POWER, POLITICS AND PEOPLE
BOOKS BY C. WRIGHT MILLS Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (1960} Images of Man (1960} (Edited with an Introduction) The Sociological Imagination (1959) The Causes of World War Three (1958) The Power Elite (1956) Character and Social Structure (1953} (with H. Gerth) White Collar (1951) The Puerto Rican Journey (1950) (with C. Senior and R. Goldsen) The New Men of Power (1948} From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946) (Ed. and Tr. with H. Gerth) BOOKS BY IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ The War Game: Studies of the New Civilian Militarists (1963} Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason (1961} Philosophy, Science and the Sociology of Knowledge (1960)
PHOTOGRAPH BY YAROSLAVA
C. WRIGHT MILLS
POWER, POLITICS AND PEOPLE THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF C. WRIGHT MILLS
Edited and with an Introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz
NEW YORK • OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1963
Copyright © 1939, 1940, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1963, by the Estate of C. Wright Mills. Printed in the United States of America Grateful acknowledgment is given to the followin~ newspapers, journals and magazines in which the essays in this volume onginally appeared. THE STRUCTURE OF POWER IN AMERICAN SOCIETY. The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. IX, No. 1, March 1958. © Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. 1958. THE SOCIAL LIFE OF A MODERN COMMUNITY. American Sociological Review, Vol. VII, 1942. Copyright 1942 American Sociological Review. A MARX FOR THE MANAGERS. Ethics: An International Journal of Legal, Political and Social. Thought. Vol. 52, No. 2, January 1942. Published by the University of Chicago Press. . THE POLITICAL GARGOYLES: BUSINESS AS A SYSTEM OF POWER. The New Republic, April 12, 1943. Copyright 1943 by Harrison-Blaine, Inc. THE TRADE UNION LEADER: A COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT. Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer 1945. Copyright 1945 by Publil; Opinion Quarterly. THE LABOR LEADERS AND THE POLITICAL ELITE. Industrial Conflict, edited by Arthur Kornhauser, Robert Dubin, Arthur M. Ross. McGrawHill Book Company, Inc., 1954. Copyright 1954 by the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. THE AMERICAN BUSINESS ELITE: A COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT. The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 4, No. 4. Supplement V, December 1945. Copyright New York University Press 1945. A LOOK AT THE WHITE COLLAR. Electronics in the Office: Problems and Prospects: Office Management Series, No. 131, October 1952. Copyright 1952 by American Management Association. PRAGMATISM, POLITICS AND RELIGION. The New Leader, August and September 1942. THE NAZI BEHEMOTH DISSECTED. Partisan Review, September, October 1942. Copyright, 1942, by Partisan Review. 'v 0
COLLECTIVISM AND THE MIXED-UP ECONOMY. New Leader, December 19, 1942. LIBERAL VALUES IN THE MODERN WORLD: THE RELEVANCE OF 19th CENTURY LIBERALISM TODAY. Anvil and Student Partisan, Winter, 1952. Copyright 1952 by Bimbo Press. THE CONSERVATIVE MOOD. Dissent, Vol. I, No. 1, Winter 1954. Copyright 1954 by Dissent. THE DECLINE OF THE LEFT. Lecture on the British Broadcasting Company. Contact. No. 3, 1959. Copyright © 1959 by the Estate of C. Wright Mills. CULTURE AND POLITICS: THE FOURTH EPOCH. The Listener (published by the British Broadcasting Company), March 12, 1959. Copyright © 1959 by the Estate of C. Wright Mills. THE NEW LEFT. New Left Review, No. 5, September, October 1960. Copyright © 1960 by New Left Review, Ltd.
THE COMPETITIVE PERSONALITY. Partisan Review, Vol. 13, No. 4, September, October 1946. Copyright, 1946, by Partisan Review. THE MIDDLE CLASS IN MIDDLE-SIZED CITIES. American Sociological Review, Vol. 11, No. 5, October 1946. Copyright 1946 by The American Sociological Association. THE SOCIAL ROLE OF INTELLECTUALS. Politics, Vol. 1, No. 3, April 1944. Copyright 1944 by Politics. PLAIN TALK ON FANCY SEX: A PEEK AT PUBLIC MORALITY. Published as GIRLS USING VICE TO HELP CAREERS, New York Journal American International, August 31, 1952. Copyright 1952 by United Press International, Inc. A DIAGNOSIS OF OUR MORAL UNEASINESS. New York Times Magazine, November 23, 1952. Copyright 1952 by The New York Times Company. THE UNITY OF WORK AND LEISURE. (LEISURE AND THE WHOLE MAN) New York Herald Tribune, October 25, 1953. Copyright 1953 by the Estate of C. Wright Mills. MASS SOCIETY AND LIBERAL EDUCATION. Copyright 1954 by the Center for the Study of Liberal Education for Adults. THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE: THE DESIGNER. Industrial Design, November 1958. Copyright, 1958, Whitney Publications, Inc. THE COMPLACENT YOUNG MEN: REASONS FOR ANGER. Anvil and Student Partisan, Vol. 9, No. 1, Winter 1958. Copyright 1958 by Bimbo Press. THE CULTURAL APPARATUS. The Listener (Published by the British Broadcasting Company), March 26, 1959. Copyright © 1959 by the Estate of C. Wright Mills. LANGUAGE, LOGIC AND CULTURE. American Sociological Review, Vol. 4, No. 5, October 1939. Copyright 1939 by the American Sociological Review. SITUATED ACTIONS AND VOCABULARIES OF MOTIVE. American Sociological Review, Vol. 5, No. 6, December 1940. Copyright 1940 by the American Sociological Review. METHODOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF TH:t;': SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 46, No. 3, 1940. IDEOLOGY, ECONOMICS, AND TODAY. The New Leader, June 26, 1942. THE PROFESSIONAL IDEOLOGY OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGISTS. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 49, No. 2, September 1943. MILLS, C. WRIGHT; TWO STYLES OF RESEARCH IN CURRENT SOCIAL STUDIES. Philosophy of Science, Volume 20, No. 4, October 1953. Copyright© 1953, The Williams & Wilkins Co., Baltimore 2, Md. U.S.A. IBM PLUS REALITY PLUS HUMANISM SOCIOLOGY. Saturday Review, Vol. .37, No. 18, May 1, 1954. © by Saturday Review Associates, Inc. 1954.
=
ON KNOWLEDGE AND POWER. Dissent, Vol. 2, No. 3, Summer 1955.
To Yara
EDITOR•s PREFACE
In preparing the collected papers of C. Wright Mills for publication I have been guided by one central principle: t() keep myself from interfering in the two-way communication between author and reader. Thus, except for matters of occasional lapses in punctuation and spelling (very rare I might add), the essays are herein presented as they were originally prepared by Wright Mills. The outstanding difference from the original, is the replacement of sub-headings (most often put in by periodicals rather than by the author) , with a uniform system of Roman numerals-signifying different sections of a particular paper. In large measure, Mills himself used this as a designation, so that the number of places where even subheadings were deleted was comparatively small. The titles of each essay have been left intact. In a few places it was necessary to subtract or add a word, but the title of each paper can be checked against the title listings in the bibliography for an indication of any changes. I have chosen to call this the "collected papers" rather than the "selected papers" because POWER, POLITICS, AND PEOPLE covers every major essay done by Wright Mills. Again, the bibliography appended to the bac\nerations by Time of Birth Occupation of Father Profession Business Public Official Farming Skilled Craft Unskilled and Semiskilled Clerical and Salesmen
1570- 17001729 1699 29.2% 14.8% 33.3 63.0 12.5 18.5 3.7 4.2 20.8
Total
100.0
100.0
17301759 6.5% 67.7 9.7 12.9 3.2
100.0
17601789 14.1% 53.3 6.5 18.5 7.6
100.0
17901819 18.1'% 29.3 7.6 34.9 5.5
18201850- 18791849 1879 1907*TOTALt 22.6% 18.7% 12.6% 18.7'}'o 47.7 63.1 40.0 35.5 6.4 3.9 4.7 7.6 23.8 21.5 23.2 7.9 7.3 10.6 2.8
3.8
2.6
3.7
2.7
2.5
0.8
1.6
0.9
6.1
0.9
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
• Recomputed from Taussig and Joslyn, American Business Leaders, p. 312, Table A-4. Our category, "public official," was not used by Taussig and Joslyn. We have computed .. business .. from their "minor executive," .. major executive,"
11
owner
of large business," and "owner of small business." Carl Joslyn has kindly examined these operations made on his data. It will be noticed that only in the cases of "farming" and "clerical" do the Taussig and Joslyn data perhaps violate the trends in our own figures, and these cases are certainly the ones most likely to be drastically influenced by shifts in the total occupied population. This table comprises 58.6 per cent of the total elite from the D.A.B. " t This total column does not include th~ Taussig and Joslyn data in the eighth generation.
the professions. We may, however, inspect the internal composition of the occupational origins of the business elite by the various generations. These figures tend generally to confirm our findings on class of origin. In each of the generations, except one, 1790-1819, business and the professions produced the majority of the business elite. For all generations, 40.4 per cent of the elite are derived from businessmen alone. For those born between 1790 and !819, however, only 47.5 per cent were derived from business and the professions. This generation attained the
83.3%
17001729
100.0
16.7
16.7
5.5
33.3
)
I
116.7
J
100.0
9.5 4.8 9.5
9.5
4.8
9.5 23.8
!
I
I
I
?-
)
I
I
,.,. 1 "·"·1
15701699
33.3
66.7%
100.0
8.0 21 .3 9.3
6.7
12.0
4.0
I
)
45.3
I
]"''" 100.0
)
f~·
17.4 20.7 16.2
14.1
I
)
I
3.3
2.2
• 131.6%
100.0
22.3 8.2 14.7
19.4
5.9
2.7
J
tb4.6
\
I J
f"•%
12.0% i 18.7 I 8.0
I
13.8% 1 10.0 I 3.0
10.9% I 8.7 6.5
17901819
17601789
Generations by Time of Birth 17301759
-• This table comprises 78.2 per cent of the total elite from the D.A.B.
Total*
High School or Academy Grammar School Apprentice Only "Negligible"
College Degree 1-3 Years College "Private School" or Tutor Business School or Law Office "Good" but Unspecified
Highest Level of Education
TABLE 7
~63.1%
I
100.0
100.0
~36.9 J
\
16.4 15.1
)
I
I 0.7
4.2
~46.6% I
100.0
16.3 (53.4 7.9 10.5 )
18.7 I
5.3 )
2.7
18.2%1 15.4 I 5.0
27.4% '1 25.3 5.5
5.4
ti.O
\
J
~49.0%
i
I
TOTAL
i8501879
14.3 5.3 8.4
23.0
5.3
2.2
20.0% 17.9 3.6
18201849
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS ELITE: TYPE OF HIGHEST LEVEL OF EDUCATION, 157(}.-1879
12b
POWER, POLITICS AND PEOPLE
average age of thirty-five at the approximate year 1840. This and the preceding and the following generations (comprising the total span 1760-1849) contain the modal proportions of the sons of farmers and skilled laborers. This span of years also contains the highest proportion of men of lower-class origin to enter the elite. The drop in the proportions of farmers and laborers after the 1840's is apparently absorbed, directly or intermediately, by the business strata. Of those business elite born between 1879 and 1907, only 18.2 per cent originated in farming and laboring families. In Table 7 it may be seen that 18.2 per cent of all members of the American business elite have been graduates of colleges and that a total of 33.3 per cent have been enrolled for some period of time in some college. When we consider that in 1940, when the proportion of persons over twenty-five years of age who had been enrolled in college was at its historical peak, only 10.0 per cent of these adults had been enrolled in college, 18 it is clear that the business elite has been educated well above the level of the general adult population. If the top five educational categories in Table 7 are summed and called "high" and the total of the last four categories are summed up to "low," it appears that 46.6 per cent of the total business elite was "highly educated." 19 Table 7 shows that the least well-educated members of the business elite were of the two generations which cover the birth years 1760-1819. These individuals caine to the approximate age of thirty-five from around 1810 to 1840. A higher proportion of the members of these "middle '"Sixteenth Census, "United States Summary" (Washington, 1943), Table 6. '" That the D.A.B. sample is not biased toward including businessmen of higher education is perhaps suggested by the Taussig and Joslyn educational figures. In their sample, big businessmen actually in the higher offices of business organizations in 1928 were educated as follows: 31.9 per cent, college graduates; 13.4 percent, college nongraduates; 28.0 per cent, high school or equivalent; 25.7 per cent, grammar school; and 1.0 per cent, none. F. W. Taussig and C. S. Joslyn, American Business Leaders (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932), p. 162, Table 37.
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS ELITE: A COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT
127
period" generations received only a "negligible" education, were apprentices only, attended only grammar school, high school, or academy. The categories used in these tables are certainly not of the best; they were more or less determined by the condition of the biographical accounts. The categories are geared closely enough to these data to permit reliable tallying and yet are abstracted enough to permit comparisons and allow a general picture of the changing educational situation of the American business elite. If we cross-tabulate the class of origin with the education attained (Table 8), we are able to find out the extent to which the lower-class subjects were able to use education as a vehicle for their upward climb. Of those business elite who originated in upper-class homes 65.7 per cent obtained a "higher education." The range across the various generations is from 50.0 per cent to 79.2 per cent. Only 19.8 per cent o( lower-class extraction were during their youth educated to the same high level, the range of the various generations being from none to 37.5 per cent. This highest proportion of the lowly born who received a higher education occurred in the generation which came to the approximate age of thirty-five in 178o.:w Table 8 suggests that about one fifth of the lower-class men used higher education in their upward climb, that those from the upper class were better educated during the Colonial period and the latter nineteenth century than during the middle years of United States history, and that there is a trend in the later generations for a greater proportion of those originating in the lower or the upper classes to obtain a higher education. Those of upper-class extraction have had better educational chances, whereas at all times the majority of those born poor who became business elite rose without benefit of higher education. 20 The total number of cases from which this 37.5 per cent was computed is rather small; the figure is quite unstable.
100.0 100.0
1760-1789
100.0
50.0% 50.0 100.0
18.4% 81.6
Upper Lower
100.0
100.0
100.0
55.3% 13.4% 69.6% 44.7 86.6 30.4
1850-1879
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
Total Upper Lowe1
79.2% 23.2% 65.7% 19.8'X 71'.8 34.3 20.8 80.2
Upper Lower
20.7% 79.3
1820-1849 Upper Lower
1790-1819 Upper Lower
• "Higher'' means the sum of the first five categories in Table 7. "High school or below" comprises the last four categories in Table 7. This table comprises 67.5 per cent of the I ,464 total cases.
100.0
100.0
100.0
Total
100.0
61.9% 38.1 100.0
73.3% 26.7 100.0.
Higher High School or Below
37.5% 62.5
74.4% 25.6
Upper Lower
Upper Lower
1730-1759 Upper Lower
1700-1729
Education Attained*
1570-1699
Extraction by Social Class and Generations
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS ELITE: EDUCATIONAL LEVEL AND EXTRACTION BY SOCIAL CLASS, 1570-1879
TABLE 8
IV Eminent American businessmen have participated quite heavily in the political life of the United States. They have held public offices in local, state, and federal administrations. These offices range from sheriff of a small county)o Secretary of State. Two facts stand out in Table 9: first, that 45.7 per cent of the eminent businessmen in the Dictionary of American Biography held political offices during the course of United States history; second, that after around 1780 the proportion of business elite holding office dropped very sharply and remained on a lower level. The number of offices held is not, of course, an adequate measure of political influence or participation. We included in "office" party posts of consequence, but no distinction was made in our tabulations between elected and appointed positions . .Most of the Qffices appear to have been of rather high importance. Because these tabulations omit entirely 'pressure-group activity, lobbying, the hiring and financial backing of political agents, and other less obvious forms of political activity, our figures underestimate the extent of "political participation" of the business elite. This fact makes all the more impressive the high proportion of business elite who actmilly held offices. The political elite and the business elite have apparently overlapped to a large degree, and "laissez faire" has not at any time worked in reverse. Elite businessmen have intervened in the political process in decisively high proportions.21 An explanation of the trends in office holding across the various generations has to account for the sharp drop between the third a11d fourth generations (birth date 1760) and the lower plateau for the latter three or four generations (since around 1790). This drop seems to occur about the time of the Revolution, when the composition of the politi21 Our schedules on "The American Political Elite" are not yet complete enough to permit a cross check on this. We are particularly interested in the type and number of governmental officials whose departments have to do with the regulations of business and who are mobile between public and private structures.
129
TABLE 9
3LII
100.0
31".37
100.0
Total*
~ 68 •9cx
100.0
28.80 100.0
53.59
100.0
55.77
18.67% ~ 44 2'X0 25.55 .
100.0
61.7
17.8% 20.5
18201849 0
~ 38 .3'X
100.0
60.84
liAS% 27.71
18501879-
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
.100.0
• This table comprises 77.2 per cent of the total elite from the D.A.B.
100.0
47.3
100.0
54.2
100.0
41.2
Total*
33.3 18.9
27.8
24.1
Held none
71.4
'1760-1789 1730-1759 Upper Lower Upper Lower 81.1% 58.8% 52.2% 45.8%
157().1699 1700-1729 Upper Lower Upper Lower 75.9% 28.6% 72.2% 66.7%
Office Holding Held office
100.0
54.25
22.36% 23.39
TOTAL .
~ 45 7'X
100.0
55.0
100.0
57.9
100.0
64.1
100.0
62.4
100.0
56.4
100.0
68.9
100.0
51.9
100.0
59.7
1820-1849 Total 1790-1819 1850-1879 Upper Lower Upper Lower Upper Lower Upper Lower 45.0% 42.1% 35.9"/o 37.6% 43.1>% 31.1% 48.1% 40.3%
Extraction by Class and Generations
.
~ 39 2'X
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS ELITE: OFFICE HOLDING AND EXTRACTION BY SOCIAL CLASS, 1570-1879
TABLE 10
.
~ 46 4'X
17901819
by Time of Birth
20.26% 26.14
17b01789
Gener~tions
50.40% ~ 71 2'X0 20.80 .
17301759
• This table comprises 99.6 per cent of the total elite from the D.A.B.
51.11% 17.77
None at all
45.09% 23.53
Three or more One or two
~ 68 .6'X
15701699
Number of Offices Held
17001729
THE AMERICAN •BUSINESS ELITE: NUMBER OF POLITICAL OFFICES HELD, 1570-IB79
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS ELITE: A COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT
131
cal elite probably shifted from foreign born to native born. Since businessmen are reported to have played a large role in setting up the new political institutions, the drop in the proportion of office-holding businessmen seems difficult to understand-if, indeed, our sample is adequate on this point. It may be suggested that during the Colonial period a considerable proportion of the governors' councils were members of the business elite. 22 These councils ignored territorial representation. The new state upper houses, which were based on territorial representation, tended to include fewer of the business elite, who were clustered in the urban centers·. Our data do not allow us to verify this. If the agents of political institutions intervened in business contexts more frequently during the lifetime of the last generation, 1859-1879, we might expect more counterintervention in political institutions by the business elite. We do not have career data with which to verify this, but on the basis of other analyses for the latter periods we suppose that such data would indicate an upward trend in political participation. 23 Our figures fail to catch this because they do not include a good sample of businessmen active in the twentieth century and because the mode of relation between business and politics has changed from old-fashioned office holding to less explicit arrangements. We do not know how many of these political offices held were occupied after the business career was more or less terminated or whether they occurred between business 22 Cf. C. P. Nettels, The Roots of American Civilization (New York: F. S. Crofts and Company, 1938), pp. 311-12. In connection with our data on political office holding among the business elite, there is the possibility that the D.A.B. is biased toward including those eminent businessmen who were also eminent in other contexts, including the political. We have no way of checking this for certain. If, however, such a bias does exist, it would dist0rt only the figures on the proportions at any given time; if we may assume that it operated constantly across the generations, the trends we have indicated might still be correct. 23 Donald C. Blaisdell, Economic Power and Political Pressures (Temporary National Economic Committee, Monograph No. 26. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1941), is the latest factual account of the matter.
132
POWER, POLITICS AND PEOPLE
jumps. Therefore, we cannot definitely say whether this office holding indicates "honors" or an instrumental use of political offices within the careers of members of the business elite. In all generations, except one, 1820-1849, members of the business elite originating in the upper class have held political offices in greater proportions than those who sprang from the lower class. Table 10 suggests that before 1780 and after 1900 the proportions from the upper class who held offices definitely exceeded those from the lower class. During the middle periods from about 1810 to 1870, the proportions of businessmen from the lower class who held offices are almost as high as those from the upper class. For the entire historical elite, it appears that members of lower-class extraction did not gain whatever advantages or honors were available through personally holding political offices to the same extent as did those from the upper class. Regardless of class extraction, however, the American business elite have held offices in considerable proportions.
v The problem of social mobility among businessmen is so complex that no solution could be offered without data on credit institutions, on marriages into the upper classes, on the relevance of wars and tariffs for given lines of business, and so on.l! 4 We have not been able to gather these data for a sufficient proportion of our 1,464 members of the business elite to handle them statistically. If further investigation could round out the picture of opportunities for success in business, we might be able to give new meanings to "mercantilism," "laissez faire," and "monopoly capitalism." Assuming that these words refer to social structures, one might view them in terms of the careers of successful businessmen. "' Our schedule contained detailed requests for these items as well as for religious affiliations, indications on status, membership in voluntary associations, etc. The information obtained is not adequate for statistically reliable use.
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS ELITE: A COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT
133
For the mercantilist elite, the pattern of success might include political influence (indicated by offices, charters, and associates) via social status (by descent or intermarriage), and business success via poljtical influence. For laissez faire, the pattern of success might involve a larger proportion of upwardly mobile persons, less ( direct) political connections, and less emphasis upon social status or ancestry. Laissez faire might also mean that there is a split between the economic and the political elite, that they are no longer identical persons, that the economic elite rises somewhat at the expense of the political elite, and that connections between the· two become attenuated and surreptitious. In monopoly capitalism the pattern of success might indicate decreased chances for members of the lower classes and a return to political influence (perhaps indirect). At the top, the political and economic elite might come closer together with the common purpose of buttressing existing bureaucratic structures. However, for men trained for several generations in laissez faire ideology, this coming together might be less obvious than the structural result might lead us to expect. During crises the power connections might become stronger and more obvious; they may be legitimated in terms of the alleged "know-how" of the business elite, their lack of compensation ("dollar-a-year"), and their patriotism. These and other items in the careers of the elite which may be hypothetically inferred from the changing political economy are suppor~ed only in a tenuous manner by the data we have available; more thorough verification cannot be made with the data we have been able to gather from the D.A.B. None of our findings, however, seems to contradict this general picture.
