The Discovery of Society Fifth Edition Randall Collins and Michael Makowsky McGraw-Hill, Inc. New York St. Louis San Francisco Auckland Bogota Caracas Lisbon London Madrid Mexico City Milan Montreal New Delhi San Juan Singapore Sydney Tokyo Toronto

THE DISCOVERY OF SOCIETY Copyright © 1993,1989,1984,1978,1972 by McGraw-Hill, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed In the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. 34567890 DOC DOC 909876543 ISBN 0-07-011841-8 This book was set in Palatino by The Clarinda Company. The editors were Phillip A. Butcher, Katherine Blake, and Bernadette Boy Ian. The cover was designed by Carol Couch. R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company was printer and binder. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Collins, Randall, (date). The discovery of society/Randall Collins, Michael Makowsky.— 5th ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-07-011841-8 1. Sociology—History. I. Makowski, Michael. II. Title. HM19.C64 1993 301'.09—dc20 92-9953

About the Authors RANDALL COLLINS is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. He received his A.B. at Harvard (1963), M.A. at Stanford (1964), and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley (1969). He is the author of a number of books and articles, including Conflict Sociology: Toward an Explanatory Science (1975), The Credential Society (1979), Three Sociological Traditions (1985), Weberian Sociological Theory (1986), and Theoretical Sociology (1988). Some of his books and articles have been translated into Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Rumanian, German, and Arabic. MICHAEL MAKOWSKY is organizational consultant to Musart Company. He attended New York University's Washington Square College, where he received his B.A. in 1962. He received his M.A. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley and Davis, Chabot College, College of San Mateo, Goddard College, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and the Cultural Integration Fellowship during the past thirty years. He is the author of Minstrel of Love: A Biography of Satguru Sant Keshavadas (1980), Breath of the Eternal: The Way of Self-knowledge: The Concept of Atman in Four Upanishads (1990), and numerous articles in contemporary journals. He is currently president of his own company, Deal Glamour Media and Educational Productions. His fields of specialization include comparative religion, social psychology, race relations, sports, and show business.

Contents Preface ix INTRODUCTION Society and Illusion 1 PART ONE The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism 17 CHAPTER ONE The Prophets of Paris: Saint-Simon and Comte 19 CHAPTER TWO Sociology in the Underground: Karl Marx 30 CHAPTER THREE The Last Gentleman: Alexis de Tocqueville 53 CHAPTER FOUR Nietzsche's Madness 66 CHAPTER FIVE Do-Gooders, Evolutionists, and Racists 81 PART TWO The Great Breakthrough 99 CHAPTER SIX Dreyfus' Empire: Emile Durkheim and Georges Sorel 101 vii

viii Contents CHAPTER SEVEN Max Weber: The Disenchantment of the World 117 CHAPTER EIGHT Sigmund Freud: Conquistador of the Irrational 140 CHAPTER NINE The Discovery of the Invisible World: Simmel, Cooley, and Mead 166 PART THREE The Vicissitudes of Twentieth-Century Sophistication 185 CHAPTER TEN The Discovery of the Ordinary World: Thomas, Park, and the Chicago School; W.E.B. Du Bois and African-American Sociology 187 CHAPTER ELEVEN The Construction of the Social System: Pareto and Parsons 205 CHAPTER TWELVE Hitler's Shadow: Michels, Mannheim, and Mills 220 CHAPTER THIRTEEN Erving Goffman and the Theater of Social Encounters 237 CHAPTER FOURTEEN Contemporary Sociological Theory in France, Germany, and the United States 251 CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Impact of Women in Sociology of the Late Twentieth Century 285 Bibliographical Suggestions 307 Index 321

Preface As sociology moves into the 1990s, some things change while other things continue to keep their relevance. The downfall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-1991 is one of the major social revolutions of modern history, drawing a kind of close to the 20th century, much as the Russian Revolution of 1917 marked a key point near its beginning. Throughout its history, sociology has been attuned to the great social conflicts of the time. The sociology of economic struggle and conflict remains relevant to understanding both of these revolutions; though our analysis has changed in some ways, we will continue to need the accumulated insights of sociology to understand the world of the future. Another, longer and slower change that makes a difference in sociology is highlighted in this new edition. The women's revolution in our society has been going on for several decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, women became more than a small minority within sociology; today women are almost half the discipline. It is no surprise that women have had a major intellectual impact on today's sociology. We review some women sociologists whose works are now moving forward on the cutting edge of the discipline. The main thrust of The Discovery of Society continues to be the development of the great classical tradition. Its central channel has flowed for almost two centuries now, and we have tried to mark its course clearly amid the complexities of surrounding argument and research. For it is our conviction that the central sociological tradition makes up one interrelated revelation of the nature of social reality; and sociology has gradually increased its explanatory power, even as it uncovers new facts and issues. There has been a great intellectual adventure going on, and we continue to be part of it. If the reader captures from this book some sense of this drama, where this flow of ideas and discoveries is coming from, and where it may be going, the book will have accomplished its purpose. It will have accomplished it doubly so for every reader who realizes the reality of the intellectual world it points to. The discoverers of society were, and are, real human beings living in social and intellectual settings analogous to our own. We hope some, seeing this, will join in creating for themselves the next chapter of the discovery of society. ix

x Preface ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank Bob Blauner, Harry Edwards, Troy Duster, and Rae Lesser Blumberg for helpful discussions in preparing the material for this new edition. McGraw-Hill and the authors would like to thank the following people for their many helpful comments and suggestions: Scott Fuller, Santa Rosa Community College; Mari Molseed, University of Michigan-Hint; Gert Mueller, American University; Charles Ragin, Northwestern University; Teresa Scheid-Cook, University of North Carolina-Charlotte; and S. Mont Whitson, Morehead State University. Randall Collins Michael Makowsky

The Discovery of Society

INTRODUCTION Society and Illusion We all conceive of ourselves as experts on society. In fact, however, the social world is a mystery—a mystery deepened by our lack of awareness of it. Society is our immediate, everyday reality, yet we understand no more of it merely by virtue of living it than we understand of physiology by virtue of our inescapable presence as living bodies. The history of sociology has been a long and arduous effort to become aware of things hidden or taken for granted: things we did not know existed—other societies in distant places and times, whose ways of life make us wonder about the naturalness of our own; things we know of only distortedly—the experiences of social classes and cultures other than our own; the realities of remote sectors of our own social structure, from inside the police patrol car to behind the closed doors of the politician and the priest; things right around us unreflectingly accepted—the network of invisible rules and institutions that govern our behavior and populate our thought, seemingly as immutable as the physical landscape but in reality as flimsy as a children's pantomime. Most obscure of all, our own feelings, actions, thoughts, and self-images—the tacit bargains that we make and remake with friends, lovers, acquaintances, and strangers and the paths we steer amid emotions, habits, and beliefs. All these things are beneath the usual threshold of our awareness. We think of ourselves as rational, choice-making masters of our actions if not of our destinies; in reality, we know little about the reasons for either. And if the social world is shrouded from us today, it becomes even more illusory the further back we go into our history. We need go only a few hundred years back in European history to an era when authority of kings and aristocracies was legitimized by divine right, when unexpected behavior from our fellows was attributed to witchcraft and seizures of the devil, and foreign lands were populated not merely by bloodthirsty Communists or the terrible Turk but by werewolves and Cyclopes. "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake!" James Joyce declared. Sociology has been part of that very slow awakening. The social world as we know it and have known it is mostly illusion. Yet, if we were all completely deluded, there would be no point in trying to investigate and explain, and this writing as well as any other would be worthless. The existence of illusions is not incompatible with the existence of facts and of the principles of logic. But facts and logic are inextricably 1

2 Introduction mixed with concepts and theories, and in the study of society the concepts and theories involved are ones that we daily act upon as well as use to explain how things are and why. Sociology is not an impossible science, but it is a very difficult one. It has progressed by disengaging the web of everyday belief, not all at once but little by little, as one taken-for-granted assumption after another has been questioned and replaced. As was once said of philosophy, sociology is like rebuilding a boat, plank by plank, while floating on it in the middle of the ocean. The history of sociology is a progression of worldviews, each an advance on some other in that it asks some previously unasked question, avoids some previous confusion, or incorporates some previously unobserved fact. Each worldview, including our own, has its illusions; waving the banner of science is no more absolute a guarantee of truth than any other. Nevertheless, there has been a series of major breakthroughs in understanding, including some quite recent ones, and we can be confident now that we are on the right path. THE SOURCES OF ILLUSION At the center of the web that clouds our vision is the realization that our knowledge is both subjective and objective. 'Tacts" are things that independent observers can agree upon; but we must look for facts in order to see them, and what we look for depends on our concepts and theories. What questions we can answer depends on what questions we ask. But the form of the question cannot be the only determinant of the answer, or else our knowledge would never go beyond the subjective point of view of the particular questioner. Any completely subjective viewpoint undermines its own validity, since there is no reason for anyone else to accept it. If there are no objective standards, then the person who claims that there are no such standards can never prove that claim to be true. There is a realm of objectivity, then, based on shared observations and the exigencies of logical communications. We do not know, however, whether any particular theory or even any particular belief about the facts is true. The problem of separating illusions from reality has been an especially difficult one for sociology, since it begins in the midst of the social world of everyday ideas and ideologies. Until we begin to notice phenomena and ask questions about them, we cannot start to check our theories against the facts or even to check our assumed facts against careful observations. It took many centuries of controversy about ideological and practical issues before some people realized that their ordinary ideas might not be accurate and hence were in need of logical ordering and empirical testing. Even after there arose a community of individuals dedicated to this purpose, much of the raw material of human illusion remained mixed in with the more solid part of sociological knowledge. Progress has come not because sociologists were convinced that a particular theory was right, but be-

Society and Illusion 3 cause the scholarly community generated a cutting edge of objectivity out of its own controversies and research efforts that has moved it onward in the right direction. We cannot usually notice something unless we have a name for it. This is true of the physical world—the botanist notices dozens of species of plants where the layman sees only a field—and it is especially important in understanding society. No one has ever seen a "society/' although we have all seen the people who belong to one; no one has ever seen an organization, only its members, the buildings and equipment that belong to it, and its name or emblem written on signs and pieces of paper. We live in a social world of symbols: of symbolic entities such as "property"—land that would "belong" to no one but for a social convention, a set of rules as to how various people must behave toward it and what words they must use in talking about it—and of symbolic acts such as "marriage"—a recorded ceremony that enables middle-class Americans to recognize the otherwise indiscernible difference between a couple "illicitly" living together and a "respectable" family. These symbols are by no means obvious if one has never thought about them. The fish apparently does not notice the water until he is out of it. The idea of a society, as distinct from the state, did not develop until the commercial and industrial changes of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution woke people up to the recognition that there were two different forms of social institutions, each going its own way. One hundred years later, thinkers such as George Herbert Mead came to recognize the symbolic nature of society and thus provided us with concepts with which to analyze the operations of this world that we have so long taken for granted. Much of sociology has developed by uncovering facts that had not previously been known, either because they were remote from ordinary experience or because they had been deliberately ignored. The earliest efforts at sociology were inspired by European explorations in the Orient, the Americas, Africa, and the South Seas. Familiar ways of life in Europe could no longer be accepted as the natural order of God but had to be explained in light of practices now found to exist in vastly different cultures. The first efforts in this direction were naive and consisted mainly of doctrines of progress, which accounted for the European culture simply as a social advance over other cultures. Such theorizing, nevertheless, began a tradition of thought concerned with explaining society. It was an early thinker on social evolution, Auguste Comte, who first gave sociology its name and thus helped to create that "invisible college" of thinkers who have ever since asked questions about society. Many facts, to be sure, could have been discovered without the voyages of Captain Cook. But the voyage to the other side of town is harder to make than a trip around the world, and a voyage of discovery in one's own home is the hardest of all. Conventional biases against looking for or recognizing facts that touch on one's life have been greater impediments to sociological understanding than the lack of facts themselves. These same biases that

4 Introduction have kept most of social reality obscure have prevented us from seeing that they are biases. Not the least important aspect of an illusion is the fact that one believes it to be the truth. The great sociologists have contributed to the sociology of knowledge as an intrinsic part of their work. They have broken through illusions by analyzing the ways in which the conditions of social life determine the contents of our consciousness. The history of sociology has been a progressive sophistication about our own thought, uncovering sources of bias that we did not know existed. The uncovering began with Karl Marx, the first great thinker to see life from the standpoint of the common worker. Marx did not discover social classes, of course; ancient and medieval law as well as social thought spoke openly of the various ranks of society, which indeed everyone knew about from daily experience. Ideological denial of stratification is an innovation of modern America. WhatJMarx disc^yer^d^was-JiiaLour_owr^thoug:htJ§ a product of our social circumstanc^a^idjhatjrrudij^^^ n5drtylsT%rt"''aTieT3e'cH^ interests. Marx may have^ehne^^nTer^ts^Moonarrowly in econc^icTeTmsrbut there is no doubt of the validity of this general principle. Marx was not the first to notice that governments tell lies or that newspapers, writers of books, and individuals in conversation put forward alleged facts and explanations that are actually selected and distorted according to the interests of their formu- lators. Much of the thought of the Enlightenment is epitomized by Voltaire's effort to unmask the absurdity of supernatural explanations for human events. Marx went beyond Voltaire when he pointed out how the socially conservative attitudes adopted by the Church were only to be expected from the leaders of a wealthy, landowning institution whose higher ranks were filled from the aristocracy and whose leaders, like Cardinals Mazarin and Richelieu, often served in the government of the kings. Marx's dictum "Religion is the opiate of the masses" is a puzzle in its own terms, however: If ideas reflect material interests, how could the lower classes hold ideas that did not reflect their own interests? It took Max Weber's analysis of the relation between ideas and power and Emile Durkheim's recognition of the effects of ritual on solidarity to provide the keys to this paradox. But the opening wedge first driven by Marx has never been retracted, even though there is a constant danger that our ideas will be molded in keeping with the prevailing political orthodoxy. We know now that ideas are upheld as conventions within particular social groups and that the ideas of the group tend to take the form that will most enhance its status and advance its interests. We know that people associate closely only with persons of similar outlook and that individuals modify their ideas to fit the groups they join. And we also know how it is possible for people to have some freedom from ideological bias by institutionalizing a competition of ideas, especially among those whose interests are based on their achievements within the collective enterprise of science or scholarship.

Society and Illusion 5 Marx's recognition of ideological bias in social ideas is not a counsel of despair. The bias cannot be wished away, but it can be gradually pushed back by continuous effort to examine our own and others' ideas for their adequacy in explaining the full range of facts about society. This is not to say that biases cannot be found in modern social science. They are deeply embedded, especially in the areas of politics, deviance, and stratification. But we can have some faith that the search for the most powerful explanatory theory will lead us away from ideological distortion, whether from the right, the left, or the center. One result of Marx's unveiling of ideology has been a distinction (first emphasized by Max Weber) between depictions of reality and evaluations of it, between "facts" (here used broadly to refer both to empirical data and to theories summarizing and explaining the data) and "values." This seems obvious enough: It is one thing to find out what the state of affairs is in the world, another thing to decide whether we think it is good or bad, just or unjust, beautiful or ugly. This distinction is important because most of our thought about the social world is evaluative: We are more interested in finding wrongdoers to condemn and heroes to praise than in explaining what happens or even in ascertaining the facts. Just after World War II it was popular to point to the "big lie" techniques of propaganda as a sign of totalitarian regimes and to stereotypes and distortions as the warning signs of extremist political thought. A closer acquaintance with serious sociology would have shown that such distinctions are naive: that all governments try to manipulate their own legitimacy, that all politics deals in slogans and ideology, and that the popular worldview is made up of stereotypes. If we are to expose the authoritarian and the brutal, deeds are much better indicators than words. The distinction between facts and values thus has a twofold usefulness: It warns us to note which statements are saying something about reality and which are only assuming something about that reality in order to arouse our feelings about the good or evil of it, and it points us to the hard discipline of separating out and testing a body of knowledge whose validity does not depend merely on our moral point of view. In the history of sociology the struggle against value biases is far from won. Indeed, controversy currently rages over this very issue. There is a strong tendency, especially among younger sociologists whose personal sympathies are vehemently on the side of dominated racial minorities in America and oppressed peasants in the Third World, to declare that all sociology must be value-biased and hence that the only choice is the moral one: Which side are you on? In support of this position, it is pointed out that academic social scientists have claimed to be value-neutral and yet have created theories that extol the virtues of American democracy, minimize the plight of oppressed groups, and rationalize military support for brutal dictatorships in Chile, Central America, and elsewhere. But the lesson is not clearly drawn. Propaganda for the left is no more valuable intel-

6 Introduction lectually than propaganda for the right or the center, whatever one may think of its moral virtue. The distinction between facts and values remains crucial, even in this context. If we do not make an effort to uphold the ideal of intellectual objectivity in assessing theories and facts, no valid knowledge is possible—even the sort of knowledge that practical and activist people claim to have about the problems of the world. If objectivity is not maintained, both serious theory and intelligently guided action will be impossible. A successful explanatory theory is universally acceptable as knowledge; but in the realm of value judgments, everyone's basic values are as good as everyone else's, and no logical argument can force people to change their minds. This means that applied sociology will be much more diverse than pure sociology; and it is for applied sociology that the arguments of radical sociologists hold true: It comes down to the moral question of in whose interests you choose to apply the arguments. The attack on some of the older sociologists, then, is a legitimate attack only on their applied work; their pure sociology, on the other hand, must be judged by the standards of scholarly objectivity, comprehensiveness, and consistency, and if mistakes are made here, they will be corrected by normal advances in research. If some of these people have misleadingly claimed value-neutrality in an effort to make others accept the conclusions of their applied work, carried out in the interests of cold-war politics, the blame cannot fall on the doctrine that distinguishes between facts and values but on the misuse these individuals have made of that doctrine. In the end the fact-value distinction remains absolutely crucial, and not only for the development of objective sociological theory. Whatever our values may be, only by taking a position of detachment are we able to see society realistically enough to act on it with any insight into our chances of success. The fact-value distinction is important to keep in mind in the following chapters. We have attempted throughout to present the successive developments in sociological theory and to assess their objective validity. Since most of these developments are far from complete in terms of formalizing the logic of their arguments and testing their factual predictions, our judgments on them must reflect the balance of existing evidence and the most promising prospects for future elaboration. But all this is an attempt to move forward within the realm of objective sociological knowledge. We have also tried from time to time to discuss some applications of these theories to particular practical issues of today. It should be clear that these applications are made from a particular point of view and in that sense we cannot make a claim on others to agree with us unless they happen to share our particular sets of values. These values are heavily on the side of maximizing personal liberty and are slanted toward the point of view of those coerced by systems of power. There are, of course, many other points of view from which theory could be applied; we have given little attention to practical questions as seen from the viewpoints of military officers, politi-

Society and Illusion 7 cians, businessmen, administrators, or dominant classes and status groups. For the theoretical side of sociological knowledge presented here, we would like to claim as much objectivity as the considerable progress of the sociological enterprise allows. For our practical applications, we claim no more than that an effort has been made to see the world accurately as it bears on our particular values. The fate of Karl Marx's insights warns us of how arduous the path to sociological understanding is. The fact that one person, even a famous one, makes an advance is no guarantee that other social thinkers will maintain it. Marx's thought had little impact on the respectable thinkers of his day. It lived on mainly in the underground until a twentieth-century generation of German sociologists (Ferdinand Toennies, Max Weber, Robert Michels, Karl Mannheim) recaptured some of its key insights. Marx's contributions did not fare much better in the revolutionary underground. Instead of being treated as a theory to be developed and refined as new facts and new insights became available, Marxism became a dogma to be polemically defended against all revisions. Near the end of his life, Marx was moved to cry out against his own followers, "I am not a Marxist!" When the Russian Revolution enshrined Marxism as an official state ideology, Marx's thought virtually ceased to be a fruitful source of new insight except, ironically, for non-Marxists or for Marxist heretics. The lesson applies not only to Marx; the uncompromising political realism of Weber and Michels has also proved too much for most respectable thought to incorporate, and it remains semihidden in an academic underground. Marx found one source of illusion about society in the realm of ideology; Sigmund Freud made an analogous discovery at the turn of the twentieth century when he discovered repression. Freud struck even closer to home. If ideology prevents us from understanding the larger processes that link us to countless others through the economy, politics, and social stratification, repression prevents us from seeing what is right before our eyes, including the motivations for our own actions. Again, the discovery was more in the way of seeing than in the sight itself. Freud was not the first one to notice that men lust for women who are not their wives (and vice versa) or that people can bitterly hate each other even while carrying on polite, and even intimate, relationships. Freud's insight was to see how widespread such desires and feelings are and to see that they can exist even in people who would be ashamed and guilty to realize that they felt anything of the sort. Freud unmasked the respectable society of the nineteenth century at its most vulnerable point—the place that was kept most hidden. Repression, like layers of clothing upon bodies, points to what is concealed by the very act of covering it. Respectable social thought of the nineteenth century, epitomized by Herbert Spencer and the British utilitarians, saw people in modern society as rational and respectable, the upholders of contractual rules that regulated the individual for the common good. Freud looked into those conscious,

8 Introduction rationalistic beliefs and those proper, middle-class ideals and found that they could be explained in terms of something else: passions of love and hate turned in upon the self in response to the social restraints that kept them from being outwardly expressed. Where preceding thinkers saw a rational human making decisions to follow the rules, Freud discovered what had long been excluded from such a worldview: that the human is still a physical animal, a creature of instincts and emotions, and that the civilized, rational part shaped by socialization does not displace the physical creature, but only reshapes it, sometimes in a mutilated form. The fate of Freud's insights has been much like the fate of Marx's. In some cases, his ideas have gained considerable notoriety among people who have heard of him only secondhand and who think that they can dismiss him with the observation that "obviously there's more to life than sex." In this way, his insight into repression has been itself repressed, along with the recognition that anything in the world is the result of sex, hate, or any other emotions impelling our rational behavior. Freud has also suffered from dogmatic followers who have given the theory a bad name in scientific circles, especially through polemics against equally dogmatic behavior- ists in psychology. Between these two extremes, Freud has done much to orient us toward investigating how childhood socialization makes us members of society. The central insights—the view of humans as emotional animals who live in groups, the existence of repression and identification—are yet largely unexplored, but they are not lost. Freud's discoveries are more appropriately investigated in group interaction than individual behavior. It is in the socially oriented analyses, conducted by such thinkers as the psychiatrist Fritz Perls and the sociologist Erving Goffman, that Freud's insights are beginning to find their explanation and their place in an integrated body of social theory. We have touched on a number of sources of illusion in our views of social reality: taking our social arrangements for granted because we know of no others, ideological distortions based on the interests and perspectives of our social positions, inability to detach ourselves from an evaluative stance, repression of things that make us feel shameful or guilty. By the time these sources of bias came to light, sociology was on the eve of the twentieth century. We shall touch on only two kinds of illusions and thereby bring ourselves up to the present: the fallacy of psychological reductionism and the misconceptions that a too-literal identification with physical science can engender. The man who cut through the first of these most strikingly was Emile Durkheim. People will commonly attempt to explain social events by the actions of individuals: to look for great individuals in history, agitators in riots, traitors in defeats. By the end of the nineteenth century the dominant evolutionist thinkers—speaking especially in defense of a laissez-faire economic policy—described society as the interplay of individual decisions, in which deliberate social policy could have little effect. Nevertheless, their basic mode of explanation was individualistic. People struggle for a livelihood

Society and Illusion 9 and rise and fall according to their individual qualities; modern society itself exists because of contracts between individuals. Durkheim struck through in a new direction: The distinctive thing about social institutions is that they persist while individuals come and go; they have a force of their own such that individuals who violate social norms not only do not change the norms but are punished as deviants. Furthermore, society can never be logically explained in terms of the motives of individuals. As Durkheim put it, society is a reality sui generis. "Social facts," such as the rules that people enforce upon each other, the forms of the institutions within which people act, and even the ideas that they hold, cannot be explained by examining the workings of an individual and multiplying the result a millionfold. These facts must be explained by social—that is, supraindividual—causes. Living organisms are made up of chemical molecules; yet physiology must be explained on its own level, in terms of the functioning of the parts in relation to each other. By the same token, society is made up of individuals but is not explicable simply in terms of individual psychology. With his emphasis on social structure as the subject matter of sociology, Durkheim gave the field a distinctive focus of its own. He also showed that such supposedly individual phenomena as suicide, crime, moral outrage, and even our concepts of time, space, God, and the individual personality are socially determined. With Durkheim nineteenth- century individualistic rationalism commits suicide. We know now that we are all social creatures and there is no turning back to the naive optimism of the nineteenth century that could see in the rational education of the individual the solution to all social ills. The final major development of sociology took place in the early twentieth century, for the most part in the United States. Instead of relying on historians, newspapers, and their own speculations, sociologists began to go and see for themselves: first with community studies, then with surveys, participant observation of organizations, and small group experiments. This research tradition has done much to counteract illusions based on ideology and on other biases. We have discovered, for example, that the conservative claims that crime is due to hereditary degeneration or racial traits (theories once popular among biologically oriented sociologists of the evolutionist school) are false, as are liberal outcries that social mobility has been declining in the United States. The great merit of an active research tradition is that it is largely self-correcting; as long as we insist that theories must explain facts, their biases are likely to reveal themselves sooner or later. But even this research tradition has its dangers and illusions. One of these is the problem of overspecialization and technicism. Sociology has become a large-scale cooperative enterprise; and, as in any large bureaucracy, the individual members tend to lose sight of the overall goals—producing and testing theories to explain all of social behavior and institutions—and become caught up in the immediate details of day-to-day research. One danger, then, has been the trivializing of research and a tendency to substi-

10 Introduction rute purely technical standards, such as statistical refinements, for substantial contributions to our knowledge about society. The physical sciences provided a model for the modern research enterprise; they have also provided a final, distinctively modern illusion about society. Many American social scientists, especially those who have not fully absorbed the great breakthroughs of Durkheim, Weber, Freud, and Mead, still find their ideas in a version of nineteenth-century tradition. Like the British utilitarians and their American followers, they continue to take the natural sciences as an uncriticized model for understanding society. Utilitarian rationalism has been modernized as behaviorism, the doctrine that asserts that human behavior is to be explained in terms of external stimuli—rewards and punishments—without any reference to scientifically inadmissible concepts such as "mind." In sociology, the old positivist doctrine shows up in the notion that the only valid material for a scientific theory is quantitative data, such as those collected in large-scale questionnaire surveys, carefully measured experimental behaviors, and census tabulations. Only "hard data," consisting of observed and preferably quantified behaviors or enumerations, are valid; "soft data," encompassing the experiences of participant observers, in-depth interviews, case studies, historical writings, and introspection, are excluded. The merit of this distinction turns out to be an illusion. Human social behavior and social institutions are basically symbolic. Society exists and affects the observable behavior of individuals only through systems of invisible names, rules, and positions that individuals can identify with and orient toward. As might be expected, strictly behavioristic theories have not borne much fruit in psychology; rather, it has been in the area of cognitive development and functioning that progress has been made. In sociology the extreme positivists have been found mostly among researchers who have been caught up in short-run technical concerns and hence have contributed little to advancing theories that explain society. It has been by insisting on the principle that we be able to explain all the facts that social science corrects itself, even against illusions created by an excessive zeal to emulate the methods of the natural sciences. Symbolic reality is the empirical reality for sociologists; it is life as all individuals experience it. Numbers derived by totaling the answers of many individuals to a few short questions about what they believe or have done are quite a long way from the firsthand experience of those individual lives that we are ultimately trying to explain. In this sense Erving Goffman and his students, with their firsthand accounts of how people manipulate the social reality they present for each other to experience, are the latest of the important innovators in sociology. We are coming to see that there is no necessary battle between "hard" and "soft" in the social sciences. Both quantitative but superficial data and direct phenomenological experience of a few situations have their values and weaknesses. When used to complement each other, they help us both to understand in depth and to check up on the generalizability of the understanding. Like a navigator plotting the position of a point from his or

Society and Illusion 11 her own moving ship, we are learning to "triangulate" our accounts of social reality from several vantage points. THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF SOCIOLOGY It is often said that the social sciences lag behind the natural sciences and that the latter have created the problems of atomic war, overpopulation, and industrial change that the former must now solve. This view betrays a naive analogy between the natural sciences and the social sciences, ignoring how unamenable to control by deliberate action the structures of a society are, except—and even here there are serious organizational limitations—by a form of political control that would be likely to create more evils than it solves. If we judge the social sciences not by the popularistic criterion of practicality, but by their advance toward a comprehensive and powerful explanatory theory of social behavior and institutions, their advance is much greater than has been recognized. Such a theory may not yet be found assembled in the textbooks, but the major pieces have been in existence for some time, and we are slowly learning to put them together. From a time when social thought was little more than myth, ideology, and speculation, we have broken through illusion after illusion, and with each destruction of old belief we have discovered something new and solid. The great breakthroughs that provide the basis for our modern knowledge took place around the turn of the twentieth century. Durkheim discovered the dynamics of social solidarity, providing us with a way to explain how society can operate as a moral order, instead of merely to justify or debunk it. Weber showed how ideas and ideals interact with material and power interests, how we can understand social order in the midst of conflict by seeing society not as a reified abstraction but as a stratified network of groups and organizations. In addition, Weber gave us the most penetrating vision of world history yet produced. Freud revealed the human as a social animal in whom civilized mind and physical body guide and torture each other. Mead showed both individual minds and social institutions to be the result of symbolic communication. Since then we have come to see how the unexplained or overlooked facets of one theory could be clarified by the insights of another. Weber synthesized leads from Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche; Goffman synthesized leads from Durkheim, Simmel, and Mead. Empirical research has fleshed out our general insights, especially on organizations and stratification, where we are beginning to see a core uniting much of sociological theory and research. This development is not yet widely recognized. Of the great figures in sociology, only Freud and Marx are names widely known to the general public. Durkheim, Weber, and Mead are little known or understood outside the bounds of academic sociology. Even within sociology progress has been obscured, most notably by the conflict between hard and soft approaches and by other controversies over the application of sociology to political is-

12 Introduction sues. Sociologists caught up in these peripheral disputes have thereby blinded themselves, in a way that Marx's analysis of ideology would have predicted, to their opponents' contributions to sociological theory and have even themselves often forgotten that a comprehensive explanatory theory is the major goal of the discipline. But in science as elsewhere nothing succeeds like success. As the demonstrated power of the central sociological tradition is increasingly brought into the light, it advances steadily. The sociological tradition has shaped our views of the world throughout the last century without our knowing it. It has been the major source of political worldviews: Radicalism derives mostly from the views of Marx; liberalism in both its laissez-faire and its welfare-state versions from the British utilitarians and evolutionists; corporate statism in Europe from the tradition of Saint-Simon; fascism from, among other sources, the racist varieties of nineteenth-century evolutionism. What is striking about this list is that modern political ideologies all derive from nineteenth-century social thought. The far more profound thought of the great breakthrough—the Durkheim-Weber-Freud-Mead contributions—has as yet had little influence on our thinking about social and political issues. Popular thought lags fifty or seventy years behind the forefront of sociological knowledge. Even the university-oriented liberal proponents of the modern American welfare state have offered little more than a benevolent reformer's belief in the "bad environmental" causes of crime and social unrest and a faith in social work and public education as panaceas. Political ideologists have yet to appreciate the hard Weberian truths about the dynamics of status stratification and the scarcely controllable momentum of bureaucratic organizations and the Durkheimian and Freudian discoveries of the personal strains in a world of impersonal rules and emotionless organizations. Modern sociology does not recommend itself to those in search of easy solutions, whether these be of the left, right, or center. Indeed, one of sociology's great contributions is to show that the center is just as subject to illusion as are the extremes. Perhaps we can now see why sociology does not offer easy practical applications in the way that advances in the physics of electricity gave rise to color television sets. If we wish our knowledge to advance, we cannot spell out what that knowledge must consist of in advance of the facts. The facts are not what most people would wish them to be, and social science cannot be called in to tell them what they want to hear. The early social thinkers of the Enlightenment thought they had the key to the world: Humans are basically rational; the evils of despotism and war are due to ignorance and superstition. Let people only learn to see things in a rational way, and Utopia would be ushered in. This dream has died hard. The generation of Durkheim destroyed its last remnants as far as serious thinkers were concerned, although it has hung on in naive public ideologies—a further illustration of how little our social behavior fits the Enlightenment dream. Politicians and social movements pursue their own ideologies and try to impose their ceremonies on reality; the applied sociologist advising them is usually in the position of an anthropologist telling the aborigines what is wrong with their fertility rites.

Society and Illusion 13 If sociology has a contribution to make, it is this: If we can be more realistic about our world, more wary of the dilemmas of social organizations, more aware both of the necessities of social coordination and of the dangers of social coercion, and more sophisticated about the illusions with which our institutions populate social reality, we can perhaps make our world more livable. It may be that if enough people realized the connections between political illusion and political coercion and the deadening effect of psychic chimeras on our everyday encounters, the quality of life would improve a great deal. A significant part of the new generation has already shown itself more realistic than those before it—more capable of cutting through social hypocrisies about sex and politics, through rituals of status deference and illusions about personal relationships. Whether a new culture of honesty and personal emancipation will enable us to control the coercive and alienating institutions of modern society is still in doubt, but greater illumination is one of our few weapons. THE BOUNDARIES OF SOCIOLOGY A final note should be made on the subject of disciplinary boundaries. We have attempted to present a brief history of sociology, but we have not insisted on any rigid classification of thinkers, and occasionally we move far beyond what a strictly Durkheimian view of the field would include. One of the reasons for the looseness of boundaries is that sociology did not become a distinct discipline until the twentieth century. Up to that time, it was often not distinguished from economics, and many of the important sociologists—Marx, Weber, Pareto, Parsons—spent some or all of their lives as economists. As economics came to concentrate more and more on the technical analysis of money, prices, wages, and employment, it gradually became a distinct intellectual enterprise as well as a separate university department, although even today institutional and developmental economists, such as James O'Connor, Arghiri Emmanuel, Samuel Bowles, and Herbert Gintis, discuss many of the same concepts and issues as sociologists. Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers tells much of the side of the story we have omitted here. Another discipline whose history is entwined with that of sociology is anthropology. The main difference between the two fields is primarily a historical one: Anthropologists became identified as the investigators of the newly discovered tribal societies of the colonial era, whereas sociologists were concerned with modern societies. The distinction has since broken down. As primitive tribes have been colonized or destroyed, anthropologists have come to study modern Western and non-Western societies, and sociologists to study traditional ones. Today there is little difference between what most anthropologists and sociologists do, although anthropology includes some fields—physical anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics—that are rather remote from the work of most sociologists. It is mainly for reasons of space that this volume does not deal with the great anthro-

14 Introduction pologists, although Spencer, Durkheim, and Freud must be viewed as key figures in both histories. The interested reader is referred to Marvin Harris's book The Rise of Anthropological Theory for a sketch of the great discoverers in anthropology. Political science had origins rather distinct from those of sociology. It originated largely in the study of constitutional law, and its main function has been to train public administrators and high-school government teachers. This background has meant that its orientation has been too philosophical and too ideologically biased to make any very notable contributions to a scientific theory of society. Since World War II the behavioral movement has developed in American political science, and political scientists now do work in areas such as political sociology, organizations, and social change, which overlap sociology. Psychology has long been both distinct from and intertwined with sociology. Its distinct branch deals with nonsocial determinants of individual behavior in such areas as physiological psychology, perception, learning, and motivation. The overlapping branch is social psychology, the study of the individual in relation to others. It has been carried on in modern American universities both in sociology and in psychology departments and sometimes in a separate department of its own. We have set the boundaries of sociology rather far over in the field of social psychology out of the feeling that disciplinary boundaries often do more harm by compartmentalizing studies that should be carried on in a broad perspective: than they do good by allowing the concentration of attention. Freud, in particular, might be considered primarily a psychologist, but we give him rather full treatment here for two reasons. First, although Durkheim is surely right that social structures cannot be explained purely in terms of individuals, society is nevertheless created only by individuals, and our explanations of social order must be founded on knowledge of how individuals function, especially in relation to others. Second, Freud has exerted a great deal of influence on sociology and anthropology—indeed more than on psychology (although perhaps less than on the medical field of psychiatry). American academic psychology has been the bastion of behaviorist orthodoxy, and much of the best thought about cognitive functioning—by Mead and Schutz as well as by Freud—has had to find refuge in sociology. Psychology's loss has been sociology's gain, but one that may eventually be repaid, as the work of the symbolic interactionists, ethnomethodologists, and sociolinguists promises much progress in understanding the psychological functioning of individual human beings. Finally, history has considerable overlap with sociology. It would be difficult to place earlier thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville, Fustel de Coulanges, Weber, Henri Pirenhe, Marc Bloch, Otto Hintze, Michael Rostovtzeff, and many modern historians such as Lawrence Stone or Fernand Braudel decisively in one intellectual camp or the other. Like sociology, history is an all-encompassing discipline: Everything that has ever happened in the social world is potential material for its narratives, just as it

Society and Illusion 15 is potential material for sociological theory. The main difference is in orientation: Sociology's is toward a generalizing theory, history's toward the description and explanation of particular sequences of events. The distinction between generalizing theory and particularistic histories is not an absolute one, however. Historians often apply general principles as a means of ordering the myriad facts available to them, and one of the great tasks of sociology has always been to describe what a particular society (usually our own) is like and to explain the social changes that have led up to our world. In thinkers such as Marx and Weber, the two aims—creating generalizing explanations and capturing a particular historical drama—were carried side by side, to their mutual enrichment. As historians grow increasingly interested in probing beyond political and diplomatic events to social structures, we can expect the two disciplines to draw together even more closely. Our history of sociology is thus mixed with those of most of the other social disciplines. We draw the boundaries here only to make our subject compact enough to handle. The various disciplines have learned much from each other in the past, and they have much to offer each other now and for the future if only we transcend narrow departmental labels. Having said this, perhaps our various colleagues will forgive us if we indulge in a little sociological pride: In the pages of this book, the reader will find the most illuminating tradition in modern social thought.

PARTI The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism CHAPTER ONE ophets of Paris: Saint-Simon and Comte CHAPTER TWO ology in the Underground: Karl Marx CHAPTER THREE Last Gentleman: Alexis de Tocqueville CHAPTER FOUR Nietzsche's Madness CHAPTER FIVE -Gooders, Evolutionists, and Racists

CHAPTER ONE The Prophets of Paris: Saint-Simon and Comte One sign that an era is over is that it begins to be romanticized. Medieval society had become remote enough from the educated French of the early nineteenth century for many of them to grow nostalgic about it. It had been a time of faith and order, they thought, when everyone from peasant to king knew his or her place, and social strife was unknown; when people were poor but happy, and the lords and priests watched paternally over their human flocks. The thinkers of the eighteenth century could hold no such illusions. They were too close to the realities of the Middle Ages and glad to have just escaped. People certainly had been poor; but happy? The physical hardships of the Middle Ages were scarcely imaginable—peasants had nothing but bread to eat, and aristocrats were often little better off; dwellings were small, cold, crowded, unsanitary, and ridden with disease. Nor was there much order. Europe had been in continual warfare since the decline of the Roman Empire, and the threat of violence permeated everyday life. It was a world without police, in which individuals looked out for themselves. Towns locked their walls to keep out robbers, and masters could inflict harsh punishment on their servants, and fathers on their children. Torture was the common treatment for public suspects, and execution and mutilation were the punishments for trivial crimes. People knew their places only because they were kept in them; order existed only as violent oppression. Nor was that period precisely the age of faith that the romanticists imagined it to be. Religious conflict was almost as chronic as political violence. The Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter Reformation were but the biggest and bloodiest battles over the world of the spirit. Heresies and persecutions abounded both before and after the time of Luther, Calvin, and Torquemada's Inquisition. The Church owned a third of the land in Europe and provided the financial and spiritual support for kings (and sometimes their soldiers, too), thereby giving virtually all conflicts a religious tone. It was an age of faith only in the sense that the Church was omnipresent, and the belief in heaven and hell was virtually unquestioned. The universe was seen as highly ordered, as in Dante's description of the world starting with the heavenly spheres, where God dwelt with his an- 19

20 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism gels, proceeding down through the social hierarchies of the earth to the nine underground levels of hell, where the damned were punished according to their sins. Virtually everyone believed dogmatically in this world order, but they disagreed with each other about just where everyone fitted into it—about who was to be Pope, which kings were to be sanctified, which theology should dominate, and whose morals should be absolute. Everyone was sure of his or her version of the truth and was ready to kill whoever stood in its way. In short, it was an era of waking nightmare, and when peace came and religion waned in the advanced kingdoms of England and France in the 1700s, thinking people heaved a sigh of relief. For them, it was an awakening, an "enlightenment." Those who entertained the salons of Paris with their conversation were the first intellectuals since antiquity to find employment outside the Church. The philosophes, as such men as Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Condorcet, and Turgot came to be known, had found a substitute for theology in science. Isaac Newton was the hero of the age, for his work on the laws of motion, published in 1687, showed how the universe ran of its own accord like a clock. Reason was the spirit of the times, and religion was its enemy. Humankind would at last be happy when the last king was strangled in the entrails of the last priest, declared the freethinker Jean Meslier, to which Voltaire gave assent—although under his breath, since he made a living by frequenting the courts of "enlightened despots" such as Frederick the Great. The philosophes rejected the theology of sin and declared that nature was reasonable and good. It was necessary only to discover the natural laws that governed the world and to put society in accordance with them. History ceased to be seen merely as the record of humankind's deeds between Adam and the Second Coming of Christ or a story of continual decline from the golden ages of Greece and Rome. Rather, people began to view history as the progress of scientific enlightenment, in which the eighteenth century stood out as an age of reason, an age of optimism. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 brought the opportunity people had been waiting for. Now they could be rid of the old order entirely and build a new one bas£d on principles of reason and justice. The king was overthrown and beheaded, aristocrats dispossessed, and the feudal order abolished. But then the liberal supporters of the Revolution began to fall away. The republicans began to turn against themselves. The Assembly purged more and more of its members, and their heads rolled from the guillotine to the cheers of the Paris crowds. The Revolution became paranoid; enemies of freedom were everywhere at home, war was declared against it abroad. The Reign of Terror was instituted under Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety. Finally, Robespierre himself went to the guillotine, and France began turning to the right. In 1799 the republican government was overthrown by a general named Napoleon Bonaparte, and the great experiment was almost over. It took another decade and a half for the drama to play itself out. But behind the grand adventure of Napoleon's conquests and eventual defeat, it

The Prophets of Paris: Saint-Simon and Comte 21 was becoming clear that an idea had failed. Reason could be a religion, too, and many people could be just as fanatical in defending the Enlightenment as any Grand Inquisitor. Paris in 1815, with a constitutional monarchy back on the throne, was superficially at order again, but intellectually it was in turmoil. Reformers, Utopians, and cultists abounded with their explanations of what had gone wrong and what must be done to set it right. At this point entered Saint-Simon, and our story begins. HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON (1760-1825) Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, as his name tells us, was an aristocrat, born into one of the most eminent families in France. Like many of his contemporaries, he was brilliant, egotistical, and absolutely unprincipled. His opportunistic career sums up many of the contradictions of his age. He began with a wild and dissolute youth, during which he was even imprisoned by his family as the only means of controlling him (as was, incidentally, his sinister contemporary the Marquis de Sade). Saint- Simon then became an officer in the French army, went to America, and fought in the battle of Yorktown. But we must not think of him as a freedom-loving volunteer like Lafayette; Saint-Simon served purely under the orders of the absolute monarch, King Louis XVI, who for reasons of state supported the Americans in order to oppose the British. Saint-Simon's political motives did not prevent him from becoming an honorary member of the American patriotic Society of Cincinnatus. If Saint-Simon was cynical, it only reflected the general tone of his age. Back in Europe, Saint-Simon chafed for some excitement. He cooked up schemes for building canals—one across Central America, another connecting Madrid to the sea—but could not successfully promote them. The French Revolution came along at just the right time. Saint-Simon took on the role of the great republican, making revolutionary speeches, presiding at the local assembly near his estate, proposing reforms, and befriending the peasants—while the chateaux of other aristocrats went up in flames. At the height of the republican fervor, Saint-Simon even renounced his title and took the name Bonhomme, equivalent to a Rockefeller today naming himself Jones. Throughout the political turmoil, Saint-Simon was also busy with private affairs. The Revolution confiscated lands of the Church and of aristocrats who were beheaded or fled the country; Saint-Simon busily bought them up at a fraction of their cost. As the republic's paper currency steadily lost value, Saint-Simon speculated in money and paid for property in worthless assignats. To be sure, Robespierre had his eye on such speculators, and Saint-Simon was arrested under suspicion of being a foreign agent. But he had established his republican image well in the provinces, and he mustered enough impeccable supporters to have himself freed. The episode proved only a temporary setback, and while heads were rolling

22 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism from the guillotine, Saint-Simon amassed a fortune. He entertained lavishly, kept a salon, and conversed grandly with a drawing room full of admirers and wits about his plans for reconstituting society. But this was not to last. The French Republic was eclipsed in 1799 by Napoleon's coup d'etat, and not long after Saint-Simon found that he had spent the last of his fortune. He began to harass his former business partners, his family, and whoever could give him money. He became regarded as a nuisance. He turned again to ideas, wrote them up, and sent them in petitions to Napoleon, to members of the Academie des Sciences, and to anyone else who might put them into action. His favorite idea was that the world could be saved if the scientists would form an international council and take over the direction of society. Instead of war and strife, people could then turn their attention to building canals and generally improving conditions. Saint-Simon had taken a typical Enlightenment idea, the belief in science, and given it a slightly more practical foundation. Strangely, Napoleon and the other eminences were too busy for Saint- Simon's schemes. His petitions were usually returned to him unopened. Saint-Simon dropped further into destitution. He came to believe that the scientists were in a conspiracy against him. His paranoia grew acute, and for a while he was confined in the famous madhouse at Charenton (the setting for Peter Weiss's play Marat/Sade). He made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide. Eventually, his fortunes improved a bit. After the monarchy was restored in 1815, Saint-Simon began to make a living as a publicist. The confiscated properties of the aristocrats were now in the hands of a new class of financiers and entrepreneurs, and with the downfall of Napoleon the remaining emigres returned and tried to reclaim them. The government became the focus for a struggle between these two groups, and Saint- Simon, who had a sharp eye for the winning side, began to put out papers and pamphlets arguing the cause of the "industrialists," as he called them. The word was soon to take on general currency. Saint-Simon's publications were always collapsing, but he made a living by making the rounds of his supporters for contributions to each new venture. Out of this enterprise, Saint-Simon developed his theory of society and began to attract a following. Saint-Simon's main idea was that industrialism was a new era in history. Progress was not a matter of science alone, but affected all the conditions of life. This new society, growing out of a declining feudalism, would provide the basis for solving all the old problems. Saint-Simon was one of the first to discern the new order emerging, and he took on the role of prophet concerning how it should operate. One of Saint-Simon's famous statements sums up his philosophy: Suppose that France suddenly lost fifty of her best physicists, chemists, physiologists, mathematicians, poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, writers; fifty of her best mechanical engineers, civil and military engineers, artillery experts, architects, doctors, surgeons, apothecaries, seamen, clockmakers; fifty of her best

The Prophets of Paris: Saint-Simon and Comte 23 bankers, two hundred of her best businessmen, two hundred of her best farmers, fifty of her best ironmasters, arms manufacturers, tanners, dyers, miners, clothmakers, cotton manufacturers, silk-makers, linen-makers, manufacturers of hardware, of pottery and china, of crystal and glass, ship chandlers, carriers, printers, engravers, goldsmiths, and other metal-workers; her fifty best masons, carpenters, joiners, farriers, locksmiths, cutlers, smelters, and a hundred other persons of various unspecified occupations, eminent in the sciences, fine arts, and professions; making in all three thousand leading scientists, artists, and artisans of France. These men are the Frenchmen who are the most essential producers, those who make the most important products, those who direct the enterprises most useful to the nation, those who contribute to its achievements in the sciences, fine arts and professions. They are in the most real sense the flower of French society; they are, above all Frenchmen, the most useful to their country, contribute most to its glory, increasing its civilization and prosperity. The nation would become a lifeless corpse as soon as it lost them. It would immediately fall into a position of inferiority compared with the nations which it now rivals, and would continue to be inferior until this loss had been replaced, until it had grown another head. It would require at least a generation for France to repair this misfortune; for men who are distinguished in work of positive ability are exceptions, and nature is not prodigal of exceptions, particularly in this species. Let us pass on to another assumption. Suppose that France preserves all the men of genius that she possesses in the sciences, fine arts and professions, but has the misfortune to lose in the same day Monsieur the King's brother, Monseigneur le due d'Angouleme, Monseigneur le due de Berry, Monseigneur le due d'Orleans, Monseigneur le due de Bourbon, Madame la duchesse d'Anguoleme, Madame la duchesse de Berry, Madame la duchesse d'Orleans, Madame la duchesse de Bourbon, and Mademoiselle de Conde. Suppose that France loses at the same time all the great officers of the royal household, all the ministers (with or without portfolio), all the councillors of state, all the chief magistrates, marshals, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, vicars-general, and canons, all the prefects and sub-prefects, all the civil servants, and judges, and, in addition, ten thousand of the richest proprietors who live in the style of nobles. This mischance would certainly distress the French, because they are kind- hearted, and could not see with indifference the sudden disappearance of such a large number of their compatriots. But this loss of thirty-thousand individuals, considered to be the most important in the state, would only grieve them for purely sentimental reasons and would result in no political evil for the State.1 By chance, a few days after this was published in 1819, an assassin took the life of the Due de Berry. Saint-Simon was arrested as an instigator. But Saint-Simon had chosen his sides well, and he was acquitted. The old era had been devoted to war and religion; aristocrats and priests had lived as parasites on the rest of society. The new era was to be devoted to the production of useful goods and services. Saint-Simon did not distinguish among bankers, manufacturers, engineers, laborers, poets, and scien- 'Henri de Saint-Simon, Social Organization, The Science of Man, and Other Writings (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), pp. 72-73.

