Iron City Blues Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution: the Jacobin Dimension

Pittsburgh, the Iron City, gives me the blues. Cleaner and quieter than when tall smokestacks filled its valleys with yellow-brown haze, the city now stands as a nostalgic reminder of salty politicians, tough tycoons, rough mill workers, and fixed capital. Such heavy industrial cities of another age inspired the bottom-up social history of my youth, with its reductive assignment of interests, organization , and action to whole categories of people—not only social classes, but also neighborhoods, religious affiliations, and citizens at large. That sort of categorical history by no means excluded attention to leaders, personal influence, and mobilization processes. However great its simplifications and reifications, in fact, it reeked of individual and collective agency. Whence my tempered nostalgia for the Iron City. S. N. Eisenstadt has a very different vision of historical processes. Except for autonomous intellectuals, few efficacious individuals and categories figure in his accounts. In general, his consequential actors are civilizations and societies. Civilizations and societies react to changes besetting them from inside and outside , thus transforming the lives of people who inhabit those civilizations and societies. The trope is familiar, but its logic is not self-evident. Anyone who proposes to make civilizations and societies major actors in human history must at a minimum provide visibly viable identifications of three elements: • boundaries separating each such unit and its member population from other such units and their populations; • distinctive culture—shared understandings and their representations in objects and practices, operating within those boundaries and throughout their extent; • self-regulating processes—likewise within those boundaries and throughout their extent. These elements need not be absolute. Boundaries may consist of interstitial zones rather than sharp lines; cultural affinities and exchanges may connect adjacent units; self-regulating processes may leave some people, places, or activities within the boundaries untouched; and so on. Nevertheless, to the extent that proposed units lack any of the three elements, describing and explaining social life in terms of civilizations and societies introduces more confusion than compre