democratic vote, the main weapon of enfranchised citizens, as noted by Sachs? We submit that citizens of East Central Europe had little recourse other than protest voting to express their discontent with the economic losses associated with the crisis and transformation when capitalism was still in statu nascendi (Greskovits, 1998). Nevertheless, in order to judge how far elites were actually concerned about voters’ revolt, we have to take seriously the suggestion of Szelényi and his collaborators that, for some time at least, reformers acted in the context of fluid political institutions: The Communist Party now views itself as a Social Democratic Party, but implements the most cruel anti-labor policies, serving the interests of the cadre-bourgeoisie. Former anti-communist intellectuals claiming to have formed neo-liberal parties often find themselves advocating the causes of the oppressed and the exploited. The notions of Left and Right, conservative and liberal, are still being negotiated. eyal et al., 1998, p. 189

For these reasons, the protest vote, albeit generally effective in dislodging ­incumbents from power, was unlikely to bring about coherent and robust countermovements. It was difficult for citizens to find new and reliable representatives of their grievances and demands when the parties themselves were still uncertain about their own niche within the fast changing political spectrum. Leszek Balcerowicz, the mastermind behind Poland’s (and later, as adviser, of other countries’) capitalist transformation, coined the term “extraordinary

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politics” to contrast the opportunities of the early transition years with the constraints of what came after. He wrote that liberation from foreign domination and domestic political liberalization produce a special state of mass psychology and corresponding political opportunities: the new political structure is fluid and the older political elite is discredited. Both leaders and ordinary citizens feel a strongerthan-normal tendency to think and act in terms of the common good […] Extraordinary politics, however, quickly gives way to the more mundane politics of contending parties and interest groups. balcerowicz, 1995, p. 161

Since the political capital of the economic reformers tended to evaporate with the shift to normal politics, Balcerowicz argued that the period of extraordinary politics was the right time for implementing radical and painful reforms without much contestation. Comparing Szelényi and his co-authors’ account of the fluid political institutional context of postsocialist class formation with the “period of extraordinary politics,” we do not find any essential differences. Whether due to the ­voters’ euphoric mass psychology or their bewilderment in the face of fluid party platforms and systems, the nascent democracies were unlikely to harbor robust countermovements marching under the banner of social protection. But if the transformative elite movements could act essentially unconstrained by countermovements, how can it be explained that, amidst the radical marketization and privatization pursued by the power bloc, substantial social protection and/or compensation was offered to the (actual or perceived) losers of these policies? Our answer is that in the context of fluid social, economic and political situations, the transformative elites tried to extend the period of extraordinary politics and Balcerowicz’s “special state of mass psychology and corresponding political opportunities,” by changing their initial narrow strategy, and acting, as it were, as agents of both the movement and the countermovement. This was all the more necessary, since the “seductive force” of neoliberalism faded away after a short honeymoon between the aspirations of the technocratic, managerial and intellectual elites and those of the populations (Bohle and Neunhoeffer, 2005). Economic freedom brought long recession instead of growth, while the second Bildungsbürgertum’s great promises of political freedom and civil society proved illusory for the majority. To mobilize consent for making capitalism, elites had to appeal to what David Landes, in a different context, has called “sentiments of wider resonance” among the citizenry. Recognition of the attachment to social status acquired in the past regime through welfarism,

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that is, by offering social protection, and of a “collective commitment to ­nationhood […] and independence” (Landes, 1991, p. 49) through nationalist identity politics became the typical ways in which the power holders tried to mobilize consent to painful economic measures. But can we at all assume that the transformative elites envisaged by the neoclassical sociologists, imbued as they were with values of individualist economic neoliberalism and political liberalism, could act as agents of collectivist countermovements—whether of the welfare-protectionist or nationalist type? On Polanyian grounds, we certainly can. As he observed, “if the needs of a selfregulating market proved incompatible with the demands of laissez-faire, the economic liberal turned against laissez-faire and preferred—as any anti-liberal would have done—the so-called collectivist methods of regulation and restriction” (Polanyi, 1957, p. 148) Along the same lines, it can suggested that even if the technocratic, managerial, and former critical intellectual elements of the power bloc saw themselves as unqualified or unwilling to act as agents of countermovements, they could have tried to manufacture popular consent by recruiting into their ranks specialist welfare-bureaucrats and socially sensitive critical intellectuals, as well as intellectuals specializing in re-building and nurturing attachments to the nation, “imagined as a community […] a deep, horizontal comradeship” (Anderson, 1983, p. 7). And so they did. In our Polanyi-inspired research we found that in some cases, these extended alliances proved less conflict-ridden than in others.11 Take the example of the three Baltic states. Their neoliberal capitalism consisted of a combination of market radicalism with meager compensation for transformation costs, together with severe limitations on the influence of citizens and organized social groups in democratic policy-making. While this configuration seems to predict systemic fragility, Baltic neoliberalism has been made more robust by a lasting “marriage” between neoliberals and nationalists. This has also been a “happy” marriage—not least because the neoliberal reformist technocrats could present the radical market opening to the West and fast privatization as a high-speed path toward extrication from the Soviet Union and independence from Russian economic and political influence, thereby compensating the Baltic societies for their economic losses with a ­regained and consciously cultivated and nurtured national identity. Slovenia has combined the least radical strategy of marketization with the region’s most generous efforts to compensate the losers of transformation. 11

The following paragraphs draw on the introduction to Bohle and Greskovits (2012), as well as on other parts of the book.

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Moreover, uniquely in the postsocialist region, the country exhibited many features of a “democratic corporatist”12 polity, where negotiated multi-level relationships among business, labor and the state oriented political rivals toward compromise solutions. Interestingly, Slovenia was also the most gradualist in terms of state withdrawal from the ownership of firms and opening its economy to transnational investors, and for a long period its variety of capitalism therefore exhibited many attributes of the “managerial capitalism” put forward by Szelényi and his co-authors. Due partly to the country’s inherited high level of economic development, and partly to the legacy of the workers’ self-management model of socialism of the former Yugoslavia, the marriage between technocrats, managers and trade unions was for some time no less “happy” than that of the neoliberals with nationalists in the Baltic states. As for the more “quarrelsome” relationships, the embedded neoliberalism of the four Visegrád states is characterized by a permanent search for market transformation and social cohesion within inclusive but not always efficient systems of democratic government. The simultaneous pursuit of contradictory social objectives has led to recurrent periods of high-voltage politics. Especially since the mid-2000s, some of the Visegrád democracies have periodically fallen short of effectively coordinating their transformation agendas. In this respect, Hungary has represented an extreme, as it faced a combination of policy-related and political symptoms of ill-conceived embeddedness: macroeconomic instability coupled with the ascendance of radical forces, which challenged the economic and political settlements and governability of embedded neoliberalism and, after coming to power, drove the country out of the embedded neoliberal regime family. 5 Conclusion Our comparison of neoclassical sociology with a Polanyi-inspired political economy of new capitalisms allows us to share some thoughts about the ways in which combining elements of the two theories might help a better understanding of the diverse paths of Eastern Europe’s capitalist democracies. We found that one of Szelényi and his collaborators’ pioneering contributions lies in the detailed account of the historical origins, skills, ideas, institutional aims, and internal conflicts of the power blocs of the first generation of post-socialist capitalisms—in other words, the Polanyian movement. This 12

This term was coined and used for the analysis of Nordic and Western European small states by Peter Katzenstein (1985).

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analysis is inspiring for future enquires by Polanyian political economists into the world of postsocialist power elites, as their own framework is less elaborate and nuanced when it comes to the features of pro-capitalist movements. After all, it cannot be accidental that the most frequently criticized terms adopted by Polanyians (along with others) are “neoliberalism” and “neoliberals.” What exactly postsocialist neoliberalism is (and is not), and who the real-world neoliberals are, represent frequently asked questions that point to the vagueness and thin empirical content of these routinely used categories. In turn, Making Capitalism Without Capitalism failed to analyze, let alone empirically substantiate, or even recognize, the salience of anti-capitalist countermovements for the survival and dynamics of the new capitalisms. In this respect, as we tried to demonstrate, it is the Polanyian political economists who might offer inspiration for future research in the neoclassical sociology tradition. Above all, we traced the asymmetry in the conceptualization and empirical details to the two schools’ distinct research agendas. The neoclassical sociologists’ focus on capitalist class formation and intra-class conflicts differs from the Polanyian political economists’ interest in the conditions of the reproduction of capitalism within the context of inter-class conflicts. These differences, however, also explain the shorter versus longer time horizons of these approaches. After all, where would sociologists, fascinated with the intricacies of class formation and re-formation, find any better terrain for inspiration and evidence than at the historical turning point of the collapse of state socialism and the birth of capitalism? Conversely, a focus on the breakthrough years alone is of little help in grasping the logics and factors of the rise or demise of viable capitalisms. That being said, we do not mean to imply that neoclassical sociology is ahistorical while Polanyian political economy is not, only that there is a difference in their perspective on history. Whereas the former approach situates the procapitalist agents of the breakthrough years in the longue durée of proto-class formation under socialism, the latter—while not silent about the impact of socialist legacies—is mainly interested in the conditions under which new capitalisms can survive in the longue durée in future. Due to the insights of the one-and-half decades that passed between the publication of Making Capitalism Without Capitalism and our own Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery, we can now claim with confidence that the varied power blocs that made the different capitalisms of East Central Europe eventually managed to help reproduce, rather than simply initiate the breakthrough of, capitalism. We proposed that the various “social contracts” offered by these transformative elites to society—a nationalist contract in the Baltic states, a welfarist contract in the Visegrád states, and social partnership in Slovenia—played a key role in the new regimes’ resilience. This also implies that

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the representatives of the power bloc of neoclassical sociology could— perhaps only willy-nilly—transcend their own narrow interests as makers and would-be members of a propertied class. They did so either by assuming the role of agents of movement and countermovement simultaneously, or by enlarging their coalitions via incorporation of elite agents from the social protectionist and nationalist countermovements, or through social partnership. Finally, we admit that we lack sufficient empirical knowledge to reflect on the fate of Central Europe’s nascent propertied classes—that is, the political capitalists, managers turned owners, former socialist entrepreneurs, and technocrats turned managers that were analyzed by Szelényi and his collaborators.13 This might well be because, inspired by Polanyi’s multi-level (national and ­international) theory of capitalism, we have perhaps been too preoccupied with the role of international and supranational organizations, such as the ­International Monetary Fund or the European Union, as well as transnational corporations and their various production chains located in the region, and ­meanwhile lost sight of the national bourgeoisies. However, despite (or precisely because of) the sweeping transnationalization of the East Central European economies in the past two decades, the shape and prospects of the domestic business classes remain a salient academic, political and policy issue. Indeed, the agenda of re-building national bourgeoisies is coming back with a vengeance in our times, which confirms the enduring importance of the research program of neoclassical sociology. References Anderson, Benedict (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, UK: Verso. Balcerowicz, Leszek (1995). Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation. Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press. Bohle, Dorothee, and Béla Greskovits (2012). Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bohle, Dorothee, and Gisela Neunhoeffer (2005). “Why Was There No Third Way? The Role of Neoliberal Ideology, Networks and Think Tanks in Combating Market Socialism and Shaping Transformation in Poland.” In Dieter Plehwe, Bernhard Walpen and Gisela Neunhoeffer (eds.), Neoliberal Hegemony: A Global Critique. New York, NY: Routledge, 89–104. Burawoy, Michael (2001). “Neoclassical Sociology: From the End of Communism to the End of Classes.” American Journal of Sociology, 106(4), 1099–1120, doi:10.1086/320299. 13

See, however, the excellent study of Mihály Laki and Júlia Szalai (2004) on this subject.

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Eyal, Gil, Iván Szelényi and Eleanor Townsley (1998). Making Capitalism Without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe. London, UK: Verso. Greskovits, Béla (1982). “Ellentmondásos értékek és értékes ellentmondások Polányi Károly elméleti rendszerében” [Contradictory Values and Valuable Contradictions in Karl Polányi’s Theoretical Framework]. Szociológia, xi(2), 201–214. Greskovits, Béla (1998). The Political Economy of Protest and Patience: East European and Latin American Transformations Compared. Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press. Hirschmann, Albert O. (1981). “The Rise and Decline of Development Economics.” In Essays in Trespassing: Economics to Politics and Beyond. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1–24. Katzenstein, Peter (1985). Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. King, Lawrence (2002). “Postcommunist Divergence: A Comparative Analysis of the Transition to Capitalism in Poland and Russia.” Studies in Comparative International Development, 37(3), 3–34, doi:10.1007/BF02686229. Klaus, Václav (1990, January 17). “Politics on Razor’s Edge: Will 1991 Be the Alpha and Omega of Our Existence?” Interview by Branislav Janik in Narodna Obrona. FBISEEU-90-012, 15–16. Konrád, György and Iván Szelényi (1979). The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power: A Sociological Study on the Role of the Intelligentsia in Socialism. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Laki, Mihály, and Júlia Szalai (2004). Vállalkozók vagy polgárok? A nagyvállalkozók gazdasági és társadalmi helyzetének ambivalenciái az ezredforduló Magyarországán [Entrepreneurs or Bourgeoises? Large-Scale Entrepreneurs in Ambivalent Economic and Social Situations in the New Millennium]. Budapest, Hungary: Osiris Kiadó. Landes, David (1991). “Does it Pay to Be Late?” In Jean Batou (ed.), Between Development and Underdevelopment. Geneva, Switzerland: Publications du Centre d’histoire économique internationale de l’Université de Genève. Polanyi, Karl (1957). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Polanyi, Karl (1941). Origins of the Cataclysm: A Political and Economic Inquiry. Unpublished manuscript. Sachs, Jeffrey (1990).“Eastern Europe’s Economies: What Is to Be Done?” The Economist, January 13, 1990. Retrieved February 9, 2009, from https://www.economist.com/europe/1990/01/13/what-is-to-be-done. Sachs, Jeffrey (1995). “Postcommunist Parties and the Politics of Entitlements.” Transition: The Newsletter about Reforming Economies, 6(3). Washington, DC: World Bank, retrieved February 20, 2009, from http://www.worldbank.org/html/prddr/trans/ mar95/pgs1-4.htm.

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Stark, David, and László Bruszt (1998). Post-Socialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Streeck, Wolfgang (2014). “How Will Capitalism End?” New Left Review, 87, 35–64. Streeck, Wolfgang (2010). “Response.” In the discussion forum on his book Re-Forming Capitalism, Socio–Economic Review (2010), 18.

Chapter 7

Mechanisms of Institutional Change Victor Nee 1 Introduction Theories of the middle-range are characteristically comprised of interrelated propositions close enough to data to be confirmed empirically. In sociology, their aim is to identify the “social mechanisms—that is, the social processes having designated consequences for designated parts of the social structure” (Merton, 1968, p. 43). Such specialty theories provide a reliable and effective pathway for sociology to develop as a social science—a pathway more steadfast, Merton argued, than Talcott Parsons’s singular focus on a more general theory. In the post-World War ii era of expansive advances in the social sciences, sociology produced a rich plethora of middle-range theories that contributed to explaining the social order at the micro-level of small groups (Homans, 1974) and the meso- and macro-level of institutions and organizations (Merton, 1968). This chapter acknowledges my intellectual debt to my close friend and colleague, Iván Szelényi (1983), whose seminal idea on the workings of markets in reforming state socialism—the idea that markets benefit direct producers— provided the key insight for my theory of market transition, which attempts to “specify the central processes in the shift from hierarchies to markets that involve fundamental changes in the sources of power, and in the structure of incentives and of opportunities” (Nee, 1989, p. 666). An emergent market economy enables entrepreneurs to manufacture products for exchange in markets, as opposed to meeting non-market production targets set by government administrators. Market transition theory argues that the replacement of bureaucratic allocation by market mechanisms involves a shift of power to entrepreneurs and direct producers. First, markets provide entrepreneurs and producers with a greater set of choices, enabling them to develop new means and modes for cooperation and exchange outside of statecontrolled allocation. Second, marketization releases rewards based on a firm’s performance. Lastly, markets endogenously expand opportunities for entrepreneurs to detect and assess new opportunities for profit-making. My research program on market transition turned to China for strategic research sites providing the opportunity to discover and confirm the social

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004400283_008

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mechanisms underlying transformative institutional change in real time. My first large-scale survey research project was in 1985 in Fujian, a southeastern coastal province. This was followed by urban social surveys in the early 1990s in Shanghai and Guangzhou, and most recently by a 12-year mixed-method field study in the Yangzi River Delta region involving four successive survey waves (2006, 2009, 2012 and 2016) with industrial entrepreneurs and private manufacturing firms. It was obvious to me that the rich canvass of multi-level social and institutional change taking place in China was on a scale as significant as the rise of modern rational capitalism in the West. I saw the opportunity to utilize the advances of modern social science to conduct a theory-driven empirical research program on institutional change. Hypotheses derived from market transition theory predicted (1) a decline in the significance of political capital relative to market capital; (2) higher valuations in returns to human and cultural capital; and (3) emergent structures of opportunity through entrepreneurship and private enterprise. The early empirical tests of market transition theory produced robust results consistent with predicted changes in the relative rewards for redistributive and market power. More importantly, the early results confirmed a social dynamic wherein the “expansion of markets opens up new opportunity structures or niches in which entrepreneurs thrive; their activities, in turn, drive further expansion of markets” (Nee, 1989, p. 666). Scope conditions are critical and are specified in some detail. For example, less market coordination and greater reliance on bureaucratic coordination will result in greater power of the class organized around redistribution. Therefore, in sectors and regions of the socialist economy where allocation and distribution continue to be based upon central decision, there will be little or no change in the processes determining stratification. nee, 1989, p. 666

In other words, the market transition theory hypothesis of a declining significance of political capital turned on the decisiveness of the shift to reliance on market exchange. My early market transition research also identified an anomaly, nouveau riche entrepreneurial households where an adult member occupied a redistributive position in local government. “Might this new elite, according to Merton’s principle of cumulative advantage, increase its wealth at a faster rate” than other households (Nee, 1991, p. 269)?

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Cadre-entrepreneurs are structurally located in networks that allow them to maximize benefits from both the public and private sectors of the socialist mixed economy. […] If partial reform prevails over the short run, as appears likely in China, this hybrid elite may grow in importance. nee, 1991, p. 269

Just as William Julius Wilson’s (1978) theory of declining significance of race “does not imply that race is no longer of any consequence in North America, market transition theory does not claim that cadre power vanishes once markets begin to coordinate economic activity in reforming state socialism.” Instead, market institutions incrementally undercut positional power based on redistribution as market exchange expands to integrate economic activity outside of the state-owned economy. Cadres may continue to be powerful as state actors, but when social mobility is increasingly shaped by the dynamics of markets than by the redistributive power of the state, they have less influence on who gets ahead (Nee, 1989; 1996). In sum, market transition theory argued that as power—control over resources—shifts cumulatively from state control to markets, there will be a change in the distribution of rewards favoring economic actors who hold market power. Because direct producers retain a greater share of the economic surplus than in a planned economy, markets both empower producers and increase incentives for gains in productivity. State actors who in centrally planned economies allocate jobs, scarce resources, and opportunities for socioeconomic mobility must now compete with market-based agents and opportunities. For these reasons, the emergence of the economic institutions of a market society—i.e., property rights, contracts, labor markets, capital markets, production markets—causes a decline in the significance of redistributive power even in the absence of any fundamental change of the political order. In sectors of the economy where a decisive shift to markets has occurred, officials are less likely to retain an all-encompassing advantage from positional power in party organization and state agencies over non-state economic actors (Nee, 1996). This chapter revisits my market transition research program, selectively drawing from a sequence of papers exploring different domains of institutional change. As Merton (1968) observed, “theories of the middle range consolidate, not fragment, empirical findings” (p. 65). In the following pages, I review a network of theories examining different dimensions and consequences of market transition. I start with the theory published in “Sleeping with the ­Enemy,” co-authored with Peng Lian, which sought to explain the decline in

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political commitment to the communist party and the increasing risks of regime change. This middle-range theory was first presented at a panel organized by Iván Szelényi at a conference in New Orleans. 2

Sleeping with the Enemy

Ever since Oscar Lange’s model of market socialism integrated neoclassical price theory into economic planning, successive generations of socialist reformers have sought market solutions to inefficient allocation and shortage in state socialism: Like alchemists bewitched with the challenge of turning lead into gold, these reformers dreamt of harnessing the power of the market to remedy the failures of the plan. The goal of all reformers has been to stimulate economic growth by combining plan and market, and above all, to safeguard the institutional foundation of state socialism even while introducing markets. To accomplish this task, communist rulers must rely on party officials and economic bureaucrats to implement the reform program, monitor the market activities of citizens, and enforce regulations. nee and lian, 1994, p. 263

An unintended consequence of the economic reforms of the 1980s—whether in Eastern Europe, China or the Soviet Union—was the cumulative erosion of the legitimacy and power of established communist parties. First, economic reforms generated a rapid escalation in transaction costs arising from the conflicting institutional logics of state controls and free markets, which increased the uncertainties of enforcement of the informal and formal rules of the game. Second, market-oriented reforms increased the payoff for opportunism in transactions across the boundaries of the planned economy and the emerging free markets. As markets expanded outside of the state-controlled economy, not only were non-state economic actors freer to pursue opportunities for profit and gain, but so were political actors with positional power in state agencies. “As a result, the shift to markets—domestic or international—increases the extent of opportunism among agents of the state” (Nee and Lian, 1994, p. 262). Szelényi and Manchin’s (1987) “commodification of bureaucratic privileges” identified the problem in Hungary (p. 121). Similarly in China, “expanding markets give rise to a hybrid stratum of cadre-entrepreneurs who use ­positional power—political capital—to gain advantages in the marketplace” (Nee and Lian, 1994, p. 264).

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The 1970s and 1980s were a period of remarkable technological progress and expansion of dynamic capitalism across the global economy. Perception of a rapidly widening gap in technological and economic performance between centrally planned economies and advanced market economies eroded confidence in the efficacy of central planning, heightening elite concern over internal trends toward economic and technological stagnation and inertia. The rapid economic advances of market economies prompted communist elites to initiate market-oriented economic reforms in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, China and Vietnam. Those reforms were far from uniformly successful. Szelényi (1989) portrayed the deterioration in economic performance that started in Hungary during the 1960s, when reform efforts floundered in a failed attempt to shift from extensive growth reliant on labor inputs to intensive knowledge-based economic growth. “Sleeping with the Enemy” relied on computer simulation to explore the social dynamics of declining political commitment to the party and increasing risk of regime change in reforming state socialism and malfeasance. Agents in the model face binary choices, commitment to the party’s cause or defection to opportunism in each period t (t = 12, 2, …). Over time, an increase in the number of opportunists reduces the payoff for commitment to ideology and the values of the communist party. The theory addressed why a decline in political commitment need not lead to collapse and regime change if the party organization is successful in lowering the payoff for opportunism and malfeasance. If, however, a communist party is unable to check the payoff for opportunism, the theorem points to cumulative deterioration, as more and more of the party elite become opportunists and defect. In other words, the monitoring capacity of the party organization is what determines the stability of a communist state in the face of increasing market temptations. Computer simulation confirmed a negative relationship between market temptation and the number of periods that the party can survive. In Figure 7.1, for example, when the payoff for opportunism, h, is larger than 7.24, the party can survive for only one period (row 1); but when h is lower than 6, the party can survive indefinitely (row 8). When market temptation increases by 20.7 percent, from 6.02 to 7.25, the social dynamic of declining commitment to the party accelerates and the party can survive for only one period instead of four as before. Hence, a sufficiently high payoff for opportunism will undermine a communist regime. But if the party leaders are successful in reducing market temptation—for example, in a protracted and thorough-going anti-corruption campaign—the party can survive indefinitely. A second computer simulation explored the effect of economic performance, c, on the survival of the communist party. Figure 7.2 shows that the lower the economic performance, the higher the risks of regime change.

