Vol 5 – Issue 4 by Catalyst

Author:Catalyst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-08-25T20:34:45+00:00

Jeff Goodwin: I’m curious about whether there were specific mentors or individuals, other than Jack Bloom, who led you to this focus on the importance of the cotton economy in particular and political economy in general. In your book’s preface, you thank four mentors: Charles Perrow, James Rule, Michael Schwartz, and Charles Tilly. Sociologists are certainly familiar with these scholars. Could you say something about their influence on your book?

Doug McAdam: Frankly, three of those four names are there because they were 75 percent of my dissertation committee. But they were extraordinarily helpful.

Charles Perrow was my chair. I wouldn’t say he influenced the substantive argument I was developing — he wasn’t a political sociologist, nor did he study race. But Perrow, as well as James Rule, was incredibly attentive. They read every last page I wrote and marked up my copies. I’m indebted to them both.

That said, I wouldn’t give them much credit for shaping the substance of the argument. Michael Schwartz is different in that regard. He is a Marxist sociologist who had studied the Populist movement in the South.6 Schwartz certainly influenced me. He pointed me toward texts and pushed me to emphasize political economy. He may have even turned me on to Bloom’s dissertation.

Charles Tilly didn’t influence me as I was writing the dissertation. I was aware of his work, but it didn’t seem particularly relevant to what I was working on. Tilly’s influence came later, after I’d submitted the manuscript to the University of Chicago Press. He was one of three reviewers. To this day, I don’t know who the other two were. Their reviews were no more than a page at most.

Tilly’s review was twelve pages, single-spaced. It couldn’t have been more helpful. Initially, I was overwhelmed by having to deal with twelve pages. But Tilly’s comments forced me to sharpen my argument. He certainly influenced its final form, although his work was moving away from political economy during that time.

Like I said, the emphasis on political economy came in part from Michael Schwartz. But it was also just “in the water” of academic circles while I was in graduate school. This was during the early 1970s. Marxism was everywhere. It was a central analytic framework used by the likes of Jack Bloom, Jeffery Paige, William Domhoff, Nicos Poulantzas, and others. And lots of graduate students at the time followed suit by using Marxism to frame and fashion their work.

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