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We have chosen to date the beginning of the system of modern societies from certain seven teen tlvcentury developments in the societal community, especially the bearing of religion on the legitimation of society, rather than, as is usual, from eighteenth-century evolution toward "democracy" and industrialization.
After the Reformation shattered the religious unity of Western Christendom, a relatively stable division arose, roughly along the north-south axis. All Europe south of the Alps remained Roman Catholic; a Roman Catholic "peninsula" thrust into northern Europe, with France as its most important component. Protestantism in Switzerland enjoyed the protection guaranteed by the special nature of Swiss independence. Although Vienna was predominantly Protestant at the start of the seventeenth century, the Hapsburgs were able to "recatholicize" Austria, aided by the Turkish occupation of Hungary, where Protestantism was strong.
As religious struggle intensified, the "southern tier" of political units consolidated. In the sixteenth century this consolidation involved a union of the two most important states, Austria and Spain, under the personal rule of the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V. The "middle" of this empire was protected by the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, immediately adjacent
to the Papal States. The presence of the papacy in Italy and the extent of Hapsburg power made continued effective independence of the Italian city-states impossible.
The Counter-Reformation enforced a particularly close alliance between Church and state, exemplified by the Spanish Inquisition. In comparison to the "liberal" trends within late medieval and Renaissance Roman Catholicism, the Counter-Reformation Church stressed rigid orthodoxy and authoritarianism in its organization. Civil alliance with the Church in enforcing religious conformity fostered the expansion and consolidation of centralized government authority. Such enforcement was undertaken in the name of the Holy Roman Empire, with its special religious legitimation and divinely ordained Emperor.1 By that time the political structure of the Empire was far more integrated than it had been in the Middle Ages.
Nevertheless, the Empire was vulnerable, in that it centered in the loosely organized "German nation"—Austria's population was only partly German by that time, and the Hapsburgs had assumed the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia through personal unions. The Treaty of Westphalia, which had ended the bitter Thirty Years' War, had not only made Holland and Switzerland independent of the Empire, but had also drawn the religious line through the remaining parts; many of the German princes had chosen Protestantism for their domains under the formula cuius regio, eius religio. Far more than the defection from Rome of Henry VIII, this choice undermined the legitimation of the old secular structure of Christendom, for the Empire had been conceived as the "secular arm" of the Roman Catholic system of basic unity. The settlement was an uneasy compromise, acceptable only as an alternative to the indefinite continuation of a highly destructive war. Nevertheless, it ended any realistic expectation that a Roman Catholic European system could be restored.2 For more than three centuries the heartland of the Counter-Reformation remained tenaciously resistant to many modernizing processes, citadels of monarchial legitimism, aristocracy, and semibureaucratic states of the older type.
Although the Protestants dreamed of prevailing throughout Western Christendom, they soon splintered into different branches and never developed a conception of unity corresponding to that of medieval Roman Catholicism.3 This fragmentation furthered the development of independent territorial monarchies based on unstable integration of absolutist political regimes and "national churches."4 It also, however, contained the seeds of the internal religious pluralism that was to advance rapidly in England and Holland.
1 James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire (rev. ed.; London: Macmillan, 1904).
2 Ibid.
3 Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, Vol. II (New York: Harper, 1960).
4G. R. Elton, Reformation Europe, 1517-1559 (Cleveland: Meridian, 1963).
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51
The outcome of the struggle between Reformation and Counter-Reformation was a double step toward pluralization and differentiation. The English-Dutch wing was more advanced, a harbinger for the future. Yet development within the Empire posed the crucial problem of integration across the Protestant-Roman Catholic line. Many historians of modern Europe have recognized only stalemated conflict here. Yet religious toleration has been extended to Roman Catholics in Protestant polities and even to Protestants in Roman Catholic polities, though generally without radical sacrifice of the establishment principle.
Religious pluralization was part of a process of differentiation between the cultural and societal systems that reduced the rigidity and diffuseness of their interpenetration. Religious legitimation of secular society was retained without committing governmental authority to the direct implementation or enforcement of religious goals.
The development of modern secular culture, with its high level of differentiation from society as a whole, has been important to the continuing interpenetration of religion and society. The focus of this development shifted northward in the seventeenth century to England and Holland but also to France and parts of Germany. Relative cultural decline in the heartland of the Counter-Reformation was clear after Galileo. The cultural importance of France indicated the equivocal nature, by Counter-Reformation standards, of its Roman Catholicism. Yet politically "reactionary" powers could be open to secular culture, as was Prussia under Frederick the Great. In general, secular culture found Protestantism more congenial than Roman Catholicism throughout this period.
The emergence of "sovereign" territorial states divided the Holy Roman Empire. They were first successfully established in France and England, which had been at best nominally part of the Empire at any time, and next in Spain, also on the geographical fringe. Then Prussia and Austria developed on the border of the "German" area, shifting the Empire's center of gravity toward the eastern frontier. In the central areas of the old Empire, territorial principalities proliferated largely through adherence of the princes to the Reformation.5
These developments also showed a certain cohesion of the European system, as all four of the leading political-territorial states were frontier units of the system. Both the northwest triangle and the Iberian penninsula faced the open sea and participated in the great maritime expansion of Europe. The latter also was partially occupied by the Moors whose occupation of much of the peninsula almost through the fifteenth century nurtured the militant authoritarianism of Hispanic Catholicism.6
5 Geoffrey Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany (New York: Capricorn,
1963).
cAmerico Castro, The Structure of Spanish History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954).
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Imperial "gravitation" toward the east was also associated with frontier conditions. The boundary between the Germanic and Slavic peoples had been unstable for many centuries—and was complicated even before the Reformation by relations between the Roman and Orthodox branches of Christianity. Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland were ethnically non-German but had become Roman Catholic. Especially after the fall of Byzantium the great Orthodox power was Russia, still peripheral to the Western system. The Germanic drive to organize and protect— and on occasion to dominate—the western Slavs eventuated in Hapsburg involvement with Hungary and Bohemia in an unstable multi- or non-national state. Incorporation of the non-German frontier peoples was complicated by Ottoman expansion, which remained a major threat until the late seventeenth century; Austria thus served as a defender of all Christian Europe.7
These developments at the borders of the European system "hollowed out" its center, especially in the Germany of "particularism," or Klein-staaterei. The center failed to develop major territorial units, although a few like Saxony and Bavaria approached such status; numerous other "states" were very small indeed. These principalities did usually swallow up the free cities of the Empire, however. The independence of the urban bourgeois classes was undermined by monarchy, aristocracy, and officialdom, abetted by the devastation and disorganization of wars. This part of Europe, thus generally fell behind the Northwest in economic development and became a power vacuum before the ambitions of the stronger powers.8
We have been speaking deliberately of the "territorial" state, rather than of the "national" state. Only in England, France, and perhaps Scandinavia were ethnic community and governmental organization approximately coextensive. In Spain diverse local elements gradually developed a common language, at least among the upper classes. Prussia became more or less purely German, partly through Germanizing of large Slavic elements. Austria was conspicuously multiethnic, including large German, Slavic, and Hungarian elements. Switzerland achieved a special limited form of multiethnic political integration and religious pluralism. The small German states divided the ethnic "German nation" into numerous political units, leaving "Germany" even more disunited than "Italy."
Except in the northwest the lack of coincidence between ethnic group and territorial organization hindered the development of liberalizing societies based on independent and solidary societal communities as occurred in the northwest area. The main territorial units either lacked the
7 Oscar Halecki, The Limits and Divisions of European History (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962).
8 Bryce, op. cit., and Barraclough, op. cit.
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ethnic solidarity that can focus such communities or included small segments of larger ethnic communities for which their governments could not presume to speak. For political authorities in this precarious situation some form of fundamental religious legitimation was especially important. Their insecurity also contributed to political authoritarianism or "absolutism" and fear of concessions to popular participation in government. Their peoples were "subjects," rather than "citizens."
The religious fission of European society and the emergence of sovereign states precipitated severe crises that culminated in the seventeenth century. No functional equivalent of the old Empire appeared, and the matter of religious legitimation remained a serious weakness of the international system, as its power relations lacked adequate normative regulation.9 This situation favored nearly chronic states of war and inhibited the constructive use of political power that could have emerged in a better-integrated collective system.
The Northwest
England, France, and Holland, each in a different wav, took the lead in the power system of the seventeenth century. Dutch independence represented a major defeat for Spain. As the Austrians were heavily engaged against the Turks, Continental hegemony fell to the French. Though not yet a paramount force in Continental affairs, England did become the paramount maritime power during this century.
These three nations were the "spearhead" of early modernity. The most important developments occurred in their societal communities. The variations among the forms of the three societal communities were immense, but each contributed major innovations relative to national solidarity. In particular, the English conception of national identity provided a basis for a more clearly differentiated societal community.10 This differentiation proceeded on three fronts—religious, political, and economic —each involving normative considerations. Legal innovations were thus critical, especially those that favored associational rather than bureaucratic potentials of the structure of national community. They were closely related to the emergence of parhamentarianism and more developed market economies.
Religion and Societal Community As noted earlier, the Reformation deprived the "visible" church of its sacramental character. Subsequently, under the
9 Bryce, op. cit., and Troeltsch, op. cit.
10 See Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York; MacmilUm, 1961).
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formula cuius regio, ems religio, the tendency was to bring the church under tighter secular control, as there was no international Protestant church capable of reinforcing ecclesiastical independence. The Protestant churches thus tended to become state or "national" churches, and conformity was enforced through political authority.
A second, "Puritan" phase, based on Calvinism in England and Holland, led to religious pluralism within Protestantism, which contrasted sharply with the religious character of Prussia, several other Protestant German principalities, and Scandinavia.
In seventeenth-century England differentiation of the religious system from the societal community could not occur without heavy involvement in politics. The Long Parliament, the Civil War, the establishment of the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the Revolution of 1688 involved not simply political issues but also the religious future of England and much else as well. English religious development involved not only the conversion of the crown to Protestantism but also a broadening of the Elizabethan measure of religious toleration.11 The political legitimacy of the Nonconformists became firmly established, preventing a return to a politically established church with a monopoly of religious legitimacy. Furthermore, through Nonconformism, the Church of England was exposed to influences from the religious "left," which could have been repressed in a purely "state church" system. Indeed, the "evangelical" wing of the Church of England has been fundamental to subsequent English development.
Interestingly, the long and severe repression of Roman Catholicism in England12 contributed to this outcome. Greater tolerance for Roman Catholicism during the eighteenth century might well have led to a second Stuart restoration and perhaps a serious attempt at a Roman Catholic reestablishment. The solidarity of a basically Protestant societal community and the relative absence of religious tension facilitated such developments as extension of the franchise. Had the English "right" been obliged to uphold the "true Church," as well as monarchy and aristrocracy, the strains would have been even more severe than they were, especially under the impact of the American and French Revolutions.13
Seventeenth-century Holland went considerably farther than England did in religious toleration. Over the long run, however, its religious constitution has proved less stable. A nineteenth-century Roman Catholic revival created a "columnar" structure among religious groups of approximately equal strength, thus introducing a severe religious rift into the
11 W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England (3 vols; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932-1940).
12 The Catholic Emancipation Act was not passed until 1830.
13 See R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution (2 vols; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959 and 1964).
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societal community.14 Although the English Roman Catholic minority now has considerable strength, England has by and large escaped this problem.
France failed to "solve" its religious problem in an even more radical sense than Holland did. The outcome of the severe Reformation struggle was a Roman Catholic victory and suppression of the Protestant movement. Protestantism in France has never since involved more than small, though important, minorities. This weakness did not, however, secure the position of the Roman Catholic Church. Secular anticlericalism, based on the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century became a major political theme of the Revolution.15 This conflict has persisted in France down to the present.
The basic French pattern has greatly influenced the definitions of religious legitimacy in other modern societies too, particularly in the Latin Catholic countries (including those of Latin America) but also in Germany and Eastern Europe. It has also contributed to the antireligious element in modern socialist movements, especially communism.
These European developments constitute a type of differentiation of the societal community and the religious system that in some respects offers an alternative to the pattern that emerged in seventeenth-century England and has reached its fullest development in the United States. The "Anglo-Saxon" pattern builds, however, on certain central religious traditions of Western society while accommodating societal solidarities that cut across the historic religious particularisms. Indeed, the range of religious commitments and solidarities that can be treated as compatible with societal membership has steadily broadened. Secular anticlericalism, however, especially in its communist version, remains closer to the formula of cuius regio, eius religio, with the implication that "nonconformists" must be excluded from the societal community.
The Polity and Societal Community The societal community, as the main zone of integration between a normative structure and a collectivity structure in which certain crucial role loyalties of individuals are centered, has always involved both primary reliance on religious legitimation and unity under a clearly structured political authority. "Absolutism" represented a solution of the political aspects of the solidarity problems that arose from post-Reformation developments.16 It required, however, that government—
14 S. M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, "Introduction," in Lipset and Rokkan (eds.), Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignment (New York: Free Press, 1968).
15 See Palmer, op. cit.
is See Max Beloff, The Age of Absolutism, 1660-1815 (New York: Harper,
1962).
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usually a monarchy—provide a central svmbol on which loyalty could focus; such a symbol was enhanced by religious and ethnic unity. Indeed, religion and ethnic affiliation were the primary bases on which European society divided into territorial political units in early modern times,17 with the general result that government and societal community were relatively undifferentiated. Nevertheless, in certain Western societies, there has been a tendency, under special conditions, to differentiate the two. England made an early and strong start in this direction, in contrast to France, an "absolutist" state in which government was identified with the societal community.
Ethnically, England, like France, had the problem of a "Celtic fringe," but only in Ireland was religion a seriously complicating factor. Ireland, where among the mass of the people Celtic ethnic affiliation coincided with Roman Catholicism and with class and geographical separation from England, was the prime area in which integration failed. Precisely in the critical period of the seventeenth century Cromwell fought bitter wars against the Irish, but the Roman Catholic Irish were never integrated into a "United Kingdom" as part of a unified societal community. Wales, though mainly Celtic, had a geographic disadvantage in maintaining its independence. It became predominantly Protestant, though more Nonconformist than was most of England, and posed no major problem of religious schism. The Scots developed an indubitable ethnic consciousness but fluctuated violently between Roman Catholicism and a more radical Protestantism than that of the English. The Scottish Stuarts became the focus of the Roman Catholic threat to the English religious constitution. Once the Protestant alternative had been consolidated, however, Scottish Presbyterianism became a major element in British Protestant denominational pluralism. Despite Ireland, therefore, Britain became relatively united ethnically, which contributed to its ability to afford religious pluralism within the bounds of Protestantism.18
Within a societal community, regional and ethnic differences are cut across by "vertical" axes of differentiation on the bases of power, prestige, and wealth. The geographical location of the center of societal organization—in Britain London—is a point of intersection.
A complex society requires substantial stratification, and it is all the more crucial in times of important innovation. As contributing to the innovative process is a function of the kind of stratification, we would expect to find important changes in stratification in the seventeenth century. Indeed, both the landed aristocracies that had developed from the feudal order and the urban patriciates were being transformed, and their relations with each other and with other groups were changing.
i7Kohn, op. cit. is Ibid.
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The landed aristocracies were the most important upper class, providing the support in prestige for the early development of modern territorial monarchies.19 The monarch was generally not only the chief of state but also the "first gentleman" of his society, the apex of a complex structured hierarchy of social prestige. The aristocracy itself was a seamless web of lineages, an affinal collectivity bound by intermarriage and eligibility for intermarriage.20
Aristocratic lineages have tended to be anchored in local interest structures, especially in land. Historic landed proprietorship was, however, a diffuse superiority status, including not only ownership but also elements of political control and social ascendance.
The rise of the early modern state reduced the political power of parricularistically defined aristocratic subgroups, especially their autonomous territorial and military jurisdiction, in favor of a prestige position that supported the monarchy.21 Adequate economic support for those prestige positions rested largely in land ownership. In predominantly rural areas, therefore, economic elements were not radically different from a more diffuse social matrix, the apex of which was local aristocracy.22
Under feudal conditions the whole aristocracy of Europe was, in principle, a single "seamless web." This unity was incompatible, however, with division into national states. Religious differences resulting from the Reformation created barriers to intermarriage and helped to contain the aristocracy supporting a prince within eius religio, but it did not eliminate the problem. In England, since the Tudor period ''foreign" dynasties have been more the rule than the exception: the Scottish Stuarts, the Dutch House of Orange, and the German Hanoverians. Had this cosmopolitanism extended to all the aristocracy, it would have impeded the consolidation of ethnic-national identities. It is important, then, that England and France, the two leading national states, split on religious and linguistic lines so that their aristocracies became basically distinct from each other—and from others.
Along with the "nationalization" of the aristocracy, the integration of top political authority with aristocracy was a primary factor in enabling roval governments to establish their authority over national societal communities.23 This possibility in turn depended largely upon the military functions of aristocracies.
