Mentoring, Methods, and Movements: Colloquium in Honor of Terence K. Hopkins by His Former Students and the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations

By Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

Terence Kilbourne Hopkins (1929-1997) was a hidden gem of the field of world-systems studies who contributed indispensably to its foundation amid a lifelong collaboration and friendship with Immanuel Wallerstein. His pedagogical humanism, methodological rigor, and scientific commitment to social change, merged with his creatively flexible admini

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press)
• Release date: Jan 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781888024920

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Mentoring,

Methods, and Movements

About this Book

Terence Kilbourne Hopkins (1929-1997) was a hidden gem of the field of world-systems studies who contributed indispensably to its foundation amid a lifelong collaboration and friendship with Immanuel Wallerstein. His pedagogical humanism, methodological rigor, and scientific commitment to social change, merged with his creatively flexible administrative skills to found the Graduate Program in Sociology at Binghamton University (SUNY). The student-centered, autonomous program fostered the formation of critically-minded scholars who pursue transdisciplinary sociology while fusing deeply personal commitments to long-term, large-scale social change.

In this significantly updated twentieth anniversary second edition of Mentoring, Methods, and Movements, Terence K. Hopkins’s former students organizing and contributing to a colloquium in his honor a few months before his untimely passing in January 1997 share key insights about what made him so unique and impactful in shaping their practices of engaged sociology—informed by an always open, dynamic, and self-reinventing World-Systems Analysis.

From the Contributors …

For several years now we sociologists have heard much talk about structure and agency as if they referred to different phenomena or to radically distinct aspects of the same thing. This distinction can make little sense to students of Hopkins, who always insisted that social structures are formed, reproduced, and reformed by the agency of actors. … —Walter Goldfrank, U.C. Santa Cruz

How did Terry do it? —William G. Martin, Binghamton University

… Hopkins’s insistent questioning opened the door to the creation of an alternate apparatus of discourse, the very flexibility of which allows the emerging debates of world-scale historical social sciences to be joined however tenuously. —Ravi A. Palat, Binghamton University

… Hopkins was attacking the idiographic-nomothetic distinction through the pedagogy. The pedagogy assumed that the student had to work hard as a student inventing and then had to continue inventing forever after. —Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University

… But then again I cannot think of a better way to reflect on Hopkins’s work than approaching it from a personal perspective. That is how he always approached his own work, after all, and he encouraged us to do so as well. —Reşat Kasaba, University of Washington

… the subtext of that magnificent modesty which permeates the work of Terence Hopkins as scholar and teacher, and student of students, as I read it, has always been to go beyond established modes … The vision of methods Terence Hopkins has offered includes this invitation to a special sort of imaginative social action: think the past to make a past with the purpose of making the future by thinking a future. —Richard Lee, Binghamton University

Mentoring,

Methods, and Movements

Colloquium in Honor of

Terence K. Hopkins

by His Former Students

and

the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations

Twentieth Anniversary Second Edition

Edited by:

Immanuel Wallerstein

and Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

Copyright © 1998, 2017, by Immanuel Wallerstein; The Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of

Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations; Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, Ahead Publishing House; each chapter or part by its contributor

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any informational storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher (representing copyright holders) except for a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Published by:

Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press)

P. O. Box 393 • Belmont, MA 02478 • USA • www.okcir.com

For ordering or other inquiries contact: [e-mail]

Library of Congress Catalog Number (LCCN): 2016920666

For latest and most accurate LOC data for this book, search catalog.loc.gov for the above LCCN

Publisher Cataloging in Publication Data

Mentoring, Methods, and Movements: Colloquium in Honor of Terence K. Hopkins by His Former Students and the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations / Immanuel Wallerstein and Mohammad H. Tamdgidi., eds.

Twentieth Anniversary Second Edition

Belmont, Massachusetts: Ahead Publishing House, 2017

334 pages • 6x9 inches

Includes bibliographical references, photos, chronological bibliography, and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-888024-98-2 • ISBN-10: 1-888024-98-4 (hard cover: alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-888024-88-3 • ISBN-10: 1-888024-88-7 (soft cover: alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-888024-91-3 • ISBN-10: 1-888024-91-7 (PDF ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-1-888024-92-0 • ISBN-10: 1-888024-92-5 (ePub ebook)

1. Hopkins, Terence K., 1929-1997—Congresses. 2. Historical sociology—Congresses.

3. Sociology—Study and teaching (Graduate)—New York (State)—Congresses. 4. Social movements

—Congresses. I. Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1930– II. Tamdgidi, Mohammad H., 1959– III. Title

