The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America

Molly McCarthy

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013, $30 pbk, ISBN: 9780226033358, 280 pp.

Reviewed by: Thomas Allen, University of Ottawa, Canada

Diary writing links literary self-expression with a highly structured experience of time. However, that structure is itself something that has changed and evolved over historical time. There have been many different diurnal forms available in which individuals might record their personal reflections; not all of these forms fit easily within the most common modern understanding of the diary as a blank book waiting to be filled with unbounded expressions of private sentiments. Molly McCarthy’s social history of the daily planner in America provides valuable insight into the ways in which planners and related media (such as almanacs) provided space for individuals to express themselves within the formal constraints of the crowded page as well as by the hints these books seemed to offer about the appropriate subjects of personal writing. This history of the daily planner thus enlarges our understanding of how self-fashioning has operated within bounds of both time and space: the diurnal form and the page or fragment thereof available for each day’s reflections.

The story McCarthy tells begins in the late eighteenth century, a period in which many Americans employed empty spaces and blank pages in almanacs to record the quotidian events of their lives. Some of the manuscripts McCarthy reproduces, both through textual quotations and in fascinating images of pages from these books, are shocking to modern sensibilities in their laconic juxtapositions. One spring day Aaron Wight, a country doctor and part-time clock-maker, recorded the weather (‘Clear’) as usual before noting that his wife had died at ‘20 M after 5’. We don’t know whether Wight would have expressed more elaborate feelings if he had had more room, or whether he had written all he thought necessary. Wight kept such daily records in his almanacs for more than forty years, a terse, compressed autobiography of sorts.

McCarthy notes that Wight’s manuscripts are of particular interest for the way that they reveal the intersections between competing frames of temporal reckoning, the daily and seasonal structure of the almanac and the hours and minutes of clock time. Obviously, not all late eighteenth-century Americans would have been so attentive to or even aware of the clock. McCarthy surveys a number of different almanacs in which a variety of individuals left handwritten records, providing a sense of the diversity of uses to which these books could be put. McCarthy attends to the different kinds of events and experiences which men and women tended to record, and also notes that some almanac makers began adding blank pages suitable for diary writing in an effort to appeal to the market. The almanac was an important and necessary book in the largely agricultural America of the eighteenth century, but publishers could enhance sales by recognising that their customers were using the book for purposes that went beyond those served by the calendars and interest tables.

In subsequent chapters, McCarthy shows how these secondary, improvisational uses of the almanac helped lead to a nineteenth-century marketplace in which publishers experimented with a variety of commercial diaries and memorandum books. The Lowell Almanac, Business Key, and Pocket Memorandum (McCarthy discusses the 1843 edition) was notably different from the almanacs of the eighteenth century. It was far more geared toward use as a pocket diary, and like its competitors in the mid-nineteenth century it was employed as such by individuals from many walks of life, from seamstresses and housekeepers to professional men. These publications were also different from the blank diary in that they imposed a rigid structure and limit upon each day’s reflections. There was some variation in the amount of space allowed, from a single memoranda page per week to an expansive three days per page in John Marsh’s New Diary, or Daily Remembrancer, introduced in 1848. In all cases, though, individuals had to choose carefully the most important events or thoughts to record.

This kind of expressive discipline created a link between commercial economy and economy of the self, as McCarthy demonstrates while tracing the evolution of the planner through the post-Civil War era and into the first half of the twentieth century. The Wannamaker Diary, launched in 1900 and remaining on the market into the 1970s, was suffused with the culture of retailing and advertising; it ‘looked more like a sales catalog than a diary’ (p. 204). The modern daily planner of the twentieth century served as a medium for expressions of a rational, market-oriented self, a self that believed in a traditional equation of ‘time as money’ as well as a more modern sense that ‘diary keeping and spending went well together’ (p. 53, 220).

Despite the common-sense plausibility of most of McCarthy’s comments about how diaries and planners were used, it must be noted that a lot of her analysis rests upon speculation. It is hard to know, empirically, what individuals were thinking when they wrote in these books, and what effects the properties of the books might have had upon this form of self-expression. Discussing a relatively unsuccessful eighteenth-century date-book published in Philadelphia by William Aitken, McCarthy offers surmises about both the publisher – ‘Aitken must have felt the moment just right’ for such a book – and the purchasers of the book, one of whom ‘appeared to embrace’ the book’s potential for recording commercial transactions while another ‘must have relished the opportunity to carry his accounts with him’ (p. 75). It’s certainly possible that Aitken had the feelings McCarthy theorises, or that his customers relished the sensations McCarthy conjectures they relished, but there’s no way of knowing. This kind of psychological speculation continues throughout the study, so that in 1910 we find that Jane Fiske could peruse old copies of her commercial diaries ‘at random, rereading and reliving all her life’s cumulative joys and sorrows. In her hands they became much more than a market commodity, a manufactured good; they represented her marriage, her motherhood, herself’ (p. 198). McCarthy is a careful and intelligent interpreter, and her speculations are not without plausibility, but such efforts to imagine the inner lives of people from past generations must always be received with caution.

