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B O O K R E V I E W S

States and Social Revolutions by Theda Skocpol (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

The last decade and a half have undoubtedly been a golden age of comparative- historical sociology. Part of this upsurge has been a revival of marxian sociology, but it has also been a time of upheaval in marxian thought. Increasingly, the borderlines between marxian and non-marxian theory have been crossed. Theda S kocpol's States and Social Revolutions exemplifies all of these phenomena. As a result, it is the best book that has ever been written on revolutions, and a major step forward in political theory.

One of the striking features of Skocpol 's book is the way she reverses some long-standing marxian ideas. Revolutions are not caused, she asserts, by eco- nomic contradictions bursting through existing political relations, and revolu- tionary agents are not rising social classes. New economic organization and classes are likely to appear after and as the result of successful revolutionary transformations. The French revolution thus cleared the ground for large-scale markets and bourgeois classes to appear in the nineteenth century, and the Russian and Chinese revolutions created the possibility of a socialist organization of industry, not as an anomalous skipping of stages, but as the natural course of such events.

The main causes and consequences of revolutions are not economic at all, but political. But the dynamic is not ideological, nor is it the volition of revolution- aries. Here Skocpol accentuates the trend within current marxist thought to give a degree of autonomy to the state. Where structuralist marxists like Poulantzas see the state as capable of mediating among social classes in order to reinforce the economic status quo as a whole, Skocpol shows that the state has interests of its own. These interests are above all international: political chiefs are concerned about international prestige, military security, and power. This affects their internal policies as well, for they must compete with other social classes, especially the economically dominani, ones, for control over the economic surplus to pay their military bills. Indeed, the administrative apparatus of the state grew up as little more than a device for supporting armies and navies, later increasingly concerned with supporting itself.

This is an important formulation. Although Skocpol does not say it in so many words, the members of the state constitute a social class. They represent a distinctive way of making a living: by military and administrative appropriation. Empirically realistic class-conflict schemes are suddenly clarified once we realize

0304 2421/80/0000-.0000,;$02.25 �9 1980 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company

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this. If the state is basically military, we have the starting point for a new theory of revolutions. Revolutions are not possible as long as the military apparatus of the state holds; thus the most basic condition is the breakup of armies and internal forces of domination. Other theories of revolution centering on the motivation of rebels by long-standing grievances, relative deprivation, or cultural strain, or about the availability of resources for organizing revolts, cannot be adequate explanations since they miss the most basic feature of revolutions. What then causes military breakdowns? The causes are above all international. Behind the three great revolutions Skocpol discusses lies the competitive dynamism of the European state system. France, Russia, and China were all potential Great Powers, overextended or poorly organized for military undertakings. Their efforts to keep up with or defend themselves against more powerful states brought fiscal crises and disintegration of the coercive apparatus. Moreover, if one could see the revolutionary crisis coming long before the event, it was because international emulation had been going on for a long time. As in Reinhard Bendix's model, which Skocpol cites, "modernization" is always historically relative, and it is a process of external emulation based on military motives. Since state rulers are the most internationally-oriented people in their realms, they themselves are the transmission belts for foreign standards and thus tend to seal their own fates.

For revolutions to be truly major, however, military breakdown must be combined with internal pressures, especially a mass movement from below. Thus Skocpol notes several different types of revolutions. First are the classic cases, her primary subject, in which there is not only a political but a social transformation accompanied by class upheaval. These class upheavals, in France, Russia, and China, were primarily peasant rebellions. The other types of revolution are the early European liberal revolutions like the English revolution of the seventeenth century and the modern nation-building revolutions in the Third World.

Skocpol uses a number of these other cases to demonstrate the importance of her external-plus-internal conjuncture in France, Russia, and China. Thus England and Prussia had political but not social revolutions, triggered by foreign-based fiscal strains or military defeats, because in neither England nor Prussia was the crisis from above accompanied by a peasant revolt from below. Similarly, the Meiji restoration in Japan was the result of a purely military crisis, with no internal revolt. In France, China, and Russia, there were long-standing problems of the rural economy, exacerbated by short-term crop failures or wars; revolts were fostered by autocratic reform efforts from above. Combining themes from Barrington Moore and Alexis de Tocqueville, Skocpol points to the transforma- tion of rural property relations, the removal of day-to-day aristocratic super- vision of the peasants, and government encouragement of collective rural organization for administrative purposes as factors which organized the peasant potential for revolt. Her comparisons do good service here. In England, for example, the clergy were under local aristocratic patronage, whereas in France they were centrally appointed; thus in the former case local leadership was united around the aristocracy, whereas in the latter there was a structural split that facilitated anti-aristocratic revolt. France and Russia had somewhat similar rural structures. China was closer to the English model of local gentry control of the economy, and hence the social part of the Chinese revolution was delayed several decades until the communists had reorganized the peasantry.

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One of Skocpol 's major contributions comes at the point where most theories of revolution end. She asks: why is revolutionary reconstruction possible after the initial breakdown? Natural-history accounts of revolutions never raise the question at all, nor do motivational or conflict resource theories, which apply only to the initial phase. Yet there is no intrinsic reason why the state should re-emerge, and in a more centralized and strengthened form at that. The people's alleged revolutionary weariness need not lead to a Yhermidorian reaction, unless there is some process which keeps the state from fragmenting into smaller parts, or becoming subject to foreign conquest which have been real occurences at other times in history. The overthrow of previous Chinese dynasties, for example, had often given rise to war-lord periods far longer than the thirty-five years it took to consolidate the revolution of 1911.

The logic of Skocpors argument is that the structural forces behind the major social revolutions are above all in the military apparatus and its international relations. The basic cause of the military breakdown is an unsuccessful effort to expand military capacity, and hence internal structures of surplus extraction and domination. State personnel seek to move further in this direction, and improved administrative organization and physical facilities were not only planned but at least partially constructed. The revolutionary struggles did not displace these goals, but revolved around who was to bear the short-term costs of the failure to achieve them. Revolut ionary leaders were not a new class rising with a new economy, but aspiring administrators produced by previous reforms, and deriving from the core provinces where the state was strongest. As the revolution removed the more parasitical elements of the privileged classes, and settled certain popular grievances, the cadres of the expanding state were left at the center of the stage.

