4 - The Professions in the Making of Estatist Society

Summary

This chapter’s analysis of post-revolutionary professional continuities is sensitive to the logics of the expertise-derived autonomy, leverage, and agency of the professional, the scholar, and the torchbearer of the enlightenment that are characteristic of modern societies, broadly and narrowly, of a totalizing revolutionary order, where those very agents of knowledge are subjected to ideological stigma. A full-variance cross-regional analysis provides baseline evidence of a self-reproducing nature of professional knowledge – in space and in time. While this exercise helps us partially account for regional heterogeneity in the social structure, a linear account would not do justice to the nuances of professional–personal life cycles given the checkered nature of professional reproduction; the heterogeneity in adaptation within employment sites and among social groups; and the horizontal network ties aiding social possibilities and effecting shifts within networks. The chapter provides a conceptual framework sensitive to the formal professional channels of social reproduction, namely (1) the “organization man” channels, capturing the established professions; (2) the proto-professional arenas peculiar to states with a radical social agenda, which I label the “pop-up” sphere; and (3) the “museum society,” where persecuted intellectuals, cultural figures, and the literati found safe havens. It also deploys insights from social network analysis to explore horizontal and spatial aspects of the social ties that facilitated the educated estates’ adaptation.