Search

This paper is an invitation to sociologists to take seriously the topic of fashion. Only a handful of scholars, such as Simmel (1904), Sapir (1931), and the Langs (1961), have given more than casual concern to the topic. Their individual analyses of it, while illuminating in several respects, have been limited in scope, and within the chosen limits very sketchy. The treatment of the topic by sociologists in general, such as we find it in textbooks and in occasional pieces of scholarly writing, is even more lacking in substance. The major deficiencies in the conventional sociological treatment are easily noted—a failure to observe and appreciate the wide range of operation of fashion; a false assumption that fashion has only trivial or peripheral significance; a mistaken idea that fashion falls in the area of the abnormal and irrational and thus is out of the mainstream of human group life; and, finally, a misunderstanding of the nature of fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore the usefulness of Weber's city typology in relation to the Russian urban experience and to attempt to locate the Russian city within Weber's celebrated Oriental-Occidental dichotomy. The failure of various intellectual and revolutionary groups before and in 1917 to liberalize a traditionalistic societal system is correlated to the absence of a middle class in the Russian cultural context. Kiev, Novgorod, and Pskov existed long before the Mongol conquest of Russia in the thirteenth century and were exposed to certain Western influences due to the political connections with the neighboring Western countries. Unknown before the Mongols arrived, Moskva "still in the nineteenth century before the liberation of the peasants from slavery retained all the characteristics of a great Oriental city of about the time of Diocletian of the second century A.D." In addition to being the seat of the patrimonial ruler, Moskva was a "locality where rents from possessions in land and slaves as well as income from office holding were spent." Elsewhere Weber said that the cities in Russia "never arrived at freedom in the Western sense. Everywhere the military, judicial, and industrial authority was taken from the cities." This act of taking away autonomous-autocephalous authority is probably Weber's reference to the total destruction of Novgorod and Pskov by the Russian rulers as soon as they emerged from the shadow of Mongol dependence as well as to the Russian colonial conquest of the non-Russian cities and countries in the more recent centuries including the twentieth. Seven major characteristics basic to Weber's Oriental vs. Occidental typology of urban behavior, as tentatively modified in view of the needs and the contribution of recent research, will be utilized in examining the Russian experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]