TIME OUT

It is rainy and cold in Paris, and my French cousins, Andre and Jacqueline Zarembowitch [retired science professors] are joining us for dinner, so I shall have to postpone the next Part of the Micro-Tutorial until tomorrow. Andre's grandfather and my great grandfather were brothers, from the little Polish town of Souvalki. Most of the Zarembowitch family stayed in Paris, while my great-grandfather, Abram, decided to continue on to the New World. The immigration official at Castle Garden [predecessor to Ellis Island] decided that "Zarembowitch" was not an American name, so he renamed us the Wolff family [after my great-uncle Wolff Zarembowitch, who met Abram at the boat.]

A bientot.

DURKHEIM'S SUICIDE A MICRO-TUTORIAL PART ONE

Emile Durkheim was born in 1858. It is useful, I think, to place him chronologically in context with the other great figures of the classical period of Sociology – Marx, Weber, and Mannheim. Karl Marx was born in 1818, and he published his great work, Capital [volume I], in 1867, when Durkheim was nine years old. Weber was born in 1864 and lived until 1920, after the end of the Great War. Mannheim was the youngest of these giants, born in 1893 and living until 1947, after the end of the Second World War.

As I explained at some length in my tutorial on The Study of Society, prior to the nineteenth century the standard contrast in Western thought was between Natural Philosophy, or the study of the laws governing bodies in space and time, and Moral Philosophy, or the study of human affairs, explanatory as well as normative. Some thinkers, such as the ancient Atomists and also modern materialists like Thomas Hobbes, sought to explain the behavior of human beings by appeal to the laws governing bodies in space and time. Others, such as Rene Descartes, drew a sharp distinction between the two realms, denying that such a reduction of the psychological or human to the physical was possible. This latter tradition can be traced all the way back to the famous passage in Plato’s Phaedo in which Socrates contrasts a physicalistic explanation of why he is sitting in prison awaiting execution with a moral or purposive explanation that appeals to the norms and purposes guiding his decision not to escape and flee.

In neither tradition was there room for, or acknowledgement of, the existence of, a separate and autonomous realm of the social that could not be reduced either to the physical or to the psychological. The discovery of the social, if I may put it that way, is a distinctive accomplishment of nineteenth century thought. Now, obviously, intelligent observers of la comedie humaine have been making shrewd and insightful observations about social phenomena for at least as long as the written record exists. One need only recall Plato’s brilliant typology in The Republic of the various fallings-away from the ideal state – Plutocracy, Timocracy, Democracy, and Ochlocracy. But Plato, like all those who followed him, traced these differing forms of social organization to the psychological characteristics of the persons who dominated them.

A first major step in the direction of the identification of the autonomy of the social was taken by Adam Smith when he compared the customary or natural prices that rule in the marketplace to centers of gravity drawing to them the fluctuating market prices influenced by the vagaries of supply and demand. But it was only in the writings of Georg Hegel [much as I hate to admit it] that we find the revolutionary idea of society as an organic unity exhibiting characteristics and forms that are not immediately reducible to, or traceable to, the psychological characteristics of individuals.

This idea underlies a good deal of Marx’s discussion of social relations of production as well as his extraordinary analysis of mystification in Chapter One of Capital. But there was considerable resistance from nineteenth century thinkers to the novel claims of the social, and this resistance cast doubt on the autonomy and legitimacy of Sociology, the new academic kid on the block, as it were.

Durkheim, the first great Sociologist, fully understood the philosophical presuppositions of the new discipline. In the work before us, Suicide, published in 1897, he undertakes to meet the objections head on and present an elaborate empirical justification of the thesis that there is a realm of social phenomena that cannot be reduced either to the psychological or to the physical.

