Implicit in most discussions of the controversy over the future path of Israeli society is a char... more Implicit in most discussions of the controversy over the future path of Israeli society is a characterization of religious and secular Jews, one that presumes that the former are better, more authentic Jews. That presumption is unfounded. Quite apart from the presumptuousness of determining who is an "authentic" Jew, if we examine intelligently the Jewish tradition, we see that it is the so-called "secular" or "progressive" Jews, those who advocate both the use of universal reason and an autonomous morality, who follow Jewish principles, who are the genuine representatives of the long Jewish tradition, not those who adhere to a traditional, hierarchical, particularistic, rigid, and external morality grounded in ritualized precepts. We may characterize the logic of religious commitment in terms of three fundamental building blocks of religiosity. First, are they grounded in a notion of natural law or are they morally voluntaristic; is God understood to act justly, in terms of a notion of justice available to believers and nonbelievers alike apart from revelation, or do God's actions and expectations constitute what is just? Second, do humans have the capacity to act righteously? Is "human nature" akin to original sin in Christianity, where no one can act in a way that merits salvation, or, as in Islam, where fitra, our natural inclination to God, enables us to both understand the straight path God lays out for us and to act in accordance with it, in a way that merits salvation. Third, is God immanent in some organization or person on earth or is God transcendent. If the former (e.g., the Roman Catholic Church or the original Shi'a Imams), some organization or person has God's authority to tell us how to act morally.
Parsons, in an ASR review of Nisbet’s The Sociological Tradition, drew a distinction between the ... more Parsons, in an ASR review of Nisbet’s The Sociological Tradition, drew a distinction between the kinds of ‘intellectual history presented by... [Nisbet’s] book and what ... [Parsons called] an historical treatment of theory and its development’ (Parsons, 1967: 640), a reading of theory that transcended the works discussed and resulted in Parsons’ own theoretical contributions. Chernilo’s book (2013) is akin to Nisbet’s work. Here, however, I will formulate an argument as if it were closer in form to Parsons’ own The Structure of Social Action (1949 [1937]). Working from Chernilo’s discussion, which emphasizes the connections between modern natural law and social theory, largely through what he takes to be their related grasp of universalism, I suggest an understanding of social theory that enables us to formulate a defensible natural law argument. For Chernilo, modern social theory is the natural law of artificial social relations (pp. 203, 220). Modern social theory presupposes that ‘there is something stable in the way in which social relations are produced and reproduced in different contexts and epochs’ (pp. 220–221); this is the primary form of universalism that Chernilo finds in it (p. 207). This contention requires that social theory have a functional dimension, specifying propositions that are held to be valid for all social systems. Second, Chernilo contends that ‘actions always take place in previously structured socio-historical contexts ...’ (p. 221). This suggests that the analysis of social relations must focus on specific patterns of interrelationship and that these patterns will differ depending on the nature of the social structure under analysis. Social theory formulates universal-class propositions about more particular types of social structure. Third, and here I think that, in spite of himself, Chernilo introduces religion into his discussion, he contends that ‘the conception of social relations ... locates the normative somewhere in between immanence and transcendence’ (p. 221). I argue, instead, that a meaningful characterization of social theory as natural law must posit a theory of social development, where the ‘transcendent’ is characterized in terms of immanent possibilities for social and individual development, and where the last stage in this progression serves as the standard enabling the critical evaluation of earlier stages. Chernilo misses this developmental dimension, even in his characterization of Habermas, in whose work it is laid out clearly. 597370 SOC0010.1177/0038038515597370SociologyBook Review Discussion research-article2015
Ronald Dworkin contended that the process of judicial interpretation in the United States and the... more Ronald Dworkin contended that the process of judicial interpretation in the United States and the United Kingdom is and should be regulated by egalitarian principles that are par‐ tially constitutive of the law. While he also referred to policies, principles, in the form of legal rights, trump legal policies in situations of conflict. The sharp differentiation Dworkin drew between principle and policy derived from the inability of (his) interpretative theory to exam‐ ine the outcomes of legal decisions social scientifically. In consequence, in a fashion analo‐ gous to interpretative theories in the social sciences and humanities, a discussion of social practices, social policies, and their consequences dropped from his theoretical agenda. In contrast, I develop the rudiments of a theory of judicial activity that maintains the autonomy of principles, while recognizing that their very meaning is dependent on the con‐ sequences of their implementation. While principles retain their deo...
