The Cognitive Chance
of Central European Sociology
Anna Wessely
The year in which the
bicentenary of the French Revolution was celebrated, produced a series
of revolutions of a very different character which promised to exert as
profound an influence on our conceptions of history and social evolution
as the French Revolution did in the 19th century. The events of that
year in (East) Central Europe not only defied the historical materialist
notion of social progress and dumbfounded all Kremlinologists, but they
also put the predictive capacities of the social sciences, whether within
or outside that region, seriously in doubt. Not even the most optimistic
oppositional activists involved in these changes had reckoned with the
outcomes produced. This fact indicates that analyses of the Soviet-type
societies must have been fundamentally flawed on both sides. Western
observers tended to overestimate the socially homogenizing force and pervasive
ideological power of the authoritarian regimes of Eastern Europe while
underestimating their economic vulnerability; the democratic opposition
in these countries tended to overestimate the strength of the communist
parties and underestimate their own potential following. The parliamentary
elections which concluded these "conservative" revolutions demonstrated
the perseverance of traditional patterns of culture in spite of the radical
social structural transformations in these people's republics where the
indoctrination of the population had combined with their depoliticization.
With all due respect
to the heroic efforts of oppositional forces in these countries, the major
factors precipitating revolutionary change were not of a political nature.
The failure of the planning, redistributive economy either to produce or
to adapt technological innovation and to develop rational economic behavior
on a macro-level set a limit to further growth, led to an increasing dependence
on foreign loans and then to indebtedness, involving the socialist countries
in an ever deepening crisis. The challenge, or threat even, of being
left out of a unified Europe and sinking to the status of the Third World
gave an extremely strong impetus to the wish for a radical change.
The actual bankruptcy of most socialist states forced their political leaders
to adopt a new course of action trying to win popular support for the economic
reforms deemed inevitable. They not only failed in that attempt but
inadvertently revealed their weakness and gradually lost control over the
events triggered of by the apparently slight changes they themselves inaugurated
(cf. Csepeli and Örkény 1992).
Following upon the
euphoric moments of 1989, intellectuals and professionals in the former
peoples' republics of Europe set themselves two objectives. Firstly,
exploiting the booming interest in post-communist societies, they wished
to present their work projects to "the world" in order to demonstrate that
these measured up to international standards; secondly, they wanted
to explore the ways of "catching up" with the development of Western scholarship.
Since the metaphors of "lagging behind" and "catching up" have flooded
political discourse on all levels in these countries, it is time to crack
their worn surfaces and see what they actually imply. If they merely
carry the call to adopt thoughtlessly whatever has become part of the staple
diet American sociological journals feed their readers on, then these metaphors
invite us to elaborate and proudly conserve our peripheral position in
international professional discourse.
In this paper we want
to present some of the reasons why we believe that Central European society
has fostered a specific approach to the understanding of society, that
should not be neglected in our anxious eagerness to be accepted at last
as sociologists - without benevolent but restrictive adjectives, used to
indicate the exotic flavor of our production. It is but a matter
of course that Hungarian sociologists must be familiar with recent trends
in sociological theorizing and technics if they want to join in the international
professional communication. Yet we also want to suggest that they
should insist on the difference of the Hungarian social experience which
might enable them to do sociology not just like anybody else but in a way
no one else can. Our point is that Hungarian, and Central European,
sociologists might have a special contribution to make to the development
of social theory. We do not mean some secret lore that merely has
to be revealed but a cognitive chance that can be explored or missed.
A journey from the
West to the East in Europe has always involved the shocking recognition
that in this part of the world, it was possible for an elitistic high culture
to enter into a symbiotic relationship with social and cultural backwardness.
Thomas Mann probably described his own experience of Hungary in Chapter
XXXVI of Doctor Faustus where Adrian Leverkühn enjoys the hospitality
of a Hungarian aristocratic lady in a mansion with an extensive library
in five languages, two concert pianos and other luxuries. The village
which belongs to the estates lives, however, "in a state of deepest poverty,
preserving an entirely archaic, prerevolutionary stage of life."