Durkheim states the central methodological or ontological problem of Sociology clearly and uncompromisingly in the Preface to the book. “Sociological method as we practice it rests wholly on the basic principle that social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual. There is no principle for which we have received more criticism, but none is more fundamental. Indubitably for sociology to be possible, it must above all have an object all its own. It must take cognizance of a reality which is not in the domain of other sciences. But if no reality exists outside of individual consciousness, it wholly lacks any material of its own. In that case, the only possible subject of observation is the mental states of the individual, since nothing else exists.”

He repeats this point with emphasis later in the same paragraph. “[T]here can be no sociology unless societies exist, and … societies cannot exist if there are only individuals.”

Durkheim proposes to establish the existence of society as an independently existing entity, and thereby to legitimate Sociology as a discipline, by studying the incidence of suicide.

Why on earth suicide?

There were two reasons for the choice. The first was practical. The systematic collection of statistical data for entire countries more or less began in the modern era with the work of the Intendants of the ancient regime in France. The Intendants were Royal servants responsible for collecting information about agricultural and other aspects of French society and promoting progressive economic policies in the countryside, frequently over the opposition of the traditionalist landed aristocracy. By the middle of the nineteenth century, central governments throughout Europe were regularly collecting and publishing all manner of data, most particularly vital statistics of births and deaths, including the incidence of disease, of crimes such as murder, and of suicide. By the end of the century, when Durkheim was writing, it was possible to access a wide range of vital statistics classified and sub-classified by age, sex, region, religion, and even time of day. So, in the time-honored manner of all students of the natural and the human, Durkheim chose suicide as a subject of investigation because he could.

Durkheim’s second reason is a good deal more interesting. Suicide, he pointed out, is a quintessentially private and individual act. It is an act that directly involves only one person. Even murder involves at least two people, the murderer and the victim. On the face of it, there does not seem to be any direct connection between one act of suicide and another [though, as we shall see, that is not quite true.] If investigation should reveal patterns of great statistical regularity in the incidence of suicide, that would suggest that forces are at work that cannot in any obvious way be explained by appeal solely to the psychological states and processes of individuals.

It is interesting to contrast this question with that which exercised the Classical Political Economists. They began from an observed regularity – Smith’s “natural prices” or “centers of gravity” – and then sought to explain that observed regularity by a Labor Theory of Natural Price [or “Labor Theory of Value” as the 18^th century put it.] But as Smith himself understood, the observed regularity of natural prices emerges out of “the higgling and jiggling of the marketplace,” which is to say it is a consequence of wide-ranging interactions between economic actors. Although the adequate explanation of the resulting regularities is a challenging task, as Ricardo and Marx discovered, the existence of those regularities is not surprising, since they emerge from a system of economy-wide interactions.

By contrast, if it should turn out that the uniquely private and individual act of suicide is subject to regularities fully as reliable as those in the marketplace, that would seem to argue for the operation of social forces not reducible to, or explicable in terms of, individual motivations.

Tomorrow, we shall discover what Durkheim learned when he looked at the vital statistics of suicide, and how he explained what he found.

THE GROUND GAME

I received a circular email message yesterday from ObamaForAmerica, inviting me to sign up for a twelve-week course preparing me to be a paid worker in the Obama presidential campaign. The election is eleven months away and Obama is already cranking up his ground game. I should perhaps explain the origin and meaning of that phrase for my readers from overseas. “Ground game” is a term of art from American football. Anyone who has watched an American football game on television is familiar with the “aerial game,” those dramatic moments when a wide receiver races thirty yards down field and plucks a football from the sky thrown with impossible accuracy by a quarterback standing behind the line of scrimmage. But serious fans and old pros will tell you that professional football games are won or lost in the trenches, a strip of turf three yards on either side of the line, where 350 pound behemoths [and that is before they put on their equipment] push and shove to open up slits of daylight through which a halfback can scoot for three, four, or five yards. That is “the ground game.”