Despite this caveat, McCarthy’s study makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the diary form, and of life-writing in general. The illustrations throughout the book are stunning and compelling; McCarthy has undertaken outstanding archival work in research centres such as the American Antiquarian Society, the Newberry, and Winterthur. This study makes a significant contribution to the fields of social history and book history, and to the sociology of identity formation within structures of economy and time.

The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution

Claire Langhamer

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, £20 hbk, ISBN: 9780199594436, 289pp.

Reviewed by: Neil Armstrong, Teesside University, England

In The English in Love, Claire Langhamer argues that the Second World War was a watershed moment in the intimate life of heterosexual couples. The experience of war helped shape desires for relationships which placed greater emphasis on love, happiness and personal growth than ever before. The ideal environment for nourishing such mutually rewarding exchanges was the privacy of the home, which became an essential right of citizenship in the context of the emerging welfare state. Fulfilment was to be contained within ‘companionate’ wedlock and domesticity, a notion underscored by marriage rates which continued to rise until the early 1970s. Langhamer contrasts this with the pragmatism of couples beginning relationships in the interwar period, though she is careful to acknowledge that both love and pragmatism could be important throughout the twentieth century. However, Langhamer also highlights the problem that love is potentially unstable; its veracity or authenticity is hard to discern. Furthermore, once heightened expectations of love and sexual pleasure had been emphasised as integral to marriage, they could no longer be contained within it. Consequently, an emotional revolution which had helped foster even greater commitment to marriage in the post-war decades also contained the seeds of its own destruction from the mid-1970s onwards.

Langhamer’s utilises a variety of primary sources, including the Mass-Observation Archive, popular newspapers and journals, films and television programmes, sociological studies, and publications derived from institutions such as the churches and the Marriage Guidance Council. Seventeen images nicely demonstrate the extent to which the themes of the book were embedded in the popular culture of the age. Langhamer’s argument persuasively rests on the ‘dynamic relationship between prescription and practice’, which highlights the many ways in which the strictures of a variety of public and private authorities were ‘adopted, adapted, subverted or rejected’ (p. 14).

The English in Love is organised thematically, with eight chapters divided into three sections devoted to love, courtship and commitment. Chapter one charts the transformation of contemporary understandings and expectations of love in the years immediately following the Second World War. Whilst in the first half of the twentieth century the act of loving a partner might indicate a duty of care, after 1950 emotional intimacy came to be associated with mutual understanding and cultivation of the self, which increasingly privileged self-fulfilment instead of self-control. Set in the context of private life, this ‘capacity for transcendence came to be a marker of authenticity’ (p. 24). But how were individuals to know if they were really in love? In the following chapter Langhamer demonstrates how the verification of love was considered in relation to both passion and pragmatism. Here love and pragmatism were not mutually exclusive, and factors such as economic security were not overlooked when choosing a partner. Nonetheless, Langhamer argues that ‘the balance between these factors was decisively redrawn’, whilst the ‘tensions between love, passion, and the sensible choice became more sharply accentuated and publicly discussed’ (p. 44). Chapter three focuses more specifically on the issue of spousal suitability. Partner selection remained rooted in social class and other categories of difference which influenced notions of attractiveness and compatibility. There remained limits to individual agency, and the inclination and opportunity to fall in love was not shaped by the emotions alone.

The middle section of the book is concerned with courtship practices and how they helped shaped contemporary understandings of love. Chapter four highlights the places where a potential partner might be found. Langhamer places particular emphasis on the cinema, dance halls, pubs, cafes and other commercial venues. Whilst there were continuities with the courtship practices of the first half of the twentieth century, the ‘likelihood of meeting partners through community and family ties continued to diminish’, as courtship became a leisure activity itself (p. 104). Indeed, as Langhamer highlights in chapter five, young people became increasingly independent in their courtship behaviour after the war, facilitated in part by their growing economic power. Whilst the importance of commercial leisure to courtship meant that it gradually became less private, courting couples were also able to move away from parental control by carving out ‘islands’ of emotional and physical privacy within public spaces, emphasising their ‘togetherness and exclusivity’ (p. 112). In chapter six Langhamer explores the tensions experienced by courting couples, particularly in relation to money and sex. Although it was expected that men would incur the costs of courting, women were supposed to ‘invest emotion whilst safeguarding their sexual reputation’ (p. 126). It was not, however, always precisely clear how this exchange should be negotiated, and various factors gradually modified behaviour, including rising affluence and National Service. Furthermore, these negotiations provided ‘an opportunity to rehearse and perform the social relations which were expected to frame married [...] life’ (p. 132).