19 See Palmer, op. cit., and Beloff, op. cit.
20 This conception of "affinal collectivity" has been much influenced by the author's discussions with Charles D. Ackerman.
-1 Palmer, op. cit., and Beloff, op. cit.
-'- See Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1966).
-3 Beloff, op. cit., and John B. Wolf, The Emergence of the Great Powers (New York: Harper, 1962).
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The process of differentiation between government and societal community was also focused on the relations between monarchy and aristocracy, as shown bv the deep conflicts of interest between the two. The political power institutionalized in specific aristocratic status was greatly lessened. Yet the new total power position of aristocracies varied greatly, as the examples of England and France show.
Broadly speaking, the differentiation occurred in France in such a wav as to leave the aristocracy overwhelmingly dependent upon its social prestige. On the whole, it was deprived not only of the exercise of political power but also of the functions of contributing major contingent support to political authority and of exerting a major influence over governmental policy.24 The sign of this outcome was the brilliant court of Versailles. Centralization at the court loosened the attachment of the aristocracy to their local communities, depriving them of local political power, which in turn facilitated the encroachment of the central government on local. affairs.25
These remarks apply most directly to the older, more 'feudal" aristocracy, the noblesse d'epee. The position of the newer aristocracy relatively recently risen from bourgeois origins and based predominantly on legal training, reinforced the integration of aristocracy and crown. The legal profession was closely associated with the crown through public offices merging administrative and judicial components. As legal officials, the French lawyers stood between the crown and both the older aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. There was considerable upward mobility through these intermediate circles, partly through the sale of offices. Yet the upwardly mobile elements generally sought to attain the status of nobility and to make their offices hereditary26
Economically the noblesse de robe was primarily dependent upon the crown both for various perquisites of its offices and, to the extent that it held land, for enforcement of feudal dues and obligations upon the peasantry. It lacked an independent economic base comparable to that of the English landed gentry.
The Church was closely integrated into this system. More than in England, high clerical offices went to members of aristocratic lineages. Furthermore, there was no equivalent of English Protestant Noncon-formism. This absence contributed to the militant anticlerricalism of the Revolutionary opposition to the ancien regime. There was a collegial aspect to the noblesse, in the form of the parlements. In contrast to the British parliamentary system, however, the parlements were considerably
24 Franklin L. Ford, Robe and Sword: The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy After Louis XIV (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953)
25 Ibid.
20 Palmer, op. cit.
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more judicial and administrative than legislative. Furthermore, there was no one central parlement but a whole series of regional parlements. The parlement of Paris had only the precedence of primus inter pares, rather than the exclusive position occupied by the Parliament of Westminster.
The deprivation of political power among the French aristocracy seems related to the group's ambivalent role in the eighteenth century. On one hand, it developed a "snobbish" exclusiveness vis-a-vis all "bourgeois" elements, many of whom had surpassed its members in political position, wealth, and cultivation.27 On the other hand, it was particularly prominent as a sponsor of modernizing cultural movements, notably in "philosophy," and thus contributed crucially to the French Enlightenment.28 Both these developments rendered problematic the position of the French aristocracy as the legitimate elite of the societal community. The aristocracy's dependence on the monarchy for its social prestige was combined with dissociation from the rest of the societal community in terms of both government power and the cultural "mediocrity" of the common man. The whole structure of crown, the two noblesses, and the Church was placed against the bourgeoisie and all the other classes,29 thus fostering the split in French society that erupted in the Revolution.
England developed differently as it departed from the initial symbiosis between government and aristocracy. Instead of "disfranchising" the aristocracy, the monarchy became its "creature." The executive functions of government and the societal community underwent a process of differentiation focused on the "support system," 30 which articulated the two. This system was centered in Parliament. In contrast to France, Parliament had consolidated a position of "real power" by 1688.
This power did not mean, however, "government by aristocracy," the simple obverse of the French solution. First, the national aristocracy was too diffuse actually to "govern"—one reason why both the Stuarts and Cromwell successfully advocated strong executive authority. Eventually there developed the system of cabinet government under a constitutional monarch who "reigned" but did not govern. Second, there was the special character of the British aristocracy. Primogeniture in England, reinforced by entail, had tended to keep estates intact over generations and to produce continuous social gradations between the titled nobility
27 Elinor Barber, The Bourgeoisie in Eighteenth Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955). -s Palmer, op. cit.
2& See especially Moore, op. cit,, and Ford, op. cit.
30Talcott Parsons, "The Political Aspects of Social Structure and Process," in David Easton (ed.), Varieties of Political Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966). Reprinted in Politics and Social Structure (New York: Free Press 1969) Chapter 13.
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and their untitled collaterals, the "gentry," who might or might not be closely related to titled families. This system favored both upward mobility into the aristocracy and indefinite extension of the status of "gentleman" downward from the titled nobility.
The status of the gentry became formalized in the House of Commons. As there were too many gentlemen for the Commons to be simply an assembly of an estate of the realm, as was the House of Lords (to which every peer belonged), it became a representative body.31 As the Commons became increasingly important relative to the Lords, the distinction between those actually exercising political power and their constituencies became important. The gentry as a whole became a constituency, not a component, of government.
During the earlier period the aristocracy, as a major component of the societal community, constituted the most active element in the support system of government yet remained relatively independent of governmental organization. Furthermore, representative participation in government facilitated the gradual emergence of a party system under which elements of society could influence the policies and selection of active executive leadership somewhat responsive to the constituencies.32
The second main type of inherited privilege was that of the urban upper class, which rested primarily on commerce. Because the rural sector of the economy was generally still predominant, territorial consolidation under the monarchies gave primacy to rural interests and was less favorable to urban upper groups: a major reason why the most highly urbanized areas were for a long time not incorporated in territorial monarchies but defended the "free city" pattern.
Holland was an exception. In winning its independence from Spain, it became primarily a federation of urban communities led by merchant groups. It experienced considerable difficulty in integrating its rural areas, however, and lacked the cohesion of its rivals. Yet, in avoiding the social dominance of a landed aristocracy, it set an important example for future development.
England's middle position facilitated a synthesis. The representative character of the House of Commons provided machinery for the political involvement of important bourgeoise groups, and the line between them and the untitled gentry did not become rigid as in France.33 This flexibility
31 C. Ff. Mcllwain, The High Court of Parliament (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1910); and F. W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1908).
32 See Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution {2nd ed.; London: Macmillan, 1961).
3» See Archibald S. Foord, His Majesty's Opposition 17H-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
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was in turn facilitated by the relatively pluralistic political system including the crown, the City of London, and the aristocracy, itself divided between nobility and gentry.
This pluralism made relatively easy the inclusion of other emerging elements in the societal community. Indeed the constituency of the House of Commons was gradually extended not only to the boroughs but in the nineteenth century to a broad mass electorate as well. By the late seventeenth century England had both a relatively firmly integrated national state and a relatively pluralistic support system, which favored future democratization in a step-by-step manner, rather than through abrupt revolutionary change.
These political circumstances were strongly reinforced by the English religious constitution and by development of the common law. Univer-salistic legal principles and the broad conception of the "rule of law," as distinguished from arbitrary authority, were institutionalized in legal systems practically all over Europe after the Renaissance, building on Roman traditions. Yet the common law was distinctive in three important and related ways.34 First was judicial independence from the crown, which came to a head with the ultimately successful struggle of Chief Justice Coke against James 1.35 Second was the closely corporate character of the legal profession, organized about the Inns of Court. Third was the emphasis upon legal embodiment of private rights and interests, sometimes against the privileges of government, sometimes in areas outside the normal range of governmental concern.3" This process had two aspects. The first involved the "rights of Englishmen," including habeas corpus, fair trial and counsel, the protection of homes against arbitrary search, and ultimately free speech, assembly, and the like. The second involved property and contract, essential foundations of the industrial revolution. Coke's attack on the "monopolies" established by royal charter was of great significance, a legal precursor of Adam Smith's attack on mercantilism.
English legal developments contributed substantially to differentiating government from the societal community. Law became less an instrument of government and more a mediating "interface" between the two. It had to serve the needs of government but was sufficiently independent to serve pluralistic private needs as well. Government was thus placed in the dual position of defining and enforcing certain legally embodied restrictions on its own powers.
34 See Maitland, op. tit., and F. W. Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1901).
35 Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance, Mcllwain, op. cit., and Roscoe Pound, The Spirit of the Common Law (Boston: Beacon, 1963).
36 Pound, op, cit.
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The legal profession came to occupy an interstitial status. It became established that judges, even in the exercise of the judicial powers of the House of Lords, should be professional lawvers. Both judges and barristers, the core of the legal profession, however, served mainly private clients, which might include government agencies.
Members of the legal profession—including judges—became the primary guardians of the rights of the general public, especially "civil" rights37 and those of property, contract, and torts.38 The independence of the judiciary and the bar seems also to have been related to the emergence of the second main branch of the British legal profession, the solicitors, who lacked the privilege of pleading in court hut were the principal legal advisers to groups of all sorts. Through the solicitors the 'egal system penetrated the pluralistic structure of interest groups; through ie bar and judiciary it maintained its delicate relation to government. The ,,ins of Court were in many ways reminiscent of medieval guilds. They resisted the "streamlining" of law that occurred on the Continent, the formalization of university training, the appointment of the most influential group of lawyers as civil servants, and an examination system to guarantee, competence.
Although judges were public officials, they were also lawyers trained in an extragovernmental profession and responsible to the traditions of the common law. The barristers and solicitors, though private professional practitioners, also had public prerogatives and responsibilities. Furthermore, the adversary system acquired a special status. More than on the Continent, legal actions were conducted between private parties, each represented by counsel,before a judge and often heard by a jury under procedural rules. The judge tended to become an umpire rather than a decision maker. Furthermore, the courts themselves shaped law, especially in rendering decisions and setting precedents relatively independently of royal decrees and acts of Parliament.
The English system left the boundaries of the legal system quite open, permitting tentative approaches to consensus before full "legalization" of a norm and its enforcement by governmental authority were reached. Appeals to collective solidarity, moral standards, and practicality thus had a place in the system other than through high-level policy determination.
Continental legal systems differed from that of England, despite
37 See T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1965).
38 In Durkheim's terms, this development indicated a new emphasis on "reshtu-tive" over "repressive" law. See Emile Dürkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (London: Macmillan, 1933).
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common origins and some common features. The new Continental monarchies tended to maintain the Roman legal tradition and its emphasis on the "unitary" authority of the state.39 This tradition tended to make civil law the instrument of government by bringing the dominant group of legally trained people into governmental service, often as the core of the developing civil services.40 Civil administration was thus differentiated from the military, which remained largely in the hands of the aristocracies. The Continental legal systems generally promoted the effectiveness of government more adequately than did the British one,41 yet the latter made possible a more advanced state of differentiation and integration between government and the societal community.
The Economy and Societal Community The crucial economic developments in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries centered on the enclosure movement and its complex aftermath. Most important was the growth of commercial farming, oriented toward markets, as distinct from the nearly subsistence farming of the medieval type, under which the sale of produce extended only to neighboring towns.42 The major break with the old system was the development of a large export trade with the wool manufacturers of Flanders and Italy. The increase in large-scale sheep raising required displacement of considerable elements of the tenant population, for sheep raising was less labor-intensive than was crop raising and was hindered by the traditional open-field system of manorial agriculture.
Many of the gentry and even noble landowners actively promoted the change, either becoming commercial farmers themselves or renting their lands to commercial tenants. The secular owners of previously ecclesiastical lands, especially of monasteries that had been dissolved, were less traditional in estate management than the Church had been. Many members of the gentry also engaged, directly or through agents, in non-agricultural economic enterprise, particularly various commercial ventures. The general process was by no means complete by the end of the seventeenth century, but, along with the other factors that we have reviewed, it had already had two major consequences.
First, the proportion of peasants who were individual tenants, or even independent proprietors, had diminished. Instead, agricultural laborers
39 See the discussion in Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966). « Ford, op. cit.
41 This aspect was emphasized by Weber; see Max Rheinstein (ed.), Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954).
42 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Beacon, 1957).
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appeared,43 and the surplus rural population tended to leave the countryside and gradually became a laboring class in the towns. A new concern with indigence and vagabondage emerged 44 in response to the dislocations and human suffering that they entailed; from then on, the "poor laws" were to be a prominent issue. The "peasant class" was sufficiently weakened so that struggles over its rights and position were not as prominent in England as in France.45
Second, the land-owning classes tended to become "defeudalized." Their economic position came to depend increasingly upon the market success of their farming and other enterprises rather than upon the enforcement of feudal obligations on a peasant class. This increased the productivity of agriculture, but it also gave the aristocracy more economical flexibility, enabling it to incorporate increasingly large commercial and then industrial elements46 This relaxation created a common interest and a partial fusion with the predominantly urban upper classes, but certainly partly at the expense of the peasantry.
The situation in France was almost the reverse. There the aristocracy was economically dependent upon the crown.47 Because of the independence of the French Church from Rome, the crown had far-reaching control of ecclesiastical appointments, which, along with military commissions and the sale of civil offices, it used to fortify the loyalty of important aristocratic elements. In addition, the aristocracy was dependent upon priveleged exemptions from taxes and upon enforcement of obligations upon the peasantry.48 French agricultural traditions were thus not conducive to reorganization in the interest of productivity. The peasantry remained relatively intact and in potentially sharp conflict with the landowning class, which helped to entrench the combination of monarchy, aristocracy, and Church further under the ancien regime,49 as well as fostering peasant support for the Revolution, though in some circumstances, as in the Vendee, the peasants did swing to the other side.50 Furthermore, in France there was little reason for urban groups to support the old regime. In Holland aristocracy was much weaker, but there were
43 An interesting reflection of the situation is that the classical economists, particularly Ricardo, generally took commercial agriculture as a paradigmatic use in their analyses. It was the agricultural laborer, the employee of a commercial farmer, who was primarily discussed in connection with wage theory.
44 Ibid.
45 Moore, op. cit.
46 Ibid.
41 Ford, op. cit., and Moore, op. cit.
48 Moore, op. cit.; see also Georges Lefcbvre, The Coming of the French Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1960).
49 Palmer, op. cit.
50 Moore, op. cit.; and Charles Tilly, The Vendee (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964).
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important conflicts of interest between the commercial urban groups and the rural society of the "hinterland." 51
The export trade in wool supported the new level of English commercial activity. It strengthened urban commercial interests centered in London, the seat of government, as well as the commercial and .financial center and a major port. The "putting-out system" 52 between spinners and weavers of wool in the countryside and the wool merchants provided an escape from the restrictive rules of the urban guilds. Merchants in the towns "staked" countryside weavers who had home looms with yarn, collected the finished cloth, and sent it to London merchants for export. This system provided yet another bridge of economic interest between the land-owning gentry and the upper groups in the towns.
The differentiation engendered by these economic changes was similar to the kind that emerged between governmental organization and. societal community. The medieval differentiation between town and country involved only very partial economic differentiation. Its basis is the distinction between primary or "extractive" production (notably agriculture) and trade and manufacture (mostly handicrafts) involved the economic division of labor but extended economic and other functions through whole communities. A rural village was thus an agricultural unit, and a neighboring town was a unit for the provision of manufactured goods. Other functions, like government, were centralized and could not be spread equally through all the small community units.
The "squires" long held much of the local power, and the gentry contributed the "social" leaders of "county society." The employment of tenant farmers by owners, however, differentiated their own functions as social and political leaders in the local community from those of economic production in which their land was a factor of production. When farms became more specifically economic enterprises, agricultural laborers and tenant farmers were employed in something closer to modern occupational roles than the henditary status of villein had been, and the standards of success for enterprise became linked to solvency through market operations. Through the market, land owners established connections with groups outside their own rural communities, especially merchants and "putting-out" entrepreneurs. This trend proliferated through specific markets economic relations that did not coincide with relations of other sorts, for example citizenship in local communities. Although the participants in the economic system could thus be divided generally into an 'agricultural interest," a "mercantile interest," and, increasingly, a "manufacturing interest," it became more and more difficult to identify these interests
51 Palmer, op. cit.
52 See Edwin F. Gay, "Putting-Out System," in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1934).
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with whole communities rather than with differentiated units within communities.
Conclusion
Our major thesis has been that England had become by the end of the seventeenth century the most highly differentiated society in the European system, having advanced farther in this direction than had any previous society. Taking the societal community as our main point of reference, we have discussed the differentiation of religion, government, and economy from it.
First, the combination of a Protestant establishment with significant toleration and denominational pluralism broke the traditional European fusion of religion and government with the societal community. Not only was English government obligated to accord major rights to religious nonconformists, but also citizenship in the societal community was no longer bound to traditional religious conformity. This separation entailed both a new mode of integration and greater differentiation, in that the acceptable societal community was no longer confined to the coreligionists of the king (eius religio) but included Protestant nonconformists as well.