VI If we disregard the methodological qualifications which have been advanced, we may derive the following assertions about the American business elite during the several stages of its history:
134
POWER, POLITICS AND PEOPLE
The business elite of the earlier Colonial period came from abroad (78.8 per cent) and from the upper classes (80.6 per cent). Their fathers were in business (33.3 per cent), the professions (29.2 per cent), or held public office (12.5 per cent). Remaining clustered in the young cities of the northeastern coast, they also held' political office (68.6 per cent) and were typically (83.3 per cent) well educated. The minority among them which came from the skilled-craft stratum (20.8 per cent) were less well educated and did not hold political office so frequently as did those from the upper classes. The generation coming to maturity during the second third of the eighteenth century was predominantly of American origin; quite abruptly American businessmen monopolized the elite positions in this country, and the first native generation of top businessmen, along with their sons, were among the Revolutionists. They continued to originate in New England, but many of them began the pattern of mi" grating to the Middle Atlantic states. These first Americans were of upper-class origin (85.7 per cent), and 63.0 per cent of them were born of fathers in business, whereas 18.5 per cent had fathers who held public office. They were not quite so well educated ( 66.7 per cent) as their foreignoriginated predecessors ( 83.3 per cent), but they were, of course, far above the average American in this rellpect. They held political office in the same proportion as the earlier men, and the minority among them from the lower classes ( 14,5 per cent) were less well educated and were slightly less li~ely to hold political office ( 66.7 per cent) than were the upper-class majority (72.2 per cent). The younger Revolutionary generation, men whose ages ranged from their teens to around forty when the Revolution occurred, was similar to the preceding generation in locality and in pattern of migrations. From one fourth to one third of them were foreign born; the vast majority were from New England and the Middle Atlantic area, but almost twice as many succeeded in the Middle Atlantic states as originated there. A few of the native Americans trickled westward, and there were proportionately twice as
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS ELITE: A COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT
135
many businessmen of foreign origin who went beyond the Alleghenies for their success as in the preceding generation. Compared with our preceding generation, a slightly smaller proportion of the younger Revolutionary men were from the upper classes (77.9 per cent) but a higher pro., portion were from the homes of businessmen ( 6 7. 7 per cent). There were also a larger proportion from farming families (12. 9 per cent) and fewer from professional fall1ilies ( 6.5 per cent) and from the families of public officials ( 9. 7 per cent). It may be that a few of the sons of yeoman farmers of New England now began to succeed as businessmen in the Middle Atlantic states. This Revolutionary generation was definitely less well educated than were their prede.cessors; 54.7 per cent of them were "highly educated." As in all generations, those from the upper classes were definitely better educated than those of lowerclass extraction. Jiowever, for almost the last time in the history of the Upited States, over one half (58.8 per cent) of the lower-class boys who entered the business elite came to hold political offices, although the upper-class boys still were much more likely to attain political position ( 81 .1 per cent). As a group, the members of this generation reached ihe peak of all generations of American business elite in the proportion who held political office ( 71.2 per ' · cent). The members of the next three generations came to maturity during the first three quarters of the nineteentH century. They reached the age of thirty-five around 1810, 1840, and 1870. During the first two of these three generations, about 43.0 per cent originated in New England, but a high proportion of these migrated from that region; they went in large numbers to the Middle Atlantic area, and they also began to follow the population movements westward: from 8.0 per cent to 17.0 per cent of them went west to their success. The peak years in the history of the elite for success in the West of eastern migrants are 1840 and 1870. Naturally, more of the nineteenth-century elite were born in the West (11.6 per cent) in the last three generations, yet even so the proportion of western population is larger than the proportion of western successes, re-
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POWER, POLITICS AND PEOPLE
gardless of their origins. More of those from lower-class homes went west to success ( 18.6 per cent) than did those of upper-class extraction ( 13.3 per cent). Also, proportionately more of the relatively few originating abroad and in the lower classes went west to business success (9.0 per cent) than did those who were from foreign upper classes ( 4.4 per cent). Very few of the business elite of northern origin achieved their success by going south during reconstruction. In the nineteenth century the business elite was composed of significantly more men from the lower class than was the case previously or than has been the case since. The peak year in the history of the United States in this respect was 1870. Not only were 43.0 per cent of the elite who then came to approximately thirty-five years of age born in the two lower classes, but there were also more from the upper-middle class than from the upper. This had not been the tendency in previous generations. These three nineteenth-century generations were the first and, so far, the last generations of business elite in the history of the United States to contain more than 25 or 30 per cent from the lower classes. Charles Beard has examined a "super-elite" of eleven men who performed immense business operations from 1865 to 1900; he finds that only two of the eleven built their fortunes on family inheritances and that only one obtained a higher education. 2 " But this was not the proportion among the broad elite we are studying. Our tabulations fully confirm the general view that the early nineteenth century was the historical cradle of business success for those of lower-class origin. It is perhaps a comment on how much can be made from a small taste of such experience to realize that even during this peak of upward mobility, only about one third of the business elite came from the lowest of three classes, whereas this class probably contained nine tenths of the employed population. More of the fathers of the generation coming to success around 1840 were farmers (34.9 per cent) than previously. ""Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, Rise of American Civilization (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1936), II, 173 ff.
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The historical peak for the proportion whose fathers fol~ lowed skilled laboring jobs ( 10.6 per cent) occurs around 1870. Definitely fewer of these nineteenth-century elite were "highly educated." The low point for the businessmen's entire history is the 31.6 per cent who were highly educated: this group came to the approximate age of thirty-five in 1810. Even during this period, however, about three times as many of these from upper-class homes were highly educated than were those of lower-class extraction. The nineteenth-century elite did not hold political office in the same high proportion as did the business elite of the eighteenth century. Yet the percentages who did hold political office range from 38.3 to 46.4 per cent. The differences between the office holding of those from the upper classes and those from the lower classes are not very great: in the early nineteenth century slightly more from the upper classes held office; in the latter part of that century, however, those from the lower classes began to hold office in higher proportions and in 1870 those from the lower classes (37.6 per cent) had a slight lead over these from the upper classes (35.9 per cent). It is generally held that the southern planters were more prone to en"ter Congress personally; whereas members of the business elite relied on lawyers to speak for them. 26 This may be true, but if one includes party and state offices, appointive as well as elective, it is clear that quite a high proportion of the business elite personally held office in the various phases of the governing of America. Between the times of Jackson and Lincoln, the social status of the business elite was considerably improved. Although it is true that no class pattern of national consequence was deeply entrenched, there was a competition for status between the planter of good family and the rising merchant. Hunt's MercharJ.ts' Magazine, published during the middle years, glorified the "self-made merchant" as equally respectable with "the luxurious planter, the time •• See Beard, Rise of American Civilization, I, 635.
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serving politician, or the cringing office seeker." 2 i A rough analysis of the content of such publications as Hunt's indicates 'that the nineteenth century was a period in which the status of the business elite rose. This competition for status, among other perhaps more material questions, was settled practically and in blood by the Civil War. The last generation for which we have presented data came to the approximate age of suc~ess around 1900. Only 10.4 per cent of this generation migrated from the East to western success, although, naturally, more of them originated in the West and succeeded there than was previously the case. Proportionately more originated in the West and went east to success than originated in the East and succeeded in the West. A slightly higher proportion from the upper classes went west from the East (10.3 per cent) than was the case for those from the lower classes who made the trip (9.3 per cent); this reverses the nineteenth-century trend of upward mobility and migration westward. This last generation is, in many respects, more comparable to the seventeenth"- and eighteenth-century patterns than to those of the nineteenth century. A similarly high proportion came from the upper classes (70. 7 per cent), and a member of the lower class had diminished chances of rising to the business heights. The fathers of this generation were overwhelmingly businessmen ( 4 7. 7 per cent) or professional men (18.7 per cent) or farmers (21.5 per cent). Only 6.5 per cent of them were from homes of laborers. They were a good deal better educated than the nine teenth-century elite, 63.1 per cent of them having obtained "higher education." Only 28.2 per cent of those from the lower classes, however, went above the high-school level, whereas 79.2 per cent of the upper classes did. In one respect they followed the long trend of United States history: 39.2 per cent held political office. This proportion is quite in line with the gradual dropping of this trait by the nineteenth-century business elite. Those who did hold office, however, were more likely to be from the 27 Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, I (September 1839), 201. Quoted by Jerome Thomases, in Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXX (December 1943), 398.
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upper classes ( 43.6 per cent) than from the lower (31.1 per cent). The best time during the history of the United States for the poor boy ambitious for high business success to have been born was around the year 1835. Since then the proportion of those in his position who realized their hopes has definitely declined, despite the steady growth in the total numbers of the elite. The best time for a boy not able to attend college, but wishing big business success, to have been born was around 177 5. Since then the proportion of , his type in the business elite has declined. The eastern boy wishing business success of the higher type and going west to find it should not have been born after around 1835 i( he was to have the best statistical chances. For the whole of the United States history: the typical member of the American business elite is of northeastern origin ( 61.2 per cent). He did not migrate westward to success. He wa~ definitely of the upper classes by birth ( 63.7 per cent) and was educated well above the level of the general population ( 46.6 per cent being in the "higher" category). The father of the business elite has typically ( 40.4 per cent) been a businessman. And 45.7 per cent of the business elite of America have held office in its various political structures.
8
A LOOK AT THE WHITE COLLAR
In the 1952 political campaign, no major candidate encountered the white-collar problem. This was so despite the alleged importance of the independent vote, which is very much-although not entirely-a white-collar vote. Yet the absence of political noise does not eliminate the insistence of the issue. Alongside the farm problem and the labor problem, there is in the United States today a white-collar problem. I do not need to stress this because we all know it. Those who are concerned with office management know it because, first-being white-collar people themselves-they are personally a part of the problem; and second-being employers or advisers to employers-they are professionally involved with the white-collar problem. They are, in short, members of white-collar strata, and at the same time they deal with the personnel issues of the white-collar employee. Of course, these two problems overlap; in fact, they are merely different ways of looking at the white-collar people. Yet they are different problems.
What is the personnel problem? Obviously the specific problems of different companies differ quite markedly; therefore, advice and counsel about them must be based on individual measurement and so be custom-tailored. For example, a large corporation in New York has different sorts of problems from a small partnership in Decatur, Illinois. Moreover, personnel problems will differ depending on whether a company employs mainly routine clerical workers or prima donna salesmen or, again, salaried professionals. 140
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Nevertheless, there is a general tension and there is a general range of problems. Before I state these problems generally, however, let me put them in quite specific terms. The office manager's difficulty would be solved completely if his employees came to him as a body and said: "We think too much time is wasted in these coffee breaks in the morning. It's getting so we can't work well with these breaks. We just get started, and then there's the coffe-'! break, and it drags along, and then it's lunch time. Now, we really come here to work for you, and that's what we want to do-work. So why not eliminate these coffee breaks?" ' Well, now, if that should happen, wouldn't he feel, "By God, they really do want to work!" And wouldn't his major problem be solved? Let me say right away that, on the basis of extensive -scientific investigation, I have found out that this is not going to happen in any office tomorrow. Why isn't it?· To answer that, we have seriously to understand the problem of incentive, as well as certain big factors beyond management's control that affect the work motives in the office. From the personnel standpoint, the problem of human incentive is threefold: how to get people ( 1 ) to work hard and strive well, ( 2) to be happy and contented in their work, and ( 3) to do these things for as low a money cost to the organization as possible. Professors these days, especially when addressing business men, are not supposed to talk about m,oney. Some professors, however, say that money is not enough to secure incentives to work-and I happen to agree with that. But we should not kid ourselves: A thousand dollars a year covers a multitude of grievances. And to say that money isn't enough is not to say that it is not necessary. There are very few outfits that would not get out mo:e work if they doubled the salaries of their employees. Let us review this problem of money as a motive for work. II During much of the nineteenth century, fear of hunger was a major incentive to work, and the economic whip
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was the major instrument of business discipline. Let us not be squeamish: It is a fact that a good dose of unemployment among office workers would go a long way toward solving the problem of work incentive. The whole nineteenth century proved that fear of poverty and plain want is a powerful stimulus to work and that unemployment does promote discipline in the factory and in the office. But two things make those methods impossible, or at least ineffective, today: first, the organization of labor unions and, second, the shift in the whole political mood of our time. The great depression and the resulting change in the political tone of American life, among other things, represented a revolt against that incentive and that discipline. And, regardless of which party wins a particular election, that is a permanent, popular shift. The sanctions of want and unemployment are just not politically acceptable today in America, and the fight that the unions would put up if they were introduced would tear the whole American setup apart. In boom times, the positive incentive of a higher share of the proceeds of work replaces the negative incentive of fearful unemployment. But, once a conventional standard of living is reached, some people will not respond to higher income as an incentive; they will take the increase in more leisure rather than in more money. Moreover, in a tight employment market, regardless of any reasonable income, they will take some of that leisure on the job. So, in a capitalist society such as this one, the economic incentive tends to break down, negatively and positively. Negatively, lack of money and fear of unemployment cannot be used publicly and widely as an incentive with any degree of success. Positively, more money as such-even granted that it is feasible in view of standards of profitwill hot promote the kind of zealous and cheerful efficiency that I suspect management really wants in its offices. By no means is this the situation in all firms, but I am trying to look ahead, and I believe that it is the model of the future-for wage workers and for white-collar employees too, especially of the more routine sort.
Ill
What next? Here, as in England and Germany, when this state is reached, there is a resort to noneconomic incentives. Attempts are made to raise the "social status" of the employee by giving him a more humane treatment within the operations of the firm. Now, there is a lot of make-believe about much of this "human relations in industry" and good'"fellow stuff. Sometimes it is done merely to keep salaries low by psychological nonsense. Sometimes it is done to freeze out a threatening union drive. But sometimes, I believe, it is done out of the single desire to solve personnel problems, to make a business get along with the work. Yet, even if the economic motives of the company management are definitely subordinated-as they are more likely to be in good times with tight employment marketsstill there is one point at which the attempt bogs down. Let me put it like this: When you're up in the corner, private enterprise can make only an economic appeal to the employee. For, in the view of the white-'"collar employee, the aim of the business is to make profit, and it is using the employee to enable it to do so. Material gain therefore tends to be the only effective stimulus of private enterprise as such. On the other hand, when the worker is part of an industry or firm which he feels is partly his, the appeal can be made to his sense of obligatiop. In wartime, for example, work incentives operate which seem to the employee to transcend the private economic goal of the company. Then, too, on cost-plus contracts, many firms can well afford to subordinate the economic quarrel with their employees. But, when the nationalist incentive flags, there is a search for some other, some larger identification. This sort of question is much debated, and well debated too, in England today.
IV But suppose there is no war incentive. What then? One answer, as in England, centers around "nationalization." Such an answer is no longer only a move toward economic 143
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equality. It is also part of an attempt to stiffen the flagging incentive to work. How is nationalization expected to do this? By providing an employee identification-the nation -that is larger and, if you will, more noble than the material profits of a private firm. For, if it is true that money incentives are negatively no longer possible, and positively not sufficient to insure cheerful and willing efficiency, then, from the standpoint of a nation in an era of war, some real incentive that goes beyond money must be provided. The attitude toward the meaning of work and its proper incentives are among the most important questions Americans have now to face. For the key factor in any economy is the character of the motives evoked to induce its people to work. I believe we are reaching a point in this country where the old incentives to labor-the economic whip and the increased gain-are running down and where there are no new incentives to take their place. The work incentives of our employees and our own work expectations are inherited from a time when most of the people at work were on their own. But today less than one-fifth of the people of America work for themselves, and most of these are farmers. America is a nation of dependent employees trying to operate on a work psychology appropriate to a nation of independent, free enterprisers. y
y Now, that is the general problem faced by the personnel man or office manager. But he is also attempting to handle the people of the white-collar world. He is likely to forget that, for as a managerial employee he sees them mainly in only one milieu: their place of work. That workplace is, in their minds, a major key to all the other worlds in whicl:J they live. But the office manager tends to see the work role as complete in itself-and, from the angle of his immediate interest, it is. He is trying to organize that office so that work will be turned out efficiently and cheaply per unit. They are so often trying to do as little as they can in their office role, because their interests, what they really live for,
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are usually elsewhere. What management considers an end, they think of strictly as a means. That is why the personnel problems of white-collar people cannot be solved at the point of production. These problems are~deeply entangled with the problems of the white-collar group as a stratum, or rather as a new whitecollar pyramid within the old nineteenth-century pyramid of entrepreneur and wage· worker. These white-collar people have undergone some quite drastic changes since 1900. Among the major trends that have made for a decline in their general position are the following: (i) The white-collar employees can no longer borrow prestige from the old-type Entrepreneurial Boss as they could 40 years ago. For their work is no longer similar to that of the independent middle class. Given the increased size of the workplace, they cannot borrow prestige from the new Executive Boss as easily as they could 30 years ago. Nor, given the increased impersonality of much of their work routine, can they borrow it so easily from The Management or The Firm, or The Esteemed Customer. There is no longer the sharp split which existed 30-and even 20-years ago between the foreign-born, foreignlanguaged, immigrant wage worker and the more "prestigeful" native-born office employee. For, with the cutting off of immigration in the last generation, the whole population, including wage workers, is rapidly rising into the category of "native white of native parentage." The white-collar people are a new, unlocated stratum, not an appendage of the old middle classes, and they are insecure in prestige, often to the point of a virtual status panic. (ii) In the meantime-as they have lost this prestigethe average white-collar income has dropped until it is only slightly above, and in several important cases lower than, the average income of various wage-working groups. This is in contrast to the 1890 situation, when, on the average, the white-collar people made about double. And today it is also true, income apart, that many of the side benefits of white-collar employment-sick leave, paid vacations, more pleasant working conditions-have now been conquered by many wage workers. In fact, wage workers in some cases
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have obtained more of that sort of benefit than have many white-collar employees. (iii) As the mechanization of the office proceeds-and it has only begun-many white-collar jobs will become more routine, and they will be subject to the same unemployment threat as wage work. And the white-collar people know this. There is a lot of debate about unemployment due to technological changes. I think it adds up to this: If the economy is expanding, and if the total hours of work decline in proportion to the total increased efficiency of the machines, then displacement by machines will be shortterm; people will get new jobs although many of them will have to change jobs. But, if the economy does not expand, and if hours are not shortened in proportion to increased productivity, then there will be technological unemployment on a permanent basis. Right now, of course, there is a shortage of office workers, and the proportionate demand for office workers has been increasing much more than the demand for shop people. But, on any long-term view, this immediate situation is due to the increased productivity of the mechanized shop and the lack of machines in the office. How the balance of shop and office will turn out, say in 197 5, no one can predict-but it is obvious that, with the new machines, if there is not an enormous expansion of the entire economy, with drastically decreased hours, people in offices will be displaced by machines. In the meantime, many white-collar people do fear unemployment due to the machine revolution in the officeand, in so far as their loss of security and their flagging work incentive are concerned, that is what counts now. (iv) The skills which the individual white-collar employee practices are often not as various as they used to be and often do not permit the degree of autonomy they once did. And, in many cases, these skills do not take as long to learn. Moreover, the virtual monopoly of high-school education which white-collar employees once held is no longer theirs, and frequently their jobs do not require much formal education. Naturally that has decreased the security and prestige of the white-collar mass.
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But that is not the whole story. These new office machines have a double-barreled effect; on the one hand, they degrade masses of semiskilled workers. On the other hand, they lead to a professional elite of salaried employees. Does this mean an upgrading of some office workers? .t\n enlargement of their iobs, rather than a routinization? Not necessarily, and obviously not for many people. The centralization of planful reflection and of top skills parallels the routinization of the white-collar hierarchy. We do not know where the line between job enlargement and job routinization will be drawn. But we can be fairly certain that many executive functions will be broken down and routinized in the course of the machine revolution in the office. On top, and just below the top, there will be more intellectualized skills needed and, down the line, fewer skilled operations. But again the question: Will the mass of office workers be upgraded to these new, near-the-top levels of skill? Probably not many. People to fill these jobs will be recruited from new generations of college graduates, who will probably also be trained in the firm specifi~ally for these newer, more skilled jobs. The average white-collar, employee today does not, ~ believe, have much reason to look forward to ~ore intriguing work because of the industrialization c. · the office.
VI All these trends-the lowered chance to borrow prestige, the relative decrease in real income, the threat of unemployment, the routinization of many skills-in one way or another affect the white-collar people with whom management must deal. When you add them up, one big fact emerges: Slowly the white-collar employee is coming up against a situation very similar to that of the shop worker. And note this: It is not so much because the white-collar worker has been mashed down but rather because the wage worker has been lifted up. That fact is back of much of the tension and uneasiness of many white-collar employees today. And all these ten-
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sions have a way of being specified by a drive for unions. Ask yourself: "Why haven't the white-collar man and the black-shirted woman managed to do something about their relative social and economic position, while wage workers have?" One answer seems immediate and clear: In an age of organization, the white-collar people have had no organizations while the many wage workers are effectively unionized. So there is a struggle going on in the white-collar mind. It ~sa contest between those interests and techniques loosely referred to as "organized business" and those referred to as "organized labor." I believe that business managers will lose many of the white-collar people, just as, over the past 20 years, they have lost many of the shop people. In my opinion, it is mainly a question of time before offic~s are significantly unionized. I know that office unionization has ebbed and flowedand mainly ebbed. But business men ought to ask themselves, in view of all the facts, "Why aren't more offi-:::es unionized?" The answer, for offices of any size, seems quite clear to me: It is not because of anything management does or doesn't do. And it is not primarily because of any peculiar, union-proof "psychology" of white-collar people. It is simply because the existing unions have not felt it worth their while to go all-out for white-collar unionism. We must remember that big unionization is only 15 years old and that the unions have been pretty busy in the shops. The cost per head of unionizing shop workers 'is usually less than for office workers. The technique is bette:· workd out, and the unions have had more organizing exp:!rience in that area. But all that is needed is a real dedsion to unionize the white-collar employees and the gaining of appropriate organizational experience. When the time comes, management may think it can stave off unions by giving its employees what the unions are out to win for them. My hunch is that it will not succeed. Besides, if management really does succeed, then the aim of the unions will in a sense have been realized anyway. One great question which business men, along with other Americans, are going to be facing in the next 10 or
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15 years is whether or not unionization, as we know it, will solve the problems of work incentive and of work gratification for white-collar people, as well as for wage workers. Frankly I have my doubts. But that, of course, is another set of problems, mainly political and psychological, up the line. In the meantime, the unionization of white-collar workers will solve many of their income and security problems, in the same sense that unions have solved such problems for many wage workers.