The final section contains two chapters focusing on commitment. Langhamer addresses how couples became engaged and the ways in which this altered quotidian experience. Engagement is set in the context of the declining age of first marriage, a theme illuminated by discussions of contemporary concerns over ‘hasty, youthful and bigamous marriages’ which prompted ‘state-sponsored strategies for bolstering marital commitment in the face of rising expectations’ (p. 19). Those expectations sometimes led to disappointment. Tensions based on economic choices, sex and a perceived lack of personal growth led to an increasing advocacy of the ‘primacy of feeling over legality’ (p. 202).

A great strength of The English in Love is Langhamer’s ability to convey complex ideas in clear engaging prose suitable for a broad audience. Despite this, historians of the emotions might be a little disappointed. In her introduction, Langhamer acknowledges the breadth and depth of work in this now well-established sub-field of history, but this is rarely referred to in the rest of the book. She distinguishes her own work from recent studies of love rooted in cultural and intellectual history by emphasising the way in which selfhood was framed and underpinned by economic and material realities. This is an important and well-established point of the book. My only major criticism is that Langhamer places so much emphasis on courtship and preparing for marriage at the expense of a more sustained discussion of love during long-term wedlock, whether ‘happy ever after’ or not. However, this certainly points the way to more exciting research in this area.

Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health, 1900–1940

Mona Gleason

Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013, $29.95 pbk, ISBN: 9780773541337207, 232 pp.

Reviewed by: Gwenith Siobhan Cross, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada

In Small Matters Mona Gleason explores children’s experiences of illness and healthcare in the early decades of the twentieth century. Relying, whenever possible, on oral history, Gleason traces the experiences of individuals who were children during that period and uses their examples in her examination of healthcare and its connections to education, power dynamics, and Canadian values. Through her interviews Gleason identifies the importance of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability in the experience of illness and medicine. The influence of these categories was such that illness and treatment were neither uniformly experienced nor uniformly relevant. In the years prior to socialised medicine, access to medical care was greatly influenced by economics; ‘the further each family found themselves from the ability to share in, or mimic, white, middle-class, patriarchal values and mores, the more difficult it became to lay claim to good health and well-being’ (p. 84). This idea that there was an intrinsic link between good health and Canadian values is explored in detail and the book demonstrates the social importance of health and sanitation.

Throughout the book Gleason shows how children were exposed to healthcare practices and policies through experiences of illness, school medical inspection, and healthcare curriculum. Expanding on arguments made by leading Canadian historians in the field, Gleason demonstrates that the prevailing beliefs about children’s bodies were a construct of the early twentieth century. Policies and developments throughout this period developed the construct by defining children’s bodies as distinct from adults – in 1937 paediatrics was formally recognised by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons as a distinct specialty. This emphasis on the definition of children normalised unequal adult/child power relationships. This imbalance in the power dynamics was emphasised in issues relating to health and was particularly apparent in hospital settings where the actions of adults made children feel powerless.

School medical inspection and health curriculums were, according to Gleason, an extension of these power dynamics and expressions of social values; ‘through health curriculum, food and space became not only racialized and classed, but acted as indices of membership within the bounds of Canadian citizenship’ (p. 99). Several individuals interviewed by Gleason recount instances where individual children – usually from lower economic backgrounds or different ethnicities – were used as an example to other children in the class. Such instances were part of how health education was used to advance hegemonic ideas of disease. The irony, however, was that sanitary conditions at schools were often deplorable. Ultimately, Gleason acknowledges that school medical inspections and health curriculums were neither wholly positive nor wholly negative. There were some medical benefits from these programmes, but there were also problems stemming from the social values embedded in their philosophy.

The correlations between social values and healthcare are clearly expressed in the recollections of individuals who were disabled. Several of Gleason’s interviewees fell ill with poliomyelitis during childhood. Their experiences of their illness, and subsequent weakness and deformity in the legs, varied greatly. Experiences of poliomyelitis are indicative of how medical treatment was not uniformly experienced; children received treatment at home, in hospitals and sanatoriums, and some families relied exclusively on a physician’s services while others employed nurses and alternative medical treatments.

The varying medical experiences are clearly highlighted in Gleason’s interviews. These interviews also showed the variations in the power dynamics of healthcare that were dependent on individual experiences. Many interviewees recounted their parents’ unrelenting faith in physicians; accessing medical care was costly and time-consuming for medical families, and parents often considered the physician the ultimate authority. Nevertheless, as Gleason emphasises, community doctoring was frequently used in addition to physician prescribed care. This domestic doctoring was central to many interviewees’ experiences. The experiences of children treated by physicians – especially in cases where families were extremely deferential to the physician – clearly highlight how children’s bodies were constructed by the medical profession and how medical treatments often allowed physicians to exercise authority over children.