Although the great revolutions were beset with long struggles with anarchical elements, counter-revolutionary forces, regional war lords, or foreign interven- tion, these violent aftermaths actually contributed to the consolidation of the state. The revolutionary parties had the opportunity to create new armies, based on bureaucratic principles and purged of the patrimonial inefficiencies of the old forces. Out of their success arose the new structure and the legitimating ethos of the centralized state. For France, says Skocpol, the outbreak of war in 1792 and the accompanying fear of counter-revolution was as important as the conjunc- ture of 1789 in shaping the course of the revolution (p. 186). In Russia, where the peasants' revolt fostered decentralization, the civil war strengthened recentraliza- tion by pulling .the peasants back into the reconstituted army. Here, the Czarist industrial and railroad-building policies, motivated by strategic considerations, had a crucial payoff. The industrial workers, though a small part of the labor force, were a key support for the revolutionary consolidation because their livelihood depended upon maintaining a large-scale division of labor. The railroad and telegraph workers, who depended even more immediately upon centralization, played a key part in the movement of troops along interior lines which provided the physical basis of reconstituting state control. Again, China is a mixed case, lacking extensive physical and administrative apparatus for centralization. But its interregnum was drawn to a close precisely because of the Japanese invasion, which made China's military fate depend upon multiple international forces of World War I1. Eventually the communist cadres, the heirs

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of the old imperial career tradition in the core provinces, were able to defeat the peripherally based Kuomintang in the race to fill the vacuum left by the Japanese defeat.

Skocpol 's overall theory is particularly interesting because it is capable of some far-reaching extensions. If the causes of revolutionary crisis and consolidation are military, then we should be able to generalize about the long-term conditions under which revolutions happen. Skocpors main cases fit very strikingly into a geopolitical model 1 have proposed elsewhere ("Some Principles of Long-term Social Change: the Terri torial Power of States," in L. Kriesberg, ed., Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change) to account for long-term shifts in the territorial power of states. The first two elements in that model are territorial resource advantage (wealthiest and most populous states expand) and marchland advantage (states with enemies on the fewest fronts expand). Pre-revolutionary France, Russia, and China each had divergent values on these two key elements. Each state was among the largest of its time; but each had gotten into a negative position on the marchland variable. France had the largest population and the largest army in Europe, but had strained its resources attempting to be both the major land power on the continent, and England's rival as a naval power. Moreover , France's continental wars, ranging from the Netherlands to Italy, had long since reached a stalemate; the eighteenth century saw the loss of her Indian and Canadian colonies, with only an expensive victory by her American allies in 1777-1783 as compensation. Similarly, Russia in the late nineteenth century had expanded beyond her huge capacities, capping centuries-old drives into Eastern Europe and Turkestan with an overexpansion to the Pacific, where Japan inflicted the defeat in 1905 that was the prelude to revolution. China in the nineteenth century faced colonial incursions all along its coast, followed by ruinously expensive internal revolts, while attempting to maintain an empire stretching from Tibet to Vietnam to Korea.

The military strains that produce revolution thus seem to follow from a mixture of favorable and unfavorable geopolitical factors: the favorable one luring a state into overexpansion, while the unfavorable one (which may indeed be created by the physical contours of that overexpansion) ensuring that military defeat and /o r fiscal strain will follow. In the long run, then, all large states in a militarily competit ive world are threatened with revolution, unless they can arrest their expansionist tendencies at a geographically defensible point.

What about the internal component of a revolutionary conjuncture? Isn't this the result of a separate set of factors, so that al though military strains may occur, they may result in no more a political than a social revolution? This may turn out to be so. Nevertheless, it is worth exploring the possibility that internal class upheavals are explainable as a condit ion ofinternalgeopolitics. This is an unfamiliar notion, but Skocpol 's analysis is suggestive in this direction. What is so refreshing in her exposit ion is that there is nothing abstract or obfuscating about her concepts of political relations. We get a strong sense of how these consist of people spread out across a landscape, linked or not by roads, postal carriers, and railways; of groups assembling once a week in the parish church, or split up in isolated estates under the watchful eyes of supervisors.

The long-run principles here are not very formalized, but as a lead the histories of

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rural property relations are most usefully seen as sets of variations on the geo- graphical dispersion of different social classes. The English enclosure move- ments probably had their greatest political effects because they physically removed the peasantry, while leaving the aristocrats ensconsed in the countryside (but also assembling annually in London); in France, the removal process was the reverse, the peasants becoming more locally entrenched and the aristocrats more absentee, thus opening the way to peasant revolt. Or in China, we can see the geographical weakness of the Kuomintang in its ability to collect taxes directly only in the coastal cities, relying on warlord intermediaries elsewhere. For an earlier period, the physical placement of aristocrats' lands - scattered or geographically consolidated and of government administrators was a key to the physical control of internal territority by various classes. Thus, although we have scarcely begun to think of a theory of internal geopolitics, it should be possible to formulate some long-term principles that mesh with those of external politics, and add up to a full-fledged explanatory model.

At this point it is important to consider tlae limits Skocpol has placed upon her analysis. For several reasons, she confines it to the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. She excepts cases like seventeenth century England, or nineteenth century Prussia or Japan because they did not undergo social as well as political transformations; in fact, precisely for this reason she is able to use them as test cases, and thus show how the military crisis must be combined with an internal mass revolt if a social revolution is to follow. But this is really only a form of exposition. A theory of revolutions should be a theory of the conditions for various kinds of revolutions, and S kocpol herself has stated some of the key determinants of the variations just mentioned. The same approach can be taken to her remarks on another set of revolutions, which actually combined external and internal factors in a fashion rather like her classical cases. These are such twentieth century revolutions as those in Yugoslavia, Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, and parts of Africa. These do not fit the classic model, she says, because the crises of France, Russia, and China took place in wealthy and politically ambitious agrarian states which were never colonially subjugated. In contrast, the Third World revolutions took place following crises in colonial or post-colonial dependency relations which were breaking up because of shifts in Great Power relations. This may be so. But 1 would prefer to see the modification as an elaboration rather than as a limitation on a successful theory. In this light, a rather powerful geopolitical theory of many varieties of revolutions should be coming into focus.