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If ­economic performance is zero, the party collapses and regime change follows. But when economic growth is sustained at a high level, say when c is higher than 3, the party can survive indefinitely. A third computer simulation explored the relationship between punishment for opportunism and the survival of the communist party. Figure 7.3 shows that when the average payoff for opportunism is higher than 3, the party will collapse almost instantaneously, but when it is lower than -.02, the party can survive indefinitely. Hence, there is a negative relationship between the punishment of opportunistic behavior and the survivability of the communist party. In sum, the computer simulation exploring the network effects of market temptation showed that if economic reforms lead to a weakening of the communist party’s capacity to monitor the opportunism and malfeasance of party members, the social risk of regime change will increase, to the tipping points causing regime change, as in the fall of the Soviet Union. Shrewdly, China’s party leaders have consistently recognized this risk. (Xi Jinping’s consolidation of party power by combining commitment to pursuing technological and economic growth with a robust crackdown on corruption is the latest manifestation of this.)

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The Endogenous Dynamics of Institutional Change

How do initially illegitimate organizational and institutional innovations arise in spite of legal prohibitions and accompanying sanctions? Why would economic actors assume the cost and risk of participation in the social construction of economic institutions of capitalism if they can instead “free ride” on the effort of others? Why would any individual take the risk of being a first mover, when the harsh penalties imposed on market temptations in the mass campaigns of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution against “sprouts of capitalism” and “capitalist-roaders” remained vivid reminders of the risks of entrepreneurial action? These are core puzzles that a theory of institutional change giving rise to private enterprise and economic institutions of capitalism must attempt to explain. In Capitalism from Below (2012), co-authored with Sonja Opper, I discussed in detail the “bottom-up” emergence of economic institutions of capitalism, as evidenced in our large-scale mixed-method field study involving 700 industrial entrepreneurs and private manufacturing firms in the Yangzi River Delta region. Not surprisingly, given the Yangzi River Delta’s long history as a robust commercial center, a private enterprise economy had rapidly developed “from the bottom up” in this region, which was later followed by local government initiated privatization of state-owned and collective enterprises. Networks and norms furnished the social cement for dynamically evolving informal and formal economic institutions. We used a Schelling-type model to identify opposition norms as the social mechanisms of endogenous institutional change. Karl Schelling’s seminal idea that the utilities shaping individual behavior depend on the observable social behavior of others provided the starting point for our theorizing. From a small cluster of dissident entrepreneurs who started up illegal and semi-legal businesses in rural townships, we showed that network externalities of an expanding private enterprise economy quickly became an irresistible economic force. We then extended our bottom-up causal narrative of the social construction of economic institutions of capitalism in a theory of endogenous institutional change. The theory offered interrelated propositions focusing on the interplay of three social mechanisms. First, large utility gains interacting with network externalities increase the payoff from collective action, as deviance assumes a self-reinforcing social dynamic. If the utility gain of institutional innovations fails to generate network externalities, then private entrepreneurs will be confined to private orders with limited scope for growth. But in communities where entrepreneurial profit attracts the neighbors’ attention, the emergence of a stable cluster of deviators further amplifies the gains of coordination and pulls even more neighbors into the fold in a self-reinforcing

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Figure 7.4 Reaching local tipping points Source: dellaposta, nee and opper (2017)

“tipping” dynamic (Nee and Opper, 2012, pp. 24–32). Others who may not have been willing to take the initial step of risky experimentation will nonetheless join the local bandwagon begun by their more entrepreneurial neighbors as collective action gains self-reinforcing momentum (Lardy, 2014). Yet, regardless of how individual incentives are structured, deviation is unlikely to survive in the long term unless it is eventually reinforced by accommodative action from political actors. The greater the utility gain and the larger the network externalities of bottom-up institutional innovations, the more likely it is that political actors will accommodate endogenous institutional change. Where deviation is widespread, such political change can be a matter of practical necessity due to the costs associated with effective enforcement of laws that are ignored or willfully disobeyed by large swaths of the population. If utility gain and network externalities give rise to self-reinforcing “tipping” dynamics, the cost of enforcement for state actors increases to prohibitive levels. Figure 7.4 clarifies how tipping-point dynamics play out within particular clusters. The initial state of universal compliance in agent i’s neighborhood is broken by a single neighbor j1 who deviates and suffers sanctions. While this example discourages nearby agents from repeating j1’s mistake, it is soon

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met with counterexamples of unsanctioned deviation in adjacent neighborhoods. Even as the example of j1’s failure looms, cases of deviation without penalty can continue to mount in the local neighborhood. As agents update their calculus of costs and benefits, the number of unsanctioned deviators makes it clear that j1’s unfortunate example was an exception to the general rule. Thus, even previously cautious agents eventually follow their neighbors, reinforcing a ripple effect that spreads to other adjacent neighborhoods. When sanctioning regimes are especially persistent, examples of deviators b­ eing punished will, of course, dominate, and local tipping points may never be reached. 4

Emergence of Modern Rational Capitalism

In departures from state socialism, multiple pathways of market transition have all led to hybrid forms of politicized capitalism in which the state sets the regulatory framework and remains directly involved in a wide range of economic transactions (Nee and Opper, 2007, 2010). A defining feature of the politicized forms of capitalism is the persistent overlap of political and economic markets and the lack of a clearly defined boundary between the state and the firm (Parish and Michelson, 1996). Institutions and cultural beliefs associated with rational capitalism have been long established in the West. But notwithstanding the widespread diffusion of these institutionalized routines and ­rational myths of the Western world (Meyer, 2009), rational capitalism has yet to displace a pervasive reliance on state intervention in economic life in former state-socialist economies. In the private enterprise economy, traditional, hybrid and modern corporate forms of rational capitalism coexist in a regional ecology of organizational forms. Traditional: Historically, merchant households and family-owned craft workshops flourished in urban centers in the Yangzi River Delta region. In the traditional form of merchant capitalism, patrimonial authority was the organizing principle of family businesses. Kinship ties provided the basis for trust and cooperation. Today, private firms in the Yangzi River Delta region are listed predominantly as limited liability companies (llcs), but the majority of these companies are owned by the firms’ founders and, especially in the formative years, were organized as family businesses. Hybrid: Hybrid organizational forms emerged in response to pressures for state-owned and collective enterprises to adapt to market forces and competition (Nee, 1992; Walder, 1995). In time, and despite state-crafted efforts to

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i­mplement economic reforms, state-owned and collective enterprises were ­massively loss-making under competitive pressure from private firms. Though many firms were shuttered by local governments, the privatization of local state-owned firms gained momentum in the late 1990s. A common practice in the privatization of loss-making, state-owned firms was for local governments to pass ownership to a factory director in a negotiated transaction, which obligated the new owner to retain the firm’s employees. This meant that the new ceo of the privatized firm relied on long-standing personal ties in the founding and development of the business. Hybrids encompass not only privatized firms, but also traditional partnerships reinvented as a means for business partners to start up private firms in more capital-demanding manufacturing and technology-enabled industrial sectors. As with family businesses, the reinvention of traditional business partnerships relied on strong personal ties for trust and cooperation, but such ties were typically based on non-kin relationships. In an institutional environment where state-owned banks discriminated against private enterprise, partnerships allowed professionals to pool their capital to found start-up firms, often in technology-intensive industrial sectors with higher costs of entry. In both the reinvented partnership and the privatized, state-owned firms, founders shared a common reliance on the strength of non-kin personal ties in managing their firms. Rational capitalist: In the modern corporate form, “a formal, rationally organized social structure involves clearly defined patterns of activity in which, ideally, every series of actions is functionally related to the purposes of the organization” (Merton, 1940, p. 560). Accordingly, in rational capitalism as it emerged in the West, ceos of corporations rely on neither kinship nor network closure in managing their firms. Rather, they are likely to seek help from alters on the basis of functional role, know-how and capability (Berle and Means, 1932). As part of the state-crafted economic reform, the Company Law enacted in 1994 codified the organizational routines and myths of the modern corporation as the basis for the legal form of llcs and public corporations. Guthrie’s (1999) study of state-owned enterprises showed that the rational myths codified in the Company Law did, in fact, guide the reform of state-owned enterprises in Shanghai’s industrial and commercial economy, establishing trends in the region. In the next phase of reform, entrepreneurs of private manufacturing firms joined the movement to incorporate under the Company Law. These entrepreneurs followed the listed public corporations in mimicking the rational myths and cultural beliefs of modern corporations and defining the role of the ceo as a corporate leader in order to gain legitimacy for private enterprise. Numerous channels of information expedited the diffusion of

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Figure 7.5 Network sequence trajectories of rational capitalist firms. Note: The types of ties relied upon during chronologically ordered key events are distinguished by color (see legend). The y axis displays cumulative density Source: nee, liu and dellaposta (2017)

the rational myths and organizational practices of the modern American ­corporation. Social learning, legitimacy-seeking, and mimicking rational capitalism quickened the process of diffusion of rationalized organizational practices and routines (Nee and Opper, 2012; Tsui, Zhang, and Chen, 2017). An underlying trend in market transition—accompanying the expansion of markets for innovation and the reliance on innovation by firms—is a parallel shift toward openness in entrepreneurs’ networks. When describing networks, closure refers to the degree to which key contacts tend to know one another. Within closed networks, which are dense networks of overlapping mutual relations, entrepreneurs can benefit from advice, information and material assistance by having embedded, strong ties with trusted alters (see Coleman, 1988; Uzzi, 1996). In contrast, network openness refers to the absence of dense webs of mutual relationships among one’s key contacts and the presence of gaps in the network structure. Entrepreneurs who build their networks heavily around professional relationships predominantly rely on colleagues (whether inside or outside the firm) for advice, information, and material assistance. A dominance of such

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professional ties in the entrepreneur’s network signals an openness to people outside his or her immediate social orbit and is contingent on functional roles and human capital (training, experience, knowledge and expertise). In contrast, an entrepreneurial network dominated by kin and close personal relations (e.g., classmates and neighbors) is closed in the sense that ties reflect ­social proximity, rather than human capital and specialized knowledge or expertise. In an institutional environment where property rights and legal recourse are unreliable, reliance on kinship and friendship often brings specific benefits of higher trust and solidarity (Peng, 2004). Yet in a market economy in which innovative activity is important for business success, closed kinship and non-kin networks can seal off access to novel ideas, entrepreneurial opportunities, and useful tacit knowledge that is available to competitors with open networks. The three clusters map closely onto the network governance structures previously described. Figures 7.5, 7.6 and 7.7 track the relative prevalence of the different types of network ties at different life course stages for the firms in each cluster, using sequence analysis of network data collected in the 2012 1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 1

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Figure 7.6 Network sequence trajectories of traditional kin-based firms Note: The types of ties relied upon during chronologically ordered key events are distinguished by color (see legend). The y axis displays cumulative density. Source: nee, liu and dellaposta 2017

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Figure 7.7 Network sequence trajectories of hybrid non-kin firms Note: The types of ties relied upon during chronologically ordered key events are distinguished by color (see legend). The y axis displays cumulative density. Source: nee, liu and dellaposta (2017)

s­ urvey of the ceos of 700 manufacturing firms in the Yangzi Delta study of ­entrepreneurs and private enterprises (Nee et al., 2017). Figure 7.5 shows that entrepreneurs in the first and largest cluster (N = 379) relied heavily on ties with professional colleagues at all observed stages. These are the rational capitalist firms that have relied consistently on human capital-intensive governance structures. Figure 7.6 shows that entrepreneurs in the second cluster (N = 163) relied heavily on kin-based ties for early events in their firm’s life course before gradually shifting toward workplace-based ties in later stages. These are the traditional kin-based firms. Congruently, Figure 7.7 shows that entrepreneurs in the third cluster (N = 133) typically relied on non-kin personal ties for aid with early events in their firm’s life course, before increasingly drawing on workplace-based ties for later events. These are the hybrid non-kin partnership firms. The visualizations suggest that traditional kin-based firms and hybrid nonkin partnerships gradually acquired the network profile that is typical of the modern capitalist firm through the replacement of personalized social capital

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with professional ties. The visualizations indirectly suggest shifts in the ­institutional environment that enabled and motivated the emergence of rational capitalism, which is also evident in convergent network governance. Clearly, the network governance of firms in the three clusters is trending toward more openness in ceos’ networks. Thus, large differences in network governance for early events in a firm’s life course appear to shrink with time. In other words, the organizational dynamics of competition and selection in China’s market economy appear to reinforce “blending” more than “segregating” processes (Nelson and Winter, 1982; Hannan and Freeman, 1989). The network governance type tells us much about the types of contacts relied upon in early events, but less so for later events because entrepreneurs across all three clusters increasingly rely on professional ties, rather than kin or non-kin social capital, in later stages of a firm’s development. In part, this reflects the wellknown shift to reliance on professional managers by founders of family firms as their businesses mature. 5

Political Capital in a Market Economy

Market transition theory predicts that “The more competitive markets replace state allocation of scarce resources and services, the less the value of political capital.” Analysis of data from a 2002 survey of 2,400 Chinese firms—stateowned, collective, private and foreign—found robust evidence confirming this prediction: Political capital, as a fungible form of capital, has greatest value in those institutional domains where government restricts economic activity. The stronger the government’s commitment to introduce competitive markets in an industrial and commercial sector, the more the value of p ­ olitical capital will decline in that sector. nee and opper, 2010, p. 2109

Markets for government contracts can be expected to be an institutional domain where political connections matter, as indeed in all market economies. In contrast, product markets are organized by a status order of perceived quality of the product. In the Chinese context of state-owned banks, credit markets are clearly an intermediate domain where political ties to government can provide real advantages in securing a loan on favorable terms. As predicted by the hypotheses of market transition theory on political capital, in the 2002 survey the advantages of political connections were highest in institutional domains

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of state-dominated credit markets and the market for government contracts, while in contrast, there was no positive payoff for political capital in competitive product markets. Surprisingly, there was no evidence confirming a systematic advantage for politically connected firms in political markets. The declining-significance-of-political-capital hypothesis found further support in our analysis of data from the subsequent surveys of 700 private manufacturing firms in the Yangzi River Delta region (Nee and Opper, 2012). In this analysis, we addressed the question of whether the ceos of private firms who invested in political connections enjoy long-term competitive advantages, as reflected in the growth of their firm and the firm’s returns on assets. Not surprisingly, positional power stemming from party membership and cadre status was not associated with larger firm size, nor with higher returns on assets. But the more significant result came from asking whether cadreentrepreneurs who secured ownership of their firm through privatization of a state-owned company enjoyed long-term advantages in a market economy. The surprising finding was that By 2008, cadre entrepreneurs operating privatized businesses have lost all of their initial advantages […] Our results do not indicate that political connections increase chances for a company to thrive in China’s market economy. While political connections are fungible in regulatory markets, entrepreneurs with political capital do not differ from others with respect to entrepreneurial success. Empirically, there is no evidence suggesting that the movement of bottom-up entrepreneurs in the Yangzi delta region depends on positional advantages and social privileges held by company founders. nee and opper, 2012, p. 249

6 Conclusion Theories of the middle-range are not derived from a general theory, but they also are not mere empirical generalizations. They are more context-bound and less general than theories in the physical sciences. Comprised of interrelated propositions with specified scope conditions, they are close enough to data so that hypotheses derived from these specialty theories are testable. In such theory-driven empirical research, the aim is, as Merton stated, to identify the social mechanisms and confirm their consequences for designated parts of the social structure, rather than a descriptive project of case studies and area studies.

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A notable parallel is seen in the similarities between Thomas’s and Szelényi’s ideas in the middle-range theorizing by Merton and Nee. The theories of selffulfilling prophecy and market transition both acknowledge the influence of a seminal idea as the starting point for analytically identifying social mechanisms and their designated consequences on designated parts of social structures. The theories of self-fulfilling prophecy and market transition are both close enough to data to derive testable hypotheses. Both theories of the middlerange identify general mechanisms, but are not derived from a general theory of the social system, nor are they descriptive histories of particular case studies. Confirmation of a middle-range theory is often messy and findings are rarely as robust as in the physical sciences. Ironically, even when confirmed, middle-range theories are easily forgotten or subsumed. Few are formalized as theorems, and even fewer have identified social mechanisms with law-like properties as in the physical sciences. Human beings are obviously reflexive actors and adapt through social learning to varying definitions of the situation. As Duncan Watts (2011), who trained in physics, put it, The social world, in other words, is far messier than the physical world, and the more we learn about it, the messier it is likely to seem. The result is that we will probably never have a science of sociology that will resemble physics. But that’s OK. (p. 262) References Berle, Adolf A. Jr., and Gardiner C. Means (1932). The Modern Corporation and Private Property. New York, NY: McMillan. Coleman, James S. (1988). “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital.” American Journal of Sociology, 94, S95–S120. DellaPosta, Daniel, Victor Nee and Sonja Opper (2017). “Endogenous Dynamics of Institutional Change.” Rationality and Society, 29(1), 5–48, doi:10.1177/1043463116633147. Guthrie, Doug (1999). Dragon in a Three-Piece Suit: The Emergence of Capitalism in China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hannan, Michael T., and John Freeman (1989). Organizational Ecology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Homans, George Casper (1974). Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Lardy, Nicholas R. (2014). Markets Over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China. Washington, DC: Institute of International Economics.

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Merton, Robert K. (1940). “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality.” Social Forces, 18(4), 560–568, doi:10.2307/2570634. Merton, Robert K. (1968). Social Theory and Social Structure. New York, NY: Free Press. (Original work published in 1949). Meyer, John W. (2009). World Society: The Writings of John W. Meyer, edited by Georg Krucken and Gili S. Drori. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nee, Victor (1996). “The Emergence of a Market Society: Changing Mechanisms of Stratification in China.” American Journal of Sociology, 101(4), 908–949. Nee, Victor (1992). “Organizational Dynamics of Market Transition: Hybrid Forms, Property Rights, and Mixed Economy in China.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 37(1), 1–27, doi:10.2307/2393531. Nee, Victor (1991). “Social Inequalities in Reforming State Socialism: Between Redistribution and Markets in China.” American Sociological Review, 56(3), 267–282. Nee, Victor (1989). “A Theory of Market Transition: From Redistribution to Markets in State Socialism.” American Sociological Review, 54(5), 663–681. Nee, Victor, and Peng Lian (1994). “Sleeping with the Enemy: A Dynamic Model of Declining Political Commitment in State Socialism.” Theory and Society, 23(2), 253–297, doi:10.1007/BF00993817. Nee, Victor, Lisha Liu and Daniel DellaPosta (2017). “The Entrepreneur’s Network and Firm Performance.” Sociological Science, 4, 552–579, doi:10.15195/v4.a23. Nee, Victor, and Sonja Opper (2012). Capitalism from Below: Markets and Institutional Change in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nee, Victor, and Sonja Opper (2010). “Political Capital in a Market Economy.” Social Forces, 88(5), 2105–2133. Nee, Victor, and Sonja Opper (2007). “On Politicized Capitalism.” In Victor Nee and Richard Swedberg (eds.), On Capitalism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 93–127. Nelson, Richard R., and Sidney G. Winter (1982). An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parish, William L., and Evan Michelson (1996). “Politics and Markets: Dual Transformations.” American Journal of Sociology, 101(4): 142-1059, doi:10.1086/230788. Peng, Yusheng (2004). “Kinship Networks and Entrepreneurs in China’s Transitional Economy.” American Journal of Sociology, 109(5), 1042–1074, doi:10.1086/382347. Szelényi, Iván (1989). “Eastern Europe in an Epoch of Transition: Toward a Socialist Mixed Economy.” In Victor Nee and David Stark (eds.), Remaking the Economic Institutions of Socialism: China and Eastern Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 208–232. Szelényi, Iván (1983). Urban Inequality Under State Socialist Redistributive Economies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Szelényi, Iván, and Róbert Manchin (1987). “Social Policy under State Socialism: Market, Redistribution, and Social Inequalities in East European Socialist Societies.” In Rein Martin et al. (eds.), Stagnation and Renewal in Social Policy. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 102–139. Tsui, Anne S., Yingying Zhang and Xiao-Ping Chen (2017). Leadership of Chinese Private Enterprises: Insights and Interviews. London, UK: Palgrave Studies in Chinese Management. Uzzi, Brian (1996). “The Sources and Consequences of Embeddedness for the Economic Performance of Organizations: The Network Effect.” American Sociological Review, 61(4), 674–698. Walder, Andrew G. (1995). “Local Governments as Industrial Firms: An Organizational Analysis of China’s Transitional Economy.” American Journal of Sociology, 101(2), 263–301, doi:10.1086/230725. Watts, Duncan J. (2011). Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer. New York, NY: Crown Business. Wilson, William Julius (1978). The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 8

Transitions and Structural Distortions Tamás Kolosi 1 Introduction1 Several hypotheses have been formulated concerning the social effects of the change of regime prior to the political–economic transformation. A significant majority of sociologists argued that, parallel to the emergence of the market economy, social inequality necessarily had to grow and spread in post-communist societies. Only two small groups of scholars have been exceptions to this. One of the “counter-hypotheses” started out from the theory that in the totalitarian systems of Soviet-type societies, statistical data were altered for ideological reasons. In these countries, inequality indices were therefore presumed to be inaccurate. According to this conception, the degree of real inequality in East-European countries not only reached, but actually surpassed that of WestEuropean countries in the communist period. In this line of argument, the source of real inequality was the distributive and privilege-distributing logic of the totalitarian system, so that inequality inevitably had to decrease alongside the democratization process. It should be emphasized, however, that this was a marginal opinion held mostly by a small group who were unaware of EastEuropean realities and who were opposed to the system solely on an ideological basis. The second approach that predicted a decrease in inequality emerged from a structuralist notion that relied primarily on empirical data from China. These scholars started from the premise that redistribution was the basis of inequality in Soviet-type societies. In the process of market orientation, inequality based on redistribution would decrease as the market economy was creating a new type of inequality, but to a smaller degree than was previously the case. In the process of transformation, the “gross inequality index”—meaning the rate of inequality created by redistribution and the market together—would decrease and stay on this level (Nee, 1989). Neither East-European (Kolosi and Róna-Tas, 1992; Róna-Tas, 1994; Mateju, 1993) nor Chinese empirical research

1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in Tamás Kolosi and Matild Sági: “System Change and Social Structure” in Social Report 1998.

