دانلود کتاب Passage of Power: Studies in Political Succession (Studies in anthropology)

The Passage of Power

Emblematic of his determined sawing against the grain is his 1974 book, The Passage of Power: Studies in Political Succession. It deals comparatively with the problem of transitions of political power in various regions of the world. It has little to do with linguistics, is only tangentially relevant to ethnology’s traditional emphasis on marginalized peoples, and, despite its brilliance, received not a single scholarly review. Its message echoes Churchill’s dictum that the worst form of government is democracy—except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. This tacit affirmation of the American system was not geared to garner popularity when, at the end of the Vietnam era, radical students and faculty were challenging foreign policy and global hegemony.

In keeping with his usual wont, Burling severed the polemical knot with mere finely honed evidence. He had both the presence of mind to see that the transfer of political power is one of the world’s most costly and disruptive problems, and the scholarly wherewithal to produce a cross-cultural comparison on how societies have actually faced it. The book starts with the human tribal heritage—still very much with us as revealed recently in parts of Africa and the Middle East. It then moves through cases from India, China, Latin America, and Russia. The Maratha Empire of 17th–century Maharashtra, for example, tried to consolidate power by inducing loyalty among its outlying principalities. It granted them local hegemony in return for political and military support. But this diffusion of power contributed to the very centrifugal forces that eventually destroyed the Maratha’s own accomplishment of centralization.

In a similar case, the 17th–century Manchus conquered China and adopted her administrative apparatus. This led to regionalization and corruption, so this victory too proved pyrrhic, and contained the seeds of its own destruction. In Latin America, Spanish colonial cities with extensive jurisdiction expanded into what amounted to city-states run by remarkably loyal councils. These conditions prepared the way in the colonies, following Napoleon’s Iberian victory, for a reactionary activism on behalf of the throne. Soon a once-effective administration was devolving into patronage, oligarchy, and misrule.

In the Soviet Union, an ostensible dictatorship of the proletariat under the tutelage of a vanguard elite saw no need to consider succession at all. What could succeed the proletariat? Yet despite this pretense of monolithic unity, the contests exemplified by the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (majority/minority) inevitably ushered in deep ideological schisms. This turned the Communist Party into a shadow government, actually run by an inner coterie of strongmen. The expedience of a vanguard elite had transmogrified into an entrenched oligarchy. Eventually the whole internationalist ideal was replaced by the reality of Stalin’s totalitarian one-nation socialism. After Stalin, without his massive purges and pogroms to enforce an ironic stability, rival bureaucrats resorted to infighting and coups. Lacking any provisions for orderly succession, dictators like Khrushchev and Brezhnev tried vainly to balance stability with the demands, again, of oligarchy and patronage.

Had Burling included a case illustrating the similar failures throughout the history of Arab and Middle Eastern succession, the book would almost certainly be considered required reading today. Be that as it may, the book still bore an unmistakable message for the self-styled “revolutionaries” of the American new left of the 1960s—whose skills, means, and sacrifices amounted to no more than a parody of true revolutionaries like Leon Trotsky. Rob’s message was that the democratic provisions for orderly succession we enjoyed in our own society were, if nothing else, the least pernicious of the available alternatives. This pearl of wisdom, prized out through solid scholarship, came from a man anything but conservative in his own politics. Indeed, immediately following the Watergate affair he contributed a piece to The Nation demonstrating the risk of executive tyranny shown by the entire history of political republics.

The third reason for Burling’s relatively limited impact, ironically, is probably that his books are easy to read. He bears an unregenerate, unrepentant loathing for ponderous or pretentious rhetoric, for any style that does not put ideas plainly. Having endured forced labor on certain such verbal rock piles as a graduate student, he vowed to write so that any college freshman could understand him. It’s his dogged pursuit of this simple directness that on most days has him hunched over his keyboard, tinkering with phrasing to make it immaculately transparent. In the late 1990s, after a visiting scholar gave an impossibly abstruse talk to the department, Burling fired off an objecting e-mail to all Michigan graduate students—and had no hesitation in forwarding a copy to the speaker himself. It reassured the students that it was not their fault if they found the talk incomprehensible. It was because it was gibberish. Similarly, after once slashing his way through the first two overgrown sentences of Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice, Rob foreswore all further treks through Bourdieuian undergrowth once and for all. Though he doesn’t entirely accept my hypothesis, I think one reason an important work such as The Passage of Power has been ignored might be that understanding it is not an intellectual challenge. Some readers expect Foucaultian poses of recondite erudition (a phrase that, if it appeared in a manuscript for Burling’s inspection, would quickly find itself expiring in a pool of red ink). Discovering no challenge, they may have confused a lucid transparency for lack of insight, the error being entirely theirs.