ABSTRACT: Normative expectations may be divided between social values that define the nature of d... more ABSTRACT: Normative expectations may be divided between social values that define the nature of desirable social orders in terms of right and wrong and cultural norms that constitute meaning. In contrast to normative expectations, which are stable in the face of situational ...
ABSTRACT Robert Wuthnow has written a comparative history of great scope and erudition. He has ta... more ABSTRACT Robert Wuthnow has written a comparative history of great scope and erudition. He has tackled big, important problems and has attempted to construct arguments capable of withstanding systematically presented comparative data. In a discipline that often seems condemned to trivial pursuits, this would seem to be exactly the type of book we should embrace as a paradigm for future research. Instead, I suggest here why I find Communities of Discourse - and implicitly, the genre of work to which it belongs - to be an unsatisfying and an unsatisfactory way to do sociology. It should be clear that I am emphasizing the weaknesses I find in Communities of Discourse; in consequence I am doing it an injustice. Too often in situations like this forum, dealing with a comparativehistorical essay, the critic attacks or praises particular empirical discussions, showing their fidelity to or deviation from her own image of some historical period. Generally, the acceptance of an argument about particular cases is inversely related to the critic's knowledge of that case. Alternatively, the critic condemns an author for failing to write the book the critic would have written. Here I, in general, refrain from the first type of discussion, but there is more than a little of the latter in my remarks. I nonetheless aim to address questions that are at least implicit in Wuthnow's analysis and to suggest some theoretical strategies that would have enabled him to have answered these questions better. In other words, I emphasize theoretical rather than historiographical issues, but in doing so I try to explain why I think that historical criticism, focusing on the interpretation of particular empirical cases, would be unproductive in this context.
Page 1. MARK GOULD RS?5ffl?fiiT5iii THE COMING OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION Page 2. Page 3. ... Page... more Page 1. MARK GOULD RS?5ffl?fiiT5iii THE COMING OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION Page 2. Page 3. ... Page 5. Revolution In the Development of Capitalism The Coming of the English Revolution Mark Gould University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London Page 6. ...
... EMPLOYMENT DISCRIMINATION ... "[Arrow] suggests that we must move beyond the usu... more ... EMPLOYMENT DISCRIMINATION ... "[Arrow] suggests that we must move beyond the usual boundaries of economic analysis-for ... Still further extensions are needed to capture some aspects of reality, for there is a whole world of rewards and penal-ties that take social rather than ...
I differentiate conceptually between Islamist and other religious movements directed towards reli... more I differentiate conceptually between Islamist and other religious movements directed towards religious and political institutions and, for each of these, between movements that endeavor to transform (1) role relationships, (2) collectivity structures, (3) normative expectations, and (4) value orientations in these institutions. I construct a value-added theory that specifies the necessary and sufficient conditions generating each of these types of movements. Movements are directed at one of these components of social action dependent on the nature of strain present for actors within the system. Their direction is guided by the nature of the opportunity structure present in the social order under examination. Religious disorders, religious movements that violate institutionalized norms and attempt to reconstruct one or more aspects of an institutionalized religious structure, emerge when religious value-commitments and obligations are deflated and actors adopt a calculating orientati...