9 THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT When we think about "the underdeveloped society," we must also think about "the overdeveloped society." There are two reasons for this: first, if we do not do so, we tend to think of everything as moving towards The Developed-it is the old notion of nineteenth-century evolutionism. And this is no longer a very fruitful idea. Second, to think of the polar types leads us to think about. a third type -an ideal which we should always keep in mind: the properly developing society. We need all three types-not just the two. In an underdeveloped society, the means of production are not sufficient, judged by historical standards, to permit a decent life. Life is dominated by a struggle for existence or, to put it more technically: the standard of living severely limits the style of life. In an overdeveloped society, the means of livelihood are so great that life is dominated by the struggle for status, based on the acquisition and maintenance of commodities. Here, the style of life is dominated by the standard of living. In such a society, there is conspicuous production and much waste; the principle of fashion is built into almost everything, and planned obsolescence becomes a central feature of the economic and social system. Change is very rapid, intensively promoted-and quite irrational. In a properly developing society, I should think that men would have a choice among various styles of life, and that no one would be dominated by a struggle for mere standards of minimum living. 150
II The theme of our seminar is change and resistance to it-and this morning the psychological aspects of these. But these-"change" and "resistance"-are both abstractions. No one is for total change of just any sort, and no one is altogether against all change. So at once several questions occur. We must ask: what changes? at what tempo? in what direction? and what are the required conditions? The answer of this seminar, put very generally, is that we are talking about ( I ) a planned and structural change ( 2) of a total society ( 3) at a very fast tempo and ( 4) in the direction of the overdeveloped society. It is obvious, I take it, that the psychological requirements of such a change are nothing less than new types of men and women, for human beings of one sort or another are selected and formed by societies, and in the undeveloped societies today t~ere are not yet enough men and women of an industrially relevant sort. That is why we are talking not only about economic levels, but about what kinds of men and women are going to prevail, to become ascendant, in our epoch, all over the world. The hard economic core of our problem has been put very clearly. It is this: Leaving aside aid from already developed countries, in order to industrialize as we know industrialization requires: ( 1) an increase in agricultural productivity; ( 2) an investment of the surplus thus achieved in capital goods for industry; while (3) holding consumption levels down. I do not think you can get· away from these simple hard facts, and I do not think that you can believe that tpe amount of aid that is going to be given by already developed countries will enable you to get away from them. After all, is it not a fact, that the amount of aid-of credits and grants-which the United States has given to other countries of the world, large as it may seem, has not gone very much to Latin American countries? The principle of that aid has seemed to be whether or not the country receiving it is militarily relevant to the United States. 151
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If then we leave aside the question of aid of the massive sort that would be needed, we are always referred back to these three hard economic facts. The psychological inference from them is that a type of industrjal man is required and built by the econowjc processes that are demanded.
Ill
We know of only two general models of industrialization. Each has its own institutional and psychological requirements. Psychological factors are pre-conditions, and also results, of each of these economic models. The first is the classic way of capitalism. Historically, it was not planned; it just grew. It is crescive. Its major institutional conditions are private ownership of the means of production, each of which are rather small in scale; it also requires a rational bureaucracy, along with a calculatable law, as a kind' of framework. Its psychological condition and consequence is a man who has material gain uppermost; who is individuated-no guilt or anxiety is experienced if he "gets al)ead"; in fact, he feels guilty if he does not. He is disciplined for work, which means that he spends the most alert hours of the best days of bis life working. He is sober and calculating, and in that sense rationaL In short: the classic capitalist entrepreneur. After the accumulation of capital is done, then you do not need this type of man so much. Historically, a thick stratum of such small enterpreneurs is the historically specific condition of North American industrialization. The second model of industrialization is communist. The world historical significance of the Soviet revolution is that for the first time in history, successful industrialization is put through without a class of capitalists. Communism, most briefly described, is "forced industrialization." Karl Marx was quite mistaken, in that communism has not come about after capitalism nor does it grow very well within it. Industrially speaking, and historically, it is a kind of "substitute capitalism." The world default of capitalism, in failing to industrialize the world, is one of communism's conditions of success. Only in underdeveloped or very little developed countries has the Communist Party made great
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advances and won power. Communism, like capitalism, requires certain types of men; not the private entrepreneur, the economic man, but.a political man who is dedicated and willful and whose superego, whose conscience, is restricted to the disciplined party. His reference group-the circle of significant others to whom he responds-is restricted in the final analysis to this party. He too has a puritanical strain; he too glorifies work, in his case of a collective sort. A party composed of such men is the agency of history-making in the communist way of industrialization.
IV There is one difference between these two models of great significance. Let me put it in terms of two models of historical change. First, the model which Engels made clear: \listory is made up of innumerable decisions of innumerable men, canceling out and reinforcing one another -as for example, in .. the movement of prices on a ·free market. Each individual is confined to his milieu and no man's decision means very much in the total process. This of course is the sociological meaning of history as fate. History can be made only in this way, until two conditions occur: ( 1) the means of power-economic, political and military-must be enormously enlarged in scale, and ( 2) these means must be decisively centralized and controlled. When this occurs, certain groups may then become history,. makers: those who have access to these enlarged and centralized means of history-making. They are limited, of course, by the structure of their established means of action, but they have much more freedom to decide and to exercise their will in the making of history than do people who do not have access to such means of power. This is the position of both the Soviet communists and the U. S. capitalists directing elite today. But it is not the condition in which the underdeveloped world finds itself. Here change is still mainly history. as fate, and the major resistance to change-such as industrialization-··-·is the semiorganized stalemate of wills that prevails within these societies. Now, I do not think it is true that the entire population
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of all underdeveloped countries want to become industrialized. No population is going spontaneously to industrialize itself. We must determine the agencies of industria).;. ization, for anonymous economic forces in the world today, both internal and external to the underdeveloped world, are now rather set against rapid structural industrialization. In brief, I believe that the agency today can only be political. Our problem is basically a political problem. Even to state the sociological issues requires that we think in terms of the political agencies we intend to use, for unless there is first built the means of power sufficient to do the job, and unless these means are centralized enough for human decisions to make a difference, we cannot speak of a structural change of the sort we have in mind when we speak of industrial development.
v Accordingly, it seems to me, two problems confront us. One has to do with the political apparatus of many underdeveloped countries. The second has to do with the problem of democratic values. The two problems are interrelated. The governing cliques, classes and institutions in the underdeveloped world often have it very good. Why should they want to change? Given unequal development of the sort which Professor Lambert has made so clear to us, they, the developed sections inside the underdeveloped world-in the capitol and on the coast--are a curious sort of imperialist power, having internal colonies, as it were. They are sometimes states but not Teally nations, and the states they dominate are often parasites on the economy rather than instruments to create a new economy. Often the political apparatus of the underdeveloped country is full of political capitalists; sometimes, in fact, the governing apparatus is a network of rackets: men get ahead and stay ahead on the expectation that things cannot be done legitimately. As sociologists, we had better study this sort of thing as an "obstacle." I think it is more important often than the "traditionalism" of indigenous populations, and many other such problems. Of course, the overdeveloped society is also often a net-
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work of rackets, but "the take" is bigger arid it is spread around more. More people tend to be in on it. (By the way, I am of course not speaking of Latin America, but of Southeast Asia, the Near East, and all those sorts of places). It is under some such conditions as these that we must ask about democratic values. The question may be put very simply: can you get a fast accumulation of capital, with all that this involves for the level of consumption, within a democratic system? I am rather doubtful of this, but I am less concerned here with tQ.e mechanism and forms of democracy than with its content. There is a distinction, which is one of the greatest moral dilemmas that men face today: the distinction between "what men are interested in" and "what is to the interests of men." This, of course, brings us back to the types of human being that will become ascendant models in the kinds of industrial societies we may wish to work for. We must ask the question in an ultimate form: is freedom inherent in man as man? I am rather inclined to believe that it may not be. In the case of the Chinese, perhaps-speaking technically-there is,no superego; they are not individuated enough; they are group-integrated and group-responsible to such an extent that they do not really know the conception of freedom. It is not "in their grain," as it is in the case of those peoples that have experienced the great bour..;. geois revolutions of the last two centuries. This whole issue of freedom may be called the problem of the cheerful robot. We know that men can be turned by coercion into robots. We did not know before our own times that they could cheerfully and willingly turn themselves into robots. I do not believe that either the USSR or the USA is altogether a substantive democracy. That is to say, I do not believe that either is a properly developing society. Moreover, these two giant states are becoming more and more alike. I wish that we had time to go into this, for the problem of the parallelism of the USA and the USSR is one of the most important in contemporary world history. In both of these states work is alienated; men sacrifice themselves to work in order to acquire things of which they
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dream, and what they dream of is very similar. It is a kind of consumer's paradise, a kind of department store where everything is free. The problem of the underdeveloped society is to achieve a higher material development of a sort that avoids the sad features of the overdeveloped society, and hence makes possible a variety of human beings, of styles of life, perhaps never before seen in human history. In the short time-and it is the first time-.-that I have been in South America, my own conviction has been strengthened that you may very well have part of the answer. You really are on your own: the answer for you is not available in historical Europe or in contemporary North America or in Soviet Russia. Whether it is available among you, I do not know. Perhaps it is good that you encounter obstacles to those kinds of development. My own hope is that you would liberate your cultural imaginations from all these other models, especially that of North America, and think freely upon what you really want. In this case "utopian thinking" means merely that you imagine all the range of alternatives that might exist, and then, consider the conditions of each of them, and the psychological and human consequences of each. Until you do this, I do not really understand how you can properly consider the obstacles to achieving industrial development of a humane sort.
PART TWO
PRAGMATISM, POLITICS AND RELIGION
These are times in which men feel about their feelings. Charles Morris has wrought what he has felt into an articulate work and he has felt susceptibly.* That many may believe that feeling has engulfed his thought need not detract from the sensitiveness of the feeling. Nor need it diminish the wise things we can learn from his book. Detailed appreciation of his literary renderings of si~ philosophies of life will here be foregone; it can only be noted that he considers the Buddhist path of detachment from desire; the Dionysian's abandonment to elemental impulses; the Promethean path of unceasing reconstruction; the Apollonian way of rational moderation; the Christian path of love in the grand manner; the Mohammedan route of the holy war. These six orientations are rejected in favor of a seventh: the Maitreyan, which is composed of just an equal slice of the Dionysian, the Promethean, and the Buddhist stuff in man, although I think it is closest to a Buddhism with concessions. What Morris offers is a personal and accommodative celebration of the modern fact of selfestrangement. In the process he has set forth a view of human nature and a philosophy of history; he has responded to an intellectual crisis which many have felt within themselves; he has assumed a theory of human agopy; and he has rejected (in principle) American pragmatism, especially a particular development of which it may be capable. These are important matters which must be examined. Morris as prophet must withstand criticism of Morris as intellect, for we have *Paths of Life: Preface to a World Religion. By Charles Morris. New York: Harper and Bros. 1942. pp. 257. $3.00. 159
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no new counterprophecy to offer. Appreciative of his bringing of his self forward for public scrutiny, we have the responsibility of making that scrutiny as penetrating as we can.
Morris works with "paths of life" and "types of personality" and his aim is to seat the former in the latter. To do this he must lean strongly toward a biological determination of personality and see personality as something superhistorical. His classification of men rests upon a quite debatable psychology of interests and of literary "traits." However qualified these views may be in their explicit statements, they work underneath the argument and at crucial points. Types of personality, each a varying mixture of three generalized elements, are seen to give rise to "types of society!" Rivalry between nations and classes are seen to exhibit conflicts between types of personality, preference for which characterizes the nations and classes in question. The wor1d crisis is seen in these terms. For Spengler's "soul" view of culture and history, Morris substitutes a more sophisticated conception, but one which, after all, is quite like elite theories of history, though without their usual pose of toughness. Thus, the theory of human nature leads into a personalist philosophy of history, and this is the weakest link in the Buddhist chain which Morris would weave for Prometheus. In reality, "paths of life" are less expressions of "types of personality" than vice versa. And both must be tied to a third feature which in its genuine import is quite lacking in Morris' scheme: the positions and careers set by particular social structures. In their interactions with wide biological possibilities, these conditions form and select types of personality, and in terms of such conditions "paths of life" are evolved and accepted. Due to historical circumstances some of these ideologies may be abstracted and generalized. Then, in a competition of ideologies, they may be taken up by men in certain social positions and strata. Understanding of "ways of life" is gained by their precise social imputation to these positions and strata; nothing,
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except obscurist poeticizing, seems to be gained by juggling their most abstracted statements above one's personal · moods. To be very concrete: Who can seriously imagine a Dionysian scrub woman? Or, a Buddhist money-driven supersalesman? Or, from another slant, probably all save one or two of Morris' types would not willingly go to war. Compare selective service, ostracism, and jail. How can one speak seriously of Maitreyan's "going his own way without apology?" Because they lack such crude sociological bases, Morris' statements of paths of life are more floating symbols than firmly anchored and specifically understood historical types. And because of this they are guides that do not know the actual paths that are possible. The interest in forms of individuality, pursued by Morris, can only be realized by an interest in forms of society. And this holds for an interest in doctoring up individual paths of life. The basic problem of Morris is that of estrangement, of self-alienation. That is why he is so interested in Buddhism's attitude of detachment, why he says he writes for people "who cannot go home again," and that is why the god and the salvation he accepts is derived from Buddhist literatures: the signal characteristic of Maitreyanism is the "attitude of generalized detached-attachment." It is generalized in order that it may not be attached to particular elements in the self or in the world which may pass away. It is the wary orientation of a man who has been hurt, who fears he will be hurt again and who is frustrated. It is an island of the self-alienated and for personal safety in an impersonal world that is big, tough, and inescapable. But is an island within. Maitreyanism, in which everything is "only one element," is not a solution; it- is a precarious balance of that which precipitates the problem of self-estrangement. Had Morris taken seriously a social theory of the self, and implemented it with an adequate view of social structures, he would have seen that the problem of estrangement arises from an urbanized, pecuniary, and minutely divisioned society and that the ground problem cannot be solved by moral consideration of personal ways of life. Yet when he gives up Prometheus as central, he can only put the matter in such terms as he has. And these terms are a personalist, naively
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idealistic view of historical change underpinned by a thoroughly inadequate view of human nature. To escape a condition means and material must be grasped as well as ideal ends envisioned. That self-estrangement arises from a social-historical condition has been adequately demonstrated by such men as Marx, Simmel, Fromm. In order to transform the conditions of estrange.;. ment (or granting, for argument's sake the personalist view of history, to remake the self), we must be dominantly Promethean or perhaps Mohammedan, if we must use these loose symbols. Only the Promethean can build a society which will intentionally form any ,type personality. What is meant by "man" I do not know, but men live in history and are formed thereby; Morris does not like contemporary history; yet the Maitreyan is not a history-making entity. And Prometheus cannot build a society as a Promethean and then turn into a Maitreyan or a Buddhist or any other self. Each day he destroys and builds the materials of his self he becomes a more confirmed Promethean, especially if he is winning. But he has steadily been losing, and that is one way of the crisis. Two directions lead out from this crisis: the one is religious, in Morris' general sense; the other is political and it is to be left to Dewey. Instead of rigorously examining why Prometheus falters, which would entail a social and political study, Morris has written the apologetics for the Maitreyan religion. II To the several thousand churches, cults, and sects existing in America today, Charles Morris would add another. Rude statistical facts do not adequately dispose of his work, but they are indicative of the fact that not many citizens wi11 take to what he offers. Certainly, those with their collars on backward may be intrigued. But sociologically, as a door to a church, this one is not on any street level. However, the coming of "the future Enlightened One, the Friend," Maitreya, has been foretold by no less a guy than Buddha. Honestly, if Morris had been less an academic philosopher and a little more of the philosophical clown, which every serious th.inker ought to harbor, he would not have been
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so damned agonized and perhaps he would not have .proclaimed an academic cult. We must grasp his book as an indicator of what is happening in parts of our intellectual world. For books, too, are parts of the crises, although I am not sure how important a part. This one manifests the crisis of American pragmatism: Promethean man falters, turns softly inward, and feels in quest of salvation. One who remembers the thirties must ask how this has happened; for until recently it would not have been expected. In the thirties, those academic philosophers who attended to social happenings were bravely fussing with mouse-like reforms. And even Morris, whose main interests have been technical philosophy, wrote a pamphlet in which he linked pragmatism with the New Deal. Perhaps here in this political linkage we find a clue to the understanding of his latest book; for it must be seen in political as well as in personal and intellectual terms. After their flirtations with the left, many withdrew with feelings of guilt, and then attained anchorage and safety in strongly nationalist affirmations. This was one major pattern among a lot of things that happened. Morris follows it only in its very beginning; for he is entirely without the nationalist frenzy. More subtly and entirely honestly, per.,. haps more deeply torn and frustrated by historical events and by their nimbus, he withdraws to peer out at history and at nations very personally. The one way is to leap out of yourself into an hysteric conformism with one form of loutish agony; the other is to withdraw into your own self to search therein for a "path of life." But both are ways of giving in. In an age of mass discipline and armies few indeed are the civilized men who can "select" "what interest is to be given dominance in the self." Nor with the high commands on the loose is it permissible seriously to speak of "knowledge alone" not being enough and of its paralyzing the capacity for decision. In armies and in social movements which make history, and hence the types and paths of persons, it is lack of knowledge that is to be deplored: For now ignorance becomes irresponsibility. It is understandable but it is to be denounced as unreal and ungeared that in such a time thinkers should begin
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delicately to consider "individual differences" and personal forms as primary. It is precisely upon this retreat inward to contemplate "the individual as a center" that Morris' major inadequacy, his philosophy of history, rests; aQd from this inadequacy his failure to see what may still be workable as a new center in the Promethean derives. Ill
"The agony of man," begins Morris, "is inherent in his life and inescapable." Not for all men. And is "agony" "irf' "his" "life" or is it that there are agonies planted in certain conditions of certain lives? If it is the former, then perhaps agony is inescapable; if it is the latter, certainly "agonies" may be open to modification, if there is the intelligence apd the power. But if we take the first view, we will speak of personalist world religions. Men are agonized all right, if they have the opportunity to feel about it, but they are not agonized because they have lost their souls. There is nothing "inherent" about agonies. To say that "enormous wars, drastic economic chaos" etc. are "outward signs that the human agony has become acute" is a mode of statement amounting to glossing and nonsense. The things that are agony may be put bluntly: one of them is the fact that men are facing chance and death without feeling any deep social anger in the process. 1 There isn't anything behind agonies except the steel produced by other men and used by other men under orders of a given social, political and economic system. And when I read of "the trap of existence" I cannot but reflect that it is often of such a character that some can buy their way out of it. Indeed there is a whole business made of it by those technicians of personal agony, the psychiatrists. In this world, those traps that nobody can buy his way out of have to be thought and fought out of. To talk about "human agony" and "salvation" and "traps of existence" is merely to hide the operative caus(;:s of painfully concrete agonies behind the mask of "sensitivity" 1
This is one of the meanings of such facts as are reported by Hanson Baldwin, "The Need for Toughness," N. Y. Times, July 27, 1942. .
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which men build for themselves when confronted with agonizing conditions. However, much it may serve as personal legitimation for wholesale death, there are times when display of personal sensitivities are fancy ways of avoiding the intellectual responsibility of explaining what is happening in the world so that men may understand and act. Men are much more than political animals, but there are times when they must be this above all, or else they lose all their other beings. If this is such a time, then reveling in other features of the self may be irresponsibility. If we are seriously to talk of "paths of life," we have to talk of wars and political movements for they are concerned, whether their actors know it or not, with manipulating the conditions of possible paths for individuals. Even the technicians of personal agonies are more and more realizing that many internal horrors will only be eradicated by social-political action. Just as wars are required for the traumatic neurosis of war, so must there be a type of competition in order to implant competitive neurosis. And if I am correct in thinking Morris' problem to be that of selfestrangement, then it will never be solved in the terms and mood which he is using.
IV The currents of events that now mash in upon men are obviously not religious, unless religion is so defined as to embrace everything that happens that is of steady consequence for men. Morris writes: "The most general mode for the conduct of life of an individual is that individual's way of salvation; the beliefs and techniques which underlie and implement that way constitute the religion of that individual." Such definitions might well mean that any man's occupation was his salvation and the ground of his religion. For by economic necessity and in virtue of their dominance of his alert hours, "occupations" are, for the most of men, "the most general mode for the conduct of life" and they set major conditions for personality types and for personal out-looks and in-looks. Such definitions as Morris' are not condu~ive to understanding the world or one's self or what is happening in either. They are better fitted for
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evocation of mood than for brisk understanding. It is as if Morris had relaxed and let a swarm of words out of the gisciplined domain of the Theory of Signs. 2 What sort -of priorities have deprived a mind of the fine-edged steel it has exhibited in technical matters? Those who already feel that way, will say that with his latest book, Morris has enlarged his range of interests. Others will perhaps say, in a phrase of Weber's, that he has made the sacrifice of the intellect. Twenty years ago, Weber indicated that many modern intellectuals felt the need of outfitting their souls with "guaranteed, genuine antiques." The matter is now beyond personal curiosities. It is very well, indeed, that world happenings have not been refracted for the American population in a religious way, for if this should ever happen, the religion involved would not be as subtle nor as harmless as Morris' secularized definitions make religion out to be.
v Much of the cogency of Morris' work derives from the genuine inadequacies of Dewey's Promethean outlook. Paths of Life may be viewed as a ''-reaction" to pragmatism because until now Morris has been among the most diligent of pragmatists; because he conceives the Promethean ( pragmatic) way as dominant at least in America, and yet rejects it as adequate, setting forth the apologetics for a new religion. Although there is nothing very subtle nor even "personal'' about the bulk of human agonies, there may be ignorance of their full conditions. Dewey's tendency to impute agonies merely to ignorance has been one of the defects of his Promethean view. In his basic categories, Prometheus has been too technological and not deeply enough political. The reasons for this perspective have to do with the social path of pragmatism as an academic movement. The course of pragmatism may be tied down socially by "Foundation of the Theory of Signs ("International Encyclopedia for Unified Science," Vol. 1, No. 2 [Chicago, 1938]) By Charles Morris.