S kocpol's work entices me to reflect backwards in history, for there are a number of other revolutions that may well fit this kind of theory. The revolutions in the city-states of ancient Greece and Italy, for example, had their bases in shifting forms of military mobilization, and occurred at times of rapid change in external relations. Again, there are ~the civic revolutions of the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance; and the sixteenth century Dutch revolution in its war of indepen- dence against Spain - the first of the great anti-colonial and modern liberal revolutions. The consequences of these for the legal bases of property relations were so significant that Max Weber declared that they determined the destiny of the Occident. All in all, then, a new and powerful theory of revolutions like Theda Skocpol 's is a significant contribution indeed.

Randall Collins University of Virginia

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Sociology and the Twilight of Man: Homocentrism and Discourse in Sociological Theory by Charles Lemert (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979).

Man, Michel Foucault has argued, is a recent invention. Only with the appearance of the modern episteme at the beginning of the nineteenth century does man as subject and object, producer and produced, as speaker and he who constitutes himself by that which is spoken, emerge as the focal point of the human sciences. While under the aegis of a language-centered classical episteme, human beings appear peripheral in their continuity with nature; the waning importance of language for nineteenth century thought brings man himself, now discontinuous with natural order, abruptly to center stage. Suggestive as this notion may be, there is an even more intriguing corollary. For if, as Foucault suspects, man and language are somehow linked inversely, the renewed prominence of language eclipses the human subject across the social sciences. Accordingly, in a memorable passage at the close of The Order of Things, Foucault pictures man as a tenuous creation which, "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea," may soon be washed away.

If Foucault speculatively conceives man's imminent demise as a consequence of changes in the order of knowledge, Charles Lemert 's Sociology and the Twilight of Man avers that high tide is at hand. Largely accepting the disappearance of man as a fait accompli, Lemert argues that recent sociology, like an epistemic backwater, still harbors "homocentr ism" at a time when other vanguard domains have abandoned the moorings of nineteenth century thinking. Embracing gram- matology, semiotics, and "intellectual archaeology," he suggests that sociology in its unitary anthrocentrism is not at all the pluralistic, eclectic, or multiple paradigm discipline that some have imagined it to be.

Lemert, whose article in Theory and Society (May, 1979) also bears on the "de-centering" of social theory, is one of the most outspoken American propo- nents of what might be called Saussurean or French Structuralist sociology. In this vein his analysis of contemporary social theory lays the groundwork for a critical consideration of the future directions sociology is likely to take. Dividing the sociological terrain into "lexical" (given to definition and clarification of conceptual terms), "semantical" (concerned with interpretation and meaning), and "syntactical" (focusing on values and normative considerations) theories, Lemert argues that all ultimately entail some core notion of "man as a finite subject who dominates his own history" (p. 16). Thus sociology remains ana- chronistically centered, while elsewhere thought is "decentered" or relational:

Very few people would deny that the intellectual movements most characteristic of "modern," post-nineteenth century thought are: relativity theory, cubism, atonalism, absurdism, dada, expressionism, structural linguistics, psychoanalysis, among others. What is common to each of these is that in place of a center, one finds relationships that cannot be explained, organized, or defined by a single perspective, principle or origin. While it cannot he argued that either man or the center have completely disappeared, it must be assumed that anything put forth as a new "paradigm" must at least be relational, not centered (p. 228).

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If there is much here which warrants serious consideration, there is also a good deal which invites controversy. At a minimum, the metaphor of a "center" or the notion of a homocentric convergence across diverse strains of sociological theorizing will raise objections in certain quarters. Perhaps more arguable, however, are the assumptions which explicitly surround Lemert's textually- oriented approach and his seemingly whole-hearted endorsement of the human subject's decline.

l h e least debatable aspect of Lemert 's tripartite treatment of theory lies in his grouping of Symbolic I nteractionism (Blumer), Phenomenology (Schutz, Berger, kuckman) and Ethnomethodology (Cicourel) under the rubric of"semantical i ty ' . Here the human subject is at once most conspicuous yet, at the ethnomethodol- ogical pole, suggestively on the verge of something else. In a similar manner "syntactical" theory (e.g., Critical Theory ~ la Habermas), despite its complexity, is more or less non-problematically characterized as homocentric. Lemert's analyses of Cicourel and Habermas are, moreover, superbly understandable introductions to often difficult texts.

In dealing with the "lexicalists" (Blalock, Homans, Parsons) and in his effort to show that they too can be circumscribed by homocentric criteria of"f in i tude ," "historicism," and "subjectivity," Lemert skates on the thinnest ice. Thus, while man is the finite center of semantically-oriented theoo ' , homocentrism exists for lexicalists almost exclusively in the role of the theoris t as inventor-creator: "The homocentrism of lexical sociologists is found in the presence and dominance of man the sociologist . . . . At the same time, lexical man lives confidently with the confinements of history; in this case the history of the terms, propositions, concepts and schemes that are accumulated to constitute, for him, the body of sociology" (pp. 25 26). In other words, if"historicism" is not an explicitly posited component of lexical theories, that dimension is nonetheless present to the extent that theory is viewed by the lexicalist as a human product with a history of its own. While artfully managed, this leads one at times to suspect that it is Lemert 's skill in fitting theories and theorists to his chosen criteria which takes primacy over the actual presence of homocentrism.

