REVIEWS

...One could argue to the contrary that behavior based on individualistic achievement could not survive without some measure of cooperation and emotional involvement as well, a capacity for which is both acquired and sustained in the family...

...But he does not follow the functionalist's Weber in denying the exclusionary 229 role of private property...

...Typical of the lack of understanding between middle-class women and unionists was Susan Anthony's behavior during a printers' strike in the winter of 1869, in which women compositors joined the male unionists...

...But this is itself possible not only where there is a high degree of legitimacy to a society, but where there is a conscious effort to reduce inequalities and expand opportunities, and where there is a sense of fairness for all individuals in the society...

...I am here...

...Degler sees in this an indication of women's gain in autonomy because they more than anyone else have a personal interest in reducing the number of births...

...It is therefore a pleasure to read a book on this theme without an apocalyptic vision...

...Sometime later, one speaks: `My brother is lost.' The other is silent...

...AT ODDS: WOMEN AND THE FAMILY IN AMERICA FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE PRESENT, by Carl N. Degler...

...If Degler were to insert just one adjective—the word patriarchal—I would agree with him...

...The interesting, though diffuse, meditations on religion is another...

...III SINCE I CANNOT ATTEMPT a full analysis of Bell's performance in this brief space, let me offer a few minor critical observations and then express what must amount simply to a preference concerning the political and cultural implications of his case for cultural conservatism...

...Society cannot be changed all at once...

...Bell's case for cultural conservatism nevertheless is impressive, even within the scope of a collection of assorted pieces...

...Parkin leaves us in the lurch, for reasons to which I will return in a moment...

...He takes an excessively cautious attitude toward any political activity he considers irrational: either not centered around a play of predictable interests or channeled through existing institutions...

...What modernity has done—in its drive to enhance experience, in its repudiation of tradition and the past, in its sanction for the new and the idea that the individual could remake his self in accordance solely with desire—is to disrupt" the coherence which marks the well-crafted self in the name of an unbounded self...

...These are the essays of a prodigal son [Bell announces straightaway in The Winding Passage...

...In contrast, the demand for the vote became a deliberate feminist issue, and one that was not to be won for a long time to come...

...His cultural conservatism encourages a certain condescension toward democratic politics, especially its rough edges...

...He concludes his historical analysis with the statement that "After two hundred years of development, both the future of the family and the fulfillment of women as persons are at odds as never before...

...And so on, until one gets the impression that Parkin realized that his sociological account had gone so far that, bereft of any material underpinnings, he suddenly found himself in need of the economically driven class actor once again...

...He recalls Trotsky's proposal to militarize the trade unions, and scoffs at the "dialectical" difference between shooting workers at Peterloo and at Kronstadt...

...From this tense interplay of autobiographical and historical ambitions, Bell's work derives much of its range and power—its reflective and restless character, its lucidity and its energy...

...Nor is it sufficient to point to the logical extremes of protest politics: "violent conflict and civil war...

...Parkin tries to unify the economic and the sociological through the device of the rational interest-seeking class...

...DuBois notes that "Women were so far outside the boundaries of the antebellum political community that the fact of their disenfranchisement, unlike that of blacks, was barely noticed...

...PARKIN WANTS to return class analysis to its pride of place...

...dwell upon the dysfunctions of this arrangement and the technical and moral superiority of a more rationally ordered class system based purely upon individualist exclusion...

...IV I FIND BELL'S VISION of culture cramped, too...

...The nihilistic implications that Bell finds in the writings of Herbert Marcuse, N. O. Brown, and R. D. Laing are prefigured in Fourier and Rousseau, in the Protestant Reformation (a principal source of modern evil by virtue of its weakening of institutional mediations), in the early Christian heretics (gnostics, pelagians, antinomians), in Dionysian excess...

...But even this is not the end of it...

...New York: Oxford University Press...

...Quite unexpectedly he takes the position that the interests of the family are at odds with the full emancipation of women—a view that explains the book's title...

...It was probably because they learned to communicate their ideas to wider audiences that they understood that they had to emphasize women's ability to deal with social issues rather than their individual rights...

...if The Way [the Law] is lost," Bell observes, "all is lost...

...These strategies appeal to the moral-rational values of society's "dominant influentials...

...Before turning to Parkin's positive proposals, I should note that these occupy less than half of a book that seems unable to decide what it wants to do...

...And he endeavors to understand that past, both its parochial, Hebraic center and its larger Western (and non-Western) circumference...

...231...

...The modern view of man takes over only the aspect of freedom, not [man's...

...And it undergirds his critique of the "hedonistic" imperatives of late capitalism, its stress on the pleasures of consumption and its subversion of the Protestant ethic of work...

...In such circumstances, the cord of religious memory snaps, and the antinomian self, which haunts Bell's imagination, spreads like a plague as individuals consider themselves unbound by tradition and institutions...

...The drop in fertility began long before there was any significant urbanization of industrialization in the country...

...The dangers are real, and the risks often high...

...The party is to serve as mediator and catalyst...

...Women's enfranchisement would eventually take place, but not before 1920...

...As ideological one-liners go, his formulation is at least arguable, though it may not convince many socialists...

