toys in the attic: THE CENTRAL PROBLEM OF
MODERN SOCIETIES: INTEGRATION THE
STRUCTURE OF THE SOCIETAL COMMUNITY THE
EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION AND THE CONTEMPORARY PHASE OF MODERNIZATION THE
INCREASING DIFFERENTIATION OF THE P-M SUBSYSTEM FROM THE SOCIETAL
COMMUNITY THE
INCREASING DIFFERENTIATION OF THE POLITY FROM THE SOCIETAL COMMUNITY THE
INCREASING DIFFERENTIATION OF THE ECONOMY FROM THE SOCIETAL COMMUNITY The industrial
and democratic revolutions were transformations by which the institutional
bulwarks of the early modern system were weakened. European monarchies survived only when they became
constitutional. Aristocracy still
twitches but mostly in the informal aspects of stratification systems – nowhere
is it structurally central. There are
still established churches, but only on the less modern peripheries like Spain
and Portugal is there restriction on religious freedom. The trend is toward the separation of church
and state and denominational pluralism (except for the Communist countries). The industrial revolution shifted economic
organization for agriculture and the commerce and handicrafts and commerce of
small urban communities; it also extended markets. The emergence of
full modernity thus weakened the ascriptive framework of monarchy, aristocracy,
established churches, and an economy circumscribed by kinship and localism to
the point where ascription no longer exercises decisive influence. Modern components had already developed by
the eighteenth century, particularly a
universalistic legal system and secular culture, which had been diffused
through Western society by the Enlightenment.
Further developments in the political aspects of societal community
emphasized the associational principle, nationalism, citizenship, and
representative government. In the
economy differentiated markets developed for the factors of production,
primarily labor. Occupational services
were increasingly performed in employing organizations structurally differentiated
from households. New patterns of
effectively organizing specific functions arose, especially administration
(centering in government and the military) and the new economy. The democratic revolution stimulated
efficient administration, the industrial revolution the new economy. Weber saw that in a later phase the two tend
to fuse in the bureaucratization of the capitalist economy.1 183 THE
CENTRAL PROBLEM OF MODERN SOCIETIES: INTEGRATION The modern
structural pattern crystallized in the northwest corner of Europe, and a
secondary pattern subsequently emerged in the northeast corner, centering in
Prussia. A parallel development took
place in the second phase of modernization.
The United States, the "first new nation," has come to play a
role comparable to that of England in the seventeenth century.2 America was ripe for the democratic and industrial
revolutions and for combining them more intimately than had been possible in
Europe. By the time of Tocqueville's
visit, a synthesis of the French and English revolutions had been achieved: The
United States was as democratic a society as all but the extreme wing of the
French Revolution had wished for, and its level of industrialization was to
surpass that of England. We shall
therefore concentrate in the following discussion upon the United States. THE STRUCTURE
OF THE SOCIETAL COMMUNITY (return to Contents) Behind the
developments outlined in the preceding paragraphs were a special religious
constitution and societal community.
The United States was in a position to make new departures from the
ascriptive institutions of early modern society: monarchy with its subjects
rather than citizens; aristocracy; an established church; an economy committed
to localism and only a little division of labor; and an ethnically defined
societal community or nation. American
territory was settled mainly by one distinctive group of migrants. They were nonconformists in search not so
much of freedom from persecution as of greater religious independence than they
could enjoy at home.3 They
were predominantly Puritans, the prototypes of ascetic Protestantism. In the colonies, however, they were divided
into a number of denominations and sects.
In the early period, for instance in Congregational Massachusetts, the
colonies estabished their own churches.
But a conception of the church as ideally a voluntary association
emerged only gradually. It was 1 Max
Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1947). 2
Seymour M. Lipset, The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1963). 3
Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, (New York: Harper, 1964). 184 THE
CENTRAL PROBLEM OF MODERN SOCIETIES: INTEGRATION fairly well accepted by the time of independence,4
though in Massachusetts disestablishnaent did not occur until more than a generation
later. The religious pluralism of the
thirteen colonies and the rationalistic, Enlightenment-influenced cultural
atmosphere set the stage for the First Amendment, which prescribed a
constitutional separation of church and state for the first time since the
institutionalization of Christianity in the Roman Empire.5 Religious pluralism spread from differences among
the original colonies to pluralism within each state, in contrast to the
pattern of cujus regio, cius religio.
