John Markoff
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3586952 |
|---|---|
| NOME | John Markoff |
| PRENOMES | John |
| SOBRENOME | Markoff |
| ASSINATURA | MARKOFF J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Pittsburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6629-4417 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 70 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 275 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 70 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1973 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Geographic Tunnel Vision and the Past and Future of Democracy
In the twenty-first century, the democracy bequeathed by the past confronts major, diverse challenges. In thinking about how it might be reimagined, it is important to look beyond conceptions of democracy that are associated with a distinctive Western tradition, indicated at an early point by Athens two and a half millennia ago. Recent scholarship has questioned some clear connection of that specific ancient experience with the democracy that has…
The Anarchist Turn in Twenty-First Century Leftwing Activism
Leftwing activism of recent decades exhibits an anarchist turn evident in quantitative indicators like mentions of anarchists in news reports and by activists adopting anarchist modes of organization, tactics, and social goals-whether or not they claim that label. The authors of this Element argue that the very crises that generated radical mobilizations since the turn of the millennium have both led activists to reject other strategies for socia…
Black Is the New Red
Overflowing Channels
When eighteenth-century revolutionary elites set about designing new political orders, they drew on commonplace theoretical understandings of 'democracy' as highly undesirable. They therefore designed government institutions in which popular participation was to be extremely limited. The new political constructions, in both France and the United States, never worked as planned. The mobilizations of the revolutionary era did not vanish as the cons…
Rafe Blaufarb. The Great Demarcation
When France’s revolutionary National Assembly announced in August 1789 that it had abolished the “feudal regime,” it actually took a huge step toward a much larger project, according to Rafe Blaufarb’s deeply original analysis in The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property. The revolutionary legislators were engaged in separating a realm of public political power from individually owned private property. On t…
Essential Contestants, Essential Contests
Social scientists continue to invest a great deal of effort in constructing superior measures of democracy without arriving at any consensus. Reflections on this state of affairs frequently refer to an essay of more than a half-century ago in which the philosopher W. B. Gallie analyzed the characteristics of what he called “essentially contested concepts.” Gallie’s account of the properties of these concepts, however, is inadequate. It looks more…
Archival Methods
Revolutions, Sociology of
Waves of Democracy
The second edition of this classic text covers contemporary democracy movements including the Arab Spring and its aftermath, Occupy, and new nations as well as old issues from the Balkans to Africa, from Latin America to Ukraine. The author has traveled widely around the world to take the pulse of transition and to profile journeys toward democracy and journeys away from democracy, too. At the same time, the book addresses important challenges th…
Poland's Contentious Elites Enter the Age of Revolution
Scholars of social movements commonly call for the field to be broadened in various ways because movements are often intertwined with other forms of conflict and because the causes or consequences of movements may operate differently in different contexts. Important change processes that were unfolding in Poland at the time of the French Revolution provide an instructive case. Although the contemporaneous French Revolution, with its enormous quan…
Jill Maciak Walshaw. A Show of Hands for the Republic
Well off the main roads or up in the mountains, with literacy low and people speaking something besides French, how were big national questions discussed, if they were discussed at all? As those at the centers of power found themselves concerned about the ideas circulating among the educated, were they also paying attention to what people were thinking and saying in the countryside far from Paris? Jill Maciak Walshaw explores several departmental…
Democracy's Past Transformations, Present Challenges, and Future Prospects
The conceptual field for discussions of democracy has generally been territorially delimited. For ancient democracy, the territory was that of a city-state; for modern democracy, a nation-state. Although since the late eighteenth century modern democracy has been in many ways quite a different set of institutions and practices from ancient democracy and although modern democracy has continually undergone significant change, the notion of delimite…
Democracia
O campo conceitual das análises sobre a democracia, de um modo geral, tem sido delimitado territorialmente. Para a democracia antiga, o território foi aquele da cidade-estado; para a democracia moderna, um estado nacional. Ainda que, a partir do final do século 18, a democracia tenha se constituído em um conjunto de instituições e de práticas muito diferentes daquelas da democracia antiga, e embora a democracia moderna venha sofrendo contínuas e …
Rural Movements and the Transition to Democracy in Spain