Nonetheless, it remains to be explained prec i se ly how any theory could escape "finitude" (the limitations of knowledge as a human creation) or how the historically contingent nature of theories could be done away with without returning to a thoroughly unreflexive state of affairs. In short, even if we view the " text" of a sociological theory as the product of a decentered "discursive practice," how is it that "finitude," "historicism," and "subjectivity" (in one sense or another) can or s h o u l d be eliminated? No doubt Lemert has responses to such questions, but they are not readily apparent in his book. This brings us to Lemert 's epistemology and his unabashed support for the disappearance of the subject as we have known it. Here his claim is that by taking an approach to sociological t ex t s which views them as "1) a social practice, 2) a material event, and 3) a product resulting from social conditions" (why is this neither finitude nor historicism?) one can thereby avoid the "metaphysical" or transcendent centering of theory in human subjects or paradigms:

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Centered thought is that in which ideas are, directly or indirectly, referred ultimately to some organizing principle which serves to limit the free play of the thought system . . . . By contrast, discursive analysis is necessarily decentered and antimetaphysical because it is the positive study of material products. Scientific discourse, as noted, is material because it is science only by being published and written/printed things leave material traces which occupy space. Theories of science which ignore this fact are idealistically metaphysical because they believe that science exists in ideas, not ink and paper. I[~ in

the one case, a theotT is seen as an idea then it is naturally centered in some sort ~[ 'mind an author or an ethos. IL in the other ease, a theory is print and paper then it ean/7ot he

summarized , collapsed, drawn up into any single transcendent center. Print, ink, and paper can only be dispersed not centered, in space. (p. 12, my emphasis)

Passages such as these will no doubt wave a red flag, especially for those who have bones to pick with s t ructural analysis or with Popper ' s no t ion of knowledge wi thout a knowing subject ("objective knowledge"). Lemert himself consciously ceases to write in the first person " l " after a few initial paragraphs . This reflects the convict ion (kemer t ' s text 's conviction'?) tha t theories are the product of a "complex, largely anonymous format ion of discursive condi t ions in respect to which the au thor is neither a simple beneficiary nor the central force" (p. xii).

All of this notwi ths tanding , the a rgument tha t sociological theory is and should be seen as "decentered ' fosters a suspicion that Kemert is working with an unexamined metaphor of an origin or center. Isn ' t it a bit of legerdemain to say tha t the "center" is dispersed into the words of the text? Isn't the "discursive practice" which produces tha t text simply ano the r center of sorts? kemer t views any approach as centered which at t r ibutes theory to ideas, minds or paradigms (which at one point he defines as the "psychological in tent ions" of the author!) .

But why can ' t "pa rad igm" be viewed as synonymous with "discursive practice'"? Kuhn, for instance, referr ing at one point to "puzzle solving" (in his article "Ref lec t ions on My Critics"), argues tha t "do ing problems is learning the language of a theory and acqui r ing . the knowledge of nature embedded in tha t language." Again, why isn't this as "centered" or "decentered" as any other discursive practice?

Finally, it can be argued that the "d isappearance" of man or the desirability of the subject 's absence canno t be advanced in Lemert 's unqualif ied manner . For example, there are passages which suggest that Derr ida himself would likely be "absen t" f rom the funeral celebrat ion for the subject which Lemert would like to hold. Hence, in the discussion at the conference on St ructura l i sm reported by Macksey and Dona to in The S t r u c t u r a l i s t C o n t r o v e r s y , Derrida stresses the need for t h e f u n c t i o n of a center and the l o c a t i o n , not the dismissal, of the subject:

I believe that the center is a function, not a being a reality but a function. And this function is absolutely indispensable. The subject is absolutely indispensable. 1 don't destroy the subject; [ situate it. This is to say, I believe that at a certain level both of experience and of philosophical and scientific discourse one cannot get along without the notion of subject. It is a question of knowing where it comes from and how it functions. Therefore I keep the concept of center, which 1 explained was indispensable, as well as that of subject . . . . (pp. 271-2)

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This is, of course, one pole of the debate between Foucault and Derrida, and Lemert is well aware of this quotation. But given such disagreement even within the "Structuralist" camp, there are problems in basing sweeping criticisms of sociology's homocentrism largely on Foucault 's point of view.

These are issues which warrant additional discussion and clarification. If Lemert does not adequately answer many of the questions which his text raises, he does suggest problems with respect to the human subject which sociology must forthrightly confront. If he fails to establish the extent to which the subject can be done without, he does bring us face to face with the limitations of any naive conception of the subject as the origin of human actions. Elsewhere, Lemert makes it clear in his recent AJS article, 84(4), and in Scott McNall 's Theoretical Perspective in Sociology - that he is talking about a "subject who uses social structures, but is neither their simple product nor their original source." These and other related statements are crucial to an understanding of Lemert 's position and should have been incorporated in Sociology and the Twilight o f Man. Although it is perhaps unfair to judge Lemert on the basis of his treatment of subjectivity in a book designed to survey limitations of contemporary sociological perspectives, the intimations of structure and subject are the most intellectually stimulating. In the bargain, Lemert has produced a lucid and often incisive analysis of recent social theory.

Robert McAulay Vassar College

Ecrits, A Selection by Jacques Lacan, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan (New York: W . W . Norton and Company, 1977), and The Four Fundamental Concepts o f the Unconscious by Jacques Lacan, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978).

The recently begun Anglo-American debate about Jacques Lacan is already following the polemical tradition of a quarter century of French intellectual pyrotechnics: Is Lacan an irresponsible charlatan or the intellectual heir of Freud? Is his exceedingly obscure style a Gallic vice or a potent method designed to incite self-analysis? Should transatlantic rumors about his five-minute analytic sessions be the occasion for mirth, theoretical reconsiderations, or indignant outrage? People end up fighting about Lacan, and there ensues sharp polarization of opinion (for or against) and a discussion alternating between lofty philosoph- ical issues and grubby details of practice. In all this, there is little room for understanding Lacan in terms of his intentions as a psychoanalytie theorist

at a particular historical moment. And there is little help for the English-speaking reader who, with the translations of Lacan's Ecrits (a collection of his major essays) and The Four Fundamental Concepts o f Psychoanalysis (one of the most influential seminars given over the past twenty-five years), may be trying to read Lacan for the first time.

When we first approach a new theorist we situate his ideas in terms of intellectual and political concerns with which we are familiar. This is how we make the theorist "our own". In Lacan's case, three issues might orient the reader in what

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are otherwise somewhat hard-to-navigate seas, and help him to a more meaning- ful relationship with Lacan's ideas. First, Lacan's work can be read as an attack on ego psychology, whose notion of the autonomous ego agent (cf. McAulay above) he sees as deeply destructive of the essence of the Freudian vision. Second, Lacan presents a critique of the psychoanalytic "institution" (the International Psychoanalytic Association, the organization of the training institutes, etc.) whose hierarchical structure and orthodoxy he believes are undermining psycho- analytic science. Third, Lacan's theory, most particularly his discussion of the Symbolic order through which language and society come to dwell within man, has meant new connections between psychoanalysis and marxism as well as between psychoanalysis and feminism.