24 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism tists—all were producers, in contrast to the parasitic aristocracy. "All men must work" became Saint-Simon's slogan, whatever work one might be suited for. His disciples later put forward the formulation: "Each according to his capacity"—eventually to become famous as part of the motto of communism. The Saint-Simonians were quite willing to call themselves "socialists," although they meant this in a rather vague sense. Modern ideologies had not yet crystallized, and the Saint-Simonians continued to believe in private property, although they did not assign it very much importance, and were more concerned with coordinating the activities of society through large and centrally directed enterprises. Great undertakings—like canals, railroads, and steamship lines—were the focus of their interest, and these things were "social" rather than individual in nature. The modern era was to be one of peace. Force would no longer be necessary, since people would turn their powers against nature instead of against other men. The state would virtually cease to exist, at least in its old, coercive form; it would be replaced by a world council of scientists, financiers, and industrialists, who would plan and coordinate for the good of all. Society would remain a hierarchy but would no longer be looked upon as stratified. People simply have different innate capacities: Some are more intellectually developed, and these would become scientists; others are more emotional and would become the poets and artists; those who are more motor-oriented would become the workers and organizers. The best of all three types would be given the top positions of leadership, and the others would array themselves below. All would be happy if they could fill their own true function, be it high or low. In sum, Saint-Simon believed in the rise of a perfect meritocracy. What Saint-Simon developed has turned out to be the characteristic ideology of industrialism. It is found all over the world today, among the technocrats of the modern French state, in the British civil service, and in the great American bureaucracies from the universities to the RAND Corporation. It is a belief that progress is based on science and that new societies are created out of the old (in the developing nations of the world as well as in the more advanced countries of the East and West), without revolution or conflict, simply by putting the scientists and industrialists in charge. There is no real conflict of classes if everyone works and is able to rise according to his or her individual merit. The system is elitist, but no one would (or should) mind, since the experts at the top are working only for the common good. This ideology includes what may be called the belief in "the stateless state": that the government exists purely as a technical, neutral instrument for coordinating society, not as a means of oppression or the provider of special interests. As we shall see, even the Communists adopted this view of their own state, although they deny that it is true of the state in capitalist countries. When Saint-Simon died in 1825, his young followers started off on an unexpected turn. Taking up one of Saint-Simon's last ideas, the creation of a

The Prophets of Paris: Saint-Simon and Comte 25 "new Christianity" of social harmony, they began to preach love of humanity and formed a Utopian community outside of Paris, where all would work for the common good. In a prim and proper fashion, they were the hippies of their day. The experiment collapsed after a year, when their leader Enfantin was brought to trial and sentenced to a year in jail for outraging public morals. After this romantic escapade, the Saint-Simonians settled down to become industrialists and financiers. Among them were the Pereire brothers, the financiers of Louis Napoleon's Second Empire and the organizers of the famous Credit Mobilier speculations. Another of these, Ferdinand de Lesseps, even brought one of Saint-Simon's earliest schemes to fruition: In 1869 he completed the Suez Canal. AUGUSTE COMTE (1798-1857) In 1817 Saint-Simon engaged as his private secretary a serious young man named Auguste Comte. Comte was well educated, having just graduated from Napoleon's new Ecole Polytechnique, where the best of modern science was taught. Saint-Simon saw his new assistant, trained in mathematics and all the sciences, as the disciple who could formulate his lc ose ideas into a complete system. They worked together for seven years, developing their views on history and on industrial society. From this enteiprise was to emerge an entirely new social science. I They split up in 1824 after a series of quarrels. The final dispute came over the question of whose name was to appear on the title page of their most important work. Without a patron, Comte fell into dire straits. He demanded a position at the Ecole Polytechnique from which to 1 each his new science and was refused repeatedly. He eked out a living grac; ing entrance examinations in mathematics, gave public lectures to whoever would listen, and wrote volume after volume about his system. Like his former employer, he barraged kings and officials all over Europe with petitions to support his work. He drew no response, for the garrets of Paris were crowded with starving writers of every variety, and his petitions were part of a deluge of such mail. Comte fulminated against those who rejected his ideas, which he felt could save the world. In classic style, he went through fits of raving mania and was confined for a while at Charenton asylum. He twice attempted suicide. Eventually, he began to gather a cult around him, and his system of Positivism gradually became known. . Comte's system derives from a basic principle, the law bf the three stages of knowledge. Comte referred to this concept as "the great discovery of the year 1822" (when he had still been working for Saint-Simon); he had even written down the hour of the day at which he had begun each new page. It was over the publication of this work that the break with Saint- Simon had come. The law of the three stages states that knowledge of any subject always begins in theological form (explanation by animism, spirits, or gods), passes

26 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism to the metaphysical form (explanation by abstract philosophical speculation), and finally becomes positive (scientific explanation based on observation, experiment, and comparison). Accordingly, there is a historical sequence of the sciences, as the various areas of knowledge pass through these stages in order of difficulty. The simplest and most remote topics become scientific first, followed by increasingly complex and concrete matters. Thus the sciences develop in this order: mathematics astronomy physics chemistry biology sociology Humans free themselves from theological and metaphysical notions first in those areas most remote from themselves—mathematics and astronomy; it is only after great advance that humans come to apply science to the realms of their own being—biology and sociology. This was, in fact, the first time that society was conceived of as an object for science, and Comte coined the term "sociology" for this new field. There appears to be a missing link in this list of sciences—psychology. But this was no oversight on Comte's part. As far as he was concerned, the individual psyche or soul was merely a religious and philosophical superstition; a truly scientific psychology would treat humans as the activity of body and brain, and hence psychology was part of physiology, a division of biology. Comte's views on psychology at the time consisted of a belief in phrenology, the system that explained human temperaments as due to the enlargement of various areas of the brain. This survives today only as a memory of analyzing a person's character by feeling the lumps on his or her head. Comte's radical rejection of any subjectivistic psychology has its modern counterpart in behaviorism. Comte's rejection of psychology has another important consequence. In his view, each science constitutes a separately organized level of existence. The social world, although composed of individuals, is not identical with those individuals, but is structured according to its own principles. Comte thus broke with the prevailing Enlightenment search for an answer to social problems in the elements of human nature. Society is not just the behavior of individuals, but something that accumulates across many generations. Just as language is created by individual people speaking, but nevertheless develops a vocabulary and a grammar that no one person ever does much to modify, society remains and unfolds by laws of its own, while individuals come and go. Comte thus hit on the concept of society as a cumulative culture, as we would now put it. The task of the new science of sociology was to set forth the laws that governed this entity. Accordingly, sociology is divided into two parts: "social statics" and "social dynamics." Comte defined statics as the study of social order, and dynamics as the study of social change or progress.

The Prophets of Paris: Saint-Simon and Comte 27 Comte himself was well trained in the sciences of his day, and he held that sociology would develop by the scientific methods of observation, experimentation, comparison, and historical research. Unfortunately, he himself never did much of this kind of research, although he was fairly well versed in history. He was in too much of a hurry to finish his system, for he believed it contained the answer to the main problem of the day: how to put a society ravaged by revolution and strife back into order. With this in view, Comte invoked some methodological principles that provided shortcuts to his goal. The first of these was the principle that isolated facts cannot be understood by themselves, but must be seen in their larger context: The whole must be grasped if one is to see the functions of the parts. This principle contains the fairly sophisticated idea, upheld by modern philosophy of science, that one must have an organizing paradigm or set of concepts before one can know what observations to make of the world. But Comte neglected the modern proviso that the concepts one begins with are only provisional, to be modified or rejected as the effort to fit in the facts goes on. Comte was confident that he had grasped the model of the whole at his first try. According to this model, society is analogous to a biological organism. Society has its various parts (the family, the church, the state) just as a body has its various organs (the liver, the brain, the kidneys, and so on), each serving some function for the whole. Comte did not mean that society is literally an organism; it exists only as consciousness, not as physical individuals, and the various social institutions are parts of this set of ideas that are passed on from generation to generation. The roots of modern functional- ism can be found in this analysis. The various parts of society thus fitted together, and none could exist without the others. The harmonious society, then, was based on Consensus, a feeling of belonging together as a moral unit. Here we can see how much more conservative Comte was than his mentor Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon was a thoroughgoing atheist and materialist, a believer in science and industry, whereas Comte felt that society could not be held together by reason alone, but demanded faith. Thus the family, the church, and the community are the core of society, for it is here that people's selfish tempers are controlled by the sentiments of love, duty, loyalty, and respect. Comte thus mixed Saint-Simon's revolutionary heritage with the ideas of the conservative opponents of the Revolution, who contrasted the chaos of the years of Robespierre with a romanticized view of feudal society. The most influential of these conservatives were the emigre aristocrats Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, whom we shall meet again when we come to Tocqueville. Social thought owes many of its advances to such mixtures. This constituted Comte's social statics. Two other principles helped him formulate his system of social dynamics: the belief that social change everywhere goes through the same sequence and the belief that all the various elements of a society change together. According to the first of these, we do

28 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism not need to investigate the history of all societies; we need only locate the most advanced society, and the stages of its history will show us the stages through which all others must pass. The evolution of one society can show the rest of the world the face of its future. Comte was thus able to place all known societies on a continuum of development, from the primitive tribes described by the explorers of America and the Orient, on through the empires of history, and culminating, needless to say, with nineteenth-century France. The second of these principles tells us that progress occurs simultaneously in all spheres—intellectual, physical, moral, and political. This follows from the idea of society as an integrated whole or system. This provided another shortcut for Comte, for it meant that one kind of change could be taken as an index for all others. Comte chose to emphasize intellectual change, since this was the area he knew best. The result was this capsule summary of the stages of human history: Material Basic Social Basic Moral Intellectual Form Unit Sentiment Theological Military Family Attachment Metaphysical Legalistic State Veneration Positive Industrial Humanity Benevolence Comte's basic ideas have had enormous influence on the development of sociology, both for good and for ill. Society is somewhat like an organism, but it is also unlike an organism in crucial ways. It is inherently full of conflict as well as harmony; and it is held together, when it is in fact held together, by coercion and economic self-interest as well as by moral sentiments. Comte's ideas about social change have been especially pernicious. They have a considerable appeal for the mentally lazy, who do not want to have to understand the intricate paths of history, which are arranged so inconveniently that they do not even progress toward the same goal. The elements of society do not all change together, and the outcomes are neither so inevitable nor so benevolent as Comte believed. For all humankind's hopes, France did not hold out the vision of the future for the rest of the world, nor does the United States for the Third World today. As we are beginning to understand, the so-called developing nations show few signs of creating our kind of politics, stratification, or even economy in the foreseeable future, and it has even become questionable whether they are "developing" at all. Today's world planners are guilty of the same haste for favorable conclusions as was Comte. There is no shortcut substitute for the scientific method of collecting, comparing, and analyzing the facts. On the positive side, Spencer, Durkheim, and others were to make good use of many of Comte's leading insights: the recognition that society would have to be explained on its own level rather than by reduction to psychology, the division of labor among social institutions, and especially the role of

The Prophets of Paris: Saint-Simon and Comte 29 moral sentiments in holding society together. Free of Comte's overwhelming ideological concerns, later sociologists have gone beyond merely advocating moral order to analyze it, to search for the conditions that create it at certain times and places, and, thus, to break through to an understanding of the emotions and rituals that harness people to each other below the level of their rational consciousness. But this was to be in the future. Comte, indeed, ended by turning his new science into a cult. The cult took form after Comte, in 1844, had a melodramatic but strictly platonic love affair with a middle-aged woman. The object of his passion was a lady named Clothilde de Vaux, who had been deserted by her husband but still remained faithful to her marriage vow. The high point of the affair was an abortive liaison, complete with much handwringing and many protestations of duty and honor, which left Comte still physically denied but enraptured with worship of Clothilde's moral superiority. Not long after, she became deathly ill, and Comte forced his way into her bedroom and locked out her parents so that he might spend her dying moments with her alone. Comte then began a series of ritual devotions, starting with daily obeisance to a lock of Clothilde's hair. He formed his followers into a Religion of Humanity, with Comte as its high priest. He began to refer to society as the "Great Being" and preached universal love and harmony through his system of industrial order. He envisioned mankind advancing to progressively higher levels of spirituality and even imagined a time in the future when love would dispense with gross material forms entirely, and women would be able to give birth without sexual intercourse. He formulated a new calendar, with days of devotion commemorating scientists, saints, poets, and philosophers alike. He planned a council of all such leaders, organized under the High Priest of Humanity, who would rule the world benevolently through the application of Positivism. The cults of Comte and Saint-Simon, like the other utopian schemes of the nineteenth century, failed to save the world, of course, or even to have very much effect on it. Saint-Simonianism provided an ideology to justify the activity of some financiers and industrialists of the nineteenth century. Comte's Positivism attracted scattered adherents around the world, notably in the United States and Russia, and at the behest of some romantic Brazilian aristocrats it was made the official philosophy of Brazil. Indeed, Comte's motto Ordem e Progresso (Order and Progress) is still found on the Brazilian flag, an ironic commentary on the actual conditions of that beleaguered country. The utopian prophets failed to change the world because they insufficiently understood it. They were too optimistic, too sentimental, and too eager for easy change to understand that history grinds out its conclusions through long and hard struggles. In the next chapter we meet the founder of the most successful social movement of modern times, a man willing to see the conflict at the core of things: Karl Marx.

CHAPTER TWO Sociology in the Underground: Karl Marx The social thinkers discussed so far have been respectable. They appeal to the established order. They talk of ideals and avoid looking too closely at unpleasant facts about the new industrial order. But the nineteenth century was not simply a glorious era of science, progress, justice, and brotherhood. Saint-Simon's harmonious hierarchy of industrial men or Comte's social organism made sense only if one closed one's eyes to what was going on in the mundane world. Black smoke was beginning to hang in the air over the industrial towns of England, France, and Germany, and on the streets behind the houses of the prospering businessmen were growing the tenements where workers crowded with their families in scenes of grime, poverty, and disease. The mines and factories were manned by a tubercular population of men, women, and children, working eleven-, thirteen-, or fourteen-hour days, six or seven days a week, without respite except through layoff or death. For Karl Marx the basis of reality was here, in the harsh facts of material and economic conditions, and the talk of philosophers, politicians, and priests was only a smoke screen designed to divert attention from it. Marx was the great angry man of the nineteenth century. Indignant at what was happening to people and at the hypocrisy and blindness of those who covered it up, he set out to reveal what was going on, to explain both the inexorable workings of the economic substructure and the deceptions of the political and ideological superstructure. Marx was the first to come to grips with the realities of social conflict instead of wishing them away, and for this he doomed himself to a life in the underground. But this was the fate he wished. Free from the illusions of respectability, he thought he saw the system bringing its own destruction and the outlines of a newer, better world arising in its midst. Karl Marx, the man of conflict, was both a realist and a revolutionist. It is not surprising that Marx is the most controversial of all modern thinkers, with the possible exception of Sigmund Freud. His writings have been the handbook of revolutionists and would-be revolutionists. With the success of his followers in Russia, China, and elsewhere, his ideas have been raised to the level of state dogma. In Moscow the Institute of Marxism- 30

Sociology in the Underground: Karl Marx 31 Leninism faithfully recorded the events that took place every day of Marx's life. Marxism became a political orthodoxy. On the other side, virtually all opponents of communism have felt they must refute the Marxist system, usually by pointing out that revolution has occurred only in backward countries, where Marx did not expect it, and has not occurred in mature capitalistic nations, where Marx did expect it. The anti-Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe and Russia during 1989-1991 further discredited Marxism as a political and economic program. Can we say, then, that Marxism is just a bizarre episode which the future will increasingly forget? Marx predicted that factory workers would be the gravediggers of the capitalist system; instead, the worldwide capitalism of the late twentieth century appears to be burying socialism. But let us make some distinctions among the various parts of Marx's ideas. His program of socialism did not work out as he expected. But Marx did not say much about socialism, only regarding this as a phase in the future which should be created when the time came. His work concentrated on capitalism and its internal conflicts. Ironically, the collapse of socialism makes the topic of capitalism even more central. This is the system we see almost everywhere, including in the old Soviet-bloc countries where capitalism is being introduced today. Socialism is certainly not a Utopian end of history, but neither is capitalism. Capitalism is full of economic conflicts, and these inner workings of capitalism are even more on the center of the stage now that the conflict with socialism has virtually disappeared. Marx's great contribution to sociology was in opening up the analysis of economic classes and economic conflict, and in proposing that they have a central place in the theory of how societies operate. Though Marxism was wrong about many things, the central insight remains an important one. Knowledge advances by using and revising ideas to account for the facts we turn up, building on strengths, shoring up weaknesses. In the long run we are best served by discovering as much as we can of the truth, not by rushing to act on half-truths or outright illusions. Marx's ideas can best be used if we are aware of both their weaknesses and their strengths, and that is what this chapter will try to display. KARL MARX (1818-1883) Marx was born in Trier, one of the small, legalistic states of the Rhineland, on the border between a progressive France and the more traditional parts of Germany. His father was a liberal, a Jew from a long line of rabbis, who had nominally converted to Christianity in order to maintain his career as a lawyer—that is, as a member of the local government bureaucracy, since lawyers were not independent professionals in Germany. Young Marx attended the University of Berlin, where he drank in taverns, acquired debts, fought the usual duel and got the usual scar on his face, and studied philosophy. In short, he prepared himself for an academic career.

32 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism But circumstances conspired to forbid him a respectable career as a brilliant professor. He became caught up in the intellectual movement known as the Young Hegelians. Georg Hegel (1770-1832) had been the dominant German philosopher of his day. He was a liberal, after the German fashion, which meant that he believed in the rule of laws rather than the arbitrary rule of humankind and hence supported the Prussian state. Hegel's philosophy was a culmination of the idealist tradition that began with Kant; it held that the essence of reality is Reason, but that the spirit of Reason manifests itself only gradually, revealing more and more facets of itself during the course of time. History, he held, is the growth of Reason to consciousness of itself, and the constitutional, legalistic state is the culmination of history. Hegel developed his philosophy while Napoleon seemed to be spreading the achievements of the French Revolution all over Europe. Later, in the reaction following Napoleon's final defeat in 1815, Hegel found it expedient to declare that history culminated in the bureaucratic Prussian state, and he became the official philosopher at Berlin. Of course, there was no reason history should come to a halt in Prussia, especially when that state still lacked a true constitution, and after Hegel's death the revolutionary implications of his doctrine came to the fore again. One faction of Hegel's students, the left Hegelians, unleashed his historical relativism as an attack on the autocratic state and its ideological bulwark, the state church. Marx's teacher, Bruno Bauer, investigated the Bible as a historical document and declared the Gospels to be forgeries and Jesus a historical myth. For this Bauer was dismissed from his university post in 1842 as dangerous to the state. This ended Marx's chances for an academic career, since sponsorship was even more important in the universities of the time than it is now. It had been predicted that Marx would be the most eminent professor of his generation, but this path was now closed. Marx took his first step toward the underground. He became the editor of a liberal newspaper in Cologne, a Westernized city on the Rhine River. Hard economic realities struck him immediately. He became embroiled in a controversy with the authorities over their decision to prohibit peasants from cutting firewood in the forest, although this was a traditional custom. The trees were protected by laws, Marx wrote acidly, while poor people froze. He began to view philosophy of all sorts as a distraction from the hard, material realities. Hegel's idealism stood history on its head, he later wrote; the task was to set it on its feet. The newspaper lasted five months before being suppressed by the government. The conservative papers accused him of being a Communist. Marx did not quite know what this meant, but he resolved to find out. Now twenty-four years old, he went to Paris, the intellectual home of all radicals. He read the French historians, imbued with the Saint-Simonian idea of progress and the image of industrial society breaking out of the bonds of feudalism, and he encountered the advocates of Utopian socialist communities. To his German Hegelianism and French radicalism he added the third leg of his system: the ideas of the British economists Adam Smith,

Sociology in the Underground: Karl Marx 33 Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. These thinkers explained how the movements of people and goods in this new era were controlled by the invisible hand of the market. Among Marx's radical acquaintances was Friedrich Engels, another idealistic young German, who had just returned from his father's textile factory in Manchester, bringing with him a harsh expose entitled The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Their ideas meshed, and they launched an intellectual partnership that was to last the rest of their lives. They were soon expelled from France for their radical writings. They went to Belgium and then to England. In 1847 they attended secret meetings in London of a new revolutionary coalition of labor unions (at that time illegal) called the Communist League. As its platform they wrote a manifesto, which ended with the following words: The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING-MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! The Communist Manifesto was finished in January 1848. In February, during an economic crisis in Paris, a group of demonstrating unemployed workers were fired upon by soldiers, and the city erupted into riot. The French king abdicated, his government collapsed, and a wave of revolt was set off through the cities of Germany, Italy, Austria, and most of the rest of Europe. The nobility everywhere were frightened and on the defensive. In France the wealthy property owners took command of the Second Republic; a popular left-wing revolt in June was crushed by the army in six days of bloody fighting. Around Europe the right wing gradually regained confidence and began to reestablish its power. Marx, who edited the revolutionary newspaper in Cologne during the uprising there, was banished by the Prussian government. Reaction had set in again. Marx went to London, his final place of refuge, and, watched by police spies, began again to write. With him came his wife, his childhood sweetheart and the daughter of a German aristocrat who had been the Marxs' neighbor in Trier. Life became a struggle to survive. For a while Marx made a living as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune, then under a liberal editor. At times the family nearly starved. They lived in the poorest working-class section of London. They pawned their possessions and borrowed money from Engels, who was then working in his father's business in Manchester. Several of Marx's children died of malnutrition and disease. Through it all he managed to work, sitting in the reading room of the British Museum from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day for years. At last, in 1867, his researches were published as Das Kapital, a book that would help bring down half the world. Marx's life work forms a comprehensive system, but for purposes of analysis it may be divided into three parts: his sociology, built around the

34 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism analysis of class consciousness and class conflict; his economics, which develops the internal contradictions of capitalism; and his social and political philosophy, built around the notion of alienation and its solution in communism. These parts are not equally valid. Marx's sociology has turned out to be basically correct and has been very important for subsequent theories. His economics, on the other hand, is crucially flawed, although it points us to some important questions. His philosophy, in the final analysis, is based on value premises and ways of looking at the world that individuals can accept or reject as a source of inspiration as they see fit. In short, it is possible to get much from Marx without accepting his whole system. MARX'S SOCIOLOGY Classes and Class Consciousness 'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," Marx declares at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, and classes are the core of his analysis. Marx did not invent the concept of class, of course. In his day one could scarcely avoid noticing them, and the danger was rather to take them for granted. What Marx did was to provide a theory of how classes are produced. He began from materialist premises. Since one could not survive without making a living, he reasoned, the source of one's living must be the most basic determinant of one's behavior. The economy of an era, with its different economic positions, was thus the source of its fundamental class divisions. In the society of ancient Greece and Rome the economy was organized around slavery; hence the basic classes were those whose living came from owning slaves (the patricians or citizens), the slaves themselves, and those who were neither slaves nor slaveholders (the plebeians or freemen). In the feudal society of the Middle Ages the basis of the economy was the manor; the main class was the nobility, who owned the land and the services of the peasants attached to it, and the serfs or peasants, who provided the agricultural labor. In modern or bourgeois society the economy is organized around industrial production and commercial exchange; and the main classes comprise the capitalists, who own the factories, the banks, and the goods to trade, and the proletarians, who own nothing but their own labor power. Within these classes there could be further divisions. For example, in feudal society the nobility was divided into ranks from king down to knight and included the landowning clergy of the powerful medieval Church. There were also minor classes not based directly on the central economy, such as servants, guild masters, journeymen, apprentices, and free peasants. For Marx the property divisions were crucial because they marked the breaking lines in the social structure. When conflicts became intense, classes would have to group themselves along these divisions. Thus modern soci-

Sociology in the Underground: Karl Marx 35 ety includes financial capitalists (such as bankers and brokers) as well as industrialists and agricultural landowners; small capitalists as well as big ones; the petty bourgeoisie, consisting of handicraftspeople and shopkeepers who both own their own tools and shops and work in them; the working class or proletariat; and the poorest and most degraded class, full of criminals and people living from hand to mouth, the lumpenproletariat. Marx used all of these classes to analyze what happened in modern society, but he expected the conflicts to polarize more and more between the property owners as a whole and the propertyless workers, with the petty bourgeoisie and small capitalists being deprived of their property and dropping into the ranks of the proletariat. This material organization of society produces what Marx calls "class consciousness." People do not have an objective view of the world; they see it from the restricted point of view of their own positions. Thus, bourgeois writers like John Locke saw private property as an inherent part of the order of nature; feudal lords saw the rights of hereditary nobility as given by God; and the ancient philosophers could not even imagine a world without slavery. This is not to say that people have no capacities for being objective or that they spend all their time thinking about their economic interests. They may occasionally be genuinely interested in the ideas of philosophy, religion, science, literature, history, or art, but where their ideas impinge on the social world, class consciousness goes into action. Out of the array of available ideas, people select those to believe in that best fit their material interests. Thus, the medieval nobility supported the conservative Christian thinkers who preached the sanctity of worldly authority and diverted the peasants toward the spiritual world and away from the oppressions of the material one. This is the meaning of Marx's phrase, "religion is the opiate of the people." Occasionally, it could work the other way, as when the religious upheavals of the Lutheran Reformation provided some alternatives, and a peasant revolt broke out under the religious guise of the belief that the Second Coming of Christ was at hand. In modern society bourgeois interests found ideological support in beliefs about personal morality; extolling the virtues of hard work, individual success, self-control, frugality, and respect for law and property were ways of getting people to support the competitive system of free enterprise. In the same way, politicians make speeches about the eternal truths embodied in their laws, even though those laws frame a system of property that benefits the group those politicians belong to. But there seems to be a contradiction here. If everyone selects ideas to fit his or her personal interests, how can religion be the "opiate of the people"? How can people have "false consciousness" and be taken in by the ideologies of their opponents? This was a serious question for Marx, since the workers did not always see the capitalists as their enemies, and until they did so, a revolution could not occur. Marx's writings imply two main answers. The first is simply that people's ideas can be controlled by coercion. He himself was familiar with government censorship, treason trials, and the

36 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism denial of rights of speech to "subversive" thinkers by those who did not want their viewpoint contested. The second, somewhat subtler, answer is that consciousness depends on the material resources people have for formulating and communicating ideas. The dominant social classes have most of these resources: They get the most education, are most likely to be literate, and have the time and money to keep up on news and ideas. Furthermore, they can influence what ideas are produced by paying the salaries of teachers or priests, owning newspapers or controlling them by buying their advertisements (or, in the present era, giving research grants). The impoverished Saint-Simon, writing publicity for the French industrialists, provides an example of how the process works. The lower classes can criticize the upper classes under their breath but not in the center of public attention, and they lack the means to formulate ideas about things happening at a distance from them. The result, in Marx's words, is that "the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas." As history moves, consciousness changes with it. The thinkers of the Enlightenment appeared because material conditions had changed in England and France, and the incipient bourgeois class was beginning to gather the resources to support thinkers of its own. Marx discerned another movement, culminating in the future. As capitalism brought workers into the cities and crowded them together in factories, it created material conditions that allowed the workers to communicate among themselves. Literacy and the press began to give the workers a chance to develop a worldview of their own. Beneath the public beliefs of bourgeois ideology an underground consciousness was growing. Here Marx found a role for himself not unlike that of Hegel: to raise the level of consciousness of the working class until it became fully aware of itself. MARX'S THEORY OF POLITICS All this culminates in Marx's theory of politics. Politics is the effort to control the state. The state fundamentally consists of the instruments of organized violence in society, and hence it is an enormous power for whoever can control it. The state is a crucial prop for the economy in that it establishes the system of property. Property, after all, is not so much the things that are owned as it is the right of owners to do what they please with them, and the denial of those rights to others. Land, for example, does not "belong to" anyone, even if it is used, until someone claims the exclusive right to use it and backs up the claim with either his or her own power or the power of the state. In this way, the state creates the rights of property in a system of slavery or serfdom or in a modern money economy. Marx was particularly interested in the fact that since the state creates private property, it can abolish it and substitute socialism. But that was for the future. Ordinary politics is the struggle to control the state so that its pow?^

Sociology in the Underground: Karl Marx 37 can be used for one's personal advantage. The struggle may be between members of the same class (such as nobles fighting among themselves for power in the Middle Ages) or between different class sectors (in modern society, petty bourgeois interests versus industrialists, financiers versus landowners). Beneath the sonorous speeches of the politicians, the real business of politics concerns mundane economic issues—taxes, tariffs, monopolies, franchises, licenses—over which people struggle and bargain for nothing more noble than the opportunity for economic gain. Occasionally, there are more important clashes. These occur in historical periods when new economic classes attempt to change the existing structure of property. Marx lived in the shadow of the French Revolution, when the entire feudal system of aristocratic privileges and monopolies was swept aside to create the basis for a market economy, transforming the noble into a holder of salable land and the peasant into a free laborer, and freeing the entrepreneur from old monopolies and restrictions. These basic, revolutionary conflicts draw together the members of the various classes. Nobles cease to fight among themselves, and the bourgeoisie unite in their common interest. An entire system is at stake. Who wins in these struggles? There are two main determinants: the distribution of material resources that enable people to struggle successfully for power and the historical situation that favors a class whose time has come. While these are not entirely distinct, we can see that the first determinant is most important in ordinary politics, and the second is crucial in times of revolution. During the feudal era, for example, ordinary politics was monopolized by the aristocracy, because they alone had the resources to engage in it. The peasants were tied down to the land; the merchants were a minor group, without military power. Men who owned enough property to afford a horse and armor could be knights; the great landowners could outfit whole armies. Thus the nobility constituted the only "political class," the only group with the time and resources to keep informed of what was going on, to make alliances with other nobles, and to take part in wars and court intrigues. In the same way, in the industrial era the capitalists control communications, money, and time. They exert an influence over government far out of proportion to their numbers because they command the resources of business and finance. The network of business contacts gives them a class organization; their business and financial affairs keep them constantly aware of what the government is doing that may affect them; their wealth and organizational bases allow them to support politicians who will represent them in office. Not the least of this power is ideological. As we have seen, the class with the strongest resources can control the means of communication and hence hinder other classes' abilities to formulate their own interests. Within the capitalist class, as within the aristocratic class in its era of dominance, those who hold the largest resources will be able to advance their interests over those of their fellows. But when another class chal-

38 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism lenges, the class that holds the greatest resources as a whole will usually unite and thus prevail. This brings us to the second determinant of power, the long-term historical changes in the economy that favor a particular class simply because that class's interests happen to coincide with the interests of the system as a whole. Marx was sure that the bourgeoisie would eventually prevail over the aristocracy in Germany, Russia, and the rest of the world, just as it had in France. Once capitalism developed to the stage where a society depended more on industrial production and trade than on subsistence agriculture for its livelihood, the capitalist economic system had to be supported by favorable state policies. To fail to give it this support would hurt everyone, especially the existing rulers, who would not want to go back to a preindus- trial standard of living. But in Marx's time the old feudal laws and government hindered capitalism; kings could only ruin it with their old policies of sales of monopolies, indiscriminate taxation, and special rights for aristocrats. The means of production had outgrown the relations of production; the fetters had to be broken. "Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one," declared Marx. The revolution came in France in 1789. The king went to the guillotine, eventually to be replaced by another in 1815—but now the old property system was gone, and a new one, suitable for the bourgeoisie, had taken its place. Instead of the old absolute monarchy, there were a constitution and a representative assembly in which the bourgeoisie could begin to shape laws to its economic needs. The bourgeoisie won because its time had come. The economy had changed, giving them the resources to contend for power, the ideology to express their interests, and the favored position of being necessary for society's prosperity. A similar revolt in the Middle Ages could only have been a failure. Even if by some chance the capitalists had had the resources to win power, they would have been unable to change the laws upholding feudal society without creating a chaos of marauding warriors and defenseless peasants. They had to wait until history was prepared for them. Marx's sight focused on another class maturing in the womb of history: the working class. Just as capitalism grew up within feudalism until their conflict kept both systems from operating and the old world had to be smashed to make way for the new, capitalism itself would begin to break up because of its internal contradictions. The periodic financial crises, with attendant bankruptcies and unemployment, were only symptoms of what was to come. As the industrial economy grew, it would come more and more into conflict with the free market and the system of private property that formed its structure. Eventually, a crisis would occur in which the interests of the workers alone would coincide with the necessities of keeping the system going. Only abolition of private property and the institution of socialism would restore economic order. The interests of the workers, then, would have at last become the interests of the whole system, and the capitalists would be displaced.

Sociology in the Underground: Karl Marx 39 The process was really twofold. Not only would economic change make the workers the necessary dominant class, but it would also shift the balance of weapons with which to conquer power. The factories and industrial cities would bring the workers together in the strength of numbers, and technological change—the press, the telegraph, and so forth—would improve their capacities for communication and organization. Modern advances would thus bring them to full mobilization and full consciousness of their interests. When the moment struck, they would be prepared. When properly understood, Marx's sociology appears to be basically correct. That is not to say that his predictions about the downfall of capitalism are right, as they obviously are not. But these are specific applications of the theory and not the theory itself. A considerable amount of modern research indicates that one's economic position (that is, occupation) is a major determinant of one's life style, interests, and beliefs; that economic change produces the lineup of classes in a particular historical era; and that the material resources for organization and communication, along with the functional necessities of governing to keep up the economy, tend to determine who will win political power. All of this, however, Marx plugs into a particular theory of how the economy will develop. His account of capitalism growing within European feudalism and bringing about the great waves of bourgeois revolutions seems basically accurate. But his theory about the inevitable tendencies of modern capitalism is wrong. It is because Marx's economics fails that the rest of the system does not turn out the way he expected it to. Marx did not, as is sometimes suggested, fail to take account of racial or religious strife that would keep the workers from unifying, or of social mobility that would make workers think of their individual chances of rising instead of their class interests in overthrowing the whole system. He merely expected such conflicts to be dwarfed by an economic crisis so great that people would have to unite along class lines simply to survive. The decline of racial animosity in the United States during the Depression of the 1930s suggests that Marx was right on this point. Similarly, he recognized the possibility of social mobility, but he believed that in a time of economic crisis the only social mobility would be downward. No, the problem is with Marx's prediction of an economic crisis that could be resolved only by socialism. We turn, then, to a brief sketch of Marx's economics. MARX'S ECONOMICS Labor Theory of Value Marx began with a premise common to Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the other classical economists: that the value of anything is the amount of labor it takes to produce it. For example, if it takes one day's labor to pro-

40 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism duce a shirt and two days' labor to produce a pair of shoes, then two shirts are worth one pair of shoes. Given the fluctuations of supply and demand on the market, the market price should eventually come into equilibrium with the real value, and two shirts will sell for the price of a pair of shoes. The labor theory of value, then, describes the basic mechanism of production and exchange in the economy. It also has a special appeal to a socialist like Marx; for if labor is what produces value, justice would seem to require that workers receive the proceeds of their labor. Profit as Exploitation If the labor theory of value is correct, we are left with a paradox: Where does profit come from? The market moves toward equilibrium; everything gets exchanged for its true value; one day's labor is exchanged for one day's labor. How can individuals get more than they put in? Marx finds the answer in one commodity that sells for its true value yet can produce more than what it sells for. This commodity is human labor itself—the workers' exertions as they sell them on the labor market. According to Marx's chain of deductive reasoning, labor should tend to sell for its true value, which is equivalent to the amount of labor it takes to produce it—that is, if it takes an average of six hours' work by farmers, weavers, carpenters, and others to feed, clothe, and shelter a man for a day, he will be paid the equivalent of six hours' work. But if the employer pays him for six hours' work, he can nevertheless work him eight hours (or twelve hours or fourteen hours, as was more common in Marx's day). This is possible because the employers own the means of production—the factory and its tools—and hence they can demand this longer working day as a condition of giving the man a job. Profit, then, comes out of the extra hours of work, over and above what the worker is paid for. This extra work is called "surplus value," and profit can be said to be based on the exploitation of labor. Law of the Falling Rate of Profit The system can now be set in motion. As capitalists expand production, they compete with each other for labor. Thus, they bid up wages to attract workers. But rising wages cut into the margin of profit. This, in turn, motivates capitalists to install labor-saving machinery to cut their labor costs. But here the capitalists start to cut their own throats. Machines do not produce profit, according to Marx's scheme; profit comes only from exploitation of labor. Any gains manufacturers may make with their new equipment will disappear just as soon as competitors catch up with them and install the same equipment. This drives the price of machinery up and the price of the produced goods down, so the upshot is merely that the capitalists have reduced the amount of labor they employ in comparison to machinery and other nonlabor costs. This means that profit has to fall, since exploitation of labor is the only source of profit, and less labor is being

Sociology in the Underground: Karl Marx 41 exploited. And in fact, the economists of Marx's day agreed that profits did tend to decline. (Modern economics has modified this principle: Profits fall within the business cycle, but not across cycles, where there can be long-term growth.) Periodic Crises This brings us to the characteristic drama of the capitalist economy. About every ten years throughout the nineteenth century there was a depression. As new machinery is installed, Marx explained, people are thrown out of work. This means there are fewer people drawing wages and hence fewer people who can afford to buy things. But the machinery has increased the rate of production. There are too many goods, too few buyers. Prices fall; profits go down. Manufacturers try to catch up by installing even more labor-saving machinery, but this only makes matters worse. Soon there are great warehouses of goods lying unused, while unemployment grows and people are destitute. Manufacturers go bankrupt, throwing even more people out of work. Eventually, the crisis reaches a bottom. The stronger capitalists buy up the factories and machines of the bankrupts at a fraction of their value and begin to make a profit. The surplus is used up, workers can be hired for low wages, and employment begins to rise. Soon the cycle begins again: a boom of expansion and profit, then a bust of falling profit, mechanism, and unemployment. The system rises and falls with grim regularity, only each time there are fewer manufacturers, holding bigger and bigger shares of the market. The Final Collapse of Capitalism Capitalism, then, moves toward a gigantic industrial monopoly. The smaller capitalists are squeezed out; they lose their property and join the ranks of the proletariat. At the same time the system creates a great reserve army of the unemployed, which keeps the competition for jobs high and wages at a level just above starvation. The proletariat thus becomes larger and more disgruntled. Each successive crisis of the system is worse than the last, because the collapse of big firms throws more workers into destitution than the collapse of small ones. During this period, the economy becomes centralized through these gigantic monopolies, preparing the way for socialism. All that needs to be done is to overthrow the system of private property and let the workers run the system for the common good. A last crisis occurs, and the workers rise up as a vast majority. The army, the politicians, and the defenders of the state can do nothing to stop them, for all are forced to see the inevitable solution. 'The centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument," Marx prophesied. "This integument bursts asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."

42 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism What went wrong? The capitalist system has not collapsed in the advanced industrial countries, whatever its strains; profits have not fallen in the long run; wages have not stayed near subsistence level. There have been cyclical crises, to be sure, and huge corporations with near monopolies dominate the business scene; but the crucial elements of Marx's picture are missing. There are two main answers. The Marxist reply has been: imperialism. V. I. Lenin, whose theory was based on the ideas of the British economist John Hobson, pointed out that modern capitalism has become international. Thus the more advanced countries, like Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, have been able to avoid domestic economic ills by exploiting the rest of the world. If capitalist countries overproduce, they can dump their excess goods in the markets of India or South America. Extra capital to invest can go to the same places; even labor can be exploited internationally, by using low-cost native labor to produce raw materials cheaply. In short, by exploiting the rest of the world, the wealthy nations can keep their profits up and can even pay enough wages to content their workers. But the crisis can only be put off, not evaded entirely. Once the entire world is brought into the capitalist orbit, the class conflict will become internationalized. War becomes an adjunct to revolution. Lenin saw World War I as a struggle of the great capitalist powers of Europe over colonial markets; the result could only be to speed up the inevitable chaos of the capitalist system. Thus, Russia underwent a socialist revolution in the economic devastation following its defeat by the Germans. World War II and the Japanese conquest were to have the same results in China. Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam are only so many more steps along the road toward capitalism's final collapse. There is another answer to the question of why Marx's predictions have not been realized, one that goes more to the core of the problem. That is: Marx's labor theory of value and the related labor exploitation theory of profit are wrong. Labor, we may reflect, is not the only thing out of which profits may be gotten by obtaining more production from it than it costs. Machinery and improved organization can provide this too, because they can increase the productivity of labor. The United States produced so much more per capita in 1970 than it did in 1870 because our technology is so much more powerful today. This means that it has been possible to produce much more than before; profits can remain high, yet workers can get more, too, by unionization and through government welfare programs. With this extra production the government can even intervene in economic crises, using the techniques of Keynesian economics (such as government employment, spending, and taxation) to keep widespread unemployment and underconsumption from happening. None of this would be possible if Marx's inexorable economic machine really worked the way he said it did; but that machine is broken at the very center. Marx's thought forms a perfect system: The economy produces social classes, class consciousness, and class power to rule the state; the labor the-

Sociology in the Underground: Karl Marx 43 ory of value, the law of the falling rate of profit, and the inevitable progression of economic cycles turn the wheels of the system. But the labor theory of value is wrong; the mainspring falls out. Marx's sociological determinants go on, but free of their inexorable underpinnings. History lapses into indeterminacy. Still, something may be salvaged from the wreck of Marx's economics. If economic crises are not necessarily inevitable, it is still true that they can occur or at least threaten to occur, and it is worth remembering Marx's prediction of their political effects. The capitalist societies of the West since the 1970s have become increasingly divided between the extremes of wealth and poverty. Marx's theory did not encompass the expansion of the middle classes between the two extremes; and we need to revise our theoretical understandings to take account of this. But the existence of the middle class does not eliminate economic conflict among classes; it only makes it more complicated. It appears what we have now is a conflict among four different classes: the wealthy property-owning capitalists at the top; the middle class; the working class; and a poverty class at the bottom subsisting on welfare and posing a specter of street crime. Class conflict now often takes place between the middle class and the poor, with the former in revolt against what they consider to be the burden of the welfare system and the threat of crime from below. But this too is class conflict, although more complex than Marx envisioned. We see tendencies, too, for the middle class to revolt against the upper class, reacting to the financial scandals and tax inequities that became so prominent in the 1980s. Class conflict obviously is not at an end. The Marxist theory bases its dynamics on an economic mechanism that does not quite work. It does not give us the answer, but points us to the crucial questions. MARX'S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Marx's philosophy is woven throughout the rest of his work. It centers around the ideas of alienation as the distinguishing feature of humankind's history and of communism as the end of history and the solution to alienation. Alienation has become a common idea in the twentieth century; modern individuals have, it would seem, been infected by a malaise that was scarcely discernible one hundred years ago. We feel there is something about the world we have created that goes against our basic nature—that we are ruled by the impersonal forces of the market and the inhuman decisions of bureaucracies. We live in a world diagrammed by Kafka. Marx was one of the first to discern this malaise, although it remained for Weber and Freud to make empirical sense out of it. For Marx alienation was less an observable fact than a basic axiom, derived from Hegel and ultimately going back to a theological notion of sin. To understand what Marx meant, we must take a brief excursion back into Western philosophy.