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(Walder, 1992) had supported Nee’s early hypothesis, which is why he later modified it himself. Relying on Chinese data, he set up a modified hypothesis, which argued that although it is possible for economic inequality to rise again with the introduction of the market economy, during the transitional period— when redistribution is suspended and market processes are not yet strong enough to be a source of considerable inequality—inequality would temporarily decrease (Nee, 1991, 1992, 1996). While there are still serious debates about this modified hypothesis, particularly concerning China (Walder, 1996; Nee and Lian, 1994), the sociologists analyzing the process of transformation in Eastern Europe have almost uniformly shown that increasing inequality is one of the most important consequences of the transition to a market economy. 2

System Change—Elite Change

The group analyzing the consequences of system change concentrated on the problem of the new ruling strata. After all, sociologists agree that both in Soviet-type societies and in market economies, unskilled workers occupy the lower levels of the social hierarchy, and that no major changes to this situation should be expected during a peaceful (non-revolutionary) transition. Instead, the questions that arise are the following: What mobilizing processes did the system change of trigger among the upper strata of the social hierarchy? What happened to the previous ruling strata? And from where was the new elite recruited? Taking the classical Marxist theory as a base, it could be said that in a capitalist society the capitalists are on top, while the top in a Soviet-type society is occupied by the party bureaucracy that holds supreme power. The question is whether during the peaceful transition the capitalists—the new economic elite—emerged from the upper circles of the party bureaucracy or from somewhere else, namely from a group that possessed less political power in the previous system, while holding relatively high social status. Although theoretically, the fate of the old elite and the recruiting of the new elite are two different dimensions of elite shift in the context of system change, these two problems are closely related in the minds of a significant number of social scientists. The latter set out from the fact that change came about with the active help of the old elites, who were only able to do so—who only dared to do so—because their way of “escaping forward” had already been prepared at the time. According to this assumption, during the political–economic transformation, the old elites were able to convert their political power into economic power. Thus, the two questions—what will happen to the old elite,

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and from where will the new elite be recruited—are, in fact, two aspects of the same question (Hankiss, 1990; Szalai, 1990; Staniszkis; 1991). In this line of argument, political capital alone could have been transformed into a good ­economic (and political) position, which would probably have made legitimization a great deal harder for the new elite, thereby challenging also the legitimacy of the new socio–economic model. While analyzing the recruitment of new economic elites, a group of sociologists—and even more so, economists who focused on newly developing ­economic elites—emphasized the importance of institutional changes in the political and economic transformation of post-communist societies. They stressed that the system of economic institutions in transitional societies differs very much from that of any other historically developed market economy. Privatization did not result in a brand-new set of property relations, but in a path-dependent recombination of old elements. Companies had fluid boundaries, assets and liabilities that were distributed throughout ownership networks (Stark, 1992, 1996; Stark and Bruszt, 1997). These economic networks had already been established during the communist period (Kornai, 1980), and after the economic transformation, a special “mutual dependence” developed between large state-owned firms and their privately owned suppliers and distributors (Kornai, 1990). Consequently, a new bourgeoisie—the “old” and “new” managers of large enterprises—could not be clearly distinguished. Managers could hold a non-owning managerial position; they could shift liabilities to the state while utilizing their “satellite businesses,” and they were able to exploit assets as they pleased without taking any risk (Szelényi, Eyal and Townsley, 1996; Szelényi and Kostello, 1996). The other hypothesis on elite change during the economic and political transition set out from the theory of symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1977), and the possibilities of converting this capital (Bourdieu and Coleman, 1991), to analyze the recruitment of the new elite. These scholars held that the previous ruling strata of East-European former socialist societies—like the ruling strata in any society—possessed not only political, but also cultural and economic capital. In addition, the new ruling strata had to be in a consistently strong position with respect to all three dimensions of symbolic capital. Accordingly, the position of the ruling strata of different social systems (and any inequality between them) varies only in accordance with the type of capital that dominates in a particular instance. The ruling strata of both Soviet-type societies and capitalist societies are therefore selected from the same circle, namely those who were able to accumulate symbolic capital. There can be no doubt that the group that possesses a significant quantity of each type of capital has a greater chance to retain their elite positions than individuals who belong to

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the best situated group along only of one or two of the dimensions. This assumption is supported by the fact that during the socio–economic transformation, individuals had to demonstrate significant adaptability (Rose, 1992). At the time of transition, those who were in possession of different types of capital could adjust more easily to the new political–economic conditions—which were sometimes changing on a daily basis—and were thus able to move their symbolic capital around more easily. It can generally be said that the ruling strata at the time of peaceful social changes can keep their elite positions (Lenski, 1966), and the post-socialist societies were no exception to this. This does not apply to violent, revolutionary transformations, in which the old elite may be destroyed physically, their properties may be taken away, or they may be sent into exile. This theory of conversion of symbolic capital differs from the theory of the “great coalition,” in that the former claims as fact that elites will lose their favorable position in the course of a peaceful transition. It is therefore natural that the new elite will emerge from among those who were at the top of the previous hierarchy. The only question that arose in this regard is what types of symbolic capital would dominate within the framework of a market economy (Kolosi, 1991; Böröcz and Róna-Tas, 1995; Szelényi, 1990; Róbert and Sági, 1995; Sági, 1995; Hanley, 2000), or rather what resources could be converted into this kind of capital to the greatest advantage. According to the “great coalition” theory, positional capital would be the most prominent symbolic capital and offer the best terms of conversion. It should be noted that this latter hypothesis set out from the tacit assumption that in the communist system of East-European countries, the crucial capital was political—in other words, positional capital. But this assumption was not supported by empirical research. It is mostly true for East-European countries that those holding political power had accumulated a considerable amount of cultural and material capital by the late 1980s. The research done in Hungary generally supported the dominance of cultural capital (Kolosi, 1987). The founder of the third hypothesis concerning elite change was Iván Szelényi. According to the “theory of interrupted embourgeoisement,” the proprietors of the period before nationalization—and their descendants—did not give up their enterprises. They held them in reserve so that it would be relatively easy to re-enter embourgeoisement with the mobilization of the appropriate symbolic capital after the end of the political restrictions on enterprises. What at first was a generally effective hypothesis was later narrowed down by Szelényi to agriculture (Szelényi, 1988; Szelényi and Manchin, 1989), where the holding area—and thus the activity of the second economy in agriculture—not only made long-range historical continuity possible regarding standards and attitudes, but also allowed for expertise to be passed from father to son. Thus,

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a­ ccording to Szelényi, the children of ex-proprietors were ready and waiting for the moment when they would be able to activate these skills properly, and continue where their fathers were forced to leave off 50 years before. Therefore, Szelényi’s hypothesis held that the renewed mobilizing of former capital plays a fundamental role in the formation of the new enterprises. Finally, my hypothesis regarding “the revolution of deputy managers” does not exclude the important role of either positional capital, or of material and cultural capital, in the formation of the new elite. On the contrary, I set out essentially from the same hypothesis that a consistently favorable position cannot be lost from one day to the next during a peaceful transition. The existence and conversion of symbolic capital makes it possible for the new elite to adapt to the new circumstances and to retain a favorable position in the future. At the same time, it should be considered that—at least in the early period of the transition—the previously advantageous positional capital may also turn into a disadvantage, since there will inevitably be a greater emphasis on politics in the course of the transition from a one-party system to a multi-party democracy. In this initial phase, the former political class may incite extreme passions among the new political elite and in the media. Intensified public exposure may actually diminish the usefulness of the power and resources that were acquired under the previous regime. Of course, the old elite may successfully convert their contacts, as well as their cultural and material capital, into new capital, but the positive effect of this capital is weakened by their previously exposed political positions. Taking advantage of this situation, those in the second line—who held similarly advantageous positions as the most exposed members of the elite, but who do not have to deal with the drawbacks of such political overexposure—will try to make the best of the favorable possibilities created by the momentary power vacuum. It can thus be observed that the second line takes the leading role, at least during the initial phase of system change (Kolosi, 1991). The empirical research on the initial stage of system change disproved Hankiss and Szalai’s theory of “elite reproduction,” and at the same time largely supported the hypothesis of “the revolution of deputy managers” (Kolosi and Róna-Tas, 1992; Mateju and Lim, 1995; Róna-Tas, 1994; Sági, 1994, 1995, 1996; Böröcz and Róna-Tas, 1995; Kolosi and Sági, 1997). The results illustrated not only the advancement of the second line in the period right after the system change, but also that a change of generation of accelerated pace was taking place on a significant scale among elite circles. At the same time, these empirical studies did not provide a point of reference as to what happens to the old elite in the wake of their exposed position. Under communist rule, older people had held the most exposed political positions, largely because it was not

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possible to leave politics honestly—one could only fail (fall from power and lose favor), and hence the logic of elite change was that as old people died, the not-so-old would take their place. It was thus assumed that the majority of this group would retire and give up their active social life. Those who were young enough to activate their long standing resources might reappear in elite circles, following the initial, more politics-centered period—as long as they had accumulated sufficient amounts of symbolic capital in the former system. In the early 1980s, an additional assumption developed with regard to these transformation hypotheses (Kolosi, 1984, 1988, 1989; Róna-Tas, 1990). This view held that the positions, connections, abilities, experiences and capital acquired in the second economy would (especially for certain groups) provide a good starting point for capitalist positions once the political obstacles in the way of private enterprise were removed and the unavailability of capital ceased to be an issue. This proved to be accurate in those East-European countries, such as Hungary and Poland, where the Soviet-type economic–political system had been softer and a more deeply rooted second economy was able to develop beginning in the late 1970s. At the same time, a contrary hypothesis can be devised that takes into account the special nature of the market activity of the second economy, and the fact that the second economy’s system of relations cannot be regarded as clear market relations. The second economy did not simply emerge independently of the redistributive economy, but in very close relation with it: it filled the gaps that the primary economy could not fill and took over those functions of production which were left unresolved by the primary economy. All this meant that the possibility of the second economy was not a right but a privilege, and as such, could be cancelled at any time. The participants in the second e­ conomy could not calculate for the long run; rather, they had to grasp the opportunities of the here and now to make their fortunes, or at least to create a relatively high standard of living for their families. In Soviet-type social systems, it was not, or only within limits, possible to put profits back into the economy, since they could not be capitalized. And it was also not possible, or only by violating the rules, to expand and enlarge the enterprise. Any entrepreneurs who achieved this were always a step ahead of the rules, and often they owed it to their personal contacts or sheer luck that their life was the “glorification of the model entrepreneur,” and not spent in prison. This is especially true for the more strictly regulated non-agricultural businesses that had lived through several cycles of tightening and loosening. Therefore, that group of second economy participants who not only pursued a supplementary family business, but wanted to ground their prosperity on a market basis amid “quasi-market” circumstances, resembled Weber’s (1978) pre-capitalist entrepreneur, willing, “for the sake of profit to ride through Hell even if it singes the sails” (p. 614). In this

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manner, the pre-capitalist is unlike a capitalist entrepreneur, who plans rationally, produces more capital through capital, and who not only abides by the laws, but also counts on the stability they provide, since he is only able to plan for the longer term on the condition that the laws are respected by everybody (Gábor R., 1992; Sik, 1994; Róna-Tas, 1997). Therefore, a hypothesis can be formulated about the effects of the second economy on businesses following the system change: the second economy had definitely improved the income position of its active participants, which greatly influenced the financial situation during transition (Róbert and Sági, 1995) and thus also increased the probability that material capital would be mobilized, activated and invested. However, only in so far as the earlier activity in the second economy was coupled with a ‘civilian’—law-abiding, law-respecting and long-term planning—attitude is it of great advantage in the period following the change of the system for the founding of a business in pure market conditions. At the same time, if someone tries to apply the attitude of the old second economy and wants to employ its values and reflexes in pure market conditions— he might meet some serious obstacles. It should be noted at this point that my hypothesis agrees with Szelényi’s theory of interrupted embourgeoisement, including its emphasis on the importance of symbolic capital. Earlier empirical research clearly supported the hypothesis that a bourgeois-entrepreneurial background makes the existence of such a bourgeois mentality more probable. Although in the socialist system—especially in the earlier phase during the 1950s—the bourgeois families had lost their economic position, they were nevertheless able to retain their cultural capital and their characteristic “intellectual-moral manners.” They were thus able to pass their values, civilization and knowledge on to their descendants (Utasi, 1984; Róbert, 1986; Ganzeboom, Graaf and Róbert, 1990; Kolosi, 1993; Braun and Kolosi, 1994; Kolosi, Fábián, Róbert and Sági, 1994). 3

Winners and Losers

From the beginning of the politico–economic changes, it was evident for both sociologists and politicians that the transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy would be accompanied by considerable sacrifices, with—to use the popular phrase—not only winners, but also losers. At the beginning of the social transformation, sociologists concentrated on the q­ uestion

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of elite change, that is, on the “winners.” As it became clear that the process of regime change was loaded with many contradictions, there was more and more talk about the losers as well. In all the countries concerned, the simultaneous political and economic transformation was linked to a powerful economic crisis, so that the “price of transition” was turning into a greater problem than had been predicted or calculated (Ferge, 1992b; Kemény, 1993; Offe, 1993; Andorka and Lehmann, 1996). The hypothesis concerning the losers relied on classical Marxist foundations. It set out from the fact that while Soviet-type socialism was not in reality the kind of social system it purported to be—namely, one in which the power of the working class prevailed—nevertheless, in these societies, workers were on average in a better position than in any capitalist society. This cannot solely be explained by the fact that in redistributive societies the degree of inequality is smaller than in market economies. The socialist system—especially in its initial stage—also began a rapid and spectacular modernizing process, the effect of which was positive for society at large, but especially for the workers, who had earlier found themselves in a disadvantaged position. In part, this relatively positive situation of the workers was due to the socialist policy that the ostensible “ruling class” should not be dissatisfied, and that its basic needs at the level of “you may eat, drink, embrace, sleep” should be largely fulfilled. During transition, at a time of economic crisis and without the effects of ideological pressure, the relative situation of workers—and, in fact, their absolute position—inevitably had to worsen, especially amidst the early stages of capital accumulation, and in light of the “wild west” variant of capitalism linked to 20th-century technology. The alternative hypothesis concentrated mainly on cohort effects. It argued that the losers of system change, by necessity, had to be the older age group: the older someone is, the harder it will be to adapt to the different circumstances and to realize and seize the possibilities offered by the constantly changing situation. In the absence of a social insurance system on the level of Western Europe, retired persons who possessed the smallest possibilities of asserting their interests (the status of children was similar) were certain to be losers (Széman, 1990). The spread of the market economy also considerably weakened the labor market prospects of people between the ages of 45 and 60. They were already at a disadvantage because it was more difficult for them to adapt than for younger people. The “new capitalists” who wanted to put out at long-term interest the energy invested in the workers tended to employ the older age cohorts less, and to dismiss them more easily (­Széman, 1996). And, as during any transformation, younger people—that is, certain segments of the younger population—were the potential winners here as well.

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A separate aspect of the problem of winners and losers during system change (partly due to the strengthening feminist movement of the 1980s) is the study of the situation of women. According to one hypothesis, women were strongly affected by the disappearance of one of the pillars of socialist ideology, namely the right to employment for everyone, as well as employment by state-owned companies. During the reduction in employment caused by the transition, owners first terminated the employment of women considered to be “unreliable employees,” i.e., mothers with small children. There have been contradictory analyses in connection with women’s unemployment in Eastern Europe: in certain post-socialist countries it was indeed observed that a disproportionate number of women became unemployed, but this does seem to have been the case in Hungary. At the same time, a more detailed analysis has shown that in the case of less educated women without qualifications, or with skills not really suited to the market, the negative effects of regime change were somewhat stronger than in the case of men with the same status (Fodor, 1997). On the other hand, the opposite effect could be observed in the case of better educated women with higher qualifications: both among managers of stateowned companies and among private entrepreneurs, the proportion of (highly qualified) women grew considerably. This leads to the conclusion that the disadvantageous situation of women improved during the transition to a market economy—even if it did not come to a complete end (Sági, 1994). In the context of the winners and losers of transition, a separate question arises regarding the problem of poverty. The changes in poverty, as well as its degrees, forms and appearance, in themselves created a cardinal field of study during the late 1980s and the early 1990s. However, from the point of view of analyzing the effects of regime change, the central questions were the following: Who were the real losers? Which group saw its relative position most weakened by the transition to a market economy? And who bore the real burden of regime change, the poorest or the middle strata (Andorka and Spéder, 1996; Kolosi et al., 1998; Ferge, 1992a)? 4

Market and Redistribution

One final question emerges in relation to the consequences of system change, namely the extent to which the transitional process affected the whole of the social structure. That is, what changes took place during the transitional period in terms of the structural mechanisms? While painfully few theoretical hypotheses have been formulated about the changing structural mechanisms of the actual post-communist transition, on the basis of a general theoretical approach, we can distinguish three lines of direction in this field.

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Based on the Weberian notion of social structure and American stratification theory, the representatives of the first group set out from the assumption that societies—whether democratic or dictatorial, or built on market mechanisms or redistribution—use the same structural approach to describe social stratification and its operative mechanisms. They assumed that both the socialist and capitalist societies are vertical hierarchies, and that there is no difference between the underlying structuring mechanisms. According to this theory, the conditions of mobility are somewhat different in the two types of societies, with divergent effects regarding the relative importance of the different dimensions of inequality (political, cultural and economic). These scholars therefore set up the (latent) hypothesis that the principles of social structuring do not change fundamentally during the transition to a market economy. The difference is only in the proportions: the role of the political dimension decreases somewhat and the role of the capital/economic dimension increases greatly, while the role of cultural capital remains unchanged (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992; Treiman, 1970; Andorka, 1982). The other possible approach was based on classical Marxist theory. This view held that the structure of the two social systems can be described using two essentially different methods: in capitalist societies, the inequalities essentially manifest in property relations, while in socialist societies the place of the “exploiting” classes is occupied by the state bureaucracy (or, according to orthodox Marxist ideology, no one). Seeing that the political transformation took place in opposition to Soviet-type societies and against their “official” ideology, the structural transformation was initially not analyzed in Marxist terms. As it became clear that Marxist social theory as such could by no means be connected so rigidly to Soviet-type societies, it was expected that Marxist social theory would undergo a sort of renaissance, as has generally been the case in international sociology (Wright, 1985; Wright and Martin, 1987). Moreover, a sort of renewal of left-wing ideas can be detected in the East-European post-socialist countries (Fodor, Hanley and Szelényi, 1997). Of course, a Marxist-based structural approach will describe the structure of the post-socialist societies that developed after the change of regime in a fundamentally different way than a Soviet-type system, whether it analyzes the societies based on a conservative Marxist two-class model or using Erik Olin Wright’s modern neo-Marxist approach, which includes transitional class-categories in the analysis. The third approach, which was largely derived from both the approach of Weber and that of the Marxists, while at the same time diverging significantly from them, set out from the concrete characteristics of social development of the country and region in question—in this case, those of Hungary in particular. The starting point of this theory was that in Hungary—and to a smaller

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extent in other East-European ex-socialist countries as well—a typical duality of redistributive and a market-type social structures had already developed in the social period commonly known as the L-model (Kolosi, 1987) or as the “double-pyramid theory” (Szelényi, 1987, 1988, 1990; Szelényi and Szelényi, 1994). It can be stated with certainty that this duality is also characteristic of modern capitalism, since contrary to the classical capitalism of the 19th century, in modern capitalism the structure-building role of redistribution is indisputable. According to this approach, there are therefore two great organizing dimensions in society—redistribution and the market—and the relative strength of these two social organizing factors compared to each other is what determines the modern social formation. The effect produced by the two dimensions on inequality and the process of social reproduction should not be seen as a dichotomous “either-or” relation in which both exclude each other, but as a continuous, bipolar axis, with the Anglo-Saxon countries and their determining market mechanisms (where redistribution only plays a small influencing role) at one extreme and the decisively redistributive societies at the other. In a developed European welfare state, such as Sweden, the proportion is probably about one-third redistribution and two-thirds market. At the beginning of the 1980s, the ratio was about one-third market and two-thirds redistribution in Hungary, while in the Soviet Union it must have been about 90 percent redistribution and 10 percent (black) market. As such, regime change can be interpreted as a proportional shift of the structural mechanisms. The effect of ­regime change in Hungary can thus be described in terms of the changing impact of redistribution on social inequality, which decreased from about 70 percent to West-European levels of 30 percent, and a growing share of the market in the formation of structural terms/relations from around 30 percent to 70 percent. This approach to analyzing the transitional period can be directed towards where we are right now in the process of the proportional shift between redistribution and the market, and to where we will end up in the course of the stabilization of structural relations. The following hypothesis can be formulated: because of the historical definition of social development, the need of the population for extensive provision by the state, the insistence on social achievements as “established rights” supplied by the provident socialist state, and comparisons between the situation of post-socialist countries and WestEuropean ones, the “result” will likely resemble the structural relations of a peripheral European welfare state, rather than those of a liberal country. In studying inequality, Manchin and Szelényi (1987) stated that its main source in capitalist societies is the market and that it can only be reduced through redistribution. On the other hand, in Soviet-type societies it is redistribution that bears the greater responsibility for inequality, while the market

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has a reducing effect (Manchin and Szelényi, 1987). This leads to the general conclusion that the main source of inequality will be that which plays a dominant role in the structural mechanisms, while the other plays an inequalitybalancing role. 5

Structural Distortions in Hungarian Society

The first decade of regime change was a success story in Hungary. Nevertheless, the majority of the population did not feel that this was the case because it went hand-in-hand with a severe economic and social crisis, as well as unfounded expectations. Given that regime change was preceded by a period of reform socialism, the transition took place peacefully through compromises between the different intellectual fractions. Mutatis mutandis, it could be argued that this was a time when the intellectuals gained power, as predicted in the early 1970s by Szelényi and Konrad (1989). At the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, an approach was set out in German social history that distinguished two major fractions of the bourgeoisie: the profit-oriented entrepreneur Besitzbürgertum and the value-oriented intellectuals Bildungsbürgertum (see Kolosi, 1991). Since the proprietary bourgeoisie could only survive in vestigial form in socialism, regime change was achieved through a compromise between the different groups of the educated bourgeoisie. The only exceptions were the former gdr, where change was led by German big capital, and a number of other European socialist countries, due to the varying strength, size and interests of the emigrant entrepreneur strata. In these countries, however, the sharp opposition between loyal and oppositionist intellectuals weakened the chances of such a compromise. The educated bourgeoisie’s access to power has had far-reaching consequences in two respects. On the one hand, although the intellectuals took the move to a market economy for granted in all sectors where they did not have a direct interest, they held it back in those sectors where education and qualifications were required, e.g., in education (especially in higher education), healthcare, culture, science and the public administration. On the other hand, in social processes, the criterion of usefulness was de-emphasized and public life was defined by value conflicts and ideological disputes. While the Antall government sought to create a national entrepreneurial stratum and to this end initiated a process of institutionalized privatization (the region’s most successful experiment of its type), the Horn government preferred to attract ­foreign capital. This, in turn, resulted in economic austerity and very high ­inflation, which forced the national entrepreneurs to concentrate even more on surviving and strengthening their own economies.

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In the 1990s, democratic institutions and a private ownership-based market economy were very quickly established, allowing a stable social hierarchy to take hold (Kolosi, 2000). However, the low employment rate due to the ­economic crisis, the excessive power of intellectuals, the weakness of the ­entrepreneurial middle strata, the smallness of “big” capital compared to the strength of international capital, and the over-proliferation of ideological and value debates ​​had already set in motion the deepening social and political drift of the 2000s. This was followed by the false welfare regime change and heavy indebtedness, which resulted in a significant economic downturn that was only somewhat compensated by European integration. Therefore, Hungary, once the “best student” of the regime change era, was pushed to the back benches as one of the region’s more impoverished countries. The government tha t came to power in 2010 correctly identified most of these problems and then, given the unlimited power of its two-thirds majority and a completely disintegrated opposition, introduced solutions that were not calculated to benefit the country, but to secure the government’s own power privileges. With the catchword of elite change, the new government sought to set up a servile clientele both in the economy and in politics. The government did not seek any co m promise with the proprietary middle classes that had emerged in the previous 20 years, but sought to create a clientelist capitalist stratum that would be beholden to it.2 It restricted democratic control, weakened market economy aspirations through state interference and, responding adeptly to the encroachments and mistakes of the European Union, used the catchword of national sovereignty to make European interventions difficult, all while trying to limit independent foreign investment. All these social and political processes assumed a fundamental distortion of social structures. Already at the beginning of the 2000s, Hungary had a very small upper middle c lass and a very large proportion of impoverished people, a so-called underclass (Table 8.1). This distortion was further reinforced by the economic crisis of the 2000s and the political misguidance of recent years. In the other Visegrád countries, the share of the upper middle class converged with that of Western-European countries over this 10-year period (no comparative data was available for three of the 15 “old” EU Member States). In  Hungary, the already low rate at the turn of the millennium continued to  ­deteriorate further. In addition, in Hungary this stratum contains a high ­proportion of public employees and a very low proportion of groups with

2 This has interrupted the development of Hungary’s autonomous entrepreneurial strata and led to the era of “capitalists appointed by politicians.” See Kolosi and Szelényi (2010).

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Table 8.1  Hungary’s social structure in comparison (%), 2002

2002

2012

HU CZ, PL, SK EU 12a HU CZ, PL, SK EU 12 Elite and intellectuals Upper middle class Unskilled workers, impoverished Underclass Unskilled workers, impoverished Underclass

24

27

36

22

29

35

45

50

43

41

46

44

31

23

21

37

25

21

a All then-EU member states except Austria, Luxembourg and Greece. For more details, see Kolosi and Pósch (2014) Source: Author’s own calculations based on data from eurostat and ákos huszár (2013)

s­ ignificant capital strength. It is no coincidence that not even the wealthiest Hungarian capitalists can be found in any of the various international rankings, and that only 45 to 50 of the top 200 Hungarian companies are majority-owned by private (Hungarian) individuals. And even amongst these individuals, there is a significant number who owe their wealth to political connections. At the other end of the social hierarchy, however, the already very high proportion of people living in poverty, the underclass, has further expanded (­Table 8.2). In comparison, the growth of this group in the other Visegrád countries has been moderate, while in Western European countries, the proportion of people living in poverty is about 15 percentage points lower. (For completeness’s sake, it should be mentioned that both the data from the Hungarian Central Statistics Office and from the tárki Social Research Institute show that between 2012 and 2014, income poverty and the proportion of people at risk of material deprivation had somehow decreased.) We know that income inequality naturally increased in the wake of regime change and the emergence of a market economy, and that over the last twenty years, inequality has fluctuated to a greater extent than during the socialist period, in line with the cycles of economic crises and growth. Nevertheless, Hungary’s income inequality corresponds to the EU average while income poverty is not too high either.

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EU 28 CZ Gini coefficient Income quintile share ratio (income of top 20% compared to income of bottom 20%) At risk of poverty (household income is below 60% of the national median) Severely materially deprived (experience 3 of 9 deprivation items)

SK

PL

HU

30.9 5.2

25.1 3.5

26.1 3.9

30.8 4.9

27.9 4.2

17.2

9.7

12.6

17.0

14.6

18.6

16.5

22.2

22.2

39.6

Source: eurostat and silc

Income inequality in Hungary essentially corresponds to the European average, and the situation is similar in the case of income poverty (people who live on less than 60 percent of the median national income). Among the Visegrád countries, inequality is lower in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but higher in Poland (where, in essence, it corresponds to the European average). The situation is more complex regarding people who are at risk of material deprivation. Eurostat, the European Statistical Office, has identified nine deprivation items, in addition to income poverty and in-work poverty, and if at least three of these apply, a household is deemed to suffer from material deprivation. Based on this rate, Hungary is considerably less well off than the European average, though this is not primarily due to any “objective” factors, but rather due to two “subjective” ones. 76 percent of Hungarians stated that they were unable to unexpected expenses, while 60 percent stated that, for financial reasons, they were unable to take at least a weeklong vacation (Table 8.3). Consequently, the structure of Hungarian society is not only distorted by income inequality and income poverty, but also by low average living standards and the large number of people experiencing poverty, who lag behind in terms of their subjective living conditions and quality of life. The vast majority of people experiencing poverty are uneducated workers whose position in the labor market is highly disadvantageous. According to János Köllő (2014), uneducated workers in Scandinavian countries (for example in Norway) have better chances thanks to well-established institutional systems of adult education, informal learning and civil integration. In Southern Europe (for example in Italy), the large number of small family businesses

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Table 8.3  Material deprivation indicators in comparison, 2014

EU 28 CZ Unable to cover unexpected expenses Cannot afford a weeklong vocation Cannot afford to pay rent, mortgage or utility bills Cannot afford buy meat or fish every second day Cannot afford to heat home properly Cannot afford a washing machine Cannot afford a color TV Cannot afford a phone Cannot afford a car

SK

PL

HU

38.9 36.9 12.8

40.8 37.3 6.1

38.9 48.8 8.3

48.6 52.6 15.4

76.1 59.8 24.9

9.5

12.8

21.5

11.2

27.3

10.2 1.1 0.4 0.6 8.4

6.1 0.4 0.2 0.3 9.4

6.1 0.9 0.4 1.3 14.3

9.0 0.5 0.6 0.5 8.9

11.2 0.9 0.3 1.7 23.9

Source: (eurostat)

creates opportunities for unskilled workers to integrate into the labor market. Neither of these models applies in Hungary, which has an education system based on social origins that is one of the most discriminatory in Europe, so that underclass positions are to a large extent passed from generation to generation. Csapó et al. (2014), based on the pisa education data, concluded that the correlation between school performance and family background in Hungary is the 6th highest among the 27 oecd countries. The destruction of the education system in the past few years (nationalization and centralization along the same patterns, limiting the freedom of education, reducing the number of places in grammar schools and higher education, and lowering the compulsory school-leaving age) have certainly aggravated the problem and contributed to the material deprivation experienced by one third of the population. This is due to an essentially 19th century approach that subjects education and the education system to the momentary needs of the labor market. As a result, the most serious distortion of the Hungarian social structure is the smallness and weakness of the upper middle class (the entrepreneurial layer in particular) and the large number of people experiencing impoverishment and hopelessness. This distorted social structure is complemented by distortions of the value structure. While modernization effects are fundamental for some groups in the labor market, the majority exhibits patterns of Eastern European behavior.

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The research conducted by tárki presents a picture of a society that is largely conflictual, lacking in trust and insensitive towards tolerance (see Tóth, 2010; Keller, 2014). There are many indications suggesting that this polarized value structure is strongly linked to existing differences in the structure of society. The high levels of state redistribution, and the massive deceptions associated with it, paint an image of an infantile society where the nationalist aspirations of the past few years have been met with the unrealistic political attempt of left-wing intellectuals to identify inequality as the primary cause of the troubles. The failure over the course of the past 25 years to establish the legitimacy of the competitive market economy is a fundamental problem (Kolosi and Tóth, 2012). The distortions of the value structure in turn reinforce the distortions of the social structure. Led by those who depend on the state for patronage, the lower middle classes and people living in material deprivation increasingly support the government’s attempts to build a strong state, and regard all kinds of entrepreneurial success and wealth with suspicion. While roughly a quarter of the population lives as real EU citizens, in European living conditions, the social activities of the vast majority consist of nothing more than the daily struggle for survival and “proletarian envy,” which emerged within the framework of socialism. References Andorka, Rudolf (1982). A társadalmi mobilitás változásai Magyarországon [Changes in Social Mobility in Hungary]. Budapest, Hungary: Gondolat. Andorka, Rudolf, and Hedvig Lehmann (1996). “Az átmenet politikai következményei” [Political consequences of the Transformation]. In Rudolf Andorka, Tamás Kolosi and György Vukovich (eds.). Társadalmi Riport 1996. Budapest, Hungary: TÁRKI, 501–527. Andorka, Rudolf, and Zsolt Spéder (1996). “Szegénység” [Poverty]. In Endre Sík and István György Tóth (eds.), Társadalmi Páternoszter. Budapest, Hungary: BKE-TARKI, 33–48. Böröcz, József, and Ákos Róna-Tas (1995). “Small Leap Forward: Emergence of New Economic Elites.” Theory and Society, 24(5), 751–781, doi:10.1007/BF00993405. Bourdieu, Pierre, and James S. Coleman (1977). “Cultural Reproduction and Social ­Reproduction.” In Jerome Karabel and A.H. Halsey (eds.), Power and Ideology in Education. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, and James S. Coleman (eds.) (1991). Social Theory for a Changing Society. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

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­ ungary.” In Kalleberg, Arne L. (ed.), Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, H Volume 8. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 253–278. Szelényi, Iván, and Balázs Szelényi (1994). “Why Socialism Failed: Toward a Theory System Breakdown—Causes of Disintegration of European State Socialism.” Theory and Society, Vol. 23(2), 211–231. Széman, Zsuzsa (1996). Az időskorú népesség helyzetének változása. [Changes in the Social Position of Old People]. Budapest, Hungary: ELTE. Széman, Zsuzsa (1990). “Éheznek az idősek? Az idősek elszegényedése 1987–89” [Are Old People Starving? The Pauperisation of the Elderly 1987–89]. Esély 2(6), 47–55. Tóth, István György (2010). “A társadalmi kohézió elemei: bizalom, normakövetés, igazságérzet és felelősségérzet—lennének…” [The Elements of Social Cohesion Should Be Trust, Norm Tracking, Justice and a Sense of Responsibility…]. In Tamás Kolosi and István György Tóth (eds.), Társadalmi Riport 2010. Budapest, Hungary: TÁRKI, 254–287. Treiman, Donald J. (1970). “Industrialisation and Social Stratification.” In Edward O. Laumann (ed.), Social Stratification: Research and Theory for the 1970s. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merril. Utasi, Ágnes (1984). “Életstílus-csoportok, fogyasztási preferenciák” [Lifestyle Groups, Preferences in Consumption]. Rétegződés-modell vizsgálat v. Budapest, Hungary: Társadalomtudományi Intézet. Walder, Andrew G. (1996). “Markets and Inequality in Transitional Economies: Toward Testable Theories.” American Journal of Sociology, 101(4), 1060–1073. Walder, Andrew G. (1992). “Property Rights and Stratification in Socialist Redistributive Economies.” American Sociological Review, 57(4), 524–539. Weber, Max (1978). Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wright, Erik Olin (1985). Classes. London, UK: New Left Books. Wright, Erik Olin, and Bill Martin. 1987. “The Transformation of the American Class Structure, 1960–1980.” American Journal of Sociology, 93(1), 1–29.

Chapter 9

The Ouvrierist Szelényi and the Missing Sociology of Labor David Ost Iván Szelényi has never written that much about workers. Those interested in understanding the working class either in state-socialist or in capitalist societies don’t regularly turn to Szelényi for enlightenment. Szelényi is, instead, widely known first of all as a theorist of elites. Virtually all his works are aimed at examining the social structure at the top: the mechanisms through which those who are there try to stay there, and the strategies that contenders use to try to get there. From the very beginning, he identified intellectuals, in the state-socialist system, as constituting an elite, a group aiming towards “class power” for itself, which is why he is also known as a theorist of intellectuals. And because his original research focused on patterns of inequality in cities, he is also recognized as an urban sociologist. And yet one can make a strong case that his entire project, the forays into his various topics, is inspired precisely by his concern for workers. Listen to how Szelényi described his work in his earliest English-language publications. In his preface to The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, Szelényi placed workers at the center of his focus. Why did he and George Konrad write the book? Because we became convinced … that Eastern European socialism has produced a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working class, and that under the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ it is actually the workers who make up the most underprivileged class. konrad and szelényi, 1978, p. xiii

Their aim? To “examine the functioning of the Eastern European social system from the point of view of the oppressed” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1978, pp. xiii–xiv). The same theme returns at the end of the book: “in every single area of economic policy the rationality of redistribution, as formulated by expert intellectuals, goes against the interests of the working class” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1978, p. 230).

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In his first book on state-socialist cities, he describes how he became a critical sociologist, rather than just an empirical one. He and Konrad had conducted a survey about who was actually living in the new housing estates built and subsidized by the state, and when they looked at the results, “we just could not believe our eyes” (Szelényi, 1983, p. 6). They figured that in a socialist country it would be workers getting the flats, but the figures clearly showed that it was “mainly the middle class” who were the beneficiaries (Szelényi, 1983, p. 6). It was upon discovering that “state housing was being allocated to the higher income groups and not to the proletariat” that he decided to study just who the elites were and how they were reproducing their own privileges (Szelényi, 1983, p. 6). But Szelényi was not just intrigued or disappointed with the empirical findings. Rather, they struck at the core of his political beliefs. And those beliefs also center on the working class. Szelényi has never been a supporter simply of state aid for workers. What drives him instead is a vision of workers’ self-­ empowerment. He has made this abundantly clear in multiple passages throughout his key works. He and Konrad were not just trying to document inequality, but to “contribute to the theory of a new, self-managing socialism— a ‘free association of direct producers,’ rather than the class rule of intellectuals organized around the redistributive planning process” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1978, p. xvi). It is the “self-determination of the associated producers” that Szelényi sees as central (Konrad and Szelényi, 1978, p. xvi). Workers may not be getting the new housing, but the real problem they face is that they are not allowed to decide for themselves how to lead their lives. They can’t quit state work and do artisanal labor instead. They can’t join together in real, self-governed cooperatives. They can’t speak out freely in workplace or trade union meetings. They can’t go and sell their labor abroad. In fact, virtually every complaint Szelényi has ever lodged against state socialism, or capitalism, is a complaint about how it prevents workers and other non-elites from determining their own lives free of elite control. When he makes his surprising pleas for market mechanisms to be introduced into state socialism, they, too, are presented simply as ways to counteract the domineering power of the state, and to allow workers some modicum of space to decide for themselves how to live their lives. Szelényi studies elites, but what comes out on every page of his works is his loathing of elites. Szelényi studies intellectuals, but everywhere we see his distrust of intellectuals. Szelényi does not study the working class, but it is his promotion of the working class, his belief that workers can and should “self-manage” and “self-govern” their own lives, that lies at the heart of all his work. Surprising as it is for a scholar known

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chiefly as a theorist of elites, Szelényi can, in fact, best be described as an “ouvrierist”—a radical who believes that the only just, socialist society is one led and administered by workers, not politicized intellectuals. Instead of the parties and bureaucracies who assert their expert, professional or scientific authority, workers should run things themselves. Szelényi used to call himself a socialist and a Marxist. He described his book Urban Inequalities under State Socialism as “a socialist critique of existing socialism” (Szelényi, 1983, p. 11). And he characterized The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power as a “Marxist, historical-materialist critique of Marxism” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1978, p. xvi). When he talks of the future he envisages, however, it’s clear that Szelényi follows a different tradition: that of anarchosyndicalism, of workers’ power. Szelényi speaks of Marx, of Weber, of Trotsky and Djilas. But the theorist he most resembles is Jan Machajski, the PolishRussian radical from the turn of the last century, who sought a revolutionary transformation of society made by and for workers, and considered intel­ lectuals to be the workers’ greatest threat. Wikipedia’s opening line about ­Machajski—a “revolutionary whose methodology drew from both anarchism and Marxism while criticizing both as being products of the intelligentsia”— could characterize Szelényi as well (“Jan Wacław Machajski,” n.d.).1 A radical who believes that working people should and can govern themselves, and who rails against socialist intellectuals—whether they be orthodox Marxists or members of the modernizing socialist New Class, insisting that only they have the knowledge to make the world a better place—such a radical is an ouvrierist, and that is what Szelényi is. No wonder his early writings were such an inspiration to left-wing critics of state socialism in the West, such as myself. And yet this most “workerist” of scholars studying Eastern Europe has, in fact, written quite little about workers. In part this is explained by Szelényi’s own habitus: a theorist interested in class and stratification, working in academic sociological departments his entire life. He trained as an empirical sociologist, not an industrial sociologist or ethnographer. He has never been an activist, though his prose often sounds as if he wishes he were one. Perhaps the greatest irony is that this theorist so committed to workerism and so skeptical of intellectuals is himself probably the greatest intellectual of Central E ­ uropean 1 The best accounts in English are Shatz (1989) and Kennedy (1992). Among contemporary social scientists, Szelényi’s anti-elite workerism perhaps most resembles the approach of James C. Scott, who has focused on Southeast Asia and is characterized on his Wikipedia page as “a comparative scholar of agrarian and non-state societies, subaltern politics, and anarchism” (“James C. Scott,” n.d.) Scott writes mostly of non-elites, while Szelényi focuses on elites, but each could gain from each other’s work; the rest of us fortunately have both to rely on.

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social science. He enjoys summarizing centuries of history and engaging in complex and arcane theoretical debates about the subtleties of class analysis. Perhaps no sociologist has interrogated his own work so consistently and energetically. He has always worked collaboratively, and in line with this ethos has been exceedingly generous to his students. The one constant in his work is his interest in the big picture, and his simultaneous painstaking attention to empirical detail (here his graduate student collaborators have helped enormously). But all the detail concerns those at the top, those who rise and fall, those who dominate and how they do it. No one can do everything, of course. Szelényi is concerned with workers and with outcasts, or the “underclass”—the latter is the subject of his most significant work on non-elites, a monograph on the evolution of Roma exclusion (see Ladányi and Szelényi, 2006)—but the most urgent question for him has been how the proudly proclaimed efforts to empower workers have nevertheless reproduced their continued subjugation. He never charges betrayal, and he doesn’t think that socialist leaders sought to hoodwink the workers. His work is distinguished by its insistence on taking the words and ethos of leftist intellectuals seriously. State socialists didn’t betray the workers, but their rational insistence on building up state power—once they came to see state power as the necessary condition for socialism—led them to reward loyalists over workers. Later, the modernizing technocrats and intellectuals genuinely thought they could do a better job. Dissidents in turn really did believe that total marketization would benefit all people, workers included, but their monetarist ideology led them to construct a postcommunist society in which workers again were the ones to suffer. In fact, it’s precisely his assumption of the good will of leftist intellectuals that has led him to focus on why exactly workers keep getting “screwed,” no matter what the social arrangement. For Szelényi, the eternal questions are “whodunit?” and “how?” It is because he assumes, and has witnessed it too often, that workers will be screwed that he has focused on those who do the screwing. But Szelényi has never met an elite that he likes. He writes about elites because he cares about workers. About workers, however, he has not had much to say. This chapter will first explore what Szelényi has said about workers and what he has missed.2 It will then look at how his concepts can help us make sense of the biggest workers movement that state-socialist society ever experienced, the Solidarity movement in Poland, and ask how, from a Szelényian 2 Although Szelényi has almost always written with co-authors, but always with different ­co-authors, this text will refer only to Szelényi as the author of these many works, so that we can see the continuities and breaks in the evolution of his thinking.

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­ erspective, we can understand perhaps the biggest riddle of all: how this p ­Polish workers movement, which was supposed to be interested in governing itself, could end up promoting the intellectuals’ program of capitalist ­restoration—what Szelényi has called the “second Bildungsbürgertum” (Eyal, Szelényi and Townsley, 1998)—while still remaining a movement of the working class. In place of Szelényi’s “New Class,” this chapter will highlight the “new working class,” and show why, on its own, it supported the same program as the intellectuals, even though it ended up hurting most members of that same working class. 1

Szelényi on Workers

Szelényi hasn’t said much about workers. But what has he said? About the early state-socialist period, Szelényi has claimed in The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power that despite their protestations to the contrary, the socialist founders did not build a system in the interests of the working class. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a fraud: workers were “the most underprivileged class” in the state-socialist system. The bureaucracy allowed individual workers into the leadership, and in fact, as he has pointed out, communist parties in power tended to have more workers in their leadership than communist parties without power. But the parties worked on behalf of the intellectuals, not the workers. In a memorable phrase, he called the East European ruling parties “mass parties of the intellectual class and cadre parties of the working class” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1978, p. 179), meaning that most of the party was made up of intellectuals, with workers serving as the window-dressing leadership. Intellectuals joined in order to “pursue their careers undisturbed,” while workers joined (in far lesser numbers) for career advancement—“in order to become an intellectual”—given that a bureaucracy that claimed to be the representative of the working class always needed actual workers as its public face (Konrad and Szelényi, 1978, p. 222). Szelényi has contrasted this with the legal communist parties in places like France and Italy, which he has called “mass parties of the working class and cadre parties of the intellectuals”: workers constituted the bulk of the membership, but intellectuals played an outsized role in party leadership (Konrad and Szelényi, 1978, p. 179). Szelényi (1987) has summarized his initial views on early state socialism most clearly in a later text where he stated that a “central thesis” of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power “was that the archenemies of state socialism are the cadre and the workers. The greatest lie in history was the pretension of the Stalinist bureaucracy that it exercised the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’” (p. 132).

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Actually, it would be more correct to say that Szelényi considered the intelligentsia and the working class the real “archenemies,” since not only were workers found among the cadre, but sometimes the bureaucracy genuinely reached out to workers. New Class intellectuals, however, in Szelényi’s view, had nothing in common with the working class, and sought no working class allies because they saw themselves as rationalizers and modernizers of the socialist project. Whereas the early bureaucracy recognized it needed to make good on its working-class aspirations, the New Class considered itself simply the best product of socialist development. Thanks to its vast knowledge and its planning abilities, it didn’t need the working class; on the contrary, it would help and enlighten the working class. If left to exercise its power it would, through rational redistribution, realize socialist principles that by definition benefit the working class. The old bureaucracy would never have embraced such a worldview. And in fact, in Szelényi’s first reassessment of his own work, “The Prospects and Limits of the East European New Class Project” (1987), he argued that the bureaucracy soon reached out to the working class in an effort to marginalize the New Class intelligentsia and its power-grabbing project. This is where Szelényi first introduced the working class as a player, if only a bit player. In this essay from 1987, Szelényi told us that the New Class onslaught was actually at its height before he and Konrad finished their book more than 10 years ­earlier, and that it was then already in decline due to a counterassault by the bureaucracy, which was pushing for an alliance with the working class. Szelényi has presented this as a kind of faux-ouvrierist effort by the bureaucracy to beat back the New Class project, but it was only partly faux, since the ruling parties did make concessions and improved workers’ conditions, for example by allowing some market opportunities for autonomous production in Hungary (the kind that Szelényi had always supported), or by offering wage hikes and supply improvements in Czechoslovakia. Workers here were only secondtier players, used by the bureaucracy to counter the intelligentsia, but they thus acquired some real agency, which Szelényi saw as a potential asset. Actually, Szelényi has been unclear as to whether workers were the ones to benefit from these reforms. This brings us to a problem that, as we shall see again later, has continually plagued Szelényi’s discussions of the working class: anytime individual workers make or gain any improvement in their position, they seem to stop being workers and become something else. The real consequence of the faux-ouvrierist pushback by the Party against the intelligentsia, according to Szelényi, was that it created a new social group, namely the “petty bourgeoisie.” These were the farmers selling goods from their family plots and greenhouses, and the workers fixing cars and TVs after hours. The first might

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be seen as agricultural workers, the second as industrial workers, and indeed, as Szelényi has noted, most of them were “moonlighters” and thus continued being workers during the day. But Szelényi has mostly conceptualized them as constituting a new petty bourgeoisie, which he would have liked to see making an alliance with the working class. It is just such an “alliance of popular forces […] linking the working class and the new petty bourgeoisie” that would be “the most attractive to me” (Szelényi, 1987, p. 138). Szelényi did not say what this would look like, and he immediately went on to note that he thought this to be the least likely outcome, since it would run against the interests of both the bureaucracy and the New Class. He claimed that reducing the bureaucracy’s power in the workplace would “lead to worker control of enterprises” (Szelényi, 1987, p. 138). But he also noted that the reforms that created the petty bourgeoisie simultaneously divided the working class, making it unclear which groups he was talking about. This piece from 1987 offered Szelényi’s most sustained comments about workers in the class structure of state socialism and their potential role in post-­ socialism. But Szelényi, while still maintaining his support for workers above all—he still sounded like a real ouvrierist here, railing against the classes and class alliances that held them back—nevertheless still resisted any urge to analyze or interrogate the working class in depth. His later work contained fewer discussions of the working class, probably because he recognized how much the working class was being eclipsed in the late state-socialist period. (The Polish sociologist Jan Malanowski (1984), writing just after the formation of Solidarity, noted how even self-proclaimed Marxists had been arguing for more inequality and an end to lingering labor privileges, which of course fits well with Szelényi’s characterization of the New Class.) In Socialist Entrepreneurs from 1988, Szelényi hypothesized that the agriculturally-based “petty bourgeoisie” he first discussed in “The Prospects and Limits” was poised to become a prominent if not dominant class, and that having two dominant classes—the Party bureaucracy and the socialist entrepreneurs—rather than just one would be better for workers. They would then be able to “play off” the two masters against each other, though he did not make it clear how exactly this would work. The fascination with the emerging petty bourgeoisie was in any case shortlived, since the next year brought the toppling of the system and the restoration of capitalism, a scenario he had not previously pondered in earnest. Admirably empirically-minded as always, Szelényi immediately set to work on a new research project, trying to figure out the nature and origin of the emerging elite. This culminated in Making Capitalism Without Capitalists from 1998, in which he argued that the postcommunist ruling “coalition” (he does not call it

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a class) “is comprised of technocrats and managers—many of whom held senior positions in communist institutions—and former dissident intellectuals who contributed to the fall of communist regimes at the end of the 1980s” (Eyal et al., 1998, p. 33). The New Class had triumphed after all—not as the redistributors of state socialism, but as intellectuals pushing for modernization who by now identified with full capitalism. Szelényi has called this the “second Bildungsbürgertum.” The first came in the 19th century, when Central European intellectuals joined with civil servants in a grand modernization project, and now, in the aftermath of state socialism, intellectuals were at it again, using their cultural capital to build up a new capitalist system. Whereas all of Szelényi’s previous works discussed the nature of the system that he was analyzing, this one focuses almost entirely on the new system’s origins: the “‘whodunit?’ question,” as he put it (Eyal et al., 1998, p. 160). This leads to a host of problems. Capitalists are absent here, since the “socialist entrepreneurs” that he championed only a year before the collapse of the system found themselves eclipsed in 1989, and no other entrepreneurs were present. Moreover, as the technocrats and old dissidents built up a new capitalism, they ­initially favored international capital over domestic capital. Szelényi acknowledges that economic capital was making a comeback; capitalism might be built without capitalists, but in the end it does generate them. Nevertheless, regarding the nature of this existing capitalism and on how the system works, he said rather little in Making Capitalism Without Capitalists. This leads us to the biggest omission of them all: there was nothing here about workers. Despite their key role in the Polish transformation, and their crucial support and acceptance for transformation everywhere else; despite their centrality for capitalism; and despite their role as the social group to whom Szelényi has always been most committed, whose fate and well-being he had always insisted were central to the assessment of any social system. The index does offer an entry for “working class,” directing readers to a total of one page, a recount of Szelényi’s past ruminations on the social structure of state socialism. Otherwise, workers were simply absent. It is this silence that earned Szelényi a scolding from his friend and fellow sociologist of state socialism, Michael Burawoy. In a blistering attack, Burawoy (2001) accused Szelényi of having “abandoned class altogether” (p. 1100). “In a paradoxical twist of history, it is as if it is not the beginning but the end of socialism that spells the end of classes!” (Burawoy, 2001, p. 1103). Whereas in The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, Szelényi had “approached state socialism from the standpoint of its exploited working class,” Making Capitalism Without Capitalists, Burawoy (2001) argued, shifted “away from class relations to the ‘pacting’ of elites”

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(p. 1105). Burawoy (2001) emphasized that “Capitalism may be made without capitalists but certainly not without workers—a small fraction upgraded, the majority disconsolate and degraded” (p. 1116). But Making Capitalism Without Capitalists “exclude[d] subordinate classes, which in effect become the bewildered—silent and silenced—spectators of transformations that engulf them” (Burawoy, 2001, p. 1107). Burawoy was being somewhat unfair here. Szelényi clearly remained motivated by class inequality, this time following the end of state socialism, and since then he has turned his attention to poverty in the new capitalism, the emergence of a Roma underclass, and occasionally discussed the conditions facing workers.3 Still, for an avowed ouvrierist, and following decades of work and thought motivated by a desire to understand and do something about the exploitation and life-chances of the working class, this waning interest in workers is a curious denouement. One wishes for an overall assessment today. That is, it would be good to know what Szelényi thinks now about state socialism and its relationship to workers. How does this period compare to today’s capitalism? Western leftists who used to malign postwar liberalism and social democracy now tend to be nostalgic about this past, and some workers and leftist intellectuals in postcommunist Eastern Europe also find themselves thinking positively about aspects of the state-socialist past. So how would Szelényi reassess the past? For workers, was state socialism perhaps not so bad? The bureaucracy did, after all, defend workers against the New Class. And the belated post-1989 triumph of that class has indeed devastated a significant number of workers, while shaking up the working class as a whole.4 I am not advocating any kind of cheery reassessment of the state-socialist past, and I disassociate myself from some current attempts to blur that past by cherrypicking only its positive features (cf. Kotz, 2018). Still, one of the distinctive appeals of Szelényi’s work has been his persistent interrogation of social systems, his candid assessment of who benefits and who loses, and how. In the past, he has refrained from observations that put state socialism in a favorable light, even when he came close to doing so. When contrasting the countervailing powers that workers were able to exercise in state socialism with their systemic subordination in capitalist countries (though here he referred only to 3 On the underclass, see Ladányi and Szelényi (2006); for more on poverty, but with some attention to workers’ conditions, see Szelényi (2013). 4 Elizabeth Dunn’s (2004) account of how new capitalist management created a new and fragmented working class in Poland remains perhaps the best account of the transformation from below.