The text reveals the
operation of a cognitive scheme which classifies people, activities, objects,
and situations in reference to their states in "more advanced parts of
the world." The inherently evolutionist assumptions of this scheme
make the observer expect a culture "correspond" to a given stage of economic
and social development. The visitors are puzzled to find their own
cultural ideals professed and realized in a completely alien social world.
The arising cognitive dissonance will generally be resolved by well-minding
suggestions as to how backwardness can be overcome, how the visited country,
people, etc. should catch up with the happier nations of the West.
The traveller's perspective
is shared by the majority of the natives. The upper strata of their
society feel the pressure of international economic competition and thus
tacitly encourage intellectuals to devote themselves to the elaboration
of various programs of social reform. The challenge of modernization
elicits three kinds of response. Traditionalists will insist on existing
structures or customs and fight against the modernizers. The latter
are, however, divided among themselves, unable to agree on the strategy
of "lifting up" their country. One faction -- borrowing the Russian
term, let's call them zapadnik -- tries to introduce as many elements of
Western civilization as possible, in order to reproduce Western/modern
conditions in their homeland. The other faction asserts the unique
value of native culture and suggests catching up with the West by embarking
on an alternative route to modernity. Using the Russian term again,
we may call them pochvennik.
The opposition of
these two stances and their ideological programs has been most perceptively
described by Norbert Elias in a seemingly academic analysis of the sociogenesis
of the German concepts of Zivilisation and Kultur in the first chapter
of his book, The Civilizing Process. Here he showed how the term
"civilization" expressed for the Western nations their self-confident sense
of national identity, while "Kultur," a term invented in Germany but adopted
by all Central European peoples, was used to define and assert the identity
of nations lacking stable boundaries and the institutions of civil society.
Elias claims that the concept of civilization "sums up everything in which
Western society of the last two or three centuries believes itself superior
to earlier societies or 'more primitive' contemporary ones" (Elias 1978).
Germans and, let us add, Central Europeans in general, reject the Anglo-French
connotations of the word "civilization." Applied to their societies,
this seemingly neutral, descriptive term turns namely immediately into
a quantitative and normatively laden standard which reveals their underdevelopment
or backwardness and feeds their bitter sense of inferiority. These
nations east of the Rhine prefer, therefore, to describe themselves in
terms of Kultur which reassuringly emphasizes the incomparable traits of
their social existence. This value-laden concept of culture will
then be opposed to Zivilisation, understood as "mere outward appearance,"
the sum total of the useful but superficial institutional arrangements
and customs, or utilitarian, technical devices.
There are several
analytical dimensions along which these conceptions can be shown to add
up to two distinctive systems of rationality:
Dimension Civilization
Kulturtime present-oriented
past-orientedspace expansion demarcationaction
goal-oriented value-orientedactor individually
responsible
subject to collective fatesocial perspective
universal particularrelation to nature
mastery, submission submissionmode of appraisal
quantitative qualitativeobject of appraisal production
single accomplishmentsargumentation procedural
substantive
Immanuel Wallerstein's conception
of a world economic system with three distinct regions, i.e., the center,
the periphery, and the semiperiphery, suggests a sociological generalization
of Elias' conceptual, etymological analysis. The concept of civilization
emerges in the center, it is unthinkingly adopted or rejected in the periphery,
while the semi-periphery takes pains to define its position versus both
poles and does so in terms of the contrast Zivilisation -- Kultur.
With respect to European
history, the Hungarian historian Jenô Szûcs proposed a theory
of three developmental regions (Szûcs 1988). His description
of Central-Eastern Europe fits very well the model of the semi-periphery
as proposed by Wallerstein. This region includes, according to Szûcs,
the area from the line of the Elbe and Saale to the Baltic Sea and the
Carpathian mountains. Since the various ethnic or religious groups
in this area had weak or no nation states, they could not find unambiguous
props for the construction of their national identities. These nations,
even if later successful in establishing their states, had constantly to
seek out and draw their boundaries anew, and ask themselves, in a political
as well as a social psychological sense, again and again: Who are
we? What is our real identity? What is the true German, Hungarian,
Czech, Croatian, or Austrian like?
