Challenging the “Correct” Line Reviewing Katherine Verdery's What was Socialism, and What Comes Next?

East European Politics & Societies

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 87-106

  Jowitt, Ken ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84993661770     PISSN: 08883254     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0888325498012001004     Document Type: Review

References (64)

1. Adam Przeworski, Sustainable Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 48. The formal similarity between this conception of change and Stalin's idea of bourgeois and feudal “remnants” is interesting. For a very different position, see “The Leninist Legacy,” in Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 284-306.
2. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), 28.
3. Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 12, 16.
4. Verdery, 20.
5. Verdery, 37.
6. Verdery, 37.
7. Verdery, 9.
8. Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, I960), vol. 3, Appendix II, 339, 401, 418.
9. See Vladimir Kontorovich, “The Economic Fallacy,” The National Interest (Spring 1993), 35-45; and Ivan Szelenyi and Balazs Szelenyi, “Why Socialism Failed: Toward a Theory of System Breakdown-Causes of Disintegration of East European State Socialism,” Theory and Society: Renewal and Critique in Social Theory, vol. 23:2 (April 1994), 211-33.
10. Verdery, 20. Emphasis in the original.
11. Verdery, 29.
12. See my “Political Culture in Leninist Regimes,” in New World Disorder, 50-88.
13. Verdery, 24, 25. In this regard, see Kontorovich's claim that “to the best of our knowledge the majority of the [Soviet] population was satisfied with its economic situation” (38-39). And where the population wasn't, Romania being a good example, their “internal resistance” and “sabotage” were ineffectual.
14. “Weapons of the Weak” refers to the book of the same name by James C. Scott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). The terms “scavenger society” and “parasitic party” are taken from my article “Gorbachev: Bolshevik or Menshevik?” in New World Disorder, 220-49.
15. Verdery, 33.
16. Verdery, 35-36.
17. Verdery, 39.
18. Verdery, 48-49.
19. Verdery, 35.
20. From “The Tasks of Business Executives,” in Leninism (London: 1940), 366.
21. Stephen E. Hanson, Time & Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 132.
22. See my “Time and Development Under Communism,” in Dwight Waldo, ed., Temporal Dimensions of Development Administration (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1970), 233-64; Wolfgang Leonhard, The Kremlin Since Stalin (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962); and Hanson, 172-80.
23. There is now a growing body of literature on the state in post-communist societies. See in particular Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), chapters 2, 19, and 20.
24. Verdery, 220.
25. Here she agrees with Ferenc Feher. See “Paternalism as a Mode of Legitimation in Soviet-Type Societies,” in T. H. Rigby and Ferenc Feher, eds., Political Legitimation in Communist States, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982). Michnik and Havel also describe these regimes as “paternal.” See Adam Michnik, Essays from Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).
26. Verdery, 63.
27. Verdery, 69.
28. See Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), prologue and introduction.
29. See chapters 1 and 4 in my New World Disorder.
30. Verdery, 79.
31. Andrew C. Janos, “Continuity and Change in Eastern Europe: Strategies of Post-Communist Politics,” East European Politics and Societies, vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 1994), 25.
32. Verdery, 143, 152.
33. Karl W. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government (New York: Free Press, 1963). See the references to combinatorial richness.
34. See New World Disorder, 41-42, 137 nn. 48, 288.
35. In my article on “Inclusion,” I argued that this developmental stage was characterized by an upgrading of the state. I see no contradiction here. Compared to the Stalinist stage of consolidation, during Inclusion the state was given greater symbolic representative functions. However, the state never became an equal of the Party, let alone a threat to it. See chapter 3 in New World Disorder.
36. Verdery, 221.
37. Verdery, 210.
38. See in Verdery, pp. 213, 214, 217.
39. Verdery, 161.
40. Verdery, 193-94. As she observes, others have used the term “clan,” or “mafia,” to describe this phenomenon. I have used the term “companion politics” to indicate their feudal quality. See “Russia: Undemocratic Past, Unnamed Present, Undecided Future,” Demokratizatsiya (Summer 1996), vol. 4, no. 3, 409-20.
41. Verdery, 200.
42. Verdery, 101.
43. Verdery, 101, 93, 55, 63, 100.
44. Gregory Grossman, “The Solidary Society: A Philosophical Issue in Communist Economic Reforms,” in Gregory Grossman, ed., Essays in Socialism and Planning in Honor of Carl Landauer (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970), 184-211.
45. See Ken Jowitt, The Leninist Response to National Dependency (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1978), 6-22.
46. Verdery, 219.
47. Verdery, 220.
48. See my “Political Culture in Leninist Regimes,” in New World Disorder, 50-88.
49. On Pelagius and Augustine, see Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 340-52.
50. Verdery, 180, 183. One comes across qualifications of this interpretation, the product of Verdery's clear dislike of liberal capitalist outcomes. So, “we should be cautious in assuming that the scheme was producing an environment for capitalism” (184). But that is precisely the thrust of her analysis.
51. Verdery, 192, 193. She then makes the following observation: “This suggests that Caritas was teaching people not market rationality but its mystification.” Indeed. But that radically contradicts her major thesis.
52. On Stoica, see p. 190; on the “faithful” investors, see pp. 172 and 173.
53. Verdery, 178.
54. Verdery, 181.
55. Verdery, 189.
56. In this connection, I refer the reader to J. B. Peires's superb book The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing 1856-7 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989; see chapter 5 in particular).
57. Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: Free Press, 1958).
58. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
59. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), 69.
60. Verdery, 227-30.
61. Verdery, 234.
62. Verdery, 221.
63. Louis Hartz, 24.
64. Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 9.