These developments involved generalization of the value level of the pattern-maintenance system in English society in two respects. First, the basis of value consensus had to be "moral," in the sense of being more general than any one denominational position would be. The Reformation and the splintering of Protestantism threatened the solidarity of the societal community. In England denominational religious commitment was, however, differentiated from moral consensus at the societal level. Second, there emerged a common commitment to the value of rational knowledge of the world, partly but not wholly because of its practical utility. Although not without strain, philosophy and science as such— not only, for example, Anglican philosophy and science—came to be regarded as "good things," supported across the religious spectrum, including Roman Catholicism.
Given the establishment of a "national" community, two main mechanisms of differentiation between the societal community and government developed. One was a government in which highly influential elements of the societal community were constituents of representative bodies rather than members of government; the critical role was played by the House of Commons. The second main mechanism was the law. More than any other legal system, English law drew a clear distinction between the status of member in the societal community with rights that the government was obligated to observe and the status of "subject" of the king as chief of government.
This differentiation was reinforced by the trend of relations between
the first crystallization of the modern system
aristocracy and government in England. Much of the English aristocracy became an active political constituency of government, instead of remaining part of the undifferentiated structure of government without an opportunity to play a decisive part in it. This pattern permitted later extension, so that larger groups could gain inclusion in the political aspect of citizenship.53
The consolidation of the common law and the supremacy of Parliament in government were closely connected with Puritanism and the special religious settlement that emerged in England.54 Denominational and political pluralism expressed the differentiation of the societal community from religious collectivities and governmental organization. Both aspects involved a process of inclusion associated with that of differentiation. Legitimate status of full membership in the societal community was accorded to religious dissenters and to political opponents of the group currently in office as long as they constituted a "loyal opposition." The legal system, both in its normative content and in its structural independence, was a primary mechanism regulating the boundary relations among these differentiated elements. It is crucial that there were legally institutionalized rights of religious and political dissent. England never resorted to a written constitution that would formally bind the "crown in Parliament" as the theoretical sovereign of the realm; nor were the courts of law ever accorded the power of judicial review, in the sense of authorization to declare acts of Parliament unconstitutional. Nevertheless, the record confirms the essential effectiveness of the legal institutionalization of "constitutional" limitations upon the powers of government, despite the close relation between government and the coercive sanctions of the courts.
The differentiation of societal community and economy focussed on the "commercialization" of agriculture, especially as it affected the landed interests of the gentry. Generally rural communities have undifferentiated ascriptive structures particularly resistant to modernization. The orientation of English agriculture to the market, however, created commercial interest that linked the rural communities "horizontally" with the towns, rather than "vertically" with a feudal type of aristocratic governmental hierarchy, and reduced the severity of the "peasant problem."
In the towns a parallel process of differentiation was breaking down the particularism of the guild system. As England was on the whole less urbanized than were some areas of the Continent, it was important that a major rural interest favored this differentiating process. The primary institutional foundations of a differentiated market economy were laid in England well before the mechanical inventions and other innovations of
53 Marshall, op. cit.
See David Little, Religion, Law, and Order (New York: Harper and Row,
1969).
the industrial revolution. The Puritan influence was very important as well, perhaps especially in the orientations of the innovative merchant groups but also among the gentry, many of whom were Puritans.
The economic phase of English development seems also to have promoted pluralism in the community structure. The processes of differentiation, which occurred within both rural and urban communities, strengthened a community of economic interests that cut across the old distinction. This trend was important above all in view of the political power of the landed classes. Economic differentiation provided a basis on which future urban groups could be included in a single solidary system. Rural-urban conflicts were not as severe in England as elsewhere in subsequent periods; compared with the situation in France, conflict between the bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy was mild.
The process of adaptive upgrading was most obviously associated with economic development. Not only in England, but also in the whole northwestern triangle, the seventeenth century was a period of substantial economic advance. There were progressive increases in the "extent of the market," both internally and externally, for each political unit.
Though within societies as social systems adaptive capacity is focussed in the economic sphere, it is affected by developments in both the cultural and personality systems. On the cultural side, the most conspicuous process of upgrading was the general development of secular culture, with its emphasis upon cognitive rationality in philosophy and science. This trend was furthered in Holland and England by the values of ascetic Protestantism.55 Although the growth of cognitive and rational culture had not yet had primary consequences for the structure of society, it had an impact. After Newton and Locke, for example, cultural leaders could not ignore the implications of the new science and philosophy for a vast range of concerns; they were equipped with a new level of adaptive resources.
The central development related to the adaptive aspect of personality was the emphasis of ascetic Protestantism upon the orientational complex that Weber called "worldly asceticism." It enhanced motivation to achievement in "worldly callings." The "situation" for giving meaning to such achievement was culturally "defined" as "this-worldly," rather than as "other-worldly," oriented toward the building of the good society and not only toward the salvation of souls in the afterlife. It was universalistic and
55 Merton's analysis of the relations of Puritanism and science in England has been not "refuted" but merely qualified by recent research. See Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England," Osiris, 4 (1938) reprinted in Social Theory and Social Structure, Chapter 18, (rev. ed.; Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1957); see also Joseph Ben-David, The Sociology of Science (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971).
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the first crystallization of the modern system
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the first crystallization of the modem system
innovative in that the mandate for achievement was applicable to all men and was to build a new "kingdom/' not to perpetuate tradition.
Encouragement of this type of personal orientation had selective effects in different spheres. One was to enhance the relevance of scientific investigation. Another was the broad pressure for a certain type of individualism in English law.r,fi There was, however, a special connection with the economic sphere, through market relations. This connection did not develop primarily, as has so persistently been alleged, because the market opened the doors to "self-interest" or "materialism." Rather, it developed because the market mechanism constituted the first massive institutional context within which it was possible to isolate individual achievements and contributions from a diffuse matrix of irrelevant ties. The market represented a differentiation of the social structure to the point at which differential opportunity, evaluation of individual contributions, and in some sense proportional rewards were possible on a wider scale than ever before. This possibility seems to us the primary significance of the connection between the Protestant Ethic of individual achievement and its expression in market activity, made famous by Weber.57
5B Little, op. cit.
&7 The connection between Protestant religious orientations and modern economic ethics has long been the subject of academic debate. The classics of the debate are Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scrib-ner, 1958); and R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Mentor, Books, 1947). See also R. W. Green (ed.), Protestantism and Capitalism (Boston: Heath, 1959); and Talcott Parsons, ''Richard Henry Tawney," American Sociological Review (December 1962).
70
the first crystallization of the modern system
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The Differentiation of Europe in the Age of Revolutions
The Counter-Reformation societies tended drastically to ''freeze" the process of differentiation, as we indicated in the last chapter, primarily because of the relations between their political regimes and a very defensive Church. Not only Protestantism but also many modernizing trends had to be opposed, especially those that might foster the independence of universalistically oriented units from the core structure of government, aristocracy, and church. These units included the "business" elements, those advocating more extensive and more democratic political participation, and "intellectual" groups, which by the eighteenth century were viewed with great suspicion by the authorities. The heartland of the Counter-Reformation, the Italian states and the papacy, served a primarily pattern-maintenance function in the general European system.
Spain became the most militant spokesman for the pre-Reformation order of society, often seeming "more Catholic than the Pope." In its secular social structure, Spain offered perhaps the prime example of a
71
A
major society frozen at an early modern level. In many respects its intransigent traditionalism isolated it from the rest of Europe.1
Austria, held together by royal and aristocratic intermarriage and Roman Catholic allegiance, contrasted sharply with Spain in its handling of ethnic heterogeneity. Although at first committed to the Counter-Reformation, the Austrian Habsburgs later accepted a limited religious pluralism established by the settlement of 1648. They were thus anachronistic in their lack of concern with political nationality, but they played an important integrative role by maintaining a large political structure that became first ethnically and then religiously pluralistic.2 That the Empire eventually disintegrated under the centrifugal forces of nationalism does not negate its importance over a long transitional period. Indeed, as late as the Holy Alliance, Austria was the focus of conservative integrationism in Europe. Furthermore, it played an important role in mediating Russia's entry into the European system, a role encouraged by mutual conflict with Napoleonic France.
The particularistic area of Germany resembled the Counter-Reformation center despite its religious diversity. Its small states were necessarily on the defensive also, threatened as they were with absorption by their larger neighbors. As in the Italian states, major structural innovations were inhibited.3
The Prussian role in the European system, conditioned by the open eastern frontier, crystallized on the basis of a special variant of the Protestant pattern. The Hohenzollern rulers had converted to Calvinism, whereas the bulk of the population adhered to Lutheranism. What emerged was a special form of the Protestant "national church" that amalgamated the two elements.4 Calvinism, within the activist pattern of ascetic Protestantism, postulated the general dominance in the community of a religious elite, the predestined elect, setting it above even the faithful Protestant common people. It was also strongly collectivist in that it conceived any Calvinist community to be founded upon its religiously ordained mission. This orientation—activist, authoritarian, and collectivist—well fitted the Prussian monarchy as a boundary unit seeking to expand at the cost of the Slavs. Furthermore, it dovetailed with the Lutheran emphasis on the Iigitimacy of duly constituted authority in maintaining a given order and in checking disorder, which might include almost any major change.
1 Americo Castro, The Structure of Spanish History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954).
2 James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire (rev. ed.; London: Macmillan, 1904).
3 Geoffrey Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany (New York: Capricorn, 1963).
4 Christine Kayser, "Calvinism and German Political Life," Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Radcliffe College, 1961.
Calvinism was admirablv suited to a forcible governing class, Lutheranism to its subjects. Along with the general unsettlement of any changing frontier community, this religious situation helps to explain Prussian advances in rationalizing both military and civil administration.
Like most of Continental Europe, Prussia was organized about a land-owning aristocracy, the Junkers. The Junkers did not become a parliamentary opposition to royal absolutism as had the English gentry; instead they were a primary support of the monarchy, particularly in a military capacity. As in England, however, they transformed their traditional estates into commercial farming operations oriented toward the export of grain. The changes nonetheless incorporated the old rigid class structure, which was strengthened when the agricultural workers who migrated to the new industries were replaced largely by Polish laborers.5
Before the nineteenth century, Prussia's most important advances were in governmental effectiveness; in both military and civil bureaucratic administration it set new standards for Europe.6 Certainly Prussia's military record, considering its size and resources, made it the Sparta of modern Europe. All classes in its hierarchically organized population came to accept a stringent conception of duty, much like the one formulated by Kant, but in this instance duty specifically to the state. The state managed to combine a relatively amenable lower group, a traditionally military landed gentry, and a not very large or strong but very urban-oriented upper Bürgertum in a highly effective operating organization.7 Gradually, it took advantage of the "liberal-national" movements in the German world, rather than being threatened by them, a trend culminating in the career of Bismarck.
Prussia's effectiveness as a sovereign state enabled it to extend its political domination over other territories; it gained control of practically all northern Germany, foreshadowing the exclusion of Austria from leadership in the unification of Germany. When the German Empire was constituted in 1871, it included a large Roman Catholic minority {nearly one-third of the population), the reverse of the settlement of 1648, which had included a Protestant minority in the old Roman Catholic Empire.8 Prussia's expansion into other parts of Germany, however, produced severe strains in the societal community, the religious diversity of which was not yet adequately integrated in a pluralistic structure.
Almost coincidentally with Prussia's expansion, the new Germany
5 See the account of Weber's early researches in Reinhard Bendix, Mux Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1962); see also Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship (New York: Wiley, 1964), Chapters 4, 6.
11 Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660-1815 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958).
? Ibid.
8 Barraclough, op. cit.
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counterpoint and further development: the age of revolutions
became the primary site of the second major phase of the Industrial Revolution. The buildup that established the political position of imperial Germany did not immediately include any major economic advance beyond that of early modern Europe generally. The major change came surprisingly slowly,9 considering how long the British example had been available. Furthermore, it centered not in the main areas of Prussian "efficiency" but in the territories about the Rhineland, which were generally more Roman Catholic than Protestant.10
Until the spread of the industrial revolution to the Continent, Britain, Prussia, and France had been in the forefront of change. In the differentiation of the European system as a whole, we may attribute primacy of goal-attaining functions to the Northwest, for the most important new institutional developments and structural differentiation were emerging there. These processes increased the adaptive capacity of the system, particularly in economic terms and in England.
For this same period, we may assign primacy of the more general adaptive function to Prussia. It had become the most important stabilizer of Europe's open eastern frontier. Furthermore, it had pioneered in the development of instrumentally effective collective organization, a generalized resource that has since been diffused throughout all functional sectors of modern societies.
The Industrial Revolution
The late eighteenth century saw the beginning of the two developments marking the transition from the early phase of Western modernity to the one that has crystallized in the mid-twentieth century. These changes are usually called the industrial revolution and the democratic revolution. The former began in Great Britain, whereas the latter erupted in France in 1789.
The emergence of these developments in the northwest sector of Europe capped the main developmental trends of the earlier period. As do all major structural changes, they occasioned severe strains where they emerged and even more severe strains when they spread into areas less well prepared for them.
The main developmental trend after the Reformation stressed, under an activist value system, the adaptive and integrative capacities of societies, which involved new orders of differentiation and increased organic solidarity in Durkheim's sense. The industrial revolution was part of this trend, in that vast increases in economic productivity entailed immense extension of the division of labor in the social sense. As we have em-
9 See David Landes, The Rise of Capitalism (New York: Macmillan, 1966).
10 See Rainer Baum, "Values and Uneven Political Development in Imperial Germany," unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1967.
phasized, such extensions in differentiation produce a functional need for new integrative structures and mechanisms. Tire democratic revolution involved primarily the integrative aspect of the societies; it focused on the political meaning of membership in the societal community and thus on the justification of inequalities in wealth and, more important, in political authority and social privilege.
Our primary interest in the industrial revolution is not in its technological and strictly economic aspects but in associated changes in social structure. It should be noted, however, that the technological changes had revolutionär}' economic effects. They made possible extremely large cost savings, lower prices, and the development of many new products.11 In England the process began in the cotton-textile industry and spread to the "heavier" industries, whereas on the Continent and in the United States the main development broadly coincided with the spread of the railroads.12
The structural key to the industrial revolution is the extension of the market system and of the attendant differentiation in the economic sector of the social structure. The market system itself, however, did not undergo a sudden revolution but only a long and continuous evolution. The distinctive prosperity of England and Holland especially, but also of France, before the new inventions undoubtedly resulted from the development of their market systems, which in turn depended upon legal and political security and legal frameworks based on property and contract, which favored the extension of commercial enterprise. English and Dutch prosperity was also a function of both relatively light governmental pressures on economic resources, especially the absence of large standing armies, and of an absence of the sharp aristocratic objections to "trade" that prevailed in most Continental countries.
Before the industrial revolution the most developed sector of the market system was finished commodities, generally luxury goods.13 The most important exception in England was the production for export first of wool, then of woolen cloth. In some areas grain was an important market commodity, but most foodstuffs and articles of general consumption entered the market system, only within local limits, if at all. Typical was the exchange of foodstuffs grown in the immediate locality for handicrafts products of a "market" town.14
From this focus the market system could spread in several directions. From the consumer product, it could extend "back" into earlier stages of
11 There is an enormous literature on these problems. Landes, op. cit., is a thorough and particularly illuminating survey.
12 J. H. Clapbam, Economic Development of France and Germany, 1815-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1963).
13 See Max Weber, General Economic History (New York: Adelphi, 1927) op. cit., and his The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1947).
14 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1957).
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counterpoint and further development: the age of revolutions
the production processes and eventually to the production of ''factors of production." There were also various intermediate products like the "gray cloth" that putting-out merchants bought from weavers. Transportation and commercial-mediation services between spatially separated producers and consumers became necessary. Raw materials, primary production, and the land itself became increasingly involved in the market nexus.
We have a special interest in two other "factor" markets, however, those for capital and labor. The former entered a new stage of development in the Renaissance, a major symptom of which was the religious controversy over the morality of "usury." 15 Long before the industrial revolution, money lending had existed on a substantial scale organized in money markets of various sorts, some already "international." Companies in which individuals could invest free of the contingent liabilities of partnerships also existed. By the end of the seventeenth century England possessed the beginnings of a central bank, a mark of its economic advancement.
Nevertheless, the industrial revolution saw a proliferation of financial markets at a new level of organization. These developments did not culminate until the middle of the nineteenth century, however, when general incorporation acts were adopted in England and in most of the American states16 and organized securities markets were established. One major advantage of German industry, when it surpassed British industry in the late nineteenth century, was the superior organization and spirit of enterprise of its investment banking system.17
Expanded financial markets provided more flexible mechanisms of adjustment for the increasingly complex and expanding economic system. More and more, money went beyond its functions as a medium of exchange and measure of value to become the primary control mechanism of the economic process. Control of money was used to influence the allocation of resources through the market mechanism. More important, the new dependence of credit creation upon large-scale financial institutions provided a type of built-in mechanism of economic growth.