44 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism The idealist tradition in philosophy can best be grasped if we begin with Rene Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes's famous phrase "cogito ergo sum" (I think therefore I am) was the one principle that he found must be true, even if one doubted everything else about the world. David Hume (1711-1776) extended the scope of skepticism by pointing out that we can never really know that something causes something else. If one event always follows another (at least has always done so up until now), we can only suppose that it is caused by the first event. We judge the probability that the same sequence will happen again. Causality, then, is something we impute to things out of our own minds, not something that absolutely exists "out there." Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the founder of the German idealist tradition, took this idea one step further. We cannot really know anything about the world, he argued, because we never experience anything except through our own subjective filters of understanding. Not only causality, but time, space, shapes, numbers, colors, and substance are all part of the framework of our own minds. The "things in themselves" can never be known; all one can know is the contents of one's own mind, imposed on the raw materials of unknowable reality. This brings us to Hegel, Marx's mentor. Hegel drew the conclusion from Kant that humans create their world by the act of perceiving it. But this does not occur all at once; it takes all of history to fulfill. In effect, inert matter has no form until living creatures develop who can perceive it; the higher forms of beauty and truth do not appear until humans arrive to see the world through these spectacles. Moreover, an individual actively fashions the world, making tools, works of art, laws, states, and systems of ideas. Each of these progressively manifests more and more of the world of forms into the world of actuality. Eventually (we are nearing Hegel's own time), humans become aware that they are the agents of something greater than themselves—that the world is a spirit that unfolds more and more facets of itself until it is fully visible. This spirit is Reason, and it reaches its culmination in the constitutional state and in Hegel's philosophy, which is Reason at last conscious of itself. Alienation enters into Hegel's system because it describes the relationship of humans to their creations up until the time they finally recognize reality for what it is—the unfolding spirit of Reason. That is, people create things but then fail to understand that they have created them. They mistake the world for something objective (at least, they did so up until the revelation of Kant). They worship objects as idols and lose sight of their own creativeness and of the spirit flowing through them. Thus, people are cut off, or alienated, from their essential selves. Marx adopted this form of analysis from Hegel but took it off its spiritual foundation. For Marx people create the world through their labors but then become constrained by the very things they have created. They create religions out of the imaginings of their own brains and then fall down and worship their gods as if they really existed. They create the state and then cannot escape its rule. They create an economic system by the labors of

Sociology in the Underground: Karl Marx 45 their own hands and then find that they are compelled to sell themselves on the market they have created. In a famous chapter in Capital entitled 'The Fetishism of Commodities," Marx describes how money begins as a means of exchange to buy goods but soon becomes an end in itself. Goods become viewed in money value only, instead of in terms of their use to the consumer. A house is no longer a place to live but becomes a piece of real estate that one can afford to live in only if the market makes it feasible to keep it. The capitalist is a person who cannot enjoy owning goods but must turn them into as much profit as possible or else be wiped out by a competitor. In the capitalist system the workers are the most alienated of all, because they become cogs in a machine, selling their own labor as a commodity, and are stripped of any meaningful relation with the goods they produce for the capitalist to sell. Alienation grows progressively worse throughout history. The final revolution that brings down capitalism, then, destroys not only a system of economic exploitation, but also a system of dehumanization. History ends with communism, for monopoly capitalism stretches human alienation to the final verge, at which it can at last be abolished. Communism was to be a society without alienation, where people no longer were to be controlled by the system they had created, but instead would control it for their own benefit. The division of labor itself would be destroyed. Humankind would at last reach absolute fulfillment. Marx's notion of alienation is not really an empirical entity, but a whole way of looking at the world, of holding up a standard to evaluate it by. Modern sociologists have tried to measure just how alienated people are in various kinds of jobs, and the results are mixed. Certain kinds of labor, such as that on the assembly line, are considered by most workers to be rather dehumanizing. Most other kinds of work (and we must remember that most people, even in factories, do not work on assembly lines) elicit a fair amount of positive reaction; and some people, although a minority, even like working on the assembly line. Marx's response would no doubt be that people can be so oppressed by the system as to lose even their elementary human wants. In the final analysis Marx believed in untapped human potentialities and held up a high standard for society to emulate. The idea of communism is easier to evaluate. Marx himself actively promoted the revolution he wrote about. He helped found the revolutionary trade-union movement, the International Workingman's Association ("the First International"), and Engels carried on the leadership after his death. In some places, notably in Germany, the unionists' Marxism became more and more rhetorical and irrelevant as their organization gained political recognition. But the revolutionary potential of Marxism would not be lost. Marx's most militant followers, inspired by his penetrating analysis of capitalism and by his assurances of the inevitability of their victory, created a state in Russia and elsewhere in his name. The Communist states emerged from the wreckage of states in World Wars I and II. In the second half of the twentieth century, the cold war and the nuclear arms race

46 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism against the capitalist West strengthened control by the military and by an authoritarian Communist party over Soviet societies. The system became overwhelmingly unpopular with its own people; ironically, the political and economic crises which Marx envisioned for the end of capitalism came about instead in the socialist states. To explain why this system collapsed would take further advances in sociology; we will meet some of this analysis later in Chapter 15. Marx would probably have rejected the Soviet system as a gross perversion of what he had in mind. He wanted a system to dignify the whole person, not to sacrifice everything to the military power of the state. But Marx never really devoted himself to the hard question of how his humanist Utopia was to be brought about. It is easy to speak abstractly of people taking control of the system instead of being controlled by it, but it is harder to see just how this may be brought about. Indeed, much of subsequent sociology has carried on a debate with Marx's ghost, as Weber, Sorel, Michels, Mannheim, and others have questioned the possibility of controlling power in the same way that the economy might be reduced to management for the common good. Events have forced us to go beyond Marx. We have had to look for ways to escape from the Leviathan of the state as well as the Mammon of the marketplace. THE MARXIAN LEGACY Since Marx's death there has been a continuous strain of dogmatism among his followers. The movement he engendered made such strong organizational and emotional claims on its members that most of them seem to have had little inclination to think any new thoughts on their own. The movement has not been entirely stagnant, however; there have been those willing to build on some of Marx's themes and drop others. In the period just after Marx's death in 1883, for example, Friedrich Engels and other leading Marxists stressed the scientific, materialistic nature of Marxist thought. In the early twentieth century, writers like Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Rudolf Hilferding brought about new developments on the economic side. These Marxists turned their attention to the role of imperialism, finance capitalism, and war in shaping society. Politically oriented Marxism, at the same time, began to claim that socialism could be achieved through parliamentary and political means. Its proponents included the German "revisionist" leader Eduard Bernstein, who preferred to speak of "evolution" instead of "revolution." The Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, who spent many years in Mussolini's prisons, argued that the goal of Marxist politics was not merely to await the economic destruction of the capitalist class, but politically to overthrow the hegemonic (actually ruling) class by gaining control of the state. In the 1920s intellectual Marxism began to shift away from materialism toward an idealistic philosophy. The first move in this direction was made

Sociology in the Underground: Karl Marx 47 by a young Hungarian intellectual, Georg Lukacs, who had previously been a follower of Hegel. Lukacs declared that the basic problem was not so much the surface issues of economic exploitation and political domination but the reification of the false ideologies upheld by capitalist domination. Lukacs thus cast Marx's doctrine of alienation (which is, of course, originally derived from Hegel) into a form that is both more philosophical and more sociological. It is people's attachment to the false ideals they use to shroud their own social striving and privileges that alienates them from a true, productive reality and from a truly honest self, according to Lukacs. And it is the working class that is least subject to reifications, because it is least attached to the dominant ideologies; its mission therefore is to liberate the more alienated, dominant society from its own false consciousness. In the next few decades, the Frankfurt school in Germany brought Marxism into even closer harmony with Hegel. Herbert Marcuse argued that Hegel, with his dialectic of the development of Reason, was the great progressive philosopher, preparing the way for Marx. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno went even further, declaring that Marxism was the sole embodiment of Reason in this era of fascist antireason brought about by the fatal irrationalities of advanced capitalism. In the 1960s leadership of the Frankfurt tradition was taken over by Jurgen Habermas. Habermas wrote of the ideological interests behind the scientific establishment by which modern government and business try to rationalize their decisions and of the legitimation crisis that has become for modern capitalism the equivalent of the traditional Marxian economic crisis. In France, meanwhile, Marxism has been integrated with existentialism by its leading proponent, Jean-Paul Sartre, and with structuralism by his opponent, Louis Althusser. ENGELS' THEORY OF GENDER STRATIFICATION Another part of the Marxian tradition which has become increasingly important in recent years is its analysis of male domination of the female. The main source was a book by Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, which appeared in 1884, just after Marx's death. Engels used Marx's notes and regarded this work as expressing the Marxian position. Engels used the anthropology of his day, leading to criticisms of this work due to the fact that the older interpretations of anthropological data are not all accepted by scholars today. Engels drew, in particular, upon the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who lived in upstate New York and was an expert on the Iroquois. This Indian tribe lived in its famous "long houses," which each contained several families living together. An especially striking feature of Iroquois society was the role of women: It was a fierce warrior society, but also a political democracy. Tribal leaders were elected, and were always men; but women had a full

48 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism vote, and elder women were particularly powerful and were capable of deposing chiefs. Moreover, Iroquois clans were basically organized around women. They followed the principle that Engels (and Morgan) called "mother right," and is now called matrilineal descent. Family lines were traced only through mothers and their children, and property was inherited only through females. Clans were exogamous, prohibiting marriage within their own ranks. Hence, a man married into a clan different from his own, but remained an outsider there. His children did not belong to his clan, nor did they inherit from him. Engels, like Morgan and some other anthropologists of the time, regarded this system as evidence of matriarchy, a universal stage in the early development of the family. Another curious feature of Iroquois society was its kinship terminology. Iroquois children referred to their mother's sisters also as "Mother," and to their father's brothers as "Father." The children of these extra fathers and mothers, then, were not called cousins, but brothers and sisters. Engels, following Morgan, took this as evidence of a prior stage of group marriage which had once existed. At this time there was indiscriminate mating between all the wives of a set of brothers, or husbands of a set of sisters; hence, it was impossible to tell whose children were actually whose. On this basis, Engels proposed the following sequence of stages in the development of the family. First, there was complete sexual promiscuity, a society of absolute freedom and equality. Next, incest between parents and their children was prohibited, but otherwise, sexual relationships were left wide open. Then, the incest prohibition was extended to siblings. Finally, this gave way to what Engels called "pairing marriage." This was exemplified by the Iroquois system of exogamous clans: The incest taboo had spread to everyone in the clan, and hence sexual partners had to be found outside, in another clan. Engels regarded all of these, but particularly the earlier stages before pairing marriage, as a version of primitive communism. This had certain characteristics: 1. No private property existed. The clan as a group held all land, whether hunting grounds or farming plots. All clan members shared food, just as they cooperated in labor to produce it. 2. Similarly, communism reigned in the sexual realm. Although there were incest prohibitions of various sorts, women and men were not exclusive sexual partners of particular individuals, but were widely shared. (The degree of sexual freedom had become fairly limited by the time of the pairing marriage system of the Iroquois, but the terminology of the earlier stages survived.) 3. There was gender equality. Women had a respected position in society, and often shared political power. Engels regarded the economic basis of this equality as crucial: Women shared fully in the labor. They were the major producers of food in horticultural (primitive agricultural) societies, and even in hunting societies produced the most stable part of the diet by gathering wild plants. Women were not alienated from the products of their labor or from the central social process of production, and hence enjoyed a high status.

Sociology in the Underground: Karl Marx 49 The rise of sexual domination of men over women was brought about by an economic change; chiefly, the growth of wealth, resulting from more advanced agricultural methods such as plowing and irrigation. As a result, Engels theorized, men wanted to pass on their property to their own children. Hence, they overthrew "mother right" (matrilinealism) and instituted "father right" (patrilineal descent). They also tended to reverse the older system of clan exogamy—since property stayed with the man's offspring— and endogamous clan rule was instituted to keep property within the clan. (Previously, under matrilinealism, the exogamous rule had had the same effect of keeping property within the clan.) With patrilineal descent came the institution of monogamy. Since a man wanted to pass his property along to his children, he wanted to be sure which children were his. Hence, no more sexual promiscuity and no more group marriage were to be allowed. This new monogamy, however, was decidedly one-sided. As Engels noted, monogamy was primarily for the women. Men could allow themselves polygamy, when they could afford it, in the form of concubines, female slaves, or prostitutes. The result of this change in the family system was the subjugation of women. 'This revolution [was] one of the most decisive ever experienced by humanity," Engels declared. ". . . the overthrow of mother right was the world historical defeat of the feminine sex" (p. 120). With the shift from matriarchal to patriarchal society, women were excluded from the public economic sphere and consigned to household labor. Men had taken over heavy agriculture, leaving women only with menial domestic tasks. Males also gained complete control of politics, and excluded women largely from religion and public culture as well. The new monogamous marriage was now concerned only with property. Love was excluded. Women were regarded simply as instruments by which men could propagate their property and their lineage. Engels seems to be saying that men did not care about propagating themselves through their offspring, but rather, that private property called for privately controlled heirs to whom one could pass it on. The family system thus became a kind of cult of perpetual private property. Engels regarded the rise of patriarchy as a revolutionary development in human history, not only in the position of women. It marked the first big turning point in the Marxian perspective—the rise of private property per se, and hence the rise of class society. Engels summed up: "The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male" (p. 129). From that point on, Engels argued, love affairs could only occur outside of marriage. Among the ancient Greeks, he pointed out, the sphere of eros was confined to men's interests in courtesans, or in homosexual favorites. In medieval Europe, love was celebrated by the poetry of the troubadours in the form of a cult of adultery, forbidden love between knights and married women. Engels went on to mock the monogamous marriages of the

50 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism bourgeoisie of his own day as inevitably producing their antithesis, prostitution and adultery. As long as the marriage was a property relationship first and foremost, love had to be found outside. Just as, historically, prostitution appeared at the same time as the beginnings of monogamous marriage, the combination, Engels declared, was indissoluble, and would exist as long as monogamy did. Even in the modern capitalist societies where parents no longer choose their children's husbands and wives as part of a system of legal inheritance of property, the economic aspect of marriage predominates. The choice of marriage partners seems to be free, but it is only formally so. It is analogous to the freedom of the modern labor market, in which wage laborers are free to sell their labor to an employer or not; but the latter is merely freedom to starve if one owns no property. Hence, women have the freedom to marry or not, but in reality economic necessity forces them into subjugation to husbands who have the income to support them. Is there any way out of this system? The Marxian analysis points the way to the solution. It is necessary to abolish private property, Marx said; this would make the motive for monogamy disappear, since there no longer would be private property to pass along to children. Women would enter the labor force on an equal basis with men, and would no longer be forced into marriage for reasons of financial support. Society would take over the support of children; concerns for legitimacy would disappear, and all restraints on "sex love," as Engels terms it, would disappear. Hence, at the end of capitalism, sexual freedom would reappear, along with the reinstitu- tion of group marriage, as in primitive communism. Actually, Engels was rather Victorian in his moral attitudes, and he went on to argue that when monogamy disappears, so will prostitution. There will no longer be any need for women to sell themselves, either long- term or short-term. Marriage, he argued, is selling oneself once and for all (long-term), instead of the economics of the prostitute who "lets out her body on piece work like a wage worker" (p. 134). But, without economic incentives, individuals could choose partners on the basis of sheer personal attraction. Engels rather romantically assumed such passions would be forever, and, hence, there would be lifelong love affairs in the Communist society of the future. Engels' argument has various flaws, but it should be noted that his work did have an important practical effect. The socialist movement in Germany, following Marxian principles, was the first large-scale political movement to come out in favor of female equality, and the socialist party leader, August Bebel, wrote a popular book expounding Engels' thesis. As German socialists gained prominence in parliamentary politics, they gave a big impetus to the German feminist movement, the strongest one on the Continent, culminating in political enfranchisement of women after World War I. Another aspect of this great upheaval in sexual attitudes which occurred during the early twentieth century in Germany was a movement for erotic freedom, which was part of the milieu in which Freud first became

Sociology in the Underground: Karl Marx 51 popular. Max Weber's wife, Marianne Weber, was an important feminist leader, and was the first woman to be elected to public office in Germany. On the theoretical side, there are numerous problems with Engels' theory. It was a pioneering formulation, and recent thought has gone considerably beyond it. There has been a great deal of criticism of its conception of the early anthropological stages of the family. It is doubtful that there ever was a stage of primitive promiscuity with no incest taboos. Also, there is no universal sequence from matrilineal to patrilineal societies. Many hunting- and-gathering societies (the oldest economic form) are patrilineal, and even more of them are bilineal (i.e., they trace descent on both sides, as we do today). Matrilineal societies seem never to have been a majority of societies at any time in history, although they are relatively frequent in horticultural societies, when women were most important in food production. But if the picture of evolutionary stages must be abandoned, nevertheless, the more abstract principles in Engels' theory have opened up important lines of inquiry. Engels' was the first sociological theory of gender stratification, attempting to show the conditions that bring about different degrees of inequality or equality between the sexes. His general conception that monogamy is connected with a property system has proven fruitful, and so has his strategy of tracing sexual domination and subordination through economic relations. Debates go on today among Marxists and feminists over the extent to which the position of women is part of the general struggle of workers under capitalism. The modern Marxian argument is that women in capitalism play a crucial but hidden role in the economic system by reproducing the labor force. This means, first of all, that women bear children who grow up to become workers; they also feed and clothe them, clean them, and bring them up. Women as mothers are thus an unpaid part of the capitalist system; without them, capitalism could not function. The same is true of women as wives; their household labor cares for their husbands' homes, feeds them, washes their clothes, and so forth. Women also put in the emotional labor of soothing the men's egos and, in general, absorbing the strains that men suffer working in the capitalist marketplace. The conclusion drawn, then, is that women are exploited by the capitalist system, even when they are not directly employed by it. Women contribute to capitalist profits, which would be a good deal lower without unpaid female labor by housewives. From this point of view, the solution to sexual inequality is to overthrow capitalism, and thereby change the economic basis that fosters female exploitation. It has been argued also, however, that women's struggle is separate from, if perhaps parallel to, the struggle of workers and other oppressed groups. Working-class men also benefit by dominating women in their homes. Sexist tradition keeps women who are employed outside the home in sex-segregated or other low-paying jobs, and thus keeps them from competing with men. Improving the position of workers per se, then, does not necessarily help women. The position of women in socialist societies, such

52 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism as those existing in Russia and Eastern Europe, is not notably different from that in Western ones. They still do most of the domestic work, while outside the household they still tend to hold inferior jobs and few important political positions. It is also pointed out that women have made some improvements in their position in capitalist societies by organizing as a separate interest group for their own rights. Where women have been able to secure high-paying jobs, their status and power have improved, even within their own households. Along with a general expansion in women's labor force participation, the traditional monogamous family that Engels described so scathingly has given way to a much more fluid situation of premarital sexuality, divorces, and remarriages based on individual preference. And this, in fact, is what Engels predicted, only it did not take the abolition of private property to bring about increased job market participation for women. The issue, though, continues to remain a vital one. While the feminist movement has had its greatest successes recently in the lives of upper-middle-class women, there remains a huge sector of women in manual and clerical jobs who constitute the most underpaid and exploited sector of the labor force. The Marxian theory may not be correct, but at least it points its finger at a crucial problem: The existence of a large category of female exploitation reminds us that there are still very large, potentially revolutionary forces that may explode some time in the future.

CHAPTER THREE The Last Gentleman: Alexis de Tocqueville Thought in the early nineteenth century was no more unitary than it is today. So far we have paid attention to the modernists: prophets of the industrial order like Saint-Simon and Comte and radicals like Marx who looked further ahead into the future. Not everyone believed in progress, however. The postrevolutionary situation had its conservatives, too, of whom the most famous were the Englishman Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and the French aristocrats Louis de Bonald (1754-1840) and Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821). The last two attacked modern society as the anarchy of mob rule and counterposed an ideology of order, obedience, ritual, religion, and hierarchy—all of which qualities were supposed to be found in the Middle Ages. Restoration France thus created the germs of the major modern ideologies: liberalism, communism, and fascism. But the heritage of conservatism is more ambiguous than this, and new thought comes from strange mixtures. Comte combined the conservatism of Bonald and Maistre with the industrialism of Saint-Simon and produced sociology as the science of order in the new society. Conservatism also produced a man who represents the best of the old order—Alexis de Tocqueville. His conservative stance brought him not to vituperation against the new era, but to the detachment necessary for understanding it. Modernists are essentially optimists. Tocqueville was a pessimist. He shared the classical Roman and Greek outlook: Life is a tragedy, with its eternal forces always in balance. His classical prose style aims to impose the only order possible upon the dilemmas of existence—the harmony of literature. Thus, equality improves most people's lives; but mediocrity is the price we must pay for it. Freedom is gained in some respects only by the loss of freedom in other respects. Tocqueville holds the classical idea of balance: An excess in any direction leads to a corresponding reaction. In an era of optimism Tocqueville's conservatism enabled him to tear off the veil blinding the eyes of his contemporaries. The others shared a belief in the withering away of the coercive powers of the state, whether this was to occur immediately, as Saint-Simon and the liberals believed, or in the revolutionary future, as Marx predicted. The idea of progress made the wars and tyrannies of twentieth-century governments inconceivable for these 53

54 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism men; Tocqueville's more timeless viewpoint on the dangers of power, however, has kept him contemporary and relevant. Tocqueville was virtually the last of the old school of gentleman-intellectuals. This sort of person was not a professor or a commercial writer, but a man of some wealth who owned a well-stocked library, wrote beautiful letters to his friends, and devoted his leisure to composing treatises and essays on philosophy, history, and everything else, to be circulated to his correspondents and sometimes published upon wider request. Some of these men dabbled in science—Darwin was to be perhaps the last of these—before the era of large university and government laboratories. It was a role existing only in aristocratic society and comprised only a very small section of the aristocracy. All in all, it was the best excuse that class had for its existence. Tocqueville himself was on the margin of the French aristocracy— the petite noblesse. His father was a government official, a prefect (governor) in various parts of France. His parents were almost executed in the Revolution; they were saved only by the Thermidorian reaction—the anti- revolutionary shift of 1793—that sent Robespierre himself to the guillotine. Other relatives of Tocqueville did not escape. Tocqueville studied law and took up a career as a lawyer—that is, as a salaried official of the royal court system. In 1830 riots in Paris led to the abdication of Charles X. When the dust had settled, the throne was still there but was occupied by Charles's cousin, Louis Philippe, of the rival house of Orleans. The Orleanists had been scheming for the throne for hundreds of years and at last achieved their aim by an alliance with the constitutionalists. (The alliance was to survive only eighteen years.) Tocqueville was forced to take an oath of loyalty to the new regime. But as a legitimist, he was opposed to this bastard monarchy, and his views caused much friction with his superiors. The recurrence of revolution convinced Tocqueville that there was an inevitable trend toward equality and the destruction of aristocratic society, but that France was going about achieving it in the wrong way. He hit on a plan: a leave of absence and a commission to go to America to study penal reform, currently a topic of interest in France. His real reasons for wanting to go were to escape from an impossible situation for himself personally and to see what lessons could be learned for the future of France. He left in 1831 for nine months iof travel in America. Out of the trip came his monumental work Democracy in America. Tocqueville liked America, even though its surface was unappealing to an aristocrat. It was the land of "mob rule," where politics consisted of demagogic bombast and the maneuvers of politicians to stay in office and dispense patronage to their followers; where business dealings were incessant and all pervasive; where high culture and refined manners hardly existed; where the laws were in the hands of the people, and individuals shot each other down in the streets of the western territories. In other words, it was an America like that of today, only cruder, tougher, and above all,

The Last Gentleman: Alexis de Tocqueville 55 more puritanical. "I thought that the English constituted the most serious nation on the face of the earth, but I have since seen the Americans and changed my opinion," said Tocqueville. "An American, instead of going in a leisure hour to dance merrily at some place of public resort, as the fellows of his class continue to do throughout the greater part of Europe, shuts himself up at home to drink. He thus enjoys two pleasures: he can go on thinking of his business and can get drunk decently by his own fireside."1 Tocqueville liked this. He himself was rather serious, hardworking, devoutly religious, and prudish, and he admired the Americans for these same qualities. Beneath the surface he saw the Americans as like his beloved Romans—people who believed in laws and used them to rule themselves; who participated actively in public affairs; who showed patriotism, religiousness, and the discipline of moral self-control. Tocqueville romanticizes America a bit, especially in failing to see that the American democracy he describes was run by the middle class and not by the poor. Given these reservations, his analysis of America continues to be sound. EQUALITY IN AMERICA The basic premise of Tocqueville's system is the inevitable advance of equality, which Tocqueville took to be so characteristic of modernity as to be a sign of God's will. Equality (which Tocqueville uses interchangeably with the term "democracy") is contrasted with aristocracy, as the other great form of society. Equality means the free mobility of individuals; aristocracy means that positions are hereditary from birth. Equality means the extension of the political franchise from the few to the many. It means the end of legal differences in status, of noble ranks and titles with their attendant privileges, and of primogeniture within the family (by which the eldest son inherits all the wealth). In short, equality means an end of deference based on immutable differences between different ranks of society. Along with this, Tocqueville believed that people were becoming more equal in wealth, education, and culture. In an effort to be balanced, Tocqueville tried to present both the good and the bad effects of the advance of equality, based on his observations of daily life in America. He pointed out that with the end of dominance by inheritable property and of primogeniture, equality had spread to the relations between fathers and sons and among brothers. The result was a decline in the old authority of the family. But the family did not fall apart, as the conservatives had predicted; the artificial bonds of property were replaced by stronger bonds of personal sentiment. As family members were no longer controlled by each other, they were able to like each other more. The same sort of freedom applied to unmarried women. Since they were no 'Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), p. 232. Copyright Alfred A.Knopf, Inc.

56 The Vicissitudes of Niniteenth-Century Rationalism longer bartered by their parents for family connections, they were free to choose their own partners by falling in love. The result, Tocqueville shrewdly remarks, is that such marriages have much less infidelity than the aristocratic marriages of convenience, which make no claim on the feelings of the partners. In the same vein Tocqueville remarks on the effects of equality on manners. The Americans are not great conversationalists who use talk as a display of rank, but rather talk plainly and openly without signs of deference. The British, he says, are caught in between the clear rankings of the French aristocracy and the equality of America, and the famous British standoffish- ness is the result. They still retain the aristocratic belief that people of rank should be given the proper deference, but equality has progressed enough so that it is hard to tell just what deference people are entitled to. The solution is to avoid speaking to people unless they are properly introduced. Tocqueville found that equality also changed the relationship between employer and employee. Instead of a relationship between a proud master and submissive servants, it becomes a simple contract between individuals in which one bargains for a limited portion of the other's labor. One does not sell one's whole self, but only a part. The old loyalties to one's superior disappear, but they are replaced by new ideals, shared by all. In the field of politics, the prevailing sentiment is nationalism. In the field of personal virtues, the old military "honor" that had to be defended by fighting duels is replaced by the business virtues of hard work, reliability, and thrift. Modern society is thus not without honor; it is only that the honor appropriate to a time of armed self-defense is changed into the honor necessary in a time of commerce and industry. Most impressive of all, Tocqueville thought, was the extension of personal sympathy in egalitarian society. He quotes a letter written by an aristocratic Frenchwoman of the seventeenth century, in which she blithely mingles descriptions of the fine weather with news about the tortures that were imposed on the local peasants who were revolting against a new tax. This lady was not an unkind person, Tocqueville explains; her letters show that she was full of kindness to her relatives and friends. It is merely that the range of sympathy extended only to those who were equals, and she could not imagine herself in the place of the peasants. In America, on the contrary, Tocqueville found a surprising display of charities of all kinds, as well as of good samariianism among perfect strangers. For the same reason, tortures disappear as a means of punishment in modern society and there is a shift toward rehabilitation and general leniency toward criminals. This sympathetic attitude is not inherent in the culture of the Americans, Tocqueville argues, but is rather a product of egalitarianism. To prove it, he points to the inability of the white Americans to sympathize with the plight of the Negro slaves, whom they do not regard as equals: It is the limits of equality, and not the cultural outlook, that set the limits of sympathy. Tocqueville's principle is still illuminating today. It helps explain why Americans often aid each other in accidents on the street, whereas Asians or

The Last Gentleman: Alexis de Tocqueville 57 Latin Americans are more likely to be indifferent to what happens to strangers in public. On the negative side, Tocqueville noted the pervasive commercialism of American life. Equality, he felt, leads to ceaseless striving for social position. Where all are basically the same, it is debilitating to fall behind. Accordingly, everyone seeks to get rich quick. Tocqueville observantly points out that even though most Americans at that time were farmers, they were not farmers in the European sense. They did not grow food merely to live on, but rather, they developed land for profit. Indeed, much of the land was scarcely cultivated, but was bought and sold for speculation in land prices. Thus, even in 1830 the American farmer was less the virtuous rural citizen he always makes himself out to be and more the speculative businessman. All this has a negative effect on culture. Business emphasizes practicality, not abstract truth or aesthetic style. As a result, Tocqueville argued, Americans become hazy and bombastic whenever they are forced to speak of any general ideas, for outside of the range of specific practical matters their minds have developed no refinements or distinctions. Culture in America thus is neither very high nor very low; everyone is well versed enough to get along, but there is no incentive or opportunity to stand out. Lacking the European aristocratic tradition in intellectual endeavor, America remains a land of comfortable mediocrity. Also on the negative side, Tocqueville finds that the continual business dealings of America add up to a general monotony. The novelty of events stays on the same plane, and nothing rises above it. He found in America the general traits of conformity over a century before David Riesman and others popularized the idea. "I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America," Tocqueville declared. He saw Americans' individualism as confined to economic competition and as entirely lacking in the world of ideas. "We must understand what is wanted of society and its government," says Tocqueville. . . . If a clear understanding be more profitable to man than genius; if your object is not to stimulate the virtues of heroism, but the habits of peace; if you had rather witness vices than crimes, and are content to meet with fewer noble deeds, provided offenses be diminished in the same proportion; if, instead of living in the midst of a brilliant society, you are contented to have prosperity around you; if, in short, you are of the opinion that the principal object of a government is not to confer the greatest possible power and glory upon the body of the nation, but to ensure the greatest enjoyment and to avoid the most misery to each of the individuals who compose it—if such be your desire, then equalize the conditions of men and establish democratic institutions.2 But in fact, says Tocqueville, we have no choice. We will have equality whether we want it or not, and if its social consequences are neither very 2Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 262.

58 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism bad nor very good, the political possibilities it opens up are momentous. It is with these possibilities that Tocqueville is primarily concerned. Equality is not the same thing as freedom, he is quick to point out. It can result either in an excellent form of self-government or in anarchy and its concomitant danger, tyranny. As examples of the latter Tocqueville had in mind the bread-and-circus mobs of Rome preceding the Caesars' overthrow of the Roman Republic or the crowds at the guillotine in the Reign of Terror that prepared the ground for Napoleon's coup d'etat in France. The events of 1830 in France again followed that pattern. The question is, why does equality sometimes lead to one, sometimes to the other of the results? The United States (along with Britain) is Tocqueville's model of a good government based on equality; France is his example of its bad effects. He did not think of the United States as perfect, however. He objected to the electioneering, the office seeking, the patronage game, the personal attacks in the public press. Bui these are the inevitable side effects of egalitarian self-government. Despite them, the United States is favored by three kinds of conditions: the structure of its government, geographical and historical accidents, and the culture of its people. i Government Structure Tocqueville found the main virtue of American political institutions to be their decentralization. He was impressed with the degree of local autonomy given to towns and counties in administering local matters such as roads, charities, schools, and taxes. By contrast, all such things in France were handled by a central bureaucracy in Paris. For the same reason, he admired the federal system, which gave the national government the powers necessary to control the currency, wars and foreign affairs, and national commerce, but which left all other matters to the states. He thought the principle exact: The national government should have full powers to take care of things affecting the nation as a whole, but not the power to intervene in what affected only a part of the country. The effect of this system, Tocqueville believed, was to make Americans public-spirited. Tocqueville felt that the natural effect of equality was to make people individualistic and selfish, since they would be busy competing in business and thus uninterested in the affairs of the larger community. But decentralized institutions counteracted this, for they tied individual self-interest to public^spiritedness. If Americans wanted to get anything done, they could not rely on a government agency to do it for them; they would have to initiate the action themselves. Where cooperation was necessary, they would have to drum up support among their fellows, take part in local government, and contribute their own efforts to getting it done. The individual who wanted a road or a canal for his or her own use, then, would have to come up with a project that would appeal to others' interests as well. Thus, a decentralized government makes its citizens energetic, industrious, and prosperous; by contrast, the tone of a centralized autocracy is one of lifeless quiet, j

The Last Gentleman: Alexis de Tocqueville 59 Tocqueville also admired the way in which the authority that did exist was split up through its own internal balance of power. He liked the presidential and gubernatorial system that separated the executive from the direct influence of the legislature. Tocqueville, thinking of the radical shifts in mood in the French Assembly of the 1790s, considered direct control by the legislature (that is, the parliamentary form of government) unstable. It was liable to those moods in which the majority tries to impose its will by force on the rest of the country— "the tyranny of the majority." Tocqueville was particularly impressed with the powers of the American courts to pass on the legality of the acts of the legislature, as well as to provide remedies for aggrieved citizens, thus making democracy into a rule of laws rather than merely a rule of politicians. But given the power of the courts in America, Tocqueville thought it important that their power was itself split up and restrained. In France, he declared, such courts would be an instrument of tyranny, for there the government exercised complete control over the courts, just as over any government agency. In America the courts were made independent through the tenure of the judges once they were in office, and the judges' power was itself circumscribed by the separation of prosecution and defense attorneys from the court. (Recall that Tocqueville himself was a professional lawyer, employed by the bureaucratic French courts, and that his visit to America was prompted by his difficulty in working for a regime of which he disapproved.) He also thought the jury system useful in balancing the power of the judges, as well as in educating citizens to participation in the orderly rule of law. The effect of these balances was that the government could not be too strong or too precipitous in its actions, so that neither an emotional majority nor a would-be tyrant could easily enforce its will. Tocqueville was careful to point out that the United States was not a land of unlimited freedom where individuals could do whatever they pleased. Unlimited freedom, in Tocqueville's conservative view, was nothing but license for anarchy. On the contrary, he declared, "more social obligations were imposed on {the individual] there than anywhere else." America was full of agencies for group control over the individual, and Tocqueville cites with approval the New England ordinances that required citizens to go to church, prohibited drunkenness, and severely punished sexual improprieties. This great community power was restrained from creating a political tyranny, however, by being broken up through decentralization and balances of power, thereby making the government both less dangerous to the nation as a whole and more responsive to private interests. Tocqueville's observations on just what "freedom" means in America are pertinent today, as a struggle goes on between the rights of individuals and the public power to control individuals' morals. The "freedom" that is built into American political institutions is the freedom of local groups from unified central control, and there is very little built into the system to protect the individual from the tyranny of these groups. Tocqueville also devotes some attention to freedoms that he thinks are dangerous in themselves, but that serve to counterbalance other dangers of the system. Tocqueville regarded freedom of the press and freedom of as-

60 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism sembly as invitations to (spread slander and extremist opinions and to form conspiracies to overthrow the government. This, at any rate, he believed to be the case in France. But in a country like the United States, where power was too decentralized to be easily swayed or overthrown by mass agitation, he believed these freedoms provided a necessary corrective to the other ills of the system. If elected politicians tended to be self-seeking and corrupt, the press could keep them in check by threat of exposure, and political parties created the competition that would publicize their failures in order to try to replace them in office. Finally, Tocqueville remarked on the beneficial effects of the separation of church and state in i America. Again his contrast is France, where the state-supported church made religion a bone of material contention. Religion was caught up in defending a particular political regime and hence added another source of political controversy. Political opponents of the regime became irreligious, and contending religions were driven into political opposition. The lack of a state church in America, then, strengthened rather than weakened both state and church. i Geographical and Historical Accidents These political structures were the main features of stable self-government in America, but there were other contributing factors. For example, the United States grew up in the virtually empty continent of North America, with plenty of land for expansion and wide oceans between it and the warring powers of Europe. The result was that America had little fear of wars and no need to maintain a large standing army. This was important, for wars are the great centralizer. In wartime the central government assumes great powers over the nation, not only over local governments, but over the citizens themselves. The entire apparatus of government is directed toward providing the materials of war: People are conscripted, taxes are high, the economy is regulated. America was spared all this because it was protected by its geography rather than its army. Tocqueville was correspondingly pessimistic about the prospects for American-style decentralization in Europe, where the threat of warfare from neighboring states necessitated constant preparation by central governments. Another accidental feature favoring stable democracy in America was the general equality of wealth. Accordingly, there were no overwhelmingly great differences among the people and no strong basis for revolutionary conflict. (The one exception, Tocqueville noted, was the existence of slaves, whose unequal condition provided the most explosive feature of American society.) Tocqueville thought it especially important that equality existed in America before the democratic government was established. By contrast, in France, where a war had to be fought against the aristocracy in order to create equality, the Revolution aided the process of centralization. The local institutions had been in the hands of the aristocrats, and hence the Revolution took away local autonomy in order to wrest control from the aristocracy; in doing so, it destroyed the decentralized bases of freedom.

The Last Gentleman: Alexis de Tocqueville 61 American Culture Democracy in America was also favored, in Tocqueville's view, by the unique social conditions of its people. They all spoke the same language, were mostly of the same Protestant religion, and had the same educational level of rough literacy. Again, here were few sharp distinctions, few bases for political conflict. Most important of all, he felt, was the strong hold of the Puritan religion. The church taught people discipline, moral order, and a belief in laws. Moreover, the Protestant churches in America were controlled by their congregations and hence provided a model of democratic self-government. All told, Tocqueville was inclined to view America as uniquely favored by its special characteristics to build equality into a stable form of democratic government, rather than to give in to its inherent dangers. In the abstract Tocqueville was more pessimistic. Egalitarian society was dangerous to freedom, he felt; his views on the subject have become known as the theory of mass society. The abolition of the aristocracy resulted in there being no one strong enough to resist the tyranny of the central government and its head, whether he be king or dictator. Moreover, the equality of conditions tended to eliminate all independent sources of power that might check unlimited control. Equality among citizens makes them emphasize uniformity; as noted above, no one is willing to stand out against the strength of public opinion. The natural tendency of the public is to demand that laws and rules apply to everyone, without exception; the public feels that it should be allowed to oversee everything, and hence the state takes on the potential for exercising total control over the individual. Since everyone is equal, no one individual has any power, and people must appeal to the only thing above the individual—the state—to do things. The state becomes the only ideal outside of the private person; the overwhelming demand for loyalty is to the nation. Thus, the individualism of a mass society of equals goes together with the total power of the state. As the private individual seeks his or her personal gain in business or other purely private affairs, political interests are reduced to a desire for tranquillity—a government that will maintain order so that one can pursue one's own affairs. The individual of mass society is willing to give great power to the centralized state and in the process loses the freedom to oppose it. The United States, in Tocqueville's view, had the uniquely favorable political structures, geographical circumstances, and customs to counteract these ill effects of equality. But France and most of the rest of Europe did not. On the Continent the governments were extremely centralized, controlling through their national bureaucracies not only armies, taxes, and public works, but charity and education, finance and workmen's savings, the regulation of manufacturing, and a large section of the public's employment. This centralization advanced irreversibly, through every revolution and restoration; there seemed to be no stopping it. Other conditions were unfavorable as well. France, Germany, and other European nations confronted each other across narrow boundaries and maintained their central govern-

62 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism merits to support a great war machine. Nor were the cultures of the people favorable to peaceful democracy: Great inequalities in wealth still existed, as did sharp cultural distinctions, religious conflicts, and a widespread absence of any religious faith at all. The prognosis for America was that there would be no more revolutions; only the unequal condition of the blacks, Tocqueville felt, could have that potential. For France and for the rest of Europe he feared more of the cycle of revolution and reaction. Democracy in America proved very successful after its publication in 1835 (a second part came out in 1840). Of all the many visitors' accounts of America, Tocqueville's was by far the most famous. It's success was due partly to the fact that it said what people wanted to hear. Thus, it was most popular in England and America, whose institutions were praised, and least popular in France, which did not come off so well. The book contains a very powerful theory of political institutions. Its main weakness is that it makes the United States seem a more perfect democracy than it really was, or is. From his aristocratic viewpoint, Tocqueville mistook middle-class Americans for poor people and hence concluded that the poor people in America were really fairly well off and, in any case, ruled the country. He saw more equality than really existed; in fact, there were poor people in the 1830s, just as now, but they were characteristically invisible, living in the remote parts of town and countryside. This defect does not vitiate Tocqueville's insights, but it adds a new dimension to them. Indeed, it points us directly at the central dilemma of modern America: Democracy can operate and be very strongly entrenched and yet not serve all the people. As in Tocqueville's day, middle-class businessmen participate in local politics, but the poor are generally unable to do so. There is democratic bargaining for power, and in the process a middle-class majority is well enough served; in a country where the middle class is a majority, a democracy can easily ignore the poor. This is implicit in Tocqueville's analysis, for he saw that democracy could operate among the white majority even while excluding the black slaves. Tocqueville, the man of classical philosophy, would no doubt be willing to recognize his error and let his analysis stand even in that light. He would probably feel (as apparently do many people today) that a democracy of the middle class is better than no democracy at all and would consider the political exclusion of the poor as an unfortunate by-product, but a price one should be willing to pay for what freedom there is. As a conservative he would be unwilling to upset the balance of power in democracy as it stands in order to extend equality to the poor. That, in his terms, would be paying for equality at the price of freedom. There is another side of Tocqueville, one that is generally ignored by his admirers and intellectual descendants. He has somber words on the subject of war as creating centralized power and thereby reducing the bases of freedom. For twentieth-century America, modern transportation and communications have ended geographical isolation, and World War II and its aftermath have created just the military megalith that Tocqueville predicted. Moreover, Tocqueville had some wise words on the tendency of military of-

The Last Gentleman: Alexis de Tocqueville 63 ficers, who have a relatively low status in a business-oriented society, to seek wars in order to justify their existence and to give them chances of promotion. Another centralizing factor has also been operating, which Tocqueville missed: the growth of the business system to national and even international scale, which brings about central government regulation, especially in combating large-scale economic crises such as depressions. Such economic crises can have the same effects as wars in concentrating government powers, just as the growth of big business corporations has eliminated much of the individualism that Tocqueville found so much a part of the American scene. By the mid-twentieth century many of the bases of decentralization that Tocqueville thought important in upholding democracy in America had disappeared. Tocqueville's own career showed how right he was about the structure of politics in Europe. In 1839 he was elected a deputy in the French legislature, representing the district of Vologne, where his ancestral chateau stood. He was continually reelected until his retirement from politics in 1851. In parliament he led the fight to abolish slavery in the French colonies and interested himself in the French colonization of Algeria. In 1848 he made a speech to the Chamber, which concluded with the words: "I believe we are sleeping on a volcano." The date was January 27, about the same time that Marx and Engels were finishing the Communist Manifesto. On February 16 riots broke out in Paris, and another revolution was under way. Tocqueville was elected to the Constituent Assembly, which was called to form the Second Republic; he led the monarchist faction. In 1849 he was named minister of foreign affairs in the government of the new president, Louis Napoleon. Tocqueville lasted in office only five months. He came into conflict with his president, who was already preparing the coup d'etat that in 1851 was to destroy the Second Republic and usher in the ill-fated Second Empire of Napoleon III. France's pattern was becoming set: Third, Fourth, and Fifth republics were in the offing, as well as a short-lived Communist commune in Paris in 1871, a Fascist regime collaborating with the German occupation during World War II, a Communist-based World War II underground, an attempted army coup in 1958, and a student-led near-revolution in 1968. Tocqueville's foresight was already becoming apparent. After Napoleon's coup Tocqueville retired from government and attempted to search out the origins of France's calamities. The result was The Old Regime and the French Revolution, one of the greatest historical books ever written. Tocqueville broke new ground in several ways. Instead of relying on what other historians had said, Tocqueville went back to the files of provincial town halls for the original documents showing the operations of local government. He compared the development of institutions in France with the development of those in England, Germany, and elsewhere, in order to test his ideas against alternative sequences. The book is a model of good scholarship, scientific thinking, and beautiful style. Its results are still definitive.