Photo Credits: Sunaryo • Gloria N. Hopkins

Cover and Book Design and Typesetting: Ahead Publishing House

Printed by Lightning Source, LLC. The paper used in the print editions of this book is of archival quality and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). The paper is acid free and from responsibly managed forests. The production of this book on demand protects the environment by printing only the number of copies that are purchased.

to

Gloria N. Hopkins

… More from the Contributors

"This is not going to be a personal speech, but the invisible hand of Terence K. Hopkins lies about me and in most of what I’ve written since I left Binghamton. … (Somebody observed there are many Hopkinses. It’s very clear that Hopkins is a rich totality of many determinations and relations.)" —Philip McMichael, Cornell University

The study of regionalism vis-à-vis globalism parallels the two poles of Terence Hopkins’s own intellectual development which began with the study of small group interaction and culminated with a focus on the dynamics of the world-system. … —Elizabeth McLean Petras, Scholar and Author

Hopkins’s comments are on his characteristic yellow-lined paper, handwritten comments with a #2 pencil. The first line reads … It’s very good, but …. Then comes the but—one, two, three, four pages of but. … even the Hopkins phrases were not immune to skeptical support. Exhibiting his characteristic penchant for sustained auto-critique, Hopkins wrote in the margins of the paper … —Beverly Silver, Johns Hopkins University

… my association with Terence Hopkins changed my life. He deepened my understanding of world-systems, he taught me what it meant to be a scholar who was deeply concerned about the movements; he was a role model for how to be a committed intellectual. … He was a tireless and merciless critic. Yet I never felt demeaned or belittled. … He pounded home time and again that it was not helpful to view race and class as binary opposites, …. —Rod Bush (1945-2013), St. John’s University

… key points in the work of Hopkins elucidate productive ways of meeting the criteria set by feminists for the study of gender. … World-systems analysis has thus far not dealt with subjective and objective, self and society as dimensions of the modern world-system. Critique of these as discrete units of analysis is implicit in world-systems analysis, but focused attention on these is the contribution of feminist theory to the discussion of unit of analysis. —Nancy Forsythe, Feminist Scholar and Activist

… The time I was fortunate to spend with him allowed me to have a sense of his profound concern about the welfare of humanity and commitment to the cause of the unprivileged …. —Lu Aiguo, Inst. of World Economies and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Science, Beijing

"It was not what Hopkins actually said to me that mattered, not his educational program nor even his parenthetical letters, but what he is (and now what he was), a style of being alive, a magical dance he does with his body or with you or with parts of who he was that had failed him, or weren’t there to begin with, a dance in which he laughs, turning away just enough to help you see it is not you he is laughing at, but us." —Evan Stark, Rutgers University

… It’s up to the movements to appropriate us. It’s up to us to appropriate movements. I wish only that there be a continuation of this, really if you think about it on a world scale, odd solidarity. It is worth continuing. Thank you. —Terence K. Hopkins (1929-1997), Binghamton University

Gathered in this volume … are sociologically imaginative world-systems analyses of Terence K. Hopkins, amid the world-historical public issues that deeply troubled him personally and are even more prevalent today. —Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, UMass Boston / OKCIR