The nationalist influences on healthcare are made predominant throughout the book, at times tied in with the negative experiences of some children. Racism permeated the ideology of healthcare; First Nations were considered inherently incapable of looking after their health. While Gleason makes a persuasive argument for the influence of race on experiences of healthcare, this argument is, unfortunately, not well developed in her oral histories. Gleason is upfront about the limitations of oral histories and acknowledges that of the 32 subjects interviewed for this book, 24 identified as either Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic. The predominance of Anglo-Saxons in her interview subjects limits the breadth of recollection available when discussing the influence of race. Similarly, Gleason argues that services in Quebec were unequally divided amongst French and English citizens, but she interviewed only two French Canadians. In spite of this imbalance in the interviews, her argument remains persuasive and well supported by literature.

Overall Small Matters is a strong addition to studies on the history of children, family, and healthcare in Canada. The work is well situated within historiography on the history of medicine in Canada. Small Matters builds on existing studies while providing extensive new material. The study obviously has a Canadian focus, but the merits of the work extend beyond the study of Canadian history. The emphasis on power dynamics and the inclusion of health in education focuses on issues that were not exclusive to Canada and ensures that this work contributes to broader studies in the history of childhood and social medicine.

Bourdieu and Historical Analysis

Philip S. Gorski (ed.)

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013, $27.95 pbk, ISBN: 9780822352730, 432 pp.

Reviewed by: Bowen Paulle, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

A judicious appraisal of even the most basic arguments developed across the fifteen chapters and 366 pages making up Bourdieu and Historical Analysis would go well beyond the scope of this review. This book, like Bourdieu’s oeuvre, is extremely rich, challenging and above all rewarding. What follows is an attempt to sketch only the main contours of what the fourteen contributing authors – and especially the editor of this volume, Philip S. Gorski – set out to achieve and why I think they were successful.

At least at first blush, this book’s main question appears to be vital yet narrow: If Bourdieu has much more to offer historical sociologists than has to date been recognised (largely because of the misreading of Bourdieu as a reproduction theorist in the Anglophone world), what have we been missing? Gradually it dawns on the reader that such a circumscribed, scholarly, and somewhat subdued question does not reflect at very least Gorski’s deeper aims. Largely due to the exceptional quality of the substantive chapters, including one by Gorski himself, but more obviously because of Gorski’s exacting Introduction and sweeping Conclusion, this meaty tome functions as a megaphone for a man attempting to transform our field, broadly defined, as well as how it relates to ‘the real world’.

What the reader already suspected is made explicit in Gorski’s conclusion, ‘Bourdieusian theory and historical analysis: Maps, Mechanisms, and Methods’. While demonstrating sensitivity regarding the forces pushing social scientists to abjure their faith in grand theories, ‘[a]t least [...] in public’ (p. 363), Gorski lays out a compelling argument against what he sees as the standard practice of refusing general theories at the ‘front door, only to quietly usher [them] in through the back [...] a little Marx, a little Weber, maybe a little Foucault, or a little network theory’ (ibid). As Gorski’s own masterful mixing and matching of (among others) Weber, Elias and Foucault in The Disciplinary Revolution (2003) demonstrates, he knows quite well that there is much to be said for this type of eclecticism. And yet, Gorski argues, especially if we are well-informed about the shortcomings of Parsons’ scheming, Marxism and many other failed attempts at grand theory, there is much to be said for working within a single framework of shared (background) assumptions, terms, and procedures. Furthermore, and this is where it gets feisty, Bourdieu’s analytic framework is not the only heavyweight contender. Marginal as it may be in some sociological quarters, in our neo-liberal era, there is a clear challenger to both Bourdieu and eclecticism alike – rational choice theory. What this book sets out to do, at least from one of Gorski’s (p. 361) most memorably driven-home perspective, is demonstrate how a reinvigorated ‘Bourdieusian David [can become] more powerful than the rational choice Goliath’ presently dominating the world of social science theory and public discourse.

