Who supported National Socialism in Germany, and why? The conventional answers are well-supported and satisfying. The Nazis, we know, gained their decisive electoral support from those “middle” groups of German society that belonged neither to the elite nor to the proletariat and that lay outside the two great “camps”-Socialist and Catholic-of German political life. That means, to name the most significant categories, Protestant (or at least secularized) peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, and white-collar workers, and even some nonunionized manual workers, most of them probably skilled.

It is clear from the title that this paper has an historiographical emphasis, one which might seem naive to the professional historian, but one which is not at all so naive to the historian of science or medicine. For me, these disciplines should speak to the present; my aim is to direct our attention to the failure of the history of medicine in this respect, and to suggest possible linkages with the human sciences, whose energies are so directed. I do not mean that its subject matter must be drawn from contemporary events—sometimes the very foreignness of the past allows an encapsulation of a situation which gives a clearer view both of the constraints operative within it, and of the unities underlying apparent diversity. This clarity can then encourage a more perceptive reflexion back to the present.

The European conquest of Asia is one of the major historical movementsof our time. Pannikar calls this the age of Vasco DeGama, Parry writesof the rise of European Hegemony, and McNeill sees it as part of an evenbroader historical process that he calls the rise of the west. For all observers it was truly a conquest, a violent and bloody struggle in which Europe gained the ascendence through superior military might.

What does wage labor and capital mean to a peasantry that is subjected to rapid rural proletarianization and what is the basis of that meaning?

I wish to discuss an aspect of this question in the light of certain ideological reactions manifested by a South American lowland peasantry as expanding sugar plantations absorb their lands and peasants are converted into landless wage laborers. In the southern extremities of the Cauca Valley, Colombia, it is commonly thought that male plantation workers can increase their output, and hence their wage, through entering into a secret contract with the devil. However, the local peasants, no matter how needy they may be, never make such a contract when working their own plots or those of their peasant neighbors for wages. It is also thought that by illicitly baptizing money instead of a child in the Catholic church, that money can become interest bearing capital, while the child will be deprived of its rightful chance of entering heaven.

The history of the professions in the West since the French Revolution is a success story, a triumph, but not always an easy one. From the beginning of the nineteenth century in continental Europe the professions had a great attraction as careers presumably open to talent, but the demand for professional services developed more slowly than interest in professional careers and more slowly than the schools that supplied the market. Lenore O'Boyle has drawn attention to this discrepancy and the revolutionary potential of the frustrated careerists produced by it.

From an inquiry into three distinct interpretations of African economic data, we have suggested that homo africanus is oeconomicus rather than antiquus. First, while substantivists (traditionalists) and modernists (developmental economists) appropriately subordinated homo africanus' economic behavior to social considerations, they mistakenly de-emphasized the role of markets, especially in economies where market contacts were peripheral. Consequently (since their model for comparative economic behavior was that of the traditional selfregulating market economy), they concluded that homo africanus antiquus est. Second, believing that when stripped of their cultural impedimenta, all economies conformed to the same laws, formalists 45 Both Maurice Godelier and Emmanuel Terray have criticized him for argued that homo africanus oeconomicus est. Accordingly, they recommended modifications and applications of concepts such as rationalization, maximization, the scarcity postulate, surpluses, input, output levels, pricing and profits, and quantification in general.

Third, we examined the models of the French structuralist neo-Marxists who, by positing homo africanus within select categories of materialist history, have maintained that structurally, materially and existentially, he was oeconomicus. Beginning with an inquiry into modes of production, they averred that he produced, consumed and circulated material goods by virtue of his existence within a social structure and superstructure which was materially determined. Accordingly, they revealed his unique relationship to the market. Moreover, structuralist neo-Marxists have transformed the substantivist theory of social "embeddedness" (or the subordination of an economy to social constraints which act as cultural obstacles to change) into a social "realization" or reflection of change within production modes, whose inner structure is transformed according to the dialectic. Their model, therefore, not only has more depth and dynamism than that of the substantivists, but its structural linkages are causally related.

The theories which have been offered to explain the governmental instability and persistent political fragmentation of the Third Republic have been of two basic types. Either specific institutional structures have been blamed, or the French national character has been cited. Often-mentioned institutional weaknesses have included the multi-party system, the dominance of the legislative branch, the independent and authoritarian civil service, the various electoral systems tried–especially the two-ballot system and proportional representation–and so on. Aspects of political culture which are said to have contributed to instability and ineffective government include an innate distrust of leaders, the avoidance of face-to-face confrontation and compromise, the lack of a training for democracy in voluntary associations, and an authoritarian educational system. The common element in all of these explanations is that they begin at the top; they see France as a uniform society with “average” ways of doing things. That is, these explanations assume that the explanation to instability and fragmentation can be found at the national level by studying the aggregate characteristics of French men and women or by analyzing the political institutions of the nation-state.

