Social Research Volume 71 No. 3 : Social Research at Seventy


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	Social Research at Seventy Volume 71 No. 3 (Fall 2004) Arien Mack, Editor

Table of Contents

Bob Kerrey's Note to Readers

Notes on Contributors

Ordering information


Editor's Note “Time goes by,” and here we are in our seventieth year—better, we think, than ever. Our quarterly issues, which for many years have been largely thematic, continue to address serious concerns in the life of the mind and the state of the world in which we live. Since 1987 some of these issues have followed from the large public conferences we organize, which are designed to examine contested and urgent social concerns. By bringing together experts from many fields within the academy and beyond, we not only have succeeded in nurturing a dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, and between the academy and the worlds of policy and government, but we have often managed to deepen the understanding of these contested issues by placing them within their larger historical contexts. Our series of conference issues began with In Time of Plague, which examined our responses to the AIDS epidemic in light of the history of responses to other lethal, epidemic diseases over time. We are now in the process of mounting the thirteenth and fourteenth conferences in this series. Their America: The U.S. in the Eyes of the Rest of the World, will take place on October 18 and 19, 2004, at the New School, and will bring together speakers from across the globe to exchange their views on this topic. This conference was motivated by the sharp increase in anti-American sentiment around the world in the aftermath of 9/11 and the U.S. actions it evoked. Our fourteenth conference, scheduled for April 2005, is entitled Fairness—a concept that has its roots in our animal ancestry and has been a prime concern of individuals, groups, and nations, motivating political and social movements throughout history. At the Fairness conference we will examine the accelerating economic, psychological, and neuroscientific research on fairness, the role of fairness in major social and political events, our understanding of what fairness means changes in various contexts, and how these changes are reflected in our laws and in our institutions. We will also discuss current instances in which issues of social justice are deeply enmeshed with issues of fairness. In between our first and forthcoming conferences, we have held conferences on as diverse a range of subjects as Home: A Place in the World, which explored the important role of home and homeland; In the Company of Animals, which examined our contested relation to other animals; Rescue: The Paradoxes of Virtue; Technology and the Rest of Culture; Food: Nature and Culture; Privacy; Altered States of Consciousness; International Justice, War Crimes, and Terrorism; Islam: The Public and Private Spheres; and Fear: Its Political Uses and Abuses. All the material from these conferences have become important issues of the journal. Of course, most issues of Social Research are not conference-based, but they too have covered a wide spectrum of topics, from “Truth-telling, Lying, and Self Deception,” “Sexuality and Madness,” “Shame,” “Courage,” and “Faces” to “Unemployment,” “Nationalism,” and “Prospects for Democracy.” We see our broad range of concerns as a reflection of the mission of our parent institution, the Graduate Faculty of the New School, which, from its founding in 1933 as the University in Exile, has defined itself as a place that takes seriously the legacy of America’s progressive thinkers, the University in Exile, and the critical theorists of Europe: It is, as the Graduate Faculty catalog notes, “grounded in the core social sciences and broadened with a commitment to philosophical and historical inquiry. In an intellectual setting where disciplinary boundaries are easily crossed, students learn to practice creative democracy—-the concepts, techniques, and commitments that will be required if the world’s people, with their multiple and conflicting interests, are to live together peacefully and justly.” We, like our parent institution, have always taken seriously our claim to be international. This is clear from our roster of authors, who have come from many places across the globe, and from the subjects of our issues, such as our series on East and Central Europe, initiated in 1988 before the collapse of the Soviet Union, to which we periodically add new issues as a way of following and understanding transitions to democracy not just in the region but around the world. Our issues on “Iran since the Revolution,” “Islam: The Public and Private Spheres,” “Pariah Minorities,” “The Status of Women in the Developing World,” and our forthcoming issues on “The Transition in China” and “South Africa: 10 Years Later” all offer testament to our commitment to being an international journal. While we recognize that it is not customary to celebrate a seventieth anniversary—that more traditionally one waits patiently for one’s seventy-fifth year—the fact that an independent, small, and deeply serious nondisciplinary journal has survived and flourished for so long seemed to us to merit an acknowledgment. To celebrate this milestone, we have collected some of the best papers that have appeared in the journal since our fiftieth anniversary issue in 1984. I would like to use this occasion as an opportunity to acknowledge all of our authors over the years, because without them there would be no journal, and its excellence is their excellence. As the editor of Social Research since 1970, my anniversary wish is that they and others like them continue to write in our pages and that Social Research and the Graduate Faculty continue to flourish long into the future. *Arien Mack* *Editor* A Note on the Seventieth Anniversary of Social Research For six decades social research has carried the voices of men and women who have explored fundamental human issues such as hate, love, violence, and altruism in ways that have forced the authors, and enabled their readers, to think beyond their disciplines. Such thinking is the essence of what the Graduate Faculty and the New School strive to promote. Social Research and the New School for Social Research seek to avoid the obscure tone of specialized scholarship, and make important new ideas available to a broad public beyond the academy. Crossing borders, both disciplinary and geographic, has always been a special strength of Social Research. In its first 50 years, the best of European critical thought and the most complex of American ideas and experiences met in the pages of the journal, as did their authors. In this regard, Social Research captured the spirit of encounter that the founders of the University in Exile brought to the United States. Something of the moral authority of the University in Exile still inhabits the pages of the journal, as its authors leave familiar places and doctrines to explore new questions and build new intellectual homes. As we move into the seventh decade in the life of Social Research, it is possible to detect in its eclecticism a certain stubborn interest in the ways that human passions—base or noble—invariably compete with human interests—narrow or broad. The journal retains its ability to bring philosophy to life through its dialogue with the social sciences, and to keep the social sciences honest by infusing the theoretical with the empirical findings of psychology and biology. As we look back, we acknowledge that this is no mean feat. As we look ahead, we are fortunate that it is not a finished project. Today, we live in a world in which political discourse has broken free of physical limitations as a consequence of the World Wide Web. However, fear and lack of imagination have always been greater barriers than geography. And, in a highly technological world that values speed and entertainment above all else, Social Research’s insistence that we face our nature as human beings, as well as the nature of our relationships, is potentially more valuable than when the journal began. We hope that its potential becomes the catalyst for greater understanding, and that greater understanding yields creative action. Bob Kerrey President, New School for Social Research