Clearly then, Gorski wants to transform the entire field of social science, and he wants to do so with an eye to what goes on outside it. Bourdieu’s coherent and explicit ontology, as well as his highly advanced methodological procedures, Gorski reasons, can yield far more satisfying depictions of social dynamics – and foster more successful ‘translations’ into public discourse – than anything we will get from either the main contender or from our present default setting (eclecticism). Gorski’s deeper challenge to us, as social scientists generally and historical sociologists in particular, is this: Either we efficiently harness and increase the power of Bourdieu’s mighty system of sensitising concepts or we remain caught up in some kind of symbolic violence that will lead us not only to go on dividing ourselves but also to our field being further conquered by a clearly inferior system of ideas. ‘Bourdieu is correct when he argues that rational choice theory is simply a subtheory within the theory of practice and that rational action is simply a particular form of practical action,’ Gorski concludes, ‘and not necessarily the most common or important one’ (p. 362). Knowing how profoundly Weber shaped Gorski’s thinking, it is hard not to ponder, while reading this, the tension between substantive and formal rationality in the older master’s language (or, at the risk of getting too eclectic, Habermas’s ideas about the colonisation of the lifeworld).

Knowing what is truly at stake, we are now in a position to understand the book’s organisational structure. In his utterly convincing Introduction, ‘Bourdieu as a theorist of change’, Gorski demolishes the notion that the book’s title should be served up with a question mark at the end. Making use of data from the Social Science Citation Index, for example, he demonstrates what was behind the selective reception and mislabelling of Bourdieu across the Anglophone world. This sets up Part One, entitled ‘Situating Bourdieu’, which begins with David L. Swartz’s rock-solid presentation of Bourdieu’s version of the triune approach that, at the level of mutually constituting and most basic sociological principles, Bourdieu and Elias shared (i.e., habitus, field/figuration, and power/capital). Craig Calhoun offers the second substantive chapter based on a trenchant argument for reading Bourdieu as a historical sociologist and a keen eye for developments related to four key historical transformations. In the final offering of the first part and ‘from the left bank’, one might say, Sorbonne professor of history Christophe Charle offers the kind of view of Bourdieu’s effect on historical research in France that was so absent during the crucial phase in which Bourdieu’s mid-career warped his reception in the Anglophone world.

Especially for those already familiar with the ingredients necessarily used to lay the book’s strong foundation, the second part, ‘Theoretical Extensions’, is the most provocative and rewarding. It gets underway, in Chapter Four, with Ivan Ermakoff’s essential dissection of how rational choice theory relates to Bourdieu’s (dis)position-based theory of practice. Next is George Steinmetz’s brilliant essay, which will be profoundly meaningful to readers of this journal, urging us to extend the reach of two of Bourdieu’s key concepts: symbolic capital and habitus. In a surprisingly critical piece, Mustafa Emirbayer and Erik Schneiderhan show that while John Dewey’s approach to creativity, democratisation, and freedom is in many profound ways consistent with Bourdieu’s, in other ways the older master’s approach was superior. More to the point, these co-authors argue in Chapter Six, if Bourdieu had been better versed in American pragmatism he might not have fallen so silent on arguably the most important question he forces us to ask: How can domination and symbolic violence be overcome? In what follows, in a similarly constructive yet critical spirit, Gil Eyal uses his own research on the complex grid of interdependent forces he associates with Israeli defence intellectuals to demonstrate why Latour’s actor-network model might actually be better suited to guide research on what transpires in spaces between fields than Bourdieu’s. In the chapter that rounds out part two of the book, while complimenting Eyal’s work in the previous chapter, Charles Camic skilfully delineates ‘Bourdieu’s two sociologies of knowledge’ and how they can fruitfully be utilised in combination with the efforts of Randall Collins and other American scholars forging a ‘new sociological internalism’.

In Part Three, ‘Historical Extensions’, five authors offer five essays attempting to show how (reinvigorated) Bourdieusian theory might enhance historical analysis. In chapter nine, Chad Goldberg shows how Bourdieu’s approach to classification struggles to shed new light on the debates underlying the (partial) emergence of the American welfare state. Then, wading through three waves of earlier research, in ways that connect with, and diverge from, Golberg’s previous chapter in interesting ways, Gorski attempts to use Bourdieu to move beyond several long-standing debates in research on nationalism. Utilising Bourdieu’s notion of synchronisation, Gisèle Sapiro follows up with a stimulating account of the French literary field during, and in the wake of, the Second World War. In chapter twelve, Robert Nye offers a probing, fully embodied, unmistakably Bourdieusian analysis of shifting gender regimes in (early) modern France. Part Three ends with Jacques Defrance’s engagement with a domain about which Bourdieu offered important programmatic statements, but, as far as I know, no sustained attention: the birth and transformation of the world of sports in contemporary France. All of this paves the way for Gorski’s masterful 39 page conclusion, which attempts to redefine both how Bourdieu’s main concepts can be used to interrogate processes of historical transformation and how we can transform the field of social science.

