The Shawshank Redemption
Reflection Essay Exam #2
Evan Mowry

The Shawshank Redemption is less about race and more about social class. In it, a man is wrongly convicted of the murder of his wife. Andy’s struggles with prison life; the predatory inmates, the abusive guards, and the sadistic warden all, while not racially charged, do carry the same element of racism and segregation. There is a distinct line of humanity that the inmates are not allowed to toe: an upper and lower class of person within the prison.
The movie does not, in general, challenge stereotypes, nor does it perpetuate them. The prison is a mixing pot of different races and social classes, and the inmates all behave more or less similarly with some notable exceptions that do not appear to have anything to do with social class or race. The furthest I could go in naming a stereotype it challenged was the slightly surprising ratio of white men to black men in prison. Especially in an era of racial oppression, I would have expected the whites to be the ethnic outsiders, not the blacks.
Conflict theory could view the prison in two ways; as an institution that mirrors an already existing tension between a prisoner class and a guard class, or as a metaphor economic inequality. I don’t think either is right. With respect to the former, there aren’t fundamental differences in the way the two classes behave. Both inmates and guards are brutal towards each other, both stick together, and both look for individual opportunities to advance. The only difference between them is who has the power within the prison; outside of the existing environment of the prison, they would behave roughly the same.
Regarding the possible metaphor of economic equality, this seems the more likely of the two. There is a distinct difference between the guards and the inmates in how they treat their peers. The movie challenges the stereotype of everyone in jail being vicious, but the fact remains that the guards do not need to fight amongst themselves to survive, whereas the inmates do. The inmates battle for their lives as if the only way to stay alive is to get ahead of all the other inmates and stay there, somehow. This is eerily reminiscent of the climate in South American cultures during periods of lower-class political apathy: the rich help each other stay that way, and the poor fight amongst each other desperately to get out of the slums. This parallel also makes sense when you see the violence against the “lower” class by the “upper”, such as the beatings, random cell searches, and neglect. In the movie it becomes apparent that some of the inmates can no longer even stand an equal system. One inmate is released, but has grown so used to the easy, stationary stability of the brutal prison that he cannot handle the free, open outdoors, and commits suicide. The main character’s best friend, Red, calls this being “institutionalized”. The walls, “At first you hate them, then you get used to them. Eventually, you depend on them”, provide a reason for rigidity. This, also, is seen in poverty stricken societies, where the poor are reluctant to act on their desires for upward mobility because it risks all they have gained at such high cost; the inmates were reluctant to leave the prison because it was what they had gotten used to; it had socialized them in a manner almost completely incompatible with the outside world.
Structional Functionalism, also, could view this movie from a variety of angles. It could argue that the inmates are in prison, and being treated as sub-human, partially because they were sub-human; convicted felons, it is popularly perceived, have fewer rights than law-abiding citizens, or none at all. In a sense, this would be saying that the prison, and all the bad things in it, exists because of the need for a societal retribution to criminals, in order to provide a living example to people of what happens to law-breakers. The brutality of the prison, in other words, is necessary as a deterrent to crime; the few must be abused so the many do not abuse, sort of thing.
Alternately, a structural functionalist could see separation of classes within the prison as a necessary, or at least effective, way of keeping order. If, for example, there was no “discipline” in the prison, there would most likely be a riot due to the aggressive and unruly nature of the inmates. If there was a riot, there would be much suffering on behalf of the guards, possibly some suffering on behalf of the people nearby the prison, and definitely a large amount of suffering on the parts of the inmates, after the national guard got called in, or whatnot. Again, being habitually brutal is a way of keeping people alive, or at least keeping the majority of them alive.
The most realistic view of the prison, given the humanistic quality of the movie, would be that of Symbolic Interaction. Someone subscribing to this view could view the prison as a melting pot, as it were, of people, all of varying degrees of power within the system that had developed. The brutality of the guards would be seen as their attempts to retain their superior position over the inmates. The brutality of the inmates would, just as in Conflict theory, would be seen as their attempts to solidify not a position of power, per se, but a position in which they can survive.
However, what attracts me most to this view is the interaction between the inmates and the guards that transcended power. Each character seemed to have threads that tied them inextricably to other characters, which they strengthened or tried to break, depending on the nature of the connection. Many of these had little to do with power, or social comfort, but much to do with feeling human: many of the most integral moments of the plot, such as when Andy offered financial advice to a guard in exchange for some beer for his work crew, weren’t motivated by the desire for advancement, but instead out of the desire to strengthen relationships. Red, who narrated the movie, even said that although it had seemed to some that Andy had done what he did to curry favors with the guards and the inmates, he thought Andy did it just to feel human.
While Symbolic Interaction best explains the behavior of the characters in the movie, all of these views are best at describing the existence of one or more different factors of the movie. One could not have a complete view of the Shawshank Redemption without looking beyond one perspective and gaining a three dimensional image of the forces at work. That, in essence, is the weakness with any one perspective: there is always another side to something (especially societal institutions and functions) than the one you’re looking at.