Scholars of Spain's democratic transition vary considerably in the role they attribute to movements. Spanish democratization is widely known for its successful elite negotiations and some describe it as an instance of democratization from above. For others it is a case of social movement activism creating problems for those elites negotiating the democratization process. Among those social movements, the least studied took place in the Spanish co…
A Moving Target
Achieving consensus on a definition of "democracy" has proven elusive. Institutions that have been taken to be essential to democracy have changed radically since the word "democrat" began to be widely used toward the end of the eighteenth century. Democratic ideas and democratic practice engender conflict that transforms institutions rather than just reproduces them. Its transformative character rests on a half-dozen key attributes of democracy:…
How Canadians Communicate III
D a vid Tara s other factors and conditions to determine how we use and give meaning to popular culture.The book raises critical issues about our uses of myths and stereotypes, how we define beauty, how we deal with our darkest visions, the role of violence in society, how culture is used both to enforce and to push the boundaries of convention and social control and how we express our many identities.The hope is that Contexts of Popular Culture …
Margins, Centers, and Democracy
Chapter Four From the Power of Economic Ideas to the Power of Economists
Officially Solicited Petitions
The cahiers de doléances of 1789 have generally been regarded as unique historical documents. In convening the Estates General, the royal government followed centuries-old precedent in asking the nation not only to elect representatives to an assembly, but to provide them with lists of the demands, wishes, and grievances of their constituents as well. One could hardly describe these documents as resources unknown to historians. Apart from a very …
Our ‘Common European Home’—But Who Owns the House
In this chapter, John Markoff notes that although the European Union has a strong formal commitment to democratic values, for example in the tests it applies to new entrants, and although civic freedoms are strong throughout the EU, this body nevertheless poses a challenge to democratisation. This is because the development of democratic freedoms and political practices has, since the eighteenth century, been accompanied by the activities of soci…
Olas de democracia. Movimientos sociales y cambio político
Globalization and the Future of Democracy
Writing on the eve of the democratic breakthrough of the late eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave vivid voice to a critique of the political institutions across the Channel that were admired by so many French reformers of the day. Commenting scornfully on British electoral practice, he observed in 1762 that:"The people of England regards itself as free, but it is gravely mistaken. It is free only during the election of Parliament. As s…
Revolutionary Demands
Where and When Was Democracy Invented
Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy made explicit an influential but usually unstated principle for comparative political sociology. In his search for the social sources of different sorts of political systems, Moore devoted chapters to revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary upheavals in England, France, the United States, Japan, China, and India. He did not feel it equally important to consider the history of democracy …
Ciclos y expansión de la democracia
The Ubiquitous Rise of Economists
Professional economists have for a long time had significant roles as advisers to policy makers. In recent years they have gone well beyond this in many countries and have come to occupy the highest positions in government. While their technical knowledge is an important reason for their influx into governments, their acquisition of the highest positions of authority, we contend, is to an important degree a ceremonial display. The symbolic aspect…
Where and When Was Democracy Invented
Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy made explicit an influential but usually unstated principle for comparative political sociology. In his search for the social sources of different sorts of political systems, Moore devoted chapters to revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary upheavals in England, France, the United States, Japan, China, and India. He did not feel it equally important to consider the history of democracy …
Civilization and Barbarism
INTRODUCTIONIn looking at yesterday's frontiers (or at today's industrialized world), social analysts tend to see violence as a straightforward and uncomplicated phenomenon: when openly used, it is a direct way of settling disputes; when it is not used but available, it is a necessary-and, at least in the short run, sufficient-condition of domination. As a background condition violence is readily forgotten. Such is the case even in the study of t…
Economic Crisis and Regime Change in Brazil
The Social Geography of Rural Revolt at the Beginning of the French Revolution
The rural uprisings that were critical in the collapse of the Old Regime in 1789 have been intensively studied; the comparative analysis of rural revolt is currently a lively topic in American social science. This paper examines hypotheses on the social contexts likely to foster insurrection through the use of a variety of quantitative indicators. The principal tool is logistic regression. Several predictors of rural upheaval suggest some of the …
Varieties of Civil Religion
