October 1996: Abstracts

Historical works on Hitler and Stalin or on specific aspects of their regimes reveal how historians differ in their treatment of individual agency. Historians' practices are examined in the light of W. H. Dray's findings about historians' concepts of causation and A. Giddens's structuration theory. Marxist and revisionist historians rejected approaches that endowed Hitler and Stalin with immense power and personal control over events. Works by Isaac Deutscher, A. J. P. Taylor, and J. Arch Getty exhibit historians' methods for reducing or nullifying agential power. Robert C. Tucker's work on Stalin offers a different approach to the problem of the interaction of structure and individual agency. Allan Bullock may be correct in his view that historians are now less likely to exaggerate or underestimate either individual agency or structure when dealing with Hitler and Stalin; and Christopher Lloyd may be correct to say that historians' practices suggest a tacit acceptance of structuration theory in some form, but it does not follow that historians are now more likely to agree about the agential power of individuals. The assessment of agential power still requires interpretation, and it is doubtful that consensus about structuration theory would affect the range of interpretation very much. However, theories of cultural evolution and comparative investigation of the "selection" of political-cultural "genes" at certain historical junctures might provide a useful framework for studying how individuals like Hitler and Stalin acquire an unusual degree of power and authority.

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This paper begins with the opposition common to almost all discussions of the nation and nationalism: that between the cultural and the civic (or contractual) nation. Behind this opposition, however, one can detect a certain "complicity" between the two conceptions. And in order to understand the nature of this complicity, the paper proposes to re-examine the origins of the modern nation during the French Revolution. The first nation, it is argued, was conceived in strictly contractual terms; and yet within only a few years the revolutionaries began stumbling towards a more cultural understanding of the nation, which served to complement its contractual definition. This turn to a more cultural discourse must be understood as responding to three rather pressing problems faced by an exclusively contractual conception. First there is the need to find a stable anchorage for the nation in space and time. Second are the difficulties posed by a purely voluntarist conception of national citizenship. Third, and above all, there are the seemingly uncontrollable conflicts borne by the identification of the nation with its political "constitution," and with the revolutionary regime said to embody that constitution. In this perspective, the emergence of a more cultural discourse must be seen as an attempt to stabilize the post-revolutionary regime by depoliticizing the "idea" of the nation. As such, this discourse's emergence is inseparable from "the discovery" of (a national) society separate from the instance of democratic, political institutions. The nation, then, has two discourses because it has a dual nature, both political and social. The paper concludes with a reflection on the hyphen in the term "nation-state," as indicating the need to bring society and polity together, but also to keep them apart.

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This article argues that to the extent that a representation is historical it is necessarily selective or incomplete with respect to the real world: not everything is known and not everything known can be included in discourse. (In contrast, fictional representations are by definition complete in themselves.) It follows from the incompleteness of historical representations that historians and readers may more or less thematize what has been left out of a historical text: what it ignores or fails to understand. Through an analysis of the manner in which Thomas Carlyle thematized his own ignorance in the face of the past, it is argued that the very limitedness of historical writing may be the source of a distinct aesthetic effect, the historical sublime. This effect is particular to historical writing and rooted in its cognitive function, although it may also be simulated for rhetorical purposes.

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Many scholars now agree that the study of revolutions and other types of collective action ought to focus more attention on culture, while not losing sight of the importance of social structures. Recent scholarship, however, suggests that while culture has begun to receive much more sustained attention, no generally accepted theoretical synthesis has yet emerged in this field. The very title of the recent collection of essays on revolution edited by Nikki Keddie reflects this impasse. In this essay, we sketch a synthetic theoretical perspective on revolutions and collective action that encompasses not only culture and social structure, but also social psychology and agency, a concept that we analytically disaggregate. Moreover, we integrate the various elements of this perspective through a consistently relational focus, one that views ties and transactions as the appropriate unit of analysis. We begin by outlining three structural or relational contexts of action: the cultural, ocial-structural, and ocial-psychological. Social action is shaped and guided at one and the same time by all three of these transpersonal environments, which intersect and overlap with one another and yet are mutually autonomous. We also suggest, however, that action is never completely determined by the relational contexts in which it is embedded. Our framework also points to the importance of agency, which we define as the engagement by actors of their different contexts of action, an engagement that reproduces but also potentially transforms those contexts in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations. This synthetic theoretical framework helps both to sharpen the causal statements that analysts of revolutions and collective action generate and to broaden the range of causal mechanisms that their research identifies.

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