Modernization theory is essentially an academic, and pseudoscientific, transfer of the dominant, and ideologically significant, paradigm employed in research on the American political system. The still dominant paradigm, despite increasing criticism and revisionism is, of course, the pragmatic-pluralist conception of political process, associated with a form of liberalism which links democratic legitimacy with high levels of participation and with egalitarian distributive outcomes. While this paradigm has been criticized as either scientifically inadequate or normatively skewed (toward freedom, against order), its vigor as a legitimating explanation is largely undiminished. This pluralist legitimation of the American political system is based upon a relatively simple conception of political structure, which is understood as producing an appearance of a formal contradiction which is, in turn, resolved by means of the concept of time (or process). Just as Martin Heidegger used the idea of temporality to resolve the apparent contradiction between Being and existence, so the temporality of the pragmatic-pluralist political process resolves the apparent contradiction between the structured inequality of the American system at any given time and the legitimating ideal of equality. Temporality justifies inequality by subordinating it to the freedom to restructure the system through unfettered, self-motivated mobility. In other words, since freedom justifies order, according to this doctrine, an alternative scientific justification of either freedom or order has obvious political drawbacks.

It is a commonplace of our recent past that functionalism and the second system of Talcott Parsons (a distinctive version of functionalism) rose to power or attained hegemony in American sociology shortly after the end of World War II, retained this hegemony through the 1950s and 1960s, and lost a near-exclusive hold in the early 1970s when many of the younger sociologists abandoned a holist or transindividual perspective in favor of an interpersonal face-to-face context (associated with the social psychological concerns of symbolic interaction and ethnomethodology). What accounts for this? Why did functionalism and the second system of Parsons capture the intellectual allegiance of so many intelligent men and women in American sociology precisely at the end of World War II? What explains the almost total hegemony of this persuasion of general theory for more than two decades? Finally, what accounts for the fact that many younger sociologists withdrew their allegiance to these views at the end of the 1960s or early 1970s?

Despite marked geographical and sociocultural differences, Greece and the two major southern-cone Latin American countries share a significant number of characteristics which distinguish them from most other peripheral and semiperipheral societies. Although they began industralisation late and failed to industrialise fully in the last century, all three countries managed to develop an important infrastructure (roads, railways) during the second half of the nineteenth century, and they achieved a notable degree of industrialisation in the years following each of the two world wars. Moreover, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, all three countries were subjugated parts of huge patrimonial empires (the Ottoman and the Iberian) and thus had never experienced the absolutist past of western and southern European societies. Finally, all three acquired their political independence in the early nineteenth century and very soon adopted parliamentary forms of political rule; and despite the constant malfunctioning of their representative institutions, relatively early urbanisation and the creation of a large urban middle class provided a framework within which bourgeois parliamentarism took strong roots and showed remarkable resilience. It persisted, albeit intermittently, from the second half of the nineteenth century until the rise of military bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in the 1960s and 1970s and, as the Greek and Argentinian cases suggest, such regimes do not necessarily entail the irreversible decline of parliamentary democracy.

Central to late Ottoman history is a series of events that marks a milestone in the emergence of modern forms of political thought and revolutionary action in the Islamic world. The sequence opened with the rise of the Young Ottoman ideologues (1865) and the constitutional movement of the 1870s. It continued with the repression of these forces under Abdülhamid 11 (1876–1909). It culminated with the resurgence of opposition in the Young Turk movement of 1889 and later, and especially with the revolution of 1908. Studied so far mostly in political and intellectual terms, the sequence seems well understood. The emergence of the Young Ottomans—the pioneers of political ideology, in any modern sense, in the Middle East—appears to result from the introduction of Western ideas and from stresses created within the bureaucracy by the political hegemony of the Tanzimat elite (ca. 1839–71). The repression under Abdülhamid follows from the turmoil of the late 1870s, the weaknesses of the constitution of 1876, and the craft of the new sultan in creating a palace-dominated police state. The emergence of the Young Turks shows that terror ultimately fostered, rather than killed, the opposition. Too, their eventual revolutionary success shows how much more effective than the Young Ottomans they were as political mobilizers.

In this article I shall argue that a fundamental and often overlooked trait of ideas and opinions is their controversial or, if you prefer, dialectical character. This means that an idea or an opinion—the words here being used in a general sense—must be seen in connection with its opposite, especially if we are concerned to find its social roots and meaning. To express an idea, to state one's view about something, is a certain kind of action. The purpose of this action is not only to establish a fact but also to exclude other opinions about this fact and, directly or indirectly, to argue against competing opinions, ideologies, theories, and groups. The local or temporal dominance of any particular opinion prompts the question, Why was this position so emphatically maintained? Which were the competing opinions to be excluded?

In response to the preceding article, Professor Sven-Eric Liedman's very interesting critique of my The Decline of the German Mandarins, let me begin by describing how I selected and approached my sources for that work. I first studied printed collections of speeches given at various German universities during the Weimar period, which I happened to encounter in the library. I next made a list of all nonscientists above the rank of instructor who taught for three or more years in faculties of arts and sciences at the universities of Berlin, Munich, Freiburg, and Heidelberg between 1918 and 1933. I read everything written by these men during those years that was relatively unspecialized or methodological in character. Finally, I extended my reading of university speeches and of my authors' works backward in time to 1890, while also adding major handbooks and anthologies in several disciplines, along with writings by academics—and a few nonacademics—who were not members of my original sample, but who were prominently mentioned in the material I had already read.