This pluralism formed the basis for toleration and eventually for full
inclusion of non-Protestant elements, a large Roman Catholic minority, and a
small Jewish minority.6 This
inclusion was clearly symbolized in the 1960s by the election of a Roman
Catholic, John F. Kennedy, to the presidency.
American society thus went beyond England and Holland in differentiating
organized religion from the societal community. One consequence of this differentiation was that publicly supported education developed in the nineteenth century as secular
education. There was never, as in
France, a major political struggle over that problem. A parallel development occurred in ethnic composition, the other historic basis of
nationality. The United States was for
a time an Anglo-Saxon society, which tolerated and granted legal rights to
members of some other ethnic groups but did not fully include them. This problem grew acute with the arrival of
waves of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants from southern and eastern Europe,
predominantly Roman Catholic and Jewish, from about 1890 to the beginning of
World War I.7 Although the
process of inclusion is still incomplete, the societal community has become
ethnically pluralistic. Negroes are
still in the early stages of the inclusion process. The bulk of the Negro population was until recently concentrated
geographically in the rural South, a region insulated from the rest of American
society since the Civil War. But the
South has been undergoing modernization through inclusion in the society as a
whole, and there has been migration of Negroes to the northern and western
cities. These developments have stimulated a further process of inclusion that
is creating tensions. The long-run
trend, however, is toward successful) inclusion.8 4
Ibid. See J. J. Loubser. "The Development of Religious Liberty in
Massachusetts," unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University,
1964; and Alan Heimett, Religion and the American Mind. From the Great Awakening to the Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966). 5
Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the
Civil War (New York: Harcourt, 1965). 6 Will
Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, rev. ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor,
1960); and Talcott Parsons, "Some Comments on the Pattern of Religious
Organization in the United States," in Structure and Process in Modern
Societies (New York: Free Press, 1960.)
7
Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (New York: Grosset & Dunlap. 1951). 185 One reason that
the American community has moved toward shedding its identity as a white,
Anglo-Saxon, Protestant community is that the “WASP" formula was never
monolithic. Not only do the Irish speak
English, hut there are many Anglo-Saxon Roman Catholics and many Protestant
Negroes. Pluralism has also been
fostered by the socialization of the newer immigrant groups in more general
societal values. Thistrend offers a
possible solution to the instability of ethnic nationalism, the problem of
securing congruence between the boundaries of the societal community and the
state. One difficulty is inherent in
ethnically pluralistic systems, however.
Because language is a determinant of ethnic membership, the right of
each ethnic group in a pluralistic community to use its own language can lead to
disruptive internal tensions, as demonstrated by the conflicts between Walloons
and Flemish in Belgium and English and French in Canada.9 Where the language of one ethnic group has
become the community language, strains may be imposed upon members of other
groups. There are enormous benefits in
linguistic uniformity, however. Its
adoption in a multiethnic community depends on the type of priority enjoyed by
the ethnic group whose language becomes the national language and on the number
of competing languages; a plurality encourages the designation of only one
language as official. In both
twentieth-century superpowers (the U.S. and the USSR), the societal communities
have gone beyond ethnic bases and adopted single languages. The settlement of
American territory was originally by English-speaking colonists from Great
Britain. Other language groups were
small and geographically limited - the Dutch in New York, the French in backwoods
outposts and Louisiana, the Spanish in Florida and the Southwest - and none
could seriously claim to provide a second language for American society as a
whole. The first large ethnically
distinctive immigrant group was the Roman Catholic Irish, who spoke English
(Gaelic was a romantic revival, not the actual language of Irish immigrants).
As non-English-speaking Roman Catholic elements arrived, the Irish pressed for
their assimilation into the English-speaking community by opposing
foreign-language parochial schools.
Indeed, common Roman Catholic interests could not have been promoted had
the Roman Catholic population been split into language groups. The Protestant immigrants (for example, the
Scandinavians) were assimilated easily, without language becoming an
issue. Jewish groups arrived quite late
and did not represent one European language.
