A Psychological Inquiry into Totalitarianism: Erich Fromm’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Escape from Freedom</Emphasis>

Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941) charts the growth and decline of freedom and selfawareness in the West from the Middle Ages to modern times, when people sought refuge from insecurity and responsibility in totalitarian movements, such as Nazism and Fascism. In contrast to the thesis that Escape from Freedom is evidence of “The Americanization of a European Intellectual,” Fromm wrote it because freedom, or the lack of it, was an acute problem in Nazi Germany, not America. His language and concepts were formed and fused during the crucial ideological and intellectual struggles of a specific, wretched moment in German history, the rise and triumph of Nazism; hence, he waged a Kulturkampf against Nazi barbarism to save Western humanist civilization.     

Missions Impossible: Prospects and Planning in American Higher Education

Most colleges and universities in the United States face serious questions about missions, money, and morale in the 21st century. Some recent excellent books are useful for showing divergent perspectives on these problems. To one extreme, an historian tends to see that lack of planning has been an unexpected, enduring positive force. To another extreme, a high profile state university president draws on innovations in structure to deal with changes in demographics and academic fields. This review essay provides a balanced exploration of the disparate approaches, leading to the conclusion that American higher education is in need of a substantive "New Deal" in purposes and policies.     

In Praise of <Emphasis Type="Italic">The American Political Tradition</Emphasis>

No book is more exemplary in identifying the continuity of democratic statesmanship in the United States than Richard Hofstadter's second book. Its scope is long—from the Framers through the New Deal. The author's insights are brilliant, expressed with literary brio. No other book manages to convey the basic homogeneity of American politics with such persuasiveness, in blending that tradition with the defense of enterprise and property (and in sprinkling the portraits with such acerbic wit). The unifying thread nevertheless needs to be modified in the light of greater sensitivity to the ordeal of race, and in evaluating how the heritage of the New Deal has tempered the commitment to an unbridled capitalism.     

Is Antifa a Terrorist Group?

Starting in 2016, a number of protests and physical confrontations aimed at individuals and groups associated with right wing politics in the United States have been attributed to an ill-defined entity called “antifa”: short for anti-fascist. A high profile example took place in Charlottseville, Virginia on August 11-12, 2017. During two days of conflict and violence, anti right wing protesters clashed with right wing supporters. During the second day of the confrontation, a right-wing supporter drove a car into a crowd of protesters, killing one person and injuring 35 others. While many antifa supporters see it as a defense against right wing extremism, some on the right view supporters instead as terrorists. I tackle these issues in this essay by applying the guidelines of the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) to determine whether the actions by antifa supporters during the Charlottesville incident consitute terrrorism. I conclude that while the events share many characteristics of terrorist attacks, they do not include all of the elements of terrorism required by the GTD. I also question whether antifa can be considered to constitute a “group” at this point in time. My essay highlights how complicated it is to distinghish terrorism from other forms of illegal violence.     

Antifa,Street Gangs,and the Importance of Group Processes

This essay reviews David Pyrooz and James Densley’s “On Public Protest, Violence, and Street Gangs” and raises new questions about the ways in which Antifa is similar to and different from social movements; the processes by which “factions within Antifa” become gangs; and the dynamic nature of relationships and interactions between and among violent and non-violent segments. It concludes with a note about the everchanging nature of social life and importance of flexibility in the design and execution of research in capturing this reality.     

State,Society, and Informality in Cities of the Global South

Contemporary urbanization in the Global South merits greater attention from scholars of comparative politics. Governance, associational life, and political behavior take distinctive forms in the social and institutional environments created by rapid urbanization, particularly within informal settlements and labor markets. In this special issue, we examine forms of collective action and claims-making in these spaces. We also consider how the state assesses, maps, and responds to the demands of informal sector actors. Tackling questions of citizen and state behavior in these informal urban contexts requires innovative research strategies due to data scarcity and social and institutional complexity. Contributors to this symposium offer novel strategies for addressing these challenges, including the use of informal archives, worksite-based sampling, ethnographic survey design, enforcement process-tracing, and crowd-sourced data.     

The Role of Public Sociology in the Development of Cultural Policies in Chile: a Transformation of Cultural Expertise

This paper seeks to analyze the policies on the cultural field implemented in Chile in recent years, explaining how expertise became fundamental and, more specifically, how this expertise evolved from that of an expert intellectual to that of an expert professional. The paper is based on the general hypothesis that the cultural field needs to be viewed in the context of a growing differentiation and autonomization of Chilean society, but that there are some interesting nuances to its evolution, particularly with regard to the transformation of expertise. This article argues that the expert in culture has a twofold nature, which is illustrated through drawing a timeline from the 1980s to the present, marking certain milestones in Chile’s national and cultural history. This timeline incorporates the intellectual work of two of Chile’s most important contemporary sociologists and experts in culture and cultural policies, Manuel Antonio Garretón and José Joaquín Brunner. A sample of their publications is analyzed and then contrasted to documents on cultural policy since the approval of the country’s institutional framework for culture in 2003, when the National Council for Culture and the Arts was created, gauging the influence of the expert intellectual on this new institutional framework and the thrust of public policies on culture. The paper concludes that the figure of the expert in culture has shifted from the “expert intellectual” to the expert of a professional kind, although the theoretical work of the former has continued to influence the debate around cultural policies to this day.     

Migration as Social Seismograph: an Analysis of Germany’s ‘Refugee Crisis’ Controversy

This article tests the hypothesis that the attitude towards migration can be understood as a social seismograph for the degree of a society’s degree of democratisation. In this article I present my hypothesis and analyse the constellation of arguments within the public controversy following the so-called refugee crisis in Germany. I work out the internal problematics structuring the three main polarisations in this discourse. Most of the contributions analysed here are interventions rather than academic texts (albeit often authored by academics) making practical suggestions to cope with what they respectively relate to different definitions of crisis. Methodologically, this article is based on a thorough reading of essays and books and their relation to one another, with view to the current conjuncture. Understanding this ‘crisis’ after 2015 requires an approach attentive not only to the different ‘politics of polarisations’ within the public controversy but also to the real and phantasmal dimensions of the crisis. Although the figure of the refugee has began to occupy a central role in the discussion of migration policy, the debate has, I demonstrate, surprisingly little or nothing to do with migration whatsoever, but rather speak to the degree of required democratisation.