The extension of the productive "chain" was of primary importance in physical production, especially in connection with the mechanisms of integration and stabilization of the economy as a whole. Increasing shares of resources were devoted to the early and intermediate stages of the progress from raw materials to consumable products.
15 Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (2nd ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
16 For an analysis of these legal developments and their importance, see J. Wil-lard Hurst, Law and the Conditions of Freedom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956).
17 Landes, op. cit.
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counterpoint and further development: the age of revolutions
A particularly important trend in this connection has been the development of generalized physical facilities. Transportation facilities like railways would seldom be economically viable if limited to the transportation of one product. Once lines existed between given centers, however, thev could be used for many purposes. Similar considerations applied to provision of mechanical power. The steam engine was one of the principal innovations of the early industrial revolution; electric power and the internal-combustion engine arrived later. Sources of energy, transmission of energy and fuel, and modes of using power were thus enhanced. Finally, the development of "tools to make tools." the machine-tool industry, also contributed to the technology of many different industries.18
These technological developments were closely interdependent with changes in the social organization of the productive process, especially of labor as a factor in production. The critical development was the differentiation of labor (or, more technically, of services) from the diffuse matrix in which it had been embedded. This differentiation involved distinguishing the work-role complex from the family household and also increased the "mobility of labor"—the readiness of households to respond to employment opportunities by changing residences or learning new skills. These changes affected the structures of family systems and local communities profoundly. Many features of the modern form of nuclear-family kinship structure gradually emerged during the nineteenth century. And industrial society became urbanized to a degree never before known in history.
These processes established what sociologists call the occupational role, specifically contingent upon status in an employing organization structurally distinct from the household.19 Usually the employing organization has only one member in common with the household; it also has premises, disciplines, authority systems, and property distinct from those of the household. Typically the employed person receives (according to his employment status and role performance) a money income that is the main source of his household's access to the market for consumer goods. The employing organization markets its product and pays the employee wages or a salary, whereas the typical peasant or artisan sold his own products. The organization thus comes between the worker and the consumer market.
The spread of occupational roles extended the range of consumer markets because of consumers' increased dependence upon money incomes in meeting their wants. But Adam Smith's famous dictum "The division of labor depends on the extent of the market" is important in this con-is Ibid.
19 Neil J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).
counterpoint and further development: the age of revolutions
77
nection: The advancing division of labor made possible increasing productivity and a rise in the standard of living among the general population.
In the factories roles were generally "occupationalized" from the bottom up. The first to become employees were propertyless wage workers, the mill hands of the textile industry. Management was generally based upon proprietorship. The owner, usually a kinship group, organized production, raised capital, set up factories, employed and supervised workers, and marketed the products. The early "capitalistic" industrial firm was thus a "two-class system/7 consisting of the proprietary lineage on one side and the employees on the other.20 This system was the structural basis for the Marxist conception of "class conflict" in capitalistic society, in which ownership and organizational authority are assumed always to operate together.
Finally, we must discuss a problem that has been very much misunderstood, largely for ideological reasons. The industrial revolution emerged under a "free enterprise" system and very likely could not have originated under any basically different one. Furthermore, we argue that a free-enterprise economy, rather than socialism in the sense of governmental operation of the whole economy, remains the main focus of evolution. Private economic enterprise and government organization of economic matters are not, however, related in a "zero-sum" manner: An increase in one does not require a corresponding decrease in the other. As Dürkheim demonstrated,21 a highly developed free-enterprise economy, compared to a more primitive form of economic organization, requires a stronger governmental structure, not a more restricted one.
A universalistic legal system, a central feature of any industrial society, cannot exist without strong government. Furthermore, increasingly complex regulatory functions are necessary to the economy, as to other aspects of society, for example, in the control of the cyclical disturbances that upset early industrial economies.
Government and economy are interdependent. Government requires taxable resources, which are increased by increments in productivity and by the mobility of resources in a developed market system. Similarly, government, in its own participation in the labor markets, benefits from the mobility of manpower.
This interdependence involves the interchange of money and power between the market system and the system of formal organization. Not only government but also such private organizations as firms participate in the power system; conversely government participates in the market
20 See Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry [New York: Wiley,
21 Emile Dürkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: MacmiHan, 1933).
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system. The power of private units is dependent upon that of government in two critical respects beside the general institutionalization of property and contract. First, the corporation as a legal entity is at least in part a "delegation" of public authority on the basis of a publicly granted and revocable charter. The use of authority within corporate organizations is legitimated by this authorization.22 Second, modern economies depend upon the credit mechanism for capitalization. Extension of credit involves the use of power by credit agencies, especially banks; they make funds available to borrowers, funds that they themselves do not "own," and bind themselves with legally enforceable contracts. This enforceability provides the basis of confidence in the time-ex ten dability of loan relations, which partake of the inherent risk of investments that cannot "pay off" except over a considerable period.
In a modern society, underdevelopment of the power system is thus highly deleterious to the economy, and underdevelopment of the monetary and market systems is highly deleterious to the polity.
The Democratic Revolution
The democratic revolution was part of the process of differentiating the polity and the societal community. As do all processes of differentiation, it produced integration problems and, where it was successful, new mechanisms of integration.
In European societies the focal point of these problems was some degree of popular support for government in the societal community. The starting point was the conception of ordinary people as "subjects" of their monarch, with almost totally ascriptive obligations to obey his authority, which was often claimed to be divinely ordained.23 Although the English crown's monopoly of governmental authority had fallen in the seventeenth century, as it had in a different way in Holland, even the English regime was far from "democratic"; it was rather sharply aristocratic.
Intellectual discussion during the Enlightenment made clear the internal tensions in the Continental territorial monarchies, exacerbated by the visibility of the British and Dutch examples.24 This strain was particularly acute in France, which had gone farthest in developing the national-ethnic basis of community while at the same time retaining an old-regime absolutism. The "common" people, including some high in the bourgeoisie, were still "subjects," whereas the aristocracy, closely allied to the crown, had consolidated its privileges. These developments identi-
22 Hurst, op. cit.
23 ]. W. Allen. A History of Political Thought in the Sixtennth Century (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960).
24 R. R. Palmer. The Age of Democratic Revolution (2 vols.; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959 and 1964).
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tied what "counted" in the societal community ever more closely with government, while pressing subjects not closely participating in government and its aristocratic penumbra into positions of dubious inclusion in the national community. As almost everywhere on the Continent, the central government, reinforced by the Counter-Reformation, pressed its diffuse claims to authority. The tradition of legally protected rights was much weaker on the Continent than in England.
Within the framework of a high level of national consciousness, the French Revolution demanded a community that included all Frenchmen and abrogated the special status of the privileges. The central concept was citizenship, the claim of the whole population to inclusions
The famous slogan of the Revolution, Liberte, tLgalite, Fraternite, embodied the new conception of community. Liberte and figalite symbolized the two central foci of dissatisfaction, political authoritarianism and privilege; Fraternite referred primarily to the broader context of belonging, "brotherhood" being a primordial symbol of community.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the symbol of liberty had two distinct references.26 One was paramount in England, where Adam Smith stressed economic liberty, especially in contrast with the governmental control associated with mercantilism. The other was paramount in France, where Rousseau was the most important author. It emphasized the liberty of the societal community, of the "people" vis-a-vis government. The problems of liberty of the people in this sense and liberty of the individual were not clearly distinguished, especially in the political sphere. It was the tyranny of the regime that had to be eliminated. The dictatorial tendencies of the Revolution emerged only after the power of the old regime had been at least temporarily broken.
The problem of equality is even more subtle. Whereas one can think of liberty primarily in terms of casting off restraints, equality inherently involves relations among units that are positively valued. Units that claim a right to equality cannot legitimately oppose recognition of the equality of others. Whereas in the context of liberty the evil is illegitimate constraint, in the context of equality it is illegitimate discrimination. The ideology of equality has often suggested that all differences of status or function are illegitimate, particularly if they are hierarchical. Social systems require varying kinds and degrees of social differentiation on two dimensions, however: a qualitative division of labor (in the Durkheimian sense) and a hierarchy.
The French Revolution, stressing both liberty and equality, focused
25 Ibid.: see also Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship.
26 Sec Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
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not only upon political authority but also upon the partially distinct system of privilege for the aristocracy. Tensions had been exacerbated by the association of the noblesse de robe with the monarchy and the older aristocracy under the ancien regime, so that the "people" stood against the "privileged," who were indissolubly identified with the government. There has been enormous ideological distortion of the European aristocracies' frivolity and social irresponsibility at the expense of the people. The critical issue of "privilege" was actually the hereditary ascription of status, which conflicted with the standards of either achievement or equality or both. The Revolution raised the question of whether privilege can be a meaningful reward or even legitimated on instrumental grounds—unless it is demonstrated that no other way of institutionalizing responsible leadership is possible. The French Revolutions attack on the principle of privilege was mainly led by the higher bourgeoisie, many of whose members were richer than were most aristocrats and, if not more powerful in the formal sense, perhaps more influential in governmental affairs.
In England, aristocracy, which included the gentry, was much more "private" and less identified with the regime. In fact, reform movements were often led by members of the aristocracy; the "French" question of aristocracy versus bourgeoisie was not nearly so explicitly raised.
The Revolutionary concept of equality, in relation to differential instrumental qualifications and the hierarchical dimension of social status, emphasized equality of opportunity. To the extent that this emerging value pattern was institutionalized, achievement and achievement capacity became the primary criteria of eligibility for differentially valued statuses. The attainment of a status or its retention under competitive pressure could then be evaluated as a reward for significant contribution to the social system. This complex gave support to a major normative component of the industrial revolution.
The main thrust in the French Revolution, however, was against inherited aristocratic privilege and toward equality of membership status, which must be distinguished from equality of opportunity, even though the two are interdependent. The pattern of privilege under the ancien regime had divided the societal community into two primary status classes. The "common man" was a "second-class citizen," who was denied by his hereditary status access to privileges enjoyed by the aristocracy, perhaps especially tax exemptions.27
Marshall has analyzed equality of membership as possessing three primary components, civil, political, and social.28 The French Revolution
27 Ibid.
28 T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1965).
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involved the first and second, whereas the third became important only in the mid-nineteenth century.
The civil component includes guarantees of what were called "natural rights"—in Locke's formulation, "life, liberty, and property." They were amplified and specified by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Bill of Rights. The revolutionary movement in France was encouraged by the fact that English and American law had already institutionalized many of these rights. The concept of "equality before the law" characterizes the civil component of equality of membership if it is taken to include both procedural and substantive protections. Here "law" means not onlv that enforceable through the courts but also the general patterning of the society's normative order.
The "political" component of citizenship focusses upon the democratic franchise. Although the principle of equality among citizens in the "final" voice of government dates from the ancient Greek polis, the French Revolution applied it to the government of a large-scale society and to all the people. It is impossible for modern government to give equal direct participation to all citizens. Developments have therefore been in the direction of representative institutions, in which political equality is focused upon the selection of top governmental leadership, generally through participation in an electoral system. The forms of these institutions vary in important ways,29 especially between the "presidential" and "parliamentary" types and between "republics" and "constitutional" monarchies.
Despite such variation all European political systems, except the communist ones but including many such overseas societies of European origin as the United States and some members of the British Commonwealth, have evolved toward a common pattern.30 This pattern includes two components of equality and two contextual features.
The first component of equality is universality of the franchise. The main trend has been toward universal adult suffrage; women's suffrage was adopted early in the present century in most Western nations. Only minors, aliens, and small classes of disqualified persons are now generally excluded. The other component of equality has been elimination of the weighting of votes. Historically, various systems have weighted votes unequally, either explicitly as in the Prussian class system of voting or implicitly as in discriminatory apportionment in the United States. Tire trend is, however, clearly toward the principle of one citizen, one vote, both in access to the polls and in the weight of each vote in determining electoral outcomes.
The first contextual feature is the system of formal electoral proce-
29 See S. M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, "Introduction," in Lipset and Rokkan, Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignment (New York: Free Press, 1965).
30 Stein Rokkan, "Mass Suffrage, Secret Voting, and Political Participation," in European Journal of Sociology (1961), 132-52.
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dure, including rules of eligibility for voting and rules by which votes are "counted." The latter aspect is critical in establishing a binding relation between the individual voter's choice and the effects of many such choices on the outcome. The second contextual development is secrecy of the ballot, which further differentiates government and societal community by protecting the individual's independent participation in each. It guards the voter from pressures not only from status superiors (for example, employers) but also from status peers (for example, fellow union members).31 This "barrier" favors political pluralization relative to the rest of the society and discourages unanimous "bloc" voting (for example, all trade-union members voting for socialist or other "left" parties) and encourages minorities within each interest group (or religious, ethnic, or local group) to vote differently from the majority. This structure enhances community flexibility and the possibility of both restraining and mobilizing government as an agency of change responsible to the community.
In one sense, the "social" component of citizenship is the most fundamental of the three.32 Some form of equality of social condition as an aspect of "social justice" has been a primary theme of Western history since the French Revolution but one that did not become institutionally salient until much later. It seems that the full emergence of this theme had to await reduction in the inequalities of governmental absolutism and aristocracy, which raised new tensions between the imperatives of equality of opportunity and equality of membership. The central principle may perhaps be that members of the society must have realistic, not merely formal, opportunities to compete, with reasonable prospects of success but that the community should not accord full membership to those inherently excluded from the opportunity complex. Allowance is thus made for those, like children, who are inherently unable to compete; those, like the unskilled poor, who are severely handicapped through no fault of their own and must be "helped" to compete; and those, like the aged, who must be supported. Furthermore, there should be a "floor" under the competitive system that defines a standard of "welfare" to which all members are entitled as a matter of "right," not as a matter of "charity."
The third Revolutionary catchword, Fratemite, suggested a synthesis of the other two at a more general normative level. In a certain sense, it was the ultimate embodiment of the implications for secular Society of the Reformation. The solidary societal community that it proclaimed could not be a two-class system in any of the medieval senses—Church and state, clergy and laity, or aristocracy and commons—but had to be a unitary community. Its members were to be considered not only free and equal, in
si ibid.
32 See Marshall, op. cit.
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the senses that we have outlined, but also bound together in a national, autonomous solidarity. This societal community was to be differentiated from government as its superior, legitimately entitled to control it. Yet the degree of its differentiation was still far from completely modern, particularly in regard to its incomplete pluralization.
French society during the nineteenth century institutionalized the democratic pattern of societal community only partially and unstably.33 The French Right held tenaciously to the patterns of the old regime down into the present century. It led several "experiments" in monarchical restoration and maintained a de facto ascendance in social prestige for the aristocracy and a strong, though contested, position for the established Roman Catholic Church. This conflict within France was exacerbated by the survival of the older system in most of the Continent, despite the spread of revolutionary patterns, especially through Napoleon's conquests.
Although England went much farther in the process of pluralization, a fact closely connected with its leadership in the industrial revolution, radical pressures toward democratization were absent, and the franchise was extended only gradually from 1832 on. Aristocracy remained strong in British society throughout the nineteenth century, though it was less "rigid" than in most Continental countries and less of an impediment to pluralistic differentiation and gradual democratization.34
The struggle over democratization was a major component of European social conflict during the nineteenth century. Napoleon was in certain respects the heir of the Revolution. The restored "legitimism" of the Holy Alliance was directed not only against French "imperialism" but also against Revolutionary ideas. Significantly, its breakdown in 1848 started in France but then became especially intense on the eastern fringe of the European system.
Through the nineteenth century leadership of the European system remained in the northwest sector, where an increasingly sharp "dialectical" conflict emerged between the British and French attitudes. Both were essential to the emerging synthesis, the one emphasizing economic productivity and pluralization of the social structure, the other democratization of the nation-state, nationalism and a new kind of societal community.
There were also important developments in the less advanced areas, however. The emergence of imperial Germany represented a major disturbance to the European system. It fully exploited the potentials of both the industrial revolution and the undemocratic "authoritarian" state while France and Britain were still insufficiently strong and unified to cope with
33 See Stanley Hoffmann, "Paradoxes of the French Political Community," in Hoffmann et at, In Research of France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963).
34 Marshall, op. cit.
the new power by genuinely synthesizing the components of modern society.
At the same time, the shadow of the "collossi" of the East and the West fell over the European system. Russia had emerged to assume a major role in the European system by contributing crucially to Napoleon's defeat and had become a primary participant in the settlement of Vienna and a guarantor of the Metternich system. By the time of World War I the United States had also emerged as unequivocally important to "the system."
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The industrial and democratic revolutions were aspects of the great transformation by which the institutional bulwarks of the early modern system were progressively weakened. European monarchies have survived only wrhere they have become constitutional. Aristocracy still twitches but mostly in the informal aspects of stratification systems— nowhere is it structurally central. There are still established churches, but only on the less modern peripheries like Spain and Portugal is there severe restriction on religious freedom. The broad trend is toward denominational pluralism and the separation of church asd state, though the communist countries present special problems. The industrial revolution shifted primary economic organization from agriculture and the commerce and handicrafts of small urban communities and extended markets.
