Remi Clignet, Death, Deeds, and Descendants: Inheritance in Modern America
Introduction by Jens Beckert and Brooke Harrington
Remi Clignet, Death, Deeds, and Descendants: Inheritance in Modern America, with an introduction by Jens Beckert and Brooke Harrington, New Brunswick (NJ/USA) and London (UK), Aldine Transaction Publishers, 2009.
Clignet shows that inheritance by the legal instrument popularly known as «the will» makes visible the complex symbolic role law plays in the intimate solidarities and fissures of personal life. In this, Clignet crafts a creative extension-by-inversion of Durkheim’s thesis (propounded in La division du travail social) regarding the criminal sanction as the index of law’s symbolic functions in relation to mechanical and organic solidarity.
Where Durkheim’s emphasis is on the subjective implications of public life, Clignet looks the other way, the way the family life cycle generates particular demands for law.
Clignet: wills as evidence of the ways individuals enlist the law’s support for their efforts to choreograph the distribution of their material assets as they anticipate their own demise – and he leaves readers with compelling implication that testators align their strategies with what they understand to be community norms.
Clignet details the assumptions guiding his overall subject and its implications for sociology.
As he notes at the outset (as a keynote echoed in the new introduction by Jens Beckert and Brooke Harrington), Clignet’s concerns are not just with testamentary practices but with social reproduction more generally.
His sources are wide ranging, including extensive bodies of literature on social and cultural reproduction, the sociology and ethnography of the United States, cultural studies of law, inheritance practices in sociocultural theory, and temporality as a dimension of sociological theorizing. He writes engagingly about the many forms «inheritance» may take, both tangible and intangible. (On all of these points, his extensive bibliography adds to the value of this new paperback edition as a resource for scholars and students). In addition to those more conceptual chapters, he also undertakes his own study of testacy, reported mainly in two of the book’s middle chapters. Drawing mainly on federal datasets from 1920 and 1944 (the only IRS datasets available to him), Clignet finds regional, ethnic and gendered effects in patterns of testacy.
Much has changed in the US affecting the legal and social contexts of inheritance, but the basic structure most significant remains in place: probate is local, falling within the legal jurisdiction of the member states, but estates are exposed to taxation at both the state and federal levels – thus traversing communities and legal regimes of differing scales.
Some of Clignet’s assumptions and inferences, but no more so than the author himself, as he is refreshingly candid throughout as to the potential limitations (conceptual and methodological) of his project, and in this the book is provocative in the best sense.
The book’s contributions lie beyond the scope of narrow debate. Clignet places inheritance on the sociological agenda as corrective to more structural and static approaches, and in the process, to counter a pervasive liberal individualism and its naturalization of the myth of free choice. In addition, the book stands as a compelling demonstration of the fact that «modern America» is intricately divided with respect to its attitudes toward private wealth and the legitimacy of law in effecting its circulation, including the making of generations.