64 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism It was not the Revolution that destroyed the decentralized institutions of France, Tocqueville found, contrary to what most conservatives held. Rather, it had been the French kings themselves. Back in the Middle Ages Tocqueville's class, the j aristocracy, had jealously guarded their independence from the king. Parliaments and independent courts had been created by coalitions of nobles as a balance of power to resist the control of the king. Such institutions had existed all over Europe, even in Russia and Spain. The kings counterattacked and managed to destroy the power of the aristocrats by creating a royal bureaucracy, into which the courts were incorporated as subordinate agencies. The aristocrats were made royal officials, and their representative institutions were reduced to virtually nothing. This process went furthest in Russia and the East and least far in England. In England, in fact, the courts and lawyers remained almost totally independent, and parliament won the final struggle with the king in the seventeenth-century revolution led by Oliver Cromwell. In France the struggle went on the longest. There the king built a mighty bureaucracy, but the aristocracy still held many powers, and the showdown did not come until the end of the eighteenth century, when a new commercial era had accentuated the trend to equality and created the massed population of Paris that would prove so important in French politics. The inefficiency of the French regime, balanced between an autocratic king and a parasitic aristocracy, led to the government financial crisis of 1789. In the temporary government deadlock the floodgates broke, and the masses attacked. The spirit of equality had been unleashed by the leveling bureaucracy and the growth of commerce, and the aristocrats who lived on with their old privileges but without their old powers and functions were to feel the vent of its fury. In the end the main effect of the Revolution was to strengthen and streamline the central government, something that could not be done as long as the aristocrats stood in the way. The Revolution merely consolidated the structure the kings had labored to create. This account sharpens the irony of America in world perspective. The United States has the jmost protection against the instabilities of modern mass society because it derives its institutions—especially its decentralized courts and local governments—from the early period of British history. The colonists of the seventeenth century who founded American society were from the conservative, minor aristocracy of England, and they brought with them the institutions of decentralized feudal control. America thus escaped even from what centralization the English kings had managed to carry out. The United States, far from epitomizing the new era of politics, has come to have one of the oldest government forms in the world. The United States', then, is not a hopeful model for the Third World, where, as if to follow Tocqueville's forebodings, revolutions destroy local autonomies in order to modernize and thus set the basis for total government control. For Europe Tocqueville's predictions have been only too true, as shown by the alternations of dictatorships and anarchical democracies in France, Germany, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere.

The Last Gentleman: Alexis de Tocqueville 65 By 1815 the main outlines of the modern era had already emerged. Napoleon, the little corporal who brought in the army to stop the squabbling of politicians and restore order in France and then set out to conquer Europe for his system, foreshadows another little man with global ambitions, this time on the other side of the Rhine—Adolf Hitler. Tocqueville's private secretary in the foreign ministry of Louis Napoleon was an aristocrat named Arthur de Gobineau. In the period after Tocqueville's death Gobineau was to become famous for his scientific theory of history as the conflict between superior and inferior races. History thus provides us with yet another ironic link between the old and the new.

CHAPTER FOUR Nietzsche's Madness Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was surely among the strangest of the social theorists. His intellectual journey too was one of the wildest, for he was the harbinger of the intellectual explosions that occurred in the twentieth century, and the explosiveness of his insights not only cracked the shell of contemporary nineteenth-century beliefs, but ended up destroying Nietzsche himself. There is an enormous creative happiness in Nietzsche's work. His overflowing energy came through in the twenty books he wrote before collapsing at the age of forty-four; and every page, almost every line, has an intensity that must have gripped the author to his pen the way it holds the reader in his or her chair. "It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book," declared Nietzsche, "—what everyone else does not say in a book." From modern depth psychology to existentialist philosophy; from modern poetry and literature to anthropology, sociology, religion, music, art, and culture; and in the tradition of revolt itself, Nietzsche has had an enormous impact. Some of this impact, such as the popularity of his ideas in the early Fascist movement, has seemed frightening, even though the interpretation of Nietzsche's ideas these forerunners of the Nazis made was virtually the opposite of what Nietzsche himself meant. Other parts of Nietzsche's work, especially concerning sociology and human freedom, are not yet fully unfolded. Max Weber said that one could judge the depth of one's intellectual seriousness by one's attitude toward Marx and Nietzsche. As yet only Weber and a few of his contemporaries have measured up to the challenge. The challenge still lies before us. NIETZSCHE'S LIFE Superficially, it would seem that Nietzsche had an uneventful, pampered childhood. His father,1 a Lutheran minister in eastern Germany, died when Friedrich was five, and Friedrich was brought up surrounded by adoring, puritanical females: his mother, sister, grandmother, and two maiden aunts. In this atmosphere of German Victorianism, Nietzsche received stern encouragement to work hard. He also acquired a deep-seated sexual inhibi- 66

Nietzsche's Madness 67 tion, which later grew into a hatred and terror of women and an insight into the way religious sentimentality upheld a repressive emotional domination. His family was well off, and the young Nietzsche was sent to an elite private school which had produced many famous German scholars, and then to the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. It was intended that he should enter the ministry, but he was drawn instead to the subject of philology (what might now be called historical linguistics), which at that time was just beginning to break new ground. Nietzsche impressed his professors enormously with his cleverness and energy. By 1869, when he was twenty- five, they had obtained a professorship in classical philology for him at the University of Basel, Switzerland. His promise was such that the formal requirements for the Ph.D. were waived. Here, then, was the young Nietzsche, well on his way to a brilliant career in scholarship. But his energies were already overflowing the bounds of normality. His public opinions fluctuated violently. In 1866 he was ardently pro-Prussian, as the Prussians made the military moves that finally began to cast Germany into a unified state after centuries of fragmentation. Then in 1869 he renounced his German citizenship to become a Swiss. In 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, Nietzsche again became the enthusiastic patriot, and he volunteered for service with the Prussian army as a medical orderly. A few months later, Nietzsche was back in Switzerland. He was, however, bitterly disillusioned with the Germans and their war. Moreover, in caring for the sick at the front, he himself had caught dysentery and diphtheria, and he returned to Switzerland in bad health. A pattern of illness during periods of stress was to stay with Nietzsche throughout his life. At age twelve, the time of puberty, he experienced severe difficulties with his eyesight; at age twenty his early fantasies of military greatness were ended by the realities of his first tour of duty, when he injured himself in a fall from a horse. Later, whenever personal or career strains blocked the easy path before him, he would always begin a withdrawal into another excruciating illness. But for the time being the path was bright and Nietzsche was enthusiastic. In 1868 he met Richard Wagner, the flamboyant composer whose revolutionary ideas of musical tonality and orchestral color were beginning to take the European public by storm. Living near the Wagners in Switzerland, Nietzsche visited them as often as he could. He fell in love with Wagner's beautiful wife, Cosima. He became an enthusiastic member of the Wagnerian movement, and of the inner circle of disciples who took personal inspiration from the Master himself and who led the drive to bring his redeeming influence into the surrounding society. At this time, the Wagnerian movement was not merely a musical experience—any more than the movement spearheaded by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the 1960s. Wagner's music was an attack on the decadence of formalistic, regimented nineteenth-century civilization. In his great

68 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism mythological operas, Wagner rejected the bourgeois spirit of the time and put in its place the heroic figures of the German Middle Ages. For Nietzsche the theme meshed with a revolutionary possibility just emerging in his own scholarly studies as a classical philologist specializing in the language and literature of the ancient Greeks. At this time philologists were beginning to discover that the previous image of the Greeks as rational philosophers, mathematicians, and artists was only the surface of the picture. Behind the sculptural perfection of their white marble statues and the restrained symmetry of their temples lurked a more emotional, primitive Greece: a society wrapped in orgiastic rituals, strange sacrifices and frenzies, and, above all, intoxicating music and dancing that took people out of themselves and into a realm of magic and power. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), Nietzsche designated these two cultures under the names "Apollonian" and "Dionysian." In the former he discerned the controlled, rational spirit that dominated Christianity and modern European civilization; in the latter he discerned a deeper force, reemerging in his own time through the agency of Wagner and his music. Nietzsche's book was poorly received by his more conservative colleagues, committed as they were to a narrower, more technical version of the field and unwilling to come to grips with the new spirit flowing through Nietzsche. At first Nietzsche fought back, publishing more attacks on orthodox thinkers and further expounding his enthusiasm for Wagner and his other heroes, such as the pessimistic philosopher Schopenhauer. By 1876, though, his health had deteriorated to such a point that he had to go on leave from the university. By 1879 he had resigned his job altogether on a small pension. From then on he moved from place to place in Switzerland and northern Italy, living at modest hotels in the most beautiful parts of the Alps, and taking long hikes when his health permitted. And he was writing at an ever-increasing pace. Troubled by insomnia, migraine headaches, vomiting, and bad digestion, he would write for ten hours at a stretch, until his eyes burned. He lived on drugs: chloral hydrate, veronal, opium, and many others. Caught in a spiral of his own making, he pushed his mind as far as it would go, far beyond the limits of what anyone had hitherto dared to think. His frenzied writing, freed by his lack of official position and by his solitude, gripped him like a demon; his body paid the price. Yet his illness also had its personal pattern. In the late 1870s, he began to break with Wagner and that circle, who were hitherto his main allies and friends. Wagner had moved to Bayreuth in Bavaria, where an admiring aristocrat had built him a lavish theater for his gigantic orchestra. In that atmosphere, Wagner's own megalomania reached its apotheosis, and he became an idol of respectable society. The final success affected his ideas: From the earlier revolutionary themes, he shifted to a sentimental reconciliation with Christianity., and he became the center of a movement of strident German chauvinism and anti-Semitism. Nietzsche, for his part, was going in the opposite direction, toward what he considered a new, psychological

Nietzsche's Madness 69 science—a hard but joyous wisdom that would break free from all surface conventionalities. During this split, Nietzsche underwent some of the worst pangs of illness. But at its end (around 1883, when Wagner died) the true voice of the philosopher had emerged. Nietzsche's sexual life was also coming to a crisis during this time. Always exceedingly polite and repressed with women, he nevertheless proposed marriage several times during this period—and was refused. In 1882 he was introduced to a beautiful and idealistic young intellectual, Lou Salome, then twenty-one years old, the daughter of a Russian general. Their ideas flashed; from intellectual intimacy they progressed to a very rhetorical, idealistic nineteenth-century courtship. Disavowing belief in marriage (as did Salome), Nietzsche nevertheless proposed to her twice, each time unsuccessfully. Finally they hit on a plan to move to Paris in a platonic menage a trois with another close intellectual friend. But Nietzsche's mother and sister heard of the plan and descended on him vengefully. At the age of thirty-nine Nietzsche could still quake at the moral imperatives of his aging mother. The plan was given up. The next year Nietzsche's health picked up, and it remained good until his final collapse at the end of 1888. His productivity suddenly increased again, this time in a new poetic direction, with the composition of Thus Spake Zarathustra, followed by a series of outspoken works attacking Christianity and calling for a reevaluation of all values. No doubt the death of Wagner helped ease the strain; so did the resolution of his sexual hopes, enforced though it might have been. His sister Elisabeth, who was constantly meddling in his affairs, married an anti-Semitic politician named Forster and moved to Paraguay, where Forster was organizing a Utopian colony. With the grounds cleared, Nietzsche was free to concentrate on his own thoughts. The torrent, already boiling, now broke all bounds. THE BIRTH OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE IRRATIONAL Nietzsche's thought had its origin as part of a larger intellectual movement—modern anthropology. This might be described as the process of breaking away from a Europe-centered worldview, and away from belief in the universal validity of European standards of rationality and morality. Of course, since the voyages of discovery in the late fifteenth century, Europeans had been aware of the existence of other societies. Yet the tribes of the Americas and the South Seas seemed to most Europeans merely primitive, until an intellectual shift occurred that made them the subject of a new discipline. Intellectual impetus for this shift came from within the world of scholarship, and especially from specialists in the Greco-Roman classics and ancient history. A number of developments in this area occurred in the 1860s. In England, for example, Henry Sumner Maine, studying ancient law, found

70 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism I that behind the legal contracts of the Romans there was a still more ancient form of law, based on tha status of the persons involved in each case. One's membership in a corporate community came first; deliberate, rational decisions negotiated among individuals came later in history. At the same time in Germany, J. J. Bachofen thought he could discern behind the European patrilineal kinship system an older system of matrilineal descent and inheritance. This gave evidence of an era when societies were organized around women, with a female-centered religion and law that differed sharply from later, male-centered institutions. And in France, meanwhile, Fustel de Coulanges (who was Emile Durkheim's teacher) asserted that the Olympian religions of Greece and Rome were actually political cults. For example, the worship of Athena was the cult around which clans had united to form the city of Athens. And behind this stage of ancient religion was a still earlier form,! the cult of the family gods, specific to each household, and a corresponding social structure in which each family was a fortified enclave, united by jits own domestic religion, and owing loyalty to no one outside its own limits. Somewhat later the English classicist James Frazer would write in the same vein that behind the beautiful stories of love and jealousy among the Olympian gods was another religion of sacrifice to the underground gods, sacrifice designed to ensure fertility by magic means. i Nietzsche was part of the first wave of these discoveries. Trained in classical philology in the jl860s, just as these ideas were breaking upon the scholarly world, he devoted his first book to the subject of the two types of Greek religion, which, |as he saw it, involved two styles of music and culture. On the one hand there was the musical cult (it was Nietzsche who discovered that music was originally religious, not a pastime) represented by Apollo and his lyre. This style, the Apollonian style, was serene, harmonious, and poised. It represented rationality, beauty in the form of perfect balance, and it was the source of the Greek ideal, which has descended to us as the notion that civilization is embodied in science, mathematics, philosophy, and classical [art. The Apollonian style represented restraint—the golden mean between extremes. On the other side was the Dionysian style, brought into Greece by a violently ecstatic group of dancers. They traveled from place to place, picking up new members who were willing to abandon their normal lives so as to chant and go into frenzies to celebrate their god Dionysus (Bacchus). This god was represented hot in beautiful human form but as a satyr, a goat- man, and his province was the harvest, the wine, and the emotions connected with intoxication, hi contrast to the Apollonian cult of restraint this was a cult of extremes, of emotional release of the basic life energies. Nietzsche discerned that the Dionysian movement became the basis for the Greek dramatic tragedies. The )3acchic chanters became the chorus, and their tale eventually came to be represented by actors. The theme was always the overweening pride of the hero, broken by the retribution of fate, as a kind of sacrifice to the endlessly fluctuating nature of life and death.

Nietzsche's Madness 71 Nietzsche thus saw tragedy, that great stirring art, as capturing the Dionysian spirit within the limits imposed by Apollonian balance. At the time, he found both Dionysian and Apollonian styles important for a full human culture. But the balance would not remain stable. For Nietzsche came to see that all of Western civilization, including Christianity, had become an extension of the Apollonian culture. The Dionysian side, however, had been steadily buried; the Greeks had held it in some measure of balance, but the Christians repressed it. This was apparent above all in the nineteenth century, during which the mythological side of Christianity had been stripped away, leaving the underlying faith in rational controls and a calm belief in progress. More and more, Nietzsche came to see the creative, underground forces of life on the Dionysian side, and he began to launch a violent attack on the dominant forces repressing them. THE ATTACK ON CHRISTIANITY Nietzsche, like most intellectuals of the modern European era, was an atheist. In a sense the basic identity of the modern intellectual was formed in the movement for liberation from the dogmas of the church that had ruled Europe since the Middle Ages. Already in the seventeenth century the battle of the liberated minds against the authoritarians was symbolized by the new science of Galileo, which was condemned by the church that burned its opponents at the stake. By the time of the French Revolution, as we have seen in Chapter 1, the progressive intellectuals were solidly in revolt against dogma, and they were ready to set up a church of Reason on the ruins of Christianity. But Nietzsche went a step further. He saw that only the overt political and intellectual repressions of the established church had been overthrown. Its deeper spirit lingered on in the dominating forms of nineteenth-century secular rationalism and Victorianism. What good did it do, declared Nietzsche, to detach oneself from Christian dogmatism if liberated intellectuals continued the very same values of emotional self-control and moralistic dedication to the community? They were merely substituting a belief in progress on earth for rewards in heaven. Nietzsche vehemently attacked the secularizers who portrayed Jesus no longer as the son of God but as a good man, the great teacher of morality, humility, and altruism. God was dead; but no one dared to see what that meant, what possibilities it opened up: Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Had he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

72 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism "Whither is God?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when ing now? Away from sideward, forward, in we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it mov- all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, ill directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of gravediggprs who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed hio."1 If God was now dead, Nietzsche asserted, we could no longer live in the hard shell left behind, stripped even of its magic. Humanity had only just begun on its hardest te sk: to live beyond this entire system of belief and control. "Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?" asked Nietzsche. "Must we not ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?" | Nietzsche's main attack was on the imperative of altruism, a principle brought from ChristiarLity into modern culture almost without alteration. The Christian doctrine [preached humility, imitating the suffering of Jesus on the cross, and giving charity to the poor. Salvation came through faith, suffering, and care of others. The ideal was epitomized by the monk who weighted himself with chains to exorcise the sexual appetites sent him by the devil; by the saint who washed the feet of lepers; and by the pious layman who gave food to [the poor at Christmas and put something in the collection plate each Sunday. What difference was there if now the ideal was to be an upright citizer., living a respectable life, dedicating oneself to duty and to the grind of work? What difference was there if the altruistic imperative now meant that the meaning of life was to dedicate oneself to the State or the Nation, to libera! reform or mass socialism? Nietzsche's argument was not just a negative one. Using his philological skills, he pointed to the history of language as a clue to an alternative morality. In modern language the contrast between "good" and "evil" was one between the moral, respectable, and altruistic on one side, and the selfish, hurtful, and egoistical on the other. But in the earliest Greek, the words meant something quite different. The "good" meant the good people, the aristocracy, those who had the energy, personal power, and grace to live well, win their battles} and dominate their situation. The "bad" meant not moral evil but people on a low level—those who failed, those with base and petty concerns, and those who lacked the vital energies and hence ended up on the bottom. If these conditions were the result of fate, then clearly there was nothing to be done about it but play one's part to the hilt. From this Nietzsche concluded two things. On the historical level it was apparent that a reversal of values had taken place, that the slave morality of 1From Walter Kaufmann, ed., Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. 95.

Nietzsche's Madness 73 the bottom had replaced the aristocratic morality of the top. And on the practical level, Nietzsche himself must undertake to launch a crusade to restore the creative forces to their proper place. We shall take up each of these in turn. THE DYNAMICS OF THE WILL Nietzsche's own theoretical position was now coming into focus. Based on a philosophy, it ramified into a strikingly modern social psychology—and a historical sociology as well. The basis of it was a theory of the will. The human essence, Nietzsche asserted, is will. (Indeed, he saw will as the essence of all life, and of all existence as well—much the way modern physicists declare that ultimately all is energy.) The true human nature is not consciousness, then, or logic, or mental categories, as Plato, Kant, and most other Western philosophers asserted. These things could only be derivatives of the will—modes of the will restricting and turning against itself. Such self-limitation by the will was not necessarily bad: After all, great thinking, art, and human action came from the molding of will into these conscious forms. But the vital energy came through these only because it represented transformations of the will itself, expressions of the selfish, un- trammeled ego flowing out into the world, encountering obstacles—other wills—struggling and rebounding, and thereby establishing a self-reflection that issued in a creative civilization. The early struggle of human wills in society, then, was essentially external. Out of these rival egoisms, a stratified society emerged. Those with the greatest energy, those most in tune with the flux of time, came out on top. From them came the creative works, the brilliant ideas, and the heroic actions. In their own unrestrained egos, they were the "good," or the "aristocracy." Those whose energy was weaker lost the battles and became slaves of the others. In the definitions of the time, they were the base, or the "bad." In the course of time, one might fall from high to low (the subject of the Greek tragedies), or even rise from low to high (like the mythological Greek heroes who became gods). If these shifts happened it was because of individual wills that committed the mistake of too much pride (hubris) or tapped a level of superhuman energy. The morality, then, was simple but dynamic. As long as people were able to act on it, there was no obstacle to their living on the highest level they could, in every sense. Heroic morality survived only through the period of small, fighting, democratic city-states. At that point in history a fatal reversal set in. With the spreading Roman conquests almost everyone became a sort of slave. The slave class despaired of ever rising again, but its numbers were now so great that it could affect the ruling climate of thought and language. In the regimented society of the Roman Empire, the slaves' condition began to approximate that of the entire middle mass. The downtrodden will of the slave class reared its head in an insidious form. They resented being domi-

74 The Vicissitudes ofNinl'teenth-Century Rationalism nated and wanted revenge. They did not want to become dominant or free but to bring the dominators down to their own level. They instituted a revolution in the very standard of morality. The successful donvLnators and their untrammeled wills now became defined as bad, or evil. ;Good was taken to mean the virtues of the slave— humility, self-abnegation, obedience, duty, and dependence on things above oneself. Ironically, these were what made good slaves, from the masters' point of view. Thel deviousness of this revolt of the slaves' will was in the slaves taking the lowest possible view of themselves, accepting even the worst demands placed upon them, and making these into a standard of virtue—with the aggressive twist, characteristic of the true will, expressed by applying these standards to everyone, masters included. In this consisted thfe slaves' revenge; this was the great revolution of Christianity. Arising hi. a society where dominant, creative individuality had become impossible, it gradually spread to become the ideal of the entire world. Although slaves were freed and even other classes adopted Christianity, the old snuggle for individual self-expression did not return. The entire society had adopted the slave morality. Altruism was its keynote, because this was the bond that linked the slaves to each other and subordinated the individual to the group. Ironically, the professed altruism and egalitarianism of the humble did not produce a society of equality and justice, even in its own terms. Christian society, beginning with the late Roman Empire and proceeding through the Middle Aj*es into the period of modern European exploration and colonization, turned out to be just as stratified as the pagan society that had preceded it. Conscience and altruism, devious products of the repressed will to power; became tools of domination as soon as the opportunity presented itself. The new society was now dominated by priests, moralists, and respectable people who made the greatest show of their own humility and personal! repression. Even the lot of the poor and the sick was not greatly improved Jsy organized charity, for Christian society needed to have them always with it so that they might be ministered to. Suffering people were among the most precious possessions of the medieval Christian community, because it was through them that others' salvation could be assured. They were to be given charity, but by no means was their plight to be permanently alleviated by changing their conditions or encouraging their own energies. Nietzsche charged the liberal and radical movements of his day with simply perpetuating tj.iis Christian interest in the sufferings of others. Now, however, it was disgiiised as a moral issue, through which the politicians could bring themselves to power. Nietzsche's historical dynamic was also paralleled on the individual psychological level. Conscience, Nietzsche noted, was the repression of the primal, egoistical wil by a devious will that struggled for a semblance of power by continuous y appealing to the group that subordinated it. In this process not only the creative emotional energy but also the will to truth it-

Nietzsche's Madness 75 self was repressed. I did this! declares memory. I did not! says will. At last, memory yields. Here again was more evidence of how will prevails over consciousness and allows the latter to form only on will's own terms. In this sense Nietzsche opened the way to modern depth psychology, just as his history of the will opened the way toward understanding Western Christian civilization. THE REEVALUATION OF ALL VALUES Nietzsche concluded from all this that life is only worthwhile as a clear, unobstructed expression of the will. All else is a turning away from life—a turning that, even on its own terms, cannot be successful, for only the will can do such a turning, and it expresses its will to power even as it negates itself. Thus altruistic, self-denying morality is doubly condemned: once, because it turns against creative life; and again, because it remains perverted even by its own standards—for it uses altruism and conscience only as slogans by which to dominate self and others. The alternative, Nietzsche recognized, would be hard. It meant embracing a world of conflict, even of violence and cruelty. Yet it was the only realistic choice—especially for those who wanted some optimism about the future—and an escape from the grim vistas of endless mediocrity and individuality-destroying mass organization. This was the only route to personal health and cultural creativity. Nietzsche pointed to the great periods of history: the Renaissance, ancient Greece—these were times of great strife, uncontrolled ambition, and Machiavellian individuality. It was out of this strife, and the emotional extremes accompanying it, that life reached its highest point. In a series of books, Nietzsche hammered out his position. Each title proclaimed his message more strikingly: The Gay Science; The Dawn; Beyond Good and Evil; The Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist. In the midst of all this creativity, his own illness fell away, and he wrote his poetic masterpiece, Thus Spake Zarathustra. It is the portrait of his own prophecy, cast in the image of the ancient Persian sage Zarathustra (Zoroaster), and it is Nietzsche's own project for a new religion, if "religion" is indeed the word for something so individualistic. In it Nietzsche envisages a future after the death of God, one which holds a higher creature yet—the superman. The term is difficult to translate from the German; it is Ubermensch, literally "over-human," a next level beyond the human type, and not yet in existence. In part this is the Dionysian individual resurrected from ancient Greece. But it is also an image of what cannot yet be stated but only created—an individual freed from social and psychological repression, and the product of struggles that have honed creativity and energy to a level beyond anything ever seen before. How is the superman to be created? By freeing ourselves from the spirit of revenge, says Zarathustra: That is the bridge we must cross to get from

76 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism human to superhuman. ;Sfietzsche expressed not only an aim for historical liberation from the legacy of slave morality and psychological repression, but he also expressed a profound philosophy. For the spirit of revenge, he says, is an outcry againbt the flowingness of time; it is a harping back to what has happened, and a stubborn desire to make amends for what has passed and cannot be remedied. To wish to change the past is the height of pathology, but this is a motive that pervades Western society after the Greeks. In place of this revenge spirit Nietzsche offers a strange doctrine of his own—eternal recurrence. Everything is destined to happen over and over again, he declares. This i is in the spirit of the early Greek fertility cults like that of Dionysus, which celebrated the endless cycles of crops and animals, living and dying, and victory and defeat. The individual will to power that is oneself can only find 'fulfillment in this world of external conflict by willing the whole cycle. In other words, one makes the world one's own by willing it, repressing nothing, asking revenge for nothing, pressing continuously onward into a future that is fated to be like the past. It is a strange doctrine indeed, because at least superficially it seems to contradict our historical sense of what Nietzsche has told us of the ancient power morality, the slave revolt, the death of God, and even the prospective coming of the superman. Of all Nietz ;che's ideas, this has been found to be the most unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, on another level, it too may have its sense and a meaning yet to be probed. In the language of the late twentieth century, we might put it thus: Is eternal recurrence the frame within which we are to see Nietzsche's own history, doomed to repeat itself? Or is that history, and especially the final phases' of the superman, the frame within which eternal recurrence finally can emerge? NIETZSCHE'S MADNESS The year 1888 was on? of Nietzsche's best. He was healthy almost all the time. He wrote five books, the biggest output of his life: two thunderous expositions of his ideas, The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist; two books attacking his old idol Wagner and holding himself up as Wagner's antithesis; and a bitterly sarcastic review of the importance of his own works, Ecce Homo (Behold the Mar*). The chapters of this last were entitled, "Why I Am So Wise," "Why I Am So Clever," "Why I Write Such Good Books," and "Why I Am a Destiny J* Nietzsche was beginning to become famous. For the first time he was attracting followers am6ng important European intellectuals. The Danish literary critic Georg Brandes began lecturing about him. Nietzsche began to correspond with the famous French critic and historian Hippolyte Taine and with the great Swedish playwright August Strindberg. With these new connections Nietzsche became more demanding toward his older friends, wanting them to come out publicly in his favor instead of merely support-

Nietzsche's Madness 77 ing him privately, and he cut off contact with them when they failed to do so. His letters, previously so polite, modest, and apologetic whenever he had a personal criticism to make, began to change in tone to megalomania- cal self-importance. A new political note began to creep in as well, especially a violent anti- Germanism. His intellectual following was appearing in Scandinavia, Russia, Italy, France, Switzerland, and the United States, but in Germany there was still nothing but obliviousness or harsh reviews. Nietzsche began to predict an alliance of the European states against backward, authoritarian Germany. By the winter, the subject obsessed him. In December 1888 and January 1889 he began to invoke the anti-German apocalypse as well as predict it. He foretold a new era, a new antimoralistic religion of the twentieth century, to be ushered in by several world wars. And he himself was now calling together a convocation of the European powers to depose the pope and begin the battle in earnest. Nietzsche began to appear in public smiling beatifically, in sharp contrast to the serious, even morose, expression that we see in earlier pictures of him. In January 1889 he was in Turin, Italy. He saw a coachman beating a horse on the street, ran to stop him, and collapsed with his arms around the horse. The next few days are unclear. A friend received a last postcard: "I am just having all anti-Semites shot. Dionysus." From then until his death in 1900, Nietzsche was in the care of others. He wrote no more, neither books nor letters. He never spoke again of his ideas. He alternated between two moods. In one he was quiet, polite, capable of pleasant conversation, like the anonymous man one might have met by chance a few years earlier in a Swiss hotel dining room. In the other mood he would become Dionysus, smiling happily, laughing wildly, singing, emotionally ecstatic. His sister Elisabeth returned from Paraguay to take over care of him from his mother. Her husband Forster had committed suicide in May 1889, when the anti-Semites' colony seemed to be failing. Taking up a greater cause, she moved her brother back to Germany and made a kind of shrine for him at Weimar, the famous old German cultural center. She arranged for the publication of his complete works, including the last and most violent, and she edited his notes under the title The Will to Power. Through her influence Nietzsche's work was popularized in Germany but with ironic results. The opponent of German nationalism and authoritarianism and outspoken critic of anti-Semitism was made into the hero of the nationalists. His anti-Christianity became a prologue for anti-Semitic propaganda; his insights into the nature of power and conflict were distorted into political tools, entirely alien to Nietzsche's own philosophy, but glorifying a militaristic German state. Nietzsche ignored it all, watched over by his sister and alternating between his moods of quiet and Dionysian outbursts. There have been a number of attempts made to explain Nietzsche's erratic behavior and the physical ailments that plagued him, especially during his later years. A popular theory is that Nietzsche contracted syphilis

78 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism during his student days or during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and that his deterioration was the onset of the syphilitic paralysis about twenty years later. Yet many crucial facts stand in the way of this theory. His health was good from 1889 until his death in 1900; there was none of the progressive physical and mental deterioration associated with syphilis. Nor is it very likely that he ever contracted syphilis in the first place given his extremely puritan character in sexual matters. There is, for example, an account of Nietzsche's being taken against his knowledge to a brothel during his youth. There he was so shocked at the sight of the prostitutes thai; he froze; finally he ran to a piano in the room, struck a chord, and breaking the spell, was able to flee. Clearly Nietzsche's madness, like the physical symptoms that afflicted him throughout his life, was psychological or psychosomatic in origin. The syphilis theory is little I more than an insult offered by those who wish to dismiss Nietzsche's ideas as the products of a diseased mind. But a psychological illness is not so easily dismissed. It reflects in the man the pressures of the real world and the self with which Nietzsche had to wrestle. Certainly, there is no one who used himself more as a laboratory and a wilderness for exploration than Nietzsche. Abnormally sensitive to strain, he nevertheless provoked himself by exploring his own wounds, uncovering the forces that produced his own terrors and inhibitions, his own self- punishments and driving ambitions. In the process, he uncovered the repressive, illness-producing forces behind Western civilization—religious morality and, beneath it, the dynamics of resentment by the powerless, as a subterfuge for their own will to power. The strains that finally brought Nietzsche's collapse in 1889 seem to have been connected with finishing the intellectual phase of his life's work. He had discovered society's repressive forces, and he saw the need for a new culture—an emotional breakthrough for Western civilization. But he too needed the breakthrough, and though he thought he saw it coming in himself, the crucial weakness was still there—the long-standing terror of the opinions of others, no doubt stemming from his stern Teutonic, religious upbringing. Nietzsche was finally becoming famous, and this meant new dangers for him. [After all, his writings were not merely an attack on respectable, bourgeois; civilization, but they were undoubtedly the most violent and far-reaching attacks ever made on Christianity and religion in general. A few centuries earlier, people had been burned at the stake for much less, and even in Nietzsche's day the political power of the church was just beginning to crack in central Europe. In the inner world of Friedrich Nietzsche's own mind and emotions, then, there may have been a personal danger that was even greater than this political one. He was becoming famous, and his mother would know at last what he had been writing and thinking all these years—that pious widow of a Lutheran minister, whose moral authority over her only son was still so great that she could interrupt his love affairs when he was thir-

Nietzsche's Madness 79 ty-nine. Perhaps it was this terror, mounting above the political and intellectual excitement, that pushed Nietzsche over the edge. In a strange way, the whirlpool into which Nietzsche now fell was completely appropriate. His philosophy held the critical intellect to be a phenomenon of the tortured, self-reflective will; the duty and compulsion to write for others was part of this struggling world of moral repression. Cutting himself loose from all that, Nietzsche turned his back on the years of migraine headaches, burning eyes, and nagging illness. He turned instead toward the most immediate sources of happiness within. In his own world of supreme individualism he was a success; he had become Dionysus. AN ASSESSMENT To total the balance sheet of Nietzsche's work is still impossible. The currents from it have flowed far and wide in the twentieth century—the century that Nietzsche predicted would be his own—and they are flowing still. In sociology, Nietzsche had an immediate impact on Max Weber, alerting him to the role of the emotion-disciplining Christian work ethic in powering modern capitalist society and to the iron cage of bureaucracy that makes a slave morality appropriate for all. Nietzsche's depth psychology was taken up and explored by Freud, his colleagues, and his followers. Indeed, Nietzsche's ideas had become so famous in the early twentieth century that Freud declared he did not want to read Nietzsche, because he felt the ideas would contaminate his own researches; yet Freud himself was thereby acknowledging the pervasiveness of this atmosphere, in which the unconscious drives could now be explored. Other depth psychologists, such as Alfred Adler, explicitly developed the Nietzschean theme of the will to power. In philosophy, Nietzsche helped set off the existentialist movement, with its rejection of all specialized academic metaphysics and epistemology that does not derive from an immediate sense of one's own fully engaged life. In this philosophy, meaning is not given from outside, but must be constantly created from within. On the other side, one cannot ignore the political uses that have been made of Nietzsche, at first by the German nationalists and the anti-Semites encouraged by Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, and later by the Nazis themselves. In the wake of fascism, Nietzsche was for a time in very bad repute in the West; Anglo-American intellectuals in particular have tended to repudiate him wholesale as a primary cause of Hitler's atrocities. Yet it can be said that almost every aspect of German culture has been attacked at one point or another as leading up to nazism. Thus do ideas become one of the casualties of warfare, even among the most well-meaning of intellectuals. In recent times Nietzsche's true themes have engaged our attention again. Post-Freudian analysts like Fritz Perls have struck a Nietzschean

80 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism note, breaking through their patients' intellectualism and moralism to force a stance of total self-assertion and total public honesty. Psychiatrist R. D. Laing asks if there is not a crucial element of repressed creativity that comes out, in the circumstances of most lives, only in madness. In this, Laing could have had Nietzsche's own life in mind as an example. And the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s reverberated the Nietzschean theme in yet another way—representing a struggle out of the bonds of nationalist militarism and bureaucratic career regimentation that characterized America at midcentury, into a life style of here-and-now high experience. The social criticism and controversy of today seem to confront Nietzsche's issues more deliberately than ever before. The halo of altruism is beginning to be torn from the elite professions, in a manner that fits well with Nietzsche's own analysis. We are beginning to see the power interests (and financial interests) of medical doctors behind the elaborate public facade of service. We realize the investment medicine has in maintaining a continual supply of sick people to make scientific tests upon and peddle drugs to, and its resulting lack of concern with permanent cures and with preventing sickness in the first place. We are beginning to see the self-interests of teachers, administrators, and employers (and students, too) behind the liberal, service-oriented rhetoric of the educational system. And most recently perhaps, we are beginning to break free of the sexist domination that has been upheld by our romantic and familial conventions for centuries and has dictated the course of relationships between men and women. Ironically, Nietzsche's own attitudes were violently antagonistic to traditional women; but in cracking the facade of sentimental idealization and morality, he began to reveal the underlying system of domination. On all these fronts, the ideas of Nietzsche still point us to the crucial paths toward liberation. Nietzsche's life itself shows the dangers of a mere halfway breakthrough. To uncover unconscious drives and attack dominant hypocrisy, one cannot afford to be cowardly in any respect. For there is the danger of being captured by just those repressing forces one is trying to become liberated from, just as Nietzsche in his madness was captured by the anti-Semites he had railed against. Yet we should remember Nietzsche as the first to tread this path, exploring the nastiest, most hidden parts of society and self. If he finally fell victim to what he uncovered, at least he had the courage to proceed in the first place, and what he revealed stands for others as guideposts to follow. In his explorations, as well as in his hardships and his ultimate tragedy, Nietzsche ranks among the most heroic of the discoverers of society.

CHAPTER FIVE DoGooders, Evolutionists, and Racists So far our history has dealt mainly with the thought of France and Germany. We take up now the third of the great intellectual cultures of modern times, that of the English-speaking world. It is not a world of towering individual thinkers like Marx or Tocqueville, with the exception of Charles Darwin, who is not really a social thinker at all. But it does produce some major ideas: the notion of society as organized around a market and the idea of man's continuity with biological evolution. It produces as well the characteristic political philosophy of Britain and America—liberalism, in both its right-wing (laissez-faire) and left-wing (welfare-state) versions. It develops the modern ideology of the application of science to the solution of social problems. For us today, concerned about the potentially dangerous consequences of science, there is a lesson in this. For it was out of the vogue of science, and especially of biology and statistics, that the ideologies of racism emerged. How this happens is still of some interest, for the mode of thought that produced racism has not disappeared along with that particular doctrine. To begin, we must retrace our steps and return briefly to the eighteenth century. Medieval Christianity had held a monopoly on thought all over Europe, and Latin had been everywhere the language of the educated thinker. It was only in the eighteenth century, when thought broke out of its religious mold, that truly national differences in culture began to appear (although the Reformation paved the way for this by breaking up the Catholic Church into national churches). In France, as we have seen, the movement that we call the Enlightenment was a sharp revolt against religion, in the name of science. The philosophes of the Paris salons entertained their listeners with revolutionary principles cloaked over by witticisms. In Britain the break with religion came much more gradually, and the tone was mildly progressive, never revolutionary. Unlike the independent, secular French intellectuals, the British thinkers emerged first of all as university professors in Scotland, where they taught a branch of theology called moral philosophy. Originally this discipline consisted of practical advice on what the good Christian should do in specific situations to avoid sin, but it gradually became secularized into a consideration of how the good society is organized. From moral casuistry, it gradually turned into economics. 81

82 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY OF FERGUSON AND SMITH The agents of this transformation were two Edinburgh professors, Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) and Adam Smith (1732-1790). Ferguson began with the medieval idea that society is formed like a living body. The king is the head, his soldiers the arms, the church the heart, the artisans the stomach, the royal ministers the eyes and ears, and of course the peasants the feet. (This is a notion from which Shakespeare, a characteristically medieval thinker, drew many of his most elaborate metaphors.) Ferguson applied the model more seriously. If society does in fact consist of specialized parts forming a body, we must conceive of a division of labor among them and a system of exchange by which the services of one part are paid for by the services of the others. And given this natural exchange, one may draw a striking conclusion: that the social division of labor can carry on its exchanges very well on its own, without the interference of the government. The social body does not need the constant supervision of its head. Adam Smith drew out the consequences of this in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations. The market, Smith showed, has laws of its own, the most basic of which is the principle of supply and demand, which regulates exchange for the benefit of the whole. No one could very long persist in producing what was not wanted, for one would get no return; the high returns for those who produce what is so wanted as to be scarce will attract other producers and thus reduce the scarcity. It is neither necessary nor desirable to interfere with this process, for there is an invisible hand that guides the results of people's labors, and in following their own self-interests, all may contribute to the general good. Smith thus at once founded the new science of economics and a new political philosophy, Liberalism. LIBERALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM: BENTHAM, MALTHUS, AND MILL The philosophy of Liberalism has two sides, which were united for a while, but later split into rival viewpoints. These two sides were organized respectively around the idea of rational beings and the idea of the natural laws of the market. On the one side, there is the way of regarding humans as homo economi- cus, rational individuals who calculate profits and losses and act accordingly. This enlightened self-interest was all to the good of the system, as we have seen, and it became thought of as the principle around which all of society could be organized. The leader of this wing of thought was the lawyer Jeremy Bentham, who founded the school of utilitarianism, originally as a program of legal reform. The laws of England were a jumble of local and national statues, full of inequities and grotesque feudal punishments like hanging for stealing bread. Bentham argued that revenge and other sentiments were foolish bases for laws and proposed a set of reforms based on

Do-Gooders, Evolutionists, and Racists 83 principles of reward and punishment that would induce people to be good. In the utilitarian philosophy the best action could be computed by a "hedonistic calculus," by which one arrived at "the greatest good for the greatest number." It provided a way of combining maximum individual freedom with the good of the whole society. The other side of Liberalism was organized around the idea of the division of labor and the exchanges of the market, which follow their own natural laws. In the tradition of moral philosophy from which this model emerged, natural laws were regarded as the way in which God (or nature) had intended things to operate; they were laws about both how things work and how they ought to work. Thus, competition, through the principles of supply and demand, results in the production of just the amounts and kinds of goods that are needed and assigns them a fair price. All restraints on trade, whether business monopolies, government restrictions, or labor unions, are unnatural and hence must be opposed. Sometimes the results of these laws seemed to be unfortunate. For example, in 1798 a country parson named Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population in which he stated that poverty was the result of a law of nature. As production increases, the population grows, he argued; but whereas the population increases by a geometric ratio (for example, 2:4:8:16:32, or some such accelerating curve), the production of food can only increase by an arithmetic ratio (1:2:3:4:5 or other constant increments), as new land is brought into cultivation only with effort, and even that approaches a limit of exhaustion. Accordingly, population will always tend to outstrip food supplies, and the less fit individuals will starve. This is not only inevitable, said Malthus, but even good for the system as a whole. Malthus and Smith used a labor theory of value and hence were confronted with the same paradox Marx grappled with: How is profit made, if the market ensures that one quantity of labor-value will be exchanged for an equal value? You will recall that Marx invoked labor exploitation as the answer; Malthus proposes population increase of the poor people as the saving element, for it ensures that there will be too many poor people for the available jobs and hence keeps wages low. Thus, the natural laws of the system are all to the good in the end, and in any case it is fruitless to interfere with them. Trying to save the paupers only enables them to reproduce, which makes the population problem that much worse. Parson Malthus even regarded this principle as evidence of God's moral retribution: Poverty is the punishment that humans bring down on themselves for their lack of sexual restraint. Eventually, a split was to develop between the two wings of Liberalism, but they would retain much in common. They both 'believed in representative government, the capacity of rational individuals to rule themselves; in the civil liberties of freedom of speech, press, and assembly, which ensured that truth would arise from the free market of ideas; in religious tolerance and the separation of church and state; and in a minimum of government interference with the freedoms of individuals, as long as they do not use their freedom to infringe upon the freedoms of others. (Just where this in-

84 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism fringement begins was to be a subject of bitter debate.) This implied a belief in private property as an individual right. The only way in which all Liberals agreed that one might interfere with others was through education (although not necessarily state-supported or compulsory education), which would enlighten people to see how their rational and moral behavior was best for themselves and for society. Liberals were uniformly opposed to revolution and believed only in gradual change and improvement. The Liberal position was of course not the only one in England in the early nineteenth century; there were also conservatives supporting the rights of the aristocracy and other vested interests, as well as more radical movements among the workers. But for the educated middle class, Liberalism became a powerful force. At the same time, its two wings were coming more and more into conflict. Not only the harshness of Malthusianism but the evils of the industrial revolution were becoming apparent. Child labor, factory conditions, hordes of beggars and paupers, squalid poorhouses and debtors' prisons, periodic crises of unemployment—the same things that drove Marx to radicalism—moved one section of Liberalism into action. The utilitarian wing, with its belief in rational action and its principle of the greatest good for the greatest number, proposed doing something to correct these ills. Soon they were joining in the commissions that investigated conditions in the factories, proposing legislation on child labor, free schools (as a way to take the children off the market), workman's insurance, prison reform, public health, and a myriad of other worthy causes. The intellectual rationale for reform was provided by the utilitarian leader John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). The "laws" of the market, Mill pointed out in 1848 in his Principles of Political Economy, are simply statements of how things will operate if we let the market operate unchecked; but there is no necessity for us to let it operate that way. Mill, in effect, destroyed the remaining assumption of moral philosophy, which saw "natural laws" as statements both of what is and of what ought to be. The market is only one system among many, Mill said. It is not God's single law, and if its results do not bring happiness, then we are free to modify it or to try another system. This created liberalism with a small "I," the modern philosophy of reform that has led to the modern welfare state. The old laissez-faire Liberalism (with a capital "L") was put on the defensive. In Britain the bolder wing of the liberals went on to support not only legislative reforms but even trade unionism and eventually the Labour party. A mild reformist version of socialism was advocated by those liberals organized in the Fabian Society, whose membership was to include George Bernard Shaw. The consequences of liberalism were not merely political; they also began the tradition of empirical research in sociology. The investigating commissions in the factories were followed by tours of philanthropic individuals into the slums and poorhouses, resulting in such publications as Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London.