...At that point, as Parkin notes, "an apparent paradox in Marxist theory" was resolved, "namely, the combination of a doctrine of inevitable [economic] capitalist collapse with a rallying call to [sociologically based] political action to bring this end about...

...For if change in economic, political, and cultural spheres follows different rhythms, the disjunctive view of society effectively rules out revolutionary politics and utopian social schemes...

...It did not, as both Degler and DuBois confirm, lead to the radical changes that had been predicted by friend and foe but, as DuBois rightly says, the change in the relations between men and women was brought about more through the fight itself than by the fact of voting rights...

...Bell's history of consciousness, this is to say, turns on a single theme, relentlessly sounding itself, exhibiting endless variations, but coming ever to the same end: to warnings of social disorder, cultural nihilism, and a disintegration and thinning of human personality...

...It was a particularly feminist demand, because it exposed and challenged the assumption of male authority over women...

...which] derives from the fact that man as a limited and finite creature denies his finiteness and seeks to reach beyond it—beyond culture, beyond nature, beyond history...

...The integrating theme of the virtues of restraint and stoic resignation not only structures Bell's perceptions of the history of consciousness...

...Trotsky's infatuation with the leadership problem," writes Parkin, "marked what could perhaps be seen as the culmination of a tendency within Marxism towards the progressive narrowing down of the social basis of the revolutionary agency...

...It wasn't too difficult in the 19th century to suppose a "civilizing tendency" toward class polarization that would eliminate precapitalist remnants...

...Similar strategies were used by 20thcentury civil rights and feminist campaigns...

...He seems temperamentally unable to subscribe unreservedly to any party, even an amorphous party of intellectuals...

...This explains capitalism's necessary economic crisis...

...Parkin offers no theoretical grounds for his defense of social democracy...

...He was, after all, a guiding force in the development of neoconservative styles of thought during the late 1960s and '70s...

...He not only rules out revolutionary politics (as do democratic socialists...

...The patriarchal family has been, I believe, under attack ever since the 19th century, as Degler so masterly demonstrates, and indeed the vote, even if it did not have the magical effect that foe and friend predicted, is symbolic of this transformation, as is the later event of women's participation in the labor force...

...His primary perspective on modern history, this is to say, serves him well only to a point...

...Only when the feminists abandoned their appeal in the name of individual rights, and argued instead that women had a special contribution to make as wives and homemakers on such issues as housing and welfare, did their appeal gain a following among both men and women...

...Bell's biography conforms neatly to the decades of recent American history...

...This translation is the task of politics...

...Bell's familiar characterization of cultural conservatism thus calls for a familiar critique...

...The third is the more recent influx of women into the labor force...

...If a crude determinism is to be avoided and political action to play a role, then a second, sociological class analysis that explains how the economically defined class becomes revolutionary must be added...

...As a consequence, antiabortion laws were mainly passed after the Civil War, as the objection to abortion became widespread because the practice testified to women's individualistic ability to make decisions on their own behalf...

...And judging from the essays in The Winding Passage, he clearly wishes to retain an affiliation: he continues to associate with these intellectuals, to contribute to their journals and participate in their symposia...

...These two processes are said to exist in all stratified societies, although they are legitimated differently in each...

...Parkin follows Weber in defining capitalism not by the primacy of the relations of production but by its "rational commitment to values...

...and the perennial issue of Jewish identity...

...Self-conscious (though not unreasonably so) about his own disposition to the sin of intellectual pride, Bell seeks the discipline of the Law and the clarity of orthodoxy: "When heresy becomes a la mode, orthodoxy, paradoxically, is the stronger standpoint for criticism of society...

...Ithaca: Cornell University Press...

...What worries him are divisions and conflicts within that class...

...At least I do not find American society heavily populated by nihilists, hedonists, narcissists, slackers, and connoisseurs of the unbounded self...

...I know that the world I live in is vastly different from theirs, yet the duplex nature of man remains largely the same, now as then...

...On the contrary, as Degler argues, the family provides a welcome if not necessary change in pace and attitude in daily living...

...Another aspect of Marx's analysis, ignored by Parkin, may help...

...Finally they sit down...

...The result of this narrowing is the abandonment of the insistence on the necessity of socialism in favor of the "socialism or barbarism" thesis...

...The difference between Marx and Parkin, which makes the one a revolutionary and the other a "bourgeois," is that Marx tried to show how the situation of the economic class would drive the sociological class to action...

...This may work for sociological analysis, but mere classification was not Marx's goal...

...Having been abandoned by the Republicans in their fight for the Negro vote, the women made the ill-fated decision to ally themselves with George Francis Train, `financier, eccentric and railroad promoter," who was a flamboyant racist and whose "attacks on the intelligence and integrity of black people were basic to his political arsenal...

...Although his prefatory remarks warn the reader not to expect a unified account, this reader at least was rather upset that Parkin didn't take the time to write a complete book...

...Difference does not imply incompatibility...

...Indeed, he is often critical of its self justifications...

...Capital presents the economic "anatomy of civil society" on the basis of a two-class model articulated by the relation to the means of production...

...Marx's twoclass model, and his distinction between the propertied and the propertyless, is thus maintained without structuralist category juggling...

...The claims of coherence interfere with the evidence of social inquiry, and the critic's lamp often turns into a mirror in which Bell perceives himself...

