The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution. byJohn MarkoffReview by: Richard LachmannSocial Forces, Vol. 76, No. 2 (Dec., 1997), pp. 713-715Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2580734 .

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Book Reviews / 713

ethnographer's unwillingness to master relevant bodies of technical knowledge is unclear. (Donald MacKenzie's recent sociological study of nuclear missile guidance shows how much similar technical detail is in the public domain and how willing relevant scientists are to talk about many aspects of their research.) The result is disappointing: Nuclear Rites is an ethnographic portrait of laboratory life painted using only the broadest brush-strokes and most basic colors.

It is therefore doubly disappointing that Nuclear Rites concludes with a misconceived attempt to differentiate the anthropology of science (supposedly concerned with Big and Important Issues) and the sociology of scientific knowledge ("grotesquely irrelevant and scholastic" in its allegedly tight focus on "social and epistemic processes in the laboratory"). It is an airy dismissal of the sociology of scientific knowledge that is only made possible by ignoring some of its most impressive (and politically sensitive) achievements, including MacKenzie's work on missile guidance, which is scarcely mentioned, and his studies of nuclear weapons design and testing, which are not mentioned at all.

The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution. By John Markoff Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. 689 pp. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $25.00.

Reviewer: RICHARD LACHMANN, SUNY, Albany

During the spring of 1789, as revolutionary action was reaching a peak in both Paris and the countryside, French clerics, nobles, and men from the Third Estate (both urban bourgeois and peasants) gathered to elect delegates to the first Estates General called since 1614. The king had been forced to call such a national legislature into session for relief from a fiscal crisis that threatened to disarm France abroad and subvert its authority at home. At the same time as Frenchmen from the three estates met to choose delegates they also composed Cahiers des doleances, litanies of their complaints about the monarchy, the other estates, and the state of the kingdom. The Cahiers have been mined piecemeal by many historians who recognize them as a peerless historical data source, the clearest window we have into the opinions and social thoughts of a past society.

John Markoff has spent decades organizing and carrying out an analysis of the Cahiers. (A companion volume, Revolutionary Demands: A ContentAnalysis of the Cahiers de Doleances of 1789, co-authored with Gilbert Shapiro, focuses on the Cahiers themselves.) This book takes the fruits of that project and uses them to address the question of why, among all the demands made by various groups of peasants, urban bourgeois, nobles, and clerics, the abolition of agrarian feudalism was the one achieved by the revolution. Markoff begins by showing that nobles,

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714 / Social Forces 76:2, December 1997

clerics, bourgeois, and peasants differed with each other and among themselves in their understandings of what seignurial privileges entailed and in their opinions of the legitimacy of each honorific or remunerative element of feudalism.

Each estate's stance in the Cahiers did not necessarily predict its actions over the years of revolution. Markoff has constructed a second data set, equally comprehensive and sensitive, of all the incidents of rural insurrection from the start of the national crisis in 1788 to the final abolition of agrarian feudalism in 1793. Markoff offers us an extensive and detailed analysis of the forms, timing, and locations of insurrection during that revolutionary half decade. Those central chapters (5, 6, and 7) combine to create, as Markoff aptly puts it, a movie of contention to match the snapshot of grievance he develops from the Cahiers.

Markoff finds an array of grievances among French peasants that gave rise to various forms of contention directed at a diverse set of targets. Markoff carefully and consistently uses the data to test specific historical theories about the French Revolution as a whole and explore theses that focus on specific aspects of that era. As such, this book will be of immense interest for, and will significantly affect, historical debates. Markoff, however, also relates those historical discussions and his analyses of the data to address issues at the center of the sociological study of social movements, revolutions, state formation, and economic development.

Markoff finds only limited support for Marxist, Tocquevillian, and regional ecological theories of the French Revolution. Peasant contention often was not tied to bourgeois antifeudalism, nor was it concentrated in high tax regions. The distinction, drawn in different ways by Marxists and students of regional ecology, between high yield, open-field northeastern France and the more backward south and west of the country, does not correlate with either the frequency or the objectives of peasant rebellion during the years of revolution. The timing, intensity, and goals of peasant rebellion varied widely within as well as across provinces and regions. Markoff finds they responded in part to specific local grievances and to opportunities opened by the intensification of intra-elite conflicts within provinces.

Markoff's main finding is that the revolution was propelled by a dialogue between rural peasants and national legislators. He reminds us that the French Revolution was a national event, not a mere concatenation of local events. The end results - the national abolition of feudalism, the abolition of the monarchy, and establishment of a republic - were enacted by a National Assembly in response to rural rebellion and Parisian uprisings.

Markoff shows how the greatest wave of rural rebellions spurred the National Assembly to proclaim the abolition of feudalism in August 1789. The years' long process of converting that declaration into concrete legislation responded to later waves of rebellion. When peasants were quiet, legislators attempted to water down the abolition by converting feudal privileges into property rights that peasants would have to honor until they could buy them from their owners. When peasants rebelled against any target, even in counter-revolution against the new regime, the legislators

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Book Reviews / 715

radicalized their decrees until feudalism was totally abolished without compensation in 1793.

The Abolition of Feudalism will become a sociological landmark. Markoff has succeeded better than any sociologist before him in showing how a myriad of particular local grievances combined in a context of elite and class conflicts and regime crises to force revolutionary action by a reluctant new regime. Reading Markoff, we can follow peasants, bourgeois, nobles, clerics, and free-floating politicians as they sought to discern the dangers and opportunities created by one another's actions. Markoff recreates the temporal and spacial contexts within which Frenchmen acted with opportunism and idealism to make a revolution, whose contexts are illuminated in this wonderful book.

Making the Majors: The Transformation of Team Sports in America By Eric M. Leifer. Harvard University Press, 1995. 378 pp. Cloth, $49.95.

Reviewer: GARY ALAN FINE, University of Georgia

As I write this review on a sweltering afternoon, the Colorado Avalanche and the Florida Panthers are battling in the finals of the National Hockey League Stanley Cup. What to long-time hockey fans must seem like a bizarre, perhaps distressing, conclusion reflects in its dramatic contours the transformation of North American professional sports. A Stanley Cup finals between Florida and Colorado breaks the link between quality and historic hockey venues. In Making the Majors, Eric Leifer claims that the expansion of professional sports is tied to the establishment of teams that are close in ability (the National Football League represents the ultimate of this process) and national consumers willing to view games between teams with which they do not have a direct, personal, and local investment. Sports playoffs should, in "the modern prototype," be equally appealing to spectators outside of the teams' home media-markets. The success of the Super Bowl as a national holiday reflect this process. Leifer propounds the plausible argument that the powerful linkage between fan interest and locality has been broken by forces of mobility and the power of a national media.

Leifer, operating from a perspective grounded in organizational and economic sociology, argues that the structure of successful "major" leagues is responsive to economic arrangements. For example, successful early leagues were characterized by close pennant races that were eventually won by large cities - critical when city size was linked to the stability and resources of teams. The New York Yankees dynasty represents the exemplification of this process. It is striking to remember that at one time football and basketball major leagues fielded teams in Canton, Ohio, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Elmira, New York.

Vigorous local markets, once crucial to professional sports (notably baseball), proved limiting in the face of national television broadcasts. For major leagues in

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