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attention to the careers of pragmatists or by attention to the positions of their publics. Pragmatists have typically been sons of the middle class rising within these strata into rather comfortable academic professions. The publics of pragmatism have varied from Charles Peirce's minute circle, to Janies' large throngs of ladies and ministers, to G. H. Mead's graduate students and colleagues. The publics of Dewey have been typically professional, ranging from school teachers to the subscribers of the New Republic whose average income in 193 t was officially estimated as $5700. In contrast to self-pronouncements, and in spite of valiant stands on particular issues, articulate pragmatism has in social fact never been the ideology of lower income groups and occupations. The one exception, and it works for the argument I am about to present, is the public school teachers. At the most, pragmatism has been the ideology of the liberal professional man, however much he may have thought about the disadvantaged. Now maybe the faltering of the pragmatic type of Promethean is due less to his alleged "religious" inadequacies than to what has arisen from his social position. Maybe because of this position he never attained an adequately anchored political orientation. But this would not be as much "Prometheus'" fault as the result of the academic position of most of those who have lived by being liberal Prometheans. Because he has deposited so very many of his values in a statement of method, it is often difficult for Dewey, or for us, to have a clear-eyed view of his social content. As method, pragmatism is overstuffed with imprecise social value; as a social-political orientation, it undoubtedly has a tendency toward opportunism. It is really not opportunist, because in the very statement of method there lies the assumptions of the Jeffersonian social world. It is quite firmly anchored. But in lesser hands than Dewey's, many things may happen. And the assumptions of Jeffersonian rural democracy tend now to mask the character and shape of political power. The political experience of most pragmatists has been limited to the university. Perhaps this is a disheartening milieu for sensitive men in a time when history has spiraled
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itself into the hard knot of dilemma. In insisting upon treading its way through many particular problems, Dewey's pragmatism has relaxed its hold on men unwillingly lost in the interstices of gigantic trends. Dewey has said that patience is something he has learned to treasure. But patience may mean defeat and this must be faced. In Morris' hands pragmatism does not grow impatient and political; it is shattered upon religious deficiencies personally imputed to it. Politically and in effect, Deweyan patience has swallowed what live content there was in Dewey's view. Dewey himself leaves Prometheus formally tied to a continual reconstruction of the world in which he moves but slowly and has no "final end." Realizing this and intimidated by cold, swift history, a pragmatist can be disheartened about "the moral crisis" in which there is no final end to sustain his little self. He can then search for one, whatever this may mean. Or he can use his technologic mind to grasp the means which might transform the objective conditions of such concrete agonies as men know. The demands of such agonies cannot be finally legitimated. But only the professor will worry over this. Dewey has not "solved the problem of value," but sociologically, one must ask: For whom does such a problem really exist? If men in the large were as snarled as the ethicists and religionists make themselves out to be, there would not be any human action and we should probably all starve. Also, as philosophy and politics show, there comes a point when .any solution of any "value problem" becomes: Who can kill whom? Or in peaceful civilized countries: Who can have whom put in jail? That's tough for the philosopher, but that's the way things really are. The rest seems a mixture of often weird conventions and sham. You may dress up the killing as you will but in the individual's real path of life there it has been and there it is. Just what the goals, the course, and the means of the Promethean today should be I cannot say in full. But this is our general condition. It ought not to compel us to make the surrender and dish up, in our own minds, messianic world religions. Rather it should lead us to remain frustrated and attendant until we are in a position to see how to have the knowledge and the power to remake the social
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orders which trap us. He who can bear frustration may be able to use it at least intellectually; he who cannot stand it and yet has not the grace of silence, will only clutter up the work at hand. And he who cannot withstand the world collapse of all his hopes will never enter the kingdom of his own self. For he has lost the management of this self and alien beings can press upon it. Once there were some men living in a valley and they had so much to do they couldn't even agree what it was. One of them detached himself and went a little way up the side of a hill, where the air was rarer and the valley looked blurred. And an old Promethean, who for some eighty years had known how it was, said, only goats climb the highest mountains.
2
THE NAZI
BEH~MOTH*
Franz Neumann's book is at once a definitive analysis of the German Reich and a basic contribution to the social sciences. No book could be both these things and not contain political directives. In looking closely at one complex object, Neumann reveals in sensitive outline many features of all modern social structure. He has that knack of generalized description that describes more than its immediate object; and he sees many things in that object, Germany since 1918, as "tbe specific working out of a general trend." To lift his style of analysis above the mere depictive and into understanding he pauses in a concrete portrayal to present a typology of possibilities. For example, of the relations of a state to a party in any one-party system, of kinds of imperialism, of the relations between banking and industrial capital, or of political patterns vis-a-vis the Reich and the various sections of her empire. Almost a third of Neumann's sentences are comparatively iqformed, and when he uses history, as in the reweaving of the rope of charismatic legitimations, he always comes up to face the day before yesterday now more clearly understood. When events move very fast and possible worlds swing around them, something happens to the quality of thinking. Some men repeat formulae; some men become reporters. To time observation with thought so as to mate a decent level of abstraction with crucial happenings is a difficult problem. Its solution lies in the using of intellectual residues of social-history, not jettisoning them except in precise confrontation with events. Franz Neumann's book represents the best tradition of the social sciences in Germany, which came to full stature during the twenties. He looks down a nco-Marxist slant *Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism. By Franz Neumann. Oxford Press. $4.00. 170
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further subtilized by Max Weber's distinctions and deepened by a sociologically oriented psychiatry. His thinking is · thus sensitively geared to great structural shifts aQd to happenings in the human mind. Such repor:ting as his book accomplishes is of central facts tied down by the best documentation available. And there is no repeating of formulae in it: Marx may bear a nineteenth-century trademark in some matters, but, as Neumann again makes clear by a fresh intellectual act, the techniq1,1e; the elements, and the drive of his thinking is more than ever relevant, and right now. There are so many who have "forgotten" what they once half understood and who take the easy ways out that it is downright refreshing to experience a book which displays a really analytic heritage with perception and with craftsmanship.
II Neumann's Germany is a type of capitalism; he calls it "totalitarian monopolistic capitalism." Those who would deny this characterization are forced by Neumann's study (a) to do sQme tall (and narrow) defining of "capitalism" which can be justified against his careful usage of the term, and/or (b) to deny the thoroughly documented and, it seems to me, determining facts which Neumann has drawn together concerning the operation of the basic institutions of capitalism in Germany. One of the generic errors of those who do not see the German, economy as capitalistic is Marx's view that capitalism is an anarchy of production. Of course, as Max Weber contended, modern Western capitalism is nothing of the sort. It is rationalized and planned. The more monopolization continues, the more capitalism is controlled and planned. "States" have interfered less in the mechanisms of laissez-faire than have monopoly capitalists. Many of those who would deny the advantages of capitalism to Germany do so within a definition of pre-twentieth century capitalism. However much this may help along the pleasant attitudes held of capitalism in other countries, it is not fair to the capitalists of Germany. They are not so old-
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fashioned as those who talk about their demise. And they are not so unhistorical. To define "capitalism" as consisting of the "free competition" of a large number of independent entrepreneurs with freedom of contract and trade is, of course, to speak of the past. A more enduring trait, and therefore one better fitted to be seized upon in a definition, is the major institution of modern society: private property in the means of production. Now rapid technological change, requiring heavy investments, further augments the gobbling up of the little by the big and this monopolization eventuates in an extremely rigid economic structure. Powerful corporations demand guarantees and subsidies from the state. Thus, in an era of monopolization "the administrative act" and not "the contract" becomes "the auxiliary guarantee of property." Intervention becomes central, and: "who is to interfere and on whose behalf becomes the most important question for modern society." In Germany, as seen by Neumann, National Socialism has tied the economic organization into the web of "industrial combinations run by the industrial magnates." By means of the newer implementation of property, the administrative command, the cartellization of German business has proceeded rapidly. The Nazis saved the cartel system, whose rigidities were sorely beset by the depression. Since then their policies have consistently resulted in a further monopolization into the orbit of the big corporations. The cartels and the political authority have been welded together in such a way that private hands perform such crucial politico-economic tasks as the allocation of raw materials. But who runs the giant cartels? Behind cartellization there has occurred a centralizing trend which has left power decisions and profits in the lap of the industrial magnates, realized many an old dream not shared by the now regimented workers or the small business men now virtually eliminated. The dreams come true in Germany may well be those of the industrial condottiere everywhere. Among specific Nazi politics which have implemented this oligarchification of capitalism is Aryanization: Jewish property expropriated has not gone to the "State," but to industrialists such as Otto Wolff and Mannesmann. (Apart from
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the Jewish case, there is a definite trend away from any thought of genuine nationalization.) The power of such industrial combines has also been augmented by the "Germanization" of business in conquered territories. The "Continental Oil Corporation" of Berlin is predominantly composed of the most important German banks and oil corporations. Heavy industry in Lorraine was equitably distributed-among five German combines. More important than these processes has been the industrial revolution in chemistry, subsidized by the State, but deriving its dynamic from capitalism, and rendering power to giant combines in the same way that all property in the means of production confers power, but more brutally. The hard outlines of the cartel powers are further confirmed by the near assimilation of finance capital by the monopolists of industrial capital. Neumann has shown that profit motives hold the economic machinery of the Reich together. But given its present monopoly form, capitalism demands the stabilizing support of a total political power. Having full access to and grip upon such power is the distinctive advantage of German capitalism. Profits in a situation of great demand and with plant expansion improving the competitive position and thereby profits-tpis is the motivating force of the set-up. Gottfried Feder is quite dead. Those who, in the face of Neumann's documentation, would accept Feder's "anticapitalist" mumbling as a true characterization of Germany have many facts to deny. And they must give an explanation of her be)ated imperialist war: Any thesis about Germany which does not explain her adventurous role in the war is inadequate. Such explanation cannot ·be performed by modern curse words (outmoded psychiatry), nor by the finger smugly pointed at bad gangs out for "power," nor by reference to merely formal growth of "bureaucracies." It requires attention to the economic structure and its political apparatus that lead dynamically into war. Neumann has not resolved this problem with the subtlety which he undoubtedly commands, but the type of characterization he offers of Germany seems to me the only one so far available which not only allows an explanation but which already has the job
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three-quarters done. Germany's expansion is the result of the dynamics of a younger monopolized capitalism in a situation where trade and investments can only be conquered by political means. Neumann has established in detail that this imperialism is primarily the policy of industrial leadership and the outcome of the internal antagonisms of the German capitalist economy. "It is the aggressive, imperialist, expansionist spirit of German big business unhampered by consideration for small competitors, for the middle classes, free from control by the banks, delivered from the pressure of trade unions, which is the motivating force of the economic system." This does not mean, however, that every element in Germany is a "tool" of industrial magnates. Ill
For the problem of elites is not identical with that of the socio-economic structure, however much the two are linked in a going concern. There ar.e four elite elements dominating Germany today. Monopoly of the means of production and of the means of violence sustain them. And each of them has its bureaucracy. Power lies within and between these four groups. All influential decisions must be understood with primary reference to them; all propaganda is to be understood in terms of their needs to control, conjure, and mask the attentions of the ruled classes from the consequences of their decisions. Power in Germany is deposited with monopoly capitalists, especially in the heavily industrial sectors; the Nazi Party; the state bureaucracy; and the armed forces. These are the rulers and the rest are the ruled, but these form at times an uneasy front, and the ruled may well be watching carefully. From these four angles, interests, anchored in the entire social structure but especially in violence and production, coalesce into the central aim: continual preparation and maintenance of imperialist war. To grasp this clearly is to see the structure of the regime as a total thing, called Behemoth. War gives National Socialism not only glory but a stabilization of its power; to industry it gives profits, con-
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quers foreign markets and accumulates booty capital. Neumann sees the bureaucracy, relatively unchanged by the Nazi conquest of power, marching with the victorious. This may be doubtful, but certainly the army has gotten "everything it wanted." In the trade policy, as well as in war, if we may so distinguish, the political and economic elites see eye to eye. Here there is an identity of interests and aims among the divisions of the ruling class. The Nazi elite have further consolidated themselves, as have managers, by climbing via political power into the ownership of heavy industry. The Herman Goering Works, which might well make capitalists everywhere envious, is the grandiose example of this process. "Political power without ... a solid place in industrial production is precarious." Thus do economic men die. The Nazis used the knowledge and ruthlessness possessed by big industry; big industry used the antidemocracy, antiunionism, and violence of the Nazis. They are not too unhappy together. In contrast with the profits and the self-manned organizations of business, labor's wages are near-stabilized, and it has no organizations of its own. From 1932-1938 wages and salaries rose 66 per cent, whereas "other income" rose 146 per cent; at the same time production nearly doubled. Neumann's experience with labor organizations in Germany make his detailed statement of the conditions of labor and of labor policy definitive. The labor market is authoritatively controlled to the limit of human recalcitrance. The working class is regimented and fragmented in order to prevent any common basis for movements, and the individual workman is isolated and terrorized. The "interference" of the party and the "State" in "economics" has again helped old dreams to come true. Not only has the prevailing class structure been accepted; in the process of the ruling elites' consolidation, it has been riveted and clinched from .the upper side. The army with its close ties to industrial and agrarian capital would seem to be a further bulwark against any attempt of the party or state to move against capitalism. Profits for capitalists, prestiged positions in the army for their sons; power and prestige for the army-these ele-
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ments coincide as the system runs into war. Rimmler, the party in general, has by no means succeeded in gaining jurisdiction over the army. The uneasy apd often indefinite balance of power between the four elites is counterbalanced by the antagonisms which beset the system and lend to the elites a total fear of the worlcing class. Again the analysis is pointed to explain war.
IV Just as the basic outline of the political and economic structure is teased out from the legal and doctrinal verbiage, so are the ideologies of the regime explained in terms of the composition and developmental trends of the social structure and its various strata. Ideologies and social structure are seen conjointly, which is the only way to see either in accurate and telling focus. For in some situations nothing that is said can be taken at its face value, and it is more important to know meanings than to test for truth. Indeed, the way to political reality is through ideological analysis. This is the way that Neumann has taken, and this is why his account of Nazi ideology is at times definitive and always interesting. His account of the blending of geopolitics and international law to form a "Germanic Monroe Doctrine" is a model for such analysis. If this particuiar style of imputation is intellectually too brutal, it stands in fortunate contrast to Rauschnigg, de Sales, Vierick, and others who have not controlled their understanding of Nazi proclamations, ideas, and policies by careful reference to their anchorage in the evolving features of the politicaleconomic structure. Ideas are political cloaks. The ideology of Gemeinschaft, e.g., masks the impersonality of a rationalized society. Those academic sociologists who in American silos learn from a "primary-group" society, take note: Jefferson died in 1826. As human relations become impersonal by virtue of bureaucratic intervention, the ideologies of "community" and of "leadership" have been imposed. In a similar contradiction Neumann shows that as the political power of the
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state has increased, the doctrine of the totalitarian state has been rejected by Nazi intellectuals. Anti~Semitism has its economic functions which work conjointly with propagandistic uses: it aids monopolization by distributing spoils to industrial capitalists whose support is vital, it diverts the discontent of small Aryan businessmen, and attempts to satisfy the anti-capitalist feeling of those areas of the masses who want wholesale expropriation. Thus, anti-Semitism operates as a surrogate for class struggle by heaping hatred upon one "enemy"; in the same act it seeks to "unify" the Aryan community. The manner in which Nazi doctrine is shaped by the need to ensnare various strata is neatly illustrated by its inclusion of perverted Marxist elements. "Proletarian racism" stands as a strategical surrogate for "proletariat;" nationalist war against capitalism, for "class struggle;" "people's community," for "classless society," and so on. Thus has the Marxist May Day become a national holiday. Neumann's style of imputation systematically accomplishes two objectives: it makes possible a controlled understanding of doctrinal formulations by referring them to political crises and social structure; and it enables an ingenious use of changes in ideology in detecting which strata of the population was not ensnared by the previous line. The Nazi line has changed frequently.
v The analysis of Behemoth casts light upon capitalism in democracies. To the most important task of political analysis Neumann has contributed: if you read his book thoroughly, you see the harsh outlines of possible futures close around you. With leftwing thought confused and split and dribbling trivialities, he locates the enemy with a 500 watt glare. And Nazi is only one of his names. Not only does acceptance or rejection of Neumann's analysis set the type of understanding we have of Germany, it sets our attitude toward given elements in other countries, sights the act of our allegiance, places limits upon our political aspirations: helps us locate the enemy
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all over the world. That is why Franz Neumann's book is not only the most important to appear about Germany; it is a live contribution to all leftwing thinking today. His book will move all of us into deeper levels of analysis and strategy. It had better. Behemoth is everywhere united.
3
COLLECTIVISM AND THE 'MIXED-UP' ECONOMY
The relations between freedom and security cannot be stated until these terms are broken up and connected to given conditions. They cannot be fruitfully stated as blanket abstractions. The spheres and strata of which we are asking and answering questions about freedom and security must be precisely determined. For such explicit delimitations must always accompany the terms if they are to be realistically used. Thus, we would speak of economic freedom for laborers, political freedom for small Persian retailers, ecoWJmic security for English bankers, or for Negro sharecroppers, religious freedom for Hebrews or for Irish Catholics, and so on. Then' these delimited and specific kinds of freedom and security would be related to one another in quite various Ways. For example, we would speak of security in an equal education for every youth as safeguarding security in the equality of occupational and inter-marriage chances. That is what would be involved in a thorough analysis of the problems of freedoms and securities. Here I shall only analyse an imputed relation between one kind of economic freedom for a restricted number and other types of freedom for the bulk of the American population. John Chamberlain's argument is that the only, or at least a major, guarantee of political freedom and personal independence for the bulk of men is the existence of private economic enterprise, or more specifically, private ownership of the means of production. This argument represents a petty bourgeois conception of liberty and freedom. It might hold where free enterprise and private property were closely linked and made up the dominant and widely diffused conditions of labor. Under 179
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modern conditions, this view is unrealistic and inapplicable. More importantly, it has dangerous consequences not set forth by Chamberlain. Masked in the guise of "little entrepreneurs," its functional outcome would most likely be the further rule of bureaucratically managed corporations. The "freedom" which private enterprise today safeguards is, in the first place, freedom for ... private enterprisers, to sell and buy and make profit. Only if the bulk of men lived by such operations, that is, were independent entrepreneurs, or could become such, might this economic arrangement safeguard freedom for the bulk of men in other spheres (such as the political). But in modern industrial society the mass of men are, and must be, dependent workers. This paramount fact of dependent, collective work is firmly anchored in large scale technology; it finds a parallel and a further anchorage in an extremely narrow distribution of property. The condition under which private economic enterprise led to independence and freedom in other spheres for the bulk of men was the dominance of an economic system of small proprietorships each based upon self-owned and operated property. These conditions formed the cradle for classic democracy. Under them it is possible to speak of private property and independent work as a basis for political freedom, and for at least a chance at equality. Now these conditions are gone and no nostalgic wish nor reference to Jefferson by John Chamberlain will ever make shopkeepers out of employees unless we throw away the efficiency of our productive forces. The issue of freedom and security is, of course, an alternative statement of the problem of democracy and socialism. And I do not see why the aims of socialism need not be quite identical with the aims of classic democracy. It is the means of attaining these ends which now must differ. The new means, the democratically planned utilization of collectivized means of production, are urged up:m us by the new conditions which separate us from the early nineteenth century. The most important of these, the large scale industrial bases, results in the decrease of "self-employed," or independent, workers. Here are the latest figures: In December, 1940, the
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self-employed numbered 6 million out of a total labor force of 54.5 million. The pattern of the War, including the distribution of war contracts, is estimated to decrease this minority to 4. 7 million self-employed by December, 1943-and this despite an estimated total labor force of around 62.3 million, which includes the decrease of the "independent" unemployed down to 2 million. It is under these conditions that we must speak of freedom, that "we" must plan the conditions of such freedoms as we may en"" joy. For no longer can training in "independent" work gear men into freedom in their work as in other spheres. The economic conditions of historical democracy cannot be the economic conditions of any future democracy. It seems to me that he who believes that political and personal freedom can only be anchored in an independent economic life had better give up the ideal of freedom. "Free enterprise" today may mean freedom for a handful in the economic sphere of action. But it means depend'" ence upon this handful for the mass of working men, and constant fear of being epgulfed by them for the smaller business men. It is not a question of having political freedom and economic insecurity under a regime of business or lack of political freedom and economic security under a collectivized owcyership and operation of the means of production. That is an unreal statement of alternatives! It is unreal because it is not informed by the existing reality of collective, dependent work nor by the consequence of this economic reality for political power, as will be indicated below. Men are not much less dependent in their economic lives; under corporate capitalism than perhaps they would be under collectivist planning. It is a ·question of who or what men are dependent upon, and of the institutional means they have available for control of this dependency. For security and freedom may live together under conditions where both of them mean a chance to control what you are dependent upon. Within the enlarging areas controlled by large scale business, there are fewer and fewer institutional channels open for such control. John Chamberlain half admits this when he tries to locate freedom in the "interstices" of private and collective economies. When he speaks of "state-
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chained jobs" vs. the freedom to shift jobs he is merely restating the employer's point of view of freedom: "If you don't like working for me under these terms, then you are free to go work somewhere else." Such a smooth mobility of labor can only be assumed in the abstractions of the clas-' sical economists. It is not freedom to "shift" jobs as much as guarantee of a job and collective control over the already collective conditions and results of any job that seems important in safeguarding both security and freedom in all spheres for all working men. A. P. Lerner's argument for a Mixed Economy rests directly upon the theory of freedom I have just examined. He justifies the existence of a section of private enterprise because he believes that this would be an anchorage for freedom for all men in all spheres. Only this assumption makes intelligible his second question and answer 1 He wants to know what is to be left private (for freedom) and· what is to be collective (for security}. He asks: Can a political economy be mixed and yet efficient? And he answers: Surely, because "we'll" decide what is to be collectivized and what is to be left private in terms of which is the more efficient! This is, of course, not an argument at all, but a circle which by-passes the question by setting· up a formal criterion which simply swallows the point to be proved. There are several auxiliary remarks of Lerner's which it is fruitful to disassemble: ( 1 ) Why should the mere erection of the norm of "efficiency" "automatically" provide "substantiar guarantees such as· a minimum inalienable income for everybody"? Sheer, economic efficiency might well call for killing-off the old and lame and troublesome, rather than guaranteeing them an income. Efficiency cannot be socially pointed or educated by the norm of ... efficiency. Perhaps it is merely a more cogent name for the nonexistent dominance of a freemarket. (2) Why should he assume that the failure of a mixed economy fully to use its resources "would inevitably result" in its replacement by collectivism? This would only be the case if the people in charge of the collectivist side of the mixture had power of life and death over the private enterprisers' side. And if this were so, how could private enterprisers be free enough to live by our risks in order to
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safeguard their "freedom"? ( 3) Why is it "arrogant pessimism" and "irresponsible" to hold that the "human race" is incapable of learning that governmental spending in peacetime, as in war, could keep up employment? Who knows that those in power will inevitably know John Maynard Keynes so well and want to practice him? It isn't a question for the "human race," nor a matter for the "nineteenth-century economists" to learn. It is less a question of the diffusion of knowledge than of power relations and economic stakes. Moreover, ( 4) Why should government "guarantee an adequate money demand for the products of private enterprise"? That is, subsidize the defaults of private enterprise as an element of an economy or as an economic system? To insure "freedom"? But if private enterprise heeds this governmental guarantee it is too weak an economic an·chorage for anybody's "freedom, "-even the freedom for the little private enterprisers who are being gobbled daily by the freedom of the big enterprisers in the W.P.B. (5) Lerner speaks of the norm of efficiency governing whether something is to .be collectivized or private. But who or what decides about this? Unless this private enterprise is to be equal in power with government, I presume that the government is. Having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, government can control and set conditions of differential "efficiency." So, again, the problem of freedom lies less directly in the·economic sphere than in the political sphere and "its" control of the economic. Two issues are left over after A. L. Lerner finished mixing up the economy: a more precise and realistic, a less formal criterion of what is to be left in private hands and what is to be collectivized. And a statement of the respective weights of the state and the private entrepreneurs in the distribution of power; or, in other words, the political conditions and consequences of a mixed economy. The editors of Fortune face both these problems in no uncertain terms. (Supplement to Fortune, December, 1942: "The Domestic Economy.") They unmix the mixed-up economy of Lerner and Chamberlain, and point out in effect the realistic implications of ideal, abstract systems. The sophisticated Tories, who wrote Fortune's plan
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know: that total freedom (laissez-faire) for business men would wreck even business as a system; that "laissez-faire" is no longer a guarantee of economic security [norJ a guarantee of freedom." More crucially, they think that "only the state can stop the drift to collectivism. Economic power," tbey write, "is in Washington and will probably stay there. The only realistic question is: to what use will that power be put?" They, too, therefore propose a "mixed economy," but unlike Lerner and Chamberlain, they give a concrete answer to just who is to have what parts of this mixture. "Th_e counter-revolution" (when was the revolution? the New Deal!) they propose "is a return to the higher values of individualism." They "propose to restore the creative, ri.sk-taking, profit...,seeking competitive individual to the legitirnate throne of a sovereign market." The "cQndition of private industry must be one of (the state's) primary concerns." This "daring individual, the risk-taking entrepreneur, should ... become the darling of America's future economy." But it seems he is not so very daring. For (a) government must place him upon his trapeze and (b) government must spread a soft net under his antics. "The industrialist must enlist the aid of ... the power of government." To this "uncommon individual," rather than Wallace's vagaries of the "cornrnon man," they would give America and the world: "We aim to make him feel that this country and century are peculiarly his." The common man will be taken care of by governmental spending, social security, and public works judiciously chosen so as not to challenge private competition. The government is to "underwrite the whole economy," that is, the doom-laden consequences of the daring entrepreneur whom government has placed upon the throne. The pattern begins to emerge. Here is a real plan about a mixture of economics with some politics thrown in. A mixed economy would not be a mi){ed economy for long, nor would it lead to a mixed and competitive political regime. Given the size and power of business today, a mixed economy would most probably result in the governmental side subsidizing the rise and the defaults of the private enterprise side, running around with a net to catch
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the daring young risk-taker's enterprises everytime he is about to fall, break his neck and mash the whole damned audience. For as Fortune knows (Chamberlain and Lerner pay no real attention to it) the only way to secure economic "Freedom" for the enterpriser is for the state to subsidize him! The political condition and consequence of this would probably be a corporate-business State. Economic power may be in Washington to stay, but Washington is full of business men who aim to stay. I will not call this arrangement "fascism," for the word has become a loose label for anything somebody doesn't like. But if this is the probable mixture of a mixed economy and its political condition and consequences, then it is obvious that the argument that freedom rests upon a mixed economy is false and dangerous. A governmental "monopoly" of jobs would not make less secure my chance to yelp than would a set of corporation's monopoly of jobs, especially if the latter's monopoly were guaranteed by their corporate business state. Given its scale and concentration, private forms of business enterprise possess the power and "freedom" that rests on "free·" enterprise. Given the parallel distribution of property and income, this means not only that a narrow business oligarchy is in a strategic place for influencing bureaucratic government decision. It means that they may infiltrate into the bureaucratic cells of the government. 'And that is precisely what they have been and are doing. We are no longer faced with the problem of stating the political results of types of economic arrangements. For by now everybody, definitely including Big Business, knows that we must speak of the political and the economic in one breath, of a political economy. This means, in another set of terms, that "business" and "government" are more and more becoming one. That their "conflict" has been institutionalized within "government" and that it increasingly goes on without benefit of Congress. And that when Congress does enter the power fights it is in terms of these interbureaucratic battles. It means that "business" can and well may become "government." Only as this is approached can the "entrepreneur" become the "darling of the economy"
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and be given America and the century. Fortune has accepted a bastard version of the Marxian theory of the state: it should become the political committee for the ruling stratum of big business. I am not here concerned with imputing motives; these are the consequences and conditions which Fortune's plan seem to me to mask. As government and business become increasingly interlocked, economic questions will more and more rbecome: who is to staff the points of political decision in the governmental hierarchies and pinnacles? The new questions of freedoms and securities must be put in the fore of these decisions. And not in abstractions nor the nostalgic wish for the dominance of petty bourgeoisie, for today "the political freedom of free enterprise" means the power of Corporations over and within the State.
~
4
LIBERAL VALUES IN THE MODERN WORLD
Most of us now live as spectators in a world without political interlude: fear of total permanent war stops our kind of morally oriented politics. Our spectatorship means that personal, active experience often seems politically useless and even unreal. This is a time when frustration seems to be in direct ratio to understanding, a time of cultural mediocrity when the levels of public sensibility have sunk below sight. It is a time of irresponsibiUty, organized and unorganized; when common sense, anchored in fast-outmoded experience has become myopic and irrelevant. Nobody feels secure in a simple place; Qobody feels secure and there is no simple place. It is a time when no terms of acceptance are available, but also no terms of rejection: those on top seem stunned, distracted, and bewildered, and don't know what to do. But what is much more damaging to us: those on the 'bottom are also without leaders, without counter-ideas, don't know what to do, do not have real demands to make of those in key positions of power. Whatever the political promises of labor and leftward forces· 15 years ago, they have not been fulfilled; whatever leadership they have developed has hidden itself for illusory safety, or been buried by events it neither understands nor wishes to control. Organized labor in the forties and early fifties has been mainly another adaptive and adapting element. What goes on domestically may briefly be described in terms of the main drift toward a permanent war economy in a garrison state. Internationally, of course, the world of nations has been polarized into two dead-locked powers, with no prospects of a structured peace, with a penumbra of variously graded 187
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and variously dependent satellites, puppets, and vacuums. For the first time in its easy history, the United States finds itself a nation in a military neighborhood, having common frontiers with a big rival. The United States is a sea and air power from an external position; wherever it turns, it faces a vast land-power with an internal position. In the meantime, Europe has become a virtual colony, held by military force and economic dependence, And neither in the West nor in the East do U.S. spokesmen seem to have ideas and policies that have genuine appeal to the people residing there. Internationally and domestically, the death of political ideas in the United States coincides with the general intellectual vacuum to underpin our malaise. Insofar as ideas are involved in our political impasse, these ideas center in the nature and present day situation of liberalism. For liberalism is at once the main line of our intellectual heritage and our official political philosophy. I shall not here attempt a full analysis of liberalism's connection with the modern malaise. I only want to lay out some key themes, which I believe must be taken into account in any examination of liberalism today.
Like any social philosophy, liberalism can conveniently be understood and discussed: ( 1 ) as an articulation of ideals which, no matter what its level of generality, operates as a sort of moral optic and set of guidelines for judgments of men, movements and events; (2) as a theory, explicit or implied, of how a society works, of its important elements and how they are related, of its key conflicts and how they are resolved; (3) as a social phenomenon, that is, as an ideology or political rhetoric-justifying certain institutions and practices, demanding and expecting others. In these terms, what is the situation of liberalism today? As a set of articulated ideals, liberalism has been and is a major part of "the secular tradition of the west." As a political rhetoric, liberalism has been the ideology of the rising middle class. As a theory of society, liberalism is confined in relevance to the heroic epoch of the middle
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class. These points are connected, for as a carrier of ideals, liberalism has been detached from any tenable theory of modem society, and however engaging in its received condition, it is no longer a useful guide-line to the future. For the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth centuries, liberal theory did clarify and offer insight; for the twentieth century, it just as often confuses. II
Liberalism, as a set of ideals, is still viable, and even compelling to Western men. That is one reason why it has become a common denominator of American political rhetoric; but there is another reason. The ideals of liberalism have been divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization. Everybody can easily agree on general ends; it is more difficult to agree on means and the relevance of various means to the ends articulated. The detachment of liberalism from the facts of a going.society ma_ke it an excellent mask for those who do not, cannot, or will not do what would have to be done to realize its ideals. As a kind of political rhetoric, liberalism has been banalized: now it is commonly used by everyone who talks in public for every divergent and contradictory purpose. Today we hear liberals say that one liberal can be "for," and another liberal "against," a vast range of contradictory political propositions. What this means is that liberalism as a common denominator of American political rhetoric, is without coherent content; that, ih the process of its banalization, its goals have been so formalized as to provide no clear moral optic. The crisis of liberalism (and of American political reflection) is due to liberalism's success in becoming the official language for all public statement. To this fact was added its use in the New Deal Era when, in close contact with power, lib~ansm became administrative. Its crisis in lack of clarity is underpinned by its use by all interests, classes, and parties. It is in this situation that professional liberals sometimes make a fetish of indecision, which they would call open-mindedness, as against inflexibility; of the absence
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of criteria, which they would call tolerance, as against dogmatism; of the formality and hence political irrelevance of criteria, which they would call "speaking broadly," as against "details." We may not, of course, dismiss liberalism merely because it is a common denominator of political rhetoric. Its wide use as justification limits the choices and, to some extent, guides the decisions of those in authority. For if it is the common denominator, all powerful decisions made in the open must be justified in its terms, and this may restrain the deciders even if they do not "believe in it." For men are influenced in their use of authority by the rhetoric they feel· they must employ. The leaders as well as the l'ed, and even the mythmakers, are influenced by prevailing rhetorics of justification. Liberals have repeatedly articulated a secular humanism, stressing the priceless value of. the individual personality, and the right of each individual to be dealt with in accordance with rational and understandable laws, to which all power is also subject. They have been humanist in the sense that they see man as the measure of all things: policies and events are good or bad in terms of their effect on men; institutions and societies are to be judged in terms of what they mean to and for the individual human being. Liberals have assumed that men should control their own life-fates. It is in terms of this value that the entire concern with consent to authority and .the opposition to violence should be understood. All loyalties to specific movements and organizations tend, for the liberal, to be conditional upon his own principles, rather than blindly to an organization. Liberals have assumed that there are rational ways to acquire knowledge, and that substantive reason, anchored in the individual, provides the way out. As a set of such ideals, liberalism has very heavily contributed to the big tradition of the West, but it is not the sole carrier of this tradition; it is not to be identified with it. And it is a re·al question whether today it is the most whole-hearted carrier of it, for it is to be greatly doubted that, as a theory of society, liberalism is in a position to lead or help men carry these ideals into realization.
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So, if as ideal, liberalism is the secular tradition of the West, as a theory of society, which enables these ideals, it is the ideology of one class inside one epoch. If the moral force of liberalism is still stimulating, its sociological content is weak; it has no theory of society adequate to its moral aims. I II
The assumptions of liberal theories about society, have to do with how liberal values could be anchored, with how they could operate as guide to policy. The liberal ideals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were anchored in several basic assumptions about the cot:!dition of modern society that are no longer simple or clear: (i) Liberalism has assumed that both freedom and security, its key values, flourish in a world of small entrepreneurs. But it is quite clear that one of the most decisive changes over the last hundred years is the enormous increase in the scale of property units. This has meant that the ideals of liberty and of security have changed: absolute liberty to control property has become tyranny. The meaning of freedom, positively put, has to be restated now, not as independence, but as control over that upon which the individual is dependent. .Security, once resting on the small holding, has become, in the world o( large property, anxiety -anxiety produced by the concentration of process and by the .manner of living without expectation of owning. Positively, security must be group-guaranteed; individual men can no lop.ger provide for their own futures. If a particular ide31 of freedom assumes for its realization the dominance of a scatter of small property, then, the social meaning of this ideal is quite different from a statement of freedom th2t assumes a situation of concentrated property. It is in its theory of society, tacit or explicit, that we find the political content of a social philosophy. If men assume the dominance of huge-scale prop~rty, and yet state eighteenth-century ideals, they are off base. In the kindergarten of political philosophy one learns that the idea of freedom in general is more serviceable as politically irrelevant rhetoric than ideal. Tweptieth-
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century problems cannot be solved by eighteenth-century phrases. Liberty is not an a-priori individual fact, and it has been a social achievement only when liberal ideals have fortunately coincided with social realities. Order can be reconciled with liberty by an underlying common sentiment, or by a balance of harmoniously competing groups. Common sentiment can grow from slowpaced tradition or be imposed from a powerful center. Competitive balance can be maintained only if each faction remains small enough and equal enough to compete freely. But now there is no common sentiment, and there is no balance, but a lop-sided competition between and among dominant factions and midget interests. Liberalism, in the nineteenth-century epoch of its triumph, never really took into account the changing economic foundations of the political ideals and forms it espoused. That simple fact goes far to explain the decline of liberalism in authoritative cogency. This is the fact upon which Marxism has been correctly focused and upon which it has capitalized. (ii) Many classic liberals, perhaps especially of the Rousseauian and Jeffersonian persuasion, have assumed the predominance of rural or "small city states," in brief, of a small-scale community. Liberal discussion of the general will, and liberal notions of "public opinion" usually rest on such assumptions. We no longer live in this sort of small-scale world. (iii) A third assumption about society, characteristic of classic liberalism, has been the stress upon the autonomy of different institutional orders. In the beginning, as with Locke, it would split off religious institutions from the political, so that the political justifications, whatever they may be, had to be secular. Later on, the economic order was split from the political order, in the classic case of laissez-faire, perhap3 coming to a head in the early philosophical radicals in England. But that was not the end of making different institutional orders autonomous. The kinship order was also to be split from the other orders so that there was a free marriage market, just as there was a free commodity market. Moreover, in each of these orders a similar princip!f>
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was upheld: that of individual freedom of choice-as an economic agent; as a presumptuous political man, who had to be shown before he would obey; as a man on the marriage market making a free contract with his partner; and so on. But what })as happened is the fusion of several institutional orders; the co-ordination of the major orders has become the contemporary reality. We see in the United States today an increased coincidence and fusion of the economic, political, and military orders. ( iv) A fourth underlying sociological assumption, probably. the most subtle and far-reaching, certainly the most philosophically relevant, is that the individual is the seat of rationa1ity. When liberals speak of rationality and "the increase of enlightenment," they have assumed that the individual will be increased in stature and dignity because his power to reason and his knowledge will be increased. But the decisive fact here, as signified quite well by such writers as Max Weber and Karl Mannheim, is that the seat of rationality has shifted from the individual and is now in the big institution. The increase of enlightenment does not necessarily wise up the individual. This has to do with the distinction of substantative from formal rationality, in short, the growth of a bureaucratic organization of knowledge. The prevailing character as well as the distribution of rationality now leads to a whole set of questions to which we have no contemporary liberal answers. This modern weakness and irrationality of the individual, and ·especiaHy~his political apathy, is crucial for liberalism; for liberalism has classically relied on the reasoning individual as its lever for progressive change. (v) Tied in with the belief in the growth of the individual's substantive rationality is the belief in the explicitness of authority. Men, as individuals or as groups of individuals, could learn to know who exercised power and so could debate it or obey. But today, one of the crucial political problems "for experts," as for laymen, is to locate exactly who has the power. It is fashionab!e now, especially among those who have left what radical circles remain, to suppose that "there is no ruling class," just as it was fashionable in the thirties
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to suppose a set of class villains to be the source of all social injustice and public malaise. I should be as far from supposing that some enemy could be firmly located, that some one or two set of men were responsible, as I should be from supposing that it is all merely impersonal, tragic drift. The view that all is blind drift is largely a fatalist projection of one's own feeling of impotence and perhaps a salve of guilt about it. The view that all is due to the conspiracy of an e(lsily locatable enemy is also a hurried projection from t)Je difficult effort to understand how structural shifts open opportunities to various elites and how various elites take advantage or fail to take advantage of them. To accept either view is to relax the effort rationally to understand in detail how it is. There are obviously gradations of power and opportunities among modern populations, which is not to say that all ruling powers are united, or that they fully know what they do, or that they are consciously joined in conspiracy. One can, however, be more concerned with their structural position and the consequences of their decisive actions than with the extent of their awareness or the impurity of their motives. But such analysis has not been part of the liberal tradition, nor does this tradition provide decisive help in undertaking it.
IV The root problem of any "democratic" or "liberal"or even humanist-ideals is that they are in fact statements of hope or demands or preferences of an intellectual elite psychologically capable of individually fulfilling them, but they are projected for a population which in the twentieth century is not at present capable of fulqlling them. What is inferred from this depends, in part, upon what is seen to l,Je the causes of this mass incapability, and, in part, simply upon the degree of sanguinity. In nineteenthcentury liberalism, the causes were seen largely as ignorance; so the answer was education. This was true of classic liberalism and, in part, of classic socialism, although the meaning and the further reasons for ignorance were more sophisticatedly worked out by socialist than by liberal
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writers. In the twentieth century, serious thinkers have further developed this socialist view, whether or not they· know it as socialist, and have come to see that the whole structure of modern society, in particular its bureaucratic and communication systems virtually expropriate from all but a smtives to themselves and to others. To explain behavior by referring it to an inferred and abstract "motive" is one thing. To analyze the observable lingual mechanisms of motive imputation and avowal, as they function in conduct is quite another. Rather than fixed elements "in" an 1 See C. Wright Mills, "Bibliographical Appendices," Section I, 4: "Sociology of Language" in Contemporary Social Theory, Ed. by Barnes, Becker & Becker, New York, 1940. • See G. H. Mead, "Social Psychology as Counterpart of Physiological Psychology," Psychol. Bul., VI: 401-408, 1909; Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstructign, New York, 1940; L. V. Wiese-Howard Becker, Systematic Sociology, part I, New York, 1932; J. Dewey, "All psychology is either biological or social psychology," Psycho/. Rev., vol. 24:276.
439
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individual, motives are the terms with which interpretation of conduct by social actors proceeds. This imputation and avowal of motives by actors are social phenomena, to be explained. The differing reasons men give for their actions are not themselves without reasons. First, we must demarcate the general conditions under which such motive imputation and avowal seem to occur:~ Next, we must give a characterization of motive in denotable terms and an explanatory paradigm of why certain motives are verbalized rather than others. Then, we must indicate 111echanisms of the linkage of vocabularies of motive to systems of action. What we want is an analysis of the integrating, controlling, and specifying function a certain type of speech fulfills in socially situated actions. The generic situation in which imputation and avowal of motives arise, involves, first, the social conduct of the (stated) programs of languaged creatures, i.e., programs and actions oriented with reference to the actions and talk of others; second, the avowal and imputation of motives is concomitant with the speech form known as the "question." Situations back of questions typically involve alternative or unexpected programs or actions of whiCh phases analytically denote "crises." 4 The question is distinguished in that it usually elicits another verbal action, not a motor response. The question is an element in conversation. Conversation may be concerned with the factUal features of a situation as they are seen or believed to be or it may seek to integrate and promote a set of diverse social actions with reference to the situation and its normative pattern of expectations. It is in this latter assent and dissent phase of conversation that persuasive and dissuasive speech and vocabulary arise. For men live in immediate acts of exa The importance of this initial task for research is clear. Most researches on the verbal level merely ask abstract questions of ,individuals, but if we can tentatively delimit the situations in which certain motives may be verbalized, we can use that delimitation in the constructjon of situational questions, and we shall be testing deductions from our theory. ~On the "question" and "conversation," see G. A. DeLaguna, Speech: Its Function and Development, 37 (and index), New Haven, 1927. For motives in crises, see J. M. Williams, The Foundations of Social Science, 435 ff, New York, 1920.
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perience and their attentions are directed outside themselves until acts are in some way frustrated. It is then that awareness of self and of motive occur. The "question" is a lingual index of such conditions. The avowal and imputation of motives are features of such conversations as arise in "question" situations. Motives are imputed or avowed as answers to questions interrupting acts or -programs. Motives are words. Generically, to what do they refer? They do not denote any elements "in" individuals. They stand for anticipated situational consequences of questioned conduct. Intention or purpose (stated as a "program") is awareness of anticipated consequence; motives are names for consequential situations, and .surrogates for actions leading to them. Behind questions are possible alternative actions with their termimtl consequences. "Our introspective words for motives are rough, shorthand descriptions for certain typical patterns of discrepant and conflicting stimuli."" The model of purposive conduct associated with Dewey's name may briefly be stated. Individuals confronted with "alternative acts" perform one or the other. of them on the basis of the differential consequences which they anticipate. This nakedly utilitarian schema is inadequate be- ' cause: (a) the "alternative acts" of social conduct "appear" most often in lingual form, as a question, stated by one's self or by another; (b) it is more adequate to say that individuals act in terms of anticipation of named consequences. Among such names and in some technologically oriented lines of action there may appear such terms as "useful," "practical," "serviceable," etc., terms so "ultimate" to the pragl)1atists, and also to certain sectors of the American population in these delimited situations. However, there are other areas of population with different vocabularies of motives. The choice of lines of action is accompanied by representations, and selection among thel)1, of their situational termini. Men discern situations with particular 5 K. Burke, Permanence and Change, 45, New York, 1936. I am indebted to this book for several leads which are systematized into the present statement.
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vocabularies, and it is in terms of some delimited vocabulary that they anticipate consequences of conduct. 6 Stable vocabularies of motives link anticipated consequences and specific actions. There is no need to invoke "psychological" terms like "desire" or "wish" as explanatory, since they themselves must be explained ·socially. 7 Anticipation is a subvocal or overt naming of terminal phases and/or social consequences of conduct. When an individual names consequences, he elicits the behaviors for which the name is an integrative cue. In a social situation, implicit in the names for consequences is the social dimension of motives. Through such vocabularies, types of societal controls operate. Also, the terms in which the question is asked often will contain both alternatives: "Love or Duty?", "Business or Pleasure?·" Institutionally different situations have different vocabularies of motive appropriate tp their respective behaviors. This sociological conception of motives as relatively stable lingual phases of delimited situations is quite consistent with Mead's program to approach conduct socially and from the outside. It keeps clearly in mind that "both motives and actions very often originate not from within but from the situation in which individuals find themselves. . . . " 8 It translates the question of "why" 9 into a "how" that is answerable in terws of a situation and its typical vocabulary of motives, i.e., those which conventionally accompany that type situation and function as cues and justifications for normative actions in it. It has been indicated that the question is usually an index to the avowal and imputation of motives. Max Weber defi~es motive as a complex of meaning, which appears to the actor himself or to the observer to be an adequate • See such experiments as C. N. Rexroad's "Verbalization in Multiple Choice Reactions," Psycho/. Rev., Vol. ~3:458, 1926. 7 (;f. J. Dewey, "Theory of Valuation," Int. Ency. of Unified Science, New York, 1939. 8 K. Mannheim, Man and Society, 249, London, 1940. • Conventionally answerable by reference to "subjective factors" within individuals. R. M. Maciver, "The Modes of the Question Why," J. of Soc. Phil., April, 1940. Cf. also his "The Imputation of Motives," Amer. J. of Sociol., July 1940.
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ground for his conduct. The aspect of motive which thi~ conception grasps is its intrinsically social character. A satisfactory or adequate motive is one that satisfies the questioners of an act or program, whether it be the other's or the actor~s. A~ a word, a motive tends to be one which is to the actor and to the other members of a situation an unquestioned answer to questions concerning social and lingual conduct. A ~table motive is an ultimate in justificatory conversation. The words which in a type situation will fulfi)l this function are circumscribed by the vocabulary of motives acceptable for such situations. Motives are accepted justifications for present, future, or past programs or acts. To term them justipcation is not to deny their efficacy. Often anticipations of acceptable justifications will control
systematic motive-mongering. Such intellectual phenomena are underlaid by split and conflicting sections of an individuated society which is characterized by the existence of competing vocabularies of motive. Intricate constellations of motives, for example, are components 9f business enterprise in America. Such patterns have encroached on the old style vocabulary of the virtuous relation of men and women: duty, love, kindness. Among certain classes, the romantic, virtuous, and pecuniary motives are confused. The asking of the question: "Marriage for love or money?" is significant, for the pecuniary is now a constant and almost ubiquitous motive, a common denominator of many others. 22 Back of "mixed motives" and "motivational conflicts" are competing or discrepant situational patterns and their respective vocabularies of motive. With shifting and interstitial situations, each of several alternatives may belong to disparate systems of action which have differing vocabularies of motives appropriate to them. Such conflicts manifest vocabulary patterns that have overlapped in a marginal individual and are not easily compartmentalized in clearcut situations. Besides giving promise of explaining an area of lingual and societal fact, a further advantage of this view of motives is that with it we should be able to give sociological accounts of other theories (terminologies) of motivation. This is a task for the sociology of knowledge. Here I can refer only to a few theories. I have already referred to the Freudian terminology of motives. It is apparent that these motives are those of an upper bourgeois patriarchal group with strong sexual and individualistic orientation. When introspecting on the couches of Freud, patients used the only vocabulary of motives they knew; Freud got his hunch and guided further talk. Mittenzwey has dealt with similar 22
Also motives acceptably imputed and avowed for one system of action may be diffused into other domains and gradually come to be accepted by some as a comprehensive portrait of the motive of men. This happened in the case of the economic man and his motives. ·
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points at length. 23 Widely diffused in a postwar epoch, psychoanalysis was never popular in France where control of sexual behavior is not puritanical. 24 To converted individuals who have become accustomed to the psychoanalytic terminology of motives, all others seem selfdeceptive.25 In like manner, to many believers in Marxism's terminology o~ power, struggle, and economic motives, all others, including Freud's, are due to hypocrisy or ignorance. An individual who has assimilated thoroughly only business congeries of motives will attempt to apply these motives to all situations, home and wife included. It should be noted that the business terminology of motives has its intellectual articulation, even as psychoanalysis and Marxism have. It is .significant that since the Socratic period many "theories of motivation" have been linked with ethical and religious terminologies. Motive is that in man which leads him to do good or evil. Under the aegis of religious institutions, men use vocabularies of moral motives: they call acts and programs "good" and "bad," and impute these qualities to the soul. Such lingual behavior is part of the process of social control. Institutional practices and their vocabularies of motive exercise control over delimited ranges of possible situations. One could make a typal catalog of religious motives from widely read religious texts, and test its explanatory power in various denominations and sects. 26 In many situations of contemporary America, conduct is controlled and integrated by hedonistic language. For large population sectors in certain situations, pleasure and pain are now unquestioned motives. For given periods and 23 Kuno Mittenzwey, "Zur Sociologie der psychoanalystischer Erkenntnis," in Max Scheler, ed. Versuche zu einer Sociologie des Wissens, 365-375, Munich, 1924. 2 • This fact is interpreted by some as supporting Freudian theories. Nevertheless, it can be just as adequately grasped in the scheme here outlined. 25 See K. Burke's acute discussion of Freud, op. cit., Part I. 20 Moral vocabularies deserve a special statement. Within the viewpoint herein outlined many snarls concerning "value-judgments," etc., can be cleared up.
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societies, these situations should be empirically determined. Pleasure and pain should not be reified and imputed to human nature as underlying principles of all action. Note that hedonism as a psychological and an ethical doctrine gained impetus in the modern world at about the time when older moral-religious motives were being debunked and simply discarded by "middle-class" thinkers. Back of the hedonistic terminology lay an emergent social pattern and a new vocabulary of motives. The shift of unchallenged motives which gripped the communities of Europe was climaxed when, in reconciliation, the older religious and the hedonistic terminologies were identified: the "good" is the "pleasant." The conditioning situation was similar in the Hellenistic world with the hedonism of the Cyrenaics and Epicureans. What is needed is to take all these terminologies of motive and locate them as vocabularies of motive in historic epochs and specified situations. Motives are of no value apart from the delimited societal situations for which they are the appropriate vocabularies. They must be situated. At best, socially unlocated terminologies of motives represent unfinished attempts to block out social areas of motive imputation and avowal. Motives vary in content and character with historical epochs and societal structures. Rather than interpreting actions and language as external manifestations of subjective and deeper lying elements in individuals, the research task is the locating of particular types of action within typal frames of normative actions and socially situated clusters of motive. There is no explanatory value in subsuming various vocabularies of motives under some terminology or list. Such procedure merely confuses the task of explaining specific cases. The languages of situations as given must be considered a valuable portion of the data to be interpreted and related to their conditions. To simplify these vocabularies of motive into a socially abstracted terminology is to destroy the legitimate use of motive in the explanation of social actions.
4
METHODOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE
Many thinkers who have addressed themselves to the problem hold ·that the sociology of knowledge has no relevance for epistemology; that sociological investigations of inquiries have no consequences for norms of "truth and validity." 1 It is possible that the problem has been instituted in too narrow and yet in too gross a fashion. It is true that from knowledge of the "social position" of a 'Von Schelting's review of Mannheim's ldeologie u11d Utopie concludes: "The nonsense first begins when one believes that factual origin and social factors . . . in any way affect the value of ideas and conceptions thus originated, and especially the theoretic achievements" (American Sociological Review, I, No. 4, 634). Thus the relating of modes of thought to social-historical situations is conceived to carry with it no legitimate criticism or reformulation of "traditional" criteria of validity and truth ( cf. T. Parsons' review of von Schelting's Max Weber's Wissenschaftslehre [American Sociological Review, I, No. 4 675 f]). Hans Speier, in recording a similar belief, speaks of the "encroachment of sociology upon a philosophic domain" and' distinguishes between "promotive" and "theoretical" thought; the latter, conceived to have "truth" alone as its aim, apparently is not to be analyzed sociologically. With GrUnwald, Speier says: "The validity of a judgment does not depend upon its genesis" (American Sociological Review, I, No. 4, 682, in reviewing E. GrUnwald's Das Problem einer Soziologie des Wissens; cf. also Speier, "The Social Determination of Ideas," Social Research, V, 2). Thus, on epistemological grounds, von Schelting and Speier would limit the subject matter and implications of sociology of knowledge. R. K. Merton apparently accepts this negative position in "The Sociology of Knowledge," Isis, XXVII, No. 3 (75), 502-3. R. Bain and R. M. Mciver, in papers read at Atlantic City, 1937, also indicate that they see no epistemological consequences of sociology of knowledge. G. H. Sabine takes this position in "Logic and Social Studies," Philosophical Review, XLVIII (1930), 173-74. 453
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thinker one cannot deduce that his statements are true or false. In this crude sense sociology of knowledge is epistemologically inconsequential. But the matter is more complicated; the consequences are less direct. An analytic examination of the negative positions concerning the epistemological consequences of sociology of knowledge and a resolution of tpe generic issue to which it is presumably addressed will advance obliquely and will include answers to the questions: ( 1 ) What is the. generic character, derivation, and function of epistemologic forms, criteria of truth, or verificatory models? (2) Exactly wherein, at what junctures, and in what types of inquiry may social' factors enter as determinants of kr.10wledge? It is apparent that "truth" and "objectivity" have application and meaning only in terms. of some accepted model or system of verification. He who asserts the irrelevance of social conditions to the truthfulness of propositions ought to state the conditions upon which he conceives truthfulness actually to depend; he ought to specify exactly what it is in thinking that sociological factors cannot explain and upon which truth and validity do rest. Those who take the negative position must state what sort of things these criteria of truth and validity are, how they are derived, and how they function. There have been and are many ways of determining "truth" and "validity." Which specific criteria do they have in mind? The canons of Aristotelian logic? Fritz Mauthner conducted a vigorous, if brief, sociological examination of these canons, suggesting that the diffusion of Indian grammatic studies and traditional cultural factors influenced their formulation and persistence. 3 Dewey has offered aQ empiraclly based theory which views this logic culturally as formulatory of the categories of speech prevalent in Greek society. He has also shown the operation of class and consequent social-esthetic factors in these criteria of validity, and the conditions under which they arose. 3 · • Aristotle, trans. C. D. Gordon (New York, 1907). 3 Experience and Nature (New York, 1929), pp. 48-50, 87, 91-92. For references to and a statement of a sociological theory of the character and shifts in logics cf. my "Language, Logic, and Culture," American Sociological Review, IV (1939), 5.
METHODOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES
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The official and monopolistic paradigm of validation and truth accepted by medieval scholasticism was most certainly influepced by such factors as "the hierarchically centralized position of the intellectual elite with its political as well as intellectual power and its strict memory, faith, and dialectical norms of recruitment. Also by the fact that by virtue of .this soc~al organization for several centuries, the logica utens and the perception schema of each individual thinker were common to major sectors of the elite." 4 Does the position under question invoke some more modern epistemological formulations, say those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Mannheim has soundly suggested that these were conditioned by the revolutionary status of the middle class, particularly by its "individualistic" character. 5 E. Conze has capably suggested th~ "Bourgeois Origins of Nominalism. " 6 Certainly Descarte's protestant epistemology is open to sociological investigation. And the "utilitarian" and "experimental" canons of verification were certainly given impetus by the social ethos of seventeenth-century Puritanism. 7 There have been and are diverse canons and criteria of validity and truth, and these criteri-a, upon which determinations of the truthfulness of propositions at any time depend, are themselves, in their persistence and change, legitimately open to social-historical relativization. 8 Moreover, we have at hand sociological theories concerning the character and emergence of certain of them. Criteria, or observational and verificatory models, are not transcendental. They are not drawn theoretically pure from a Greek heaven, although "choice" and usage of one set of them may be so justified. Nor are they part of an a priori, or in• C. Wright Mills, "Types of Rationality" (unpublished MS). 5 K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. L. Wirth and E. Shils (New York, 1936); Part I, esp. pp. 24-28. "Marxist Quarterly, I, 1; Nos. 2 and 3 contain discussions; see also P. P. Wiener, "Notes on Leibnitz's Conception of Logic and Its Historical Context," Philosophical Review, November, 1939. 7 See R. K. Merton, Science, Society, and Tec;hnology in Seventeenth-Century England (Bruges, Belgium, 1938), and references therein. 8 In addition to studies cited above, see Sorokin, who isolates and utilizes several different forms of validation as key items for study (Social and Cultural Dynamics [New York, 1937], Vol. II}.
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nate, equipment of "the mind" conceived to be intrinsically logical. 9 On the contrary: the historical diversity of such models supports Dewey's view that they are generated by and are drawn from inquiries proceeding in given times and societies. Dewey's thesis concerning the character and historical occasion of logical and epistemological formulations10 empirically accounts for the historical data. For forty years he has contended that the verificatory models upon which imputations of truthfulness rest are forms drawn from existent inquiries and have no meaning apart from inquiries: "Inquiry (logic e.g.) is the causa cognoscendi of logical forms, primary inquiry is itself causa essendi of the forms which inquiry into inquiry discloses. " 11 Careful examination reveals no fund~mental disagreement between Dewey's and Mannheim's conceptions of the gen-:eric character and derivation of epistemological forms. 12 "The indirect approach to truth," states Mannheim, "though social history will in the end- be more fruitful than a direct logical approach." Mannheim's view overlaps the program that Dewey has pursued since 1903, when he turned from traditional concerns and squabbles over the ubiquitous relation of thought in general to reality at large, to a specific examination of the context, office, and outcome of a type of inquiry. 1s In terms of the norms upon which ideas were accepted and rejected, C. S. Peirce analyzed four segments from "E.g., Hans Speier speaks of "a property of human nature which enables man to search for truth" ("The Social Determination of Ideas," op. cit., pp. 186, 193). For a contrary view see below; also A. Goldel!weiser's Robots or Gods? (New York, 1931), p. 53. 10 Logic; The Theory of Inquiry (New York, 1938 ), chap. i; "Philosophy," Research in Social Science, ed. W. Gee, pp. 251 ff. See also H. Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction (Chicago, ·1938), chap. i. 11 Dewey, Logic, p. 4. 12 f:.g., " . . . the representative modes of thought and their strucc ture, from which a conception is built up as to the nature of truth in general . . . the concept of truth itself is dependent upon the already existjng types of knowledge" (Mannheim, op. cit., p. 262). 13 Studies in Logical Theory (Chicago, 1909), chaps. i-iv.
METHODOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES
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4
Western intellectual history.l His comparative and quasisociological work was preliminary to his own acceptance of an observational and verificatory model which he himself analyzed out and generalized from laboratory science. But not all thinkers, even philosophers, have gone about the "choice" of what verificatory model was to guide their thinking so consciously and thoroughly as Peirce. The "acceptance" (usage) and "rejection" of verificatory models by individual thinkers and by elites is another juncture at which extralogical, possibly sociological, factors may enter and be of consequence to the validity of an elite's thinking. Mannheim's "total, absolute, and universal" type of "ideology" in which social position bears upon "the structure of consciousness in its totality," including form as well as content, may be interpreted to mean this social-historical relativization of a model of truth, or the influence of a "social position" upon "choice" of one model as over again~t another. Mannheim's remarks do not contradict this more explicit and analytic statement. Those who contend that sociological investigations of thinking have no consequences for the truth or validity of that thinking misunderstand the source and character of the criteria upon which truth and validity are at any time dependent. They also overlook the fact that these criteria themselves and the selective acceptances and rejections of one or another of them by various elites are open to cultural influence and sociological investigation. Apparently they assume, without surveying the possibilities, that whatever validity depends upon, it cannot be examined empirically and sociologically. This view is underpinned by a blurred theory of knowledge and mind that prohibits analysis of those aspects or junctures in knowledge processes at which extra-logical factors may enter and be relevant to the truthfulness of results. For their attack is often against the view that the validity of a judgment depends upon its genesis, u "Methods of Fixing Belief," Collected Papers (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), Vol. V, Book 11, chap. iv, sec. v. Peirce's pragmatic papers contain very suggestive leads for the sociologist of knowledge (see esp. sees. ii and v).
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and they are iQclined to interpret "genesis" in terms of an individual's motivation for thoughtY' It is true that the current "scientific" thought-model, drawn in the main from post-Renaissance physical inquiry, distinguishes between the truth of the results and the motives and social conditions of an inquiry. For this paradigm demands that assertions be verified by certain operations which do not depend upon the motives or social position of the assertor. Social position does not directly affect the truthfulness of propositions tested by this verificatory model. But social positions may well affect whether or not it or some other model is used by types of thinkers today and in other periods. By no means have all thinkers in all times employed tl:lis particular verificatory model. Indeed, many do not now accept it. Many contemporary social scientists only know this physical-science model by name, and their "usage" is limited to the sprinkling of ·a few terms through their writings. This particular model did not and could not have existed prior to the wholesale rise of physical science in western Europe, for it was drawn from this type of inquiry. But even in inquiries satisfying this paradigm the motives or social positions of the thinker do not exhaust the aspects of inquiries which may be relative to social factors. Any observational and verificatory pattern may itself be socially relativized, and the "selection" and use of any model (as well as its specific diffusion pattern across variegated elites) is open to sociological explanation. Two other asp~cts of inquiries that are open to possible social-historical influences and that may bear on criteria, and hence on truthfulness and validity of results, may be mentioned: ( i) The categories upon which all discourse and inquiry depend are related to social situations, to cultural determinants. Numerous investigators 16 have indicated how conE.g., Speier distinguishes the type of thinking that in his view ' is not open to sociological investigation from the ·~promotive" type which is on the basis of the individual thinker's epistemological motivation and intention (see below). 10 Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, chap. i; ~- Vivas, "A Note on the Question of Class Science," Marxist Quarterly, I, No. 3, 437 ff.; see Mills, "Language, Logic, and Culture," op. cit., pp. 15
METHODOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES
459
cepts, as surrogates of societal contexts, may shape in~ quiries that apparently are foot loose and socially free. Detection of the societally conditioned meanings of the terms upon which an inquiry depends may be viewed as a critique of the warrantability of this inquiry's results. In C. W. Morris' terms the "pragmatic" (which includes the sociologiCal) dimension of the language process is basically related to the semantical and syntactical. 17 What is taken as problematic and what concepts are available and used may be interlinked in certain inquiries. 18 It should be noted that within the sociological perspective, the problems which occasion reflection may be viewed from numerous angles as connective of intellect and culture. Viewing the selection of problems in terms of motivating values is only one, the grossest, mode of connection. (ii) Closely linked with such a view of categories is the social theory of perception. In acquiring a technical vocabulary with its terms and classifications, the thinker is acquiring, as it were, a set of colored spectacles. He sees a world of objects that are technically tinted and patternized. A specialized language constitutes a veritable a priori form of perception and cognition, 19 which are certainly relevant to the results of inquiry. Epistemologies have differed widely as to the manners in which empirical elements enter into knowledge. But however variously they have incorporated empirical elements, in looking at the world for verification their concepts have conditioned what they have seen. Different technical elites possess different perceptual capa676,80, for a statement and references; and particularly M. Granet's application of Durkheim's sociological theory of categories, La Pensee chinoise (Paris, 1938) also C. Wright Mills, "M. Granet's Contribution to Sociology of Knowledge" (mimeographed material, l)epartment of Sociology, University of Wisconsin [1940])-avaiJ, able upon request. 17 Foundations of the Theory of Signs ("International Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences," Vol. I, No. 2 [Chicago, 1938]). This book and the movements it represents are very suggestive American sources ~or sociology of knowledge. 18 Mills, "Language, Logic, and Culture," op. cit., pp. 675 ff. '" See G. A. DeLaguna, Speech (New Haven, 1927), p. 344 and Index: "Perception"; also M. Sherif, The Psychology of Social Norms (New York, 19 36) (see references).
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cities. Empirical verification cannot be a simple and positivistic mirror-like operation. Thus the observational dimensions of any verificatory model are influenced by the selective language of its users. And this language is not without social-historical imprint. The implications of this social view of perception for simple correspondence theories of truth, e.g., are obvious. Failure to recognize such junctures in inquiry that are relevant to the "truthfulness," "objectivity," and "impartiality" of the results of inquiry issues in an arbitrary limitation of the legitimate subject matter of an empirical sociology of knowledge. An argument long used against all forms of relativism frequently appears in discussions 20 of the present problem: either the relativist's own assertion and argument are themselves relative, in which case he has no grounds for denying or imputing truth to the thought of others, or his argument and assertion are unconditionally true, and hence relativism is self-contradictory. 21 This argument may be put in strict logical form: (a) Thinking is functional of cultural factors. (Hence, its "objective," "impartial validity," is destroyed.) (b) The sociology of knowledge is a type of thinking. (c) Therefore, the sociology of knowledge is functional of cultural factors. (Hence, it cannot be "objective," "valid.") Now Mannheim himself has empirically documented abclinkage.22 He has indicated the cultural and political conditions of the sociology of knowledge. It is the premises hung after the "hences" and their assumptions that we need to examine. These anti-relationistic arguments apparently ignore the character and status of epistemological forms (see sees. (i) and ( ii) above). They assume the existence of an absolute truth having no connection to inquiry; and they are signifi20 E.g., von Schelting, American Sociological Review, p. 667. I am leaving open whether or not von Schelting's is an adequate statement of Mannheim's position. I am concerned not with defense or appraisal of Mannheim's work, nor of von Shelting's in toto, but only with the one point. In general, however, I find Mannheim's "relationism" (Ideology and Utopia, esp, pp. 253 ff., 269-70) quite tenable. The position is logically imperfect and unsatisfactory only from an absolutist viewpoint. 21 Cf. E. Vivas' statement and able dissection of this argument (op. cit., p. 443). 22 /deology and Utopia. chap. i.
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cant only from an absolutist viewpoint. The imputations of the sociologist of knowledge may be tested with reference to the verifi,catory model gen~ralized, e.g., by Peirce and Dewey. Their truthfulness is then in terms of this model. Granted that this model is no absolute guaranty, it seems the most probable we have at present. (As a practical fact, if we would socialize our thought among professional thinkers today, we must cast it in such terms.) Criteria are themselves developing things. A precondition for "correctipg" the model for future use is self-consciously to use it now. "Inquiry into inquiry [logic] is ... a circular process, it does not depend on anything extraneous to inquiry." 23 The assertions of the sociologist of knowledge escape the "absolutist's dilemma" because they can refer to a degree of truth and because they may include the conditions under which they are true. Only conditional assertions are translatable from one perspective to another. Assertions can properly be stated as probabilities, as more or less true. And only in this way can we account for the fact that scientific inquiry is self-correcting. The sociologist may without contradiction also point out social factors conditioning failure to use this particular model. Mannheim quite correctly claims that new criteria for social science may emerge from the inquiries of the sociology of knowledge. It is entirely possible. I shall elaborate the point below. It i~ enough here to realize that "traditional criteria" emerge from logical analysis of "traditional" types of inquiry. The attempt to restrict the object matter and implications of the sociology of knowledge in order to save its assertions is mislocated and not consonant with modern theories of knowledge. 24 Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, chap. i. "' Moreover, in his criticism of Mannheim, von Schelling does not appear to take into account the fact that the existence of purpose and perspective does not necessarily mean that the results of inquiry must be false; it merely means that its truth is always conditional, not absolute. Since the turn of the century many logicians and social psychologists have contended that all inquiry has a purposive element and is within a particular perspective. Mannheim's epistemological work, fragmentary as it is, does not deny the fact of purpose and perspective in an effort to s1ve some "traditional conception of truth" framed on a spectator, godlike theory of mind. 23
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Another such attempt is advanced by those who would limit the sociology of knowledge to investigation of the conscious attempts of a promoter to find a public; the social conditions of types of promoters; means of diffusing ideas persuasive of values, etc. 2;; From this point of view the sociology of knowledge can have no epistemological relevance or object matter because it can study thoroughly only a "promotive" type of thought. In so far as it examines "theoretical thinking" ("the aim of [which] is ... simply truth"), it is apparently limited to examination of "the selection of certain problems." In addition to individual motivation, there is a second differentiation of the two types of thinking: the public of the philosopher (theoretic) is "the timeless ranks of those who seek the truth." Neither of these differentiations is analytic enough. It does nof help any to say that they are different "qualities of thinking." I take this public of the "theoretical" thinker to be the members of a technical elite, generically delimited as (a) those who read his work or who he thinks will; that is, those participating, more or less meaningfully, in his universe of discourse. (b) They are persons engaged in doubting, criticizing, and fixing their beliefs, i.e., in thinking, 26 (c) in a way that satisfies the conditions of some thought-model, the forms of which they are more or less aware of and whi-:h they strive to follow. This is what "seeking truth" means. Thus analyzed sociologically, "philosophers" and "theoretic" thinking certainly constitute data for the sociologist of knowledge. The very existence of such a group is sociologically significant. The origins and consequences of such groups in various contexts have received little explicit attention. I have already indicated how the "selection" of criteria, and criteria themselves, are open to sociological investigation, how the categories of technical discourse, the problems addressed, and perceptual schemata may influence the direction and validating forms of thinking. 27 !!5 E.g., Speier, "Social Determination of Ideas," op. cit., pp. 199 and 200. ""See Peirce, op. cit. Also E. Freeman, The Categories of Peirce ("Chicago Series" [Chicago, 1937]), pp. 39-40. "'Speier's failure to recognize these points as open to social influ~ ence is probably conditioned by exclusive concern with one type
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Furthermore, for a thinker merely to wish, or to be motivated, to attain truth does not guarantee or imply whether or not his assertions are true. Much less, whether he or they are open to social relativization. "True" is an adjective applied to propositions that satisfy the forms of an accepted model of verification. In the model now dominant among secular, professional thinkers, verification is independent of the individual's motive for thinking, whether it be "truth" or "persuasion." I do not see that we are justified at this stage of research in differentiating types of thinking in terms of epistemological motivation. Such are not the kind of types we need and can use in dissection. For it would take a social-psychological analysis of a thinker to determine whether or not he really was, or believed he was, aiming at truth, i.e., following or attempting to follow a verificatory model. One could properly identify "theoretic" thinking only in terms of a given verificatory model. In research we cannot fruitfully impose "ours" upon past thinkers. There have been several models in Western thought, and I have already indicated that they are themselves open to social-historical relativization. 28 There is in our time no common form of validation to which all will submit their assertions. This epistemological condition presents an opportunity to study comparatively the diverse norms themselves, their function, and genesis. In the face of epistemologic diversity and confusion it seems foolish to call our work irrelevant to some one arbitrarily selected set of norms which were derived from a particular gamut of inquiry or concocted from miscellaneous beliefs. of socio-psychologic mechanism connecting ideation and culture. In his article he accepts only "need," "problem," and "interests" of the thinker. "The relations between ideas and social reality is . . . constituted in the medium of needs" ("Social Determination of Ideas," op. cit., p. 183). See my "Language, Logic, and Culture," op cit., in which this view is criticized and other modes of relation advanced. 28 Speier's paper ("Social Determination of Ideas," op. cit.), is valuable in its acute remarks on "social actions" and the ambiguity of the term "need" as it appears in many sociologies of knowledge; but he has failed to analyze what he terms "theoretic" thinking. The limitations he would exact of sociology of knowledge are without adequate justification.
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But the tasks for sociologists of knowledge implied by such statements are not too clear. They need to be indicated more precisely. Of course, as Wirth has indicated, we aspire to contribute to "the social-psychological elaboration of the theory of knowledge itself." I am here concerned with pointing up the usefulness of such work to sociologists, i.e., the methodological functio11 of sociology of knowledge. The sociologist of knowledge need not rest with factual examination and relativization of aspects of knowledge processes. For such experience places him strategically, on a comparative and contextual basis, for positive methodological construction. We need here to realize Dewey's identification of epistemology with methodology. This realization carries the belief that the deriving of norms from some one type of inquiry (even though it have wide prestige, e.g., "physical science") is not the end of epistemology. In its "epistemologic function" the sociology of knowledge is specifically propaedeutic to the construction of sound methodology for the social sciences. 29 Had Mannheim consistently recognized this, he would have avoided ambiguities and mislocations in his work. But, on the whole, Mannheim as epistemologist is concerned with the detection and correction of limitations of social-political inquiries. 30 In his review of Rice's Methodsa 1 he abstracts some notions and forms which control inquiries of American and German sociologists, criticizes each style of study by the other in supplementary fashion, and briefly links the two in a general research model which he submits social inquiry should follow if it would issue into firm knowledge. ""L. Wirth has correctly indicated that an incipient sociology of knowledge has often been an unexploited by-product of methodological discussions (Preface to Mannheim, op. cit., pp. xvii-xxiii). ""As was Spencer, Study of Sociology (1873) and J. S. Mill, A System of Logic, Book VI. Notice the manner in which Spencer moves from discovery of procedural fallacies having social sources, from "the many modes in which evidence may be vitiated," to the construction of methodological techniques designed to obviate such fallacies and vitiations. The idea that detection of social sources of error may lead to sounder methodology is clearly evidenced. In this connection cf. E. Durkheim, Regles de Ia methode sociologique (Paris, 1895), chap. ii. :u American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XXXVIII, No.2 (1932).
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Von Schelting is incorrect in implying that Mannheim does not "postulate the possibility of objective validity for cognitive achievements. ":~ 2 In fact, Mannheim does not stop with the mere assumption. He goes on as a sound methodologist to attempt formulations of criteria for social inquiry in terms of existent modes of social thought as empirically ascertained by logic and a contextual sociology of knowledge. If Mannheim has fallen short in his attempts to enunciate sound criteria for social inquiries, it is not due to misconceptions of the character of epistemological forms nor to "epistemological inconsistency." The desire to treat politically important problems without being a victim to bias was responsible for the development in Germany of . . . . Wissenssoziologie. This new branch of research, intended to be an organ of critical self-control has already succeeded in detecting and subjecting to control important sources of error. 33 This certainly is indicative of one generic meaning of the epistemological relevance of sociology of knowledge. The sociologist of knowledge joins the live logician and social methodologist in the critical building of sounder methods for social research. Among the specific issues he may fruitfully problematize are those concerning the respective methods of physical and social inquiry. There are those who, in the name of science, would impose the procedural forms of the former on the latter in wholesale fashion; and there are social students who will have nothing to do with physical science. The sociologist of knowledge grounded in comparative understanding may not only establish social sources for the two extreme positions, but, constructively, he may implement the planned alteration of certain physical forms that are found advisable to achieve fruitfully the transfer. "Experiment" as a verificatory form is an instance in •• Op. cit., p. 667. 88 Mannheim, op. cit., p. 281; also see Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (New York, 1940), in which methodological problems of "social planning," as a type of thought, are constructively presented.
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point. Dewey, e.g., has abstracted this form from physical inquiry and has attempted to generalize it for all "inquiry qua inquiry." His writings are informed by failure to see fully and clearly the difficulties and the ambiguities associated with the physical paradigm of inquiry and particularly, "experiment," when applied to social data. Experiment in a societal situation does have characteristics and problems which experiment in a laboratory does not possess. For instance, the "control" and manipulation necessary to "experimental" work as it occurs in physical science often assume political and evaluative dimensions that experiment in laboratory contexts does not. 34 And the "reconstitution" of an object, which according to Dewey is necessary before it can function as an object of knowledge, involves many issues. To say the least, the attempt to carry this laboratory technique over into social data precfpitates methodological and political problems to which Dewey and his disciples have not squarely addressed themselves. Inadequacy at this point, and others, suggests that there is need to analyze social researches in their cultural and intellectual contexts and attempt to articulate the inchoate rules implicit within them. In this manner we may empirically supplant the a priori assumptions that there is or is not, that there should or should not, be any essential difference between social inquiry and physical science. Such analysis would also enable explicit and sophisticated formulation of problems peculiar to social inquiry. Problems of "value" arise within and frustrate social inquiry. To state one aspect of the problem: how do the research problems actually addressed by social scientists involve evaluations and how, if at all, do such involvements condition the truthfulness of results? 3 " Questions of value should not be taken iiberhaupt. Located as snarls in social inquiry, questions of value become specific and genuine. They need to be answered by sociological analyses of spe"' See L. H. Lanier's recent presentation of the point (Southern Review, Vol. V, No. 1, 1939). For comprehensive documentation and partial ramification cf. my "Reflection, Behavior, and Culture," pp. 91-102, available at the University of Texas library. 35 Cf. T. Parsons' (Structure of Social Action [New York, 1937], pp. 593, 601 ff.) references to and discussion of Max Weber's "Wertbeziehung."
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cific disciplines and problems arising in them. Not only the content of values in social inquiries should be detected, but how values creep in, and how, if at all, they condition the direction, completeness, and watrantability of the results of research, In this way we may gain a position from which to formulate rules of evidence that will prevent exhortation from informing our results. Such contextual examinations will permit precise definition of issues that are now vague. Perhaps the central methodological problem of the social sciences springs from recognition that often there is a disparity betwen lingual and social-motor types of behavior. Now the sociologist of knowledge is explicitly concerned with factual investigations of theJverbal components of ac.,. tion, with the "common sense," e.g., articulations of vari,. ous cultures. In this field one of his problems is the ascertaining of differential disparities obtaining between overt systems of behavior and what is said by the actors in different cultural contexts. Such systematic investigations would have consequences for the construction of techniques of investigation. 36 They should enable the methodologist to build into his methods standard margins of error, different rates of discount for different milieux. They would show (for various cultural actions, types of subjects, and various modes of verbalization) how much and in what direction disparities between talk and action will probably go. In this way factual investigations should provide a basis for rules for the control and guidance of evidence and inference.37 Because of its dominantly academic position in American sociology, systematic theorizing has proceeded in textbooks for students, not for research. What effect has this •• Since the writing of this paper, R. K. Merton has indicated the point with reference to a specific study ("Fact and Factitiousness in Ethnic Opinionnaires," American Sociological Review, February, 1940, pp. 21-22). 37 Here sociologists can garner suggestions from critical historiography which attempts to locate (culturally and biographically) observers (e.g., Roman popes) of social events in order properly to discount their recorded observations. This method is aware of the differences of societal occurrences as seen and written of by variously situated reporters. See A. W. Small, Origins of Sociology, esp. pp. 48, 84, 85, 98; H. E. Barnes, A History of Historical Writings (Norman, Okla., 1937), chap. x.
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had on the research model to which sociologists have looked for verification of their work, and hence on its validity? The ideal of intimacy of contact to which Cooley practically assimilated the conception of society, with consequent distortion and partiality, has its roots in certain American cultural traditions:~R and in compensation for the actual depersonalization and secondary character of life in an urban-industrial order. The emphasis upon continuous process as a central category in American sociology has perhaps aided the overlooking of revolutionary dislocations in "social change." Safe multiple-factor views as to historical causation are very convenient to a "liberal democratic" view of politically implemented social change. Pluralistic causes are easily carried to a point at which no action is possible; revolutionary manipulation calls for belief in a monistic cause. These are fragmentary items close at hand which the sociologist of knowledge is in a position to examine. The detailed self-location of social science, if systematically and sensitively performed, not only will lead to detection of errors in methods under way but constructively will result in ·presentation of sounder paradigms for future research. 88
T. V. Smith, Beyond Conscience (New York, 1934), e.g.: "Social distance is [considered] a dire fate . . . immoral in our Christian tradition" (p. 111).
THE LANGUAGE AND IDEAS OF ANCIENT CHINA
A few of the younger men in American sociology are becoming tired of the paste-pot eclecticism and text-book tolerance which have characterized much of their tradition. They are lear~ing that an open mind is all too often merely an empty head, and tolerance a substitution of politeness and politics for analytic rigor. Instead of the jumble of speculation and busy work which goes to make up large portions of socjal psychology, they feel the need of a sociological psychology that would be socially and historically relevant, and a strict counterpart and parallel endeavor to physiological science. 1 The sources of this view are many and farraginous, but back of it lies the French tradition. This lineage is related to De Bonald and De Maistre, and receives an initial crystallization in Comte's classification of the sciences, is recast and deepened by Espinas, DeRoberty and Durkheim. 2 With the latter, the view became formally wedded to the structure of French academic life. Out of the theories of Durkheim have flowed concrete and systematic monographs: five by Levy-Bruhl on the sociology of morality and preliterate mentality; Abel Rey, Francis Cornford, on Greek mentality and myth; Jane Harrison, Pierre-Maxime Schuhl on the Greeks; by Durkheim himself on Australian religion and mind; Alexandre Moret on Egypt; Halbwachs on the social frames of memory. There are others. These works are known to the rank and fiJe of Ameri1 Such a general view informs the theory and hypotheses contained in the writer's "Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive," American Sociological Review, Dec. 1940. "See E. Benot-Smullyan's Harvard thesis; microfilm No. 18, Dept. of Sociology, University of Wisconsin.
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can sociologists only at second hand, or more often at third. The unfortunate thing about this is that no secondary writings can adequately convey this tradition's fortunate balance of brilliant analysis with firm empiricism. Because they are methodologically sophisticated the members of the "Durkheim school" have educated eyes and if at times their theories are a little floating, careful formulation will render them vera causa. It is a bracing thing to corne to direct grips with such a monographic tradition, one that is carefully and consistently analytical. Besides this methodological awareness, French sociologists have made two related- contributions: a sociologistic psychology and the suggestive beginnings of a sociological theory of knowledge, mind, and language. Implicit within sociologistic psychology is the view now becoming known as sociology of knowledge. French -sociology is an extremely important source for this emerging discipline. For latent within the sociologistic psychology is its application to intellectual phenomena; and more to the point: that application has been, in France, through language: Society exercises an influence on our intellectual functions irt a particularly powerful manner through language, a social creation which exists before these functions and survives them. Also, through logical operations and scientific techniques which it subtilizes and, in fact, through all acquisitions of scientific results which so rapidly enrich our conceptology from the time that we begin to reflect. 3 In the monographs already mentioned this latent tendency has become articulated and it has been put to work on various bodies of data. Sociology of knowledge_ is at present many things to a lot of men. It is not yet wise to attempt rigid systematization of its outlines. More portions drawn from past theories must be picked out, torn apart, and tentatively welded to empirical monographs. But in one aspect, sociology of knowledge may be said to be working toward a theory of mind and knowledge which takes as its data not an individual's .performances or tests, but the entirety of intellectual history. A theory is an explanation of some phenom"G. Dumas (ed.), Traite de Psychologie, Vol. 2, 1924, page 1126.
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ena. Drawing upon the theories and findings of all sociaJ science, sociology of knowledge is an attempted explanation of the phenomena of intellectual history. In its explanations of these materials it appeals to the data of social history. AIJ.d in order to trace the mechanisms connective of mentality and society, the sociology of knowledge must be informed by a "psychology" that is socially, ethnologi' cally, and historically relevant. 4 Besides much of the French tradition, such a sociologistic statement of sociology of knowledge will be able to draw from (a) the German "folk-psychology" and (b) those American traditions that have received sophisticated articulation in the theories of G. H. Mead. (a) Folk-psychology undertook to approach the materials of "social psychology" through a study of cultural history. As it focused on mental operations, obviously intellectual history was adduced. The generation after Lazarus and Steinthal made the two currents of folk and physiological psychology major and generic channels of research. Within the cradle of Hegel's objective idealism the attempt was made to concretize and illuminate the movement of mental development with anthropological, historical, and linguistic data. Despite "individualistic" taints confusedly carried over into his sociological view, Wundt followed Lazarus and Steinthal in the effort to get at the operations of mind not through direct study of individuals, but in terms of the intellectual and social residues of mental processes. On the basis of the external facts of culture, Wundt approached psychological phenomena; on the basis of intellectual history and in terms of culture, he explored the operations of mind." (b). It seems strange that no one has explicitly raised the question of the data drawn upon by Mead in the construction and elaboration of his social theory of mind. Mead mentions dog fights in connection with the conversation of 4 Mills, C. Wright, "Language, Logic, and ·Culture," American Sociological Review, Oct. 1939. This article is addressed to this problem of the modus operandi. • See discussion of folk-psychology and references in Fay Karpf's American Social Psychology, pp. 42-54; Goldenweiser, Alexander, History, Psychology and Culture.
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gestures and the rise of the self. And he did have a dog that followed him about and fought other dogs so that Mead would be stimulated to thought. But after the days at Leipzig, Mead did not prosecute "research" in the laboratory manner. He was trained, or rather, had trained himself, in the history of general ideas. He knew the history of Western philosophy and of physical science thoroughly, intimately. I think his theory of mind is informatively qriented with reference to these histories: they were his subject matter and his data. His work on the histories of science and philosophy is less an "application" of a developed theory of mind than they are bases for it. Recall his extended discussions of the romantics: Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, and the definitive essay of scie11ce. 6 If you will read Mead from this angle he is more understandable, and certain of his obvious inadequacies are explainable: particularly tbe naive view of the reactions of the individual thinker to "the community." Only if "community" is read to mean "scientific or intellectual community" do cert~in portions of Mead's work appear adequate. Of course, the theory of mind is also an immanent development from Wundt, Baldwin, Cooley, Dewey, and Watson (and long before Watson the behavioristics of C. S. Peirce. 7 ) It is also informed by the Durkheim school. In the present essay I wish to make concrete this sociologistic view of sociology of knowledge by showing it at work in Marcel Granet's La Pensee Chinoise. However, I shall concentrate on presenting an abstract, or condensed summary, of the main contours of Granet's study itself. It seems advisable to translate in paraphrase as much of the content of the book as space permits. For it, or nothing on it in any detail, is at present available in English. 8 Thus we are ""Scientific Method and the Individual Thinker," in Creative Intelligence, edited by JohnDewey. 7 The Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce, vol. 5 (ed. by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss). 8 See, however, H. E. Barnes and Howard Becker, Social Thought From Lore To Science, vols. 1 and 2, index: "Granet;" and E. B. Smullyan's review of Granet, American Sociological Review, June 1936, pages 487-492, and Harvard Thesis op. cit.
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interested in Chinese thinking and its connections with the culture of the ancient East. But underlying Granet's detailed examination are the contours of a perspective that we wish to grasp: the sociological approach to mind and knowledge, to intellectual.history. There are several difficulties infecting Granet's theoretic orientation which we shall indicate and toward the more adequate solution of which we hope to contribute. And there is a new term I should like to introduce and make part of your working vocabulary. II
In La Civilization Chinoise, 9 Granet delineates the distinctive features of the societal and political system of the ancient Chinese. His framework is comprised of two major trends which he disengages from the drifts in ancient China's culture: "mastery over the soil and political unification." This work is complimentary to La Pensee Chinoise.10 It sets forth polit.ical and cultural reconstructions, wh.ile the latter is concerned with Chinese thinking. The trends ascertained and reconstructed in each sphere support and are integrated with those in the other. "From the epoch of Han" tbere is a general movement in t,he intellectual life toward a scholasticism "which is a counterpart to the orthodox discipline of Chinese life." 11 In all spheres Chinese life during this period moved toward the reign of orthodoxy and formalism. 12 La Pensee Chinoise is in no sense a manual of the literature or the philosophy of China. It is an attempt to set forth the "rules and symbols which govern the life of the mind in China." Of the four sections of the work, three are concerned with "common notions," notions which underly • Translated as Chinese Civilization, by K. E. Innes and M. R. Brailsford. 10 Both are concerned with the ancient period, concluding with the Han Dynasty. 11 Ibid., page 4. '"Ibid., page 427.