...Bell's exaggerations obscure the fundamental cultural development in postwar America—namely, a quest for self-fulfillment that extended during these years to members of previously excluded social categories, from women and black people to Eastern and Southeastern European ethnics...

...Although not a full intellectual portrait, this collection does provide a snapshot of Bell as he approaches sixty...

...closure directed upward is defined as usurpationary...

...Little that is new is advanced...

...While he documents in great detail the step-by-step emancipation of women during the 19th century, he sees the transformation that has taken place in the family as holding as much promise as threat...

...acted as a brake on their radicalism...

...As it stands, the book is only a beginning...

...But Bell's organization of these dispositions, I think depends too heavily on the assumption that extremes define the subculture of art, and by diffusion eventually characterize wider contexts of culture...

...Even in the most recent period, he confesses, his "temperament" has drawn him to "activist concerns" (as founding co-editor with Irving Kristol of the Public Interest from 1965 to 1973, and as a member of several government commissions on current social issues...

...He adopts Weber's notion of "social closure" as the manner in which a group maximizes its rewards by restricting the access of others to resources and opportunities...

...Women's participation in politics, in reform work, their increased presence in the public arena, makes it difficult to understand the long delay in the acceptance of women's suffrage...

...The reason for this seems to be the same as the one that caused the outrage over abortion...

...He underlines this notion with a concluding parable: "Two monks have been circling in the desert for a long time...

...If the result is elimination of the barriers excluding the black community, one can expect to see a "blacklash" since the whites will have lost their supplementary compensations...

...The demands of Bell's mature persona threaten to subvert his desire to understand the sweep of the history of consciousness and the shapes of contemporary politics and culture...

...Nor does the pose seem casually struck...

...The two levels cannot be identified mechanistically...

...II IN Feminism and Suffrage, Ellen Carol DuBois tells in detail about women's vain fight for the vote...

...His intellectual base thus seems to offer some of the comforts of home, though by no means all of them...

...On balance, he seems to admire what he sees...

...More capitalintensive production increases the potential damage from industrial action, inclining management to settle more quickly...

...Marx's revolutionary class was composed of workers, whereas Parkin's excluded are rational, interest-calculating competitors in the marketplace...

...Already in the 18th century there was a new emphasis on affection in marriage —if love was not the basis of marriage, it would at least be a consequence of it...

...His argument is a descriptive-historical (replete with sardonic asides) account of the transition problem to which I referred at the outset...

...Parkin's point is that class analysis can account for workingclass division, and for reform, without appeal to the deus ex machina of the "relative autonomy" of the state...

...He traces excesses—of sensuality, of reason, of faith in technology, of ambition (even the untempered will to do good)—from the present to the early moments of Western civilization...

...The chapter on class that concludes the third volume of Capital did not remain incomplete because Marx died at his desk...

...The old Bell puts in cameo appearances—in an insightful though slashing and ultimately tasteless dissection of Michael Harrington's The Twilight of Capitalism, and in his irritable though not altogether unconvincing rejoinders to coarse attacks on the "end of ideology" thesis that he reformulated and presented in the late 'SOs...

...They are essays written in my middle years, midway in the journey of our life, in that dark wood, seeking a return to the straight way of my ancestors...

...Beyond this point, it conceals—and even distorts—much of what Bell sets out to illuminate...

...Contrary to the received wisdom that sees in the 19th century only the oppression of women, Degler shows that women have gained a measure of autonomy precisely in that century, and he also argues convincingly that the democratization of the family, the reduction in the birth rate, the gaining of legal rights and the vote have not weakened the family as the most important American institution...

...But the stakes, at least in recent American political history, have been even higher: in the black civil rights movement, in the antiwar movement, in the women's movement...

...Phenomena like "white backlash" can be explained by his categories...

...Though it may be improved, it cannot be perfected...

...In spite of his diverse ideological preferences, Bell is not without an intellectual base...

...At his best, Parkin is concerned that Marxism in all its variants is unable to deal with such phenomena as racism, sexism, or national and religious differences that divide the working class...

...At bottom, it asserted or assumed that women, like men, had interests and lives that were separate and different in purpose from those of other members of the family...

...The structuralism of Nicos Poulantzas attempts to refine the "boundary problem" that maps presentday capitalist stratification...

...finitude [Bell observes in an introductory piece on technology, nature, and society...

...And his intriguing though unelaborated suggestions concerning the potential use of market mechanisms for social purposes is still another...

...One test of such a reading of culture turns on how well it accounts for the textures of American life in the '60s and '70s...

...I call attention to the personal center of these 221 essays for two reasons...

...Yet lest it be objected that Degler is polyannaish in his outlook, the conclusion he arrives at will dispel this impression...

...But for one making his way through the winding passage—the Dantesque transition from "the netherworld to the fires of redemption"—the Law is the indispensable compass...

...This is why Parkin is as critical of the illusions of social democracy as he is of those of revolutionary Marxism...

...Thus DuBois concludes, "the demand that women be included in the electorate was not simply a stage in the expansion and democratization of the franchise...

...One wonders how this French variant could have had the impact it seems to have...

...Second, the personal center unifies The Winding Passage...

...Bell minimizes the increasingly democratic cultural and political character of the quest, its relative novelty to tens of millions of citizens...

