Social Order and Political Change

Fülszöveg

SOCIAL ORDER AND POLITICAL CHAN6E
CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENTS AMONG THE CHEROKEE, THE CHOCTAW, THE CHICKASAW, AND THE CREEK
Duane Champagne
"The author's data are arrayed in a stimulating way which will be controversial. Sociologists, political scientists, and those in native American studies will certainly pay attention to the book, and I do not think that historians and anthropologists will ignore it. It is a book that cannot be ignored. If im-portance is measured by the ability to attract attention in a variety of disciplines, then this will be an important and much-discussed book."
—Jonathan Turner, University of California, Riverside
Under what conditions can democratic governments be förmed and become stable? The author addresses this question in a unique way that brings sociological and political theory to bear on the study of traditional societies, long the preserve of historians and anthropologists. By examining in detail the history of four American Indián... Tovább

Fülszöveg

SOCIAL ORDER AND POLITICAL CHAN6E
CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENTS AMONG THE CHEROKEE, THE CHOCTAW, THE CHICKASAW, AND THE CREEK
Duane Champagne
"The author's data are arrayed in a stimulating way which will be controversial. Sociologists, political scientists, and those in native American studies will certainly pay attention to the book, and I do not think that historians and anthropologists will ignore it. It is a book that cannot be ignored. If im-portance is measured by the ability to attract attention in a variety of disciplines, then this will be an important and much-discussed book."
—Jonathan Turner, University of California, Riverside
Under what conditions can democratic governments be förmed and become stable? The author addresses this question in a unique way that brings sociological and political theory to bear on the study of traditional societies, long the preserve of historians and anthropologists. By examining in detail the history of four American Indián societies—the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Creek—the author documents a generál theory of politics and constitutional government.
The four societies present an opportunity to study the process of democratic institution building in a controlled, comparative historical context. The societies were subject to similar geopolitical relations with the United States; they were incorporated into the same sequence of world economic system relations (initially fur trade and then the cotton markét); they ex-perienced the emergence of class structures; and they all produced somé form of constitu-
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tional democracy. The Cherokee, however, adopted a stable constitutional government earlier and with less coercion than the other three nations. Why was this so?
With the aid of comparative analysis, the author finds the answer in the Cherokee dif-ferentiation of politics from the nationally and religiously ordered clan system. This set of institutional relations allowed the Cherokee to maintain a strong sense of social solidarity while tolerating conflict, increased political dif-ferentiation, and formation of a political na-tionality. The other three societies were either less differentiated or less socially unified. They förmed their constitutional governments thirty to forty years later than the Cherokee and with more internál political coercion—and, in the Creek case, with less political stability.
The formation and stabilization of demo-cratic state governments is a major issue in such contemporary phenomena as political change in Third World nations and the trans-formation of the governments of Eastern Europe. The four case studies presented in this book form the basis of a new and powerful theoretical argument for understanding histor-ical patterns of democratic change, political stability, and the relations of political power.
Duane Champagne is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of American Indián Societies: Strategies and Conditions of Political and Cultural Survival.
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