Lacan's attack on ego psychology is made most powerfully in a,, essay that is the theoretical centerpiece of the Ecrits. This is "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," usually referred to as the "Discourse of Rome". It was written and revised from 1949 1953 and put Lacan on a collision course with the international psychoanalytic movement. When most analysts, influenced by Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Rudolf Loewenstein, were working toward a new ego psychology, Lacan, in this essay, was characterizing "the theory of the ego and the analysis of defenses" as "everything most contrary to the Freudian experience" (p. 64). Lacan insists that the Freudian vision implies an end to the "Cartesian subject," the thinking, act ing"cogito". Like other writers in the French structuralist tradition who take the work of de Saussure as a reference point, Lcan develops a notion o f a constructedsul~iect. For Lacan, man is constituted by language, by the Symbolic order. In "The Discourse of Rome," he holds without equivocation: " M a n speaks then; but it is because the symbol has made him man" (p. 65).

According to Lacan, the ego psychologists, with their notion of an autonomous ego as agent and actor, profoundly undermine this Freudian insight that man is not his own center. In his essay on "The Mirror Stage" in the Ecrits. we have Lacan's own description of an ego built out of the misidentifications, confusions, and alienations of a pre-symbolic stage of development. This image of the ego has nothing in common with the sturdy, helpful being described by the ego psychologists. While the American school of ego psychology called for "thera- peutic alliances" with the ego, Lacan insisted that the ego, trapped in the pre- symbolic mode of alienating identifications, is the carrier of neurosis and that for the analyst, to ally with the ego is to consort with the enemy.

The Ecrits begins with an attack on ego psychology as a neutralizer of what is most powerful in the Freudian vision, and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (which brings together seminars Lacan gave at the Ecole Normale Sup6rieure in 1964) begins with an attack on what Lacan sees as the second enemy of a true "return to Freud," thepsychoanalvtic institution. The setting for the first seminar, that of January 15, is dramatic. The French psychoanalytic association of which Lacan is a member has just been told that as a condit ion for affiliating with the International Psychoanalytic Association they must bar Lacan's participation in all psychoanalytic training. The ban is to be final, irrevocable. Lacan refers to it as "excommunica t ion" and for him, "not only by

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virtue of the echoes it invokes, but by the s tructure it implies," the insti tutional j udgmen t against him '~introduces something that is essential to our investigation of psychoanalyt ic praxis. This is the quest ion of ' W h a t is it in that communi ty that is so reminiscent of religious practice?'" (p. 4).

One of Lacan's recurrent themes is the need for criticism, experiment , and all iance with other disciplines if psychoanalytic science is to flourish. There is no room for ritual observance: "One remains loyal to t radi t ion because one has nothing to say abou t the doctr ine itself" (Ecrits, p. 39). But the psychoanalyt ic inst i tut ion, like the Church, needs to define psychoanalysis in terms of visible acts, in terms of techniques that could be t ransmi t ted and moni tored by a bureaucrat ic structure. Lacan raised the problem of an analogy between psycho- analytic and religious inst i tut ions in the 1953 "Discourse of Rome".

A technique is being handed on in a cheerless manner, reticent to the point of opacity, a manner that seems terrified of any attempt to let in the fresh air of criticism. It has in fact assumed the air of a formalism pushed to such ceremonial lengths that one might well wonder whether it does not bear the same similarity to obsessional neurosis that Freud so convincingly described in the observance, if not in the genesis of religious rites, (Ecrit.~, p. 37)

By 1964 and the "excommunica t ion , " Lacan is not only sure that the psycho- analytic church stands between psychoanalysis and its development as a science, he is also sure that it s tands between the analyst and his calling.

The 1964 seminar was an act of defiance of the psychoanalyt ic establishment. The In te rna t iona l Psychoanalyt ic Associat ion had told kacan he could not teach; he chose to cont inue his teaching, but outside of t radi t ional psychoanalyt ic or psychiatric institutions. In 1964 kacan moved his seminar from its hospital setting to the Ecole Normale where it reached a wide audience of non-analysts phi losophers , linguists, literary critics, and social scientists. He began his seminar on " E x c o m m u n i c a t i o n " by asking " A m I qualified?", the quest ion provoked by the censure of the Internat ional . And he answered yes, but that the grounds on which he was qualified were not inst i tut ional but personal, as personal as his analytic vocation. Like Luther who cried out for personal faith against the inst i tut ional dogmas of the Church, Lacan asserts a psychoanalyt ic protes tant ism,

where psychoanalysis is seen as a calling ra ther than a medical career and where the au thor iza t ion to become an analyst is squarely placed on the shared experience of analyst and analysand, not on its labelling by an insti tution. The s tandard practice in classical Freudian t ra ining institutes is to declare some analyses a priori as t ra in ing analyses which will open the way to cert if ication to practice. Lacan believes that such inst i tut ional legit imations profoundly com- promise the analytic experience, and that a psychoanalyt ic society must keep itself out of that experience.

Dur ing 1964, as he was giving his seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts q[ Psychoanalysis, kacan was t rying to set up that kind of non-intrusive psycho- analyt ic organizat ion, He founded the Freudian School of Paris. F rom the beginning, the Freudian School declared itself a psychoanalyt ic society unlike the

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others. It was open to analysts and non-analysts alike, there was a new emphasis on development of interdisciplinary research, there were no special categories of analyses set apart by professional privilege, and there was no hierarchy of training analysts who alone would be qualified to conduct training analyses. So, Lacan is preoccupied in 1964 with the problems of the psychoanalytic institution. A professional organization of surgeons does not by the fact of its existence undermine the surgeon's practice. But Lacan is not so sure about the impact of a professional organization of psychoanalysts. In his seminar of June 10, "Of the Subject Who is Supposed to Know," Lacan is writing about the paradox faced by the psychoanalyst who is a member of a psychoanalytic society. He writes that the analyst must refuse all certitudes, must refuse to be put in the position "of the subject who is supposed to know." But the existence of the analytic society undermines the integrity of this radically agnostic analytic position: "What does an organization of psychoanalysts mean when it confers certificates of ability, if not that it indicates to whom one may apply to represent this subject who is supposed to know?" If psychoanalysis is a subversive science, designed to undermine all truths, to question the meaning of all bonds, then the problem of how to organize psychoanalysts is akin to the problem of how to organize anarchists: perhaps only permanent organizational revolution can break the contradiction.