...The history of the last 200 years, Degler convincingly shows, has been one of increased equality between men and women in society at large and in the home as well...

...This theme dominates his essentially classical liberal political vision...

...Such independence would wreck our domestic institutions, it was feared...

...THE QUESTION IS whether Parkin's sociological class analysis is the necessary complement to Marx's economic class theory, or whether it is a replacement of it...

...The problem of how the economic class is transmuted sociologically into a revolutionary class is crucial for a nonmechanical reading...

...Parkin's book is a contribution to sociology (and to Marxism) insofar as it poses sharply the problem of the relation between the economic and the sociological concepts of class...

...Bell's attempted return is more tentative, more complicated, and perhaps less immediately satisfying...

...At worst, Bell declares in an essay on "Ethnicity and Social Change," politics becomes more than an "arena of interests or of social transformations": it turns into an arena of passions...

...This, however, makes possible reforming tendencies within what Parkin calls the "liberal bourgeoisie...

...Whites in South Africa, Protestants in Northern Ireland, males, or Party members can be the dominant or exclusionary class, no matter what their "relation to the means of production...

...Parkin claims that his reformulation can deal with forms of domination that escape Marxism's economic nets...

...In the last analysis, Parkin's critique is "bourgeois" because it is apolitical...

...Time and again, the demise of the family in America has been predicted by ultraradicals and conservatives alike, by the former as part of their wishful thinking, by the latter as part of their disenchantment with every sign of social change...

...The practice was written about and condemned mainly by phy226 sicians, but "All commentators on the extent of abortion in the 1850's and 1860's testified to the practice in all classes and particularly among married women...

...It is worth recalling their alliance with the women typesetters who conducted a hard fight for recognition in the printers' union...

...Parkin's model of class claimed to reproduce Marx's division of the propertied and propertyless without recourse to the relation to the means of production...

...From that time stems Wendell Phillips's famous statement, "As Abraham Lincoln said, `One War at the time,' so I say, One question at a time...

...But these forms of exclusion are collective...

...1960-1980: academic work, first at Columbia, then at Harvard...

...To Lenin's "democracy for the poor" he opposes (with little argument) Rawls's enlarging the share of the least rewarded...

...In a word,] modern culture particularly in its utopian versions, denies the biblical idea of sin...

...Precapitalist remnants—be they such attitudes as racism or nationalism, or such modes of production as those of the artisan or the peasant—are swept away as capital fulfills its "civilizing mission...

...On balance, however, Bell prefers to have us focus on his present self, on the image—and substance—of an intellectual who has more or less completed his framework of historical and sociological vision, put away the illusions of childhood, and entered into a period of serious reflection on ultimate questions...

...For these reasons it is also more interesting...

...Yet when it is neglected, there can be no freedom, no mature self, no civilization...

...Thus one of the big issues regarding the admission of women to unions—that they are being used as strikebreakers— was indirectly and unwittingly supported by Susan Anthony (who later apologized for her faux pas...

...Three important facts stand out in the history of women's gains...

...Women's right to vote would give every woman the individual right to express her opinion and to assert her own self-interest...

...Degler points out that it is significant that this occurred just at the time when "the modern child-centered family, in which the woman was the moral guide and guardian, was establishing itself...

...What he obscures, however, is of equal if not greater importance...

...The growing usurpationary strength of the British working class has troubled those sociologists used to a deferent and "mature" trade union organization...

...Parkin's tongue-incheek refutation of this structuralism is vicious, and correct...

...The Winding Passage, then, does not portray another callow and submissive youth returning to his father, superficially wiser about the ways of the world yet merely grateful to be home...

...For if change in economic, political, and cultural spheres follows different rhythms, the disjunctive view of society proceeds from Bell's cultural conservatism and reinforces his political liberalism...

...Cultural conservatives may applaud the results of democratic movements...

...This led to an improvement in the position of women in marriage...

...II ALTHOUGH BELL INSISTS that he does not explore a single thesis, the essays in The Winding Passage amount to a series of meditations on the wages of excess—explorations of the economic, political, social, cultural, and personal consequences of ignoring the Law...

...Before the Civil War they had been allied with the abolitionists...

...Among his chosen comrades, he commands a minority status not merely because he persists in using the concept of socialism as a normative perspective on the sphere of economy...

...Jean Cohen's recent "System and Class: The Subversion of Emancipation" (in Social Research, Winter 1978), makes many of these critical points in a far more satisfactory way...

...Once it is recognized, for example, that meritocratic testing still reproduces the cultural prejudices of lineage, the demand to replace procedural equality with equality of condition may arise...

...reaping any political benefit from a communally divided working class, as Marxists would claim...

...By the 19th century, courtship became an important stage in family formation...

...The alliance with the unions ended with the expulsion of Anthony in 1869 from the National Labor Congress and with the end of the Women's Typographical Union nine years later...

...Progress toward a democratic polity and the even more elusive goal of a fair distribution of wealth has required a more spirited approach to politics than Bell's vision easily condones...

...After women lost their fight to be included in the 14th Amendment, they searched for other allies...

...Capitalism reproduces itself by transforming the new needs of which Marx spoke into economic interests that the system can then satisfy...

