In Ruling Oneself Out Ivan Ermakoff (2008) addresses the puzzle of what amounts to collective political suicide: why would any constitutional body pass legislation that in effect cedes all its power to another entity—an autocrat? Constitutional rule rules itself out, closing off any pathway back to constitutional rule. Ermakoff explores this unusual but not unique development in two cases of the utmost significance for World War II: the March 1933 decision by the German Reichstag to give power to Adolf Hitler to modify the Weimer constitution without further recourse to parliament, and the French National Assembly’s decision in Vichy in July 1940 to transfer all state powers to Marshall Philippe Pétain.

Ermakoff has woven a fabric of many threads—some historical, some methodological, some theoretical—drawn together in complex patterns. His analysis begins by artfully turning what in many books would be a historiographical review of previous work into a deep and thorough consideration of three alternative explanations of abdication.

In many Western countries, including the Netherlands, couples marrying in the interwar period experienced unprecedentedly high levels of childlessness. Only recently do we witness a return to these levels, as part and parcel of the so-called second demographic transition. Looking back on the interwar period, many scholars have attributed the decline of fertility and the increase of childlessness to rampant economic and political instability. However, contemporary social scientists ascribed the phenomenon to individualization, secularization, and the priority newlywed couples gave to a career and a luxurious lifestyle. From this perspective, childless couples in the interwar period could be seen as “pioneers” of the second demographic transition. To disentangle “traditional” and “modern” backgrounds of childlessness, we have studied the fertility histories of nearly 3,000 Dutch couples married between 1919 and 1938. Our results, in particular the strong association of childlessness with religiously mixed marriage, confirm that an important part of childlessness in the interwar period can be associated with a modern, individualized lifestyle.

The theme for the 2008 Social Science History Association conference was “It’s about Time.” By surveying the program and panels on offer in Miami, the presidential address instead asked, “Is it about time?” Location and space figured more centrally than time in the titles of the conference’s many papers. Still, two conceptions of time were prominent features of the program. For some scholars, the past is like a foreign country; it can be compared to the present. For even more of the 2008 presenters, however, interest in time meant a concern with process. The analysis of time reflected on the program seemed to have developed along disciplinary lines. Historians and life-course sociologists analyzed time through narratives, time lines, or periodization. Sociologists dominated the theorization of time as sequential. Time geographers were most explicit in relating time and space, mainly in micro-level analyses. How to visualize and represent time in two dimensions remained an unsettled matter; some disciplines imagined timed processes as narrow or broad (represented along an x-axis), while others analyzed them as shallow or deep (represented along a y-axis). Scholars working with timed media, such as video, may have insights into how to overcome this representational roadblock.

We use a historical case study of the Institut Pasteur to articulate the concept of the transformational organization in science, an organization with the capacity to make a large number of scientific breakthroughs in a short period of time. In considering the potential characteristics that explain a burst of scientific innovations, we attempt to move beyond the standard arguments in the management and organizational sociology literature that typically focus on complex research teams with cross-fertilization of ideas. Rather, we discuss the organizational characteristics that facilitate the development of these types of mechanisms. In doing so we address the dilemma faced by organizations seeking to assemble complex teams, that is, increasing cognitive distance. To illustrate the concept of a transformational organization, we explore the formative years of the Institut Pasteur, 1889–1919.

Ruling Oneself Out is an extremely impressive scholarly achievement at multiple levels. It offers a model of how to identify and pose an important research question; that is, a question worth asking and answering not only because it is intrinsically interesting but also because it is theoretically puzzling and at the same time of great practical significance. Ruling Oneself Out is all this and more.

Ivan Ermakoff (2008) begins by asking about the conditions that lead dominant actors to surrender their power in ways that are likely to undermine their own interests. It is an intriguing question and all the more puzzling because he examines this process in the context of two cases in which the decision to surrender power was reached after a long and public process of deliberation and discussion. Moreover, both cases—the German Reichstag’s passage of the enabling act in March 1933 that gave Adolf Hitler the authority to circumvent the constitution and the transfer of state power to the proponents of an authoritarian and reactionary Vichy regime in the summer of 1940—followed open and democratic decision-making procedures to realize an outcome that would ultimately undermine the commitment to democracy that made those outcomes possible.

Drawing on multiple perspectives and different analytic takes, Howard Kimeldorf ’s, Ari Adut’s, and John R. Hall’s comments raise three broad issues at the center of the agenda laid out in Ruling Oneself Out. The first issue concerns the motivational underpinnings of decisions reached in conditions of high uncertainty. The second draws the focus on the logic of the argument and its possible connections with models of organizational behaviors. The third points to the explanatory scope of the theory and the indeterminacy of the processes at play. In this article I address these critical remarks and, along the way, stake out claims and implications.

An argument about decisions cannot avoid delving into motivations and subjective perceptions. Several of Ari Adut’s and Howard Kimeldorf ’s comments focus on this issue. Adut draws attention to the possible effects of coercive pressures and pervasive expectations of retaliation in July 1940. In addition, his comments suggest that we should not downplay the significance of opportunism as a motive for endorsement.

Ivan Ermakoff ’s Ruling Oneself Out focuses on two major instances of voluntary surrender of power in Western history: the March 1933 bill that empowered Adolf Hitler with the right to amend the Weimar Constitution and the transfer of full executive, legislative, and constitutional authority to Marshal Philippe Pétain in July 1940. The first event inaugurated the Third Reich, the other Vichy France. Much ink has been spilled over these events. But Ermakoff finds various problems with the existing accounts and advances his own theory of collective abdication in their stead. Moreover, his theory is geared to analyze all kinds of political crises and breakdowns where collective abdication plays a role—as it often does in such contexts. Ermakoff ’s theory is a formal one. It can hold for any situation in which a group confronts the possibility of collective persecution and has to decide whether to resist or abdicate. It is not confined to formally defined collectivities or to parliamentary settings: the dynamics that it reveals are independent of specific group configurations and institutional contexts.