Contents

Immanuel Wallerstein

Introduction

I. Graduate Education: The Formation of Scholars

Walter L. Goldfrank

1. Deja Voodoo All Over Again: Rereading the Classics

William G. Martin

2. Opening Graduate Education: Expanding the Hopkins Paradigm

Ravi Arvind Palat

3. Terence Hopkins and the Decolonization of World-Historical Studies

Immanuel Wallerstein

4. Pedagogy and Scholarship

II. Methods of World-Historical Social Science

Reşat Kasaba

5. Studying Empires, States, and Peoples: Polanyi, Hopkins, and Others

Richard E. Lee

6. Thinking the Past/Making the Future: Methods and Purpose in

World-Historical Social Science

Philip McMichael

7. The Global Wage Relations as an Instituted Market

Elizabeth McLean Petras

8. Globalism Meets Regionalism: Process versus Place

Beverly Silver

9. The Time and Space of Labor Unrest

III. Scholars and Movements

Rod Bush

10. Hegemony and Resistance in the United States: The Contradictions of Race and Class

Nancy Forsythe

11. Theorizing About Gender: The Contributions of Terence K. Hopkins

Lu Aiguo

12. From Beijing to Binghamton and Back: A Personal Reflection on the Trajectory of Chinese Intellectuals

Evan Stark

13. Sociology as Social Work: A Case of Mis-Taken Identity

Terence K. Hopkins

14. Coda

Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

The Utopistics of Terence K. Hopkins, Twenty Years Later: A Postscript

Colloquium Photos

About the Contributors

Terence K. Hopkins Bibliography

Index

Immanuel Wallerstein

Introduction

On August 15, 1996, on the occasion of the retirement of Terence K. Hopkins, his former students at Binghamton and Columbia conducted a day-long colloquium in his honor. The Colloquium was organized by Reşat Kasaba, William G. Martin, and Beverly Silver. They gave it the title, Mentoring, Methods, and Movements, because they believed these were the three interconnected themes that summed up Hopkins’s commitments, achievements, and legacy. As befit a ceremony in honor of Terence Hopkins, it was an occasion of vigorous intellectual debate, much love, and considerable festivity. Terence Hopkins died unexpectedly and prematurely on January 3, 1997.

This collection of slightly revised essays are offered to the readers because the authors feel very strongly that the messages he conveyed about mentoring, methods, and movements are crucial for the advancement of world social science. They were conveyed by Terence Hopkins in a very special way which only those who worked with him can know, but the messages are clear nonetheless and are very practical for those who wish to participate in the enlarged vision Hopkins had of the possibilities of social science.

We thank several persons who made contributions to the Fernand Braudel Center in memory of Terence K. Hopkins, and helped thereby to produce this memorial volume.

I. Graduate Education: The Formation of Scholars

Walter L. Goldfrank

1. Deja Voodoo All Over Again: Rereading the Classics

One of the first things I was taught as an undergraduate in 1957 was never to say I’d been reading this or that text, but rather that I’d been rereading it, in fact that chapter x or pages such­-and-such were of particular interest. This usage of course would immediately serve to mark me as a learned and sophisticated person who had long since read everything worth reading and was merely refreshing his memory. A sociological friend tells me that he too was taught this, as a Berkeley graduate student, by Hanan Selvin in the early 1960s. Many years later, a few weeks ago to be exact, a colleague asked if I had read any new books on development he should look at, and I replied that no, not really, that mostly I found it more satisfying to reread the classics than to chase the ambulances that careen from crisis to crisis around the globe, and that chapter 20 of Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) seemed especially useful to ponder these days.

It was when I was a graduate student in his care that Professor Hopkins greatly reinforced my rereading bent, which besides is much cheaper than buying books and much easier than frequenting libraries. So today I want to revisit some classic pages he taught me to cite, though not from Polanyi, nor from Adam Smith on pin-making, nor yet from Lenin on the development of capitalism in Russia. Rather, I want to call your attention once more to pp. 248-51 of Durkheim’s Suicide (1951) and pp. 66-69 of Weber’s Protestant Ethic (1950).

For several years now we sociologists have heard much talk about structure and agency as if they referred to different phenomena or to radically distinct aspects of the same thing. This distinction can make little sense to students of Hopkins, who always insisted that social structures are formed, reproduced, and reformed by the agency of actors. This lesson most often came my way with reference to nouns ending in ­ation, like situation, organization, or stratification. Such nouns, we were taught, refer at once to an outcome and to a process, to a structure and to the agents who create it, to a state or condition and to the human activities that constitute it in an ongoing way.

For example, you may find yourself in a sticky situation, as I did when I tried to compose this talk, but you realize when you think about it that some other people’s actions situated you there, along with your own. You might find it convenient to talk about social organization, institutional arrangements and all that, but you’d better remember that someone is doing the organizing, instructing, and reminding the participants about where they belong, and sanctioning and rewarding them to keep them in line. And you wouldn’t be a sociologist if you didn’t discuss stratification, from the secret ranking discussed in a whisper around Fayerweather Hall at Columbia to the visible and contentious ones that are the stuff of politics. But if you think of stratification(s) merely as structure, you are neglecting the activities of appropriating and selling, or of evaluating and judging, the very activities that produce the classes or strata you are observing.