...Indeed, the cultural conservatism that he expresses often transforms important surfaces and textures into simple caricature...

...After the Civil War, in their fight for the 14th Amendment, abolitionists abandoned their alliance with the women...

...The feminists did not 227 understand the principle of union solidarity, while in turn union people did not share the feminists' better understanding of the sexual division of labor...

...and that it can explain divisions among the rulers that make reform possible...

...New York: Columbia University Press...

...social democracy with the concept of the not-as-bad-as-it-might-be society...

...The vote, so it was now argued, would help extend women's special sphere rather than question women's place...

...Despite the reduction in the number of functions of the modern American family, or perhaps because of it, Americans want to live in families...

...In each case, Bell gravitates toward the most outrageous extensions —and distensions—of modern experiments in self-definition and self-expression...

...Without a sense of justice, righteousness, and proportion—a commitment to limits imposed by the Law—man becomes his own worst enemy...

...This theme animates Bell's vision, guiding his complicated return to his Jewish roots and informing his reflections on the historical period through which he has lived...

...A big change had taken place with regard to children who began to be seen as different from adults, and this led to the idealization of the mother who more and more became the sole rearer of children to the exclusion of the father...

...They are the exclusionary class...

...It is nevertheless worth proposing once again, even in desperately brief outline...

...A celebrant of the discipline of history and tradition, Bell nevertheless seems moved to stress the peculiarities of his individual talent, to press—within limits, of course—the claims of the self...

...This hour belongs to the Negro...

...Here, I believe, Bell's cautionary tale becomes misleading...

...Nor would it be fair, considering the nature of this (or any) collection of occasional pieces, to fault Bell for not developing his arguments in more detail...

...The `risk' of such inflamed political competition is that issues may not be negotiable (as they are when tied to interests alone), but become `causes' that invite violent conflict and even civil war...

...he found the answer in men's power to feed, clothe, and employ women and therefore to make political decisions on their behalf...

...I do, too, but the perceiving self in this case, as in any, does not allow for sufficient variety...

...Yet in spite of his considerable powers of intellectual resistance, I believe that he finally submits to his preoccupation with the antinomian self and its civilized counterpart...

...Exclusion thus took the individualist form of, for example, meritocratic testing...

...There Bell outlines and illustrates his by now familiar view of social structure...

...And this demand will be strengthened since, for the system as a whole, discrimination that prevents talent from rising is inefficient and harmful in the long run...

...A socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture: this is how Daniel Bell tried to make the briefest possible sense of himself amid the political and cultural confusions of the moment...

...If they were to devote themselves to the care and moral education of their children, fewer children would enable them to do a better job...

...220 pp...

...Degler raises the question why there was such a strong resistance to granting women the vote when throughout the century, beginning in 1840, there had been a steady improvement in the legal status of women even though it fell far short of equality...

...the emergence and spread of modernist and postmodernist culture...

...Bell, as much as any other contemporary observer, knows that the axial principle of con224 temporary culture is the quest for fulfillment...

...He also may be the most conservative of the lot on cultural matters, if only because he considers religion a perennially important historical force as well as an abiding personal concern...

...His account of the profanation of modern society, for example, weaves together several thematic strands: the gradual realizaton of the antinomian self following the Reformation...

...Finally, we are told that "Marxism operates with the concept of the good society...

...Together, they compose the "dominant class under modern capitalism...

...FEMINISM AND SUFFRAGE: THE EMERGENCE OF AN INDEPENDENT WOMEN'S MOVEMENT IN AMERICA 1848-1869, by Ellen Carol DuBois...

...But clearly it was a last resort, not an asserted right...

...Parkin insists that "dual closure" represents a "rational" response by the excluded and not simply a ploy by the state to divide the dominated class...

...Although this closure can be individualist (hiring of relatives, and so forth), it is usually collectively based on factors like race, sex, or religion...

...She tells us that when John Adams considered the question, "Whence arises the right of men to govern the women without their consent...

...To believe Degler, women's emancipation may stop right here because it is at odds with the interests of the family...

...The trend is unmistakable...

...As to "individualism and meritocracy," the fact that they contradict the normative structure of the family is precisely— and here Degler agrees with me—what makes it a desirable antidote to the psychological strains that have to be endured in living up to the values of the modern world...

...Throughout, the dramatic opposition turns on the disciplined, knowing self in conflict with its unrestrained, antinomian and thoroughly subversive underside...

...When the doubly excluded blacks resort to collective usurpationary tactics they will draw sympathy from the "liberal bourgeoisie" who "far from...

...Exclusionary closure is exercised in a downward direction...

...For the most part, these essays display Bell from a contemplative angle: during the 1960s and '70s, he suggests, his interests were "more scholarly, reflective, and academic," and his subjects "more theoretical, philosophical, and methodological...

...He explains these through the notion of "dual closure," whereby a section of the excluded class ensures itself a larger share by excluding in its turn another part of the class...

...And he points—in a general way—to its follies and frequent shallowness...

...no reference appears to the spread of charismatic modes of worship to Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant churches during these decades...

...Hence, they helped raise women's consciousness...

...old theological premises and newer therapeutic nostrums, plain sense and nonsense: a syncretic mixture (to borrow Bell's phrase) at once splendid, sordid, and consolingly ordinary...