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Table of Contents

Hannah Arendt	Philosophy and Politics
E. J. Hobsbawm	The Making of a "Bourgeois Revolution"
M. Ranier Lepsius	The Nation and Nationalism of Germany
Claus Offe	Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition in East Central Europe
Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal	Liberalism and the Right to Culture
Michael Ignatieff	The Seductiveness of Moral Disgust
Hans Jonas	Ethics and Biogenetic Art
Amartya Sen	Economic Methodology: Heterogeneity and Relevance
Robert Heilbroner	Economics as Universal Science
Michael Walzer	What Does It Mean to Be an "American"?
J udith Shklar	Squaring the Hermeneutic Circle
Orhan Pamuk	A Private Reading of Andre Gide's Public Journal
Jerome Bruner	Life as Narrative
Wendy Doniger	The Mythology of Masquerading Animals, or, Bestial Myths: Religious Constructions of Relationships between Humans and Animals
Alan Ryan	Professional Liars
John Hollander	Literature and Technology: Nature's "Lawful Offspring in Man's Art"

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Notes on Contributors
(at time of publication)

Philosophy and Politics
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was University Professor at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research from 1968 unitl her death in 1975. Her books include The Origins of Totalitariansim (1968), The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1963), and The Life of the Mind (1975).
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The Making of a "Bourgeois Revolution"
E. J. Hobsbwam