Of course, along the way, a few stones were left unturned. Although several of the authors including Gorski (repeatedly) reference the work of Norbert Elias, one is left wondering how the profound affinities in the approaches of these two master sociologists might stimulate new advances in relational and processual analysis (cf. Paulle, Van Heerikhuizen and Emirbayer 2012). Similarly, both with regard to Gorski’s own substantive contribution on nation-isation and with regard to his invitation to rally around the same flag, one would have liked to hear more about how extending Bourdieu’s theory might lead to advances on Brubaker’s (e.g. 2009) earlier, and also clearly Bourdieu-inspired, work on nation-ness as well as race and ethnicity.

While more omissions might be noted, the main takeaway for me remains this: those contributing to this volume are indeed up to the challenge Gorski laid down. I will use this bundle of essays extensively in my teaching and research. This book should become an instant, field (theory) re-defining classic.

Institutionelle Entdemokratisierungsprozesse. Zum Nachhinkeffekt des sozialen Habitus in Frankreich, Iran und Deutschland (Dissertation).

Behrouz Alikhani

Hannover: Springer VS, 2012, €42.99 pbk, ISBN: 9783531193076, 303 pp.

Reviewed by: Dieter Reicher, University of Graz, Austria

The book represents Alikhani’s dissertation supervised by the German-Iranian figurational sociologist Dawud Gholamasad. The study focuses on the so-called ‘processes of de-democratisation’ in three countries: France, Germany and Iran. The French case is based on the events after the French Revolution that leads finally to the dictatorial reign of Napoleon I and the events after 1848 that result in the Second Empire of Napoleon III. The German case is based on the Weimar Republic period leading to the Nazi regime. The Iranian case discusses the failure of the constitutional monarchy between 1906 and 1925.

Like Gholamasad, Alihkani too argues that in all of these cases anti-democratic and anti-liberal sentiments have led to authoritarian regimes. They are all the result of unfinished processes of modernisation that interrelated with a widespread authoritarian character and an anti-democratic social habitus. Here, Elias’s theme of the ‘drag effect’ (Nachhinkeffekt) of the social habitus plays a central role. Elias argues that some elements of society develop slower than others. Sometimes, particular aspects of the habitus drag behind the development of social structures. Thus, romanticism, nationalism, or religious movements may flourish within certain groups of society as kinds of conservative reactions towards modernisation. Elias demonstrates the importance of the ‘drag effect’ in his study of the Germans. He shows that the failure of the Revolution of 1848 had blocked the establishment of democratic and liberal attitudes, but promoted instead, also within the middle classes, the aristocratic ideals of the warrior. During the turmoil of the Weimar Republic this anti-democratic culture was a fruitful base for the Nazi-movement and its belief in obedience and violent solutions. Alikhani also suggests that the ‘drag effect’ of the social habitus is of importance in order to understand ‘de-democratisation’ in French events, and especially in the Iranian case that is clearly the centre of the book.

However, Alikhani discusses processes of de-democratisation with the help of Tocqueville, Marx and Elias. Thus, before he turns to the history of the Iranian constitutional monarchy and the rise of Rezah Khan, Alikhani focusses on France and Germany. Alikhani discusses the French case with help of writings of Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville which he reinterprets from an Eliasian perspective. Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856) focuses on the French Revolution and the subsequent events that led to the takeover of Napoleon I. Alikhani shows that there are some parallels between the thinking of Elias and Tocqueville. To a figurational sociologist it is striking to see that Tocqueville already stresses the importance of customs (mœurs) similar to Elias’s concept of the social habitus. Thus, for Tocqueville one important reason for the rise of the authoritarian Napoleonic reign was explained by the attitudes and habits of the French population. Tocqueville means that the French common man was not interested in politics. Rather, the Ancien Régime centralised and bureaucratised the country and weaned the population as well as the nobility from active political participation. Interestingly, Alikhani finds the aspect of social habitus also in the writings of Marx who focuses on the revolution of 1848 and the subsequence rise of Napoleon III (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852). Alikhani stresses the Marxian notion that the ‘party of order’ (consisting of a coalition between royalists, Bonapartists and the bourgeoisie) heavily relied on an ethic of violence and anti-democratic attitudes. This too is a momentum of the social habitus resembling to some degree what Elias wrote about the Germans.

The most important part of the book is concerned with the Iranian case. Alikhani’s narrative starts long before the period of 1906 to 1925. The author stresses the importance of the long-term perspective. For centuries, Iran was the victim of raids of nomadic tribes plundering and pillaging the country. Thus, Persian culture was very often affected by processes of decivilisation. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the shah was able to centralise the country to a certain extent, allowing him to organise a standing army more powerful than the forces of the warrior tribes. However, the balance of power remained fragile. Thus, the period of constitutional monarchy was still characterised by a relative weak central power. Alikhani argues that within this historical frame of the 1920s and 1930s, and due to the lack any democratic tradition, there was a sustained call for the ‘strong man’ that is familiar with what we know about the Germans’ sentiments towards Hitler. Rezah Khan was successful in fitting into this scheme and began to unify the central power under his regime.