Lacan's iconoclasm within the psychoanalytic institution made it easier for his ideas to reach the world of French radical politics, particularly during the May June 1968 events, when students who were protesting the hierarchy, orthodoxy, and frozen discourse of the French university identified with Lacan as a veteran of.such struggles. Indeed, it is through Lacan that psychoanalysis has been "rehabili tated for radicals" in France. But there is more to the connection between Lacan and a radical politics than a critique of bureaucracy. In particular, the Lacanian critique of ego psychology opens out onto larger political concerns. In the"Discourse of Rome? ' Lacan himself called the Americans on what he sees as the political implications of their behaviorist-tinged ego psychology.

In any case it appears incontestable that the conception of psychoanalysis in the United States has inclined towards the adaptation of the individual to the social environ- ment . . . . And the indigenous term "human engineering" strongly implies a privileged position of exclusion in relation to the human subject. (Ecrits, p. 38)

Whereas American revisionists of Freud had strained to produce more optimistic versions of his work by promising self-improvement without calling society into question, Lacanian thinking leads to seeing a tighter, more explicit link between psyche and society. Lacan describes the development of a Symbolic order during the Oedipal Crisis, the point at which the child accepts the father's name and the father's "no" to sexual relations with the mother. The father's name, an element of language, comes to stand for the interdiction of a repressed desire for the mother. The child has been living in a fusional world of dyads. The father's name is a metaphor, a mediator. All of the child's further development, even, for Lacan, the development of his unconscious, depends on the capacity for such mediations. But with the possibility for such mediations, carried by the internalization of the laws of language, comes the laws of society. Society comes to dwell within the

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individual. And so, a third orienting issue in reading Lacan is to think about how his work builds a bridge between psychoanalysis and politics. Let us look at some of the ways in which Lacan's psychoanalytic theory copes with complaints that marxists have traditionally lodged against psychoanalysis.

First, the marxist complaint that psychoanalysis adapts people to a bourgeois society is countered by Lacan's insistence that only a perversion of psychoanalysis (such as the version developed in America) conceives of itself in terms of adapting people to a social status quo. Lacan presents psychoanalysis as a form of truth- seeking; from this vision, political activists have been able to extract a notion of psychoanalysis as a form of political consciousness raising. A second reproach has been that despite human misery, psychoanalysis focuses on the individual ego, not on the society. But as we have seen, for Lacan, the coherent, autonomous ego is an illusion and one of the goals of psychoanalysis as science is to explain its psychological and social construction. With his theory of the Symbolic order, where society inhabits man, Lacan takes up the agenda of the theorists of the Frankfurt School; that is, to understand Freud's contribution, like Marx's, is central to understanding the relationship between the individual and society.

A third marxist objection has been the alleged biological determinism of psychoanalysis. Does anatomy make destiny or is destiny made by the individ- ual's place in the system of production'? Lacan's reading of Freud is militantly antibiological, shifting all descriptions from a biological-anatomical level to a symbolic one. According to Lacan, Freud never meant to say anything about anatomy but was really talking about how culture imposes meaning on anatomi- cal parts. For Lacan, when Freud seems to be talking about organs, he is really talking about information.

In America, where interpretations of psychoanalysis stressing biological models gained a wide audience, the women's movement has seen Freud as one of history's great misogynists. Freud is read as claiming that passive and subordinate femininity is a consequence of the anatomical difference between the sexes. The Lacanian reading has given French feminism an altogether different complexion: the marxist branch of the women's liberation movement is deeply influenced by psychoanalysis and actually calls i tself"Psychoanalysis and Politics".

The attack on ego psychology, the attack on the psychoanalytic institution and a new possibility for bridge building between psychoanalysis and politics are structuring issues for the reader of the Ecrits and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. But some feel that Lacan's style of presenting them is irresponsibly obscurantist. The question of style, indeed of willful opacity, is certainly relevant to the reader who comes to Lacan in good faith, wanting to understand, and is taken aback by prose which resembles nothing in the psychoanalytic literature as much as it resembles Mallarm6. The question of style brings us to what is perhaps a fourth "orient ing issue" that must inform any reading of Lacan, an issue central to Lacan's theoretical agenda: the question of what kind of discourse is appropriate to p:~vchoanalvtic theory.

The words of the analyst in the analytic session do not have the status of truths

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requiring assent or disagreement. They are provocations to speech, to personal exploration. Lacan asserts that the writing of the psychoanalytic theorist must also be of this nature. Lacan's critics have objected that he lacks the rich texture of Freud's work, where examples from case histories and daily life abound. Freud's kind of "texturing" by examples (like somebody leaving an umbrella behind) have a reassuring earthiness. If you read Lacan looking for such, you are indeed disappointed. Lacan has an altogether different idea of the examples needed by the reader. His text i tself - the plays on words, the play with words is there for the reader as examples of how language works in the shifting, slipping, associative chains of the unconscious. The point of the psychoanalytic text is not just to convey information, but to do something to the reader.

In Lacan's style of presentation the text is not static; meanings seem to change, to take on different shades on different readings. Lacan feels that this sort of text is most true to his project: to provoke, even to incite a return to what he feels was most subversive in Freud's vision. This is the idea that the meanings we attribute to our everyday actions must be fundamentally called into question. Nothing is as it seems. Our language reveals a reality where we lack control, consciousness, autonomy. And we can never fully know this reality. Psychoanalysis is basically a knowledge about the impossibility of knowing. In the first paragraph of his preface to the English edition of The Four Fundamental Concepts q[" Psycho~ anaO'sis, Lacan makes this point:

All l can do is tell the truth. No, that isn't so 1 have missed it. There is no truth, that in passing through awareness, does not lie. But one runs after it all the same . . . .

If Lacan's texts seem uncomfortable and disjointed, if they provoke the reader to considerable annoyance with Lacan for not "making up his mind," Lacan would say that in psychoanalytic discourse this is as it should be and that, particularly in the United States where a version of psychoanalysis has become established university truth and standard medical practice, a problematic discourse may be a good thing.

