Contenu du sommaire

Autodidactive executives. There is a great deal of talk at present in France about «executives*», as if this social category, which has no history of «trouble making» (and virtually no history in general), was somehow a «problem» today. When a group become an issue, discussions about it often begin in response to questions that the group has raised concerning itself : experiences which previously were scattered and silent take on definite forms. In this process, a group existing on the practical level may give itself a visible form. Or, putting the matter in slightly different terms, a division may occur within an existing group which has become too large, too heterogenous, or too conflictridden to maintain a «working consensus» regarding the conception of the model member (here, the model executive) within the group (here, the compagny) and regarding, especially, his public image. In the case of executives, one may ask whether the subjective unity of the category is not threatened by the growth in its overall size and, no doubt, by the increase in the relative proportion of those with the least resources and the fewest academic and professional degrees. We have chosen to organize the documentary material around an individual case, that of an «autodidactic» executive. He entered the labor market in the 1960s as a «technician» and was subsequently «promoted» to the rank of «technical and commercial executive». But this «success» was the prelude to a series of disappointments, humiliations, and failures which made him aware of his «limits». In the course of these same experiences he thus acquired the models of excellence which, in the social image of the category, define the «executive», and he discovered that he is not an «executive», or rather that he is not one in the same way and to the same as others are. It is the meaning and function of this process of «becoming aware» that we analyze here. The case may well be. typical : in his testimony, the informant is perhaps conveying a generic experience which is common to a whole group in the sense that it is paradigmatic and is expressed in terms of schema generated through collective elaboration. * The meaning of the French word «cadre» is not precisely the same as that of the English word «executive». In particular, in French «cadre» can be applied further down the business and corporate hierarchy (as far as, roughly, «lower-level management»).

Jews in the class structure of Hungary. An essay on the historical roots of the anti-semitic crises of the twentieth century. The first crisis of anti-Semitism in Hungary occured immediately after World War One. The present essay attemps to elucidate the conditions which made this crisis possible by means of an analysis of the massive social integration of Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century and of the structural disequilibrium this produced in various areas of Hungarian society. A survey of the historical circumstances of the establishment of Jewish communities in Eastern and Central Europe brings out the singular nature of the Hungarian situation : from the time of the edict of toleration proclaimed by Joseph II in 1781, Hungary offered optimal conditions for neweomers which elicited a massive immigration. As a result, towards the end of the century there existed a historically unique combination of a large number of Jews raised «in the Oriental manner» and the possibility of their becoming integrated «in the Western manner». The political policy of Magyarization and of integration pursued by the liberal and nationalist nobility led to such measures as the citizenship law of the Estates General of 1840, the Jaw of emancipation voted by the Revolutionary Assembly in 1849 (though its effects were only ephemeral, its was the first of its kind in Eastern or Central Europe), and the definitive law of emancipation which foliowed the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. This policy openend the way for the socio-cultural assimilation of the Jews. At the same time, the incapacity of this same nobility to enter into the bourgeois professions left the field free for the mobile elements among the immigrant Jews to take over control of the country's wholesale trade (especially in agricultural products) and to enter the intellectual occupations. After the compromise of 1867 there no longer existed any obstacles to the development of capitalism, and the Jewish bourgeoisie, endowed with remarkable business skills and in possession of liquid capital, steadily strengthened its position, playing the major role in the creation of the country's industrial, financial, and commercial infrastructure, while simultaneously remaining outside the governing classes. Thus, towards the end of the century, a division of the work of social domination became established in which the descendants of the nobility, who were often impoverished, the gentry), took up new positions in the official administration while the bourgeoisie, the majority of whom were Jewish, took possession of the economic power. Like the dominant classes, the middle classes, -notably the intelligentsia- remained divided into Jewish and Christian fractions, each of which was marked, at first, by different social origins, by a different ethos, and by different collective ambitions and each of which occupied relatively separate positions within the intellectual and liberal professions. At the beginning of the twentieth century one can observe, on the one hand, a fusion of the Jewish and Christian intelligentsia in the fields of intellectual production which were situated far from the center of socio-economic power and which included a large proportion of Jews, and, on the other hand, an increasing degree of competition between Jews and Christians in the other areas of middle class activity. This competition was exacerbated by World War One, which provo-ked a dramatic contraction of the markets of economic and symbolic production. This development, in turn, served as the pretext - helped along by the collapse of the liberal political regime - for an anti-Semitic activism in the middle classes which continued to increase until World War Two.

The position of the intelligentsia in the class structure of state socialist societies. The author, in describing the class structure of the state socialist societies of East Europe, puts forward the hypothesis that the mechanisms of redistribution play the same role in these societies as private ownership of the means of production does in capitalist societies - namely, to ensure the setting aside of surplus value and the expropriation of the producers. Those who have an interest in increasing the importance of such mechanisms may soon corne to constitute a new dominant class - larger than the political elite, the bureaucracy, or the techno-bureaucracy - which could potentially integrate all elements of the intelligentsia. Unlike the bureaucrat as he is described by Max Weber, the intellectual in state socialist societies contends that he has a monopoly on the teleological knowledge necessary to assure a rational, socially just, and economically efficient distribution of his society's surplus. It is on this basis that he claims power for himself. The socialist societies and the rise of the new dominant class are not the products of Marxist ideals ; on the contrary, it almost seems as if the intellectuals have profited from these ideals in order to seize power for their class. It is no accident that the new social organization has appeared in societies in which there already existed an intelligentsia (the Russian origin of the term is in itself significant) and in which the intellectuals had not been transformed, as in the Anglo-saxon countries, into professional relegated to the role of experts, but were considered, instead, to be social critics. The distinction between the intelligentsia as a class and the political elite makes it possible to understand the struggles which have opposed, notably during the Stalinist period, the class in the broad sense and the restricted elite which claims to monopolize political power, that is to say, the power to act in the name of the class. It enables us to understand, as well, the major economic antagonism, the basis of friction between the classes ; for this antagonism is not between Party «bureaucrats» and «liberal intellectuals» or «dissidents», but between the intelligentsia as a whole and the working-class. Class consciousness is at a very low level in present-day East Europe, and the workers are dispossessed not only of their work but even of their class identity. This is undoubtedly because the intelligentsia, as dominant class, tends to lose its capacity for creating intellectuals who remain an organic part of the dominated class and to produce only ideologists who will act to further their basic class interests, the most important of which is the ideology of the absence of class.