Journal Article Varieties of Civil Religion, by Robert N. Bellah and Phillip E. Hammond. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980, xv + 208 pp. $14.95 Get access John Markoff John Markoff University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 42, Issue 2, Summer 1981, Pages 179-181, https://doi.org/10.2307/3710595 Published: 01 July 1981
El irresistible ascenso de los economistas
Globalization and the Future of Democracy
Writing on the eve of the democratic breakthrough of the late eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave vivid voice to a critique of the political institutions across the Channel that were admired by so many French reformers of the day. Commenting scornfully on British electoral practice, he observed in 1762 that:"The people of England regards itself as free, but it is gravely mistaken. It is free only during the election of Parliament. As s…
Peasants Help Destroy an Old Regime and Defy a New One
Recent work on social movements has drawn attention to the interactions of movements and power-holding elites. A dual examination of the changing character of rural revolt in France between 1788 and 1793, on the one hand, and the collapse of the Old Regime and subsequent legislation on rural affairs, on the other, shows that both elite action and insurrectionary mobilization were shaping each other. The revolutionary assault on "feudalism" was fo…
The Rise and Fall of Civil Religion
This paper posits that one common source for diverse civil religious experiments is a “reaction to a problematic pluralism.” We seek to demonstrate this by focusing on two cases removed from each other in time and space: post-revolutionary France and contemporary Malaysia. They also differ sharply in the particular civil religious variant and mood adopted, which we illustrate in an initial, descriptive section on civic rituals and beliefs for our…
A Moving Target
Achieving consensus on a definition of "democracy" has proven elusive. Institutions that have been taken to be essential to democracy have changed radically since the word "democrat" began to be widely used toward the end of the eighteenth century. Democratic ideas and democratic practice engender conflict that transforms institutions rather than just reproduces them. Its transformative character rests on a half-dozen key attributes of democracy:…
Allies and Opponents
prosperous, nobles and non-nobles alike, shared a vision of social change. I use statements of grievances drawn up at the beginning of the French Revolution-the cahiers de dole'ances-to measure local variation in the extent to which nobles and prosperous commoners agreed on their programs for the future of France. This variation is used as the dependent variable in a multiple regression analysis to identify the social processes that helped either…
Democracy's Past Transformations, Present Challenges, and Future Prospects
The conceptual field for discussions of democracy has generally been territorially delimited. For ancient democracy, the territory was that of a city-state; for modern democracy, a nation-state. Although since the late eighteenth century modern democracy has been in many ways quite a different set of institutions and practices from ancient democracy and although modern democracy has continually undergone significant change, the notion of delimite…
Rural Movements and the Transition to Democracy in Spain
Scholars of Spain's democratic transition vary considerably in the role they attribute to movements. Spanish democratization is widely known for its successful elite negotiations and some describe it as an instance of democratization from above. For others it is a case of social movement activism creating problems for those elites negotiating the democratization process. Among those social movements, the least studied took place in the Spanish co…
Professional Ideology and Military Activism in Brazil
No one has done more than Alfred Stepan to clarify the recurrent features of Brazil's coups and the systemic character of the coup-generating mechanisms. The ways in which the military had a vital political role in Brazil's periods of formal democracy, the ways in which all significant political actors attempted to make use of the armed forces, the degree to which actual military intervention was the result of the officers being urged on by the c…
Overflowing Channels
When eighteenth-century revolutionary elites set about designing new political orders, they drew on commonplace theoretical understandings of 'democracy' as highly undesirable. They therefore designed government institutions in which popular participation was to be extremely limited. The new political constructions, in both France and the United States, never worked as planned. The mobilizations of the revolutionary era did not vanish as the cons…
Suggestions for the Measurement of Consensus
There is a literature on a group of appealing measures of the degree of agreement within a population or between two populations with regard to one or several qualitative attributes. Yet the application of such measures to the study of consensus remains undeveloped. Simple measures may be elaborated that lend themselves to analyses which are conceptually complex. These measures are particularly suited to some forms of content analytic data
How Canadians Communicate III
D a vid Tara s other factors and conditions to determine how we use and give meaning to popular culture.The book raises critical issues about our uses of myths and stereotypes, how we define beauty, how we deal with our darkest visions, the role of violence in society, how culture is used both to enforce and to push the boundaries of convention and social control and how we express our many identities.The hope is that Contexts of Popular Culture …
