Recombinant Property in East European Capitalism

Sociology began as a science of transition, founded at our century's turn on studies of the epochal shifts from tradition to modernity, rural to urban society, Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, feudalism to capitalism, and mechanical to organic solidarity. For the founders of sociology, the crisis besetting European societies at the end of the 19th century was diagnosed as a normative and institutional vacuum. The old order, regulated by tradition, had passed but a new moral order had not yet been established. During our own fin de steele, not the crumbling of traditional structures but the collapse of communism gives new life to the transition problematic (see Alexander, 1994, for an extended critical discussion). As the science of the not yet, transitology studies the present as an approximation of a designated future (Blanchard, Froot and Sachs, 1994), risking an underlying telelogy in which concepts are driven by hypostasized end-states. I In that framework, the transitional present is a period of dislocation as society undergoes the passage through a liminal state suspended between one social order and another (Bunce and Csanadi, 1992), each conceived as a stable equilibrium organized around a coherent and more or less unitary logic. But is ours still the century of transition? And is that model of social change, so formative in the launching of sociology, still adequate for understanding the momentous changes in contemporary Eastern Europe? Difficult to assimilate within the transition problematic are the numerous studies from Eastern Europe documenting parallel and contradictory logics in which ordinary citizens were already experiencing, for a decade prior to 1989, a social world in which various domains were not integrated coherently (Gabor, 1979, 1986;