Revolutions and freedom of movement: An analysis of passport controls in the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions

Theory and Society

Volumn 26, Issue 6, 1997, Pages 837-868

  Torpey, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 21944444193     PISSN: 03042421     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1006878801728     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. Theda Skocpol, States and social revolutions: A comparative analysis of France, Russia, & China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
2. Skocpol, States and social revolutions, 287.
3. Max Weber, Economy and society, vol. 1, tr. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 223-225.
4. See also Weber's remarkably prescient remarks on "Socialism" in W. G. Runciman, editor, Weber: Selections in translation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978 [orig. 1918]), 255:
5. "The unfortunate thing [about "state socialism"] would be that, whereas at present the political bureaucracy of the state and the economic bureaucracy of private enterprise, of the cartels, the banks and the large firms, exist alongside each other as separate bodies, so that in spite of everything, economic power can be held in check by political, in the situation envisaged both sets of officials would form a single body with a solidarity of interests and would no longer be under control."
6. Skocpol substantiates this claim by arguing that, under the new Chinese regime, the peasants "possess more direct control over and participation in decisions about the affairs of their locally focused lives [my emphasis] than did either the Russian peasantry after 1929 or the French peasantry after 1789-1793." Skocpol, States and social revolutions, 286-287.
7. Stein Rokkan has sharply stated the relationship between control over borders and the "state-ness" of modern states: "[T]he military-administrative power of any state can best be gauged by an analysis of its success in controlling interaction across its boundaries, in checking the movement of men, commodities, and ideas." It would perhaps be more correct to add the qualifier "when the state wishes to do so," for not all states are concerned to control movements and transactions across their borders at all times. But Rokkan's fundamental insight concerning the centrality of border control to modern "state-ness" remains sound enough. It nonetheless fails to address the way in which "state-ness" may inhere in states' capacity to control internal movements. See Stein Rokkan, "Dimensions of state-formation and nation-building: A possible paradigm for research on variations within Europe," in Charles Tilly, editor, The formation of national states in western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 589.
8. Theda Skocpol, States and social revolutions. Skocpol is elaborating on Weber's discussion of states in Economy and society, where he notes that "a stable system of taxation is the precondition for the permanent existence of bureaucratic administration."
9. Max Weber, Economy and society, vol. 2, 968.