Do-Gooders, Evolutionists, and Racists 85 SOCIAL EVOLUTIONISM: DARWIN AND SPENCER Mill had given the reform wing some heavy intellectual ammunition. But just when the battle seemed won, the fading conservatives acquired unexpected help. In 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. At a stroke, Darwin set the natural world in order, just as Newton had done two centuries earlier in physics. All the species of plants and animals could now be seen as evolving from common ancestors through the great principle of natural selection. Continual small variations in each generation resulted in gradual change, as those most fit to survive and reproduce in the available environments did so, and those less fit died out. The result was a series of branchings, as creatures evolved until they became adapted to stable habitats. This was the great intellectual event of the nineteenth century, as its result was to put the capital "L" Liberals back in the saddle. Darwin's model of evolutionary advance through competition and survival of the fittest was strong justification for leaving social processes alone to take their course. Actually, Darwin's system had more than an affinity with laissez-faire, for Darwin had hit upon his great organizing principle in biology—natural selection—while reading Malthus on the dynamics of population. Darwin provided Liberals not only with support, but also with the right kind of enemies. The church conservatives naturally regarded evolutionism as contrary to the biblical account of Creation, anl their outcry grew even louder in 1871 when Darwin published The Descent of Man, which carried out the evolutionary corollary that man must have a common ancestor with animals, most probably with the great apes. Liberalism, joining hands with evolutionism, once again drew the most progressive thinkers to its cause. The most prominent of the social evolutionists was Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Like Mill and Darwin, he was an eccentric, unsociable Englishman, although unlike Darwin he was poor enough to have to work for a living. Trained in science, Spencer began working as a railway engineer. He was always producing mechanical inventions, including a not- very-successful flying machine. The only invention that he actually made money on was a sort of early paper clip. By the time he was thirty Spencer realized that more money could be made by inventions in the world of ideas, but he continued to set up weird labor-saving devices around his own home. Spencer's career was launched as a writer on scientific and political subjects for popular magazines, which were just springing up around mid- century to cater to the growing middle-class audience. To this public Spencer began to sell his combination of evolutionism and laissez-faire.1 Evolutionism, Spencer argued, shows that we are subject to forces beyond 'Spencer was not a literal follower of Darwin, but it must be recalled that evolutionism was generally in the air at the time. From 1830 to 1833 Charles Lyell published his theory of geological evolution, which had already brought down the wrath of the church and popularized the subject. Darwin himself had formulated his ideas in the late 1830s, and they were privately known among leading scientists.

86 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism what we can see. Our actions, however well intentioned, will fail to achieve their aims if they attempt something contrary to the laws of nature. Spencer thus backed up the economic principles of laissez-faire with an evolutiorrist view of social stratification as produced by natural causes. Rich men have risen to the top by their talents, and the poor are at the bottom because: of their inherent deficiencies. Accordingly, we should not expect reforms to work just because they seem to be reasonable and good. For example, Spencer said, we need to determine the psychological differences between the sexes before deciding whether to give women the vote. Since all creatures adapt biologically to their environments, it is both useless and cruel to try to civilize the natives in the colonies or to allow criminals and mentally defective persons to produce their inevitably defective children. Spencer even questioned the value of universal education: To educate the intellect, he pointed out, does not change people's emotioni. or behavior. Spencer thus claimed that we must know social science before making any changes. And where is that science? Spencer set out to produce it himself. Indeed, he produced not just a sociology but an entire encyclopedia. Between 1860 and 1896 Spencer turned out a massive series entitled System of Synthetic Philosophy. Volume 1 is First Principles, followed by Volumes 2 and 3, Principles of Biology; Volumes 4 and 5, Principles of Psychology; Volumes 6 through 8, Principles of Sociology; and culminating in Volumes 9 and 10, Principles of Ethics. There were volumes planned on Principles of Astronomy and Principles of Geology, but these were not finished before Spencer's death; these should logically have come first, but they were postponed because Spencer feared he would die before the main part was complete. We should recall that this was the era before radio and television, and the main leisure pastime of the middle class was reading. Spencer lived off this audience for most of his life, selling advance subscriptions to his works and also publishing them in magazine installments. Principles of Sociology began coming out in 1872 in The Contemporary Review in England and in Popular Science Monthly in the United States. These volumes are full of interesting examples of different customs found around the world—child marriage, savage puberty rites, the forms of tribal kingship, and so on at great length. It is just the thing for a writer who gets paid by the page and whose readers have long hours at home in the evening to fill. Spencer hired three professors to gather together all the available data for his sociology, which he grouped under the headings of "Uncivilized Societies," "Civilized Societies (Extinct or Decayed)," and "Civilized Societies (Recent or Still Flourishing)." Thus we get our information especially from explorers like Captain Cook in the South Seas and Dr. Livingstone in Africa. Spencer supplied the unifying theory. Basically, his model was like that of Comte, whom Spencer had read and appreciated. Society is like an organism, passing through various stages of development. Spencer updates this theory by showing that change is due not merely to progress in knowledge, but also to principles of evolu-

Do-Gooders, Evolutionists, and Racists 87 tionary selection. He also emphasizes that society is different from an organism; it is made up of the actions of individuals and lacks a consciousness concentrated in one place. He also rejects Comte's conservative notion that society is a moral unit and, of course, Comte's political scheme for reorganizing the world under a "High Priest of Humanity." Instead, Spencer wanted to show how society develops structures that culminate in the invisible hand of the market, whereby individuals are given a maximum of freedom and yet contribute to the best functioning of the whole. Spencer gave his system intellectual elegance by explaining all evolution—cosmic and biological as well as social—with a single basic principle: Matter begins as a homogeneous mass of simple particles and gradually becomes organized as the particles come together to form heterogeneous parts of a complex whole. In short, things move from the simple and unorganized to the complex and organized. Spencer took this idea from embryology: An embryo begins as a mass of undifferentiated cells, which gradually become specialized organs interacting with each other. Spencer stated the principle more abstractly and then applied it to the evolution of the solar system, the earth, biological species, and finally society. Evolution is the process of adaptation to the environment, and its long-term trend, from the lower and earlier adaptations to higher and later ones, is from simplicity to complexity. Spencer thus arranges primitive, ancient, and modern societies in an order reflecting the stages of evolution. Societies build up as small tribes grow, are conquered, or otherwise combine with others. Size brings about a differentiation of structure. From the comparatively structureless tribes, we get first (a) a regulative system for dealing with the outside environment, analogous to the nervous system in organisms—that is, the state, which provides offense and defense against other societies; then (b) a sustaining system of economic production that provides life support for the regulative system; and finally (c) an exchange and distribution system, consisting of communications and transportation networks, commerce and finance, and so on. As society grows, each of these sectors subdivides in turn. The state becomes more complex; the king must share his power with the royal bureaucracy and eventually finds himself relying entirely on his ministers. The economy becomes increasingly autonomous, as the market system alone is capable of coordinating the diverse productions. Spencer regarded religion as an archaic stage of development. Fear of the gods was based on fear of the spirits of the dead, he argued; society outgrows this sort of control over the individual, just as it outgrows the state. Thus one's mental capacities improve along with society. Humans become less emotional and more rational; ideas become more definite; lore is replaced by scientific knowledge; customs are replaced by laws. Viewing the world around him, Spencer saw two main types of societies. One, the militant society, consists of societies in which the regulative system dominates the sustaining system. Cooperation is compulsory and enforced by the state; the society is autocratic, warlike, and religious. Such

88 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism societies could be found in Germany and France. The other type, the industrial society, is peaceful and republican; cooperation is voluntary, through the means of the market. Here, the state exists for the benefit of its members and not vice versa. England was Spencer's prime example of such a society. He stuck by his principles, however, and denounced Britain's imperial conquests as a dangerous shift away from the industrial to the militant form of society. LIBERALISM IN AMERICA Both of these wings of L(l)iberal thought—the social reform and the evolutionist—spread to America not long after they arose in England. Spencer had a triumphant American tour. Lavish banquets were given in his honor by wealthy businessmen, grateful for the intellectual support he gave them in what was indeed an era of robber barons. The main home-grown exponent of laissez-faire evolutionism was the Yale professor William Graham Sumner (1840-1910). His tone can be gathered from an exchange with his students: "Professor, don't you believe in any government aid to industries?" "No! If s root, hog, or die." "Yes, but hasn't the hog got a right to root?" "There are no rights. The world owes nobody a living." "You believe, then, Professor, in only one system, the contract-competitive system?" "Thaf s the only sound economic system. All others are fallacies." "Well, suppose some professor of political economy came along and took your job away from you. Wouldn't you be sore?" "Any other professor is welcome to try. If he gets my job, it is my fault. My business is to teach the subject so well that no one can take the job away from me."2 Sumner's system had some advantages over Spencer's in that it concentrated less on the overall form of social evolution and paid more attention to the particular "folkways" or customs that evolved to fit a particular historical situation. Sumner was especially astute in seeing that moral norms, which he called "mores," are simply customs that take on considerable emotional force. Sumner took a rather radical stance, considering that he was an ordained minister, as he detailed the varieties of moral beliefs and practices through slavery, torture, infanticide, cannibalism, monogamy, polygamy, public nudity, and sacred prostitution, in order to show that all standards are relative to the customs of the time. "The mores can make anything right," he asserted, thus claiming that there are no timeless verities, except of course the law of natural selection itself. Sumner, who retired from preaching in the pulpit in order to devote himself to preaching in the classroom, elevated natural selection to the status of the fundamental moral 2William Lyon Phelps, "When Yale Was Given to Sumnerology," Literary Digest International Book Review, III (1925), 661.

Do-Gooders, Evolutionists, and Racists 89 law. In fact, Sumner got into some trouble over this. He had a famous academic freedom controversy with the president of Yale, an extremely religious man, who objected to Sumner's assigning evolutionist readings to his students. But the tides were running for evolutionism, and Sumner emerged victorious in the end. But if evolutionism was strong in America, reformism was even stronger. The reformers simply took what they wanted from evolutionism and ignored the rest. The reform mentality already had roots in America. The 1830s and 1840s witnessed a sprinkling of Utopian communities, like the famous Brook Farm in Massachusetts, inspired by Henry David Thoreau and the transcendentalists. Some of them were modeled on the ideas of the Parisian prophets Charles Fourier and Auguste Comte. So when the British liberal reformers gathered in 1856 to form the British Social Science Association, the Americans were prepared to follow suit. In 1865 the American Association for the Promotion of Social Science was founded, with guiding advice from John Stuart Mill himself. The American association was a melange of reformers of all kinds, held together by a common quest for respectability under the guise of social science. Its diverse ingredients are shown by the groups that successively split off to form their own societies: the American Prison Association in 1870; the National Conference of Charities and Corrections in 1874; the American Public Health Association, the Association for the Protection of the Insane, and the American Historical Association in 1884; and the American Economic Association in 1885. From the latter were formed the American Political Science Association and the American Sociological Society in 1905. Intellectually, these people were interested primarily in justifying their projects by whatever ideas supported them. But toward the 1880s academic factions began to form, and this stimulated a concern for intellectual coherence. What was happening was the great reform of the American universities, beginning with the foundation of Johns Hopkins University in 1876. The American colleges were adding graduate departments, expanding their student bodies, and offering electives and hence a variety of new courses. The universities were breaking out of the old classical curriculum and offering a place for new specialties in everything from modern literature to basketry. "Social problems" courses began to find their way into the curriculum, and gradually economics, political science, anthropology, psychology, and sociology got footholds in academia. The first sociology department in the world was founded at the new University of Chicago in 1892. Many of the Chicago sociologists had close connections with Hull House, a pioneering institute of social work ministering to the immigrants in the Chicago slums. Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House, began to do descriptive sociology by producing maps of social patterns on the South Side of Chicago. These maps became an inspiration for the urban sociology that later developed at the university. There were no great intellectual figures among the early American sociologists, whose leaders were Lester Ward, Albion W. Small, Franklin H.

90 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism Giddings, Edward A. Ross, and William Graham Sumner. But they were all morally dedicated people. Many of them were sons of ministers, and quite a few had careers in the ministry themselves before becoming teachers. (This, however, was not unusual in the religiously oriented American college.) Only Ward, who was a paleobotanist with the United States Geological Survey, was not a college professor. Their one overriding interest was social problems and their main theoretical question (except for Sumner, who preached laissez-faire) was how to justify intervention in social problems, given Spencer's evolutionary case for laissez-faire. Their arguments went generally as follows: First of all, they accep>ted the basic idea of gradual progress through evolution. The problem was to show that it was natural for men to lend a hand in the evolutionary process. The answer, in one form or another, was that evolution in its higher stages acts through human consciousness and volition. Lester Ward called this the "principle of social telesis." The state, then, was not an outdated impediment to evolution, but in fact acted as the conscious agent of the community as it planned its own advances. Sociology played its role in this adveince by discovering the laws determining human behavior, so that society might intervene intelligently for human betterment. What are these laws? A few sociologists advocated research to discover them, but most of them believed the laws were available through theoretical analysis. Comte and Spencer's notion of society as an organism would not do, for the Americans wanted to operate on the individual level, not to reform the entire society all at once. There was much discussion of the ways in which society was or was not like an organism, with the general conclusion being that since society consists only of individuals, sociology must provide an explanation of how the individual acts. Sociological theorists thus began with an effort to describe the basic elements of human behavior, whether these were to be called mental faculties, social forces, interests, instincts, or motives. Their theories consisted of long lists of them, such a.1, desire for food, pleasure, sex, love, social belonging, and so forth. All social institutions, like the family or the state, were then explained as the results of combinations of these elements. Actually, these were not explanatory theories at all. By the 1920s a researcher counted 15,789 different "instincts" listed in the sociological literature and concluded that this whole mode of explanation was useless. Merely giving something another name did not explain it; to try to explain social groups by the "instinct of social belongingness" told us nothing at all about why groups occur at certain times or in certain forms under different conditions. All the theorizing had merely served to give sociology a reputation for intellectual vacuousness. But the sociologists were not greatly perturbed, for they were not seriously trying to build a real theory in the first place. They were not really interested in what determines social structures; they simply wanted a rationale for their efforts to reform the individual and solve social problems. They already knew the source of social ills before they started, and they wanted to get right at the solution.

Do-Gooders, Evolutionists, and Racists 91 What were these social problems? Recall that the sociologists were largely moralistic Anglo-Saxon Protestants from small-town or rural backgrounds. What they saw as a social problem was the growing industrial city and its immigrant population. Instead of containing clean, law-abiding, churchgoing, middle-class citizens, the city was dirty and crowded and full of crime, drunkenness, mental illness, illegitimacy, divorce, delinquency, unemployment, pauperism, radicalism, and political corruption. Sociology, then, consisted of describing these urban conditions and proposing what to do about them. Its answers fitted in precisely with the Progressive movement of the turn of the century (and incidentally, with the Prohibitionist movement too, as that rural movement built up for its last assault on the city just around World War I). The answers consisted of social work and education on the one hand and legislation on the other. Social workers and schoolteachers could train immigrant workers to become good, clean, hard-working American citizens and thus raise themselves out of poverty and its attendant ills. Legislation could eliminate the conditions that bred these effects: reforming the structure of city government to take power from the corrupt immigrant politicians and put it back in the hands of the respectable middle class; encouraging healthy economic competition by breaking up monopolies and checking fraudulent business practices; reforming the penal system to rehabilitate criminals instead of merely punishing them. The most radical of the sociologists, Edward A. Ross, even went so far as to support the right of workers to form trade unions. As a result he got into a famous academic freedom fight at Stanford University with its wealthy benefactress, Mrs. Leland Stanford, widow of one of the great robber-baron railroad builders. Neither the theorizing nor the research of the early sociologists produced any real advance in knowledge. They were convinced in advance that the "bad environment" of the city produced these ill effects; and they collected facts only to illustrate the conditions and to goad people into doing something about them, not to test their explanations or the efficacy of their cures. Sumner, like Spencer in England, inveighed against all this. It would not do any good, he said. If you did not understand the historical forces that produced certain customary behaviors, your actions would not bring about the consequences you expected. Sumner himself was not immune to criticism. His own theory of natural selection was extremely general, and he tended to give a great many examples of different institutional forms, without developing a theory that explained just what conditions would produce what kinds of forms. But in a large sense, Sumner was right. The reformers did not really understand how society worked, and hence their reforms were unsuccessful and full of unintended consequences. Their solutions were to rehabilitate individuals through education and social work and to legislate so that everyone would have an equal chance to compete in the world. In fact, their politics were naive, and their rehabilitation sentimental. They were too individually oriented to understand how politics works, how power is bar-

92 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism gained for, and how government bureaucracies really function despite the noble ideas that might guide them. They never did eliminate political corruption (except where the population of cities changed enough so that the middle class could be in control), or curb monopolies, or rehabilitate criminals. The modern therapy-oriented prison is no better than the old punitive one in end results. It serves primarily to introduce new inmates into a criminal culture, and it seems likely to do so as long as people with crirrinal records are kept out of all but the least respectable careers. Social work has become little more than bookkeeping for handing out welfare payments. The school system, the cornerstone of reformist hope, has expanded to include the vast majority of the youth population, but with paradoxical results: Instead of providing everyone with an opportunity for upward mobility, the mass school system has served mainly to push up educational requirements for employment, so that high-school graduates now search for the same low-level jobs that were once the lot of grade-school dropouts. Ard as the giant bureaucracies expand to include ever-larger segments of our lives, the rebellion and alienation found at the bottom of a competitive stratification system merely move into the school system. Instead of a solution to social problems in the outside world, the schools have become the containers and creators of their own problems. Observing all this, Sumner would have shaken his head and barked out something about "You can't change the folkways." In retrospect the social-problems perspective is most revealing where its problems have disappeared. Divorce, for example, has dropped out of the catalog of concerns—not so much because there are no more divorces (there are even more than ever)—but because we no longer regard divorce as much of a problem. Without the old moralistic views of marriage, we have come to see divorce as a better thing for the individuals involved than an unhappy marriage. In the same way we are coming to see mental illness less as a purely individual condition and more as a term by which people label others who do not live up to their demands for social discipline: and propriety; thus the "solution" can just as well be to change the social demands on the individual as to try to change the individual to fit those demands. In the long run the profound relativism of Sumner's "the mores can make anything right" is a far more sophisticated perspective than the moral absolutes of the reformers. The chapter could end here with the admonition that rushing to eliminate social conditions that offend certain people's values, without really understanding the processes involved, leads to both intellectual and practical failure. But there is an even more sobering conclusion. THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE The great idea of the late nineteenth century belongs to the evolutionists: the insight into humankind's continuity with the animal world. This insight gave enormous impetus to scientific efforts to solve social problems, espe-

Do-Gooders, Evolutionists, and Racists 93 daily in Europe. If humans were a kind of animal, the reasoning went, then they could be measured, trained, or selected. A school of scientific criminology sprang up, following the Italian Cesare Lombroso's theory of the criminal type. Criminologists measured the cranial capacities of convicts and of "normal" people in an attempt to show that a hereditary degeneration was the cause of crime. The solution, they claimed, was compulsory sterilization. In England Francis Galton (whose own superior heredity was shown by the fact that his cousin was another gentleman-scientist, Charles Darwin) helped found modern statistics, which he used to demonstrate the family heredity of persons of genius and, conversely, of paupers, the mentally ill, and other defectives. On the Continent a large number of statistical studies attempted to show that the superior members of society rose to the top and the inferior ones sank to the bottom—and that superiority or inferiority was shown by differences in the sizes of heads and in their health, height, weight, vigor, and intellect. Gobineau had already written his scientific history as the conquest of weaker races by the strong; German historians and anthropologists developed military theories of social evolution, in which they argued for the beneficial effects of war in improving society. This sort of biologism became the dominant (or at least the most popular) mode of social thought in Europe around the turn of the century. In the United States it was reflected in the writings of such figures as Sumner and Thorstein Veblen. Its main American impact, however, came during and after World War I, when the progressives finally became discouraged about reform and began to conclude that the only way to save American institutions was to cut off immigration from Europe. This was finally done in 1922. Ross, the most radical of the sociologists, typifies the shift. From supporting labor unions, he shifted to writing about the "yellow peril" of cheap labor from the Orient and about the degenerate paupers crowding in from southern and eastern Europe. On the other side of the Atlantic, racism focused into a growing wave of anti-Semitism, not only in Germany but in France, Russia, and elsewhere. The British, always a little aloof from Continental fads, were less concerned about inferior races than about inferior individuals. They turned their attention to such efforts as those of Francis Galton's Eugenics Society, dedicated to the breeding of only the best human stock. What was the fallacy in all this? Partly, it was a matter of scientific interpretation. Some individuals are in fact constitutionally superior to others in intellect and other faculties, and certain societies have in fact conquered others. But society cannot be explained purely on the level of individual traits. Social institutions work according to principles of their own, regardless of the individuals involved, and the military strength of a society is due primarily to its accumulated culture and its form of organization. More careful studies show few discernible differences in intelligence or other abilities among races. On the individual level such differences undoubtedly exist. But the studies of Galton and his colleagues on individual heredity fail to control for social biases in measuring heredity's supposed effects.

94 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism The fact that poor people have poor parents, and rich people rich parents, is at least partly due to cumulative advantages and disadvantages in upbringing, education, and career opportunities, not to mention the inheritance of wealth. And, of course, differences in health, height, weight, and so on have something to do with the diets of children of different social classes. But these are purely scientific mistakes, and if the object were merely to develop a correct explanation of the varieties of human behavior, they would eventually be corrected with the further testing of the theory. The damage is done, rather, because the theory is constructed only in order to solve a problem—and a "problem" is not an objective category at all, but a matter of values. If paupers are something to be eliminated as a burden on society, then a theory about hereditary degeneration will do very well as a justification. If one defined the problem from a different value standpoint— for example, a humanitarian concern for all people—then even if the hereditary degeneration theory were true, one would not want to eliminate people. Instead of judging poor people by their fitness to compete in society, one might try to fit society to them. In the same sense, arguments pro or con about racial inferiority are beside the point: It is an important question only if one is committed to a form of society that reserves all privileges for those on top, not if one cares about universal human rights. Thus the scientific approach to social problems is often just a way of cloaking one's moral failings. An objective, scientific viewpoint treats people with detachment, as things to be analyzed to see how they run. This is a necessary stance for the advancement of theoretical understanding, and indeed modern social thought has advanced by transcending a naive rationalistic model of humankind and coming to see the nonrational part of its nature. But scientific objectivity does not free us from moral choices. Lombroso, Arthur Gobineau, and the rest have been swept into the ashbin of history, mostly in revulsion against the Nazi regime that gave their ideas a bad name, as well as in scientific rejection of their theories. But the underlying attitude has not disappeared. Galton's eugenics survives more modestly in the IQ tests that govern people's passage through our educational bureaucracies. There is a new Machiavellianism that treats people merely as means to ulterior ends; because it understands some of people's weaknesses and susceptibilities, it is willing to treat their lives as humanly worthless. The technical planners of the CIA and their siblings in government bureaucracies around the world, with their kill ratios, public relations campaigns, and strategic population movements, are the spiritual heirs to Lombroso and Gobineau. Recognizing this, we enter the bitter world of twentieth-century sophistication. THE SOCIOBIOLOGY REVIVAL For all the bad reputation acquired by the nineteenth-century thinkers, biological sociology has made a comeback in recent years. Its leading practitioners have been biologists, not sociologists, but they have acquired a cer-

Do-Gooders, Evolutionists, and Racists 95 tain following within sociology itself. Edward O. Wilson, the curator of entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, is the founder of the new field of sociobiology, which he defines as "the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior." The old nature/nurture issue in sociology, which traditionally favors the nurture, or learning, end of the continuum, is reversed by Wilson. His chapter on 'The Morality of the Gene" stresses the comprehension of the evolution of social behavior through demographic factors and genetic structure. Wilson is a genetic determinist. According to his sociobiological hypothesis, nature is more critical in determining human society than nurture. A physicist once made a logical pun. Physicists are made up of atoms. Physicists study atoms. Therefore, physicists are the atoms' way of studying atoms. Thus, Wilson's view is that the organism is the genes' way for making more genes, and Homo sapiens' organic social structure is more influenced by biology than by socialization. According to Wilsonian sociobiology, communication is genetically programmed to some extent by natural selection and consists of the relation of the pair of signal-and-response. Communication is a two-way street; it is neither the signal by itself nor the response. He notes that the great division between humanity and the ten million species of animals is our unique verbal system, which he uses as a measure to define the limits of animal communication. Wilson, unlike his contemporary, John Lilly, is no advocate of interspecies communication, because he sees human language as the most advanced system. Even the sophisticated waggle-dance of the honeybee cannot manipulate messages to provide new classes of communication, as is the case with science and its interdisciplinary spinoffs. Wilson's new science of sociobiology is an attempt to bridge the gap between the natural and social sciences through a creative synthesis. Two modes of metacommunication, which Wilson defines as "communication about the meaning of other acts of communication," are status signaling and play invitation. He uses the model of dominance and submission as a heuristic device, and takes the case of the brisk gait, erect-tail posture, and calm manner of the dominant male rhesus monkey and the opposite set of signals displayed by the subordinate male as an example of status signaling. He analyzes the "lef s have fun together" attitude of humans and other mammals as examples of play invitation. Taking the social insects as a select sample, Wilson observes that their jnost highly organized communication systems are incommunicable from individual to individual but only arise between groups. A sociological example within the context of our species' interacting macrosocial units is that of nations and multinational corporations. Wilson is a human chauvinist, who ranks humankind as the fourth and peak pinnacle of social evolution above the nonhuman mammals, the higher social insects, and the colonial invertebrates. The latter category includes such zooids as corals and jellyfish, whose individual members are, in most cases, fully subordinated in function and physical interdependence to the

96 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism group. This society or colony he defines as an organism. Such higher social insects as ants, termites, and certain wasps and bees recognize castes rather than individual nest mates, and their societies succeed because of their ability to dispatch food gatherers that return on a regular basis to home base. Conflict arises in bumblebee society through the constant struggle between queens and workers to produce sons, and the queens exercise social control by attacking their daughters who attempt to lay eggs. Wilson notes that such cold-blooded vertebrates as fishes, reptiles, and amphibians are the equal of mammals and birds in the social organization of parental care, territoriality, and courtship patterns of behavior. However, the main evolutionary trend within the higher mammalian order is its females' ability to provide milk. The universal nuclear unit of mammalian societies is the mother-offspring association and the biosocial fact of prolonged child dependency on the mother. Mammals have diverse social systems with male-female pair bonding as the universal unit in monogamous and polygamous modes. The most complex social systems in each of the nonhuman mammalian orders (e.g., the marsupials, carnivores, rodents, primates, and ungulates) occur in the physically largest member. The highest status humans have given to the carnivores among the nonhuman mammals in our folklore is "king of the beasts"—the lion. A group of lions is defined as a pride, the core of which consists of a closed sisterhood of several adult females who are at least cousins and have inherited fixed territories of association over several generations. Wilson is akin theoretically to H. Spencer and W. G. Sumner in his Social Darwinism and his assertion of the superior complexity of human social organization as the fourth pinnacle. Human societies vary more than the nonhuman ones in group size, gene exchange rates, and hierarchy properties because of the inequality of their members in behavior and achievement. He explains the great variation in human social structures, from the savage customs of the old slave society of Jamaica to the civilized legal codes, folkways, and mores of modern societies as a lack of competition from other species. He observes that due to this "ecological release," humans have been so successful during the past ten thousand years in dominating the environment that any culture can succeed for a time which has internal consistency and maintains reproduction. Human altruism notwithstanding, Wilson fails to account for the major political consequences of the scientific revolution, the increasing likelihood of mass destruction or species decimation with our overkill arsenals of nuclear weapons and biochemical warfare agents. Wilson's sociobiology has been regarded by many as reactionary in its political implications. A number of other sociobiologists have drawn conservative conclusions regarding sex roles, which have been strongly attacked by feminists. Wilson and his colleague, Lumsden, have come very close to old-fashioned racism in their theory of biological bases of cultural differences among groups. Interestingly enough, Wilson's approach to evolution has been challenged by another type of biological/social research.

Do-Gooders, Evolutionists, and Racists 97 According to the dolphin researcher John C. Lilly, our society and science have been human-chauvinist in their orientation and tendency to consider other species inferior in mind and primitive in group relations. Lilly defines our generalized other of human chauvinism as "interspecies deprivation," and we suffer the consequent loneliness of a species with a superiority complex. The symbolically interactive mode of Lilly's research agenda puts him squarely in the Meadian camp, and the biosodal fact that dolphins have large brains and minds gives human beings the opportunity to discover the society and culture of a twenty-five-million-year-old terrestrial life form. The dolphin's major mode of perception of the world is acoustic compared to the visual orientation of the human being. The dolphin has a sophisticated sonar detection system and is able to communicate with other dolphins through a series of clicks, whistles, and buzzes, which Lilly calls "dolphi- nese." The research resulting from the emergent, mutually consenting human-dolphin community indicates that the dolphins show the beginnings of understanding a computer-generated vocabulary by responding correctly to sonic cues or tones. Full communication with humans has not yet been achieved, but the establishment of an ongoing symbolic interaction would amplify the dimension of the collective consciousness of humanity into a more expanded we feeling and create a context for intraplanetary communication with another intelligent species. Whatever its outcome, research of this sort shows an alternative to the reductionistic genetic approach of sociobiology. There is a biological dimension to human society, but it may well be that the ecological rather than the genetic side will turn out to be its crucial aspect. DARWIN'S CONSEQUENCES The great idea of the late nineteenth century belongs to Darwin. And if its consequences were sometimes frightening, they could also be extremely illuminating. Darwin's vision of humankind in the perspective of animal evolution sets the starting place for a sociology that could finally begin to become a science. It gives us a vantage point, detached from our immediate concerns, from which to see just what it is we should be explaining: the behavior of a smart, hairless monkey, who walks upright and is able to communicate and cooperate in extraordinarily intricate ways. The implications of this vision are carried out by those thinkers referred to in the next section as the makers of the great breakthrough. The symbolic nature of the social world this creature inhabits and the way in which it affects the consciousness of the human animal were to be exposed by Cooley and Mead. Freud was to explore the human animal's instincts and the ways in which they interact and conflict with the pressures of society. Weber was to unravel the complexities of struggle for domination in this human, symbolic world. And Durkheim would grasp the nature of the invisible social structure

98 The Vicissitudes of Nineteenth-Century Rationalism through the rituals that sustain it. As American social thinkers were complacently refining their technical apparatus for measuring social problems and as Europeans gathered ideological ammunition for a military bloodbath, an intellectual revolution was shaking the world of social thought at its core.

PART II r~ The Great Breakthrough CHAPTER SIX Dreyfus's Empire: Emile Durkheim and Georges Sorel CHAPTER SEVEN Max Weber: The Disenchantment of the World CHAPTER EIGHT Sigmund Freud: Conquistador of the Irrational CHAPTER NINE The Discovery of the Invisible World: Simmel, Cooley, and Mead

CHAPTER SIX Dreyfus's Empire: Emile Durkheim and Georges Sorel 1898: Paris in turmoil again. The issue: the Dreyfus affair, a scandal in the French army blown up into a political cause celebre between the contending factions of France. Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, had been the victim of an effort to cover up a spy scandal. Secret military documents were recovered from the German embassy. The real culprit seemed to have been an aristocratic debauchee named Esterhazy, but the investigation arbitrarily seized on Dreyfus, an outsider to the army tradition, as scapegoat. He was degraded with full ceremonial regalia. Troops lined up on the parade ground, resplendent in gold braid and red-striped trousers; Dreyfus stood at attention while his commander tore the epaulets from his sleeves and his medals from his chest, and broke his sword across the knee. The dishonored Dreyfus was sent off to the inhuman labor colony at Devil's Island, and the army, its honor restored, returned to its arms race with the enemy across the Rhine. But the case would not stay covered up. Emile Zola, the most famous novelist of France, penned a famous open letter to the president of the republic. "J'accuse!" it began, and it charged the government with deliberate complicity in a miscarriage of justice. Zola was himself arrested and tried for crime against the state. The trial aroused the nation, both left and right; crowds fought outside the courtroom. Zola's ringing speeches had no effect on the court, a sort of Warren Commission of its day; he was found guilty and sentenced to prison. He escaped to England, where he continued to rally the cause. The scandal could not be contained by the ritual of the courtroom. Ministers were forced to resign, fights broke out in the Assembly, students battled in the streets. There were more trials as the army took its revenge on an officer who had dared question the nonexistent evidence against Dreyfus. Unfortunately for the army, the evidence in the new trial was exposed as a forgery. The conservatives had gone too far, and their enemies closed in ruthlessly. The army, the Catholic Church, the wealthy bourgeoisie, and the peasants all fell back under the pressures of a revengeful left—the anticlerical civil servants, teachers, students, and workers. 101

102 The Great Breakthrough The victory proved short-lived. The conservatives eventually benefited from a mood of reaction to the changes proposed by the victorious liberals, a series of confrontations with Germany brought chauvinism back to the fore, and France settled down again from the acute to the chronic phase of social conflict. The battles would all be fought again, many times, throughout the decades to come. The students of the University of Paris were in the center of the battle as it dragged on through the first decade of the twentieth century, and some of their professors were rallying points of the Dreyfusard cause. Battles between radicals and conservatives often raged in the streets of the Latin Quarter, and the students were organized in an elaborate system of shock troops, spies, and messengers on bicycles to alert their fellows when a conservative gang tried to break up the lectures of popular republican professors. Among the most eminent of these professors, the holder of the first chair of sociology ever established at the French university, wasEmile Durkheim (1858-1917), one of the intellectual giants of modern times. Durkheim's sociology, more than any other, began to make sense of the events that swirled around him: the heavy silence of the parade ground as Dreyfus's epaulets were stripped off, the impact of Zola on the stand at his rigged trial, the waves of public hysteria breaking across France, now in one direction, now in another. Durkheim penetrated these events with a vision of the nature of society that revealed what the rationalist thinkers of the nineteenth century could not see: Society is a ritual order, a collective conscience founded on the emotional rhythms of human interaction. At the peak of scientific and industrial progress, Durkheim broke through into the intellectual world of the twentieth century and its deepest problem: the nonrational foundations of rationality. DURKHEIM: THE DIVISION OF LABOR IN SOCIETY Durkheim's basic concern was the instability, violence, and decadence of modern society, at least as it displayed itself in France. The optimistic predictions by Comte and Spencer of continual progress in industrial society had not come true. But Durkheim could not accept the Marxist idea that the modern industrial division of labor is inherently self-contradictory and self- destructive or the conservative idea that we must return to the old order of religion and authority. Durkheim was a bourgeois liberal, a self-conscious member of the rationalistic educational bureaucracy, neither a radical nor a conservative. He identified with the French Third Republic, which had succeeded Napoleon Ill's Second Empire after the disastrous war with Prussia in 1870. He was a modernist and nationalist, an ardent believer in science and in republican France. He took as his task to defend the modern division of labor without being a naive optimist. The purpose of sociology was to explain how to make modern society work.

Dreyfus's Empire: Emile Durkheim and Georges Sorel 103 Durkheim was also an ambitious man. He was born the son of a Jewish rabbi in a province of eastern France and made his way to the elite Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris by his high intelligence and hard work in the competitive exams. The Ecole was the training ground for teachers and scientists. Most graduates went to the schools of the provinces; the best captured the few prominent positions in Paris. Durkheim's chances lay in the realm of social science, and he played his cards well. In 1885 he paid a visit to the laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt in Germany, who had just created the science of experimental psychology out of an old philosophical field of speculation. But psychology in France was overshadowed by conservative crowd psychologists like Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon. Durkheim, instead, adopted the sociology of Comte and Spencer, which emphasized a realm of phenomena above the psychological level. Here one could create a science of social order and could defend the republic and industrial society. The only problem was that sociology remained largely speculative, as well as intellectually naive. Durkheim set out to do for it what Wundt had done for psychology: to take it out of philosophy and establish it on the research methods of empirical science. The strategy was sound, and Durkheim's brilliance made it work. By 1902 Durkheim was back from the provinces and teaching his new science at the Ecole Normale. The modern era in sociology had begun. Bald, bespectacled, wispy-bearded, intensely serious, Durkheim applied himself to sociology with rabbinical devotion. His fellow students at the Ecole had called him "the metaphysician." His logical mind turned itself to the task of finding a scientific basis for social order. His fundamental hypothesis came from Comte—the basis of society is a moral order. His first great work, The Division of Labor in Society (1893), attacks the problem rigorously from several angles. First, Durkheim gives a deductive argument. Society cannot exist simply by rational agreement, he states, because agreements are not possible unless each partner trusts the other to live up to them. Think of economic contracts, which Spencer and the utilitarians and economists before him thought of as the basis for modern social cooperation: I'll agree to work for you for a week, if you'll agree to pay me out of the proceeds of this work at the end of the week. But notice: We are agreeing not only to exchange labor for pay; we are also agreeing to uphold the agreement. The second agreement is implicit rather than conscious, but it is absolutely crucial. Without this implicit mutual trust, no specific contracts would be possible; for if this trust does not exist, the truly rational individual will not live up to his or her contracts. If I trust you but you break the contract, then you have a week of work from me for nothing. On the other hand, if you trust me and I break the contract, I can perhaps collect a week's pay for little or no work. In the absence of mutual trust, then, the rational individual will never live up to his or her contracts and will never trust others to live up to theirs. Modern game theory would put it as shown in the accompanying table. The rational choice for both game players is always to cheat, since each then

104 The Great Breakthrough stands a chance of winning everything (if the other follows the contract), and at least they will not lose anything (if both cheat). To follow the contract without being sure that the other player will follow it too is to risk losing everything for a moderate gain. What this proves, says Durkheim, is that a "precontractual solidarity" must exist before contracts can be depended upon. The facts seem to bear out his analysis. In a factory in which boss and employees do not trust each other, the boss must spend all his time making sure that his employees are working, and his employees do their best to get as much pay as possible for the least amount of work. Sheer economic rationality reduces cooperation to the amount that can be produced by immediate control of one party over the other. On the other hand, tremendously productive cooperation is possible if everyone identifies with a common goal. This is Durkheim's logical argument that society is based on a common moral order rather than on rational self-interest. The "social contract" of Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others is thus revealed to be an impossible fiction; contracts are only possible after society has been established, not before. An objection that might be advanced is that people live up to their contracts because they are forced to. If a man does not pay me for my work, I can sue him, and the state will force him to pay. This argument is open to the reply that governments have only recently in history come to enforce contracts for private citizens and that exchange before that had to be built up on some other basis. Moreover, Durkheim argues, the state itself exists only because people have banded together and agreed upon certain ways of exercising force; the king did not rule because he personally was stronger than everyone else put together, but because he led a group of followers. The collective use of force, then, depends just as much on a prior solidarity as anything else does. What creates this fundamental solidarity, then? It is not an intellectual agreement, says Durkheim, but a shared emotional feeling. People in society have a "collective conscience" (or "collective consciousness," since the work in French means both these things): a sense of belonging to a commu- B Follows contract Cheats Follows contract Both share gain. A wins everything. B loses everything. Cheats B wins everything. A loses everything. No one wins or loses anything.

