This essay is an attempt to map out the rudiments of a theory of manners and formal deference and to demonstrate how such a theory can be usefully applied to certain long-standing problems in the historical sociology of Europe. It is also meant to demonstrate the continuing relevance of comparative ethnography for social theory—something which has been somewhat cast into doubt in recent years.

The historical problems I have in mind is how Max Weber's famous observations (1930) about how the rise of Puritanism was related to the emergence of a commercial economy in early modern Europe can be related to processes that other scholars have noted during that same general period, the rise of “puritanism” in its more colloquial sense, even in areas totally unaffected by Calvinist theology. I am thinking particularly here of the work of Norbert Elias and Peter Burke.

THE COLONIZATION OF MADNESS

Lunatic asylums began to emerge in India towards the end of the eighteenth century. Although some critics expressed concern as to the propriety of an institutional response to mental illness, they formed a small minority. During a period when the asylum took on “a status as panacea equivalent to the steam engine, the rights of man, or the spread of universal knowledge” (Bynum et al. 1988:3), medical and public opinion had come to believe that madness could be cured and that confinement in an institution could not fail to be beneficial both for Europeans and Indians. Furthermore, Europeans in India could not usually rely on any family or parochial networks, so the East India Company had to assume responsibility and increasingly make institutional provision for these employees until they could be sent back home to Britain. The steady growth in institutional provision was also applied to lower-class Indians. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, the three small institutions in the provincial capitals of Madras, Mumbai (Bombay), and Calcutta (originally intended for the European insane and for only a small number of Indians of the better classes) were no longer considered adequate in view of the considerable expansion of British territory during that period. Consequently, the need to set up a network of public asylums to receive both “criminal” and “harmless” insane Indians in provincial centres upcountry had become pressing.

At the end of a distinguished career as chronicler of the Burgundian court, Georges Chastellain (1404–75) penned a quick sketch of the outstanding accomplishments of his duke, Charles the Bold. Accustomed to expositions awash in chivalric pomp, Chastellain employed a different tack to commemorate this sovereign: He sketched eleven “magnificences” performed by the duke of Burgundy, all reconstructed images of this prince's engagement with ceremony. Foremost among this snapshot collection of state ritual was neither a tournament, nor a wedding ceremony, nor even a processional entry. What stood out, in Chastellain's estimation, as Charles' greatest deed was something more riveting and more powerful than any of these spectacles so beloved by the fifteenth-century Burgundian court:

The first [magnificence] was at Brussels, where, seated on his throne, his sword unsheathed and held by his Marshall, he gathered the men of Ghent arranged kneeling before him and at his pleasure and in their presence cut and tore up the political charters they bore. Done for permanent record, this action was without parallel.

For Chastellain, the supreme magnificence of Charles the Bold was a lesson in exemplary punishment, the public abasement of the aldermen and guild deans of the Flemish city of Ghent in January 1469, a year and a half after a city revolt of rank-and-file guildsmen had unsettled celebrations in honor of his accession to the countship of Flanders.

We didn't have sharecroppers in here very much like we did in the South. Those families were paid a salary, which wasn't very much, and they always had a hard way to go, but most of the farmers, they had just about as hard a way to go as their tenants; their farms were small. … They [the tenants] all had their own garden, and own livestock and everything, and some of them even did do a little sharecropping. Most of them worked only so much a day for so much an hour. … But you know, one thing through here, whenever the work closed down in the fall of the year they didn't have any income. And they were really—[they had a] hard way to go. Now a lot of farmers that had more feeling for them would carry them through the winter, but I remember lots of them didn't have any income at all in the wintertime and it was really a big hardship.

In 1991 Jack A. Goldstone published an important book, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, in which he boldly charted a new way to explain the basic causes of revolution throughout Eurasia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Goldstone attempts to explain the periodic waves of early modern state crises, rebellions, and civil wars in widely divergent cultures and geographic settings by developing an intriguing model of state breakdowns which he applies primarily to England, France, the Ottoman Empire, and China. Goldstone views the crises of large agrarian absolute monarchies mainly as the result of a single basic process: prolonged population growth in the context of relatively inflexible economic and social structures, eventually resulting in rapid price inflation, sudden shifts in resources, and rising social demands on a scale that most agrarian-based bureaucratic states found overwhelming. Simply put, long-term population and price in-creases have helped push rigid political, economic, and social institutions into crisis. Since the publication of Goldstone's work, there has been a positive response to it from many historians and social scientists. So far, however, no one has attempted to test Goldstone's model by applying it to a state break-down which the author did not include in his study. In my own research I have discovered that Goldstone's model may apply to Russia even though he did not focus on it. In this article I hope to demonstrate that his work helps explain Russia's Time of Troubles (1598–1613) and that the Russian test case helps validate Goldstone's model as an important contribution to comparative history.

