In Leibniz, in Whitehead, there are only events. What Leibniz calls predicate is nothing to do with an attribute, but an event, “crossing the Rubicon.” So they have to completely recast the notion of a subject: what becomes of the subject, if predicates are events? It's like a baroque emblem. (Gilles Deleuze)

The [Swiss] Confederacy presented a deep political ambiguity, a union of urban oligarchs and peasant producers, all of whom collectively ruled over yet other subjects, which mirrored the tension between the [South German] cities' own oligarchical present and communal past. If there is indeed “an unbroken progressive line” between the communal burghers of this age and the bourgeoisies of a later one, it runs through deep shadows of ambiguity and tension, which flowed from securing the liberties of some through the subjection of others…More and more, the bigger folk in the cities made their livings from the vast web of market relations…and made their peace with the early modern state. (Thomas Brady)

The main fault that Hermann Rebel finds with the practitioners of “symbolic actionism” is a tendency to naturalize systems of power and cultural domination and to treat subaltern groups as if they were unable to examine their position in them critically. This tendency in turn causes symbolic actionists to misrecognize self-interested maneuvers within existing systems of domination as counterhegemonic symbolic manipulations. The overall effect of symbolic-actionist analysis, therefore, is to “downplay the degradation and terror experienced by victims of exploitation and persecution.” Rebel's view of such relationships could hardly differ more. As he sees it, hegemonic forces were so disruptive that to speak of peasant societies as culturally autonomous and of peasants as historical “agents” is at best self-deceiving.

My study of the Swiss Peasants' War of 1653 has received four reviews in the United States. I am grateful to Hermann Rebel for supplying another, most unusual review to Central European History. It is unusual not only in length but also in judgment. Where the other reviews wrote positively about the book, Rebel rejects it completely.

If I read Rebel correctly, his criticism covers four main points. First, he criticizes the book's theoretical point of view, alleging that the call for a “return to historical events in social history” means a return to “histoire événementielle” and would lead to “high antiquarianism.” Second, Rebel criticizes my methodological inferences from this theoretical point: systematic attention to the cultural dimension of human action; the expansion of social history's traditional methods of analysis and perspectives on time (longue durée, temps sociale) to include cultural and anthropological insights (from, i.e., Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Clifford Geertz); and the introduction of a “slow-motion” perspective.