Hegel was right to
say that "Nations are what their deeds are." Actually, a nation with
a history of great deeds (in Hegel's example, the Englishmen "who navigate
the ocean, have the commerce of the world, to whom the East Indies belong
and their riches, who have a parliament, juries, etc." [Hegel 1956: 74])
does not have to worry about its national character. It is the peoples
in ethnically mixed and backward countries, losing out in international
competition and threatened by the expansion of self-confident empires,
who are anxious to define and metaphysically enhance their allegedly unique
attributes. With no historical deeds to be triumphant about, they
will tend to create their self-image from other ingredients, i.e, they
will rely on the normative domain of their Kultur.
But, at this point,
the nations of (East) Central Europe find themselves entangled in a paradoxical
state of mind. Their Kultur does separate them from the West, but
not from each other. They reject quantitative comparison in terms
of civilization with the West and insist on their qualitative singularity
for the reasons just mentioned. This kind of cultural comparison
which combined the elaboration of the difference with a sincere admiration
of the achievements of the other has worked smoothly along the North-South
axis. The best known examples are, perhaps, the intellectual best-sellers
of the 19th and early 20th centuries, filled with speculations on the respective
nature and merits of the "Gothic" and the "Mediterranean" spirit.
Yet, the same strategy cannot be applied in respect to other Central European
neighbors because those allegedly unique cultural traits would soon turn
out to be not so unique after all. Nationalist rhetoric reintroduces,
therefore, the otherwise despised quantitative standard and endeavors to
marshal evidence that the speaker's country is more advanced, more civilized,
nearer to the West than its neighbors. The operation has certainly
many pitfalls. While theoretically nonsensical, it has become a persistent
element of practice. Most Central European intellectual and artistic
achievements, allegedly spontaneous manifestations of the national culture,
have to find Western approval first in order to secure themselves lasting
success in their country of origin or to be noticed at all in the neighbor
countries. Thus, for instance, the myth of fanciful and intellectually
provoking, fin-de-siècle Habsburg Central Europe had to be created
by Western historians for Austrians, Croatians, Hungarians, and Czechs
to recognize and embrace this flattering common image of themselves.
Very slowly, Central
Europeans have begun to recognize that it is precisely the similarity of
their historical and social experiences -- their precarious, intermediate
position between East and West, the secular coexistence of various ethnic,
religious, and linguistic communities on the territories of belatedly evolved
nation states with insecure boundaries and artificially rigid social structures
-- that produced the specific features of their culture.
One salient feature
of this culture is probably an outcome of the particular form modernization
has taken in this region. It has been a one-sided and state-controlled
process of modernization, unaccompanied by the development of civil society.
Within the preserved rigid social structure, urbanization, greater social,
geographical, and occupational mobility did not create a melting pot for
the previously isolated communities. Rather these rapid changes made
many members of these societies experience certain aspects of the position
and role expectations associated with the type of social relationship described
as the stranger by Georg Simmel. Since occupational roles were insufficiently
differentiated from social statuses and their prescribed codes of behavior,
individual mobility entailed discontinuity with the former self, a sense
of loss and alienation. Orientation in the newly emerging social
settings, unfamiliar to almost all participants, required a creative combination
of an empathic understanding of the other as different, shrewd calculation
of the advantages one's own cultural baggage could secure, and participation
in a fake consensus on the superiority of traditionally defined forms of
unequal interaction to its neutral, legally or organizationally prescribed
forms.
The experience of
cultural heterogeneity and conflict, the simultaneousness of the inside
and the outside views have reduced the stock of taken for granted elements
within the social environment. It required constant alertness, it
made people conceive of every interaction as a situation of stress demanding
special techniques of coping. These included the dogging of issues,
mutual efforts to preserve the appearance of mutual agreement as well as
attempts to find and elaborate the "common denominator," to mediate between
conflicting interests by evoking their possible synthesis. These
latter attempts were guided not so much by a rational belief in the possibility
of rational conflict solving as rather by the idea that on a certain, deep
or high, level, conflicts could be shown to be either mere misunderstandings
or parts of an overarching unity. This kind of therapeutic intent
is clearly present in those "languages of translation" Central European
thinkers have proposed for overcoming the barriers to the understanding
of the self and the other. What we have in mind here is Mannheim's
sociology of knowledge, Freud's psychoanalysis, and Wittgenstein's philosophy
of language games.
It is no accident
that these influential theories had originated in Central Europe but found
success in the West. Their suggested solutions -- to overcome misunderstanding,
to achieve individual autonomy by way of enlightened insight -- could not
be institutionalized in Central Europe. They could, however, be exported
to the West and revolutionize whole realms of accepted knowledge.
In the course of their reception, these theories with a therapeutic intent
have, however, undergone radical change. Their efforts to present
a global vision, to provide a description which shows how mutually exclusive
assertions represented elements of one and the same context, could not
be assimilated into the rational operation of normal science, could not
be fitted into the system of the academic division of labor. These
"languages of translation" have become accepted and institutionalized as
rational, scholarly, formalized ways of speaking where "it is less important
to do full justice to each case in its absolute uniqueness than to be able
more and more correctly to classify and subsume each case under pre-established
categories" (Mannheim 1936: 305). This scholarly discourse is no
more oriented toward the Central European desire to express socially coded
individual differences. "Rather the neutralizations of the qualitative
differences in the varying points of view, arising in certain definite
situations, result in a scheme of orientation which allows only certain
formal and structural components of the phenomena to emerge into the foreground
of experience and thought" (Mannheim 1936: 304). As a consequence,
Freudian psychoanalysis has become medicalized; Mannheim's program
for the sociology of knowledge, originally designed to become the integrative
framework for the various elements of knowledge gathered in the humanities
and the social sciences, has been reduced to narrowly defined inquiries
within a subfield of sociology; and Wittgenstein has been admired
as "the technical philosopher of 'truth tables' and 'language games',"
whose theses in the concluding section of the Tractatus "about solipsism,
death and 'the sense of the world' which 'must lie outside the world'"
should be dismissed as casual afterthoughts with no binding force (Janik
and Toulmin 1973: 22-23). In this adapted form, the imported theories
had a fermenting affect, serving the purpose of making conflicts transparent
and manageable.
The reception of Freud,
Mannheim, or Wittgenstein in the West was systematically blind to the ethical
aspects of their theories, to their distrust of formalization and operationalization,
their insistence that conflicts were not merely problems to be solved,
difficulties to be overcome, but represented an authentic form of existence
on a pre-theoretical level. This pre-theoretical level is pointed
to by the indefinable terms denoting the socially coded forms of individual
consciousness: Weltanschauung, Lebensform, Unbehagen. Scholarly
complaints about the lack of analytical distinctions and discipline in
the way these terms are used, about the habit of Freud, Mannheim, and Wittgenstein
to offer examples instead of producing empirical generalizations and/or
logical deductions, indicate why it has been impossible to fit their theories
into the institutionalized frameworks of knowledge.
A similarly motivated
refusal to follow the rules of academic sociological description characterizes
the tradition of sociography in many Central European countries, especially
Poland, Hungary and Romania. The authors combined in themselves the
interests and methods of poets and politicians, social philosophers and
journalists, reformers and researchers. They thought of themselves
as parts of an important social movement within contemporary society.
Several decades after the first publication, their works are still capable
of eliciting public debates. Curiously enough, a leading Hungarian
Communist ideologist, József Révai has produced the most
fitting description of this sociographic movement. He claimed that
it had been able to throw light on the fundamental problems of Hungarian
society, which arid, scientific descriptions could never grasp. The
necessity and impossibility of a normal, i.e., Western form of peasant
embourgeoisement in these countries could be adequately expressed only
in the metaphorical language of these sociographers who spoke of sickly
processes, half-hearted and awkward embourgeoisement, silent revolution,
escape (Révai 1955: 300-303).