The metaphor captures quite nicely the two components of a presidential campaign. The aerial game is the high profile speeches, debates, and tv ads on which the media commentators lavish their attention. But in a nation that can only lure a bit more than half of the eligible voters to the polls in a presidential year, and scarcely more than a third in an off year, elections are won and lost in the neighborhoods where volunteers and paid workers walk the streets, ringing doorbells, handing out literature, and registering citizens to vote. In 2008, Barack Obama and his team ran the most brilliant ground game in the modern history of American politics. Op Ed writers pontificated about Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, the Philadelphia speech about race, and the debate performances, while almost unnoticed, tens of thousands of campaign workers were registering new voters and cajoling nominal Democrats to make the short trip to their local voting places.

In the summer of 2008, shortly after retiring and moving with Susie to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I signed up as a volunteer in the Obama campaign. For the next three months, I got a worm’s eye view of the Obama ground game. [My son, Tobias, a senior law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, first earned his spurs in the January snows of Iowa, and then played an important role in the aerial game, chairing the Advisory Committee on LGBT Affairs for the Obama Campaign and literally flying – on his own dime – from Maine to California, addressing audiences of LGBT activists.] Since all this happened before I had become a serious blogger, it occurred to me that I ought to pass on to my readers some idea of how the Obama ground game was actually played. What follows is as local and individual a description as you will ever read, focusing as it does on what happened in one medium sized town in one county of one state, but if you will, in your mind, multiply this story by all the towns and counties and states in America, you will have some idea of how Obama actually won the nomination and the election.

The Chapel Hill campaign was run by two young paid organizers, whose responsibility extended to all of Orange County. One was a young man from Iowa who volunteered in the caucuses there and then was recruited as a full-time worker. The other was a young North Carolina woman taking a year off from her undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. The ground game was broken down into three stages. In the first stage, we worked to register new voters, an especially important task in a college town where virtually all of the undergraduates had come of age since the 2004 election. Each day, we would spend hours at tables in front of supermarkets, the town library, the Farmer’s Market, or the desks where new students signed up for their courses, and talked people into filling out registration forms. Some of us would walk the neighborhoods, knocking on doors and asking whether people were registered. Every evening, before turning the forms in to the local Election Commission office, we would enter the data we had collected into a computer program created by the headquarters of the campaign in Chicago. It was an absolute rule that data must be entered the same day it was collected. Since I find it difficult to engage in conversation with people I have never met, I only did the doorbell ringing gig eight or ten times. Mostly, I entered data, bringing my laptop each day to the headquarters office on Rosemary Street in downtown Chapel Hill.

The second stage was devoted to a combination of information-gathering and persuasion. Each day, the headquarters in Chicago would email us a stack of canvassing maps and accompanying lists of people to try to reach. Each map, printed out on a regular 8 ½ by 11 sheet of computer paper, showed five or six streets of one neighborhood, with thirty or forty black dots arrayed along the streets. Each dot corresponded to one of the names and addresses on the contact list [the maps were constructed from Google Maps, I always assumed.] A pair of volunteers would set out for a two hour shift with a map and a list. We would drive to the neighborhood, park, and start walking up and down the streets, using the address list and the map to locate our targets. At each house, we were to record whether anyone was home, whether the person listed actually lived there [an important consideration in a college town where people change addresses frequently], whether the people listed were registered, and – most important – whom they were planning to vote for. Although the Obama campaign was an entirely separate operation from the local Democratic Party, we also asked about preferences in the gubernatorial and senatorial races and shared information with the Orange County Democratic Organization.

Each evening, the information collected would be entered into the campaign data program. The next day, a new set of lists and maps would arrive by email, taking into account the data that had been entered the previous evening. In that way, we never wasted time searching for a voter who had already been canvassed, unless that person was listed as “uncertain,” in which we case we would go back after a while to try to persuade him or her to vote for Obama.

The final stage of the ground game was the get out the vote effort. As soon as early voting began, we would go out,, visiting the homes of people who had been identified by previous visits as Obama supporters, giving them information cards on voting times and places. Other volunteers manned desks at the voting places and kept track of who was voting, so that we would not try to reach someone who had already voted.