Furthermore, they never exceeded 5 percent of the total population. The
United States has thus retained English as the common language of the total
societal community without widespread feeling that it represents the imposition
of Anglo-Saxon hegemony. 8
Talcott Parsons, "Full Citizenship for the Negro American?" in
Talcott Parsons and Kenneth Clark (eds.), The Negro American (Boston:
Houghton Mittlin, 1966). 9 Hans
Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1961). 186 THE CENTRAL PROBLEM OF MODERN SOCIETIES:
INTEGRATION A relatively well
integrated societal community has thus been established in the United States on
bases that are not primarily ethnic or religious. Despite diversity within the population, it has largely escaped pressure
by ethnic-linguistic or religious communities for political independence
or equal rights that would undermine the solidarity of the more inclusive
community. Parallel developments
occurred in American patterns of ascriptive stratification, especially compared
with European patterns of aristocracy.
Tile American population was nonaristocratic in origin and did not
develop an indigenous aristocracy.10 Furthermore, a considerable proportion of upper-class elements
left the country during the American Revolution. Granting of titles came to be forbidden by the Constitution, and
neither landed proprietorship nor wealth have legal recognition as criteria for
government office and authority.
Although American society was from the first differentiated internally
by class, it never suffered the aftermath of aristocracy and serfdom that
persisted in Europe; tile nearest approximation appeared in the South. The participation of the wealthier and more
educated groups in government has been disproportionate, but there has also
been a populist strain and political mobility, advancement coming first through
wealth and recently through education. American society
thus abandoned the tradition of aristocracy with only a mild revolutionary
disturbance. It also lacked the heritage of Europe's peasant classes. As an industrial working class developed,
the European level of class consciousness never emerged, largely because of the
absence of aristocratic and peasant elements.11 American society has also carried
differentiation between government and societal community very far. For government and societal community to
become differentiated, the right to hold office must be dissociated from
ascription to monarchy and aristocracy and associated with achievement. Furthermore, authority must be limited to the legally defined powers of office
so that private prerogatives and property interests are separated
from those of office. Finally,
the elective principle requires that holding office be contingent upon
constituent support; loss of office through electoral defeat is an inherent
risk. The
independence of the legal system from the executive and
legislative branches of government has been one mechanism for maintaining this
kind of differentiation. 10
Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, 1953). 11
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt,
1955). THE CENTRAL
PROBLEM OF MODERN SOCIETIES: INTEGRATION
187 Another mechanism
is the connection between the government and community stratification. The
newly independent nation opted for a republican form of government (with
precautions against absolutism)12 linked with the societal community
through the franchise. Although the
franchise was originally restricted by property qualifications, it was extended
rapidly, and universal manhood suffrage, except for Negroes, was attained early
in the nineteenth century. The highest
government authority was vested in elected officials: the President and members
of the Congress, the state governors anti members of state legislatures. The exception has been the appointment of Federal (and increasingly
state) judges, with the expectation that they be professional lawyers. A competitive party system based upon the
participation in politics of broad segments of the societal community soon
emerged.13 It has been
fluid, oriented toward a pluralistic structure of interest groups rather than
toward the regional, religious, ethnic, or class solidarities more typical of
Europe. The societal
community must articulate not only with the religious and political systems but
also with the economy. In the United
States the factors of production, including land and labor, have been free of
ascriptive ties, and the Federal Constitution has guaranteed their free
movement among the different states.
This freedom has encouraged division of labor and the development of an
extensive market system. Locally
oriented and traditionally directed economic activities and the ascriptive
community structures in which they were embedded have thus been undermined, which has had consequences for the
stratification system; to the extent that stratification was rooted in
occupational structure, it was pushed toward universalism and an open class
structure but not toward radical egalitarianism. The American societal community that emerged from these
developments was primarily associational. This characteristic reflected components of
the value system. Universalism, which
had its purest modern expression in the ethics of ascetic Protestantism, has
exerted continuing value pressure toward inclusion - now reaching the whole
Judeo-Christian religious community and beginning to extend beyond it. The inclusion component alone could lead to
a static, universalistic tolerance. It
is complemented by an activist commitment to building a good society In
accordance with Divine Will that underlies the drive toward mastery of the
social environments through expansion in territory, economic productivity, and
knowledge. The combination of these two components contributes
to the associational emphasis in modern social structure - political and social
democracy being conspicuously associational.
12
Rossiter, op. cit.; and Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Confederation
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1940). 13
William N. Chambers, Political Parties in a New Nation, 1776-1809 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1963); and Richard P. McCormick, The Second
American Party System (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1966). 188 THE CENTRAL PROBLEM OF MODERN SOCIETIES:
INTEGRATION The associational
emphasis has been enhanced in the United States by the partial elimination of
ethnic membership and social class as ascriptively constitutive
structures. In the early modern phase,
the basis of community in Europe was ethnic-national. Yet the coincidence between ethnic membership and territorial
organization throughout Europe was incomplete.