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what the Varieties of Capitalism school would define as liberal market ­economies), he noted that a case can be made that state socialism is a “better system than capitalism,” only to cut short his answer by stating that he was “reluctant to offer such an apologia” (Szelényi, 1988, p. 9). Still, Szelényi began his oeuvre with an interest in workers. What, then, do we learn about workers in comparative social systems from the decades-long trajectory of social transformation in Eastern Europe? 2

Differentiation within the Working Class

For a sociologist who so carefully identified and differentiated specific fractions of the elite, Szelényi has been rather careless in his discussions of the working class. We know he supports the working class, and that he rejected both the Party and the New Class for profiting on the backs of the working class. But who exactly are the working class? We know he roots for them. But in the end, what does that mean? For whom exactly is he rooting? On the one hand, it would seem to be blue collar workers in the factories. Already in his early work, he drew a sharp distinction between these and “clerical workers,” whom he treated as members, or at least clients, of the New Class. Thus, he spoke of “an overblown administrative apparatus […] which often counts one clerical employee for every two workers,” and noted dismissively that many such “office workers have little to do now but take coffee breaks” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1978, p. 227, 228). Yet not even all industrial laborers counted. Those who joined the Party, and stayed there, were excluded from the favored working class. When Szelényi spoke of ruling communist parties as “mass parties of the intellectual class and cadre parties of the working class,” he meant that workers who became party officials thereby became intellectuals, in the sense that they entered the ranks of New Class redistributors and enjoyed the benefits thereof (Konrad and Szelényi, 1978, p. 178, 222). And Szelényi also excluded from the working class those workers who became professionals, thanks to the training and education they received from early state socialism, which offered preferential treatment for non-elites. These exclusions make some sense. Workers who become apparatchiks are like those from working class backgrounds in capitalist societies who become cops: their new positions gave them such a vastly different role in the class hierarchy, and such a different class habitus, that a clear demarcation between past and present appears obvious. As for the new skilled workers and professionals (in Russian, vydvizhentsy, or those that have moved up: the workers and peasants who, through the educational opportunities offered to non-elites by

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early state socialism, advanced into professional positions), while they may have remained loyal to much of their old working-class habitus, their training indeed elevated them into a new class position. And since the vydvizhentsy process itself had largely ended by the 1970s, it was often their children, and not those still in the working class, who were the beneficiaries of the New Class redistribution process that Szelényi dissected in The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. Nevertheless, sometimes it seems as if Szelényi seeks to exclude from the working class any workers who gain any training or education, and thereby gain some advancement over their previous situation. Szelényi is, of course, always on the side of the most oppressed, but workers who win some gains do not all thereby cease being exploited or lose their working-class position. By hinting that they do, Szelényi ignored the phenomenon of what came to be known as the “new working class,” and, as we shall see below, thereby missed many of the key aspects of the Solidarity movement in Poland. Before we get to that, though, let us return to the matter of clerical workers, a group that was indeed growing in the 1970s. Were they really simply the New Class aspirants that Szelényi described? The real story was rather different. Most clerical workers were, in fact, a marginalized part of the working class— more specifically, the marginalized female part of the working class. The gender aspect is crucial here. Most young men in small cities with large factories (which was where a large part of the growth in clerical labor occurred) had limited regular schooling and then went to trade school, or trained on the job. For years, only men had access to such stable jobs in the factories. But while men were being trained in vocational schools and on the job, women learned cooking and cleaning, at home and at school. This was particularly true in the countryside and in small cities with large factories where there were few other opportunities. In big cities, many women were able to access higher education and become professionals. Elsewhere, however, their only prospects for advancement were factory jobs, from which most women were initially barred, both due to family divisions of labor and to discrimination in education allocation. Becoming clerical workers was therefore a chance for women to join the working class, not the New Class. The change sprang from three sources: the introduction of labor-saving technology in the home, freeing women from the need to full-time manage a household; the increasing aspirations of women; and the rational redistributors of the New Class, committed to modernizing socialism. Thanks to these factors, working-class women without skilled vocational training could finally find good employment as clerical workers. In every single one of the Polish factories where I did research in the early 1990s, employment peaked around

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1980—not because these firms had become more productive (in fact, the dire debt-driven recession had started in 1976), but because the efforts to employ previously unused female labor had increased dramatically in the 1970s. Certainly, not all these new clerical jobs were economically necessary. State socialist systems, which aimed to build factories and turn peasants into workers, have always wasted labor power. Stories of male industrial laborers, idle because of shortages or over-employment until the inevitable “storming” just before the plan was due, are legion in discussions of Soviet-type economies. There can therefore be little doubt that many office workers did indeed take a lot of coffee breaks. Yet to dismiss them essentially as parasites, pushed by the New Class to undercut the real working class, is to miss the gendered aspect of working-class formation, and the growing role of women in the working class. Moreover, far from these being cushy white-collar jobs, over the course of the 1980s, as market ideas became increasingly popular both within the regime and among the political opposition, female office workers found themselves increasingly marginalized. After 1989, these workers quickly became the most vulnerable, as skilled male industrial workers now saw them as a threat to the plant’s market viability. Precisely because they were working-class women without high skills, the male industrial workers producing complex goods wanted to jettison the unskilled labor that they saw as dragging the plant down. The men supported a transition to “hard budget constraints”—that is, to a firm focused on producing goods, not giving people jobs. They believed, not unreasonably, that private owners would enforce such a logic, and that their firms would have a better chance—to be bought out, or to survive prior to sale—if they had already jettisoned the women workers in their midst. Associating clerical workers with the intelligentsia New Class thus prevents us from understanding the nature of and the divisions within the working class. Szelényi’s image of workers in state-socialist society thus comes very much out of the old Marxist imaginary: male industrial laborers distrusting political parties, wary of intellectuals, proudly low-brow in culture, yet somehow interested in governing themselves. Szelényi’s workers are also largely unskilled. So wary is Szelényi of the privileges that education brings that at times he seems ready to eject skilled workers from working-class ranks. This can border on the absurd. In his early work on housing allocation, Szelényi wrote that “Skilled workers are reasonably well represented, but the bulk of the working class is nowhere to be seen. This meant that state housing was being allocated to the higher income groups and not to the proletariat” (Szelényi, 1983, p. 6). In the first sentence, the skilled barely hold onto “working-class” status (that the “bulk” of the working class was denied good housing meant that skilled workers constituted that part of the working class that received it), while in the second the skilled are explicitly distinguished from the “proletariat.” ­Sometimes Szelényi

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d­ erides the letter them as part of the “labor aristocracy,” and sometimes he claimed that their training and education propels them into the New Class ­itself. Workers who embrace anything other than low-brow culture are also suspect. Since state socialism promotes “high-brow upper middle class” ­culture—“Socialist man should read books, listen to music, be dressed like, and behave with his children as doctrinaire left-wing academics do” (Szelényi, 1982, S320)—workers who genuinely have such aspirations also become sus�pect for Szelényi. As today’s east European right-wing populists are wont to say, “real workers” are only those with low-brow housing-block authenticity. In Szelényi’s radical view, only those workers with the fewest resources can do any good for workers. Only they are the real workers. But this misses so much of real working-class history, in which skilled workers led the struggle for trade unions of which the unskilled were then able to take advantage. This doesn’t mean that they had the same interests, or that there weren’t any clashes, but as with social movements more generally, fighting the elites requires resources, and those at the bottom who have the resources open up the way for those who don’t. The bigger problem with Szelényi’s surprisingly orthodox Marxist conception of the working class is that it completely misses the rise, in the late 20th century, of a “new working class.” This concept, quite popular among critical sociologists like Alain Touraine, Serge Mallet, or André Gorz, is entirely absent in Szelényi (cf. Touraine, 1964; Mallet, 1975; Gorz, 1980). Of course, some of the elements of their work were relevant only to late capitalist society, rather than to state-socialist countries long engaged in the process of turning peasants into workers. But by the 1970s some of their themes—a working class more educated than in the classical imagination, a concern not just for higher wages but for humane and autonomous working conditions, an interest in management (the 1973 takeover of the lip watch manufacturing plant in France and the 1972 strike at General Motors’ Lordstown plant were key examples of such new labor struggles)—were also emerging in state-socialist Eastern Europe, and were common typically among the more skilled.5 Many of Solidarity’s leaders came from such a milieu, such as Zbigniew Bujak or Władysław Frasyniuk, both of whom finished technical school and worked as blue-collar laborers before becoming heads of the Warsaw and Wrocław Solidarity chapters,

5 The world-systems theorists Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein (1992) have argued that these new groups, which they defined only vaguely as “key components of the working class and of the intelligentsia” (p. 223), were the chief agents promoting the upheavals of 1968 in the West and of 1989 in Eastern Europe, and for that reason they considered these two upheavals as integrally linked.

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respectively. These workers had ideas, they had drive, and they wanted to humanize their working conditions. They may not have wanted to be workers any longer, but they cannot be described as anything but. The irony is that while Szelényi’s imaginary is very much that of an old working class, his interest in self-management—The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power was intended, he has said, to “be the theory of a new, self-managed socialism—a ‘free association of direct producers’” (Konrad and Szelényi, 1978, p. xvi)—found supporters chiefly among the new and more skilled working class, the very group he suspected of having turned coat and joined the New Class. Rather than write the skilled and aspirational working class out of the ranks of the proletariat, Szelényi should have tried to make better sense of the working class by grappling with its real and growing complexity. In this way, he could also have made sense of Poland’s Solidarity. Whenever Szelényi has written of Solidarity, he has done so with great admiration. But he treats it as too much of a classic “workers movement,” without recognizing the kind of workers it actually included. The ship workers in Gdansk were among the most advanced workers in the country. Among the key strike activists in 1980 were the engineer Andrzej Gwiazda and the historian Bogdan Borusewicz. In his most ­extensive comments about Solidarity, written in 1981 during the height of the Polish crisis, Szelényi insisted that the Party represented the New Class while Solidarity represented labor (Szelényi, 1981). But here he was simply forcing his categories onto reality: the Party lost the support of professionals in Poland starting in 1968, briefly won some of them back with the onset of Gierek in 1971, before losing them again during the tailspin crisis beginning in 1976. A prominent civic group of professionals, calling itself “Experience and the Future,” had already moved decisively towards an oppositionist stance before the rise of Solidarity. Indeed, Szelényi recognized this in his later work. In “The Prospects and Limits,” he acknowledged that “the New Class lost a lot of blood in Poland in March 1968,” and that by 1980, it had alienated intellectuals “probably irreversibly” (Szelényi, 1987, p. 117, 118). The secret of Solidarity, and a key reason for its capitulation to neoliberalism once state socialism ended in 1989, was that it was a movement of a new working class, whose members made an alliance with the intellectuals partly because they agreed with the latter’s call for autonomy and democracy, but also because they objected to the unskilled workers in their ranks, who they believed would hold back the economic modernization they saw as central to their firms’ survival.6 The Party collapsed because it ceased representing any 6 See the fuller discussion in Ost (2005), Chapter 5.

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significant social group, as its total 1989 electoral defeat demonstrated. Solidarity chiefly represented the new working class, which accounted both for its alliance with intellectuals and its hostility to the unskilled. Szelényi might have disparaged “clerical workers” as agents of the New Class, but for Solidarity’s leaders they were the unskilled who had no place in the firm. 3

Lessons of Solidarity

It’s probably best to understand Solidarity as a movement of the new working class seeking to distinguish itself from both the Party and the intellectuals. And yet, Solidarity remains a great puzzle. While it arose in 1980 because workers at the Lenin Shipyards rejected the advice of their intellectual allies to hold off on demanding independent trade unions, this working class movement eventually turned into the vehicle for neoliberal New Class domination after 1989. Can Szelényi’s categories help us understand this evolution? Yes and no. His discussion of symbolic capital and the distinction between class and rank in Making Capitalism Without Capitalists, can help us understand Solidarity’s brilliant success in mobilizing support. Szelényi defines ­symbolic capital as “the facility with which different kinds of capital can be converted into other advantages” (Eyal et al., 1998, p. 21). In other words, symbolic capital appears when individuals or a movement can deploy the resources in their possession to advance and make gains. Solidarity’s brilliance was that it deployed its class logic to carve out independence from the Party, and its rank or status logic to separate itself from the intelligentsia. On the one hand, Solidarity neutralized the Party by appearing simply as the representative of the working class. Szelényi has noted that state socialism originally operated as a “modern rank order,” in which loyalty to the Party (and not wealth or education) served as the key to entry into the elite. In his terms, political capital trumped both economic and cultural capital. But the Party itself had always claimed that loyalty to it only meant loyalty to the working class, and this left it vulnerable to Solidarity’s contestation. For not only had Solidarity demonstrated widespread working-class support through the strikes themselves, but it did its best to keep political or systemic demands off the table. That is, while the demand for an independent union itself clashed with the logic of the system, Solidarity refrained from drawing this conclusion, and tried to reassure the bureaucracy that it sought only to speak for workers, so that the Party’s overall power would not be threatened. Thus it abandoned the term “Free Trade Unions,” the Cold War term used by opposition labor activists prior to Solidarity, in favor of “independent self-governing trade union,” which

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was more in tune with the socialist lexicon. Its leadership sought to marginalize hotheads in favor of moderates. By playing up its working-class and nonpolitical nature, Solidarity sought to neutralize charges that it was just a movement trying to topple socialism. But if it played on its class nature in relation to the Party bureaucracy, it also made status and national appeals to the intelligentsia. Szelényi himself acknowledged that rank logic has long had particular importance in Poland, with its gentry ethos of the intelligentsia valiantly fighting for honor and nation. Solidarity’s achievement was to appropriate such logic to a working-class movement. To do so, it built on Poland’s insurrectionary tradition, in which non-elites, in contrast to Hungary, have always played such a crucial role. That is, Hungary has also had a long legacy of the gentry heroically fighting for the nation. But whereas in Hungary, the gentry had managed to build a powerful country and even a mini-empire by the mid-19th century, in Poland the gentry kept losing. After losing the Polish state itself in 1795, its insurrections against foreign domination were not only beaten militarily, but suffered the ignominy of being sabotaged by Polish peasants, who did not see the gentry as allies. While gentry norms survived defeat and state dismantlement in Hungary following World War I, Poland needed a veteran of the Socialist Party, former labor organizer Józef Piłsudski, to regain independence. Piłsudski then faced a populist nationalist as his main rival, who also tried to mobilize non-elites (as Poles rather than workers). Rank status did not disappear in Poland as a consequence, but instead also became available as a resource for the workers’ movement. The onset of state socialism only strengthened this tendency. The new regime was generally more favorable than others in the region to maintaining status hierarchies from the past. The universities, for example, were hardly purged, and though Marxist-Leninists were quickly made dominant, space opened up to non-Marxist intellectuals relatively soon (see Connelly, 2000; Ost, 2015). The result of these insurrectionary and populist traditions was that intellectuals recognized that non-elite support was essential for realizing their own aims. Hence it was not just the state-socialist bureaucracy that proclaimed the exaltation of the working class, but also the intellectuals. This did not, of course, mean that all individual workers enjoyed such status; the derogatory label of “robol” was often deployed by intellectuals to disparage individual workers as lazy, uncouth boors. But because of the legacy of insurrection and the crucial role played by non-elites in Polish history, there was great respect for the working class when it got involved in grand national struggles. Solidarity took full advantage of this legacy to guard its independence from intellectuals. Therefore, while it was a workers’ movement in relation to the Party, it was a national movement in relation to intellectuals. As such, it ­insisted

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that it was not just a workers’ movement, but a Polish workers’ movement. It defined itself in classic patriotic terms as the guardian of the most cherished national values. In a sense, Solidarity was able to out-intellectualize the intelligentsia. Now workers were the heroic element. Now a workers’ movement became the embodiment of the nation. And the intellectuals fell in love. Note the difference between Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble, his 1977 film about the heroic intellectual fighting the bureaucracy in her effort to discover the truth about the Stalinist past, and his 1981 Man of Iron, lionizing the worker activist and relegating the same intellectual to a supporting role as the new hero’s wife. To summarize, Solidarity deployed a logic of class with the bureaucracy, and a logic of rank with the intelligentsia, and thereby defended its independence from both. Why then did it end up capitulating to what Szelényi would call the “second Bildungsbürgertum,” or the post-1989 campaign of intellectuals for a restoration of capitalism? The reason is that so much of the new working class also desired this. These were the modernizing workers, the ones who saw new opportunities for themselves in a transition to a more high-quality and highskilled production regime. This meant that, just like the economic liberals, they wanted a streamlining of the firm: sacking the lesser-skilled female “clerical workers”; spinning off all the libraries, museums, movie theaters, and other social assets; privatizing and marketizing firm-owned housing (this is far from anything ever proposed by Szelényi, for whom marketization served only as a counterpoint to “rational redistribution,” which is why he also supported redistribution as a counterpoint to the market). This new working class at the helm of Solidarity imagined itself to be the new winners—if only capitalism came fast enough. The Solidarity union leaders themselves opposed unions in the early 1990s. They made sure that unions would not defend the “unskilled,” and saw them as necessary only to make sure that enterprise privatization would proceed without theft (Ost and Weinstein, 1999). Imagining themselves to have long been penalized by state socialism (which did, as Szelényi noted long ago, prevent them not only from organizing on their own behalf, but from taking maximum advantage of their skills by demanding higher wages, working abroad, forming cooperatives, or limiting the employment of “clerical workers”), they now imagined themselves as victors in capitalism (Ost, 2000). Such was their disillusionment with state social�ism that they saw their enemy’s enemy as most definitely their friend. It would take a while before they discovered otherwise, before they learned about capitalism. “Private owners will pay good workers good wages,” they used to say, in cheery anticipation of capitalist restoration. Szelényi’s early works were written when Westerners were said to be “naïve” about really-existing ­socialism, but 1989 revealed the naivety of Easterners vis-à-vis really-existing capitalism.

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Before acknowledging reality, Solidarity’s new working class leaders would comfort themselves with tales that the capitalism they confronted after 1989 wasn’t “really” capitalism, since former communists owned the firms (which Szelényi, in Making Capitalism Without Capitalists, discovered was not, in fact, the case), a discourse that pushed them into the arms of an emerging national right. It took until the mid-2000s before some of them realized that they needed to build up the unions that they themselves had helped to weaken, and that they needed to fight against the market now that the market was allpowerful (Ost, 2009). By this time, however, it was already too late: labor had been marginalized, and the right had succeeded in diverting anger at economic liberalism into anger at political liberalism, setting the stage for the radical right that rules Poland and Hungary today, with considerable working-class support.7 New Class technocrats and former dissidents may have brought capitalism back to Eastern Europe, but they couldn’t have succeeded without strong working-class support—specifically, without strong “new working class” support. It’s because of that support that capitalist restoration did not lead to the class struggles that Szelényi had imagined would and should ensue once the New Class succeeded. So whereas Szelényi always posited the working class as the real threat to the New Class, it was a key part of the working class, in fact, that made a smooth New Class capitalist transformation possible. This happened at a huge cost, paid first by the “clerical workers” and other low-skilled workers, and then by the more skilled who thought they would triumph. But the second Bildungsbürgertum needed this new working class to succeed. Szelényi is as much on the side of workers now as ever. A greater attention to the sociology of the working class, however, could have helped him uncover the contradictions within that class, which not only allowed the elite coalition to play out as it did, but has ensured that workers have still not played the emancipatory role that Szelényi has always hoped for, and even expected. References Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein. “1989, the Continuation of 1968.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 15(2), 221–242. Reprinted in George Katsiaficas (ed.) (2001). After the Fall. New York, NY: Routledge. 7 The Defeat of Solidarity (Ost, 2005) was my attempt to explain the right’s success in turning anger at capitalism into anger at liberalism. See also Kalb and Kalmai (2011) and Ost (2018).

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Burawoy, Michael (2001). “Neoclassical Sociology: From the End of Communism to the End of Classes.” American Journal of Sociology, 106(4), 1099–1120, doi:10.1086/320299. Connelly, John (2000). Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dunn, Elizabeth (2004). Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Eyal, Gil, Iván Szelényi and Eleanor Townsley (1998). Making Capitalism Without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe. London, UK: Verso. Gorz, André (1980). Farewell to the Working Class. Boston. MA: South End, 1980. “James C. Scott” (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 30, 2019, from https://en.wiki pedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott. “Jan Wacław Machajski” (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 11, 2018, from https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Wac%C5%82aw_Machajski. Kalb, Don, and Gabor Kalmai (eds.) (2011). Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Kennedy, Michael D. (1992). “The Alternative in Eastern Europe at Century’s Start: Brzozowski and Machajski on Intellectuals and Socialism.” Theory and Society, 21(5), 735–753. Konrad, George, and Iván Szelényi (1978). The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Kotz, David M. (2018). “Socialist Future in Light of Socialist Past and Capitalist Present.” In John Frederick Bailyn, Dijana Jelaca and Danijela Lugaric (eds.), The Future of Post(Socialism). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Ladányi, János, and Iván Szelényi (2006). Patterns of Exclusion: Constructing Gypsy Ethnicity and the Making of an Underclass in Transitional Societies of Europe. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Malanowski, Jan (1984). “Polish Workers.” International Journal of Sociology, 14(3), 1–117. (Original work published in 1981). Mallet, Serge (1975). Essays on the New Working Class. New York, NY: Telos Press. Ost, David (2009). “The Consequences of Postcommunism: Trade Unions in Eastern Europe’s Future.” East European Politics and Societies, 23(1), 13–33, doi:10.1177/ 0888325408326791. Ost, David (2005). The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ost, David (2000). “Illusory Corporatism in Eastern Europe: Neoliberal Tripartism and Postcommunist Class Identities.” Politics and Society, 28(4), 503–530, doi:10.1177/003 2329200028004004.