...No attempt is made to distinguish among evangelical and neo-Pentecostal strains...

...Still, I was disappointed from time to time by this limitation...

...Accurate to a point, this characterization is finally misleading...

...17.50...

...The cultural capital legitimated by credentialism shares with productive capital a basic characteristic: state protection, a legal guarantee...

...The implication is that the economic or the sociological class becomes a revolutionary political class when its economic interests are retranslated into radical human needs...

...She sees clearly that the issue was not simply that women's demands threatened the family, but that they threatened the patriarchal family...

...From Bell's perspective, however, the democratic character of this quest and the admittedly debatable successes reported by persons are only faintly visible...

...Although he subtitles his book "a bourgeois critique," Parkin is clearly on the side of the excluded (for moral reasons, he repeatedly stresses, and not because of some inherent necessity of their triumph, as some Marxists would have it...

...Throughout these essays he argues, often forcefully, against "holistic" views of society (especially Marxiain views...

...1940-1960: an active life as a prolific journalist, editor, polemicist the New Leader, Fortune, etc...

...In private many women did assert that autonomy by simply having abortions even when they were illegal...

...Writing about the demographic transition, Degler asks: Why was so much fuss made over the issue of abortion in the 19th century, especially after the Civil War, when fertility had already gone down ever since the American Revolution...

...The political wages of the major sins Bell counsels against, then, is certain failure...

...As Bell acknowledges, these overlapping divisions represent emphases, not exclusive directions...

...Carl Degler remains cool...

...The Law can be tyrannical, Bell admits...

...Although these activities kept women in their place in relation to men, they catapulted women out into the public even as they emphasized "the home" as a segregated sphere...

...But Bell should not be judged simply by the company he keeps...

...Interests, as Albert Hirschman shows in The Passions and the Interests, emerge as the dominant human passion with capitalist development...

...Dual closure or exclusion by the excluded is frequently encountered in the history of the working-class movement...

...Degler agrees with Kingsley Davis that Americans "would rather risk a poor first marriage than to postpone marriage, and they would rather get a divorce early than to continue a bad marriage...

...Parkin is certainly right in criticizing the inadequacies of the Marxist sociology of class...

...Not even feminist women were yet far enough advanced in their assertion of women's individuality and self-interest to accept abortion—at least not in public...

...Closure thus implies the exploitation of one group by another, and can be assimilated to the Marxian notion of class...

...How could these have succeeded (insofar as they have) without expressions of passion and social anger...

...As in the past, the new woman's movement arose on the coattails of the civil rights movement, but soon gained independence from it...

...The "civilizing influence" of capital need not be understood merely materialistically as producing more commodities, nor need it be viewed with Weber as an increase of calculating rationality...

...True, the division of roles was rigid...

...For all its refinements and its attention to technological and economic progress, Bell's vision seems to me inadequate as a basis for describing, analyzing, and evaluating the 223 entry of ordinary persons into the workings of modern history...

...Just as Lenin set Marx's economic categories into sociological motion by paying attention to consciousness, so his successors try to set these new socioeconomic categories a-dancing...

...He goes further off course in lengthy historical accounts of Marxism's development since the Second International...

...Confronted by what the more optimistic designate as "late" capitalism, Marxist sociology, according to Parkin, makes two false moves...

...At the beginning of the strike, Anthony asked the employers' association to help establish a training school for women in typesetting, to which the employers immediately responded affirmatively...

...While he is correct to state that up to now equality has not prevailed in the family, there is no reason why this could not be so in the future...

...Mainly fragments, these early pieces explore themes that neither contradict Bell's current sense of things nor presuppose his sociological apparatus: the dangers and follies of the early New Left...

...What Bell would find, were he to set aside his generalizations on religion, is a mingling of tradition and innovation, antinomian excess and grace...

...Though repulsed by extremes, he also seems fascinated by them...

...I agree with William Chafe (see my review of his book, The American Woman, Spring 1973, and his article "Feminism in the 1970s," Fall 1974 Dissent) that not only will women's place never be the same again, but that a new consciousness continues to pervade American women...

...One last example must do...

...This gain only confirmed what Degler demonstrates to have taken place all along during the 19th century: namely a profound transformation in the relations between men and women, one that had to wait another 40 to 50 years to become again the purpose of a new woman's movement...

...Although, as Degler also shows, women's work still is usually auxiliary to that of men, and women generally continue to see their primary role as that of homemakers, a new consciousness has imbued American women, whether or not they consider themselves part of the women's movement...

...But the contribution is limited to sociology, and therefore limited...

...After a long meditation, he says: `No, I am not lost...

...A calculating economic rationality that ensures the private selfcontrol necessary for public social control is privileged over the other needs...

...Cloth, $17.50...

...Often as not, however, they do so post facto, once the political dust has settled...

...Legal forms of exclusion can be instituted in terms of race, religion, sex, or party membership...

...He thus remains at the level classically called civil society—where this unity exists anyway...

...It would violate the spirit of Bell's cultural conservatism to emphasize its familiar character...

...The basis for it was, as Degler describes in great detail, women's massive participation in the labor force that had started during the war, and that continued through the'S0s and thereafter...

