Abstract
Sociologists tend to downplay the role of accidents, circumstance, serendipity, and luck. This essay describes three times that history derailed Michael Kimmel’s research agenda, and how he “recovered.”
Social scientists tend to see individual decisions as embedded in complex structural patterns. We rarely consider the role that chance, accident, or even luck plays. Had we gone to College A instead of College B, we would have had a different friend, who would have introduced us to a different girlfriend or boyfriend, and we would have ended up with a different spouse than the one for whom we believe we were “fated.” History itself can shift the course of a life in a heartbeat. In my case, history has “intervened” in my research—no less than three times.
The first time was during my first semester of graduate school at Brown University in September 1972. At that time, Rhode Island was the most solidly Democratic state in the country. A statewide pre-election presidential poll predicted that a Republican would carry the state for the first time in memory, and that every other Democratic candidate would win by a landslide.
My MA thesis promised to examine how ticket-splitting was a way to resolve the psychological experience of “cognitive dissonance”—the incongruence between behavior and self-perception. “I’m a Democrat, but I just voted for Nixon.” I hypothesized the Democratic stalwarts saying, “so I’d better vote for all the other Democrats.”
The pre-election poll was a near-perfect picture of the actual voting results. I planned a post-election poll to test the “halo hypothesis” that more people say they voted for the winner in an election than actually do. My poll was scheduled to begin in early January 1973. That very morning, the first reports of the arrests for the break-in of Democratic Party headquarters by Nixon operatives began pouring out of Washington. Watergate soon became a household word. Overnight, Nixon’s halo faded; virtually no one would admit they voted for him. So much for that thesis. Instead, I decided to write about sociological theory: at least guys who had been dead for a century wouldn’t make any trouble for me.
Five years later, I was preparing a PhD thesis. This time, I planned a historical dissertation on seventeenth century France. I was interested in tax revolts—how citizens mobilize their opposition to taxation as the first phase of revolution. My research led me to compare the English Revolution of 1640-1660 to a lesser known aristocratic revolt in France known as the Fronde during the same period. A single tax scheme started these affairs. In England, it was Ship Money. In France, the king floated municipal bonds (called rentes), which were barely disguised taxes on the lesser nobility.
Berkeley’s libraries had some massive tomes, published in the mid-nineteenth century, listing the holdings of every archive in France. Looking over these lists I learned that all the records of the rentes—who bought them, and for how much—were just sitting at the library of the Hotel de Ville waiting for me! Or so I thought.
Six months later, armed with a certified dissertation proposal and enough funding to last for two years in the archives, I showed up on a sunny September morning at the librarian’s desk at the Hotel de Ville.
“I’ve come to see the records of the rentes,” I informed a rather stuffy and officious man. “The what?” he said, incredulously. “The rentes,” I said, wondering if I was somehow fracturing my French. “You know, those municipal bonds from the mid-seventeenth century that nearly brought down the king.” “Oh,” he said, smirking. “They’re not here.” “Excuse me? Where could they possibly be? The major volumes that list the holdings of the French archives said they were here.” “Well, those records were here. Then. In 1868, when those volumes were compiled. But you may recall that during the Commune in 1871 the Parisian mobs burned the Hotel de Ville. I’m afraid those records no longer exist.”
Which explained why no one had ever had studied them before.
Fast forward to the present: as the new century dawned, I was studying the waves of ethnic nationalist violence sweeping across Europe: Basque, Breton, Irish, Corsican nationalists. I planned to interview members of their organizations, beginning September 1, 2001. Ten days later, no one wanted to talk to me about ethnic nationalism.
But other groups wanted to talk, so when history intervened again, I went with it. I’ve spent the past couple of years interviewing White Supremacists and ex-Neo-Nazis in the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia to understand their grievances and worldviews. It’s a big, rewarding project, and had history not intervened again I never would have pursued it.
“Accidents will happen,” Elvis Costello sang. They can scarcely be predicted, and certainly not controlled. History may knock us off course, or present the chance of a lifetime.