Group Project: Let’s all (re-)read Seymour Martin Lipset’s groundbreaking “Political Man” (1960) over the break! - ThreadSky

casmudde.bsky.social • 80 days ago

Group Project:

Let’s all (re-)read Seymour Martin Lipset’s groundbreaking “Political Man” (1960) over the break!

Comments

And/or listen to Gary Marks talk about it and other works of Lipset?

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ubQGnvYUGh2ObkDyAbZJ2?si=L1SWIxe9Qlye56EXazctTA

casmudde.bsky.social•79 days ago

Probably my favorite episode of your podcast!

peterla.bsky.social•79 days ago

Very good episode. I recommend this (and several of your other podcast episodes) for the students in my political behaviour course!

nonstopdemocrat.bsky.social•80 days ago

"Great then is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property; for where some possess much, and the others nothing, there may arise an extreme democracy, or a pure oligarchy;"

Trouble ahead spelled out on page 1.

peterla.bsky.social•79 days ago

Great book, although with some quite vicious statements about working class people

ralphscott.bsky.social•79 days ago

Isn't it just! I used this quote in my thesis but with this caveat:

jack-bailey.co.uk•79 days ago

Downs is full of similarly patronising/sexist language about women

ralphscott.bsky.social•79 days ago

Well the weird thing here is that women are just ignored! Though I guess the focus of this passage is on how post-compulsory education and work shape political horizons, which were both still often closed off to women. Very different now!

casmudde.bsky.social•79 days ago

Not necessarily how men are still, at the very least implicitly, the norm.

The term “working class” still often refers to “white, industrial man”.

ralphscott.bsky.social•79 days ago

Yes, very true. I more meant that to look at the effects of work and post-compulsory education without considering the gender component is to miss a lot nowadays (given more women than men tend to attend university now), eg this paper: https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241271123

rosedegeus.bsky.social•79 days ago

It’s been a while but pretty sure also true for the American voter 🫠

mathildevanditmars.eu•79 days ago

How strange that I do not have any memory of this... Quite striking indeed 🫠 Love that you put this in your thesis!!!

ralphscott.bsky.social•79 days ago

Given the topic it seemed essential to return to Lipset! But yes there's certainly some generalisation going on...

casmudde.bsky.social•79 days ago

Isn’t it remarkable how omnipresent these views remain today though, both in academia and media?

ralphscott.bsky.social•79 days ago

Absolutely! Still very influential in how the political effects of education are theorised I think which is why I wanted to include the full quote.

(One thing that is striking about reading Lipset and other foundational work like it is how free they feel to theorise and speculate. Different times!)

mariosrichards.bsky.social•79 days ago

Not so weird given that the alternative - correctly or incorrectly - *feels* like "no there's no obvious lever you can pull to avoid future Holocausts".

peterla.bsky.social•79 days ago

Yeah, that's a good example! Here's another one:

casmudde.bsky.social•79 days ago

Still a very strong Freudian influence, partly through Adorno.

ralphscott.bsky.social•79 days ago

Wow, strong stuff! 😬

danjdevine.bsky.social•79 days ago

Agreed! His authoritarianism of the working class paper is something.

peterla.bsky.social•79 days ago

Yeah! Working on a paper now with @chknutsen.bsky.social where we revisit this thesis for *political* authoritarianism specifically. Across global surveys, experiments etc we find little evidence of working class people being less supportive of democracy or its norms than other groups.

pzuluaga.bsky.social•79 days ago

📌

garritzmannj.bsky.social•79 days ago

great book! But we could also take a break over the break 😉

tobysjames.bsky.social•79 days ago

Group discussion q: I still start modules on comparative politics with his work. Should we? Does it make sense to go back to the classics and chart the lineage of the discipline in this way? Or should we skip straight to contemporary theories given the gaps and progress that we have seen since?

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply