Knowledge and Passion: Essays in Sociology and Social Theory in Honour of John Rex 9780755620739, 9781850433231, 9780755631339

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PREFACE

The present volume is a collection of sociological essays dedicated to John Rex, who retired recently from his Chair of Sociology at the University of Warwick. John Rex's superb teaching inspired many generations of students and elicited many sociological vocations. He founded two new departments of sociology, one at the University of Durham and the other at the new University of Warwick. Former students and colleagues at these universities as well as at the Universities of Leeds and Birmingham, where he taught for a number of years, have all contributed to this festschrift. He was also director for some years of the SSRC Research Unit on Ethnic Relations in the University of Aston and later in the University of Warwick. Most of the essays in this volume range over central themes in John Rex's published work. Born and educated to first-degree level in South Africa, he has always maintained a passionate civic and sociological concern with the area of race/ethnic relations. The volume opens with a discussion by Robin Cohen of recent changes in the racial-cultural cleavages in South African society in which John Rex's substantial papers on the South African racial conflicts are taken into account. Rex's pioneering role in the initiation of systematic empirical research on race relations and urban conflicts in Britain led to the publication of several co-written books which remain landmarks in the field. Robert Moore's contribution on race and citizenship in Britain today takes stock of the changes in vn

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this area since Rex's initial studies. It should be noted that John Rex has also published a number of books and articles in the broad theoretical and comparative study of race relations (including studies of race relations in colonial and urban settings). Although widely used in teaching, this corpus of work still awaits systematic review and critical discussion. John Rex's most celebrated book, Key problems of sociological theory (1961), remains a landmark in the history of British sociology for many reasons. It was the first systematic and innovative work in sociological theory by a British sociologist for many years. It contributed in a decisive fashion to a fresh appreciation of the Weberian legacy, as Martin Albrow points out in his wideranging review of the reception of Max Weber's work. It addressed the problem-situation of sociological theory of the time in a novel way, producing an incisive critique of functionalist social thought before this stance became virtually mandatory. It was also perhaps the first defence of methodological individualism in British sociology (as distinct from its advocacy in the methodology of economics and in the philosophy of the social sciences produced by philosophers notoriously antipathetic to sociology). It should be noted that Rex has taken a sharply critical stance towards the oversimplifications of rational choice theory and other facile approaches which are too often identified with methodological individualism tout court. The major stimulus that John Rex's publications and teaching gave to the reception of Weberian thought in Britain is also reflected in Peter Lassman's contribution comparing Tocqueville and Weber, two master analysts of the politics of modernity. It should be borne in mind that John Rex has also been attracted to Simmel's hermeneutic approach to sociology. We are fortunate in being able to include in this volume an original essay by him which also provides an introduction to his general sociological orientation. Simmelian as well as Weberian concerns with personality and culture in postmodernity are extensively addressed in Mike Featherstone's contribution. In stressing the centrality of social conflict for sociological analysis already in the early 1960s Rex broke new ground. His contributions to this field of theoretical reflection remain distinctively Weberian. Rex's approach to the fundamentals of social conflict analysis and functionalist perspectives on the topic are

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compared in Leslie Sklair's essay in this volume. The prime concerns of Rex's action approach, if not the substantive details of his work, are addressed in Margaret Archer's contribution on linking structure and agency. The theme of social conflict is also central to Richard Brown's chapter, which draws on theoretical and empirical work in industrial sociology to work out a model of the negotiated order of the industrial enterprise. Jeffrey Alexander, whose earlier discussion of John Rex's theoretical approach is unique in its thoroughness, contributes a chapter on theoretical issues in the sociological tradition. Roland Robertson's contribution continues his long-sustained sociological inquiry into the master-processes of globalization in the contemporary world and their relevance for the central issues of sociological theory. The title of this collection is meant to convey to a wider public what will be known to his former students and colleagues: John Rex's passionate commitment to rigorous sociological inquiry and scholarship, allied to the equally passionate pursuit of social justice and humane concerns. Thanks are due to all the contributors for their general support of the project and for their willingness to write new and substantial papers against almost impossible deadlines. For special help I would like to thank Irving Velody and Robin Cohen. The volume might not have seen the light of day without Anna Enayat's enthusiasm for the project from the very beginning and her continued support. Herminio Martins

CONTRIBUTORS

Martin Albrow is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wales, College of Cardiff. Jeffrey Alexander is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Margaret S. Archer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Richard K. Brown is Professor of Sociology at the University of Durham. Robin Cohen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Mike Featherstone is Reader in Sociology at Teesside Polytechnic. Peter Lassman is Lecturer in Political Science, University of Birmingham. Herminio Martins is a Fellow of St Antony's College, University Oxford. Robert Moore is the Eleanor Rathbone Professor of Sociology the University of Liverpool. Roland Robertson is Professor of Sociology at the University Pittsburgh. Leslie Sklair is Reader in Sociology at the London School Economics. XI

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1 RACE AND ETHNICITY IN A POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA: 'Pluralism' Revisited Robin Cohen

INTRODUCTION Many anti-apartheid activists in the opposition movements inside the country, and in the exile movements abroad, have been inclined to will South Africa's ethnic and racial divisions away - as fabrications wrought by the government's ideological obsessions. The theory and practice of apartheid as transparent fig-leaves for baaskap (white power) have fed the belief that, with the removal of white political hegemony, the true class basis of South African society will be revealed. Certainly, pro-apartheid spokespersons have systematically or unconsciously sought to conceal real and important societal fissures along class lines. But the half-truth that South Africa is divided by 'class' not 'race' functions as a barrier in the liberation movements' discussions of what is to be done in a post-apartheid political environment about continuing ethnic and racial divisions.. Some seem to hope that if race and ethnicity are not talked about no one will notice them (the tactic that was so nearly successful in the case of the naked emperor in the fairy tale). This inclination towards selective blindness is reinforced by an apparent reluctance to learn any lessons from the experiences of other countries, the doctrine of South African 'exceptionalism' uniting both left- and right-wing theorists on South Africa. But the explosion of ethnic, regional and national consciousness in the Soviet Union, and nearly

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every Eastern European country, should at least raise some doubt about whether the dismantling of apartheid will automatically dispense with inter-ethnic competition and violence. State socialism, a single-party system and a loyal military and security arm prevailed in the former Soviet bloc countries from anything from forty-five years to nearly three-quarters of a century. Yet these components of unbridled state power (not likely to be present in a future South Africa), together with forcible population shifts, Stalin's terror and the crushing of embryonic nationalistic forces, have been impotent in the face of the explosions of popular nationalist and ethnic sentiment during the period 1988-90.1 There are, undoubtedly, positive aspects to the expression of a democratic will in these countries, but few can be sanguine about the rise of fundamentalist Christianity or Islam, the outbursts pf rampant anti-Semitism and the explosions of inter-ethnic violence witnessed in many state socialist countries. With the release of Mandela and the legalization of the political movements advancing majoritarian principles, it may be that some less conventional lines of argument and discussion regarding the shape of a post-apartheid society are now both possible and relevant to current debates. Using Rex's work on 'the plural society' as a jumping-off point, my object is to shift the tenor of discussion of race and ethnic divisions in South Africa away from the assumption that they are God-given or 'natural' (the position of the old right)2 and away from mere denigration, denial and epithet (common in much of the left). I have to add - as intentions are so easily misunderstood in the prevailing heady political atmosphere of the country — that I do not applaud or justify the expression of racial and ethnic consciousness, nor do I consider high levels of inter-ethnic tension inevitable. However, it would be foolish to imagine that the possible or even likely appearance and manifestations of this phenomenon will be easily managed in any new social order that may emerge, especially one in which the problem is inadequately recognized. REX AND PLURALISM IN GENERAL As many readers of this festschrift will know, John Rex was born and educated to first-degree level in South Africa, before wartime

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service and his sociological career took him to the UK. Given his deep and continuing interest in the country of his birth and his central contributions in the field of comparative race relations and the social theory of conflict-ridden societies, it is perhaps remarkable that in his vast output there is little explicitly on South Africa.3 A more careful reading of his work, however, suggests that his South African background often remained as a key leitmotiv underlying his more widely cast work. Such an inference, for example, can be drawn from his influential article (Rex, 1959) on 'The Plural Society in Sociological Theory'. There he immediately signals his interest not in 'integrated social systems' but in those where conflict is endemic. While acknowledging the contributions of Merton and Coser - who accepted that social relationships in all societies are never as perfectly institutionalized as many functionalists assumed — he extends the argument to cover a number of non-European societies more fundamentally segmented, indeed characterized, by race and ethnic division. In particular he highlights the work of Furnivall on Indonesia and Burma, and Malinowski (1945) on white-native culture contacts.4 Rather than following Rex's discussion of these authors in detail, I wish simply to extract some salient observations that seem to pertain to current political discussions of South Africa. For Furnivall (1948), in plural societies 'the market' was insufficiently powerful to modify cultural heterogeneity. The individual thus acted out of self-interest or within the framework of ethnic group interests, rather than in a generalized rationally calculative way. The growth of South Africa's mining and post-war secondary industrialization was undoubtedly a more powerful integrative force than the market-place and the operations of Dutch mercantile capitalism in Burma and Indonesia. This renders any direct comparison with Furnivall's pluralism inadequate. Moreover, as I argue elsewhere (1986: 18), 'it has proved historically impossible for the various ethnic groups in South Africa to thrive (or even survive) in territorially, economically or culturally distinct segments.' Despite this complementarity, there is none the less a high level of correlation in South Africa between ethnic identity on the one hand and occupational profiles and economic activity on the other. Thus, it was only with great difficulty and partial success that the Afrikaners were able to move from agricultural pursuits to challenge the hegemony of the English-dominated mining houses,

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insurance companies and industrial concerns. Jewish and Indian entrepreneurs were heavily represented in the clothing trade and in smaller retail outlets. Coloureds gained some economic independence in pursuing the skilled crafts and trades or in colonizing the white-collar salariat as teachers, nurses and clerks. Finally, African South Africans were predominantly miners, unskilled or semiskilled workers, domestic servants, agricultural labourers or peasants. To get a more up-to-date glimpse of an occupational structure which I cannot describe in detail, let me mention that by 1985, there were 704,000 African workers in manufacturing, 235,000 of them above the 'supplementary living level', the rest in poorly paid occupations (Wilson and Ramphele, 1989: 570). The past tense has been deliberately used in describing these ethnically specific economic pursuits, because I do not wish to suggest that we are dealing with immutable or impermeable categories. Indeed, if there were not counter-tendencies to castelike forms of ethnic stratification, there would have been no reason to have shored up the colour bars to occupational mobility using the notorious 'job reservation' laws. With their collapse, Africans are slowly moving into skilled and managerial positions in industry, while occupations in the service sector are becoming much more ethnically diverse. The professions have also become ethnically neutral to an increasing extent.5 None the less, even if we assume incremental 'cross-overs' and leaky boundaries between ethnic identities and economic pursuits, the moment when majority electoral dominance is established, will still see privilege, advantage, opportunity and wealth punctuated and graduated by the colour codes white/Coloured/Indian/African. Ethnic segmentation is thus not primordial (a la Furnivall), but will still be both visible and, more importantly, politically potent. I shall return to the question of how we might characterize such segmentation sociologically in my conclusion. A second author on plural theory discussed by Rex in his 1959 article, is Malinowski (1945). As Rex accepts, much of Malinowski's argument pertains too closely to the world of the colonial anthropologist and is innocent of economic analysis. Malinowski does, however, point to the 'culture contact' situation, in which wholly new social institutions arise that can be attributed to neither parent culture. Malinowski calls this 'the three column approach' positing European colonists and African indigenes as the repre-

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sentatives of two parent cultures. As Rex notes, though suggestive, the model is too naive, even for the two-group situation described by Malinowski. But it is equally evident that there is nothing intrinsically implausible in extending the argument to a multiple group situation such as modern South Africa. There, too, a melange culture, commonly or partially shared, has emerged in such diverse areas as language, sexual relations, religious adherence, musical expression, furniture design, educational norms and sports activities. The third column', or what might for my purpose be better termed 'the creolized' or 'national' column, has also emerged racially — in the existence of 2.77 million so-called 'Coloureds', 9 per cent of the population. As I remark in an earlier work (1986: 19), despite the frequent ahistorical assertions of a supposed tradition of racial endogamy, 'next to Brazil, this is the largest absolute and relative number of "Afro-Europeans" in any country of the world'. This group is of key interest sociologically. First, it modifies any theory of primordial pluralism — contrary to van den Berghe's early pluralist account (1965) it cannot be regarded as a similar segment to other population groups. Second, the Coloured population acts - or may act - as the principal trdger (bearer) for a more truly national culture and consciousness. Again, I shall return to this point in my conclusion.

REX AND PLURALISM IN SOUTH AFRICA Rex's explicit attempt to look at the theory of the plural society in relation to South Africa was first published in 1971 (and is cited here in the 1974 reprint). He is under no illusion that a theory of plural societies can be neatly applied to South Africa. Whereas societies so characterized (the Caribbean, Indonesia, East Africa) were not industrialized, the extent of industrialization in South Africa rather suggested the relevance of Marxist class categories derived from European and North American experiences. Whereas in plural societies the contending groups and segments are held together by the institution of government, in South Africa the expanding economy and the exploitative labour system also locks the various groups together, albeit in an unequal contest. Whereas in the 'pure' theory of plural society conflict is organized solely along the lines of race or ethnicity, in the South African case it is

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apparent that economically based class conflict also arises. Ultimately Rex (1974a: 59) concludes that such is the force of these objections that if they are taken as intrinsic to the definition, 'South Africa does not present us with a case of the plural society' (emphasis added). Though Rex is driven by the logic of his prior definitions to this conclusion, it is clear from earlier sections of the article that he finds himself reluctantly proceeding into a cul-de-sac. For example, he talks (1974a: 46) of wanting to loosen Marxist class definitions in order 'to have a theory of much more general significance'. He continues: 'In these terms indeed it might well be possible to work towards a general theory which combines some of the advantages of pluralist theory with those of Marxism'. (One might parenthetically add that such is the heterodoxy of current Marxist theory that the contributors, say, to Marxism Today in the 1980s would have little difficulty in accommodating Rex's wishes. But contemporary left-wing social theory - especially within South Africa — was then ideologically uncompromising and would have regarded any marriage between pluralism and Marxism as inconceivable, illegitimate, or a concession to apartheid racial theory.) In other contexts Rex was able to find the flexibility and generality he sought in Weberian status groups (Stdnde) which enjoyed differential access to the market-place and to the goods and resources (political and social, as well as economic) that emanated therefrom. It remains somewhat puzzling to me as to why Rex was deterred from bending the notion of Stdnde to the South African case — an attractive possibility when one considers that a 'status group' could be held to cover the ensemble of political power, social esteem and economic activity as well as the element of endogamy associated with an ethnic group. Leo Kuper6 attempts just such a blending of theoretical traditions in the following definition: Societies that are composed of status groups or estates that are phenotypically distinguished, have different positions in the economic order, and are differentially incorporated into the political structure, are to be called plural societies and distinguished from class societies. In plural societies political relations influence relations to the means of production more than any influence in the reverse direction.

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While the opening section of this definition would be totally compatible with the argument made earlier regarding the broad correspondence between race/ethnicity and economic activity, the insistence on firmly distinguishing plural from class societies would make it difficult to effect the combination between pluralism and Marxism that Rex favoured, and that the multifarious dynamics of South Africa demand. The general applicability of plural society theory is, in Kuper's case and in others, much restricted by the exclusive and even dogmatic statements made by those working in the tradition. For example, the most eminent of the plural society theorists, M. G. Smith, insists (1965) on a long list of 'compulsory' institutions that have to be embodied in each segment. Kinship, education, religion, recreation, 'certain socialities', property and economy (emphasis added) have to be contained within each segment for the theory of the plural society to obtain. (Government was obviously exempted, as the common institution.) As already argued, such a level of segmentation does not apply in South Africa and it is even doubtful (though this rebuttal cannot be pursued here) that it applied to Smith's illustrative cases of Grenada and Jamaica. Rex (1974a: 47-8) is clearly uneasy about Smith ignoring the obvious common Caribbean institution of plantation slavery, but feels on at least two grounds even less certain of applying the plural society theory, as articulated and developed by Smith, to South Africa. First, he sees (1974a: 51) migrant labour as a central institution cementing the asymmetric but intimate relations between the racial and ethnic groups: In this institution one sees the way in which political and economic factors, the world of the employer and employee, the world of blacks and whites, and the world of town and country, are in fact a single world. It is only when this is understood therefore that one can go on to note the diversity, heterogeneity and pluralism which such a politico-economic institution may permit. Much of Rex's supporting argument spells out how the institution of migrant labour was constructed and operationalized in the mining compounds, the servants' quarters, and the reserves - he adds the urban location in a later article (1974b). This argument

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needs no repetition in the current exercise of contrasting pluralism to Marxism, as Marxist accounts (for example, Wolpe, 1972) of these institutions describe them in similar terms - as a means of subordinating and cheapening African labour. The second reason for his questioning the applicability of Smith's pluralism to South Africa lies in Rex's conception of the dominance of the political over the economic in South Africa. For pluralists, and especially for Furnivall and Smith, the state was largely a residual and empty construct ('a thin skein' as Furnivall calls it); important relations and issues were decided within the segmented groups and in terms of direct inter-group competition and conflict. Rex was not alone in pointing to the strength of the South African state and the apparent capacity of the National Party to order the relations of production and reproduction through political fiat. The belief in the overweening power of the modern state was a conception that united many social and political theorists in the wake of the 'May Events' of 1968. In South Africa, the most influential argument along such lines is made by Heribert Adam (1971) who maintains that the apartheid regime was sufficiently adaptable and its supporters sufficiently powerful to modernize, for an indefinite period, the system of racial domination.7 Rex himself, in a wholly erroneous prediction (1974a: 54), thought the state sufficiently powerful to suppress the emergence of an organized African working class: The direction of change in South Africa has been towards the removal of such political and trade union rights as native workers possessed, rather than their gradual acquisition, as has been the case amongst the European working class. The long-term trend in this change is a sure indication that the native workers of South Africa are not becoming a class in the European Marxist sense. Nearly twenty years later, one can, with some poetic licence, advance the opposite argument. The British miners, symbol of working-class organization and power, have been broken by internal divisions, mass redundancies and Thatcherite anti-union policies, just as black South African miners assembled what probably was the quickest-growing union in the world. Trade union rights for African workers are established after prolonged class struggle,

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while African worker attitudes and actions correspond well with those of a Marxist-style proletariat. Again, the last decade has been marked by the assertion of people's power in such unlikely contexts as the Philippines, Korea, Mongolia, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (and now South Africa itself). In short, the mighty Leviathan looks like a much more sickly beast than it appeared in 1968. Does this relative weakness mean that ethnic and racial sectionalism are better able to assert themselves? How else, for example, are we to interpret the centrifugal tendencies in the Soviet Union? And what implications does a weak state have for the expression of ethnic and racial consciousness in the post-apartheid period? Before addressing this issue and returning to the question of what we might wish to rescue from the pluralist tradition described and analysed above, it is first necessary to consider other notions of pluralism and, at least briefly, to allude to the views of some of the major political actors shaping South Africa's future.

PLURALISM IN ANOTHER SENSE Rex's discussion of pluralism is confined to the ethnically/racially segmented societies described notably by Furnivall, Malinowski, Smith, Barth (1969) and Kuper. Quite properly, this tradition is distinguished by these authors themselves (see, for example, Smith and Kuper, 1969) from another, and now much more loosely used notion of 'pluralism' - one evoked by the expression 'democratic pluralism'. What, then, is meant by pluralism in this second sense? The notion seems to have particular resonance in the context of the development and sanctification of US democracy. It thus refers partly to a separation of powers in the American constitutional sense and to the regional dispersal of power through a decentralized State/Federal or centre government/local authority structure. More nebulously, the American tradition also celebrates a diversity of interest groups, temporary campaigns and political coalitions to effect change, the rotation of office, the capacity to lobby, and freely to join or start political parties competing for the popular vote in fair elections. More recently, pluralist democracies are seen

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as societies where human rights are given greater respect than in dictatorial, authoritarian or totalitarian states. The collapse of state socialist regimes has decisively put paid to any notions of democracy other than the 'plural' form and, most decisively, discredited 'democratic centralism', the vanguard role of the working class and the leading or exclusive role of a single party. Indeed, far more insistent than the call for a 'free market* has been the demand in state socialist and other one-party and military-ruled states for multi-party democracy and its appurtenances - in a word for 'pluralism'. Raising this second usage of 'pluralism' is not simply a matter of clarifying some confusing terminology — though I have, I hope, made the broad distinction between the two usages clear. Rather, it is to point to the fact that the two traditions are converging, or at least interacting, in a complex way, in practice. In the Soviet Union, for example, it was precisely the burgeoning of pluralist democracy (glasnost) that triggered the expression of ethnic, racial and national pluralism. The relationship between the two kinds of pluralism is likely to be more complex in South Africa as the struggle for determining the shape of a post-apartheid polity hots up. How then do the main opposition forces to the apartheid regime relate to the 'two pluralisms'?

SOUTH AFRICAN ACTORS: THE ANC It is beyond dispute that one of the major institutional actors shaping South Africa's post-apartheid future is the African National Congress (ANC). I suggested earlier in vague terms that the South African left (by which I meant in particular the spokespersons for the United Democratic Front, the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, together with more diffuse 'liberal' opinion) currently proclaim a naive 'nonracialism' or maintain a selective blindness when it comes to the issue of race and ethnicity. It is time to be more specific. The ANC has in fact undergone a number of critical transitions to its current position of 'non-racialism'. Meli (1988:81), the editor of the ANC's journal, Sechaba, writes in his history of the organization of the predominant concerns in the 1920s:

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[to] unite the Africans in the struggle against colonial domination . . . [the ANC] instilled a feeling of belonging to an oppressed people whose existence was threatened; it sought cohesion, consolidation, a defence of national values and an assertion of national identity; it defended the rights, customs and traditions of our people; fought against the loss of land, liberty and independence and for the preservation of African culture. By 1955 the exclusive emphasis on African rights was supplanted by the desire for a co-operative relationship with the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People's Congress, the (white) Congress of Democrats, and the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), which acted as a federation of separate white and African unions. With the partial exception of SACTU, it was thus representatives of racially and organizationally distinct bodies who had signed the Freedom Charter. Interracial accord was marked by a key passage in the preamble to this document proclaiming that 'South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.' Despite this declaration, however, it was not until 1969 that the ANC in exile 'opened its doors' to what were described as 'other nationalities' or 'other national groups' (ibid.: 166). Even then the movement held back from arguing for complete nonracialism: 'The policy should not be misinterpreted or misunderstood as "liquidationism" or "nihilism" [sic]. The ANC never for a moment believed that there is no need or room for the South African Indian Congress, Coloured People's Congress, SACTU or Communist Party' (ibid.). This continuing element of recognition of separate group interests and separate political organization was resolved more firmly in the early 1970s when the ANC had to define the distinctiveness of its own position against that articulated both by the Black Consciousness Movement (see Mohamed, 1990) and by a small group within its own ranks arguing against the influence of the white-dominated Communist Party and demanding exclusive African hegemony. The ANC's reaction was generally unsympathetic to what was seen as the confused or excluding claims of the Black Consciousness Movement, while the internal 'Gang of Eight' was unceremoniously expelled. Formally, then, the ANC had historically moved through three

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stages: (a) from 1910 to 1955, as a wholly African body espousing African interests - itself, of course, an important advance in that the ethnic subdivisions of the African people were discounted; (b) from 1955 to the 1970s, as an African body in favour of co-operative multi-racialism-, and (c) from the 1970s to the present, as a body prepared to co-operate with all who support its nationaldemocratic programme on a non-racial basis. Even in its last position, however, there remains an important qualification. According to Meli (1989: 201, emphasis added) the ANC is still 'especially' concerned with the 'national liberation' of Africans, but only 'involved' with the 'social emancipation' of all South Africans. The reference to 'national liberation' is a key plank in many ANC documents and, of course, immediately raises the issue of which groups constitute 'the nation' - the Africans, as implied in the above statement, or 'all who live in South Africa', as suggested by the Freedom Charter. The notion that the ANC is engaged in a 'national liberation struggle' is constantly reaffirmed as if it were self-evident. Yet, unlike those countries of Africa and Asia which attained their independence after a 'struggle' (sometimes not such a struggle) against an imperial and colonial power, the struggle in South Africa is directed to an internal minority that seeks (sought?) to monopolize permanent political power. The circle is squared by the theorists of the South African Communist Party through the notion of 'colonialism of a special type' - a theory, unfortunately, that owes more to a poorly conceived attempt to conform to the edicts of the Comintern in the 1930s than to an analysis of realities of white settlement, especially the large amount from non-colonial or post-colonial territories. In effect, if not in name, as Meli (1989: 96) almost concedes, the ANC is a majoritarian, not a national liberation movement interested, above all, in extending civic rights and developing full political participation for Africans, Coloureds and Indians. Whites already enjoy these rights, so have to be 'socially emancipated', a veiled warning, or, more positively, a gentle hint that whites will have to accept that representatives of the majority will rule. What remains ambiguous is the extent to which the ANC will recognize, or be forced to recognize, sectional or group interests assuming it attains state office after a free election.8 ANC spokespersons have already denounced the white regime's talk of 'group

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rights' - fearing, probably correctly, that this is a ploy to maintain white political power. But the constitutional protection of ethnic and racial minorities should not necessarily be narrowly conceived as the covert perpetuation of apartheid. Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana and Zimbabwe all had entrenched seats, separate electoral rolls or systems of proportional representation in their independence constitutions. Federal states like the USSR or Canada countenance sub-territorial hegemony by different ethnic groups or 'nationalities'. Complex systems to guarantee cross-ethnic voting were devised to hold the Federation of Nigeria together in the wake of the divisive civil war, while simultaneously the centre was forced to concede to the creation of fourteen new states. None of these countries testifies to the satisfactory solution of the issue of continuing racial and ethnic division and all the systems that have been devised to cope with destructive inter-group tension have proved flawed or even destabilizing. However, it is unlikely, least of all in South Africa, that the manifestations of ethnic/racial group identification and solidarity will simply disappear by the state proclamation of non-racialism. In South Africa, since 1948 3.5 million people (nearly one-eighth of the population) have been forcibly relocated to ensure greater ethnic homogeneity. The white right sees its own survival as umbilically connected to the assertion of its racial identity. The black right commands some territorial power and ethnic loyalty, and is unlikely to yield easily to an assertion of a national monopoly of power. (The current popular struggles in the Ciskei, in Natal, the Transkei and Bophuthutswana for incorporation into South African are all indications of this incipient contest.) If this analysis is correct, the ANC's formal commitment to nonracialism and its outright repudiation of 'group rights' is insufficient, except as an ideal. In practice, the ANC will need to consider some constitutional protection for minority interests and be required to take some cognizance of the threat from groups organized on an ethnic footing. It is perhaps too early (I write in June 1990). But Mandela is already reported as saying that Zimbabwe represented what the ANC hoped would emerge. Like in Zimbabwe, whites need not fear for their position, he went on, and would be allowed to establish private white schools. If this statement was more than a casual remark it indicates a considerable concession to 'group rights' by the ANC. As Martin Woollacott

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{Guardian 22 February 1990) suggests, one strand of white political thinking is to insist on strong local government units controlling their own schools, police and municipal services. If the boundaries of these units are established in a sufficiently careful way (a task made much easier by the residential patterns established by forty years of the Groups Areas Act) whites 'would command resources, from an infinitely wealthier tax base, that would enable them to maintain a separate and privileged way of life'. The notion of local white power, defined on both a racial and a class basis - encouraging the settlement of a few African families in rich white areas would be politic but unthreatening - raises the issue of pluralism in the second sense I outlined. The ANC — • and with it the South African Communist Party - have declared themselves in favour of a multi-party state and disclaim any intention to seek a monopoly of power.9 If this commitment to pluralist democracy survives the exigencies of the transfer of power, when 'bitter-ender' whites can be expected to be active, the ANC would find it difficult to press for the empowerment and advancement of black South Africans at a national level, while refusing to concede white municipal power. As in the case of the Soviet Union, the two varieties of pluralism are strangely intermeshed.

SOUTH AFRICAN ACTORS: THE PAC, INKATHA, THE 'BITTER ENDERS' Against the ANC's effective civic rights position, is that proclaimed by the much weaker and less representative movement, the PanAfricanist Congress (PAC).10 The PAC refuses to accept the legitimacy of white occupation of African land and thus sees the white population as colonial settlers, who should, as a first step, return the lands appropriated by the Land Act of 1913. The Union Constitution of 1910 and the international recognition of the white minority government as the recognized authority governing the country, are regarded as equally illegitimate. Like some Inuit groups in Canada and some Aborigines in Australia, the PAC seems to be defending an impossibly romantic dream - that of turning the historical clock back and starting from the status quo ante mercantile capitalism, the discovery of mineral wealth and the consequent mass white immigration. The logical

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difficulty of winding the clock back is that if one turns it a few more revolutions, the indigenes of most of South Africa turn out to be the Khoi-khoi (Hottentots) and San (Bushmen) - the Bantuspeaking peoples being interlopers from another part of the continent. This point is sometimes made by logic-chopping defenders of white rule - arguing, in effect, that the African claim to proprietorial rights is no more valid than that of the whites. This is, however, an 'academic' argument in the worst sense of that word, threatening, as it does, nearly unlimited regress - as far perhaps as the racial origins of pithecanthropus erectus, fossil remains discovered in the Northern Transvaal. More saliently, the PAC's and similar positions have one major advantage and one fatal flaw. The positive side lies in its lack of ambiguity. The nation is coincident with the ensemble of African ethnic groups, as was the definition in other African states. Whites and Indians are settler groups and should be repatriated to their countries of origin. Alternatively, as Sobukwe (cited in Meli, 1989: 138) put it, they could be regarded as Africans if they 'owefd] their loyalty only to Africa and accepted] the democratic rule of the African majority'. The position of the PAC was echoed by statements of later political groups like the Black Consciousness Movement and the Azanian Peoples' Organization (AZAPO). But though they are apparently consistent they all suffer from a key error: the analogy with other parts of Africa simply does not hold. First, this is because of the higher relative and absolute numbers, and more diverse character, of the whites in South Africa. Second, and much more important, is that there simply is no colonial government with whom to fight, or with whom to negotiate independence around a green baize table. Despite its recent legalization, the PAC refuses to talk to the de Klerk government on the consistent grounds that the white minority government is illegal and it would, therefore, be negotiating with the wrong party. (I well recall an acrimonious debate with an AZAPO supporter in Oxford in 1988. When asked who the right party might be, he replied, 'Mrs Thatcher, of course!') This level of political fantasy is unlikely seriously to challenge the ANC's centrality in the bargaining process. However, there is no doubt that the expression of African anger, and the desire for African hegemony and exclusiveness represents an important strand of African opinion — one that will constantly push towards the

16

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separate identification of an African interest and against any bland formulations of 'non-racialism'. A source of ethnic, as opposed to racial particularity, will come, as recent political events have made apparent, from the Inkatha movement. Few are deceived that it will remain, as it sometimes proclaims, a cultural organization - indeed the political, armed and labour wings of the movement are active in Natal. Inkatha is all too evidently seeking to articulate Zulu claims against those of other Africans and may partially succeed in promoting the claim that the ANC is Xhosa-dominated. Finally, the white 'bitter-enders' (I evoke this description to recall the group of Afrikaners who refused to accept defeat in the Boer War) will continue to assert their claims to separate schools, neighbourhoods and language. Some of their demands could conceivably be conceded, though it is unlikely that a post-apartheid state will escape sabotage and continuous violent attack from this group.

CONCLUSIONS: CONVERGING PATHS OF ANALYSIS? Much of the political debate about the future of South Africa contrasts race/ethnicity to class, pluralism to Marxism, support for apartheid to support for the ANC and the mass democratic movement. Using the theoretical space opened by John Rex's analysis of pluralism, I've sought to question these simplistic dichotomies. While it is true that South Africa is not a plural society in the highly restricted sense used by Furnivall and M. G. Smith, it none the less displays important elements of ethnic pluralism, which seem also broadly to flow along class lines. Rex (1974a: 58) puts it this way: Clearly what we have is not something which can be adequately interpreted in terms of some universal Marxist law of class struggle, but a specific kind of class struggle there undoubtedly is, namely one in which the classes are groups of varying histories and ethnic origins who enter the modern society with varying rights and degrees of rightlessness

Race and Ethnicity in a Post-Apartheid South Africa

17

according to the kind of conquest or unfreedom which was imposed on them in an earlier period. This formulation directly addresses the distinctiveness of South Africa - in so far as the fault-lines of race and class often run along parallel or overlapping contours. Where this happens perfectly, race/ethnicity and class are inseparable concepts - struggles in the real world being simultaneously directed to the improvement or defence of class and racial or ethnic interests. As Rex suggests, this situation arose historically with the entry of different race or ethnic groups (through migration, trade or conquest) into what emerged as one polity, at different times and on different terms.11 How can we describe this process sociologically? Again, the pluralist literature can be raided for the purpose. Smith {passim) almost en courant deployed a highly serviceable concept, namely the notion of 'differential incorporation', to describe inequalities between segments without reference to class inequalities. Ironically, however, the expression performs much better as a bridging term between the pluralists and the Marxists. Rex himself seems only to have recognized the potency of the concept of differential incorporation in seminar presentations (I cannot find any development of it in his writing), but it works well for the 'race/ethnic classes' of South Africa. Like conventional accounts of class mobility, these collectivities can alter their place in the pecking order through the familiar means of educational mobility or family savings, or through group organization and struggle. Another important means of group mobility is through the capture of political power. Thus, the remarkable relative shift in the economic and occupational profile of the Afrikaners (two-thirds of whom were illiterate in the 1930s) can be satisfactorily explained by their use of state office to construct restraints on competition by other challenging groups (notably Africans and Coloureds) and so to leap-frog them to disproportionate privilege. A similar mechanism was mooted recently by Mandela when challenged about the programme of limited nationalization that the ANC espouses. 'How else,' he replied, 'can we get hold of the resources to help my people}' To sum up. The ANC's proclaimed belief in 'non-racialism' should be seen only as an aspiration. As a guide to policy it is inadequate for a number of reasons:

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1 It flies in the face of the historical patterns of differential incorporation that link race and ethnic awareness umbilically to class consciousness, organization and interest. Though nominal 'pure' class organizations, like the trade unions, are increasingly evident, membership remains predominantly, though not exclusively racially specific in practice because differential incorporation and apartheid laws have produced a coincidence betweei^ race and occupation. 2 It does not address the question of how to deal with the extreme white right-wing and the conservative, pan-Africanist, Azanian and Inkatha leaderships, which still see their interests as coincident with the defence of their racial or ethnic identity. We could, of course, hope that such figures could be persuaded to see the world through spectacles not tinted with the peculiar colours of the South African Population Registration Act, which has been used to classify all 31.2 million South Africans. But the ideological residues of 300 years of white privilege and black oppression, and 40 years of apartheid, are unlikely to be so easily eradicated. 3 The ANC's own declaration of 'non-racialism' strictu sensu is relatively recent and poorly theorized. The notion of 'the nation' and its constituent elements is particularly vague and underdeveloped. The near absence of any consideration of cultural policy in the ANC literature is symptomatic of this lacuna. 4 The capture of state power alone will not destroy the broad contours of race and class privilege. While the ANC can be expected to follow the path pioneered by the Afrikaners (in using political power to offset economic and social disadvantage), the state to be inherited will be a hobbled Leviathan. In general, the widespread belief in the efficacy of state power (remember Nkrumah's dictum 'Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else will be added to it') has been decisively contradicted by the countervailing force of civil society in many countries, not least Nkrumah's own. Additionally, an African government in South Africa will inherit an administration, security apparatus and police force that are dominated by right-wing whites.

Race and Ethnicity in a Post-Apartheid South Africa

19

5 It is already hinted that local islands of white privilege (in the schools, for example) at municipal level will be conceded. 6 If we accept the genuineness of the ANC's own commitment to pluralism in the sense of 'democratic pluralism', the free operation of a number of political parties and the multiplication of centres of political power may very well release old ethnic ills from Pandora's democratically fashioned new box. Like in the former Soviet bloc, 'democracy' also may mean that the political centre may have to recognize the rights of groups to say how much they dislike each other and how much they wish to remain apart. It is perhaps appropriate to conclude on a more optimistic note. Thus far, the ANC has shown remarkable political skills in extracting the maximum leverage from Mandela's release. Its political statements have been guarded and notably free of rancour. It may be that at a political level the ANC can devise constitutional formulae or ad hoc measures to reassure minorities, while not compromising on their commitments to African advancement and non-racialism. Another constitutional formula, seen in Namibia, is a Bill of Rights based on the defence of individual rights. The ANC's task would be made much easier if the economy, currently in the doldrums, picks up - a not impossible scenario if international markets open up again, investment flows back in, the price of gold recovers and the African consumer market is stimulated. In these circumstances, class mobility will become more detached from ethnic identity, while any continuing ethnically based competition can be represented as a variable sum game with all groups winning, even if not in equal measure. Finally, at the social and cultural level, the optimistic scenario would witness a massive increase in Malinowski's 'third column' interactions. It is in this respect that I want again to mention the crucial role of the Coloured community - linked to the Afrikaners by religion and language, to the Africans by their common maltreatment, to urban South Africans of all colours by their dynamic development of a 'creolized' culture. This, together with interracial co-operation in the big cities, may be the embryo of a truly national culture — one that provides South Africa with binding and healing definitions, a nationalism that can, finally, supersede and subsume ethnic and racial consciousness. One can but hope.

20

Knowledge and Passion NOTES

1. As a Georgian himself, Stalin was much more aware of the appeals of nationalism than the cosmopolitan Bolsheviks of Moscow; his writings on nationalism can still be read with profit and interest. By forcible population shifts to ensure ethnic homogeneity or, per contra, to break up too powerful ethnic/nationalist groups, Stalin hoped to win time to impose the hegemony of the state, the party and a USSRwide economic logic. 2. For a discussion of the ideology of apartheid as a 'naturalizing process' see Cohen (1986: 9-11). 3. Rex's contributions wholly concerned with South Africa consist of an early piece (1954) on apartheid in the universities; a much more extensive article on the extent to which South Africa can be considered a plural society (1974a); a discussion of the initiations of labour exploitation (1974b) and an edited collection for UNESCO (1981). Here, principal reference is made to Rex (1974a) and to other contributions not explicitly concerned with South Africa. 4. Both, together with Myrdal, who is not discussed here, were to figure strongly in his later work. 5. One small illustration must suffice to demonstrate how previously closed occupations can quickly open out to different ethnic groups. The Medical School at the University of the Witwatersrand always admitted African candidates, but numbers were tiny, ostensibly due to the high entry requirements. Once South African medical qualifications were challenged by anti-apartheid campaigners abroad, many whites found that their passion to take the Hippocratic oath was miraculously transformed into an even stronger desire to acquire the still internationally accepted accountancy qualifications. The gap in recruitment was overwhelmingly filled by African medical students. 6. Kuper's view is summarized by Banton (1983) and cited approvingly in Rex (1986: 34), though not with direct reference to South Africa. 7. That Rex was impressed by Adam's account is clear from his reference (1974b: 11) to 'a recent and very perceptive study of South African polities'. 8. This is not as self-evident as it might appear at the moment. The ANC's relationship to the major federation of internal anti-apartheid organizations, the United Democratic Front, still has to be worked out in detail. On the right, the Inkatha movement commands considerable voting power, while the exact constitutional arrangements in terms of voters' rolls, protected seats and the territorial incorporation of former Bantustans, remain uncertain. The electoral fates of Nkomo in Zimbabwe and Ortega in Nicaragua, also suggest that the ANC's electoral chickens should not be counted yet. 9. How satisfactory these assurances are remain a matter of opinion. But they appear to be genuine and sincere. A useful critique of the

Race and Ethnicity in a Post-Apartheid South Africa

21

democracy practised by the South African left is provided by Glaser (1991). 10. I regret that space forbids developing a complete analysis of other African political groups, especially the Azanian Peoples' Organization, sections of which, in recent months, have developed a very sophisticated blend of nationalism and locally organized socialist democracy. 11. Rex (1974a) is preoccupied by the combination of black unfree labourers with capitalism introduced by whites - a situation that challenged Marx and Weber's arguments that capitalism was only compatible with free labour. I concur with Rex's counter-arguments, but do not wish to pursue the question here, for I have done so at book length (1987) elsewhere.

REFERENCES Adam, H. (1971) Modernizing Racial Domination (Berkeley CA: University of California Press). f Banton, M. (1983) Racial and Ethnic Competition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Barth, F. (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (London: Allen & Unwin). Cobbett, W. & Cohen, R. (eds) (1988) Popular Struggles in South Africa (London: James Currey). Cohen, R. (1986) Endgame in South Africa? The Changing Structures and Ideology of Apartheid (London: James Currey). Cohen, R. (1987) The New Helots: Migrants in the International Division of Labour (Aldershot: Gower). Cohen, R. et al (eds) (1990) Repression and Resistance: Insider Accounts of Apartheid (London: Hans Zell). Furnivall, J. S. (1948) Colonial Policy and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Glaser, D. (1991) 'Discourses of Democracy in the South African Left: A Critical Commentary', in R. Cohen and H. Goulbourne (eds) Democracy and Socialism in Africa (Boulder: Westview Press). Malinowski, B. (1945) The Dynamics of Culture Change (New Haven: Yale University Press). Meli, F. (1989) A History of the ANC: South Africa Belongs to Us (London: James Currey). Mohamed, Y. (1990) T h e Power of Consciousness: Black Politics 1967-77', in R. Cohen et al (eds) 1990.

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Rex, J. (1954) 'Apartheid in the South African Universities', Universities Quarterly 8 (4). Rex, J. (1959) 'The Plural Society in Sociological Theory', British Journal of Sociology, 10 (2). Rex, J. (1974a) 'The Plural Society: The South African Case', in A. Leftwich (ed) South Africa: Economic Growth and Political Change (London: Allison & Busby). Rex, J. (1974b) 'The Compound, the Reserve and the Urban location - the Essential institutions of South African Labour Exploitation', South African Labour Bulletin 1 (4). Rex, J. (1981) (ed) Apartheid and Social Research (Paris: UNESCO). Rex, J. (1986) Race and Ethnicity (Milton Keynes: Open University Press). Smith, M. G. (1965) The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Berkeley: University of California Press). Smith, M. G. and Kuper, L. (eds) Pluralism in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press), van den Berghe, P. (1965) South Africa: A Study in Conflict (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press). Wilson, F. and Ramphele, M. (1989) Uprooting Poverty: The South African Challenge (Cape Town: David Philip). Wolpe, H. (1972) 'Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid', Economy and Society 1 (4).

CITIZENSHIP AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL AGENDA, 1965-1990 Robert Moore

1

CITIZENSHIP

The Pilgrim's route to the Celestial City was fraught with danger. Among other physical and spiritual hazards, giants threatened his safe passage. Was it this journey that William Beveridge had in mind when he identified the five giants, Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness on the road to reconstruction? The post-war reconstruction created conditions that were less than heavenly but in which it was possible, according to T. H. Marshall (1950), for the population to become citizens. This is not the occasion to review Marshall's idea of citizenship but simply to list some of its key features. In so doing we should note that citizenship can be both an abstract ideal and a critical idea. In this latter sense it may be used to test concrete realities. In his description of citizenship in democratic Athens, Stone emphasizes that to be a polites, a citizen of a polis, was a badge of honor. It implied that the citizen had a right to debate, and a right to vote on, the decisions that affected his life and that of his city. (Stone, 1988: 9) In the early European city men were free of feudal overlords, they enjoyed equality in their guilds and corporations, they made their 23

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own law and judged one another according to it. Modern citizenship typically entails the possession of civil, political and social rights. The lack of one set of rights makes the other two relatively ineffective. According to Marshall equality before the law was largely achieved in the eighteenth century. Advances in political rights were made in the nineteenth and full adult franchise achieved in the twentieth. Social rights were largely to be gained in the postSecond World War period. Citizenship was to become the status of all, not of a privileged elite. Marshall's definition of citizenship is wide and radical including the right 'to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the society'. But it can be criticized on a number of grounds, most notably its apparent lack of concern with what we might call industrial citizenship. Civil, political and social rights were extended to include the regulation of working hours, minimum wages legislation and provision for health and safety at work, and through trade union legislation. All these limited the previously unlimited rights of the owners of productive property. None the less the master—servant relationship underpinning relations at work, however much modified by legal constraints or the exercise of trade union power, denies the autonomous participation of the workforce or partnership in economic activity. Most people lack any control over the objectives and organization of their work.1 The analogy most applicable to industrial relations (nicely captured by E. P. Thompson in his Writing by Candlelight [1980]) is that of the big house with the property owners above stairs and the servants below. This is the negation of Marshall's idea of citizenship, but it is not the negation of all possible ideas of citizenship. The whole population need not be citizens for it to be a desirable status. This was the case in the Hellenic and Roman civilizations, and property was a necessary condition for acquiring the status of citizen in the European city states. The burgher or bourgeois was the citizen. The French Revolution gave citizenship its radical meaning, and one that Marshall claimed is equally radical in capitalist society, where citizenship confronts social class. I have chosen to begin this essay with a reference to the idea of citizenship because when John Rex and I were working in Birmingham in 1964—5 it was important in our research, but it has received less attention than housing classes.2

Citizenship and the Sociological Agenda

25

One way of understanding the 'problem' of race relations was to see immigrants from the Commonwealth and their children as people in the process of acquiring the full civil, political and social rights to which their nationality status entitled them. Commonwealth immigrants were equal before the law and had the vote. In so far as immigrants (or anyone else) were denied access or equal access to the social rights embodied in the welfare state, then they were not fully citizens. We discovered many institutional impediments to the acquisition of citizenship, especially in the practice of Birmingham City's Housing Department. One answer to the problem therefore was to find ways to remove the impediments. Part of the sociologist's task was to explain the operation of those institutions, practices and beliefs that disabled the Commonwealth immigrants' citizenship. We were working with sponsors and collaborators who held another set of assumptions to be true, though they held them more strongly than Rex and I. This was the belief that there was a political and welfare state consensus administered by reasonable men of goodwill (and they did mean men). These men were very much like us, with higher education and a shared set of liberal, humane values who, given the facts, would implement rational policies in a dispassionate way. They were professionals committed to disinterested administration which precluded the application of irrational considerations like 'race'. Since the mid 1960s we have seen changes in the status of immigrants and their kin. Since 1979 there has been an attempt to dismantle the consensus and with it the post-war settlement embodied in the Beveridge proposals and the welfare state. Citizens are now consumers to be judged by productive or market criteria rather than the rights and obligations of a common citizenship. The civil servants who embodied the consensus have been replaced or marginalized. From the 1960s a consensus developed on 'race' grounded in wartime debates inside government that were rooted in distinctly illiberal assumptions. The nature of this debate has become clearer as the relevant government papers have become available. It calls into question the extent of liberalism and humanity among administrators. The discussion of the issues that concerned John Rex and I in the mid 1960s has also moved into a European context. First,

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sociologists now debate the post-war migrations into Europe in terms of new international divisions of production and labour and not as local phenomena. Second, issues of citizenship and migration have become policy questions for the European Community.

2.

CITIZENSHIP AND NATIONALITY

Commonwealth citizens were British citizens and until 1962 they had freedom of movement such that they were able to enter the UK without having their passports stamped. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act made it possible to control and monitor their movements and was the first of a series of measures dealing with the deportation of Commonwealth citizens. The 1965 White Paper Immigration from the Commonwealth restricted the numbers for the first time. It was published while we were working in Birmingham and it had the effect of settling the minds of a confused public. In Birmingham they had wondered — often aloud to us — if the black population was responsible for the housing shortage or its victim. The White Paper asserted that immigrants were the cause of such social problems, and by implication the fewer we had of the former, the less there would be of the latter. This firming of public opinion led me to say later that the White Paper was the cornerstone of modern British racism. Worse was to come. At the beginning of Human Rights Year (1968) the government enacted its Commonwealth Immigrants Bill which introduced the notion of 'patriality' that was to be enshrined in legislation in 1971. The 1968 Act was an attack upon citizenship in a more fundamental sense than had been used before. Overnight thousands of people became stateless by losing the right to enter the country whose passport they held. Unless resident in the UK, they were unable to exercise any of the civil, political and social rights of citizenship in Marshall's sense. Further legislation was to follow with the Immigration Act of 1971 when most of the restrictions were removed from white Commonwealth citizens. The Act reduced Commonwealth nonwhite citizens to the status of migrant workers. Twelve years later the 1983 Nationality Act extinguished most of the remaining rights of Commonwealth citizens and proliferated new citizenship statuses of an exclusionary kind.

Citizenship and the Sociological Agenda

27

Tina Wallace and I have described how the legislation and the Immigration Rules were used mainly to prevent dependants from joining immigrants in the UK (Moore and Wallace, 1976). One common method was to deny the validity of a relationship. The most recent Immigration Act (1988) includes a measure to minimize the impact of DNA fingerprinting, now it has been shown to establish parent-child relationships beyond doubt. The Act also extinguishes the right granted in the 1971 Act for men settled before January 1973 to bring in wives and children and forbids entry of second wives in polygamous marriages. The latter were only likely for a minute proportion of the very richest entrants. This last provision was almost certainly made to provide tabloid newspapers with the material to generate racial and cultural hostility, while distracting from the more serious restrictions introduced. The 1988 Act also removed the need for an EC citizen to present him- or herself to an Immigration Officer on entry. It seemed not to have occurred to Beveridge that people would live in anything other than families. For him the family consisted of a housewife and children dependent upon a bread-winning man. This highly gendered aspect of his Report and the institutions of the welfare state has been widely commented upon and criticized.3 The right to family life was assumed and not argued in the Beveridge Report and yet by the mid 1970s the prevention of family reunion had become one of the main means of reducing the number of non-white people from entering the UK. The giant Racism was not identified as a serious hazard to citizenship in either of the senses we have been using it here. We might speculate whether Beveridge shared the eugenic view very widely held across the political spectrum that 'coloured' people and the more degenerate members of the working classes would undermine the nation with inferior 'stock'. He certainly took a patriarchal and imperialist view of the British housewife as having vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race and of British ideals in the world. (HMSO, 1942: 117) Thus John Rex and I had started with Marshall's radical conception of citizenship but major public debates about it in the years

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following were about citizenship in an exclusionary sense. Citizenship was not to be discussed in terms of accession to rights but in terms of who should be excluded from the UK. The popular connotation of citizenship was thus radically changed. In retrospect I am puzzled why so many working in the field of race relations in the 1960s took an unhistorical view. It was as if we felt that the post-war settlement enabled us to start with a clean sheet and ignore the past. But there had been a series of moral panics about immigration from the mid nineteenth century, culminating in measures against aliens (largely Jewish) and colonially recruited seamen, from the end of the nineteenth century. There had been riots in major seaports in which white mobs had attacked black people. Most of these riots were followed by criminal charges being laid against the victims.4 MPs had spoken at the turn of this century in terms indistinguishable from Enoch Powell in the 1960s. What nobody could have known in the mid 1960s was that debates about race had occupied the time of ministers, the Colonial Office, Admiralty, Army Council, Air Council, the service departments and possibly the Cabinet during the Second World War. These debates throw light on the foundations of the post-war consensus.5 The arguments were quite simple: the services did not wish to commission black officers and because every recruit was, in theory, a potential officer, they did not wish to recruit any black people. The services, engaged in a war against a racist regime which sought to promote 'Aryan' Europeans as the master race, wished to commission only men of pure European descent.6 The Colonial Office, for its part, wanted to ensure the loyalty of the Empire and feared that a colour bar in the services would be bad for morale and the war effort in the colonies. The service departments were clear in their attitude: any official removal of the colour bar would force them to operate a covert colour bar. The reasons offered make familiar reading: white men would not want to be led by black men; black and white officers would find it difficult to mix in the mess; black families might create problems in married quarters; the commissioning of black men might create resentment in South Africa and the southern States of the USA; if black officers and other ranks were recruited how could they remain after the war, when the services' main task would be to keep order in the colonies?

Citizenship and the Sociological Agenda

29

Papers were prepared and discussed at the highest levels. What was to be done about British-born blacks and persons of 'mixed race', black students who had served in university OTCs or qualified nurses who volunteered for the VAD? The Admiralty never recruited a black person during the war, the Army commissioned one black officer into a British regiment and the RAF, from August 1942 onwards, in the face of severe skill shortages, recruited tradesmen and eventually commissioned black men, mainly from the Caribbean. Covert debates about black immigration were to continue after the war without any serious challenges to the premisses upon which they were based. In the post-war period the government was concerned about the increased number of black workers, but the Commonwealth ideal prevented them doing much about it. It was left to the Ministry of Labour and the trade unions to forge a consensus on the dispersal and control of 'coloured workers' (see Duffield, 1988: ch. II). The premisses upon which these debates were based were as much part of the foundation of the post-war consensus as Beveridge's ideas about women.

3 THE DECLINE OF CITIZENSHIP The citizenship of Commonwealth citizens, in the basic sense of nationality and rights of residence, was under attack from 1962 onwards, and, as we have seen, actually threatened by private government debates from the 1940s. Citizenship in Marshall's sense seemed secure none the less. Any change in this citizenship would be a change for the whole population. But the extent to which the legal, political and social rights that comprise citizenship, in Marshall's sense, are contingent upon political circumstances was underestimated. In the mid 1960s the post-war consensus seemed a reality and it was rare to see open criticism of the ideas of social justice and citizenship, although plainly there were different interpretations of social justice. In the 1970s and 1980s the ideas have been more openly challenged, with citizenship finding its most extreme critics among the authoritarian right, from which position Roger Scruton wrote that he 'regards no citizen as possessed of a natural right

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that transcends his obligation to be ruled' (Scruton, 1984: 16). Scruton recognizes subjects but not citizens. Criticism of citizenship and the welfare state have gone hand in hand with action to change both. 3.1

Citizenship and political rights

One feature of what sociologists in the 1960s called 'plural societies' which distinguished them from 'totalitarian' states was the recognition of legitimate opposition and respect for interests which may be oppositional. The party in power either nationally or locally ensured 'the other side' had some kind of representation, even if of only a token kind. Thus one feature of British government from the Second World War has been loyal governments opposed by equally loyal oppositions who were seen as potential holders of power. Both management and organized labour were represented on public bodies and government advisory committees, with representatives often nominated by the CBI and the TUC. They were treated as legitimate interests, with a valuable contribution to make to discussions of public policy. Thus was organized labour (the most threatening section of the working class) incorporated into the institutions of government. Incorporation also ensured a degree of compliance by giving trade unions something to lose if they either lost control of their own members or disagreed too fundamentally with government and employers. This was the bedrock of the consensus. More recent changes in the nature of production and the composition of the labour-force have raised critical questions about exactly whom these arrangements represented, but such issues have hardly been debated. This is because in the last ten years governments with impregnable parliamentary majorities have sought to eliminate rather than incorporate opposition. The Conservative policy of delegitimizing trade unions has included reducing or eliminating their representation on public bodies. Any consequential loss of compliance has been offset by unemployment, changes in the labour market and restrictive legislation. This process has been one part of what Taylor-Gooby describes as a rearrangement of the balance of reward between social classes, unemployed and employed people, trade unions and

Citizenship and the Sociological Agenda

31

capital, state sector workers and others [which] is in process in the UK and the USA (Taylor-Gooby, 1989: 643). Britain has also been characterised by a strong tradition of local government with many functions bearing directly on the day-today lives of the population being carried out by local authorities. There were always important questions of accountability to be tackled, and John Rex and I showed how people could experience the activity of local government as oppressive. Local government has been a training-ground for Labour politicians and the big-city authorities were mainly Labour Party (and trade union) strongholds. In the early 1980s the second largest local authority in Britain offered radical alternatives to government policies on the government's doorstep. Furthermore, given the government's high priority for the reduction of public expenditure it became imperative for them to reduce the spending power of local authorities. This resulted in the virtual abolition of autonomous local government and the actual abolition of the metropolitan authorities, including Greater London. Urban renewal was increasingly put in the hands of private enterprise under the supervision of non-elected development corporations. The political activities of more senior local government employees were also restricted. With a substantial curbing of the powers of both trade unions and local government the government had effectively removed sources of opposition, but in so doing had reduced the 'plural' nature of the polity. The paradox of a government committed to greater individual freedom becoming a centralizer has been frequently noted. The 1980s also saw the replacement of Health Board members and school governors with government supporters, as well as attacks on the professional autonomy of teachers, social workers, academics and doctors. The civil service was relied upon less for policy advice as the Prime Minister increasingly drew upon the work of right-wing 'think tanks' and her own Policy Unit. Important questions of civil service accountability have been bypassed thereby. Furthermore the 'normal channels' and old-boy networks through which the lobbies, pressure groups and academics operated in Whitehall and Westminster have been destroyed, forcing those who would influence the government and the civil service to find new strategies.

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Finally in this catalogue of change we note the concern with secrecy on the part of government which has verged upon obsession, and attempts to limit the activity of the mass media. One of the most significant government successes was to prevent the transmission of a TV programme which showed how the government used the machinery of state for party political ends when a Cabinet Committee was formed to deal with the 'problem' of the peace movement. This was a case of undermining rather than arguing with opposition. Loyal opposition had become the 'enemy within'. But the public was not meant to know. The 'Zircon Affair' and Spycatcher were both attempts at prior censorship to protect the government from public knowledge of what every potential foreign enemy already knew. In such cases the national interest has been equated with the political interests of the government, a notion now to be built into the Code of Practice for civil servants. If citizenship includes the right to debate issues that affect daily life and the life of a society then the public must be well informed. A serious limit to an informed public was contained in these attempts at restriction and in the ban on broadcasting interviews with supporters of various organizations involved in violent conflict in Northern Ireland. Here the government was denying members of the public the opportunity to make up their own minds on important current problems by trying to deny a voice to selected political interests. This has in part been overcome by the absurdities of 'voice over' or subtitles, but the fact remains that we are not meant to hear authentic voices. Because the British people have no constitutional rights that can limit the power of governments there is a constant struggle between the people, organized around various interests or issues, and the government of the day. The political rights embodied in citizenship are not fixed. The political changes of the last decade have diminished the quality of citizenship. We are all now less informed and less able to debate effectively and to vote on and influence the decisions that affect our lives and the life of our city or society. 3.2

Citizenship and civil rights

An essential element in the exercise of political rights is the right of assembly — a right that may have to be exercised spontaneously or

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at short notice. Thornton commented upon the 1986 Public Order Act: [It] has made sure that the right to demonstrate openly can be seriously restricted and controlled. It is an Act that strikes at the very heart of legitimate protest, particularly spontaneous protest. It extends existing police controls over processions and marches, it creates for the first time in the history of our law statutory controls over open-air meetings and picketing, it creates a new range of widely drawn public order offices . . . Above all it gives the police, in the exercise of these powers, an almost unchallengeable discretion, described by the Prime Minister in a speech to the Conservative Party conference as 'a blank cheque'. (Thornton, 1989: 35-6) Thornton notes that the Act was used against students putting up a satirical poster during the 1987 Election campaign (ibid., 37). Similarly the Prevention of Terrorism Act, passed as a temporary measure in 1974, gives the police very extensive powers of detention and the Home Secretary the power to 'exclude' people. In the case of people from Northern Ireland this creates a form of internal exile. In the first ten years of the Act nearly 6000 people were arrested and detained. About 450 of these were charged, only a handful with terrorist offences. The Act was made permanent (subject only to annual renewal) in 1989. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 has greatly extended the power of the police to stop and search and to set up road blocks; it enables the police to arrest for a non-arrestable offence, to detain for up to ninety-six hours without charge, and to strip and body-search detained persons. The Law Lords are not notably radical but Lord McCluskey was moved to say of the detention powers that 'I detect shades of South Africa here'. Historically the jury has been a protection against the executive and the judiciary. The Criminal Justice Act 1988 removed from about 10,000 people a year the right to trial by jury and removed the right of peremptory challenge for those who did appear before a jury. The parallel right was not removed from the Crown. The practice of jury-vetting continued. An accused person's right to silence, a key element in the British system of criminal justice, is now threatened.

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As a final example of legislation restricting the civil rights of a citizen we may note the Official Secrets Act which came into force in 1989. This created absolute offences and removed the 'public interest' defence that had persuaded the jury in the Ponting case. The Act also removed the need to prove that any harm had been done or was likely to be done by the unauthorized disclosure of documents or information. The present author found himself in an unusual position over the question of 'unauthorized disclosure' when during research he discovered that a telephone had been tapped and this was an unexpected and important piece of information about the subject of his research. Had the research been published in 1989 there would have been no problem. In 1990 an offence would have been committed, and there would have been no defence against a criminal charge. Starting from a weaker base than the majority population as a whole the situation for black citizens has deteriorated further. Some have become retrospectively liable to deportation. Since the late 1960s blacks have been victims of passport raids at home and at work. Many of these raids seemed to be 'fishing expeditions' for information on the black population. The police were reluctant to become involved in the administration of immigration control. Senior officers feared that such involvement would heighten conflict between rank-and-file policemen and the black community. They were correct. Searchlight (1990: 17) began 1990 by asserting that '1989 has been a year dominated by the abuse of police power', but for the black population every year has been so dominated. Victimization by the police is a key issue for black communities throughout the country. Young people on the streets are always of interest to the police, but black youth particularly so. Clare Demuth (1978) produced evidence to suggest that 'sus' was used to keep young black people off the streets. The Criminal Attempts Act of 1981 has now replaced 'sus'. The PSI study (Smith et al, 1983) discovered that when on foot one half of young West Indians in London had been stopped by the police, compared with 20 per cent of white youth and 10 per cent of Asians. The same report showed racist attitudes were widespread and tolerated throughout the Metropolitan police. West Indians are five times more likely to be arrested and found guilty than whites for the same offences, but in a number of recent

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cases blacks have not been convicted because juries have not accepted police evidence. None the less some Young Offenders Institutions have a 30 per cent black population, while adult blacks are over-represented in prison. The crimes that black youth commit are likely to be generated by contact with the police without thirdparty involvement. Obstruction, drugs-related offences, assaulting a police officer, are typically black offences. Even allowing for age and social class it is almost impossible to ascertain whether young black people actually commit more criminal acts than their white contemporaries because we can not know the extent to which police initiatives actually generate criminal statistics. Issues of the accountability of the police have regularly been raised after serious disturbances and were persistently pursued by Margaret Simey in Liverpool (Simey, 1988). The response of the Association of Chief Police Officers to demands for greater accountability seems to be to promote the idea of a national police agency for serious crimes and to concede nothing locally. The actions and attitudes of the forces of law and order were clear in the mid 1960s but when John Rex and I spoke of the possibility of urban riots we were held to be irresponsible for saying what we did and responsible for stirring up racial conflict by doing so. Enoch Powell was making similar predictions, but for quite different reasons. He predicted American-style riots while himself playing the role of a British Governor Wallace. Racially motivated attacks have been documented since the 1970s. It was not until 1981 that research was undertaken by the Home Office. This showed that 'the number of racial incidents per thousand of the population is fifty times higher for Asians and thirty-seven times higher for black people than for white (Bhat et ah, 1988: 53). The usual response to a reported attack was to suggest a private prosecution, or to check the victim's immigration status. I made references to such cases in Racism and Black Resistance in Britain (1975) and to cases of the police charging black people who defended themselves against attack. Thousands of black people have lost British consular protection overseas because of their loss of citizenship. But in the UK all are, in theory, equal before the law whatever their citizenship status. But when people are in fear of the police and feel themselves unable to make their legitimate claim on the police for protection from violence or other abuse, then they are effectively outside the law.

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The opposite of 'citizen' is 'outlaw'. When people feel themselves to be outlaws they can never be citizens. The law discriminates in many ways: no one may sleep in a shop doorway or steal food. The law protects the rich and the poor alike but a poor person is more likely to sleep in a doorway or steal food than a rich person; he or she may become a criminal and acquire a criminal record, with all the consequential disadvantages that this confers. The rights of citizenship hang together. Without social rights, even rights falling short of Marshall's 'life of a civilized being', equality before the law is unrealizable in practice. 3.3

Citizenship and social rights

Beveridge saw his proposals as eliminating want. Through a system of social insurance individuals and families would accumulate entitlements they could claim as of right for contingencies such as old age, unemployment and sickness. A non-contributory and means-tested benefit (National Assistance, later Supplementary Benefit) was to be paid during a transitional phase in which people were contributing but were not yet fully 'paid up'. In the event pensions were paid in full from the beginning of the scheme enacted in the National Insurance Act of 1946. The National Assistance Act of 1948 created a system of means-tested benefits that were not marginal or for transitional needs but were to become an increasingly important means of support for the poor. This was because of the inadequacy of National Insurance benefits (most notably pensions) and later the rise of long-term unemployment and the emergence of new categories of claimant (the very old or single parents, for example) for whom the original insurance provisions did not adequately provide/Want was not therefore eliminated. Hindess has argued that the elimination of poverty would be a question of extending the social component of citizenship to a deprived minority but that what has happened in effect has been to subject that minority to professional control and stigmatization the very opposite of Marshall's ideal (Hindess 1987). Nowhere is stigmatization more obvious than in the case of the unemployed and Supplementary Benefit claimants. The stigmatization of claimants has made reduction of benefit relatively easy for a government committed to containing expenditure and reducing

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the scope of provision. Their targets are not to be found in the ranks of the employed, well-organized, white men but among unpopular groups. The Fowler reforms have substantially reduced the entitlements of those most in need in Britain. Davies and Lister writing about the changes in the system of single payments make a general comment about the social security system: The safety net of the social security system has been looking increasingly threadbare in recent years, but this is the first time a government has deliberately legislated to cut a gaping hole in that safety net. No longer will the state safety net be measured according to the needs of those who turn to it for help; instead it will be measured according to the Treasury's priorities. Moreover, the state is taking on the role of moneylender-in-chief to the poor. (Davies and Lister 1988: 72) Their last remark refers to the fact that claimants may be paid a loan from the Social Fund to meet urgent needs not covered by other benefits, which they then have to pay back from benefits or earnings. But claimants could be so poor that they will be refused a loan because they will be unlikely to pay it back. This entails a substantial move away from providing for all people the means 'to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society'. The state has terminated a responsibility it has held since 1601 to give aid, in the last resort, to the very poorest. Whereas the welfare state might have bound people together into a common citizenship it now increasingly functions to divide and fragment. The welfare state has, according to Richard Berthoud been replaced by state welfare. In the former people, banded together, to 'organize a common system to cover certain needs and securities . . . Everybody would be provided for by their membership of the nation.' In the latter 'the nation is seen to consist of a majority, able to cover their own needs and securities, with a minority, unable to do so, forced to depend on others' (Berthoud, 1987: 25). The government has allowed insurance benefits for the unemployed to be eroded by inflation and has removed income-related supplements. People have thus been forced increasingly on to discretionary means-tested benefits where they are constantly

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required to prove that they are genuinely seeking work and they become subject to surveillance. The difference between citizenship and dependency is a painful one.7 The general trend may now be one of increasing differentiation and fragmentation. The welfare state is under pressure from two directions through making the status of both welfare state workers and clients increasingly unpleasant and ill-rewarded. The services upon which the poorest and most stigmatized are dependent have been the most heavily cut. The clients of the services most under threat often lack direct representation and political muscle. They are more likely to be represented by pressure groups comprising mainly people with life-chances very dissimilar from their own. Questions of representativeness and accountability are not questions to be asked of state provisions alone. For white people the non-insurance state social security system has always involved intrusion into their privacy and exposure to enquiries and decisions by often unhelpful and judgemental public officials. The system has been as much about controlling the poor as meeting their needs, as is evidenced by the provisions to ensure that the system does not remove the incentive to work. But for black persons, the welfare state has been a means of direct control, over and above that experienced by whites. Gordon and Newnham summarize the role of welfare state agencies for non-whites during the period of tightening immigration control thus: . . . what developed during this period was a system in which discrete and separate agencies of the state were advised or encouraged to play a part in the enforcement of immigration controls, either by refusing benefits or services to people whom they alleged were not entitled to them, or by checking their immigration status and informing the immigration authorities. In a very real sense, housing departments, hospitals and educational establishments are seen to be arms of the Home Office and agents of immigration control. (Gordon and Newnham, 1985: 70) They found that when the 1971 Immigration Act came into force schools were asking for passports before admitting children. Soon

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after, women in Leicester were being asked to prove their right to use the NHS (ibid.: 68). The Association of Metropolitan Authorities recommended authorities to check an applicant's entitlement to be in the UK and to report to the Home Office if they thought a breach of the immigration legislation had taken place (ibid.: 70; Gordon, 1981: 70-3). All of this may seem unexceptional, why should people who are not entitled to them enjoy the benefits for which the population has paid? It seems logical that abuse should be prevented, but is the protection of services from abuse also meant to deter genuine claimants, as had been shown to be the case with National Assistance and Supplementary Benefits? Suggesting that papers or passports should be required because entitlements might be in doubt is to invite officials to make special enquiries in the case of people who sound or look 'foreign'. In the eyes of many, a dark skin is foreign. It is black people therefore who have been especially vulnerable to requests for papers and passports. Disputes over immigration status can lead to denial of benefit in what appear to be attempts to starve out black claimants. Gordon and Newnham give an example of a woman who was entitled to indefinite leave to stay but had not applied for it. After going abroad to care for her sick mother she found herself unable to return to the UK where her children were being cared for by a neighbour. She was eventually admitted, but only as a visitor. She later needed benefit, but when her visitor status expired her benefit was stopped. The attitude adopted by the state and its agencies towards immigrants is not, of course, neutral in its effect. There are further consequences in asking for papers, thus: The connection between immigration status and entitlement to benefit means that the transfer of information from one government department to another is required and that the normal rules about confidentiality do not apply. Furthermore, it means that at least some DHSS staff see it as their responsibility to identify people who may be here in breach of the immigration laws and to inform the immigration authorities. (ibid.: 28) Because the immigration laws have been implemented in an oppressive way people legally entitled to be here may have cut corners in

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gaining admission. Others may not know that such corners have been cut for them, and may now be liable to prosecution or deportation as a result of contact with the welfare state. Yet others may have become vulnerable retrospectively. Added to these constructive denials of social rights are the adoption of assumptions which are discriminatory in their effects. These include the idea that the close-knit Asian community is able to provide for its own members, who ought not then to be applying for social security or exceptional needs payments. Persons who are unable to have their families with them because of the immigration laws are unable to claim benefits for dependents abroad. Thus an unemployed man can claim no additions for wife and children abroad, although he would get such additions if they were in the UK. He may have been seeking their admission to the UK for some years, including periods when he was better able to support them. Now he will fall foul of the 'recourse to public funds' provision also. An imputed share in property abroad is, however, taken account of in reducing personal benefits. With the abolition of child tax allowance and the introduction of the poll tax persons with dependants in their home country have become even less able to aid them. In 1981 £900 million of welfare benefits was unclaimed. This might be taken as one measure of the extent to which people have failed to realize their citizenship. Campaigns by local authorities and pressure groups to encourage entitled persons to claim, and the provision of facilities to help them do so were branded as irresponsible by the government. But people were only being encouraged to claim their entitlement. The campaigns were themselves partly stimulated by the anti-scrounger drives of politicians who were suggesting that many people were sponging off a welfare state paid for by hard-working people. Such assertions further stigmatize and deter claimants. The black population is a small part of the total population and of the total claimant population, except in so far as it is overrepresented among the unemployed and very low paid. But there is evidence from local pressure groups that because of the connection between social security and immigration control many black people do not claim their entitlements. The welfare state has by no means yet been marginalized. It is

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immensely popular. Social security is still the largest single item of state expenditure and, including health and education, about 7 million people are employed in the welfare state. Goodin and LeGrand (1987) have suggested that those services from which the middle classes most benefit have been the most protected. None the less for a small but increasing number of more prosperous and articulate people the idea has grown that 'proper' education and health care are obtained through the market. This is partly dictated by ideas of consumer choice, but partly forced upon those who can afford to pay by the inadequacy of public provision. Richard Titmuss pointed to social divisions in 1958 (Titmuss, 1958: 34-55). Thirty-two years later increasing numbers of people are experiencing the benefits of the private welfare state, company cars, subsidized housing and health insurance, and substantial pensions that carry the inequalities of their working lives into retirement. Such provisions feed the private sector and create further demands of their own. They sustain a stratified system of welfare tied to economic divisions rather than citizenship and serve powerfully to undermine the ideal of citizenship. The institutions that were in part a creation of the experience of the Second World War and of the 1930s viewed from a wartime perspective have changed. The post-war settlement, the 'truce', is at an end and it could be argued that this was long overdue. We no longer live in a society dominated by manufacturing production, done largely by men living in occupational communities and organized into large and powerful unions, dealing with government and employers in a way that entrenched their privileges over the un-unionized, the low paid, the unemployed, foreign workers and women. Employers no longer enjoy the benefits of cheap raw materials from an Empire and captive markets in colonies. That change was necessary was clear from the perspective of 1965. The Empire had ended and Malcolm X came to Birmingham University to remind us of this, while Martin Luther King came to the UK to suggest that the citizens of the former Empire ought to do something about their rights in the 'mother country'. Birmingham and the West Midlands were plainly over-dependent on the motor car production that was pulling workers into the city and region. Nobody could be in any doubt that radical changes were soon to come about. It fell to a Conservative government to make the changes, and they have made them in a way that diminishes

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rather than enhances citizenship and makes social class divisions more transparent and painful. The welfare state has reinforced not only the divisions it was meant to eliminate but racial divisions also. 3A

Industrial citizenship

Marshall's citizenship could bind or integrate people across the divisions that are essential to capitalism, without suborning the divisions. Industrial rights would impinge upon the fundamental institutions of capitalist society and the divisions themselves. The reduction of industrial rights have been on the recent agenda. Trade union legislation (five Acts of Parliament between 1980 and 1989) and codes of practice have removed immunities and restricted the rights to organize strikes, pickets and sympathetic action to the point where unions find it difficult to take effective industrial action. In the 1980s workers were dismissed from their jobs for belonging to a trade union and the government incurred ILO censure by removing the right to collective bargaining from school teachers with its 1987 Teachers' Pay and Conditions Act. Three changes in employment legislation (1979, 1980, 1985) have made it easier for employers to dismiss workers. Unemployment has also weakened the position of trade unions, as has the growth of part-time work among women and young people, sometimes in locations and occupations not previously characterized by strong unionization. Young people had Wages Council protection removed from them in 1986. Wages Councils might have been abolished in 1990 but for the provisions of a planned European Directive. Low pay has, however, become more common, with the government removing the Fair Wages Resolution from their own contracts in 1983. Local authorities, some of whom had been in the forefront of good employment practice (at least for white people and in some cases for black) were prohibited from using contract compliance in their dealings with contractors. This removed what in the USA has proved to be the single most powerful weapon for improving the status of black workers. The government's objections to the European Social Charter seem in large part to hang upon issues of workers' rights (which a journalist wryly described as a contradiction in terms for the British

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government). In this they were joined by employers who were alarmed at the possibility of workers having some representation in the direction of companies. This very modest proposal for industrial citizenship runs counter to recent British history. It could be said that to argue about citizenship is futile without considering employment and the labour market. Certainly the status of immigrants and of the black population can only be fully made sense of by considering the way in which they have been incorporated into the labour market. If the welfare state is seen simply in terms of the reproduction of labour power then Marshall's citizenship is simply a form of legitimation and could not transform society. The transformation would only come about if citizenship was extended to the realm of production. The question of the role of black labour and the 'function' of racism was not one that we addressed in Birmingham in the mid 1960s, where urban issues seemed more urgent. We did not escape criticism for this. Any sociological analysis must now include asking whether relatively rightless people are essential to the functioning of European economies (Duffield, 1988; Fevre, 1984). 'Race' and gender provide a basis for dividing workforces, and enabling certain sections to be 'super-exploited' (Frobel et al, 1980: 350-60). Will the acquisition by blacks (and women) of some of the rights enjoyed by native workers undermine their usefulness in the labour market? To what extent will their previous role in the labour market be taken over by other minorities, including refugees and asylum seekers? If minorities are to function in the economic sphere as a class fraction, a stratum or an underclass then industrial citizenship would be a major contradiction and highly 'dysfunctional'. Refugees and asylum seekers, often with irregular entry status are especially vulnerable to exploitation by employers because they dare not seek redress for bad treatment. Over 100,000 such people are now available in Britain. Will the settled black population now become even more marginal? 3.5

Citizenship and the black citizen

We have seen the interaction of nationality and citizenship and of the separate elements of citizenship. Black people have failed to

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gain the full protection the law affords the majority. The black population have come to feel themselves 'out-lawed', a feeling enhanced by the immigration legislation itself. Politically vulnerable communities find it less easy to win their social rights. Attempts to do so - even by the more privileged - lead to conflict with authority. Individuals with experience of the immigration system may be less willing to risk drawing attention to themselves, family and neighbours by contact with the social security system. The private and fiscal welfare states disproportionately exclude black citizens because of their position in the labour market. Thus they are effectively excluded from both public and private provision. A racial division of welfare has been created below Titmuss's social divisions. This essay has concentrated upon income-maintenance aspects of the welfare state because this was a key to the elimination of Beveridge's giants. But in an area as important as education (increasingly the route to economic security) black parents might well find themselves excluded from school governing bodies, especially if they are a minority of parents. Schools that opt out of the state system may find mechanisms to exclude all but a few black children. All that is needed is for governing bodies not to be over-zealous in tackling indirect discrimination. It remains true that very large numbers of white people have barely achieved citizenship as Beveridge and Marshall saw it. The citizenship status of the whole population has declined absolutely, but that of the black population has declined relatively as well. Race and class interact to deny full and effective membership of society for many, and autonomy is denied all but a few. The way in which citizenship is pursued is therefore important. A corporatist and statist route always seemed paradoxical; but what better way was there when previously the unrestricted clash of competing interests guaranteed citizenship on a cash or power basis only? 4 EUROPE AND THE RESEARCH AGENDA Those of us who have lived in areas which are largely dependent on agriculture or fishing have long been familiar with (apparently wilful) popular ignorance of the working of the European Community. The black population does not share this ignorance.

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In 1988-9 I undertook a project which included asking black community activists and professional people about the issues which academics, research councils and the charitable trusts might usefully address. Their responses do not exhaust the whole agenda for those of us who work in the field of 'race' relations. Many of their concerns with representation, accountability, education, the criminal justice system and immigration control have been incorporated in this essay. The responses from the black population are, however, important as such and raise issues that have been neglected by sociologists, with only a few exceptions. They were largely issues of citizenship. Citizenship issues dominated responses about Europe. 4.1 Europe and Trevi The European Convention on Human Rights and the Social Charter are generally welcomed as a means of widening citizenship for the UK population but nearly all my Asian and Afro-Caribbean respondents referred to 1992 with apprehension. They all felt that immigrants had a legal status in Europe inferior to that in the UK and that European union threatened them with the harmonization of the most oppressive features of the European national provisions. They are right to be worried. Representatives of European Ministers of Justice are meeting in conditions of extreme secrecy in the so-called Trevi group to discuss the European dimensions of international drug-smuggling, terrorism and immigration. It seems likely that all non-European nationals will need visas to enter the Community. It will become even more difficult for friends and relatives to visit the UK, and perhaps the 'primary purpose' rule will be extended to all people who seek to enter the Community. The behaviour of European police forces and immigration services were well known. Will it become more difficult to travel from the UK to the Continent for business or pleasure. Will black people be dogged by suspicious authorities, suspected of being illegal immigrants, liable to detention and violence from the authorities? Will British black people be stopped at French or German railway stations and asked for papers? Will they soon be asked at British stations? What mechanisms could be put into place to minimize

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the effects of this, or to protect them from discrimination if black people are to be bracketed with terrorists and drug smugglers? The possibility of the introduction of European identity cards was seen as especially threatening, particularly given the opportunity their issue would afford the authorities to record a wide range of information about black residents throughout the Community. The fact that many residents in the UK had by accident or default acquired irregular citizenship status (in the sense of nationality) also raised the spectre of widespread detentions and deportations following the introduction of identity cards. The accumulation of data also raises questions about the rise of the European far right. No doubt this sense of alarm has been heightened by recent events in Eastern Europe, with the possibility in the medium term of a more xenophobic united Germany and in the longer term the accession to Europe of smaller nations with histories of anti-Semitism. If such interests achieved significant political power would not the existence of detailed, electronically stored data about the black population constitute a special danger, ultimately for the development of deportation policies? The question of social rights and the elimination of poverty seems a much more ambiguous one because, while rightless workers may be essential to the functioning of production, Europe will find 45 million people in poverty, underconsuming and not paying tax, a problem to sustain as part of an ageing population. The need to raise levels of consumption may conflict with a need to marginalize or a desire to deport black people. 4.2

An agenda for the sociology of 'race' relations

Sociologists work at the intersection of biography and world history, but like all intellectuals, they have their own priorities. The agenda can be only partly written by the public. However esoteric and unrelated to daily concerns they may be, issues concerning not just housing but housing classes, not just inequality and poverty but theoretical issues of class, race and gender have to be pursued rigorously. The idea of citizenship may now seem like an ideal constructed in a particular and perhaps false liberal interlude in our history. But the word 'truce' was carefully chosen to describe the institutional arrangements of post-war Britain. A truce is not necessarily

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a peace; it is a conditional cessation of hostilities, and while a permanent peace may grow from it, war may also break out again. It was central to liberal thought and to the Labour Party revisionists that the class war was over. The truce did seem so strongly institutionalized that it would become permanent, with powerful interests vested in it. It now appears to have been rather transitory and it is indicative of the good health of British sociology that much current work addresses the social and economic changes that made it so transitory.8 The critical power of T. H. Marshall's formulation is undiminished and perhaps enhanced in the conditions of the 1990s. It is possible that citizenship as he saw it is ultimately unrealizable in a capitalist society. If this is so then the omission of industrial citizenship from Marshall's discussion is even more significant because it would have had the potential to transform the basic institutions of capitalism, not civil society alone. But such is its critical force that citizenship has re-emerged both explicitly and implicitly as a powerful focus of debate in both academic and political circles. As part of a political programme, however, we are now further from realizing the ideal than we were in the mid 1960s. The black population are both relatively and absolutely worse off than before. The welfare state can not either deliver what it promises or have a secure future unless questions of accountability in the context of competing interests are adequately dealt with. By contrast with the welfare state the market seems to offer freedom, choice and accountability to those who can afford it. But, for example, choice in the housing market is largely forced by a pattern of subsidies that favour owner occupation.9 The left and the right criticized the welfare state for creating dependency; the left had no programme for expanding the citizen's autonomy. There was no wide demand for active autonomy given the satisfaction of the mass of the population with large-scale collective provision. What has now been offered as a substitute for welfare state dependency is the relative freedom of the market. But the market generates its own dependencies. In Sparkbrook there were people with passports but without effective civil, political and social rights; they were governed by agencies who felt quite unaccountable to them. General questions

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of accountability may be researched in their clearest and most poignant form in the case of minorities. The ideal of citizenship for all seems to me to be a noble objective, however much it may have been the product of a particular historical moment. As a critical concept it has great power to illuminate the changing structure of contemporary Britain. As an ideal type it gave us leverage on understanding the position of Commonwealth migrants in Birmingham. It is still part of my research agenda to understand and explain the institutions, practices and beliefs that disable the population from achieving citizenship - or perhaps to ask, 'In what conditions might citizenship be achieved?' The erosion of corporatist structures, the assault on the taken-for-granted elements of civil society and the entry of the UK into the single market have ensured that the question has passed beyond the sociological agenda into public debate.

NOTES 1. One further feature of the post-war settlement was the establishment of a corporatist 'truce' between organized labour and capital, but it was an arrangement which excluded large numbers of un-unionized workers and did little to increase worker control at the place of work. In lectures and discussion John Rex often described post-war Britain in terms of 'the institutionalisation of the truce'. 2. Rex and Moore (1967). 3. See for example Williams (1989). Women in particular might also suggest that a basic right of citizenship is the right to inhabit one's own body as one will. This would seem to be as fundamental as the legal right to nationality. 4. For an excellent short account of these riots see Joshua, Wallace and Booth (1983). See also Fryer (1984: ch.10). 5. What follows is based upon Marika Sherwood's essay 'The Colour Bar in the British Military Services 1939-45', in Sherwood (1985). 6. Whatever the nature of the regime we were fighting it appears that expressions of anti-Nazism or anti-fascism could make servicemen objects of suspicion and ostracism. I am grateful to Tony Lane for recounting some examples from his research on the Merchant Navy. 7. For a list of the changes see the Appendix to Atkinson (1989). 8. Taylor-Gooby's paper (1989: 653) appeared after this chapter was written but he suggests that choices between collectivist and private means of consumption are essentially pragmatic and contingent rather than transitory. His review of the sociology of welfare while only

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including one element of citizenship indicates some fruitful lines of research. 9. For an interesting technical discussion of the means of measuring subsidy see Clarke et al. (1989).

REFERENCES Atkinson, A. B. (1989) Poverty and Social Security (Brighton: Harvester). Berthoud, R. (1987) 'New Means Tests for the Old', Year Book of Social Policy 1986--7\ M. Brenton and C. Ungerson (eds) (London: Longman). Bhat, A., Carr-Hill, R. and Ohri, S. (1988) Britain's Black Population (Aldershot: Gower). Clarke, M., Longley, P. and Williams, H. (1989) 'Microanalysis and Simulation of Housing Careers: Subsidy and Accumulation in the UK Housing Market', Papers of the Regional Science Association, vol. 66. Davies and Lister, R. (1988) Single Payments, in Cohen and Tarpey (eds) London: Child Poverty Action Group. Demuth, C. (1978) (Sus': A Report on the Vagrancy Act 1824 (London: Runnymede Trust). Duffield, M. (1988) Black Radicalism and the Politics ofDeindustrialisation (Aldershot: Avebury). Fevre, R. (1984) Cheap Labour and Racial Discrimination (Aidershot: Gower). Frobel, F., Heinrichs, J. and Keye, O. (1980) The New International Division of Labour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Fryer, P. (1984) Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto). Goodin, R. E. and LeGrand, J. (1987) Not Only the Poor: The Middle Classes and the Welfare State (London: Allen & Unwin). Gordon, P. (1981) Passport Raids and Checks (London: Runnymede Trust). Gordon, P. and Newnham, A. (1985) Passports to Benefits (London: Child Poverty Action Group & Runnymede Trust). Hindess, B. (1987) Freedom, Equality and the Market (London: Tavistock).

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HMSO (1942) Social Insurance and Allied Services, Cmnd 6404 ('The Beveridge Report'). HMSO (1965) Immigration from the Commonwealth, Cmnd 2739. Joshua, H., Wallace, T. and Booth, H. (1983) To Ride the Storm (London: Heinemann). Marshall, T. H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Moore, R. S. (1975) Racism and Black Resistance in Britain (London: Pluto). Moore, R. S. and Wallace, T. (1976) Slamming the Door: The Administration of Immigration Control (Oxford: Martin Robertson). Rex, J. and Moore, R. S. (1967) Race, Community and Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Scruton, R. (1984) The Meaning of Conservatism (London: Macmillan). Searchlight (1990) no. 175, January. Sherwood, M. (1985) 'The Colour Bar in the British Military Services 1939-45', in Many Struggles: West Indian Workers and Service Personnel in Britain, 1939-45 (London: Karia Press). Simey, M. (1988) Democracy Rediscovered (London: Pluto). Smith, D. et al. (1983) Police and People in London (London: Policy Studies). Stone, I. F. (1988) The Trial of Socrates (Harmondsworth: Picador). Taylor-Gooby, P. (1989) 'Current Developments in the Sociology of Welfare', British Journal of Sociology, 40 (4). Thompson, E. P. (1980) Writing by Candlelight (London: Merlin). Thornton, P. (1989) Decade of Decline: Civil Liberties in the Thatcher Years (London: NCCL). Titmuss, R. M. (1958) Essays on the Welfare State (London: Allen & Unwin). Williams, F. (1989) Social Policy (Cambridge: Polity Press).

THE NEGOTIATED ORDER OF THE INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISE Richard K. Brown

INTRODUCTION Bureaucracy

Industrial organizations, employing tens, hundreds or thousands of people, are one of the most distinctive features of industrial societies. It is therefore not surprising that the efforts of many sociologists, and of social scientists preferring a variety of other labels, have been devoted to attempting to describe, understand and explain their origins, development and operation. While this area of enquiry, in common with others in the discipline, has drawn on the work of the 'founding fathers' of sociology for concepts and approaches, it has, with one notable exception, not found in their writings a ready-made basis for the analysis of organizations. The exception, of course, has been Weber's ideal type bureaucracy, his formulation of the characteristics of an administrative apparatus most closely and appropriately associated with the exercise of rational-legal authority (see Gerth and Mills, 1948: 196-244). The use of Weber's ideal type as a starting point for studies of organizations, which has produced a distinguished series of publications, would probably find few advocates today. Attempts to use the ideal type as the model of an industrial enterprise have come up against the problem of how to conceptualize those aspects of 51

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social action and social relations within organizations which do not correspond with the expectations raised by the ideal type. One solution has been to distinguish between 'formal' and 'informal' aspects of organizations. There has, however, been no agreement as to how such a dichotomy should be defined - 'official' and 'unofficial'?, 'functional' and 'dysfunctional'? (Morgan, 1975) and in at least some circumstances it proved difficult to apply it in any meaningful way at all (for example, Burns and Stalker, 1961: 122). Other studies have resulted in the formulation of typologies of organizations only one of which might be regarded as 'truly' bureaucratic: 'mock', 'representative' and 'punishment-centred' bureaucracies (Gouldner, 1955), 'bureaucratic' and 'craft' administration (Stinchcombe 1959), 'mechanistic' and 'organic' management structures (Burns and Stalker, 1961), and so on. In marked contrast to such developments, and explicitly critical of them, Pugh and his colleagues adopted a highly quantitative and positivistic approach which in effect dismembered holistic models of organization, such as the ideal type could be seen to be, in order to produce a series of 'dimensions of organization' of supposedly universal applicability (Pugh et al.y 1963; Pugh and Hickson, 1976). The controversy engendered by this approach cannot be discussed further here (for one account of it see Donaldson, 1985), but it cannot be regarded as preserving very much of Weber's original formulation. Thus, though the ideal type 'bureaucracy' is still of great value as a 'sensitizing concept', which aids the identification of crucial features of the modern world, and of organizations of all types, it is not in itself necessarily an adequate model, still less a description, of industrial or other organizations. Indeed, as Burns (1969a: 151), among others, has pointed out, many of the empirical studies have constituted a critique of the bureaucratic rationality which is at the base of Weber's formulation; they have treated 'organizational structures, managerial goals and systems of work relationships not as an ineluctable datum of the industrial system, but as themselves an institutional apparatus with unforeseen consequences, with wide variation in appropriateness and effectiveness, and different significance and utility to the people involved', and have seen industrial organizations as 'a set of institutions in historical process, and not a gradual process towards an ideal state of efficient and rewarding exploitation of human resources'.

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Organizations as systems What might be considered one of the strengths of Weber's ideal type bureaucracy is that, as Blau (1956: 32-3) pointed out many years ago, it can be seen as providing a functional analysis of organizations. As such it is comparable to a variety of other approaches to the analysis of industrial organizations which emphasize their systemic qualities. The idea that organizations are best conceptualized as systems is one with a long and rich history within the sociology of organizations. This is in no way surprising: it accords with the structural-functionalist paradigm which was dominant in sociology generally at the time when the sociology of organizations was being developed as a distinctive area of study; and as Emery and Trist (1965: 21) have argued persuasively: In a general way it may be said that to think in terms of systems seems the most appropriate conceptual response so far available when the phenomena under study - at any level and in any domain - display the character of being organized, and when understanding the nature of the interdependencies constitutes the research task. It is certainly difficult, and unnecessary, to ignore altogether the systemic aspects of organizations, but establishing in what sense it is appropriate to use such a concept in relation to organizations is rather more difficult than is allowed for by Emery and Trist, and other proponents of a 'systems approach'. To refer to an industrial organization as a 'system' is to make a number of assumptions about it. Some of the most central of these are: that it comprises a set of interdependent 'parts', such that a change in one part will affect some or all of the others, and that the whole system is more than just the aggregation of these parts; that there is some relatively clear continuity about this set of interdependent parts such that it can be considered the 'same' organization despite any changes which may take place; and that it has a relatively clear boundary which separates it from a wider 'environment'. In addition most conceptions of organizations as systems assume that there is an over-arching set of goals and/or values which secures the integration of the system; and, in open system models, that the maintenance of the system (and the

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achievement of its goals) is secured by exchanges between the system and its environment. None of these assumptions is without problems (see, for example, Silverman, 1970). There is no consensus about the nature of the 'parts' which constitute the system; as Moore (1979: 338-9) pointed out in his discussion of functionalism, the parts ('structures') can be either 'concrete' (membership groups or aggregates) or 'analytic' (identified by their functions), though this distinction is not always clear-cut. In a world in which mergers, takeovers, nationalization and privatization are commonplace, it is far from unproblematic to establish the continuity of an organizational 'system'. Defining an organizational boundary is equally difficult; in the case of industrial organizations, for example, should it include non-executive directors, shareholders, customers, and/or suppliers and sub-contractors with varying degrees of dependence on the organization? Decisions about boundaries obviously have implications for the conceptualization of the organization's 'environment' and the nature of the exchanges which take place across it; some analysts have focused almost entirely on physically observable exchanges (raw materials, labour, wages and salaries, and so on — see for example Rice [1956, 1963]), but, as Parsons and Smelser (1956) among others have shown, any attempt to enumerate such exchanges in full is much more complex and, for example, involves considering sources of legitimacy, control and commitment. Each of these questions has been the subject of widespread debate, but the issue which has perhaps given rise to even greater controversy is the assumption that one can identify organizational goals and use them to determine organizational 'needs', thus accounting for the structure of the organization and the nature of processes within it. At first sight organizations, as distinct from societies, would appear to have goals which are relatively unproblematically embodied in articles of association or some similar constitutional document. However, such goals may change: they can be 'displaced' (means become ends), and even if identifiable they are unlikely to be fully endorsed by all members of the organization or be relevant to an understanding of how members of the organization actually behave. It is not safe to assume, for example, that by accepting a contract of employment an employee is accepting the 'goals' of the organization as defined by the

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employer, and accepting that employer's authority as legitimate (see Rex, 1961: 111). Given the inequalities of condition and opportunity which exist in all industrial societies, entry into particular forms of employment may, in effect, be coerced, and the acceptance of the terms of employment which have been offered largely pragmatic. However, once it is seen that all members of an industrial organization may not share entirely the same goals, and that they can have conflicting interests, analysis which gives explanatory priority to goals becomes much more difficult. There are further problems in identifying the 'needs' of an organization, even if its goals could be established unambiguously - problems which parallel those in relation to discussions of the 'needs' of the social system as a whote (Rex, 1961: 70-3; Silverman, 1970). In a general sense there may be some essential prerequisites of organization, for example some mechanisms for recruitment and socialization of members, but, as the notion of 'functional alternatives' implies, 'needs' can often be met in any one of several different ways. In some circumstances, for example, what might be thought essential for the survival of an industrial organization in a capitalist economy, that it be profitable, can prove to be neither necessary nor sufficient: unprofitable concerns have been kept in being for considerable periods of time, for example by governments (Rolls Royce, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders) or by their owners (some newspapers, many football clubs), and profitable ones have been closed. In such circumstances it is difficult, if not impossible, to say what structural arrangements, resources, and so on would be needed to secure organizational survival. A major problem with analyses in terms of systems has been the tendency to 'reify' the system, to treat it as an entity which has goals and needs distinct from those of the individuals who compose it, and which can act on its own as if independent of the decisions and actions of its members. Some degree of apparent reification is probably almost unavoidable in discussing organizations, and it can be legitimate if it remains a kind of shorthand. For example, as Mouzelis (1975: xiii-xvi) points out, to say 'the organization has adopted a new strategy' is perfectly proper so long as it does not obscure the possibly complex processes of discussion and negotiation through which such a new policy was agreed. It is much more difficult, if not impossible, to apply the same gloss to Rice's

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claims that 'the system itself exerts forces towards the creation and maintenance of fixed relations between its elements in spite of variation in the rate of exchange with the environment'; or, more simply, 'any healthy system will resist change' (Rice, 1963: 262). Such a way of conceptualizing organizations is highly misleading in that it conceals the possibly very varied aims and commitments of organizational members, the conflicts which are likely as individuals and groups within the organization attempt to realize their own interests, and the extent to which action taken in the name of the organization as a whole may reflect the power of only some of its members to impose their definition of organizational goals. In some of the more sophisticated developments of systems thinking these problems were clearly recognised. Burns (1969b), for example, has written of 'the plurality of social systems' in order to reflect the fact that employees in industrial organizations have commitments to internal political and career considerations, as well as to the working organization. The implications of his work have been effectively summarized by Elger (1975: 109): Though Burns and Stalker take the tradition of systems typologies as their point of departure . . . they develop, in relation to a rich array of empirical materials, a processual analysis which treats actors' allegiances, perspectives and strategies as problematic features of organizational action. In this context organizational structure and operative goals are seen as the outcome of negotiation and interpretation processes among organizational members with differential resources. THE EMPLOYMENT CONTRACT AND EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS In searching for an approach to the analysis of industrial organizations which accommodates these negotiated and processual aspects of organizational structure and operation it is illuminating to begin with the contract of employment. Such organizations exist because and in so far as those who establish and/or control them are able to employ others to undertake work. The social relations between employers and employees are regulated by contracts of

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employment. Like all legal agreements employment contracts typically do not state explicitly the full range of expectations, rights and obligations which may link employer and employee. As compared with contracts which regulate the buying and selling of other commodities, however, employment contracts which regulate the buying and selling of labour power have certain other important distinctive features. In the first place, the exchange of wages or salaries for work is not one which can take place instantaneously; it implies a continuing relationship between employer and employee in order for the work to be done for which the payment is to be made. Second, the contract itself is normally remarkably indeterminate or 'open-ended'; it typically does not and possibly cannot state in more than very general terms the nature of the employee's obligations, the work he or she is expected to do in return for payment. The buying and selling of most commodities, whether expensive and complex like a house or a car, or simple and everyday like purchasing a newspaper, involves a transaction which takes place at a precise point in time. In contrast, employment involves employees entering into a continuing relationship with the purchasers of their labour power because it is only over time that they can 'deliver' the work for which they are being paid. Moreover it is very difficult, if not impossible, for the employer to specify in advance precisely what is expected of the employee; this can only be worked out in the continuing day-to-day relations which the employment contract establishes. It is difficult because of the costs of trying to specify in advance all that an employee might be expected to do during the hours of employment (which typically are specified) (see Marsden, 1986: 22). It may be inherently impossible because of the problems of including in a contract a meaningful and enforceable statement of the quantity and quality of work which is being demanded: how hard the employee is to work, and what standards of performance are required. Lupton and Bowey (1974: 74) indicate some of the problems involved: The contract of employment between an employer and an employee hardly ever specifies exactly what the employee undertakes to do during each hour or day of his employment. It is neither possible nor desirable to define every action and sequence of actions precisely, because the employer usually

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seeks a degree of freedom to direct the work-force to perform tasks which are appropriate to the changing demands of customers, the availability of materials, breakdowns of machinery or equipment and so on. And the employee seeks a degree of freedom to respond as he thinks fit. The limits within which these freedoms may be exercised are sometimes written into a contract and sometimes 'understood', but in either case custom and practice will further elaborate what it is reasonable for the employer to demand of the employee and vice versa. These continuing relationships between employer and employee are also relations of authority, or super- and sub-ordination. To accept employment is to enter into a situation involving loss of freedom and autonomy, of being prepared, within whatever limits, to do as one is told. Without such power employers would be unable to ensure that the work for which they are paying would actually be done as and when they wish it to be done. Much of the administrative apparatus of large-scale employing organizations can be seen as comprising the means of 'closing' the employment contract and ensuring the performance to desired standards of the tasks for which workers are being employed. The exercise of authority would be needed in any circumstances in order to ensure that tasks were completed to time and in a co-ordinated way. In the context of capitalist and, indeed, most other industrial societies it is all the more necessary, from the employer's point of view, because the interests of employer and employee are in conflict. This conflict derives from the fact that whereas for the employee the wage or salary is income, for the employer it is a cost. For any employer providing goods or services in a competitive market there will be pressures to contain or reduce labour costs, and if this is not done there is a danger that the enterprise will be forced out of business. For employers in the public sector there are more or less equivalent restrictions on labour costs arising from finite budgets within which demands for services, which are always likely to be expanding, have to be met. The conflict is not only about the size of the wage packet or salary cheque, however, but also concerns what work the employees are required to do, their levels of physical and mental effort, the responsibilities they are to carry, and so on. In this way the employer's exercise of authority, and the employee's defence of a degree of autonomy on the job, are equally a source

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of conflict. The terms of the employment contract include both pay and other rewards, and the contribution which the employee is expected to make to the employing enterprise, and both may be contentious. The effort bargain The work of Baldamus (1961) provides a very incisive exploration of employment relations focusing particularly on what has come to be known as 'the effort bargain' (see also Behrend, 1957). Though 'occupational costs', those connected with the acquisition of skill, experience, and so on, are compensated by means of wage differentials determined in the labour market, the bargaining over 'effort' necessarily takes place within the enterprise: The formal wage contract is never precise in stipulating how much effort is expected for a given wage (and vice versa). The details of the arrangement are left to be worked out through the direct interaction between the partners of the contract. If a worker slackens his effort at one moment, the foreman's job is to remind him, as it were, that he departs from his obligations, and, in certain circumstances, it is quite possible that there may be some haggling between the two as to what is a 'fair' degree of effort in relation to wages paid. (Baldamus, 1961: 35-6) 'Industrial administration' can therefore be seen as 'a complex network of managerial controls over the wage-earner's effort' {ibid.: 123).

Bargaining over appropriate levels of effort is made much more complex in Baldamus's view, however, because effort itself is a highly subjective and unstable phenomenon. Provisionally defined as 'the sum total of physical and mental exertion, tedium, fatigue, or any other disagreeable aspect of work', effort 'defies rigorous definition and is certainly unmeasurable' (ibid.: 29-30). That some stability is possible in the employment relations surrounding the effort bargain is due to the institutionalization of expectations on the part of managers and workers; the development of general obligations to work during socialization in the home and at school, which are then standardized, and linked to shared wage

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expectations, during experience in the workplace. The nature of such expectations in any particular case - and they can clearly vary over time and space — forms an important 'condition of action' for those managing an industrial organization. One frequently adopted means of trying to specify the terms of the effort bargain is the use of schemes of payment by results. Studies of such schemes in action illustrate the difficulties of establishing a relationship between pay and output which will be seen to represent 'a fair day's pay for a fair day's work' (see Lupton, 1961, 1963). Consequently their use is typically accompanied by considerable ongoing negotiation as to the appropriate rate for the job. Such negotiation is also to be found, however, in situations where time rates of pay are in operation. In these circumstances what may be at issue are questions like the speed of the assembly line, the levels of manning for specific tasks, or the length or frequency of tea-breaks (see, for example, Beynon, 1984). Whatever the detailed issue in contention, however, the structure and operation of the organization at any point in time is the outcome of processes of negotiation between the partners to the employment contract. Skill, responsibility and consent Baldamus's discussion is explicitly concerned with non-skilled work, situations where the employee only has his or her simple labour power to sell. Much employment, however, involves the employee in drawing on their skills and experience in order to carry out whatever tasks are prescribed. Determining what and how much skill is required in any particular case is far from simple. Many skills are difficult if not impossible to measure, some are 'tacit', and the labelling of particular jobs or tasks or workers as 'skilled' can become highly contentious involving necessarily subjective claims and judgements by the parties concerned (Cockburn, 1983; Manwaring and Wood, 1984). Such an outcome is all the more likely given that work defined as 'skilled' will normally receive higher rewards. Thus issues regarding the allocation of work (who has the appropriate skills to undertake particular tasks) and the pay differentials appropriate for different categories of employee are also likely to be the subject of negotiation. Much recent discussion in industrial sociology has been

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concerned with the ways in which employers attempt to control their employees so as to maximize the contribution they receive in return for the payment of wages and salaries. The dominant argument, associated particularly with the work of Braverman (1974) and his analysis of Scientific Management, has postulated a general strategy of 'deskilling' as a means of increasing control. Control can best be secured, it is suggested, by separating conception (the planning, specification and programming of work, which would be the sole preserve of management) from execution; fragmenting tasks and defining precisely how they are to be performed; and exercising close control over the ways in which work is carried out by means of supervision, incentive payment schemes, and so on. Though the development of work organization in the twentieth century provides plenty of evidence of the occurrence of such processes, some of the more exaggerated claims which have been made about management's ability to control its workforce cannot be sustained empirically and are suspect on theoretical grounds. The main problem with such an argument is that it ignores the element of discretion which remains in any task, no matter how 'deskilled', and, more generally, fails to recognize that employers can, and need to, secure a degree of willing cooperation from their employees in order to obtain the full value of their work. Absolute control is not only impossible it is also undesirable in that it diminishes what the employee can contribute. This point has been well made by Bendix (1956: 251) in his discussion of managers' attempts to secure the legitimacy of their authority: In modern industry the cooperation needed involves the spirit in which subordinates exercise their judgement. Beyond what commands can effect and supervision can control, beyond what incentives can induce and penalties prevent, there exists an exercise of discretion important even in relatively menial jobs, which managers of economic enterprises seek to enlist for the achievement of managerial ends. Braverman's argument was based on the assumption that the interests of management and worker, of capital and labour, are in conflict. As has already been argued this is a legitimate assumption to make, but such a position does not provide an exhaustive

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description of the employment relationship; it is more ambivalent, more contradictory, than that suggests. Employees have interests in the continued viability of their source of employment; and, as Bendix argues, employers have interests in securing the benefits of employees' co-operation and willingness to act responsibly. Writing in a Marxian framework, Cressey and Maclnnes (1980: 14) pursue a comparable argument: For even though capital owns (and therefore has the right to 'control'), both means of production and the worker, in practice capital must surrender the means of production to the 'control' of the workers for their actual use in the production process. All adequate analysis of the contradictory relationship of labour to capital depends on grasping this point . . . It is precisely because capital must surrender the use of its means of production to labour that capital must to some degree seek a cooperative relationship with it, unite labour with the means of production and maximise its social productivity and powers of cooperation. The implications of the arguments so far can be summarized as follows. The employment relationship is an inherently antagonistic one in that employer and employee have conflicting interests in both elements in the employment contract: the contribution in effort, skill and the exercise of discretion expected of the employee and the pay and other rewards to be exchanged for that contribution. Such a conflict cannot be finally resolved at the moment of agreeing the contract (within the sphere of the labour market); it has to be worked out as part of the ongoing interaction between the two parties, because only within the employing organization and in the process of carrying out the work for which the employee has been hired can the employee's contribution finally be specified in any determinate way. The unmeasurable and contested nature of all three elements of the employee's contribution - effort, skill and the exercise of discretion - limit the likely duration of any agreement and make it highly probable that the employment relationship will have to be continually renegotiated as circumstances change. Thus the social relations of employment must be seen as involving ongoing processes of negotiation between employer and employee (or their representatives).

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Over time, of course, such relations may become highly institutionalized, in the form of industrial relations procedures and/or as workplace custom and practice. Given that in most highly industrialized societies the institution of employment is highly valued, there will be pressure to regulate employment relations and to impose normative sanctions on the behaviour of the parties so as to prevent some of the more disruptive consequences of ongoing conflict and negotiation. Thus processes of institutionalization will be strongly socially supported. The achievement of some order and stability is also assisted by shared or compatible interests which are equally inherent in the employment relationship - interests, for example, in the continued viability of the organization itself on which both parties depend. Consent and co-operation are also an integral part of the, inherently ambivalent, social relations of employment. THE NEGOTIATED ORDER The idea that organizations should be conceptualized as having a 'negotiated order' has been expressed most clearly and forcefully by Strauss and his colleagues in the context of studies of psychiatric hospitals. Working with the symbolic interactionist tradition associated with the University of Chicago they outlined their understanding of the nature of this negotiated order as follows (Strauss

etal.,1971: 103-4): Order is something at which members of any society, any organization must work. For the shared agreements, the binding contracts - which constitute the grounds for an expectable, non-surprising, taken-for-granted, even ruled orderliness — are not binding and shared for all time. Contracts, understandings, agreements, rules - all have appended to them a temporal clause. That clause may or may not be explicitly discussed by the contracting parties, and the terminal date of the agreement may or may not be made specific, but none can be binding forever - even if the parties believe it so, unforeseen consequences of acting on the agreements would force eventual confrontation. Review is called for, whether the outcome of review be rejection or renewal or revision, or what

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not. In short, the bases of concerted action (social order) must be reconstituted continually, or, as remarked above, 'worked at'. Such considerations have led us to emphasize the importance of negotiation — the processes of give-and-take, of diplomacy, of bargaining — which characterizes organizational life. In the remainder of their account the authors elaborate on this initial statement of their perspective. They suggest that an organization such as a hospital is a 'locale' where employees drawn from different occupations (and other persons such as, in their case, patients) come together to work out their respective purposes. They will have different commitments, ideologies and ambitions, reflecting differences in their occupational training and socialization, their positions in the organizational hierarchy and the stage reached by their careers; and different views as to the 'proper division of labour'. Such differences cannot be resolved by reference to any shared 'single, vaguely ambiguous goal' which is of mainly symbolic importance, nor by reference to the organization's rules ('far from extensive, or clearly stated or clearly binding'); application of the rules needs judgement and they represent a resource to be used, stretched, broken, and so on. The resulting negotiation is 'patterned' in various ways: by implicit or explicit time limits to agreements, as stressed in the above quotation; in terms of the issues (in the case of hospitals, for example, programmes of treatment for patients, and the role of non-professionals); and by demands from outside agencies such as the state and professional associations. They conclude: The model presented has pictured the hospital as a locale where personnel, mostly but not exclusively professionals, are enmeshed in a complex negotiative process in order both to accomplish their individual purposes and to work — in an established division of labour - toward clearly as well as vaguely phrased institutional objectives. We have sought to show how differential professional training, ideology, career, and hierarchical position all affect the negotiation . . . (ibid.: 121)

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Such a model is seen by its proponents as relevant to the study of 'corporations, universities and government agencies' which, like hospitals, also have complex divisions of labour. In a largely sympathetic review and critique of 'negotiated order theory' Day and Day (1977) suggest that it has several important limitations. These are in particular its excessive reliance on the methods of participant observation, its overemphasis on participants' own accounts of their actions and the neglect of additional information such as records, documents and the observation of others, and its neglect of the outside environment of an organization, the structural features of the wider society. 'By necessity', they argue (1977: 140) 'the theory will have to become much more politically, structurally, and historically grounded than it has been in the past.' Such criticism is justified. While the approach ('theory' is claiming too much) represents an important corrective to the overly structural accounts of organizations provided by 'systems thinkers' and others, and rightly emphasizes the importance of the actions of and interactions between organizational members, it fails to give sufficient attention to the conditions within which such action and interaction take place. Yet all action is constrained to some extent, and action (and negotiation) within organizations such as industrial enterprises is only likely to be possible within more or less narrow limits which are not, or not easily, amenable to modification by the actors involved. The emphasis on the ways in which the 'order' within organizations is negotiated must therefore be complemented by an attempt to specify some of the conditions which are likely to constrain such processes. Such an attempt will also go some way to remedy a further weakness of the approach suggested by Strauss and his colleagues. This is their failure to recognize adequately that although all members of an organization (even patients in a mental hospital) are able to negotiate the conditions of their participation to some extent, they cannot do so to the same extent; some are much more powerful than others, and can draw on more and possibly more varied resources - material and/or ideational - to secure their own preferred outcome to any negotiation. Ultimately, specifying all the relevant conditions of action must depend on the circumstances of each particular case but certain generalizations can be made. Firstly, industrial organizations, and the industries of which they are a part, have histories during which

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relations and procedures become institutionalized, allocations of resources get established and certain courses of action come to be seen as the legitimate or at least the normatively preferred ones. Second, political institutions, and especially the state, influence the conduct of industrial organizations, very directly through legislation and regulation, less directly by means of incentives, sanctions and influence. Third, industrial organizations in particular have to meet certain economic and technical exigencies if they are to remain viable as productive enterprises. These last conditions of action need to be elaborated in a little more detail. The key starting point for exploring the technical and economic constraints on action within industrial organizations is probably the product (or service); what is being or is to be produced, and for whom, sets limits to organizational structure and operation. Though technological requirements in relation to a particular product rarely determine social relations and the organization of production in any complete sense, they are likely to impose some limits on what is possible. These limits may well be made tighter by the constraints of the markets within which the organization operates: the markets for capital, raw materials and/or other supplies, and labour, and for the sale of the product of service. Large and powerful organizations may be able to dominate, even control, some or all of the markets in which they operate, but for most organizations factor and product markets represent more or less intractable conditions of action. There is a further addition to be made to the sort of approach suggested by Strauss and his colleagues if it is to be appropriate for the analysis of industrial organizations in Britain and most other industrial societies. Though there is reference in their account to the influence of associations of employees (especially professional bodies), the focus is on day-to-day negotiation within the organization. The conflicts of interests of employers and employees in a society like Britain have led, over the years, to the institutionalization of industrial conflict, and the emergence of trade unions and^ employers' associations, which bargain on behalf of their members. Much of this activity typically takes place 'outside' industrial organizations, though there are variations over time and between industries and societies as to the extent to which this is the case. As Flanders (1970: 86) has rightly pointed out such industrial relations activity is a rule-making process, the institutionalized means of job

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regulation. What Flanders failed to pursue is the ways in which the agreements reached between trade union officials and employers' representatives, or between managers and shop stewards, during processes of collective bargaining, are themselves negotiated and renegotiated in the day-to-day interaction of managers, supervisors and employees in the workplace. In the final section of this essay some of these arguments will be developed and illustrated by drawing on research in the shipbuilding industry which was carried out in the then Department of Social Theory and Institutions, University of Durham, between 1967 and 1970.1 SHIPBUILDING The modern shipbuilding industry in Britain developed during the last third of the nineteenth century and in the years before the First World War, when Britain was by far the most important producer of ships in the world. As is well known, the industry was very severely affected by the slump in world trade in the inter-war years, and although shipbuilding in Britain appeared to be regaining its share of world markets in the period immediately after the end of the Second World War the story of shipbuilding since the 1950s has been one of long-term decline. In important respects the industry can be seen as an assembly industry, buying in materials and equipment from a large number and wide range of suppliers. Unlike the products of many assembly industries, however, most ships have been unique products, built to meet the specifications of particular owners. It has not been possible to standardize and fragment tasks nor to prescribe them in detail in advance of production. The construction and fitting out of a ship has therefore required the labour of workers in a relatively large number of distinct and skilled occupations. The production process has continued to depend to a greater extent than in most modern manufacturing industries on the responsible exercise of their skills by craftsmen who are also able and willing to undertake, on the job, at least some of the necessary co-ordination of their work with that of others; in Stinchcombe's terms, 'craft' rather than 'bureaucratic' administration. The industry in Britain was able to develop in this form because

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there already existed appropriately skilled workers in the labour markets of the main shipbuilding areas, and the institution of apprenticeship which secured the reproduction of that labour force. It was in the interests of employers to be able to recruit and deploy appropriately skilled labour for each of the tasks necessary for the completion of a ship - shipwrights, platers, riveters (and later welders), caulkers and burners, blacksmiths, joiners, fitters, electricians, and so on. Given the unpredictable nature of the demand for ships, however, workers in each of these trades were concerned to preserve for themselves all the areas of work which they regarded as within their competence. The allocation of work in the industry became a source of considerable conflict as rival trades, in most cases organized by different trade unions, claimed particular tasks for themselves. The Webbs (1913: 513) have described how on Tyneside 'within the space of thirty five months (between 1890 and 1893), there were no fewer than thirty five weeks in which one or other of the four most important sections of workmen . . . absolutely refused to work.' As a result of such demarcation disputes very detailed lists of 'who did what' were agreed between the pairs of trades in dispute, and procedure agreements were also drawn up to provide a framework within which, it was hoped, future disputes could be settled without recourse to stoppages of work. This division of labour in shipbuilding provides a vivid illustration of the sorts of arguments advanced by Strauss and his colleagues: multiple processes of negotiation to establish and re-establish an always precarious social order. Many of the initial agreements concerning the apportionment of work were reached at district level; they had to be applied, and possibly further negotiated, in the context of working practices and arrangements in particular yards. Shop stewards and foremen (almost invariably former craftsmen) played an important role in maintaining them; they possessed copies of lists of work which originated in the nineteenth century. As we found from observation, however, the strict letter of demarcation agreements was not always followed in practice, particularly, perhaps, at times when work was plentiful. In addition to such necessary day-to-day negotiation, changes in the technology of shipbuilding and/or the product market for ships could give rise to the need for more fundamental renegotiation. New processes (e.g., prefabrication; welding in place of riveting), new materials (e.g., plastics), new types of ships (e.g., liquid gas

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carriers), and so on, might all lead to competing claims to do some or all of the new work (McGoldrick, 1983; Roberts 1988). As claims to an exclusive competence to perform certain tasks or use certain tools have a moral element as well as being reflections of sectional interests (Brown and Brannen, 1970: 199-200), the disputes which developed could be difficult to resolve. Thus shipbuilding provides an unusually rich array of examples of the negotiation of the division of labour, of how tasks are to be allocated between different skilled craftsmen, and between skilled and non-skilled workers too. This negotiation has taken place at different 'levels' within the 'formal' framework of collective bargaining machinery, but has also involved the day-to-day actions of shipyard workers, supervisors and managers. Some of the arrangements established to aid workplace collective bargaining, in particular the definition of the role of shop steward, can provide a further example of the ways in which negotiation and renegotiation took place at various levels within the hierarchy of the firm. Shop stewards were elected by the different categories of craftsmen, and by non-skilled workers, to represent them in negotiations with employers regarding their terms and conditions of employment, and some form of workplace representation in the Tyneside shipyard in which the research was carried out dated back to the end of the nineteenth century. The position of shop steward is an ambiguous one: they are full-time employees of the organization for which they work, but if they are to be able to represent their members effectively they must be able to leave their work to consult with members, take up grievances, and so on. Thus the powers and duties of shop stewards have to be defined not only by the unions to which they belong, but also, in certain important respects, by their employer. In 1967 the formal agreement, The Procedure for Avoidance of Disputes', between the Shipbuilders and Repairers National Association and the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions stated: (5) A shop steward shall be permitted access to such facilities as are required to enable him to carry out his duties. No shop steward shall be dismissed because of any act done by him in good faith in the proper performance of his duties as shop steward, but otherwise he shall be subject to the same terms and conditions of employment as his fellow employees.

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The shipyard manager responsible for industrial relations was emphatic that shop stewards were ordinary employees; the policy was to give shop stewards no special privileges; they were not to be treated differently from any other workers, and might indeed be made redundant along with others. He argued that this also applied to the Secretary of the Yard Shop Stewards Committee, a shipwright, though it was recognized that in his case his work as Secretary was virtually a full-time occupation. (As his job included selling safety boots, in practice it certainly was.) The manager also agreed that foremen were often lax in insisting that shop stewards requested permission to leave their work, and that stewards might try to expand union business indefinitely, particularly when they were newly appointed. Our own observations made this appear a very unrealistic picture of the position of at least some leading and far from newly appointed shop stewards, and the process of trying to arrange interviews with them confirmed this impression. There were continual problems in contacting certain stewards as they were never to be found where they were supposed to be working. Certain shop stewards, who appeared to be, 'unofficially', full time on union business, which included the weekly prize draw, were the target of remarks from other workers about their not having touched the tools for years, or having been seen on an exceptional occasion with their hands dirty! On the other hand, fieldwork notes also included comments like the following:2 When I was seeing [the principal shop steward for the fitters] about doing an interview with him, he was in a hurry to get back to work: 'I've got to do my week's quota'. An interesting phrase really, indicating that he at any rate wasn't totally free to spend his time on shop stewards' activities, but had to keep right by doing a certain minimum. and Also I remember, from the morning that [the chairman of the shop stewards committee] said he would have to work: 'I've got to do a bit. I've got death benefits tomorrow and negotiating next week.' Another indication that the shop stewards

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have to do a certain minmum agreed tacitly between each individual and management to clear his position. Thus the official agreement defines the situation in one way, which is by and large accepted by yard management, but the position in practice of each shop steward becomes a question of implied negotiation between himself and certain relevant managers and/or foremen. This situation was about to change, however. At the time when the interviews and observation just described were being carried out, shop stewards were involved in detailed yard level negotiations to deal with special allowances, bonus earnings, and so on for the particular groups of men they represented. At least some of them used their extensive networks of contacts with other stewards in their own and other unions to regulate and channel demands and grievances, and management may have 'turned a blind eye' to some of their activity because it brought benefits in the form of orderly industrial relations. The changes which are discussed below radically changed this situation, reduced the influence at yard level of many shop stewards (who also became subject to management's attempts to tighten up on the utilization of labour) but gave a minority of representative shop stewards an expanded role in the new group negotiating committees. The issues described so far - the allocation of work and demarcation, and the role of the shop steward - gave rise to negotiation of an ongoing and recurrent nature. The wider economic and political environment of shipbuilding, however, could give rise to demands for much more far-reaching changes in the social organization of the industry, and the response to such demands could have major implications for particular enterprises and affect both the nature and scope of workplace negotiation, and the 'order' which was sustained by it. In response to the deteriorating economic position of shipbuilding in the 1960s the government appointed a committee of inquiry, under Mr A. R. M. Geddes, '.. . to establish what changes are necessary in organisation and methods of production . . .' and '. . . to recommend what action should be taken . ..' (Shipbuilding Inquiry Committee, 1965-1966: 3). The Geddes Report advocated the creation of much larger shipbuilding groups which would, it was hoped, have the resources to compete effectively in world markets.

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The government accepted the report and made funds available through the Shipbuilding Industry Board to assist the creation of such groups. On Tyneside such a process went ahead and all the shipbuilding yards on the river came together in 1968 to form a consortium. The full benefits of such reorganization depended, however, on ' securing mobility of labour between yards. For this to be possible it was necessary to establish common terms and conditions of employment for workers who had previously been subject to four different employers. A 'Workers' Charter' was therefore negotiated jointly with all the manual workers' unions, and separate pay agreements negotiated with each union for the various grades of work undertaken by their members. The negotiating committee consisted on the workers' side of full-time officials and representative shop stewards from each of the yards; it thus brought into being both a situation in which certain basic features of the terms and conditions of employment were no longer settled at yard level and differentiation between shop stewards, some of whom did, for a time, become almost full-time negotiators and who continued to play a more influential role than their colleagues. It should be added that the changes also limited the authority and affected the activities of yard management. The pay rises associated with the new agreements were granted in exchange for changes in working practices which were intended to increase productivity. In addition to the requirement of mobility between yards already mentioned, management wished to secure greater flexibility and interchangeability; the former involves workers doing subsidiary tasks which were well within their capabilities, such as tack-welding and burning on the part of platers and shipwrights, but had customarily been the preserve of separate occupational groups, while the latter implies that some workers at least will transfer between previously distinct areas of work as production needs dictate. The agreements stated that 'complete flexibility and interchangeability across the whole membership of [the union]' and 'mobility between shipyards' had been fully granted to the company by the respective unions. Our evidence is that in practice there were differences between the three changes. Mobility between yards occurred almost immediately, though at times it had the unintended consequence of allowing foremen to transfer their least desirable

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workers, including men off sick! Flexibility had happened 'informally' before the agreement was made and was put into practice fairly quickly, especially when tack welders were retrained to do other work; but inter changeability was necessarily slower because it depended on there being workers trained as 'ship constructors' to undertake a number of previously distinct tasks. Nevertheless within three years of the signing of the agreement 'flexibility and interchangeability' were seen as sufficiently a reality for the union to use their withdrawal as a sanction during a dispute. Later in the 1970s, however,flexibilityand interchangeability in the Tyne yards were once again subjects of 'formal' negotiation between management and unions. In conjunction with the new agreements management also introduced new means of control over the workforce with regard to timekeeping, and in order to try to ensure increasing productivity. The Conditions of Service agreement in November 1968 included a detailed 'clocking and booking procedure' for timekeeping; by April the following year, some details of this had been changed; and shortly afterwards it was described by one worker as 'already breaking down'. As part of the standardization of terms and conditions of employment a whole complex of payments systems, some still involving an incentive element, were replaced by simplified bonus schemes for each of the main trade groups. This provided less close control over workers' levels of effort than the former schemes, and consequently foremen were expected to play a more active role in supervising and disciplining the men. The Industrial Relations Manager, however, was very clear that the schemes could not be regarded as 'sacrosanct'; in his experience payments systems tended to 'drift' and changes became necessary after a few years. He was already considering changes in the supervisory organization in the yard to make it easier for foremen to exercise control. Further examples could be provided - about different aspects of the organization, such as the structure and operation, for example, of management - but those given above should serve to illustrate some of the points made earlier. The organization and allocation of work in shipbuilding has been the subject of 'negotiation' for at least a century, and other aspects of the organization, such as the role of workers' representatives, or the structure of management, were similarly subject to change negotiated at different levels in the

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organization including during the day-to-day interaction of managers, supervisors and workers. The changes following the publication of the Geddes Report, and comparable changes following the nationalization of the industry ten years later, illustrate the ways in which influences external to the organization itself have an impact on it, constrain the actions of organizational members and give rise to further radical renegotiation of the ongoing order of the enterprise. Such negotiation, however, involves the exercise of power and the use of sanctions by the parties concerned, and this is affected by developments external to the organization. Managements might reject the recommendations of the Geddes Report, for example, though there were substantial incentives for them not to do so, but nationalization went ahead whether they liked it or not. The worsening position of British shipbuilding in world markets increasingly undermined the power of the workforce and their unions, ultimately leaving them powerless in the face of yard closures.

CONCLUSIONS Arguments in favour of a sociology which is 'historical', which sees 'the relevance of time', have been powerfully made and well received in recent years (and see the discussion in Martins, 197'4). So too have demands for a sociology which adopts a 'processuaP approach. Both are aspects of the concern to pay attention to both structure and action in sociological analysis, to discover 'the problematic of structuring' (Abrams, 1982), or to develop a theory of 'structuration' (Giddens, 1979). In so far as this chapter can be seen to make similar demands it is in good company. The argument of the chapter, however, also contains a more specific point. This relates to the particular nature of the employment contract and the way in which its terms cannot be settled at a single moment in time but can only be determined during the ongoing relationship between employer and employee. That such relations are orderly, as they mostly are, is due to continuing processes of negotiation within employing organizations. Such negotiation includes not only collective bargaining as conventionally understood by students of industrial relations but also the

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ways in which, for example, the implementation and the implications of the 'rules' established by collective bargaining are also negotiated in the day-to-day interaction of managers and workers. Existing attempts to develop an approach to organization as a 'negotiated order' have suffered from a neglect of the wider structural conditions of action which set limits to what is negotiable, conditions determined by the economic, political, social and legal environment of the organization, and by its history. As many of the better studies of industrial organizations have demonstrated, however, such a limitation is not inherent in the approach itself. The brief illustrations from research in shipbuilding will, it is hoped, also support the case for analyses of industrial organizations which take proper account of the context of the negotiation of order. NOTES John Rex made the initial approach to Sir John Hunter, then Chairman of Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson Ltd, for access for a study of the Wallsend shipyard, in December 1966. Research began in 1967, though full access was not, in fact, granted until the end of that year, at which time the then Social Science Research Council also awarded a grant. The research was carried out by Peter Brannen, Jim Cousins, Michael Samphier and the author between 1967 and 1970. For some account of its findings see especially Brown and Brannen (197Q), and Brown etal (1972). The fieldwork was carried out and the notes made by Jim Cousins.

REFERENCES Abrams, P. (1982) Historical Sociology (Shepton Mallet: Open Books). Baldamus, W. (1961) Efficiency and Effort (London: Tavistock). Behrend, H. (1957) 'The effort bargain', Industrial and Labor Relations Review 10. Bendix, R. (1956) Work and Authority in Industry (New York: Wiley). Beynon, H. (1984) Working for Ford (2nd edn.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

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Blau, P. M. (1956) Bureaucracy in Modern Society (New York: Random House). Braverman, H. (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press). Brown, R. K. and Brannen, P. (1970) 'Social Relations and Social Perspectives amongst Shipbuilding Workers - a Preliminary Statement', Parts 1 & 2, Sociology, 4 (1), 4 (2). Brown, R. K., Brannen, P., Cousins, J. M. and Samphier, M. L. (1972) The Contours of Solidarity: Social Stratification and Industrial Relations in Shipbuilding', British Journal of Industrial Relations 10 (1). Burns, T. (ed) (1969a) Industrial Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Burns, T. (1969b) 'On the Plurality of Social Systems', in T. Burns (ed.) Industrial Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Burns, T. and Stalker, G. M. (1961) The Management of Innovation (London: Tavistock). Cockburn, C. (1983) Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change (London: Pluto). Cressey, P. and Maclnnes, J. (1980) 'Voting for Ford: Industrial Democracy and the Control of Labour', Capital and Class 11. Day, R. and Day, J. V. (1977) 'A Review of the Current State of Negotiated Order Theory: An Appreciation and a Critique', The Sociological Quarterly, 18. Donaldson, L. (1985) In Defence of Organization Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Elger, A. J. (1975) 'Industrial Organizations - a Processual Perspective', in J. B. McKinlay (ed.) Processing People: Cases in Organizational Behaviour (London: Holt, Rinehart & Winston). Emery, F. E. and Trist, E. L. (1965) 'The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments', Human Relations 18 (1). (Reprinted in F. E. Emery [ed,] [1969] Systems Thinking [Harmonds worth: Penguin].) Flanders, A. (1970) Management and Unions (London: Faber). Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. W. (eds.) (1948) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Giddens, A. (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory (London: Macmillan). Gouldner, A. W. (1955) Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (London: Routledge &c Kegan Paul). Lupton, T. (1961) Money for Effort (London: HMSO).

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Lupton, T. (1963) On the Shopfloor (Oxford: Pergamon). Lupton, T. and Bowey, A. M. (1974) Wages and Salaries (Harmondsworth: Penguin). McGoldrick, J. (1983) 'Industrial Relations and the Division of Labour in the Shipbuilding Industry since the War', British Journal of Industrial Relations 21 (2). Manwaring, T. and Wood, S. (1984) The Ghost in the Machine: Tacit Skills in the Labour Process', Socialist Review 74. Marsden, D. (1986) The End of Economic Man? Custom and Competition in Labour Markets (Brighton: Wheatsheaf). Martins, H. (1974) Time and Theory in Sociology', in J. Rex (ed.) Approaches to Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Moore, W. E. (1979) 'Functionalist^, in T. Bottomore and R. Nisbet (eds) A History of Sociological Analysis (London: Heinemann). Morgan, D. H. J. (1975) 'Autonomy and Negotiation in an Industrial Setting', Sociology of Work and Occupations 2(3). Mouzelis, N. P. (1975) Organisation and Bureaucracy (2nd edn.) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Parsons, T. and Smelser, N. J. (1956) Economy and Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Pugh, D. S., Hickson, D. S., Hinings, C. R., MacDonald, K. M., Turner, C. and Lupton, T. (1963) 'A Conceptual Scheme for Organizational Analysis', Administrative Science Quarterly 8 (3). Pugh, D. S. and Hickson, D. J. (eds.) (1976) Organizational Structure in its Context (Farnborough: Saxon House). Rex, J. A. (1961) Key Problems of Sociological Theory (London: Routledge &C Kegan Paul). Rex, J. A. (1981) Social Conflict (London: Longman). Rice, A. K. (1956) Productivity and Social Organization (London: Tavistock). Rice, A. K. (1963) The Enterprise and its Environment (London: Tavistock). Roberts, I. P. (1988) 'A Question of Construction: Capital and Labour in Wearside Shipbuilding since the 1930s', University of Durham, Ph.D Thesis. Shipbuilding Inquiry Committee, 1965-1966 (1966) Report, Cmnd. 2937 (London: HMSO).

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Silverman, D. (1970) The Theory of Organizations (London: Heinemann). Stinchcombe, A. L. (1959) 'Bureaucratic and Craft Administration of Production', Administrative Science Quarterly 4. Strauss, A., Schatzman, L., Ehrlich, D., Bucher, R. and Sabshin, M. (1971) 'The Hospital and its Negotiated Order', in F. G. Castles, D. J. Murray and D. C. Potter (eds) Decisions, Organizations and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Webb, S. and B. (1913) Industrial Democracy (London: Longmans, Green).

REFLECTIONS ON THE WORLD RECEPTION OF MAX WEBER Martin Albrow

In a volume dedicated to John Rex, due acknowledgement has to be paid to the fact that he is one of those rare sociologists who has firmly adhered to a Weberian standpoint throughout his work. He has not involved himself in the intricacies of Weber exegesis or scholarship, but has instead simply set out to apply Weberian concepts and approaches and, where relevant, to modify, adapt and develop them. The reflections which follow equally seek to avoid the internal debates of Weber scholarship, indeed of Weber criticism. Instead they are also in a sense empirically based, seeking to contribute to the interpretation and explanation of the paradoxical facts of the worldwide reception of Weber's work, the authority without followers, the sage without a school. A comprehensive treatment of this topic would require a volume in its own right and be a substantial contribution to the sociology of knowledge. What follows are preliminary considerations only, but among other things, they serve to highlight the special place Rex has in the spread of Weber's influence. A WORLD-HISTORICAL FIGURE In 1964, two major conferences on Max Weber's work were held. One was in Heidelberg. It brought together, as no other occasion

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could have, a galaxy of Western intellectuals: Raymond Aron, Theodor Adorno, Reinhard Bendix, Jiirgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, Wolfgang Mommsen, Talcott Parsons and many others of equal fame. Their discussions centred on values, power and capitalism. It was a famous ideological battlefield in which the political presuppositions of social science were laid bare (Stammer, 1971). The other was in Tokyo, a joint occasion organized by the economists and sociologists of Tokyo University. The first day was devoted to Weber's contribution to the social sciences in general, the second to his sociology of religion. A key role was played by Hisao Otsuka whose study of the methodology of the social sciences in Weber and Marx was a major stimulus to a Max Weber wave in Japan in the 1960s (Ibaraki, 1989). The two events were startlingly different. The one an explosive shattering of the appearance of scholarly detachment and objectivity, the other a concerted evaluation of aspects of Weberian thought which could serve as points of growth for Japanese social science. Each occasion was strikingly symptomatic of time, place and cultural conjuncture. Both were evoked in yet another conference, this time organized by the Theory Section of the German Sociological Association in Kassel in 1986. The tone was different from either of the previous gatherings. Reports were presented not only from Japan but also from Britain, Bulgaria, Italy and Poland. Analytical and critical accounts of widely diverse aspects of Weber's work were presented, as well as developments from his starting points. Weber was regarded by one of the organizers, Johannes Weiss, 'as a scientist and Homo Politicus compared with whom since his death there has been no comparable presence in German public life and informed circles' (Weiss, 1989: 8). The Kassel conference could be regarded as an amalgamation of the previous two, Weber recognized both as scientist and political figure. But it was more too. It recognized that Weber is an international phenomenon, variously interpreted in different cultural settings, with such a range of ideas that there is always some aspect of his work which has potential for development, no matter under what circumstances attention is directed to it. He can be, and is, used to analyse markets in Eastern Europe, patrimonialism in Latin America, or work motivation in China, and when the circumstances which make such interests salient have passed away

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we can be sure that in other places or in response to new demands Weber's work is likely to be cited. A recent series of radio programmes on Weber in Germany was published with an introduction, which compared his influence on the century to Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Einstein, and called him 'the great stimulus and innovator in literally every social and cultural science' (Gneuss and Kocka, 1988: i). (He isn't even called a sociologist!) The collection of papers edited by Sam Whimster and Scott Lash, Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity (1987) sees Weber reinserted 'as thefigurecentral to contemporary debates on the need for societal rationality' (cover). The dust-jacket on my own book Max Weber's Construction of Social Theory asserts: 'Of all the great theorists Max Weber 1864-1920 remains closest in spirit to the course of the twentieth century.' Of course this is publishing hype and should not be mistaken for cool appraisal. A recent article attempts to bring us down to earth. Hans Derks (1989) analysed the fluctuations in Weber literature worldwide from the evidence of the bibliography produced by Seyfarth and Schmidt in 1977 who reported approximately 2400 articles and books on Max Weber published between 1920 and 1976. Derks detected a falling off in the period from 1973 and then on the basis of fragmentary information for the period after suggested that this decline continued. The decline between 1973 and 1976 would appear to be substantiated and Derks suggests an explanation can be found in the decline of Parsons's influence and the rise of Marxist and French structuralist thought. 'Intellectual liberalisation, alternatively the break up of sociological orthodoxies was not propitious for the attractiveness of Weber' (1989: 294). That is an explanation, however, which causes one to be sceptical about the extrapolation into the eighties. For Weber was never incorporated satisfactorily into a sociological orthodoxy, certainly not structural functionalism and, through the left-Weberianism of C. Wright Mills or John Rex, he was more a stimulus to liberalization than an obstacle to it. If we take the British experience, there was a decline in interest in Weber in the late seventies - a period of blooming perspectives, phenomenological, critical and structuralist, but in the eighties Weber has been found relevant on many points. The point is that his emphasis on subjective meaning can penetrate phenomenological approaches or, as Habermas has shown, his theory of legitimation

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can be the focus for critical theory. Now at the beginning of the nineties Weber's strength as an interpreter of culture has impressed itself on those for whom previously structuralist theories held the key to unlocking the secrets of modernity. In the period 1981-90 I have counted thirty-four books published in English (in the United States of America or Britain) on Weber. In the period 1967-76 Derks counted twenty-eight American books. In the same period, nine were published in Britain. From his count it is not possible to tell how many of the nine are represented in his Americanfigureof twenty-eight — probably, given joint publication arrangements, most. It is certainly not conclusive evidence for a decline of interest in the later period. Of course there is no doubt on a sheer volume and citation basis that Marx remains far and away the dominant founding figure for the social sciences. It is also the case that the literature on Wittgenstein is accumulating at an extraordinary rate. So, as Derks says, Weber is no unique phenomenon, but in my view to speak of a sharp decline in the literature is not only premature but probably overtaken by events. The Marxological dominance is explicable on political grounds. Western Marxists and Marx scholars could imagine they were writing within a frame of universal discourse by providing a bridge between the dogmatic Marxism of socialist states and bourgeois liberal science. The grounds for that belief have disappeared, while Weber has penetrated the discourse of most of those states. In China, for instance, the Sociological and Historical Institutes of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Departments of Sociology and History of Beijing University planned a symposium to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Max Weber's birth in Beijing, 1-7 September 1989. The themes were to cover Weber on China, on capitalism and on methodology. Invitations were sent to Weber scholars from seven countries. The events of June 1989 intervened. The symposium was postponed indefinitely. But a substitute was organized by Wolfgang Schluchter in Germany, 23-27 July 1990, and ten Chinese scholars, mainly from Beijing, came to discuss the modernization of China in the Reimer-Stiftung in Bad Homburg with the support of the Volkswagen Foundation. The account by Chen Qineng (1990) of 'Recent Studies of Max Weber in the People's Republic of China' listed twenty-one Weber articles or books in China from 1986 onwards.

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My own estimation is that far from being in decline, passing away to be of historical interest only, Weber is rapidly being recognized not just as a founding father of sociology, a place which guarantees honourable mention in histories of the discipline only — 'Who reads Herbert Spencer now?' — but also as a seminal thinker who is occupying a place in the long line of thinkers which begins with Plato and Aristotle and includes such names as Machiavelli, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel. He is now, to use the language of the nineteenth century, a 'world-historical figure'. Such figures are recognized by the way their ideas reach out beyond their time and culture, and speak to universal concerns. We can therefore return repeatedly to their ideas, often recasting them to suit our purpose, but always finding new inspiration. It takes time to identify such figures and there may well be periods when their stature is in contention. Indeed, the list of names does change, but not frequently and arbitrarily. It is easily possible to understand why Nietzsche was in it in the early part of this century and not later, and now again may be there. Russell was probably there until quite recently - Popper's place may be enduring. The fate of individuals and the shape of the list as a whole changes for cultures and periods, but it has an enduring quality much as has any heavily structured feature of human society. For the moment at least Weber is there, and there are many indicators that he is there for some time. We will look more closely at these but one guarantee for the future is suggested in the work of younger sociologists. The International Sociological Association has recently run a Worldwide Competition for Young Sociologists. There were in the end 335 entries from 64 countries in 10 languages. Daniel Bertaux who organized the competition found that the idea of universal sociological language seemed to hold and that its mainstream was 'towards the shaping of a common language whose roots seem to go back to Max Weber more than to any other founding father of sociology' (Bertaux, 1990). POLITICAL FACTORS IN WEBER'S RECEPTION No one can doubt that in the short run at least politics can dominate science, and in the vicissitudes of Weber's reception

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political forces play a full part. The most obvious instance is the story of his treatment in the Soviet Union and its satellite states. We are fortunate that a full-length study of the Marxist treatment of Weber, and in particular of East European responses, is contained in Johannes Weiss' Weber and the Marxist World (1986). Weiss points out that The City, The General Economic History and The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilization were translated into Russian in 1923, earlier than any translations into English. The General Economic History was only translated into English in 1927. (An Italian translation of The Agrarian Sociology appeared as early as 1907.) Alexander Neusychin wrote a series of papers on Weber in the years 1923-27, and was very positive in his evaluation of The City. But between 1930 and 1955 Weber was effectively banned, being described in the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia as 'a reactionary German sociologist, historian and economist, Neo-Kantian, the most malicious enemy of Marxism' and as an 'apologist for capitalism' (vol. 7, 1951; cited by Weiss 1986: 16). Later Marxist writing continued to draw a veil over the pre-Stalinist Marxist reception of Weber, even that by Bukharin who considered Weber 'one of the best modern students of religion' (cited by Weiss, ibid.: 17). The position of Max Weber and of sociology during the Stalinist period was unambiguous. But the same could not be said for other periods of state socialism. Much depended on the extent to which sociology was able to emancipate itself from the official philosophy of historical materialism and assert a scientific independence. When that was combined with the needs of the state for information on the living conditions and attitudes of the population, sociology managed to obtain a relative autonomy. In the former German Democratic Republic that was not possible. Until the 1980s sociology had to hide itself in so far as it was possible under the heading of social analysis as an aspect of historical materialism, while Western sociology was always rejected as bourgeois ideology, and seen as a reaction against Marxism. Max Weber was treated as a prime representative of that reaction, offering a multiple factor theory of causation instead of recognizing the ultimate causal position of economic factors (Belkina, 1975: 35). In the everpresent threat — intellectual and otherwise — from the far stronger West German state, no concession could be made to Western sociology.

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The situation in Bulgaria was rather different. Sociology acquired an independence as a technical adjunct to social planning, and in the seventies and eighties sociologists like Chavdar Kiuranov and Nico Yahiel took key positions in the party and government. Every factory was expected to have a qualified sociologist. It was the nearest yet that sociology has come to realizing its Comtean dream. The difficulties in the way of receiving Weber were great; for instance, by the time Marx's centenary was being celebrated in 1983, Parsons's work was in vogue, but not Weber. However, the very orientation of Bulgarian sociology allowed one aspect of Weber's work to become highly salient, namely the rationality problematic, and Nikolai Genov reported in 1986 that the problems of social reality in a socialist state could only lead to a growing appreciation and critical discussion of Weber's contribution (1989: 206-7). More than any other Western sociologist, however, Weber was held to represent an anti-Marxist position, and wherever his work was sympathetically addressed then it was a sign of liberalization. The conference organized by the University of Warsaw in Jablonna in 1985 was, for instance, highly symptomatic of underlying change in the attitudes of the Communist Party. Held between 19-23 April participants were invited to discuss 'Max Weber and Problems of the Contemporary World' and represented the broadest spectrum of response to Weber, from older Marxist critics like Stanislaw Kozyr-Kowalski to a new right philosopher from Britain, Roger Scruton. In an atmosphere of utter pessimism about the social condition of Poland, Max Weber was discussed in a noholds-barred manner. There was palpable excitement in particular because a leading member of the Polish Politbureau had just published a book on Weber (Marian Orzechowski, Political Power and Authority in the Theory of Max Weber). Zdzislaw Krasnodebski (1989) who was at the Jablonna conference reported a year later in Kassel that this publication represented the loss of faith in laws of history and meant that the new non-believers had to turn to decisionistic elements in Max Weber. Not that this was the only Weberian input. Krasnodebski reported that an alternative view of Weber was to be published in Samizdat, something which the West would only find remarkable, but it was only a sign of the unofficial cultural life being quite as important as the official. Broadly, we can say that for state socialist societies the reception

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of Max Weber is the touchstone for the crumbling of dogmatism. But it should not be forgotten that Weber has been treated as a representative of political ideology in the West too. Here I will not labour the well-known attack on Weber by Marcuse at the 1964 Heidelberg Conference nor the widespread Western Marxist attempt to bury Weber in the sixties and seventies. He had, of course, been very effectively interred in Germany during the Nazi period and treated as the prime representative of liberal bourgeois thought. Not everything written about Weber from the Nazi standpoint was ignorant propaganda. Christoph Steding acknowledged Weber's importance in the following way: 'Weber is not just another private person, not just some politically involved liberal Professor. He is much more in a quite exceptional sense representative of a whole generation' (1932: 7). But of course Steding's generation was determined to replace him. It is against this background that we have to recognize the reception of Max Weber after the Second World War was directly inspired by the felt need to understand German thought, although how far there were calculated decisions, and how far simply individual responses to the demands of the day we may never know. A brilliant study of Weber as representative of the imperial German political system was written in Britain by J. P. Mayer during the war and he saw it explicitly as a contribution 'to a mutual understanding based on common functional tasks between England, the USA and Russia with regard to the German problem' (1944: 94). Henderson and Parsons's translation of the first part of Economy and Society was begun before the war and was published after in the spirit of an agreement that 'the universality of science transcends even the conflict of war' (1947: v). The rush to translate Weber into English after the war was assisted by the suspension of German copyright by the occupying powers, but the motive was very much to heal the wounds left by the Nazi period and felt not only by emigres like Karl Mannheim, but also by those like Talcott Parsons who had studied in Heidelberg. In Germany itself the reception of Max Weber after the war was more ambivalent than elsewhere. Sociology was re-established as a discipline with active American help, but Weber's own part in that was minimized by scholars like Konig who emphasized Durkheim and structural functionalism or Adorno who promoted his own enlightened sociology. At the same time there were scholars who

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proceeded as if nothing had happened - Julius Schaaf (1946) and Dieter Henrich (1952) engaged in a methodological dispute around Weber without reference to the political context. The problem was precisely Weber's intimate relationship with German political development. It was easy for scholars in other countries to embrace his science and with it to acknowledge a debt to German thought without having to embrace war guilt. It was much more difficult for Germans in the immediate post-war period to recognize their debt to a figure from Wilhelmine Germany. The political amnesia was broken first by the republication of Weber's political writing in 1958, introduced by the German President Theodor Heuss, and then by Wolfgang Mommsen's seminal Max Weber and German Politics (1959). The ground was prepared for the vehement disputes over value judgement and positivism in the 1960s in Germany where Weber became more the target and vehicle for ideological dispute than a contributor to science or scholarship.

CULTURAL AND SCIENTIFIC FACTORS IN WEBER'S RECEPTION Drawing the line between the political and cultural is necessary but relatively arbitrary, especially since the concept of political culture is widely accepted. Max Weber is of interest to Chinese scholars today in part as a potent source of Western ideas, in part because he wrote about China, but also because he is felt to have an insight into the relations between traditional Chinese culture and the requirements for social transformation. Much the same could be said about the reception of Weber in Japan. In the 1930s, rival Marxist interpretations of the Meiji period (1868-1912) brought Weber's discussion of religious factors in economic development into the argument and after the Second World War this theme was resumed especially by H. Otsuka who drew on Weber to further his own views about the democratic reconstruction of post-war Japan. In particular, as a Christian, he emphasized the necessity for individual responsibility in the face of the encroaching mass society. In the judgement of Takeji Ibaraki (1989) Weber's contribution in Japan has been to amplify a Marxist interpretation of capitalist society in the

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direction of relativizing it and introducing a genuine comparative economic sociology. Here we see how the scientific contribution of Weber is employed in a particular cultural context with a definite ideological purpose. The result is, of course, a partial, often distorted reception in which concepts are employed for purposes for which they were not intended. That view has recently been advanced by Gina Zabludovsky (1989) examining the way Weber's concept of patrimonialism has been used in Latin America. Richard Morse argued in 1964 that Weber's patrimonialism exactly described the Spanish conquistadores power, and the usage has become so commonplace through a variety of writers that it has entered official political discourse. At the same time the availability of Weber's writing in Spanish is limited and the weaknesses of his concept of patrimonialism taken in isolation are not counterbalanced by an all-round appreciation of his purposes, for example, his ideal-type metfiod is not adequately recognized. Weber of course would have well understood and indeed anticipated the problem in his analysis of value relevance (Wertbeziehung). The cultural context provides the frame in which the interest in patrimonialism is generated, but at the same time limits the overall perspective. To that extent, only a scientific interest which crosses those cultural boundaries - and which is correspondingly possibly less salient to the demands of the day in the specific culture - is going genuinely to challenge the current assumptions. In the end, the autonomous logic of science will burst the bounds of particular cultures. The scientific interest per se can lead its follower beyond any initial culturally confined problem-setting provided that is the genuine interest. In the case of Weber's work, it will be argued here, the leads he offers beyond any limited agenda are multiple and interwoven for those who have the patience and endurance to follow them. But it is as rare for them to be followed through as it is to find anyone prepared to acknowledge the label Weberian. It is of course also the case that the purest scientific interest is often not associated with the wish to amplify or extend Weberian insights. If we take the cases of those who have had arguably the most exclusively cognitive interest in approaching Weber, let us say Parsons (1937), Giddens (1971), Alexander (1983) or Runciman (1972), who all distinguish themselves with the sophistication

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of their Weber exegeses, it has in fact been in order to transcend and incorporate him into some wider framework or to subordinate him to a distinctive cognitive approach. This is clearly a legitimate scientific endeavour; whether, however, as is sometimes assumed, it is a necessary one is arguable. There is after all another alternative, namely that the Weberian approach is amended and amplified by being confronted with the changing contemporary world. That may be a better way to understanding it than by changing the frame of reference. Changes of conceptual frame may be as likely as changes in statistical procedures to obscure the reality of social changes rather than to illuminate them. THE BRITISH CASE All these issues can be illustrated from the British case of Weber's reception. At the Kassel conference I gave my own account of the history of that reception (1989) up to 1985 identifying features which made British intellectual life particularly receptive to Max Weber, or at least to certain aspects of his work. They were in brief: 1 Weber's individualism and its affinities with classical British political economy; 2 his empiricism and concern for the kinds of causal analysis of which John Stuart Mill would have approved; 3 the eclectic and pragmatic approaches to theory which marked Weber off from his idealist predecessors and brought him closer to the political culture of Britain; 4 the insistence on the fact/value distinction in a tradition going back to Hume's distinction of 'is' and 'ought'; 5 a legal positivism which separated law from morality and brought him close to Hobbes and Austin; 6 the affinity between Weber's Protestant antecedents and Protestantism in Britain; 7 the sheer fact that Weber shared the widespread admiration for British constitutions of the time. All these were factors which assisted the circle of young sociologists at the London School of Economics in the 1950s, and who became

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the path-finders for British sociology as it was institutionalized in the post-war period, to find in Weber an inspiration which did not clash with their own generally egalitarian non-Marxist reformism, did not impose a theoretical strait-jacket but at the same time provided the nascent discipline with a distinct intellectual authority outside the traditional British sources. In this respect neither Mill nor Spencer had been as successful as Weber in making sociology intellectually acceptable in Britain. However, it was pick-and-choose theory. Dahrendorf (1959) could make Weber's Herrschaft or life chances central, Lockwood (1958) could emphasize market position and status. Later Parkin (1979, 1982) would make Weber's idea of social closure into a weapon to slay Marxist analyses of group conflict but, although he has written a brief and incisive introduction to Weber, he has stopped short of further elaboration or application of his ideas. Almost certainly it has been John Rex who has done most to secure the acceptability of the broad framework of Weberian thought in British sociology. In doing so he both broke and highlighted certain of the inherent limits within the British response to Weber. As such he is a particularly interesting figure on whom to focus in order to illuminate more general issues in the reception of Weber. As I pointed out in my Kassel paper, Rex's Key Problems of Sociological Theory (1961) was a landmark because 'for the first time he gave a very un-English emphasis in Britain to the study of Weber for the purposes of building coherent sociological theory rather than a set of unconnected theoretical insights' (1989: 176). The 'un-English' element is hardly surprising - Rex is a South African who was not incorporated into the British sociological establishment at the London School of Economics but instead did his doctorate at Leeds. The book with which he burst on to the British scene was quite unlike anything published before in sociology in Britain: it was a systematic introduction to sociological theory from a Weberian standpoint and included consideration of by far the greater part of the analytical and methodological aspects of Weber's work - ideal types, meaning and understanding, motivational explanation, social relations as facts, the types of act, class, status, power, legitimacy and problems of objectivity. All contributed towards the end of analysing social systems with conflict situations as the focal point of interest. And, while the contributions of others like Marx, Mannheim, Simmel, Dahrendorf

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were acknowledged and discussed, Rex made it clear that the rigorous insistence on interpreting social systems in terms of human action, which was the hallmark of Weber's approach, was also to be his own commitment. For Rex the proof of the worth of Weberian theory was its effectiveness in social research and he repeatedly demonstrated it in his chosen field of ethnic relations. But that did not mean that he was unaware of the technical issue on which Weber scholars have concentrated so much attention, particularly in Germany. One of his rare papers on Weber's methodology, which he published in 1971, disentangles influences from Rickert, Dilthey and positivism in Weber, and then argues that it was Simmel who exercised the greatest influence. That view fitted with Rex's own emphasis on conflict and coincides with, say, Levine's opinion in the States (1984) or Helle's in Germany (1988). Others like Schluchter might now add Jaspers to the list, but the extent to which Rex could survey and provide such a far-reaching appreciation of the diversity of sources in Weber's thinking exceeded the scope of many of the specialist methodologists who might have spent years on one facet of his work. The emphasis on Simmel increased over the period of Rex's work, but he never lost sight of the fundamentally empirical thrust of Weber's concern. If others had followed Rex, we would never have been served repeatedly with the dictum that Weber could not analyse structure. In Rex's words, What he sought to do, starting from the elementary concepts of social action and social relation, was to build up a systematic set of concepts of multi-person structures, first on the purely formal level, but then more specifically by relating his formal concept to structures which he had found actually operative in his historical work, and which were sometimes described in terms of the participants' own historical language. (1974: 197) All the way through to his most recent book, Race and Ethnicity, where he is emphatic that Weber's approach takes full account of anything that might be called 'groups' (1986: 8), we find a deep appreciation that what has been called methodological individualism is a postulate for empirical work on real social structures, and

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he distinguishes that from rational choice theory. Again he weaves his way through the competing claims of Marxism, Parsonianism, structuralism to identify the Weberian approach as the one which analyses meaning within frameworks of social relations. In my view, then, Rex's work is as authentic an expression of the Weberian approach as one can find in British or any other sociology. Yet at the end of my Kassel presentation summing up the British reception of Weber I argued that there were two obvious gaps - one was systematic theory in Weberian style, the other the rationalization process. The first arises because no one else has demonstrated the same breadth of appreciation for Weber as Rex, and that in turn is a product not only of the battle of the perspectives which dominated theoretical work in the sixties and seventies, but also because the prime orientation not only of British sociology, but also of Rex himself, has been to exploring cleavages and differentiation in British society. Rex's contribution to these explorations was fully acknowledged but its Weberian inspiration neglected. The same applies to the other major Weberian empirical sociological work of Frank Parkin (1979). The battle of the perspectives itself could often be seen indeed more as an expression of those social conflicts rather than intellectual disputes in their own right. In that battle the Weberian corpus was highly selectively deployed, or more frequently rejected and the comprehensiveness of its approach was lost to sight. That in part was also the case with the rationalization thesis. But here two provisos have to be added. The first is that it is the one major aspect of Weber's work which has not attracted Rex's interest. The second is that since 1986 the gap has in part been filled by the substantial volume of essays edited by Sam Whimster and Scott Lash, Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity (1987). While most of the contributors come from outside Britain and Lash is American, though working in Britain, it is significant that Weber is introduced as the 'foremost social theorist of the condition of modernity (1987: 1), and that both the editors have strong interests in Germany. This goes hand in hand with a transformation of theoretical interest in Britain from class to culture as the focus and from perspectival debates to debate about postmodernism. The old frame for British social theory has been broken. Simultaneously Weber is seen as much more than just a sociologist, but also cultural critic, as is evidenced by the collection of papers around

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the issue of 'Science as a Vocation', which has been edited by Lassman, Velody and Martins (1988). Finally, mention should be made in the British context of the work of John Hall whose Powers and Liberties (1985) takes up the Weberian world-historical problematic in its broadest cross-cultural and comparative scope. AXIAL RESONANCE This recent expansion of the scope of interest in Weber's work to take in his comparative sociology and the rationalization thesis is not peculiar to Britain. Pietro Rossi reports that the recent revived interest in Italy focuses on Weber as theorist of the rationalization process. That he attributes in part to the great success of Wolfgang Schluchter in Germany in his extended series of books on Weber's comparative religion and the problem of rationalism (Weiss, 1989: 156). Weiss, in introducing his collection of the Kassel papers, affirms that Weber is presently honoured as the theoretician of the Western rationalization process with all its immanent contradictions (Weiss 1989: 8). In the United States, Scaff's Fleeing from the Iron Cage (1989) seeks to draw out the lessons of the 'essentially cultural element in Weber's work' and links him 'with the most serious questions of modern thought' (1989: 5). In so doing, Scaff, like Hennis (1988) in Germany, argues for Weber to be wrested from the exclusive claims of sociologists. All of this suggests that we are in a genuinely new phase of universal reception of Max Weber, namely the worldwide recognition that his thought is comprehensive in its scope and goes beyond narrow limits of time and place. This new awareness itself can help us to understand the earlier stages of his reception and the political, cultural and scientific vicissitudes which have only been exemplified here and in no way exhaustively documented. It is the comprehensiveness and scope of Weber's work which makes so many different parts of it relevant in different times and places. The fragmented and opportunistic use of his oeuvre is not then simply a function of his early death and piecemeal translation, though that contributes. It has a multiple and versatile potential because it addresses the whole breadth of modern culture, and just as modern culture is highly fragmented and specialized, so his work has been received piecemeal fashion. How else, might one ask, is it

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possible to comprehend a scholar who offers sociological analyses of both stock exchanges and music? The result is a paradox, the worldwide reception of Weber in so many different circumstances and through so many different facets of his work and yet with rare exceptions (Rex being one, Collins [1986] in the USA another) no Weberians, virtually no development of his key concepts, and until recently a silence or rejection of the rationalization process as a key element in his work or as a real world happening. When the sheer breadth of his work and its significance for modern culture are recognized, that is coupled with a de-emphasis on his sociology. But that is perhaps precisely because Weber is a genuinely profound interpreter and reflection of a polysemic, polymorphic world. He appears more and more like a Western version of a Hindu deity, a Shiva who takes on different bodily shape according to the context and the follower's preference, and whose inner and persistent identity is only apparent to the possessor of deeper understanding. Weiss puts it another way. Perhaps after all, contrary to appearances, there has not been a fundamental change in the big cultural problems, they remain with us as facets of modern Western rationalism (Weiss, 1989: 8-9). This is essentially the standpoint I have taken in my own recent book, Max Weber's Construction of Social Theory (1990), which in its second part 'examines the power of Weber's work which, in the view presented here, originates in his command and understanding of what, following Daniel Bell (1976: 7-12), one can call the axial principle of Western culture, namely rationality. It is the principle which underpins, binds together and generates other principles of the culture' (1990: 4). It is this which explains the persistent recovery of Weber's contributions in such widely dispersed contexts and incidentally also the periodic losses. World wars, for instance, or state ideology, class or ethnic conflict, can easily submerge the axial principle and indeed make it temporarily irrelevant to the parties concerned. Who wants to read about the rationalization process in the middle of a nuclear alert? — although Karl Mannheim was very sure that when the Second World War ended, problems of rationality would be central to social reconstruction (1940). But even in such fraught times the fruits of that profound understanding will still have contingent relevance in the same way as the technological fruits of

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science are employed even at times when pure science cannot be pursued. Equally a deep commitment to certain values, such as Rex's lifelong struggle against racism and racial discrimination, entirely consistent with Weberian sociology, is bound to divert attention away from the world-historical context of rationalization. Yet the rationalization process has continued apace since Weber's time and intensified throughout the century, and as the ruins of state socialist systems set precise dates on the salience of Marxist analysis, so the relentless and increasing pace of the institutionalization of rationality demonstrates that Weberian thought has an enduring relevance. It has what I want to call here axial resonance, namely the ability to focus attention on, express and in turn intensify the dominant principle of a culture, in this case rationality. Of course that thought has to be updated, above all because the axial principle has itself developed over time. Weber explicitly links his ideas to a generative, transformative principle and for that reason could calmly contemplate the dating and eventual transcendence of his own ideas. In this respect both Habermas and Luhmann can be seen as working in different ways within the tradition of exploring and developing Western rationality. Neither, however, are particularly interested in the empirical referents. I have sought to show elsewhere that it is possible to document the institutionalization of intensified rationality since Weber's time (1987). Axial resonance is the quality which the ideas of those people possess whose names are added to the lists of world-historical figures. The artefactual nature of these lists, the fact that each of us constructs our own for different purposes should not blind us to underlying factors which ensure that certain names appear again and again. Tradition, yes, is involved, but that simply registers the persistent force of a principle. Nor is it simply a matter of intellectual stature. Simmel, Rickert, Dilthey, Jaspers were all in their way more impressive in an intellectual sense in any one sphere; but Weber's supreme influence was eventually guaranteed by his profound grasp of the big idea which occupied the strategic place in the culture of the twentieth century.

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Albrow, Martin (1987) The Application of the Weberian Concept of Rationalization to Contemporary Conditions', in Sam Whimster and Scott Lash (eds) Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity. Albrow, Martin (1989) 'Die Rezeption Max Webers in der britischen Soziologie' in Johannes Weiss (ed.) Max Weber heute. Albrow, Martin (1990) Max Weber's Construction of Social Theory (London: Macmillan). Alexander, Jeffrey (1983) The Classical Attempt at Theoretical Synthesis: Max Weber (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Belkina, Galina (1975) Marxismus oder Marxologie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag). Bell, Daniel (1976) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Bertaux, Daniel (1990) 'Designing the Worldwide Competition', International Sociology 5. Chen, Qineng (1990) 'Recent Studies of Max Weber in the People's Republic of China' (mimeo). Collins, Randolf (1986) Weberian Sociological Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Dahrendorf, Ralf (1959) Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Derks, Hans (1989) 'Das Ende eines einmaligen Phanomens? Die Max-Weber-Literatur 1920-1988', Zeitschrift fiir Soziologie 18. Genov, Nikolai (1989) 'Max Webers Aktualitat in der bulgarischen Soziologie', in Johannes Weiss (ed.) Max Weber heute. Giddens, Antony (1971) Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gneuss, Christian and Kocka, Jiirgen (eds) (1988) Max Weber: Ein Symposion (Munich: DTV). Hall, John (1985) Powers and Liberties (Oxford: Blackwell). Helle, Horst (1988) Soziologie und Erkenntnistheorie bei Georg Simmel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft). Henderson, A. M. and Parsons, Talcott (1947) Translation of Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Glencoe: Free Press). Hennis, Wilhelm (1988) Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction (London: Allen 8c Unwin).

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Henrich, Dieter (1952) Die Einheit der Wissenschaftslehre Max Webers (Tubingen: Mohr). Ibaraki, Takeji (1989) 'Probleme der Rezeption des soziologischen Werks von Max Weber in Japan - unter besonderer Beriicksichtigung der Interpretation der Gesellschaftstheorie "Ma(r)x Webers" in der "marxistischen Biirgerschafts-Schule"', in Johannes Weiss (ed.) Max Weber heute. Krasnodebski, Zdzislaw (1989) 'Die Max-Weber-Rezeption in Polen', in Johannes Weiss (ed.) Max Weber heute. Lassmann, Peter, Velody, Irving and Martins, Herminio (1988) Science as a Vocation (London: Unwin Hyman). Levine, Donald (1984) 'Ambivalente Begnungen: "Negationen" Simmels durch Durkheim, Weber, Lukacs, Park and Parsons', in H. J. Dahme and O. Ramtnstedt (eds) Georg Simmel und die Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Lockwood, David (1958) The Blackcoated Worker (London: Allen & Unwin). Mannheim, Karl (1940) Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (London: Kegan Paul). Marcuse, Herbert (1971) 'Industrialization and Capitalism' in Otto Stammer (ed.) Max Weber and Sociology Today (Oxford: Blackwell). Mayer, J. P. (1944) Max Weber and German Politics (London: Faber). Mommsen, Wolfgang (1959) Max Weber und die deutsche Politik 1890-1920 (Tubingen: Mohr. (English edn, 1984, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890-1920 [Chicago: Chicago University Press]). Morse, Richard (1964) The Heritage of Latin America', in L. Hartz (ed.) The Founding of New Societies (New York: Harcourt Brace). Orzechowski, Marian (1984) Polityka, wtadza, panowanie w teorii Maxa Weber a (Warsaw). Parkin, Frank (1979) Marxism and Class Theory - a Bourgeois Critique (London: Tavistock). Parkin, Frank (1982) Max Weber (Chichester: Ellis Horwood). Parsons, Talcott (1937) The Structure of Social Action (New York: Free Press). Rex, John (1961) Key Problems of Sociological Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

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Rex, John (1971) Typology and Objectivity: A Comment on Weber's Four Sociological Methods', in A. Sahay (ed.) Max Weber and Modern Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Rex, John (1986) Race and Ethnicity (Milton Keynes: Open University Press). Rossi, Pietro (1989) 'Die Rezeption des Weberschen Werks in Italien nach 1945', in Johannes Weiss (ed.) Max Weber heute. Runciman, W. G. (1972) A Critique of Max Weber's Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Scaff, Lawrence (1989) Fleeing the Iron Cage (Berkeley: University of California Press). Schaaf, Julius (1946) Geschichte und Begriff (Tubingen: Mohr). Schluchter, Wolfgang (1981) The Rise of Western Rationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press). Seyfarth, Constans and Schmidt, Gert (eds.) (1977) Max Weber Bibliographie. Eine Dokumentation der Sekunddrliteratur (Stuttgart: Enke). Stammer, Otto (ed.) (1971) MaxcWeber and Sociology Today (Oxford: Blackwell). Steding, Christoph (1932) Politik und Wissenschaft bei Max Weber (Breslau: Korn). Weber, Max (1958) Gesammelte Politische Schriften (2nd edn) (Tubingen: Mohr). Weiss, Johannes (1986) Weber and the Marxist World (London: Routledge). Weiss, Johannes (ed.) (1989) Max Weber heute (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Whimster, Sam and Lash, Scott (eds) (1987) Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity (London: Allen & Unwin). Zabludovsky, Gina (1989) The Reception and Utility of Max Weber's Concept of Patrimonialism in Latin America', International Sociology 4.

DEMOCRACY AND DISENCHANTMENT: Weber and Tocqueville on the 'Road to Servitude5 Peter Lassman

The similarity of themes and concerns shared by Weber and Tocqueville has rarely been discussed (Freund, 1974; Hennis, 1988a). It has become fashionable to criticize the naive use of the concept of 'influence' in the history of ideas. Without exploring this issue here I should like to say that I am in substantial agreement with W. H. Greenleaf when he states that many of the criticisms of the use of the concept of 'influence' can become too restrictive. There is nothing absurd in seeing two thinkers, despite being situated within different milieus, as belonging to 'the same or a cognate world of ideas'. Perhaps 'not influence but affinity is the key word here'. It is not absurd to argue that strictly speaking 'no question of influence need arise: it is simply that there are certain similarities in manner of thought which appear to the mind of the observer' (Greenleaf, 1972: 28). It is true that there is very little direct evidence that Tocqueville influenced Weber. Nevertheless, as far as the question of direct influence is concerned it seems highly unlikely that Weber with his encyclopaedic knowledge was unaware of the work of Tocqueville. Democracy in America was one of the most well-known books in nineteenth-century Europe. The first volume was published in 1835 and was translated into German in 1836, Spanish in the same year, and English in 1838. It was referred to by Marx in his 'On the Jewish Question' (1843) and was extensively reviewed by John Stuart Mill. Furthermore, Dilthey mentions 99

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Tocqueville in his essays on the nature of the human sciences and goes so far as to say, 'He is among historical researchers . . . undoubtedly the most illustrious of all political analysts since Aristotle and Machiavelli' (Dilthey, 1927: 104). It is also worth mentioning that J. P. Mayer, who wrote one of the first discussions of Weber's political thought and who also edited Tocqueville's collected works, reports that he had asked Marianne Weber (in 1939) whether in her opinion her husband had been influenced by the French thinker. Mayer quotes her reply as follows: There seems to me to be no doubt that Max Weber knew de Tocqueville's writings although I have no actual proof of it. . . . The relationship between the historical-sociological views of the two thinkers seems to me a very credible proposition' (Mayer, 1939: 189). There is, in fact, even stronger evidence for Weber's awareness of Tocqueville which, curiously, seems to have gone unnoticed. This is Weber's extensive use, especially for his work on law, of the work of Bryce. Bryce's Studies in History and Jurisprudence, one of Weber's key sources, contains the essay 'The United States Constitution as Seen in the Past: The Predictions of Hamilton and Tocqueville' (Bryce, 1901). These points are made more interesting in the light of some of the current reappraisals of the place of Weber within the history of Western social and political thought. A particularly forceful and stimulating reinterpretation of Weber's thought has been offered by Hennis and Tenbruck in particular. Hennis, especially, has revived the themes of the earlier reception of Weber by, among others, Landshut and Lowith who had argued that his thought could only be understood when placed within a much broader context than was usual (Hennis, 1988b; Tenbruck, 1989). It has often been felt that both Weber and Tocqueville are difficult thinkers to locate within the conventional categories of political theory. It is usually argued that they both belong to something called the 'liberal tradition' but in a manner that is, nevertheless, uncertain. It has been suggested that a useful way of summarizing much of this confusion concerning Weber has been to describe his thought as being both 'a problem of liberalism and a problem for liberalism' (Beetham, 1989). In terms of the problematic status of both theorists it is interesting to note that Weber has been called a 'liberal in despair' while Tocqueville's 'liberalism' has been termed 'strange' (Mommsen, 1974; Boesche, 1987).

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Calling Weber a iiberaP does not command universal agreement. For example, Hennis has placed Weber within a tradition of political thought that has nothing to do with typical liberal concerns — an interest in civil order and welfare, for example, which is at the root of the political thought of the British liberal tradition of Hume, Bentham and Adam Smith. Nor, it might be added, does Weber have much in common with Locke. Weber, it is argued, belongs to a different tradition of modern political thought, which can be associated with the names Machiavelli, Rousseau and Tocqueville. Here it is not a question of securing interests and comfort, but rather the unfolding of the power of the soul, an unfolding that appeared to be possible not on an individual basis, but rather communally, associatively, ultimately in the ancient sense of politics. (Hennis, 1988b: 196) If this interpretation is accepted then Weber is not to be discussed as a liberal in some vague and general sense but rather as a thinker whose importance consists in the insight that there is a fundamental tension between the demands of such a 'republican' or 'civic' sense of politics and its realization within the confines of the modern European state. Both Weber and Tocqueville reveal the structure of their political thought through the medium of political commentary. There is an essential continuity between the theoretical preoccupations and political commentaries of the two thinkers. This important point has been made by Wolin who argues that this continuity 'is a reminder that the theorist-turned-commentator has not shed his theoretical view. Rather, he has used the theory to inform his commentary and he has made his commentary an intimation of his theory' (Wolin, 1980: 191). Weber and Tocqueville are politically engaged thinkers and their more theoretical works are unintelligible if this is not recognized. Nevertheless they both strive for the necessary degree of detachment that will enable their work to rise above the level of mere partisanship. It is clear that for both theorists political understanding requires a difficult balance of knowledge and passion. This awareness of the difficulty of political understanding is heightened by their interest in the dramatic events of their own times. Just to mention these is to give an indication of

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the nature of the response that was required: the revolution of 1848 and the Bonapartist coup; the era of Bismarck and the First World War; the Russian revolutions. It is also worth remembering that both visited America and were profoundly influenced by the 'restless energy' that they encountered there. In trying to make sense of the political world of their own times both thinkers are remarkable for their attempt to transcend the limitations of contemporary ideological concerns and of unnecessarily restrictive hypotheses. In so doing there is no fundamental difference of procedure between the two thinkers and the method of classical political thought. Both were profoundly political thinkers. Tocqueville describes his method in these terms: A traveller who has just left a vast city climbs the neighbouring hill; as he goes farther off, he loses sight of the men he has just left; their dwellings are confused in a dense mass; he can no longer distinguish the public and can scarcely trace out the great thoroughfares; but his eye has less difficulty in following the boundaries of the city, and for the first time, he sees the shape of the whole. (Tocqueville, 1945, vol. 1: 447) This striving to 'see the shape of the whole' is itself a deeper form of commitment precisely because of its desire to be liberated from the limitations of the ideologies of everyday practical politics. Tocqueville himself, discussing Democracy in America, pointed to what many would 'consider to be the principal defect of the work': It is written to favour no particular views, and in composing it I have entertained no design of serving or attacking any particular party. (Tocqueville, 1945, vol. 1: 7) There is no essential difference between this attitude and that of Weber. In his discussion of the 'vocation' of politics Weber mentions three 'decisive qualities' for the genuine politician or statesman: passion, a sense of responsibility, and a sense of proportion. In fact it is the latter quality that is decisive. It refers to an 'ability to let realities work upon him with inner concentration and calmness. Hence his distance to things and men' (Weber, 1948: 115). Equally, these are precisely the same qualities that are possessed by the true scholar. Weber and Tocqueville define both

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politics and scholarship in terms of the same virtues. It is not going too far to suggest that 'in recommending that quality to politicians, Weber was attempting to transfer to political activity a virtue characteristically associated with theoretic activity' (Wolin, 1980: 198). Both Weber and Tocqueville believed that they were witnessing the emergence of a new age characterized by new forms of social life and of political expression. A new age requires a new language of political analysis. Furthermore, without the understanding made possible by a new language men and women would not be capable of responding rationally to these new conditions. This is the meaning of Tocqueville's famous statement that: The first duties that are at this time imposed upon those who direct our affairs is to educate democracy, to reawaken, if possible, its religious beliefs; to purify its morals; to mould its actions; to substitute a knowledge of statecraft for its inexperience, and an awareness of its true interest for its blind instincts, to adapt its government to time and place, and to modify it according to men and conditions. A new science of politics is needed for a new world. (Tocqueville, 1945, vol. 1: 7) Similarly, Weber was intensely aware of the conditional character of social and political concepts. There is, in Weber's view, a tragic element present even in the history of concept formation. The constant development of concepts and theories in the 'cultural sciences' did nothing if it did not reveal the inevitable limitations of those very same concepts. For Weber: The great attempts at concept-formation in the sciences of social life were always useful for revealing the limits of significance of those standpoints which provided their foundation. The greatest advances in the social sciences are factually tied to the displacement of practical cultural problems and appear in the clothing of criticism. (Weber, 1949: 105-6; translation slightly amended) Weber makes it especially clear that the era of democracy presents a heightened awareness of this problem. The advent of

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modern democracy requires a new form of political understanding. Weber states in a forceful manner that the 'problems of parliamentary government and democracy, and the essential nature of our modern state in general, are entirely beyond the horizon of the German classics' (Weber, 1948c: 394). Nevertheless, it would be wrong to take these statements entirely at face value. While intensely aware of the problem of understanding a 'new age', both Weber and Tocqueville continued to be influenced and fascinated by thinkers from the distant past. It is impossible to transcend completely a tradition. Neither Weber nor Tocqueville produced extensive accounts of their own intellectual histories but they left many clues throughout their work concerning which past thinkers they considered to be of decisive significance. The problem of understanding the nature of modern democracy and its limitations is a theme that both theorists share. Both Weber and Tocqueville perceived that the advance of mass democracy was an unavoidable component of the modern political order. Nevertheless, the advance of democracy also contained its own unique internal contradictions. There was no inevitable victory for liberty entailed by the progress of democracy despite their use of the rhetoric of 'fate' and 'providence'. In fact, for both theorists the inherent danger that was implicit within modern democracy was the gradual and largely unnoticed drift into the 'new servitude'. For Tocqueville a central characteristic of democracy is equality. On the first page of Democracy in America he informs us that: The more that I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that this equality of condition is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated. Gradually the distinctions of rank are done away with; the barriers that once severed mankind are falling; property is divided, power is shared by many, the light of intelligence spreads, and the empire of democracy is slowly and peacably introduced into institutions and customs. (Tocqueville, 1945, vol. 1:3) Tocqueville's construction of the 'democratic state' is, in essence, an 'ideal type'. This 'ideal type' itself fits into an implicit typology of which the other two types are 'aristocracy' and 'revolution'. It

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may be going too far to suggest that there is a structural similarity between Tocqueville's three types which, in effect, refer to England, America and France, and Weber's well-known three types of 'legitimate rule' which are sketched out in a more abstract manner but do, in fact, derive their sense from his meditation upon particular states, especially England and Germany, as well as his experience of a long visit to America. That there is a common set of themes running through the work of both thinkers has, occasionally, been recognized. Two of the earlier commentaries on Weber in English, by Bendix and Mayer, did make the connection. For Mayer, Weber's work 'offers the most congenial recapitulation of de Tocqueville's formulation of the problem [the rise of the masses] . . . differing only . . . in the disillusioned gaze of an age which had cast off religion' (Mayer, 1939: 157). Both regarded democracy as an inevitable development of the modern world. But it is here that an essential difference, despite all of the similarities, is evident. While Tocqueville is prepared to recognize the 'providential' nature of this development, Weber is more inclined to speak of an unavoidable 'fate' and, perhaps, even of a 'fatality'. Bendix noted that both Tocqueville and Burckhardt saw the 'totalitarian' potential within democracy and that these ideas, which were not uncommon in the nineteenth century, probably influenced Weber. Nevertheless, Bendix did not follow up this observation and, writing before Mommsen's analysis of Weber's political ideas, placed Weber within a framework of 'liberal criticism' of bureaucratic absolutism (Bendix, 1960: 454). Tocqueville's belief in providence helps to explain his acceptance of democracy. Tocqueville argued that the gradual development of the principle of equality is, therefore, a providential fact. It has all the chief characteristics of such a fact: it is universal, it is lasting, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress. (Tocqueville, 1945, vol. 1: 6) Tocqueville does not regard the development of democracy in triumphalist terms. Although there can be no return to the aristocratic age, democracy must be seen as a mixed blessing. It is here, according to writers such as Hennis, that we see the influence of Rousseau, especially the Rousseau of the 'First Discourse', whom

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Tocqueville himself tells us he read daily. The advent of democracy brings with it many benefits but there is a moral price to pay. Tocqueville tells us that: Democracy does not give the people the most skilful government, but it produces what the ablest governments are frequently unable to create: namely, an all-pervading restless activity, a superabundant force, and an energy which is inseparable from it and which may, however unfavourable circumstances may be, produce wonders. These are the true advantages of democracy. (Tocqueville, 1945, vol. 1 : 261) There is a price to be paid for these 'wonders': Do you wish to give a certain elevation to the human mind and teach it to regard the things of this world with generous feelings, to inspire men with a scorn for mere temporal advantages, to form and nourish strong convictions and keep alive the spirit of honourable devotedness? Is it your object to refine the habits, embellish the manners, and cultivate the arts, to promote the love of poetry, beauty and glory? Would you constitute a people fitted to act powerfully upon other nations, and prepared for those high enterprises which, whatever be their results, will leave a name forever famous in history? If you believe such to be the principle object of society, avoid the government of democracy, for it would not lead you with certainty to the goal. (Tocqueville, 1945, vol. 1 : 262) Democratic society is concerned with the production of 'comfort' and 'general well-being'; it is not concerned with the virtues of heroism, noble deeds or glory. In other words, democracy produces moral mediocrity. But there is no turning back. The most that can be done in the face of this providential development is to 'make the best that is allotted to us and, by finding out both its good and its evil tendencies, be able to foster the former and repress the latter to the utmost' (Tocqueville, 1945, vol. 1 : 262). Tocqueville belongs to an established tradition of political thought. If his work, and especially the second volume of Democracy in America, is assimilated to a general 'sociology of culture'

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then certain fundamental elements will probably go unrecognized (Kraynak, 1987). Certainly, this label bears no relationship to his intentions. Tocqueville was influenced, it is clear, by both Rousseau and by Montesquieu. The influence of Montesquieu, for example, is evident in that part of Democracy in America which has the title, The laws contribute more to the maintenance of the democratic republic in the United States than the physical circumstances of the country, and the customs more than the laws' (Tocqueville, 1945, vol. 1 : 330). Here Tocqueville is following Montesquieu in what can be seen as an 'adaptation of civic humanism to a form of society and economy apparently incompatible with it'. According to Montesquieu every form of society can be regarded as being structured in terms of a central organizing principle. This is its 'esprit general'. However, this is not to be thought of as a prototype of some modern form of a bland 'comparative social science'. The point of Montesquieu's enterprise is provided by his political concern for the creation and preservation of civic virtue which can be summarized as 'self-subordination of personal or group interest to the common good' and 'its distinctive forms were love of country, belief in equality, and principled frugality and asceticism' (Richter, 1970: 84). All these terms are, of course, part of the Weberian vocabulary. This ought not to be surprising because Weber made use of the same sources as Tocqueville did. Weber, from a very early age, had read and meditated on both Machiavelli and Montesquieu who are also vital sources for Tocqueville's thought. Weber's term the 'Spirit of Capitalism' is almost certainly a straightforward adaptation of Montesquieu's 'Spirit of the Laws'. Tocqueville's own 'spirit of religion' and 'spirit of liberty' are possible mediating links between himself and Weber. Where Tocqueville sees the character of Anglo-American civilization being based upon its 'customs and mores' and its 'habits of the heart', which are themselves part of 'the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty', Weber notes the connection that Montesquieu had advanced between piety, commerce and freedom. Weber asks (of the English): 'Is it not possible that their commercial superiority and their adaptation to free political institutions are connected in some way with that record of piety that Montesquieu ascribes to them?' (Weber 1948d: 45). What is novel in Tocqueville's form of political analysis is his recognition that a democratic people could adopt either a

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democratic form of government, as in America, or a monarchical one, as in France. The problem here is that with the arrival of 'the sovereignty of the people' there occurs the new danger of the 'tyranny of the majority': The tyranny of the majority is not only a political phenomenon but also an intellectual and moral phenomenon - an enslavement of the mind and a weakening of the will arising from the inability to conceive of any sort of authority except that of the people, or any standard of legitimacy except that of majority opinion. (Kraynak, 1987: 1178) The 'empire of democracy', the sovereignty of the people, produces something new which is only intimated in the work of earlier political thinkers: the pressure towards conformity of popular taste and culture. This is a 'species of oppression' unlike anything that has ever existed before. Tocqueville calls this peculiar characteristic of democratic society 'individualism': Individualism is a mature and calm feeling which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. (Tocqueville, 1945, vol. 2: 104) Furthermore, 'individualism saps the virtues of public life'. It is a phenomenon that is specific to democratic society and it is not to be confused with selfishness. 'Selfishness is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another; individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of condition.' Individualism is, in Tocqueville's view, a product of the Enlightenment and of the Reformation which are both responsible for the modern spirit of scepticism. The paradox is that this form of thought does not liberate but has the opposite effect. Most people cannot cope with the uncertainty that is the consequence of such freedom and will surrender their independence of judgement to the opinion of the majority. Tocqueville's version of this 'dialectic of Enlightenment'

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is to chart the emergence of a paradoxical combination of both individualism and conformity. This is the ground for the emergence of a new form of tyranny: democratic tyranny. In combination with the materialism that is characteristic of democracy there is a fundamental threat to the existence of the civic virtue that is essential for the survival of a democratic republic. Individualism and the weakening of the social bond when combined with the competitive striving for wealth and success is bound to lead to a weakening of citizenship and a withdrawal from the public sphere. This is Tocqueville's fundamental concern. There is a fundamental similarity between the diagnoses offered by both Weber and Tocqueville of the modern democratic condition. For Tocqueville the most important danger is not the threat of 'anarchy' brought about by individualism but that of 'a road to servitude5 along which modern states will drift without noticing it. Similarly, it is a central concern of Weber's political thought that everywhere 'the housing of the new servitude' is ready. Weber, in terminology that is significantly similar to Tocqueville's, argues that the problem is not that there is too much democracy and individualism with too little authority, aristocracy and 'respect for office'. The direction of economic development is towards greater unfreedom. There is no inevitable connection between advanced capitalism, democracy and liberty. In fact, Weber argues, supporters of democratic institutions and of individualism are 'swimming against the stream of material developments'. Nevertheless, despite the similarities in their respective diagnoses, there are major differences between the ideas of the two thinkers. Put simply, Weber lives in a post-Marxian and post-Nietzschean age. He is much more aware of the consequences of industrialization than Tocqueville ever was and he cannot avoid the problem of the conflict of values and of scepticism directed at all substantive philosophies of history. The modern democratic state is a 'disenchanted world'. There is, however, an even more fundamental difference between Tocqueville and Weber. This resides in their very different ways of conceptualizing 'politics' and 'the political'. This distinction between 'politics' and 'the political' is one that is at the heart of Tocqueville's conceptual system although it is a distinction that he did not make explicit. Weber did not see the need to make much of this distinction even if he did, which is not certain, recognize it.

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The distinction itself refers to the difference between, on the one hand, the distribution of power and the agencies of power that exists in all states and complex societies, and, on the other hand, that domain of argument that explicitly puts into question the established institutions of a society and reflects upon the fate of a whole society. In terms of this distinction all societies possess distributions of power although not all societies possess states. Not all states and societies possess politics. Most states and societies may possess intrigues, plots and struggles for power, but this does not entail that politics is also present in this second sense (Castoriadis, 1989). The relevance of these brief comments is that they help to make clear the underlying structure and the limitations of Weber's political thought. Weber saw the relevance of the question of the political for an understanding of modern society. For example, Weber makes it clear, and this is generally ignored by modern social scientists, that the essential presupposition for his wellknown discussion of 'class, status and party' is the existence of a polity. He recognized that there had to be some conceptual limitation of the use of the concept. Politics, for Weber, cuts across the distinction that has been made between the 'political' and 'politics' but in an extremely narrow and restricted manner. Politics in Weber's broad sense refers to 'any kind of independent leadership in action', such as the policy of a bank or of a trade union or even of a wife attempting to guide her husband. This definition is discarded because it is too broad. Weber escapes from this broad but useless definition by reverting to a more traditional, but very narrow, definition. Politics is defined as referring exclusively to the leadership of the state. Furthermore, the state cannot be defined usefully in terms of the ends it pursues because these are too various. The state is to be defined only in terms of the specific means at its disposal and these are the means of violence. The modern state is that form of human association that alone can claim the right to use violence within a given territory. Given this focus upon the physical character of the modern state, 'politics' for Weber is defined in terms of domination or, more accurately, 'rule', and the struggle for power both within and between states. To say that a question is a 'political' question is, for Weber, to say that it has a fundamental and unavoidable relationship with the distribution of power within a state (Weber, 1948a).

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Whatever the merits of Weber's approach to political realities, it has to be said that it leads to enormous difficulties. Even if we stay within the limits of Weber's own methodological prescriptions we are presumably not to take this way of looking at the problem of politics as itself being a 'real' definition rather than an 'idealtypical' one. Nevertheless, without becoming involved in the problem of the status of Weber's concepts it is clear that he acted as if he were proposing a 'real' definition. If it is a 'real' definition then the exemplars upon which it is based are the contemporary German and, to a lesser but significant extent, the British states. Weber's own perception of the nature of these states was itself mediated through the categories and concerns of the 'political science' of his own time (Hiibinger 1988). The effect of this is to lose sight of 'politics' or, probably, more accurately, to strengthen the idea that 'politics' in the classical sense cannot take place within the modern world or, if it does, then it can do so only within extremely narrow limits. It is an interesting fact that Weber, in his Zwischenbetrachtung, a text that many contemporary writers take to be central for an understanding of his work, discusses politics in terms of the 'Eigengesetzlichkeit' of domains of rationalization (Weber, 1948b: 333—40). The focus here is on the emergence of the modern state and of the rational homo politicus. Weber notes the emergence of the modern type of political man who 'just like economic man' must act in a matter-of-fact manner sine ira et studio. Here Weber asserts that the modern state is guided by the objectives of 'reason of state': The state's absolute end is to safeguard (or to change) the external and internal distribution of power; ultimately this end must seem meaningless to any universalist religion of salvation. This fact holds and still holds, even more so, for foreign policy. It is absolutely essential for every political association to appeal to the naked violence of coercive means in the face of outsiders as well as in the face of internal enemies. It is only this very appeal to violence that constitutes a political association in our terminology. The state is an association that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, and cannot be in any other manner. (Weber, 1948b: 334)

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The logic of Weber's argument here appears to produce a pure Machiavellianism. The 'autonomy' of the political sphere is such that in following its own immanent 'laws' it frees itself from all moral constraints. Weber's analysis, like Machiavelli's, emphasizes the distinction between Christianity and the world of power politics. Nevertheless, despite his avowed 'value-neutrality', Weber does judge the political sphere to be a 'world governed by demons'. To enter into the political realm is to make a contract with 'diabolical powers'. However, Weber does not say that there is no room for ethics in politics, but rather that there are ethical paradoxes that are peculiar to the political domain. Ethical judgement enters into the political world by means of his idea of the genuine political leader. A politician of this type is guided by the sense of having a 'calling' which is itself constituted by the possession of an 'ethic of responsibility' which predominates over an 'ethic of conviction' which is also necessary for the 'calling for polities'. The idea of an 'ethic of responsibility' as a constitutive element for the proper vocation of political leadership raises one obvious question that leads directly to the centre of the Weberian conceptual labyrinth. To what is the political leader responsible? One answer that Weber provides is simply that it refers to the sense of responsibility that the politician must have for the consequences of his actions. On a deeper level it might be said that there is a responsibility to history and fate, and Weber does, at times, speak in this manner; but such talk is inherently vague and, perhaps, more to the point directly contradicts his own methodological prescriptions. Weber's metaphysical commitments, disguised as methodological directives, led him into a position where he could find no escape from an image of a world deeply divided between incommensurable ultimate values. In such a world all that was left was the reality of internally consistent 'vocations' that were the only locus of meaning. When this idea was applied to the political realm it meant that a genuine politics was only possible for those Berufsmenschen who recognized the tragic and demonic nature of the political domain. In the context of the modern state this could only mean that a politics of responsibility could exist only in an essential tension with the claims of democracy. Not only does the 'demon of politics' live in an 'inner tension' with the 'god of love', but the god of political responsibility lives in an irreconcilable contradiction with

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the 'political irresponsibility' of the 'dilettantism' of the politically engaged intellectuals. Both Weber and Tocqueville feared that modern democratic states would drift into a 'new servitude'. Tocqueville, especially in the second volume of Democracy in America, argued that the 'new servitude' would take the form of a highly centralized paternalistic state rather than the 'tyranny of the majority' that he had pointed to in the first volume. Weber's account of the social 'levelling' that would be the product of bureaucratization when combined with the process of universal alienation pointed to essentially the same developments. The two thinkers, who are so similar in their diagnoses of the human condition in the modern state, are very different in their prescriptions. The necessity for political participation that Tocqueville saw as an antidote to both the tyranny of the majority and to excessive centralization was totally discounted by Weber. Whatever value it might once have possessed it was no longer relevant. This distinction between the ideas of the two thinkers is itself a reflection of a much deeper and significant difference in their ideas of the nature of politics and of the political. Weber's view of the realities of modern politics is deeply pessimistic: It is a horrendous error of the literati if they fancy that the governing of a large state is the same as the self-government of any medium-sized city. Politics means conflict. (Weber, 1968, vol 3: 1399) The contrast between the views of the two thinkers is made especially clear in their interpretations of 'Bonapartism' and the nature of parliaments in the modern state. In Tocqueville's account a 'Bonapartist plebiscitary democracy', which he identified especially in his later writings as a threat to liberty, was an essentially illegitimate form of rule. For Weber, in his later writings, it appears that this form of government is the most appropriate form. The contrast between the two thinkers can be summarized in this way: Tocqueville regarded the Caesarism, or Bonapartist dictatorship of Napoleon as an illegitimate perversion of democracy; Weber thought plebiscitary dictatorship provided the leader-

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democracy (Fiihrer-demokratie) required by the conditions of modern society as he understood it. (Richter, 1982: 210) Without entering into the historical debate concerning Weber's pronouncements on the best constitution for post-1918 Germany it is clear that his account of the nature of parliament and of democracy reveals his implicit political philosophy. Running throughout all of Weber's work is a scepticism concerning the possibility and value of democratic politics. The contrast with Tocqueville is made even more apparent when it is realized that Weber's scepticism is not the by-product of a form of postNietzschean genealogy of power in terms of which it is simply a fact of the modern world that democracy in the classical sense is out of the question. In Weber's account classical democracy did not exist in the classical age either. Weber's conceptual system, especially his classification of forms of domination or rule, reinforced this picture. Quite simply, Weber was unwilling and, probably, unable to recognize the existence of either democracy or of genuine politics in any context. An important example of this is his universal tendency to describe all political leaders in terms of the concept of charisma. As a consequence Weber generally defines all those whom he does not consider to be 'responsible politicians' as 'demagogues'. Weber does not say that mass democratic participation automatically leads to the impossibility of 'rational polities'. What he does say is that without 'responsible leadership', for example from the trade unions, the likelihood of mass irrationality is high. Weber's discussion of the prospects for a rational and democratic politics in the modern world is clarified when it is placed within the broader context of his conceptual categories. Consideration of Weber's treatment of the ancient world is highly revealing of his view of the nature of politics. It has been observed that with regard to Weber's well-known typology of forms of rule there is a problem concerning what it includes and, more importantly, excludes. The key problem here is the place of the ancient polis. Finley has argued that: The polis was obviously neither a traditional nor a rational (ie bureaucratic) form of domination. This leaves only the charismatic type virtually by elimination, and it has to be said that

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the justification for that classification is extremely thin and casual. (Finley, 1985: 93-4) No amount of talk about the 'antinomian' character of Weber's political theory can disguise the fact that it contains highly damaging and unresolved contradictions (Mommsen, 1989). The inability to cope with the classical polis is indicative of the more general problem that Weber faced in connection with the nature of democracy as such and by implication with the nature of politics. The logic of his conceptual vocabulary always meant that Weber had to classify democracy as a form of charismatic rule. The legitimacy of a democratic state is as a result equated with charismatic legitimation. It follows almost automatically that the only way in which democracy could be spoken of as a viable political form in the modern world was by means of an analysis of leadership. Furthermore, there seems to be a contradiction in the idea that a political leader could be both charismatic and bound by the 'ethic of responsibility' in so far as one of its attributes is, presumably, an ability to compromise. Parliaments are discussed by Weber not primarily as institutions where political debate takes place but, instead, as the locus for the selection of politically responsible leaders. Weber attempted in his later work to balance the idea of a directly elected President with that of a democratic parliament. The directly elected President appears on the scene in a way that resembles the role of the Lawgiver in Rousseau's Social Contract or of Machiavelli's The Prince. A fundamental problem here that Weber did not discuss is the question of how the people, who are supposed not to be able to enter into a rational political debate and who are prone to the influence of demagogues, are supposed, through the medium of referenda to elect those political leaders who are, in Weber's terms, 'responsible' and directed primarily by an 'ethic of responsibility'. The reliance upon the acceptance of charismatic leadership can be no guarantee for the emergence of reason in politics even if there is provision for the removal of those leaders who have lost the trust of the people (Weber, 1971: 498-501). Weber's discussions of the political crises of his own time are of more than historical interest. Weber's importance resides in his questions concerning the nature of the modern democratic state and the dangers that threaten its existence. In this respect, he is

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similar to Tocqueville. The principle difference between the two theorists rests upon their contrasting views of the nature and possibilities of politics in the modern world. Both recognized 'Rousseau's paradox' of politics; that the institutions of a wellgoverned people requires that the people themselves are sufficiently politically educated to create those institutions. The paradox resides in the fact that the necessary degree of political education is itself meant to be the consequence of possessing those same institutions (Rousseau, 1968: 87). Tocqueville's answer to this paradox is his faith in the virtues of political participation and the 'habits of the heart' that support a democratic order. Weber's response is to put his faith in the virtues of a form of political leadership that is not too distant from the ideas of political education present in classical concepts of the Lawgiver. Weber's own sympathy with the prophets of the Old Testament has often been noted. Can it not be that one reason for this is that he saw himself placed in a similar position? If so, then his own statements ought not to be regarded as social scientific generalizations but, rather, as advice directed to statesmen that is based upon an objective analysis of the dangers and tendencies that threaten contemporary democratic states. REFERENCES Beetham, D. (1989) 'Max Weber and the Liberal Political Tradition', Archives Europeennes de Sociologie 30(1). Bendix, R. (1960) Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (London: Heinemann). Boesche, R. (1987) The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press). Bryce, J. B. (1901) Studies in History and Jurisprudence, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press). Castoriadis, C. (1989) 'Power, Politics, Autonomy', in A. Honneth et al. (eds) Zwischenbetrachtungen im Prozess der Aufkldrung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Dilthey, W. (1927) Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7 (Leipzig and Berlin: Duncker and Humblot) Finley, M. I. (1985) Ancient History: Evidence and Models (London: Chatto &C Windus).

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Freund, D. (1974) 'Max Weber und Alexis de Tocqueville' Archiv fiir Kulturgeschichte 56. Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. W. (eds) (1948) From Max Weber (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Greenleaf, W. H. (1972) 'Hobbes: The Problem of Interpretation', in M. Cranston and R. A. Peters (eds) Hobbes and Rousseau (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor). Hennis, W. (1988a) 'Tocqueville's Perspective', Interpretation 16(1). Hennis W. (1988b) Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction (London: Allen &c Unwin). Hiibinger, G. (1988) 'Staatstheorie und Politik als Wissenschaft im Kaiserreich: Georg Jellinek, Otto Hintze, Max Weber', in H. Maier et al. (eds) Politik, Philosophie, Praxis (Stuttgart: KlettCotta). Kraynak, R. P. (1987) Tocqueville's Constitutionalism', American Political Science Review 81(4). Mayer, J. P. (1939) Prophet of the Mass Age (London: Dent). Mommsen, W. J. (1974) The Age of Bureaucracy (Oxford: Blackwell). Mommsen, W. J. (1989) The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber (Oxford: Polity). Richter, M. (1970) The Uses of Theory: Tocqueville's Adaptation of Montesquieu', in M. Richter (ed), Essays in Theory and History (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press). Richter, M. (1982) Towards a Concept of Political Illegitimacy', Political Theory 10(2). Rousseau, J.-J. (1968) The Social Contract (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Tenbruck, F. H. (1989) 'Abschied von der "Wissenschaftslehre"?', in J. Weiss (ed.) Max Weber heute (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Tocqueville, A. de (1945) Democracy in America (2 vols) (New York: Vintage Books). Weber, M. (1948a) 'Politics as a Vocation', in Gerth and Mills (eds) From Max Weber. Weber, M. (1948b) 'Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions', in Gerth and Mills (eds) From Max Weber. Weber, M. (1948c) 'National Character and the Junkers', in Gerth and Mills (eds) From Max Weber.

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Weber, M. (1948d) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin). Weber, M. (1949) The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press). Weber, M. (1968) Economy and Society (2 vols) (Berkeley: University of California Press) Weber, M. (1971) Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tubingen: Mohr). Wolin, S. (1980) 'Political Theory and Political Commentary', in M. Richter (ed.) Political Theory and Political Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

REDUCTION AND DECEIT IN SOCIAL THEORY Jeffrey C. Alexander

In his essay in praise of the post-positivist philosopher of science Michael Polanyi, Raymond Aron wrote that 'to recognize the impossibility of demonstrating an axiom system is not a defeat of the mind, but the recall of the mind to itself. To recall our mind to ourselves we must recognize that mindfulness is part of our science. The sociological mind thinks against empirical reality as much as having its impressions stamped by it. This very simple thing is what I would like to call theory. Theory refers to those non-empirical elements which, by standing 'against' the empirical world, allows us to see it more clearly. Theory is sometimes temporally prior to empirical observation; it is always analytically independent. This definition of theory is deliberately broad. It implies, for example, a critical attitude not just towards logical positivism but to philosophical empiricism as well, for the latter assumes the doctrine of falsification, which holds that theories can be refuted by something called the non-theoretical factual world. Yet facts are themselves products of two different pressures. While they receive structured impressions from the physical world, the framing of these impressions depends on metaphysical assumptions that have already been learned. We talk in our scientific work about facts as opposed to theories. While this is a vital and necessary analytical distinction, we should not deceive ourselves that it is an ontological one. Decisions about facts are matters of 119

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scientific convenience; they allow us to leave unchallenged a certain range of material at a particular point in time. These decisions often reflect ad hoc contingencies. The material we are prepared to challenge now assumes the status of the hypothetical; it becomes 'non-factual' and 'theoretical'. What we are not prepared to challenge at this point is allowed to remain as fact. Decisions about facts reveal as much about the scientific consensus in the professional community at a particular point in time as they reveal about the accuracy with which these scientific statements mirror nature. There is a symbiotic interpenetration, then, between theories and facts. It is because they rigidly demarcate theories and facts that most practising social scientists deny that science progresses in response to non-empirical theoretical processes as much as in response to the expansion of empirical knowledge through induction or controlled experiment. Yet, if facts are not ontologically separated from ideas, then non-empirical arguments which change ideas will play a decisive role in the perception of new knowledge, in disputes about falsification and disputes over measurement. If the perception of facts is dependent upon intentions rather than reflections, then there is a discomfiting relativity about scientific knowledge. Three reactions to the recognition of this relativity are possible. The first is to ignore it. Empirical sociologists carry on because they have not only the conviction but the phenomenological experience that they are discovering new knowledge. This experience is reinforced by the fact that an empirical researcher is typically a member of a reference group defined by agreement about the framework of his or her research programme. This joint membership makes superfluous reference to the theory that informs the factual perceptions of the members of the group. That this research programme is, at any given point in time, only one of several competing approaches to an empirical problem does not in itself contribute to theoretical unease. The findings of other researchers in the field can be dismissed as inaccurate in their observations and methods rather than as inspired by compelling yet divergent theoretical assumptions. The second reaction to the inevitable relativity of social scientific knowledge embraces it as Weltanschauung and rejects the quest for certainty altogether. In the last two decades, as the fin-de-siecle draws near, this position has appeared increasingly attractive. The

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most serious students of science (Latour, 1987) argue that consideration of the possibility of norms of objectivity contributes nothing to their empirical investigations of scientific conduct; indeed, they argue that the practice of science is no less subjective than any other lifeworld process. In the work of Richard Rorty (1979), relativism has been apotheosized as the legitimate heir of postanalytic philosophy. In the work of Clifford Geertz (1973), it has been anthropologized as thick description, a method that would make efforts at theoretical abstraction irrelevant. In the work of J.-F. Lyotard (1984) and Michel Foucault (1972), relativism is heralded as the local narrative that will succeed modern objectivity in the postmodern world. For those who accept the relativism of knowledge but do not wish to embrace relativism as a creed, there is a third alternative. That is to make the case for the possibility of increasing objectivity within the framework of post-positivist thought (Alexander, 1990). Except in the most vulgar sociological terms, after all, science is certainly not the same thing as falling in love, although passion and morality play a role in both. In science it is the ethos of objectivity that is the object of passion; in love, it is passion itself, and the unique and particular individual who seems to embody it. Objectivity strives for universalism, for the depersonalization of what Thomas Nagel (1986) calls 'the view from nowhere'. The role of intention in science means, of course, that nowhere can never be achieved, for we always must be somewhere to have this view. Still, one's point of departure can be decentred in a more or less determined way. Depersonalization depends on finding standards of evaluation that are outside the phenomenon at hand, standards that can be rationalized, abstracted, generalized and reflected upon in a public and relatively disciplined way. If the impact in social science of non-observable presuppositions is just as important as the impact of observable facts, the challenge is to make the former amenable to more or less rational discussion. Can they be formalized in some way? Can explicit criteria be developed for evaluating competing non-empirical claims? This is the ambition to which theoretical sociology aspires. One response is to formulate what I have called 'theoretical logic' (Alexander, 1982-3). My claim has been that there is a structure, more accurately a series of structures, that inform the tacit

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knowledge of social science. Whether we are conscious of them or not, these theoretical structures form the contours of our empirical practice. Because they form closely similar patterns across a wide diversity of social scientific work, they have what seems to be a relatively objective status. They are not invented by empirical sociologists or even by the greatest theorists themselves. They should be seen, rather, as part of the mind of social science, as forms of thinking that are recapitulated and recombined in remarkably similar ways across wide chasms of time and space. The effort to develop a theoretical logic is an attempt to make such structures explicit. Only in doing so can we reflect responsibly upon the commitments that our theorizing inevitably makes. This call for a theoretical logic brings to our self-conscious attention common practices that are often dismissed as unscientific. Arguments about non-empirical qualities are omnipresent among practising social scientists. We discuss and debate the ideological meaning of certain positions; we argue and dispute the impact of different methodological techniques; we fiercely dispute the assumptions about human natur^ that one or another position implies. Yet we are inclined to regard such discussions and arguments as being far afield from 'real science'. We are apt to see them as padding, as the context of science, as things we talk about in introductions or conclusions, or as matters we discuss with friends and students. Few sociologists are likely to regard these arguments as the stuff of real science itself. From the perspective I am developing here, however, we must take all of this very seriously. These discussions reveal the informal and tacit knowledge that leads us to the heart of science. Theoretical logic addresses itself to these common practices. It seeks to develop systematic and explicit standards to evaluate such discussions and disputes. Theoretical logic can be developed at different levels of generality. We can make explicit and more universal our understandings of ideology, of models, of meta-methodological assumptions and methodological techniques, of propositions about empirical conflict and order. Much contemporary theoretical debate has radically distorted theoretical logic by singling out one of these levels as more important than the others. For thirty years we have been treated to announcements of radical versus conservative sociology, positivist versus theoretical, conflict versus order sociology, functionalist sociology versus institutional. Each new school claims that

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the chosen dichotomy can explain the general character of theory itself. Yet each, in truth, only addresses a particular level of analysis. These radical simplifications have camouflaged the true complexity of sociological thought and the relative autonomy of its various parts. Contemporary debates reflects superstructure/ base reasoning. We need a more subtle appreciation of relative autonomy and mutual interpenetration. In my own work on theoretical logic I have tried to insert another level into this contemporary debate, a level I have called the presuppositional. All theorists, and indeed all empirical sociologists, presuppose fundamental qualities about the nature of action and the nature of order: what kinds of motives do social actors have (action), and what allows acts to be put together into relatively coherent patterns (order)? It is vitally important to see that these are independent choices. They have, as it were, theoretical autonomy, and it is precisely out of this autonomy that the complexity of contemporary sociology proceeds. Sociologists can adopt an individualistic attitude toward order (emphasizing negotiation, emergence, choice) or they can make a decision for collectivism (emphasizing the supra-individual, sui generis quality of social patterning). But either choice still leaves the decision about action open: will individualistic theories be instrumental (assume that action is rational) or will they be normative (allow non-rational motives)? A collectivist theory can be instrumental or it can be normative. It can also, of course, seek to incorporate both dimensions of action at the same time. When one looks back over the history of social thought, and to sociological theory in the post-war world as well, one can only conclude that the human mind seems intent on simplification and reduction in the presuppositions it makes. For the sake of simplicity and elegance, to allow greater deductive power, to create an aura of emanational inevitability — and for many other reasons as well - social thought tends always towards the one-dimensional. It makes itself either instrumental or normative but rarely tries to embrace both. It is because of this tendency that strains toward, idealism and materialism have dominated so much of our intellectual history. Yet if the human mind seems attracted to simplification and reduction, it seems also to be the master of (unconscious) denial and deceit. For the practitioners of one-dimensional theory present

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their reductionist choices as if they had been 'thrust upon them5, that is, as if they were not really choices at all. This is accomplished by a subtle but apparently intuitively accessible theoretical strategy. The autonomy of action and order is eliminated. The two choices are conflated with one another. Those who engage in one-dimensional thought present their decision about order - to others and, it seems, also to themselves - as if it were necessitated by their single-minded decision about action alone. What has happened is a form of reduction. One of the central questions of social theory has been conflated with the other. This strategy is omnipresent in the collectivist tradition. Marx maintained that the only real alternative to individualism was historical materialism. His vast corpus is punctuated by emphatic calls for social as compared to individualistic analysis. He writes in his famous Preface to The Critique of Political Economy that 'it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness' (Marx, 1962 [1859]: 363).l In the Grundrisse he insists that 'society does not consist of individuals' but rather that it 'expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand' (1974 [1858-9]: 265). It is not the individual who determines society, but society that determines the individual. But what, we might well ask, is society? The answer that Marx offers, in the clearest possible terms, is that society takes form only as the mode of production. The logic is as follows: social theory = society, not individual; society = economic, not moral constraint. Thus Marx (ibid.: 156—7, original italics) explains at a different point in the Grundrisse that 'socially determined interest . . . can be achieved only within the conditions laid down by society and with the means provided by society.' Hence the 'reciprocal and allsided dependence of individuals', Marx insists, is a 'social bond' that is expressed 'in exchange value9. These theoretical equations hold good, of course, only if we combine our commitment to collective order with instrumental assumptions about action. The truth is that decisions about action are independent of decisions about order. In principle, we can combine collective order with non-rational action, with the result that the 'social' alternative to individualism assumes a normative rather than material form. It is the very knowledge of this theoretical possibility, however, that Marx sought to avoid. By conflating

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action with order — reducing the action question to something that is answered by the order decision - Marx 'pretended' that there was no choice at all, that to be collective theory has to be instrumental. Indeed, for Marx normative structures are not really structures at all. In his writings after 1846 he always claimed that Hegelianism was really individualism in disguise. This camouflaged reduction is nowhere more clear than in his attack on Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy. Marx begins by likening Proudhon to Hegel, that is, to an idealist who views society as the product of individual actors. In Proudhon's work, Marx (1963 [1847]: 109) asserts, 'he is constructing the world by the movement of thought'. Once the ghost of Hegel has been invoked to reduce normative currents to individual desires, Marx can contrast Proudhon's emphasis on ideals and principles with his own emphasis on real history and social factors. Lampooning Proudhon's essay as suggesting that it is 'the principle that made the history and not the history that made the principle', Marx concludes (ibid.: 115) that 'logical sequence' must be reject as a social force. The real environment of human actors is not moral or cultural principles but economic forces. Truly, one must be destitute of all historical knowledge not to know that it is the sovereigns who in all ages have been subject to economic conditions, but they have never dictated laws to them. Legislation, whether political or civil, never does more than proclaim, express in words, the will of economic conditions, (ibid.: 83) It might be said that by adopting this theoretical logic Marx sought to usurp the social for his own (instrumental) purposes, to limit the collectivist approach to economic and material concerns. In this ambition he seems to have succeeded. Henceforth, discussions of 'social origins', or of 'social history' would have a special kind of meaning. They would be weighted down with order in the material sense. Henceforth, sociological discussions of 'structure' would - despite the best efforts of thinkers from Durkheim to LeviStrauss to Merton - have a material, political or economic ring. One thinks here, most recently, of Treiman's (1977) work on international stratification, which claims a 'structural approach'

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even to processes of prestige, of Skocpol's (1979) book on revolutions, and of Blau's (1977) structural theory of inequality. This materialist conflation is a great camouflage, and that is precisely the point. If social equals material, who could challenge Marx's theory if he or she wished to remain 'collective' and structural, that is, if one wished to avoid the randomness of individualistic non-sociological thought? Elie Halevy poses the same kind of deceptive alternatives in his great book, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1972 [1901-4]). He writes that a theorist must accept either the 'natural identity of interests' posited by the individualistic school of classical economics and early Utilitarianism or one must opt for the 'artificial identity of interests' of the later Bentham and Marx. Halevy's purpose here, however, is the opposite of Marx's. He wants to discredit collectivist theory and he sees artificial identity theory as proto-totalitarian because it perceives structures as external and coercive. Still, Halevy's theoretical logic is something of a ruse, for he claims, deceitfully, that collectivist theory must be 'artificial' or not at all. This claim is as misleading as Marx's, and for the same reason. It acts as if questions of action are decided by decisions about collective-versus-individual order. In this case, of course, the short-circuit is designed to push us away from collectivist theory rather than towards it. Peter Blau and James Coleman follow the same theoretical strategy, but with a theoretical ambition more in line with Marx. For Blau, 'structural effects' must be anti-psychological (Blau, 1960) and even, more recently (Blau, 1977), physical and demographic. Sanctions are most effective if they rely on 'external fear'. Again, an argument is presented that collective order works only with instrumental motives. Coleman's (1966) theory is much the same. He argues for the collective character of 'decisions' against what he takes to be George Homans' individualism. Yet Coleman's collectivity turns out to refer only to external force. Why? The secret is that his structures are no more simply collective than Homans' are simply individual. Each theorist's decision about order subsumes and obscures his commitment to action in an instrumental form. What shows the truly presuppositional status of this theoretical strategy is that it has been used to justify the completely opposite kind of one-dimensional thought, namely sociological idealism.

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Durkheim's theory is as paradigmatic for this tradition as Marx's was for materialism. In 1909 Durkheim wrote an essay on the social sciences. What he (1978 [1909]: 75) said was extremely revealing. Until recently, he wrote, thinkers believed that social change was arbitrary and individualistic, that powerful men, like legislators and kings, 'could at their pleasure change the nature of societies, make them change from one type to another.' But such beliefs, Durkheim suggests, are illusory, for social life changes only according to collective not individual forces, and these forces can be understood in terms of immutable 'laws'. This point, of course, could have just as easily come from Marx's pen. It closely resembles, down to the reference to kings, Marx's 1846 attack on Proudhon's theory in The Poverty of Philosophy, Both theorists decry explanations that are individualistic, and both stake their own unique theoretical claims on the fact of their collectivism alone. But, while Marx moved from his critique to the 'obvious' point that kings were ruled not by themselves but by economic forces, for Durkheim the obvious reason for the superiority of collective facts is their moral nature. Perhaps we should examine this strategy in more detail. In contrast with Marx, the deceptive reduction of Durkheim's argument is much less well understood. Durkheim's dualistic theory of human nature equated individualism with egoism and materialism, linking the higher, more altruistic and moral parts of human nature to supra-individual society. Only after he had published Division of Labor in Society•, however, did Durkheim rely exclusively on such a purely normative explanation of social facts. To camouflage the nature of this normative choice — indeed, to hide the fact that a choice has even been made - he argues that the only way to explain the 'social' is to turn to the moral. The theoretical logic is: social theory = society, not individuals; societal = moral, not physical, constraint. This theoretical camouflage allows the conflation of action and order, and it is central for every one of Durkheim's principal works. (1) To justify the exclusively moral emphasis of Suicide, Durkheim (1951 [1897]: 211) argues that social functions, such as economic reproduction, which are 'indispensable for physical life', are forces that 'concern only the individual'. The collective 'bond' that man accepts (ibid.: 252), is 'not physical, but moral; that is, social'. The reason that financial upheavals are crises (ibid.:

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246—9) is not because they are disturbances in the material order. Because the forces exterior to an individual 'can only be moral', financial upheavals create crisis only if they affect moral society. (2) In his revisionist Preface to the second edition of the Division of Labor (1933 [1903]: 5-6), in 1902, Durkheim attacks the ordering power of labour division as follows: To be sure, individuals working at the same trade have relations with one another because of their similar occupation.' But this kind of organization - the cohesion that results from the division of economic labour rests upon physical and material needs, and these relations, Durkheim now concludes, can 'have nothing ordered about them'. (3) In his lectures on professional ethics and civic morals, Durkheim reiterates the same point. Without 'moral discipline,' he argues (1961 [1925]: 141) in his introduction, 'there would be no reason why he [the individual] should not make his way or, at the very least, try to make his way, regardless of everyone in his path'. (4) Durkheim later justifies his sociology of education on precisely the same grounds. Education concerns itself exclusively with morality because morality is the only force that can order individual life. 'To the egoistic and asocial being that has just been born,' Durkheim writes (1956 [1903]: 125), society 'must, as rapidly as possible, add another, capable of leading a social and moral life.' This 'is the work of education'. (5) In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim, 1965 [1911]), the economic life of aboriginal tribes is the prototype of the dispersed, individualistic existence that attenuates the collective energy generated by ritual association. The social life of the aborigines is composed of 'two phases' - the economic, which is profane and non-social, and the ritualistic, which is sacred and social. This fateful dichotomy is already apparent in Durkheim's first essay on religion, 6De la definition des phenomenes religieux\ where he (1899: 25-6) describes profane things as 'quite naked individual impressions'. It reappears even in his philosophical essay on the dualism of human nature, where the profane is identified (1973 [1914]: 160) with 'sensations coming from the physical world' and with 'vulgar things that interest only our physical individualities'. Durkheim's reduction of action to order set the stage, when combined with the language philosophy of Saussure, for the

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emergence of normative structuralism in contemporary anthropology, semiotics, and post-structuralism.2 In these traditions, too, the term 'structure' is designed to deceive as much as to explain. LeviStrauss is no more structural than Marx, nor is Barthes, for that matter, more 'structural' than the later Sartre. The structuralism of Levi-Strauss and Barthes is a form of synchronic idealism. Their conflation of action with order camouflages this normative choice, presenting it as what it is not: as the only possible collective, supraindividual theory rather than as one among many. The other legacy of Durkheim's reduction can be found in Parsons and the contemporary normative tradition he ambivalently sought to sustain. At the heart of The Structure of Social Action there lies a crucial ambiguity: is what Parsons (1937) calls 'radical anti-individualistic positivism' a true alternative to individualistic Utilitarianism, or is it not? Logically, it should be, and Hobbes, Bentham and Marx should be listed among the founders of modern, sociological thought. To some degree, Parsons concurs. He does so because his theory opens up one of the few multidimensional approaches in the history of social thought. In the end, however, Parsons will not have it, often claiming that only normative approaches are real solutions to the problem of order. This, of course, is patently false, as Rex (1961) forcefully demonstrated almost thirty years ago.3 Collectivist theory can be normative or material. In so far as Parsons equates norms with order per se, he does so to preserve the hegemony of idealism. While it is only normative order that allows voluntarism to be maintained, Parsons acknowledges his commitment to voluntarism but does not wish to make it a decisive criteria for theoretical choice. The choice hides itself behind Parsons's equation of norms with order. If this equation were true, then the instrumental tradition of Hobbes, Bentham and Marx could not properly be called sociological. This would be convenient for Parsons; the only real alternative to his own approach would have been forced to leave the scene. Conflating action and order is an attempt to hide the act of theoretical choice. To do so is to present theorizing, the very essence of mind, as a negation of mind itself. This is ironic, but it is also useful. If theoretical choice is eliminated - if materialism or idealism can be made to seem the necessary outcome for any who would choose the collectivist position - then the possibility of counter-argument is permanently overcome.

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It should be clear that this same reduction of action to order permeates the individualistic tradition of social theory as well. Homans (1964) rests his claims for exchange theory - and his attacks on Parsons and Levi-Strauss - on the slogan 'Let us bring men back into sociology, real men, with flesh and blood.' He portrays his theoretical decision, in other words, as having to do simply with matters of order alone: individuals must be recognized, not just supra-individual social order. Yet, once again, this is a hoax. Homans has not simply made decisions about order but also about action. His men have only certain types of blood: type 'E' for egoism and type T for instrumental. They are exchangists. Homans wants to commit us to such an understanding of action without telling us he is doing so; under the guise of maintaining a more individualistic order, he will force his readers to be instrumentalists as well. This obfuscation can be theoretically compelling even while it leaves us without access to the world of ideas and norms. The normative individualistic tradition typically operates in the same way. Herbert Blumer and Harold Garfinkel describe their one-dimensional, idealist approaches not as normative theories but simply as theories which focus on the individual. For Blumer, this is the world of interaction, for Garfinkel (most recently) the realm of individual practice. But of course interaction and practice can also be conducted instrumentally, not simply through the meaningful intentionality that the traditions of symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology uphold. The reduction of action to order is a strategy, an element of theoretical logic that shows, as it were, the secret shame of onedimensional theory. One-dimensional theories do not want to go parading about naked. Rather than presenting themselves for what they are, they try to be deceptively clothed. Why shame instead of pride? Because the more closely we examine the logic of the great corpus of sociological theory, the more clearly it becomes evident that in some part of their minds one-dimensional theorists know they are wrong. If we look hard at the classical statements of idealism and materialism, and at the major idealist and materialist traditions, we see that one-dimensional theory is inherently unstable. It is destined to be denied, even by those who invented it. The thought of its foremost practitioners, not to mention the traditions which

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were treated by each, fairly burst with residual categories. We find, everywhere, unsystematic references to the kind of action and order which these theories ostensibly tried to displace. At certain points in his career, for example, Marx allows that the cost of labour may be affected by national traditions and not just by the cost of reproduction. If taken seriously, this allowance would entirely undermine his wage theory and, eventually, his theory of revolution. In the 18th Brumaire, Marx often makes psychological courage and rational morality decisive, and he sharply separates class interest from class politics. Durkheim, for his part, time and time again uses the normal/pathological distinction to bracket his insistence on norms, acknowledging that the 'sickness' of industrial society allows instrumental motivation and the 'forced' division of labour free reign. If this were true, however, Durkheim's voluntaristic and normative theory would hold good only for some future utopia. Indeed, in many respects the third book of the Division of Labor may as well have been written by Marx. Yet such self-contradiction in the founder's thought pales in comparison to the systematic antagonism toward onedimensional theory that is often betrayed in the traditions they inspired. Under the guise of explication and elaboration, the greatest students of Marx struggled valiantly against key themes in the master's thought (Alexander, 1982: 343-70). Lenin, Gramsci, Mao, Lukacs, Habermas, Sartre - all were deeply affected by idealism and worked furiously to establish some normative foothold in materialism. Their thought veers between the Scylla of indeterminacy, where they unsystematically introduce their voluntarism, and the Charybdis of the last instance, where they touch base with economic determinism. Indeed, it was tngels himself who first sought to undermine Marxism's systematic one-dimensionality. In his letter to Bloch, Engels (1962 [1890]) denied that Marx had sought determinism (the very thing Marx had struggled his whole life to achieve), pointed to the 18th Brumaire (Marx's most ambiguous and unsystematic work) as evidence for this claim, and established the very categories of 'mutual influence' and 'last instance' that would allow idealism to be introduced by later students. At first these followers created the myth of 'vulgar Marxism' to cover their disloyalty, as if they were only refuting the likes of Kautsky and Plekhanov. Later they used Marx's early writings in much the same

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way. Yet these fig-leaves cannot hide the rather embarrassing fact that the history of Marxism is itself a demonstration of the errors of Marx's one-dimensional vision. Such sub rosa but none the less radical revision marks the history of Durkheimianism as well (Alexander, 1982: 306-27). More than ten years after Durkheim himself had forcefully rejected a materialist approach to the relation between morphology and consciousness, his most important student and nephew, Marcel Mauss (1979 [1906]: 34), argued in his famous ethnography of the Eskimos that it was precisely the 'implacable physical laws' of climate which explained Eskimo morphology and, from that, almost everything else about Eskimo life. Mauss concludes (ibid.: 80) that 'social life in all its forms - moral, religious, and legal - is dependent on its material substratum', stressing that everything 'varies with this substratum'. Bougie contradicted Durkheim's idealism in much the same way, implicitly eliding moral density with Marx's emphasis on productive force. 'Social density,' he wrote in Qu'est-ce que la Sociologies (1921 [1907]: 27) 'depends closely on the modes of economic production; one form of collective property tends to augment it, whereas other tend to diminish it.' Halbwachs claimed in his Les Causes du Suicide (1930) that he was merely updating Durkheim's early classic in empirical terms. Actually, he turned it theoretically upside down. His main variable, like Durkheim's, was frequency of interaction, but he used it in a utilitarian rather than a moral way, claiming that it provided 'opportunities for suicide', not moral bonds. To be sure, Durkheim's students were ambivalent. Alongside their effort to embrace materialism, they also engaged in moral theorizing. And they, too, had their intellectual fig-leaf. Just as Marxists could justify idealism by referring to some earlier writings, so could the Durkheimians. They constantly pointed to the materialistic segments of Durkheim's Division of Labor, acknowledging only in their private correspondence that by the late 1890s Durkheim himself had decisively refuted this earlier work. Similar contradictions can be observed in the one-dimensional traditions of individualist thought. Exchange theory fairly bursts at its seams. In the book which initiated its modern form, Homans (1961) devoted an entire chapter to 'justice', explaining it by the peculiar ability that feelings of moral solidarity have to deny the logic of instrumental calculation. Coleman (1966), ostensibly

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trying only to correct Homans's individualism, introduces the normative framework of constitutionalism that implicitly corrects his instrumental perception of action as well. Blau (1964) escapes from rationalism by introducing values as emergent properties, but he would like to insist they are emergent simply from exchange. More recently, social science has been inundated with arguments for indirect exchange and for the importance of institutional and normative compensations for transaction costs, formulations which save the concept of exchange only by drastically changing the instrumental conception of action upon which it rests. This brief essay began from an explicit acknowledgement of the relative autonomy of theoretical from empirical thought and of the relativity of social knowledge that this implies. Its aim has been to demonstrate the possibility of making universalistic and comparatively objective statements within this post-positivist frame. Employing the standards of 'theoretical logic', I have revealed the unconscious strategies of reduction and deceit that permeate sociological theory. I have suggested that one-dimensional thinking reduces the complexity of social life to a single mode and that this reduction is camouflaged by the theorist's claim that questions about action can be reduced to those about order. This claim, I have argued, is deceitful. From the original deceit derives the camouflaged revisions of the followers and from both of these sources some of the most tendentious and contentious disputes in contemporary social thought. If we wish to avoid deceit, we must avoid reduction. If we acknowledge that decisions about order do not close off options about action, we can see more clearly that social theory involves several relatively independent decisions. At the very least, this recognition should force one-dimensional theory to take responsibility for its limited character. It is even possible that the embarrassment of this disclosure will make such simplified thought more difficult to uphold. Social theory must avoid the simplifications of one-dimensional thought. The reduction it entails is unstable. Its deceit is uncomfortable. Social theory should be multidimensional. This is the only way to avoid damaging residual categories and to make followers happy and honest. It is also the only way to understand the true complexity and richness of social life.

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1. In the analyses of Marx and Durkheim which follow, I am drawing directly from my discussions in Alexander (1982). 2. For a discussion of these contemporary approaches as close legacies of Durkheim's later 'religious sociology', see Alexander (1988). 3. Rex dissected Parsons's misleading reduction of the order problem to normative co-ordination and demonstrated in an extremely powerful way the false dichotomy that marred Parsons's formulation. 'Is the problem posed correctly by Parsons in the first place' Rex asks (1961: 102). He answers in the negative:'[Parsons] presents us only with stark alternatives. Either we have social order or we have Hobbes' war of all against all.' Rex (ibid.: 106) shows that, on the grounds Parsons offered himself, 'factual order' could solve the problem of order as well, and criticizes Parsons on the grounds that 'he sets out a range of possibilities but he goes on to develop a particular one of them only.' For a discussion of how Rex clarified these probems, and of how his own solutions led him to adopt conflationary positions of his own, see Alexander (1987: 127-54).

REFERENCES Alexander, Jeffrey, C. (1982) The Antinomies of Classical Thought: Marx and Durkheim (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Alexander, Jeffrey C. (1982-3) Theoretical Logic in Sociology, vols I-IV (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Alexander, Jeffrey C. (1987) Sociological Theory Since World War Two (London: Hutchinson). Alexander, Jeffrey C. (1988) 'Durkheimian Sociology and Cultural Studies Today', Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies (London: Cambridge University Press). Alexander, Jeffrey C. (1990) The Case for General Theory: The "Epistemological Dilemma" and the Search for Present Reason', in Steven Seidman and David Wagner (eds) Postmodernism and Sociological Theory (Oxford: Blackwell). Blau, Peter M. (1960) 'Structural Effects', American Sociological Review 25. Blau, Peter M. (1964) Exchange and Power in Social Life (New York: Free Press).

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Blau, Peter M. (1977) Inequality and Heterogeneity (New York: Free Press). Bougie, Celestin (1921) [1907] Qu'est-ce que la sociologies (Paris: Alcan). Coleman, James (1966) 'Foundations for a Theory of Collective Decisions', American Journal of Sociology 71. Durkheim, Emile (1899) 'De la definition des phenomenes religieux', UAnnee sociologique 2. Durkheim, Emile (1933) [1903] The Division of Labor in Society (2nd edn) (New York: Free Press). Durkheim, Emile (1951) [1897] Suicide (New York: Free Press). Durkheim, Emile (1956) [1903] 'Pedagogy and Sociology', in Durkheim, Education and Sociology (New York: Free Press). Durkheim, Emile (1961) [1925] Moral Education (New York: Free Press). Durkheim, Emile (1965) [1912] The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press). Durkheim, Emile (1973) [1914] The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions', in Robert N. Bellah (ed.) Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press.) Durkheim, Emile (1978) [1909] 'Sociology and the Social Sciences', in Mark Traugott (ed.) Emile Durkheim on Institutional Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Engels, Frederick (1962) [1890] 'Letter to Bloch', in Marx and Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: International Publishers). Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon). Geertz, Clifford (1973) 'Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture', The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books). Halbwachs, Maurice (1930) Les Causes du Suicide (Paris: PUF). Halevy, Elie (1972) [1902-04] The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (Clifton, NJ: Jonathan Kelly). Homans, George C. (1961) Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World). Homans, George C. (1964) 'Bringing Men Back In'. American Sociological Review 29. Latour, Bruno (1987) Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

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Lyotard, Jean-Franqois (1984) The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Marx, Karl (1962) [1859 'Preface to The Critique of Political Economy'] in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. I (Moscow: International Publishers). Marx, Karl (1963) [1847] The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers) Mark, Karl (1974) [1858-9] The Grundrisse (New York: Penguin) Mauss, Marcel (in collaboration with Henri Beuchat) (1979) [1906] Seasonal Variations of the Eskimos: A Study in Social Morphology (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Nagel, T (1986) The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press). Parsons, Talcott (1937) The Structure of Social Action (New York: Free Press). Rex, John (1961) Key Problems of Sociological Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Rorty, Richard (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Skocpol, Theda (1979) States and Social Revolutions (New York: Cambridge University Press). Treiman, Donald (1977) Occupational Prestige in Comparative Perspective (New York: Wiley).

7 THE SIEGE MENTALITY: The Rex-Parsons Debate Revisited1 Leslie Sklair

Of all the areas where the works of John Rex and Talcott Parsons have had an influence, conflict is the one on which Rex has written most, and Parsons least. This might seem predictable when we recall that Parsons's main intellectual concern was supposed to be with the problem of order, but I argue that behind most functionalist (and many anti-functionalist) writers on conflict there lurks the figure of Parsons, whether identified or not, and behind most of the writings of Parsons himself there lurks the spectre of conflict, often in the form of deviance, whether identified as such or not. This essay tries to solve a puzzle generated by the critique of Parsons to be found in the theoretical writings of the foremost proponent of conflict theory, John Rex. Rex's conflict theory, as elaborated in his Key Problems in Sociological Theory (1961) and Social Conflict, twenty years later, can be read as an uncompromising rebuttal of Parsonian functionalism on the grounds that Parsons prioritizes order while Rex prioritizes conflict. For two decades the paradigmatic split between order and conflict conceptions of society dominated sociology. The puzzle is that, for Parsons, as for Merton and other functionalists, order and conflict are both highly problematic, to the extent that, as I shall argue, functionalists can be said to labour under a veritable siege mentality. While Rex himself goes some way to acknowledge this (see, for example, 1981: 45,102) it seems to make no difference to the conflict theory 137

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treatment of Parsons. Conflict theory exposes the doctrinal consequences of Parsonian functionalism, but it leaves (what Alexander has usefully labelled) the theoretical logic unscathed, and perhaps even strengthened. In an historical foray into how deviance theorists challenged functionalism during the period when it was most ideologically potent, I try to show that the professional and political success of the anti-functionalists was not matched by any theoretical advance, paradoxically because the theoretical logic of functionalism had better answers to the questions they were posing than they had themselves. The inability of 'radical sociologists' of all sorts to see what Parsons was really offering closed off some fruitful theoretical lines.2 From this perspective, it is not surprising that various versions of structural Marxism have been 'accused' of being functionalist. This essay implies that the 'accusation' can be turned into a 'commendation'. FUNCTIONALISM AS METHOD, ORDER AND CONFLICT AS PROBLEMATIC In 1895 Durkheim wrote in his Rules of Sociological Method that crime 'is a factor in public health, an integral part of all healthy societies' (1938: 67). In short, crime (and we can say the same for deviance and conflict of all types) is functional for society - albeit in amounts that neither exceed nor fall below by very much what is required for social evolution to take place. From this bold statement a great deal follows, and almost a century after it was made we are still trying to grapple with its consequences. For present purposes let us content ourselves with a fairly dogmatic recitation of the main tenets of sociological functionalism. These are as follows. Each society is a system, it consists of sub-systems, and is itself usually part of a larger set of systems. All systems have needs, and when these needs are satisfied, the system trundles along; when they are not satisfied, the system experiences strains and eventually breaks down completely. In order to satisfy needs, social systems develop social structures (or institutions). The point of these institutions is that they permit system needs to be satisfied in patterned, regular, and expected ways, and they do this by motivating the people who occupy the roles and statuses that make up the institutions. Therefore, the

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existence and persistence of social phenomena are explained through the consequences of the phenomena for the system within which they occur. However, as is well known, some social phenomena seem not to be satisfying any needs of the systems within which they operate; they seem to be contributing to the breakdown rather than the maintenance of the system. Deviant behaviour, and the conflict it produces, are how these phenomena are usually described. Albert Cohen defines deviant behaviour as behaviour 'which violates institutionalized expectations - that is, expectations which are shared and recognised as legitimate within a social system' (Cohen, 1965: 462). Anything which violates these 'institutionalized expectations' (which are transmitted through the processes of socialization) therefore, is to be considered as deviance and a cause of conflict from the functionalist point of view. There are three main types of relationships between deviant behaviour and the needs of social systems. What at first sight may appear to be totally destructive or dysfunctional may, on closer study, appear otherwise. This possibility was developed by Merton (1957a: ch. 1) into his famous distinction between manifest and latent functions. The study of the latter, the unintended and/or unrecognized consequences of social action, informs us that some of what we thought to be destructive to social systems, in fact contributes critically to their persistence. Thus, Durkheim analysed the functions of crime, Merton analysed the functions of the Boss system in American politics, and 'priority disputes' in science (Merton, 1957b), Coser elucidated the functions of social conflict (1956), and so on. The general theme of this type of analysis is that social systems so clearly tend to states of equilibrium that even disturbances play their part, latently or indirectly, to maintain the essential features of the system and to ensure its persistence. From this perspective, deviance may be seen, as it were, positively on occasion, not as an entirely negative social phenomenon to be mindlessly eradicated. Deviance and conflict, like crime in Durkheim's analysis, may fulfil latent functions. This suggests a second aspect of the place of apparent disturbances in social systems. In certain circumstances, within social systems, it is sometimes the case that the satisfaction of one need is incompatible with the satisfaction of another need. This most

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commonly happens when scarcity of resources forces a choice between the satisfaction of one or another need. Expanding the notion of resources, we can conceive of situations in which it is impossible to fulfil both of two expectations, each of which we recognize to be equally as legitimate as the other. Deviant behaviour and conflict must ensue, whether we do nothing, fulfil one expectation successfully, or try to fulfil both unsuccessfully. Functionalists (and others) speak about 'incompatible or contradictory role demands' to describe this, and they have devoted much attention to the effects of such role conflicts on the key institutions in society. The analysis of deviance generated by role conflicts leads us into the third type of relationship. The fact that people act in a multiplicity of social systems (or sub-systems) makes it likely that the demands of one sub-system might clash with the demands of another. This establishes a crucial point about functionalist method which is often overlooked: it is absolutely essential that the study of any empirical case specifies clearly the system or sub-system to which the analysis pertains. Neither functions nor dysfunctions, conformity nor deviance, order nor conflict, needs nor expectations, have much theoretical use in practice save when they are located in their systemic contexts. The recognition of this, and the stimulant of research into the structure of strategic sub-systems, led to the development of 'subcultural theory' (Cohen, 1955; Cloward and Ohlin, 1960; Downes, 1966). The basic premiss of this theory is that there are stable and organized social sub-systems, some gangs for example, whose behaviour might violate the institutionalized expectations of those outside, but which does not violate the shared and legitimated expectations of the members. From the point of view of the gang members, therefore, the deviants are the outsiders, and the needs of the sub-system, the gang (or other subculture), can be satisfied only by deviance from the expectations of those in other subsystems, and conflict must result. A brief look at a typical example of the functionalist approach to deviance and conflict shows how the theory works in practice. Merton's theory of anomie (1957a: chs IV and V) is particularly apt because it illustrates the fruitfulness of functionalist method and the severe limitations of functionalist doctrine.

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GOALS, MEANS AND DEVIANCE Merton's theory is beautifully simple in its outline. Societies have cultural goals and there are institutionalized means for the achievement of these goals. People can adapt to this situation of given goals and means in one offiveways. Conformity implies acceptance of goals and means, and this mode of individual adaptation 'is the most common and widely diffused. Were this not so, the stability and continuity of the society could not be maintained' (1957: 141). I shall merely note that the sources of this conformity are not clearly accounted for. The other four adaptations are deviant. These are innovation (acceptance of goals and rejection of means); ritualism (rejection of goals and acceptance of means); retreatism (rejection of both); and rebellion (rejection of both and substitution of new goals and means). It is Merton's 'central hypothesis that aberrant behaviour may be regarded sociologically as a symptom of dissociation between culturally prescribed aspirations and socially structured avenues for realizing these aspirations' (ibid.: 134). In The Social System Parsons had argued that the tendency to deviate is 'conditioned by the objective opportunities provided in the social system, in the structuring of which the "loopholes" in the system of social control are particularly important' (Parsons, 1951: 321). Cloward and Ohlin had followed this lead in their study of delinquent gangs and injected the notion of opportunity structures into the theory of anomie. Through this they provided a lever on the relations between conventional and deviant systems, on the one hand, and the likelihood of conformity and deviance on the other. For some people there are internalized prohibitions which restrict the use of illegitimate means, for others - those who would be deviant if the opportunity arose - there are socially structured barriers. In this way the outcomes of the original contradiction between goals and means may be more finely traced out. The role of opportunity structures in the theory was developed by Albert Cohen (1969), who focused on four ways in which the opportunity structure responds to deviance. Both legitimate and illegitimate opportunities may be opened up or closed off. Cohen's contribution may be viewed as a bridge between the functionalist method and the interactionist doctrine, and this shows up clearly

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in his criticism of what he calls Merton's 'assumption of discontinuity' between the norm and the deviant. As this exposes an important theoretical weakness of Merton's original statement and also draws attention to the intrusion of the functionalist doctrine into the debate, I shall treat its implications in a little more detail. The functionalist approach to deviance identifies (a) the source of its production in the difficulties that may be encountered by social actors in fulfilling the needs of the systems in which they act; and (b) the rates (rather than the incidence) of deviant behaviour in the particular modes of adaptations to the socially induced strains peculiar to specific groups in society. So 'socially deviant behaviour [is] just as much a product of social structure as conformist behaviour' (Merton, 1957a: 121). This was aptly described by Matza (1969: 31ff) as a variant of the 'appreciation perspective' (as opposed to the 'correction perspective'). But the appreciative or sympathetic approach is only one aspect of the functionalist view, perhaps less important than the more general, philosophical point that Merton himself makes in introducing his theory of deviance. Functionalism is anti-anarchist.3 In anarchism (benevolent or malevolent), Merton says: The social structure is seen as an evil necessity, first springing from and later restraining the free expression of hostile impulses. In contrast to such anarchistic doctrines, functional analysis conceives of the social structure as active, producing fresh motivations which cannot be predicted on the basis of knowledge about man's native drives. If the social structure restrains some dispositions to act, it creates others. (Merton, 1957a: 121). This statment introduces into the discussion, almost by default (as one might expect from the trend of the functionalist method and its assumptions) the idea that represents the bete noire of the sociological anarchist — the necessity for social control. The social structure not only produces strains which will create deviant behaviour and conflict, but also produces restraints which operate to prevent them, or to minimize their most harmful consequences if they should occur. These restraints are called 'the mechanisms of social control'.

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SOCIAL CONTROL AND THE SIEGE MENTALITY Talcott Parsons, in his magisterial The Social System (1951), gives the authoritative functionalist account of social control and its relationship to deviance and conflict. For Parsons, deviance and conflict are inevitable and mechanical in the social systems, not so much because they may have positive functions (as Durkheim and Merton argue), but more because they are inherent in the nature of social interaction in complex social systems. Thus: 'People under strain are . . . expected to deviate in some ways and to some extent' (Parsons, 1951: 300). This can only be because deviance operates as a re-equilibrating device, to restore the system unbalanced by the strain to its former state of equilibrium or to bring it to a new stable state. Nevertheless, deviance can operate like this only where it is kept firmly under control; the amount of deviant behaviour tolerated (as it were) should match the strain involved. Tired children and tired businessmen, for example, are both permitted a certain amount of leeway. Parsons illustrates this insightfully in his discussion of the sick role. All of this refers to everyday experience. There is a fine and perpetually ongoing balance to be maintained and restored between deviance and conformity, conflict and order. The most fundamental mechanisms of social control are to be found in the normal processes of interaction in an institutionally integrated social system' (ibid.: 301). Therefore, all the way from 'normal processes of interaction' to the creation of the police, courts of law, the army, God, super-ego, posterity and so on, mechanisms of social control play their part to defend the integrity of the social system, to permit accommodation to change, and even (on occasion) to ensure the success of inevitable revolutions in human affairs. The Parsonian theory of social control, notwithstanding the imputed normalcy of the processes involved, demonstrates most completely the strength of the theoretical logic and what I shall label the siege mentality of the functionalist doctrine. The siege mentality entails the view that social systems are always potentially vulnerable to attack, no less from inside than from outside. Approval and reward for behaviour which supports the system, disapproval and punishment for behaviour which threatens it, must be maintained to ensure the persistence of the system; adaptation and change of system properties must be

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possible where the defiance proves to be too strong for the system to resist; accommodation where neither the system nor the deviance is clearly more powerful - the siege of Troy is reputed to have lasted ten years. But sieges imply stable territory to be defended and identifiable enemies to take aggressive action. What, then, is the stable territory of functionalism? It clearly does not have one, by virtue of its key methodological dictum (as here stated by Parsons in his chapter on 'Deviant Behaviour and the Mechanisms of Social Control') - 'It is therefore not possible to make a judgement of deviance or lack of it without specific reference to the system or sub-system to which it applies' (ibid.: 251). To which system do the judgements of deviance implicit in the siege mentality apply? To answer this question we must totter on the great divide which separates the theoretical logic of functionalism (or, more loosely, functionalist method) from functionalist doctrine; and it is sobering to reflect that the rock on which the good ship begins to flounder (if I may be excused a mix of metaphors) is marked relativism. Merton and Parsons both violate the methodological norm of functionalism, system specificity, but in somewhat different way$. Merton, by stipulating that the opposition between cultural goals and institutional means might provoke deviant responses in people unable to live up to either or both, is not speaking of any old goals or means. As has often been pointed out, Merton is really speaking about how a dominant system (in this case, middle-class, white, America) defines its goals and means not only for itself but for the whole society - all the other systems and sub-systems. As I pointed out above, the development of 'subcultural theory' was a recognition of the fact that Merton was often rather ambiguous about the system in question, sometimes suggesting that it was in fact the whole society he was referring to, at other times suggesting that it was the less inclusive system of middle-class, white, America. If the former, then it was patently not the case that the goals and means he identified held for every system and sub-system in the total society; if the latter, then the theory can cover only those who were part of the system in the first place - you cannot deviate from goals and means pertaining to a social system within which you have no part, on the functionalist definition. Parsons's violation is somewhat more systematic, deriving from theoretical demands rather than, as in Merton's case, an ad hoc

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problem. Given his avowed aim to found a general theory of action for the social sciences, Parsons is always on the lookout for general features of social action and interaction. The most important of these is that: 'All social action is normatively oriented, and that the value-orientations embodied in these norms must to a degree be common to the actors in an institutionally integrated interactive system' (1951: 251). This is not all. Parsons goes on to say: 'Probably a stable interactive relationship without common valuepatterns is not empirically possible' (261). This is consensus theory (the key element in functionalist doctrine) with a vengeance, but it is not a logical consequence of Parsonian functionalism. For Parsons, the reference point against which we measure deviance is the social system, the skeleton of society as a whole, normatively integrated, consensual on the basic, common values. All systems, as it were, are crucially tied in with the big system which makes society possible. Thus, as Parsons (1951: 319-20) argues: Without deliberate planning on anyone's part there have developed in our type of social system, and correspondingly in others, mechanisms which, within limits, are capable of forestalling and reversing the deep-lying tendencies for deviance to get into the vicious circle phase which puts it beyond the control of ordinary approval-disapproval and reward-punishment sanctions . . . there are, in fact, important unplanned mechanisms in the social system which in a sense 'match' the inherent tendencies to socially structured deviance. The method and the doctrine at this point merge, for the location of the standard to which people conform and from which they deviate - 'our type of social system' - solves the problem of relativism which so bedevils all theories of deviance. Functionalist method indicates not that there can be no necessary solution to the problem of standards, but that the solution will be an empirical one. The functionalist doctrine, on the other hand, in the form of consensus theory, stipulates the solution a priori. For the former, deviance is a system-specific problem, and each social system or sub-system legislates for itself, each operates on its own terms, and some survive while others fail to survive. The phenomenon of interlocking systems makes the situation more complicated, but raises no special theoretical problems. As long as system needs

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were, more or less, being satisfied, disturbances could be tolerated. Where system needs were not being satisfied due to the predominance of deviant behaviour, then the resulting conflicts were a matter for empirical investigation. Something like the pluralist theory of political systems emerges from this analysis. Sometimes one group is stronger, sometimes another, sometimes yet another, sometimes none prevails and a balance is reached. In Rex's version in Key Problems, the outcomes are the ruling class situation, the truce situation, and the revolutionary situation. So it is with deviance — systems tend to operate to satisfy their own needs and interests. Where systems are forced into competition and one prevails then the others must accept the definitions of, for example, the goals and the means of the predominant system. In a similar fashion, the behaviour of individuals within systems is rendered deviant or conformist by the standards set. It is not part of the theoretical logic of functionalism that all individuals have equal parts in the creation of the norms and values which determine the parameters of the systems in which they act. The functionalist method, therefore, seeks to solve the problem of relativism by what might be termed 'competition for the definitions and enforcement of dominant standards'. Who wins the competition, and indeed whether there is a winner at any particular time, are open questions. For functionalist doctrine - in its weak form, the Mertonian anomie theory or in its strong form, the Parsonian consensus theory - it is otherwise. In order that society as a whole might survive, certain overarching values and norms are necessary. The functionalist theory of stratification is the best example of this. In a typical overstatement, the doctrine asserts that differential rewards are inevitable in the social system, while proving, at best, that role differentiation is inevitable in some social systems.4 The assumption is the integrationist consensus notion that social life is not possible unless people actually do agree on essentials, and are prepared to support sanctions against those who break the basic rules. The callousness (or bastardized value-neutrality) of the functionalist doctrine emerges here in what could be termed 'the sacrificial integrative function' of the deviants for the social systems they are unfortunate enough to disturb. This is clearly the implication of Dentler and Erikson (1959). The deviant, they argue, helps to give

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a 'shape' to a group, acts as a live, permanent experiment testing out the boundaries of group tolerance. Erikson's study on the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay in the seventeenth century, is even more explicit: 'Deviant persons often supply an important service to society by patrolling the outer edges of group space and by providing a contrast which gives the rest of the community some sense of their own territorial identity' (Erikson, 1966: 196). Deviant persons also get hunted down, tortured, murdered and judicially executed. Some crime, we recall from Durkheim's analysis, is necessary for the healthy society, as is the punishment which facilitates social cohesion. The fallacy of functionalist doctrine, as conflict theorists have amply demonstrated, is to confuse conformity with consensus, to mistake common values for the commands of the powerful, and to underplay the costs of deviance. Deviance is the violation of institutionalized expectations, but in most societies some of the most fundamental 'common values' turn out to be the expectations of specific, concrete groups protecting their privileges. It is quite possible to have a relatively stable society where this is the case. Parsons adopts the correct doctrinal position for a bourgeois ideologist when he deals with deviance through the siege mentality. But there is nothing in functionalist logic to suggest that there has to be value consensus in all surviving societies, though conformity to basic system goals (in order to make the fulfilment of system needs possible) is mandatory. Consensus is, therefore, contingent on the form of organization prevailing in a social system; the other main source of conformity is, of course, violence in one of its many guises. Between violence and consensus there are many types of persuasion, for example, 'false consciousness'. What is lacking in the doctrinal thesis of basic system goals, and what renders it quite inferior to Marxist theories of hegemony, is a concept of interests, particularly class interests. In a system genuinely based on consensus, conformity to basic system goals would clearly be unobjectionable and probably very simple to implement. But when privileged minorities try to impose their definitions of goals, means and needs on majorities, conformity becomes objectionable on moral grounds, and complicated rationales have to be constructed to justify its imposition.5 This view implies that in genuinely consensual systems minorities will count for less than majorities where conflicts arise, an anti-anarchist implication of

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the logic of functionalism. Optimistic radicals, for example, predict that under democratic socialism these conflicts will rarely arise, while reactionaries and anarchists expect them to arise all too often (for widely disparate reasons).6 The siege mentality, therefore, is only politic, for any social conformity not based on consensus will always tend to break down, deviance and conflict will always be imminent. The power to create deviance and to punish it, like the power to create conformity and to reward it, rests with some social groups rather than others, and with some strategically located individuals rather than others. The strains that motivate deviance, like the controls that structure conformity, are consequences of the distribution of resources and power in social systems. Functionalist logic suggests this and leaves us to investigate empirically. Functionalist doctrine dictates that only societies where conformity is guaranteed by agreement of the vast majority of those concerned, will survive. In the very long run - and for entirely the wrong reasons - it may be right. Parsons asks the same question as Hobbes - How do we solve the problem of order? - and reaches a not dissimilar conclusion: people make (or act as if they had made) a social contract, without looking at the small print of the contract, and they are encouraged to speculate continually on the dire consequences of violating its precepts or, worse, giving it up altogether. But both had the siege mentality, both could not help but see that social order was a real problem only for those with privileges to defend, and both feared the consequences of challenging these privileges. The functionalist approach to conflict and deviance, in its doctrinal form, is a special, though critical, case of this general position. Stinchcombe, more than twenty years ago, put his finger on the problem when he said (in words somewhat echoed by Rex in 1981) that the 'conservative cast of functional theory ['the doctrine'] is not logically necessary, but it is an inherent rhetorical opportunity. . . . This selective affinity between functional explanations and conservative social thought often involves sloppy functionalism' (Stinchcombe, 1968: 91). This guilt by association has had a soporific rather than a stimulant effect on sociology. This is not to say that sociologists have stopped (or could stop) using functionalist method, but that it is no longer an issue (recognized or by default) for them. The doctrine then, has dragged the method into

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the sociological dustbin and the putative resuscitation of Parsons through 'neo-functionalism' in the 1980s,7 may not be sufficient to save it from a doctrine-induced terminal decline. The main reason for this, I think, is that functionalism has never satisfactorily answered the key questions that radical sociologies and, in particular the work of John Rex, posed so effectively in the 1960s and continue to pose today: Which expectations become legitimized? How does the process of legitimation (or institutionalization) work? These are, of course, key questions that have not been adequately solved by conflict theory either (or by any other sociological tendency, for that matter).8 WHO BENEFITS AND WHO GETS HURT? Stinchcombe's view, which I share, that functionalist method does not entail, but often provokes and bolsters conservative thought leads us to the politics of the functionalist approach to order, deviance and conflict. It is easy to take the step from the method to the doctrinal support of the status quo. The main political implication of functionalism for deviance and conflict, however, is the role (or lack of a role) of power and interests. The exercise of power, though not entirely neglected, plays a relatively minor part in functionalist explanations. Matza, in his discussion of Tunctionalism and Pathology' (1969: 53-62) argues that the functionalists were more concerned with the latent functions of deviance than with the more manifest dysfunctions. If we are to see the whole picture, we must ask not only 'Who benefits?' but also 'Who gets hurt?' Merton's analysis (1957a: 72-83) of the functions of the political machine (and the rackets), makes little mention of who pays. As Matza says, 'The machine was a pretty good racket that, if anything, exploited the vast majority of the ethnic poor along with the more fortunate good citizens to provide windfall assistance, gains, and mobility for a favored few . . . Merton's moral innocence was too limited' (Matza, 1969: 61-2). The functionalist doctrine is one of value consensus - social systems are held together by common consent over fundamental values. Conflict and deviance are checked for the most part by social control which is inherent in the 'normal processes of

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interaction in integrated systems'. Power, then, in the form of force rather than in the form of 'normal' social controls, is marginal and to be called upon only in emergencies. Most deviance (or a large part of some forms of it) is generated through structural strains and/or problems of socialization, and so is responsive to structural mechanisms itself. The notion of social systems held together by force, in which fear of reprisals (however masked), and not consensus over values, motivates conformity, is foreign to functionalist doctrine. Systems so organized could not survive. The doctrine may be right in the long term, but for the wrong reasons. It is hardly worth arguing, so obvious does it appear, that social systems based on force rather than consensus have existed and do exist. The rhetoric that the doctrine is the only alternative to anarchy (as theory and as practice) precisely confuses consensus with conformity. Power, then, is systematically underplayed because the siege mentality, paradoxically, is always reinforced by a dogmatic belief in the internal strength of the fortress. Concentration on latent functions gives the impression (not always false) that the besiegers are really performing valuable (in the extreme form - essential) functions for the besieged. Thus, conflict and deviance become a vehicle of social change and the distinction between counter-cultures and subcultures becomes arbitrary (or provisional). What is blurred tends to be the system-specificity, and the logic degenerates easily into the doctrine. Functionalist method directs our attention to the structured satisfaction of system needs; it invites us to look at the consequences of such processes for the maintenance or otherwise of social systems. There is no built-in demand that system-integration or conformity have to be accomplished this way or that, consensually or through brute force. The doctrinal hypothesis (or assumption) that in the long run consensus works better for all than brute force, would probably be shared in any case by most sociologists, functionalists, anti-functionalists, and non-functionalists alike. CONCLUSION My purpose here has been abstract rather than substantive. In defending the theoretical logic of functionalism I wish to assert no more than that it points researchers to areas of interest and that it

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provides some basic tools which enable them to formulate explanations for the things they find problematic. No doubt the method does influence both what will be considered problematic and what will be considered to be a proper explanation. But this is a characteristic of methods in general and not functionalism in particular. In discussing the doctrine I have tried to show where it has erred, and here we can discern the malevolence of the functionalist doctrine in particular, and not doctrines in general. Some doctrines, after all, are more sociologically convincing than others.

NOTES 1. This paper owes a great deal to John Rex's courses at Leeds in 1961 and 1962 and to his open-minded and stimulating teaching for the unusually argumentative group of students that it was my good fortune to belong to. 2. Several writers have suggested something like this. For an early, if crude statement see Sklair (1977). More recently, the essays in Alexander (1985) where 'virtually every contributor pushes functionalism to the left' (1985: 14) and Alexander's own (1987) work which develops the idea in a variety of ways. 3. It is gratuitous to speculate that the anti-anarchism of functionalism was a contributory cause (realized or unrealized, conscious or subconscious) of (a) the opposition of the '1968' generation of Young Turks of Anglo-American and Continental sociology to anything that was remotely connected with functionalism, and (b) the widely broadcast information that Soviet sociologists found much of interest in functionalism in general and Talcott Parsons in particular. 4. Ironically, for an interesting recent discussion of some of the basic principles of the 'functionalist theory of stratification' see 'Forum on DATW [distribution according to work] in a Socialist Commodity Economy', Social Sciences in China (March 1989: 9-19). 5. As I argue in the context of the culture-ideology of consumerism in the capitalist global system (Sklair, 1990). 6. The level and extent of mandatory conformity in any social system depends on a variety of factors. Marcuse's (1969) distinction between basic and surplus repression still provides, in my view, the most promising approach to this important and neglected topic. 7. I refer here to the attempts in Alexander's four volume study of sociological theory (1982-3) and his edited volume (Alexander, 1985); and Holton and Turner (1986), among others, to revitalize Parsonian theory. These theorists claim to be creating a new sociological paradigm, but it is clearly based to some extent on Parsons. 8. It is significant that perhaps the most important attempt to engage

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these problems, by Habermas (especially 1975), was rather more influenced by Parsons than at first sight appeared to be the case.

REFERENCES Alexander, Jeffrey C. (1982—3) Theoretical Logic in Sociology (4 vols) (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Alexander, Jeffrey C. (1985) Sociological Theory since 1945 (London: Hutchinson). Alexander, Jeffrey C. (ed.) (1985) Neofunctionalism (Beverley Hills: Sage). Cloward, Richard A. and Ohlin, Lloyd E. (1960) Delinquency and Opportunity (Glencoe: Free Press). Cohen, Albert (1955) Delinquent Boys: The Culture of a Gang (Glencoe: Free Press). Cohen, Albert (1965) 'Social Disorganization and Deviant Behavior', in R. Merton et al. (eds) Sociology Today (New York: Harper). Cohen, Albert (1969) The Sociology of the Deviant Act: Anomie Theory and Beyond', in D. Cressey and D. Ward (eds) Delinquency, Crime, and Social Process (New York, Harper & Row). Coser, Lewis (1956) The Functions of Social Conflict (Glencoe: Free Press). Dentler, Robert and Erikson, Kai (1959) 'The Functions of Deviance in Groups,' Social Problems 7. Downes, David (1966) The Delinquent Solution (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Durkheim, Emile (1938) The Rules of Sociological Method (Glencoe: Free Press). Erikson, Kai (1966) Wayward Puritans (New York: Wiley). Habermas, J. (1975) Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon). Holton, R. J. and Turner, Bryan (1986), Talcott Parsons on Economy and Society (London: Routledge). Marcuse, Herbert (1969) Eros and Civilization (London: Sphere). Matza, David (1969) Becoming Deviant (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall). Merton, Robert (1957a) Social Theory and Social Structure (revised and enlarged edn) (Glencoe: Free Press). Merton, Robert (1957b) 'Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A

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Chapter in the Sociology of Science', American Sociological Review 22. Parsons, Talcott (1951) The Social System (Glencoe: Free Press). Rex, John (1961) Key Problems in Sociological Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Rex, John (1981) Social Conflict: A Conceptual and Theoretical Analysis (London: Longman). Sklair, L. (1977) 'Ideology and the Sociological Utopias', Sociological Review 25 Sklair, L. (1991) Sociology of the Global System (London: Harvester). Stinchcombe, Arthur (1968) Constructing Social Theories (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World).

8 TAKING TIME TO LINK STRUCTURE AND AGENCY Margaret S. Archer

If I had not met John Rex while still at school, I would never have become a sociologist: such was his contagious enthusiasm for a discipline which was never mentioned in my type of secondary schooling. I hope that the kind of sociologist I did become is one for which he does not want to disavow any responsibility. However, there is one crucial point on which I believe John views my efforts to develop the 'morphogenetic approach' with some reservations - reservations centring upon the dangers of reification which he suspects lurk in my treatment of emergent structural, cultural and agential properties. This essay in his honour is therefore an attempt to convince him both that reification is avoidable and also that the acknowledgement of emergence is indispensible to social theory. I may fail to persuade him, for our dialogue has already stretched over thirty years, but if so disagreement will serve to prolong it - which is why the importance of time seemed particularly appropriate as the topic of this essay. The 'problem of structure and agency' is now a familiar phrase used to denote central dilemmas in social theory - especially the rival claims of voluntarism versus determinism, subjectivism versus objectivism, and the micro- versus the macro-scopic in sociology. These issues are central for the simple reason that it is impossible to do sociology at all without dealing with them and coming to some personal decisions about them. When writing they affect the 154

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statements that we advance, and when reading they affect the sentences that we can accept. These issues are problematic for any social theorist who cannot come down with conviction on one side or the other; and that means a great many of us, each of whom is then of necessity in the job of reconciliation. Imperative as this is, the urgency of the 'problem of structure and agency' is not one which imposes itself upon academics alone, but on every human being. For it is part and parcel of daily experience to feel both free and enchained, capable of shaping our own future and yet confronted by towering, seemingly impersonal, constraints. Those whose reflection leads them to reject the grandiose delusion of being puppet-masters but also to resist the supine conclusion that they are mere marionettes, then, have the same task of reconciling this experiential bivalance, and must do so if their moral choice is not to become inert or their political action ineffectual. Consequently in facing up to the 'problem of structure and agency' social theorists are not just addressing crucial technical problems in the study of society, they are also confronting the most pressing social problem of the human condition. The way in which this problem is examined here rests first upon an assertion and second upon an argument, both of which will be outlined immediately. The assertion is that what we are seeking is a theoretical stance which is capable of linking structure and agency rather than sinking one into the other. The argument is that structure and agency can only be linked by examining the interplay between them over time. Taken together these involve a particular way of seeing the problem and a conviction that its solution depends upon certain conditions being met. However, all of this needs unpacking in order to draw progressively closer to the heart of the argument, namely that without the proper incorporation of time the problem of structure and agency can never be satisfactorily resolved. From the outset let it be clear that when discussing 'structure' and 'agency' I am talking about a relationship between two aspects of social life which, however intimately they are intertwined (as in our individual experiences of, say, marriage), are none the less analytically distinct. Few would disagree with this characterization of social reality as Janus-faced: indeed too many have concluded too quickly that the task is therefore how to look at both faces of

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the same medallion at once. It is precisely this methodological notion of trying to peer at the two simultaneously which is resisted here, for the basic reason that they are not co-existent through time. For in addition to being analytically distinguishable, given 'structures' and given 'agents' occupy and operate over different tracts of the time dimension and therefore are also empirically distinguishable. Thus, for example, a particular marital structure predates our contemporary constitution as married social subjects which is an entirely different point from the perfectly compatible statements that previous actors through their prior social practices themselves constituted the institution of marriage earlier in history (since this refers to agents long dead), or that our present actions as married subjects are contributing to the transformation of this institution at some future time (since this refers to distant restructuring). Consequently our very definition of the 'problem of structure and agency' is predicated upon analytical dualism, which is not the same thing as philosophical dualism because there is no suggestion that we are dealing with separate entities, only separable ones; but nonetheless this predicate does not command universal assent. In itself it requires justification. This is not the place for a lengthy vindication of analytical dualism, but it can be briefly commended by reference to the usefulness of the distinction Lockwood (1964) made between 'social integration' and 'system integration'. By making it, he was claiming that it was both possible and profitable to separate out the two analytically, that is, to distinguish the orderly or conflictual relations maintaining between groups of actors from the orderly or conflictual relations prevailing between parts of the social structure. The point of the exercise was so as to theorize about the interplay between the two, which in turn gave more explanatory purchase upon social stability and change than did theories based on one of them alone (such as conflict theory exclusively concerned with agency relations and the extent of group antagonism, or normative functionalism preoccupied with structural relations and the nature of systemic interdependencies). What is of particular significance here is Lockwood's awareness that the distinction between 'social' and 'system' integration is more than a methodological artifice when temporality is taken into account. Thus he states that '[TJhough definitely linked, these two

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aspects of integration are not only analytically separable, but also, because of the time element involved, factually distinguishable' (1964: 250, my italics). Equally, in using the distinction for explanatory purposes Lockwood relies completely upon the independent variation of the two aspects in time. Thus when examining his key Marxist example he stresses that 'it is perfectly possible, according to this theory, to say that at any particular point of time a society has a high degree of social integration (e.g. relative absence of class conflict) and yet has a low degree of system integration (mounting excess productive capacity' (ibid, my italics). Indeed the generic explanation of stability and change which he puts forward rests upon the historical coincidence or disjunction between the properties of structure and those of agency. Since empirically the two are not held to be temporally co-variant, then examination of their variable historical combinations can become a new source of explanatory power. Thus I am arguing for the necessity of analytical dualism, for keeping structure and agency separate because they are not coexistent in time, precisely in order that one can examine their interplay over time. There are difficulties of course in distinguishing adequately between 'parts' and 'people', but these are methodological ones and not matters of philosophical intractability. The obverse of this theoretical stance is what I have termed the Fallacy of Conflation since the basic defect of any theory which embodies it is that structure and agency are elided. Later on I shall try to demonstrate that such an elision fundamentally precludes an adequate account of social stability and change. The reason for this is that such theories entail a truncation of the time-span which comes or can come under their purview. Time referents are always too short, whether it is that too much of time past or time future (or both) are excluded. In brief, the Fallacy of Conflation always entails a failure to incorporate temporality into social theory properly. This it seems is a logical consequence of elision itself. However, a little more needs to be said about the different forms of conflationary theorizing in order to put some meat on the bare bones of the argument. Conflation of the two levels of analysis of the properties of structures with the activities of social groups always takes place in a particular direction. There are three possibilities and two of these are the antithesis of each other since conflation takes place in precisely the opposite direction: in the

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one, social structure is held to organize social interaction while in the other, inter-personal interaction is presented as orchestrating the structure of society. Thus in what can be called the 'downwards' version, structural properties engulf agency through the basic processes of regulation and socialization, while in what will be termed the 'upwards' version, social interaction forms and transforms structures whose properties are merely the resultants of domination or objectification. In brief, both versions treat one level as an epiphenomenon of the other level: they differ about which of the levels is held to be epiphenomenal but not about the legitimacy of elision per se. However, epiphenomenalism is not the only way in which the more general process of conflation operates. There remains the third possibility, namely that of 'central' conflation, where the two levels are held to be inseparable because they mutually constitute one another, a view which is enjoying considerable vitality in sociology at the moment. In both the 'upwards' and 'downwards' versions, the fundamental drawback is that by making agency dependent upon structure, or vice versa, they automatically preclude any two-way interplay between the levels — because in each, one level is rendered inert. Consequently the dependent aspect is robbed of the capacity to exploit or to influence the determining aspect, for it lacks the autonomy or independence to do so. This then blocks an adequate conceptualization of the processes explaining social stability and change. Instead adherents of both approaches advance rather crude unilateral accounts, which have equal but opposite defects. In the one, structural properties are simply pushed around by some untrammelled dominant group or placed at the mercy of capricious renegotiation by unconstrained agency. In the other, social structure imposes its choreography on interaction, and agents are reduced to Trdger or bearers of its properties, whether through oversocialization or mystification. If, as my initial assertion maintained, an adequate theoretical stance is one which acknowledges the interplay between structure and agency, then this is predicated upon some autonomy or independence being assigned to each. However, the errors attaching to conflation do not depend upon epiphenomenalism, on rendering one aspect of social life itself lifeless. Epiphenomenalism is not the only way in which either structure or agency are deprived of autonomy and thus their

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interplay is denied, for any form of conflation has the same two consequences. In other words, conflation is the more basic fallacy, and epiphenomenalism is merely a form it can take, or rather two particular cases of it. This is demonstrated by the remaining possibility - namely, 'central' conflation, where elision occurs in the 'middle'. This directional approach, which enjoys a certain vogue at the moment as 'structuration theory', interprets neither structure nor agency as epiphenomena of each other. Indeed this is a prime article of faith amongst modern proponents of 'central' conflationism. Instead what happens is that autonomy is withheld from both levels and this has exactly the same result of precluding any examination of their interplay. Here structural properties and social interaction are conflated because they are presented as being so tightly constitutive of one another. Unlike everyday terms which involve mutual constitution, such as 'riding' (where horse and rider have separate properties, some of which are irrelevant to the practice - horse's colour or rider's colour - and some of whose interplay is vital to it - horse's size and rider's weight), in central conflation the intimacy of reciprocal constitution amounts to an actual elision of the two elements which cannot be untied and hence their influences upon each other cannot be teased out. In contradistinction to every version of conflation in social theory is the morphogenetic approach which stands foursquare on analytical dualism (Archer, 1979, 1988, 1990). It is an umbrellalike perspective which subsumes more specific formulations, such as exchange theory (Blau, 1964), and much of general systems theory (Buckley, 1967). In the present context, its distinctive feature is that it works in terms of three-phase historical cycles made up of: structural conditioning ^ social interaction ^ structural elaboration. By definition, then, the morphogenetic perspective accords full significance to the time-scale through which structure and agency themselves emerge, intertwine and redefine one another, since this is the very format employed in the analysis of any problem. However, before comparing conflationary approaches with the morphogenetic perspective so as to explore how a respect for time is a condition of theoretical adequacy, the three phases require brief inspection, for they are the method by

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which analytical dualism is operationalized and the link between structure and agency is established. In structural conditioning, systemic properties are viewed as the emergent or aggregate consequences of past actions. Once they have been elaborated over time, they are held to exert a causal influence upon subsequent interaction. Fundamentally, they do so by shaping the situations in which later 'generations' of actors find themselves and by endowing various agents with different vested interests according to the positions they occupy in the structures they 'inherit' (in the class structure, in the social distribution of resources, or in the educational system, for example). From this follows a conviction that 'the properties of social structures and systems must be taken as given when analysing the processes of action and interaction' (Cohen, 1968: 196) because of the conditional influence exerted by the former on the latter. In short, when we talk about structural properties and their effects from the morphogenetic perspective, we are also endorsing methodological collectivism. Thus we accept that the results of past actions have effects in their own rights later on, constraining or facilitating influences upon actors, which are not attributable or reducible to the practices of other agents. However, social interaction is seen as being structurally conditioned but never as structurally determined. On the one hand, the mediatory mechanism which transmits structural influences to human actors consists in the former moulding frustrating or rewarding contexts for different groups of agents depending upon the social positions they occupy. In turn, it is argued that these experiences of frustrations or benefits condition different situational interpretations and dissimilar action patterns: groups experiencing exigencies seek to eradicate them (thus pursuing structural change) and those experiencing rewards try to retain them (thus defending structural stability). Regularities of this kind, detectable in subsequent patterns of interaction, are reflections of these objective opportunity costs. None the less, their effect is only conditional: they force no one, but simply set a price on acting against one's self-declared interests and a premium on following them. To acknowledge this involves nothing more sinister than the Weberian assumption that most of the time for most people there is a rough congruence between their interests, interpretations and actions. On the other hand, since conditioning is not determinism,

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the middle element of the cycle also recognizes the promotive creativity of interest groups and incorporates their capacity for innovative responses in the face of contextual constraints. The structural elaboration which then ensues is interpreted as being a largely unintended consequence. The modification of previous structural properties and the introduction of new ones is the combined product of the different outcomes pursued simultaneously by various social groups. The unintended element largely results from group conflict and concession which together mean that the consequential elaboration is often what no one sought or wanted. (This is what separates the morphogenetic approach from simple cybernetic models based on goal-steering: here the positive and negative feedback loops, resulting in structural elaboration and restoration respectively, run free of any control centre.) The end-point and the whole point of examining any particular cycle is that we will have provided an analytical history of emergence of the problematic properties under investigation. At this point, which is also the start of another cycle, the elaborated structure constitutes a new conditional influence upon subsequent interaction, and the concepts and theories we employ to deal with this next cycle may well have to change in order to deal with this shift in our subject matter. Thus every morphogenetic cycle distinguishes three broad analytical phases consisting of (a) a given structure (a complex set of relations between parts), which conditions but does not determine (b), social interaction. Here, (b) also arises in part from action orientations unconditioned by social organization, and in turn leads to (c), structural elaboration or modification - that is, to a change in the relations between parts. The cycle is then repeated. Transition from state (a) to (c) is not direct, precisely because structural conditioning is not the sole determinant of interaction patterns. Only holism conceptualizes a movement straight from (a) to (c), without mediation; the methodological collectivism endorsed here cannot countenance such a move. What methodological individualists claim is that action alone, (b), constitutes the necessary and sufficient conditions for the explanation of (c). To them (a) can be eradicated. Advocates of the morphogenetic perspective do not deny that social interaction is the ultimate source of complex phenomena (which include both unintended and emergent consequences): they simply maintain that

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because this causal chain unravels over time and each posterior action sequence was itself structurally conditioned, we must acknowledge that we cannot deduce (c) from (b) alone and thus have to consider individual actions to be necessary but not sufficient conditions of structural change. Therefore, to account for the occurrence of structural elaboration (c), interactional analysis (b) is essential, but inadequate unless undertaken in conjunction with (a), the study of structural conditioning. Hence the distinctive feature of the morphogenetic approach is its recognition of the temporal dimension, through which and in which structure and agency shape one another. Time is incorporated quite explicitly in the delineation of successive cycles and their component phases, which, of course, constitute the explanatory framework itself. However, it is not merely the importance attached to time in morphogenetic theorizing which sets it apart from other approaches which elide structure and agency. The actual time-span which any morphogenetic explanation addresses is in fact longer than in every version of conflationary theory. Reference to the basic morphogenetic diagram will be used to illustrate how the elision of structure and agency in conflationist approaches means that each of them works with a narrower time referent. Obviously all theories have to make some reference to time, since events occur in space/time; but however long the chronological span may be, as dictated by the substantive problem in hand (it is longer if the problem is the development of monarchy than if it is the development of state socialism) in morphogenetic analysis it must always be still longer than these substantive considerations alone dictate. In contradistinction, it will be argued that conflationary analysis effectively confines itself to a sociology of the 'present tense'. Referring back to my preliminary argument, this then prevents any conflationist solution of the 'problem of structure and agency', since examination of the interplay between the two elements over time is ruled out. Downwards conflation, where structure and agency are elided because action is treated as fundamentally epiphenomenal, has many variants, but is encountered today in any uncompromising version of technological determinism, economism, structuralism or normative functionalism. Despite their differences, nuances and apologetics, which cannot be entered here, the bottom line is

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Diagram 1 Morphogenetic Perspective

IT1 STRUCTURAL

CONDITIONING

T2

SOCIAL

INTERACTION T3I

STRUCTURAL

downwards conflation

ELABORATION T4I

upwards conflation

central conflation

always that actors may be indispensable for energizing the social system (no people: no society); but it is not they whose actions give it direction by shaping structural properties. Agency, it is allowed, constitutes the motor power, but agents themselves are never admitted to touch the steering wheel. So the course of social change is never pictured as a wild zig-zag as social groups struggle to wrest the wheel from one another, often taking them where no one wants to go and potentially into a brick wall. (Indeed, one of the hallmarks of such theorizing is that structures stalk in straight lines). At most it might be allowed that social interaction is a sort of white noise or Brownian motion in the system, but one whose very randomness deprives it of any decisive effect upon the state of the system. This apart, we are presented with either the 'oversocialized view of man' or the 'overdetermined view of man' depending on whether the epiphenomenal character of agency is grounded in

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idealism or materialism, which are the twin fountainheads of downwards conflation. Consequently, to any downward conflationist, action leads nowhere that structure does not guide it. Hence, with reference to Diagram 1, there is never anything to examine after T2 other than the imprint of structure upon agency. Since people are literally the agents of structure — its embodiments-cum-executors - then sociocultural change results from some autonomous unfurling process which is operative at the structural level, and though this may be conceptualized in all sorts of different ways, the common denominator is that human actors are never granted the autonomy to have any independent effect upon it. Since social interaction is never credited with the capacity to generate intended, unintended or emergent properties which are of structural magnitude or consequence, then T3 is never approached in analysis because 'the future' is the unfolding of immanent structural tendencies which are already present in the system. (At most, they might be considered to develop in adaptation to an external environment, often a purely physical one; but even if it is made up of other structures, these of course are held to have the same relationship to their own agents.) Looking backwards instead, if action is epiphenomenal then logically structure must predate it. Yet because action is not held to create it (i.e., there is never a T3 at any point in history) then the sources of structure are located elsewhere since they have to come from somewhere. Social systems thus become the progeny of holistic or psychologistic factors. The explanation of how things got to be the way they are is handed over to impersonal forces or factors — the hidden hand of systemic adaptation, the iron grip of material progression, the unseen grasp of a destiny ideal or architectonic principle. The psychologistic alternative makes the grid of the human mind the ultimate, though unconscious, progenitor of social structure. This method of dealing with the historicity of socio-cultural systems is encapsulated in Ruth Benedict's statement that they are 'individual psychology thrown large upon the screen, given gigantic proportions and a long time span' (Benedict, 1932: 24). However, what this means about the time-span over which any social structure emerges and develops is that it is not by examining group interaction during that period that we can arrive at an explanation of it. On the contrary, social structures are never

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admitted to have social origins. (In contradistinction, social agents are always assumed to be structural products.) What follows from this is that the whole investigation of the Tl to T2 period, in which social structures crystallize, is withdrawn from the explanatory ambit of social theory proper. From the viewpoint of downward conflation structure does indeed pre-date action, though not in the acceptable sense that this particular structural property at Tl predates these specific actors at Tl, but in the primordial sense that no anterior action sequences are ever credited with the genesis of structures (even if care is taken to emphasize that previous interaction is itself conditioned by an even earlier structural context). Thus in so far as advocates of downwards conflation address the future, this is never one which actors intentionally define or unintentionally produce through the conjunction of their promotive interests. And, in so far as they address the past, they immediately cede the explanatory rights of social theory to human biology, individual psychology, economic inevitability, evolutionary adaptation or simply to speculative metaphysics. In so far, then, as downward conflation does incorporate temporality, it ceases to be sociological. Finally it follows from all this that downwards conflationists basically restrict their treatment of structure and agency to an examination of the impress of structure upon agency in the present. Thus instead of an investigation of their linkage over time, this perspective reduces every actor to the eternal humanoid and endorses the reification of structure in perpetuity. Upwards conflation represents the exact opposite since structure is held to be the creature of agency. The social context of action may not look that way to the investigator upon first inspection and it may never feel that way to the actor because of lasting objectification. Nevertheless, to upward conflationists it is always a major descriptive error to treat structural properties as having the ontological status of facts rather than facticity, and it is equally erroneous to allow them to figure in explanatory statements as external constraints upon action. Thus, for instance, the neophenomenological school asserts the primacy of agency by reducing the structural context of action to a series of inter subjectively negotiated constructs. However, the basic charter of all versions of upward conflation, of which interpretative sociology is only one variant, is methodological individualism. Its prime injunction is to

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view so-called structural properties as reducible to the effects of other actors, which are in their turn always recoverable by agency. Essentially, structure becomes epiphenomenal in classic statements of methodological individualism because the social context is defined as made up of nothing more than other people. For this strategy of 'personalization' to work in social theory its protagonists have to show that all structural properties (every aspect of the social environment) which figure in explanations refer to nothing more than the activities and attitudes of other people. Thus the argument goes: since society is made up of people there is nothing in the environment (although it may appear to be non-people) which people in turn cannot change, leaving aside its physical components. Hence to Watkins: [The] central assumption of the individualist position — an assumption which is admittedly counter-factual and metaphysical - is that no social tendency exists which could not be altered if the individuals concerned both wanted to alter it and possessed the appropriate information. (Watkins, 1971: 271) Note here that the structural properties and the constraints they exert have now become the effects of contemporary action. For it follows that what constitutes our social context are things that the 'people concerned' do not want to change / do not know how to change / do not think about changing. Thus any temporal back reference to the Tl to T2 phase in Diagram 1 is ruled out. For whatever the origins of the structural tendencies and characteristics we observe, their present existence is due in some way to the people present. A big jump has thus been taken from the truistic descriptive statement 'no people: no society' to a much more contentious explanatory one, 'this society because of these people'. Yet the 'central assumption' upon which this is based is not metaphysical; it is a hypothesis and one which can be tested provided the time dimension is reintroduced. But if it is, then this assumption is undoubtedly counter-factual for there appear to be some structural properties which cannot be eliminated at will (given any amount of information, thought or desire) by contemporary actors - at least not for a considerable period of time! This would be the case for demographic structures, for levels of literacy or of national education. Such structural influences are the

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unintended consequences of past actions which came into play between Tl and T2, but their conditioning and constraining effects at T2 cannot be reduced to or made the responsibility of contemporary agents who quite literally inherit them. The fact that such structural properties are ultimately reversible by human action is not at issue; the point is that they exert constraints until they can be changed. There are then some aspects of our environment which obstruct us (e.g., certain kinds of military recruitment or pension policies are impossible with a particular kind of demographic structure) but these cannot be attributed to the sustaining behaviour of contemporary actors. This severance of present from past raises problems not only about structure, but also about agency itself. If the bedrock of any acceptable explanation of a social phenomenon is individual dispositions, i.e., something is accounted for when related to the motives, aims, beliefs, or any other intelligible reaction of contemporary people to their social circumstances, then another difficulty appears. As Gellner has pointed out, this presupposes the possibility of isolating more elementary dispositions 'as they are prior to their manifestations in a social context. The real oddity of the reductionist case is that it seems to preclude a priori the possibility of human dispositions being the dependent variable in an historical explanation - when in fact they often or always are' (Gellner, 1971: 260). It is as if, in explanining any contemporary phenomenon, we were constantly starting afresh since it is assumed that we can detect dispositions which influence the explanandum without their being dependent upon it or on other earlier social phenomena. It was of course in response to this charge that the attempt was made to allow for environmental influences, provided these could bexonstrued as the 'innocent' effects of (contemporary) other people, which I have argued cannot always be done. However, not only is the historical conditioning of current action discountenanced (unless it can be 'personalized'), but also the future is cut off from the present - for agency as for structure. On the one hand, if dispositions can never be the dependent variable, then the things which today the individualist explains as the unintended results of independent elementary attitudes are simultaneously held by such theorists to be incapable of influencing the attitudes and actions of tomorrow's agents. On the other hand, structural complexity (properties such as inflation or social differ-

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entials) can be viewed as the final result of social interaction: indeed it is precisely the reductionist aim of the methodological individualist to trace such social consequences back to their individualistic origins. Yet although the development of structural properties from human interaction are admitted beyond T3 (so long as they are construed as the 'innocent' products of people), the analysis is then firmly end-stopped. What the individualist can never allow, as far as the complex structural consequences of interaction are concerned, is that 'their fates qua fates of complexes can nevertheless be the initial conditions . . . of a causal sequence' (Gellner, 1971: 263). In other words, they cannot accept that the escape of unintended consequences from past action may, at T4, become consequential in their own right - as emergent properties or aggregate effects which represent new structural influences upon subsequent action. For structural factors are inefficacious without the sanction, as it were, of contemporary other people. So at some point prior to T4, any such property has become something which agency does not want to change / does not know how to change / does not think about changing. Consequently methodological individualists endorse a perpetual 'autonomy of the present tense' and have to truncate temporality if they are to eliminate emergent structural properties and view agency as responsible not only for their origins but also for their maintenance and influence. Central conflation is an approach based upon the putative mutual constitution of structure and agency and finds its most sophisticated expression in modern 'structuration theory'. Now, the general principle of mutual constitution is entirely unobjectionable; what I resist is the representation of their bonding as contact adhesion such that structure and agency are effectively defined in terms of one another. For the net result of this is that mutual constitution ultimately implies temporal conjunction between the two elements. Thus structural properties (defined reductively as rules and resources) are held to be outside time, having a 'virtual existence' only when instantiated by actors. In exact parallel, when actors produce social practices they necessarily draw upon rules and resources and thus inevitably invoke the whole matrix of structural properties at that instant. All this is condensed in the brief statement that 'structure is both medium and outcome of the

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reproduction of practices' (Giddens, 1979: 69). This represents the key notion of the 'duality of structure' which is advanced in direct opposition to the analytical dualism advocated here. Ironically Giddens maintains that 'the conception of structuration introduces temporality as integral to social theory'. While agreeing whole-heartedly that the incorporation of time is a condition of theoretical adequacy, I doubt whether 'structuration' does integrate the temporal dimension adequately. On the contrary, I would argue, the time-referent of structuration theory is in fact restricted to the T2-T3 span in the diagram. The reason for this is an inability to examine the interplay between structure and agency over longer temporal tracts because the two presuppose each other so closely. The intimacy of mutual constitution thus means that the only way in which structure and agency can be examined 'independently' is through an artificial exercise of 'methodological bracketing'. I shall maintain that an ineluctable consequence of this procedure is the actual suppression of time. On the one hand, institutional analysis brackets strategic action and treats structural properties as 'chronically reproduced features of social systems'. This image of recursiveness figures prominently, but many would deny that these features necessarily are 'chronic': though they may be long-lasting they are nevertheless temporary (e.g., feudalism) or may change frequently (e.g., resource distributions). Instead, through this kind of institutional analysis, they acquire a spurious methodological permanence. On the other hand, to examine the constitution of social systems as strategic conduct, institutional analysis is bracketed, and what is studied is the mobilization of rules and resources by agents in their social relations. This leads immediately to the reverse image 'change, or its potentiality, is thus inherent in all moments of social reproduction.' Here, an equally spurious changeability appears as a product of this methodological device - structural malleability is not only high, it is constant over time. On the contrary many would argue that it is variable and that its temporal variations are partially independent of strategic action, however intensely it is mobilized or knowledgeably it is conducted. This methodological bracketing has produced a pendular swing between contradictory images - of chronic recursiveness and total transformation. It might be replied in defence that since both occur simul-

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taneously in reality, then no contradiction is involved as social reality is inherently Janus-faced. Insistence upon this entails a principled refusal to unravel the interrelations between structure and agency since this would be an unacceptable lapse into dualistic theorizing. Yet, ironically, what does the bracketing device do other than traduce this very principle, since it merely transposes dualism from the theoretical to the methodological level - thus conceding its analytical indispensability. Most importantly this bracketing approach has serious implications concerning time which seem inconsistent with the aim of making temporality integral to explaining social reality. What is bracketed are the two aspects of the 'duality of structure', structural properties and strategic conduct being separated out by placing a methodological epoche upon each in turn. But because these are the two sides of the same thing, the pocketed elements must thus be co-terminous in time (the symmetry of the epoches confines analysis to the same epoque); and it follows from this that temporal relations between structure and agency logically cannot be examined. The attempt to reunite the two elements under the rubric of 'structuration' consists in the introduction of three 'modalities', drawn upon by actors strategically but at the same time constituting the structural features of the system - 'interpretative scheme', 'facility' and 'norm'. Hence the notion of 'modality thus provides the coupling elements whereby the bracketing of strategic or institutional analysis is dissolved in favour of an acknowledgement of their interrelation'. But the interrelationship is not really at issue (outside hard-line ethnomethodology or the most extreme structural determinism). The real theoretical issue is not whether or not to acknowledge it but how to analyse it, and how to explain the structural elaboration generated from it. Yet little of this can be tackled from an approach which precludes theorizing about the temporal relations between structure and agency. The basic notion of the 'duality of structure' militates against the latter because it resists untying structure and action, except by the bracketing exercise. In turn this means that structuration theory cannot recognize that structure and agency work on different time intervals (however small the gap between them). This, paradoxically, leads to the full importance of time in social theory being seriously underplayed. What is stressed is that theorizing must have

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a temporal dimension: what is missed is that time is an actual variable in theory. In consequence, advocates of central conflation assert that 'social systems only exist through their continuous structuration in the course of time', but are unable to provide any theoretical purchase on their structuring over time. Morphogenetic analysis, in contrast to the three foregoing approaches, accords time a central place in social theory. By working in terms of its three-part cycles composed of (a) structural conditioning, (b) social interaction and (c) structural elaboration, time is incorporated as a theoretical variable rather than simply as a medium through which events take place. For the very occurrence of events, like the progressive structuring of an educational system, necessitates our theorizing about the temporal interplay between structure and agency. What is crucial then is that the morphogenetic perspective maintains that structure and action operate over different time periods - an assertion which is based on two simple propositions: that structure logically pre-dates the actions which transform it; and that structural elaboration logically post-dates those actions. First, as far as (a), structural conditioning, is concerned, it is argued that the initial structured distribution of a property at Tl is the aggregate or emergent consequence of prior interaction (which of course acknowledges Comte's important insight that the majority of social actors are indeed dead). This initial distribution and constitution in turn influences the time taken to eradicate it, for all structures manifest temporal resistance and do so generically through conditioning the context of action. Most often their conditional influence consists in dividing the population (not necessarily exhaustively) into social groups working for the maintenance versus the change of a given property, because the property itself (e.g., distribution of wealth, enfranchisement, educational control) distributes different objective vested interests to them at T2. In other words, it takes time to change any structural property, and, no matter how short, that period repersents one of constraint for some groups, notably those whose goals lead them to attempt to change it. Second, (b) social interaction, when initiated at T2, then takes place in a context which is not of its own making. Here it appears impossible to follow the methodological individualist and assert

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that any structural property influential after T2 is attributable to contemporary actors (not wanting or not knowing how to change it), because knowledge about it, attitudes towards it, vested interests in retaining it and objective capacities for changing it have already been distributed and determined by T2. On the other hand, between T2 and T3 human agency exerts two independent influences, one temporal, the other directional. It can speed up, delay or prevent the elimination of prior structural influences and also agents can affect the nature and substance of elaboration at T4. (Voluntarism has an important place in this perspective but it is ever trammelled by past structural and cultural constraints and by the current politics of the possible.) Finally, if action is effective, then the transformation produced at T4 is not merely the eradication of a prior structural property and its replacement by a new one; it is (c), the structural elaboration of a host of new social possibilities. Some of these will have gradually come into play between T2 and T4, and this form of analysis can thus explain the timing of the new structures which emerge. Simultaneously, however, structural elaboration re-starts a new cycle, for it introduces a new set of conditional influences upon interaction which are constraining as well as facilitating. T4 is thus the new Tl, and the new cycle must be approached afresh analytically, conceptually and theoretically. Although in fact all three lines in the diagram are continuous, the analytical element consists in breaking up the flows into intervals determined by the problems in hand: given any problem and accompanying periodization, the projection of the three lines backwards and forwards would connect up with the anterior and posterior cycles. This represents the bedrock of an understanding of systemic properties, of structuring over time, which enables explanations of specific forms of structural elaboration to be advanced. REFERENCES Archer, Margaret (1979) Social Origins of Educational Systems (London and Beverly Hills: Sage). Archer, Margaret (1988) Culture and Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Archer, Margaret (1990) The Morphogenesis of Social Agency' (forthcoming). Benedict, Ruth (1932) 'Configurations of Culture in North America', American Anthropologist 34. Blau, Peter (1964) Exchange and Power in Social Life (New York: Wiley). Buckley, Walter (1967) Sociology and Modern Systems Theory (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall). Cohen, P. S. (1968) Modern Social Theory (London: Heinemann). Gellner, Ernest (1971) 'Holism versus Individualism', in May Brodbeck (ed.) Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciencies (New York: Macmillan). Giddens, Anthony (1979) Central Problems of Social Theory (London: Macmillan). Lockwood, David (1964) 'Social Integration and Systems Integration', in G. K. Zollschan and H. W. Hirsch Explorations in Social Change (Boston: Hough ton Mifflin). Watkins, J. W. N. (1971) 'Methodological Individualism and Social Tendencies', in Brodbeck (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences.

GLOBALIZATION AND SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY Roland Robertson

In this discussion I shall be primarily concerned with the implications for social theory of the phenomenon of globalization. I shall argue that the major national traditions of social theory were established in the period 1880-1925 under increasingly global constraints and that the subsequent 'nationalism' of social theory has constituted a considerable impediment to sustained analysis of the world as a whole. More specifically, my claim is that sociology became preoccupied with the national society without much recognition of the global basis of societality. At the same time it became preoccupied with the alleged shift from Gemeinschaft to Geselleschaft - the shift to modernity — in such a way as to lead to neglect of what has come to be called postmodernity. The idea of a shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft was partly shaped by an increasingly globalized world. The classical sociologists of the period in question, however, largely neglected the globalization process in favour of a concern with the nationally constituted society. Thus social theory itself has to a considerable extent been a manifestation of the globalization process. Even though the situation has undoubtedly improved in the sense that there is now a much more direct concern with the global circumstance and some recognition of the relative autonomy of processes of globalization, there is still a strong tendency for social theory and empirical research to fall short of full engagement with the global system. Undoubtedly that deficiency may be partly 174

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attributed to the perception in some quarters that world-systems theory a la Wallerstein and his followers is, so to say, taking care of that phenomenon and/or it is simply a matter of some people specializing in the study of the world-as-a-whole, while others continue to go about their normal business. The claim being made in the present context, however, is that a genuinely reflexive sociology must attend to the global circumstance of the production and reproduction of the discipline. Some argue that interest in the global circumstance is a macro-problem which does not impinge much, if at all, on their own, in varying degrees, micro-foci. However, to invoke such a distinction along those lines is immensely misleading. For it involves subscription to the view that the global is 'out there', beyond the national society, while the micro is safely ensconced within the national society and thereby protected from global activities. One other preliminary point should be made. There have been many calls in recent years for the 'internationalization' of sociology, indeed of virtually all disciplines. These have often been made in terms of a plea for the acquisition of 'international competence', particularly in the USA. While one certainly welcomes this development in a general sense there are some causes for reservation. Internationalization of the curriculum has become, again notably in the USA, a central theme of the 'educational economy'. It has been inserted into the planning of the futures of all stages of the educational, including the research, process with exceedingly little discussion of its raison d'etre—apart from some general commentary on the interdependence of the contemporary world and, more disturbingly, the necessity of 'international competence' for the survival of the nation. By and large, however, the desirability of 'international education' is taken as self-evident; while the actual programmes for international education typically pay little if any attention to the multidimensionality of the global system as such. Rather they follow the 'other-cultures' approach. That is they are basically centred on increasing knowledge of 'alien' societies. At its worst, this approach can in fact actually lessen knowledge of the global system.

THE PROBLEM It must be emphasized that the view of sociology as a societycentred discipline can be and has been exaggerated. A$ will be

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briefly shown, sociology was at its early nineteenth-century beginnings a distinctively 'international' or 'global' proto-discipline, which embraced and indeed sought to enhance the globalization processes which were (continuing) to make the world into a single place (Robertson, 1987). And even when there was something of a reaction against that tendency during the period leading up to the First World War — a period marked by a turning away from the optimism of nineteenth-century social theory - there was somewhat more attention paid to what we have come to call globalization than is usually recognized. None the less both the concentration on the national society and the inattention to globalization are striking characteristics of the period 1890-1920. The present discussion is intended mainly as a contribution to the necessary task of rewriting the history of social theory in a period of rapid globalization. Almost needless to say every discipline writes its own history in terms of the primary foci, however implicit they may be, of the present - a history which in one way or another leads up to contemporary concerns. That does not mean that histories of disciplines, including the differentiation and the combination of disciplines, have to be presents in their thrust. They do not have to be adumbrated as stories of smooth progress towards a present state of affairs. Rather their histories change or are modified in terms of the shifting interests of the present. Thus a history which is concerned with the idea of globalization as the increasingly central focus of social theory will be particularly concerned with the vicissitudes of such themes as internationalism and cosmopolitanism, inter-societal and inter-civilizational relations, relativism, humanity, and so on. More specifically, it will attempt to track down relatively neglected aspects of a theorists's or a school's writing which bear upon the theme of globalization or which appear to have been affected by shifts in the globalization process. In sum, a new history of social theory - a history written in and for an era of rapid globalization - seeks to reclaim from the past of social theory its globalist tendencies. The most crucial period of social theory - namely, the so-called classical period of the late nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century — was on the face of it neglectful of what now appear to us as a quite remarkable expansion of 'international society', a very rapid increase in the rate of compression of the world as a whole, and very significant developments concerning

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the crystallization of global, or at least international, values and norms (Gong, 1984; Kern, 1983; Robertson, 1987). The classical theorists in varying degrees overlooked these 'world shaking' developments — or at least only talked about them obliquely. For the most part they engaged in comparison of societies and civilizations rather than the interaction between them. To be more specific, they did not seriously entertain the idea that national-societal cultures or identities are continuously and increasingly interpenetrative. That lacuna has been a source of many misleading ideas, pro and con, as to dominant ideologies, common cultures, central value systems, and the like (Robertson, 1991). One of the ironies about this lack of attention to interaction, particularly cultural interaction, between societies during the period of classical sociology was that sociologists failed for the most part to recognize that their own ideas were not merely being diffused to other societies and civilizations, but that they were being selectively employed for the purposes of 'society construction'. The ideas of people such as Spencer, Tonnies, Durkheim and Weber were used particularly in societies on the fringes of Eurocentric 'international society' (notably Turkey) and, even more interestingly, in Japan and China (Robertson, 1990a). The point of central importance here is that sociological ideas were produced in Europe largely for internal-societal consumption. It is indeed well known that there was surprisingly little reference to, let alone communication with, sociologists across national boundaries in Western Europe in the period 1880-1925. It is thus not surprising that there was virtually no recognition of the fact that at the same time as the classical sociologists were busy comparing East and West, intellectual and political leaders in 'the East' were already using Western ideas for the purpose of interpreting their own positions vis-a-vis modernity and globality; as also happened with Comtean positivism in Latin America. Specifically, non-Westerners were at one and the same time attempting to relativize and implement Western notions of societality. As we shall see, one of the most important reasons for the neglect of inter-societal relations in the period of classical sociology arose from the very origins of sociology as a relatively autonomous discipline. In the hands of people such as Saint-Simon, Comte and Spencer - as well as Marx - there was claimed to be 'a fundamental antinomy' between war and industry (Aron, 1966: 302). Saint-

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Simon believed that occupational specialists concerned with industry, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other, were the real leaders of the future kind of society. Comte, believing that every type of society pursues a dominant goal, maintained that labour would be the overriding objective of industrial societies. In their different ways Spencer and Marx implemented this idea in their social theories. We know of course that there was a fatal flaw in this way of thinking. Raymond Aron indicated that flaw succinctly when he wrote: Industrial society, as soon as it was no longer bourgeois and liberal but technological and organized, was spontaneously, of itself, a military society . . . Conscription, mass levies, total mobilization of material, human and spiritual resources belong to the essence of modern society, industrial but democratic as well. (1966: 303) Thus the industrialization of war has proven overwhelmingly wrong the belief that industry or labour produces peace. On the other hand, in spite of that tragic feature of the twentieth century, there is a not unpersuasive argument that industry and commerce will yet create through increasing interdependence a much more peaceful world (Rosencrance, 1986). The fact that three of the great sociologists of the classical period - Durkheim, Simmel and Weber - all died within the threeyear span 1917-20 at relatively early ages has of course a lot to do with the relative neglect of inter-societal and trans-societal issues. Their lives had probably been shortened by the world war of 1914-18 - a war which they well might have systematically addressed had they lived long enough to reflect deeply upon it. But that aside, one must note that in that period there was little explicit acknowledgement of the relativity (even on SimmePs part) of sociological standpoints. Certainly most of the classical sociologists were primarily concerned with the fates of the particular societies in which they lived. All this causes us to observe that for all the talk about sociology as a reflexive discipline - or the need for it to become one - there has been remarkably little reflection upon the global situation in connection with the history of that discipline. While specialists with respect to particular periods and those specializing in aspects

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of global compression - such as the time-zoning of the world and the spread of the Gregorian calendar - have indeed drawn attention to globalization, such matters have rarely been seen as having significant implications for the discipline as a whole. It is maintained here, on the other hand, that if the reflexivity of sociology is to be realized it is in global terms that such reflexivity must in the first instance be recognized.

GLOBALIZATION The notion of globalization has by now become a rather widely used term. On the other hand, many of those who use it either do so with the apparent assumption that its meaning is self-evident or in very diffuse ways. This is partly due to the fact that the word has become prominent simultaneously as a 'scientific' concept and as a term of general discourse. The only definite trend in the overall employment of the term seems to be that there has been a shift away from using the term synonymously with internationalization. While there certainly remains a tendency to think of globalization and internationalization as pointing to the same sets of empirical circumstances there does appear to be an increasing recognition that the first term is much broader in its scope and that it indicates more basic and fundamental processes of change. The simplest way to think of this matter is that internationalization is a response to globalization. In any case, I seek here to summarize and continue one approach to the theme of globalization which in an explicit sense has its origins in the early 1980s, but which in a deeper sense goes back to the mid 1960s. As far as the latter is concerned I need note only that within the context of a not inconsiderable amount of work on what was at the time known mainly as the sociology of international relations J. P. Nettl and I attempted to lay the basis for what I would now call a voluntaristic theory of international relations (Nettl and Robertson, 1968). To a large extent that perspective was located within the debates about modernization of the 1950s and 1960s (including some early but nowadays overlooked discussion of postmodernity). Nettl and I attempted to change the terms of the debate about societal modernization by emphasizing what has recently been called the pragmatic, social-

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psychological dimension of modernization (Simpson, 1991). The 'psychology of comparisons' — that is, the ways in which political leaders make comparisons of their own nation's standing with those of significant others - was used to show that there was a relatively autonomous global culture concerning the problem of societal modernization. This was not culture in the conventional sense of a binding culture of consensus but rather a field of 'definitions' concerning what Bourricaud (1987) has more recently called the problem of 'universal reference'. The approach to globalization which I have more recently been developing takes its departure from empirical generalizations concerning the rapidly increasing compression of the entire world into a single, global system and conceptual ideas about the ways in which the world as a whole should be mapped in broadly sociological terms. The two strands of elaboration are, of course, closely linked. Central to what I have called the mapping of the world is the claim that there are four major focal points of the globalization process: nationally constituted societies; individuals; the international system of societies; and humankind. It is largely in terms of the enhancement of each of these reference points, in the sense of their being tangibly crystallized, and the raising of problems as to the relationships between them that the globalization process has proceeded in recent centuries. At the same time there have been changes in the ways in which each of these major components of the overall global circumstances have been operatively constructed (Robertson, 1990a, 1990b). All this means that we have to conceive of the concept of globalization as having primarily to do with the form in terms of which the world has moved towards unicity. Thus when we speak of globalization we must realize that we are referring in the first place to a relatively specific path which the world has taken in the direction of becoming a single system. The world could in theory have become a single system along different trajectories - without, for example, involving the salience of the national society which has actually been a central (some would say the central) ingredient of the overall globalization process. The assertion of particularity, national or otherwise, is not in and of itself anti-global, for such an assertion is in a general sense an aspect of globalization. There are secondary and more diffuse meanings of globalization

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which are compatible with the primary conceptual meaning that I have attributed to it. As the discourse of globalization has rapidly expanded in recent years - so as to become a common feature of journalism, political interaction and intellectual discussion - it has tended to cluster around two major tendencies. On the one hand, globalization is used to refer diffusely to growing interdependence across the world on a number of different dimensions, of which the economic and the mass-communicative are almost certainly the most emphasized. On the other, the term is frequently used in the sense of the globalization of institutions, collectivities and practices - as in the phrase 'the globalization of science', or even in the notion of the globalization of whole societies. Cutting across these two tendencies is that which stresses the 'lifting' of structures and activities from 'local' contexts so as to become global (Giddens, 1990). As I have said, there is no contradiction between these ways of defining globalization and the strategy which I have advocated, so long as what I would call globalization as such is accorded the central and primary place in any attempt to make the issue of globalization into a genuine research programme (and a guide to practical action). However, two closely related warnings are necessary with respect to the issue of flexibility in the use of the idea of globalization. The first of these arises in connection with the not infrequent tendency to use the words globalization and internationalization interchangeably. This tendency, which I referred to earlier, must be resisted because it involves at worst reducing the general process of globalization, the compression of the entire world, to one of its dimensions. Clearly, relations between national units have been and remain of very crucial significance but it surely cannot be seriously argued that the world should be defined as consisting only in relations between nations; besides which such an approach in its sharpest form denies even the relevance of internal-societal features of nations to consideration of the global system. The second, closely related warning concerning the degree of flexibility in the use of the notion of globalization has to do with the local—global theme, made part of our contemporary consciousness largely in terms of the injunction to 'think globally and act locally'. While it cannot be denied that the idea of a polarity, even an antinomy, is rather prevalent - and thus cannot be casually overridden in the interests of analytical elegance and cogency - it

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must be pointed out that the exclusion of the local from the global which is implied in much of the discourse about the condition of the late twentieth-century world is highly problematic. Specifically, it borders on the absurd to imply, let alone openly maintain, that 'localities' are not part of the contemporary world as a whole. If we are talking about the increasing unicity of the world in one sense or another how could it be that all the localities in the world are not part of the world? Clearly there is something wrong in this current of modern, or postmodern, thought and it is one of the tasks of the serious student of the global circumstance to correct it. My own formulation of the general contours of the globalization process is intended partly to overcome this problem - by including individuals, for example,firmlywithin the global system. Having thus stated the central features of the rationale for my approach to globalization, I turn now to some more specific issues, the first of which concerns the problem of the form of globalization. In speaking of form, in a generally Simmelian way, I am pointing to the fact that the compression of the world has occurred along a particular if highly contested trajectory. The fact that that form has crystallized along relatively specific lines is much more important for certain purposes than the economic, political and military practices which have created it. Thus, to take a major example, Immanuel Wallerstein has accomplished a great deal in demonstrating the ways in which expanding capitalism has played an absolutely crucial role in the creation of the modern, globewide 'worldsystem'. However, even were we to accept the economic-historical aspect of his argument there would remain enormous problems as to the degree to which all other aspects of the world-as-a-whole are epiphenomenal. More specifically, even if it were primarily capitalistic expansion that created the asymmetrical interdependencies of the contemporary world there would remain the problem of how those have been and are subject to shifting patterns of organization and interpretation. That, then, is a minimal justification for an interest in the form of globalization. But I want to argue a stronger case than that. The proposal that we consider the general globalization process in terms of the four reference points - societies, individuals, the system of societies, and humankind - constitutes an interpretation of shifts in the expanding world-order of the past four hundred years or so. In using the term world-order I do not seek to indicate

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an image of a smoothly changing system. I desire only to provide as parsimonious an image as possible of the historical record concerning the terms in which the world has actually been 'organized'. History is replete with models of and for the patterning of world-systems. But only a few have actually been realized — and they have been heavily constrained by the realities of the model (or competing models) which obtained at the time of their articulation. Thus my 'search for order' does not conform to the numerous caricatures of Parsons's interest in that same problem. Rather it involves a quest for the most general terms in which the patterning of the world has evolved. Thus it seems to be that on an increasingly worldwide basis there have crystallized four sets of references in that connection: an increasing requirement that nationally constituted societies are the major 'containers' of human beings; an increasing recognition of individuals in their own right, entities with identity; an increasing sense of a globewide system of relations between societies; and, finally, an increasing recognition of collective humankind as a species, a species which is conscious of its relationship to its natural and cosmic environment. That transnational, as well as supranational, organizations and movements have become rapidly more numerous and significant makes no fundamental difference, at least not for now, to the salience of the national society. The very terms transnational and supranational in themselves illustrate the continuing salience of the national society, which has acquired an increasingly standardized form in the twentieth century (Meyer, 1980). That the category 'individuals' has often been regarded as essentially constructed and manipulated makes no difference either, for there seems to have arisen as a global norm an image of the individual - differentiated by gender, ethnicity, and so on - as bifurcated into 'rational' and 'existential' components (Meyer, 1987). That the system of international relations is increasingly complex and subject to interference from a variety of extra-systemic forces does not obviate the relative independence of this domain. Finally, the fact that invocations of humanity and concern about the general fate of the human species are often cynical does not deny the long-term trend for this to become a relatively independent factor in global affairs. Much of this is to make the simple point that global affairs have become increasingly complex, in which connection there arises an important moral and ethical question - one which has some

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bearing on the current universalism-versus-communitarianism debate (Rasmussen, 1990). While I cannot explore the latter in detail in the present context a few reflections are in order. For a start it is quite remarkable how little acknowledgement there has been within that debate about the global circumstance. In particular, participants in the debate have almost entirely failed to consider the possibility that the debate has arisen as a manifestation of increasing global complexity and interdependence. Indeed some proponents of the communitarian position appear to want simply to move back from Gesellschaft to Gemeinschaft. Thus the possibility that Gesellschaft was one way of coping with increasing global complexity is denied from the beginning. In any case, I would claim that no ethical or moral stance can be regarded as viable if it denies the basic principle of global complexity. In that connection it is worth pointing out that during what I call the takeoff period of globalization into sustained 'growth' in the declining years of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth century there occurred certain empirical developments which demonstrated the global reality of the universalism-particularism question. Specifically, it was during that period that there arose and was virtually institutionalized an expectation that each national society should have its own unique identity and that citizens should pledge their commitment to such. The expectation of particularism, or difference, was thus globally grounded. More accurately, we have in the twentieth century witnessed both the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism on a global basis. Coming to terms with that issue is the central ethical and moral problem (Robertson, 1991). SOCIAL THEORY Albrow (1990: 6-8) has argued that we can identify five stages in the history of sociology, as far as matters relevant to the present discussion are concerned: universalism; national sociologies; internationalism; indigenization; and globalization. While differing from Albrow on a number of specific points, I believe that this scheme is a useful starting point. I will thus modify and elaborate his scheme and connect it to my discussion of globalization in general.

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In referring to a phase of universalism Albrow (1990: 6) points to the aspiration of early sociology 'to provide a science of, and for, humanity based on timeless principles and verified laws'. It was, says Albrow, a sociology inspired by the natural sciences; although it should be added that unlike the natural sciences there was in the minds of its most well-known practitioners, namely Saint-Simon and Comte, a strong practical component in the sense that both sought, although in different ways, to bring about the very conditions to which their cognitive schemes could be applied. In brief the positive stage of scientific thought was not even fully guaranteed in rationalistic West European societies, let alone the rest of the world. Paradoxically a new kind of religion was necessary, not merely to provide a sense of order and commitment to 'real life' but also to sustain and expand the scientific commitment to a universal, foundational analysis of humanity. The universalistic phase of sociology had its roots in certain strands of the Enlightenment, reaching its strongest point in the philosophy and sociology of Saint-Simon and Comte, on the one hand, and Marx, on the other. Saint-Simon drew up a programme for the reorganization of European society 'which was in fact a forerunner, suited to its period, of future world government' (Merle, 1987: 7). His ideas were elaborated in a review which was aptly called 'The Globe', whose reach can be demonstrated in the words of one of his disciples, Enfantin, who wrote that 'the era of universal politics which is opening up is that of contact with Africans and Asians, Christians and Moslems' (Merle, 1987: 7). Another disciple, Littre, wrote that 'there is in fact only one great branch of knowledge, that of humanity, which includes everything and epitomizes everything' (Merle, 1987: 7). Saint-Simon and his followers were actually involved in large projects for 'world' organization, including the cutting of the Suez Canal and the colonization of Algeria. As Turner (1990: 344-8) has argued, Saint-Simon saw a close relationship between a new form of social science, or rather the establishment of the study of society on a scientific basis, on the one hand, and the coming of 'globalism', on the other. Saint-Simon basically thought that a science of society was impossible without the unification of humanity and vice versa. This general thrust of Saint-Simon's thought was of course at the core of Comte's simultaneous advocacy of a positivistic science of society (which he

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called sociology) and a 'religion of humanity'. The programme of Saint-Simon and Comte were, from our point of view, marked by a mixture of scientism and utopianism; although it should be said that Saint-Simon should be called a Utopian only to the extent that, as Durkheim (1962: 222) put it, 'one would apply the same term to his industrialism'. For Saint-Simon believed, as we have already seen, that it was industrialism which promoted cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Marx's approach was of course different, although as is well known he was influenced by Saint-Simon. In general terms Marx agreed that labour and industry on a global scale would result in peace. On the other hand his image of the path to such was much more sophisticated and realistic than that of Saint-Simon. Capitalism as a determining mode of production would provide the grounds for the universalization on a global scale of social relations. In speaking of the stage of national sociologies Albrow (1990: 6) is concerned with 'the foundation of sociology on a professional basis in the academies of the Western world, especially in Germany, France, and the United States, but also in Italy, Britain, Spain and non-Western countries, such as Japan'. While emphasizing that the 'universal aspirations' were not given up 'the intellectual products . . . took on striking characteristics of the national culture' and professional contacts became largely confined by national boundaries. Thus the fusion of national sociologies with 'the residues of universalism' produced a quest for 'exclusive intellectual hegemony which was not so remote from the imperial territorial ambitions of the nation-states associated with the parent culture'. I would modify Albrow's characterization by drawing attention to the strong possibility of his having exaggerated the difference between his first and second phases. The universalistic phase was undoubtedly concerned directly with humanity as a whole - as though it made no difference where the universalistic message came from - but its primary advocates did none the less project a distinctively French view of that whole. Moreover we see in Durkheim's work a continuation of a nineteenth-century tendency - to be found, for example, in the writings of John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx - to try to establish a 'universal' theory by weaving together central themes from what were perceived to be the dominant Western traditions. Thus Durkheim himself in his social

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epistemology sought to synthesize German idealism and British empiricism. But the result of the synthesis was in fact, and Durkheim proclaimed his epistemology in this way, a Frenchrational synthesis. It would take much space to explore in detail the forms of and degrees to which the classical sociologists were reflexive about their concern with societality. I shall return to this matter in my concluding remarks. The phase which Albrow (1990: 6) calls internationalism started after the Second World War with the collapse of national sociologies and the general disaster of the two world wars. Internationalism in science 'was taken for granted'. However, it was basically divided (in ways which roughly corresponded to cold war divisions) between 'an all-embracing modernization thesis, especially in the American Parsons version' and the internationalism propounded by Marxist proletarianism. Albrow provides no stage, however transitional, between the phase of national sociologies, the collapse of which he exaggerates, and the phase of internationalism - which would make the national sociologies phase stretch all the way from the late nineteenth century to the post-1945 period. This is unconvincing because it was during the 1920s and, even more so, the 1930s that the problem of relativism first became thoroughly thematized in sociology and anthropology. In sociology we find the attempts of Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim to deal directly with the issue of the relativism - or, which is not the same thing, the relativity - of perspectives. To be sure, Simmel had made that a central ingredient of his interpretation of modernity, but he did not confront the problem of global relativism, or relativity, as Scheler did. And while Mannheim's pragmatic sociology of knowledge was ostensibly directed at intra-societal relativism and relativity there can be little doubt that in a general sense his concern to overcome or resolve those problems was a manifestation of a more widespread and diffuse concern with the theme of commensurability. This was also the period of the rise, in varying degrees, of relativistic anthropological perspectives, contrasting with the evolutionism, historicism or diffusionism of previous anthropology. In sum, the lack of ostensible internationalism should not lead us to conclude that concern with problems arising from globalization were not in the air. The concern with relativism in the 1920s should thus be regarded as a manifestation of the problems raised

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by increased global compression and the rise of distinctive ideologies of world-order. Those ideologies - such as German fascism, Japanese neo-fascism, communism and Woodrow Wilson's 'selfdeterminationism' — themselves arose in relationship to the great acceleration of the globalization process which had begun in the late nineteenth century. Having said all this one has to emphasize that Albrow makes an important point as to the bifurcated internationalism of the post1945 period. I would add only two, closely related, points. First, it is ironic that Albrow should single out Talcott Parsons as the representative of an extreme position with respect to 'the increasing worldwide penetration of Western rationality' expressed as 'an allembracing modernization thesis'. Parsons spent his entire adult life striving to resist sociologies based upon instrumental rationality (which was in any case a distinctively Germanic Problemstellung). Second, tempted as he may have been by 'modernization theory', he always insisted that the cold war would be ended, if it were to be ended at all, by the democratization of communist countries and the generalization of their internationalism (Parsons, 1964). Communism's internationalism, he very optimistically — one might say utopianistically — said, was its major contribution to the world. More generally, Parsons believed that it was through a convergence of communism's collectivism and capitalism's individualism that we would reach beyond the cold war. That this would be an asymmetrical convergence (in favour of the West) is not particularly relevant in the present context. What is of relevance is that of all the people to blame for promoting a one-sided view in a bifurcated field of 'internationalism' Albrow has not chosen a good candidate/The general idea that the thrust of modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s constituted the prevalent form of Western internationalism is accurate. I would add only two things. First, modernization theory has deeper roots than Albrow claims. Quite apart from its embeddedness in the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft problems, it had a more immediate grounding in the 'applied sociology' which was encouraged during the Second World War. Indeed sociology in the USA 'came of age' through its mixture of professionalism and patriotism in the early 1940s - and it is of more than passing interest that the alleged and self-proclaimed theorist par excellence, Talcott Parsons, played a crucial role in that respect. Specifically, the immediate origins of 1950s and early

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1960s modernization theory lie in the Allied - but particularly the American — attempt to force democracy upon Germany and Japan. It was in the 1940s setting of the Second World War that we find, in a very interesting way, the crucible from which 'modernization' really sprang. Second, the idea of the Third World had some of its (highly problematic) origins in Woodrow Wilson's model for a completely 'self-determined world' presented in Paris at the conclusion of the First World War. In fact the Wilson Principles constitute one of the grounds of the fissures in twentieth-century 'world polities'. Wilson sought a universalistic entitlement to particularism - at least he rhetorically proclaimed that ideology. On the other hand, he did not announce a serious engagement with the world-as-a-whole. People in 'the periphery' have come to realize, much more than those at 'the center', that the world is indeed a single place. The phase of indigenization^ according to Albrow (1990: 7), was centred upon the Third World. Albrow rightly says that this phase, or stage, has to be distinguished from the phase of national sociologies - but he does not provide entirely convincing accounts of its difference. Indeed his inclusion of Canada - and I would add Australia, New Zealand, some Latin American societies and even others - confirms the uncertainty which he exhibits concerning this phase. In trying to improve upon his typification of this period I would say that it was, and to some extent still is, one in which practitioners or 'national sociologies' have attempted for the most part to insert their perceived 'traditional sociologies' into a global sociology. It is obvious that such an attempt requires continuity with a 'universal language' (Archer, 1988). It makes no sense to produce an entirely idiosyncratic point of view, unless one simply wants to retreat from the world. Albrow maintains that there are two leading characteristics of Third World indigenization as it developed in the 1970s: opposition to external, particularly Western, terminology and methods and a stress on the perceived national-cultural tradition, although there has been a strong tendency to lean on Marxist models. In any case one can delineate the general indigenization movement into relatively distinct tendencies. One such tendency is to be found in Latin American contexts (which Albrow does not discuss) where it has not been so much the case that foreign theories, methods and substantive themes have been rejected, but rather that particular

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ways of 'Western' thinking - mainly Hegelian and Marxist, but recently postmodernist - are intended to account for 'dependency' and produce a form of praxis with respect to the surmounting of deprivation. Thus the primary target of such tendencies have been theories of societal modernization which, according to their critics, propose that 'development' can occur only along a US American trajectory, in terms of a definite pattern of differentiation, and on a society-by-society — as opposed to an inter-societal - basis. The recent importation of and excitement about ideas concerning postmodernity have enhanced this view, but this time as part of a (worldwide) 'cultural turn' in the social sciences. Specifically, the attraction of the idea of postmodernity in Latin American societies seems to fit a relatively autochthonous genre of literary expression, namely magic realism, and, from a more clearly sociological standpoint, provides a kind of solution to the question as to whether Latin America is moving from pre-modernity to modernity. The idea of postmodernity confirms the view that the question of modernity can be transcended. Postmodernism is seen as legitimating mixtures of the traditional and the modern. There is much to be said for the argument that Latin America is the importer of 'alien' ideas par excellence and thus that it does not seriously qualify as addressable under the rubric of indigenization. But although the first part of that view may be persuasive the second part does not follow from the first. The point is that imported themes have been syncretized into unique constellations of ideas with certain elements of autochthony constraining receptivity to some ideas rather than others. The notion of indigenization is relevant because the syncretic bundles are for very domestic purposes. In coming to what Albrow (1990: 7-8) calls the final, but certainly not the last or ultimate phase, he speaks of the globalization of sociology. Globalization is directly the result of the interaction between 'nationalism' and internationalism, and less directly of all the preceding stages. The principle of globalization 'results from the freedom individual sociologists have to work with other individuals anywhere on the globe and to appreciate the worldwide processes within which and on which they work' (Albrow, 1990: 7). 'A universal discourse has arisen with multiple interlocutors based on different regions and cultures,' says Albrow. And he goes on to remark that globalization does not only mean that sociologists

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can communicate openly but that, first, they are 'confronted with the full diversity . . . of sociological dialects and special visions' and, second, they are constrained to focus upon globalization as 'a process at a new level of social reality'. Albrow adds that that new reality is best described by the term 'global society'. It has to be said that Albrow's commentary is specifically addressed, at least as far as the phases of internationalism, indigenization and globalization are concerned, to the history and structure of the International Sociological Association and thus exhibits a particular concern for organizational, international and educational issues. In fact, the more that he moves towards the present the more he is concerned with the social rather than the ideational aspects of sociology. Indeed he tends to conflate these dimensions. I am not so much interested here in the issue of the ways in which sociologists interact or, more specifically, the ways in which their interaction is structured by the International Sociological Association (although those are certainly not unimportant matters). Rather, I am concerned with the ways in which social theory and sociology generally are affected by globalization and even more so the problems of studying globalization. Much of my argument thus far has hinged upon the proposition that sociology has lagged behind the globalization process. The critical juncture in that respect was the period of classical sociology at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. During that remarkable and fateful period very definite steps were taken towards the organization of the world, and there occurred the first war on a global basis, a war of such extent being made possible by the very means which had also facilitated rapid globalization. On the other hand, it could well be argued that the Napoleonic Wars actually constituted the first world war (Fregosi, 1990). The fact that they were not widely construed as such is largely due to the absence of the means of rapid communication and movement which were available one hundred years later. None the less it is probably the case that the ideas of Saint-Simon and Comte were embedded in an expanded 'worldview' occasioned in part by the Napoleonic Wars. In my view, that widening of the empirical terrain was as important as those Enlightenment views which encouraged universalism and cosmopolitanism, as was the fact that the European settlement of the Congress of Vienna was 'antinational' (Brubaker, 1990). None the less by the end of the

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nineteenth century a retreat from direct interest in global affairs was underway. How do we account for the inattention on the part of sociologists to such indicators of globalization as the Geneva and Hague Conventions; the invention of the airplane; the implementation of World Time and the time-zoning of the world; the establishment of the Nobel Prizes; the near-global spread of the Gregorian calendar; the rise of the ecumenical movement; the widespread use of the wireless; the beginnings of the modern Olympic movement; and so on? Why was scarcely a word uttered about these developments except in the most general of terms, as when Hobhouse (1906: 331) wrote of 'humanity rapidly becoming, physically speaking, a single society'? To be sure Max Weber's pessimistic view of the widening of the iron-cage instrumental rationality, Durkheim's optimistic views as to a higher form of 'international life' and his general concern with humanity, and Simmel's not dissimilar interest in the relativization of individuality and societality by humanity (Robertson and Chirico, 1985) should give us pause in accusing them of being overly neglectful of the global circumstance. Indeed Turner (1990: 348) is correct in saying of Durkheimian sociology that it continued 'Saint-Simonian internationalism . . . despite the devastation of war'. None the less there can be no denying that what have turned out to be crucial trends in world history were greatly neglected, even by Durkheim and his school. It may well be that the very conditions of globalization promoted a particular concern with the nationally framed society, that globalization was taken for granted, and what were perceived as the consequences of globalization were given special attention. In other words, globalization presented increasingly difficult problems to the national society and it was the latter to which sociologists in the classical period gave their attention. We can now see, on the other hand, that in large part the increasing significance of the nation is attributable to the crystallization of a global political culture concerning the 'organization' of the global system and that the 'institutionalized individualism' that Durkheim dwelled upon was paralleled by a global problem of 'institutionalized societalisrrf (Lechner, 1989). Brubaker has expressed an important aspect of this issue in his ideal-typical image of citizenship in the nation state:

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Every person should belong to one and only one state. The orderliness of inter-state relations requires that this norm be at least approximately realized in a world that is 'filled up' with states, each of which claims only a fraction of the human population as its own . ..' (Brubaker, 1990: 381) In fact the take-off period of modern globalization, which coincided with the period of the national institutionalization of sociology, was precisely when that ideal-typical image came into its own - when, for example, there was a globally widespread 'escalation of intervention to regulate international migration' in the form of legislation to guarantee as much as possible homogenous national populations (Bovenker et ai, 1990). Thus the classical sociologists lived at a time when problems of national integration, particularly in newly independent or unified nations, such as Germany, Italy and Japan, were seen to be acute. On the other hand they clearly overlooked in varying degrees that those problems had a distinctively international - indeed global dimension. Issues of citizenship had as much to do with the regulation of inter-societal relations as they did with internal integration. Classical sociology's focus on the society and the nation was thus in one sense inevitable and sensible. But in another it was seriously shortsighted. The continuing, overt neglect of international, not to speak of more far-reaching global, issues on the part of sociology from the early 1920s until the 1960s can be partly attributable to the structuring of the academic disciplines. For since that time the discipline of international relations and to some extent political science have been considererd as the arenas in which international affairs are properly studied. But as is becoming obvious, that both reflects a reality, in the sense that the realm of international relations is relatively autonomous and cannot be reduced to other considerations, and constitutes a form of false consciousness. In other words international relations need in one sense to be studied in their own right, including the study of international law, but that should not proceed in isolation from other aspects of the global situation. That is not simply an analytic norm, it is also more importantly - a moral one. The flexible model of globalization which I have sketched is thus intended not only to give us improved analytical purchase; it is also presented as a realistic

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image of 'world society' which allows us to see that the global system is not just or even primarily about relations between or across nations. It has just as much to do with 'the quality' of societies and their viability, with individuals as persons, and with increasingly salient conceptions of humanity, including humankind's relationship to external nature. For all its failings with respect to the matters with which I have been concerned in this short chapter it is worth noting that it is largely though not exclusively from within sociology that discussion of them has at last emerged, although important contributions have come from anthropology, cultural studies, political science and communication studies. As far as the history of sociological theory is concerned, it is important to note that each national sociological tradition has in fact an image of the world, even though that may be a latent one. In other words even where there appears to be little explicit interest in global matters there is still, if only negatively, an image of the ways in which the world is 'made up'. Thus one specific task is to bring out the implications for a theory of the world of particular traditions and the debates within them. Another is to think in terms of each tradition has both inward-looking and outwardlooking aspects and to lay bare the nature of the discourse between them.

REFERENCES Albrow, M. (1990) 'Globalization, Knowledge and Society', in M. Albrow and E. King (eds) Globalization, Knowledge and Society (London: Sage). Archer, M. (1988) Culture and Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Aron, R. (1966) Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Bourricaud, F. (1987) 'Modernity, "Universal Reference" and the Process of Modernization', in S. N. Eisenstadt (ed.) Patterns of Modernity, vol. I, The West (New York: New York University Press). Bovenker, F., Miles, R. and Verbunt, G. (1990) 'Racism, Migration

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and the State in Western Europe: A Case for Comparative Analysis', International Sociology 5(4). Brubaker, W. R. (1990) 'Immigration, Citizenship, and the NationState in France and Germany: A Comparative Historical Analysis', International Sociology 5(4). Durkheim, E. (1962) Socialism (New York: Collier Books). Fregosi, P. (1990) Dreams of Empire: Napoleon and the First World War (New York: Brick Lane Press). Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Gong, G. W. (1984) The Standard of 'Civilization' in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Hobhouse, L. T. (1906) Morals in Evolution: A Study in Comparative Ethics, vol. I (New York: Henry Holt). Kern, S. (1983) The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Lechner, F. J. (1989) 'Cultural Aspects of the Modern WorldSystem' in W. H. Swatos (ed.) Religious Politics in Global and Comparative Perspective (New York: Greenwood Press). Merle, M. (1987) The Sociology of International Relations (Leamington Spa: Berg). Meyer, J. W. (1980) The World Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State', in A. Bergesen (ed.) Studies of the Modern WorldSystem (New York: Academic Press). Meyer, J. W. (1987) 'Self and Life Course: Institutionalizatipn and its Effects', in G. Thomas et al. (eds) Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society and the Individual (Newbury Park, CA: Sage). Nettl, J. P. and Robertson, R. (1968) International Systems and the Modernization of Societies: The Formation of National Goals and Attitudes (London: Faber). Parsons, T. (1964) 'Communism and the West', in A. and E. Etzioni (eds) Social Change (New York: Basic Books). Rasmussen, D. (ed.) (1990) Universalism vs. Communitarianism: Contemporary Debates in Ethics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Robertson, R. (1987) 'Globalization Theory and Civilization Analysis', Comparative Civilizations Review 17 (Fall). Robertson, R. (1990a) 'After Nostalgia? Wilful Nostalgia and the Phases of Globalization', in Bryan S. Turner (ed.) Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity (London: Sage).

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Robertson, R. (1990b) 'Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept', in M. Featherstone (ed.) Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (London: Sage). Robertson, R. (1991) 'Social Theory, Culture Relativity and the Problem of Globality', in A. D. King (ed.) Culture, Globalization and the World-System (Binghamton: State University of New York and Macmillan). Robertson, R. and Chirico, J. A. (1985) 'Humanity, Globalization and Worldwide Religious Resurgence', Sociological Analysis 46. Rosencrance, R. (1986) The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic Books). Simpson, J. H. (1991) 'Globalization and Religion: Themes and Prospects', in R. Robertson and W. R. Garret (eds) Religion and Global Order (New York: Paragon House). Turner, B. S. (1990) 'The Two Faces of Sociology: Global or National?', in M. Featherstone (ed.) Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (London: Sage).

10 PERSONALITY, UNITY AND THE ORDERED LIFE Mike Featherstone

The painter takes his body with him,' remarks Valery (quoted in Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 162). So too does the sociologist, not only in the sense that he wrestles with the problem of the imposition of his embodied and situated gaze on the social relationships he seeks to decipher, but also in the communication of the results of his efforts to others. Yet in theorizing it is quite easy to lose sight of the body, the act of reading or writing all too easily occludes the fact that these are embodied practices which depend on a complex set of social relationships and interdependencies to sustain the necessary solitude (Bourdieu, 1983). It is evident when we go to a lecture, we not only have the text, but the embodied performance, the inflections of the spoken words, the tone of voice, gestures, body language, stance, and so on, which provide additional resources which serve to clarify and give intelligibility and persuasiveness to the message. I can still vividly recall attending John Rex's first series of lectures after being appointed professor at Durham University. He opened the lecture on Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life with the striking biographical remark that he first read the book while studying divinity in South Africa and that the impact of the book was so momentous that he took out his bicycle and pedalled down to the ministry to hand in his resignation. Statements like this have an impact not only through the dramatic nature of the event recounted, but through the way they are told. The mode and style of communication are assumed 197

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not only to throw light on the veracity of the statement, but also to provide an indication of the character of the speaker. There is, then, a sense in which a lecture has the quality of an exhibition or show (Bourdieu, 1990). Hence those who enjoy intellectual or academic success are in demand to speak around the world.1 We go along to see them not only to attain the clarification and immediacy of understanding that co-presence seems to deliver, but also to observe the person. Here, we are under the assumption that seeing the person, capturing a fragment of his life, will somehow enable us to gain some significant angle not only on his writings, but also on his more fundamental basic problematic or life-purpose. It is not only the working out of the possible traces of rhetoric and charisma, the potential for identification and heroicization that is of interest, but the assumption that there is a unity to a life and work, some style, motif or underlying structure which gives them coherence. It is in this sense that Elias (1985) disputed Hildersheimer's assertion that although Mozart was a brilliant musician he was a failure as a person. For Elias the life and the work form an integrated whole. Elias is, of course, far from being alone in making this assumption. Peter Gay (1973: 439), for example, tells us that 'Cassirer's The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau seeks to make sense of the whole man and to relate him to his writings - to discover, as Cassirer usually tried to do, an inner unity behind superficial contradictions.' Ray Monk, in discussing his book on Ludwig Wittgensteins remarks, 'When one considers his life and work as a unity — which is, above all, what I tried to do - this striving for Anstdndingkeit [decency, honesty] is central, for he considered it a prerequisite, not only to be a good person, but also to be a good philosopher.' Yet the assumption that we should see a person's life and work as framed from the outside by the commentator, or constructed from within by the subject through the lens of unity, is by no means undisputed. David Frisby (1981) focuses upon the alleged fragmented nature of Simmel's oeuvre, only to be taken to task by Roland Robertson (1982: 97) who argues that we should endeavour to seek the unity in Simmel's lifework. But within sociology it is perhaps Max Weber's life and work which provides the most vivid example of the struggles over whether his work should be conceptualized through the frame of unity. Such struggles have been heightened by the current wave of

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postmodern theorizing with its emphasis upon discontinuity, fragmentation, syncretism and otherness. Before examining such theories it would first be useful, however, to turn to a discussion of Max Weber. PERSONALITY AND THE LIFE ORDERS A good deal has been written in recent years about the 'thematic unity' (Tenbruck, 1980) and 'central question' (Hennis, 1988) of Weber's life and work. Arguing against the 'fragmented appreciation' of Max Weber, which has made Weber appear for some as the archetypal 'postmodern writer', Albrow (1990: 3) has recently argued that Weber's work has an inner logic and coherence. He quotes with approval the task which Ralf Dahrendorf (1987: 580) has identified as the prime requirement for Weber scholars: 'to weld his works and times together in the best tradition of Verstehen\ This echoes a long tradition of Weber scholarship of which Karl Jaspers's (1989: 145) remark that 'Max Weber's life and thought were insolubly entwined' is characteristic. Jaspers's admiration for Max Weber was of course unrestrained and he made the life and personality of Weber the model for his existential philosophy. For Jaspers Weber showed a remarkable consistency, which not only revealed itself in actions, but in his lack of artifice which became effectively written into his body:2 Physiognomy and gestures were original with him. No affectation and pretence surrounded him, He merely took his stand without the protection of conventions and masks. He placed no importance on himself. His naturalness automatically put aside all illusion and surrendered itself to every possible attack. He was the phenomenon of a human being who was entirely a human being, who thought what was, and became experiential. (Jaspers, 1989: 154) This lack of guile, fashion and stylization was for Jaspers manifest in the uniformity of the form within which Weber lived his life, a form in which we could say the ethic of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) was lived with the relentless commitment of an ethic of ultimate ends (Gesinnungsethik). To become a

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personality one could not pursue a myriad of new sensations and value commitments, rather one had to impose one's stamp on life, to ^orm it and subject it to a specific purpose.3 This entailed commitment, consistency and a sense of duty, the patience and strength, 'the strong slow boring of hard boards' which takes both 'passion and perspective' (Weber, 1948a: 128). At the same time, the sense of duty should not be understood as dull and cautious; it was animated by a demonic intellectual passion to surpass and surmount all fixity in pursuit of the end he has grasped. For Weber we could all meet the demands of the day in our vocation and interpersonal relations if each of us 'finds and obeys the demon who holds the fibers of his very life' (Weber, 1948b: 156). This type of commitment and consistency is not to be confused with an attempt to manufacture charisma. As Manasse (1957: 384) remarks, 'The demonic person does not attract but repel others who desire to devote and to subject their individualism to his own. Instead of passing out the slogans to a flock of idolisers he is suspicious of every fixed formula.'4 While an irrational commitment to ultimate values is given its affective charge by some demonic emotional impulse which drives the person and can give life a fatefulness, the means to realize the given end entail the suppression of desires and emotions through the systematic devotion to the task. It is this tension which has led Weber's life to be understood via the concepts of heroic ethics, heroic stoicism and heroic defiance, which feeds interpretations such as Jaspers's which claims that Weber's life formed a new type of personality which could be the inspirational model for the modern age.5 Individuals who organized their lives around an ultimate value to follow 'hero ethics' or 'genuine idealism' were the ones who only could be regarded as establishing distinctive personalities according to Weber (Portis, 1978: 118). Weber, like Simmel, considered the selection of ultimate values to entail a wager, a commitment which could not be substantiated amid the plurality of conflicting values and the differentiation of the value spheres which was characteristic of the modern age. Yet despite this uncertainty and the suspicion it cast on all manifestations of totality and an ethics of ultimate ends, as cultural beings it was our responsibility to pursue our ideals relentlessly. As Portis (1978: 116) remarks:

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An individual who devotes himself to the realization of his ideals not only has a greater sense of personal identity and a higher degree of self-esteem than one whose direct goal is to establish an identity, he actually is a more substantial 'person' because he 'is more than his mere appearances.' Hence for Weber while we may encourage others to develop the desire for self-clarification and a sense of responsibility, we should avoid the desire to impose our own standards upon others and accept that for those who follow science as a vocation there is no answer to the vital question Tolstoy posed, 'What shall we do?, How shall we arrange our lives?' (Weber, 1948: 152-3). Yet there is a sense in which this commitment to an ethic of responsibility can itself become an ultimate end, especially if we take into account the heroic and vital language in which it was expressed - the language which so captivated the audience which first heard 'Science as a Vocation', and continues to captivate subsequent generations of readers. Hence Lassman and Velody (1989: 172) argue that 'what we are presented with is the construction of an "epical" denial of the possibility of an "epical" theory for the modern age.' While, as they point out, this anti-foundational stance of Weber has meant that he has been rediscovered in the debates over postmodernism - in that Weber's account of the modern world is not dissimilar to that of Lyotard (1984) and others who point to the delegitimation of 'grand narratives' - it is important to stress that this is not the whole story. Where Weber differs from Lyotard is that for him science is a vocation, a will to truth based on 'an inner need for truth which makes science a form of faith' (Turner, 1990: 114). As mentioned earlier, to become a personality requires a firm commitment to one's convictions within a context of value pluralism and uncertainty. It involves a 'Here I stand and can do no other' wager, which by its very commitment and steadfastness implies an ethical judgement of the lack of worth of other standpoints. As Charles Turner (1990: 115) remarks: 'This Weberian move away from an (ironic) "totalizing perspective" refuses to substitute for an ethical "totality" a series of postmodern partial standpoints.' Two points can be made here which point the discussion towards postmodernism: first, the centrality of aesthetics within postmodern theories and the scepticism with which Weber

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addressed aesthetics as a mode of theorizing and a way of life suggests that the relationship between ethics and aesthetics needs to be explored; and, second, related to this, we need to discuss the relationship between 'hero ethics' and 'average ethics' which Weber formulated, and which can also be formulated in terms of masculinity and femininity (Bologh, 1990: 102). This paper will focus on the first question; the second, though equally deserving of attention, we will leave to a future occasion.

ETHICS AND AESTHETICS In the final chapter of The Religion of China Weber (1951) contrasts Confucianism with Puritanism. The Puritan viewed the world as material to be fashioned ethically whereas Confucianism asked for adjustment to the world. There was no attempt in the latter to order conduct into a systematic unity. The Confucian ideal was that the 'cultivated man', showed propriety, he was 'harmoniously attuned and poised in all social situations' (Weber, 1951: 156), he displayed a 'watchful self-control, self-observation and reserve', and an 'aesthetically cool temper' which caused all duties to be 'frozen into a symbolic ceremonial' (Weber, 1951: 234). 6 His life was therefore a 'complex of useful and particular traits', it did not constitute a 'systematic unity.' As Weber comments: Such a way of life could not allow a man an inward aspiration towards a 'unified personality', a striving which we associate with the idea of personality. Life remained a series of recurrences. It did not become a whole placed methodically under a transcendental goal. (Weber, 1951: 235) For Weber, this wholeness or systematic unity had emerged most successfully in the Puritan, who was dedicated to a cause through ethical imperatives not through tradition. Yet, as Hennis (1988: 93) argues, the spiritual bond between dedication to one's vocation and the 'innermost ethical core of personality' became broken with the establishment of capitalism in the West, leaving problematic the 'human type', which would replace the Puritan. In the modern world the loss of an ethical totality proved difficult to repair. The problems of grafting a comprehensive ethic for the totality of life-

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conduct on to the separate aesthetic, erotic and intellectual lifeorders within a differentiated cultural sphere proved demanding. The prospect of this being achieved via an ethic of responsibility or its alleged twentieth-century existentialist replacement which Jaspers had formulated, which was so clearly based upon the hero ethics of the life and work of Max Weber, was also problematic as it needed social conditions which would support independent rentiers - a solution which along with other intellectual and mystical attempts at salvation 'was not accessible to everybody' and hence entailed some form of aristocracy (Weber, 1948c: 357). Yet why were not the aesthetic, erotic and intellectual spheres viable alternatives to the Puritan ethic and its paler vocational twentieth-century shadow, the ethic of responsibility? Why could one not speak of an ethic of aesthetics, or even an ethic of eroticism as viable life-orders which could produce unified personalities? The simplest answer would be to presume a prejudice on Weber's part against aesthetics and eroticism arising from his Protestant and Kantian background. In effect, both the preoccupation with forms and the immersion in 'the greatest irrational force of life: sexual love' (Weber: 1948c: 343) drew attention away from the ethic of brotherhood and responsible commitment to a life-long cause; ethics could be reduced to a matter of taste and style. Furthermore, for Weber these inner-worldly, anti-rational lifeforces were in his time not merely content to remain confined within their respective spheres, but through their opposition to the 'iron-cage' routinization, rationalization and meaninglessness of modern life were being offered up as solutions, as effective ways of life which were surrogate forms of salvation (Scaff, 1989: 104). There is evidence that Weber softened his attitude towards the erotic and aesthetic spheres in the last decade of his life, and this is manifest in his increased sympathy to these modalities of experience in each progressive revision of the 'Zwischenbetrachtung' (Green, 1974: 171). This may have derived from Weber's encounter with the particular blend of eroticism, psychoanalysis, romanticism, bohemianism and Lebensphilosophie which was manifest in Otto Gross and his followers. It is true that Weber was very critical of Gross's beliefs, and this was apparent in his unsympathetic response to Gross's article submitted to the Archiv and his use of the dismissive label 'psychiatric ethic' (Bologh, 1990: 102), yet this is by no means the whole story. Weber's affection for Else

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Jaffe, who had been closely involved with Gross, and his subsequent passionate love affair with her certainly altered his view of the status of eroticism, and by association aestheticism.7 Weber's increased contact with Gross and his followers and the visits he made in 1913 and 1914 to the 'alternative lifestyle' communes they set up at Ascona, also helped to give Weber a more nuanced appreciation of eroticism. According to Marianne Weber this led to a more differentiated view of the contrast Weber had developed between 'hero ethics' and 'average ethics'. Now the idealist 'hero ethics' was accompanied by a new insight which allowed the followers of an erotic-emotional lifestyle to be admitted: There is a gradation of the ethical. If the ethically highest step is unattainable in a concrete case, one must try to achieve the second or third best. What that is cannot be derived from a theory, only from the concrete situation. (Weber, 1975: 388; translation adapted and quoted in Schwentker, 1987: 490) The sexual life, for Weber (1948c: 346-7), represented the only tie linking man to animality and with its 'boundless giving of oneself provided an 'inner worldly salvation from rationalization', especially for 'the vocational specialist type of man'. While eroticism represented an escape from both the supra-personal ethical values and the routines of everyday life, with its 'indifference to everything sacred and good', its very worth could be said to 'derive just from this hostility and indifference' (Weber, 1949: 17; see Green, 1974: 171). Hence what was an irrational passion could become a value.8 With regard to the aesthetic sphere, Weber (1948c: 342) tells us that modern men tend to transform moral judgements into judgements of taste, and that 'this shift from the moral to the aesthetic evaluation of conduct is a common characteristic of intellectualist epochs'. Yet while Weber sought to map out the problems with which this confronted the individual - an individual who sought to order his life and develop his personality in a critical manner, while leaving room for ethical consistency and responsibility - he also shared a good deal with Simmel. As Scaff (1989: 127) tells us, for Weber 'Simmel was above all the modern Kulturmensch, or cultural being, who figures so prominently in key passages of Weber's writings, the essentially new human self fully absorbed

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into the life-order of aesthetic modernism, the ahistorical self actualized in a world of limitless possibilities.' For Simmel human beings tear themselves away from the natural world through a process of 'cultivation', and the formation of life through the development of personality offers the prospect of a solution to the subject-object dualism (Scaff, 1989: 196). Simmel states that we cannot become cultivated into a unified person 'by having developed this or that individual bit of knowledge or skill; we become cultivated only when all of them serve a psychic unity which depends on but does not coincide with them.' He adds: The development of every human being, which is examined in terms of identifiable items, appears as a bundle of developmental lines which expand on different directions and quite different lengths. But man does not cultivate himself through their isolated perfections, but only insofar as they help to develop his indefinable personal unity. In other words: Culture is the way that leads from the closed unity through the unfolded multiplicity to the unfolded unity. (Simmel, 1968: 29) For Simmel (1971: 230, 232), then, 'culture is a perfection of man' and 'the development of our inner totality'. The tragedy is that for this development to take place (subjective culture) man depends upon externally created objects (objective culture) which are capable of possessing a conceptual unity, an ideal structure which lives only in the work itself and which cannot be replicated in a person's life. Hence, as Weingartner (1962: 168) remarks, for Simmel 'the personality of the individual understood to be a unified, integrated whole' is in Simmel's (1986: 14) words always a goal of development that is attained only imperfectly. Every great philosophy, however is an anticipation of this unity of form which is unattainable in any real psyche. The image of the world has the roundness of the ideal of personality. The great works of culture (art, religion, and so on) are so measured by their own criteria they resist harmonious assimilation with other elements necessary for the development of a spiritual wholeness.

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The consequent hiatus between objective and subjective culture in which things become more autonomous leads to an impoverishment and fragmentation of subjective culture, which becomes particularly marked in modern life (Simmel, 1971: 232, 234). Weber (1948c: 356) also captures this in his 'Zwischenbetrachtung' essay where he tells us that 'the "cultivated" man who strives for self perfection' may become' "weary of life" but cannot become "satiated with life" in the sense of completing a cycle.' This is because the perfectibility of the cultural man can in principle progress indefinitely, hence the amount the individual, as recipient or 'builder of cultural values', can handle in the course of his life 'becomes the more trifling the more differentiated and multiplied the cultural values and goals of self-perfection become'. It becomes impossible for us to conceive of absorbing the 'whole' of culture or defining the criteria on which we could make an 'essential' selection. He continues: The 'culture' of the individual certainly does not consist of the quantity of 'cultural values' which he amasses; it consists of an articulated selection of culture values. But there is no guarantee that this selection has reached an end that would be meaningful to him precisely at the 'accidental' time of his death. This passage resonates strongly with Simmel's diagnosis of the problems of modern culture in a world in which the delusion of unitary meaning had been lost while 'a longing for synthesis and wholeness' remained (Scaff, 1990: 289).9 Simmel did, however, discuss a number of responses to the contradictions of modern culture (see Scaff, 1989: 199ff). First, he refers to the various organizations, interactions and modes of sociability, which attempt to provide a meaningful order for life. Yet such attempts, as joining a political party or social movement, cannot provide an overarching sense of certainty and cultural unity in the differentiated modern world. Second, there is the aesthetic response which seeks to provide salvation through art, or the living of one's life as a work of art. Art can provide particular momentary glimpses of unity in which the world is viewed as a delimited whole, the mystical unity in which the world is viewed sub specie aeternitatis. Third, there is the 'cool reflection' of intellectual

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detachment. Here there is the tragic acceptance that conflicts and problems cannot all be solved and that 'the present is too full of contradictions to stand still' and while we 'gaze into an abyss of unformed life beneath our feet' we have to recognize that 'perhaps this very formlessness is itself the appropriate form for contemporary life' (Simmel, 1968: 25; Scaff, 1989: 201). The uncertainty in the face of the conflicting and competing forms of the world may then lead to the affirmation of life itself as the only surety (Whimster, 1987: 276); an acceptance of 'the paradoxical idea of form's absence as itself a form' (Scaff, 1990: 293). It might be possible to conceive of some fusion of the second and the third perspectives, as for example in the work of specific artists who sought not to flee from life into another totality of objective culture, but sought to capture the sense of the formlessness of life itself in a form. In his last essay on Rodin, Simmel concluded that the goal of art should not be merely salvation from 'the confusion and turmoil of life' but could entail a movement in the opposite direction via 'the most perfect stylization and enhanced refinements of life's own contents'; hence Rodin 'redeems us from just that which we experience in the sphere of actuality, because he allows us to experience our deepest sense of life once again in the sphere of art' (Simmel, 1983: 153; Scaff, 1989: 103). Simmel's depiction of Rodin's project can also be used to point to the way in which he too sought to develop forms of expression capable of doing justice to the fleeting impressions, the fragmentation and formlessness which made up the experience of modern life and the various ways in which this experience itself was subjected to rapid formation and deformation. It is in this sense that Simmel's contribution to the understanding of the cultural dimension of modernity, particularly in the large cities which were the heart of modern culture, has been highlighted to the extent that he has been proclaimed as 'the first sociologist of modernity' (Frisby, 1985a, 1985b). Simmel sought to explore the experience of the everyday world of modernity in the sense which Baudelaire had invoked in his depiction of the essence of the experience of modernite as being the problem of how to live amidst the endless parading of the new. Here the focus was on the new experiences of life in the big cities, the constant parade of new fashions and styles, the generation of defences against overstimulation and neurasthenia in the blase attitude and playful modes of sociability. The emphasis is upon the

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overwhelming flow of life, the genesis of new forms, some of which celebrated and prolonged the tension between life and form by their temporary and transitory nature - what Maffesoli (1988) has referred to as 'formisme', the playful development of temporary affectual identifications (Einfuhlung) and modes of sociability which in the modern city offer new forms of individuation and collectivities. To refer to processes of formation and deformation, swings between immersion in, and distantiation from, experiences and sensations is not only to draw attention to the salience of culture, but to a more general aestheticization of everyday life. Here the emphasis is not just upon the massive increase in the production of aestheticized objects as part of the development of a mass consumer culture, which changes the nature of the urban landscape, but also to point to the changes in the mode of perceiving, living and acting within this new consumer culture which heighten aesthetic sensibilities (see Featherstone, 1991). Some of these tendencies have been labelled postmodernism, which raises the question of whether they are genuinely new and distinctive to the late twentieth century, or whether there are continuities with the modes of experience which Simmel sought to comprehend in the turn-of-the-century modernity. In addition we need to enquire into the implication here on the development of personality and a unified or ordered life-course. Do they point to the viability of an 'ethics of aesthetics' as an alternative mode of ordering life within the contemporary world? Or does this represent a further attenuation and dissipation of the elements of personality-formation we have spoken of? The centrality of aesthetics within Simmel's whole work has often been remarked on. Goldscheid (1904: 411-12; quoted in Frisby, 1981: 86) for example writes that behind Simmel's whole work there stands not the ethical but the aesthetic ideal. And it is this aesthetic ideal which determines his whole interpretation of life and thus his whole scientific activity. What holds him back from all democracy is the feeling . . . that he denotes with the category of distinction [Vornehmheit] . . . for him this distinction is always only expressed as aesthetics and not as an ethical distinction.

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Frisby (1981: 85) tells us that Simmel substituted an aesthetic for an ethical stance on reality which Kurt Lamprecht referred to as 'an aesthetic ethics'. The question is not whether this mode of orientation is a legitimate or illegitimate frame of reference with which to understand the social world in some timeless categorical sense, but whether Simmel's specific mode of perception was both formed by and a response to particular sets of changes which were restructuring the nature of everyday experience. If this is the case then his choice can in no way be dismissed as capricious; rather it needs to be fully investigated, not least because what we refer to as 'postmodernism' may either be understood as continuous with these developments, or representing a new and distinctive set of breaks with it - which points to the need to investigate these alleged linkages and 'conditions of possibility' within a new historical context. POSTMODERNISM A good deal of confusion and justified scepticism exists about the terms 'postmodern', 'postmodernism', 'postmodernity' and 'postmodernization' and their relationship to the family of terms associated with the modern (for a discussion of these terms see Featherstone, 1991, 1988). The history of the terms suggests that postmodernism was first used to point to a movement beyond artistic modernism centred in New York in the 1960s. It was then picked up by philosophers and literary critics who detected homologies between the artworks and practices of postmodern artists and poststructuralism and deconstructionism. The rapid transmission of information between Europe (particularly France) and North America helped to draw in other critics, intellectuals and social scientists, which resulted in the stretching of the concept towards an epochal shift: postmodernity understood as something we are on the threshold of detecting, which points to the decay and dissolution of modernity. It may well be that the concept has little lasting utility for the social sciences (at least if the emphasis is placed on the term 'science'), being itself a product of demonopolization processes in academic life which are breaking down some of the barriers between subjects and subject-based establishments - tendencies which are themselves inimical to the maintenance of

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science. Where the term may, however, have some utility is in the way it directs our attention to cultural change. The main features associated with postmodernism can be briefly summarized. First, a movement away from the universalistic ambitions of master-narratives where the emphasis is upon totality, system and unity towards an emphasis upon local knowledge, fragmentation, syncretism, 'otherness' and 'difference'. Second, a dissolution of symbolic hierarchies which entail canonical judgements of taste and value, towards a populist collapse of the distinction between high and popular culture. Third, a tendency towards the aestheticization of everyday life which gained momentum both from efforts within the arts to collapse the boundary between art and life (Pop Art, Dada, Surrealism, and so on) and the alleged movement towards a simulational consumer culture in which an endlessly reduplicated hallucinatory veil of images efface the distinction between appearance and reality. Fourth, a decentring of the subject, whose sense of identity and biographical continuity give way to fragmentation and superficial play with images, sensations and 'multi-phrenic intensities'. Of particular interest here are the third and fourth features. Let us take as an example one of the most influential writers on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson. The phrase 'multi-phrenic intensities' is his and is used to indicate what he regards as an effect of the postmodern tendencies which have emerged in the postwar culture of the consumer society (Jameson, 1984a, 1984b; see also Featherstone, 1991). It refers to a breakdown of individuals' sense of identity through the bombardment of fragmented signs and images which erode all sense of continuity between past, present and future, all teleological belief that life is a meaningful project. In opposition to the notion that life is a meaningful project, here we have the view that the individual's primary mode of orientation is an aesthetic one, and like the schizophrenic he is unable to chain together the signifiers and instead must focus on particular disconnected experiences or images which provide a sense of intense immersion and immediacy to the exclusion of all wider teleological concerns. Jameson's views have been influenced by the writings of Baudrillard, although in contrast to the latter's nihilistic conclusions, he has sought to retain a Marxist framework to conceptualize these postmodern tendencies as the cultural logic of late capitalism. For Baudrillard (1983) we live in a depthless culture of

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floating signs and images in which 'TV is the world', and all we can do is watch the endless flow of images with an aestheticized fascination and without possible recourse to moral judgements. Some have argued that evidence of these tendencies are to be found within everyday life and modes of signification: in the sign-play of youth cultures, the styles and fashions of the flaneurs who move through the new postmodern urban spaces, and in the particular fusions of art and rock which produced contemporary popular music (Hebdige, 1988; Chambers, 1987; Frith and Home, 1987; Harvey, 1989). The implications for the theory of personality, character-formation, and the project of a unified and ordered life which we discussed in terms of the writings and lives of Weber and Simmel in the previous section, would seem to be clear. A new version of the ethic of aesthetics seems to be in the offing, one which lacks the underpinning sense of the unified life-order which is to be found in Weber and Simmel's deliberations. Yet troubling questions remain: how far are the formulations referred to as postmodern genuinely new — are there, for example, clear historical antecedents which would suggest that they should be reconceived as transmodern} How far are such decentred identities actually possible and is it possible to conceive them not as actually disordered lives, but as lives which still retain some sense of teleology and life-order, albeit within a more flexible generative structure which allows for a greater play of differences? It would be useful to approach these questions via a discussion of Rorty's work. Rorty follows the postmodern emphasis upon a decentred self by arguing that there is no underlying coherent human essence behind our various social roles. Rather than being something unified and consistent, the self should be conceived as a bundle of conflicting 'quasi-selves', a random and contingent assemblage of experiences (Rorty, 1986; Shusterman, 1988: 341-2). Once the old essentialist self has been discarded as impossible to found, the thirst for new experiences and constant self-enlargement can become the ethical justification for life: aesthetics becomes the ethical criteria for the good life. For Shusterman, Rorty's position represents a rehash of fin-de-siecle aestheticism. G. E. Moore, who was influential in the Bloomsbury Group, argued for an aesthetic life structured around the search for, and appreciation of, beautiful things, people and experiences.

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Wilde and Pater shared a similar ethic with the latter anticipating Rorty's Freudian-Faustian aesthetic life by advocating a 'quickened, multiplied consciousness' and thirst for enriching our experience via the intense excitement of novelty (Shusterman, 1988: 354). Wilde's advocacy of an aesthetic life entailed: (1) a life of pleasure in aesthetic consumption; (2) the need for life to form an aesthetically pleasing whole; and (3) occasionally, the assumption that such unity could be found in constant change (Shusterman, 1988: 354). But in contrast to Rorty's denial of any coherent structuring to the bundle of quasi-selves, in Wilde's case we have the injunction to turn life into a work of art; and here 'the idea is not so much a life of aesthetic consumption, but a life which is itself a product worthy of aesthetic appreciation for its structure and design as organic unity' (Shusterman, 1988: 347). Hence while Wilde maintained a subversive and critical attitude towards culture, and saw the artist as the true revolutionary figure because 'he expresses everything', he saw the great artist as inventing a type 'which life tries to copy' (Rieff, 1990: 276-7). There are clear parallels here with the life of Stefan George whose aestheticism and the blurring of the boundaries between life and art was one of the modern secular ethics with which Weber was concerned. In addition, there are echoes of the Ancient Greeks' reluctance to separate the good and the beautiful. In this context it is evident that one source of the current preoccupation of theorists of postmodernism with repairing the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, which were so long held separate in the Western tradition, has been the later writings of Michel Foucault. Foucault argues that Baudelaire's description of the new sense of the fleeting, ephemeral nature of time which comes into being with modernity, emphasizes that to be modern is not merely to lose oneself in 'presentness', the flux of the passing moments (cf. Simmel's notion of the formless flow of experienced life); it also entails an ascetic attitude in taking oneself as an object of formation and elaboration. Dandyism entailed the art of inventing oneself, of making life into a work of art (Foucault, 1986: 40-2). There would seem to be a strong Nietzschean element here in the assumption that the aim of life is to give style to one's character via some form of self-fashioning. It also raises again the question of the reconciliation of the goal of character-formation with a modernist cultivation of a protean, dispersed, transgressive self,

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which we shall shortly return to. In his final writings Foucault examined the Greek ethic that we have to aspire to be the type of person who builds his or her existence into a beautiful life, an aesthetic ideal of self-nobility. This did not entail conformity to a moral code, whether religious or juridical; rather, Foucault wished to shift the focus to the analysis of the ways in which the individual is meant to constitute him- or herself as an ethical subject. This notion of ethics emphasized both asceticism and teleology in the subjection of the self through the obligation to 'give your existence the most beautiful form possible' (Foucault, 1986: 353). This stylization of life and aesthetics of existence did not entail a restless hermeneutics of desire, but a moderate and prudent ordering of the conduct of life in terms of formal principles in the use of pleasures (Foucault, 1987: 89—90). A conception of the achievement of a structured and unified life which, like dandyism, entailed the pursuit of the goal of distinction which was not open to all.10 Given that both the Greek aesthetics of existence and nineteenthcentury dandyism were exclusive ethics not open to all, how far can we assume that a similar ethics of aesthetics is possible outside the realms of postmodern theory and should be understood as signs of an epochal shift, a movement towards postmodernity? Foucault (1987: 362), for his part, is keen to distinguish the Greek ethic from 'the Californian cult of the self and indeed regards them as 'diametrically opposed'. Neither new consciousness movements nor consumer culture would therefore seem to offer a basis for an ethics of aesthetics. Yet there are clear tendencies within consumer culture and youth movements which emphasize the stylization of life, albeit on a less grand scale, and it would only be through the analysis of self-help books, manners books and how-to-live manuals and their companions in newspapers, magazines and television — a contemporary effort to follow the methodology devised by Norbert Elias (1978/1982) - that a preliminary answer could be arrived at. There also remains the question of how unified and life extensive such postmodern attempts to create an ethics of aesthetics are. Maffesoli (1988, 1991), for example, emphasizes the emergence of new forms of collective solidarity which are found especially in the metropolis. These transitory affective collectivities, which Maffesoli refers to as 'neo-tribalism', emerge within complex societies which have given way to a polytheistic 'swarming multiplicity of

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heterogeneous values'. This draws attention to features of the contemporary world which more rationalistically orientated sociologists are apt to neglect, the persistence of strong affectual bonds through which people come together in constellations with fluid boundaries to experience the multiple attractions, sensations, sensibilities and vitalism of an extra-logical community, the embodied sense of being together, the common feeling generated by a common emotional adherence to a sign which is recognizable by others. The whole post-1960s' movement of rock festivals and the more recent Band Aid-style concerts provide good examples. Emphasizing the temporary, transitory and 'fickle' nature of these 'neo-tribes' (Bauman, 1990: 434) has argued that they fit well the Kantian concept of 'aesthetic community'. Such communities hold out the promise of unanimity, temporary republics of united taste in which each fragile consensus is constantly doing and undoing itself. It would seem that such temporary communities draw on neo-Durkheimian notions of the emotional charge and sense of the sacred which the group immersion and excitement generates. It is argued that this is clearly a collective sense of the ethic of the aesthetic in which the mass, which was formerly so negatively evaluated in terms of the efforts which the individual was required to make to distinguish himself through the Greek or dandyist 'aristocratic' individualistic modes, now becomes positively evaluated. The individual does not seek apollonian distinction but immerses himself in the dionysian collective. Maffesoli's (1991: 16) particular definition of the ethic of aesthetics, unlike Foucault's, is one with 'neither obligation nor sanction', there is 'no obligation other than coming together and being a member of the collective body'. The movement from considerations of personality, character, individuation and identity towards collective identification leaves behind notions of duty, obligation, asceticism, unity and teleology which are central to the theories of the aesthetic life order as formulated by Foucault, Weber and Simmel. This movement could also be understood in terms of the more general shift in the attitude of some academics, artists and intellectuals towards a positive evaluation of the mass, in terms of embracing the 'tactility' and embodied presence of groups in 'lower' social orders whose proximity, manners and lifestyles were once held to be so threatening and enervating - the fear of engulfment by the 'herd' which is a dominant motif in mass culture

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theory from Nietzsche to Eliot and Adorno. On a global level it also means an increased interaction and visibility of images and information about other cultures and traditions which could formerly be placed in a strict hierarchical and evolutionary order (for example the extent to which they are civilized within the Western mode) which are now accepted not as inferior, but as having the right to be different (see Featherstone, 1990). The acceptance of syncretism, polytheism and tolerance of difference and otherness - which is a feature highlighted in postmodern theories, undermining the particular conjunction of a politics and aesthetics which attempts to sustain universal judgements, which we find, for example, in critical theory - is itself both something advocated on a theoretical level and a response to changes in the relative situation of cultural specialists, both on an inter- and intra-societal level. Postmodernism has been associated with both the end of the avant-garde (Burger, 1984; Crane, 1987) and the end of the intellectuals (Jacoby, 1987). This is to be largely conceived in terms of the cohesiveness of their project which entailed explicit and implicit judgements about the worth of art and intellectual knowledge for humankind. It is in this sense that Bauman (1988) has detected a postmodern shift in intellectuals from the acceptance of their self-proclaimed Enlightenment role of legislators to the lesser role of interpreters. The loss of confidence in their ability to manufacture plausible, coherent or rational world-views which offered the prospect of some form of innerworldly salvation, has meant that we should not just speak of the secularization of religion, but of the secularization of science, art and intellectual knowledge too. Along with a decline in the charismatic authority of the artist and intellectual, manifest in notions such as the artist or intellectual as hero or genius, we have had a decline in the specialist counter-cultural communities and lifestyles, such as bohemias, which helped to sustain them. Postmodernism, with its emphasis on the repetitive nature of all art, its already-seen quality, which makes it at best only a copy (to the extent that the artist should only simulate what is already there in everyday life and consumer culture), manifests a distance from any attempt to conceive these changes in terms of any tragic reduction of subjective culture, such as we find in Simmel, or alternative Weberian conceptions of heroic stoicism. This also amounts to the denial of creativity, the capacity of human beings

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to create their culture ever anew in many varied ways, which was so central to the German cultural science tradition especially as found in the works of Weber, Simmel and Dilthey. Instead of the possibility of living out the life of an active Kulturmensch, all that remains is the attraction of the aesthetic play with fragments of already-formed culture, which we survey with passive fascination in a manner akin to the player of Herman Hesse's glass-bead game. Yet we should beware of taking at face value the claim that this fragmentation is absolute. While deconstruction and, by association, postmodernism manifest a hostility to what de Man refers to as 'the organic unity' and 'the intent at totality of the interpretive process' of works of art in favour of a celebration of heterogeneity, multi-vocality and intertextuality - the variety of incompatible arguments which inhabit a text - unity cannot be dispersed with altogether (see Culler, 1983: 199-200). Rather, deconstruction and postmodernism problematize unity in favour of more complex notions of syncretic unity and unicity. To banish the frame altogether is to move from culture into life, and this surrender to formlessness is not a viable option for cultural specialists, either in terms of their works or lives. CONCLUDING REMARKS It would seem, therefore, that we have a wide range of positions on the question of whether it is possible to develop a unified personality in the contemporary world. Before we summarize the various positions in terms of a typology, it would be useful to briefly recap Max Weber's view. Goldman (1988: 165) provides a useful assemblage of what he takes to be the four fundamental conditions for the generation of personality which are scattered throughout Weber's work First, there must be the creation or existence of a transcendentallike ultimate goal or value that gives leverage over the world through the tension it creates between the believer and the world. Second, there must be a 'witness' to action that is not social, seeing the 'outer' person, but transcendent, regarding the 'inner'. Third, there must be the possibility of salvation or redemption from death or from the meaninglessness of the world

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and the attainment of a sense of certainty about it. And fourth, there must be no ritual, magic or external means for relieving one's burden guilt, or despair. Together these four conditions anchor the sense of meaning and may later provide possibilities that life in an age without religion has otherwise lost. It may be possible, following Weber's invocation of a gradation in his discussion of hero ethics, to conceive of a similar gradation of personality-formation, with the above set of characteristics taken as summarizing the conditions of possibility for the full development of personality. The Puritan and Old Testament prophet clearly falls at this end of the continuum. Next we might place the aesthetics of existence of the Greeks. The artist, cultural specialist, intellectual or scientist in the modern world might come next, bearing in mind that, with whatever heroic stoicism they might attempt to order their lives, for Weber modern culture could not provide a viable replacement for the solutions proposed by religious theodicy. For Weber these secular ethics merely fuelled desire and inflated the sense of the possible without providing an ordered cosmology which would fulfil the psychic need for a meaningfully ordered life (Whimster, 1987: 289). It can be suggested that the plea Weber made for the maintenance of the separation of the various life-orders in the modern world has gone unheeded and we have seen not only partial signs of the collision of the spheres he referred to in 'Politics as a Vocation', but a heightened dedifferentiation, the changes which some want to label as the end of art, the end of the avant-garde and the end of the intellectuals, which some would place under the sign of postmodernism. In effect the deformation of the cultural sphere has collapsed the authority and prestige which maintained the distance between the cultural specialist and the ordinary person. While we are currently entering a more exacerbated phase of the demonopolization of the power of cultural establishments vis-a-vis outsider groups, there is no reason to believe that in the future new global conditions might come into being which would reverse this trend. If, however, we consider some of the cultural tendencies which are associated with the term postmodernism, it is clear that we would have to move further along the continuum, with the possibility of a unified ordered life in terms of some ethic of aesthetics as conceived by, for example Rorty or Maffesoli, giving

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way to a looser agglomeration of experiences and sensations which may become syncretized into a less coherent form of unity, or unicity. Something which may provide the excitement of role change and mask-wearing, as Hennis (1988) reminds us, cannot provide the ordered life. Weber, too, had his misgivings about the possible emergence in the West of similar tendencies to that found in the Confucian ethic, being scathing about this Eastern case of utilitarianism, the Mandarin blend of the cautious, calculating pursuit of earthly pleasures and pragmatic, bureaucratic conformism (see Liebersohn, 1988). As we move further along the gradation we encounter some of the intensities, immersions and immediacies of the vivid disconnected experiences that some associate with the shift towards a postmodern culture. Jameson's 'multi-phrenic' intensities point to the complete breakdown of form into life. Yet however frightening this prospect may be for those whom this is thrust upon (and it is hard to conceive of schizophrenia as otherwise), for those who plunge into the stream of life in a controlled way, the artists, intellectuals, critics and the cultural intermediaries and audiences who empathize with them, there is the comforting possibility of a different return, this time a return from life to form. However attractive and transgressive the dissolution of established forms, the collaging and reordering of existing ones and the immersion into life may seem, this process gives rise to new objectifications. These are not only the new forms of art and intellectual life, but also the piling-up of forms with which to interpret this process, some of which are pedagogies to help the uninitiated learn how to make sense of the new experiences and modes of formisme. In effect, how to decontrol their emotions, to play with a variety of new and potentially threatening images and sensations without the fear of a total loss of control must also be considered. The process of formation and deformation of culture continues apace. In this sense the fears expressed by Daniel Bell (1980) about the transgressive and antinomian characteristics of modernism and postmodernism, need not be so strong, nor his nostalgia for the Puritan so marked, for the modern artist and intellectual necessarily plays with and shapes life in ways which, however much they may seem to stretch our intellects and sensibilities, necessarily aim at some eventual, albeit more complex, multi-readable, recovery of form into life — but a form moreflexibleand less elevated a form on the side of life and against form itself. The turn-of-the-century

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publics and audiences may have found the transgressions of the followers of the artist and erotic life-orders threatening, disturbing and troubling, yet today we have larger audiences who can attune themselves to a wider range of more complex sensations and forms, who can rapidly switch between aesthetic distanciation and the heady immediacy of temporary immersion. Rather than this being interpreted nostalgically as signalling the end of morality, perhaps it points to a more complex range of unities, syncretic blends and differentiations between both the ethical and the aesthetic, and an involvement and detachment which entail varying degrees of mutual respect, restraint and tolerance within a new cultural context. This could be a context in which some of the old communalities (the 'common culture' as a goal of both the state's national selfformation process and oppositional counter-cultural movements of artists and intellectuals) will wither away, or not least find themselves uncomfortably juxtaposed alongside other traditions and value-complexes, which are difficult to discredit or ignore within a wider, more complex cultural form of global compression. It may seem a massive and unwarranted step to speak about personality-formation in the same sentence as the global cultural order, especially in today's specialized world; yet the tradition of sociology associated with Weber, Simmel and those such as Elias and Rex who have sought to carry on the scope of their efforts is one which had little time for the boundary-maintainers who kept to their own territories and identified sociology with the narrowly conceived study of society - society which was generally regarded as the left-over bits after the economy, the nation state, international and transnational relations, cultural values and personality formation had been taken out. It is this more widely conceived transdisciplinary sociology which would seem to be best suited to attempt to answer the vital questions of our time, questions which demand perspective and detachment, the capacity to range far away to understand something which is very near to our hearts.

NOTES 1. George SimmePs capacity to attract a varied audience to his lectures, which became public events, is well known. His mode of delivery was remarkable as a contemporary noted:

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2.

3.

4.

5.

Yet in fact Simmel's lectures were a show in the sense that he gave the identical lecture on several occasions with virtually no changes, and his ability to give the impression that he was struggling to work out his ideas in front of the audience shows that he was a master of impression management (see Staude, 1990). Apart from such descriptions by Weber's contemporaries, we can only see the embodied Weber through photographs. It is worth recording that in John Rex's study at Durham University a framed photograph of Max Weber was prominently displayed on the mantelpiece. This was the leonine steadfast portrait of Weber which is the frontpiece of Gerth and Mills's (1948) From Max Weber. This should not be taken to mean that Weber strove to become a personality; far from it - see his attack on the idols of 'personality' and 'personal experience' in 'Science as a Vocation' (Weber, 1948b: 137). He despised the cult of personality, and the romantic search for experience and emotional fulfillment. This was manifest in his attitude towards the idols of the cult of youth such as Stefan George. Only the person who showed inner devotion to a specialist task could become a genuine personality (Albrow, 1990: 44). For a discussion of the derivation of Weber's sense of the demonic from Goethe, as well as the Protestant and Kantian sources of Weber's commitment to the ordering and unifying of life via the free action of the person, see Albrow (1990). Jaspers was not alone in his admiration for Weber. Theodor Heuss, the future President of West Germany began his obituary of Weber: For us young people meeting him meant the experience of a daemonic personality. He had power over men, the power of destructive anger, of objective clarity, attractive grace; all his utterances were suggestive, endowed with 'charisma', with the grace of inborn leadership.' (Green, 1974: 278)

6. Weber (1951: 131-2) tells us that the 'gentleman ideal' was 'the man who had attained all-around self-perfection, who had become a "work

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of art" in the sense of a classical, canon of psychical beauty, which literary tradition implemented in the souls of disciples'. This was accumulated through education in the classics which was subjected to certified examinations so that 'canonical and beautiful achievements' could be displayed in a 'salon' culture. 7. The main account of the relationship is in Green (1974). It is also referred to in Roth's (1988: xlii) new introduction to Marianne Weber's biography of Max and Whimster's (1989: 463) review article. The love letters from Max Weber to Else as yet remain unpublished and there remains considerable controversy as to their actual contents. In the German edition of Marianne Weber's (1989) Lebensbild Roth adds to the controversy by arguing that Marianne knew about the affair and hence there was never a time when Max fell short of his obligation to be totally honest with his wife about the situation (see Liebersohn, 1988-9: 126). It is worth adding that the discovery came as a tremendous blow to Karl Jaspers, for here was a clear case of the person he had built up to be a paragon of consistency, honesty and responsibility, who had gone to great lengths to conceal his affair from his wife (see Whimster, 1989; Henrich, 1987). 8. Well before the 'Ethical Neutrality' essay (1917) was written, Weber is reported of having asked Else Jaffe in 1908 'But wouldn't you say that any value could be embodied in eroticism?' To which she replied 'But certainly-beauty!' (Green, 1974: 171). 9. See, for example, his discussion in The Philosophy of Money (Simmel, 1978) and the essay 'On the Concept of the Tragedy of Culture' (Simmel, 1968) where he tells us that the 'voracious accumulation' of objective culture is 'deeply incompatible with the forms of personal life'. He adds: The receptive capacity of the self is limited not only by the force and length of life, but also through a certain unity and relative compactness of its form. The individual might pass by what his self-development cannot assimilate, but this does not always succeed so easily. The infinite growing supply of objectified spirit places demands before the subject, creates desires in him, hits him with a feeling of individual inadequacy and helplessness, throws him into total relationships from whose impact he cannot withdraw, although he cannot master their particular contents. Thus, the typically problematic situation of modern man comes into being: his sense of being surrounded by an innumerable number of cultural elements which are neither meaningless to him, nor in the final analysis, meaningful. In their mass, they depress him, since he is not capable of assimilating them all, nor can he simply reject them, since after all, they do belong potentially within the sphere of his cultural development. (Simmel, 1968: 44)

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10 Foucault (1987: 341) writes . . . it was reserved for a few people of the population; it was not a question of giving a pattern of behaviour for everybody. It was a personal choice for a small elite. The reason for making this choice was the will to live a beautiful life, and to leave to others memories of a beautiful existence. I don't think that we can say that this kind of ethics was an attempt to normalize the population.

REFERENCES Albrow, M. (1990) Max Weber's Construction of Social Theory (London: Macmillan). Bauman, Z. (1988) 'Is There a Postmodern Sociology?', Theory Culture & Society 5(2-3). Bauman, Z. (1990) 'Philosophical Affinities of Postmodern Sociology', Sociological Review 38(3). Bell, D. (1980) 'Beyond Modernism, Beyond Self, in Sociological Journeys: Essays 1960-1980 (London: Routledge). Bologh, R. W. (1990) Love or Greatness. Max Weber and Masculine Thinking —A Feminist Inquiry (London: Unwin Hyman). Bourdieu, P. (1983) 'The Philosophical Institution', in A. Montefiore (ed.) Philosophy in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Bourdieu, P. (1992) 'Thinking About Limits', in Featherstone, M. (ed.) Cultural Theory and Cultural Change (London: Sage). Burger, P. (1984) Theory of the Avant-Garde (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Chambers, I. (1987) 'Maps for the Metropolis: A Possible Guide for the Postmodern', Cultural Studies 1(1). Coser, L. (1977) 'George SimmeP, in Masters of Sociological Thought, 2nd edn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Crane, D. (1987) The Transformation of the Avant-Garde (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Culler, J. (1983) On Reconstruction (London: Routledge). Dahrendorf, R. (1987) 'Max Weber and Modern Social Science', in W. J. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel (eds) Max Weber and his Contemporaries (London: Allen Unwin). Elias, N. (1978/1982) The Civilizing Process (2 vols) (Oxford: Blackwell).

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Elias, N. (1987) Interview with M. Featherstone et al., Theory Culture & Society. Featherstone, M. (1988) 'In Pursuit of the Postmodern', Theory Culture & Society 5(2-3). Featherstone, M. (1991) Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage). Fechter, P. (1948) Menschen und Zeiten (Gutersloh: Berdelsmann). Foucault, M. (1986) 'What is Enlightenment?', in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Foucault, M. (1987) The Use of Pleasure (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Frisby, D. (1981) Sociological Impressionism: A Reassessment of Georg SimmeVs Social Theory (London: Heinemann). Frisby, D. (1985a) 'Georg Simmel, First Sociologist of Modernity', Theory Culture & Society 2(3). Frisby, D. (1985b) Fragments of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity). Frith, S. and Home, H. (1987) Art into Pop (London: Methuen). Gay, P. (1973) The Enlightenment, vol. 1 (London: Wildwood House). Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. W. (1948) From Max Weber (London: Routledge). Goldman, H. (1988) Max Weber and Thomas Mann (Berkeley: California University Press). Goldscheid, R. (1904) Review of Philosophie des Geldes, Archiv fur systematische Philosophie 10. Green, M. (1974) The von Richthofen Sisters (New York: Basic Books). Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell). Hebdige, D. (1988) Hiding in the Light (London: Routledge). Hennis, W. (1988) Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction (London: Allen & Unwin). Henrich, D. (1988) 'Karl Jaspers: Thinking with Max Weber in Mind', in W. J. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel (eds) Max Weber and his Contemporaries (London: Allen & Unwin). Jacoby, R. (1987) The Last Intellectuals (New York: Basic Books). Jameson, F. (1984a) 'Postmodernism and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', New Left Review 146. Jameson, F. (1984b) 'Postmodernism and the Consumer Society', in H. Foster (ed.) Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto).

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Jaspers, K. (1989) Karl Jaspers on Max Weber (New York: Paragon House). Lassman, P. and Velody, I. with Martins, H. (eds) (1989) Max Weber's Science as a Vocation (London: Unwin Hyman). Liebersohn, H. (1988) Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870-1923 (Cambridge: MIT Press). Liebersohn, H. (1989-9) Review of Marianne Weber Max Weber: A Biography, with a new Introduction by Guenther Roth, Telos 78. Lyotard, J. F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Maffesoli, M. (1988) Le Temps des tribus (Paris: Meridiens Klincksiek). Maffesoli, M. (1991) The Ethic of Aesthetics', Theory Culture & Society 8(1). Manasse, E. M. (1957) 'Jaspers' Relation to Max Weber', in P. A. Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (New York: Tudor). Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) 'The Eye and the Mind', in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press). Monk, R. (1990) Ludwig Wittgenstein (London: Cape). Portis, E. B. (1978) 'Max Weber's Theory of Personality', Sociological Inquiry 48(2). Rieff, P. (1990) 'The Impossible Culture: Wilde as a Modern Prophet', in The Feeling Intellect (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Robertson, R. (1982) Review of D. Frisby Sociological Impressionism, Theory Culture & Society 1(1). Rorty, R. (1986) 'Freud and Moral Reflection', in J. H. Smith and W. Kerrigan (eds) Pragmatism's Freud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Scaff, L. A. (1989) Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley: California University Press). Scaff, L. A. (1990) 'Georg Simmel's Theory of Culture', in M. Kaern et al. (eds) Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology (Dordrecht: Kluwer). Schwentker, W. (1987) 'Passion as a Mode of Life: Max Weber, the Otto Gross Circle and Eroticism', in W. J. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel (eds) Max Weber and his Contemporaries (London: Allen & Unwin).

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Shusterman, R. (1988) 'Postmodern Aestheticism: a New Moral Philosophy?', Theory Culture & Society 5(2-3). Simmel, G. (1968) 'On the Concept of the Tragedy of Culture', in The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays (New York: Teachers College Press). Simmel, G. (1971) 'Subjective Culture', in D. Levine (ed.) Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Simmel, G. (1978) The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge). Simmel, G. (1983) Philosophische Kultur (Berlin: Wagenbach). Simmel, G. (1986) Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (Amherst: Massachusetts University Press). Staude, J. R. (1990) 'George Simmel and Max Scheler', mimeo. Tenbruck, F. (1980) 'The Problem of Thematic Unity in the Work of Max Weber', British Journal of Sociology 31. Turner, C. (1990) 'Lyotard and Weber: Postmodern Rules and Neo-Kantian Values', in B. S. Turner (ed.) Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity (London: Sage). Weber, Marianne (1975) Max Weber: A Biography (New York: Wiley). Weber, Max (1948a) 'Politics as a Vocation', in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds) From Max Weber (London: Routledge). Weber, Max (1948b) 'Science as a Vocation', in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds) From Max Weber. Weber, Max (1948c) 'Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions', in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds) From Max Weber. Weber, Max (1949) 'The Meaning of "Ethical Neutrality" in Sociology and Economies', in The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press). Weber, Max (1951) The Religion of China (New York: Free Press). Weingartner, R. H. (1962) Experience and Culture: The Philosophy of Georg Simmel (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press). Whimster, S. (1987) 'The Secular Ethic and the Culture of Modernism', in S. Whimster and S. Lash (eds) Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity (London: Allen & Unwin). Whimster, S. (1989) 'Heidelberg Man: Recent Literature on Max Weber', Theory Culture & Society 6(3).

11 HEGEL, TEXAS: Issues in the philosophy and sociology of technology Herminio Martins

i The notion that technical artifacts represent extensions (projections, amplifications) of the human being and not least of the human body (the senses, the limbs, the nervous system, etc.) has become a topos of modern thought. The prosthetic theory of technology (as we may call it) was formulated in a variety of texts in the 1860s and also appears in partial versions in classical Marxism, the popularizations of Darwinian evolutionary theory and in Freudian psychoanalysis. The first systematic exposition of this point of view was set forth in a treatise on the philosophy of technology published in 1877 by Ernst Kapp (1808-96).a Our author, as a Young Hegelian shared much the same intellectual environment as that of classical Marxism. Driven into political exile by the defeat of the liberal and democratic German risings of 1848—9 he settled in a German colony in Texas where he was active as farmer, inventor, hydrotherapist and scholar. On his return to Germany nearly 20 years later he absorbed evolutionary ideas as elaborated by the German popularizers of Darwin and the doctrines of the unconscious which shaped the philosophical and aesthetic climate of the German-speaking world. As a Hegelian, he sees human history as the objectivation of the human essence. As a left-wing Hegelian he considers this objectivation as stemming not from spirit but from the embodied human 226

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being. Just as Feuerbach had seen anthropology as the key to theology Kapp sees anthropology as the key to the understanding of the history of technology. He thus formulated an anthropological theory of technology. The central explanatory locution of this anthropology of technology is 'organ projection' (Organprojektion). Thus early tools are easily seen as projections of human body parts and above all of the human hand whose versatility and suppleness empowers it as the most technogenic body part (thus the cupped hands generate the class of container implements, the fist is the analogon of hammers and many kinds of weapons). The human senses of sight and hearing provide the models for optical and acoustical instruments respectively. Eventually the internal structure of the human body provides the unconscious model for other technical artifacts. Even recent technical inventions of Kapp's lifetime are analogized to the inner structures of the human body: the cables of the electric telegraph were compared to human nerves and the railway to the circulatory system. In these latter analogies this author was by no means alone since similar analogies were drawn by many contemporary observers. What appears most forced in Kapp's work is the attempt to provide an all-inclusive, unitary theory of technology of a strictly anthropocentric and anthropomorphic kind. Each state and stage of technology is brought into correspondence with some phase of the human species-being. But if Kapp develops an anthropological theory of technology he also, by the same token, elaborates a technological theory of anthropology. The unconscious produces variegated technical externalizations projecting various features and phases of the human being. Once produced, technical artifacts provide the indispensable means through which human beings can attain selfknowledge. The growth of technology is the agency through which the species-being can come to self-consciousness. The self-understanding of human nature cannot be attained through introspection or through the study of human behaviour as such but through the study of the products of human labour, above all technical artifacts. Each artifact, each technological object provides, as it were, a discovery procedure for some phase of human nature and the make-up of our minds and bodies. This would explain why technological metaphors have been so crucial in every epoch of thought to our self-interpretation. Kapp, however, does not

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systematically consider the way in which these technomorphic models of human nature are reified as if they had not been in fact the result of unconscious organic projection. In Kapp's vision pretechnological man was a homo absconditus? radically lacking in self-knowledge or self-consciousness. Through the unceasing creation of technical artifacts more and more phases of the human being become available to consciousness until the most hidden powers, capacities and faculties of the human being become gradually disclosed to humans through a consideration of human works. It is thus the study of the products of human action, especially in the stable form of technological objects, that most reveals human powers to the human mind (in this he anticipates Popper's similar claims concerning world three, the realm of the products of human ideation, though Kapp singles out tools as the most important category of human works for the growth of human self-consciousness or self-knowledge). In Kapp's anthropodicy the unfolding of technological possibilities might eventually bring about the condition of the homo manifestos, the totally self-conscious human species-being, although it is not very clear whether Kapp envisages this as an actual end-state or simply as a regulative ideal. Kapp does not systematically discuss social or epistemic obstacles to the technologically maximal state of the homo manifestus nor to the proper recognition that the technological world consists of nothing but projections of our being (what McLuhan called 'the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our bodies as really out there and really independent of us', (1964, p. 68; emphasis in the original). In other words, Kapp lacks a theory of technological alienation perhaps because he sees technology as an exclusively disalienating force. The metaphysical emphasis on the unconscious becoming conscious through technical externalization provides him with a kind of cosmic guarantee that the growth of technology will be pari passu the growth of human selfconsciousness. The Feuerbachian emphasis on the body or rather the embodied human being dates his approach to some degree as a form of what one might call 'technological somatism'. For the presumption of the ontological unity, integrity, depth and above all priority of the embodied human being, the ontological priority of the organic over the mechanical is placed in jeopardy by contemporary biotechnologies and the thrust towards the mechanization of organic life.

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Whilst for Kapp the human being was rooted in the depths of the unconscious, for contemporary technoscience there are no ontological depths only information-processing systems in one shape or another. Technology in this perspective is the key to anthropology but anthropology has no ontological priority. Technological somatism' is no longer unquestioned and a more salient configuration in theories of technology today is almost its mirror-image, 'technological gnosticism', which we discuss in the next section. II Recent trends and tendencies in a variety of technological areas as well as proleptic claims and prophecies by leading workers in such fields as genetics, bioengineering and artificial intelligence, support the contention that we are currently facing a cultural syndrome that Victor Ferkiss (1980) has called 'technological gnosticism' (and which could equally be called 'technoscientific gnosticism' in view of the interpenetration of scientific research and technical invention. Indeed major advocates of these projects have been workers identified primarily as 'scientists' rather than 'technologists'). The expression 'technological gnosticism' may seem an oxymoron as gnosticism is usually understood as involving abhorrence of the organic, repugnance for the body, aversion for the natural - certainly for natura naturata, natural beings in their manifest grossness if not the hidden, plastic powers of natura naturans — and a metaphysical pathos in which the 'viscosity' of things is felt as radically inimical to spirit. Technology entails manipulation of the material world and thereby appears inherently counter-gnostic. However by the superficially paradoxical expression of 'technological gnosticism' is meant the wedding of technological realizations, projects and aspirations to the characteristically gnostic dreams of radically transcending the human condition (and not just of ameliorating it and enabling human beings to cope with hostile natural forces). To overcome the basic parameters of the human condition - its finitude, contingency, mortality, embodiment, animality, existential boundedness — appears among the drives and even the legitimations of contemporary technoscience in at least some areas. Admittedly such hyperbolic locutions as the 'abolition' or 'annihilation' of space and time

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(for example) have been around since at least the 1840s when the invention of the electric telegraph evoked a 'rhetoric of the technological sublime' (Marx, 1964), have been reiterated in connection with many subsequent developments in technologies of transport and communication. They became the cliches of discourse concerning the electronic media and information technologies. The 'rhetoric of the electronic sublime' (Carey, 1989) is a particularly luxuriant current version of the broader theme and no doubt may be partly discounted as media-hype through the growth oi; informatization (the interlinking of computer systems with telecommunications). It affords glimpses of computopias in which the material world and human sensuous experience thereof are increasingly replaced by information-processing (with a different, superior ontological status, closer to spirit than to matter and energy in the classical world-picture). Philosophers of technology from Bergson (1907) to Gehlen (1980) stressed that the major thrust of human technology involved the manipulation of the inorganic by the organic (as represented by homo faber) and assumed that the organic world would remain essentially opaque to analytical-reductive understanding, retaining its ontological integrity vis-a-vis the technological impulse of our species (apart from limited technological interventions such as those whose achievements Darwin had already pondered on whilst developing the theory of natural selection). This theory of technology no longer holds true, for the manipulation of the organic world in order to bring about transformations in both the organic and inorganic worlds has been a major growth area in recent decades. Whilst for Bergson the technological impulse (what one might call the elan technique) of our species continued the 'natural technology' of living organisms generally by other means and would remain within the horizon of the elan vital, the current prospects of bioengineering indicate a major turn in the evolution of human technologies, precisely in a gnosticizing manner. The fabrication of artificial life-forms (for a wide range of utilitarian purposes but also with the underlying aspiration of producing more perfect organisms) in a planetary context in which natural biospecies are far from being exhaustively listed, and in which indeed they are disappearing at an accelerating rate with an irreparable and growing loss of biodiversity (greater than in natural ecocatastrophes) is one of the paradoxes of our contemporary

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situation. The sense of the basic givenness of the world of living organisms has been radically overthrown with the prospect of indefinite transformation of the natural boundaries of biospecies and of an extraordinary acceleration of the processes of genetic and somatic change (see e.g. Rikfin, 1983): the technological temporality of bioengineering replaces the slow pace of the bioevolutionary time-frame through direct intervention in genomes (quite apart from the indirect and often unintended large-scale changes in habitats and biomes brought about by techno-economic growth). The laments for the destruction of natural habitats and natural biospecies are often dismissed with the claim that technologies can provide precisely engineered substitutes for any and every 'natural' kind that is lost. This is a claim made not just by technoscientific authorities but also by mainstream economists whose theodicy of economic growth constantly relies on a 'fallacy of infinite substitutability5 (Daly, 1977) and the last-resort appeal to the fact that some people actually like plastic trees. Consider also the prospect seriously entertained by leading researchers in the artificial intelligence field - at any rate the advocates of the socalled 'strong AI program' - that within the next 40 years 'we' will be able to replace our mindful brains (which are just 'meat computers') with brainless minds, substituting our 'fleshware' by software and our cogito by a computo (e.g. Moravec, 1990). The claim is that, as the mind is essentially computational, its links to an organic body are essentially contingent: a far cry from the Feuerbachian anthropological materialism which inspired much nineteenth-century theorizing about technology, including the 'technological somatism' of Kapp. These technological developments and prospects provide prima facie candidates for inclusion under the rubric of 'technological gnosticism' though other cases could be discussed. Doubtless each area of technology needs to be carefully assessed for its ontological import but that one should take seriously the gnosticizing tendency of some recent technologies seems reasonably clear. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that these considerations are in no way directed against the 'project of modernity' as such nor against the essential role technologies can play along the lines of the classical Promethean vision in mitigating the disabilities and infirmities of the human condition. The striving towards transcendence is also inseparable from the human condition

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and\in no way to be dismissed as a Cartesian or some other form of hubris. By taking 'technological gnosticism' as an organizing concept in our discussion of the philosophy and sociology of technology we do not thereby wish to associate the present argument with the farreaching implications which the concept of gnosticism carries as the master-category of Voegelin's (1968) philosophy of history and politics. For Voegelin the essence of modernity lies in the growth of immanentized gnosticism in such forms as the doctrine of indefinite or perpetual progress, in visions of perfect societies and human perfectibility generally, and in the social movements which lay claim to historiographic gnosis as salvific knowledge projecting the end of history as the redemption of humanity. In the West such gnostic tendencies militate against the classical noetic and the Judeo-Christian revelatory heritage through the pivotal theodicy of history elaborated by Joachim of Flore (d. 1202) often seen as the principal matrix of immanentized and historicized gnosticism. Those more sympathetic to the projects of modernity and the Enlightenment would repudiate or qualify this interpretation by stressing the internal collapse of the medieval-Catholic world outlook as the enabling factor in the emergence of modern science and the legitimation of curiositas as 'the second overcoming of gnosticism' (Blumenberg, 1983). For Blumenberg the 'breakthrough of technicization' in modern industrial technology obviating, at least for a time, the Malthusian nightmare, represented another phase in 'man's self-assertion in the face of nature's inhumanity' (1983, p. 224). Thus the stress in this author's perspective is on modern scientific rather than classical and religious counter-values to the permanent possibility of gnosticism in Western civilization. Neither scholar has considered the turn of modern technologies to gnosticizing ways nor the 'immiseration of nature' brought about by an all-enveloping technosphere. These developments have partially undermined the conditions of existence of modern civilization and its cultural heritage, raising deep concern about the unrestricted Promethean vision of technological amelioration of the life-conditions of the species and the intrinsically liberatory role of scientific knowledge. These larger debates in the philosophy of history and politics and the global appraisal of modernity cannot be addressed focally in this chapter. But at least as a historical footnote it may be

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recalled that the ambiguities of contemporary technoscience are not entirely novel emergents or the result of wholly unprecedented conjunctures. The cultural constellation that presided over the growth of early modern science did include gnostic inputs. Amongst the influences shaping the development of mathematicalexperimental science and the cosmologies accompanying it were alchemy (as a nursery of experimental practices but something of its larger visions also, involving the project of the mastery of time and the acceleration of natural processes), astrology or astrobiology, Hermeticism, mystical Pythagoreanism, Cabbalistic teachings and a variety of forms of natural or spiritual magic. These influences have been, if anything, overemphasised in recent decades assuming a particularly overblown form in the 'Yates thesis' which virtually saw the seventeenth-century scientific revolution as an offshoot of mystical, magical and mythical undercurrents (or at least these were seen as the pervasive intellectual climate within which modern science came into being). Still, one might invoke 'the last Magus' - as Keynes called Newton - who devoted thousands of hours to alchemical experiments and filled reams of paper with minute protocols and records thereof, although of course this remained an unpublished, esoteric corpus of work (Dobbs, 1975). It is important not to exaggerate the role of these influences, and in any case the precise manner in which these influences combined with other logically and historically prior factors in the tangled web of historical causation currently defies coherent historical synthesis. The Aristotelian-Thomist natural teleology of an ordered, intelligible cosmos had already been undermined by fourteenth-century theological voluntarism which entailed the radical contingency of the empirical world. In some ways Descartes was the last and greatest of the theological voluntarists, for him God could even unmake the laws of logic and all axioms of reason (Funkenstein, 1986). The gnosticizing tendencies in contemporary technoscience, unlike those of early modern science, cannot be imputed directly to nameable gnostic currents of thought. It is nevertheless a curious turn of events that has brought about what one might characterize as an elective affinity between the spirit of modern technoscience and the ethos of this worldly, immanentized (rather than classical transcendent) gnosticism. Time was when much sociology of science centred round the elective affinity between this-worldly

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asceticism (especially in radical Protestantism) and the ethos of modern science (with its universalistic, empirical, experimental, transformative temper), though some critics preferred to stress the affinity of modern science with the ethos of cosmological hedonism or world-joy in the natural world. The overcoming of gnosticism which took place, if not quite in early modern science, but in its later development through the eighteenth century, was not definitive. Perhaps we should speak of a 'third gnosticism' (Landmann, 1983) not only in the virulence of totalitarian movements and ideocracies, and in the pervasive relativizing historicism of liberal societies, but in the inner sanctum of current technoscience. It would be wrong to suppose that some of the recent technoscientific developments mentioned above as 'gnostic', were not anticipated and even ardently desired by some very reflective scientists. Here I would like to recall a striking text published by the socialist physicist J. D. Bernal in 1929, one of a family of texts of the period speculating in a quite fundamental way about the implications of prospective technologies, not least biotechnologies, for the thorough reshaping of human beings and societies. It would be a striking text in any case but the fact that the author was subsequently a major influence on thinking in both democratic and state-socialist societies about the world-shaping role of technoscience (he coined the phrase 'the scientific and technological revolution of our time' in 1939, which was to be so prominent in communist discourse from about 1968 onwards) confers added value to it. In any case its author, by then a Lenin Prize laureate, republished the work in 1970 without in any way disowning it, although the goals for humanity set out in this vision of a very long-term future would seem wholly dissonant with those of mundane progress and plenty on earth provided by munificent technoscience which he advocated as a propagandist for science and socialism for several decades.3 In the work - perhaps significantly entitled The world, the flesh and the devil - he propounded a number of techno-gnostic goals for the science-based development of the species. One of the goals was the advent of 'mechanized man' in which as much as possible of the natural organic human body would be replaced: technologized man would largely consist of a brain-case with a new mechanical body. New artificial sense-organs would replace our feeble sensorium and enormously enlarge our sensory

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capacities for perceiving space and time (this vision has been partly superseded by that of some currents of artificial intelligence in which the brain itself would be replaced with inorganic software). While human bodies were still needed they would be produced in ectogenetic factories (following Haldane, 1923). Natural food would be replaced entirely with synthetic food before more complete emancipation from such requirements. Much of the species would eventually live in permanent space colonies enclosed in totally artificial environments (here curiously technological gnosticism appeals to prior aesthetic gnosticism, for Bernal notes that in any case modern painting has rejected the depiction of the natural world, including the human body. He could have cited, for example, Mondrian's utter abhorrence of anything reminiscent of organic form in the pictorial work). The new mechanized humanity would contemplate the unredeemedly organic remnant of humans on earth as a kind of 'zoo'. Classical gnosticism abhorred individuation, ontological separation and the diaspora of beings (Brun, 1963), individuation and personhood being in any case ontologically vitiated by the inevitability of death. Bernal envisaged the interconnection of brains in such a way that multiple individuals would be linked by affective bonds so strong that the most fanatical devotion that we can observe today can barely afford us a glimpse of them; eventually with the growth of these collectives, something like immortality would be attained. For the classical gnostics salvific knowledge is the telos of existence: for Bernal scientific discovery would replace all other human goals and needs and at least the elect of knowledge, the scientist-gnosticians, would engage in the pursuit of cosmic self-consciousness perhaps leaving behind lower level minds (or brains), for knowledge was seen a&^oth the means and the end of worthwhile existence. There is throughout the text a marked tension between scientific elitism and an egalitarianism which is never entirely repudiated, leading the author to posit a hierarchy of minds with the scientific vanguard as the bearer of cognitive evolution quite literally leaving behind those not yet committed to the sole pursuit of scientific discovery. The pursuit of science and technology recurrently sets itself the goal of total knowledge, as in the Laplacean vision of a closed block universe in which it would be feasible to predict the entire future and retrodict the entire past (one way of abolishing time, or at any rate the stronger and richer modes of temporality beyond

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mere ordinal succession).4 Technologists today are prone to envision technophanies in which the total domination of nature is itself almost dematerialized into absolute knowledge and a kind of totum simul. Current versions of technophany linked to discourse about information technologies in which 'information' becomes the paramount concept of its categorial framework, suggest total conversion of the non-informational into information as the consummatory moment of technological progress. Since information and light are closely connected - information in electronic technology is transmitted at the speed of light - something like a neoPlatonist light metaphysics in which ontological perfection is equated with or symbolized by, light has been formulated by various prophets of information technologies.5 But even here Bernal, although he did not anticipate lasers, electronic computers or cybernetics had already formulated this mode of technophany: 'consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherialized .. . becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light' (Bernal, 1970/29, p. 46). Here technophany becomes photophany [fiat lux). In spite of what is sometimes claimed it seems to me that this techno-gnostic vision is in some ways a far cry from 'ordinary' revolutionary messianism in much of the socialist or even the Marxist-Leninist tradition. Consider Trotsky's vision of the great leap forward of humanity under socialism or communism published only a few years before Bernal's technotopian sketch of the future progress of the species: Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise (Trotsky, 1925, p. 256). Obviously Trotsky lacked the scientific and technological knowledge and imagination of Bernal, and indeed his willingness to work out visionary blueprints. Nevertheless the contrast between the two visions of the scientifically and technologically empowered collectivist future appears to stem from more than just the substantial

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differences in intellectual formation and to be rooted in very divergent conceptions of human flourishing. The professional revolutionary was the more conservative in his scale of values and, at this level at any rate, more congruent with mainstream socialist humanism and the Promethean vision of technological mastery of nature for the sake of human betterment. The very references to the enhancement of the human body, naive and liable to elicit ridicule, show a distinctly naturalistic and un-gnostic sense of the biological anchoring of even 'superior' types of human beings. Neither visionary appreciated fully either the polytheism of values a la Weber or even the richness of the firmament of values outside the radically agonistic Weberian perspective but which can equally suggest a pan-tragic vision in which value realizations necessarily involve losses as well as gains, and in which the dreams of reason can turn into nightmares. Although both Trotsky and the later Bernal supported grandiose macro-engineering projects, only the early Bernal seriously contemplated the 'immiseration of nature' for he viewed the disapperance of natural biospecies, landscapes and indeed the whole planetary habitat without compunction (and not for the sake of maximizing the human population but for the sake of the unlimited pursuit of scientific discovery or the drive towards technophany). And it was the scientist, not the messianic revolutionary, that envisaged the breakdown of personal identity in future humanity and the emergence of immortal corporate beings as a higher ontological category than discrete, mortal embodied individuals. This is not Comte's Great Being, evoked by Haldane in later years, for the Positivist's concept was essentially backwardlooking, involving the cult of great human beings of the past, and a sense that Humanity is a continuant largely made up of the dead (nor would this founder of sociology have countenanced radical technological manipulation of the organic world or even of the geosphere). HI In the following pages we deal in a little more detail with some of the more problematical technological developments and prospects briefly indicated or alluded to in the previous section, though the discussion remains pretty sketchy within the limits of a brief essay.

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Each of these technoscientific areas has attracted a vast body of scholarly and pamphleteering literature and will doubtless continue to do so for some time to come. Although there are strains towards bipolarization of opinion in each issue-area, few decisive confrontations have yet taken place (in some cases quite significant social and political conflicts particularly over reproductive rights, have already taken place). (1) The area of most sustained and bitter confrontation is probably that of reproductive technologies.6 The rapid development of the 'new reproductive technologies' over the last 25 years or so has elicited very confused, ambivalent and widely fluctuating responses on the part of feminists as well as other sections of opinion* Moral bewilderment and wavering policy responses have been the norm in Western polities. Technological gnosticism inclines towards technological fixes concerning the animal limitations of the human condition and parturitive birth is an obvious target. Haldane (1923) had already suggested that ectogenesis would and should eventually predominate in a scientifically well-ordered society; this was welcomed by Bernal who incorporated the ectogenetic factory as the dominant mode of reproduction and satirized by Aldous Huxley in his classical dystopia. In the halcyon days of technofeminism (Firestone, 1971) it was indeed proclaimed that this mode of reproduction would finally redress - or contribute in a decisive way to redress — the 'natural' inequality of the sexes: reproductive technology would thus be instrumental in overthrowing patriarchal domination. The notion that any particular technology or technic per se could be uniquely, exclusively and decisively empowering for women or any subordinate section of humanity no longer enjoys the kind of antecedent plausibility it perhaps once did. In the main feminist thought has shifted towards a more critical, certainly more distrustful attitude towards would-be liberatory technologies in any sphere, not least in that of reproductive technologies. Indeed in some cases all the 'new' reproductive technologies have been rejected in sweeping manner as wholly detrimental to women and totally shaped by generic male interests and/or by the professional vested interests of male biotechnologists. This somewhat extreme view, which exaggerates the extent to which any technology is wholly, exclusively and permanently under the control of any identifiable social group or category, is perhaps

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that of a vocal minority. Feminist critiques have correctly emphasised the extent to which pregnancy and childbirth have been extensively appropriated by the medical profession, medical definitions of reality and high-tech systems of health care which deal with them more or less as areas of pathology or near-pathology. Of course these strains towards medicalization and hospitalization in dealing with natural processes also occur in the area of death and have possibly co-determined shifts in Western attitudes towards the dying, death and the dead (see e.g. Martins, 1983). . Gnosticizing strains technologize, if not yet effectively transcend, the natural and existential facticity of the human condition. Reproductive and genetic technologies currently suggest the feasibility of human cloning, as cloning of livestock is already a wellestablished practice. This would be a new version of the alchemical but now 'algenic' (Rifkin, 1983) dream of immortality. It is no longer the indefinite survival of one and the same numerically distinct individual that is in question but the indefinite survival of the same type-person by multiplying successive, numerically distinct tokens of it. Replication is in any case a master-theme of contemporary technologies: the making of copies, often even better than the originals, of any entity whatever, and in some cases the making of copies without an original, the Platonic simulacrum evoked by Baudrillard (1981). Genes are replicators and so are cultural items or memes (Dawkins, 1978). How odd that at a time when the radical arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, the incommensurability of scientific paradigms and the non-representational status of scientific theories, the nonmimetic or aniconic character of the arts have become dogmas of contemporary thought, much contemporary technology centres round the claims of perfect replication, simulation and cloning. To return to the question of cloning: this is an area in which humanist bioethics may converge with traditional religious ethics in stipulating absolute prohibitions (Ferkiss, 1980) as well as in the case of a possible market for the sale and purchase of human body-parts for transplants. Unless some absolute prohibitions of an ethical and legal kind are stipulated, the drift towards radical biotechnologies and biomarkets with property rights in human genes and body parts, for example, may become irresistible under the present conditions of laissez innover. The articulation of technological fixes with market fixes (privatization, attribution of property rights and commodification)

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in the area of surrogate mothering illustrates what can happen in situations of moral uncertainty and conflicting claims of human suffering and human rights. (2) The surge of contemporary biotechnologies or bioengineering represents, as we noted, a new epoch of technology unforeseen by most classical theorists of technology who assumed explicitly or tacitly that the organic world would remain largely inaccessible to technological intervention of a creative rather than destructive or simply remedial kind. The primacy of the organic over the mechanical was postulated as much by vitalist philosophers of technology like Samuel Butler or Bergson, as by anthropological theorists of technology from Kapp to Gehlen. This metaphysical postulate was often, though not always, associated with the presumption that the organic world would remain epistemically inaccessible to the discursive intellect or instrumental reason, and could only be known in a non-discursive or non-instrumental fashion. The achievements of comteporary molecular genetics, the major breakthrough of which was roughly coeval with the emergence of the high-speed electronic digital computer, have increasingly been associated with computer modelling, information theory, cybernetics and microelectronics. The reductionist metaphysical research programme in biology appears to have been triumphantly vindicated. Whether this is so or not need not be discussed here but the practical technical implications are far-reaching and of central concern as much to the philosophy of technology as to the philosophy of science, and perhaps more so for the issues in evaluative metaphysics (Rescher, 1982) and technoethics call for urgent reflection and eventually legislation in the foreseeable future in a number of areas. Biotechnologies do not merely seek to provide cosmetic improvements and more prostheses for human and non-human organisms but to create new forms of life. Of all contemporary technologies biotechnology has perhaps the most decisively ontological vocation. Its horizon includes the creation of new organic life-forms as a result of genetic modification, including cross-species genetic transfer and potentially the breaking down of natural biospecies boundaries (whilst organic as well as inorganic evolution had been generally inimical to mesoforms and indeed a general principle of the instability of mesoforms had been enunciated by many natural

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philosophers such as Fraser (1982)). Artificial life-forms mock natural boundaries and the taxa of 'normal' bioevolution. The current biotechnological agenda also includes the creation of mixed biological and mechanical life forms, approaching the creation of organic computers (with biochips instead of silicon microchips). From the side of computer technology it is claimed that computers moving rapidly through a sequence of techno-generations are increasingly acquiring lifelike properties (reproduction, locomotion, metabolism with the environment) in addition to the mindlike, calculatory properties with which they started their evolutionary career (Simons, 1983/85). Artificial lifeforms, biomechanical beings, lifelike computers: these ontic creations indicate that the ontological import of contemporary biotechnologies and information technologies is considerable and challenges our received descriptive metaphysics (our image of the basic furniture of the world and its ontological joints) as well as folk cosmologies. Dessauer, a philosopher of technology writing in Weimar Germany, characterized the realm of technological artifacts as a 'fourth realm' of made things superadded to the folk - taxonomic animal, vegetable and mineral - worlds. But this fourth realm of made things now exerts direct 'downward causation' upon the antecedent worlds and remakes boundaries and divisions within as well as between these folk worlds: it redifferentiates, dedifferentiates and restratifies the pre-given chain of natural beings as pure manipulanda, bracketing any natural ontological attitudes or natural pieties that might hinder what appears as a Faustian project of Total Management (e.g. Heim, 1987) of the organic as well as of the inorganic worlds. The sharp ontological boundary between these worlds as well as between the natural and the artificial has now entered the arena of essential contestability in the light of contemporary technological practicabilities. The creation of new technospecies involving varying mixes of the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the artificial, the human and the nonhuman ranks high in the agenda of contemporary technological demiurgy ('playing God', a phrase often used in connection with genefixes and bioengineering of new life forms invokes the wrong image of creation ex nihilo: technological poiesis is Timaeic or demiurgic though technophanic visions, as we have noted, do aspire to a god-like total knowledge and the totum simul). But perhaps even the demiurgic analogy is too far-fetched.

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Another analogy which has enjoyed considerable currency is that with alchemy. Indeed the physicist Lederberg (cited by Rifkin, 1983) has coined the term 'algeny' for the biotechnological analogue to the old alchemy: all living material falls under the categories and techniques of mechanization. The algenists like the alchemists seek to overcome the heterochrony between the slow, crescive natural processes and the human desire for ever more accelerated, time-compressing processes of fruition within human life-spans by technically induced accelerations (although all technology may be said to aim at time-compression of naturally occurring processes). Still no-one supposes that contemporary algenists strive for or undergo the kind of moral regeneration and spiritual perfecting that alchemists sought in consonance with the ontological perfecting going in the materials being processed in the laboratory. But the major difference of course lies in the fact that biotechnologies 'work' whilst the practices of the alchemical gnostics did not, in the main, despite incidental effectiveness and psychagogic value. Biotechnological gnosticism 'works' though the creation of life-forms as well as of machines generally with increasing capacities of self-direction and margins of autonomy surely increases the unpredictability of such artifacts (indeed the creative possibilities of technoevolution, if in coevolution with human technologists, are often posited as a major achievement of contemporary technologies). The creation of mixed artificial life and the mind-like technoforms has, surprisingly perhaps, been welcomed and indeed eulogized in feminist science fiction and some feminist philosophy. The ontological frissons induced by the transgressing of species and category boundaries generally appears to these writers to be supportive of the feminist desire for the blurring of genders, genres and genera. They rejoice in the breakdown of such hoary and typically asymmetrical dichotomies as natural/artificial, nature/ culture, male/female, mechanical/organic, mind/body, God/man, original/replica, self/other. They regard thefictiveor actual emergence of androids (though these should perhaps be called gynoids), cyborgs, cybots, mosaics, chimaeras as felicitous challenges to ontological separations and dualisms (Haraway, 1985). It is not clear why moral egalitarianism should entail the abolition of all ontological separations: that of course was the gnostic dream of transcending the diaspora of beings. Although contemporary

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feminists have been very sympathetic to classical gnosticism which some feminist scholars see as proto-feminist and egalitarian it would not follow that the same seal of approval should be placed upon technological gnosticism which involves world-transforming projects inimical to environmental protection and the preservation of the biosphere values which ecofeminists prize highly. Moral egalitarianism and the distrust of asymmetrical dichotomies or polarities such as the master-polarity of Right and Left which has underwritten invidious distinctions in social practices (Hertz, 1909) or the male—female dichotomy surely does not entail or require a gnostic ontology of cancellation of all dualisms. In any case disputes over our descriptive and evaluative metaphysical frameworks are quite a different matter from actual technological intervention in the remaking of extant taxonomic boundaries. Why should techno-ontology dictate our reflective metaphysics or necessarily legitimate our egalitarian concerns? Should technospecies rank more highly or be more congenial to a feminist ethic than natural biospecies or folk-taxonomies? Surely all instances of categorization should be reconsidered in terms of alternative categorial frameworks, and techno-ontology should not enjoy a privileged status just because the blurring of genera appears to bear an affinity to the ethical blurring of gender distinctions. It is our very capacity to remake biospecies and to create composite technospecies that calls for prudence just as much as the wider ecological implications of advanced industrial technologies. Channel (1991) claims that the breaking down of the boundaries between the mechanical and the organic, the natural and the artificial, living and nonliving information-processing systems heralds a new 'bionic' world-view. But this implies that our technological capabilities should dictate our evaluative metaphysics, our conceptions of the worth and 'moral considerability' of unmade as well as made things. We need not subscribe to the antitechnological extremes of 'deep ecology' or biocentric ethics to suggest that a more reflective evaluative metaphysics should not take the ontological or axiological import of contemporary technologies for granted: paramount values may lie with unmade things and milieus, and an anthropocentric or technocentric standpoint in ontology or axiology should not override other standpoints (nor is this a new-fangled offshoot of current environmental concerns. G. E. Moore for instance posited that natural beauty

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would still be valuable in the absence of any human beings whatever though the appreciation of such beauty by human beings does add value to it. And not everybody likes plastic trees or even necessarily values them because they blur category distinctions between the inorganic and the organic). Though techno-ontology as the determination of our ontological maps by the current horizon of technological manipulability is to be distrusted, this is not to say that technological metaphors and models do not play major heuristic roles in the scientific and metaphysical imagination. Indeed the writings of Plato and Aristotle are replete with technomorphic metaphors, not least in their accounts of organic life and in Aristotle's scheme of causal explanation. But to claim that technology is the prime matrix of metaphysical as well as scientific models of reality and explanation would be to claim too much. Biomorphic and sociomorphic metaphors have been drawn upon as well as technomorphic ones and they have interacted in exceedingly complicated ways (Topitsch, 1954). To claim that technology by itself provides the master metaphors for the understanding of nonhuman nature is an interesting but doubtful version of technocultural determinism. In any case since our contemporary technoeconomic practices have disclosed vast destructive potentials, the tropes of technology warrant special metaphysical scrutiny instead of triumphalist endorsement or a strong antecedent presumption of metaphysical adequacy. Our ethical stances should not be uncritically shaped by the technoscientific tropes which prevail at any particular period: even such a pervasively used key concept as that of 'information' as used in contemporary biology is perniciously polysemic, as pointed out by Oyama (1985) in her remarkable critical appraisal, which has not been sufficiently noticed or assimilated. (3) According to Kapp's technological anthropology we can only understand ourselves through the technical artifacts we make. Technological objects furnish discovery procedures for our selfknowledge. Contemporary scholars in the Artificial Intelligence movement might well concur though they would not subscribe in the main to the asymmetry between the organic and the mechanical which is axiomatic in Kapp's approach. Be that as it may, the most important technoscientific model of mind today is the computational or information-processing model and this model arose from

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the development of electronic, digital, general purpose computers. The weak version of the artificial intelligence programme only claims that computer programs afford major heuristic instrumentalities in the study of the mind. The strong version, the only one to be considered here, claims that the (human) mind is essentially computational: in principle all features of mentation are accessible to computational modelling and there are no substantial grounds in physics, technology or logic (in the form of impossibility theorems or indecidability principles) to insulate any features from this research programme's accounting powers. Although formallogical, calculative operations provided the initial successes of computer technology the scope of computer modelling is not restricted thereby and the computer simulation of the emotions and even psychopathologies has been successfully accomplished, according to what a wit has called the artificial intelligentsia (Simons, 1985). In the early stages of the AI movement the paramount aim was to provide satisfactory models of the workings of the human brain: there were obvious analogies between all-or-nothing performances of neuron firings and binary Boolean algebra, neurons and logic gates, but the relatively meager pay-offs of this programme led to a switch to a more sophisticated research programme; not the modelling of the brain but of the mind itself. It was realized that the digital computer is an abstract machine (or abstract automaton) and that this versatility made it more appropriate and fruitful to develop truly general computational models without substantiation by or reference to the findings of brain science. Thus according to the computational model of mind, mental functions or functional systems can have, in principle, any physical realization though in practice computers have been based on silicon chips (this may in fact change with the advent of non-silicon based chips or biochips). Conversely, and this is the thesis of so-called materialistic functionalism (Seager, 1983), it is also claimed that all realizations of mental-functional system-descriptions are necessarily physical systems. The fact that human minds appear to be essentially and inextricably connected with the human brain and the human body is really neither here nor there: it is a contingent feature of particularistic human biology and not a necessary and universal requirement of mentation whose functional system-descriptions can be realized in inorganic systems as well as in the fleshware of

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biologically embodied human minds. Followers of this line of thought have coined some choice epithets for the particularistic view that human minds are essentially embodied, 'species chauvinism' being one of these, as well as the characterization of the brain as a mere 'meat computer'. The strong AI view may be seen to imply that the total powers of the human mind — construed as a species of the genus information-processing system - could in principle be transferred without remainder to computer programs. Several strong AI advocates have engaged in provocative thoughtexperiments to dramatize this strictly computational theory of mind. Perhaps the most provocative is that put forward by Moravec in which he invites us to envisage as a likely prospect within the next four decades that all features of a given person's mental life could be simulated in full by computer programs, and that therefore one could continue to exist as a mind without the brain that supported one's mental life: Layer after layer the brain is simulated, then excavated. Eventually your skull is empty, and the surgeon's hand [the hand of a robot brain surgeon] rests deep in your brainstem. Though you have not lost consciousness, or even your train of thought, your mind has been removed from the brain and transferred to a machine. In a final, disorienting step the surgeon lifts out his hand. Your suddenly abandoned body goes into spasms and dies. Your perspective has shifted . . . to a shiny new body of the style, color and material of your choice (cited in Penrose, 1990, p. 3). Recent philosophical psychology has specialized in horrific thought-experiments, sometimes suggested by scientific dystopias or by idealizations of current technoscientific possibilities or practices (brain surgery and commissurotomies have been often cited). This thought-experiment transcends the findings of human biology but does evoke the techniques of emerging nanotechnology as well as the computational model of mind which is the most tenaciously held and systematically developed metaphysical and scientific research programme in the theory of mind.7 Perhaps we should regard this thought-experiment and the research programmes it dramatizes as the last and highest stage of technological gnosticism and the most Faustian twist in the 'rhetoric

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of the technological sublime'. As in contemporary postmodernism, 'depth' (ontological or epistemological) is eschewed, but a kind of awesome even demonic sublimity is cultivated. That the mind could ever be totally translucent to itself is a peculiar metaphysical horror of hyperbolic technoscience.

NOTES 1. Good accounts of Kapp's work can be found in Brun (1963), Curtis (1978) and Huning (1985). Biographical data were drawn from Mitcham (1985). 2. This pair of terms was not used by Kapp but by Ernst Bloch. However, they seem appropriate to convey Kapp's teaching. 3. The heady package of technoscientific boosterism and ostensible socialist-humanist values in BernaPs teachings was called 'Bernalism' by Werskey (1978), a term which has enjoyed wide currency. 4. For a recent cosmology with a stratified hierarchy of temporalities, see Fraser (1982). 5. It is pertinent to recall that classical neo-Platonists could be highly critical of gnosticism, as in the case of Plotinus. 6. Recent helpful discussions of reproductive technologies may be found in Sawicki (1991) and Wajcman (1991). 7. 'Nanotechnology': the development of micro-machines on the molecular scale of nanometers (billionths of a meter). Computer technology operates on the operational time-frame of nanoseconds (billionths of a second), hence the talk of the computerized nanosecond culture.

REFERENCES Baudrillard, J. (1981) Simulacres et simulation (Paris: Galilee). Bergson, H. (1907) L'evolution creatrice (Paris: Alcan). Bernal, J. D. (1970/1929) The World, the Flesh and the Devil (London: Cape). Blumenberg, H. (1983) The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press). Brun, J. (1963) Prendre et comprendre (Paris: PUF). Carey, J. (1989) Communication as Culture (London: Unwin Hyman). Channel, D. F. (1991) The Vital Machine (New York: Oxford University Press).

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Curtis, J. (1978) Culture as Polyphony (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press). Daly, H. (1977) Steady-state Economics (San Francisco, Calif.: W. H. Freeman). Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Dobbs, B. (1975) The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ferkiss, V. (1980) Technology and culture; gnosticism, naturalism and incarnational integration', Cross-currents, xxx. Firestone, S. (1971) The Dialectic of Sex (New York: William Morrow). Fraser, J. T. (1982) The Genesis and Evolution of Time (Brighton: Harvester Press). Funkenstein, A. (1986) Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Gehlen, A. (1980) Man in an Age of Technology (New York: Columbia University Press). Haldane, J. B. S. (1923) Daedalus or Science and the Future (London: Kegan Paul). Haraway, D. (1985) 'A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s', Socialist Review 80. Heim, M. (1987) Electric Language: a Philosophical Study of Word-Processing (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press). Hertz, R. (1909) 'La preeminence de la main droite: etude sur la polarite religieuse', Revue philosophique de la France et de Vet?anger 68. Huning, A. (1985) 'Homo mensura: human beings are their technology - technology is human', Research in Philosophy and Technology 8. Kapp, E. (1877) Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (Braunschweig: Westermann). Landmann, M. (1983) The children of darkness are more clever than the children of light: why do machines make their* appearance only in the machine age?', Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 9. McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media (London: Routledge Sc Kegan Paul).

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Martins, H. (1983) Tristes durees', in R. Feijo, H. Martins and J. Pina-Cabral (eds) Death in Portugal (Oxford: JASO). Marx, L. (1964) The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press). Mitcham, C. (1985) 'What is philosophy of technology?', International Philosophical Quarterly 25. Moravec, H. (1990) Mind Children: the Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Oyama, S. (1985) The Ontogeny of Information (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Penrose, R. (1990) 'Matter over mind' (review of Moravec, 1990), New York Review of Books 1 February 1990. Rescher, N. (1982) Essays in Philosophical Analysis (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press). Rifkin, J. (1983) Algeny (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books). Sawicki, J. (1991) Disciplining Foucault (London: Routledge 8c Kegan Paul). Seager, W. (1983) 'Functionalism, qualia and causation', Mind 92. Simons, G. (1983) Are Computers Alive? (Brighton: Harvester Press). Simons, G. (1985) The Biology of Computer Life (Brighton: Harvester Press). Topitsch, E. (1954) 'Society, technology and philosophic reasoning', Philosophy of Science 16. Trotsky, L. (1925) Literature and Revolution (New York: International Publishers) Voegelin, E. (1968) Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago, II.: Henry Regnery). Wajcman, J. (1991) Feminism Confronts Technology (Cambridge: Polity Press). Werskey, G. (1978) The Visible College (London: Routledge &C Kegan Paul).

12 THE NEO-KANTIAN APPROACH TO STRUCTURE John Rex

A variety of recent approaches to the social and cultural studies have adopted the term 'structure' to characterize themselves. The term 'structure' is opposed to those of 'action' and 'subjective meaning', and 'structuralism' is seen as being in contrast with a hermeneutic debate. Most such approaches involve a strong assertion that they are, as compared with their rivals, 'scientific'. What this essay sets out to do is to draw attention to the fact that one major tradition in sociology, namely that of Max Weber, cannot be included as 'structuralist' in the popular modern sense, that it emphasizes the concepts of 'action' and of 'hermeneutics', and yet it has its own concept of structure and its own sense of the proper and highly important role of scientific enquiry in social and cultural affairs. In order to understand fully these differences it is necessary to go back to Kant, because nearly all subsequent approaches to the human studies involve some degree of deviation from the essentials of the Kantian approach to the philosophy of science and ethics. What is called neo-Kantianism is precisely an attempt to reassert the essentials of this Kantian approach, while at the same time extending them to give an adequate account of the basis of the human studies. Although Max Weber does not offer us any extended discussion of these matters, he does in fact take an entirely Kantian view for granted, and many of his discussions of methodological matters only make sense in terms of Kantian presuppositions. 250

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The most central presupposition of Kantianism may be very simply stated. It is that science is a relatively useful activity. It would be absurd in the light of the enormous gain in human welfare to deny that scientific thinking has helped men to control and command the physical world as well as the world of organisms and even of human behaviour. Not to recognize this is to open the door to irrationalism. But, and this is equally important, science is not to be regarded as giving us the whole truth about the world, truth, that is, about the world as it actually is. It is not a metaphysic. In particular, whatever we may say about the determinism of nature or about organic or human behaviour, this does not exclude the possibility of regarding human beings as capable of choice and of being morally responsible for their actions. While science aims at discovering the 'laws of nature' in terms of which it is possible to predict events, moral and political discourse refers to a moral law which confronts man and is confronted by men, so that, while we may say that they should obey, we also recognize that they could disobey. Science which deals with the world of the 'is' therefore does not exclude reasonable discussion of the 'ought'. The Kantian approach to science proceeds by way of recognizing both that science must take account of the evidence of our senses, but also that, since all our senses reveal is a continuous and unstructured flow of events, the world of nature of which it speaks is a world of 'phenomena' - that is to say, these events understood as being organized in terms of the categories which we impose on them through perception and reason. What philosophy has to tell us, therefore, is that the world of nature which we describe is not the world as it actually is, the world of nuomena but a world which involves part experience, part mental construction, and that a judgment of the value of science must take account of the nonexperiential a priori categories which occur in perception and reason. This is not simply to say that science involves theoretical concepts. There is, after all, no such thing as pure description once we use language, and when we name something we must conceptualize. What is more important than this is that we conceptualize in a particular way, which involves not merely naming and classifying experiences, but seeing them as having location in space and time and as being 'causally' related to one another. What Kant had accepted from Hume, who was the ultimate

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critical empiricist is that what we call science cannot be justified on empirical grounds alone. Crucially empiricism cannot account for the meaning of cause any more than it can for the notion of moral obligation. What he sought to show was that the categories in terms of which science organized experience were of a limited and definable kind and acceptable to all reasonable men engaged in scientific investigation. Provided the use of the categories were made explicit, it was still possible to have a critical epistemology capable of distinguishing between propositions which were scientifically true or false. The frank admission that science was not justifiable in terms of experience alone led many of Kant's successors to more fundamental doubts about its validity. In sociology, for example, Durkheim, (1915) who was trained as a Kantian, embraced a radical type of sociologism in which the categories themselves were seen as a social product having been learned by the Australian aborigines, for example, in the course of social ceremonies. Others, in the tradition of 'phenomenology' sought to bracket the categories away in order to gaze at the world as it actually was. Against all these it is necessary to insist that the categories are not arbitrary or relative and that science does attain relatively useful knowledge. The most important immediate critic of Kant, however, was Hegel. For him reason was not to be taken as given. The process of scientific understanding was part of a total developmental process through which Spirit imposed itself on the alien world of Matter. The key to understanding the world, therefore, was a philosophy of history in which Spirit was seen as overcoming its alienation and subjecting the whole world, including the social world, to the rule of reason. Hegel's rejection of Kant is particularly important for sociology because of its influence on Marx. Although Marx claimed to have stood Hegel on his head, it has to be understood that he did not return to Kant's moderate critical epistemology represented by the critical analysis of the a priori categories. What he did was to suggest that, while Hegel had got matters right by suggesting that there was active principle at work in the development of the world and history, that principle was to be found not in reason or thought, but in labour. If Hegel provides us with an idealistic metaphysic and philosophy of history claiming to go beyond Kant's critical epistemology, Marx provides us with a labour metaphysic

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in which the Kantian categories are replaced by an account of dialectically developing modes of production. The conflict between Kant and Hegel will, I believe, never be finally settled. Kantianism will always be criticized because, having abandoned an untenable empiricism, it simply asks us to take the categories on trust as the eternally given requirements of reason. It will be said that the observer whom it posits is not the innocent he appears to be. The categories which he uses must, therefore, be subject to historical and sociological scrutiny. But, if this is the case, it must be asked what the validity is of the propositions about history and sociology in terms of which the criticism is made. If they are said to be scientific, one might well ask for an epistemological critique of the science on which they were based, and that brings us back via a vicious circle to the point at which Kant started. We only avoid this critique if we boldly assert that they are based upon speculative metaphysics. It was precisely because much subsequent development in the Geisteswissenschaften in Germany was based on an even more openly speculative metaphysics, that the neo-Kantian movement arose as an attempt to provide a basis for disciplined thinking, not merely in science, but in the human studies, which had come to be seen as representing a kind of 'third world' between the world of science and that of moral and political discourse. This led to a consideration of two separate, if ultimately related questions. One was that of the place of 'hermeneutics' in human thinking. The other was the possibility of a distinct sociological a priori, whose categories would have the same significance for the human studies as the Kantian categories had for science. Hermeneutics represents an area of enquiry different both from that of the world of science and from that of moral discourse. If science asks the questions 'What is the case?' or 'Why is this the case?' and ethics is concerned with the question 'What should we do?', hermeneutics is concerned with the question 'What does this mean?' Answering that question had produced its own theoretical and methodological debate over the centuries, going back in fact much further than the debate about the methodology and philosophy of science. (Bauman, 1978). Primarily, hermeneutics had dealt at the outset with the meaning of literary texts and particularly the meaning of the Christian scriptures. The problem was to discover the criteria in terms of

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which one interpretation could be regarded as more valid than the other. Quite obviously such questions were themselves of importance for sociology and the other human studies, since inter alia what sociology had to deal with was very often cultural texts. Even more centrally, however, these studies were concerned with the question of another kind of meaning, the meaning not of texts but of action. Weber, who gradually came to accept that he was a sociologist, but who was actually a polymath straddling all the human studies, naturally engaged with these questions, taking them up as they were posed especially by Wilhelm Dilthey (1977) then Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin. Weber, in fact, misrepresents Dilthey, taking him simply to mean that the understanding of texts and of the action of others depends upon some kind of act of sympathetic introspection in which we claim to know and to speak about the thoughts of others in the same way as we are able to know our own internal states (Weber, 1968) There are indeed many statements in Dilthey which may justify us in arguing that this was his view in practice. It was also the case, however, that Dilthey aimed at putting hermeneutics on a 'scientific' basis by developing a science of cultural psychology which he thought could provide a fundamental basis of the human studies in the way in which mathematics provided a basis for the natural sciences. It is important to realize, therefore, that what Weber was seeking to do was not merely to call for a more disciplined hermeneutics than that suggested by a sloppy reliance on sympathetic introspection, but rather to give his own answers to the question of the nature of this more disciplined hermeneutic. The specific sector of Dilthey's thought with which Weber engaged was that which was concerned not with texts but rather with the meaning of human behaviour. There, whether by sympathetic introspection or by an analysis of the contents of the mind of the other, Dilthey had suggested that one could have some kind of direct or valid knowledge of what the other meant or intended. Weber, the whole cast of whose thinking was Kantian, suggested that we could never have this complete knowledge, but that the most that we could do was to put forward 'ideal types' of action, against which, as yardsticks, actual behaviour could be compared. Characteristically these ideal types referred to purposive action in which, given particular ends, the actor was thought of as applying rules for the selection of appropriate means (except in the residual

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case of affektual, which to all intents and purposes defied explanation). At this point it is only possible to understand Weber's position if we take up the question of his other major methodological engagement, namely that of his engagement with neo-Kantianism, particularly with the work of Simmel. Simmel was, in fact, a discursive writer and he moved from one philosophical position to another. In his Grundfrage (Simmel, 1917), for example, he makes a distinction between social forms and the content of social relationships and suggests that we can arrive at a direct knowledge of the forms by a process of abstraction and observation and this is taken to be Simmel's characteristic position. Throughout this work, however, and most particularly in his remarkable essay, 'How Is Society Possible?', his approach seems to be quite explicitly Kantian (see Wolff, 1950, 1959). It is indeed possible to see his whole work as a quest for the a priori categories of social science (Martindale, 1961). The question 'How is society possible?' is seen by Simmel as quite explicitly paralleling that of Kant - namely, 'How is Nature Possible?' - and, just as Kant's answer was that the phenomenal world of science took for granted the categories of perception and reason, so Simmel's answer was that in principle, speaking of society or the social must take for granted the existence of categories of an appropriate kind in terms of which human behaviour could be interpreted. We do not directly experience phenomena, but construct them from experience with the aid of the categories. Equally we do not see society. Human behaviour is all that we observe. We use social categories to interpret human behaviour as action and as being governed and controlled by human relationships. The project which Simmel here proposes must be seen as quite different from one in which a scientist observes appearances and then sees beyond these to an underlying reality of 'deep structures'. This is what is argued for in the new philosophy of science called 'realism' (Keat and Urry, 1975), as well as in the structuralism of Levi-Strauss (1967) and in the structuralist Marxism which was recently fashionable in Paris (Glucksmann, 1974). None of these doctrines refers to a priori categories of reason and perception. Rather they claim to be referring to the world as it actually is beyond the world of appearances. Hence their statements about

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the underlying deep structures tend to be dogmatic and speculative. SimmePs Kantian project by contrast, if it were carried out, would imply a critical look at the categories of our sociological thinking in order to find, as Kant does in science, a basis for distinguishing between valid and invalid propositions. Unfortunately in practice, Simmel himself offers us a loose conception of the 'social forms' which are part category, part concept and which seem to be all too like the deep structures of modern structuralism. But, although there is a version of Simmel, which might justify his being claimed as an ally by the structuralists (and, indeed, it is surprising that they have employed his work so little), the much more fundamental interpretation points to a very different neo-Kantian conception of the human studies and also, as we shall see, to a very different concept of structure. If, however, Simmel deviates from his own project in the direction of scientism, one notices that even in his seminal essay he deviates in another direction: namely, that taken by Hegel, Marx and Durkheim. He does this by suggesting that there is a remarkable respect in which the sociological a priori differs from that of natural science. This is that, whereas the categories of the scientist are to be thought of as those of the observer, the categories of social life are the much more variable ones employed by the observed actors or participants. Not surprisingly, therefore, Simmel is hailed as a founding father not merely by structuralism, but by Schutzian phenomenology and ethnomethodology. In fact the two types of sociology deriving from a non-Kantian reading of Simmel are actually combined in the recent work of the British sociologist, Giddens (1979), whose concept of structuration seeks to combine the notion of deep structures with an appreciation of the creative accomplishments of those who participate in structures. Whatever the merits of such interpretations, however, they are not the ones which we wish to develop here. They all rest upon a confusion of concepts on the one hand and categories on the other. What we have to do if we are to follow through the Kantian method posed by Simmel is, prior to the question of developing concepts in terms of which human behaviour can be interpreted as social, to give an account of the categories in terms of which those concepts are formulated. This ultimately is what Max Weber came to do and what makes his sociology such a distinct enterprise from

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all forms of scientism as well as from the relativism of many other schools. At first Weber sought to dissociate himself from Simmel's sociology altogether. He did not believe that it was realistic to speak of action which was defined purely in formal terms as social regardless of the ends to which it was directed. All action was social-economic, social-religious, social-political, and so on, never purely social (Weber, 1969). Because it was action, however, it had a definite categorical form. The first task of sociology, therefore, as well as of other disciplines which deal with action, was to define what was involved in the concept of action itself. This was where Weber began when he sought to provide a systematic introduction to his most general sociological work, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1968). The definition of action which is given at the outset of his first chapter is, of course, complicated by the fact that this is also arguing simultaneously with Dilthey and the hermeneutic tradition. There is therefore an emphasis upon subjective meaning. 'In action,' Weber tells us, 'is included all human behaviour insofar as the actor attaches a subjective meaning to it' (1968: 4). But in practice he does not go on to offer a general theory of meaning and may be accused by the hermeneutic tradition, indeed, of avoiding the most fundamental questions. What he does is to replace the concept of meaningful action with that of purposive action. Whatever the consequences of this for Weber's contribution to hermeneutic theory, however, the most important consequence is that he has turned his attention to the question of the categories appropriate for the study of action and social relations. If purposive action is at the core of sociology, then those who participate in society must be thought of as at some point being influenced in their behaviour, not in any simple sense by causes, but by the choices made by human beings in their pursuit of ends. In order to understand the importance of what Weber is saying here it is useful to contrast the approach which he is suggesting with that of Emile Durkheim (1938). For Durkheim social facts are things, and the task of sociology is to look in the normal scientific sense for the social causes of social behaviour. For Weber, on the other hand action is defined as social, if and in so far as, by virtue of its subjective meaning the act of one actor takes account of the action of another and is thereby orientated in its course. The action

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of ego may take account of and be influenced by the action of alter, but instead of this being a simple matter of causation in the natural science sense we have to notice, first, that it is alter's action of which ego takes account and that that action is thought of as involving purposiveness; and, second, that ego's action only takes account of, rather than being caused by that of alter. There is a huge difference between the a priori categories being used here and those used by causal studies in natural science and in the Durkheimian approach to sociology. It is perhaps worth noting that although Weber's concept of hermeneutics might be far from comprehensive it, too, has not disappeared. In taking account of the behaviour of alter, ego is thought of as interpreting its meaning, just as the observer interprets the behaviour of both of them as being 'action' - that is to say, as being meaningful rather than as some kind of Pavlovian reflex. Together with his appreciation of the distinctiveness of the categories implicit in sociological discourse therefore, Weber also retains some kind of hermeneutic perspective. Neither of these things are apparent in the more scientific kind of sociology represented by Durkheim. What difference, then, does it make that Weber seeks to base his sociology on the concepts of action and interaction? Clearly, at its heart, a great deal. For, even if it is allowed that one actor taking account of the behaviour of the other involves a kind of external constraint, it is still the case that the other's behaviour is explained in terms of action which in turn is thought of not as being determined but as depending on responsible choice. In fact, even if we find that there are long chains of interconnectedness in which A takes account of and is therefore constrained by the action of B, and B takes account of and is constrained by the action of C, and so on, there is still thought to be some reference point at which we are not simply talking about cause but rather of action and choice. This is the fundamental point about categories in sociology. As I have said elsewhere (Rex, 1973), The paradox of sociology lies precisely in this that though we appear to be constrained by social facts external to us, those social facts are the result of human action and can be changed by human action.' It must be remembered, however, that this reference ultimately to action in all Weber's concepts does not imply utopianism or total voluntarism. Men may be responsible for their actions but

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that does not mean that they always choose not to be constrained. Rational action in a social context involves taking long chains of interconnected action for granted and acting on the assumption that the expectations which actors have of one another's actions within these chains will be fulfilled. One cannot change the whole of these chains of interconnectedness at any time. Nor would one wish to do so. Weber, indeed, more than most men, was a pessimist rather than a Utopian and is often most renowned for the pessimistic vision of a totally rationalized world in which all human beings were cogs in a vast machine. The important point for him, however, was to recognize the points at which resistance and change might occur. Sociology, the study of chains of interconnected actions, is important in itself. The essence of neo-Kantianism is the recognition that there is a 'third world' between the causal world of science and the world of moral freedom. It recognizes constraint, yet at the same time keeps open the notion of responsibility and the possibility of change. It is worth noting that although 'sensuous human activity' in Marx is a metaphysical assumption rather than simply a category in terms of which behaviour is to be interpreted as action, Marx's understanding of these issues was at one time very close to Weber's. In the 'Theses on Feuerbach' (Marx and Engels, 1962) one finds a resistance to all forms of scientific or mechanical materialism and sociology of the Durkheimian sort. It is seen to be essential in studying human beings to emphasize the 'active side' as the idealists have done. Then, too, social relations depend upon action, and 'the human essence' is the ensemble of social relations. The social order conceived as a network of social relations is thought of as capable of being changed. The only important point to notice is that it cannot be changed at any time or at any point. If our starting point is sensuous human activity or labour, the most important point of leverage is to be found in those most immediate social relations which arise in the course of productive labour. Marx may have placed more emphasis than Weber on this particular point of leverage but the essential conception of the nature of social structure and its active side is very close to Weber's. We may sum up thus far by saying that, inheriting the Kantian conception of the usefulness and the limitations of science and its compatibility with the world of moral discourse, neo-Kantianism none the less saw the necessity of recognizing other types of

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discourse which belonged neither to one field nor the other. One such source of discourse was hermeneutic, the other was that which applied itself to the study of action and interaction, particularly in the form of the study of networks of social action or sociology. The former involved the recognition of subjective meaning, a category unknown to science, the latter involved the notion of a relative determinism coupled with the notion of moral responsibility. The human studies as a whole may in fact involve two separate lines of development. One, the study of meaning could lead to the systematic study of texts and other cultural expressions taken by themselves. We might call this culturology. The other, which involves mutual expectations and interaction between individuals, refers to the study of social structure and is properly called sociology. Parsons (Parsons and Shils, 1952), it might be noted, recognizes this distinction when he writes about the sciences of action as involving three 'systems': the culture system, the social system and the personality system. He, in fact, departs from Weber in two respects, on the one hand insisting that we are talking about systems (a scientific concept), and, on the other placing great emphasis upon the personality system. But the general perspective which leads to his division between the study of culture and the study of society is one which we share. The next question which arises is that of the relation between culturology and sociology. Clearly they are not wholly unrelated. One type of interpretation of the meaning of texts is to see these texts as the result of human action of a purposive kind. On the other hand, we could not arrive at the conception of action and interaction without recognizing that human beings endow their world with meaning in formulating goals, in choosing means for the attainment of goals, and in taking account of one another's behaviour, and these processes depend upon reference to systems of cultural meaning. To say this, however, is not to accept what has happened to sociology and culturology and the relations between them. In fact, both have tended to become scientized or defined as though they were natural sciences and each has sought to dominate the other. Levi-Strauss divorces his own concept of structure from that of Radcliffe-Brown, who had seen social structure as consisting of meaningful social relations between human beings, and then goes

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on, together with structuralists who derive from the study of linguistics, to treat the study of culture as a science (Levi-Strauss, 1967; see also Glucksmann, 1974). Structuralism in literature also seeks to dissociate itself altogether from the hermeneutic tradition and to declare itself scientific. Many sociologists subsequently have seen their own subject as subordinate to this new culturology, regarding social action simply as the expression of underlying patterns and structures. On the other hand, those who start with sociology have very often taken up the concept of system as Parsons does, and then proceeded via general systems theory to explain the cultural as well as the social. From the point of view being enunciated here all these tendencies avoid and evade the issues which the hermeneutic and the neo-Kantian traditions have sought to pose. It should be noted that in the arguments about Weberian sociology Weber is often indicted not simply for being a voluntarist. Indeed, his own pessimism and anti-utopianism often lead to his being charged with the opposite, namely, of accepting the inevitability of the rationalization of the world and the reduction of men to being cogs in the machine. What he is also criticized for, however, is being a conventionalist - that is, for not claiming that his ideal-type concepts represent the world as it actually is, but rather, concepts which at best only approximate to social reality. This charge is not only valid; it is one which Weber and any neoKantian would accept. Sociology is not the final truth about the world any more than science is. It simply represents a useful kind of understanding and knowledge which enables men to cope with their situation. Jiirgen Habermas who, despite his Hegelian and Marxist origins within the Frankfurt School, accepts some of the fundamentals of Kantianism, has made a parallel distinction to that being made here. Although ultimately he believes in the unity of philosophical enquiry, Habermas suggests that it is possible to distinguish between analytical-empirical science, hermeneutic and criticalemancipatory science, making a threefold rather than the fourfold distinction which is made here (cf. Weber, 1969). Analyticalempirical science corresponds to Kant's science of the phenomenal world, and Habermas accepts that it is appropriate for purposes of control. Hermeneutics, whose purpose according to Habermas is the promotion of understanding, belongs also in our classification.

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But the third category of critical-emancipatory science seems to combine sociology as we have described it with the world of moral discourse. For Habermas, Weber's sociology belongs to the world of analytic-empirical science and also to hermeneutics. As we have outlined it thus far it would be better to regard it as criticalemancipatory, although the curiously anti-utopian tendency within it clearly draws it away from the unity of moral discourse and scientific enquiry which is Habermas's ideal. There is, however, another aspect of Weber's theory which seems to provide justification for placing his work within the analytical-empirical category. This is his attempt to combine his hermeneutic notion of purposive action with that of causation in the natural science sense. Weber's notion of causality is ambiguous. In some of his earlier writings it was very far removed from the scientific notion of causality. There he was concerned with something like the legal notion of the imputation of responsibility and his concept was essentially a moral one. In Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1968) however we find him using the term in something far more like its natural science sense. Sociology is defined as the science which is concerned with the interpretation of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal account of its course and effects. An explanation, we are told, must not only be adequate on the level of meaning but also 'causally adequate'. And there are many references to social relationships as consisting in a probability that certain action will ensure. Lazarsfeld and Oberschall (1965) have used these references to suggest that Weber was moving away from hermeneutics and the sociology of action altogether towards a positivist conception of sociology (Weber, 1968: ch 2). As a matter of textual criticism this point cannot be denied and Weber may well have felt the need, as Durkheim did more strongly, to reconcile his views with those of positivists. None the less one should note that there is another possible account of his use of the term 'cause' in this context. What Weber wants to do is to distinguish between explanations on the level of meaning, which are only plausible stories, and explanations which have been subject to testing and have been found to be valid. Thus, for example, one might argue plausibly that given the subjective meaning of coming from a broken home, it would make sense for a child to commit delinquent acts. This, however, would only be a

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plausible story if it were demonstrated that children in these circumstances show some statistically greater tendency to commit delinquent acts than do children from normal homes. One can call the latter type of proof causal in the sense that, as in the case of natural science, given one's theoretical assumptions, that which was shown to occur empirically followed. But this is to refer to causality in only a loose sense and not in the sense in which it is used in natural science. Both natural science and the sort of sociology which Weber envisages construct models which are used in predicting empirical events and both may be tested to see whether their predictions follow in particular circumstances. But suggesting that a particular model is useful in explaining a particular social situation is still compatible with holding that within the model itself there is a degree of indeterminacy and moral responsibility. The broken home referred to in the example is the product of human action, and the action of the child is also an action which takes account of the broken home but which is not necessarily determined by it. All in all, what we see in Weber is an attempt to talk in a disciplined way about human affairs - in a way in which our propositions can be proved, but which also does justice to the degree of indeterminacy which results from the fact that human beings are morally responsible agents. It is this which determines his approach to structure. Weber's concept of social structure rests on the notion of social relations which arise between human beings in the course of meaningful action and in which they take account of one another's action or expected action. It is similar in fact to the concept of structure put forward by Radcliffe-Brown (1968) in his Structure and Function in Primitive Society and has nothing in common either with the concept of structure as it is used by Levi-Strauss or that which is used in Parsons's systems theory, or, finally, that which positivists draw from looking at statistical tables - tables which depict relationships about aggregates of individuals rather than meaningfully acting individuals. The key notion is that of a social relation. A social relation exists when one individual takes account of the behaviour of another and orientates his conduct accordingly. This other individual may also orientate his own conduct to that of a third party, and so on, so that we get chains and networks of social relations. Such chains and networks may be organized into more complex entities such as

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groups and markets, but it is always assumed that the operation of groups and markets and the like depends upon their required forms of behaviour being understood and accepted by those who participate in them. They may, it is true, perform their duties in response to norms rather than in response to direct demands of individuals, but these norms are conceived as being capable of being construed as facilitating the action of one or more parties. We have noticed, however, that this mode of analysis has some parallels with the analysis suggested by Radcliffe-Brown for smallscale primitive societies. The problem is whether it is really applicable when we are dealing with large-scale national or international society. It could, of course, be argued that such large-scale societies are ultimately reducible to a huge network of social relations; but Weber, at least, would accept that it would not be practicable to do this. We have to deal with such huge complexes of relations in summary form, by speaking only of typical actors in a simplified model, and we have to assume that individuals do take account not merely of the action of particular others but what they see as the behaviour of groups. This does not, however, alter the fundamental point which Weber is making. It may be possible to speak of the 'state' or 'the Calvinist church' doing this or that, but all such references are placed within a context of individuals acting meaningfully and taking account of the behaviour of others. For some purposes we may see an individual as taking account of an entity called 'the state' in his behaviour. But on another level we should want to unpack the concept of the state and see it as arising from the actions and interactions of individuals. Everything depends on what it is that we wish to explain at a particular moment. What Weber does, in fact, is to start with a limited number of concepts of typical action in the various institutional spheres and show how group structures and institutions arise. These are then applied to explaining as well as being illustrated by particular historical events. His section on 'The sociological categories of economic action' (Weber, 1968) provides a good example. It starts with an account of the basic types of economic action and relationships and builds up more and more complex typologies of possible structures including, for example, a typology of possible social relations of production. One thing which he does not do is to offer an overall theory of

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the way in which the development of one institution is necessarily determined by the development of another. That is to say, he is not a functionalist. Parsons, by contrast, argues that the very meanings which individuals give to their own behaviour are actually the consequence of their being socialized into, or programmed to do, those things which keep group life and inter-institutional life going. All that Weber will do is to investigate empirically and historically the actual relationships which prevail between one institutional form and another. It might, of course, be the case that in the very long run sociology is able to show recurrent patterns in the relationship between one institutional sphere and another. Weber himself could see that in complex capitalist society the social relations arising from production had an important influence on other institutional spheres. He also saw that the ideological and religious sphere had an effect on other institutions including the economic. Any such analysis was for him unsatisfactory, however, unless the empirically established regularities could be explained in terms of relationships of meaning, located in the actions of typical individuals. If in order to distinguish between valid explanations and those which were mere plausible stories he called for empirical proof, he also called for historical regularities which had been demonstrated to be supplemented by explanations on the level of meaning for typical actors. This was true in his view of simple statistical correlations. It was equally true of his approach to institutional history. Structural analysis is a term which enjoys a considerable vogue in contemporary sociology. It usually carries with it the idea of dealing with supra-individual entities and dealing with them in a scientific way, in accordance with some conception of the normal canons of natural science. It is particularly associated with the study of culture (rather than society), although so-called structural functionalism and the recent French versions of Marxism place greater emphasis upon social structures. From all these points of view, the neo-Kantian approach to social structure, with its emphasis on hermeneutics and relative voluntarism seems to violate the aims of scientific structuralism. Yet, as we have seen, Weber, who stuck very closely to a neo-Kantian approach, who never subordinated the human studies to natural science, who retained a concept of men's moral responsibility for their actions, and who, in some sense at least, developed a hermeneutic sociology, had a concept of

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social structure of his own, which has perhaps done more to illuminate institutional history than that of any other sociologist. Finally, one should note that there is now a growing literature which suggests that Weber has to be understood by starting with his political involvements and by his belief in the rationality of the bourgeois entrepreneur on the one hand and the plebiscitary leader on the other. On this basis, his concept of rationality and of purposive action, and with it his methodology, have been called into question. What I have sought to show is that, starting from Kant, there is an approach to sociology and the human studies which is valid, regardless of Weber's political commitments. As one who in no way shares those commitments, it seems to me that this concept of sociology and its particular view of the meaning of social structure have as much validity today as they did in Weber's time and that they will outlast the present vogue of scientific structuralism. REFERENCES Bauman, Z. (1978) Hermeneutics and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding (London: Hutchinson). Dilthey, Wilhelm (1977) Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding (The Hague: Nijhoff). Durkheim, Emile (1915) Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London: Allen & Unwin). Durkheim, Emile (1938) The Rules of Sociological Method (New York: Free Press). Giddens, A. (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory (London: Macmillan). Glucksmann, Miriam (1974) Structural Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Keat, Russell and Urry, John (1975) Social Theory as Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Lazarsfeld, Paul and Oberschall, Anthony (1965) 'Max Weber and Empirical Social Research' American Sociological Review 30. Levi-Strauss, Claude (1967) The Scope of Anthropology (London: Cape). Martindale, D. (1961) The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

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Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (1962) Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House). Parsons, Talcott, and Shils, Edward (1952) Towards a General Theory of Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R. (1968) Structure and Function in Primitive Society (London: Cohen & West). Rex, John (1973) Discovering Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Simmel, Georg (1917) Grundfrage der Soziologie (Berlin/Leipzig: de Gruyter). Weber, Max (1969) The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe: Free Press). Weber, Max (1968) Economy and Society, vol. 1 (New York: Bedminster Press). Wolff, Kurt (ed.) (1950) The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press). Wolff, Kurt (ed.) (1959) Georg Simmel, 1858-1918 (Colombus: Ohio State University Press).

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLICATIONS BY JOHN REX*

A BOOKS 1 1961 Key Problems in Sociological Theory', London, 194 pp. Translations: 1970, German, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese. 2 1967 (co-author with Robert Moore) Race, Community and Conflict, Oxford, 304 pp. (Reprinted in 1975). 3 1970 Race Relations in Sociological Theory, London, 161 pp. 4 1973 Race, Colonialism and the City, London, 310 pp. 5 1973 Discovering Sociology, London, 278 pp. 6 1973 Sociology and the Demystification of the Modern World, London, 271pp. Translation: 1976, Spanish. 7 1974 (editor) introduction and essay entitled 'Social Structure and Humanistic Sociology' in Approaches to Sociology, London, 302 pp. 8 1979 (co-author with Sally Tomlinson) Colonial Immigrants in Great Britain — A Class Analysis, London, 357 pp. 9 1981 Social Conflict: A Theoretical and Conceptual Analysis, London, 131 pp. 10 1981 (editor) Apartheid and Social Research, Paris, 199 pp. 11 1983 Race Relations in Sociological Theory (new edition with additional material), London, 208 pp. Translations: 1983, Japanese; 1985, Malay. Bibliography supplied by Professor John Rex.

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12 1986 (co-editor with David Mason) Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations, Cambridge, 350 pp. 13 1986 Race and Ethnicity, Milton Keynes, 1986,148 pp. Translation: Portuguese. 14 1987 The Ghetto and the Underclass, Aldershot, Hants, 140 pp. 15 1987 (co-editor with D. Joly and C. Wilpert) Immigrant Associations in Europe, Aldershot, Hants, 247 pp. 16 1991 Ethnic Identity and Ethnic Mobilisation in Britain, Research monograph no 5, Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Warwick, Coventry, 129 pp. B CONTRIBUTIONS TO BOOKS 1 1966 'Abhangigkeitsbeziehungen von Ideologic, Theorie und Methode in der Soziologie', in M. Thiel (ed.), Enzyklopadie der Geisteswissenschaftlichen Arbeitsmethoden, Munich, pp 225-45. 2 1968(a) 'The sociology of the zone of transition' in R. Pahl (ed.), Readings in Urban Sociology, Oxford, pp 211-32. Translation-. 1973, Hungarian translation of above essay in Varossoziozogia, Kozgazdasagi es Konyvkiado, Budapest, pp 203-24. 3 1968 'Frederick Engels', 'Emile Durkheim', and 'Max Weber', in T.Raison (ed.) The Founding Fathers of Sociology, Harmondsworth, pp 6 8 - 7 7 , 1 2 3 - 3 4 , 1 7 0 - 7 7 . 4 1968 'The race relations catastrophe', in T. Burgess (ed.) Matters of Principle, Harmondsworth, pp 170-83. 5 1970 'The concept of race in sociological theory', in S. Zubaida (ed.) Race and Racialism, London, pp 35-55. 6 1971 'Typology and objectivity - A comment on Weber's four sociological methods', in A. Sahay (ed.) Max Weber and Modern Sociology, London, pp 17—36. 7 1972 'Nature versus nurture - the significance of the revived debate', in K. Richardson &c D. Spears (eds) Race, Culture and Intelligence, Harmondsworth, pp 167-78. 8 1974 'The plural society: the South African case', in A. Leftwich (ed.) South Africa: Economic Growth and Political Change, London, pp 44—59.

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9 1974 'Capitalism, elites and the ruling class5, in P. Stanworth & A. Giddens (eds) Elites and Power in British Society, London, pp 208-19. 10 1974 'Black intellectuals and Black bourgeoisie', in B. Parekh (ed.) Colour, Consciousness and Culture, London, pp 177-88. 11 1975 'Racialism and the urban crisis', in L. Kuper (ed.) Race, Science and Society, London, pp 262-300. 12 1976 'Racial conflict in the city: the experience of Birmingham, England, 1962-1975' in S. Clarke and J. Obler (eds) Urban Ethnic Conflict, Institute for Research in Social Science, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, pp 132-63. 13 1977 'New nations and ethnic minorities', in UNESCO Race and Class in Post-Colonial Society, Paris, pp 11—50. 14 1979 'Black militancy and class conflict', in R. Miles & A. Phizacklea (eds) Racism and Political Action in Britain, London, pp 72-92. 15 1979 'Racism and education', in UNESCO The Child's Right to Education, Paris, pp 119-28. 16 1979 'Race relations theory and the study of migration in advanced industrial societies', in J. Berting, F. Geyer & R. Jurkovich (eds) Problems in International Comparative Research in the Social Sciences, London, pp 16-23. 17 1980 'The theory of race relations - A Weberian approach', in UNESCO Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, Paris, pp 117-42. 18 1980 'Immigrants and British labour - the sociological context', in K. Lunn (ed.) Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities, Folkestone, pp 232-38. 19 1980 'Social science research - a Neo-Kantian perspective', in Social Research and Public Policy - Three Perspectives, Social Research Association, London, pp 25-52. 20 1980 contribution to international commentary in R. BryceLaporte (ed.) Sourcebook on the New Immigration, New Brunswick, New Jersey, pp 475-77. 21 1981 'Urban segregation and inner city policy in Britain', in C. Peach (ed.) Ethnic Segregation in Cities, London, pp 25-43. 22 1981 'Aims and objectives', in M. Craft (ed.) Teaching in a Multi-cultural Society, Brighton, pp 36-52. 23 1981 'Max Weber', in J. Wintle (ed.) Makers of Modern Culture, London, pp 550-52.

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24 1982 'Convergences in the sociology of race relations and minority groups', in T. Bottomore et al (eds) Sociology - The State of the Art, London, pp 173-201. 25 1982 'Racism and the structure of colonial societies', in R. Ross (ed.) Racism and Colonialism, The Hague, pp 199-218. 26 1982 'West Indian and Asian youth in Britain - some research perspectives', in E. Cashmore & B. Troyna (eds) Black Youth in Crisis, London, pp 53-71. 27 1982 'Racial conflict in the inner city', in M. Cross & J. Rex (eds) Unemployment and Racial Conflict in the Inner City (Working Papers in Ethnic Relations No 16, SSRC Research Unit on Ethnic Relations, University of Aston in Birmingham, St Peter's College), pp 1-14. 28 1982 'Three stages of immigrant housing and community in Birmingham, England', in J. Solomos (ed.) Migrant Workers in Metropolitan Cities, European Science Foundation, Strasbourg, pp 101-17. 29 1983 'Race', in T. Bottomore (ed.) A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Oxford, pp 405-7. (Second, revised edition, 1991, pp 456-58.) 30 1983 'Race and the urban system', in N. Iverson (ed.) Urbanism and Urbanization, Leyden, pp 89-106. 31 1983 Foreword to the 1983 editon of R. Benedict, Race and Racism, London, pp ix—xiii. 32 1984 'Conflict and community survival', in L. Fried (ed.) Minorities, Community and Identity, Dahlem Foundation, Berlin, pp 119-32. 33 1984 'Disadvantage and discrimination in cities', in J. Benyon (ed.) Scarman and After, Oxford, pp 191-99. 34 1984 'Trzydzeisci tez o epistempologii i o metodisie u sociologii', in E. Mokrzycki (ed.) Kryzys i Schisma, Vol 2, Pauswowy Institut Wydarzilzy, Warsaw, pp 137-53. 35 1984 'Theories of race and ethnic relations', in UNESCO, Yearbook of Peace and Conflict Studies, Paris, pp 47-78. 36 1984 'Theories and balance in the inner city' in International Federation for Housing and Planning, 1984 Papers and Proceedings of 37th World Congress, Berlin, The Hague. 37 1985 'Race and the inner city', in Commission for Racial Equality Five Views of Multi-racial Britain, London. 38 1985 'Law and order in multi-racial areas - The problem after

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Scarman', in P. Norton (ed.) Law and Order in British Politics, Aldershot, Hants, pp 100-15. 1985 'Integratie, multiculturalise, en ethnische en rassentegenstelling', in Sperna J. Weiland & J.H.P. Pailinkck Boom Meppel Ethnische Minderheden - Wetenschap en Beleid, Amsterdam, pp 11-26. 1985 'Equality of opportunity and the ethnic minority child in British schools', in S. Modgil et al (eds) Multi-cultural Education - The Interminable Debate, London, pp 205—19. 1986 'The pattern of acculturation amongst Asian and West Indian descended youth in Britain', in Urban Quality of Life: Social, Psychological and Physical Conditions, New York and Berlin, pp 121-33. 1986 'Life in the ghetto', in J. Benyon & J. Solomos (eds) The Roots of Urban Unrest, Oxford, pp 103—11. 1986 'The heritage of slavery and social disadvantage', in C. Brock (ed.) The Caribbean in Europe, London, pp 111—36. 1987 'Ethnic and race relations', in P. Worsley (ed.) The New Introducing Sociology, Harmondsworth (third edition), pp 323-65. 1987 'Twenty years of racialism and multi-racialism', in B. Taylor (ed.) Michael Dummett: Contributions to Philosophy, Dordrecht, pp 200-19. 1987 'Multi-culturalism, anti-racism and equality of opportunity in the Swann Report', in T.S. Chivers (ed.) Race and Culture in Education, Windsor, pp 1-16. 1989 'Equality of opportunity, multi-culturalism, anti-racism and education for all', in G. Verma (ed.) Education for All, London, pp 11-25. 1990 '"Rasse" und "Ethnizitat" als Sozialwissenschaftliche Konzepte', in EJ. Dittrich & F.O. Radtke (eds) Ethnizitat, Wissenschaft und Mindeaheiten, Opladen, pp 141—54. 1990 'L'atteggiamento verso gli immigrati in Gran Bretagna', in Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli Italia, Europa e nuove immigrazioni, Turin, pp 67-86. 1990 'Le probleme des politiques d'integration', in Agence pour le Developpement des Relations Interculturelles, Uintegration des minorites et immigres en Europe, Paris, pp 97-107. 1990 'The integration of immigrant youth in British society', in Norrkoping Statens Invanddarvert, Flyktingungdomars och

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andra generation — Invandrarungdomags situation i norden, Norrkoping, Sweden, pp 41-9. 1991 'Multi-culturalism, anti-racism and equality of opportunity in Britain', in R. Nile (ed.) Immigration and the Politics of Ethnicity and Race in Australia and Britain, Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, London, pp 98-108. 1992 'Race and Ethnicity in Europe', in J. Bailey (ed.) Social Europe, London, pp 106-20. 1992 'The neo-Kantian approach to structure', in H. Martins (ed.) Knowledge and Passion: Essays in Honour of John Rex, London, pp 250—67. (forthcoming 1993) 'Religion and ethnicity in the metropolis', in R. Barot (ed.) Religion and Ethnicity - Minorities and Social Change in the Metropolis, Kampen, Netherlands.

C ARTICLES 1 1954 'Apartheid in the South African universities', Universities Quarterly, vol 8, no 4, August, pp 333-40. 2 1959 'The plural society in sociological theory', British Journal of Sociology, vol x, no 2, June, pp 114-24. 3 1959 'Social statistics for mid-century Britain', Yorkshire Bulletin of Social and Economic Research, vol 11, no 1, July, pp 56-9. 4 1968 'The social segregation of the immigrant in British cities', Political Quarterly, vol 39, pp 15-24. 5 1968 'Economic growth and decline and their consequences for the sociology of planning', Town and Country Planning Association Summer School Proceedings (Town Planning Institute), pp 28-33. 6 1969 'Sociology and planning - a dialogue', The Municipal Review, vol 40, pp 95—7. 7 1969 'Race as a social category', Journal of Bio-social Science, supplement 1, pp 145—62. 8 1970 'The concept of housing, class and the sociology of race relations', Race, vol xii, no 4, pp 293-301. 9 1970 'The spread of the pathology of natural science to the social sciences', Sociology of Sociology, Sociological Review Monograph No 16, Keele, pp 243-62.

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10 1971 'The plural society - the South African case', Race, vol xii, no 3, pp 401—13. 11 1971 'The compound, the reserve and the location - the essential institutions of South African labour exploitation', South African Labour Bulletin, vol 1, no 4, pp 7-17. 12 1971 'Inter-ethnic relations in an urban context: an example of a theoretical model', Ethnies, vol I, Paris, pp 191-203. 13 1972 'New minorities in Scandinavia', in Etniska Minoriteter, 1, Norden, Lund. 14 1972 'Social stratification — power', New Society, 5 October, pp 23-6. 15 1973 'Race relations research and racial justice', Race, vol xiv, pp 481-88. 16 1975 'Nations, nationalism and the social scientist', Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, fourth series, vol xiii, pp 57-67. 17 1975 'Revisiting Weber', Sociology, vol 9, no 3. pp 503-6. 18 1975 'The sociology of South Africa - a review article', Journal of Southern African Studies, vol 1, no 1, pp 247-52. 19 1977 'Sociological theory and the city - a response to some recent trends in Australasian sociology', Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, vol 13, no 3, pp 218-25. 20 1977 (with Sally Thompson, Peter Ratcliffe and David Hearnden) 'Housing, employment education and race relations in Birmingham (a research note)', New Community, vol vi, no 1, pp 123-27. 21 1977 'Value relevance, scientific laws and ideal types - the sociological methodology of Max Weber', Canadian Journal of Sociology, vol 2, no 2, pp 151-65. 22 1978 'Legitimation, ideology and culture in late capitalist societies', Sociology, vol 12, no 3, pp 561—66. 23 1978 'The present crisis in sociological theory', Social Wetenschappen, 21e, Jaargang, no 2, Tilbury, pp 52-9. 24 1978 'Threatening theories', Transaction, New Brunswick, pp 46-9. 25 1979 'The future of black culture and politics in Britain', New Community, vol vii, no 2, pp 225-33. 26 1980 'Old and new themes in urban development', Built Environment, London, vol 6, no 3, pp 216-24.

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27 1981 'A working paradigm for race relations research', Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol 4, no 1, pp 1—25. 28 1981 'Convergences in the sociology of race relations and minority groups', International Social Science Journal, vol xxxiii, no 2, pp 351-73. 29 1981 'The integration of Britain's black citizens': a lecture to mark the establishment of the SSRC Research Unit on Race Relations at the University of Aston. Published by the University of Aston, Birmingham, England. 30 1982 'Racial conflict in the inner city', Housing Review, Housing Centre Trust, London, vol 31. 31 1982 'The 1981 urban riots in Britain', International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol 6, no 1, pp 99-114. 32 1983 'British sociology 1960—80: an essay', Social Forces, vol 61, no 4, pp 999-1009. 33 1984 'Integration, multi-culturalism and ethnic and racial conflict': Verhagen Lecture; published by Erasmus University, Rotterdam. 34 1985 'Kantianism, methodological individualism and Michael Banton', Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol 8, no 4, pp 548-62. 35 1985 'The concept of a multi-cultural society', Occasional Papers, no 2, Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Warwick. 36 1987 'The concept of a multi-cultural society', New Community, vol xiv, nos 2—2, pp 218—29. 37 1991 'The political sociology of a multi-cultural society', Gandhian Perspectives, Varanasi, India, vol iv, no 1, pp 55-75. 38 1991 'The political sociology of a multi-cultural society', European Journal for Intercultural Studies, Stoke-on-Trent, vol 2 , no 1, pp 7-19. 39 1991 'Race, ethnicity and the rational organisation of evil': review article on Z. Bauman Modernity and the Holocaust, Theoryy Culture and Society, vol 8, pp 167-74. 40 1992 'Ethnic mobilisation in a multi-cultural society', Innovation, Oxford, vol 5, no 3. 41 1992 'The integration of Muslim immigrants in Britain', Migration, Berlin, and Innovation, Oxford, vol 5, no 3.

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D SHORTER ARTICLES 1 1958 'Is sociology doing its job?', The Listener, vol 60, 28 August, pp 305-8. 2 1961 'Institutions and men', The Listener, vol 66, 30 November, pp 905-6. 3 1962 The good of bureaucracy', The Listener, vol 67, 15 February, pp 275-77. 4 1962 'New societies in Africa', New Society, 22 November, pp 23-5. 5 1963 'Emile Durkheim', New Society, 28 March, pp 22-3. 6 1964 'Max Weber', New Society, 3 December, pp 23-4. 7 1965 'Integration: the reality', New Society, 12 August, pp 13-5. 8 1966 'Which path for sociology?', New Society, 6 October, pp 529-31. 9 1967 'Frederick Engels', New Society, 15 January, pp 14—6. 10 1967 'Wright Mills', New Society, 5 October, pp 465-67. 11 1981 'Enrol Lawrence and the sociology of race relations: an open letter', Multi-racial Education, vol 10, no 1, pp 49-51. 12 1983 Review of P. van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol 6, no 3, pp 368-71. CONFERENCE PAPERS 1 1974 'Colonial society and racial polities': Research Committee on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, International Sociological Association, Toronto. 2 1974 'Ethnic minorities and the class structure': address to the International Sociological Association, Toronto. 3 1974 'Ethnic and class stratification: their interrelation and political consequences - Europe', International Sociological Association, Toronto. 4 1981 'Weberian and Marxian concepts in empirical research in urban political sociology', Conference on the present-day relevance of the work of Karl Marx and Max Weber, Duisburg, Germany. 5 1987 'The concept of race and ethnicity', The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld, Germany. 6 1988. 'Conceptual and practical problems of recent local

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authority policy developments on equal opportunities', Conference on local authorities and equal opportunity, University of Warwick, Coventry. 1988 'Some theoretical problems of attitude change', UNESCO multi-disciplinary meeting of experts, Manila, Philippines. 1988 'Policy problems relating to immigrant minorities in north-west Europe', European University, Florence. 1990 'The reception of migrants in Great Britain', Agnelli Foundation, Turin. 1990 'Muslims in a multi-cultural society', Anglo-French workshop on research on Islam in France and England, University of Warwick, Coventry. 1990 'Research on Muslims and the Rushdie affair', conference on new issues in Black politics, University of Warwick, Coventry. 1990 'The integration of immigrant youth in British society', Swedish Department of Immigration, Norrkoping, Sweden. 1990 'Policy problems relating to immigrants in Europe', integration of immigrant minorities in Europe, Agence pour le Developpement des Relations Interculturelles, Paris. 1991 'The political sociology of a multi-cultural society', Gandhian Institute of Studies, Varanasi, India. 1991 'Anti-racist strategies in Europe', international conference on racism, Creteil, Paris. 1991 'Race and ethnicity in Europe', Society Science History Association, New Orleans. 1991-2 'The talks and the balance of power in South Africa', CERI, Paris; Duke University, Durham, N. Carolina; and Hunter College, City University of New York. 1991 'Muslim immigrants in Britain', Tufts University, Boston. 1992 'The integration of Muslim immigrants in Great Britain', Muslims in Europe, Berlin Institute for Comparative Social Research, Berlin. 1992 'Religion and ethnicity in the metropolis', Centre for the Study of Minorities and Social Change, University of Bristol. 1992 'Ethnicity as resource and stigma: ethnic mobilisation in a multi-cultural society', Migrants, development and metropolis, Berlin Institute for Comparative Social Research, Berlin. 1992 'Ethnic mobilisation in multi-cultural societies', Centre

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for Research in Ethnic Relations, Arden House, University of Warwick, Coventry. 23 1992 The sociology of conflict', Institute of Sociology, Kiev. 24 1992 'The "talks" and the balance of power in South Africa', Centre des Etudes et Recherches Internationales, Paris. 25 1992 'Ethnic and class conflict in Europe', European Sociological Association, Vienna. REPRINTS 1 1970 'The changing national class structure', in E. Butterworth 8c D. Weir (eds) The Sociology of Modern Britain, London, pp 201-5. 2 1971 'System sinnhaften sozialen handelns', in K.H. Tjaden (ed.) Soziale Systeme, Berlin, pp 132-40. Reprinted from Key Problems of Sociological Theory. 3 1975 'The theory of housing classes', in J. Lambert & D. Weir (eds) Cities in Modern Britain, London, pp 332-37. 4 1976 'Race relations in sociological theory', in G. Bowker & J. Carrier (eds) Race and Ethnic Relations, London, pp 112-20. 5 1977 'The plural society in sociological theory', in H-D. Evers (ed.) Sociology of South-east Asia, Kuala Lumpur. 6 1980 'The concept of race in sociological theory', in J. Stone (ed.) Race, Ethnicity and Social Change, North Scituate, Mass., pp 44-58. E OTHER WRITING Also other broadcasts and reviews in The British journal of Sociology, Sociological Review, Politial Quarterly, Population Studies, The New Statesman and Nation, New Society, The Sunday Times, and The Times Literary Supplement. F EDITORIAL WORK 1970-73: Editor of series of popular texts on sociology to be published jointly by Granada Books and MacGibbon & Kee. Fourteen books were published by 1973.

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1973-1985: Editor, International Library of Sociology, Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1974-76: Consultant editor, American Journal of Sociology. 1979: Member of Editorial Board of Ethnic and Racial Studies. 1980: Member of Editorial Board, Cambridge University Press series on Comparative Ethnic and Race Relations. 1991: Member of Editorial Board of Innovation.

INDEX

Abrams, P. 75 Adam,H. 8,20 Adorno, T. 80, 86 Albrow, M.: on globalization 184—6, 187-91; on Weber 7 9 - 9 8 , 1 9 9 , 2 2 0 Alexander, J. 88, 151; on reduction and deceit in social theory 119—36 Archer, M. 189; on structure and agency 154—73 Aristotle 244 Aron,R. 8 0 , 1 1 9 , 1 7 7 - 8 Atkinson, A. B. 48 Austin, J. 89 Baldamus,W. 5 9 , 6 0 Banton, M. 20 Barth,F. 9 Barthes, R. 129 Baudelaire, C. P. 212 Baudrillard,J. 210,239 Bauman,Z. 214,215,253 Beetham,D. 100 Behrend,H. 59 Belkina,G. 84 Bell,D. 94,218 Bendix, R. 61-2, 80,105 Benedict, R. 164 Bentham,J. 101,126,129 Bergson, H. 230,240 Bernal,J.D. 2 3 4 - 8 , 2 4 7 Bertaux, D. 83 Berthoud, R. 37 Beveridge, William (and Report) 23, 25, 27, 44

Beynon, H. 60 Bhat,A. 35 Blau, P. M. 5 3 , 1 2 6 , 1 3 3 , 1 5 9 Bloch,E. 131,247 Blumenberg, H. 232 Blumer,H. 130 Boesche, R. 100 Bologh, R. W. 202, 203 Booth, H. 48 Bougie, C. 132 Bourdieu,P. 197-8 Bourricaud, F. 180 Bovenker,F. 193 Bowey,A. M. 57-8 Brannen, P. 69,75 Braverman, H. 61 Brown, R. K.: on industrial enterprise 51-78 Brubaker, W. R. 191,192-3 Brun,J. 235,247 Bryce,J.B. 100 Buckley, W. 159 Burckhardt,J. 105 Burger, P. 215 Burns, T. 52,56 Butler, S. 240 Carey, J. 230 Castoriadis, C. 110 Chambers, I. 211 Channel, D. F. 243 ChenQuieng 82 Chirico,J.A. 192 Clarke, M. 49 Cloward,R.A. 140,141

280

Index Cockburn, C. 60 Cohen, A. 139,140,141-2 Cohen, P. S. 160 Cohen, R.: on South Africa 1—22 Coleman, J. 126,132 Collins, R. 94 Comte, A. 177,185-6,191, 237 Coser, L. 3, 139, 220 Crane, D. 215 Cressey, P. 62 Culler, J. 216 Curtis,}. 247 Dahrendorf, R. 90,199 Daly,H. 231 Darwin, C. 226,230 Dawkins, R. 239 Day,R. andJ.V. 65 deMan,P. 216 Demuth, C. 34 Dentler, R. 146 Derks,H. 91-2 Descartes, R. 233 Dessauer,F. 241 Dilthey, W. 91, 95,100, 216, 254, 257 Dobbs,B. 233 Donaldson, L. 52 Downes, D. 140 Duffield,M. 29,43 Durkheim, E. 86, 197; on deviance 138,139,143,147; on globalization 177,178,186-7,192; and neoKantian approach to structure 252, 256-8, 262; and reduction and deceit in social theory 127-9,131-2 Elger,A.J. 56 Elias,N. 198,213,219 Emery, F. E. 53 Engels,F. 131,259 Erikson,K. 146-7 Featherstone, M.: on personality, unity and ordered life 197-225 Fechter,P. 220 Ferkiss,V. 229,239 Feuerbach, L. A. 227,228 Fevre,R. 43 Finley,M. I. 114-15 Firestone, S. 238 Flanders, A. 66-7 Foucault, M. 121, 212-13, 214, 221-2

281

Fraser,J.T. 241,247 Fregosi, P. 191 Freud, S. 81,226 Freund,D. 99 Frisby, D. 198, 207, 208-9 Frith, S. 211 Frobel,F. 43 Fryer, P. 48 Funkenstein, A. 233 Furnivall, J. S. 3,8,9,16 Garfinkel,H. 130 Gay, P. 198 Geddes, A. R. M. (and Report) 71-2, 74 Geertz,C 121 Gehlen, A. 230 Gellner,E. 167-8 Genov,N. 85 George, S. 212,220 Gerth,H.H. 51,220 Giddens, A. 74, 88,169,181, 256 Glaser,D. 21 Glucksmann, M. 255,261 Gneuss,C. 81 Goethe, J. W. von 220 Goldman, H. 216-17 Goldscheid, R. 208 Gong, G. W. 177 Goodin, R. E. 41 Gordon, P. 38-9 Gouldner, A. W. 52 Green, M. 203,204,221 Greenleaf, W. H. 99 Gross, O. 203-4 Habermas, J. 131,152; and Weber 80, 81, 95, 261-2 Halbwachs, M. 132 Haldane, J. B. S. 235, 237, 238 Halevy,E. 126 Hall, John 93 Haraway, D. 242 Harvey, D. 211 Hebdige,D. 211 Hegel, G. W. F. and Hegelianism 125, 252, 253, 256; see also Kapp Heim,M. 241 Helle,H. 91 Henderson, A. M. 86 Hennis, W.: on Weber 93, 99,100-1, 105,199, 202, 218 Henrich,D. 87,221

282

Index

Hertz, R. 243 Hesse, H. 216 Heuss,T. 87,220 Hickson,D.J. 52 Hindess, B. 36 Hobbes, T. 89,129,134,148 Hobhouse, L. T. 192 Homans, G. C. 126,130,132-3 Holton,R.J. 151 Horkheimer, M. 80 Horne,H. 211 Hubinger,G. I l l Hume, D. 89,101, 251-2 Huning, A. 247 Huxley, A. 238 Ibaraki,T. 80,87 Jacoby, R. 215 Jaffe,E. 203-4,221 Jameson, F. 210,218 Jaspers, K.: on Weber 91, 95,199, 200, 220, 221 Joachim of Fiore 232 Joshua, H. 48 Kant, I. and Kantianism 220, 250-67 Kapp,E. 226-9,231,244,247 Keat,R. 255 Kern,S. 177 King, Martin Luther 49 Kiuranov, C. 85 Kocka,J. 81 Kozyr-Kowalski, S. 85 Krasnodebski, Z. 85 Kraynak,R.P. 107,108 Kuper,L. 6-7,9,20 Lamprecht, K. 209 Landmann, M. 234 Lane,T. 48 Lash,S. 81,92 Lassman, P. 93, 201; on Weber and Tocqueville 99-118 Latour, B. 121 Lazarsfeld, P. 262 Lechner,F.J. 192 Lederberg 242 LeGrand,J. 41 Lenin, V. I. and Leninism 131, 236 Levi-Strauss, C. 129-30, 255, 260-1, 263 Levine,D. 91

Liebersohn, H. 218,221 Lister, R. 37 Littre,E. 185 Locke, J. 101 Lockwood,D. 90,156-7 Lupton,T. 57-8,60 Lyotard,J.-F. 121,201 McClusky, Lord 33 McGoldrick,J. 69 Machiavelli, N. 101,107,112,115 Maclnnes, J. 62 McLuhan,M. 228 Maffesoli, M. 208,213-14,217 Malcolm X 41 Malinowski, B. 3,4-5,9 Manasse,E. M. 200 Mandela, N. 2,13,17,19 Mannheim, K. 86, 90, 94,187 Manwaring, T. 60 Marcuse, H. 86,151 Marsden,D. 57 Marshall, T. H.: on citizenship 23-4, 26, 29,36,42,44,47 Martindale, D. 255 Martins, H. 74, 93: on technology 226-49 Marx, K./Marxism 62, 99,157; and globalization 177-8,185,186; and neo-Kantian approach to structure 252, 256, 259, 265; and postmodernism 210; and reduction and deceit in social theory 124-7, 129,131-2,134; and siege mentality 138,147; and South Africa 6-7,16, 22; on technology 226, 230, 236; and Weber 80-2, 84, 86-7, 90, 92, 95 Matza,D. 142,149 Mauss,M. 132 Mayer, J. P. 86,100,105 Meli,F. 10-12,15 Merle, M. 185 Merleau-Ponty, M. 197 Merton, R. 137,139,140-3,144 Meyer, J. W. 183 Mill, J. S. 89-90,99,186 Mills, C. W. 51, 81, 220 Mitcham, C. 247 Mohamed, Y. 11 Mommsen, W. 80, 87,100,105,115 Monk,R. 198 Montesquieu 107

Index Moore, G. E. 211,243-4 Moore, R. S.: on citizenship and social agenda 23-50 Moore, W. E. 54 Moravec,H. 231,246 Morgan, D.H.J. 52 Morse, R. 88 Mouzelis, N. P. 55 Nagel,T. 121 Napoleon Bonaparte 113 Nettl,J. P. 179 Neusychin, A. 84 Newnham, A. 38-9 Nietzsche, F. 81,83,212 Oberschall, A. 262 Ohlin,L.E. 140,141 Orzechoweski, M. 85 Otsuka,H. 80,87 Oyama, S. 244 Parkin, F. 90,92 Parsons, T. 54; on conflict and deviance (debate with Rex) 137-53; on globalization 183,187-8; and neo-Kantian approach to structure 260, 261, 263, 265; and reduction and deceit in social theory 129-30, 134; and Weber 80, 81, 85, 86, 88, 92 Penrose, R. 246 Plato 244 Polanyi,M. 119 Popper, K. 83 Portis,E. B. 200-1 Powell, E. 28,35 Proudhon, P. J. 125,127 Pugh,D. S. 52 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 260, 263-4 Ramphele, M. 4 Rasmussen, D. 184 Rescher,N. 240 Rex, J. 154, 219, 220; on citizenship 24-5, 27, 31, 35, 48; on conflict and deviance (debate with Parsons) 137-53; on Durkheim 197, 252, 256-8, 262; on industrial enterprise 55, 75; on neo-Kantian approach to structure 250—67; on normative approach 129; on Parsons 134, 260, 261, 263, 265; on pluralism

283

2-9,16-17, 20,21; on South Africa 5-9,16-17, 20, 21; on Weber 79, 81, 90-2, 94-5, 250, 254-5, 257-9, 261-6 Rice, A. K. 54,55-6 Richter,M. 107,114 Rickert,H. 91,95 Rifkin,J. 231,239,242 Roberts, I. P. 69 Robertson, R. 198; on globalization and sociological theory 174-96 Rorty,R. 121,211-12,217 Rosencrance, R. 178 Rossi, P. 93 Rousseau, J.-J. 101,105-6,107, 115-16,198 Runciman, W. G. 88 Russell, B. 83 Saint-Simon, C. H., comte de 177—8, 185-6,191,192 Sawicki,J. 247 Scaff,L. 93,203,205,206-7 Schaaf,J. 87 Scheler,M. 187 Schluchter, W. 82,91,93 Schmidt, G. 81 Schwentker, W. 204 Scruton, R. 29-30, 85 Seager,W. 245 Seyfarth, C. 81 Sherwood, M. 48 Shils,E. 260 Shusterman, R. 211-12 Silverman, D. 54, 55 Simey, M. 35 Simmel, G.: and globalization 178, 187, 192; and neo-Kantian approach to structure 255-7; and personality, unity and ordered life 198, 204-9, 211, 212, 214, 216, 219-20, 221; and Weber 90, 91, 95 Simons, G. 241,245 Simpson, J. H. 180 Sklair, L: on siege mentality 137-53 Skocpol,T. 126 Smelser,N.J. 54 Smith, A. 101 Smith, D. 34 Smith, M. G. 7-8, 9,16, 17 Spencer, H. 90,177, 178 Stalin, J. 2,20 Stalker, G. M. 52,56

284

Index

Stammer, O. 80 StaudeJ.R. 220 Steding, C. 86 Stinchcombe, A. L. 52, 67,148-9 Stone, I. F. 23 Strauss, A. 63-4, 65, 66, 68 Taylor-Gooby, P. 30-1, 48-9 Tenbruck, F. H. 100,199 Thatcher, M. 31 Thompson, E. P. 24 Thornton, P. 33 Titmuss, R. M. 41 Tocqueville, A. de: and Weber 99-118 Tolstoy, L. 201 Topitsch,E. 244 Treiman, D. 125 Trist,E. L. 53 Trotsky, L. 236-7 Turner, B. 151 Turner, B. S. 185,192 Turner, C. 201 Urry,J. 255 van den Berghe, P. 5 Velody,I. 93,201 Voegelin, E. 232 Wajcman,J. 247 Wallace, T. 27,48 Wallerstein, I. 182

Watkins,J.W.N. 166 Webb, S. and B. 68 Weber, Marianne 100,204,221 Weber, Max 237; and globalization 177,178,192; and neo-Kantian approach to structure 250, 254-5, 257-9, 261-6; on organizations and bureaucracy 51. 52-3; and personality, unity and ordered life 198-204,206, 211,212, 214-17, 219-21; Rex on see under Rex; and Tocqueville 99-118; world reception of 79-98 Weingartner, R. H. 205 Weiss, J. 80,84,93,94 Werskey,G. 247 Whimster,D. 221 Whimster,S. 81,92,207,217 Wilde, O. 212 Williams, P. 48 Wilson, F. 4 Wilson, Woodrow 188,189 Wittgenstein, L. 82,198 Wolff, K. 255 Wolin,S. 101,103 Wolpe,H. 8 Wood, S. 60 Woollacott, M. 13-14 Yahiel,N. 85 Zabludovsky, G. 88