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Ost, David (2015). “Stuck in the Past and the Future: Class Analysis in Postcommunist Poland.” East European Politics and Societies, 29(3), 610–624, doi:10.1177/0888325415602058. Ost, David (2018). “Workers and the Radical Right in Poland.” International Labor and Working-Class History, 93, 113–124, doi:10.1017/S0147547917000345. Ost, David, and Marc Weinstein (1999). “Unionists Against Unions: Toward Hierarchical Management in Post-Communist Poland.” East European Politics and Societies, 13(1), 1–33, doi:10.1177/0888325499013001001. Shatz, Marshall (1989). Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia and Socialism. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Szelenyi, Iván (1981). “Comments on the Significance of Class Conflicts in the Current Struggles in Poland (1980–1981).” Angewandte Sozialforschung, 3–4, 305–321. Szelényi, Iván (1982). “The Intelligentsia in the Class Structure of State-Socialist Societies.” American Journal of Sociology, 88, S287–S326. Szelényi, Iván (2013), “Poverty and Social Structure in Transitional Societies: The First Decade of Post-Communism.” Plovdiv, Bulgaria: College of Economics and Administration retrieved April 30, 2019, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ 312056150_Poverty_and_Social_Structure_in_Transitional_Societies_The_first _Decade_of_Post-communism. Szelényi, Iván (1987). “The Prospects and Limits of the East European New Class Project: An Auto-Critical Reflection on The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power.” Politics and Society, 15(2), 103–144, doi:10.1177/003232928701500201. Szelényi, Iván (in collaboration with Róbert Manchin, Pál Juhász, Bálint Magyar and Bill Martin) (1988). Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Szelényi, Iván (1983). Urban Inequalities Under State Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Touraine, Alain (1964). “Management and the Working Class in Western Europe.” Daedalus 93(1), 304–334.

Chapter 10

Auto-critical Reflection on Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions Iván Szelényi I am honored that ten distinguished scholars took my life work seriously enough to find time in their busy schedules to write the wonderful essays published in this volume. In order to remain faithful to my methodological principles I want to focus in a self-critical, self-ironic manner on what I learned from my esteemed colleagues and acknowledge the mistakes I made in my work. 1 Knowledge/Power In his splendid, sophisticated chapter, Gil Eyal offers an appreciative account, but at the same time—a well-deserved—devastating critique of the book I wrote with George Konrad, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. In the first sentence of his chapter, Eyal describes the book as “an interrogation of the social role of knowledge and the men of knowledge,” and while I read this is a compliment, it is, however, followed by serious criticism. Before I address this criticism, let me put my self-irony aside and remind the readers—Gil Eyal mentions this circumstance—that we wrote the book in a sort of self-imposed self-exile, in a cottage that we rented from the parish priest of a Budapest suburb, Csobánka, believing, falsely, that we would remain “clandestine,” hidden away from the eyes of the secret police. The problem was that we were writing the book for ourselves and did not have an audience in mind. If we had had proper academic feedback before we finished the manuscript, the text would have been less impenetrable and we would have had a chance to clarify matters that may have led to misunderstandings. Once I ended up in “real exile” in the West, I made an effort to make the book more accessible to Western readers—in part this was an attempt to locate the book within Western literature, with some of which we were not sufficiently familiar. As Eyal rightly points out, these clarifications—at least to some extent, while clarifying some matters—only further muddled the argument.

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Terminology was a major problem. Already in the book, and in the articles that followed, we used a number of terms to describe the “agents”: intellectuals, intelligentsia, “new class,” public intellectuals and, of course, Bildungsbürgertum. But who were the agents that we really wrote about? Eyal is absolutely right, the book should have been entitled “The intelligentsia on the road to class power.” Well, “intelligentsia” (a term coined in the 1860s as a reflection of the conditions in Russia at that time) as Eyal rightly points out, is similar to “public intellectuals” (popular since 1987 to describe New York intellectuals writing in popular journals, like The New York Review of Books), or the “new class” (I distinguished “different waves” of new class theorizing in my article with Bill Martin, 1988) in that these are historically specific and “space-bound” concepts. It was our fault that we did not make the distinctions between different types much clearer. For us, “intellectual” (men of ideas—to make the terminology even more complicated) was a generic concept that had two genetic types, the “intelligentsia” and the “professionals.” In my reading—I am not sure George Konrad agrees with this—our book is about the “intelligentsia,” hence those “men of ideas”—to use Eyal’s terminology—who want to bring the ­future into the present. The intelligentsia are those “men of ideas,” whose “mission” is to tell society what to do. They are (wo)men who claim to have a teleological vision. Professionals are “technicians,” they cannot tell people what to do, the best (to refer to Max Weber) they may be able to do is to give advice. Hence the intelligentsia “narrows the future,” while professionals “broaden” it, leaving it to ordinary people to choose what future they want—since there are multiple “possible” futures. There were at least two other major errors in the book (and in the papers where I tried to “get it straight”). The very fact that we narrowed the book to “rational redistribution,” or socialism, was—in retrospect—an error. We had a bigger story to tell and I wish we had been familiar with Foucault’s (and Gouldner’s) work at the time we wrote our book. The first sentence of Eyal’s paper alludes to this. This book is primarily not about socialism or Stalinism and reform communism, it is about “power/knowledge,” which in Foucault’s (1970) crispy formulation have an “intimate link.” In a socialist redistributive economy we spotted a specific instance of that “intimate link.” But the big story is that there is no knowledge without a power claim (to put it with Steven Lukes, be it decision-making power, power to set the agenda, and power to eliminate a subject from discussion because it is “immoral”—not PC, fascist, communist, liberal, or illiberal). Is there a chance to avoid the trap of knowledge/power? Well, if professionals use their knowledge to help people to understand that there are alternative futures and alternative courses of action today (this is what I call Socratic irony: I do not give you answers, but I enable you to ask

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questions and you choose your answer—if I do it well, you will not even be able to guess what my answer would be). I am not a preacher, I am an analyst. I do not judge, I understand. Falsification is, of course, possible: I can tell you that you believe in a solution that is not available, or impossible. There are false and untrue statements, but there is never only one true statement. Within the realm of the possible you have to select which is the possible for which you stand. There is a second dangerous concept in the book, and much to my surprise, Eyal did not nail this down: this is the idea of “marginal intellectuals.” To cite Nietzsche via Eyal: “bad air, bad air.” After 40 years, I am not that sure why we added the idea of “marginal intellectuals,” but it sounds suspiciously like “selfaggrandizement,” a sneaky return to Mannheim. Are we, after all, the “socially unattached intellectuals”? Hopefully not, and hopefully all that we were recommending was the role of Socrates, not to give answers, but to add questions… But I am concerned that the term “marginal” almost foreshadows “­dissidents,” the people who in late socialism typically had the only good answers and who incidentally after the fall of communism—for a short while—­ obtained a great deal of power. For a while it almost looked as if the intelligentsia indeed came to power, not by rationalizing redistribution, but by promoting the idea of free markets and liberal democracies as the only ways in which societies can organize themselves. One certainly can be an analyst without being marginal, and marginal intellectuals tend to be advocates rather than analysts. If Eyal had visited me in my self-imposed exile in Csobánka in 1974 and suggested that I forget about intellectuals/intelligentsia etc. etc. and rather write about “fields” and “classificatory struggles,” I certainly would have been receptive. But I am not sure it would have offered me a better research design. Intellectuals as a generic concept, with the intelligentsia and professionals and their genetic variations might not have been a bad idea had we not been stuck on “rational redistribution” and state socialism. Even Bildungsbürgertum is not such a weird concept, if we interpret it the way Eyal, Townsley and I did in Making Capitalism Without Capitalists. There we posed the question why the power aspirations of the intelligentsia had failed so many times. I think our solution deserves consideration. Agents who claim power based on their ownership of “cultural capital” (that is, the Bildungsbürgertum) usually play a critical role in overthrowing “ancient regimes,” for example during the French Revolution, in 1917 in Russia, and in 1989 in Eastern Europe. Once the regime falls, the Besitzbürgertum (the propertied bourgeoisie) takes its proper place and the Bildungsbürgertum returns to its libraries and universities. I still believe this was a major correction to The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power.

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Irony, Cultural Power and the Fourth New Class Project

Gil Eyal (2003) already mentioned with some sympathy the “irony project.” His intriguing idea is that irony is not a method, but a research habitus and he describes it as a good way to expose students to the study of sociology. While I insisted that irony is only a method of critical inquiry, to see it as a research habitus is rather interesting. In his dissertation on Solidarnosc, Michael Kennedy offered an analysis that hewed close to Konrad’s and my book by identifying the movement as a class alliance between professionals, intellectuals and workers. But Michael soon had his “culture turn” and moved away from class analysis and began to see the evolution of post-communism increasingly in terms of cultural struggles. I believe this could be reconciled with Gil Eyal’s suggestion to focus attention on fields and classificatory struggles within fields. This indeed casts some doubt on “irony as a method” of critical social science. While Kennedy likes irony as long as it implies that the analyst distances himself from “classes,” he is worried that irony is also an “absolution from responsibility.” As he puts it even more powerfully above: “irony…remained relevant mostly for those who find their greatest comfort in the café, and worse, a justification for remaining distant from the implications of addressing intellectual responsibility itself, especially in these times in which we live.” And I am in some trouble here indeed. I not only committed the crime of escapism, but I even contradict myself. After all, in my article on the “Triple Crisis of Sociology” I suggested that sociology might overcome this crisis by becoming a left-leaning, critical neo-classical sociology. This is not very ironic, is it? (Unless you interpret this as a “business proposal”—how to get more students into your classes—and not as a normative, ethical recommendation). Michael Kennedy is right on the dot, this is a major contradiction in my sociology (though as a former dean I have nothing against “business proposals”… if your job is to run a sociology department, you need to recruit students…so you offer what students want…) Well, this is what I asked for. When the editors of this volume started to solicit contributions, I begged them not to do a “Festschrift,” but to collect essays that would critically engage my work. Which is just what I got. This chapter is supposed to be about auto-criticism, and not about selfdefense. Nevertheless, let me just point out that I am in good company when it comes to this “self-contradiction.” Weber tried to resolve the same problem by making a distinction between “politics as a vocation” and “science as a vocation.” When I claim that irony may be a useful scientific method for the times after socialism, I try to separate my role as a citizen, who inevitably will be

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e­ ngaged in politics, and as a scholar who—in my view, which I believe Weber shared—ought to strive for “objectivity,” even if absolute objectivity will never be achieved. When I call for irony I object to knowledge producers who claim the right to tell people what is the right and ethical way to proceed. (In Weber’s spirit: the best I can do is to tell people what they can—or cannot do—but it is not my job to tell them what they ought to do.) I object when, in an interview in a newspaper or on TV, they call me a “Yale Professor.” This is an abuse of my scholarly standing for political purposes. You may say that this is silly—after all, my readers tend to know that I was a professor at Yale, hence I speak with some authority, and there is just no way that you can break the knowledge/ power link. Paul Krugman never tells readers in his New York Times op-eds that he is a Nobel Prize Laureate in economics. Everybody knows it and for most readers it will matter a lot. What about the “triple crisis of sociology” then? In a way, I am guilty as charged. Nevertheless, even in this piece, sociology is my “object.” The puzzle is: while in the mid-1970s, sociology was flooded with talented students, today fewer people select this as their major and they tend to be less “talented,” or at least less “motivated.” I hope that my analysis is correct, namely that in the 1970s, sociology was so attractive because it had a reasonably well-defined body of theory (starting with Marx, Weber and Durkheim, and hence asking the “big questions”), it had a “methodology” (mainly survey research) and it offered a home to left-leaning or liberal students (feminists, black liberationists, transsexuals, gays and lesbians). The empirically testable hypothesis of the paper was that theory had disintegrated, that survey research was in trouble and that the political mission was basically gone (or at least substantially reduced). As a professor of sociology I was inevitably nostalgic about the “great decade” and should have made it clear that our task is to get more and better students into sociology. What I failed to point out as a “self-interested” sociologist was that the triple crisis of sociology may be seen in positive terms, as a more rational division of labor within the universities. Sociology became interdisciplinary, offered a home to gender studies, African-American studies, Chicano studies, etc. Is that not great? Mea culpa for being a “sociology parochialist.” Allow me a final, mainly appreciative, but to some extent critical, comment on Michael Kennedy’s solution, on what I understand as the emergent “fourth project of intellectuals.” If I understand Kennedy correctly, this fourth project is not about class power, but about cultural power: “If we want knowledge to remain critical, intellectuality must find its road to cultural power.” I fully understand Kennedy’s frustration with Trumpian “alternative facts” and the charge that those who are critical of the administration are spreading

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“fake news.” The same goes for Craig Calhoun’s diagnosis of the first year of the Trump administration as an “attack on knowledge itself” (cited by Kennedy), not to mention Rudy Giuliani’s most absurd statement that “truth is not truth.” Truth claims can be accepted as truth as long as they are not falsified, and there may be multiple unfalsified truth claims… I have sympathy for Kennedy’s “fourth project,” a struggle for “cultural power, whose aim should defend critical intellectuality,” which seeks to subject all claims and facts to the critical scrutiny of reason (but reason alone). What we now see in the world, especially in the West, is the wild fire of a new “culture war.” But what Kennedy calls “the fantasy of a nation” (and may I add, of race and religion) versus the “truth of intellectuality” is, in my view, not a culture war, but a war against culture and knowledge: Trump and Giuliani. But in order to avoid turning the “fourth project” into another project for class power, we have to return to Habermas and Mannheim. In the US, and in Western and Eastern Europe a genuine culture war is being waged, and in order not to turn cultural power into class power, we have to invoke Habermas’s discourse on domination-free speech and Mannheim’s “relationism.” Mannheim’s claim that every truth has a certain angle (I tend to believe it always does) does not mean that there is no truth. But it may mean that there are multiple truths, as long as they can be subjected to the critical scrutiny of the mind and the facts of all competing claims. Once we have carried out this exercise through domination-free discourse, it will be the decision of each agent what is his/her truth. The “fourth project” turns into a class project if I label those who disagree with me as “non-intellectuals” (as stupid, communists, fascist, etc.). The knowledge/power link can only be broken if the truth is arrived at intellectually through a “domination-free discourse” by all members of civil society. If— big IF—that is conceivable at all, which is why manufacturing discourse is the major weapon of those who claim to have a knowledge monopoly over power. And I return here to Eyal and fields and classificatory struggles. After all, it is decided on the field of knowledge who is knowledgeable and who is not, which knowledge has value and which does not. There are no objective criteria for deciding this, and it is the most important classificatory struggle of our times and probably of all times. 3

New Class Theory as Sociology of Knowledge

Lukács invented the term “Budapest School” during the late 1960s to name his—at that time still Marxist—disciples (Ágnes Heller, 1967; Mihály Vajda, 1970; György Márkus, 1966; etc.). I admired these scholars, but in some of my

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writings I made two modifications. First, I suggested that a “First Budapest School” of critical social science had already been in place during the early 20th century (which included Lukács himself and, of course, Karl Mannheim, the Polanyi brothers—Karl and Michael—and Arnold Hauser, etc.) and that the “Second Budapest School” of critical social science, which emerged during the 1960s, included some post-Marxist social theorists, including János Kornai (1980), Jenő Szűcs (1983) and, with some immodesty, myself and George Konrad. To be compared with the giants of what I call the “First Budapest School,” namely with Lukács and Mannheim, is even more humbling. To begin with, let me make some confessions about my “Hungarian origins” and a more general comment on the uniquely Hungarian roots of the sociological tradition in philosophy. Though I lived in Budapest for the first 37 years of my life and was, of course, educated there, in high school and later at the Karl Marx University of Economics my exposure to Hungarian social science and philosophy was rather limited, to say the least (our exposure to the writings of Karl Marx was at least as limited—I encountered the “real” Marx in 1965 in Berkeley in the brilliant lectures of Neil Smelser). When, in my early twenties, I decided to retrain myself as a sociologist, I immersed myself mainly in French, German and American literature. I learned the profession mainly during my post-doctoral studies in 1964–65. As I have previously mentioned, I heard the name Karl Polanyi for the first time at Columbia University, and though I knew that a scholar named Karl Mannheim existed, I only became familiar with his sociology of knowledge in Robert Merton’s wonderful interpretation (see Chapter xv in his Social Theory and Social Structure, 1949— which led me to read Ideology and Utopia for the first time). During my time in Hungary, Lukács was blacklisted. I learned about Mannheim and Lukács at Flinders University in South Australia and the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I taught a course on Mannheim at Flinders in 1978 and a very popular course on Lukács (History and Class Consciousness, 1923/1967, which was a real hit), Gramsci (Selections from the Prison Notebooks 1929–35/1971) and Korsch (Marxism and Philosophy, 1923/1970) in Madison in 1985. So much for the first Budapest School, unless there is a genetic component to the Hungarian tradition of combining sociology, history and philosophy. I am inclined to think that the sociological foundation of philosophy, or the philosophical foundation of sociology, is not uniquely Hungarian—it is rather European, or Central European, and to the extent that this has influenced my work, the main inspiration came first of all from Max Weber, and possibly also from Karl Marx. A more local impact on my work came from the second Budapest School. Around 1970, I became fascinated with the idea of developing a “critique of

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political economy” (primarily based on Weber, though the post-Marxist label that Tamás Demeter uses is not unfair). And later, the political economy of socialism and post-communism remained a major focus of my work. In 1970–74, I also got involved in the sociology of knowledge, and I am grateful to Demeter for emphasizing that this has remained one of my central themes for the rest of my life. One major problem with my work, especially in The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, is that I did not separate these two projects. We really should have written two separate volumes for this book, one on the socialist redistributive economy and another one on the sociology of knowledge. Putting these two together into one analysis was damaging to both. Even in my later works I did not distinguish these two trends in my research (except in a few articles, such as the one “On Irony”). Let me use this opportunity to respond to Tamás Demeter by elaborating on my sociology of knowledge (in the remainder of this post-script, I will elaborate further on my “critique of political economy”). And let me also briefly ­return to the impact of the early 20th century Hungarian sociology of knowledge. Indeed, a rejection of Lukács and Mannheim was—at least one of—my point(s) of departure. For both theorists, the critical question is the relationship of theorists to “the class,” or “classes.” As far as the early Marxist Lukács is concerned, this appears to be the “lowest point” in his theorizing. How can a bourgeois philosopher, the son of a wealthy banker, articulate the interests of the proletariat? When he understood Marxism, he simply became proletarian. Mannheim is a little more persuasive—and in my reading indeed deeply rooted in Hungarian history. Theorists who have an independent existence (for instance, because they come from well-to-do families) can be “socially unattached” intellectuals. In sharp contrast with this tradition, in The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power we tried to explore the self-interest of knowledge producers as knowledge producers. Hence this sociology of knowledge has much more to do with Nietzsche (1888/2000) and Foucault (and Gouldner, 1979) than with Lukács and Mannheim, and it is indeed post-Marxist (and I would say, Weberian). Knowledge producers have an interest to make claims that they have a “transcontextual orienting knowledge,” which can tell people what they are supposed to know, and if they can make people believe this claim, they will claim privilege and power in exchange. This is the Weberian instance: this is all about claims and beliefs in claims and has no implication for the “productivity gain” of this knowledge. The knowledge based on which knowledge producers claim privilege and power may be useless, or it may even be harmful. The point is: can they persuade others that they need their knowledge?

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And one last point: knowing and non-knowing is a question of struggle, and to put it even more strongly, it is a negative sum game. My knowledge—if accepted—reduces your knowledge. If my knowledge is “theoretical,” yours is only “practical,” thus your knowledge is only enough to carry out the instruction I gave you. This is, of course, by now straight out of Bourdieu. Those subordinated to authority receive only “practical” knowledge in school, while “theoretical language and imagination” are the monopoly of the privileged and a major mechanism of the reproduction of privileges. This is a critical theory of knowledge. Knowledge is not innocent, it is intimately linked to power, and every act of knowing is an act of power. “We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers, and with good reason. We never looked at ourselves—so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves?” (Nietzsche, 1887/2008, p. 3). The sociology of knowledge that I hoped to cultivate sought to take an honest (and often painful) look at ourselves. 4

Central and East European Sociology and Marxism

I am humbled that Karmo Kroos found my work, especially The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, significant enough to write a dissertation about it, and I am almost embarrassed that he calls me a “superhero” and an “iconic figure” of Central and East European sociology. To begin with, let me make a few qualifications. My self-assessment is far more modest. Allow me to cite my own words from the necrology I wrote on the passing of my very best friend, Jirí Musil: “I do not know whether Jirí Musil was a great sociologist. By all likelihood, he was not (neither am I)” (Szelényi 2012). I arrived at this conclusion after careful evaluation. Jirí was very smart, had outstanding skills and a great sense for identifying the important problems. On the other hand, he never produced the great work that I had expected from him since the very beginning of our friendship in the fall of 1963. At that time, he was a research fellow at vuva, the Czechoslovak institute for regional research. He was expected, just like Konrad and myself at váti, the equivalent Hungarian institution, to do highly applied work, and not to deal with politically controversial topics. He had a lovely, but ill wife and a young daughter, hence he had to be careful, and during the early 1960s the Czechoslovak regime was rather strict. In Hungary, after 1963, we had substantially more academic freedom, at least for a while. Then came the Prague Spring, but at just the moment when he could have written the “great book,” he got a job in England, where he enjoyed the freedom and probably had a rather heavy teaching load. The book was not written. Then came 1989–1990. On our annual joint summer

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vacation in the High Tatras (each summer between 1982 and 2012, we spent a few days together in Tatranska Lomnica) I told him: “Sorry Jirí, no more excuses. Where is the opus magnum?” It never happened. He founded ceu in Prague, and commuted weekly to its Budapest campus to teach, with no time for writing. But when I wrote that “neither am I” a great sociologist, it was not out of self-pity. When Konrád and I were working on The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, at least I believed that we were writing the masterpiece (I am not sure that Konrad thought so, too, as he was already a world-famous novelist). He had already been “crowned” by a great review in The New York Review of Books, but for me this was the make-it-or-break-it moment. And as far as becoming a “great sociologist,” we definitely blew it. Some of our critics acknowledged that it was an original piece of work, but as Stark—I am again citing him via Kroos—wrote, “Konrad and Szelényi’s argument, seemingly straightforward, actually moved through twists and turns as even the core concepts… change the referents and meaning in different parts of the text.” Well, this is some trouble for an opus magnum. (Incidentally, Coser got it all wrong, again via Kroos: he claimed that it was “wishful thinking,” or “science fiction.” The last thing this book aimed to do was to give power, especially class power, to intellectuals. Coser, as a typical American sociologist, had missed the deep irony—and self-irony—of the book.) But Kroos is smart enough not to call me a “great sociologist,” and he instead labels me an icon of cee sociology. Never mind that Ossowski, Bauman and many others had at least as much (if not more) of an impact than my own work, but this is a more realistic evaluation. Nevertheless, I have a problem with the term “cee sociologist.” My relationship to Hungary and cee is a complex one. I would claim this is my “village,” this is the “field” where I conduct my research. I understand communism and post-communism usually better than many of my American colleagues, as they did not have the “lived experiences” that I had. On top of this, Hungarian is my native tongue, I understand some Russian and via Russian I often have a hunch of what most other Slavic languages (especially the professional langue) are trying to convey to me. But I tried not to identify myself as an area studies person. On the contrary, I was fighting against area studies. During the late 1980s, I was elected a member of the so-called Joint Committee on Eastern Europe of the acls and the ssrc. This was a wonderful committee that fundamentally changed the nature of East European studies. Before and during the 1970s, East Europeanists were typically political refugees, whose main expertise was the knowledge of languages and the field. The new