The emergence of "full" modernity thus weakened the ascriptive framework of monarchy, aristocracy, established churches, and an economy circumscribed by kinship and localism to the point at which it no longer exercised decisive influence. Certain modern components that had already developed to some degree by the eighteenth century became increasingly important, particularly a universalistic legal system and secular culture, which had been diffused through Western society by means of the En-
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lightenment. Further developments in the political aspects of societal community emphasized the associational principle, nationalism, citizenship, and representative government. In the economy differentiated markets developed for the factors of production, primarily labor. "Occupational" services were increasingly performed in employing organizations that were structurally differentiated from households. New patterns of effectively organizing specific functions arose, especially administration (centering in government and the military} and the new economy. The democratic revolution immensely stimulated the former, the industrial revolution the latter. Weber saw that in a later phase the two patterns tend to fuse in the bureaucratization of capitalist economy.1 They have also, however, begun to fuse in other contexts, notably the associationalizing of the technological base of modern efficiency.
We have seen that the modern structural pattern initially crystallized in the northwest corner of Europe, whereas a secondary pattern subsequently emerged in the northeast corner, centering on Prussia. A striking parallel development occurred in the second main phase of modernization. The United States, the "first new nation," has come to play a role approximately comparable to that of England in the seventeenth century.2 America was fertile soil for both the democratic and industrial revolutions and for combining them more intimately than had been possible in Europe. By the time of Tocqueville's visit, a synthesis of the French and English revolutions had already been achieved: The United States was as "democratic" a society as all but the extreme wing of the French Revolution had wished for, and its level of industrialization was to surpass that of England. We shall therefore concentrate in the following discussion upon the United States.
The Structure of the Societal Community
Behind the developments outlined in the preceding paragraphs were a very special religious constitution and societal community. The United States was in a position to make new departures from the principal ascriptive institutions of early modern society: monarcry, with its "subjects," rather than citizens; aristocracy; an established church; an economy committed to localism and only a little division of labor; and an ethnically defined societal communih, or "nation."
American territory was initially settled mainly bv one distinctive group of migrants. The\ were "nonconformists" in search not so much of freedom from persecution as of greater religious independence than they could en-
1 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947).
2 Seymour M. Upset, The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1963).
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i
joy at home.:i They were predominantly of the Puritan persuasion, which Weber considered the core of "ascetic" Protestantism. In the colonies as a whole, however, they were divided into a number of denominations and sects.
In the early period, most notably in Congregational Massachusetts, the various colonies generally established their own churches. But a conception of the church as ideally a voluntary association emerged, in a process that passed through a decisive phase shortly before the crisis of independence,4 though in Massachusetts full disestablishment did not occur until more than a generation later. The religious pluralism of the thirteen colonies as a whole and the rationalistic, Enlightenment-influenced cultural atmosphere set the stage for the First Amendment, which prescribed a constitutional separation of church and state for the first time since the institutionalization of Christianity in the Roman Empire.5
Religious pluralism rapidly spread from differences among the original colonies to pluralism within each state, in contrast to the pattern of cuius regio, cius religio. This pluralism formed the basis for toleration, and eventually for full inclusion, of non-Protestant elements, especially a very large Roman Catholic minority and a relatively small but important Jewish minority.6 This inclusion has been symbolized in recent years by the election of a Roman Catholic, John F. Kennedy, to the Presidency. American society thus went beyond England and Holland in differentiating organized religion from the societal community, a process that had many important consequences. In particular, publicly sponsored and supported education as it developed in the nineteenth century was secular education. There was never, as in France, a major political struggle over that problem.
A parallel development has occurred in ethnic composition, the other principal historic basis of "nationality." The United States was for a long time an Anglo-Saxon society, which tolerated and granted legal rights to members of some other ethnic groups but did not fully include them. This problem grew acute with the arrival of waves of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, predominantly Roman Catholic and Jewish, from about 1S90 to the beginning of World War I.7 Although
a Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, (New York: Harper, 1964).
4 Ibid. See J. J. Loubscr. "The Development of Religious Liberty in Massachusetts," unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1964; and Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966).
5 Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, 1965).
6 Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, few (rev. ed.; Garden City. N.Y.: Anchor, 1960); and Talcott Parsons, "Some Comments on the Pattern of Religious Organization in the United States," in Structure and Process in Modern Societies (New York: Free Press, 1960).
T Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (New York: Grosset & Dunlap. 1951).
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the process of inclusion is still incomplete in the present century, the societal community has become ethnically pluralistic.
Negroes are still in the early stages of the inclusion process. The great bulk of the Negro population has been until recently segregated socially and geographically in the rural South, a region that has been considerably insulated from the rest of American society since the Civil War. Recently the South has been undergoing rapid "modernization" through inclusion in the society as a whole, and there has been massive migration of Negroes to the northern and western cities. These developments have stimulated a further process of inclusion that is creating acute tensions. It may, however, be predicted with considerable confidence that the long-run trend is toward successful inclusion.8
One reason that the American community has moved toward shedding its identity as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant community is that the "WASP" formula was never by any means monolithic. Not only do the Irish speak English, but there are also many "Anglo-Saxon" Roman Catholics and many Protestant Negroes. Pluralism has also been fostered by the socialization of the newer immigrant groups in the more general societal values.
Clear]v this trend offers a possibility of solution to the instability of ethnic nationalism, the problem of securing congruence between the boundaries of the societal community and the state. One particular difficulty is inherent in ethnically pluralistic systems, however. As language is a crucial focus of ethnic membership, the right of each ethnic group in a pluralistic community to use its own language can become the focus of disruptive internal tensions, as demonstrated by the conflicts between Walloons and Flemish in Belgium and English and French in Canada.9 Where the language of one ethnic group has become the community language, great strains may be imposed upon members of other groups. There are enormous benefits in linguistic uniformity, however. Its successful adoption in a multiethnic community probably depends on two main factors. The first is the type of priority enjoyed by the ethnic group whose language becomes the national language. The second is the number of competing languages; a plurality encourages the designation of only one language as "official." In both the twentieth-century "superpowers" the societal communities have largely gone beyond simple ethnic bases and have adopted single languages.
The original settlement of American territory was by English-speaking colonists from Great Britain. Other language groups were small and
8 Talcott Parsons, "Full Citizenship for the Negro American?" in Talcott Parsons and Kenneth Clark (eds.), The Negro American (Boston: Hough ton-Mi ffiin, 1966).
a Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1961).
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lively free of ascriptive ties, and the Federal Constitution has guaranteed their free movement among the different states. This freedom has encouraged a high degree of division of labor and the development of an extensive market system. Locally oriented and traditionally directed economic activities and the ascriptive community structures in which they were embedded have thus been undermined, which has had important consequences for the stratification system; to the extent that the latter was rooted in occupational structure, it was pushed toward universalism and an open class structure but not toward radical egalitarianism.
The American societal community that emerged from these developments was primarily associational. This characteristic was rooted in certain components of the value system. Universalism, which had its "purest" early modern expression in the ethics of ascetic Protestantism, has exerted strong and continuing "value pressure" toward inclusion—now reaching to the whole of the Judeo-Christian religious community and beginning to extend beyond it. Of course, the inclusion component alone could lead to a static, universalistic tolerance. It is, however, complemented by an activist commitment to building a good society in accordance with Divine Will that underlies the drive toward mastery of the various social environments through expansion in territory, economic productivity, knowledge, and so on. The combination of these two components has much to do with the associational emphasis in modern social structure—political and "social" democracy being conspicuous aspects.
The associational emphasis has been enhanced in the United States by the increasing elimination of ethnic membership and social class as ascriptively constitutive structures. In the early modern phase the most important basis of community in Europe was ethnic-national. Yet the coincidence between ethnic membership and territorial organization throughout most of Europe was incomplete. Ethnic-centered "nationalism" was thus not an adequate substitute for religion as a basis of societal solidarity, even as it gained in importance with "secularization" and the inclusion of religious diversity within the same political jurisdiction.
The most important new basis of inclusion in the societal community has been citizenship, developing in close association with the democratic revolution.14 Citizenship can be dissociated from ethnic membership, with its strong tendency toward nationalism and even "racism," which provides a sharp ascriptive criterion of belonging. The alternative has been to define belonging in universalistic terms, which inevitably must include reference to voluntary "allegiance," although probably no societal community can
14 T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1965).
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be a purely voluntary association.15 The institutionalization of access to citizenship through naturalization, regardless of the ethnic origins of individuals, represents an important break with the imperative of ethnic membership.
The development of the American pattern of citizenship has broadly-followed that outlined by Marshall for Great Britain, starting with the "civic" component, as he calls it, and developing the political and social components from there. The social component, though it has lagged behind that of the principal European societies, has been greatly extended through public education, social security, welfare policies, insurance, union benefits, and other means in the present century. Contemporary concern with problems of poverty marks a new phase in that development. On the whole, the structural outline of "citizenship" in the new societal community is complete, though not yet fully institutionalized. There are two mutually elated stress points, the present salience of which is an index of the importance of the new structures: race and poverty. They involve above all the need to extend the processes of inclusion and upgrading still farther.
A highly developed legal system is central to a stable societal community that has dispensed with religious and ethnic uniformity as radically as has American society. The Puritan tradition and the Enlightenment fostered a strong predilection for a written Constitution, with its echoes of covenant and social contract.16 An individualistic fear of authoritarianism had much to do with the separation of government powers.17 A federal structure was practically necessitated by the Segal separation of the colonies. All three circumstances placed a premium on legal forms and on agencies charged with legal functions. Also many of the framers of the Constitution had legal training. Even though they provided for only one Supreme Court, without specifying membership qualifications and with very little specification of its powers, they did lay the foundations for an especially strong emphasis on the legal order.
But three important developments were not clearly foreseen by the Founding Fathers. First was the importance of judicial review in settling conflicts among the branches of Federal government, among the states, and between the states and the Federal government. The second was the adoption and further development of English common law and the resulting proliferation of "judge-made" law. Finally, there was the expansion and
15 See Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1953).
16 See Edward S. Corwin, The "Higher Law": Background of American Constitutional Law (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1955).
17 Bernard Bailyn, "General Introduction," in Pamphlets of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).
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professionalization of legal practice. In contrast to the system in Continental Europe, the legal profession, though participating freely in politics, has not been organized about governmental functions.1&
Because the separation of powers and Federalism have decentralized American government to such an extent, legal institutions have been particularly important in the continuous attenuation of local autonomy, so critical a force in all early modern societies. The recent reintegration of the South into the nation is the most conspicuous example.
The Constitutional framework strongly emphasizes universalistic criteria of citizenship. These criteria have undergone fairly continuous evolution, involving both specification and generalization, in crucial interdependence with the evolution of the legal system, particularly the interpretive contributions of the Federal judiciary. One consequence has been pressure toward inclusion, most dramatically of Negroes.
At a more general level there is an important duality in what Marshall calls the "civic" component of citizenship, which has become particularly prominent in the United States because of this nation's special reliance on a written Constitution. One aspect is the more familiar citizen's rights and obligations as they have been formulated in the course of legal history. This component, of course, covers a very wide range, and certain principles of "equality before the law" are prominent almost throughout. Back of it, however, stand more general principles, first embodied in the Bill of Rights and extended both by amendment and by judicial interpretation, a particularly important phase of which has occurred recently. There is in this complex a strong egalitarian emphasis, increasingly stressed over time, on the basic equalities of citizens' rights to protection, certain freedoms, certain basic conditions of welfare, and opportunities, especially perhaps access to education and occupational development. In fact, it seems correct to say that, at least in principle, the new societal community has come to be defined as a company of equals. Departures from the egalitarian principle must be justified, either on the basis of incapacity to participate fully—as among small children—or of being qualified for special contributions, as through competence, to the societal welfare.
The Educational Revolution and
the Contemporary Phase of Modernization
The recent educational revolution is as important as the industrial and democratic revolutions have been. As a "child" of the Enlightenment, education has consisted primarily of inculcating intellec-
18 See Roscoe Pound, The Spirit of the Common Law (Boston: Beacon, 1963); and James Willard Hurst, Law and the Conditions of Freedom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956).
tual disciplines grounded in secular philosophy and organized in the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. These secular disciplines have become institutionalized in the "academic" system, that is, the system of higher education based on the universities. The universities are centers not only of instruction but also of the systematic pursuit of new knowledge through research. Compared to its medieval and early modern antecedents, the contemporary university has an altogether new comprehensiveness.16
One aspect of this new revolution is the spread of basic education. Before the early nineteenth century even elementary literacy had not extended beyond a small elite in any large-scale society. To attempt to educate the whole population was a radical departure. Formal education has had a long history, but until the educational revolution it was limited to a small proportion of any generation and generally of much shorter duration than it is today. This movement has thus meant an immense extension of equality of opportunity. A decreasing proportion of each successive generation has been handicapped by lack of access to educational qualifications for various statuses, both occupational roles and life styles. The spread of coeducation has been a particularly conspicuous egalitarian development.
At the same time, however, the educational system is necessarily selective. Differences in inborn ability to do intellectual work and in family orientations and individual motivations mean that levels of educational attainment and distinction vary. This factor has become prominent in what some currently call the "meritocracy," which, however compatible with ideals of equality of opportunity, does introduce new forms of substantive inequality into the modern social system.
A main feature of the educational revolution has been continuous extension of the education of the population beyond basic literacy. A major step has been the expansion of secondary education to the point at which the high-school "dropout" is viewed as a problem, lacking certain status characteristics of full membership in the societal community. Furthermore, rapidly increasing numbers of people are involved in higher education. The relatively stable situation of late nineteenth-century Europe accorded higher education to a small elite group, never more than 5 percent of the age group. The United States has broken decisively with this limitation; the proportion of youth receiving some higher education is around 40 percent and is steadily edging upward.
The creative-innovative aspect of the educational system has greatly increased its momentum. The earlier "inventions" of the industrial revo-
m Joseph Ben-David, The Sociology of Science (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971); and Talcott Parsons and Gerald M. Piatt, "Some Considerations on the American Academic Profession," Minerva, 6, No. 4 (Summer 1968), pp. 497-523.
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lution were overwhelmingly the work of "practical men." Applied science did not begin to have a serious impact upon technology until the late nineteenth century. But technology has now become highly dependent upon research "payoffs/' involving ever-wider ranges of the natural science's, from nuclear physics to genetics, and also the social or "behavioral" sciences, perhaps most obviously economics and some branches of psychology. The social sciences share with the natural sciences the benefits of some striking innovations in the technology of research. For example, mathematical statistics and computer technology facilitate the objective investigation of large populations and extend the range of empirical procedures.20
The emphasis in the United States on an associational pattern of social development favored early initiation of the educational revolution and its extension farther than has occurred in any other society. This revolution in turn strengthened the associational trend, primarily through, its effects upon the stratification and occupational systems. Certain ascrip-tive elements in the system of stratification have been generally eroded.
Of course, the hereditary principle has given way only slowly and not yet completely. As long as kinship and family Temain important, it probably cannot be altogether eliminated. Family solidarity requires that children share the advantages and disadvantages of their parents during their earlier years, and the premium on competence in the larger world is so high that pressures to perpetuate approximate status from generation to generation are unavoidable.21 But this requirement is very different from hereditary privilege as such.
The twentieth century opened a new phase in the transition from hereditary ascriptive and totally nonascriptive stratification. Each of the first two revolutions had generated an ideology embodying the aspirations to nonascriptive status of certain groups. In the industrial revolution the ideology extolled "pursuit of self-interest" by the individual for his own (and implicitly his family's) economic advancement. The ideal participant in this competitive system was the "self-made man," who linked bis inborn capacity to the opportunities opened up by a competive market system: Allegedly the most capable succeeded most fully. Associated with the democratic revolution was the ideology of political equality among citizens, in contrast to the ascriptive inequalities of the system of "privilege," aristocracy, and governmental absolutism.
The ideological dilemma of capitalism versus socialism was deeply
20 See Harvey Brooks, "Scientific Concepts and Cultural Change," in Gerald Holton (ed.), Science and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1966).
21 Talcott Parsons, "A Revised Analytical Approach to the Theory of Social Stratification," in Talcott Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory (New York: Free Press, 1954).
grounded in this pair of conceptions, neither of which considered the aristocratic system acceptable. The capitalist alternative emphasized, first, freedom from the ascriptive past, then protection from governmental "interference." The socialist alternative proposed the mobilization of governmental power to institute fundamental equality, ignoring almost completely the exigencies of economic efficiency (though the emphases on development and defense have been very strong in the Soviet Union) and governmental effectiveness in other connections. Both failed to ground themselves in adequate conceptions of the societal community and of the conditions necessary to maintain its solidarity.22
The focus of the new phase is the educational revolution, which in a certain sense synthesizes the themes of the industrial and democratic revolutions: equality of opportunity and equality of citizenship. The "native ability" of the individual to attain a just standing directly through market competition is no longer assumed. Instead, stratification by ability is recognized as mediated through a complex series of stages in the socialization process. Increasingly, there are opportunities for the relatively disadavantaged to succeed through selection, regulated to an unusual degree by universalist norms.