Cliometricians contended that counterfactual history was something new. They then characterized i... more Cliometricians contended that counterfactual history was something new. They then characterized it in terms of a specific, quantitative methodology. In this paper, I contend that all arguments are counterfactual (or, what is the same thing, comparative). We cannot chose to do counterfactual history; we chose either to make coherent arguments, which are counterfactual, or to make assertions that are logically flawed, are no arguments at all. As Durkheim put it, "Comparative sociology is not a special branch of sociology; it is sociology itself, in so far as it ceases to be purely descriptive and aspires to account for facts." 1 The methodology we adopt is secondary; it should be selected to best address the problems we examine. 2 To construct a counterfactual, i.e., to make an argument, requires a general theory enabling us to create societal universals, propositions valid across societies. Thus, to explain any historical event, or the emergence of any institution, requires the construction of a social science theory (Weber, 1968 (1926): 19, 29). Historical analysis is a form of retrospective secondary analysis. It involves the construction of post-hoc explanations , which are often best-fit characterizations of the relationship of theory to data. This is a hermeneutic process, but it cannot be reduced to interpretation. Instead, to tell a story about a particular set of events, we must integrate that story with another narrative, an articulated theory. If that theory is general, if it enables us to construct an appropriate counterfactual, it will, at the same time, enable us to make appropriate comparisons; the coherent story we tell is a narrative that includes a variety of cases and the theory. The theory allows us to generalize each particular story within a narrative that provides a coherent explanation for all members of the relevant set, e.g., for all revolutions of a particular type. This strategy privileges no specific methodology, but it does force a methodological recognition of why this task is so difficult. This is because the same concept is likely to be operationalized differently in diverse historical situations, and in multiple ways in any one historical situation. Durkheim's charge, too often implemented in quantitative work, that we should adopt a consistent operationalization of our concepts across cases, is belied in his own research, where, for example, anomie and egoism were characterized differently operationally across a wide variety of settings, and within any one setting. We cannot identify concepts consistently through a singular set of observables, but must, instead, recognize that functionally-defined concepts may be present in multiple incarnations; concepts may be overdetermined. This reality makes our task much more difficult than it would be otherwise. There is another difficulty specific to the socio-cultural sciences. We are unable to reduce the objects of our knowledge to phenomena, objects, described as if we were natural scientists. As Weber recognized, preliminary to *Eric Malczewski, the chair of the panel at the Social Science History Association Conference (2017) where this paper was first presented, kindly suggested to me that this paper is important not just for historical sociology, but for all of sociology. I agree that my argument is applicable more generally than to historical sociology, but, here, I have kept the focus on retrospective, historical, analyses.
Ronald Dworkin contended that the process of judicial interpretation in the United States and the... more Ronald Dworkin contended that the process of judicial interpretation in the United States and the United Kingdom is and should be regulated by egalitarian principles that are par‐ tially constitutive of the law. While he also referred to policies, principles, in the form of legal rights, trump legal policies in situations of conflict. The sharp differentiation Dworkin drew between principle and policy derived from the inability of (his) interpretative theory to exam‐ ine the outcomes of legal decisions social scientifically. In consequence, in a fashion analo‐ gous to interpretative theories in the social sciences and humanities, a discussion of social practices, social policies, and their consequences dropped from his theoretical agenda. In contrast, I develop the rudiments of a theory of judicial activity that maintains the autonomy of principles, while recognizing that their very meaning is dependent on the con‐ sequences of their implementation. While principles retain their deontological status, they are necessarily integrated with their policy consequences, if only to clarify their meaning. It is crucial to remember that if law is constituted as a set of legal norms, it is also a form of social action and that the two are not always congruent; this simple insight will turn out to be help‐ ful in selecting the legal principles that we should endeavor to implement. To make my argument manageable within the context of this paper, I contrast Dworkin's notion of equality, which is essentially procedural, with an image of equity that merges for‐ mal and substantive claims, recognizes that the implementation of egalitarian norms may accentuate inequality, and mandates actions to enhance substantively egalitarian outcomes. I contend that while Dworkin's image of law as integrity is capable of understanding (making coherent) and normatively justifying the movement from Plessy v. Ferguson 1 to Brown v. Board of Education, 2 it cannot explain and justify systematically the further development manifest in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. 3 While Brown enunciated a procedural model of equality that might be understood solely at the level of doctrine, Griggs began the process of enunciating a sub‐ stantive (and procedural) model of equity (in the disparate impact doctrine) that requires an examination of the specifics of each case, an evaluation of legal principles in terms of their consequences, and thus the articulation of equitable principles, which take into account the socially‐structured positions of actors and the potentially differential consequences for them of a procedurally‐rational and universalistic policy. In an equitable jurisprudence, principles, procedures, and substantive outcomes are united doctrinally as the gap between formal and substantive rationality is closed.