Ethnic-centered nationalism was thus not an adequate substitute for
religion as a basis of societal solidarity, even though it gained in importance
with secularization and the inclusion of religious diversity within the same
political jurisdiction. The new basis of inclusion in the societal community has
been citizenship, developing in
association with the democratic revolution.14 Citizenship can be dissociated from ethnic
membership, which leans toward nationalism and even racism; race provides an ascriptive criterion of
belonging. The alternative has been to
define belonging in universalistic terms, which must include reference to
voluntary allegiance, although no societal community can be a purely voluntary
association.15 The
institutionalization of access to citizenship through naturalization,
regardless of the ethnic origins of individuals, represents a break with the
imperative of ethnic membership. The development
of the American pattern of citizenship has followed the pattern outlined by
Marshall for Great Britain, starting with the civic
component and developing the political and social components from
there. The social component,
though it has lagged behind that of the principal European societies, has been
extended through public education, social security, welfare policies, insurance,
and union benefits, in the present century.
Contemporary concern with problems of poverty marks a new phase in that
development. The structural outline of
citizenship in the new societal community is complete, though not yet fully
institutionalized. There are two stress
points: race and poverty. Their
salience reflects the need to extend the processes of inclusion and upgrading
still farther. 14 T.
H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development (Garden City,
N.Y.: Anchor, 1965). 15 See Karl
W. Deutach, Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge Mass.:
M.I.T. Press, 1953). 16 See
Edwin S. Corwin, The "Higher Law": Background of American
Constitutional Law (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1955). THE CENTRAL
PROBLEM OF MODERN SOCIETIES: INTEGRATION
189 A developed legal system is necessary for a
stable societal community that has dispensed with religious and ethnic
uniformity as radically as has American society. The Puritan tradition and the Enlightenment fostered a predilection
for a written constitution, with its echoes of covenant and social contract.16 An individualistic fear of authoritarianism
fostered the separation of government powers.17 A federal structure was practically
necessitated by the legal separation of the colonies. All three circumstances placed a premium on legal forms and on
agencies charged with legal functions.
Furthermore, many of the framers of the Constitution had legal
training. Even though they provided for
only one Supreme Court, without specifying membership qualifications and with
little specification of its powers, they did lay the foundations for an
emphasis on the legal order. But three
developments were not foreseen by the Founding Fathers. First was the effect of judicial review
in settling conflicts among the branches of Federal government, among the
states, and between the states and the Federal government. The second was the adoption of
English common law and the resulting proliferation of judge-made law. Finally, there was the
professionalization of legal practice.
In contrast to the systent in Continental Europe, the legal profession,
though participating freely in politics, has not been organized about
governmental functions.18
Because the separation of powers and federalism have decentralized
American government, legal institutions have been important in the attenuation
of local autonomy. The recent
reintegration of the South into the nation is a conspicuous example. The Constitutional framework emphasizes
universalistic criteria of citizenship.
These criteria have undergone continuous evolution, involving both
specification and generalization in interdependence with the evolution of the
legal system. One consequence has been
pressure toward inclusion, most dramatically of Negroes. The duality in
the civic component of citizenship has become noticeable in the United States
because of this nation's reliance on a written constitution. One aspect is the citizen's rights and
obligations as they have been formulated in the course of legal history. This component covers a wide range,
including principles of equality before the law. Back of it stand more general principles, first embodied in the
Bill of Rights and extended both by amendment and by judicial interpretation. The second aspect, increasingly stressed
over time, consists of the basic equalities of citizens' rights to protection,
freedoms, basic conditions of welfare, and opportunities, especially access to
education and occupational development.
At least in principle, the new societal community has come to be defined
as a company of equals. Departures from the egalitarian principle
must be justified, either on the basis of incapacity
to participate fully - as among small children - or of being qualified for
special contributions, as through competence,
to the societal welfare. 17
Bernard Bailyn, "General Introduction," in Pamphlets of the
American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1965). 18 See
Roscoe Pound, The Spirit of the Common Law (Boston: Beacon, 1963); and
James Willard Hurst, Law and the Conditions of Freedom (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1956). continued (return
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ideological furnishings for the
homeless mind
daurril library: talcott parsons