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and inform variant schools and sects. 13 Granet speaks of the "mental habits" and of "dispositions of mind." His concern is not with who thought what and when, nor with the minute connections between individual thinkers. He is attempting to lay ba··e "the anonymous tradition" which "nobody, in effect ... wrote" and the "institutional bases" ("le fond institutionnel," 4) of the thought that it crac;lles. He does not believe that one can unde1stand t.he diverse sects and schools nor explain their raison d' etre and variation without reference to these common and sociological factors. His aim is to analyze in a manner that he considers most objective several of the most influential and pervasive of Chinese conceptions and intellectualized attjtudes. Above all, he is not concerned wjth judging these notions either as to their moral or intellectual worth. He is not trying to learn from these writings anything about the world. They are data, not pabulum. His primary concern is with the "parallelism" of ideas and social structures, the "origin" of conceptions from societal forms and drifts. This concern underlies and informs his entire examination of Chinese thought. It begins to be validated, as we shall see, from the first stroke of Granet's analysis of the language and particularly of the leading ideas themselves. He is able to show that the content of the leading categories is explainable by the structure of Chinese society and that the evolution of these ideas depend, in strict fashion, upon societal evolution. Names and dates are peripheral matters of Granet. 14 What is central and essential is the detailed marking of the "parallelism" between ideas and societal features. He does not appeal to a generalized "spirit of the times", or some such ghost, but attempts to explain ideas in terms of the concrete history of a social system. La Pensee Chinoise is thoroughly consistent with the 13 This paper will deal exclusively with these three sections, i.e., from pages 1-419, and the brief conclusion. 14 As a matter of fact he· correctly indicates that the important dates in the histories of intellectual doctrines are not chronological ones, but the pivots and drifts that the society in question takes. (26) Such matters as these form the framework in which he writes, not a chronological system based on the movements of the stars and moon.
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theory and research of Durkheim in sociology of knowledge. It "represents the most systematic and powerful atte_mpt up to date to apply the fundamental conceptions of Durkheim's sociologistic theory of knowledge to a given body of facts. 15 But Granet correctly insists that he is, first of all, a Sinologist. Indeed, in his field, he is very eminent. He modestly disclaims knowledge of sociology, but explicitly states that the Durkheim-Mauss essay on "primitive classifications" contains remarks on China that "mark a date in the history of Sinological studies." He hims_elf states that his work is consistent with and a test of Durkheim's theory of the categories. 16 However, he insists, justifi~;tbly, that he did not merely "apply" or illustrate the theory (28, 29). Neither my tendency to agree with this remark of Granet's or Smullyan's to question it, 17 are worth very much: only another able Sinologist is really competent to judge. Granet's concern with the language and logic, with the "principles" of Chinese thinking, rather than with the sects, schools, and the individual thinkers, is due both to his sociologistic perspective and to the scantiness of firmly attested sources for the period in his focus. This concern is a striking departure from traditional intellectual histories. With reference to Sinology, it is new in aim and point Qf view, and it is significant that by it Granet claims he was enabled to iso\ate new relations and facts and to interpret the schools and individual thinker themselves. His work shows clearly one important methodical consequence of sociology of knowledge. A notable feature of the book is the extreme caution and the informed manner in which Chinese sources are used. In order to control inferences from the ancient writings, Granet discounts and interprets their content in the light of the cultural contexts and the positions of their supposed authors, as well as the 15
Smullyan microfilm, page 465. Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,-See first and last sections, but particularly page 630 ff. 11 Review of Granet in American Sociological Review, June 1936, pages 487-92. On this point see also H. Berr's Preface to La Pensee Chinoise. 10
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intellectual traditions which seem largely to have governed how and what they should write. Many of those who wrote "histories" held high positions in the orthodoxy. They were inextricably attached to an aristocratic ruling stratum. The scholars were "learned counsellors of state." The intellectual continuum in which they worked contained an idealization of tradition as such: all historical writings were definitively inspired by a tenacious ideal of traditional piety. "In proportion as the editions (of a work) become perfect and as criticisms become more learned, the work becomes more perfectly in accord with ancient tradition." . . . Nothing is to contradict the official version. Such erudition makes "all research aiming at what a European historian would call truth almost impossible. " 18 By realizing these facts, Granet is able to control and shape his inferences, and properly to discount and evaluate the evidence before him. Not only does he do this in the usual manner of critical historiography. 19 He uses these traditional sources not as statements of historical fact, but as evidence from which to infer the sentiments and ideas of the Chinese writers as cultural units. Thus sociology of knowledge is used methodologically as an organon of historical reconstruction. 20 A concrete instance of this methodological control may be seen in connection with translation of the words, jen and kien ngai. Respectively they characterize the positions of Confucius and Motze. Western scholars have rendered them as "altruism" and "universal Iove." The error of such "translation" is corrected by sociological understanding of the Chinese language, which is simply not capable of expressing such abstract "conceptions." Even if this were not a linguistic fact, there is a further difficulty: no one can understand the ancient texts without reference to the glosses with which generations of men have endowed them. From the time of Han, these glosses are informed by a strict orthodoxy. They give the "correct interpretation," 18
Chinese Civilization, page 51. For an elementary statement, see A. W. Small, Origins of Sociology, Chapter 4-7. 20 See C. Wright Mills, "Methodological Consequences of Sociology of Knowledge," American Journal of Sociology, Nov. 1940. 19
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i.e., the interpretation required of the candidates taking the examinations which gave access to official honors and a bureaucratic position. There is no "free reading" permitted. Academic guideposts, moral and political in purport, must be followed. If we wish to go beyond or beneath these commentaries we must have the aid of a "manual of semantics." The preparation of such a manual would require extensive sociological knowledge. Says Granet: "It is possible to ascertain the precise significance of an attitude or specific prescription only if one first endeavors to define the positions that the different sectarian groups occupied in the history of Chinese society." In discussing problems incident to a translation from Chinese to English, I. A. Richards says, "One gets the impression that an unwritten and unelucidatable tradition accompanies and directs their interpretations. It is as though the text were only a bare fragmentary notation -to be supplemented out of a store ef unrecorded knowledge-much as a music score may receive a special interpretation handed down in and through a school. And there is the further difficulty that this tradition is by no means uniform even for the best-trained scholars. Much of this applies of course, though with less force, to our·own use of Western languages and it is by recognizing and analysing these esoteric determinants of meanings in our own speech that we can best approach the Chinese." 21 I II
Granet begins his study of Chinese thought with an account of language because he considers language " ... the most convenient point of departure in signalizing certain dispositions of Chinese mentality." Two "essential observations" emerge from this examination of the elements of language and of style: Chinese thought avoids all artifices which tend to utilize any verbal expressions of ideas in a manner to economize mental effort; and it disdains analytical forms of thought. All of the words and linguistic elements in the thinker's vocabulary glitter with those values 21
Mencius on the Mind, page 12.
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properly associated with emblems. Their intellectual traffic does not convey ideas, or permit the smooth exchange of conceptions; it simply evokes and invokes, stirs up vast systems of attitudes destined to permit man to participate in diverse aspects of civilizing actions. This Sino..,Tibetan language is shot through with emblems. It is heavy with judgments of value. It does not conduce to an impersonal and objective expression. Granet's analysis of the Chinese language discloses its controlling function to be an ideal of moral, social, and ritualistic efficacy. The language does not appear to be organized in order to express abstract signs which are of aid in specifying ideas. The symbols utilized are rich in practical suggestions. Rather than definite meanings, these possess an "indeterminate efficacy." This language does not furnish an instrument for analysis, but rather channels all thought into a sort of organon of conduct. The ideal of efficacy definitely outruns the philosophical mentality which would seek definite conceptions. It is not organized for the purpose of noting concepts, analyzing ideas, or discursively exhibiting doctrines. It is fashioned entirely for the communication of sentimental attitudes, the suggestion of lines of conduct; to convince and convert. Rich in concrete values, this monosyllabic tongue is not apt for medium for clear expression. It is a boundless repertoire of "vocal emblems" of great effective power. It is practical22 in its function and content. The qualities of the Chinese language are very different from those which Occidentals would choose in order to insure a clear transmission of their thought. Th~ words are very brief. Their phonetic poverty makes it often difficult to distinguish between them. A great majority of the words may be used indifferently as nouns, verbs, or adjectives without any sensible change in their form. Now, only a language with a relatively rigid construction is able to carry clearly expressed "ideas" (Occidental 22
It should be understood that the "practical" is always culturally relative. To many strata of contemporary America t4e "practical" is nearly equivalent to the pecuniary. This cultural content was of course not present in the Chinese practicality. Compare T. Veblen, The Place of Science.
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2
ideas!) . a The oral form of the order of words is determined by a Succession of emotions and feelings. This order stresses the affective and practical importance attributed to different elements in a congedes of emotions. But it is nQt S\litable for, indeed it obviates, the clear expression of abstract jdea,_s. Chinese is a really admirable force for communicating "a sentimental shoc,k" for inviting one to take part in some a_ction. Always it js concrete and tied closely to conduct. A word does not "correspond" to a concept. And it is not a simple sign neutrally denoting an object. It is not given its vivid life by grammatical or syntactical artifices. In its own immutable and monosyllabic form it contains all the imperative energy of the act of which it is the vocal correspondent and the emblem. This characterization is brought out .forcibly in an article of Granet's, "Some Peculiar!ties of Chinese Thought and Language": 24 Almost all the words connote singular ideas, which are highly specialized. And what tpis vocabulary expresses is not the needs of a mentality that classifies, abstracts, and generalizes, and which aims at working upon clear-cut, distinct facts, prepared for logical organization: it shows, on the contrary, just the opposite tendency, the dominant desire for specification, particularization, the picturesque. . . . As they appear to us and as the Chinese explain them, the words of their vocabulary seem to correspond to conceptual images . . . united, on the one hand, to sounds that appear to be endowed with the power of evoking the characteristic details of an image, and, on the other hand, to signs that represent the gesture which is noted by the motor memory as essentiaP' The word in Chinese is not a sign serving to note a concept. It does not fix in a definite manner a degree of abstraction and generality. It evokes and loosely fixes a very active and indefinite complex of particular images. For instance, there is no word which simply signifies "old map.." There is on the other hand a great number of words which represent different social "aspects" of 23 See Bloomfield, Linguistic Aspects of Science. •• Revue. Philosophique, Jan.-Feb., and Mar.-April, 1920, pages 104-114.
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old age: The aspect of those who have need of a very rich food, the aspect of those old persons whose respiration is suffocating them. Such concrete vocations lead the mind to a crowd of other visions which are also very concrete. All the details, for example, of the mode of life proper for those who are decrepit and require a nourishing food, those whom one must exempt from military service, those no longer obligated to go to "school," those for whose death one must hold ready :::tl! the funeral materials, (for which one has prepared a long while), those that have the right to carry a staff through the streets of the village-such are a few of the images awakened by the word K'i to which "corresponds" our quasi-singular notion of old persons, sixty to seventy years. In ancient China at seventy, one becomes specifically "old." One merits then the appellation Lao. This word evokes a social juncture of life. It does not "mean" merely a chronological juncture. Its use leads to the evocation of a flock of images which are not at all to be confused with an abstract idea. If this wave of evocations is not stopped, the response will spread to embrace all of the aspect~ which sigp.ify the different categories of persons whose active period of life is finished. The emblematic function of words gives rise to what Granet calls "descriptive auxiliaries." These are very important in the ancient poetry. Indeed, they play a considerable role in the Chinese poetry of all periods, and even prose is not entirely without them. When a poet "paints" (the term is used advisedly by Granet) the peformances of two sorts of grasshoppers with the aid of the auxiliaries, yao-yao and t'i-t'i, he does not intend to keep himself within the bounds of description. He wishes to give counsel, to order his audience to obey a set of rules of which the gestures of the grasshoppers are the natural emblems and of which the auxiliaries, with which he paints ·them, are the vocal emblems. These are specific rules of conduct giving the obligation of marriage outside the family and residence and the entrance into housekeeping after the agricultural season. Implicit in these words is a certain discipline of life.
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Or again, there are the auxiliaries, siu, which paint the particular noise that a couple of wild geese make with their wings; the yang, which renders l:he cry of the same· geese when the female responds to the call of the male. It suffices to invoke this vocal painting in order to be assured that one's spouse will impregnate herself with the virtues of a female goose, that she will follow, ·without ever passing beyond his command, the chief of the household, and henceforth she will be submissive to all his orders. And these are the types of w~rds which even the wisest of the thinkers must use. For the language of the Chinese "philosophers" is not a bookish or intellectual formation; it proceeds, or is derived from, an ancient tradition of oral and practical teaching. Nothing in their vocabulary or grammar even suggests that the Chinese ever felt the need of giving to each word a discrete and individual meaning. The meaning and syntactical function of words are vague; similar homophones awaken series of very dissimilar images and scenes. Often in certain words, reports Granet, one can detect a sort of imitative music. The language is, of course, quite iso.,. morphic. It is not only that this language is powerfully evocative, but that merely to pronounce its elements is to constrain one's self and one's conduct. In each word there dwells, with a sort of efficacy, a latent and imperious value, a value-attitude and hence a sanctioned act. Each word in the language invit~s its users w feel that to speak is to act or to react. Woven through the language is a perennial drift toward magic. The Chinese terms for life and destiny (ming) are not distinguishable from those which designate the vocal and graphic symbols. Thus, the names for two "concepts" resemble each other to the point whereat they are easily confused. And yet, each of these terms integrally expresses an individual essence. They are not mere terms. They are appellations which lead to the sensing of reality. To know the name, to say the word, is to possess the being itself or to create it. Suppose a lord is killed. This act would not exist if someone did not call the person who committed the crime an "assassin."
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In the art of language one exalts himself and stresses the virtue of the etiquette. By language rnnks are attributed and emblematic associations proper to them are drawn forth. Such words do not delimit an abstract class, but qualify, contaminate, lead to various destinies, and stir up real things. As emblematic realities words command the phenomena of man and of nature. The "living, active" words are very numerous. By expressing an action or a state each word resuscitates an individual and singular essence. All of nature participates in the proper names. This swarm of singular words contrasts remarkably with the phonetic ,poverty of the language. In the abundant language of the Chinese there is not one expression which in a socially neutral manner conveys the general and abstract idea of "death." It cannot be spoken of without evoking (by the use of a single monosyllable) a set of intricate ritual, and an entire sector of societal action. By a single word one disposes of the defunct, assigns a mourning practice 3Hitable to his rank, fixes his destiny in another life, classifies his family. If one is not circumspect in the appellation used, it will turn back upon him. The force of emblems is reciprocal, turns back upon him who knows not how to select and use the proper one. Each of many situations has its protocol and correct term. The force of emblems realizes itself in an elaborate etiquette. This etiquette dominates Chinese life, and vo,.. cabularies are graded in order to permit each situation the protocol, the correct term. Only this term is endowed with the proper efficacy. Such vocabularies form a repertory of judgments of value, judgments singular in their persuasive power. The system of symbc!s is an instrument permitting the realization and the perpetuation of a reign of order by etiquette. Each word, according to circumstance and mimicry, grasps in a determinate sense the preconceptions of the speakers and is endowed with its particular power of suggestion. This language is not concerned with conserving or enlarging its phonetic richness, or with developing its morphology. There is no tendency toward perfection of
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clear meanings. It is not at all modeled in a fashion conducive to the expression of "ideas." It remains in concrete values and above all does not decrease in the affective and practical power by which each word as an emblem is char" acterized. As Sumner said of preliterate language in general, so also of ·ancient Chinese: "They are overwhelmed by a flood of detail. " 2 r. Thus if a poet employs in the right place the "single word" for "spring," not only will the usage suggest an enormous mass of images and acts properly to be performed at this time of year, but he will raise in his audience, in plain accord with the will of nature and the custom of his ancestors (the West says of its own similar terms: they are "self-evident"), a feeling or sentiment so active and efficacious that it is necessary to attribute to it the value of a vow, or of a sacred order. For the word is not a sJmple sign or a clear and distinct meaning, but an emblem, a pivot of life around which swings sacred constraints and solemn inducements. Condensed in it are all the values and virtues of prayer, orders, joy and poetic themes. The graphic characters of Chinese correspond very closely to the oral symbols. They are figurative in the extreme. Chinese is a writing which conserves the original freshness and efficacy of its spoken words. And in these graphic symbols reside cues to the performance of a certain order of civilization. The literature which transmits and hence interprets the language, the "descriptions" of poets, the "narrations" of "historians," the historiettes, or "little moral tales" of the philosophers-these do not seek to be logical or original. Their construction depends upon formulae, upon thoroughly stereotyped themes. These thematic threads conserve the evocative power, the valueefficacy of the speech. A certain rhythm almost completely replaces what is syntax in occidental languages. The role of this rhythm in the speech forms is quite prominent. Not only does it perform ·the ordinary functions of Western syntax, but it confers on the language formulations a further specific efficacy; it recalls to the reader something of the collective l!5
Folkways, page 137.
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exaltation of the festival times with their songs and dances and their living emotbns. In these festivals and rites, man has reaffirmed his intimate connections with all else in the universe, his liaison with sound and with reality. And the words, set forth in rhythm, recall those things and sanctify them by the very act of utterance. In their writing the Chinese seek above all to attain the effects of action which seem more naturally reserved for spoken language. Granet explains this, in part, by the fact (a) of the importance so long accorded to the practice of oral teaching in the Chinese intellectual tradition; and (b) that the differences between the spoken and written languages are due to the latter corresponding to the sort of dead yet lively words characterizing the antique period. This orientation of mind toward value-efficacy rather than intellectual clarity explains, according to Granet, the fact that writing in China has never ceased to be ~mblematic. This writing is often qualified with ideograms because a special character is attached to each word. These chaJ,"acters vary in complication. They are resolvable into a certain number of graphic elements which are stripped of signification and which simply correspond to certain movements of the instrument used by writers. Thus, in their form they are technologically and not socially determined. These several traits grouped in gre~ter or lesser number form small figures. These figures are endowed as symbols with images. Only a few of them remain simple. They are elaborated and in complex form exist in .great numbers. Thus, habit plus knife are equivalent to beginning. Even very complex figures are ideogrammatic. Each figure is qualified with two "radicals," one to indicate its meaning, and one serving as a phonetic index. The radicals lead to the images of a concrete category of objects and to the specifying of objects belonging in one class of pronunciation. Leibniz mistook this dissective function of the radicals as indicative Jf a type of analytic thought, but Granet finds its import to lie wholly in practice. The written language is phonetically complex, yet with the aid of the radicals it can be utilized by widely diffused populations speaking dialects. Thus, a word will
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mean the same to different peoples yet be pronounced quite differently. Granet does not make the "point but it is possible that these radicals greatly and effectively reduced changes in the meaning of words due to contacts of variant cultures. For changes in pronunciations are completely separated from meaning. Thus, this particular language is an admirable organ of a traditional and sacred culture. By the very structure of each figure it conduces to the perpetuation of meanings. Also, by tolerating local pronunciations without selling out common meanings to them the language was the language of an entire civilization. Another factor involved in the latter point was the practice of inter-feudal reunions which fostered a common speech among the nobles of each district. But this structural separation of phonetics from meaning powerfully served in the diffusion of Chinese civilization in a way that phonetic script could not. Yet at the same time that the figurative mode of writing is culturally "practical," it gravely limits the development of terminologies which could be used in procedures of , thought removed from the cultural contacts from which the language was derived. The language is firmly linked to governmental concerns. The first governmental obligation of a chief or lord is to furnish his subjects with emblems which permit them to domesticate nature. From the first time that a graphic symbol was used, write the ancient Chinese, the demons fled, complaining that men had destroyed their power. Graphic signs have this magical virtue. In utilizing them men gain power. By signalizing the essence of every object they signalize its personality, its rank, its proper location in the universe. Tradition has it that Houang-ti, an early chief, acquired great glory because he took care to give the correct designations to all things. By doing this he showed the people their utilizable resources. A prince must place in their proper order the objects of nature and the actions of men. By naming objects he adjusts actions to things. By pronunciations and written characters he performs these proper linkages, and thus orients his sub-
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jects to the proper lines of conduct. Houang-ti, who first founded the social order, commenced by designating each family, thus fixing its destiny and indicating its singular virtue. Throughout the ancient epoch one of the chief duties of the sovereign was to survey and to "take care of" the systems of designations. He appointed a commission charged with constantly determining whether the visual or auditory emblems constituted a symbolic conformity with the "genius" of the dynasty. A group of scribes and the blind musicians composed the proper symbols. The correct meaning of words and consciousness of "etymological" values are identical, and they harbor the practices of an elaborate and ancient civilization. The Chinese language "consists" of a realistic art of song and a graphic symbolization of the realistic art of design. The graphic symbols are highly stylized. Their usage evokes an attitude which characterizes or significantly judges a certain type of action or connection. Thus friendship is two hands united. The symbol of cold is composed of diverse elementary signs: men, straw, and house. This particular ensemble is suggestive of the initial conduct of the winter season. The Chinese countrymen at that time reenter into village life, reliquished during the season of work in the fields and of the great rains. They commence by stopping up their clay walls with straw and the roofs of their hovels with thatch. Thus the idea, cold, is tied to a concrete matrix of action, and in its graphic form it is "a sort of etymological reconstruction of notions." The Chinese language concerns itself very little with phonetic richness but it is enriched by the use of derivations in the writings. These serve to increase the vocabulary. Since the first combinations of signs began they learned to decompose into elements a complex figure and by recombining elements to create a limited number of characters. In order to obtain a new term with a definite pronunciation it suffices to combine with a radical each one of the ancient graphic emblems having this pronunciation. The taste for the concrete, joined to the passion for an etiquette governing each detail of life, lead to an extraordinary proliferation
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of graphic signs. In the course of their recital the poems graphically speak to the eyes. They set going a graphk: memory which doubles the verbal memory. It is difficult for us to understand this procedure. But it is clear that it has had a decisive effect upon words never becoming simple signs. The figurative writing has for the most part aided.ih guarding the freshness of the character of the living words. They are always able to express in imagerial fashion the concrete. Such a language lends to the Chinese mind a disposition which is profoundly anti-abstract and consistently conservative. It appears suitable to a thinking which has never proposed to itself to economize mental operations. The literary history of China is entirely given over to the constant reiterations of the same old themes. It remains dominated by the postulates of an indigenous orthodoxy. There are several reasons for supposing that the fashions of speaking and of literary prose do not differ from those utilized- in the ancient poetry. The archaic prose which serves as a model for the learned prose is not a creation entirely due to the .literary or learned men. This opinion of Granet's would be received as heretical among most Sinologists-Chinese and Occidental. The poetry of which the archaic prose drew its procedures is not a learned poetry, but simply the poetry of a sacred order. Only in this way, says Granet, can we account for the remarkable characteristics of the Chinese style. In speaking and writing the Cl).inese uniformly express themselves by employing consecrated formula. They compose their discourses with the aid of sentences that are enchained by certainty. These rhythms and sacred sentences provide authority for devel9pments of certain phrases. The Chinese literature is a literature of patch-work ("Centons"). When they wish to prove or to explain, relate or describe, even the most original authors fall into stereotyped historettes, suitable expressions borrowed from a common and traditional fund. This fund is not very abundant, and besides the writers do not seek to renovate it. A goo