One puzzling problem of the book concerns the validity of the concept of ‘de-democratisation’. As Alikhani rightly outlines, the concept of ‘functional democratisation’ goes far beyond the static notion of ‘democracy’ favoured in political science. Elias argued that in more complex societies the extent of the division of labour increases and chains of interdependence become longer. Certain powerful groups become less able to control and freely manipulate the more complex figurations. Formerly powerless groups, outsiders, now gain better positions. The momentum of the whole power balance between elite and non-elite groups shifts in favour of the latter. This means the term ‘functional democratisation’ is related to the increase in power of former outsiders and the decrease in power of former established groups. Thus, ‘functional democratisation’ is not necessarily related to the establishment of a political system called ‘democracy’. Compared to old feudal reigns, dictatorships in the context of industrialised societies may have a relatively high degree of ‘functional democracy’, although they are not democracies at all. Therefore, the term ‘de-democratisation’ logically has to refer to the reverse process: the decrease in power of former outsider groups (after a period of increasing power) and the re-establishment of the old power-positions of the traditional elites. I am not quite sure whether or not the Iranian and the other cases mentioned in this book really refer to this kind of ‘de-democratisation’. They are definitely related to the knowing ‘decivilising’ process culminating into dictatorship. Thus, Alikhani’s book is inspiring because it forces the scholar to revisit the themes of decivilising processes and functional democratisation. To sum up, Alikhani’s book is worth reading and well done. It is not only a worthy contribution to figurational sociology, but for everyone who is interested in historical and comparative studies of dictatorships and democracies.

Habitus und Politik in Kärnten. Soziogenetische und Psychogenetische Grundlagen des Systems Jörg Haider

Christian Dorner-Hörig

Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2014, €39.99 pbk, ISBN: 9783658042394, 270 pp.

Reviewed by: Cas Wouters, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

This process sociological study is published as number nine in the series Figurationen. Schriften zur Zivilisations- und Prozesstheorie, edited by Annette Treibel with the assistance of Helmut Kuzmics and Reinhard Blomert, all process sociologists from Germany and Austria. The book was originally a dissertation supervised by Helmut Kuzmics.

The author, Christian Dorner-Hörig, reports on his research into the sociogenesis and psychogenesis of political relations, culture and habitus in Carinthia, geographically a huge basin surrounded by high mountains that for many centuries was an important part of the Habsburg Empire. Carinthia became the Southern-most province of Austria, and it enclosed a traditional region of Slovenia. Therefore, the author focuses mainly on the changing relationships between the rulers and bureaucracies of the empire and state, of which Carinthia was a region or province, and its local political system of rulers and bureaucracies, as well as on the relationships between the two main ethnic Slovenian and German populations.

Integration processes that drew Carinthia into the Austrian state were late and incomplete. The fact that Carinthia lagged behind in this respect partly explains why the political system and habitus of feudal-patrimonialism was preserved for longer in this region than in Austria. Dorner-Hörig documents enduring characteristics of patrimonial relationships, such as a rather personal and arbitrary type of command with a tension balance between inflicting harsh punishments and conferring special favours. Usually these relationships are experienced to some extent as unbending and merciless, yet generating at the same time a deeply felt awe, devotion and even love for the patrimonial authority, particularly at times when its representative exhibits generosity, gratitude or understanding. The author connects Austrian patrimonial history with its habitus of striving for harmony, being highly sensitive to authority and relatively dependent upon external constraints to control and direct self-restraints. The unequal power ratio of patrimonial relationships corresponds with a relatively simple personality structure in a ‘subject culture’ (Untertanenkultur) that is directly attuned to a balance of controls that are heavily tilted towards external constraints and a we–I balance tilted strongly towards identification with the ‘we’.

Integration processes in Carinthia also lagged behind because of tensions between its two main we-groups: Slovenian and German Carinthians, each with their own language and identity. If one considers that in 1890 the Slovenian part of the population was still 25.5 per cent and that this percentage had been reduced to 2.4 per cent by 2001, then it is no surprise that relations between the German majority and Slovenian minorities are a long-standing political issue. These tensions, Dorner-Hörig argues, have functioned as a barrier in the development of relations to a level of integration in which conflicts might lose their principal connotations of danger and threat, and change towards being experienced as a productive force of change and an essential part of democratic relations and behaviour. In Carinthia there is a long history of deeply rooted authoritarian persuasions combined with mistrust and hostility against anyone who is not a member of the we-group. It is expressed for example in the fear of losing favours or being punished in other ways for being or having been politically engaged with the party or movement that loses power. It is mainly from this patrimonial political culture and habitus, combined with persistent uncompromising ethnic group tensions, that the rise of Jörg Haider and his nepotistic regime can be understood and explained. In fact, as Dorner-Hörig shows, the conditions for such a regime had existed in the pre-Haider period.