...His own position is that if class theory is reformulated, reforms can be explained without recourse to this vague, "relative" third factor...

...the misguided visions of such utopians as Fourier and Veblen...

...Moreover, Bell applies his perception of the consequences of the antinomian self to ever wider 222 historical contexts...

...MARXISM AND CLASS THEORY: A BOURGEOIS CRITIQUE, by Frank Parkin...

...When the second, structural sociological dodge—the thesis of the "relative autonomy of the state"—is added, Parkin has no trouble showing its ad hoc nature and the inconsistencies to which it leads...

...His ultimate justification for this option is that the working class is "rational" enough, has experienced enough, to doubt the claims of revolutionary Marxism to do better next time...

...527 pp., $19.95...

...Degler seems to argue that less is more, for he explains that if the family has multiple tasks, "to be everything comes close to being nothing...

...This danger increases as Lenin inserts ever-shorter political periods into Marx's broad economic-historical sketch of capitalist development so that, finally, only the leader's sixth sense can foretell the moment when the revolutionary fusion is possible...

...But he is driven off course by his animus against structuralist Marxism (which, for some reason, he identifies as "Western Marxism" tout court...

...The Way is lost...

...19201940: early years of preparation, culminating in a youthful encounter with socialism and membership in the second generation of New York intellectuals...

...Parkin rejects nicely the "almost Parsonian faith in the binding force of normative constraints," and suggests that deference had been 230 the rational result of powerlessness, but that this powerlessness no longer exists...

...Parkin mocks the naive expectation that after the revolution people will be too absorbed in "the fascinating arts of self-realization to bother unduly with anything as squalid and divisive as the pursuit of material interest...

...Another modern form of private property that performs the same function is credentialism...

...But is there any reason why an anti-individualistic institution cannot survive in an individualistic culture...

...The methods of birth control were several, though not easily accessible or safe, but there was one that could be performed by women on the basis of their decision alone: that was abortion...

...DuBois's fine book is a recounting and analysis of the various political alliances the feminists had made over the years, usually to be disappointed either because of the allies' divergent interests or because women did not quite understand the constraints of politics...

...But what happens when the dominant form of social exclusion is individualistic...

...Private property in the means of production gives exclusionary power to a small group of owners...

...Marx also thought that capitalism created new, radical needs...

...Now, "organizing...

...This is because, he says, "the family is an anti-individualistic institution...

...In these essays, then, the cultural conservative overshadows the political liberal and totally eclipses the economic socialist...

...In a long discussion of Heller's The Theory of Needs in Marx (in Telos, Fall 1977), Jean Cohen distinguishes between interests and needs...

...A nondeterminist, noneconomist reading of Marx is still possible...

...It simply assumes that the economic crisis will split society along structural fault lines, which the would-be revolutionary must know in advance in order to command the troops efficiently...

...His fragmentary discussion of New York intellectuals is a case in point...

...From proletariat to party to leader, to exhortation—such is the resolution of "how" to translate economic class into sociological reality...

...As classical capitalism takes the form of neo, or late, or corporate, or monopoly, or state, or bureaucratic capitalism, the ambiguity in Marx's theory of class becomes more important...

...This theme of the consequences of excess even may have influenced the formation of Bell's sociological apparatus...

...the diffusion of hedonistic values of the culture of consumption...

...He reminds us, wisely I think, to distrust the motives and suspect the probable outcomes of this search, especially as it unfolds at the fringes of the culture...

...The 19th-century proletariat could use public actions, perhaps on the border of illegality, to oppose collective discrimination...

...To be sure, men had a similar interest and so did society as a whole, but women had an interest in it as women—not as providers or landowners...

...politics remains epiphenomenal, just another form of interest calculation...

...Examples of the dispositions Bell names may be found in the work of everyone from Gide to R. D. Laing...

...While she does not speak of the change in the feminists' arguments, she points out that by the end of the century there was a switch in the suffragists' militancy from agitation to organizing, which forced them "to make important changes in their- political style and content...

...He seeks to construct a distinctive, mature self out of the materials of his past...

...The usurpationary strategies employed by the excluded depend on whether discrimination is individual or collective...

...Structuralist Marxism doesn't explain "how" an economic class is transmuted into a sociological, and then revolutionary, political class...

...When Parkins turns to politics in his last chapter, he does not apply his own sociological model, for reasons that are never made clear...

...What he misses, and what Marx also missed, is the domain proper to politics...

...But today's new strata, classes, occupations, divisions cannot be categorized away by Marxists since their place has been carved out by capitalism's own development...

...I think Degler's own fears for the future derive from the fact that he equates "the family" with "the patriarchal family...

...Perhaps the effort of unifying his book would have driven him to reflect further...

...The increasing complexity of the division of labor means that key groups can stop the whole process...

...It is not enough, however, to regret the intrusions of passion—even crude, quasi-religious passions—as a force in politics...

...He recalls the weaknesses and insipid programmatic realizations of those Social Democratic regimes that have governed, and cites their example against present-day disciples...

...As a consequence, there is no sympathetic attempt to see the range of real people searching, separately and together, for ways to define themselves against the uncertainties of society and the even greater uncertainties of what lies beyond death...

...Modern capitalism emerged from a struggle against such collective exclusions in the form of kinship or lineage...