These metaphors were,
and still are, rooted in the prevailing undifferentiated form of social
discourse which mixes types of discourse that would, in other parts of
the world, constitute the separate genres and appropriate languages of
poetry, fictional narrative, social science, politically agitating pamphlets,
or meditative essays.
Not only the discourse
was undifferentiated, but the roles of the participants as well.
This is a historically evolved role, the role of the intellectual, obligatory
for all who wish to join in the discourse. Anyone preferring a professional
role to this traditionally defined image of the intellectual was perceived
as an outsider whose concerns were different from those of the society.
Intellectual activity thus could not emancipate itself from the dominant
form of political discourse. Overt or covert censorship from all
sides hedged in public discourse and suggested that all utterances possessed
an almost magic force, capable of evoking and realizing the referents of
the words used. Moreover, the undifferentiated state of the public
domain entailed the dependence of intellectuals on the various political
and economic powers that be. This forced them to reckon with many,
often inconsistent expectations which could only be met by exploiting the
systematic ambiguity of a language of images. This was clearly a
trap from which there was but one way of escape: to preserve personal
integrity by reducing every topic of discourse onto an ethical plane and
find the public's approval by producing aesthetically gratifying texts.
The result was a form of scholarship confined to the domain of national
Kultur.
Yet, this archaic
kind of sociology, torn between its pochvennik an zapadnik poles and unable
to supersede their conflict, seems to have retained much of its former
significance. Firstly, its lasting impact on our culture serves as
a reminder that if sociology is to retain or regain its public relevance,
it cannot confine itself to the study of professionally defined problems.
Secondly, it offers a literary and, therefore, highly flexible language
suited to the description of non-Western type societies and social attitudes.
This language moves freely between different stylistic registers and allows
the combination of a personal tone and interpretive approach with an effort
to produce a possibly objective, analytical description of social phenomena.
It suggest itself as a language of mediation between conceptual frameworks
and lived experience as well as between structurally different types of
social experience. It is this third aspect which links this form
of social inquiry to the intellectual efforts of a Wittgenstein, Freud,
or Mannheim.
Can this tradition
be deconstructed? Would that yield anything but the image of a national
inferiority complex deflated to its proper size? We suggest that
the attitude which had arisen in the Central European context and gave
life to the theoretical projects of a Freud, Mannheim or Wittgenstein as
well as to the literary prose of the sociographers should be developed
and cultivated. It may usefully serve as a constant reminder that
it might be impossible to express the failure of the modern project, the
dialectic of rationalization in the language of any single, differentiated
intellectual sphere, in the analytical language of description its scholarly
standards prescribe.
And, finally, let
us indicate the link between this attitude and the cognitive chance of
Central European sociology, referred to in the title of our paper.
Figuratively speaking Central Europe had been almost Western ever since
the Middle Ages and became almost Eastern after the second war. Squeezed
in between two threatening and sociopolitically very different regions,
it has always been forced to understand both in order to survive.
Now, with the recently begun transition to democracy, Central Europe is
drifting again toward the West. The most valuable asset in its baggage
is its cultural capacity of combining the Eastern and the Western European
perspectives in its approach both to Western and to Eastern type societies.
It may happen that Central Europeans throw away this asset in their vain
hope of thus hastening their assimilation to the desired union with "Europe."
Mythical narratives of our purely Western substance having been stained
and distorted by evil Eastern influence have started proliferating already.
Let us hope that they will not grow powerful enough to rob us of our cognitive
chance, envisioned by the great Central European thinkers of this century:
to carry out the job of translation between the two parts of this continent.
Epilogue from 1992
A full year has passed since
we wrote this essay. What seemed then a realistic chance has proved
to be a missed chance, if not an outright illusion from the very start.
Then we suggested that the Central European contribution could broaden
the scope of the postmodern sociological discourse. History has played
a dirty trick on us, again. At present, we find ourselves in a backward-looking
world that pathetically tries to breathe life into the figures of speech
used by a half a century-old rhetoric of Kultur.