The Great Transformation: the political and economic origins of our time
Evan Mowry

In the transition from mercantilism to free trade, western civilization went through great upheaval. In his book The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi documents and analyzes the various changes the major powers of the time went through, and how society stumbled and righted itself in adjusting to the new system it had adopted. By dissecting liberal economic theory, the dissolution of the gold standard, the balance of power that existed between the major economic powers of the time prior to the rise of economic liberalism, and the nature of a self-regulating market (hereafter referred to as SRM), Polanyi, at times positively and at times normatively, paints a clear and vivid picture of the effects of his “great transformation” on the citizens of the nations surrounding, and involved in trade across, the Atlantic Ocean. Polanyi uses England as a lens to see the whole capitalist world during the period of transition from 19th to 20th century economics, and in doing so clearly reproduces in his writing how political influence, societal changes, and the attempts at engineering a free market economy interacted with each other.
Central to the book is Polanyi’s argument that an SRM; a worldwide market free of political or social restrictions, is impossible. He clearly defines the difference between markets and an SRM, and clearly outlines his unorthodox economic theories. In doing so, he exposes liberal economics as illogical in its assumption that an SRM exists already: a natural function of human interaction. His concept of reciprocity and his idea that people, as individuals, naturally participate in distributive systems explains the tendency of humans to trade and barter without implying a higher truth about economic ideals.
Polanyi makes very few direct generalizations about human nature, but the ones he does are quite simple. Society, he argues, isn’t a war between the classes; tension exists, that is true, but all the members of society only stand to lose with its loss. Society is mobilized in its own defense, and will reject aspects of it that threaten its existence. The SRM threatened its existence first by a drastic alteration in the life of the lower classes, and second through fluctuations in trade, so much so that the many classes and interested sectors banded together to pervert it for their own protection, to a point at which it could not be called a liberal free-market. You could say that he makes more generalizations about society than human nature. Throughout the book, though, he doesn’t disparage or praise human nature, merely comes to dispassionate conclusions by looking at historical evidence.
Most striking of The Great Transformation’s tendencies was that of viewing the sequence of events as just as important as the events themselves. When he refers to Speenhamland and the Poor Laws, Polanyi makes certain to state that it was not subsidies to the poor that nearly ruined the British economy, it was the watering down of the work force at a time when a competitive work force was needed most. I also very much appreciated Polanyi’s lack of charged character analysis when describing the acts of people, instead depicting them merely as fact. He does not view people as greedy, but for the most part self-interested.
In the chapter Freedom in a Complex Society, Polanyi does become concerned with the future of economics and society, and this is where The Great Transformation becomes most normative, and where perhaps the greatest number of his views on the nature of government and economics can be found. Polanyi’s disillusionment with liberal theory stems from the idea that economic policy must be subservient to society, and not a function of it. He sees hope in the tendency of modern nations in which “…the economic system ceases to lay down the law to society and the primacy of society over that system is secured.” (Polanyi, 251). He applauds the removal of rich influence from the economy, and the change in the nature of property that accompanies this loss of control. With this he tackles the question that had been irking me during the meat of the book: what is the “right” amount of interaction for government to undertake with an economy? At what point is freedom more or less desirable than governmental control, and what is the role of an economic system?
Because “The institutional separation of politics and economics, which proved a deadly danger to the substance of society, almost automatically produced freedom at the cost of justice and security.” (Polanyi, 253), Polanyi comes to the conclusion that pure freedom cannot exist in an SRM-based society; “Neither freedom nor peace could be institutionalized under that economy, since its purpose was to create profits and welfare, not peace and freedom.” (Polanyi, 253) The very freedoms that society, he believes, must strive to retain are infringed upon by the instability of an SRM more than they are by deliberate restrictions enacted to safeguard their existence. Polanyi’s contribution to political thought is much greater than a mere detailing of the fall of the market economy: he offers a new ideal for human society: a society as free as possible. Ironically, he asks whether a society can be freer with fewer economic freedoms.
The Great Transformation was extremely informative and interesting in theme. The writing is dense, and sometimes overly complex, even for someone who enjoys reading. His writing was helped by his chronological proximity to the events detailed in his work; I think it would have lacked context and clarity if it had been written much later after the events, due to the tendency society has of manipulating the way things are perceived from decade to decade. Finally, I very much appreciated an apparent unbiased in opinion of the events of the turn of the century; such empirical analysis is frequently lacking in political/economic theory such as this, due to the complexity of the ideas being linked.
The Great Transformation is an excellent tool for formulating a politico-economic philosophy. Karl Polanyi provides striking criticisms and insights into the effects of societal and governmental structures on economic theory, and does so in a rational, empirical manner. When a question is raised, it is exhaustively answered in the next chapter, or even paragraph, and the book is laid out logically, with a great deal of informative and intriguing tangents which only bring more color and lend credence to his arguments for government influence in markets.