E. J. Hobsbawm is University Professor Emeritus of Politics and Society at the Graduate Faculty, New School University. Among his most recent books are Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (2002), On the Edge of the New Century (2000), and On History (1997).
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The Nation and Nationalism of Germany
M. Ranier Lepsius

M. Rainer Lepsius is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Sociology, University of Heidelberg. He is co-editor (with Mommsen) of The Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, Section II: Letters, a multi-volume collection in German of Weber’s works and letters.
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Capitalism by Democratic Design?
Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition in East Central Europe
Claus Offe

Claus Offe is Professor of Political Sociology at Humboldt University of Berlin. Among his most recent books are The Democratic Welfare State: A European Regime under the Strain of European Integration (2000) and Varieties of Transition: The East European and East German Experience (1996).
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Liberalism and the Right to Culture
Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal

Avishai Margalit is Schulman Professor of Philosophy at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is the co-author, with Moshe Halbertal, of Idolatry (1992). His most recent books include The Ethics of Memory (2002) and Occidentalism (with Buruma, 2004).
Moshe Halbertal is Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is the author of People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (1997) and the coauthor, with Avishai Margalit, of Idolatry (1992).
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The Seductiveness of Moral Disgust
Michael Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff is Carr Professor of Human Rights Practice and the Director of the Carr Center of Human Rights Policy, Harvard University. Among his most recent books are The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2004) and Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (2001). His newest volume, After Paradise, is forthcoming.
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Ethics and Biogenetic Art
Hans Jonas
Hans Jonas (1903-1993) was Alvin Johnson Professor Emeritus of Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research. He published numerous books and articles on ethics, social philosophy, the philosophy of biology, Jewish theology, and Gnosticism, including The Imperative of Responsibility (1979).
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Economic Methodology: Heterogeneity and Relevance
Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, is Lamont University Professor at Harvard University. Among his more recent books are India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (co-author, 1995) and On Economic Inequality (1997).
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Ethics as Universal Science
Robert Heilbroner
Robert Heilbroner is Norman Thomas Professor Emeritus at the Graduate Faculty, New School University. Among his many books are The Worldly Philosophers (1953), 21st Century Capitalism (1993), and The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought (coauthor, 1996).
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What Does It Mean to Be an "American"?
Michael Walzer

Michael Walzer is Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J and co-editor of Dissent. Among his recent books are Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism (forthcoming, 2004) and Arguing About War (2004).
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Squaring the Hermeneutic Circle
Judith Shklar

Judith Shklar (1928-1992) was John Cowles Professor of Government at Harvard University. She was the author of nine books on political philosophy, including Ordinary Vices (1988). Two volumes of her essays, entitled Redeeming American Political Thought (1998) and Political Thought and Political Thinking (1998), were published posthumously.
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A Private Reading of Andre Gide's Public Journal
Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk has been the recipient of major Turkish and international literary awards. Among his most recent novels are Snow (2004) and My Name is Red (2001). His work has been translated into more than 30 languages. He lives in Istanbul.
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Life as Narrative
Jerome Bruner
Jerome Bruner is Senior Research Fellow and Research Professor of Psychology at New York University School of Law. Among his many books are Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (2002), The Culture of Education (1996), and Acts of Meaning (1990).
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The Mythology of Masquerading Animals, or, Bestial Myths:
Religious Constructions of Relationships between Humans and Animals
Wendy Doniger
Wendy Doniger is Director of the Martin Marty Center and Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. Her book, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was, is forthcoming, and she is currently completing a translation of the last four books of the Mahabharata.
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Professional Liars
Alan Ryan

Alan Ryan is Warden at New College, Oxford University. He has written extensively on liberalism and political philosophy, including the recent books Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education (1998) and John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (1995).
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Literature and Technology: Nature's "Lawful Offspring in Man's Art"
John Hollander
John Hollander is Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, his numerous books of poetry and criticism include Picture Window: Poems (2003) and The Work of Poetry (1997). His book, Poetry and Music, is forthcoming.
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