In Marx's characterization of the first stage of manufacture, economic production is constituted ... more In Marx's characterization of the first stage of manufacture, economic production is constituted by the formal subsumption of labor under capital and thus the retention of precapitalist processes of production. In consequence, increases in production occur with constant returns to scale, competitive constraints are incompletely developed (per unit costs are not reduced), cooperation is simple, and this economic structure is consistent with various traditional as well as with rationalizing values. The objective, coercive, competitive constraints found in machine capitalism (the " iron cage ") are absent, and if capital accumulation occurs within this first stage of manufacture, it must be motivated subjectively. While Weber provides an explanation of the nature of this subjective motivation, an explanation of the capacity of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism to motivate capital accumulation systematically presumes a characterization of the logic of economic production that is developed incompletely in Weber's analysis. The Protestant ethic becomes the spirit of capitalism, and methodically motivates capital accumulation, only when it interpenetrates the first stage of manufacture. Thus, neither Marx nor Weber alone provides an adequate explanation for the emergence of machine capitalism. Marx slights the necessity for the autonomous, subjective motivation of capital accumulation within the first stage of manufacture, while Weber provides an inadequate analysis of the nature of manufacture, the structure of economic production that is rationalized subjectively by the spirit of capitalism. However, their arguments are complementary and, if integrated, provide the foundation for a satisfactory explanation of this developmental process. Through my characterization of their analyses of capital accumulation in the first stage of manufacture, I construct an argument about Marx and Weber's understanding of the role of value-commitments in the analysis of economic/ social structures and about the common logic of historical explanation found in their theories.
Implicit in most discussions of the controversy over the future path of Israeli society is a char... more Implicit in most discussions of the controversy over the future path of Israeli society is a characterization of religious and secular Jews, one that presumes that the former are better, more authentic Jews. That presumption is unfounded. Quite apart from the presumptuousness of determining who is an "authentic" Jew, if we examine intelligently the Jewish tradition, we see that it is the so-called "secular" or "progressive" Jews, those who advocate both the use of universal reason and an autonomous morality, who follow Jewish principles, who are the genuine representatives of the long Jewish tradition, not those who adhere to a traditional, hierarchical, particularistic, rigid, and external morality grounded in ritualized precepts. We may characterize the logic of religious commitment in terms of three fundamental building blocks of religiosity. First, are they grounded in a notion of natural law or are they morally voluntaristic; is God understood to act justly, in terms of a notion of justice available to believers and nonbelievers alike apart from revelation, or do God's actions and expectations constitute what is just? Second, do humans have the capacity to act righteously? Is "human nature" akin to original sin in Christianity, where no one can act in a way that merits salvation, or, as in Islam, where fitra, our natural inclination to God, enables us to both understand the straight path God lays out for us and to act in accordance with it, in a way that merits salvation. Third, is God immanent in some organization or person on earth or is God transcendent. If the former (e.g., the Roman Catholic Church or the original Shi'a Imams), some organization or person has God's authority to tell us how to act morally.