This story was repeated in cities and towns in all fifty states. As the campaign progressed, David Plouffe and his team, in Chicago, would evaluate the costs and benefits, and decide how to shift their paid workers into states that looked promising or out of states that looked lost [the winner take all rules of American politics make it a waste of time to mine lodes of supporters in states that are overwhelmingly for one’s opponent.]

When commentators allude in passing to a candidate’s “ground game,” some version of this operation is what they are talking about. The email I received tells me that the Obama ground game is shifting into gear. None of the Republican candidates has any sort of ground game whatsoever, save perhaps in Iowa and New Hampshire, and the man who is looking more and more likely to win the Republican nomination, Newt Gingrich, has never exhibited the slightest talent or patience for the organizational tasks required to create an effective ground game. This is why I am guardedly optimistic, even in a year when the republicans ought to be able to win the White House.

ANOTHER TUTORIAL COMING UP

Judging from the statistical data that Google provides to those who use its blog-making apparatus, some of the folks who dropped in on this blog to read what I had to say about Newt Gingrich's doctoral dissertation have decided to visit the site again just to see whether there is anything else here to tempt their intellects. For them, I should explain that over the past year, from time to time, I have attempted what I call "tutorials" -- multi-part posts stretching over days, or even weeks, in which I systematically explain some subject in a more formal way than is typical of blogs. In this guise, I have discussed The Thought of Karl Marx, The Thought of Sigmund Freud, How to Study Society, The Use and Abuse of Formal Methods in Political Philosophy [that one became a short book], Herbert Marcuse's ONE DIMENSIONAL MAN, Max Weber's THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM, David Ricardo's PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AND TAXATION, and Ideological Critique [with special attention to Karl Mannheim's IDEOLOGY AND UTOPIA, among other works.] All of these, and much more besides, can be found on box.net by following the link at the top of this blog.

Tomorrow or the next day [depending on how the quail turn out], I shall do a very short tutorial -- a Micro-Tutorial, as it were -- on the great classic work of early Sociology, Emile Durkheim's SUICIDE. I have been on something of a mission to encourage my readers to re-acquaint themselves with the classics of what might be called the Heroic Age in the study of society -- the writings of Marx, Weber, Mannheim, and others. The Micro-Tutorial on Durkheim is part of that effort.

SERIOUS SCHOLARS WEIGH IN ON THE GINGRICH DISSERTATION

None of my many, many scores of blog posts has generated as many comments as the piece I did on Newt Gingrich's doctoral dissertation -- fifty-one comments, at last count, only two or three of which are my responses. I warned everyone in my original post that I am no kind of expert on Belgian colonialism, but the topic was too hot to ignore. Obviously, we would all prefer to hear from some folks who actually know what they are talking about [one of whom, Professor Seay, did contribute a comment], and today, one of the experts weighed in. Adam Hochshild is a genuine scholar of Southern African matters, as well as being, I am proud to say, an old friend. He has an Op Ed piece in the NY TIMES today on the dissertation that you all should read [just go to the TIMES site and click on Opinion in the left-hand column.] I am especially pleased that his knowledgeable judgment of the dissertatiion pretty much confirms by amateur impressions.

As I suggested in my original post, Gingrich's ideological orientation in the dissertation is roughly that of the Cold-War Council on Foreign Relations foreign policy establishment. This is the bi-partisan imperialist consensus that has ruled American foreign policy for the past sixty years, guiding the policy decisions of such otherwise dissimilar Presidents as John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, as well as of a bevy of Secretaries of State. Belligerant Neo-Conservative American dominationist war-mongering is a right-wing variation of that consensus, fitfully matched on the left by an inchoate opposition to American wars that does not, for the most part, issue from any coherent alternative policy orientation, save in the writings of such figures as Noam Chomsky. One of the delicious ironies of this year's run-up to the 2012 presidential contest, occasionally remarked upon, is that Ron Paul is the one aspirant to the presidency who actually rejects the post-war consensus, exhibiting instead a Washingtonian abhorence of foreign entanglements.