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committee, led by Ken Jowitt, Dan Chirot, Katherine Verdery, Gail Kligman, the wonderful Jan Gross and others, was looking for empirically rigorous, but ­theory-driven projects. The committee had substantial funding to support ­research, conferences and dissertation work. We also started a journal, the ­Journal of East European Politics and Societies, and for several years it set an exciting research agenda, where Eastern Europe served as the site for testing theories, rather than being the object of research. I was delighted when David Featherman became president of the ssrc. He was a genuine social scientist, with ­interest in data, methods and theory, and no interest in area studies per se. 1989–90 was, of course, potentially a turning point. The Soviet Empire collapsed, and there was thus no reason anymore to have “Centers for Russian and East European Studies.” At ucla I took the initiative and persuaded the Provost to set up a committee to review the center of that name, and the committee I chaired recommended the creation of a Center for European Studies instead. As there was violent opposition from former Kremlinologists, a Center for European and Euro-Asian Studies was eventually created. However, this did not matter all that much, since with the fall of the Soviet Empire the interest of the State Department and the cia for the whole area declined, and funding as well as student interest dried up. Consequently, I did not really have a cee sociologist identity. For me, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power was primarily not a study of state so­ cialism, but a study of knowledge/power, as I mentioned earlier. We made a small contribution in this respect, describing state socialism as a redistributive economy, but I am ready to concede that trying to “construct a new dominant class of intellectuals” around redistribution was far-fetched, and that Gouldner was right, it was also “unconvincing.” Our book had quite an impact in Germany and in the United States, where it was read as a contribution to the sociology of knowledge, very much in the line of Michel Foucault. This is why I think that Kroos reads something into my work that was not there, namely a rivalry with Bence and Kis (Rakovsky, 1983). Since the whole idea of East Euro�pean Marxism left me cold, I was simply uninterested in their books (when János Kis left Marxism and turned into a liberal he became much me interesting for me). It is conceivable that Bence and Kis saw us as rivals (since we were being persecuted, they had the good taste not to attack us). Nevertheless, in a way we were radicals, since we offered an alternative to a Marxist discourse about socialism and especially about intellectuals. It is also true that once I was in exile, I began to appreciate Karl Marx much more than before. Once confronted with “actually existing capitalism,” I was struck by the critical potential of Marx, but it was the Western Marxism offered by Perry Anderson (1974), Bob

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Brenner (1982), Michael Burawoy (1982), and Erik Olin Wright (1985) that influ�enced me much more than East European humanist Marxism. Hence I do not see myself as a cee sociologist, but as a comparativist, interested in inequality and social structure—I just happened to select my field of research in the state-socialist and post-communist world. I became very interested in China (though I never saw myself as a China specialist), but as a comparative case nothing can be more interesting than China, whether you call it capitalist, state-capitalist, or socialist with Chinese characteristics. I am grateful to Kroos for the list of my graduate students, as I did not have this list myself. I did not have a “school,” but I did run a “shop.” I met with my students once a week, where we discussed each other’s papers and learned from one another. I often learned as much (or more) from my students as they did from me. Let me return to Socrates, since this was his way of teaching. It is more important to ask good questions than to find the “right” answer. 5

Sociology from Below

There are many ways for social analysis to look at social history from below. Yes, Burawoy and Ost are right that class is certainly one important starting point for sociology from below. Ost is also right that gender can be a component.1 This is also true for certain ethnic groups (the Roma in Eastern Europe), especially in interaction with class, and if they have turned into an “underclass” the perspective “from below” makes for a powerful way to conduct analysis. In incarceration, Bruce Western found his own unique arena for doing such research, and in his chapter for this book he places special emphasis on mental health and drug addiction among the millions of incarcerated Americans (2.2 million in jail, 4.7 million on probation, 2018). I was fortunate enough to have many talented graduate students, and Bruce was among the best, if not the best. Bruce’s father, John Western—an outstanding sociologist himself—was a Professor of Sociology at the University of Queensland while I was a professor at Flinders University (at that time, there were only seven sociology professors in the whole of Australia). John and I became very good friends. When I was chair of the graduate program at the City 1 Éva Fodor’s (1997) research is interesting from this point of view: in Hungary at least, better educated women initially benefited from the transition to capitalism, since they were employed in expanding sectors of the economy, such as banking or insurance, that were underpaid and underappreciated under socialism. They were thus avoided by men, but became revalued with the transition.

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University of New York (at that time, it was not ranked among the great sociology graduate programs), Bruce approached me and told me he wanted to do a Ph.D. in the US, and that his father had advised him to work with me. As a friend of his father and a fellow Australian I was happy to accept and gave him the best scholarship available. The real surprise came when Bruce arrived. During our first meeting I realized that he knew more about sociology than I did, hence I invited him—a first-year grad student—to co-teach a course with me on “class,” namely a re-evaluation of Erik Olin Wright’s international class survey. I certainly learned a lot and I hope that Bruce also learned something about teaching sociology. In 1988, I accepted an offer from ucla, a much better graduate program than cuny at that time, but my condition for accepting the offer was that the university would also give a fellowship to Bruce. He graduated in 1993 and has had a brilliant career since then. During the late 1990s, he published a pathbreaking article on incarceration and demonstrated that the US unemployment rate at that time so much lower than in Europe (Western and Beckett, 1999) because people who would have been on unemployment benefits in ­Europe were put in jail in the US. Once in jail, many people spend the rest of their lives there (three strikes and you are out—one of the worst policy decisions of the Clinton administration), though often the “crimes” are minimal (being caught for carrying marihuana). This is dehumanizing and, of course, prohibitively expensive at the same time, much more expensive than the ­Scandinavian welfare system. With this article, Bruce, then a freshly tenured ­associate professor, created a cottage industry on incarceration. He set a new research agenda for sociologists, political scientists, criminologists and economists. Bruce is one of the most sophisticated quantitative sociologists today in the US, but this chapter is based on ethnographic work, a case study that combines important theoretical insights and careful qualitative data collection with the passion of a public intellectual. I am honored by the fact that Bruce mentions the benefits of having me as mentor of his dissertation. (To be frank, since my quantitative skills were limited, I asked the best quantitative sociologists at ucla to co-chair the dissertation). This chapter depicts the vicious circle between mental health, drug addiction and incarceration. Two-thirds of people who are incarcerated enter jail with mental health and drug addiction problems, and the time they spend in jail only worsens their conditions. Bruce also notes that most people with mental health and drug addiction problems never end up in jail because family members help them handle their problems, and because there are alternative institutions to help such people

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(which are increasingly a thing of the past). Jail becomes the worst possible alternative. This is a wonderful chapter and I am proud that Bruce in some ways links his research to the time he spent with me in graduate school. 6

Polanyi and Neo-classical Sociology

I first heard the name Karl Polanyi from Terry Hopkins in 1964 at Columbia University (during my post-doctoral semester in New York, Terry was my comentor, next to my main mentor, Bob Merton). It was typical of the parochialism in socialist Hungary that one could gain a degree in economics and start working as a sociologist while never having heard of Polanyi. Terry was already working with Wallerstein—in 1964, there was no world systems theory (1974) yet—but he introduced me to the work of Polanyi, especially to his books The Great Transformation (1944) and Trade and Market in Early Empires (1957). Around that time, Polanyi was also teaching at Columbia and, of course, had a tremendous impact on Wallerstein, which was not duly acknowledged in Wallerstein’s path-breaking book (at that time, Polanyi was regarded as nonMarxist, and for early world systems theory, heavily Marxist in name at least, he was not a desirable point of reference). It took me a couple of years before I started to fully appreciate Polanyi. It was István Márkus—a fine and unduly forgotten Hungarian ethnographer— who brought Polanyi to my attention once more during the early 1970s, but as far as I am concerned, for the wrong reasons. He advocated and believed that “genuine” socialism should be based on reciprocity. I found this a little silly, but since I was interested in the political economy of socialism—and working with a wonderful group of students, including Gábor Kertesi, György Lengyel, József Hegedűs and many others—I concluded that state socialism can be described as a “redistributive economy.” That was, of course, not Polanyi—for him, the redistributive economies were archaic empires (1957)—and although he mentioned in passing that the ussr may be considered a redistributive system, this was an unorthodox expansion of the Polanyian theory. Greskovits and Bohle are right that this insight was the foundation of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (1979), and they are also right that in my next major monograph, Making Capitalism Without Capitalists (1998), Polanyi did not play a critical role. To make my error worse, I framed this second monograph around the notion of “capitalism from above” and did not seriously consider the ­importance of “countermovements” or “double movements” (Polanyi, 1944) “from below.” This constitutes a major criticism of my “neo-classical sociology” project—whatever it is.

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Allow me, therefore, to address the “capitalism from above” and “capitalism from below” question. The criticism of Making Capitalism is absolutely justified. I would just like to make two comments. (1) In my other writings—most clearly in the chapter I wrote with Larry King for the Handbook of Economic Sociology (2005)—I distinguish three pathways from socialism to market ­capitalism, capitalism “from above” (Russia especially), “from below”2 (China ­during the 1980s) and “from the outside” (Central Europe, especially Hungary during the 1990s). It is inexcusable that in 1998 we did not clearly distinguish these “varieties of post-communist economies,” though by the second decade of the 21st century it appears that post-communism has converged around “state-led,” “illiberal” forms of “capitalism from above.” (2) Greskovits and Bohle are absolutely right, for Polanyi the classical way to capitalism is one where “disembedding” is matched by “countermovement,” based on popular, especially working-class, resistance. I neglected this in Making Capitalism, which therefore comes across as “elitist.” This was a mistake, but I hope a forgivable one, given the special conditions of post-communist capitalism-making. I honestly did not see much of these “countermovements.” In China, which was indeed closer to the classical model of transition to capitalism than the Russian or East European versions, there are strikes, but what about Eastern Europe? So far I have not seen much “resistance” against the forward march of liberal capitalism. Let me add a few auto-critical comments about neo-classical sociology. I will start this with an apology. The term “neo-classical sociology” was first formulated while Victor Nee and I were walking towards the Faculty Center at ucla. I cannot recall who used the term for the first time, but we were both enthusiastic: Yes, this is what is “new” in the sociology we practice. I should have added at least a footnote acknowledging this when I first used the concept in Making Capitalism. There is an even bigger problem with this idea, and I should have been much clearer about what our ambitions were. It certainly did not occur to me to see neo-classical sociology in tandem with neo-classical economics. Neo-classical economics is a new paradigm, which—although inspired by the classics—proposed a new rational choice approach for thinking about economics. My frustration with sociology was not paradigmatic, but I was upset that sociology no longer addressed the big problems it used to tackle, for example during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it is was a partner of economics, and occasionally even offered a major challenge to it. By the end of the 20th century, sociologists were usually thought of as the 2 Interestingly, Victor Nee (2012), who unlike me is a real scholar of China, used “Capitalism from Below” as the title for one of his latest books on Chinese capitalism.

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“good guys,” while economists were the “smart” ones. Sociology was on the ­defensive, both in terms of the importance of the issues it examined and as regards the technical skills it applied to data analysis. Economics was on the offensive, and it even took away the traditional “research questions” of sociology, such as inequality, educational attainment, and even social mobility, while sociologists were writing “cultural narratives” (a nice theory with little methodological rigor), or mapped social networks. Hence the idea behind neo-classical sociology was to bring sociology back into the critical debates, the decline of socialism, a new way of making capitalism, the shaky rise of democracy, how it was being challenged by a yearning for leadership, and how liberal values were being questioned through references to national interests. Neo-classical sociology simply tried to suggest the re-introduction of the great questions that Marx, Weber and Durkheim posed, and to make sociologists “smart” again. 7

Market Transition Theory

Victor Nee’s 1989 asr article on “market transition” was an agenda setter and changed our views about the transition from state socialism to market capitalism. It is indicative of the importance of Nee’s market transition theory that Renmin University of China in Beijing is organizing an international symposium on “Transitional China and Chinese Sociology” from May 24 to 26, 2019. The symposium will celebrate four anniversaries, the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, the 40th anniversary of the reconstruction of Chinese sociology, the 15th anniversary of the Chinese General Social Survey and the 30th anniversary of market transition theory. Journal articles usually have a lifespan of four to five years, and there are not many asr articles that are celebrated 30 years after they were published. Happy birthday, Victor. Victor Nee is generous enough to acknowledge that I made a minor contribution in initiating what came to be known as “market transition theory.” I do not see myself as a market transition theorist at all, but I did try to develop a “new theory of inequality” before I was expelled from Hungary in 1975, and in 1978, I published my first “post-exile” piece under the title “Social Inequalities in State Socialist Redistributive Economies” in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology, a relatively low-impact journal, and I am not sure I got any citations for it. The problem was not only that this was not asr or ajs—it was simply too difficult to digest the message of the article. First, there was a problem with the term “redistribution.” For social scientists, redistribution implied the “welfare

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redistribution” pursued primarily by social democratic welfare states (this is why, shortly after we proposed it, János Kornai rejected our concept of the redistributively coordinated economy and suggested the term “bureaucratic integration” instead). But following Polanyi, I now used the concept differently, and was writing about “redistributively coordinated” economic systems as distinct from “market integrated economies.” My “new theory of inequality” was a terminological innovation that had farreaching theoretical and political implications. The main point of this “new theory” was that basic inequalities were the results of the then “dominant” mode of coordination, and that the “secondary mode” of coordination typically moderated these inequalities. Under state socialism, the privileged strata were served by state redistribution, while the underprivileged had to fend for themselves by surviving on the markets. Cadres got public housing, while unskilled workers who commuted had to build their own houses, purchasing the land and materials on the market. My theory was also based on what David Stark later astutely called the method of mirrored comparisons. Since capitalist economies are market integrated, the major inequalities are created on the market and have to be counter-balanced by welfare redistribution. Socialist economies are the mirror image of this system. Furthermore, my theory was only about the mechanisms by which inequalities are created and compensated and had nothing to say about the extent of inequality. Redistributive economies usually operate at a lower aggregate level of inequality than market economies—but for my theory, this was beside the point. But it was not beside the point for my Western left-leaning colleagues. When I completed my book Urban Inequalities Under State Socialism in 1973 and submitted it to Pergamon Press, it was rejected on political grounds (it was—falsely—read as an attack on welfare redistribution and a glorification of market mechanisms). Oxford University Press then published the book 10 years later (Hugh Stretton, the wonderful—left-leaning, but open-minded—Australian historian read it, understood it and recommended it). In any case, I wrote the 1978 article to clarify the misunderstandings, but this basically went unnoticed until Victor Nee published his path-breaking article on the theory of market transition in 1989, and suddenly my paper was getting citations everywhere. For Victor, the insight was that markets can be a source of equality, and he developed this into his “theory of market transition.” I wish I could claim that I was one of the “founding fathers” of market transition theory, but I was not. I only offered a new way of thinking about the economic mechanisms creating inequalities in various economic systems. Nee, on the other hand, developed this into a general theory (though only of the ­middle range) of the changes in economic systems. As redistributive power

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declines and hence the power of market actors increases, we have a historical narrative of the making of “rational capitalism.” Nee, unlike me, is a genuine China scholar. He speaks Chinese and is intimately familiar with China’s socio–historical context. And though I am proud that Nee acknowledges me as one of the sources of inspiration for market transition theory, I expressed my doubts about what I see as the “determinism” and “uni-linearism” of this theory. It is telling how Nee and I use the term “capitalism from below.” I coined the term in 2005 and Victor then used it in 2010 as the title for one of his latest books. The timing is not of much importance, but the content is. My use of “capitalism from below” referred to the 1980s, when it appeared that the major beneficiaries where “ordinary people,” collective farm workers or industrial workers who used the opportunities opened up by Deng Xiaoping to improve their lot (occasionally substantially, a few even by becoming billionaires). Nee went further, and in his theory, market players defeated the redistributors, and rational capitalism replaced the state-led economy. I would not challenge Nee at all, since he not only knows more about China than I do, but also collected data on businesses in the Yangzi Delta and found profit-oriented firms doing better than state-owned companies. He offered solid empirical findings that I am in no position to challenge. Nevertheless, I still insist that there was a major shift in the way “capitalism was made” in China during the late 1980s and the 1990s. I am skeptical whether the Chinese economy is less state-driven than it was, say, in 1978–1988. In my less informed readings, there is a heated debate in China about the correct Chinese formulation: is it “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is it “state capitalism” or is it just market capitalism? For me, the critical question is the role of the control exerted by the central state. As far as I can tell, the central state—especially since President Xi, but according to many indicators well before him—is getting stronger and stronger. Yes, Victor Nee is right, President Xi conducts a “war against corruption,” but who are the people being targeted as corrupt? Could there be similarities between Xi’s China and Putin’s Russia, where political enemies are labeled as corrupt, while loyal clients are defended against “unfair competition” from “corrupt” competition? Daughters and sisters of high-ranking politicians are becoming suspiciously wealthy in no time. Does their wealth really come from profits generated on competitive markets, or from rents generated by politically induced monopolies to create privileged positions for kin and loyal followers? In my recent book with Péter Mihályi, Rent Seekers: Profits, Wages and Rents: Different Sources of Inequality (2019), we see many postcommunist countries, including Russia and China, shifting away from the profit- and wage-maximizing strategies of the early years of the transition and turning into rent-seeking economies.

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Is China today still “capitalism from below,” or is it increasingly turning into “capitalism from above,” where political power is still calling the shots? Taxation laws have changed and Beijing again collects more taxes than it did in the 1980s, while the banking system is still controlled by state agencies and “princelings” run the large corporations. Victor knows this better than I do, but it looks as if there are indicators that Chinese capitalism is looking more and more like the Russian model, and less and less like the “rational capitalism” we imagined. After President Xi’s anointment as leader for life—with virtually total authority— which institutions will prevent him from allowing rent-seeking behavior and make sure that profit maximizers will win over rent-seekers? 8

Interrupted Embourgeoisement, Elite Reproduction (or Circulation) and the Revolution of Deputy Managers

Already in the late 1970s, at least in Hungary and China, and by the early 1980s in some other socialist countries (like Poland), the “second economy” increasingly played a role. A new social actor, a form of new bourgeoisie, was in the making. Where this new bourgeoisie came from became one of the most popular research topics after 1988–1990. Tamás Kolosi distinguishes four theories to answer this question: the first was a theory of elite reproduction (old elites were able to convert their political power into private economic wealth), while the second theory emphasized that those who could combine political position and cultural capital would end up at the top of the new hierarchy. He cites my hypothesis of interrupted embourgeoisement as the third theory, and finally lists his own theory of the revolution of deputy managers as a fourth such hypothesis. Before I reflect on his excellent analysis, let me insert here a brief autobiographical note. I first met Kolosi when the Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party established its own social science research institute. The “mission” of this institute was to replace the mainly neo-Marxist and largely ideological critique of “actually existing socialism” and launch a course run mostly by empirically oriented sociologists in order to create a new set of cadre sociologists. At that point, ironically, I was regarded as one of the major “methodologists” (I did not know much methodology, but in comparison with others I had quite a bit of experience with survey research), hence I was invited to be one of the instructors (the rest of the team of instructors was really excellent and consisted of the most experienced researchers). That’s how Tamás became one of my students (alongside many other outstanding future sociologists). The one-year course produced a half-baked survey on Hungarian intellectuals,

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and at the end the director of the institute (who was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party) asked me to continue as the director of a sociological laboratory. This was really odd: while I was not a Marxist and never joined the Party, for one or two years I was the highest non-Party communist functionary (after all, I reported to a member of the Central Committee). In this position, I had a meeting with Tamás and one of his friends every week. I had just started my work on The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, and Tamás was finishing his book Marxism and Social Structure, a Marxist critique of empirically oriented stratification research. He rejected stratification analysis and instead advocated class analysis. In his understanding, the key questions of class analysis were who is producing economic surplus, and who ­disposes of that surplus. I loved this, and for me it was a major step towards the theory of redistributive economy. The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power could not have been written without Kolosi. Nevertheless, the fate of my book (I had to spend a short time in jail and was eventually exiled from my native Hungary) had a lot to do with Kolosi abandoning Marxist class analysis and turning into a distinguished stratification researcher (thereby acquiring methodological skills that are far superior to mine). Let me now return to Kolosi’s analysis of re-stratification during market transitions. Kolosi lists my “theory” as the third one, though in reality it was the first. Already in the early 1970s, during field research in Hungary, I became excited by what I thought were the early markings of capitalism and the emergence of a “new petty bourgeoisie,” especially in the countryside. During the early 1980s, I had access to an astonishing survey by the Hungarian statistical office, which was collecting agrarian second economy data with mobility data. It required a great deal of number crunching, but we got some support for the theory that a number of the most successful (very) small agrarian entre­ preneurs came from families who were already market-oriented before communism. Communism interrupted their trajectory to entrepreneurship, but as communism began to falter, their children (or grandchildren) re-entered the “bourgeoisification” trajectory. Hence the “theory” of interrupted embourgeoisement. I completed my book on this topic, Socialist Entrepreneurs, in 1986, and it did not occur to me that we were on the way to a “market transition,” or a transition to a “capitalist mode of production.” At that point, I believed that we were seeing the emergence of a “socialist mixed economy,” so to speak a “third way” between state socialism and market capitalism, where the “new class” was a petty bourgeoisie. My hypothesis therefore addressed a very different historical situation than Jadwiga Staniszki’s theory of the cadre bourgeoisie, Erzsébet Szalai’s claim that the “late Kadarist technocracy” was coming to power, or Tamás Kolosi’s “revolution by the deputy managers.” When I

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­finished Socialist Entrepreneurs, I wrote my “first auto-critique.” By the late 1970s and early 1980s, I acknowledged that the “flirt” between the communist bureaucracy and intellectuals had broken down, as intellectuals lost their ­interest in “rationalizing” socialism and the bureaucracy, at least in some countries, figured out that it would be able to retain its power and command position by making minor market concessions to another “new class,” namely the new petty bourgeoisie. Ironically, Kolosi remained closer to The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power—after all, the “deputy managers” were skilled professionals who did obtain a great deal of power and even property, while the drastic opening to markets and privatization destroyed the new petty bourgeoisie (very few of them made it into the new grand bourgeoisie). By 1990, I also understood that the former communist countries did not represent a “third way”—they were instead turning into market capitalist economies, hence it was time to write my “second auto-critique.” This time, in a joint research project with Tamás Kolosi, I posed the question about the “reproduction or circulation of elites.” The answer to the question of who the “winners” were, former bureaucrats or technocratic intellectuals, was that “the glass is half full, half empty.” In some ­countries, such as Russia, there was more “reproduction,” while in others, such as Hungary, Poland or the Czech Republic, there was more “circulation.” Let me add a brief final note on interrupted embourgeoisement. As I pointed out, this theory addressed a specific historical situation, for which we were able to find some support in the case of Hungary. Even more interestingly, some of my Chinese scholars who crunched numbers from China in the 1980s not only thought the theory insightful, but also found some empirical support for it. But there is more to this than just some insights about the “socialist mixed economy” and its new petty bourgeoisie. Let us take the example of Tamás Kolosi himself, for instance. His parents were merchants and owned an antique store. It is reasonable to speculate that without communism, Tamás might have taken over his parents’ store and, especially since he is a talented businessman, might have turned it into an empire not unlike the impressive publishing and bookstore empire that he currently owns. 9

The Missing Class: Workers

David Ost is absolutely right: most of my work is an analysis of those who are at the top of society: bureaucrats, technocrats, intellectuals, entrepreneurs (and let me confess: I even have an interest in billionaires…). There are few exceptions, which Ost cites, including Patterns of Exclusion (Ladányi and

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S­ zelényi 2006, though he does not analyze it), Poverty and Social Structure in Transitional Societies: the First Decade (2013, a small, little-known book published by a small publishing house in Bulgaria, but available on the internet), and finally Nation Building with Non-Nationals (2018), a study of Pakistani guest workers in the United Arab Emirates. (It is unfortunate that Socialist Entrepreneurs did not receive much attention in David’s chapter, even though it is about peasants and ­peasant-workers). But it is typical that none of these works received any ­attention in the previous chapters of this book, and therefore I am indeed freq­uently labeled—basically accurately—as an “elite theorist” or a “specialist on intellectuals.” What is the sociology of knowledge of this apparently odd distortion of the view of social structure? However, it may not be as odd as it appears at first sight. This is not unlike my choice of Eastern Europe, and Hungary especially, as my research site. Sociology and even ethnography is often auto-biographical. Women like to write about women, African-Americans about African-Americans, gays about gays, and intellectuals about intellectuals. Introspection is not necessarily a bad way to start research. I once had dinner with Tamás Kolosi, the sociologist turned millionaire, and he told me a number of exciting stories about his fellow millionaires. I told him, “Tamás, I will come back during the Thanksgiving break to do an interview book with you.” He agreed, insisting only that it should be co-authored, and eventually it appeared (albeit only in Hungarian, under the title How to Become a Billionaire (2010). It is really Tamás’s book and his introspection. But enough excuses. Ost is right, since I do not have a theory of the “working class,” and it is indeed not an actor in my account of making capitalism (Ost, 1991, 2005). He is generous enough to acknowledge that I do have a social commitment. I write history from below, from the point of view of the losers, I am a “Marxist critic of Marxism” (though I was never a Marxist, I only used the Marxist method to show how flawed Marxism was, to metaphrase Gouldner), a “socialist critic of socialism” (later I called myself a social democrat, but after Bernie Sanders I do not mind the democratic socialist label either). But I never clarified theoretically what the “below” is—I often referred to workers, the working class, direct producers, etc., but without a theory. While I was not one of them and I did not know much about them, I still could have tried to find out more about them (as I did in the case of Pakistani guest workers or the Roma, arguably with modest success). Identifying a link between my work and that of Machajski (1905/1937, he could also mentioned Bakunin, 1872/1966) is not entirely precise, but is also not unfair. I was not an anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist (and I never was an activist), but I liked their criticism of Marxism.

