Every subject of the state, Immanual Kant reasoned in a discussion of “civil equality” in 1793, “must be able to attain the social rank [Stufe eines Standes] … to which his talent, his effort, and his luck can carry him” without hindrance by any “hereditary prerogative.” A year later Kant's former disciple Johann Gottlieb Fichte likewise imagined a society in which “the choice of a Stand” would be “a choice through freedom” to which no “particular action” or “general institution” could pose a legitimate barrier. The two philosophers offered variations on the radical social principle of “careers open to talent,” extending the promise of upward mobility to talented children of the underprivileged. Proclaimed by the French National Assembly in August 1789, the principle also had a German lineage and, in the first decade of the next century, was to figure prominently in the official program for national revival in Prussia.

Nearly a quarter of a century has elapsed since the revolution in Cuba. Yet there is little consensus about its accomplishments. Evaluations of the effect of the sociopolitical transformation range from uncritical admiration to passionate criticism. It is surprising that no study has compared developments in postrevolutionary Cuba with developments during the same time period in the rest of Latin America, even though such a comparison would contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which the disruption has altered Cuban prospects for development.

The history of women is different from that of men. Women's history is the highlighting of the cultural construction of gender, the ways in which “men” and “women” are defined in considerable autonomy from biological males and females. The culturally constructed gender system interacts with a society's political system in ways that are just beginning to be explored.1 At the same time, scholars also find their definitions of national states to be in flux. Criticizing both Weberian and Marxist traditions of analysis of the state, Charles Bright and Susan Harding have stressed the open-ended, continuous, and contingent interplay between state structures and initiatives on the one hand, and social movements on the other.2 It is an auspicious time to reconsider the relationships between women and the state in cross-cultural perspective. Here I will examine the women's suffrage movement in Japan (1919–31 ) in its political context in order to encourage comparison with other women's suffrage movements, and to re-examine the interwar Japanese state from the viewpoint of one of its least-studied challengers.

The historiography of agrarian Germany before 1914 is fundamentally based upon two moments (in the Weberian sense): one of a structural and the other of an institutional nature. The structural moment comprises an emphasis upon the existence and role of agrarian dualism, that is, upon a sharp contrast, emerging from the later Middle Ages onwards, in the agrarian systems found east and west of the River Elbe and its tributary the Saale, which together formed a line bisecting Germany from Hamburg to the modern Czechoslavakian frontier. The institutional moment consists of the shift from a free-trade to a protectionist policy in respect of cereals after 1879. In the words of a leading West German agrarian historian, “On 1 January 1880 … a new epoch commenced for German agricultural policy.” In addition, the adoption of a grain tariff from 1879 is generally assumed to have had a determining influence upon the subsequent development of German agriculture and, for that matter, is thought by some writers to have exerted a considerable influence upon the entire course of modern German history.

Revolution, like war, is an historical phenomenon of great importance, and no scholar is likely to argue that revolutions have not had a significant influence on the history of nations and regions, even on the history of the entire world. Unlike war, however, revolution has no coherent chronological history, andthere are no studies of the phenomenon comparable to William McNeill's recent work The Pursuit of Power, or to Theodore Ropp's older but equally important War in the Modem World. Despite volumes written on the subject of revolution by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and others, one searches in vain for a comprehensive history.

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 the last few years, modern historians of India have pushed the historical frontier of their field backwards in time. Colonialism is no longer considered the great watershed it once was thought to be. Historians who concern themselves with economic processes such as protoindustrialization tend in particular to minimize the impact of the consolidation of colonial rule in the late eighteenth century. Changes viewed as significant by these historians usually begin with the introduction of capitalism and the early encroachment of a world system, both of which predate the full political realization of colonialism. Historians who concern themselves with political changes tend in the other direction, although increasingly they have proposed major continuities between the ancien régime and the early colonial state. Historians concerned with social change view colonialism as significant but invoke various new forms of dualism to account for the limited effects of colonialism on local social forms. Whatever their differences, all of these historians agree that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are crucial for viewing later changes in economy, polity, and society, and, from their varying theoretical and ideological perspectives, delight in excoriating traditional views of India as static and “traditional” before the arrival of the British.

Kinship studies have traditionally been the core of the anthropological enterprise, but the knowledge gained in studies of indigenous kinship systems has not generally been of interest to other disciplines. This essay intends to draw attention to some of the political and social implications of patterns of kinship relations by comparing two large historical culture areas, that of the frontier region of Inner Asia, and that of the peripheral tribes of the Middle East.

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.

The object of this article is to present the main findings of a study of the functional organisation of the house in postmedieval London. It will also discuss a formal approach to plan analysis that is considered to have wide application in the comparative study of domestic space.

In historical writing on the British West Indies, discussion of the transition from slavery to other forms of labour control after emancipation has been largely confined to the plantation colonies. It is usually argued that planters were most successful in controlling former slaves in colonies where they were able to limit the freedman's access to land and thus create a dependent wage-earning proletariat. Such an analysis cannot, however, be readily applied to the Bahamas, where the plantation system based on cotton production had collapsed before emancipation and where the sea provided an important source of subsistence and employment. This article examines the control mechanisms which enabled a white mercantile minority to consolidate its position as a ruling elite in the postemancipation period. Rather than a monopoly of land, the important elements in this elite's economic and social control were a monopoly of the credit available to the majority of the population and the operation of a system of payment in truck. The credit and truck systems frequently left the lower classes in debt and, as a governor of the colony in the late nineteenth century remarked, in a position of “practical slavery. ”

Sherry Ortner's account of the development of anthropological theory is admirable both because of the complexity of her argument and because it opens up a series of interesting possibilities for theoretical self-criticism among anthropologists. In this essay, I consider a theme which is not directly addressed in Ortner's piece, but which might usefully be considered in relation to it. The theme involves the significance of place in the construction of anthropological theory in the period since World War II.