...Parkin's classes act according to a rational perception of their own interests, whereas Marx's are driven by an underlying necessity...

...In "The Return of the Sacred...

...What I am proposing— doubtless unfairly—is that Bell should have written the social autobiography of a major American intellectual, including an account of his failures and mistakes, his hesitations and revisions...

...but it is only one of the exclusionary devices affecting today's life chances...

...The United States has the highest marriage rate in the world...

...If the divorce rate is also rising, so is the remarriage rate...

...The resistance by the public, including women, to both abortion and the vote, different as these phenomena are, can be explained by the same factor: both would permit women to make their individual decisions, and this was seen as a threat to the woman's expected subordination to her family...

...But as women's activities were increasingly confined to "her sphere," that is the care of children, the nurturing of the husband, and the maintenance of the home, women were also said to be the moral guardians of the home, and they took this assignment seriously...

...The danger, of course, is that the party will substitute itself for the class...

...it replaced them with Weber's "rational commitment to values...

...Class as closure can reproduce itself individually or collectively...

...Born in 1919, he seems to have lived a life that breaks easily into twenty-year chunks...

...Here, he employs his sociological contraption without adding to it...

...We are thus meant to see Bell in his study, not in the conference rooms of government, or along the back alleys of ideological politics...

...If the family has lost most of its functions and is left with the task of providing "love, support to children and affection between spouses, it might be said that the modern family, unlike those of earlier ages, is for the first time free to perform its primary purposes without internal distraction...

...The second is the fight for the vote...

...And he passes over its rich ordinary aspects that most of us pursue temperately as we go about the ancient tasks—at once sacred and mundane—of earning a living, caring for children, comforting aging parents, cultivating friendships, engaging perennial religious questions, and even enduring the frequent disappointments of political involvement...

...Neither says a word...

...it sees man as a creature of infinite power able to bend the world to his own will...

...Later in the book, talking about the suffrage fight, he asks again why so much fuss was made over giving women the vote when all through the century they had made gains in legal rights...

...Bell typically begins an essay by setting the context—often masterfully—and ends by exploring his main points all too briefly...

...They came out into the public arena with their writings, their church activities, their teaching and their social work...

...At best, he observes in an interesting piece on "Liberalism in the Post-industrial Society," politics "can be the conscious art of bargaining, of trade-offs, of what, in game theory, is called non-zero-sum games...

...Wage increases may be won or union rights extended...

...One might say that simply because abortion was the assertion of woman's complete control over her body, at the expense of both child and husband, the 19th century could not condone it...

...Lenin understood the theoretical problem of relating the economic and sociological class through politics...

...What is incompatible is equality in a patriarchal family...

...Indeed, the first political movement dates from the middle of the century (the Seneca Falls meeting in 1848...

...One of Parkin's empirical illustrations is useful here...

...Whatever its merits and drawbacks, this disjunctive view of society proceeds from Bell's cultural conservatism and reinforces his political liberalism...

...The culmination of Leninism is the exiled Trots228 ky's continual hectoring of the leadership for missing the golden moment when the iron was hot...

...a suggestive essay on the future of religion, Bell subsumes the Christian resurgence of the '60s and '70s under the category of "Fundamentalist," and calls it simply a "moralizing" religion...

...First, they add nothing substantial to Bell's sociological apparatus, set out in detail in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976...

...paper, $4.95...

...He recognizes the practical problems of its "salami tactics," and criticizes its argument that private property is the basis and guarantee of an "open society...

...Like Degler, DuBois sees in the resistance to women's demands for the vote the fact that these were at odds with women's traditional subordination to the family, but DuBois goes farther...

...For reasons that are still quite unclear, toward the end of the 18th century, individualism, consideration of one's own interest, began to be taken up by women...

...Increasingly as the century progressed the abortion rate went up...

...The first is the sharp decline in fertility, what Degler calls "the demographic transition...

...Later, women turned to the unions...

...Their goals vary from redressment of immediate effects of discrimination to reform of the exclusionary devices themselves...

...The "social feminists," , as they called themselves, claimed the world as their home...

...It structures his criticisms of the millennial character of utopian Marxism, allowing him to conduct yet another brief—but tony—oration at the nihilistic implications of modernist and postmodernist culture, which in his view subordinates moral to aesthetic considerations, and in the end subsumes both under unrestrained sensuality...

...All sides must accept the rules, he observes...

...As Bell himself admits, a reasonable politics requires unusual circumstances...

...Thus women's emancipation, paradoxically, began precisely when the insistence on motherhood and the limitation of women to their own sphere put them in their place...

...When he returns to his track, it is usually through brief empirical accounts or references to, for instance, the Irish or South African or British situations...

...The rise in abortion dates to about 1820...

...A third level of analysis is necessary, that of politics...

...Since Degler himself has shown that the American family has continuously been changing away from rigid patriarchy to companionship, it is not understandable 225 that he would rest his argument on the belief that "Democracy, individualism, and meritocracy .. are conspicuous by their absence from the family, even with its present modifications" (my emphasis...

...This conclusion is "odd," if I may borrow Degler's own term, because in the body of his book he has demonstrated that in the past the gains in women's individual rights have not confirmed the fears of those who opposed women's emancipation...

...217 pp...