In the winter of 1861–62 there was a guerrilla uprising in WesternMissouri, directed in main against the Union Army and against localpro-Union sympathizers. The number of active participants was smallby more recent standards. At any given time the guerrillas in questionprobably numbered no more than 200 individuals. They had, however, an impact beyond that suggested by their size. In the ensuing three years the guerrillas managed to tie up more than 40,000 Union troops on stationary occupation duty. As in almost all classic cases of guerrilla warfare, the Union forces were rendered relatively immobile by the necessity to protect fixed points such as urban areas, supply depots, and lines of communication. In addition to their military effect, the guerrillas have become over time a fairly well known part of American folklore. Their leader through most of the period was William Quantrill. From their ranks came at least two of the more famous bandit gangs of frontier history—the James brothers and the Younger brothers. Their most famous exploit, the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, has been the subject of film and other commercial treatment.

In a provocatively entitled article, “Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community: An Open and Shut Case,” Professor G. William Skinner has raised a number of important issues regarding the closed corporate and open peasant community types first formulated by Eric Wolf (1955, 1957). Skinner questions Wolfs assumption (1957: 8) that closed corporate communities developed in areas where society became dualized “…into a dominant entrepreneurial sector and a dominated sector of native peasants,” whereas open peasant communities arose in the new, market-production oriented settlements budded off from Europe “ …in response to the rising demand for cash crops which accompanied the development of capitalism in Europe” (Wolf, 1955: 462).

There is an enormous social-scientific literature on the concepts of politicalviolence, internal war, and social conflict (e.g., Nieburg, 1969;Eckstein, 1964; Oberschall, 1973). These categories are intended toexclude conventional military conflicts between recognized states on theone hand and purely interpersonal violence on the other hand. But the theoretical treatment of one variety of violent social conflict is more limited, and it is this that I want to discuss: revolutionary terrorism. The use of terrorist tactics would seem to be more widespread today than in the past, if newspaper headlines are to be relied upon, and certainly public concern about it is greater. It is therefore incumbent upon social science to attempt to contribute to an understanding of it.

The Graeco-Roman world, with which I am concerned to the exclusion of the pre-Greek Near East, was a world of cities. Even the agrarian population, always a majority, most often lived in communities of some kind, hamlets, villages, towns, not in isolated farm homesteads. It is a reasonable and defensible guess that, for the better part of a thousand years, more and more of the inhabitants of Europe, northern Africa and western Asia lived in towns, in a proportion that was not matched in the United States, for example, until the Civil War. (Admittedly only a guess is possible, since statistics are lacking for antiquity.) The ancients themselves were firm in their view that civilized life was thinkable only in and because of cities. Hence the growth of towns as the regular and relentless accompaniment of the spread of Graeco-Roman civilization; eastward after the conquests of Alexander as far as the Hindukush, to the west from Africa to Britain with the Roman conquests, until the number of towns rose into the thousands.

Colonial Latin American societies have generally been presented as systems of estates following forms that were firmly entrenched in Europe before the Spanish conquest in America, an estate being “a legally defined segment of the population of a society which has distinctive rights and duties established by law” (Lenski 1966:77). Lyle McAlister suggests that the American equivalent of a threefold European system of noble—clergy—commoner estates was represented by broad racial classifications: Spaniards—Castas—Indians.

With the continuing rapid growth of cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, social scientists have expected a clear shift of political power from rural to urban-based groups. The usual assumption is that this shift would stem from the process of urban economic growth which would lead to political centralization and political integration, both centered in the city. Such assumptions are found most explicitly in many ofthe theories of modernization developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Such theories were often derived from a so-called “Western” or European model.

Most runaway slave communities in the Americas were quickly overcome by whites. However, a good many of those communities not only survived but became legally recognized towns whose residents eventually blended into the surrounding population. The first part of this article attempts to demonstrate that, although whites managed to eventually destroy most New World fugitive slave settlements, a surprising number of them managed to survive. The second section analyzes the social, demographic, and economic changes that one such community, called Mandinga, went through in evolving from a runaway hideout to a legal township.

Did Idi Amin join the army because of a lack of alternative economic opportunities for uneducated Kakwa in colonial Uganda? Or was he helped by the prior attractiveness of “tall African specimens” to those who were recruiting for the King's African Rifles?

Why have black people performed better by world standards in athletics than in most other sports and games? Does the explanation lie in the low economic status of blacks? Or is it partly a question of the physical attributes of some black “athletic specimens?”

Did the food culture of the Gurkhas and Punjabis help to make them “martial people” suitable for recruitment into the Indian army? Or were there primarily economic differences between them and the less martial communities of India like, say, the Gujerati?

Overt ethnic conflict is frequently accompanied by the observation that the conflict is not essentially rooted in ethnic differences but is primarilyeconomic in origin. Examples are not hard to come by; it has been madein regard to the American Negro situation, the Catholics in NorthernIreland and the Ugandan Asians, to name but three instances. The claim that economic differences underlie ethnic conflict raises the questions of whether all interethnic conflict can be accounted for within the framework of a conflict theory of social stratification, and this in turn raises the broader question of whether all types of interethnic relations, of conflict and harmony, assimilation, integration, separatism and segregation can be subsumed under a more general theory of stratification.