What caught my attention in the Ginfrich dissertation was its pedestrian quality, its lack of intellectual curiosity or imagination. I ploughed through many doctoral dissertations over the course of an academic career that lasted just exactly half a century, and I think I can spot a piece of solid mediocrity when I see one. Gingrich is not stupid. By the standards of the modern Academy he is adequately intelligent. [I remind you that this is an Academy that contains, among other wonders, roughly ten thousand professional philosophers, so the bar is set reasonably low.] But he clearly does not have a sparkling intellect, a genuinely curious mind, a penetrating imagination.

Although I do not myself actually know any Republicans [I don't get out as much as I used to], I gather from the commentary on the web that Gingrich's popularity among folks of that persuasion derives in part from their belief that he would make mincemeat of Obama in face-to-face debates. Gingrich himself has compared such an imagined encounter to the Lincoln-Douglas Debates [although I think he fancies himself playing both parts.] I am quite willing to wager a sizeable sum that Obama would destroy Gingrich, without appearing actually to lift a finger.

J'ARRIVE

Two quick Southwest flights, a delayed Air France flight, an easy taxi ride on a drizzling Sunday morning, and we are here again in our tiny, perfect 5th arrondissement pied-a-terre. Two shopping trips for staples, a nap, and we are ready to have a light dinner at Brasserie Balzar, famous old watering-hole for Parisian academics, on rue des Ecoles. Tomorrow, when everything is closed in Paris, I shall cook paupiettes provencale, ready-made at the local boulanger. Then the market reopens on Tuesday, and I shall probably try something simple, like quail.

While I was en route, Herman Cain "suspended" his campaign. It is looking more and more like Newt. After a good night's sleep I shall resume blogging. The Newt-dissertation blip on this blog site is almost over, and I remain with all of you, faithful readers and interlocuters.

Perhaps I shall try a very brief micro-tutorial on Durkheim's Suicide. Most of the book is taken up with now outdated statistics, but the theoretical portions are classic.

PERSONAL STUFF

Tomorrow morning, Susie and I leave once more for Paris -- Southwest to Boston, Air France to Charles de Gaulle. We shall be there for three weeks, returning Christmas Eve. Sunday evening, our first night there, we shall dine at the Brasserie Balzar, on rue des Ecoles, around the corner from the Sorbonne and across the street from the Musee Cluny. As is our custom, we shall attend several free concerts of early music in outlying arrondissements, but I have also taken the plunge and bought two 35 Euro tickets [$46 a piece] for a performace of Bach's Christmas Oratorio at l'eglise de la Madeleine. This coming Thursday, we shall attend a reading at the Village Voice Bookstore by the South African expatriate writer Denis Hirson. Naturally, I shall be doing a good deal of cooking -- quail, duck, rabbit, dorade royale [a fish], coquilles St. Jacques, and the like. But mostly, we will sit in Le Metro, our local cafe, drinking wine or coffee and watching the world go by.

I shall be blogging from Paris, of course. I still have not fixed upon a text for my next mini-tutorial, so any suggestions are welcome.

On another personal note, my diet is now officially over. I managed to lose 19 pounds in the nine and a half weeks that I dieted. I figure I am good for another four or five years, by which time I shall be in my early eighties.

If any of you pay attention to the counter on this blog that totals up visits, you may have noticed a spike in the past several days. I usually get about 500-600 visits a day [at least from those folks who come directly to the blog rather than accessing it in some other way], but two days ago I had 6000, yesterday perhaps half that, and today already more than I usually log in a day. Why? Because my post on Newt Gingrich's doctoral dissertation attracted the attention of Bruce Leiter and Andrew Sullivan, both of whom mentioned it on their vastly more popular blogs, and a whole bunch of people clicked over. Welcome to all the new visitors. I hope some of you stick around.

Now, some last minute preparations and we are off to Paris.