Putting Lacan in context makes his writing more comprehensible. And looking at what he has done through the prism of his intentions makes for a sympathetic reading. But Lacan's work, particularly his ideas about the discourse appropriate to psychoanalytic theory, raises serious problems. The opaque and fluid discourse enters into conflict with the most basic propositions which underlie normal science. Lacan might well answer that it is inappropriate to have a clear and consistent psychoanalytic discourse, but where does that leave us when we try to judge the merits of his work? There is one answer which basically says: "Mr. Lacan, we will not hear you. Circular justifications of one's own incomprehen- sibility are the stuff of which demagoguery is made." Another approach accepts a certain complicity, an assent to Lacan's demand that we judge his work by special standards. We can either say that a psychoanalytic discipline whose vocation is to dissolve assumptions about everyday reality demands a discourse that strains to break the rules of everyday logic and everyday speech. Or we can look to his writings as a kind of therapeutic instrument like Wittgenstein's image of the ladder in the Tractatus, they can be cast away once they have been used to climb

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to a desired place. In this view, the question is not whether Lacan's propositions are true or false. We judge them by their effects.

A third approach is sympathetic to Lacan, but holds him to normal methodol- ogical standards. We can restrict our judgment to those parts of Lacan's texts in which he states his theory in a way that comes sufficiently close to that of our normal scientific discourse. Here. one could focus on Lacan's theory of the mirror phase which has become common coin in French writing about ego development or on his description of the Symbolic order, an aspect of Lacan's theory which, as we have noted, has been of great importance to marxist commentators. But even with this "restricted" strategy there are problems, most particularly the problem of evidence. Even when he is being clear, as in his description of how the child misidentifies his body in the mirror phase (Ecrits, pp. 1 7), there is no presenta- tion of any data of specific children being systematically observed. Of course, there is the implicit assumption that Lacan has seen all this, has accumulated his evidence in the course of his analytic practice. This assumption and ambiguity about evidence runs through all psychoanalytic literature, but Lacan's published texts leave the reader with a particularly.acute sense of a gap between the power of his assertions and the weakness of concrete, supporting data.

Given all of this, should these books be read? After all, reading them does involve a substantial commitment of time and tolerance. If the reader's purpose is to find well argued and proven new theories of psychoanalysis, there is room for doubt. But several other motivations would lead to an unambiguous yes. First, Lacan's theoretical system has been absorbed into the expressive language of contempo- rary French writing in a wide range of fields from literary criticism to political theory. Here I refer not only to the Althusserian school, other recent attempts to reconcile Marx and Freud, but also to a new wave of French feminist writing and Les Nouvelles Philosophes. None of these are intelligible without knowing Lacan. Second, there is a positive side to Lacan's blurring of the line between the discourse appropriate to talking about psychoanalysis and the discourse appro- priate to doing it. This blurring makes problems when we wish to judge Lacan as a theorist, but there is no question that his associative and allusive chains of signification convey as few others have done the tonality of the psychoanalytic experience.

Sherry Turkle Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg by Norman Geras (New Left Books/Schocken, 1976).

Only of late has marxism directed the historiographical enthusiasm of labor history at its own tradition. Davidson's study of Gramsci, Liebman's of Lenin, and Knei-Paz' of Trotsky are all pioneering works in this regard. In a more general sense Anderson's recent attempt to map "western marxism" is also symptomat ic of this turn. As a whole, however, the project initiated by New Left Books has been more concerned with installing successive continental gurus in the Anglo-American context than with the history of the working class movement

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itself. Norman Geras' attempt to rescue Rosa Luxemburg is an important exception to this NLB tendency, al though not the only one. Geras' book is difficult to assess because it is difficult to separate his own problems from his subject's. Geras identifies with Rosa; but this is more problematical than it might initially seem. Author and subject share the terrain called revolutionary marxism, for which it is necessary to change the world in order to understand it. If books take on lives of their own, this is even more true with books by marxists, for they have a dual character as scholarship and as political intervention. As a work of scholarship The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg is without doubt the best available on the subject in English. Geras' book is not only a response to Nettl 's "standard" biography, but also to other recent commentaries and anthologies. His scholarly motif is clear and strong: Rosa Luxemburg has been vilified, transformed,

travestied.

In the book's four essays Geras analyzes barbarism and collapse, the period between the two Russian Revolutions, the mass strike, and the relationships between ends and means. Rosa Luxemburg is analyzed both esoterically and as the provider of political themes. In the opening essay Geras argues that the "socialism or barbarism" alternative in Luxemburg overrides any teleology. The famous couplet is seen here as context, in the manner of Marx's famous comments on the making of history in The Eighteenth Brumaire. The only problem here is that like her peers Rosa is a victim of uneven theoretical development. [n the rescue process Geras presents her theory as more coherent than it actually is. He presumes that science and revolution, theory and practice are unitary. But his unfolding argument itself reveals some of the ambiguities in Luxemburg's thought (pp. 29, 35). Without exaggerating, the problem is that Geras runs the danger of presenting Rosa's theory as seamless. As Michel L6wy has pointed out in a separate review (New Left Review 101 102), Geras' own ambivalences are at least partially representative of those in Luxemburg.

The analysis of the period between the two Russian Revolutions is an attempt to avoid the conflation of Trotsky and Luxemburg. Lenin is closer to Luxemburg in these early days although by October "We all became trotskyists." Geras' philology here is excellent. Chapter two is in fact a location of the whole debate on revolution within the unique milieu of developing Bolshevism. As history, the quality of this location could not be under-emphasized. Earlier provisos notwith- standing, Luxemburg becomes a trotskyist in the chapter on the mass strike. It is hard not to feel that this syncretic trotskyism is the binding thread of the whole book but more on this later. Geras correctly points out that she identified the problem of bridging minimum and maximum programs, of simultaneously avoiding reformism and sectarianism. But Luxemburg does no more than prefigure the notion of a transitional program. Further, the tendency of transi- tional programs to degenerate into reformism (sliding scales of wages and so on) has been widely noted. Neither Lenin nor Trotsky did more than identify the problem. Even the program advanced by Mandel in The Second Slump still divides neatly into halves: holding measures today, the revolution tomorrow.