Dreyfus's Empire: Emile Durkheim and Georges Sorel 105 nity with others and hence feeling a moral obligation to live up to its demands. We share feelings of right and wrong, and these are inseparable from our feelings of belonging to a group, whether it be the human race, one's country, or one's family. The collective conscience does not mean that there is a group mind hanging over our heads, but rather that people have feelings of belonging to a group. Where do these moral feelings come from? Durkheim proposes that they come from forms of social interaction between individuals, especially in ways that we would now call "rituals." Roughly, he proposes the principle (taken from the crowd psychology of his day) that as people come together and focus their attention on a common object, thoughts and feelings passing back and forth among them become strengthened until they take on a supraindividual force and seem to be detached from the individuals themselves. Thus, the members of a crowd watching a flag being raised and singing a national anthem together focus their attention on these objects and, knowing that others are focusing their attentions too, they come to feel that they are in the presence of a principle or force greater than any of them individually—the nation. Ideas held in common thus become transformed into a world of their own, the world of moral norms. If moral feelings are the result of social interactions, Durkheim can apply and test his theory in another way. He can go to the historical evidence and see if moral norms change as the result of changes in social conditions. This second argument, an empirical one, makes up the bulk of The Division of Labor. As an indicator of moral norms, Durkheim uses laws. Laws are not a precise indicator of the moral feelings of a society, he says, since they may lag behind or run ahead of public sentiments; but they give at least a general indication of how people conceive of right and wrong. There are two kinds of laws: criminal laws and civil-administrative laws. Criminal laws express a strong state of the collective conscience, for they provide that an individual who disobeys society's law incurs society's anger and must be punished. Looking back through history, Durkheim points out that this collective conscience must have been very strong indeed, for it often prescribes violent punishments for violations of taboos, even when the violations do not involve harm to persons or property. On the other hand, civil and administrative laws express a much milder sense of community conscience, since they carry very different penalties. Whereas criminal laws call for punishment regardless of what damage has been done, civil laws call only for offenders to make amends for what they have done: If they have failed to pay, they must pay up; if they hold someone else's property, they must give it over. On the one hand, the law demands retribution; on the other merely restitution. Durkheim then shows that the proportion of these kinds of laws has changed with the type of society. In smaller, earlier societies, most law was retributive, punishing almost all offenses with torture, mutilation, or execution. In the larger, modern societies law becomes mostly restitutive. Not only do the pages of the law books come to be made up largely of civil-

106 The Great Breakthrough administrative laws, but also there is an absolute decline in the number of things that penal laws control and a diminution in the severity of the punishments. The connection between these societies and their laws, Durkheim finds, is the changing division of labor. Retributive law is found mostly in societies with little division of labor, restitutive law mostly in those with a high division of labor. The former societies are based on what Durkheim calls "mechanical solidarity." By this he means that in a tribal or peasant society like the Hebrew tribes of the Old Testament (which he had studied thoroughly), most people are like each other. Almost everyone is a farmer or a warrior. Accordingly, there is a very strong collective conscience, since people have many ideas in common from their common experiences. Any violations of this collective conscience find crushing punishment from the laws; the individual, being like others, is given no leeway to depart from their collective practices. The individual is integrated mechanically and by force. Societies with a high division of labor, on the other hand, Durkheim refers to as bound together by "organic solidarity." People have a great variety of different occupations; they come into contact only because the worker, the farmer, the shopkeeper, the carpenter, the engineer, and so on exchange services with each other through a complex economic market. People experience very different life circumstances and thus have much less in common with each other. But they do acquire some knowledge of each other's viewpoints by repeatedly coming in contact with others while making exchanges; hence a newer, milder form of collective conscience appears. This is expressed in the restitutive laws that regulate civic commerce, which provide only enough social control to keep the complex society operating and do not impose the collective outrage of the whole community on violators of a private contract touching only a few individuals. Durkheim calls this organic solidarity because it is the exchanges themselves, like those between the different organs of a body, which provide the basis of collective belonging. The historical argument bolsters Durkheim's deductive argument about the necessity of precontractual solidarity. Not only must nonrational solidarity come first logically, but it does in fact come first in history. As Durkheim had learned from his teacher Fustel de Coulanges, ancient civilizations like those of Greece and Rome grew up on the basis of religious rituals that regulated virtually every aspect of everyday life; the rational economic contracts came later, after the society already existed. Nor does the collective conscience disappear after the modern division of labor is set up; it merely changes its form. Thus, societies begin in small groups that maintain order through a strong and repressive collective conscience. As societies grow, a larger population presses down on the available resources for living, and individuals begin to specialize. The division of labor begins to grow more and more complex. Thus, some individuals become different from others they come into contact with and are bound together through economic and political ties across longer distances. The collective con-

Dreyfus's Empire: Emile Durkheim and Georges Sorel 107 science has fewer things to build upon, for there are fewer things that all members of a society have in common. Its contents gradually become more abstract. Rather than sanctioning specific local customs and taboos, it begins to uphold only the more general and abstract principles of fairness, justice, honesty, and so on. The collective conscience becomes simultaneously less powerful and more principled; its tone is less violent and more humanitarian. Durkheim thus manages to give a theoretical explanation of the phenomenon that both Comte and Tocqueville had noticed without being able to explain: that the scope of human sympathy expands with the progress of civilization. All in all, Durkheim hoped with this demonstration to prove that modern society is good. A complex division of labor is inherently orderly, for it contains within it its own moral principles. The decline of traditional religion is nothing to worry about; on the contrary, the modern morality that replaces it is more humanitarian and tolerant. The complex division of labor creates individualism, since people must follow specialized life patterns of their own, but there is nothing to fear from individualism, for it does not mean that individuals no longer have any social ties. On the contrary, individualism is socially produced and expresses only the way individuals relate to each other through exchanges, rather than via the repressive similarity of mechanical solidarity. As we shall see, Durkheim was not entirely successful in arguing that all is basically well with the modern division of labor, and he kept returning to the subject again and again as his researches kept turning up evidence that could just as well be interpreted to mean that modern society is self-destructive. But Durkheim was not yet through with his main theoretical task: to show how moral feelings of solidarity underlie social order. To his logical and historical arguments, he added an empirical proof based on observations of the society around him. The collective conscience is a social "fact, says Durkheim. And indeed, you can experience it yourself when you are in a group. It is a feeling of contact with something outside yourself that does not depend precisely on any one person there, but which everyone participates in together. "An atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a knife." What can produce such a feeling? For Durkheim, examples were all around in the still-smouldering political tradition of France: the tense stillness surrounding Dreyfus on the parade ground, the vengeful excitement of the crowd at the guillotine. What provided the power of these collective situations was that people were gathered, focusing their attention on the same thing, and generating a contagious emotion. From these extreme and powerful instances of a collective conscience existing where people play the role of the Public at its most awesome, we may see a continuum that shades down through the shared moods of football crowds and theater audiences to parties, committee meetings, and finally to the most casual conversations. The stronger states of collective feeling are the easiest to notice; the subtler ones we take for granted. But for every case Durkheim provides a method by which a state of collective conscience can be made clearly ob-

108 The Great Breakthrough servable: You know a social norm is there because you encounter resistance to violating it. The sentiments behind minor rules of politeness and deference show themselves most clearly in the uneasiness that occurs when someone breaks them; the invisible barrier of social conventions is never so apparent as when someone utters an obscenity at a polite gathering. The standards of just what the polite rules are can change between different times and between different groups, of course. But where the norms are strong, whatever they happen to be, the invisible order of a collective conscience can be clearly seen. This was all the more noticeable in the heavy formalities of nineteenth-century bourgeois France. Deviance and Social Solidarity Durkheim was especially interested, then, in acts of deviance, because it was here that society's norms could be seen most clearly in operation. Crimes and their punishments, he felt, were among the central features of a society. When one man commits a crime—a murder or a rape, for example—there is a widespread sense of public outrage, shared by people far beyond those who are personally damaged or threatened by the criminal. People show their nonrational, non-self-interested attachment to society in general by their reactions to events that have nothing to do with themselves personally. The fact that this is not a feeling of personal interests is shown when the same sort of public outrage occurs over purely symbolic issues, in which no one is damaged at all—for example, cases of public obscenity (the showing of a nude play or movie would be a modern example) or symbolic political acts, like Zola's letter to the French president. What is violated, in all these cases, is not someone's personal interests but the collective conscience itself. A ritual order has been defamed, and ritual punishment is necessary to restore its purity. This is why there is so much public concern with ceremonies of punishment such as court trials and executions. It also helps explain why there is so much sentiment favoring capital punishment, in the face of overwhelming evidence that it has no deterrent effect on crimes of violence: The punishment serves a ritual function, not a practical one, and hence it is supported by people who attach themselves to a certain kind of ritual order. Durkheim even went so far as to argue that crime is functional for holding society together. Without crimes there would be no ceremonies of punishment; and without such periodic ceremonies to bring people together in a ritual reaffirmation of their solidarity, society would gradually fall apart. The argument is overstated to make the point, of course. Durkheim himself later pointed out that there are positive rituals as well as negative ones, which also serve to create a sense of solidarity. The rituals of church services, patriotic holidays, and even family festivities like birthday parties all serve this function. The entire functionalist school in anthropology follows up on Durkheim's basic insight. Thus, Marcel Mauss (Durkheim's nephew), Arthur Radcliffe-Brown, Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Levi-Strauss, and

Dreyfus's Empire: Emile Durkheim and Georges Sorel 109 others have shown how marriage ceremonies, funerals, rites of passage, and gift exchanges all function to reaffirm social bonds, especially when the bonds are disturbed by the loss or gain of a member in a group. In sociology W. Lloyd Warner and Erving Goffman have made the most important applications of Durkheim's perspective to the rituals of modern American society. Durkheim went still further in his study of deviance and solidarity. In addition to his general observations, he produced a study of statistical data which remains a model for scientific research in sociology. This was his great work Suicide, published in 1897. Durkheim was not entirely original here. He drew on a tradition that went back to the 1830s, when the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet pointed out that the rates of births, deaths, marriages, murders, suicides, and so on remained fairly constant from year to year, even though each of these rates was the result of many independent individual actions. Quetelet thus argued for the existence of a realm of social facts independent of the individual and proposed a science, which he labeled "social physics," to explain these facts. But Quetelet was only a statistician, and he came up with no explanation beyond a notion of an "average person" who is likely to act in given ways. This line of research was ready-made for Durkheim, for it dealt with acts of deviance—especially suicide—for which he did have a sociological theory. He now had an opportunity to test his theory in a rigorously scientific way. Suicide was the first really good piece of large-scale data analysis in sociology. Throughout, Durkheim applied the basic methodological principle of all good research: If you want to know the cause of something, look for the conditions under which it occurs and compare them with the conditions under which it does not occur. This is akin to Durkheim's principle of how to observe social norms by looking for the cases where they are violated. Behind both principles is the strategy of understanding through opposition: Explanations are revealed by contrast and comparison. It is this principle that was behind the insights of Tocqueville as he compared France arid America, and it continues to provide the basis for virtually all important advances in modern sociology. Durkheim, for example, began with the popular theory that suicides are due to individual psychopathology. This was the sort of explanation he wanted to dispose of, since he was engaged in an academic battle for recognition in which psychologists were his major competitors, and he wanted to show that social factors are on a separate and more important level of explanation. In short, Durkheim was opposed to psychological reductionism, which saw events only through the actions of individuals instead of penetrating to the social conditions that moved the individuals. He attacked the psychopathology theory of suicide by comparing the regions of Europe having the highest suicide rates with those having medium and low suicide rates and then showing that there was no correlation between rates of suicide and rates of psychopathology. In a similar fashion he tested other popular theories that attributed suicide to ethnicity, climate, or geography. In

110 The Great Breakthrough each case Durkheim showed that on close examination the variations in ethnic composition, average temperature, and so on did not correspond to variations in the suicide rate. Having disposed of these competing explanations, Durkheim proceeded to advance his own. The suicide rate did vary by social condition, he found. For example, Protestants had higher suicide rates than Catholics, who in turn had higher rates than Jews. This could not be explained just by differences in theology, Durkheim argued. If Catholicism made suicide a more serious sin than did Protestantism, Judaism nevertheless made no special prohibition of suicide and yet had the lowest suicide rate. The difference among these religious groups, rather, was in the social environments they provided for their members. Judaism was the most close-knit religious community, Protestantism the least, with Catholicism intermediate in surrounding the individual with a round of ritual activities. In general, Durkheim argued, the more tightly integrated into society the individual is, the more he is prevented from committing suicide. Durkheim backed up this interpretation by looking at further variations within these categories. In every religious group most suicides are among men, since women have the greatest day-to-day religious participation and are more tightly integrated into the close community of the family. Among the Protestant churches, the Anglicans had the lowest suicide rate, and they were the most ritualistic and Catholic-like of the Protestant denominations. Durkheim went on to point out, rather ingeniously, that the regions of Europe with the highest levels of education have the highest suicide rates, except among Jews. This corroborated the general argument that the lack of social integration caused suicide, since education was an indication of a secularized, individualistic, nonreligious society except among Jews, for whom education of laypeople had been a key part of the religious tradition. From different angles Durkheim corroborated his general theory: Society is what gives meaning to individual lives; it is when individuals are cut off from society that they kill themselves. Not only did the evidence on religion point to these conclusions, but also the fact that suicide rates declined in times of war, revolution, or other periods of great social crisis that drew everyone together into a common sentiment. The evidence also showed that married persons were less likely to kill themselves than unmarried persons; that widowhood and divorce increased the chances of suicide, but that this was mitigated the more children there were remaining. The more social bonds surrounding an individual, the less the chance of suicide; the fewer the bonds, the more danger of self-destruction. From all of this emerged one of Durkheim's key concepts: the idea of a state of "anomie" or lack of norms that give a clear direction and purpose to the individual's actions. In this concept Durkheim sums up a major cause of the ills of modern society. Durkheim's Suicide is a classic work, and it survives as a model of how to use empirical analysis to corroborate a general theory. It does have vari-

Dreyfus's Empire: Emile Durkheim and Georges Sorel 111 ous shortcomings. The data are not entirely reliable, and there were mistakes in the analysis. Moreover, Durkheim did not fully explain suicides. After all, not everyone who is Protestant commits suicide, even if he or she is unmarried, highly educated, and so on. The full explanation of any individual case of suicide must involve just the kind of psychological factors that Durkheim wanted to exclude. But Durkheim was less interested in providing an exhaustive explanation of suicides than in showing that social integration and social anomie have important effects on the individual's behavior. He was less interested in suicide itself than in what it can tell us about the structure of society. Suicide remains an important book in the history of social thought, whether it is precisely valid or not. It not only helps to support Durkheim's general analysis of the importance of ritual interaction for social solidarity, but it also lays down the model for sociology as a science: to treat general theoretical principles in terms of variables and thus to test them by systematic comparison with the supposed causal conditions. Durkheim thus moved from the methods of nineteenth-century speculation to the sophisticated analysis of the twentieth century. Religion and Reality These might seem enough major contributions for one man, but Durkheim was not through yet. He organized the first French sociological journal, the Annie sociologique, and around it a school of researchers to carry on the new tradition. Out of this group came a major school in modern anthropology, which constituted Durkheim's main following in France. Durkheim himself became increasingly interested in ethnographic reports on primitive tribes, some of which material he analyzed in collaboration with his nephew Marcel Mauss, who had done much of the statistical compilations for Suicide. In 1912, a few years before his death, Durkheim published his final work, perhaps the greatest single book of the twentieth century. It was entitled The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. In this work Durkheim carried through to another level the revolution in our view of reality begun by Karl Marx. Every class has its own view of reality, its own consciousness, Marx had argued. Durkheim went even further, to demonstrate the social relativity of even our most general and taken-for-granted ideas. Time, space, causality, God, the self—all these could now be seen as creations of society. In place of the old absolutist view of reality "out there," Durkheim shows us that the natural world is only a backdrop for the symbolic creations of humans and their social rituals. As we have come to see through the applications of this perspective by Erving Goffman and other recent sociologists, there is not one reality by many, and they exist only by virtue of being enacted by human beings. Durkheim carried out this revolution in our perspectives by analyzing data on the aboriginal tribes of Australia, plus some other tribal societies, in

112 The Great Breakthrough an effort to understand the basis of religion. But since religion was all-pervasive in the worldviews of these peoples, Durkheim had an opportunity to explain the basic modes of thought in a society. He began by trying to define religion. What is it that all religions have in common? Not the idea of gods or spirits, since religions such as Buddhism and Confucianism lack these. Not the idea of a supernatural realm set apart from the world of nature, since primitive societies have not developed the idea of a realm of nature and hence make no such distinction. In fact, says Durkheim, we cannot find the key to religion in the realm of ideas at all. The only thing that all religions contain is a set of "sacred objects" that are set off from all other objects and toward which humans must act with ritual care. Ritual objects in Christianity, for example, include Bibles, altars, rosaries, holy water, and consecrated bread and wine; in the aboriginal tribes that Durkheim analyzed the main sacred object was the tribal totem. A totem is an animal, such as a fox, snake, grub-worm, or kangaroo, which tribe members are forbidden to kill or eat; and periodic ceremonies are held in which the tribe comes together to pay respect to this sacred object. It is impossible to understand this treatment of a totem from a practical point of view, says Durkheim, but if one views it socially, its significance becomes obvious. The totem functions to hold the tribe together. Without it, there would be no tribal unit at all, for it is by sharing a common totem that its members identify with each other. The totem is thus the basis of kinship and of social membership. The whole tribe is assembled only at the periodic totem ceremonies, and it is at these rituals that its members create and recreate the sense of emotional solidarity that Durkheim had argued was so important for social order. The totem thus creates a social and moral order. Since it is forbidden to kill the totem animal, it is also forbidden to kill those who name themselves after the totem, one's fellow tribesmen. The totem, in effect, symbolizes the society and its moral demands on the individual. In the same way, one can see more modern religions as functioning primarily to maintain a moral community. The church service of a nineteenth- century American village, for example, brought the community together once a week—perhaps the only time the community regularly assembled. The rituals of the service, from the reading of the sacred book to collective hymns and prayers, functioned to create a feeling of moral order. In general, Durkheim argues, the moral commandments of a religion—its Golden Rule, Ten Commandments, restrictions on self-indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh—are fundamentally social rules. They regulate humans' behavior toward each other and serve to keep up the sense of social unity and restraint on self-interest that make society possible. Why do people live up to such moral rules, at least to some degree? Not really because of fear of supernatural sanctions like heaven and hell or of the sacred power of the totem; these rationalizations for religious customs come and go, but the power of social controls remains. Rather, suggests Durkheim, it is because the supernatural sanctions symbolize society and its acceptance or rejection of the individual. The people who live up to the

Dreyfus's Empire: Emile Durkheim and Georges Sorel 113 moral commandments and participate wholeheartedly in the religious rituals get a great feeling of solidarity with the countless generations who make up their society, and they represent this feeling to themselves as being "saved." Those who break the rules and avoid the rituals cut themselves off from this feeling of belonging and suffer the consequences of their own self- centeredness. As theologians put it, to be cut off from God is the sinner's self-inflicted punishment. Durkheim would agree, but with the added sociological proviso: God is only a symbol for society. Durkheim thus brings to a close a chapter that began in the Enlightenment with the attack of science on religion. But religion must be more than superstition and error, Durkheim had pointed out, for how could it have survived so long if it were only this? Durkheim at last enables us to understand beliefs about the supernatural, by showing them for what they really are: symbols generated by social behavior that is at the core of every society. God is revealed to be not exactly what believers think, but something real nevertheless: the collective conscience of a community. And if this collective conscience changes its symbolizations from the sacred totem animals to more universal gods, until finally even the remote Christian God with his transcendental heaven and hell disappears into the memories of the past, this is only what we would expect from Durkheim's earlier demonstration, in The Division of Labor, that a society's moral order changes with its social structure. Sacred objects like totems, altars, and books are only displaced by new sacred objects like flags, which represent the worship of the state. By implication, much that seems bizarre in the behavior of avowedly atheistic and materialistic Russian and Chinese Communists becomes clearer when we see that communism has been organized as a political religion, now split between competing orthodoxies. In general, Durkheim's theory proposes that the historical trend is toward a more and more abstract and general collective conscience; concrete symbols of God disappear into a generalized moral belief about the brotherhood of humanity. Durkheim's sociology of knowledge thus manages to explain humans', fundamental religious ideas in terms of their social interactions. In addition, Durkheim shows that society determines even the basic categories of our thought. We live in a world of time and space, but how we conceive that time and space is socially determined. It is Friday; it is eleven o'clock in the morning; it is the year 1992: Implicitly this puts me in a world held in common by most other people in our clock-watching, post-Christian civilization. But there is nothing absolute about these units. There is no reason that time must necessarily be broken up into seven-day weeks or twenty-four- hour days; we could just as well have ten-day weeks or no weeks or hours at all (as is the case with many primitive tribes). We divide time into units only because we need to coordinate our activities with others in our complex modern civilization, not because hours and weeks really constitute the framework of nature. But as we continually act upon them, these units become part of the framework of our minds, and we make them subjectively into an absolute reality. In just this way, society implicitly furnishes the

114 The Great Breakthrough bases of our worldviews. The year a.d. 1992 puts us directly in the context of a Christian view of history, since the anno Domini orients us in relation to the year 1 of the mythical birth of Christ. The Chinese, whose calendar would stand at the year 4690, inhabit a fundamentally different historical universe. Time concepts, Durkheim shows, derive first of all from the scheduling of religious ceremonies. Space, causality, number—all these abstract ideas can also be traced to social origins and continuing social uses. Space is the area the tribe inhabits; this has grown immensely from the wanderings of aborigines in the Australian desert, through the voyages of Columbus and Magellan, but it still has a basic social meaning for us, as the effects of space travel on our thought about the universe continue to illustrate. Our fundamental concepts all grow from a social matrix in a similar way, and our very idea of objective knowledge ultimately refers to things that we can reliably communicate to others. Durkheim tears away another illusion that keeps us from seeing the world as it is: We mistake our socially given images of reality for the reality itself. Only by seeing the social relativity of our ideas are we on the path to understanding ourselves. It is a powerful intellectual performance that Durkheim puts on, indeed one of the most impressive of modern times. But what about the social issues with which he began, the effort to cure the social strife of modern France? Here Durkheim was less successful. He tried to use sociological functionalism as a basis for a scientific diagnosis of society's ills: not to impose any particular values on how society should operate, but to ascertain the "healthy" state of the social organism and thereby to understand its "diseases." He tried to show that a modern division of labor is basically healthy and well integrated and that when it is not, it must be because of special conditions. Thus Durkheim believed that strikes, political conflict, and labor violence were forms of the "abnormal" division of labor. But he was never able to propose a clear solution. His theory told him that the problem must lie in a lack of sufficient integration of the individual into the moral order of a social community, and in his famous Preface to the second edition of The Division of Labor, Durkheim proposed that the lack of solidarity could be cured by organizing individuals into occupational guilds. The solution was not convincing, for there is no reason to believe that such occupational communities would not continue to conflict with each other. Durkheim's main shortcoming was that he never came to grips with the existence of stratification and the realities of political conflict; he concentrated on the bases of social solidarity to the extent that his image of society excluded all nonsolidarity features. Durkheim would have been more successful in his search for political solutions if he had followed Tocqueville's lead on how political organizations can intensify conflict or limit it. In general, Durkheim's optimistic argument that modern industrial society is normally well integrated is not convincing. His own theories tend to refute it. If humans are emotional animals who derive their sense of purpose from the rituals they perform with others, then the gradual suppres-

His own theories tend to refute it. If humans are emotional animals who derive their sense of purpose from the rituals they perform with others, then the gradual suppression of emotions and the elimination of ritual in our highly bureaucratic society should produce considerable malaise. Such, in fact, were the more pessimistic conclusions of Weber and Freud. Although Durkheim did not want to draw this conclusion, his evidence on anomic suicide resulting from the loosening of ritual social bonds supports a pessimistic interpretation. THE REVOLUTIONARY PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGES SOREL One of Durkheim's compatriots drew the implications better than he did. This was Georges Sorel (1847-1922), a retired engineer, whose values and politics were as far removed from Durkheim's as possible, although both men held each other in considerable respect. Sorel was an acquaintance, among others, of V. I. Lenin, Benito Mussolini, and Fritz Ebert (the Socialist who became the first president of Germany after World War I). His politics seemed an equally bizarre flux, from monarchism on the far right to anarcho-syndicalism on the far left. But there was a basic principle underlying Sorel's shifting political sympathies. He regarded modern society as completely decadent, lacking in any real virtue, dedication, or brilliance. He despised the petty squabbling of the academics, and saw the business world as entirely self-seeking and corrupt and politicians as equally contemptible. The failure of the Socialists to take a stand on the burning moral issue of the Dreyfus affair at the time when Zola was putting his life on the docket convinced Sorel that the organized left was equally decadent. By 1907, when he wrote Reflections on Violence, Sorel had come to identify with ultrarevolu- tionary anarcho-syndicalism. Reflections on Violence takes up the anarcho-syndicalist idea that a general strike of all workers will someday bring down bourgeois society and usher in the new era of the revolution. This revolution, says Sorel, is a myth. It will never be, for society after the revolution would not be greatly changed, and in any case the chances of victory are nil. But—and here is where Sorel parts company with most other "practical" thinkers—the myth of the general strike nevertheless serves a purpose. It unifies the group of workers and gives them a feeling of participating in a moral cause. In the same way, violence has an important value, for it unifies individuals in a struggle for their common ideals and against their common enemies. In modern society, says Sorel, only social movements in battle have this high moral tone, a sense of joyous spontaneity as individuals feel themselves dedicated to something greater and higher than themselves. For this reason, such revolutionary movements are the only source of value today, even if they are doomed to fail. It is not the actual goal that counts, but the feelings that go along with struggling to attain it in the company of others. Sorel throws light on the appeal of violence in modern society, although his analysis applies just as well to nonviolent movements. The civil-rights

movement and its succeeding peace and student movements of the mid- 1960s often had much of the sense of euphoria among their participants that Sorel describes as the main value of such movements. And if these movements have generally failed to bring about their goals, that does not make them any the less worthwhile. Sorel's lesson foreshadows later existentialist insights: that in a world of dilemmas and well-entrenched injustices, the value of an action is to be judged less by consequences than by its intrinsic Tightness. Sorel has always been a puzzling figure, since his point of view lends itself to many interpretations. Sorel himself defended the Communist revolution in Russia, while Mussolini praised him as a source of Italian fascism. But Sorel was not really a Fascist. He did not want a society that tries to impose an imitation of old-fashioned order by brutal suppression; his values, rather, were for the spirit of perpetual movement. More than anything else, Sorel was a true anarchist. And whatever the political implications that could be drawn from his work, Sorel clearly pointed out two characteristic phenomena of modern society: its emotional starvation and the irrelevance of its ideals to workaday reality. This was more than Durkheim allowed himself to see, although he spent most of his life probing the conditions of the same feelings of solidarity. Durkheim wanted very strongly to believe in something, and in the end it cost him his life. World War I turned his ardent French nationalism into a paroxysm of anti-German sentiment. When his son Andre was killed at the front, defending the flag that Durkheim considered the modern version of the most sacred object, Durkheim went into a depression that culminated in 1917 in his death. It was not the first time that an individual's insights, so valuable to others, had gone unused by himself.

CHAPTER SEVEN Max Weber: The Disenchantment of the World Max Weber (1864-1920) has exerted more influence than any other social scientist except Marx and Freud. His ideas had wide currency, first in Germany and then throughout the scholarly world. His term "charismatic leadership" has passed into general usage, and all of social science knows something of the concepts of legitimacy, bureaucracy, rationalization, ver- stehen, ideal types, value-free science, the three-dimensional approach to stratification, and the Protestant ethic with its links to the origins of capitalism. Yet Weber's general sociology and his vision of world history are as yet barely known; they remain hidden behind isolated selections and popularizations, and we are continually surprised as more and more powerful portions of Weber's worldview are brought into the light. Weber himself is partly to blame. His works are voluminous but unfinished and scarcely succinct, and even a superficial acquaintance with them turns up notions of such utility that one is tempted to inquire no further. In recent years, as the fuller discovery and development of his sociology go on, Weber increases his hold on our attention. The most commanding figure of the great period of German social scholarship, Weber still towers over the world scene more than seventy years after his death. Like many other great sociologists, Weber (pronounced "Vay-ber") was a man at the center of things, pulled loose from illusion by constant exposure to contradictory points of view. Born in 1864 into a prosperous family of German industrialists, he grew up in Berlin where his father was a judge and a successful politician. Backstage acquaintance with the realpolitik of Bismarck's empire made Weber a political realist from his childhood. His father sat in the Reichstag with the National Liberals, representing the interests of the big manufacturers and standing between the Junker aristocracy on the right and the Social Democrats (socialist labor unionists) on the left. It was not a propitious time for liberals in Germany (indeed, it rarely ever was, except during the short-lived revolution of 1848). The landowning aristocracy and the army took a rigid stand against democracy, and the Socialists preached revolution according to Karl Marx. The liberals had no 117

one to turn to except the state bureaucracy, and their ideals went down the drain as their nationalism increasingly became their only political resource. From an early age Weber scorned the unrealistic claims of left and right, but found himself increasingly uncomfortable with the center. Throughout his life an ardent nationalist, he nevertheless saw Germany blundering steadily into a war that would destroy it. His sociology confirmed his fears of imminent disaster, and Weber came to see himself as a twentieth-century Jeremiah, prophesying doom. He began a career like his father's, studying law at Heidelberg and Berlin. But his pessimism about politics and his own overpowering urge to exercise his independent intellect steered him into an academic career. Germany in the nineteenth century led the world in the eminence of its universities. It was especially prominent in the historical fields. It had been here that Leopold von Ranke and Friedrich von Savigny transformed history from the status of antiquarian chronicles into a science, with its canon to tell things "as they really were." With German thoroughness, the Herr Professor Doktors had produced detailed accounts not only in conventional military and political history but also in economic, legal, and cultural history and in archaeology, ethnography, and linguistics. German philosophy, too, since the days of Hegel had a strong historical flavor. Weber trained himself in virtually all these fields, with the result that his knowledge of world history probably exceeded that of any other person who had ever lived. In an age of growing specialization Weber's feat was the mark of an extraordinary individualist. But Weber was nothing if not extraordinary. Tall, stout, black-bearded, and moody, he impressed all who met him. His colleagues viewed him as a towering intellect. At the end of Weber's doctoral exam Theodor Mommsen, the most eminent historian of his day, rose and said that he knew of no man better qualified to succeed him "than the highly esteemed Max Weber." But Weber stood in an intellectual circle even wider than the world of German historians and philosophers. At his father's house he had met the eminent politicians and academicians of Berlin. In his own house at Heidelberg the leading intellects in all fields, as well as artists and musicians, met. Among his circle would be found such men as Karl Jaspers (the future existentialist psychiatrist), Ferdinand Toennies, Georg Simmel, and a young radical who could not get a university position despite Weber's intercessions on his behalf, Robert Michels. Weber was fully acquainted with Marxist underground thought. He read many languages, traveled broadly, and knew the English evolutionists and the French positivists as well as the German historians. He was a one-man crucible for the intellectual currents of the nineteenth century, and from his central position he forged a viewpoint for sociology as both a science and a study of meaningful human creations. His twin methods of verstehen and ideal types emerged from his position at the center of intellectual crosscurrents: Social reality is not merely to be explained by mechanical analogies to the natural world, but must be understood (in German, verstehen) by imagining oneself into the experiences of men and women as they act out their

own worlds. Ideal types, as we shall see below, are the tools for making scientific generalizations out of our understanding of this infinitely complex and shifting world. Sociologists must sympathetically understand the people around them—indeed, also those who have been dead for centuries—and they are bound to feel acutely what is closest to home. Here, too, Weber was at the center of powerful antagonisms. Beneath the surface of a proper German bourgeois family, Weber's father and mother carried on psychic war. His father—harsh, self-righteous, and authoritarian—clashed incessantly with his altruistic, self-denying, and religious mother. Between the two poles Weber may have discerned the remnants of a rigid Protestant ethic whose discovery is his most famous contribution. Certainly Max Weber himself was a prime example of the ethic. Immensely hard working, impeccably honest, dedicated, serious, methodical, he drove himself with an inner vehemence that left him an insomniac for years and dead at the age of fifty-six. The family conflict finally took its toll. In 1897 when Weber was thirty- three and just beginning his career as a professor of economics at Heidelberg, he became involved in a quarrel while visiting his parents. Years of suppressed bitterness broke through the respectable patrician formalities, and Weber angrily threatened to break off all contact with his father if he did not change his treatment of his mother. Not long after, he heard the news: His father had fallen dead of a stroke. Depression set in. A powerful, even charismatic, lecturer, Weber found he could no longer teach. When he tried, his arms and back became temporarily paralyzed. He found it difficult to speak; serious thinking was impossible. He took a leave of absence from his job, finally resigning it entirely. He traveled incessantly, yet spent hours in hotel rooms staring at his fingernails. He spent several weeks in a mental institution. The experience opened a new side in him. "Such a disease has its compensations. It has reopened to me the human side of life," he wrote his wife. "An icy hand has let me loose. In years past my diseased disposition expressed itself in a frantic grip upon scientific work, which appeared to me as a talisman. . . ." Slowly he began to recover, and in 1904 he was back at work. He took a trip to America on an invitation to speak at the St. Louis World's Fair. The loftiness of American ideals and the corruption of American capitalism fired his imagination, and he returned to Germany to finish his first famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. From then on his production never flagged, although he was unable to bring himself to teach until the end of his life, after the close of World War I. He had lost seven years. The work of the next sixteen has never been surpassed. Weber's sociology is often obscured behind the maze of crosscutting definitions that make up the opening chapters of Economy and Society, his major work. Clear and distinct concepts are essential to make sense out of a subject as complex as the workings of society. But concepts are easiest to grasp if we can see them as they are actually put to use. Weber set himself the task of explaining the greatest development of world history: the rise of

modern industrial civilization. In order to do this he had to push his sights progressively back from economics to law, politics, and religion; to chart the interconnections between kinship and stratification, bureaucracy and warfare, until every institution was connected with every other, and the web of explanation stretched from the present to the beginnings of human life on earth. In exploring the question of economic development, Weber created nothing less than a sociology of world history. His contributions to general sociological theory consist of the models he developed in an effort to grasp the key processes of society without doing violence to the complexities of history as it actually occurred. Weber had nothing but contempt for evolutionist or cyclical theories that blindly simplified the facts to fit a few preconceived principles of growth. In his tightrope walk between vague or inaccurate generalizations and the myriad particular forms of world civilization, Weber moved toward a comprehensive theory of humankind's social behavior and of the institutions humankind creates. We shall take up first Weber's general sociology, then his vision of world history. WEBER'S SOCIOLOGY: STRATIFICATION, ORGANIZATIONS, AND POLITICS Stratification: Class, Power, and Status Weber's sociology centers around three interrelated subjects: stratification, organizations, and politics. Of these, stratification provides the core theory of society, to which all else is related and within which may be found the forces that move society. Weber was a thoroughgoing nominalist; for him, real people in real physical places are the subjects and movers of all that exists and happens in society. To be sure, cultural ethos (such as the Protestant ethic), legal systems, and large-scale organizations all have their own logical structures and laws of development. But they never develop by themselves; they develop through the thought and action of real people. Weber might well have adopted Marx's slogan as his methodology: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please." Weber could not accept a reified abstraction like "Society" as it appeared in organic analogies, nor the Weltgeist (world spirit) of Germanic cultural theorists. We never see society, but only groups of men and women. Furthermore, these groups are very different, even within one society. It is an error to suppose that the ethical philosophies of the upper classes express the beliefs of middle-class shopkeepers or peasant laborers. India cannot be summed up in Brahmin philosophy, nor Germany in Hegel. If we are to understand society and culture we must begin with the actual diversity of separate groups, not with some easy generalization based on a single perspective. Stratification, for Weber, provided the link between the diverse groups we can actually observe and the invisible order through which

thousands and millions of individual actions add up to results that individuals neither intend nor control. What kind of order is it that ties people to others whom they may never see? Weber found three such orders: economics, politics, and culture. A man sells his labor in a factory that exists only because of a nationwide division of labor, and he affects the price of goods by the ways he spends his wages; he pays taxes and is killed on a distant battlefield because far-off government ministers struggle for power; his family walks in a funeral ceremony elaborated long ago by a hierarchy of priests and changed slowly from one repetition to another. Each order affects humans' behavior, lays down the conditions within which they must make their lives, determines both their views of the world and which people they will associate with. But not all people are affected alike. The life chances of the financier's son are not those of the farm laborer's; the ordinary citizen's worldview is not that of the party leader; the pious housewife does not inhabit the social milieu of the intellectual. We can see the social order comprehensively if we think of it as a stratification of individuals into groups based on similar economic, political, or cultural positions. Groups of people who associate together are the basic units of society. Much research since Weber's day has shown that it is in such face-to-face groups that people acquire their identities, their values, and their worldviews. Thus the diversity of society is produced by its major institutions—businesses, states, armies, churches, schools. At the same time the members of the various groups are tied together through their positions in these institutional networks. Weber did not find it necessary to ask the general question of what holds society together. He saw that societies over the sweep of history were always coming together and falling apart, shifting and changing from one set of institutions to another. History shows nothing permanent but continual war, conflict, and change: states conquering and disintegrating, trade and finance spreading and shrinking, religions and arts slowly shifting from one theme to its opposite. What does remain beneath the change, the concrete basis of human society, are groups of people bound by ties of common feeling and belief: families, households, kinspeople, church and cult members, friends, communities. The core of Weber's view of stratification is thus a theory of group formation, a set of hypotheses about the conditions that bring people together into solidaristic groups. These conditions are found in the way people relate to the institutional orders that link groups together into a society. Weber accepted certain motives as a basis for an explanation of human behavior: need for food and material comfort; fear of death and avoidance of physical pain; desire for sexual gratification, for membership and status in a social and moral community, and for a meaningful view of the world. Weber did not attempt to explore the psychological dynamics of these motives or to account for individual differences in motivation; in these respects his theories may be complemented by the insights of Freud and Mead and by the social theories concerning group solidarity of Durkheim and his fol-

lowers. Weber took these motives as given because he found them manifested throughout human history. They enter his theories as the three main sanctions by which people influence each other's behavior: offers of economic gain, threats of physical coercion, and appeals to emotion and belief. Economics, politics, and culture are corresponding institutional realms; class, party ("power group" might be a preferable term), and status groups are the groups formed on their bases. Weber's central hypothesis is that people who share common positions and interests in the economic arena, in the political struggle, or in the realm of culture are likely to act and associate together and to exclude all others from their company of equals. In the economic market classes are formed as people come together with others who experience similar work conditions. Here Weber follows Marx's discovery: The peasant laborer, the factory worker, the skilled craftsperson, the rural landlord, the industrialist, the merchant, the stock-market speculator all inhabit distinct social worlds. Material conditions have a powerful effect on people's lives, throwing factory laborers together in urban tenements and drawing country gentry together in their round of visits between estates. Economics shapes not only how people live and in whose company, but also how they see the world and how they will act. Economic position gives people distinctive interests: The worker sees an advantage in demanding higher pay, forming a union, or supporting a Socialist party; the peasant tries to keep down his duties to his lord and his taxes to the king; the industrialist opposes unionization and socialism; the financier is concerned about the price of gold and the prevailing rate of interest on loans. People are thus moved to act on their economic interests, and the resulting conflict draws individuals of similar economic position closer together and isolates them from those of opposing positions. How many such opposing groups there will be and how extensive the conflict among them depend on the nature of the economic system in that particular society and on the relationships between economic stratification and political and cultural stratification. Weber incorporates Marx's basic model into his theory of stratification, but he sees economic determinism as only one of three factors. Weber viewed politics, like economics, as a realm in which struggle is widespread. History, after all, reads most obviously as a record of military conquests and feudal rivalries, palace intrigues and coups d'etat, peasant revolts and urban insurrections; the activities of peaceful eras consist of the ups and downs of politicians' careers, the shifting authorities of officials, and the power play of interest groups in voting and lobbying. Thus, individuals may be stratified by their political interests as well as by their economic interests. Minor government officials are drawn together in a distinct group, as are military officers, independent feudal knights, modern party politicians, or municipal judges. Coercive power is a scarce good; many people are concerned with getting as much of it for themselves as possible, and virtually all people wish to make it bear on themselves as little as possible. As we shall see below, politics may be analyzed as a continual struggle

to gain authority for oneself and to evade subjection to the authority of others. Political interest groups may overlap with economic interest groups— feudal knights may represent the landowning class; politicians, the classes of industrialists or workers. But power is a separate pie to be carved up, capable of inducing alignments of its own. The kinds of political stratification and political group formation in a particular society depend on the nature of its political institutions. It should be apparent by now that Weber saw society as a complex and ever-shifting interplay of forces. Political stratification is influenced by economic alignments and vice versa; both of these interact with cultural stratification. Weber was forced to devise a strategy for talking coherently about this world in which nothing ever stays put long enough for us to pin a label on it and in which our labels always oversimplify what is going on. For this purpose he conceived the notion of the ideal type, by means of which he could abstract from reality a form of social action that is rarely or never found by itself. We can discover the dynamics of stratification, for example, if we mentally decompose it into its constituent elements—the ideal types of class, power group, and status group. We can thereby discover the dynamics of economic class formation without having to bear in mind the processes of power politics. Having done this, we can successively take up political struggles and the status-producing effects of culture. Finally, we can apply these insights to the overall stratification of any society resulting from the interaction of these three processes. The technique is similar to that of the chemist, who explains the properties of a compound first by identifying its constituent elements and then by noting their interactions. The modern sociological research method called the "multivariate analysis" of survey data reflects the same general strategy. The interaction of culture with economics and politics is especially subtle. As already noted, economic and political positions have considerable influence on the values and beliefs of their occupants. Marx was the first to notice this for economics, and Weber carried out a parallel analysis of politics. We can speak, then, of economic and political determinants of culture. But there is a third way in which culture enters stratification, a discovery of Weber's own. If culture were merely the result of economic and political position, one could not say that culture was important for stratification. People would be stratified by their income or their power; and whatever deference they received or had to give, whatever boundaries were drawn between them and people who would not deign to associate with them (those ranking above them) and people whom they did not care to associate with (those ranking below) would be based on money or power, not on anything to do with their culture. Weber saw that this was not so: that in addition to the stratification produced by class and power, there were numerous possible hierarchies in the realm of culture. Historically, the most important of these cultural hierarchies have been based on religion. There is a definite stratification within every religion: At minimum there is a difference in status between believers and nonbelievers. The former consider

themselves more virtuous and enlightened than the latter, regardless of their respective wealth and power, and such cultural strata are just as likely to associate together and exclude outsiders as are economic classes and power groups. Most religions have much more than this minimum stratification. There are hierarchies from popes, gurus, and high priests on down through minor ceremonial assistants, devoted worshipers, merely formal members, and intermittent sinners. Admittedly, this is not necessarily an exclusive basis of stratification; churches often have property interests and political connections, and clergy may associate socially with correspondingly wealthy or powerful laypeople. Cultural stratification is important especially because it is closest to the way most people actually view their worlds. We feel that we associate with certain people and not with others, not usually because we see ourselves as economic or political allies, but because we like and respect certain people and not others. If we analyze that liking we find that it usually involves cultural stratification. Respectable churchgoing people in general prefer others like themselves, not hard-drinking denizens of bars and pool halls; hostesses who practice gracious etiquette and converse about the arts do not invite the backyard barbecue set. It is here that Weber's philosophical background plays a key role in his sociology. In his introductory methodological writings, Weber emphasized that the proper subject of sociology is meaningful human actions. It is not a meaningful social action when all people put up their umbrellas at the same time, if they are simply reacting to an external stimulus—rain. Rather, what sociologists are concerned with are actions that people understand as having social significance. Work is significant because people understand it as a path to social success, or as too degrading for the gentry, or as an assurance of salvation in the afterlife. Leisure, too, is a field of meanings: One lives in a noble style of display and consumption, or one eschews the external world for the sake of one's ascetical enlightenment, or one competes with one's neighbors to show one's respectability. There are many such possibilities, and these make up the field of cultural stratification. They were so important in Weber's overall model of society that he continually emphasized the subjective side of life. For Weber, sociological analysis had to always involve verstehen—an empathic understanding of what people's subjective meanings are. Whether we deal with our contemporaries or with people in the past, we must always make the effort to put ourselves emotionally and intellectually in their places. Only thus do we understand the struggles involved in stratification and the rest of human social life. Cultural stratification is thus the most complex and subtlest of all the forms of stratification. There are relatively few distinct political and economic groups in any society, but the varieties and ramifications of cultural hierarchies can be enormously refined, especially in a modern industrial society. Indeed, cultural stratification can subdivide the lines of status distinction to such a degree that virtually every group or individual may have a status of its own. In addition to religion, cultural hierarchies can be based

on secularized religious ideals like honesty, hard work, ambition, and self- control (Weber's Protestant ethic); on achievement or understanding in science, literature, music, and art; on good manners, tastes in decoration and clothes; or even prominence in sports. Cultural stratification may be formally recognized in a society, as in the Hindu caste system based on ritual acts that keep members of the "higher" religions from coming into close contact with those who once belonged to "lower" religions. The ranks of European aristocracy, with their elaborate etiquette and code of honor, illustrate a similar development on a nonreligious basis. Cultural hierarchies are the substance of the world as most people experience it, but their significance comes from the ways in which they are connected with the rest of the social order—with economics and politics and their corresponding forms of stratification. This connection can operate in two ways. First, cultural stratification can be the basis for economic and political stratification. The New England colonies are one of the best examples of this. The church leaders were also the political authorities, and only members in good standing of the church congregation—a minority of the people—could participate in governing the community. Moreover, the religious upper class took the lead in organizing commerce, farming, and fishing and thus became an economic upper class. The religious, political, and economic hierarchies began to separate in the eighteenth century, but even today Americans (especially middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants) tend to judge people's status according to their "respectability" in religious terms—essentially, according to how well they live up to the vestigial norms of the Protestant ethic. Second, economic and political stratification tend to turn into cultural stratification. The cold realities of wealth and power are too blatant for most people, no matter what their status. There is a widespread need to feel that those on the top merit their good fortune; thus people who rise in wealth or power attempt to cloak themselves in cultural respectability. The conquering tribesmen of antiquity called on priests to sanction their conquests, just as Charlemagne had himself crowned by the pope after building a kingdom by war. Later, the way to the top is forgotten; the aristocracy claims that it rales not by force but by hereditary right and by the merits expressed in its code of honor and its patronage of the arts. Just such a mutation has occurred between the robber barons of nineteenth-century finance and the high society of today. Economic, political, and cultural goods can be traded off for each other, and Weber postulates a tendency for the three hierarchies to come together in times of social tranquillity. The wealthy try to become powerful and cultured; the powerful use their influence to become rich and surrounded with high culture; cultural elites try to use their prestige to acquire wealth and power. But changes and competition within the realms of economics, politics, and culture periodically upset the composition of classes, power groups, and status groups, and we find the three hierarchies consolidating, breaking down, and rearranging again and again. History is a continuous

battle, not only of knights against officials, bureaucrats against politicians, landowners against financiers, industrialists against unionists, and priests against scientists and intellectuals, but of each of these orders against the others. The processes of stratification not only make up the fabric of our everyday lives, but as we shall see shortly, they turn the engines of history as Weber saw it. Organizations: Patrimonialism and Bureaucracy Surveying world social forms, Weber noted that there are two general ways in which people can stabilize their relationships: either by establishing strong personal ties or by setting up general rules. These were ideal types, of course. Reality is always a mixture of them, although the organizations of traditional societies have usually fallen near the personalistic pole, and modern organizations near the abstract rules pole. Weber often speaks of the former type of organization as patriarchal or patrimonial and of the latter as bureaucratic. The distinction follows broadly from that which Weber's older colleague Ferdinand Toennies made between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). Personalistic organizations usually begin with the family household. We find the lord in ancient China or Assyria, or the citizen in Athens or Rome, or the baron in medieval Europe running his estate and his politics like a great family enterprise. Sons and brothers are his most trusted assistants, whether in supervising farming or trading expeditions, fighting a war, or collecting taxes for a higher authority. Servants and slaves are like part of the family, subject to the same loyalties and jealousies and to the same patriarchal whims. No distinction is made between public and private, between the official finances and the domestic purse. The king collects taxes equally for his troops and for his wine cellar, and his subaltern lord pays his own expenses and profits out of what he can collect before passing it on up. This form of organization can be extended across large numbers of people by linking together chains of masters and followers. In a patrimonial regime the king has trusted lieutenants who administer distant sections of his realm; they in turn assign their trusted followers to various areas and tasks; and so on down to the lowest official, whose job it is to coerce the peasants to give up their produce. Premodern trading companies and factories were organized in the same way, but on a much smaller scale. The main disadvantages of the personalistic form of organization are that it is neither very efficient nor very easy to control. Lines of communication from top to bottom are virtually nonexistent, and orders from above are likely to emerge as rumors below, if indeed they are passed on at all. How tasks are carried out depends almost entirely on the energy and initiative of the individuals involved. Under the circumstances such organizations tend to fall back on tradition—to do a job as it was done last time and as far back as anyone can remember, since there are no other guidelines and it may not be safe to do anything that a vengeful superior could criticize. At

the same time, such organizations continually slip from the control of their founders. Again and again in history a lord conquers a large territory and appoints his most trusted followers to collect the spoils, and they in turn appoint their assistants. By the time the conqueror dies, and sometimes before, the central authority begins to dissipate. Only a small portion of the taxes or booty collected comes through to the king. Eventually the more powerful lords may make themselves totally independent. Sometimes the process continues until the jurisdictions are fragmented down to the lowest level (as happened in medieval Germany); sometimes it is arrested halfway in a feudal compromise splitting authority among the levels; sometimes it is reversed by another conquest. These political disadvantages provided the impetus for developing the other main type of organization: bureaucracy. Kings and lords long ago found that they could arrest the dissipation of authority not merely by setting servants to spy on each other (which tended to make an organization secretive and clique-ridden) but by laying down general rules. Instead of leaving procedures to the discretion of subordinates, the ruler himself could control matters from afar by selecting, training, and checking up on persons whose only job was to follow the rules. Instead of having general authority over a territory, an official could be confined to one specialized kind of job; power was thus split up and controlled from above. If abuses came from the lack of distinction between personal property and the king's property, a rigid line between public and private could be drawn. Instead of tasks being performed intermittently by local barons, they could be handled by officials recruited for full-time careers and paid specified salaries. Weber found elements of this type of organization in cultures as far back as ancient Egypt and China, but its main development occurred only in Europe as the absolutist monarchies emerged on a bureaucratic basis, ending the period of medieval feudalism. Trie first great bureaucracies (after the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages) were developed in France, Prussia, and Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the nineteenth century the form was widely imitated, not only by governments but by industrial enterprises that needed an efficient form of control over a large and complex division of labor. Since then bureaucratization has spread to all forms of social life—so much so that Weber regarded it as one of the main currents in modern history. Considering its advantages, why did full-blown bureaucracy develop so late? Weber pointed out certain social and material prerequisites. The development of writing and then of a large group of literate officials was necessary for an organization carrying out specialized rules and keeping records of its activities. A money economy was needed if officials were to be paid in salaries instead of in land or booty. Improved transportation and communication (roads, navigable rivers and canals, a courier system) were necessary if a king was to keep track of what his officials were doing in distant realms. Changing material conditions aided the development of centralized administration. Firearms made the self-equipped knight obsolete