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And I am not in bad company with my muddy definition of the working class, not that Marx is much clearer about the two-class model he outlined in The Communist Manifesto (capitalists and workers). He makes the prediction, which was hardly credible even in 1848, and was later falsified, that society would split into the “tiny minority” of property owners and “the overwhelming majority” of workers (who, he earlier suggested, had nothing to lose but their chains). It almost sounds like “we are the 99 percent,” which is analytical, sociological and political nonsense (the 99 percent will never mobilize to overthrow the top 1 or 0.1 percent and eliminate all property, not least because many of them are also property owners). Elsewhere, when Marx turned analytic, he instead used the term “direct producers,” who are more akin to “the worker with the hammer in the hands.” This is empirically sensible, but the class he defined this way never became the “overwhelming majority” or even a “simple majority.” Today, in the advanced world, it makes up around 10, at most 20 percent of the population. And indeed, this bottom decile or quintile are the real “losers” of “making capitalism” from communism, but they are unlikely to become a revolutionary force or the agents of “universal emancipation.” Marxists who wanted to remain true Marxists have been struggling with this ever since. Poulantzas (1975) remained as close to classical Marxism as possible (direct producers), but could never explain how such a proletariat would become a revolutionary force. Erik Olin Wright (1985) tried to resolve this by means of “contradictory class locations,” but he eventually had to abandon this idea. David Ost’s solution is the “new working class,” which could include anyone from skilled workers to engineers. Does it include everyone who sells labor, no matter how specialized and rare their skill is? Ost’s rather persuasive theory suggests that Solidarnosc was a movement of this “new working class,” in alliance with intellectuals. He knows the story, while I do not, and therefore I trust him on this. But are the members of that “new working class,” who possess rare skills, not property owners themselves? And if indeed their skills are so valued and rare, are they not operating on a “closed market”? And is it not conceivable that their income is thus not only based on wage, but also has a “rent component”? (In my recent book with Péter Mihályi, forthcoming in 2019, we make the point that for the top quintile, some of the income is “rent,” which is neither profit nor wage, but stems from privileged positions on the educational and real estate markets). Perhaps Solidanorsc was the movement of the “new working class” and its members really were actors in the transition. But the transition to where? To the post-communist version of neoliberal capitalism. Let me end this discussion with just one more question. This is an interesting working-class theory, but what sort of working class is this, which acts as the vanguard of capitalism?

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Certainly not exactly the working class that Karl Marx had in mind. And who were the big losers of this transition? None other than the 10 to 20 percent of unskilled or semi-skilled manual workers, and the peasant workers who had no more than a primary school education, many of whom became unemployed when, due to the transition, about 20 percent of jobs were eliminated. Were they not the people whom Bakunin called the “flower of the proletariat”? What if, in terms of class theory, Bakunin was more to the point than Marx? And this is also the question I pose to Michael Burawoy, who published his wonderful, critical essay on Making Capitalism Without Capitalists in the American Journal of Sociology (2001). References Anderson, Perry (1974). Lineages of the Absolutist State. London, UK: New Left Books. Bakunin, Mikhal (1872/1966). “Marx, the Bismarck of Socialism.” In Leonard Kimmerman and Lewis Perry (eds.), Patterns of Anarchy. New York, NY: Anchor, 882–893. (Original work published in 1872). Brenner, Robert (1982). “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism.” Past and Present, 97, 16–113. Burawoy, Michael (1982). Manufacturing Consent. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Burawoy, Michael (2001). “Neoclassical Sociology: From the End of Communism to the End of Classes.” American Journal of Sociology, 106(4), 1099–1120, doi:10.1086/320299. Eyal, Gil, Iván Szelényi and Eleanor Townsley (2003). “On Irony: An Invitation to Neoclassical Sociology.” Thesis Eleven, 73(1), 5–41, doi:10.1177/0725513603073001002. Eyal, Gil, Iván Szelényi and Eleanor Townsley (2001). “The Utopia of Postsocialist Theory and the Ironic View of History in Neoclassical Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology, 106(4), 1121–1128, doi:10.1086/320300. Eyal, Gil, Iván Szelényi and Eleanor Townsley (1998). Making Capitalism Without Capitalists. London, UK: Verso. Fodor, Éva (1997). “Gender in Transition: Unemployment in Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.” East European Politics and Societies, 11(3), 470–500, doi:10.1177/0888325497011 003003. Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and Punish. New York, NY: Vintage Books. (Original work published in 1975). Gouldner, Alvin W. (1979). The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. New York, NY: Seabury Press. Gramsci, Antonio (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1929– 35). In Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds.). New York, NY: International Publisher.

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Heller, Ágnes (1978). The Renaissance Man. New York, NY: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (Original work published in 1967). King, Lawrence Peter, and Iván Szelényi (2005). “Post-Communist Economic Systems.” In Neil Smelser and Richard Swedberg (eds.), Handbook of Economic Sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 205–229. Konrad, George, and Iván Szelényi (1979). The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich. Kornai, János (1980). Economics of Shortage. Amsterdam, Netherlands: North Holland. Korsch, Karl (1970). Marxism and Philosophy. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. (Original work published in 1923). Ladányi, János, and Iván Szelényi (2004). Patterns of Exclusion. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lukács, György (1967). History and Class Consciousness. London, UK: Merlin Press. (Original work published in 1923). Lukes, Steven (1974). Power: A Radical View. New York, NY: Macmillan. Machajski, Jan W. (1937). “The Intellectual Worker.” In Victor Francis Calverton (ed.), The Making of Society: An Outline of Sociology. New York, NY: The Modern Library. (Original work published in 1905). Mannheim, Karl (1936). Ideology and Utopia. London, UK: Routledge. (Original work published in 1929). Márkus, György (1978). Marxism and Anthropology. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum. (Original work published in 1966). Merton, Robert (1949). Social Theory and Social Structure. New York, NY: The Free Press. Mihályi, Péter, and Iván Szelényi (2019). Rent Seekers: Profits, Wages and Inequality. The Top 20 Percent. London, UK: Palgrave. Nee, Victor (1989). “A Theory of Market Transition: From Redistribution to Markets in State Socialism.” American Sociological Review, 54(5), 663–681. Nee, Victor, and Sonja Opper (2012). Capitalism from Below: Markets and Institutional Change in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2000). On the Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published in 1888). Ost, David (2005). The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Post-Communist Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ost, David (1991). Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Polanyi, Karl (1944). The Great Transformation. New York, NY: Farrar and Rinehart. Polanyi, Karl, Conrad M. Arensberg and Harry W. Pearson (eds.) (1957). Trade and Market in Early Empires. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Poulantzas, Nicos (1975). Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. London, UK: New Left Books.

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Rakovsky, Marc (György Bence and János Kis) (1983). A Szovjet Tipusú Társadalom Marxista Szemmel. Paris, France: Dialogues européens. Szelényi, Iván (in collaboration with Riaz Hassan and Vladislav Maksimov) (2018). Building Nations with Non-Nationals: The Exclusionary Immigration Regimes of the Gulf Monarchies with a Case Study of Pakistani Return Migrants from and Prospective Migrants to the United Arab Emirates. Budapest, Hungary: Corvina. Szelényi, Iván (2012). “Jirí Musil and the East European Origins of the New Urban Sociology.” Sociologicky Casopis, 48(6), 1156–1163. Szelényi, Iván (in collaboration with Róbert Manchin, Pál Juhász, Bálint Magyar and Bill Martin) (1988). Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Szelényi, Iván (1983). Urban Inequalities Under State Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Szűcs, Jenő (1983). “The Three Historical Regions of Europe.” Acta Historica Academiae Scientianum Hungaricae, 29(2–4), 131–184. (Original work published in 1981). Vajda, Mihály (1976): Fascism as a Mass Movement. London, UK: Allison and Busby. (Original work published in 1970). Wallerstein, Immanuel (1974). The Modern World System. New York, NY: Academic Press. Western, Bruce (2018). Homeward: Life in the Year after Prison. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Western, Bruce, and Katy Beckett (1999). “How Unregulated Is the U.S. Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution.” American Journal of Sociology, 104, 1030–1060, doi:10.1086/210135. Wright, Erik Olin (1985). Classes. London, UK: Verso.

Name Index Andorka, Rudolf 73, 78 Bakunin, Mikhal 19, 248, 250 Bauman, Zygmunt 4, 5, 70, 70n Bence, György [Gyorgy] 72-73, 79, 83–90, 92n, 93–97, 105, 238 See also Rakovsky, Marc Benda, Julien 4 Borusewicz, Bogdan 220 Bourdieu, Pierre 9, 10, 12, 22, 63, 71, 83, 107, 187, 235 Bozóki, András 71 Brint, Steven 5 Bujak, Zbigniew 219 Burawoy, Michael 101, 106, 147, 149–150, 152n, 157, 157n, 214–215, 238, 250 Calhoun, Craig 45–46, 232 Callon, Michel 17, 37n Charle, Christophe 3–4 Chirot, Ken 237 Coleman, James S. 71, 177, 187 Demeter, Tamás 52, 54, 234 Dewey, John 16, 17 Djilas, Milovan 22–25, 72, 73, 88, 209 Durkheim, Émile 4, 231, 242 Eyal, Gil 1, 22, 29n, 36–37, 41n, 61, 71, 104, 112, 146, 149–151, 153, 156, 158, 227–230, 232 Fehér, Ferenc 52 Fodor, Éva 104, 111, 193, 238n Foucault, Michel 8–9, 18, 70, 228, 234, 238 Frasyniuk, Wladyslaw 219 Gorz, André 219 Gouldner, Alvin W. 5, 25, 35, 37, 70, 99, 103–105, 234, 237, 248 Greskovits, Béla 146n, 240–241 Gwiazda, Andrzej 220 Habermas, Jürgen 15, 17, 232 Haraszti, Miklós 80–81, 84

Hauser, Arnold 77, 233 Hegedüs, András 73n, 74, 74n, 77–80, 78n, 79n, 80n, 82, 87–88, 95, 99, 106 Heller, Ágnes 89, 232 Hollander, Paul 103n Hopkins, Terrence 219n, 240 Jowitt, Ken 237 Kennedy, Michael D. 35, 37–41, 44–45, 209n, 230–232 King, Lawrence 19, 26, 81, 111, 146n, 241 Kis, János [Janos] 72, 73, 74, 79, 83–90, 88n, 92–97, 105, 237 See also Rakovsky, Marc Kligman, Gail 237 Kolosi, Tamás 71, 79, 100, 185, 188–190, 195, 197–198, 245–247, 248 Konrád, György [George] vii, 1–2, 24–29, 53, 61, 70, 73–74, 82–83, 84, 85, 90–98, 100, 104–105, 128–129, 146–147, 207–209, 227, 228, 235–236 Kornai, János 71, 99n, 187, 233, 243 Latour, Bruno 16, 18 Lippman, Walter 15–17 Lukács, György [Georg] 52, 53–61, 65–66, 73, 77, 79n, 80n, 87, 88, 232–234 Lukes, Steven 228 Machajski, Jan 19, 209, 248 Malanowski, Jan 213 Malia, Martin 18–19 Mallet, Serge 219 Mannheim, Károly [Karl] 19–22, 23, 54–57, 65–66, 77, 229, 232–234 Márkus, György 64, 87n, 232 Márkus, Mária 74n, 77, 78n, 79, 79n, 80n, 87n, 88n Marx, Karl 19, 38, 59, 231, 233, 237, 242, 249–250 Merton, Robert 166, 168, 181–182, 233, 240 Mihályi, Péter 244, 249 Musil, Jiří 99–100, 235

254 Nee, Victor 167–169, 181–182, 185–186, 241, 241n, 242, 243–244 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 229, 234, 235 Oppenheimer, Robert 8–9, 11 Orban [Orbán], Viktor 44 Ost, David Julian 36n, 207, 238, 247, 248, 249 Pahl, Raymond Edward 99–100, 101n Pilsudski, Jozef 222 Polanyi, Karl 146–147, 151–155, 160, 162, 163, 233, 240, 241, 243 Polanyi, Michael 233 Poulantzas, Nicos 249 Putin, Vladimir 39, 41, 43–45 Rakovski, Marc 72, 72n, 83n, 84–90, 93–97, 105 See also Bence, György [Gyorgy]; Kis, János

Name Index Smelser, Neil 233 Stark, David 71, 86n, 95n, 148n, 236, 243 Stretton, Hugh 244 Szalai, Erzsébet 189, 246 Touraine, Alain 219 Trump, Donald 35, 44–48, 231–232 Vajda, Mihály 232 Verdery, Katherine 64 Wajda, Andrzej 223 Wallerstein, Immanuel 219n, 240 Weber, Max viii, 20, 38, 129, 190, 194, 209, 228, 230–231, 233–234, 242 Western, Bruce 109, 128, 238–240 Wright, Eric Olin 86n, 99, 194, 238, 239, 249 Xi, Jinping 172, 244–245

Subject Index agencies of intervention 11–12 Atomic Energy Commission (aec) 8 Baltic states 156, 157, 160–162 Bildungsbürgertum 1, 29n, 152, 159, 196, 211, 214, 223–224, 228, 229 boundary work 3, 4, 7–8, 9, 13, 14, 25, 27 bourgeois, bourgeoisification 57–60, 86n, 153, 163, 187, 188, 191, 212–213, 234, 245–247 Budapest School 74, 77, 89, 92–93, 95–96, 232–233 bureaucracy 20, 22–23, 24, 63, 194, 211–213, 215, 221–223, 247 party bureaucracy 186, 213, 216, 222 capital 167, 176, 187–192, 194, 196–198, 214, 221 cultural capital 23, 168, 188–191, 194, 221, 229, 245 human capital 178–179 political capital, positional capital 159, 167, 169, 180–181, 187–190, 221, 245 symbolic capital 10–12, 187–192, 221 capitalism viii, 59, 70, 146–158, 161–163, 173, 175–176, 192, 195, 213–216, 223–224, 238, 240–250 market capitalism 130, 160, 242, 245, 246 post-socialist capitalism viii, 36, 149–150, 155–157, 161–163, 241 state capitalism 238, 244 capitalism from above 150, 152, 240–241, 245 capitalism without capitalists 70, 148, 149, 153, 154, 214–216 capital-labor conflict 150, 157 Central European University, ceu 236 central planning vii, 24, 26–27, 62, 64, 170, 208 China 166–170, 172, 186, 238, 242 Chinese capitalism 180–181, 241, 241n, 244–245 class 2, 19–20, 22–28, 35–36, 47, 58–59, 61, 66, 86, 88, 90, 151–152, 194, 197–198, 200, 230, 232, 234, 238–239, 246, 248–250

new class vii, 1, 4–5, 7, 8n, 19, 22–24, 53, 62, 209, 211, 212–221, 224, 228, 237, 246–247 working class 80, 81, 85–86, 193, 207–210, 211–215, 217–224, 241, 248–250 classificatory struggle 3–4, 23–24, 29, 229, 230, 232 clerical workers 216–218, 221, 223, 224 collective intellectual 9 Columbia University, New York 75, 99, 233, 240 communism, communist party 36, 48, 73, 158, 169–170, 172, 211, 245–246 conflict 61, 72, 86n, 137, 147, 150, 152–154, 152n, 160–162, 196, 201 consciousness 28, 59, 66, 85 conversion 23, 188–189 corruption 170, 172, 244 critical intelligentsia 22, 25, 37, 92, 99, 150, 151, 160 critical theory 30, 36, 85, 95, 235 culture, culture war 20, 23, 39–44, 46, 48, 188, 189, 192, 195, 215, 219, 230, 232 cybernetics 27 deprivation 198–201 dialectics, dialectical 58, 59, 62–63 dominant 26, 72, 104, 213, 237, 243 Dreyfus Affair 4–5, 13 East-European countries 185, 188, 190, 194–195 economic indicators 12n, 15, 18 economics, neo-classical economics 38, 75–76, 240–242 economists 9–10, 26–27, 87, 162, 187, 242 education 20–21, 97, 133, 196, 199–200, 216–219 elite, elite conflicts and coalitions 28, 36, 92, 151, 225 embedded neoliberalism 156, 161 embourgeoisement 188, 191, 245–247 enterprise councils 29, 213 enterprises, entrepreneur, entrepreneurs viii, 87, 148, 163, 166–168, 173–181, 190–191, 193, 197, 214

256 expert 7–8, 10, 13–14, 17–18, 24–25, 27–28, 46, 207, 209 extraordinary politics 158–159 field 10–12, 22, 23–24, 29–30, 35, 70, 77, 83–84, 107, 229–230, 232, 236 forms of capital (see capital) 36, 175, 186–191, 221 globalization 37, 40 gross domestic product (gdp) 12n, 15 habitus 2–3, 7, 151, 209, 216–217, 230 human frailty 132, 145, 146 iconic 72, 103, 104, 107, 235 idealism 65, 152 ideology, ideological 20, 22, 28–29, 36, 42–43, 46, 53, 57–61, 63–65, 73, 80, 84–86, 88–94, 96–97, 104–105, 128–129, 151, 185, 196–197, 245 income poverty 198–199 indicative planning 26–27, 29 inequality 128,143, 185–186, 192–201, 207, 208, 213, 215, 238, 242–243 intellectual, intellectual field 8, 10–12, 23–24 intellectuality 35, 44, 45, 46, 48–49, 231–232 intellectuals, intelligentsia viii, 1–10, 13, 15–16, 16n, 18–20, 22–26, 28, 35–38, 46–48, 65–66, 70–74, 80, 85–86, 89–92, 94, 96–97, 131, 147, 151–152, 160, 192, 208–212, 214–215, 218, 219n, 220–223, 228–229, 234, 237, 245–249 intellectuels 7 intelligenty 18–19 interest 4–5, 47, 58–60, 62–63, 87–88, 90, 97, 106, 147, 234, 237, 247 interventions 2, 8–18 irony 36–37, 227, 228, 230–231, 236 Kádár era, post-Stalinist era, reform era 25, 27, 73, 90, 105, 150 Kadarism 74, 246 Karl Marx University of Economics, Budapest 75, 75n, 76, 233 knowledge 1–2, 8, 10, 24–25, 45–46, 48, 52–58, 61–66, 103, 178, 227, 228, 231–232, 235, 237

Subject Index lay experts 8, 10 liberalism 148, 152, 160, 224, 224n, 228, 229, 241 illiberalism 228, 241 liberal democracy 229 marginal intellectuals 1, 25, 28–29, 84, 91–92, 100, 229 marginalization 77, 81, 93–94, 100, 106, 143, 218 market, market transition viii, 39, 64, 128, 166–168, 175, 177, 180, 182, 185–188, 191–196, 201, 241–246, 249 market transition debate 71n, 106, 186 market transition theory 71, 71n, 166–168, 180, 242–244, 246 Marxism 58, 73, 78, 87–88, 95–98, 209, 234, 237–238, 248–249 matters of public concern 14, 16–17 middle class 21, 47, 152, 197–198, 200–201, 208 modes of intervention 13–15 movement and countermovement 151–163, 241–242 nationalist identity politics 160 neoclassical sociology 38, 146–147, 149, 150–155, 157n, 161–163, 230, 240–242 neocorporatism 156 neoliberal, neoliberalism 36, 40, 48, 129, 148–150, 156, 159–162, 220–221, 249 new class theory vii, 52, 53, 61 new elite 90, 167, 186–189 Nomenklatura, nomenclature 72, 149 norms 173, 222 opinion 13–18, 13n, 44 patrimonialism viii, 175 physical and mental health 128–130, 141–143 Polanyian triad 155 political coordination 154–155 political economy viii, 48, 76, 82, 87, 95, 146, 149, 151–152, 159, 161–163, 180–181, 185–190, 234, 240 post-communism 36, 39, 70–71, 74, 102, 106, 149, 155, 188, 211, 214–216, 231, 236, 241 power vii, 22, 24–25, 37, 48, 62, 65, 70, 87–88, 90–92, 97–98, 106, 147, 166–169,

257

Subject Index 186, 189, 196–197, 211–212, 228–229, 231–232, 234–235, 236, 243–244, 245, 247 prebendalism, neo-prebendalism viii privatization 148, 156, 159–160, 173, 176, 181, 187, 196, 223 problematic of allegiance 4–5 professionals 16, 23, 177, 180, 217, 220, 228–230, 247 prognostics 27 property 60, 61, 149, 151, 179, 187, 194, 249 protest vote 158 prototype 8, 24 public intellectuals 1, 3, 6–11, 13, 16, 25, 228, 239 public opinion 13, 15–16 public sphere 12, 15–17, 52 rationalist 62n redistribution viii, 24, 26–28, 61–62, 64, 147, 167–168, 185–186, 193–195, 201, 207, 212, 217, 223, 228–229, 237, 242–243 redistributive economy 70, 190, 228, 234, 237, 240, 243, 246 reform communism, reform socialism  25–29, 105, 150, 169–170, 196, 228 reification 57–58, 60 representation 48, 54, 56–57, 59–60, 62–63, 65 research program 2, 70, 74–75, 101, 106–107, 128, 147, 151, 163 Romantic 26, 55, 57 Russia 41–45, 160, 209, 241, 244, 247 Samizdat 13, 84, 103, 146n self-management 28–29, 87, 160–161, 208, 220 Slovenia 156, 157, 160–161 social hierarchy 70, 186, 197–198 socialism, state socialism viii, 24, 61, 76, 81, 84, 95, 130, 147, 149, 150, 162, 166, 168–170, 175 193, 207–211, 213–217, 219–223, 229, 237–238, 240–241, 242–244, 246 socially unattached intelligentsia 19 sociography 78, 81, 82 Sociology Group at the Academy of Sciences 77

sociology, sociology of knowledge 52–57, 61–62, 65–66, 99, 103, 231–235, 236, 248 solidarity 42, 178 Solidarity 210–211, 213, 217, 219–224 Soviet-type societies 84, 86, 88, 96, 98, 185–187, 192, 194–195 specific intellectual 8–11 stratification systems 71, 194, 246 strikes 157–158, 219, 220, 221, 241 style 13, 56–57 system reproduction 148, 153–154 targets of intervention 2, 15 technocracy, technocrat 23, 26–27, 63, 80, 89, 92, 149, 151, 155, 159–161, 214, 247 teleological knowledge 24–25, 26, 48, 61–66 teleological redistributor 26–28 teleology 24–28 the state 17–18, 58, 152, 156, 168–169, 175, 195, 201, 208, 244 think tanks 14, 15, 16, 16n three Ts 73 totalitarian system 185 transformation 23, 26, 36, 38–40, 46–47, 59, 71, 149, 157–158, 160–161, 185–192, 194, 214, 215n, 224 transition viii, 39–40, 41–44, 64, 70–71, 90, 92 104, 106, 128, 131–132, 138–139, 159, 166–168, 175, 177, 186-189, 191–196, 223, 238n, 241–242, 244, 249–250 See also market transition; market transition debate; market transition theory trust 175–176, 177–178, 201 truth, truthfulness 4, 7, 8, 13, 14, 18, 25, 38, 41–45, 46–48, 223, 232 universal intellectual 8 University of California, Berkeley 75, 99, 233 urban planners 100 varieties of capitalism 146–149, 152, 155n, 156, 161, 216, 241 viable capitalism 150, 162 Visegrád states 156–157, 161, 162, 197–199 Weberian 16n, 38, 194, 234 Welfarism 159–160 Weltanschauung 54–56, 59