The "utopianism" of complete political equality is modified by structures intermediate between the "absolute" individual and the ultimate national collectivity. These structures do not preclude inequalities as such and even legitimate some forms of it—but they tend to minimize both the ascriptive fixity of such inequalities and the arbitrariness of their imposition. People are both "trained" and selected according to socialized capacity for the more responsible roles, which require higher levels of competence and carry higher levels of reward, including income, political influence, and to a lesser extent power.
Education is a particularly important factor in the general stratification system, in socialist as well as in free-enterprise societies of the modern system23 Future changes will have to build on this pattern, rather than bypassing it. They cannot be based upon relatively "pure" economic criteria of selection, the enforcement of "flat" equality by political authority, or the presumption that such equality will arise "spontaneously" if only certain barriers are removed, which is essentially the eighteenth-century romantic conception of the goodness of "natural man."
The educational revolution is having a profound and growing impact on the occupational structure of society, especially in the direction of general upgrading. The increasing importance of the "professions" is especially significant. Sociological discussion has tended to consider occupational
22 See Marshall, op. cit.
23 See R. Bendix and S. M. Lipset, Class, Status, and Power (2nd ed., New York: Free Press, 1965).
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roles as part of the pattern of "bureaucracy," which stresses hierarchical organization and "line" authority. The professional component, however, is most effectively institutionalized in another pattern, the "collegial," a form of association in which membership involves an occupational role, a "job," not casual participation.24
The professional complex reaches back into classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, especially including the priesthood and the practice of law and medicine. The new phase began with emphasis on scientific competence, first in law and in the "scientific medicine" of the later nineteenth century and then in many branches of engineering and other applied sciences, as well as in the social-behavioral fields.
The competence required in the professions is generally attainable only through advanced formal training, which now occurs in academic settings. The modern university has thus become the keystone in the professional arch. The profession par excellence is the academic, the profession of seeking and transmitting knowledge. It is surrounded by a ring of professions charged with applying knowledge to social order (law), health (medicine), effectiveness in governmental and private collectivities (administration), efficient use of the nonsocial environment (technology), and so on.25
The educational revolution, through the development of the academic complex and channels for applying academic competence, has thus begun to transform the whole structure of modern society. Above all, it reduces the relative importance of two major ideological concerns, the market and bureaucratic organization. The emerging emphasis is on associational organization, especially its collegial form.
Pattern Maintenance and Societal Community
Pattern maintenance is, we have argued, one of the four basic functional requirements of any society (or other action system). We define it, first, as the maintenance of the basic pattern of values institutionalized in the society and, second, as the shaping and maintenance of the appropriate motivational commitments of individuals in the society. The religious and educational developments that we have traced represent a major change in the American pattern-maintenance system.
The pluralization of the American religious complex, culminating in the inclusion of large non-Protestant groups, has, in one sense, been a process of "secularization," especially in contrast to the functioning of the older established church. As the values of society are rooted in religion,
24 See Talcott Parsons, "Professions," in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968).
25 Ibid.
one possible consequence of the pluralization of religion is the destruction of the moral or value consensus. This destruction has, however, by and large not occurred in the United States. Value generalization has been much more important: The underlying moral consensus has persisted, but it is now defined at a higher level of generality than in the European societies that have institutionalized internal religious uniformity. These highly general values are, through specification, made applicable to the numerous structural contexts necessary in modern societies. We thus insist that American society and, in somewhat different ways, other modern societies maintain strong moral commitments that have survived through, and have even been strengthened by, religious pluralism and secularization.
Contemporary social structure is characterized by a special kind of integration with the cultural system. In a sense modernity began with the secularization of the medieval integration of society and religion, resulting in both the Renaissance and Reformation. The societal system has since undergone a series of "declarations of independence" from close cultural— especially religious—"supervision." This independence has successively involved three main foci: legal order, first institutionalized in seventeenth-century England; national-political order, especially in pre-Revolutionary France; and market-economic order, especially in the aftermath of the industrial revolution.
The newest phase returns to primary concern with cultural elements. The focus is not religion, however, but the secular "intellectual disciplines" and perhaps, in a special sense, the "arts," whether or not they are defined as "fine." Whereas philosophy was in the ascendance in the early modern phase, "science" has become so in the twentieth century, above all through extending its scope to the social and behavioral fields and even to the humanities. The educational revolution has introduced mechanisms by which the new cultural standards, especially those embodied in the intellectual disciplines, are institutionalized in ways that partly replace traditional religion.
This new pattern is not without its strains. Unlike a century ago, when the religious implications of Darwinism stimulated bitter controversies, there has been relatively little recent ideological agitation about science. There has been much concern with "culture," however, especially the arts and some aspects of philosophy, one theme being an "aristocratic" disdain of "mass culture" expressed by such figures as T. S. Eliot, Dwight MacDonald, and Ortega y Gasset. Even concern within the religious context has a different flavor from that of the nineteenth-century conflict with science. One aspect of this concern is ecumenism, so widely heralded by "liberals," especially the Roman Catholic shift since the papacy of John XXIII and Vatican II. Another is the new skepticism about all traditional and organized religion, as in the atheist branch of existentialism
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(Sartre) 26 and the "God is dead" movement within Protestantism.
Intellectual alienation seems to be primarily a manifestation of strains involved in "value generalization." The value specificity of certain older symbolic systems has hindered the establishment of a moral consensus that, at the level of total societal values, could have more in egrative than divisive effects. We call resistance to value generalization "fundamentalism." It has been conspicuous in religious contexts, often closely linked with extreme societal conservatism, as among the Dutch Calvinists in South Africa. Indeed, the Fascist movements of the twentieth century have on the whole been fundamentalist in this sense. We can also speak of a fundamentalism of the extreme left, from certain phases of the Communist Party to the current New Left.
There have also been major changes in the mechanisms by which appropriate motivational patterns are created and sustained among members of the society, which is the second focus of the pattern-maintenance function. Some of these changes have involved the family.27 The differentiation between employing organizations and households has removed most economically productive activity from the home. For a variety of reasons this shift has created strong pressures toward isolating the nuclear family: the married couple and its dependent children. The breadwinner of the household—usually the adult male—is involved in an occupational world in which he is evaluated primarily by performance. This evaluation is incompatible with a status system that emphasizes ascribed positions, for either individuals or households, in a tight kinship or ethnic system.
Isolation does not imply the radical breaking of ties to extended kin, especially members of the spouses' families of orientation, which typically remain important. The nuclear family has, however, become increasingly independent with respect to property, community status, and even religious and ethnic commitment. A critical index of this independence is the decline of arranged marriages, which contrasts with the emphasis on the solidarity of lineages in both peasant and aristocratic statuses.
The dependence of the family, both in status and in income terms, on occupational earnings places a premium on residential mobility. The favored residence is for 3 single family, rented or purchased. Geographic mobility has tended to weaken not only kinship ties but also certain general community ties of a Gemeinschaft character. In fact, there are strong emphases on privacy, and little presumption of intimacy with one's neighbors.
These developments enhance the significance of the family as pro-
26 See Michel Crozier, "The Cultural Revolution: Notes on the Changes in the Intellectual Climate in France," in Stephen R. Graubard (ed.), A New Europe? (Boston: Beacon, 1966).
27 Talcott Parsons, "The Kinship System of the Contemporary United States," in Essays in Sociological Theory (New York: Free Press, 1954).
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vider of a secure emotional base for its members' participation in society. Not only have other diffuse emotional relationships been undermined, but also in certain respects family members are under increasing stress outside the home because of obligations placed upon them at work and school. The general process has thus been one of differentiation, the nuclear family focusing on pattern maintenance connected with its members' personalities to the exclusion of other functions.
These developments have placed considerable strain upon the housewife, who must be increasingly self-reliant in fulfilling her obligations to her husband and children. Furthermore, the woman's role has expanded in important ways, as symbolized by women's suffrage and participation in education and the labor force.
The educational revolution has had important consequences in this context also. Increasingly, socialization with respect to achievement in nonfamilial roles is left to educational institutions, which are differentiated from the family. It is the educational system and not the family that increasingly serves as the direct source of labor for the economy. Similarly, it is the educational system, and not kinship, that increasingly determines the distribution of individuals within the stratification system.
We can at this point venture a more general interpretation of the educational revolution than has so far been advanced. Two revolutions shaped early modernity: the industrial, which differentiated the economy and the polity from each other and developed new links between them, and the democratic, which involved analogous changes between the polity and the societal community. We suggest that the educational revolution is the climax of similar changes between the societal community and the pattern-maintenance system—and through it the cultural system. We have traced the differentiation of the societal community and the pattern-maintenance system through many steps, especially the development of a normative order and the definition of a societal community not grounded directly in religion. The educational revolution is a further step in this secularization. It also, however, involves important integrative mechanisms, among them a means for institutionalizing secular culture. Furthermore, it reflects an increasing emphasis upon socialized capacity as a criterion of full membership in the societal community, as well as of distributing new members through the stratification system.27
Polity and Societal Community
The differentiation between societal community and the political system is most fundamental to government but could
27 Talcott Parsons and Gerald M. Piatt, "Higher Education, Changing Socialization, and Contemporary Student Dissent," in Matilda Riley, et ed. (eds.), Aging and Society (New York: Russell Sage,-1971).
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be viewed in the broader analytical setting of the 'political factor" of collective goal attainment, regardless of the status of the referent collectivity.28
The most important development is the focusing of political function in the specific role type that we call office, elective and appointive, which is broadly correlated with two types of collectivities, the associational and the bureaucratic, and in the institution of citizenship. When elective office is a complement of citizenship, government is differentiated from the societal community, and the members of that community (and for the most part its territorial subdivisions) become constituents of it. Through the franchise they are the ultimate source of its formal power— within a constitutional framework—and the ultimate beneficiaries, individually, in groups, and as a community, of government contributions to societal functioning.23 Elective office, with power to make and implement collectively binding decisions, is thus at the heart of the leadership function. In large-scale societies the mobilization of support, both for election and for decision making, tends to be achieved through political parties that mediate between the government leadership and the numerous "interest groups" in the constituency.30
As elective office is not usually a permanent job, it seldom approaches an "occupational" role type. Stable democracies, however, generally have a class of relatively "professional" politicians whose primary concern is to occupy elective office or to assist those aspiring to it, party organizers, for example. In the United States federalism and the decentralization of local governmental units have enlarged this class.31 Anchorage in appointive office and in private sector (for example, in legal practice), in order to obtain occupational security and personal property, are, however, essential to those who commit themselves to political leadership. In general, democracies urgently need a functional equivalent to aristocracy as the security base for leadership.
In line with the size and complexity of the society, an extensive system of governmental administrative agencies has developed but without upsetting a certain balance between the "political" (elective) and the bureaucratic components of government.
28 See Talcott Parsons, "The Political Aspect of Social Structure and Process," in David Easton (ed.), Varieties of Political Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), reprinted in Talcott Parsons, Politics and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1969). Several other essays in the latter volume are also relevant.
29 Ibid.
30 Talcott Parsons, " 'Voting' and the Equilibrium of the American Political System" and "On the Concept of Political Power," in Parsons, Politics and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1969), and of course an immense literature.
31 See V. O. Key, Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups (5th ed.; New York: Crowell, 1964).
What is true of the democratic polity as an associational collectivity is, with appropriate adaptations, broadly true as well of the other associations that have proliferated in modern societies. The problems of associations vary according to size, complexity, interest, and internal conflicts. The problem of securing a sufficiently independent position for leadership, across these partisan divisions, is, however, always crucial.
The choice between centralization, which enhances collective effectiveness, and decentralization, which permits "representativeness," freedom of expression, and the pursuits of interest by groups, is a general dilemma for democratic associations.32 Connected with this dilemma is the matter of incentives to become integrated with the collective enter-prize, as opposed to "going it alone." Broadly speaking, the institutionalization of associational patterns is correlated with intracommunity pluralization. When a collectivity has associative functions but the exercise of authority is sharply dictatorial, we may assume strong obstacles to full institutionalization. Another index of incomplete institutionalization is the insistence by individuals and groups on recognition of their particular and partial "rights" by means of techniques ranging from simple assertion through organized protest to obstruction. Indeed, when basic interests are at stake, the optimal functioning of complex democratic associations involves a delicate balancing of many factors.
Although representative democracy has proved to be a relatively workable solution at the government level under some circumstances and in some private associations, it evidently cannot be extended to all organizational contexts. In representative democracy the elected component can be linked to bureaucratic organization as the "nonbureaucratic top," the importance of which Weber emphasized.3''5 Another important device for filling this role is the fiduciary board, which is not only prominent in nonprofit sectors but is also becoming in fact the main governing agency of the large private business corporation.
Bureaucratic organization is characterized by predominantly appointive office, emphasis on effective collective goal attainment, use of authority to coordinate implementation of centrally adopted plans, and a strong hierarchical structure. Criteria connected with elective office, like subordination to universalist norms and the separation of the private and official spheres, apply there as well, however.34 The spread of bureaucracy, both public and private, has been a hallmark of later modernization. In nineteenth-century Europe, civil service expanded but had difficulty in
32 See S. M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan (eds.), Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967), especially the Introduction.
33 See Max Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1947), pp. 324 ff.
34 Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization.
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remaining independent of aristocratic connections, as in France, in England, and somewhat less in Prussia. In the United States this tendency was strongly counteracted bv the "spoils system" and democratic populism.35
Bureaucratic elements probably began to emerge close to, though not quite at, the top of government. In industry, however, they emerged at the bottom, with the employment of "laborers," whereas what we now call "managerial" and "technical" functions along with ownership, were mainly in the hands of an ascriptive proprietary element. This situation has changed, especially through the separation of ownership from "control," or active management, in the large corporation during the last half-century.36 Although owners still exercise some authority in a fiduciary sense, for example, in the selection of managers and in setting broad policy, management is organized predominantly in occupational roles, which depend little or not at all upon personal property rights or lineage structures in which property rights are institutionalized. Recently higher management has become increasingly "professionalized" as technical qualifications and formal training increase in importance. Competence is no longer primarily a matter of "horse sense" and a diploma from the "school of hard knocks."
Tire combination of the spreading democratic revolution and the differentiation of modern societies has, as in other contexts, been a primary source of both new freedoms and adaptive capacities, on one hand, and of new integrative strains, on the other. The new phase that is the subject of this chapter has involved, in the United States and in most modern societies, the completion of the universalization of the franchise within the particular constituency. There has also been a notable spread of this pattern of equal membership and power within a wide range of private associations, though just what the limits of this process will turn out to be, for example, in such organizations as universities, remains to be seen.
At the same time, the increase in the scale and the burden of collective responsibility of associational systems has intensified the need for effective and responsible leadership, which presumably cannot be provided without considerable concentration of power. On course, administrative bureaucracy is one fundamental way of meeting this need, but the problem of accountability within such organizations is acute, and the modem solution has been to make bureaucracy ultimately responsible to electorates but more immediately to elective officers of the political system: in the
35 The classic discussion is M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Party System in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1912).
36 A. A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Commerce Clearing House, 1952).
American government in particular, the executive and legislative branches. This solution clearlv involves giving immense power to elected officials— presidents and governors of states, as well as members of Congress and of state legislatures. They in turn are held accountable through the electoral process, which may, from the present point of view, be regarded as a device for handling the inevitable tension between the egalitarian basis of citizens' rights and participation, on one hand, and the sheer functional exigencies of effective collective action, on the other.
The professions have also been increasingly involved in business, other areas of the "private sector," and government. Professional competence is not usually organized in "line authority" patterns, even in a "rational-legal" framework. This difference has modified both public and private "bureaucratic" organizations, reducing the importance of line authority, so that the organizations have become more associational, for it is essential to secure the cooperation of specialists without asserting sheer authority.37 Much of modern "bureaucracy" thus verges on the "collegia!" pattern.38 This "collegial" pattern, modifying bureaucracy in an associational direction, involves membership roles that are occupational; participation is a "full-time job." Collegial responsibilities cannot be specified in the fashion that line authority ordains for primarily bureaucratic organizations. Nor are they peripheral and segmental as are membership responsibilities in associations more generally, including the political component of citizenship; a "full-time voter" would be highly peculiar in a pluralistic polity, though some such concept perhaps describes the Communist Party member.