Since the Reformation and contra-Reformation the we–I and we–they balances blended together in distinctive ways. Using the German language, for example, was often identified with being protestant. For the nobility, however, German was merely an instrument of control, whereas for the people of northern Carinthia it expressed a symbolic unity with more northern German-speaking regions against catholic Vienna. In contrast, the German language was a symbol of oppression for the people of southern Carinthia. This was the Slovenian or Windischen area, as it was called before the nineteenth century. Comprised mainly of peasants, this group succeeded in presenting themselves as the oldest indigenous population of Carinthia. Until the mid-nineteenth century a considerable part of the German-speaking population was apparently willing to divide Carinthia along the river Drau into two separate political lands within the Habsburg Empire.

In the Nazi-era Carinthia was home to many Nazis, but also to those who bitterly resisted them. Such tensions have led historians to speak of the July Putsch in 1934 as a ‘civil war’, creating a rupture even between family members and neighbours. Later, however, when Austria became part of the Third Reich, the attempted genocide of the Slovenian population in Carinthia became part of the political objective to ‘make this land German’. However, it did not prevent the Nazis conscripting Slovenian men to fight in their army. Many of these Slovenians took refuge in the woods to take part in partisan warfare, enabling the resistance to continue its opposition to the Austrian Nazi regime.

Enduring tensions between its Slovenian and German speaking populations still haunt Carinthia. A characteristic issue is the Ortstafelfrage, an ongoing political debate about how many and which villages and towns should be indicated and signposted using their German and their Slovenian names. In the Ortstafelsturm of 1972, signposts were vandalised. Members of established groups in Carinthia, usually German-speaking, have developed such a strong habit of declining any intimate relationship with members of the outsider group that the expression of ‘having a Slovenian Granny in the basement’ could become an established phrase. When asked if he had any Slovenian ancestors the mayor of a town south of Klagenfurt answered: ‘No, not really [...] only a mother’ (p.82).

Dorner-Hörig shows how the formation of ethnic conflicts and we-feelings in Carinthia, as well as the conservation of a feudal-patrimonial habitus, were highly interconnected long-term processes. It is very promising to compare these processes with similar long-term ethnic tensions elsewhere, for example in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, the Basque Country, South-Tyrol, etc., in each case taking the involved processes and levels of state and habitus formation into account. The tensions and conflicts involving immigrants and their communities in almost every European country since the 1970s could also be studied in this context. These comparisons could clarify important similarities and differences, especially when described and compared as models of established–outsider figurations.

In his essay ‘Towards a theory of established–outsider relations’, Norbert Elias highlights several universal regularities of established–outsider figurations. He suggests the model can be used comparatively to understand a whole range of changing power balances: between states, classes, ethnic groups, colonisers and the colonised, etc. In fact, his own On the Process of Civilisation can also be read as an account of changes in established–outsider relations among (particularly the upper layers of) European societies from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. In the first of its originally two volumes, Elias draws attention mainly to shifts in the balance of controls – the tension balance between external and internal social codes of behaviour and self-regulation. Using the word ‘civilisation’ in the book’s title only compounds the impression that his main focus is on this particular balance of controls. But the novelty of presenting an empirical-theoretical integration of long-term changes in this balance will have led readers to ignore the explanatory function of related and simultaneous shifts in balances of power of specific groups of people over time, particularly the upper layers of European societies mainly in France, England and Germany. Elias compares the dynamics and changing patterns of what could be conceptualised as French, English and German models of established–outsider relations, and it could be argued that his synopsis in part four ‘Overview: Towards a Theory of Civilising Processes’ is mainly built on an elaborate comparative construction of these three models into a European model.

This perspective suggests the possibility of a ‘Carinthia Model’ of established–outsider relations. Such a model could emphasise the balance of control as much as the balance of power, as well as other balances such as the they–we–I balances (for more balances, see Wouters (2014) ‘Universally applicable criteria for doing figurational process sociology: Seven balances, one triad’ Human Figurations, Vol. 3, No. 1). In addition, it would demonstrate the explanatory power of a processual approach. One could even envisage such a model of established–outsider relations becoming a standard for comparison. In his account of the development of a specific political figuration, its culture of patrimonialism, and its connections with the history of tensions between two ethnic groups, Dorner-Hörig clearly shows enough potential and provides enough material with which to elaborate a ‘Carinthia Model’, one that could stand alongside Elias and Scotson’s Winston Parva and later Elias’s Maycomb Model of established–outsider relations.


 
I wish to thank Jonathan Fletcher for his comments on my English.