COLONIAL SUBJECTS AND INDIAN TRADITIONS

In late October 1891, the Madras MailOctober 23,1891. The Madras Mail was the largest English daily in Madras at the time. brought dramatic attention to the fact that “the barbarous and cruel custom of hookswinging to propitiate the Goddess of Rain, which has been obsolete for some time, has been revived at Sholavandan near Madura.” The newspaper describes this event with scandalized disapproval. “The manner in which this horrible custom is carried out consists in passing iron hooks through the deep muscles of the back, attaching a rope to the hooks, and (after the method of a well sweep) swinging the victim to a height several feet above the heads of the people. The car on which the pole is placed is then drawn along by large ropes in willing hands . . . Full details of this hookswinging affair are too revolting for publication.” The person swung from the hooks was selected by lot from a larger group that represented a number of the villages sponsoring the festival. Throughout the article, he (for it was always a man) was referred to as “the victim.” The newspaper explains its choice of language: “Victim he may well be called, because, though he enters upon this ordeal voluntarily, the chief reason which drives him to it is the sentiment of doing good to his village.”

Public practices for the suppression of witchcraft are periodically performed throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Anthropologists have generally sought to interpret such practices rather than explain them. This interpretation rests on assumptions about what such practices might mean for social actors rather than on the actual social processes which make their public performance possible. In the anthropological view, the performance of anti-witchcraft practices amounts to an expression of discontent with aspects of social and economic life deriving from the terms of Africa's engagement with the contemporary world. Antiwitchcraft practices and the witchcraft discourse of which they are part are understood to constitute locally constructed critiques of social transformation and modernity. But, whatever the coherence of the symbolic logic expressed in anti-witchcraft practices, such accounts fail to explain why large numbers of people participate in such practices from time to time or how such practices become public.

It is a great tribute to the late Norbert Elias that Hans-Peter Duerr has embarked upon a four-volume critique, Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozess, of Elias's original two volumes of The Civilizing Process (recently reissued in a single-volume edition). Duerr's volumes may initiate a major intellectual debate and thus lead to the wider recognition of the importance of Elias—whom Duerr himself rates as “perhaps the most influential and stimulating sociologist of the second half of the twentieth century” (Duerr, vol. 3:11).

Space does not permit us to examine here the wealth of empirical detail which Duerr deploys, so we shall concentrate on discussing the main theoretical issues at stake. We cannot help noticing, however, a certain double standard in his handling of evidence. Duerr is a very severe judge of the way that Norbert Elias handles his historical evidence in documenting medieval customs and sensitivities, and his keen eye in this regard is to be applauded. However, whereas every item used by Elias to support his point of view is subjected to extremely rigorous criticism, all the items that can be used to contest Elias's views are accepted at face value.

The opening of the formerly closed, state socialist societies of East Central Europe has provided the opportunity to bring new empirical evidence to bear upon models of profession-state relations developed in pluralist western societies. The classic view of Tocqueville and Durkheim has been that professions are an intermediary group linking individuals and the state. Although not always explicitly stated, this model served as the basis for scholarly work on the professions in the post-World War II period, where it (more or less) fit the image of a differentiated pluralist society. Most work on the professions was based on the Anglo-American case.

But even in the United States, state support was more central to maintaining professional authority than was originally thought. Without explicitly discarding the model, Freidson (1970) introduced a distinction between corporate and technical (clinical) autonomy that provided a way out of the paradox he identified, that both aspects of professional autonomy are protected by the state. Corporate autonomy refers to the political power of the organized profession to define the social and economic context of professional work, and clinical autonomy, to the control of decision making in the workplace. Testing his hypothesis on the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, Freidson argued that despite differing degrees of corporate autonomy, the medical profession retained clinical control of decision making, the core of professional autonomy, even in the extreme case of the former Soviet Union.

In 1866, the Atlantic Monthly published a fictional case study of an army surgeon who had lost all of his limbs during the Civil War. Written anonymously by American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, “The Case of George Dedlow” describes not only the series of wounds and infections which led to the amputation of all four of the soldier's arms and legs but also the after-effects of amputation. Reduced to what he terms “a useless torso, more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape,” Dedlow finds that in disarticulating his body, amputation articulates anatomical norms. His observation of his own uniquely altered state qualifies him to speak in universal terms about the relationship between sentience and selfhood: “I have dictated these pages,” he says, “not to shock my readers, but to possess them with facts in regard to the relation of the mind to the body” (1866:5). As such, the story explores the meaning of embodiment, finding in a fragmented anatomy the opportunity to piece together a more complete understanding of how the body functions—physically and metaphysically—as a whole.

This essay addresses the relationship between white-collar workers and nationalism by introducing a cultural-symbolic approach to examine how national discourse became an essential “point of production” of white-collar identities, particularly those of clerks and clerical work. Based on an analysis of the imagery that clerks use to describe their work experience, this discussion attempts to document and explain how and why nationalism, as a cultural system with an internal logic and specific stylistic devices, was employed by the clerks “from below” to construct their occupational identity.

The association between white-collar workers and nationalism, particularly in the context of state building, has long attracted the attention of sociologists and historians. First, the emergence of non-manual workers as the social basis of bureaucratic organizations was linked to state formation. Second, the role of white-collar workers in the evolution of national-capitalist economies and urban consumer communities was regarded as essential in linking state building and economic change. Third, political and social histories of the nationalist Right centered on bureaucrats and clerical employees as standard-bearers of conservative politics.