Officially Solicited Petitions
The cahiers de doléances of 1789 have generally been regarded as unique historical documents. In convening the Estates General, the royal government followed centuries-old precedent in asking the nation not only to elect representatives to an assembly, but to provide them with lists of the demands, wishes, and grievances of their constituents as well. One could hardly describe these documents as resources unknown to historians. Apart from a very …
A Comparative Method
(1990). A Comparative Method: Reflections on Charles Ragin's Innovations in Comparative Analysis. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 177-181
Literacy and Revolt
It has been widely argued that the growth of mass literacy is critical for the development of modern forms of contentious politics. Recent Scholarship, however, has challenged this view. This study explores the relationship between levels of literacy in rural France toward the end of 18th century and the extent and nature of peasant mobilization at the beginning of the French Revolution. It is found that literacy did not promote rural disturbance…
Consensus and Conflict at the Onset of Revolution
Although the literature includes considerable abstract discussion of the roles of consensus and conflict in social life, there have been few attempts to measure them in concrete historical situations. This article examines consensus, both in general and on various subjects, within and between important social groups at the beginning of the French Revolution 1789. On agenda, the subjects that a group chooses to discuss, there is evidence of nation…
Democracia
O campo conceitual das análises sobre a democracia, de um modo geral, tem sido delimitado territorialmente. Para a democracia antiga, o território foi aquele da cidade-estado; para a democracia moderna, um estado nacional. Ainda que, a partir do final do século 18, a democracia tenha se constituído em um conjunto de instituições e de práticas muito diferentes daquelas da democracia antiga, e embora a democracia moderna venha sofrendo contínuas e …
Olas de democracia. Movimientos sociales y cambio político
Peasants Protest
For all the attention the rural insurrection of 1789 has received, there is still a great deal to learn. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has suggested that the revolts provide us with a window into a great transformation of the French countryside. He is struck by the contrast with the great seventeenth-century movements of violent resistance to the fiscal pressures of the growing state. After a long interval in which the defeated peasantry raised no majo…
Quantitative Studies of the French Revolution
Revolutions have fascinated moralists, political theorists, and historians for centuries. Since 1789, the prevalence of and, perhaps more important, the threat of have been pervasive forces in contemporary society. Social scientists and other students of the human condition have launched inquiries with an extremely wide diversity of objectives and methods; and we feel it necessary, in order to delineate our own approach, to distinguish among the …
Toward the Integration of Content Analysis and General Methodology
Governmental Bureaucratization
If only everybody meant the same thing by 'bureaucracy'-or 'feudalism', 'Old Regime', 'capitalism', and so on, ad nauseam. If we all agreed on what these terms meant a good deal of paper might be saved. Since this is not even remotely the case, I had better begin by saying something about how the term 'bureaucracy' is to be used in the pages that follow. A government shall be said to be bureaucratized to the extent that it has come to resemble th…
Statistical Recycling of Documentary Information
In the process of studying the French Revolution, the authors were faced with the problem of how to use rather poor “pre-censal” data. Not only were there many different sources available, but there is little information on how they were collected, or how reliable they were. Rather than abandoning hope, or arbitrarily choosing one or another of the sources, the authors factor analyzed them, and found that there had been two main methods of collec…
Civilization and Barbarism
INTRODUCTIONIn looking at yesterday's frontiers (or at today's industrialized world), social analysts tend to see violence as a straightforward and uncomplicated phenomenon: when openly used, it is a direct way of settling disputes; when it is not used but available, it is a necessary-and, at least in the short run, sufficient-condition of domination. As a background condition violence is readily forgotten. Such is the case even in the study of t…
The Rise and Fall of Civil Religion
This paper posits that one common source for diverse civil religious experiments is a “reaction to a problematic pluralism.” We seek to demonstrate this by focusing on two cases removed from each other in time and space: post-revolutionary France and contemporary Malaysia. They also differ sharply in the particular civil religious variant and mood adopted, which we illustrate in an initial, descriptive section on civic rituals and beliefs for our…
Varieties of Civil Religion
Journal Article Varieties of Civil Religion, by Robert N. Bellah and Phillip E. Hammond. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980, xv + 208 pp. $14.95 Get access John Markoff John Markoff University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 42, Issue 2, Summer 1981, Pages 179-181, https://doi.org/10.2307/3710595 Published: 01 July 1981
