Millar, W. P. J.

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

164 Histoire sociale / Social Historyfor the slaves and people of colour, the Police des Noirs encountered considerableprovincial resistance, and petitions for freedom continued to be granted, albeit at thesame low rate.To the extent that the policies and court decisions of a relatively small fractionof the French administration can be attributed to the attitudes of a wider society, theterm political culture is legitimate. My own view is that this public policy,especially after 1777, reflected both the growing power of the planter lobby and thegrowing paranoia of the police power in the face of increasing opposition to thestate, especially at the street level. Blacks were one more identifiable threat, alongwith the poor, the grain rioters, the writers of mauvais discours, and the publishersof sensationalized legal briefs and banned books. Seymour Drescher is surely rightto describe the wider French public as indifferent to the question of slavery. Perhapsthe very lack of slaves and blacks in France explains this. Peabody has told us whythere were so few.Robert ForsterJohns Hopkins UniversityHarold Perkin  The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World.London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Pp. xviii, 253.Harold Perkin has written a wonderfully stimulating and provocative account of thedevelopment of our modern world in the last 50 years. It is the last of an unintend-ed trilogy (p. xi) analysing what he views as crucial turning-points in humanhistory. The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880, published in 1969, andThe Rise of Professional Society, which followed two decades later, dealt with theIndustrial Revolution and its effects on English society, and with the subsequentrevolution in human organization, again in its English context, characterized by therise of the professional classes. In this third volume, Perkin extends his narrativeto the present time and expands it to investigate the development of the professionalelites in much of the post-industrial world: the United States, Britain, France, thetwo Germanies, Soviet Russia, and Japan.A word of caution to those accustomed to more conventional notions aboutprofessionals: Perkins use of the term is in its widest sense, to include not onlythe traditional professions, from lawyers and doctors to engineers and accountants,but also professional bureaucrats in government and professional managers inbusiness corporations (p. 1). For Perkin, professionals are any knowledge-basedexperts who provide special services. In the former Soviet Union, even the nomen-klatura, the Communist party officials, elites, and intelligentsia, are termed profes-sionals in that their positions depended on their human capital, assisted by theirpolitical loyalty (p. 23). Public and private sector bureaucrats and managers, infact, form the professional elites with which Perkin is concerned, and moretraditional professions are noticeably absent from these pages.Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 165The scope is ambitious and the pace brisk, but Perkin manages to cram into 200-odd pages of text a huge amount of information embedded in a highly readableanalysis of a world controlled by these professional elites. His aim is to examinetheir success in establishing their dominance, and the temptations they are underto exploit their society to excess (p. xv). The message is deeply felt and passion-ately put  professional society is the most creative system the world has everseen, bringing material, cultural, intellectual, and moral benefits on a scale notdreamed of by earlier generations, he writes. How can we enjoy the enormousbenefits of professional society without allowing the professional elites to abusetheir power and exploit their societies to the point of exhaustion and collapse?(p. xvi).While this theme lends great force to the argument, the text is fascinating initself. An introductory chapter explains the significance of his subject and itscharacterization by ten main trends: high living standards for all, the rise of theservice industries, the substitution of professional hierarchies for social class as thefundamental social structure, recruitment on merit, the entry of women, the growthof big government and of the welfare state, the spread of higher education, the riseof giant corporations, and the growth of a global economy dominated by trans-national corporations. Perkin then takes us on a chapter-by-chapter tour of eachcountry to examine in what ways these developments have been instrumental inshaping the recent historical past. Among the most interesting is the chapter onJapan, containing such nuggets as the jinmyaku (literally, veins in the rock) the tight networks of telephone and presumably other contacts maintained bygraduates of the elite schools when they move into professional and managerialpositions of power and control  as well as a sophisticated analysis of that coun-trys economic and social system.Perkins most condemnatory passages are reserved for the free-market economiesof the United States and Britain, where the professional/managerial classes, heclaims, have wallowed in greed, corruption, and unenlightened self-interest unim-peded by the mediating effects of the state (an argument that may strike chillinglyhome for Canadian readers of the business press and the latest revelations, forexample, of Ontario Hydros mismanagement and its CEOs disgrace). Germanyand Japan, interestingly, emerge as the favoured models of professional society,though not without warnings of their imperfections, such as intolerance and neglectof various social groups. Finally, Perkin pulls the separate themes together in acomparative chapter, then traces the rise of the global economy, and with it thesuperordinate power of the managers of transnational corporations.It would be relatively easy, given the scope and brevity of the book, to quibblewith some of its points. The incorporation of women into the professionalworkplace, for example, is supposed to be one of the major trends of Perkinsprofessional society, yet this subject receives little attention (in the chapter on theUnited States, none at all), and the implications for professional elites and thestructure of their society are hardly touched upon. Such criticisms miss the point ofthis book, however. Perkin has given us a wide-ranging, ambitious argument, theproduct of a lifetimes work on the subject, filled with wit, passion, and insight, and166 Histoire sociale / Social Historycalculated to provoke, raise questions, and ultimately make us ponder the future ofour global society.W. P. J. MillarLondon, OntarioLeonore Davidoff  Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender andClass. New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. x, 276.Worlds Between is a collection of feminist scholar Leonore Davidoffs essays, themajority of them published over the past 20 years in a variety of journals andanthologies. These were essays that I had first encountered during the 1980s as anundergraduate student of history and womens studies, such as Mastered for Life:Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England and Class and Gender inVictorian England: The Case of Hannah Cullwick and A. J. Munby. My firstreaction, on rereading them, was one of mild shock when I realized how much timehad passed since many of them were first published; they were generally not newwhen I encountered them, but their insights and arguments opened up fresh vantagepoints to my novice historians eyes. A decade later, I now read these essays asessential elements of nineteenth-century feminist historiography, for the richness ofDavidoffs scholarship, the complexities of her insights, and the care that has goneinto her research.Davidoff opens the collection by telling us that these are essays from themargins, concerned with previously ignored or trivialized subjects such as domes-ticity, housekeeping, dirt and disorder, and the relationships of domestic servants,landladies and lodgers, farmers wives and daughters, and siblings (p. 1). However,I would qualify this statement by adding that, while they were written in the contextof a profession that generally treated such topics with disdain, such is no longer thecase. Since these pieces were first published the margins have moved  I admit,in some cases, inched  much closer to the centre because of the work of Davidoffand her generation of feminist historians. In elaborating on these margins, Davidoffhas shown us just how important they have been. These essays contain numerousinsights, such as the importance of domesticity and the home in shaping and medi-ating class relations in nineteenth-century English society; the ways in which classcarried specifically gendered meanings and, a related point, the central place ofgender in English societys hierarchies; the importance of rituals and patterns ofconsumption; and the complexities and contradictions of these relations of subordi-nation and power.Davidoffs insistence that gender and class relations must be analysed in specifichistorical contexts runs throughout the book; her work demonstrates how bothfeminist theory and historical scholarship benefit from such an approach. First,historical research has generated important theoretical insights into gender. Second-ly, our understanding of the past has acquired many new dimensions through theefforts of scholars such as Davidoff. As well, many of these essays suggest that

Harold Perkin — The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World

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Harold Perkin — The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)