Rereading pp. 248-51 of Durkheim’s Suicide is a good way to help yourself think about stratification. These pages occur in section II of the famous chapter about anomie where Durkheim is urging us to recognize that unregulated aspirations, or passions which are not harmonized with the faculties (p. 248), can drive individuals to despair and that such regulation is an eminently social matter, rather than a biological or psychological one. Only society, he tells us, can estimate the reward to be prospectively offered to every class of human, functionary in the name of the common interest (p. 249). At this point, echoing Marx’s assertions about the historical and moral elements in the wage, Durkheim refers to the dim perception that different social services are valued differentially and that different degree[s] of comfort are hence appropriate on the average to workers in each occupation (p. 249). He asserts that social notions of appropriate levels of living for distinct social groups change over time, but that, within relatively fixed limits, individuals know what they’re supposed to want and therefore tend typically not to want more than they’re likely to get.

Public opinion (p. 250), that is, the acts of judging and discussing by (at least) those with a voice, constructs not only the hierarchy of functions (p. 250) or positions but also the rules of access to those positions. Once it regarded birth as the almost exclusive principle of social classification; today it recognizes no other inherent inequality than hereditary fortune and merit … but this discipline can be useful only if considered just by the peoples subject to it (p. 251). Durkheim argues that, were inheritance abolished in the interest of greater equality, unequal talents and gifts would still produce inequality. More interesting: he suggests that, were equality of results demanded, it would take more social discipline to constrain the gifted to accept parity with the mediocre than it would, under a meritocracy, for the less accomplished to accept their lesser stations. (God, do the French elites dream of meritocracy!)

Most of this is well known as the basis of the so-called functional theory of stratification, and except for the observation that stratification is an ongoing activity, it’s not a point of view one would normally associate with Prof. Hopkins. But this last speculative point about the differential social coercion involved in maintaining meritocracy as opposed to equal outcomes had previously escaped my notice, despite many rereadings, as I’m sure it did yours. It is perhaps applicable to considerations of exit, voice, and disloyalty in the recently defunct self-styled socialist regimes, perhaps also to how we might rethink the institutional arrangements through which we currently fund graduate students in our departments. In this way, rereading is an activity which can lead us to reevaluate and restratify, as well as to reconsider macrosociological issues.

My second rereading is from pp. 66-69, and most of you will have highlighted those pages in your copies of Weber’s Protestant Ethic. These pages occur in the chapter entitled The Spirit of Capitalism, and in them Weber gives a behavioral account of a hypothetical transformation of economic activity from traditionalistic to rationalized capitalism. He begins by describing the idyllic life of a putter-out in the middle of the eighteenth century: receiving cloth from his peasant producers, dealing via correspondence with his middlemen customers, working maybe five to six hours a day, earning moderately, getting along well with his competitors; [a] long daily visit to the tavern, with often plenty to drink, and a congenial circle of friends, made life comfortable and leisurely (p. 67). The spirit of all this was traditional: the way of life, the profit rate, the amount of work, the labor relations, the circle of customers and the manner of attracting new ones (p. 67).

Now at some time this leisureliness was suddenly destroyed, Weber continues, often without any change in the form of organization such as factories or mechanization (p. 67). Rather, one young man merely went around the countryside, carefully chose weavers for his employ, greatly increased the rigor of his supervision … and thus turned them from peasants into laborers (p. 67). He also changed his marketing strategy by cultivating the final consumer, attending to details, personally soliciting customers, adapt[ing] the product directly to their needs and wishes, and introduc[ing] the principle of low prices and large turnover (pp. 67-68). Given the competitive situation, those who would not imitate the new business methods went under, or at the least were forced to curtail their consumption (p. 68). Weber goes on to argue that the spirit of capitalism thus embodied produces its own capital and monetary supplies as the means to its ends and that the first innovator was generally met with mistrust, … hatred, above all … moral indignation (pp. 68-69).

What occurred to me on this rereading is the following. Whatever the connection between the alleged worldly asceticism of latter-day Calvinist Protestants and the introduction of rationalized business practices, the processual model Weber presents in these pages can be taken as paradigmatic for understanding changes in competitive situations of any kind. It has lately seemed to me that the sort of rationalized behavior Weber describes on pp. 66-69 has been occurring in the fields of health, and, ironically enough, leisure itself. In the status competition of the reasonably well-off, it is not enough to drink eight glasses of water a day, but it must be environmentally and minerally correct water. It is not enough to perform moderate exercise, but such exercise should improve and tone each muscle group. We are enjoined and cajoled to measure our body fat, to reduce our cholesterol, to monitor our intake of various substances. Worse yet, odious innovators in Weber’s sense are leaving the realm of business and invading sports and leisure, so that one is embarrassed (if not quite run out of town) to play bad tennis or drink indifferent wine. What indeed is left for the elite amateur in a world of rational Weberian professionals?

Rereading the classics, I want to assert, is an activity that both befits the elite amateur and benefits the rational professional. Whether you seek to fortify your fading recollection of an enduring insight or to mine yet another nugget for yet another article in yet another journal so that you may advance in yet another competitive struggle, reopen the great books. You may yet get to say, I can’t believe I reread the whole thing.

References

Durkheim, Emile (1951). Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Polanyi, Karl (1944). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times. New York, Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart.

Weber, Max (1950). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner’s.

William G. Martin

2. Opening Graduate Education: Expanding the Hopkins Paradigm

¹

A sociology of social inquiry is needed, not as still another subfield of study (whose "boundaries would merely legitimate ignorance of what is beyond them), but as an integral part of the method informing our research and, as far as possible, being consciously developed and used in the conduct of our studies and in our commentaries on each others’ work.

— Hopkins (1979: 45)

I. Binghamton in Reflection: How Did Terry Do It?

It is a question that I have asked myself many times over the past decade since I left Binghamton. It became most pertinent and pressing when I found myself the Director of Graduate Studies for the Sociology Department at the University of Illinois, forcing me to confront not just many more relationships with young graduate students but also the administrative structures and tasks associated with a well-established graduate program at a large public university.

Some things seemed easily imitated. Recalling the communal effects of his grand fall party, I too stocked my larders, opened my house, and poured forth music until the early morning hours. Lacking the noble and all-too-patient support of Gloria, I could neither match nor maintain such generosity. Day-to-day tasks proved more unrelenting, daunting, and distracting from larger agendas. How might one encourage colleagues to create more flexible, individually-designed programs to address graduate students needs—and demands? How could one massage admissions procedures to ensure our acceptance of a wider, broader stream of students? How might one redesign often inflexible core requirements, expand sources and criteria for funding, and shorten the dreaded time-to-degree?

The flood of day-to-day administrative and individual problems left little time for reflection. Recalling Binghamton provided, moreover, few immediate answers. Indeed, as I have heard it expressed by many of my fellow Binghamton students who also ended up in U.S. institutions, Binghamton seemed a world apart. We had been thrown into a far colder climate ­whether it was the flat maize fields of Illinois, the balmy shores of southern California or Hawaii, or the snow-blown climes of the Northeast. Everywhere, it seemed, I heard of fellow graduate students confronting the hegemony, even if declining, of a core group of positivist and U.S.-centric social science scholars and scholarship. Our graduate program admission standards, core requirements, course offerings—and need I say, standards for tenure?—all dictated grappling with far more limited prospects and perspectives than we had expected. Even more crippling were the effects of the Reagan retrenchments and the demise of the discipline within the academy. We felt, at times, beleaguered, isolated, and ill-prepared for such a fate.

Yet as we move toward the next millennium we may, I believe, be much more optimistic, and draw much more heavily upon the lessons of Binghamton. For even in the most harsh fiscal or intellectual settings it has become evident that the academic institutions we have entered are facing the prospect of a wholesale restructuring in the coming generation. University presidents, chancellors, and deans know this, as do those who fund advanced research. This offers us, I believe, significant opportunities—if we can seize them. In no area is this challenge greater, and potentially more rewarding for world scholarship, than in the restructuring of how knowledge is produced and scholars nourished. And it is here, in order to seize these opportunities, that we so desperately need to capture and consider deeply the lessons Terry has provided us. I speak not only of the specific mechanics of constructing an environment for young scholarship to flourish, but of how they coalesce into a nascent paradigm for creating the conditions for restructuring on a world-scale, the institutions of knowledge production.

I will proceed in three parts. First, I want to sketch—as Terry would say, an interpretative sketch—the transformations before us, to establish the opportunities we face. Secondly, I want to illustrate with specific examples the avenues we can pursue, drawing on Hopkins’s innovations as set against more traditional sociological settings. And finally, I want to open up very briefly for consideration and discussion the even greater possibilities afforded us in the coming generation, possibilities that were not available in the even chillier environment when the Binghamton program was established.

II. The Collapse of the Academy, and the Possibilities for World-Historical Studies

Why are these matters up for discussion? Why do we have the kinds of issues we have? What is our intellectual world—in that sense our consciousness—which leads us to be concerned, now, with these kinds of discussions?

— Hopkins (1978: 199)

These are perplexing and stressful times for many scholars (see e.g., Bérubé & Nelson 1995; Cole, Barber & Graubard 1993). Within the mainstream of sociology cries of distress abound, as faculty and departments confront the falling academic and public reputation of the