Social democrats and anarchists stand in for Stalinists in the concluding essay on ends and means. The assumption is that to disperse one's theoretical enemies is

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equivalent to vindicating one's own position. Despite a sincere desire for emancipation, or thodoxy still bifurcates into "those who know" and "those who don't". The Party understands the best interest of the class (p. 186). Party plurality in a conciliar framework is offered as the road to socialist democracy, but as one revisionist has recently pointed out, it is not the failure of councils that is problematic, but the dependence on them (Poulantzas, State. Power. Social- ism). One detects here and elsewhere in Geras' (and Rosa's?) work a tension between emancipation and organization. Geras' is the kind of flee-floating or thodoxy which becomes caught in a bind. How far can or thodoxy float freely? Can marxism be revived rather than rethought? Geras' predicament is of a special type: his is a radical trotskyism, a position apparently closer to the recent Pablo than to the International Marxist Group in Britain with which Geras identifies.

Allthough we cannot criticize Geras for his concentration on politics, more attention could have been paid to Rosa's political economy. Rarely has any marxist 's political economy been so badly treated. "Revolutionists" and "revi- sionists" met in unashamed alliance (e.g., Bukharin and Bauer) against Luxem- burg. Geras touches on this in his chapter on catastrophism, but seems to accept or thodox wisdom regarding Rosa's "errors". In the accumulation debate the least important point was the so-called third market. It was a sad reflection on the state of marxism that Luxemburg had to persuade her enemies that capitalism as a world-system was objectively crisis-ridden. Today the real importance of this debate is methodological. Luxemburg quite correctly took Marx to task for his excessive logical elegance, particularly in the first volume of Capital. Marx's presupposition of one mode of production, and implicitly of the world as that mode writ large, was logically indefensible, or at least was logically defensible only within an insufficiently historical logic. Marx's incomplete methodological self-understanding coincided with the development of a tradition given to producing political economy as "models". The worst of this tradition emerged with Grossman, the later Althusser, and even Rosdolsky, with the separation of theoretical discourse from the real world. Luxemburg was onto problems which she could identify but not solve. Her notion of the "theoretical fiction" alone has enormous ramifications: what has marxism to do with theory as fiction?~ Of course she defends Marx here, obviously for immediate political reasons. The lesson, however, is that the disease called "theoreticism" is neither particularly new nor peculiarly French.

Apart from willfully misrepresenting Luxemburg, Bukharin compounded Marx's textual problems, for example, identifying accumulation with production. But Luxemburg 's pursuit was not at all "left-Keynesian". Her aim was not to transfer contradiction from production to realization, but to understand the process as a whole. Mandel 's more recent writings break with the long tradition of miscasting her argument, at last transcending the original terms of the accumulation debate. Luxemburg 's focus on the process of reproduction as a whole seems logically to anticipate the contemporary theorization of crisis. While her opponents apply variations on structural-functional logic to reproduction, she opens it up as a problem: how can capital be overthrown if it effortlessly recreates itself ad nauseum? In this sense Luxemburg may have anticipated the Habermasian theorization of crisis in its multiformities. Without suggesting a necessary

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connect ion between a phi losophy of history with practical intentions and a philosophy of practice with historic intentions, it can be seen here that Luxem- burg's relevance is broader than that of a great revolutionist. The intellectual legacy of Rosa Luxemburg is much more open-ended than that of l,enin or even Trotsky. Alone with Gramsci she stands head and shoulders above the personnel of marxist history. These were organic revolutionary intellectuals: their struggle was not only to tell the truth but also to arrive together at it.

The nuances of organizational or military strategy cannot solve contemporary problems without replacing them with different problems which are themselves insoluble. The real problem for socialists today is not "how to pull off a revolution" but how to initiate the process in which the capital relation is replaced with use-value relations. That marxism has no medium to pierce the ideology and practice of everyday life is not particularly problematic for trotskyism. Unfortu- nately, Geras' theory is posited on a Stalinist-Trotskyist dichotomy which allows no scope for alleged "third roads". In Geras' explanation Lenin also becomes a trotskyist. But whatever the legitimacy of this particular decision, it cannot explain Lenin's position after 1917. The recent work of Bettclheim and Linhart clearly reinforces the notion that Lenin's trotskyism was strategic and conjunc- rural. Certain contemporary heretics would want to extend that judgement, so that Bolshevism per se could be seen as conjunctural and therefore as obsolete.

Probably all marxism contains in its concrete utopia elements of the Kantian imperative of autonomy. Heller has established that this is the case with Marx himself. Certainly Lenin and Trotsky experience at least phases of such a radical humanist an thropology in their practice or theory. But with trotskyism in particular this inclination seems more than merely prospective. In trotskyism the working class is incipiently autonomous, but duped or restrained. The tension between this condit ion and the necessity for disciplined leadership is not resolved. In one of his most provocative sections Geras makes the sharp observation that it is impossible for solutions to be given in advance (p. 184). While this is obviously correct, it takes us no further than the pragmatism of Gramsci or Mao. Marxism's special character as a theory which can see behind and ahead dissolves into conjunctural necessity. What is this, if not the history of the Russian Revolution, its living legacy in theoretical form?

Geras' concern is more with the marxist tradition than with the marxist problematic. Theory is therefore reduced to history. For Geras, that history begins in 1917, or really in 1905. He would deny the suggestion that Russian socialism existed only partially, only regionally, and above all only sut~jectively in the months following October. But the Soviet experience cannot be a lodestar any more than the Paris Commune could be for earlier marxists. Marxism's first obstacle today is the divorce between theory and practice, or if you like, between intellectual and manual life. Its second obstacle is Statinism (without in any sense reading Stalinism back into Leninism). Marxism's frustration is its inability to find a way to change bourgeois society without duplicating the dysfunctions of previous experiments. To acknowledge this condition is not to take out bets in the Solzhenitsyn stakes or to engage in social science fiction, but to honestly confront the future. Since the pithy theses on Feuerbach were scribbled in 1845, marxism has experienced little but historical tragedy and tarce. Therein lies the crisis of marxism.

Peter Beilharz Monash University, Melbourne

Theory and Society 9 (1980) 647-664 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in the Netherlands