Parsons, in an ASR review of Nisbet’s The Sociological Tradition, drew a distinction between the ... more Parsons, in an ASR review of Nisbet’s The Sociological Tradition, drew a distinction between the kinds of ‘intellectual history presented by... [Nisbet’s] book and what ... [Parsons called] an historical treatment of theory and its development’ (Parsons, 1967: 640), a reading of theory that transcended the works discussed and resulted in Parsons’ own theoretical contributions. Chernilo’s book (2013) is akin to Nisbet’s work. Here, however, I will formulate an argument as if it were closer in form to Parsons’ own The Structure of Social Action (1949 [1937]). Working from Chernilo’s discussion, which emphasizes the connections between modern natural law and social theory, largely through what he takes to be their related grasp of universalism, I suggest an understanding of social theory that enables us to formulate a defensible natural law argument. For Chernilo, modern social theory is the natural law of artificial social relations (pp. 203, 220). Modern social theory presupposes that ‘there is something stable in the way in which social relations are produced and reproduced in different contexts and epochs’ (pp. 220–221); this is the primary form of universalism that Chernilo finds in it (p. 207). This contention requires that social theory have a functional dimension, specifying propositions that are held to be valid for all social systems. Second, Chernilo contends that ‘actions always take place in previously structured socio-historical contexts ...’ (p. 221). This suggests that the analysis of social relations must focus on specific patterns of interrelationship and that these patterns will differ depending on the nature of the social structure under analysis. Social theory formulates universal-class propositions about more particular types of social structure. Third, and here I think that, in spite of himself, Chernilo introduces religion into his discussion, he contends that ‘the conception of social relations ... locates the normative somewhere in between immanence and transcendence’ (p. 221). I argue, instead, that a meaningful characterization of social theory as natural law must posit a theory of social development, where the ‘transcendent’ is characterized in terms of immanent possibilities for social and individual development, and where the last stage in this progression serves as the standard enabling the critical evaluation of earlier stages. Chernilo misses this developmental dimension, even in his characterization of Habermas, in whose work it is laid out clearly. 597370 SOC0010.1177/0038038515597370SociologyBook Review Discussion research-article2015
Ronald Dworkin contended that the process of judicial interpretation in the United States and the... more Ronald Dworkin contended that the process of judicial interpretation in the United States and the United Kingdom is and should be regulated by egalitarian principles that are par‐ tially constitutive of the law. While he also referred to policies, principles, in the form of legal rights, trump legal policies in situations of conflict. The sharp differentiation Dworkin drew between principle and policy derived from the inability of (his) interpretative theory to exam‐ ine the outcomes of legal decisions social scientifically. In consequence, in a fashion analo‐ gous to interpretative theories in the social sciences and humanities, a discussion of social practices, social policies, and their consequences dropped from his theoretical agenda. In contrast, I develop the rudiments of a theory of judicial activity that maintains the autonomy of principles, while recognizing that their very meaning is dependent on the con‐ sequences of their implementation. While principles retain their deo...
ABSTRACT: Normative expectations may be divided between social values that define the nature of d... more ABSTRACT: Normative expectations may be divided between social values that define the nature of desirable social orders in terms of right and wrong and cultural norms that constitute meaning. In contrast to normative expectations, which are stable in the face of situational ...
ABSTRACT Robert Wuthnow has written a comparative history of great scope and erudition. He has ta... more ABSTRACT Robert Wuthnow has written a comparative history of great scope and erudition. He has tackled big, important problems and has attempted to construct arguments capable of withstanding systematically presented comparative data. In a discipline that often seems condemned to trivial pursuits, this would seem to be exactly the type of book we should embrace as a paradigm for future research. Instead, I suggest here why I find Communities of Discourse - and implicitly, the genre of work to which it belongs - to be an unsatisfying and an unsatisfactory way to do sociology. It should be clear that I am emphasizing the weaknesses I find in Communities of Discourse; in consequence I am doing it an injustice. Too often in situations like this forum, dealing with a comparativehistorical essay, the critic attacks or praises particular empirical discussions, showing their fidelity to or deviation from her own image of some historical period. Generally, the acceptance of an argument about particular cases is inversely related to the critic's knowledge of that case. Alternatively, the critic condemns an author for failing to write the book the critic would have written. Here I, in general, refrain from the first type of discussion, but there is more than a little of the latter in my remarks. I nonetheless aim to address questions that are at least implicit in Wuthnow's analysis and to suggest some theoretical strategies that would have enabled him to have answered these questions better. In other words, I emphasize theoretical rather than historiographical issues, but in doing so I try to explain why I think that historical criticism, focusing on the interpretation of particular empirical cases, would be unproductive in this context.