and aided the rise of the large, bureaucratic army of foot soldiers. Similarly, the invention of industrial machinery helped replace scattered handicraft production with the bureaucratic factory. But the bureaucratic form itself is historically primary; without its development through the struggles of politics, modern industrial innovations could never have been used and hence would never have been invented. Moreover, bureaucracy is hardly Utopian. The kings who created it in order to control their errant knights soon found that their new machinery was slipping from their hands. Once established, the bureaucracy could do its work of administering regulations without a ruler and could even make up new rules as the occasion provided. Indeed, rulers soon began to get in the way of its smooth functioning, and hereditary monarchs grew progressively weaker until they fell in revolutions or degenerated into figureheads. Nor is bureaucracy the epitome of efficiency. Cabinet ministers and industrialists often have little more control over it than do kings. Weber saw in the world around him all the phenomena that have become famous under the labels "red tape" and "Parkinson's Law": the tendency for officials to see rules as ends in themselves rather than as means to ends; the difficulty of finding responsible decision makers amid a maze of rules and regulations, the tendency for organizations to drift, to expand mindlessly, to make their own survival the highest value. Many of these themes have been explored in subsequent research by such sociologists as Philip Selznick, Peter Blau, and Michel Crozier. Always a political man, Weber discovered organizational politics even in the supposedly neutral instrument of bureaucracy. As was noted with regard to his theory of stratification, Weber saw how individuals' views and interests develop from the positions they hold, and he saw how rules and regulations could be used in the continual jockeying for authority and autonomy that human beings carry on. What American sociologists have since come to think of as "informal organization" within "formal organization," Weber saw as part of the implicit dialectic of the struggle for control. Personalistic and bureaucratic forms of organization, after all, are ideal types, and reality is always a mixture. As the Weberian scholar Guenther Roth has pointed out, the clever administrator uses both strategies of control—a mixture of personal loyalties and bureaucratic impartiality and the use of special emissaries with diffuse authority to carry out tasks that the rules and regulations impede. Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were masters of the technique of mixed strategies. Both methods have their drawbacks, but only by tireless juggling between them can an organizational leader actually lead. Politics: Traditional, Charismatic, and Rational-Legal Legitimacy Politics is conflict over who shall control the state, the apparatus of coercion in a society. To call the state an apparatus of coercion means only that its ultimate appeal to force is the one thing that all states have in common; it

does not mean that all states necessarily coerce most of their members most of the time. A democracy is a type of state in which power is split up among contending parties and separate jurisdictions, so that in fact the state does relatively little coercing. That perhaps is an ideal, and Weber would agree with Hegel's verdict that "history is the chopping-block at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized." Politics is made up of three components: the groups contending for power, the organizations through which power is sought and exercised, and the ideas and ideals that legitimate authority. We have already considered the first two: The contending groups are found in the stratification of a society and may consist of economic classes, existing power groups, or status groups—each interested in manipulating the state to further its ends. We can have various kinds of political movements: those interested in economic policies and the state protection or control of property; those interested in power for its own sake or in extending the power of an organization (whether it be a party, welfare bureaucracy, army, police force, or court system); and those interested in having the state sanction some particular culture with official status (those interested in or opposed to school prayers, abortion, the prohibition of alcohol, explicit sex in movies, psychedelics, and so forth). We have also seen the various kinds of political organizations that have existed and noted some of their preconditions and dynamics. There remains the dynamics of legitimacy. Weber saw that people have material and power interests, but that they also see the world in terms of ideas and ideals. Individuals will fight and die for worldviews as well as for money and power. The difference between Weber's view and the naive conservative view that sees the state as a spiritual unity is that Weber realized that people's ideals differ within the same society. As Weber put it, people have both material and ideal interests, and their interests often conflict. As Weber noted, a society cannot be held together by force alone. Obviously, an army can control an unarmed populace. But within the army the general is not necessarily the strongest man, and he may not even carry a gun. Why then are other men afraid to disobey him? Because if one man disobeys and the others obey, the single dissenter will be shot. Why don't all the men disobey together? Because if they want to act together, they must have some sort of organization, and that again raises the question of who shall lead and how his authority will be enforced. To the old philosophical question "Who shall guard the guardians?" Weber replied that organizations can be based on force provided widespread beliefs about legitimacy exist. The general's orders are obeyed because each man expects others to obey him, and this expectation is based on the widespread belief that the general has legitimate authority. Weber was well enough acquainted with history and with the daily newspapers to know that orders are not always obeyed, that the legitimacy of a leader or regime can rise and fall. Accordingly, he was interested in the dynamics of legitimacy. Out of his historical perspective, Weber produced

three ideal types of legitimacy. First, authority could be based on tradition: A king rules because his family has always ruled (so he says), because he is chosen by the gods, or because the tribal council selected him through traditional ceremonial methods. Second, authority could be based on personal charisma: "It is written .... but I say unto you . . . ," proclaims the prophet, the hero, the dominant personality, discarding tradition in favor of his own revelations. Third, authority could be rational-legal: The laws provide the procedure for selecting legitimate presidents and chancellors; bureaucratic regulations delegate authority to the police and the passport clerks. Each of these forms of legitimacy has a corresponding form of organization. Traditional rulers are found primarily in patrimonial and patriarchal organizations; charismatic leaders usually have a personal retinue of disciples and a large unorganized following; rational-legal officials are found in bureaucracies. Each form of legitimacy has its advantages and drawbacks. Traditional leaders seem to have little to worry about. Tradition says they are kings or chiefs, and there is nothing anyone can do about it (except of course their enemies in other kingdoms and tribes). Still, Weber points out that political struggle is never entirely absent, although it may be underground. Traditional rulers are often limited by the very tradition. Their advisers, noblemen, and priests are seldom idle about interpreting tradition to their advantage and against the powers of the ruler. If they want to do things their way, they must continually struggle to interpret traditions to their advantage. But there are dangers in success, too; if they extend their power too far beyond tradition, they may lose their traditional legitimacy. Ancient history (and modern, too) is full of kings turned tyrants who were overthrown and replaced by one of the noblemen waiting in the wings. One possibility for the ambitious traditional monarch is to mix traditional authority with personal charisma. But this has its difficulties and dangers too. First, in order to be charismatic, one must have some extraordinary personal qualities. To be sure, these can often be evoked by stagecraft and public relations, but the charismatic leader has entered an arena in which the pressure is on, and he or she must live up to the billing or disappear into that special obscurity reserved for has-been charismatics. Every emergency—famine, riot, invasion, or special omen—calls for a corresponding miracle. If the charismatic leader does not live up to his or her own reputation, he or she soon loses legitimacy to a rival charismatic or to an "I-told- you-so" traditionalist. The tides of legitimacy can ebb and flow with startling rapidity, as the history of modern coups d'etat demonstrates. Finally, authority can be rational-legal. But rationalization is another dangerous beast to ride. Once this force is unleashed, there is no individual who cannot be found dispensable. The European monarchs who tried to consolidate their traditional authority by building a purely legal state found in the end that there is no justification for kings in a rational-legal code. The descendants of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great paid for the power they built. Rationalization attempts to remove the arbitrary, to provide a clear

and sufficient reason for every social act. Not only kings, but party leaders, prime ministers, dictators, and individual bureaucrats themselves can be found wanting by the standards of the rational-legal regimes they control. Every regime that proclaims its principles—whether in the ideals of socialism, the United States Constitution, or the Declaration of the Rights of Man—is subject to the judgment of its people. Of course, regimes can get away with considerable deviations from their avowed ideals, since they control powerful organizational and material resources, including the communication facilities, which can define much of the reality its people observe. Still, ideals create a rallying point for potential opponents (like the dissident writers in the Soviet Union or the antiracist and antimilitarist movements in the United States) and constitute the weak link in the authority structure of a regime weakened by defeat, economic crisis, or internal conflict among its power holders. The traditional ruler, at any rate, did not have to spend much effort in justifying his or her actions. Thus, even where they are not lived up to (that is, almost everywhere), rational-legal principles of legitimacy set the basic context in which political dispute goes on. WEBER'S THEORY OF HISTORY: THE RATIONALIZATION OF THE WORLD The great transformation in history was that unmistakable phenomenon called "modernization," which turned a world of peasants, lords, and priests into a buzzing hive of organization, machinery, and movement. Weber found the core of that change in the new industrial economy. An explanation of the emergence of modern capitalism would thus be an explanation of modernity, and Weber's search for its roots led him to describe the social outlines of world history. Weber began by analyzing the modern economic system. The key attribute is predictability. There is no point in manufacturing large amounts of goods unless you can be sure of a regular market for them, and you cannot get the benefits of modern machinery and specialized division of labor unless you can continuously produce large amounts. Moreover, you cannot run a factory unless you can depend on having a regular supply of workers to hire and unless you can borrow money for capital expenses when you need it, and under fair and reasonable conditions. In short, modern industry depends on large and stable markets, a dependable and economically motivated labor force, and a trustworthy financial system. Weber saw that these preconditions were missing throughout most of history and that a long chain of prerequisites had somehow to emerge before the modern economy could take off. Markets, for example, had been mostly local—peasants producing their own necessities and bartering or selling the rest in nearby towns. Of the many factors that limited larger markets, three important ones were: (1) the riskiness of transporting valuable goods in a world of continuous warfare

and conquest, where robbers and barons were equally dangerous and civil order existed only within the walls of one's town or sometimes only in one's house; (2) the general lack of a widespread system of money and credit to facilitate large-scale trading; and (3) distrust of strangers—from other lands, other religions, other villages—which made trading a matter of crafty haggling and merchants often indistinguishable from pirates. Labor, in the modern sense, was also a historical rarity. Industries cannot run efficiently and competitively if workers are not available who will move from job to job as demand for products changes and who can be attracted to the areas of greatest profit by offers of commensurate wages. (As we see, Weber's economics is in the classical English tradition.) But workers in traditional societies are for the most part not free economic agents. Peasants are often bound to the land as serfs; industrial laborers are usually family members, household servants, or slaves, bound to the enterprise, and a continuing expense whether they are overworked or underworked. Guild monopolies control most of the remaining labor supply. All these various obstacles had to be broken down before the industrial labor force could be brought together in the factory system. Finally, modern finance is also a recent development. Only in the large kingdoms and empires did a widespread system of money exist at all. Even then, there were many obstacles to a dependable system of loans. Widespread literacy was necessary before the more complex forms of credit—such as the stock market—could arise. Money was lent only at exorbitant rates of interest as long as the risks of nonpayment and failure were great—as they were in an era when courts and police did not exist to back up contracts and when every business enterprise was risky. Not the least of the danger came from the state itself. Taxes were capricious and often little more than robbery; if a banker lent money to a king, there was no guarantee that he would ever get it back. Thus several great German banking houses—including the famous Fuggers of Augsburg—were wiped out in bankruptcies of the kings of Spain during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In such a world the life of a businessman was a precarious one. If by chance he was successful and amassed a fortune, he did not reinvest it in expanding his business, but made every effort to buy himself some land and a title of nobility and thus get out of the business world entirely. Weber's task was to trace back through history to find out where and how each of these obstacles fell—to determine the one time and place where all the circumstances were right and where the industrial takeoff could begin. The story begins in remote antiquity in a world of tribal societies—some agricultural, some made up of nomadic herdsmen and hunters. Religion played a key role in their social structure and in their worldviews. People lived and worked almost entirely with their kinspeople, and the kinship network and the community were united by a common set of ceremonies surrounding all aspects of life. Gods and spirits were everywhere— in the sky and the trees, guarding the hearth and the door of the house, and legitimating the authority of the patriarch-priest-chief. Like Durkheim, Weber recognized the integrating force of religion in primitive society.

Change came about especially by political struggle. Hunting tribes conquered agricultural tribes, creating two-class societies of peasants and warrior-aristocrats. Conquests went wider and wider; empires rose and fell; kings emerged; complex stratification grew within the ranks of the aristocracy; and ro)ral administration (primitive bureaucracies) came into being. The familiar pendulum swings of world political history began: Overextended patrimonial regimes disintegrated into feudalism and then reconsol- idated under a new conqueror. In these larger, more complex societies, wealth became concentrated. A division of labor developed around the royal courts, as artisans, servants, scribes, and merchants specialized to satisfy royal tastes. Priests developed separate hierarchies of their own, amalgamating war gods and nature gods into new syncretisms and pantheons. In a number of these large societies—notably China and India—and in independent cities and small states on their peripheries—notably in Greece and Israel—a great change took place in the realm of religion between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C. Talcott Parsons, a leading interpreter of this phase of Weber's work, calls this change the "philosophical breakthrough": the rise of the great world religions. In each of these—Confucianism, Brahminism, Buddhism, Greek ethical philosophy, monotheistic Judaism and its later offshoots, Christianity and Islam—the nature of humankind's relationship to the physical and social worlds changes. The change consists of separating the idea of the natural world from the idea of the spiritual world. Instead of gods and spirits routinely intervening in the world around us (as in Greek mythology), there exists another, very different realm: heaven and hell, another sphere of reality, a world of ideal principles. The consequences of this change were far-reaching. As long as the world is in the play of gods and spirits, it cannot be taken as a very predictable place. One can only try to placate its invisible rulers by ceremonies and sacrifices or to control them by magic. But once the spiritual realm becomes separate, both nature and society can be treated in a stabler way. First, by removing animistic entities the world becomes open to rational explanation. The door is opened to scientific investigation and explanation. This new-found rationalism can spill over into the social realm as well. People can think of laws based on consistent general principles, instead of bowing before the eccentricities of sanctified tradition. Political and social arrangements, too, become subject to a rational critique—although this latter implication was not really seized upon until the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Second, religion itself can develop in new directions. Primitive religions merely describe an accepted if invisible side of the ordinary world. One placates the gods in order to kill one's enemies and make one's crops grow; one does not worry about being good or going to heaven. (Think of the heroes of the Odyssey or the early part of the Old Testament.) The philosophical breakthrough opens up two new possibilities: (1) The spiritual realm can now be a place to which one escapes from the trials and tribulations of the world. If the righteous individual—the one who follows all the rituals and does all his or her duties—nevertheless has bad fortune in the

world, it does not fundamentally concern that person. In fact, the material world can now be seen as a dangerous temptation, for the truly holy person concentrates only on salvation. (2) The ideas of good and evil can develop separately from the ideas of worldly success and failure. For the primitive person sin simply means misfortune; as long as one is prosperous, healthy, and powerful, one has a clear conscience. The philosophical breakthrough puts a new ethical obligation on human beings. They are now to be concerned with justice and injustice toward their fellow human beings; conscience becomes its own reward and punishment. These new possibilities, especially the second, are potential forces for great changes in society. The new ideas of good and evil and the concept of a world of perfection can provide tremendous leverage for changing the world to make it live up to these ideals. Here in antiquity we find the basis of Weber's Protestant ethic, which was to play a powerful role in the takeoff of industrialization 2,000 years later. There is one more crucial attribute of the religions of the philosophical breakthrough: They are all universalistic. Earlier religions are limited to the members of one family, one tribe, or one ethnic group. The world religions, emerging in or near empires with unlimited ambitions of conquest, exclude no one. Indeed, earlier religions are tolerant; they conceive of a pluralistic world of many peoples, each with their patron gods. But for Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and so on there is only one god or spiritual reality; all else is false, illusory, or subordinate. This shift is crucial because religions mark the limits of solidarity in society. In primitive and traditional societies, people are bound together with those who share a religious community. One can and must trust people who worship the same household or tribal gods. But strangers—people with different gods—are alien beings who cannot be trusted. One result of this setup was a widespread prohibition on usury—lending money at interest to other members of one's own religious group. Outside the group one could bargain in as cutthroat a fashion as possible, since there were no ethical obligations toward outsiders. Thus, to universalize a religion was abruptly to broaden the community within which peaceful social transactions could regularly be carried out. The philosophical breakthrough opened many of the doors to industrialization: laying the basis for a moral community of trust underlying peaceful commerce; rationalizing the legal system; motivating people to remake political, social, and economic institutions in keeping with an imperative to transform the world more closely to the ideal. But these implications took a long time to work themselves out, and not all the world religions opened up just the right path to the transformation of society. Weber's first major writing, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is on this subject. It selects for careful study only one thread in the complex tapestry that was rising capitalism—the role that religious beliefs played in motivating the businessmen who developed capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Weber points out that the attitude of the modern capitalist is not simply the drive for economic gain; this ac-

quisitiveness is found everywhere in world history without resulting in a mass-production economy. What is significant for a large-scale, profit-making system, rather, is the methodical attitude: the making of a continual series of small savings and small profits that gradually add up to a long-term, mass-production economy and, ultimately, to far greater profits than the greedy, one-shot businessperson could ever attain. Weber saw this methodical, "rationalized" attitude emerging first in another sphere—the religious ideas of the most radical Protestants soon after the Reformation. These were especially the followers of Calvin, who were prominent in the most commercialized areas of the Netherlands, France, Germany, and, above all, England and America. They no longer believed in salvation by prayers, charity, or religious rituals; they believed that God was an omnipotent, inexorable power, who had already picked out those who were to be saved and those who were damned. The psychological effect of this doctrine of predestination, Weber declared, must have been to put a tremendous strain on the believers. Was one saved or not? One could do nothing specifically religious to help oneself; priests and monks were no better than anyone else (and quite possibly worse, since they could do no honest work); hence these radical Protestants eliminated monasteries and tried to make priests as much like lay persons as possible. What one could do, though, was to work—hard, methodologically, without coveting gains but continually pressing on, until by one's own success one felt that one did fit into God's scheme of predestination, and that one was one of the elect. In this way, the religious beliefs of radical Protestants helped produce just the attitudes that made successful capitalists and thus fostered the industrial revolution. This theory, known as "the Weber thesis," has been argued pro and con ever since it first came out in 1904. Unfortunately, it has become so famous that many scholars have attempted to refute it (or support it) without knowledge of Weber's later work on the other world religions, or of his general sociology, in which he ties religious ideas to organizational forms, status groups, and political struggles. Weber's theory of capitalism has been interpreted narrowly as an argument that ideas determine social change. Probably the reason it has been so popular is that it apparently refutes Marx, showing that religion is the cause of material conditions instead of vice versa. This position has been especially fostered in the United States by Talcott Parsons, who translated The Protestant Ethic in 1930, which was years ahead of translations of any of Weber's other major works. Now, however, we have a wider picture of what Weber actually discovered. The study of radical Protestant beliefs was just a preliminary analysis of recent Western religious history; later he would develop a massive world comparison of all the great religions and their social effects. Weber completed The Religion of China, The Religion of India, and Ancient Judaism; he died before he could begin his studies of Islam and early Christianity. His broad conclusion was that only a certain kind of breakthrough—the mixture of the ethical and scientific rationalism of Greek philosophy with the Judaic- derived legalism and world-changing activism that went to make up

Christianity—gave the impetus for rationalizing social institutions and changing the world in the economic and political upheavals of modernity. Confucianism, Brahminism, Buddhism, and Islam he found entwined with the patrimonial order of stratification in such ways that they strengthened the unpredictable, irrational aspects of their societies rather than weakened them. In Europe the key story concerns the growth of the Christian Church— the first large-scale truly rationalized bureaucratic organization in history— and its growing consolidation with the remnants of the Roman Empire, itself legally rationalized under the influence of Greek culture. The age-old pendulum of political consolidation and disintegration swung on, but was nearing the end of its monotonous cycle through time. By the sixteenth century kings began to build the bureaucracies—using priests as their first bureaucrats—that would eventually destroy the fragmented and conflict- ridden feudal system, establish a predictable set of laws and a trustworthy monetary system, bring peace and order to large expanses of territory, and carry out regular tax policies. Commerce spread; mechanical inventions were sought and made; and handicraft industries developed. Western Europe perched on the brink of industrialization, held back only by government mercantilist policies of establishing monopolies and by the feudal bondage of labor to the soil. The final obstacles fell in England—ironically, the Western European country in which the feudal gentry had fought the most successful battle against the king and in which royal absolutism was least far advanced. After the civil war of the seventeenth century the small gentry class gained control of the state bureaucracy and used it to further their economic interests—moving the peasants off the land, thereby creating a labor force for the textile mills, and establishing an economic policy that would remove restraints on competition. The battle was fought and won by radical Protestants: men who felt that work, honesty, and rule following were the commandments of God and who were further impelled by a powerful vision of the ideal world of heaven and hell. Their emergence at this propitious time in history is not yet understood, but the tradition from which they emerged is clear: They revived the early spirit of Christianity and brought to fruition the world-transforming potential of the religious breakthroughs of antiquity. Once the industrial revolution was in full swing, its progress was unim- pedible. New social classes appeared, transforming politics from the exclusive province of military aristocrats and court cabals to an object of mass movements and bureaucratic manipulations. Science, education, and mass communications were unleashed, to transform again and again the nature of stratification and of industry. England rose to wealth and world power. The rulers of other nations, however fearful of modernization's destructive effect on the old order that supported them, were forced to emulate England in order to keep pace militarily; otherwise, they faced the risk of becoming colonies of the modernized states.

From his towering intellectual vantage point, Weber watched the panorama of events flow through the centuries. Die Entzauberung der Welt, he called it—the disenchantment of the world, the master trend of history. Rationalization steadily pushes back the uncertain, the mythical, the poetic. Once all the world was seen through a veil of ritual and ceremony, goddesses and fire-breathing dragons, and the thousand fearful chances of everyday life; now daily railroad trains bring tourists to the castles of Transylvania. Even the God-fearing Protestant entrepreneur has disappeared, replaced by the bureaucratic employee. Since the modern system is established, it runs of its own accord. But the Protestant ethic is not dead, it is merely secularized. Its spirit hangs on in the very institutions of modern society and in the tightly controlled personalities of people who work in a world of rules and regulations, merit ratings, and bureaucratic security. In an America split in cultural war between a white middle-class generation still deep in the Protestant ethic and that generation's own sons and daughters, who have rejected the "uptight" world in alliance with the members of a black culture that escaped such a world only by being kept at the bottom, Weber's sociology strikes the central theme. No one saw more clearly than Weber the ways in which our lives are "haunted by the ghosts of dead religious beliefs." For all his voluminous writings Weber was first and foremost a political man. From his early career he was active in the law courts and government agencies of Berlin. His interest in economics was first stimulated when reform groups commissioned him to study the problems of labor immigration in East Prussia and stock-market manipulations. He began with his father's upper-class imperialist loyalties, but increasing exposure to the hardships of the lower classes shifted his sympathies gradually to the left. Nevertheless, he had no illusions about the costs of reform. He regarded the Socialist utopia as an ideology with which the leaders of the Social Democratic party kept their followers in line, and he was in accord with his young friend Robert Michels' analysis of the "Iron Law of Oligarchy" in party politics. The Marxists' flaw was that they failed to see the bureaucratic nature of the modern economy, whether it be capitalist or Socialist. Weber became interested in Russia during the abortive revolution of 1905 and learned Russian in order to follow the events firsthand. His analysis was a remarkable foresight into the Soviet period. Should Russia lose a major European war and the revolutionary left come to power, he predicted, Russia would experience a bureaucratization of the entire social structure such as the world had never seen. Considering Weber's views on the quality of life in a bureaucracy, his expectations were anything but optimistic. "The dictatorship of the official and not of the proletariat is on the march," he wrote. The situation in Germany was scarcely more hopeful. Weber's growing disillusionment with conservative nationalism came as he watched Germany's inept foreign policy, losing allies and progressively isolating it-

self while at the same time carrying on an arms race and an increasingly strident campaign of nationalist self-glorification. He placed the blame on Germany's political structure: an impotent parliament incapable of controlling an irresponsible state bureaucracy; an army staffed by the defensively arrogant aristocrats of a bygone era; and a foolish hereditary monarch initiating policies that trapped the rest of the nation in their wake. In the 1890s Weber took part in efforts to create a responsible democratic party, but he dropped out when its hopelessness became apparent. When World War I finally broke out, the release from years of tension came as a relief. Weber was at first enthusiastic. "In spite of all," he declared it "a great and wonderful war." As a fifty-year-old reserve officer in the German army, he was called to duty as the director of military hospitals in the Heidelberg area. A year later he retired and went to Berlin to wield what political influence he could to end the war. After his first enthusiasm had worn off, Weber quickly realized that Germany's military and political leadership was incapable of carrying out a victorious policy and that a prolongation of the war could only result in the destruction of German—indeed, of European—power and the turning over of world domination to America. By 1918 his last loyalties to the Kaiser were gone, and he published a series of newspaper articles calling for a democratic constitution for postwar Germany. The fall of the old regime seemed to take a personal weight from Weber's shoulders. From the Versailles peace conference, where he served on the German delegation, he wrote that he slept soundly at night for the first time in many years. Even his inability to teach was overcome. He accepted a professorship at Munich, where he lectured to enormous crowds of students, intellectuals, and public dignitaries. Politics suddenly showed opportunities. Weber became the leader of a new, liberal, democratic party. An archrealist, he nevertheless saw a ray of hope. Political parties might be corrupt oligarchies, but only within free parliamentary competition might leaders arise capable of controlling the recalcitrant state bureaucracy and giving the nation intelligent policies. But time had run out. In 1919 Weber fell ill of pneumonia, and he died the next year at the age of fifty-six. His party collapsed; the first of the German republic's many economic and political crises was upon it. Responsible leadership would not be forthcoming; the irresponsible leaders were already gathering in the beer gardens of Munich. Politics is a dangerous and morally taxing vocation, Weber had told his students in one of his famous last lectures. The idealist as well as the cynic is caught in webs of consequences far beyond those intended in his or her acts. Ideals alone are not enough; they must be accompanied by hard realism, sympathetic imagination, and an unyielding sense of responsibility. The following might have been his own epitaph for his accomplishments in the realm of knowledge as well as his failures in the realm of politics: Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth—that man

would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say "In spite of all!" has the calling for politics.1 'Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 128.

CHAPTER EIGHT Sigmund Freud: Conquistador of the Irrational The cataclysmic twentieth-century wars had yet to burst upon the face of humankind; Darwin's Origin of Species was three years away from publication, and Einstein's birth lay twenty-three years in the future, when Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was born in Freiburg, Moravia. Western civilization was intact. Europe enjoyed an uneasy peace, while America was on the verge of civil war. In modern times Freud has become a legendary figure in the history of science. He is remembered as the founder of psychoanalysis, a method for understanding human motivation and a technique for healing the psyche. He presented himself in his autobiography as a scientist; yet he opened a crack in the scientific edifice of Reason, which had dominated the intellectual scene since the Enlightenment. The social philosophers of that period, including Montesquieu, Diderot, d'Alembert, Rousseau, Condorcet, and Turgot, subscribed wholeheartedly to the Aristotelian dictum that humankind is composed of rational animals. The philosophers' vision, which the founding fathers of sociology attempted to put into practice, was of free rational humans emerging from centuries of ignorance, fear, and superstition into a bright new dawn of Reason, science, and unlimited progress. Humankind, the moving force of society, was to be guided by rational knowledge in a conscious attempt to remake the world in its own image and thereby shape its planetary destiny. Freud's greatest discovery was the systematic unearthing of the vast and hidden continent of the human unconscious. Via the method of psychoanalysis he probed the depths of the psyche and uncovered the irrational side of human nature. It is one of the paradoxes of Freud's life that the work of this eminent scientist and man of reason should have heralded the end of the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment dream of the eighteenth-century philosophes died in Freud, a child of that Enlightenment. No longer could the Western individual trust solely and naively in Reason to solve the problems of collective living. Freud showed that the individual is basically 140

a nonrational being, driven by such emotional forces as "sexual instincts" and "repressed wishes." Although Freud did not discover the unconscious, he was the first to give content to what had previously been an unfilled form. The idea of the unconscious had been brewing in the German intellectual climate since the publication of Eduard von Hartmann's The Philosophy of the Unconscious in 1859. But the metaphysician von Hartmann did not claim to have explored the region of the unconscious; rather, he arrived there by a process of abstract reasoning and found "will" and "intellect" (parallel to Freud's formulations of "id" and "ego") in a state of conflict. Nor was the nineteenth century the first age in the history of Western thought to have conceived this idea; it may be traced back to antiquity. The idea of an unconscious in humankind lurked in Plato's parable of the cave more than two millennia prior to Freud. EARLY LIFE AND WORK As a child, Freud was the center of attention in his Viennese family's household. He was so much his mother's favorite that she discontinued his younger sister's piano lessons because the ten-year-old Sigmund complained that the noise disturbed his studies. Freud was a child prodigy who began reading Shakespeare at age eight and was later fascinated by Thiers' Consulate and Empire. A hero-worshiper during adolescence, he dreamed of becoming a great general. He was so taken with the romance of Napoleon that he pasted onto the backs of his toy wooden soldiers little labels bearing the names of the French emperor's marshals. Freud graduated summa cum laude from high school. During the last six of his eight years at Sperl Gymnasium he ranked number one in his class and occupied such a privileged position that he was hardly ever questioned in class. His choice of profession was determined to a great extent by his social position as a Viennese Jew. The alternatives open to him were those of industry, business, law, and medicine. His intellectual bent eliminated the first two, and he considered taking up the study of jurisprudence. However, although he felt no direct attraction to medicine, he was motivated by the sort of curiosity that is directed more toward human concerns than toward natural objects. It was a period of indecision. On the one hand, he was influenced to study law by a school friend who was later to become a famous politician; on the other hand, he was attracted by the then topical evolutionary theories of Darwin, which offered hopes for an extraordinary advance in understanding the world. Freud reached his decision to enter the field of medicine upon hearing a dramatic reading of Goethe's essay on Nature. His youthful idealism was given direction by the old master's romantic picture of Nature as a bountiful mother, who allowed her favorites the privilege of exploring her secrets.

Freud had come to believe that the secret of power lay in understanding rather than in force. Swayed by the late-nineteenth-century Zeitgeist, he questioned humankind's relation to itself as well as its place in Nature. With his father's blessings and financial support, Freud embarked on his career as a medical student at the University of Vienna in the autumn of 1873. His work load averaged over twenty-five hours per week, including lectures and laboratories, in such broadly diversified fields as anatomy, chemistry, botany, microscopy, mineralogy, physics, spectrum analysis, biology, histology, Aristotelian logic, physiology, and zoology. The budding genius thereby acquired a solid scientific background in addition to the habits of hard work and self-discipline. During this academically successful period Freud began to recognize the limitations as well as the capabilities of his intellectual gifts. He learned also the truth of the Mephistophelean dictum: "It is in vain that you range round from science to science; each man learns only what he can." After receiving his first grant in 1876 to study the gonadic structure of eels, Freud found a temporary home in Ernst Briicke's physiology laboratory. Briicke was for Freud a role model as well as an intellectual mentor. He was an exemplar of the person of science—uncompromising, ascetic, disciplined. An austere German Protestant professor with a Prussian accent, Briicke represented the antithesis of the Viennese schlamperai (or "sloppy thinkers") with whom Freud was already familiar. Briicke's Institute of Physiology was part of a far-reaching scientific movement known as the Helmholtz school of medicine, whose teachings made a lasting impression on Freud. Its founders, all to become famous scientists, had sworn a youthful oath to uphold the principles: No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism. In those cases which cannot at the time be explained by these forces one has either to find the specific way or form of their action by means of the physical-mathematical method or to assume new forces equal in dignity to the chemical-physical forces inherent in matter, reducible to the forces of attraction and repulsion.1 By 1870 this current of thought had achieved complete dominion over the minds of the German psychologists and medical teachers; it stimulated research everywhere. Helmholtz's mid-nineteenth-century mechanical view of the universe, which reduced all natural phenomena to the forces of attraction and repulsion, was incorporated by Briicke into his Lectures on Physiology (1874). The student Freud was captivated by his teacher's account of physical physiology. Briicke defined physiology as the science of organisms. He distinguished between organisms and machines; the latter were mere dead material entities in action, while the former possessed the faculty of assimilation. 'Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, edited and abridged by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1963), p. 29. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. New York, 1961.

However, both were considered to be phenomena of the physical world. According to the principle of the conservation of energy, organisms and machines were similarly composed of systems of atoms and driven by forces. In science the real causes were symbolized by the word "forces." The less scientists knew about these causes, claimed Briicke, the more kinds of forces they had to distinguish: mechanical, electrical, magnetic, light, heat, and so forth. Progress in knowledge had reduced these forces to two—attraction and repulsion. Briicke extended this line of reasoning to the human organism. He incorporated this nineteenth-century image of humankind into two volumes of what was then known about the interplay of physical forces inside the living organism. That Freud was influenced strongly by the content and spirit of these ideas is revealed in his 1926 characterization of the dynamic aspect of psychoanalysis as forces that assist or inhibit one another and combine with and enter into compromises with one another. His image of the human being, as we shall see, was tinged heavily with the mechanistic view, which he absorbed as a student at Briicke's institute. With the aid of a photographic memory Freud passed his final medical examination in 1881 with flying colors. During that year he found Theodor Meynerfs lectures on psychiatry of particular interest because of their non- laboratory approach to medical science. Although he wanted to pursue a theoretical career, his financial situation upon receipt of his M.D. was so shaky that he accepted Briicke's advice to abandon this ambition. He served as doctor in residence at the Vienna General Hospital, where he gained three years of experience in surgery, internal medicine, dermatology, and psychiatry. One year before his marriage to Martha Bernays in 1886, the twenty- nine-year-old Freud was seeking the professional recognition that would enable him to establish a private practice and to start a family. He hoped that his discovery of the clinical use of cocaine as a local anesthetic would earn him early fame. Using himself as a guinea pig Freud observed that cocaine produced exhilaration and lasting euphoria; it increased his capacities for self- control and intensive mental work. Although it aided him in controlling the contents and flow of his consciousness, preoccupation with the magical rather than the medicinal properties of the drug cost him credit for the find. A younger colleague, Carl Koller, won the distinction of inaugurating the use of cocaine on the sensitive eye surface. Freud had yet to prove his worth. The Interpretation of Dreams Prior to Freud the field of psychiatry was relatively virgin territory. The great French scientists Jean Charcot and his student Pierre Janet had established a lone outpost with their work on hypnosis and hysteria.2 The relationship between Charcot, with whom Freud studied during the years 1885-1886, and Janet was akin to that between Saint-Simon and Comte. 2Hysteria may be briefly defined as the experiencing of mental anxiety and/or bodily pain without an apparent physical cause.

Saint-Simon and Charcot were the inspirational thinkers, while Comte and Janet, their disciples, were the systematizers. It was Janet who delved deeply into the psychic process of hysteria and found, according to the theories of heredity that dominated fin de siecle French psychology, that the disease was a form of degeneration of the nervous system that manifested itself in congenital "weakness." Since Freud's pioneering psychiatric work, forms of mental illness (including hysteria) have come to be viewed largely as socially conditioned, although organic causes can combine with social ones. The background role of heredity in mental illness remains obscure, even after almost a century of research. Upon publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 Freud began to emerge from obscurity. He had been practicing neurology and psychiatry for a decade in Vienna. In 1897 he began an arduous self-analysis, which gave him greater insight into the resistance of his patients and laid the foundations for his system of psychoanalysis. His revolutionary scientific work examined for the first time in a comprehensive and systematic manner the previously unsuspected notion that the fulfillment of a wish was the essential motive of a dream. The conquistador of the irrational had struck ore in an unexplored land. His first great discovery on this hidden continent was the "dirty little secret" that people lust and hate. Although this came as no surprise to the lower classes, the established middle and upper classes, including their learned scientists and scholars, were shocked by such a picture of themselves. The mere mention of Freud's name was considered impolite and risque in the genteel drawing rooms of Viennese society. Respectable society followed the leaders of nineteenth-century European intellectual life in considering their civilization the summit of human progress. The social evolutionary trend of nineteenth-century sociological and anthropological thought, including the work of Comte, Frazer, Morgan, Tylor, and Spencer, had convinced modern Europeans of their cultural superiority to the so- called barbaric or primitive peoples. These modern Europeans, secure in their conversation parlor, stereotyped native tribespeople as packs of painted savage, drum-beating cannibals, and promiscuous sexual libertarians. Since the nineteenth century had a way of turning Victorian moral absolutes into hereditary categories, Europeans came to believe the myth that they were racially superior to black Africans. The latter were considered to be subhuman, abnormal, and sexually unrestrained. Freud disturbed Europe's sleep by showing in his case studies and dream analyses of respectable society matrons that the moral barrier between "normal" and "pathological" scarcely existed and that the sexual underground was much bigger than anyone was willing to admit. Repression Freud's greatest discovery on this new continent was the phenomenon of repression. The entire structure of psychoanalysis is based upon the foun-

dation of repression as it operates in the human being. According to Freud, random thoughts, dreams, slips of the tongue, neurotic symptoms, and daily mistakes all have meanings (that is, express intentions or purposes) that are unknown to the person. They are what he calls "unconscious ideas." The individual who is undergoing psychoanalysis resists becoming aware of unconscious ideas that may threaten his or her established sense of self. The individual's rejection of an idea or a desire that he or she nevertheless possesses is repression. It functions to keep things out of consciousness; its consequence is that the individual refuses to recognize the realities of his or her human nature. In his first major work Freud divides the mental apparatus into three components. He compares the unconscious system to an anteroom, which houses the various excitations, desires, ideas, drives, and instincts. These elements push forward to gain admission into a second and much smaller room that houses consciousness. A doorkeeper or "censor" stands between these two rooms in the parlor of the preconscious, so to speak. The doorkeeper scrutinizes ideas and excitations that seek admittance, and those that are turned back at the threshold are repressed. Freud found in numerous clinical cases that repression occurred where there was a conflict between opposing wishes and desires. In addition, he found f"iat experiences that were the occasions for such conflict almost invariably had sexual content. Freud relates the case of a girl who felt great relief upon her older sister's death. Since she could not recognize consciously the envy of her deceased sister, whose husband was now available to marry her, the girl became hysterical. She had repressed the thought, "Now he is free and can marry me." During the course of psychoanalysis she was able to remember the thought and to reproduce the intense excitement that she had experienced upon the occasion of her sister's death. In a burst of emotion, her conscious mind had suddenly recognized the unconsciously repressed material. By reliving that trauma from her past, she effected her own cure. Next came one of Freud's keenest insights: that people with the highest ideals tend to have the greatest repression of strong aggressive and sexual desires. This empirical generalization, based on his observations of patients, suggested that ideals were founded on repression and that they took their vitality from the suppressed feelings themselves. In short, uptight, honest, hard-working, righteous, authoritarian believers in the Protestant ethic derive their energetic tension from love and hate turned in upon themselves. Freud later cited Woodrow Wilson's intense moral idealism as an example of this character type. A third discovery, one that stemmed directly from the theory of repression, was that children have sex lives. The seemingly obvious notion that children are sexual creatures so roused the ire of his contemporaries that they ostracized him. However, Freud stuck to his empirical guns. In analyzing dreams and neurotic symptoms, he found that they contained a core that represented a return or regression to early childhood experiences.

Assuming the validity of the hypothesis of the unconscious, it follows that children learn to repress their emotions. At one point they are innocent and unrepressed. The unconscious and conscious are not yet separated. Wishes to play with their orifices, genitals, and feces are freely indulged. It is only through the process of socialization, when the child begins to internalize the parents' values of cleanliness, propriety, and order, that the child learns to behave in a "proper" manner and to tailor himself or herself to society's norms. FREUD'S EXPLANATORY SYSTEMS Freud evolved several major explanatory systems during the course of his career: (1) the theory of primary and secondary process; (2) the theory of stages of sexual development; (3) the libido theory; (4) the trinitarian theory of the psychic apparatus; and (5) the theory of Eros versus the death instinct. Although none of these systems is self-contained and discrete from the others, we may isolate each for the purposes of analysis. The fabric of Freud's thought is sewn with many threads, and in order to unravel the whole, it helps to proceed from earlier to later systems. Primary and Secondary Process Freud's earliest system began with the act of repression itself, which he explained in terms of the "primary process," as expressed in wishes, symbols, and fantasies; and the "secondary process" of our socialized awareness, which censors and controls the former. Each concept may be used to refer to either ways of thinking or ways of managing energy. Freud contends that humankind transcends its animality by undergoing a basic change from primary process, ruled by the unconscious system and the vicissitudes of the id instincts, to secondary process, dominated by the conscious system and the demands of the ego. Although primary process persists into adulthood, the mature ego is able to control the childlike id by denying gratification, restraining pleasure, working to achieve rational goals, and remaining secure from irrational passions. Freud describes this dynamic shift within the human psyche as the transformation of the pleasure principle into the reality principle. Beyond seeking mere instinctual satisfaction, human beings develop the faculty of reason and learn to test reality; they discover that making distinctions, such as good from bad, true from false, and useful from useless, is the beginning of wisdom. Human beings thereby metamorphose from pleasure-loving babies into conscious, thinking subjects located within a social system that demands that they function properly in their economic roles. Of course, they are free to have a fantasy life; however, they must ultimately subordinate their mentality to the reality principle (that is, they must obey society's norms and live according to its values). They may have strange dreams, weird thoughts, irrational wishes, powerful desires, or immoral fantasies, but they

must not let the imagination run away with itself to the point of excluding external reality. For example, James Thurber's beloved character Walter Mitty imagines himself to be a famous brain surgeon in the act of performing a crucial operation on a millionaire banker who is a close personal friend of Roosevelt, only to have a parking lot attendant shout at him to stop his car before he slams into a Buick. The Stages of Sexual Development One of Freud's major hypotheses is that the first five years are crucial in the further psychological development of the person. It is during this phase of life that the link between the individual and society is forged. Talcott Parsons later interpreted this to mean that the child acquires a superego (or conscience) during this period by identifying with parental values. Since the parents are society's cultural agents, the child will learn the dominant values from them. If cultural values are success oriented, as they are in America, the child will be encouraged to gear its organism toward the achievement of such desirable goals as position, power, and prestige. The will toward acquisition of goods, from soap to status, is thereby built into the individual by society from an early age. From his observations of patients and their neuroses Freud developed a model of five overlapping stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital. During the earliest stage infants derive gratification from sucking the mother's breast. The erogenous zones of the mouth and lips are the first to come into play in deriving sexual pleasure. During this oral, or cannibalistic, phase the amoral baby makes no distinction between taking food and sexual activity. The suckling aims to incorporate the object (mother's breast) into its own body; it still lives according to the primary process of striving for instant gratification and has not yet developed the secondary process by which it distinguishes itself from the world and separates subject from object. The baby is the universe; it is at one with the environment. During the latter part of this stage the child begins biting; it becomes oral-sadistic. It begins to objectify and to differentiate itself from its surroundings. Although it does not yet know their names, it begins to locate such objects as the breast, the nipple, the blanket, the rattle. It encounters its first significant "other"—mother. It is cutting its first teeth and it explores the world by grasping things, shoving them into its mouth, and chewing on them. It is not sure whether to bite or suck. It is ambivalent. This primeval uncertainty, Freud argues, is the prototype for the polar emotions of love and hate. During the anal phase of the organization of the libido the child concentrates its energy on the anus as a source of gratification. The child becomes fascinated with its feces and enjoys playing with them. Excrement is viewed as an extension of itself without any connotations of good or bad; it is neutral waste. Through the mother the child learns, via the diaper change, that excrement is bad. This routine is a rather unpleasant task, however loving the mother. The helpless nursling, who is emotionally sensitive to even the

subtlest nuance of facial expression and tactile sensation, sees and feels the parent's distaste at this daily ritual. The role of this early memory trace or psychic imprinting upon the baby can hardly be overestimated in the course of individual development. Excrement becomes negative, associated in the child's mind with the smelly, dirty "bad-me." The clean "good-me" of the child is rewarded with parental smiles and verbal acclaim for not soiling its clothes. Toilet training is the beginning of civilization in the individual. The seeds of society and repression are sown by teaching the child self- (that is, bowel) control. During the phallic stage of psychosexual development the individual discovers the genital erogenous zone as a source of pleasure. The penis for the male and the clitoris for the female become the primary organs of sexual excitement. Freud understood the initial sexual instincts of childhood to be largely objectless, or "autoerotic." The key stage of development is the phallic, at which the Oedipus complex emerges, for this is the point at which sexual drives become firmly attached to an external object. Harking back to the Greek myth of Oedipus Rex to find an archetype for his clinical diagnoses, Freud theorized that the young male desires his mother and hates and fears his father. (For the female child, he expected the process to be the reverse.) The male child resolves this conflict by repressing the wish to kill his father; he identifies with him instead and makes him his personal ego- ideal. Thereafter, the internalized father (or superego) punishes the child by making him feel guilty whenever he wishes for something forbidden. The external punisher has taken up residence inside the child's own mind. According to Freud, sexual interests are submerged during the latency period between the ages of five and twelve, to reappear again at puberty in the genital or adult stage of sexual organization. During these years between the phallic stage and puberty, the child learns from its initial social environment, its family and school, how to channel its sexual feelings into socially acceptable behavior. Although Freud postulated the Oedipus complex as sociologically universal, ethnographic work by Malinowski and other cultural observers has disconfirmed this hypothesis. The concept does, however, provide the student of humankind with a heuristic device for understanding the individual's advance from bondage to freedom. As long as the individual remains attached in an emotionally dependent way to the parents, personal independence has yet to become a reality. Freud based his encompassing theory of neurosis upon fixation at the oedipal or one of the preoedipal stages, due to some conflict over gratification. In addition, some personal trauma in adult life may bring about temporary neurotic regression to an earlier mode of gratification. The Theory of Libido Freud's image of humankind reflected the mechanistic bias of his contemporaries. For Freud, as for other middle-class thinkers of his time, humans

were perceived as primarily isolated and self-sufficient. They were alone in a universe not of their making and found themselves, somewhat akin to Hobbes' imaginary atomic individual, surrounded by others in the same predicament. Uprooted from the medieval context of soil, hearth, and community, nineteenth-century urban individuals' needs for commodities drove them to the marketplace, where they encountered other individuals who needed what they had to sell and who had to sell what they needed. Society's cement consisted in this mutually profitable exchange. The wheeling and dealing for the material advantages took place on the vast stock-exchange floor of life under the guidance of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the self-adjusting market. Freud's libido theory, as we shall see, expressed the same idea in psychological rather than economic terms. The French aristocrat and homme de belles-lettres La Mettrie argued cogently in 1748 that humankind is a complicated machine. Although Freud probably never read La Mettrie, he did pick up this theme. Freud's mechanical human was driven by libido (basic sexual energy) and regulated by the need to reduce tension to a certain minimal threshold. Pleasure consisted in an unwinding or reducing of tissue tensions and in the avoidance of pain. The barometer of well-being was a kind of tepid mean between ecstasy and depression. Males and their mechanical brides sought each other out in order to arrive at mutual satisfaction of their libidinous needs. Nevertheless, they remained as fundamentally alienated from one another as seller and customer on the market. Despite their mutual attraction, they remained at opposite magnetic poles and could never transcend their sepa- rateness. According to Freud, humankind's nature is fundamentally aggressive and asocial, and humans are social animals only by virtue of the necessity to satisfy the ravenous libido. The concept of libido is essentially a nineteenth-century economic idea in psychological dress, in the sense that it is conceived of as a fixed quantity subject to the laws of matter. One may spend it as one pleases, but once it is spent it cannot be recovered. In the same way, Freud treats love as property or capital. Love was considered as a valuable commodity to be invested wisely and not merely to be frittered away on every passing stranger. Hence, Freud despaired of the possibility of altruistic love, except among the psychoanalytic elite; he ridiculed the commandment to "love thy neighbor as thyself" as an absurdity. Ego, Id, and Superego Freud's mature system emerged as a three-element conception of the psychic topography. The ego (cognition of the external world), the id (the emotional or instinctual being), and the superego (identifications and social ideals) were portrayed as dynamically interrelated regions or "psychic localities" within the mind of humankind. These concepts are ideal types in the Weberian sense. They function as diagnostic categories, which are neither separately observable entities nor physical portions of the brain;

rather they are interactive mental principles that are always found in mixed form. For example, the primitive id drives become fixed on (or "cathected to") certain objects, such as mother, father, or self. These object cathexes are incorporated by the unconscious system of the mental apparatus and act as the building blocks of the emerging character structure of the individual. The ego is a structure or organization of the mental process by which the human being stays in contact with social reality. It represents the viewpoint of Reason, which constrains the limitless passions and impulsive desires of the irrational id. The ego simultaneously draws energy from and acts as the agent of the id. The outpouring of "how to" books for single men and women—how to find a mate or how to seduce a member of the opposite sex most effectively and deliriously—illustrates this point. The superego emerges as a function of the ego. It arbitrates the relationship between the ego and the external world and even punishes the ego. The superego is the interior judge, which represents the moral demands of society and reinforces the authority principle as it operates in the affairs of human beings. One of the major fruits of this tripartite system was Freud's essay "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego," in which he set forth an explanation of the foundation of social unity and its dissolution. Taking Gustave Le Bon's treatise on The Crowd as a springboard for analysis, Freud sought to fathom the willingness with which the ordinarily civilized individual subordinates his or her ego to the mindlessness and destructive tendencies of the group (that is, individuals en masse). Since Freud's basic premise was that social cohesion is based on sexual organization, it followed that the libidinal bond, rather than a community of interest, was the power that cemented the group. Beyond sex, what held society together was the dynamic psychic mechanism of identification, whereby a number of separate individuals join together by substituting a common object for their ego ideal. Freud interpreted the ruler as a father image, an answer to people's wish to be led. Thus, the persecuting primal father becomes the "cultural superego," or what Comte called the "Great Being of Humanity," who is incarnated as the totalitarian dictator and invested by the people with supreme temporal power. Charismatic leaders, as Weber reminds us, derive their domination from neither legal nor traditional sources; rather, their authority and power to command are founded in the collectivity's perception of their possession of extraordinary, unique, and magical qualities. Alexander the Great, Caesar, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, Napoleon, Lenin, and Hitler are examples of such politically charismatic personality types. Louis XIV, the divine-right monarch of seventeenth-century France, epitomized the secular sanctity of this administrative function in the famous historical aside, "L'etat, c'est mot" (I am the state). The absolutist political leader thereby places himself or herself in the stead of the subjects' parents, and the subjects tend to obey readily and even to worship that leader.