The seeming inadequacy
of our examples, taken from the 1920s and 30s or even earlier, to illustrate
a cognitive attitude that we still suppose to be present in contemporary
Central Europe, needs some explanation. We had no intention to suggest
the continuity of a specific tradition that, having been forced underground,
could appear now in full light and bear fruits comparable in significance
to the works of Freud, Mannheim, or Wittgenstein. Their examples
were used, rather, to illustrate a specific and recurrent social position
with its attitudinal, motivational and cognitive implications, i.e., that
of the stranger, or involved outsider.
Citing precisely these
authors had another reason. Eric Hobsbawm has recently suggested
that any talk of Central Europe, or Central European culture, is mere illusion-hunting
nowadays, for that culture used to be that of German-speaking Jews, which
vanished together with their carriers in the crematoria of Auschwitz (Hobsbawm
1991). Against this view would claim that neither was that culture
merely Jewish, nor without a lasting impact on the national cultures of
Central Europe.
One of the persistent
features of that culture was the social problem-oriented pursuit of social
science which did not let a discipline prescribe it the problems and acceptable
methods of research, but attempted to respond to the challenges that reached
it from the social environment. The decades since the mid-60s have
produced a particular variant of this tradition. The repression of
autonomous political attitudes and cultural orientations has elicited,
as a response, a necessarily interdisciplinary form of social science discourse
where scholars tended to attend more closely to the new insights won in
other fields than to the accumulated results of their established disciplines.
The forbidden competition of schools and trends within one branch of scholarship
has been, in a way, replaced by the competition or plurality of alternative
scientific object constructions. The mastering of social problems
has been, for the last 50 to 60 years, at least in Hungary, the exclusive
reserve of government politics and the kind of positivistic, social technology
it favored, in which citizens, however appreciate by the public, have no
say. Independent scholarly effort has been focussed, therefore, on
producing alternative definitions of the social problems. All invention
has been poured into the definition of the problems themselves, and, frequently,
research more or less stopped as soon as this was accomplished.
All this goes a long
way to explain the curious sterility of post-1989 social science in the
former European people's republics. The funds for positivist research
have been seriously cut and what is still being done and published shockingly
lacks social or political relevance. Alternative perspectives have
never had access to research opportunities and now, when they could finally
test their hypotheses, most of their representatives have gone into politics
and now find themselves confronted with the petrified oppositions they
formerly tried to overcome.
The cognitive chance
outlined in our paper seems, by now, missed for these countries.
If the present trends continue, a new wave of immigrants from Central Europe
may again enrich Western social science without, however, having been able
to facilitate a solution to the social problems they had set out to understand.
Or, to be even more pessimistic, whatever used to be specifically Central
European thinking, might disappear without a trace. Right now it
seems that in understanding our own present problems we have stopped to
look at and reflect on ourselves and prefer to take over the perspective
of all those "transitologists" (busying themselves with issues of the "transition
to democracy") who have succeeded in turning us from the subjects into
the objects of social research.
References Cited
Csepeli, György and
Antal Örkény (1992): Ideology and Political Beliefs in
Hungary. The Twilight of State Socialism. London: Pinter Publishers.
Elias, Norbert (1978):
The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Freidrich
(1956): The Philosophy of History. New York.
Hobsbawm, Eric (1991):
"Austria and Central Europe." In Lettre Internationale, Hungarian
edition, 3:1-3.
Janik, Allan and Stephen
Toulmin (1973): Wittgenstein's Vienna. Trowbridge: Redwood
Press.
Mannheim, Karl (1936):
Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Révai, József
(1955): Marxizmus, népiesség, magyarság.
Budapest: Kossuth.
Szûcs, Jenô
(1988 [1981]): "Three Historical Regions of Europe. An Outline."
In Civil Society and the State, John Keane ed., pp291-332. London
and New York: Verso.
Note
1 Written in collaboration
with György Csepeli and first presented at the "Hungary in the World"
congress in Budapest, June 1991.
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