Page 1. MARK GOULD RS?5ffl?fiiT5iii THE COMING OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION Page 2. Page 3. ... Page... more Page 1. MARK GOULD RS?5ffl?fiiT5iii THE COMING OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION Page 2. Page 3. ... Page 5. Revolution In the Development of Capitalism The Coming of the English Revolution Mark Gould University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London Page 6. ...
... EMPLOYMENT DISCRIMINATION ... "[Arrow] suggests that we must move beyond the usu... more ... EMPLOYMENT DISCRIMINATION ... "[Arrow] suggests that we must move beyond the usual boundaries of economic analysis-for ... Still further extensions are needed to capture some aspects of reality, for there is a whole world of rewards and penal-ties that take social rather than ...
I differentiate conceptually between Islamist and other religious movements directed towards reli... more I differentiate conceptually between Islamist and other religious movements directed towards religious and political institutions and, for each of these, between movements that endeavor to transform (1) role relationships, (2) collectivity structures, (3) normative expectations, and (4) value orientations in these institutions. I construct a value-added theory that specifies the necessary and sufficient conditions generating each of these types of movements. Movements are directed at one of these components of social action dependent on the nature of strain present for actors within the system. Their direction is guided by the nature of the opportunity structure present in the social order under examination. Religious disorders, religious movements that violate institutionalized norms and attempt to reconstruct one or more aspects of an institutionalized religious structure, emerge when religious value-commitments and obligations are deflated and actors adopt a calculating orientati...
Cliometricians contended that counterfactual history was something new. They then characterized i... more Cliometricians contended that counterfactual history was something new. They then characterized it in terms of a specific, quantitative methodology. In this paper, I contend that all arguments are counterfactual (or, what is the same thing, comparative). We cannot chose to do counterfactual history; we chose either to make coherent arguments, which are counterfactual, or to make assertions that are logically flawed, are no arguments at all. As Durkheim put it, "Comparative sociology is not a special branch of sociology; it is sociology itself, in so far as it ceases to be purely descriptive and aspires to account for facts." 1 The methodology we adopt is secondary; it should be selected to best address the problems we examine. 2 To construct a counterfactual, i.e., to make an argument, requires a general theory enabling us to create societal universals, propositions valid across societies. Thus, to explain any historical event, or the emergence of any institution, requires the construction of a social science theory (Weber, 1968 (1926): 19, 29). Historical analysis is a form of retrospective secondary analysis. It involves the construction of post-hoc explanations , which are often best-fit characterizations of the relationship of theory to data. This is a hermeneutic process, but it cannot be reduced to interpretation. Instead, to tell a story about a particular set of events, we must integrate that story with another narrative, an articulated theory. If that theory is general, if it enables us to construct an appropriate counterfactual, it will, at the same time, enable us to make appropriate comparisons; the coherent story we tell is a narrative that includes a variety of cases and the theory. The theory allows us to generalize each particular story within a narrative that provides a coherent explanation for all members of the relevant set, e.g., for all revolutions of a particular type. This strategy privileges no specific methodology, but it does force a methodological recognition of why this task is so difficult. This is because the same concept is likely to be operationalized differently in diverse historical situations, and in multiple ways in any one historical situation. Durkheim's charge, too often implemented in quantitative work, that we should adopt a consistent operationalization of our concepts across cases, is belied in his own research, where, for example, anomie and egoism were characterized differently operationally across a wide variety of settings, and within any one setting. We cannot identify concepts consistently through a singular set of observables, but must, instead, recognize that functionally-defined concepts may be present in multiple incarnations; concepts may be overdetermined. This reality makes our task much more difficult than it would be otherwise. There is another difficulty specific to the socio-cultural sciences. We are unable to reduce the objects of our knowledge to phenomena, objects, described as if we were natural scientists. As Weber recognized, preliminary to *Eric Malczewski, the chair of the panel at the Social Science History Association Conference (2017) where this paper was first presented, kindly suggested to me that this paper is important not just for historical sociology, but for all of sociology. I agree that my argument is applicable more generally than to historical sociology, but, here, I have kept the focus on retrospective, historical, analyses.