The collegial pattern is today perhaps most fully institutionalized in the academic world, which, contrary to what many have argued, is not giving way to bureaucratization,30 even though higher education has recently undergone unprecedented expansion. The basic equality of "colleagues" in a faculty or department is in particularly sharp and persistent contrast with bureaucratic hierarchy. A second distinctive feature of collegial structure is election, as distinguished from appointment from above. Most modern academic "appointment" systems involve a complex balance: Fiduciary agencies (for example, boards of trustees) usually have "final" authority, whereas professional peers have control at important stages in selections. The imposition of an appointee explicitly unacceptable to his prospective colleagues is virtually nonexistent in the higher-level academic
37 Parsons, Structure and Process in Modern Societies, Chapters 1, 2.
38 It is notable that the issue of "collegiality," as distinct from papal monarchy has recently become prominent in the Roman Catholic Church, under the stimulus Vatican II.
39 Parsons and Piatt, op. cit.
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institutions. Professors elect their colleagues, at least indirectly, if not directly.40
Many organizations stereotyped as bureaucracies have become "col-legialized" in many ways. Modern government is not predominantly bureaucratic, not only because it has been "democratized" through elective office and responsiveness to the public but also because its internal structure, especially its "executive branch," is collegialized to a considerable degree. Furthermore, the progressive attenuation of owners' control of economic organizations has not resulted only in bureacratization, though the latter has been widespread in large-scale organizations. With the increasing importance of scientific technology, academically trained professionals have become ever more necessary in industry, not only because of their substantive contributions but also because of their impact on organizational structure. The most recent phase has brought large-scale industrial employment of research scientists, as well as engineers, with corresponding developments in fields like health and educational services.
Economy and Societal Community
As it has evolved into the contemporary phase, the economy has departed considerably from the classical pattern delineated in nineteenth-century "capitalist" ideology. It is subject not only to institutional control, especially legal regulation based on laws of contract and property, but also to a complex system of constraints and regulations through government price-policies, oligopolistic business practices, and collective bargaining, to name a few. There is also substantial redistribution of resources, particularly through the use of tax revenues to subsidize many groups and activities beyond the primary functions of government, ranging from relief of the indigent to subsidies for scientific research.
Nevertheless, the market system is still an autonomous and differentiated subsystem of American society.41 The rigid opposition between a "free enterprise" system, with minimal social and governmental controls, and "socialism," with government ownership and control of all the principal means of production, has proved to be unrealistic. The emerging pattern corresponds to a general modern trend toward structural differentiation and pluralization. In societies broadly identified as having "free
40 For some purposes a third process of achieving occupational membership must be considered: "hiring." It suggests the naked economic nexus, treatment of the incumbent's service as a "commodity." Modern occupational systems, partly influenced by union organization, have clearly been developing away from such economic casual-ness for all but a decreasing minority.
41 Talcott Parsons and Neil J. Smelser, Economy and Society (New York: Free Press, 1956).
enterprise" economies, only the rear guard of the political Right that opposes all modification of ninteenth-century laissez-faire would seriously challenge this judgment. Indeed, the instability inherent in even approximations of the "pure" capitalist system, as formulated by both its proponents and its socialist opponents, is a cogent reason for treating the nineteenth-century phase of modern society as transitional.
Around the turn of the century the United States surpassed England and then Germany in quantitative economic growth. This rapid development resulted from a variety of conditions. At Independence, the United States had fewer than 4 million people, concentrated along the Atlantic coast but with room for relatively unhindered westward expansion. Partly because of British control of the seas, the "imperialist" energies of France and Spain soon ebbed in the Americas. It was therefore possible for the United States peacefully to purchase Florida and the Louisiana Territory; somewhat later Mexico put up only weak resistance to further territorial expansion, which made room for population growth and provided immense economic resources of all sorts. Such expansion also predisposed the nation to a liberal immigration policy, which, among its many important consequences, guaranteed much of the labor force for industrialization.
The development of monetary, banking, and credit institutions grounded in "commercial banking" was rapid and extensive, though these instruments were very unstable throughout the nineteenth century. Thanks to the banking system the circulating medium consists mainly of bank deposits—cash represents a small fraction—-and supports many forms of credit, corporate securities, and even the public debt.42 The credit system favors continuing economic innovation as the contemporary academic system favors "cognitive innovation." No other society rivals the United States in "monetarization" of economic affairs, especially the use of banks and credit instruments.
The American pattern of capitalism has been particularly distinctive in two respects. The first was the development of mass production, pioneered by the Ford Motor Company. Because mass production is necessarily oriented toward large consumer markets, mostly domestic, it came to be understood that profits depend not only upon the "share of the market" captured by a particular firm but also upon the total disposable income of the consumers. Henry Ford's high-wage policy, instituted quite apart from labor-union pressure, marked a turn toward production that was capital-intensive, rather than labor-intensive. This shift has resulted in a continuing relative decline in the manufacturing labor force, despite immense increases in production. There have been corresponding
42 J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936).
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increases in "service" and "white collar" occupations.43 The second feature originated in Germany but has evolved farthest in the United States: the harnessing of scientific knowledge to industrial production. From the chemical and electrical industries it has spread to a wide range of others. Electronics, closely related to cybernetics and information processing, is perhaps the farthest-reaching development so far.
The American legal system has also favored economic growth. The Constitution prohibited tariffs and restrictions on the movement of people among the states at a time when Europe was much more fragmented by internal and interstate tariffs. The legal framework regulating property and contract was adopted from England but then was developed substantially farther, mostly through judicial decisions.44 Later American lawyers pioneered in developing the private corporation, laying the legal groundwork for differentiation of ownership from managerial control.
An extensive system of occupational roles, based on employment rather than on proprietorship, was institutionalized in American society quite early and has spread with industrialization and urbanization. It involves differentiation between households and employing organizations, mainly business firms, though it also applies to employment in government and much of the private nonprofit sector. "Occupationalizing" of work in the early phases of modernization was generally restricted to employed "laborers" at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy. Later employment —and therefore the labor market—spread upward; it now includes, as executives (managerial or administrative) and professionals, most of the elements that were previously proprietary. This critical structural transformation is entirely overlooked in most comparisons of capitalism and socialism.45
In the fully modem phase, with the decline in the proportion of the labor force in agriculture, the primary contributions of adult males to larger functional interests of the society are, with few exceptions, made in occupational "jobs." Furthermore, the participation of women, particularly married women, in the labor force has also increased sharply.
Certain functions strongly resist "occupationalizing." They seem to reflect diffuse interests that would be threatened by the kind of specialization inherent in occupational roles. Their diffuseness may take in several systems. The family and household are central to both personality and organic concerns. Culture has been historically conspicuous in religious functions, but in the modern world it is also expressed by artists, who strongly resist "professionalizing." At the level of social system, aside
43 Neil J. Smelser, The Sociology of Economic Life (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964).
44 Hurst, Law and the Conditions of Freedom.
45 Talcott Parsons, Structure and Process in Modern Societies.
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from the role of the politician, which we have already discussed, there are many both government and private "fiduciary" roles, like "trustees" of organizations that are not exclusively "profit making." For the individual citizen, however, fiduciary responsibility for the "public interest" becomes segmented; it involves his roles as voter and optional participant in communication processes and associations that further his views. Many categories of people are under strong pressure, psychological and otherwise, to become "engaged" to the point of giving their "causes" clear priority over their "jobs" or their families. These pressures are intensified in modem society by extensive and continuous change and attendant conflicts. Furthermore, the attainment of such limited goals as economic security and a fairly high standard of living opens vast possibilities for further improvements, to which strong emotions become attached. In social-psychological terms, our times are an age of unprecedented "relative deprivation."
A labor-union movement is prominent in every modern society. Structurally it is rooted in the "gap" between household and job that has been created by the spread of occupations. Its leaders have been not the most disadvantaged workers but those with higher levels of skills and social status, so that in some respects it is a successor to the craft guilds. Its primary strength, however, has been among manual workers and its primary orientation toward the protection and improvement of their economic interests and status. It has spread unevenly both among the most unskilled and among white-collar workers.
In the United States, especially since the New Deal, the union movement has acquired substantial strength in industry without providing a base for a political socialist movement as it has in most of Europe since the late nineteenth century. This anomaly reflects the extent to which American society was already "democratized," including opportunities for economic and social mobility.
There has been general and continuous upgrading within the occupational world. The proportion of the modern labor force that is composed of unskilled "laborers" has been shrinking. Historians of the industrial revolution long treated growth in physical volume of output, investment of money capital, and numbers employed in an industry as alternative general measures of productive growth, presuming that they varied in close proximity. But they have ceased to do so. Since the 1920s the total output of manufacturing industry in the United States has increased greatly, wheras the number employed in it has remained almost constant, and the proportion of the labor force employed in it has declined substantially.
This decline is primarily a result of "mechanization," now merging into "automation," and to improvements in organization, which have occasioned much "technological unemployment," as in the tragic example
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of the early nineteenth-century hand-loom weavers. There has been a progressive restriction of employment opportunities for those without fairly specific qualifications. This restriction has, however, produced not a permanently rising unemployment rate but a general rise in the competence of the labor force, resulting from educational upgrading. In the middle third of the present century the early phase of mass and assembly-line production placed a high premium on "semiskilled" labor, often to the detriment of older skilled craftsmen. Now more general levels of com petence, which presume secondary-school education rather than particular skills, are increasingly required.
The development of occupational roles and the attendant emphasis upon performance have undermined the significance of ascriptive background conditions. Although "discrimination" by lineage membership, social class, ethnic origin, religion, race, and so on is tenacious, there seems to be steady and effective long-run pressure for evaluation—and thus admission to membership and achievement opportunities—on predominantly universalist grounds.46
Distribution of income among households is complex. The most important single factor is the labor market, which reflects differential demand for different services. Independent proprietorship has steadily declined, especially in agriculture. Wages and salaries, along with such forms of income as commissions, are broadly a function of competence and responsibility required in occupational roles, which are in turn increasingly influenced by education. Here it should be kept in mind that, because of increasing financial aid to higher education, the latter is no longer available mainly to children of the well-to-do.
Modification in the scale determined by demand for occupational services—some of the demand, as for academic professionals, is subsidized— occurs at both ends. In all modern societies massive "transfer payments" (as economists call them) subsidize the living standards of the lower-income groups through "relief," old-age security, unemployment benefits, health services, low-rent housing, and many other measures. A "floor"-— below which it is felt no major category of people should fall—defines the minimum content of the "social" component of modern citizenship.47 The pattern is uneven, as indicated by present concern over poverty in the United States. Nevertheless, the adoption of such a floor is characteristic of industrial societies in the twentieth century. Furthermore, transfer subsidies merge with measures to help otherwise handicapped individuals to "help themselves," most obviously through universal public education. Furthermore, largely under pressure from trade unions, increased wages
46 Parsons, "A Revised Analytical Approach to the Theory of Social Stratification," and "Equality and Inequality in Modem Society . . . ," 40/2 (Spring 1970).
47 Marshall, op. cit.
and growing "fringe benefits" have greatly improved the economic position of the so-called "working class."
The market is historically the locus classicus of competitive individualism, institutionalized in the full expectation that participation would lead to differential success. Most capitalist theory has thus focused only upon guaranteeing the fairness of competitive conditions, the pattern of equality of opportunity. There are many facets of the balance between equality and differential success as it has been continuously worked out since the eighteenth century. Not the least important phenomenon has been the increasing differentiation between the success status of the firm and the occupational status of the individual participating in the firm's productive activities.
Socialism, as we have remarked, has tended to set up a rigid alternative to the "free enterprise" market economy, advocating concentration of control of all major factors of production in central government. A principal demonstration that this alternative is not the only one lies in the establishment (just reviewed) in all "industrial" societies of some kind of "floor" of income and welfare open to all participants in the economy. We shall presently remark on some mechanisms that tend to counteract the more extreme tendencies to inequality in the other direction. We therefore suggest that here again there is a basic integrative "problem," of balancing the egalitarian component in modern values and those components of the "achievement complex" that engender differences of hierarchical status within the societal community. We shall comment briefly on the more general problem at the end of this chapter.
At the other end of the demand scale there is appreciable property income. To a very great extent, this income is dissociated from proprietorship. Rural landed proprietorship, the main politico-economic base of early modern aristocracies, has lost its importance. In the most recent phase the importance of business proprietorship has also declined, though much less drastically. The crucial form of property has come to be fluid, marketable monetary assets; corporate and government securities are the prototypes. In the United States property income is estimated at something over 20 percent of "personal" income, a proportion that seems not to have varied greatly for a generation or more.4S Much of such property is in forms outside ordinary currently disposable income, for example, investments in private insurance. Another very important development is the extent to which property income goes to institutional rather than to individual holders such as to foundations, colleges and universities, hospitals, and other charitable organizations and other endowment funds.
Although property income is heavily concentrated among the well-to-
48 William Haber (ed.), Labor in a Changing America (New York: Basic Books,
1966).
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do, there is wider participation in its nonproprietary forms than there was in the earlier phase of free-enterprise societies, extending especially to the upper middle class. The accumulation of wealth by the rich is substantially checked by progressive taxation of incomes and estates. In general, income distribution is much more nearly equal in the later phases of modern societies than it was in the earlier phases or is in most contemporary "underdeveloped" societies. What is true of income is probably-even more true of opportunity, especially since the opening of higher education to increased proportions of each age group. Although the long-run stability of the current pattern is uncertain, the probable trend is toward greater equality still.
There is a curious counterpoint to these developments in criticism of the leading classes of modern society. On one hand, they are accused of having "gone soft"; on the other, they are accused of being too absorbed in the "narrow" interests of their work. Although all such accusations invite suspicion, the latter seems realistic. Occupationalizing and professionalizing management have entailed immense upgrading of educational standards, expectations, and average attainment, requiring high motivation to achieve among participants. The widespread motivational commitment necessary was probably not present during earlier phases of our social development. Despite certain reductions in the hours of formal work and perhaps a slackening of effort in some types of work, commitment to occupational performance remains high. Very likely it has been increasing, particularly at the highest occupational levels. The upper occupational groups in modern society, far from constituting a "leisure class" are generally among the most intensely "working" groups in human history. Paradoxically, the allegedly "exploited" working class has moved far closer to becoming the leisure class of modern society. The hard work of the upper groups does not consist mainly of muscular exertion or adherence to stringent supervisor)- discipline; rather it involves solving difficult, often baffling, problems and taking responsibility for solutions.
There has been a general raising of standards of nutrition, clothing, housing, and other components of the standard of living. Only in the lowest brackets of the modern poor is there such drastic deprivation—to the point of near starvation, considerably lower life expectancy, ragged clothing, and the like—as characterizes much of the "underdeveloped" world today. This problem clearly is not the same as that of the incidence of such "social pathologies" as drug addiction.
There has also been a general upgrading in expressive standards, as demonstrated by rising consumption of "cultural goods" and by related levels of aesthetic taste in household furnishings, food, and the like (including participation in public recreation). Even though previously disadvantaged or isolated groups have often fostered aesthetic monstrosities that older and later upper groups have not been slow to ridicule, it seems that
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"sophisticated" tastes are probably shared by a substantiallv larger proportion of the population in modern societies than ever before. This development is difficult to evaluate, however. On one hand, increased consumption is apt to be disapproved bv "puritans," who regard it as evidence that the current generation is "going soft." On the other, Gemeinschaft romanticists allege that the taste of simple people has everywhere been corrupted by modernization.
Another prominent theme in the discussion of standards of living in "affluent" societies is competition for status through "conspicuous consumption," extending from the ostentatious entertainment and palaces of the old aristocracies to the rather modest contemporary "keeping up with the Joneses." Some such competitiveness is probably unavoidable when standards of universalism and achievement are institutionalized. Yet it seems that the decline of the aristocracy has reduced the importance of invidious consumption differences. For example, the White House, though hardly a log cabin, is far from being another Palace of Versailles. The Gilded Age mansions of New York's Fifth Avenue and Newport are either disappearing or being turned over to "public" use; similar trends are apparent in Europe. Probably in most modern countries "bourgeois" ostentation is now considerably less extreme than it was in the eighteenth or the nineteenth centuries, though there is much broader enjoyment of some kinds of "luxuries." As "conspicuous consumption" is not new and has almost certainly declined at the extremes, it is difficult to see in modern luxury consumption a primary symptom of the decadence of modern society.48
An associated development is the "capitalization" of "consumers' durable" goods, including the dwelling and such equipment as central heating, "appliances," and furniture. Privacy is also important in the modern standard of living—a "room of one's own" for the married couple and for all but quite young children is now taken for granted.
These developments are partly a consequence, partly a determinant, of an important change in class structure, the reduction in the "servant class." Early in the present century the typical "middle class" home had one domestic servant "living in," where as to be "upper middle class" required a considerable staff. Today only the very rich have a staff of servants, a large proportion by virtue of some institutional position. The upper middle-class household generally operates with a "cleaning woman" one or two days a week and baby-sitters.