Suggestions for the Measurement of Consensus
There is a literature on a group of appealing measures of the degree of agreement within a population or between two populations with regard to one or several qualitative attributes. Yet the application of such measures to the study of consensus remains undeveloped. Simple measures may be elaborated that lend themselves to analyses which are conceptually complex. These measures are particularly suited to some forms of content analytic data
The Urban Establishment
Civil Religion and Moral Order. Theoretical and Historical Dimensions
Professional Ideology and Military Activism in Brazil
No one has done more than Alfred Stepan to clarify the recurrent features of Brazil's coups and the systemic character of the coup-generating mechanisms. The ways in which the military had a vital political role in Brazil's periods of formal democracy, the ways in which all significant political actors attempted to make use of the armed forces, the degree to which actual military intervention was the result of the officers being urged on by the c…
The Social Geography of Rural Revolt at the Beginning of the French Revolution
The rural uprisings that were critical in the collapse of the Old Regime in 1789 have been intensively studied; the comparative analysis of rural revolt is currently a lively topic in American social science. This paper examines hypotheses on the social contexts likely to foster insurrection through the use of a variety of quantitative indicators. The principal tool is logistic regression. Several predictors of rural upheaval suggest some of the …
Consensus and Conflict at the Onset of Revolution
Although the literature includes considerable abstract discussion of the roles of consensus and conflict in social life, there have been few attempts to measure them in concrete historical situations. This article examines consensus, both in general and on various subjects, within and between important social groups at the beginning of the French Revolution 1789. On agenda, the subjects that a group chooses to discuss, there is evidence of nation…
What We Don't Know About the Coups
In the wake of the Latin American military coups of the 1960s and 1970s, an extensive and impressive body of literature explored the origins and development of these new military regimes. This paper examines some of the high points of this literature: Huntington's and Nun's proposals of the military as the agent of the modernizing middle classes, Skidmore's focus on the inadequacy of one precoup party system, and O'Donnell's version of the thesis…
Contexts and Forms of Rural Revolt
The varied forms and targets of rural insurrection are the subjects of an extensive literature. The diverse modes of peasant mobilization at the beginning of the French Revolution provide a setting for the examination of hypotheses concerning the social conditions that generate specific types of social conflict. A logistic regression analysis reveals the varying contexts in which rural mobilization took on its many forms; but economic integration…
Literacy and Revolt
It has been widely argued that the growth of mass literacy is critical for the development of modern forms of contentious politics. Recent Scholarship, however, has challenged this view. This study explores the relationship between levels of literacy in rural France toward the end of 18th century and the extent and nature of peasant mobilization at the beginning of the French Revolution. It is found that literacy did not promote rural disturbance…
Revitalizing U. S. Technology
Some Effects of Literacy in Eighteenth-Century France
Some Effects of Literacy in Eighteenth-Century France Two decades ago a team of sociologists conducted a study of the attitudinal consequences of literacy in what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. They found, through a carefully designed sample survey of factory workers and rural cultivators, that the outlook of the literate differed in a number of particulars from their nonliterate compatriots. The literate, for example, were more likely t…
The selective Transmission of Historical Documents
Gilbert Sphapiro, John Markoff, Silvio R. Duncan Baretta. La transmission sélective des documents historiques : le cas des Cahiers de Doléances des paroisses de 1789. Quelle est la probabilité de survivance sur n années d'un document ? Les vicissitudes de l'enregistrement, de la conservation, du catalogage et de la publication affectent cette probabilité, examinée ici dans le cas des Cahiers de doléances des paroisses de 1789. Le taux de survivan…
Peasants and King in Burgundy
Allies and Opponents
prosperous, nobles and non-nobles alike, shared a vision of social change. I use statements of grievances drawn up at the beginning of the French Revolution-the cahiers de dole'ances-to measure local variation in the extent to which nobles and prosperous commoners agreed on their programs for the future of France. This variation is used as the dependent variable in a multiple regression analysis to identify the social processes that helped either…
The Superstitious Mind
The Social Origins of Political Regionalism
Of Rule and Revenue.Margaret Levi
A Comparative Method
(1990). A Comparative Method: Reflections on Charles Ragin's Innovations in Comparative Analysis. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 177-181
Political science (54 obras) · Sociology (44 obras) · Law (43 obras) · Politics (38 obras) · Political economy (28 obras) · History (22 obras) · Economics (19 obras) · European Political History Analysis (19 obras) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis (18 obras) · Law (18 obras)