Ronald Dworkin contended that the process of judicial interpretation in the United States and the... more Ronald Dworkin contended that the process of judicial interpretation in the United States and the United Kingdom is and should be regulated by egalitarian principles that are par‐ tially constitutive of the law. While he also referred to policies, principles, in the form of legal rights, trump legal policies in situations of conflict. The sharp differentiation Dworkin drew between principle and policy derived from the inability of (his) interpretative theory to exam‐ ine the outcomes of legal decisions social scientifically. In consequence, in a fashion analo‐ gous to interpretative theories in the social sciences and humanities, a discussion of social practices, social policies, and their consequences dropped from his theoretical agenda. In contrast, I develop the rudiments of a theory of judicial activity that maintains the autonomy of principles, while recognizing that their very meaning is dependent on the con‐ sequences of their implementation. While principles retain their deontological status, they are necessarily integrated with their policy consequences, if only to clarify their meaning. It is crucial to remember that if law is constituted as a set of legal norms, it is also a form of social action and that the two are not always congruent; this simple insight will turn out to be help‐ ful in selecting the legal principles that we should endeavor to implement. To make my argument manageable within the context of this paper, I contrast Dworkin's notion of equality, which is essentially procedural, with an image of equity that merges for‐ mal and substantive claims, recognizes that the implementation of egalitarian norms may accentuate inequality, and mandates actions to enhance substantively egalitarian outcomes. I contend that while Dworkin's image of law as integrity is capable of understanding (making coherent) and normatively justifying the movement from Plessy v. Ferguson 1 to Brown v. Board of Education, 2 it cannot explain and justify systematically the further development manifest in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. 3 While Brown enunciated a procedural model of equality that might be understood solely at the level of doctrine, Griggs began the process of enunciating a sub‐ stantive (and procedural) model of equity (in the disparate impact doctrine) that requires an examination of the specifics of each case, an evaluation of legal principles in terms of their consequences, and thus the articulation of equitable principles, which take into account the socially‐structured positions of actors and the potentially differential consequences for them of a procedurally‐rational and universalistic policy. In an equitable jurisprudence, principles, procedures, and substantive outcomes are united doctrinally as the gap between formal and substantive rationality is closed.
In Marx's characterization of the first stage of manufacture, economic production is constituted ... more In Marx's characterization of the first stage of manufacture, economic production is constituted by the formal subsumption of labor under capital and thus the retention of precapitalist processes of production. In consequence, increases in production occur with constant returns to scale, competitive constraints are incompletely developed (per unit costs are not reduced), cooperation is simple, and this economic structure is consistent with various traditional as well as with rationalizing values. The objective, coercive, competitive constraints found in machine capitalism (the " iron cage ") are absent, and if capital accumulation occurs within this first stage of manufacture, it must be motivated subjectively. While Weber provides an explanation of the nature of this subjective motivation, an explanation of the capacity of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism to motivate capital accumulation systematically presumes a characterization of the logic of economic production that is developed incompletely in Weber's analysis. The Protestant ethic becomes the spirit of capitalism, and methodically motivates capital accumulation, only when it interpenetrates the first stage of manufacture. Thus, neither Marx nor Weber alone provides an adequate explanation for the emergence of machine capitalism. Marx slights the necessity for the autonomous, subjective motivation of capital accumulation within the first stage of manufacture, while Weber provides an inadequate analysis of the nature of manufacture, the structure of economic production that is rationalized subjectively by the spirit of capitalism. However, their arguments are complementary and, if integrated, provide the foundation for a satisfactory explanation of this developmental process. Through my characterization of their analyses of capital accumulation in the first stage of manufacture, I construct an argument about Marx and Weber's understanding of the role of value-commitments in the analysis of economic/ social structures and about the common logic of historical explanation found in their theories.
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