1. Once in a great while one encounters an organization that combines some level of voluntary coordination while respecting and even encouraging local initiative. Solidarnosc in Poland under martial law and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement in the United States are rare examples. Both came into existence only in the course of protest and struggle.
2. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1978).
3. Milovan Djilas, The New Class (New York: Praeger, 1957).
4. Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action (London: Freedom Press, 1988), 14.
5. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), 293–94.
6. John Dunn, “Practising History and Social Science on ‘Realist Assumptions,’ ” in Action and Interpretation: Studies in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. C. Hookway and P. Pettit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 152, 168.
1. Gramsci develops the concept of “hegemony” to explain the failure of universal suffrage to bring about working-class rule. See Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971).
2. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).
3. See R. R. Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 96–97.
4. Yan Yunxiang, conversation.
5. Kenneth Boulding, “The Economics of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Economics,” American Economic Review 58, nos. 1/2 (March 1966): 8.
1. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered (New York: Harper, 1989), 117.
2. Edgar Anderson, Plants, Man, and Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952) 140–41.
1. Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action (London: Freedom Press, 1988), 92. The playground examples are all drawn from the introduction to Ward’s chapter 10, pp. 89–93.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper-Collins, 1988), 555.
3. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper-Collins, 1974); Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2008).
4. See, for example, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1533248/Is-this-the-end-of-the-road-for-traffic-lights.html.
1. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 28.
2. Paul Averich, Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 66.
3. Vaisberg, speaking in 1929, and quoted in R. W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivization of Russian Agriculture, 1929–1930 (London: Macmillan, 1980), 175.
4. A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, ed. Daniel Thorner, trans. Basile Kerblay and R. E. F. Smith (Homewood, IL: Richard Irwin for the American Economic Association, 1966, originally published in Russian in 1926).
5. Henry Stephens Randall, “Cultivators,” in The Life of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, 1858, p. 437.
6. Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice: The Social Basis of Obedience (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1978).
7. Robert E. Lane, Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1962).
8. Steven H. Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
9. See, e.g., Alf Ludke, “Organizational Order or Eigensinn? Workers’ Privacy and Workers’ Politics,” in Rites of Power, Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages, ed. Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 312–44; Miklos Haraszti, Worker in a Worker’s State (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977); and Ben Hamper, Rivet Head: Tales from the Assembly Line (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).
10. M.J. Watts and P. Little, Globalizing Agro-Food (London: Routledge, 1997).
11. See, e.g., the assertion by Michel Crozier that even within large bureaucratic organizations, the key to behavior is “the insistence of the individual of his own autonomy and his refusal of all dependence relationships.” The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 290.
12. Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). See also E. P. Thompson’s magnificent The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966).
13. There are other social contributions of the petty bourgeoisie that are noteworthy no matter one’s location on the political spectrum. Historically, petty trade and petty production have been the key engine of market integration. If there is a good or service that is in short supply somewhere and that will therefore command a higher return, the petty bourgeoisie will usually find a way to move it where it is needed. For the likes of Milton Friedman and market fundamentalists, the petty bourgeoisie are doing “God’s work.” They operate in a setting of nearly perfect competition; their agility and speed in responding to small movements in supply and demand come close to the utopian vision of perfect competition in neoclassical economics. Their profit margins are slim, they often fail, and yet their aggregate activity contributes to Pareto-optimum outcomes. The petty bourgeoisie, in general, come reasonably close to this idealization. They provide needed goods and services at competitive prices with an alacrity that larger and slower-footed firms are unable to match.
14. I write “perhaps” here because there was, at mid-century, a research culture in large firms such as AT&T (Bell Labs), DuPont, and IBM that suggests that large firms are not necessarily inherently hostile to innovation.
15. Jance Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961).
1. “Atlanta’s Testing Scandal Adds Fuel to U.S. Debate,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, July 13, 2011.
2. C. A. E. Goodhart, “Monetary Relationships: A View from Thread-needle Street,” Papers in Monetary Economics (Reserve Bank of Australia, 1975).
3. Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 43.
4. Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” Social Studies of Science 22 (1992): 597–618.
5. The term “meritocracy” was coined in the late 1940s by the Englishman Michael Young in his dystopian fantasy, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: An Essay on Education and Inequality (London: Thames & Hudson, 1958), which mused on the disadvantages, for the working class, of a ruling elite chosen on the basis of IQ scores.
6. Porter, Trust in Numbers, 194.
7. Where do we draw the line between justified quantification, which seeks to achieve transparency, objectivity, democratic control, and egalitarian social outcomes, and metastasized quantification, which replaces and indeed stifles political discussions about the proper course of public policy?
We surely cannot conclude that all official uses of audit methods are wrong and foolish. Rather, we need to find ways to distinguish between sensible and dangerous uses of numbers. When confronted by audit or quantitative indices, we should ask ourselves a few questions. I would suggest asking questions that respond to the concerns I raised earlier in my discussion, namely, the presence or lack of construct validity, the possibility of “antipolitics,” and the colonization or feedback danger. Thus, we as citizens should ask ourselves:
a. What is the relation between the proposed quantitative index and the construct—the thing in the world—it is supposed to measure? (For example, does the SAT accurately represent a student’s aptitude, or more broadly, whether he or she deserves to go to college?)
b. Is a political question being hidden or evaded under the guise of quantification? (For example, did the hamlet evaluation point system and the body count method obfuscate the American debate about whether the Vietnam War was wise or indeed winnable?)
c. What are the possibilities for colonization or subversion of the index, such as misreporting, feedback effects, or the prejudicing of other substantive goals? (Does reliance on the SSCI in American universities lead to the publication of lousy articles or the phenomenon of “citation rings”?)
In short, I am not proposing an attack on quantitative methods, whether in the academy or in the polity. But we do need to demystify and desacralize numbers, to insist that they cannot always answer the question we are posing. And we do need to recognize debates about allocation of scarce resources for what they are—politics—and what they are not—technical decisions. We must begin to ask ourselves whether the use of quantification in a particular context is likely to advance or hinder political debate, and whether it is likely to achieve or undermine or our political goals.
1. François Rochat and Andre Modigliani, “The Ordinary Quality of Resistance: From Milgram’s Laboratory to the Village of Le Chambon,” Journal of Social Issues 51, no. 3 (1995): 195–210.
2. The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., recognizes the power of particularity by giving every visitor a card with an individual photograph of a Jew whose particular fate they learn only at the end of the visit.
3. Most of these plaques were not a state initiative but were created by small groups of German citizens who insisted on the importance of marking the local history of Nazism in the collective historical memory. While they are less moving on the whole than the Münster exhibition, they compare favorably with the United States, where one looks largely in vain for memorial reminders such as “Slave auctions were held on this site,” “Let us remember ‘Wounded Knee’ and ‘The Trail of Tears,’” or “Here were conducted the infamous Tuskegee Experiments.”
4. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965), 122.
5. Lenin’s writings are complex in this respect, sometimes celebrating spontaneity, but, as a general matter, he saw the “masses” as raw power, rather like a fist, and the vanguard party as the “brain,” as the general staff deploying the power of the masses to best advantage.