There are two other reasons for this development. First, modern industry has become increasingly capital-intensive, making labor the scarcest factor and thus increasingly expensive—the reciprocal of the general rise
41> Perry Miller shows that Americans had much the same concern with decadent affluence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as they have now. See Nature's Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
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in the standard of living. Second, increasing egalitadanism has stigmatized the status of servant,50 making employment in factories or stores increasingly preferable to domestic service.
These developments have not been without cost to the middle-class married woman. Deprived of household help and subject to increasing demands in the emotional management of family relations, in the broader range of citizenship, and increasingly in occupations as well, she relies upon an array of modem household appliances that is not sheer extravagance.
Conclusion
The United States' new type of societal community, more than any other single factor, justifies our assigning it the lead in the latest phase of modernization. We have suggested that it synthesizes to a high degree the equality of opportunity stressed in socialism. It presupposes a market system, a strong legal order relatively independent of government, and a "nation-state" emancipated from specific religious and ethnic control. The educational revolution has been considered as a crucial innovation, especially with regard to the emphasis on the associa-tional pattern, as well as on openness of opportunity. Above all, American society has gone farther than any comparable large-scale society in its dissociation from the older ascriptive inequalities and the institutionalization of a basically egalitarian pattern.
Contrary to the opinion among many intellectuals, American society —and most modem societies without dictatorial regimes—has institutionalized a far broader range of freedoms than had any previous society. This range is perhaps not greater than that sometimes enjoyed by such small privileged groups as eighteenth-centurv European aristocracy, but it is certainly broader than ever before for large masses of people.
There are many complexities attached to such freedoms. Perhaps they can be said to begin with freedom from some of the exigencies of physical life: ill health, short life, geographical circumscription, and the like. They certainly include reduced exposure to violence for most of the population most of the time. Higher incomes and extensive markets enhance freedom of choice in consumption. Then there is an immense range of free access to various services like education, public accommodations, and the like. There is widespread freedom of marital choice, of occupation, of religious adherence, of political allegiance, of thought, of speech and expression.
50Vilhelm Aubert, "The Housemaid: an Occupational Role in Crisis," in S. M. Lipset and N. J. Smelser (eds.), Sociology; The Progress of a Decade (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961).
From a broad comparative and evolutionary perspective, the more "privileged" societies of the later twentieth century have to an impressive degree, which would have been impossible to predict a century ago, successfully institutionalized the more "liberal" and "progressive" values of that time.
There are of course important flaws. One surely is war and the danger of war. As we are dealing here with the nature of the societal community, however, we shall postpone discussion of intersocietal relations to the concluding chapter of this book.
We have already suggested that the primary deficiencies of the new societal community type do not lie in the older grievances against the tyranny of authoritarian regimes, especially of the monarchical variety, or the entrenched privileges of aristocracies. Nor do they apparently lie in class antagonism and exploitation in the strict Marxian sense. The problems of inequality and social justice remain salient, but framing these problems in simple terms of bourgeoisie versus proletariat is, for reasons that have been reviewed in this chapter, no longer relevant.
There is one clear context, however, in which the equality-justice problem is central in the United States: the existence of substantial poverty in combination with the large Negro minority that has suffered a long history of discrimination originating in slavery. It is important to be clear that the two aspects of the problem do not coincide completely. By most criteria the substantial majority of the American poor is white, and there is a substantial nonwhite population that is not poor. There is, however, an especially striking coincidence of the two among "ghetto" blacks in the central cities.
The older view of these problems stresses "absolute" deprivation, malnutrition, disease, and the like. The conviction that relative deprivation is more important, that what "hurts" most is the sense of exclusion from full participation in the societal community has, however, been growing among social scientists.51 In our general paradigm of social change we have stressed the connection between inclusion and adaptive upgrading— through rising income—but they are not identical. The connection does, however, help to explain why, considering the very great recent reduction of legal and political discrimination, tensions over the race problem have intensified rather than subsiding. That mitigation of feelings of relative deprivation through inclusion is in a sense "symbolic" does not make it one bit the less urgent and important.
In a second context, the problem of equality and social justice is more difficult to assess. As just noted, the older grievances of tyranny entrenched
51 See Lee Rainwater and William Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1967); and Talcott Parsons and Kenneth Clark (eds.), The Negro American (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1966).
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privilege, and class in the Marxian sense are less central than they once were. But there still remains a pervasive sense that specially advantaged groups use their positions illegitimately to promote their own interests at the expense of the common interest. In an earlier generation these grievances were most likely to be defined in economic terms, as in Franklin D. Roosevelt's reference to "malefactors of great wealth." Significantly, the tendency now is to invoke the symbol of "power"—in C. W. Mills' phrase, a "power elite" is now held responsible for most of our social ills. Members of the power elite are less likely to be defined as office holders than as sinister wire pullers behind the scenes. Ideological complexes with paranoid themes are very old indeed, but the question of what lies behind this particular one nevertheless arises.
Indignation over the economic privileges of the rich does not seem to be a major source of the general moral malaise in modern society; indeed, it seems less so that it was at the turn of the century. There is a virtually unanimous consensus that those elements below the "poverty line" should be brought above it. Beyond that consensus the problem of economic inequality becomes very complicated. It seems that the long-range trend has been one of reduction in "conspicuous consumption" among the highest groups. Though not much has happened for a generation, it is likely that the future trend will be toward greater equalization.
In terms of power and authority, society has on balance become more decentralized and associational, rather than more concentrated. This trend again suggests an explanation in terms of relative rather than absolute deprivation. "Bureaucracy," has become a particularly prominent negative symbol, implying as it does stringent centralized control through rigid rules and authority. We have argued that the main trend is actually not toward increased bureaucracy, even if bureaucracy itself were not in process of transformation, but rather toward associationism. But many sensitive groups clearly feel that bureaucracy has been increasing. This sense is also related to recent waves of accusation against the "military-industrial complex" in the United States, which in turn is associated with a pervasive sense of limitation on freedom; in the most extreme circles the gains in freedoms that we have summarized are virtually denied.
There are in the expression of this sense of deprivation two especially prominent positive symbols. One is "community," which is widely alleged to have grossly deteriorated in the course of modern developments.52 It is pointed out that the residential community has been "privatized" and that many relationships have been shifted to the context of large formal organizations. We should note again, however, that bureaucratization in its
52 One form is the nostalgia for Gemeinschaft, which has been a prominent feature of the "sociological tradition," especially as portrayed by Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1967).
most pejorative sense is not threatening to sweep all before it. Furthermore, the whole system of mass communications is a functional equivalent of some features of Gemeinschaft society and one that enables an individual selectively to participate according to his own standards and desires.53 The second positive symbol is "participation," especially in the formula of "participatory democracy " Demands for it are often stated as if "power," in a specific technical sense, were the main desideratum, but the very diffuse-ness of these demands casts doubt on this conclusion. We suggest that the demands are mainly another manifestation of the desire for inclusion, for full "acceptance" as members of solidary groups. Similar considerations seem applicable to the abhorrence and fear of illegitimate power. Just what form desirable participation can take compatible with the exigencies of effective organization is a matter of great complexity, but this focus of tension seems clear.
Perhaps some confirmation of this interpretation can be derived from the prominence throughout modern societies in recent years of extreme student unrest associated, as we have suggested, with the development of mass higher education. This phenomenon is too complex to be analyzed here, but it is suggestive that the themes stressed by student radicals have more general resonance in society at large. Both negatively and positively power is a potent symbol; the "wrong" kind of power allegedly explains most of what is "wrong" in society, and "student power" is prominent among the remedies advocated. Bureaucracy and related themes are associated with the "wrong"kind of power. On the positive side a new concept of "community," with respect to which participation is strongly stressed, is endowed with almost magical virtues.54
We have in this book stressed the importance in modern society of three "revolutions." Each has been a center of tension and conflict, producing radical groups that have opposed both certain features of the social structure that is in flux and the revolutionary changes. The French Revolution, the most prominent single phase of the early democratic revolution, thus spawned the Jacobins, the "absolutists" of Rousseauean democracy. The industrial revolution, somewhat later, generated conflicts about which we have had a good deal to say; the socialists, especially the communist wing, were the radicals of this phase. It may not be too far-fetched to suggest that the student radicals of the New Left have begun to play an ana-
53 Surely the main orientation of sociology is not toward restoring the societies that preceded the industrial and democratic revolutions, or even the educational revolution. Rather it has been toward a search for those components of social systems that have accounted for some of the positive features of earlier societies, with a view toward understanding how they can be reshaped to meet the functional exigencies of emerging modern societies. See Edward A. Shils, "Mass Society and Its Culture," Daedalus (Spring I960); and Winston White, Beyond Conformity (New York: Free Press, 1961).
54 Parsons and Piatt, op. cit., p. 26.
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logous role in the educational revolution—though how many phases are still to come we do not know.
At this point we face what seems to be a paradox. Of all people, revolutionaries most resent hearing that they share any values with those whose "immoral" systems they seek to overthrow. As we have used the concept of values in analysis, however, it is legitimate to raise the question whether or not the basic value patterns of modem society, and especially of the United States, are being fundamentally challenged. Are the institutional achievements associated with "liberal progressive" values of the nineteenth century no longer relevant? Have they been repudiated by the new generation?
The answer clearly is no. These values tend to be taken for granted, not repudiated.55 On one hand, modern society is indicted for not living up to its professed values, as demonstrated by the existence of poverty and racial discrimination and the persistence of war and imperialism. On the other, there is a vague insistence that society should not be content with these value implementations but should introduce altogether new ones.
Egalitarian themes are very prominent in definitions of what the next phases should be, and the two symbols of community and participation at least point in certain directions, however unclear their implications may be in detail. The modem system, particularly in the United States, seems to have just completed one phase of institutional consolidation, but it is also undergoing the ferment that accompanies the emergence of new phases, the shape of which cannot yet be clearly discerned.
One thing that does seem clear is the strategic significance of the societal community in such situations. As has been suggested, the emergence of the most important features of this community is quite recent. Furthermore, there is every reason to believe both that the United States has led the change and that the main features will spread through all modern societies. A somewhat fuller description of these features is therefore in order.
The principle of equality has broken through to a new level of pervasiveness and generality. A societal community as basically composed of
55 One conspicuous objection to this statement is obvious: The more extreme student radicals resort to the revolutionary tactic of "confrontation," including the use of violence and all manner of devices to deny what liberals consider a fair hearing for those whose positions they oppose; deliberate disruption of academic discussions is a cast in point. This behavior is a repudiation in practice of what we may call the "procedural" values of "liberal" society; it is often defended most vociferously as necessary because of the repressive character of the "Establishment." At the same time it should be noted that people who engage in such tactics repeatedly invoke their "rights" in a way that clearly precludes their having repudiated these liberal values. Furthermore, it is con spicuous that this trait is common to all extreme radicals and not only to current ones. The Terror under the Jacobins was hardly "democratic," yet it was perpetrated in the name of democracy. Communist tactics in our own time have been similar This conflict between supposed ultimate values like equality and freedom and the tactics of radicalism is built into extreme radical movements.
equals seems to be the "end of the line" in the long process of undermining the legitimacy of such older, more particularistic ascriptive bases of membership as religion (in pluralistic society), ethnic affiliation, region 01 locality, and hereditary position in social stratification (notably in the aristocracy but also more recent versions of class status). This basic theme of equality has long antecedents but was first crystallized in conceptions of "natural rights" under the Enlightenment and found particularly important expression m the Bill of Rights of the American Constitution. The Bill of Rights has proved to be a kind of time bomb, as some of its consequences have emerged only long after its official adoption, most dramatically through Supreme Court action but also more generally. The current prominence of poverty and race problems in the United States is largely owing to the deep moral repugnance that the conception of an inherently "lower" class, to say nothing of an inferior race, arouses in modern societies, despite vociferous objections to modern egalitarianism among certain groups.
Some widely current radical ideologies seem to demand that genuine equality requires total abolition of all hierarchical status distinctions. This version of "community" has been a persistently recurring ideal for many centuries. Such close approximations to realistic institutionalization as have occurred, however, have always been on a small scale and for the most part of rather short duration. It seems that too intensive a drive in this direction would be seriously disruptive of such larger-scale institutions of modern societies as law, markets, effective government, and competent creation and use of advanced knowledge. It would likely shatter society into an indefinite number of trulv "primitive" small communities.
The main direction of modern societal development is toward an essentially new pattern of stratification. The primary historical bases of legitimate inequality have, as we have stressed, been ascriptive. The value base of the new egalitarianism, however, requires a different basis of legitimation. In general terms this basis must be functional in the society conceived as a system. Differential outcomes of the competitive educational process must thus be legitimated in terms of societal interest in the contributions of especially competent people; special competence is at least a function of both high native ability and "good training." There is also a societal interest in high economic productivity with no presumption that every individual or collective unit that participates will be equally productive, special rewards for the economically more productive units thus become necessary. Similarly, effective organization is a functional necessity of large and complex collectivities, and one of the prime factors in such effectiveness is the institutionalization of authority and power, which has an inherently differential aspect, the relative "concentration" of power.
There are two main modes of reconciliation between the value im-
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peratives of basic equality and of functional needs for competence, productivity, and collective effectiveness—all of which, of course, intersect in concrete areas of the social structure. The first mode is the institutionalization of accountability, the most familiar example of which is the accountability of elected officials to their constituencies. Economic markets perform certain analogous functions, though imperfectly, as do mechanisms for certifying competence in the academic world, the professions, and certain other "fiduciary" bodies.
The second mode is focused in the institutionalization of equality of opportunity, so that no citizen shall, for familiar ascriptive reasons (race, social class, religion, ethnic affiliation, and the like), be barred from equal access to opportunities for performance, as in employment, or to opportunities for making effective performance possible, like health and education. This ideal is of course, very far from full realization, but the view, so prevalent today, that equality of opportunity is sheer "mockery" demonstrates that it is in fact being taken far more seriously than ever before. In earlier times the "lower classes," or individuals disadvantaged on other ascriptive bases, simply took for granted that opportunities open to "their betters" were "not for them," and they did not protest. The volume of protest is thus not a simple function of the magnitude of the "evil."
It is clear that balancing value-commitments to equality on one hand and inequalities implied in functional effectiveness on the other present complex integration problems to modern societies, especially as so many of the historic bases of hierarchical legitimation are no longer available. This difficulty is further compounded by the appearance of the problem not in one overarching sphere but in many very different spheres. There are many bases for functional inequality; the classification "competence-economic efficiency-collective effectiveness" constitutes only a most elementary framework. There must be integration not only between claims to special prerogatives and the principles of equality but also among different kinds of claims to special prerogatives in a highly pluralistic social system.
This integration is the focus of emerging institutions of stratification. In our opinion, none of the inherited formulas purporting to describe modern stratification is satisfactory. The basis is surely not, except in very special, limited, and ever fewer instances or ethnic membership. It is neither aristocracy in the older sense nor class in the Marxian sense. It is, however, still incompletely developed and essentially new.
Tire integration of such a societal community must depend upon special mechanisms. They center around the attachment of highly generalized prestige not only to specific groups but also to the statuses that they occupy, including office in the sense of the bearers of authority in collectivities. It is essential that the prestige of such groups and statuses be
rooted in varying combinations of factors rather than in any one, like wealth, political power, or even "moral" authority. We define prestige as the "communication node" through which various factors essential to the integration of the societal community can be evaluated, balanced, and integrated in an output that we may call influence. The exercise of influence by one unit or set of units can then help to bring other units into some kind of consensus by justifying allocations of rights and obligations, expected performances, and rewards in terms of their contributions to a common interest. At our present level of reference, the common interest could be that of the society conceived as a community.
The concentration on the societal community that has characterized this book as a whole and the present chapter in particular should be balanced by recognition that values always potentially, and usually actually, transcend any such particular community. That is one reason why this book has been concerned with the system of modern societies, rather with any one such society. The forces and processes that have transformed the societal community of the United States and promise to continue to transform it are not peculiar to this one society but permeate the whole modern—and "modernizing"—system. Only on such bases is it understandable that European societies with no racial problems of their own can feel justified in taunting Americans about their callousness in the treatment of blacks or small independent countries in raising outcries of "imperialism." From this point of view, the intersocietal institutionalization of a new value system, including its relevance to stratification, becomes crucial.
The salient foci of tension and conflict, and thus of creative innovation, in the current situation do not seem to be mainly economic in the sense of the nineteenth-century controversy over capitalism and socialism, nor do they seem political in the sense of the problem of the "justice" of the distribution of power, though both these conflicts are present. A cultural focus, especially in the wake of the educational revolution, is nearer the mark. The strong indications are, however, that the storm center is the societal community. On one hand, there is the relative obsolesence of many older values like hereditary privilege, ethnicity and class. On the other, there are unsolved problems of integrating the normative structure of community, which seems fairly complete in outline, with the motivational basis of solidarity, which remains much more problematic. The new societal community, conceived as an integrative institution, must operate at a level different from those familiar in our intellectual traditions; it must go beyond command of political power and wealth and of the factors that generate them to value commitments and mechanisms of influence.
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