Eros Versus the Death Instinct Freud's culminating explanatory system seeks speculatively to understand the individual and history in life-and-death terms. In the history of culture Eros may be distinguished from Agape; the former recalls the Greek ideal of passionate love between human beings by means of which each overcomes the sense of separateness, and the latter refers to the concept of altruistic love, according to which we are all one. Freud treats the two of these together in contrast to Thanatos, which represents the personification or mask of death in Greek mythology; it is the harbinger of suicide, war, pestilence, and famine. Like elliptic cycles, each of these heavenly powers, as Freud called them, recurs periodically in the rise and fall of civilizations and individuals. Transsexuality is a recent gender category in the sociology of sex; and despite Freud's scientific metholology and tolerant attitude toward homo sexualis, he had no transsexual clients in Victorian-era Vienna. Hence, his theory was consequently void of their mention. In the life of individuals Eros stands for the sexual instincts. More specifically, it points toward those modes of human sexuality that have been categorized as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and transsexual. Whereas the dominant social value of heterosexuality may be understood as the attainment of genitality, and homosexuality as oedipal identification with the wrong sex, bisexuality gained little or no stature in Freud's psy- chomorphology, except for the indication that polymorphous perversity might be a characteristic of early childhood. However, one of the most revolutionary implications of Freud's psychology of sex is the postulate of the universal bisexuality of human beings. In seeking to explain neuroses and perversions, Freud borrowed his colleague Wilhelm Fleiss's concept of constitutional bisexuality. Fleiss contended that this condition is biologically based in male and female characteristics, which are present in both men and women. Although Freud rejected the organismic in favor of the psychological viewpoint, he accepted the validity of the theory of bisexuality as explaining many traits of human behavior. Freud's brilliant and wayward disciple Carl Jung picked up this theme of male-in-female and female-in- male, translating it in terms of archetypes of human consciousness rather than biological fixtures or psychological entities. Whatever the individual's mode of conduct, the theory of bisexuality sheds light on Agape as well as Eros, for it shows the human being as capable of expressing tender as well as aggressive emotions. Looming in the Freudian unconscious are death and sexual instincts. Drawing upon August Weismann's heuristic division of the living substance into mortal (or "somatic") and immortal (or "germ plasmic") parts in multicellular organisms, Freud deals with two forces operating in the substance. While the sexual instincts perpetually strive to renew life, the death instincts seek to lead the living toward death. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud postulates the "nirvana principle," according to which "the

dominating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant, or to remove internal tension due to stimuli." This proclivity in the life of human beings finds partial expression in the pleasure principle, which strives to reduce the tension of desires by satisfying them. In addition, Freud uses the nirvana principle as a basis for believing in the existence of death instincts. He assumes that life is striving to return to an initial state of things from which it originally departed. Thus, "the aim of all life is death." On the supraindividual or historical level the death instinct manifests itself in periods of cultural degeneration, civil war, and international antagonisms. Indeed, the present age has been characterized by Raymond Aron as "the century of total war." Of course, history is replete with wars, plagues, famines, revolutions, crumbling civilizations, and the like. It was Hegel who once remarked that "what we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history." The radical difference between today and yesterday is that with the technological development of nuclear weapons and sophisticated methods of chemical-biological warfare, our species now has within its power the means to extinguish itself entirely. Freud was a pessimist with regard to human affairs. He recognized a death wish in the collectivity as well as in the individual. But he had not completely given up hope. In the concluding paragraphs of Civilization and Its Discontents Freud invokes the life force, Eros, as the other heavenly power to rise up and defeat its equally immortal adversary, Thanatos. LATER CAREER In his later years, Freud turned to the elder-philosopher role and began to comment on the issues of war and peace, the drift of modern secular history, and the place of humankind in the biological cosmos. To the end of his days in 1939 Freud wore the mantle of scientist-explorer. In a lengthy letter to Einstein in 1932 Freud expressed the hope that a combination of the "cultural attitude" against war and the fear of the consequences of a future war might result in its elimination as an outmoded institution. In Civilization and Its Discontents he posed the key question of the modern era: Is not civilization founded upon repression, and, if so, is not the universal neurosis of humankind its price? Unlike Marx, who sees the historical deck as stacked against the collectivity, Freud sees it as stacked against the individual. In lieu of homo economicus Freud presents us with an image of humankind as homo sexualis, whose irrational drives must be channeled into productive labor in order for civilization to carry on. Society sublimates sex into the striving for success. As a champion of the Enlightenment, Freud was highly suspicious of any notions that would contradict his famous dictum, "Where id is, there shall ego be." Although he was not blind to suffering and to the sources and means for overcoming it, he maintained his rational posture and dis-

missed religion as a consolation for the person who possesses neither art nor science. In The Future of an Illusion he psychoanalyzes religion as a projected superego of the helpless individual who identifies with an omnipotent and omniscient God, the father-king. Like the skeptical Voltaire, Freud wanted to live without illusions and preferred to cultivate Reason's garden. THE FREUDIAN MOVEMENT: ADLER AND JUNG Within the span of a half-century, the psychoanalytic movement gathered disciples, both wayward and orthodox, and established professional associations in countries around the globe. Psychoanalytic thinking has penetrated the social sciences as well as the humanities. Whole societies have been explained by a cultural "unconscious," and studies on the sexual customs and habits of populations have been published. No longer is a classic appreciated on the sole basis of art for art's sake; nowadays, we inquire a la Freud into the artist's early childhood secrets or sexual hangups to see what really makes him or her tick. By 1909 Freud had achieved international recognition. In that year he journeyed to America to deliver a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He gave five talks in German to large audiences on the fundamental techniques of psychoanalysis and was generally well received by such American psychological luminaries as Adolf Meyer, Edward Titchener, and William James. The lectures were published as The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement. In this polemic he explained his revolutionary ideas, sketched the movement's history, and castigated Alfred Adler and Carl Jung as heretics. Adler was more concerned with the phenomenon of power in society, and he based his psychotherapy upon the patient's neurotic sense of power- lessness or inferiority. The thrust of his teaching was the attempt to understand and to cure this condition by the psychotherapeutic reawakening of social interest. Adler comprehended sexual conflicts more as products of the individual's maladjustments in his later social milieu than as reflections of early childhood difficulties. Adler, Karl Menninger, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Carl Rogers emphasized social more than sexual factors in the etiology of mental illness. Notwithstanding Freud's early indignation at this line of approach, their work has made the greatest impact upon the practice of psychotherapy in America. Carl G. Jung (1875-1961), Freud's most influential disciple, was born in a suburb of Basel, Switzerland, the son of a Protestant minister. Religious experiences in early childhood helped Jung to transcend the psychic ropes of the conventional piety of the Church, which he observed to be more concerned with rituals, rites, and roles than with considering Jesus Christ and the spirit of God as a living reality. He was a lonely youth, read everything he could, and chose the study of medicine as a compromise between the sci-

ences and humanities. He was attracted to psychiatry as the study of "diseases of the personality," became interested in psychic phenomena, and wrote his thesis "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena." Jung did his internship at the Burgholzli Medical Hospital in Zurich, which became his permanent home. He studied with Pierre Janet, the famous French psychiatrist, in 1902, set up an experimental laboratory at the Psychiatric Clinic, and invented the word-association test for psychiatric purposes. He became a lecturer and senior physician there in 1905 and sent copies of his articles and his first book, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, to Freud. His intellectual mentor invited him to Vienna and the pair of great psychologists talked non-stop for thirteen hours in their first dialogue. Weekly correspondence followed, and Freud came to regard Jung as his Jung's Structure of the Psyche

Signtund Freud: Conquistador of the Irrational 155 successor because of the disciple's deep insight as well as his scientific connections in the Christian society of early-twentieth-century Europe. Although they maintained a close friendship, the founding fathers of psychology had basic disagreements. Freud insisted that the causes of repression are always sexual trauma and Jung disagreed. He saw humans as more than biological and sexual beings and took an interest in the way occult, mythological, and spiritual phenomena were interwoven throughout daily life and the case histories of his patients. Jung published Symbols of Transformation in 1912, which analyzed the Freudian concept of libido as generalized psychic energy and contained other ideas that varied from Freud. Jung's increasing self-reliance caused a break between himself and Freud, but Jung stood by his own convictions despite the pain of the split from his guru. Unlike Freud, who traveled little, Jung was more cosmopolitan; he visited Africa, India, and the Pueblo Indians, and studied non-European cultures while developing his own theories of the unconscious and religious symbolism. When their collaboration ended in 1913, Sandor Ferenczi, an associate of Freud's, quipped, "The Jung no longer believe in Freud." Jung is in accord with Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Sumner, Cooley, and Mead in the assumption that society precedes the individual in the inter- connectedness of mind as well as the ways in which the individual expresses in his or her personality the characteristics of the culture as a whole and the qualities of the historical phase in which we live. The following interrelated concepts are relevant for the comprehension of Jung in sociological and historical terms: the psyche; psychic energy; archetypes and history; the persona; anima and animus; the attitudes and functions; and the collective unconscious. The circle motif pervaded Jungian psychology and the self is portrayed as the central archetype of the total personality. Jung conceived of an archetype as a form or image of a collective nature which occurs cross-culturally. In the individual product it is unconscious. The concept of the unconscious in the Jungian topography of the psyche occupies a much vaster space than that of the conscious. The unconscious includes the nonwaking stages of dream and deep sleep and is divided into personal and collective aspects. The personal unconscious contains psychic contents which have been repressed or forgotten and drives which have not reached the layer of consciousness. It contains material which has been in consciousness or may be potentially in consciousness and is related to a particular individual. The psyche is the functional starting point for analyzing the framework of Jung's thinking. It is a container, and when he asks what moves in its "space," he discovers "energy." He borrowed the Freudian term libido for instinctual sexual energy and redefined it as psychic energy, or the energy of the processes of life. Jung had a larger and more flexible concept of energy than Freud, as the energy is expressed on the cosmic level of life in the sociological network of relationships, and on the individual plane of the psyche of the human being. Jung takes a dialectical orientation based on the idea that all forms of life may be understood as a struggle of contending

forces. Male and female, yang and yin, destruction and creation, death and rebirth, cold and hot, suffering and joy, damnation and salvation, pain and pleasure, doubt and faith, despair and hope, hate and love are all examples of the constant dance and drama of the pairs of opposites. Jung saw all life as energy and the principle of opposites is an integral part of his conception of the psyche. Yet he always remained aware that the map is not the territory. According to Jung, the amount of psychic energy generated varies directly with the intensity and depth of a conflict, and he stated that the greater the tension between the pairs of opposites, the greater will be the energy that is set loose. The psychic energy that is generated by the dynamic interplay of the pairs of opposites is the moving force of society. The process of self-indication and the interaction of selves in institutions and organizations are driven by the libido and psychic energy. Just as the central archetype of the personality is the self, which functions as the nucleus from which the ego and persona radiate, so the primal archetypes of religious symbolism are God and the Messiah. All world religions have names for God, and the most sacred object, in the Durkheimian sense, is the legend and myth of the Messiah as the expectation of the Coming One. This empirical phenomenon is a matter of comparative religion and not mystical wish-fulfillment. The archetypes and history converge at a deep level of the collective unconscious as the panorama of a world historical age in themes such as the Second Coming of Christ, the Advent of the Messiah, and the return of the Mahdi in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The rise of Panduranga Vittala and the Coming of the Maitreya Buddha appear in Hinduism and Buddhism. This arrival of a Great Savior has been forecast by all world religious scriptures, tribal story-teller sages, mythologies, and folklore of the human race. The Messiah archetype may be another name for a highly refined and infinitely renewable energy. Jung's concept of the persona is similar to the Mead-Cooley theory of the social self. The persona is the way we present ourselves to one another in daily life, and Jung referred to it as the mask individuals wear for social intercourse. The life process is conceived of as a theater of social encounters in various milieux, and the ego projects images of a persona that is suitable to the situation as it emerges. Thus, the persona includes social roles, the clothes and costumes we wear, and our styles of self-expression in ideas, speech, facial gestures, and body language. The persona functions as a cover for the inner life of the individual in the stage play of society, which requires easily identifiable occupational categories and basic attitudes, such as amiability or harshness. While Freud postulated the constitutional bisexuality of human nature, Jung recognized that in every man there is a woman and within every woman there is a man. The Jungian psyche is balanced by the feminine side in men, which he called the anima, and by the masculine side in women, which he called the animus. The feminist movement owes a good measure of its success to the growth of the animus factor in the female population, while the gay liberation movement has been partially fueled by the rise of

the anima element in the male population. Jung even asserted a biological basis for these sexual opposites within the personality. Although Jung's biological claim has not been demonstrated, the concepts of the anima and the animus play an important role in the social psychology of sex. Notwithstanding the androgynous person's mode of integrating the anima and animus, Jung explains introversion and extroversion as the atti- tudinal types which symbolize the inward and outward movement of the reservoir of psychic energy. They are ideal types, in the Weberian sense that no individual conforms all the time to either an inward or an outward orientation but lends in one direction or another depending on will and circumstance. The psychic energy is constantly expressed in four functions, two of which are termed rational and two nonrational. Thinking and feeling are defined as rational functions of the psyche because they involve the individual taking a deliberate attitude and action toward an object. The thinker interprets an object; the feeler judges it. Sensation and intuition are considered nonrational because they are not purposive. Jung saw the sensation function as passive because the object is experienced by the individual instead of acted upon. The function of intuition is such that during the nature of the process the individual does not seek directly to understand the object. An idea, an answer, etc., just "comes" to you, and is therefore nonrational. One should see the overlaps and variations in these functions and attitudes and not analyze them as neat and separate categories. They are heuristic devices for understanding psychological types and trends in society and history. For example, Jung contrasted Immanuel Kant, an introverted-thinking type, with Charles Darwin, an extroverted-thinking type. Both theoreticians developed thinking as their dominant function, but Darwin turned it outward and Kant inward. Jung said, "Darwin ranges over the wide fields of objective facts, while Kant restricts himself to a critique of knowledge in general."3 The Collective Unconscious Jung borrowed Freud's bimodal paradigm of the structure of the psyche by portraying a division between the conscious mind and the huge realm of the unconscious. According to Jung, the human infant is born with a psychological, as well as a biological, heritage. The neonate inherits more than a human body with a long evolutionary past and the genes of its parents; the baby comes equipped with a kind of psychic receptacle Jung called the collective unconscious, which is filled with archetypes. He used the word "collective" to differentiate it from "personal" and to indicate its priority to the individual personality. It is not collective in the ordinary sociological meaning of joint possessiveness; rather, it is collective in the sense that it is something generically present in humans and collectively held by all people. The unconscious is not a negative concept, as in Freud. Jung refers to the unconscious as that vast reservoir of psychic energy out of which all the 3C. G. Jung, Psychological Types, trans, by H. G. Baynes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923), p. 484.

materials of consciousness emerge. Although the idea is amorphous and difficult to analyze, it is theorized as a positive and creative entity which supplies the symbols and other psychic contents which are brought to the surface of waking-state consciousness in daily life. Jung went beyond the psychological to the archetypal self in Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Jung understood that we live in anomic times, in an historical transition period from an old to a new order of society, and recognized that individuals have spiritual needs which transcend the economic marketplace, social status, and the political arena. As a psychiatrist, he assisted his patients on their paths of growth to individuation; he also explored the collective unconscious and pointed to the cross-cultural archetypes, such as the eternal wonder child (e.g., Jesus, Hermes, Moses, Zeus), the universal mother as earth goddess in Hindu, Greek, and Roman religions, the grandmother of the American Indians, and the hero cycles in world mythologies. Jung had a marvelous way as a therapist of bringing people to their creative selves in the individuation process of his analytic and depth psychology. Through the interpretation of dreams, myths, and symbols, he brought people to a higher level of awareness of their fund of psychic energy that is the source of self-fulfillment, worldly prosperity, and the ongoing symbolic interaction of society. And yet, Jung was aware of the shadow side of human nature, of the irrational element in the collective unconscious of civilization, represented by such death archetypes as Yama-Raj (God of Death in Hinduism), Thanatos (the Death Wish in Greek), and the Grim Reaper. Equating the archetypal self with "spirit" and "Christ" is counterbalanced in Jung's dualistic pairs of opposites schema by the shadow side of the inner executive ego, portrayed as a demon or the devil. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are built into the psyche and its social manifestations. The causes of World War II may be explored through a social orientation of Jung's psychology. Nazi Germany can be seen as a classic example of demons and the Wotan symbols (e.g., primitivism, violence, and cruelty) of pre-Christian Germanic mythology arising from the historical depths of the collective unconscious into the national character and social psychology of a modern warlike state. Speaking generally, Jung says, "It is—and always was—my opinion that the political mass movements of our time are psychic epidemics, i.e., mass psychoses."4 Jung thus made the connection between the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and history. FREUD'S LAST TESTAMENT Freud continued to live in his beloved Vienna until the situation there became intolerable. With the rise of Hitler to power in Germany the predicament of the Jews worsened. Psychoanalysis was "liquidated" in Germany. 4C. G. Jung, Essays on Contemporary Events (London: Kegan Paul, 1947), p. 79.

Freud's and other psychoanalytic books were burned in Berlin in 1933, and Jews were forbidden to serve on any scientific council. The Nazis seized control of the German Society for Psychotherapy, renamed it the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, and required all members to make Hitler's Mein Kampf the basis for their work. Several official Nazi psychotherapists met with representatives of the society and informed them that psychoanalysis could continue only if Jews were excluded from membership. Threats accompanied pressure, and the leveling process continued as the various branches of science were "nationalized," brought under a central control, and geared to serve National Socialist aims. In lieu of Freud's psychoanalysis and Einstein's theory of relativity, Nazi science adopted the doctrine of Aryan racial superiority. With the Nazi invasion of Austria in March 1938, the streets of Vienna were lined with roaring tanks and trainloads of patriotic "extras" shouting, "Heil Hitler!" Freud was surprisingly reluctant to leave his native land; but his biographer and friend Ernest Jones managed to convince him to leave, and Jones arranged the complicated diplomatic details of Freud's emigration from Austria to England. However, the Nazis extracted their pound of flesh. They confiscated Freud's bank account and demanded a fugitive tax, without which they threatened to confiscate his library and art collection. During these trying times Freud worked an hour a day on his Moses and Monotheism, which tormented him like a "ghost not laid." During his short stay in London Freud continued to practice psychoanalysis, kept up his correspondence, worked consistently on Moses and Monotheism, and received visiting dignitaries. His callers included the writer H. G. Wells, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, the painter Salvador Dali, and the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. Three secretaries of the Royal Society asked him to sign its Charter Book, which contained the signatures of Newton and Darwin. Although Freud was in agony from a jaw cancer that eventually claimed his life, he received these accolades with the grace of a nobleman and maintained his sense of humor to the end. Upon hearing a radio announcement to the effect that this war was to be the last war, a friend asked Freud if he believed that. Freud replied, "Anyhow it is my last war." Freud's last will and testament was Moses and Monotheism. In this quasi- mystical, novelistic essay of self-discovery, Freud develops his general theory of monotheism, which focuses on Moses as the father figure and lawgiver of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Saul of Tarsus, the renegade rabbi who is commonly known as St. Paul, was to organize Christianity in early- second-century Rome on the foundations of original sin and salvation through sacrificial death. Saul's revelation was that human suffering is the effect of having murdered God the father, and his mission as the Apostle Paul was to preach that the sacrificial victim was indeed the long-awaited Messiah in the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Freud argued that Christianity, which emerged from ancient Judaism, became a "Son religion" as a result of having displaced the slain primal father. In Moses and

Monotheism Freud not only amplified and extended the insights of Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion; he was also reacting covertly to the oncoming pogrom. He concludes his book about Moses with the wry observation: "Only a part of the Jewish people accepted the new doctrine. Those who refused to do so are still called Jews." Beyond the personal meaning that this rather speculative work had for Freud, Moses and Monotheism is highly suggestive theoretically. Its methodology rests on the projection of the psychoanalytic procedure onto the world historical plane. The history of a people may be read as if it were the history of an individual, with the intention of unearthing the cultural secrets or "repressed content" of the collectivity, whether the latter be a cult, a nation, a religion, or a civilization. Research along this line might illuminate the phenomenon of leadership in accordance with Freud's emphasis on leaders as embodiments of the collective superego. Such an approach would allow freer reign for what Mills called "the sociological imagination" to come to grips with what is going on in today's world at the fine point where biography intersects with society and history. CRITICISM AND ADVANCES Freud's theories gave rise to a flurry of psychological experiments in the 1930s and 1940s. Most of these were dubious tests of his hypotheses; for example, attempts were made to test repression by seeing if people find it harder to remember unpleasant things than pleasant ones, even though the mechanism of repression was postulated only for strong instinctual drives and their derivatives. A combination of behaviorist orthodoxy and middle- class America's reluctance to deal with any of the strong emotional drives that Freud was discussing has meant that academic psychology has done little to follow up his leads. Clinical practice, on the other hand, has heeded Freud's recommendations to pay attention to emotions and behaviors of which we are not ordinarily conscious (for example, childhood experiences, sex, and aggression). That clinical psychologists and psychiatrists are ambivalent about the veracity of Freudian theories and the effectiveness of his therapeutic methods should not obscure the fact that Freud's most basic discoveries have been vindicated, so much so that they have almost passed into the realm of common knowledge. One criticism that may be leveled against Freud is that he reified his concepts. Notwithstanding his analytic disclaimers, he treated such mental ephemera as ego, id, superego, consciousness, and unconsciousness as if they were real objects; and Freudian terminology has come to be used by many professionals and laypeople in the same way. There is a measure of truth in the assertion that concepts, once entrenched in the literature, develop a life of their own; however, this linguistic phylogenesis must not blur the distinction between the real and the nominal. It should be underlined that Freud's conceptualizations are analytic tools rather than actual entities.

In addition, it may be said of Freud that he was culturally bound in his thought. His Eros/Thanatos duality is subject to this critique, in the sense that Freud's attitude toward death reflects a pessimistic period of Western thought. In conjunction with his contemporaries Freud regarded aging and death as the irresistible antithesis of life. This viewpoint contrasts with such recent Western European psychological paradigms of inner growth as Erikson's "ages of man" and Maslow's "hierarchy of needs," and contradicts Eastern doctrines of spiritual rebirth, through which aspirants attain enlightenment and come to see the world through the eyes of one newly born. Neither age nor sex is a barrier to this experience, as long as life is understood as a process of interior growth and personal development rather than as a slow decline into the grave. The most valid criticism of Freud is that he observed repressed, middle- class, Victorian men and women and generalized from them to all humankind. Twentieth-century anthropological research by Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and others has shown that neither the latency period nor the Oedipus complex is universal. The type of adult sexual repression that Freud found in the social milieu of his day is by no means characteristic of all cultures. In addition to traditional societies on the Asian, African, and South American continents, contemporary lower- and middle-class subcultures in Europe and North America have mores different from Freud's formulations. However, all of this does not invalidate Freud's work. It means, rather, that appropriate theoretical modifications must be made. Such innovations have been attempted by a group of "left-wing" Freudians, including Erik Erikson, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse, and Fritz Perls, who opened up a broad path for social and historical factors to enter this ongoing colloquy on human nature. If Freud's work is understood as describing a particular historical period, it is a valuable complement to that of Weber. The Protestant-ethic personality—hard-working, uptight, repressed, puritanical—is exactly what Freud was depicting. Thus, the dictum, "Neurosis is the price we pay for civilization" is the clinical insight corresponding to Weber's pessimism about the effects of rationalization and bureaucratization on the quality of modern life. Freud also complements Durkheim. Durkheim was of two minds about modern society. At first he argued that "organic solidarity" was a sufficient condition for social order, even though the contractual network first had to emerge from the emotionally binding "mechanical solidarity" of traditional societies. Later, after the Dreyfus affair and the tremendous conflict of turn- of-the-century France, Durkheim reconsidered and concluded that a purely formal, rules-and-regulations type of society created widespread anomie. As a social remedy for the normless state of affairs he advocated a return to workers' guilds, in which emotional solidarity could be found. Freud bolsters the later phase of his French contemporary's theory by suggesting that if people's feelings are overly repressed, any strains in the social order are

likely to cause a channeling of pent-up emotion into social movements that allow them an outlet. WAS FREUD A SEXIST? With the resurgence of feminism, Freud again became controversial. On the one hand, he has been accused of being sexist. Psychoanalysis justifies traditional male and female roles in society, keeping women in the home while men pursue outside careers. On the other hand, some feminist theorists have tried to use and revise Freud precisely in order to explain the sexism that has dominated the social world. On a certain level, it is true that Freud was an old-fashioned sexist. Despite the fact that most of his patients were women, he constantly wrote his theories from a male viewpoint. The Oedipus complex, the key to the psychic structure, is obviously a male problem: the little boy who must repress his desires for his mother and come to identify with his father. Freud never really explained how this worked in the case of females. His principal theory about women is one that has outraged feminists. Freud argued that a small girl, when she notices she lacks a penis, assumes that she has been castrated. This results in a lifelong sense of inferiority to men, and a more passive role in adult society. Should she exhibit aggressiveness or the desire to achieve in the masculine, public world, Freudians attribute this to her penis envy. Nevertheless, despite these serious drawbacks, a number of feminist thinkers have attempted to revise Freud to help explain why we have had a male-dominated society. Their analyses are not designed to show the inevitable, but to see just what it is that needs to be changed. Juliet Mitchell, one of the first to argue that women are economically subjugated, went on to state that the patriarchal system of male domination is nevertheless older than capitalism, and constitutes an independent force behind sexism. To understand this, it is necessary to see how love, sexuality, and motherhood are internalized within the female psyche; and Freudian theory comes in handy for this purpose. Among the most important of these feminist revisions of Freud is the theory of Nancy Chodorow. Her key question is, why do women do mothering in our society? Mothering, the process of taking care of a child, physically and especially emotionally, is not the same as sheer biological child- bearing or the nursing of an infant at the breast. Once children are born, their own biological mother need not be the person who takes care of them. This has been true especially since bottle feeding was first practiced. In fact, however, women do most of the mothering, caring for toddlers, and even older children. Some feminists even argue that women are mothering their whole lives: They mother their husbands at home, just as on the job as secretaries, nurses, or waitresses they are expected to perform mother-like roles for male bosses and customers.

Mothering, then, is a social role, not a biological one. It is not instinctual, Chodorow points out; studies show that both men and women react similarly to infants' cries and smiles, and among animals even males will often care for an infant of their species if left alone with one. Similarly, women who are separated from their infants for medical reasons shortly after childbirth do not develop as much affection for them. The mothering role is learned. But how? Chodorow draws on a version of Freudian themes for the answer. Both the infant boy and girl are cared for by a mother. In the original state of the child's psyche, there is no reality-oriented ego, but only a pleasurable merging with the other. It is this infant experience, according to Freud, that is the prototype of later sexuality; long afterwards, the child and then the grown adult seeks unconsciously to recapture this feeling by sexual contact (or some symbolic displacement of it). This transfer is inevitable; no one can remain an infant in mother's arms indefinitely. There are social pressures, too, in the form of incest taboos, which force the child to give up any sexual designs on the mother, and seek sex partners outside the family. For a boy, this process results in the classic Oedipus complex. The jealous father has a special role in depriving the son of his mother. The little boy, fearing his punitive father, not only gives up his sexual desires for his mother, but internalizes his father in the form of a superego, a kind of fantasy father that he identifies with and carries around inside his head. For a little girl, though, the break is not so severe. She is given more permission to be close and affectionate with her mother, even in a physical way. True, she too has to pull away, and fathers normally carry on a degree of flirta- tiousness with their daughters that is basic to encouraging them into a heterosexual role. But there is not the traumatic pressure as in the case of the boy. Moreover, the girl does not come to identify with her father, or internalize him as her superego. Instead she acquires a distinctively feminine superego, and indeed a whole feminine psychic apparatus or personality. This feminine personality is characterized by an underseparation between herself and other people. Whereas the boy develops a sharp separation between himself and the world, due to the forceful and abrupt giving up of his mother in the Oedipal complex, the girl does not experience this sharp division. Men turn out to be distant, oriented toward the world of objects, domineering, and achievement-driven. Women prefer intimacy and warmth in personal relationships, and define themselves more in relation to a group of others. And this, Chodorow concludes, is exactly what makes up the maternal personality. A mother is simply a typical female, finding her personality needs in being close to other people and submerging herself in the group— in this case, the group made up of her own family, and especially her children. Because of her continuing lack of psychic separation from her own mother, she has a need to continue this kind of close and nurturant relation with others. Mothering reproduces itself across the generations. Chodorow concludes that if women are to break out of this sex-typed

situation and take their places successfully in the larger society, this cycle of role reproduction must be broken. One way it can be broken is if men take a larger part in caring for children, especially emotionally. Then children will grow up with less radical separation between male and female worlds; psychologically, boys brought up in this way should have less of the depersonalizing split between self and others, while girls will identify more with fathers and acquire greater psychic entree into the hitherto male-dominated worlds of work, politics, and achievement. Chodorow's theory is not without its flaws. For one thing, sexist domination of society is not simply a matter of women willingly complying with nurturant feminine household roles. There are also the economic processes of which the Marxist feminists have written, and the sheer struggle for sexual domination from which men benefit. Moreover, Chodorow's women are too idealized: warm, loving, selfless creatures who have no demands of their own. In fact, plenty of women have been tough, aggressive, suspicious, or selfish, and have fought for position both inside the family and outside it. Chodorow fails to see enough conflict in society, either in the outer world where sexual discrimination is practiced, or in the family itself. Women have been quite capable of fighting with their husbands over family power when they have had the resources to do so. And mothering itself is not so idyllic as Chodorow makes it; women get angry at their children, sometimes even abusing them, and fight with their children over control more than they would like to admit. What has to be borne in mind is that Freud's perspective is one of conflict, too. The tendencies that Chodorow describes probably do exist, but they coincide with other tendencies—assertive and selfish ones—what Freud called the id. A mother can simultaneously love her children and fight with them, just as she can both nurture her husband and hate his patriarchal controls. It is this kind of inner conflict and ambivalence, in fact, that makes divorces so bitter, and makes the struggle for women's rights one of the most emotionally difficult of battles. Freudian theory thus continues to play an important part in our thinking today. Clearly the last word is not in on a theory of sexism in male-female relations. In addition to Chodorow and other feminist theorists who emphasize the mother role as the archetypal female activity, a theory of gender stratification has been developed from Freud's emphasis on sexual drives as a primary human desire. In this perspective, developed by Randall Collins on the basis of earlier theories of Kingsley Davis and Claude Levi-Strauss, men have sought to control women as erotic property. In earlier tribal societies, women were exchanged among groups to make political alliances. In modern society, men and women bargain directly in a sexual marketplace, in which men have up until now held most of the economic bargaining cards. In this perspective, it is not surprising that as women acquire greater economic resources of their own, they can afford to bargain with men less for men's earning power and more for their own sex-

ual attractiveness; hence the time of the feminist movement also turned out to be a time of erotic liberalization. Freud, in fact, may have been closer to this than we realize. Freud's own theories were paternalistically sexist, but his data were not. Bearing in mind that the first great wave of women's liberation in Europe began in the German-speaking countries around the turn of the twentieth century, one can put into perspective Freud's patients, mostly neurotic women from this very era, suffering from the family stresses of a newly emerging situation in which women were beginning to assert some independent rights. Freud may have misinterpreted what was going on, claiming to see in these conflicts an eternal psychic pattern when it may only have been an historically temporary one, as women struggled over sexual repression as a strategy within a male-dominated society. But the genius of a theorist may be to point at the crucial processes, more than to arrive immediately at the correct answer.

CHAPTER NINE The Discovery of the Invisible World: Simmel, Cooley, and Mead SIMMEL About the same time that Emile Durkheim was giving sociology a distinctive scientific identity in France, a similar attempt was being made in Germany. The German equivalent of Durkheim was Georg Simmel (1858-1918), whose career is strikingly similar to Durkheim's—and also strikingly different. For Durkheim was successful, and Simmel was not. Like Durkheim, Simmel formulated a view of society as a level of analysis independent of observable individuals, with laws of its own that required a separate science to investigate them. Simmel pointed out more clearly than anyone that since only individuals are physically real, the subject matter of sociology must be an invisible world of symbols and forms of interaction. He thus avoided some of the possible mystification inherent in Durkheim's "collective conscience." But Durkheim went on to become one of the most prominent thinkers in France, while Simmel spent twenty-nine long years waiting to be called to a professorship in Germany. All his life Simmel was an outsider, and his work shows both the strengths and weaknesses peculiar to that position. Simmel came from a wealthy and cultured Jewish family, and indeed his work is full of echoes of music, art, and drawing-room conversation. After studying philosophy, he became a privatdozent (private lecturer) at the University of Berlin in 1885. Not until 1914—just four years before his death—was he to gain the long-sought promotion to full professor. Forces conspired to keep him out. He was a Jew in a time of growing anti- Semitism, a liberal in Imperial Germany, the proponent of a discipline, sociology, that was associated with the un-German politics of Comte and Spencer. Simmel retreated more and more into the world of art and sociability, his sociology becoming a collection of insights—a theory of society, as it were, as if seen by a passerby, catching a few features as they struck 166

the eye but never penetrating to the heart of the edifice. Like the subject of one of his most famous essays, Simmel was the stranger who sees things that other humans, wrapped in their familiar routines, cannot see, a man privy to secrets given him because he has no one to tell them to. The formal background of Simmel's sociology was the tradition of German philosophy—Kant, Hegel, Dilthey, Wundt—which showed how humans see the world through a veil of their own perceptual forms and how these forms were passed on through human history in language, artistic ideals, myths, and legal systems. Accordingly, Simmel argues that society is an invisible world with laws of its own. These laws are found in the flow of culture—language, technology, social institutions, art—which molds each new generation along the lines of the past, and in forms or patterns of interaction among humans that have effects on what they may individually do. But humans are also living individuals. The culture that molds them and the interactions that constrain them are what make them human, but they are also something external and alien. The drama of humankind is, then, a struggle between the individual and the society—a drama that is fundamentally a tragedy, for the two forces must always exist together in every living person. Simmel's sensitivity to these two simultaneous levels of existence resulted in a striking insight, one that has been followed up only recently: The social institutions that make up the relatively permanent heritage of a society—the state, the family, the economy, the class structure—are only an extended version of the everyday interactions of men and women meeting on the street, in stores and offices, or at a party. Thus, by studying the formal structure of the more fleeting encounters, we reach the essence of our invisible society. "The interactions we have in mind when we talk about "society' are crystallized as definable, consistent structures such as the state and the family, the guild and the church, social classes and organizations based on common interests," wrote Simmel. But in addition to these, there exists an immeasurable number of less conspicuous forms of relationship and kinds of interaction. Taken singly, they may appear negligible. But since in actuality they are inserted into the comprehensive and, as it were, official social formations, they alone produce society as we know it. . . . Without the interspersed effects of countless minor syntheses, society would break up into a multitude of discontinuous systems. Sociation continuously emerges and ceases and emerges again. Even where its eternal flux and pulsation are not sufficiently strong to form organizations proper, they link individuals together. That people look at one another and are jealous of one another; that they exchange letters or dine together; that irrespective of all tangible interests they strike one another as pleasant or unpleasant; that gratitude for altruistic acts makes for inseparable union; that one asks another man after a certain street, and that people dress and adorn themselves for one another—the whole gamut of relations that play from one person to another and that may be momentary or permanent, conscious or unconscious, ephemeral or of grave consequence (and from which these illustrations are quite casually chosen), all these

incessantly tie men together. Here are the interactions among the atoms of society. They account for all the toughness and elasticity, all the color and consistency of social life, that is so striking and yet so mysterious.1 In one of his essays, Simmel speaks of men whose profession is to sit at home in full dinner dress, ready for a call from superstitious hostesses who find that they have a dinner party of thirteen about to sit down at table. Simmel was himself something of a "fourteenth man at dinner." Always the outsider, even in his chosen sphere of fleeting encounters, Simmel could not divest himself of his sociologist's detachment. Even more so than his later incarnation Erving Goffman (whom we shall meet in Chapter 13), Simmel was simultaneously within and without; neither completely participant nor completely observer; and his writings are a texture of insights that never quite make a solid system. \j Simmel was the first to remove sociability from the realm of the taken- for-granted and to analyze it as part of the social structure. Sociability, he pointed out, is a little world within the world, with laws all of its own. Here one did not allow practical and serious matters to intrude. The doings of the outer world might provide the starting place as subject matter for conversation, but the conversation was to rule the subjects and not vice versa. In the hands of skilled conversationalists, politics, business, art, gossip, the weather, all become the vehicle for talk that is carried on for the sake of talking, as raw material to be shaped by the formal requirements of these artists of fleeting symbols. Sociability is thus a world of make-believe, making the world of "outer" reality into a fantasyland that exists solely for the pleasure of the players. In the same vein, Simmel offers a perceptive analysis of the game of flirtation (which suggests that he must have been experienced at it—as do his knowledgeable remarks on love affairs and secrets). In its most refined form flirtation takes the raw material of sex and weaves from it a fabric of delight and fantasy, a symbolic world which turns the simplicity of physical passion into the subtle universe of love. By such sketches Simmel takes us into the heart of the salon society of Europe in one of its most dazzling eras. But Simmel never really pushes through to a sociological theory of the causes and effects of sociability or pursues the ramifications of his view of humankind's symbolic performances into a general model of society. He does not draw the implication, just recently being developed, that individuals create their worldviews out of just such encounters—not only in polite upper-bourgeois drawing rooms, but in all classes of society—and that it is just such shared fantasy worlds that bind some individuals together and set them off against others. Simmel's payoff is aesthetic rather than sociological. He concludes his discussion of sociability with the observation that polite conversation has the same sort of function as a majestic view of the 'Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Kurt H. Wolff, ed. Published in 1950 by The Free Press Division of the Macmillan Company. Reprinted by permission.

ocean: Both give pleasure because they transmute the turmoil of life into a pleasing spectacle, viewed from a distance. The tragedy of conflict and failure, of individual versus society, exists in sociability as in serious life, but as material for play, and hence no longer dangerous and uncontrolled. The conversationalist emerges victorious in his world of symbols. Simmel's sociology ranged much wider than drawing rooms, to include the serious realms of power, money, and historical change. As always, this material yields insights to Simmel's eye as he abstracts out the formal properties of diverse situations. His analyses of the effects of group size are classic, demonstrating that a group too large for all its members to converse together will have a different structure than a smaller one. The point is drawn even more sharply when he compares two-person groups with three-person groups. The dyad's fundamental reality is its perishability, for it will dissolve whenever one person decides to leave; this gives each partner a particular hold on the other. The triad, however, has a basic independence of its members, for it will still exist if one person leaves. The individual thus becomes less significant to the group. Moreover, new configurations open up here, as it becomes possible for two to form a coalition against the third, or one to play the other two off against each other. In short, the whole realm of organized society and its power relations opens up through shifts in numbers and in the resulting geometry of social relationships. Simmel thus develops the meaning of Thoreau's remark, "I have three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for company, three for society." Simmel had other insights, some of them brilliant, on the structure of group conflicts, on the social relationships created by secrets, on the way in which the variety of groups in modern society gives each individual a distinctive set of social ties and hence produces modern individualism. But Simmel never really carried these ideas far enough to produce a comprehensive sociological theory. Unlike Durkheim, he does not try to test causal propositions against empirical evidence, but only to display a philosophy of the forms that flicker across the human landscape. At bottom, Simmel, the lonely outsider, hated society. He wrote that people in groups are ruled by the lowest common denominator and that the higher forms of intellect and morality are always individual products. This personal disposition contradicted Simmel's own insights on the ways in which the individual is a product of society, and it kept him from pressing on to the breakthroughs that came to Durkheim when he realized that people's moralities and ideas have their origins in groups and their rituals. But if Simmel, the outsider of the German intellectual world, could not produce a genuine sociology from the leads it offered, there were others who would. The American universities had been reformed in the 1870s and 1880s along German lines, and American intellectuals were shaking off the stupor of the era of petty religious colleges. American sociologists, full of the same German philosophy that sustained Simmel and impressed by the empirical approaches of the new experimental psychology, were to succeed

where Simmel failed. In Cooley and Mead, the relationship between the invisible world of social symbols and the mind of the individual was to become a theory of considerable power. THE LIFE AND WORK OF COOLEY Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the fourth of six children. His father was a migrant from western New York, who had a distinguished career as a justice on Michigan's Supreme Court. Charles was an introspective, imaginative, and ambitious boy who read profusely. He prepared himself for college at age sixteen; however, ill health forced him to take seven years to graduate from the University of Michigan. Before taking his doctorate in economics in 1894, Cooley studied mechanical engineering, worked for the Interstate Commerce Commission, and traveled abroad. For his doctoral dissertation he presented a theory of transportation relating a socioeconomic solution of the railway question to the study of territorial demography. This work remains a benchmark in "human ecology," a field that was to be fruitfully researched and developed by Roderick McKenzie, Robert Park, and Ernest Burgess in Chicago a generation hence. Cooley's early inspiration came from Emerson, Goethe, and Darwin. From Herbert Spencer, whom he criticized subsequently for his subjectivity and lack of "culture," Cooley received his first broad outline of evolutionary knowledge. Franklin Giddings of Columbia University encouraged his aspirations to teach sociology as a university subject at Michigan. Cooley was a member of an academic clique that admired John Dewey, whose personality and lectures on political economy in 1893 and 1894 made a deep impression on Cooley's thought. Dewey criticized and went beyond Spencer by maintaining that society was an organism in a more profound way than the latter had perceived. Dewey's analysis of language as the "sensorium" of society corroborated Cooley's burgeoning interpretation of written language as the social medium of transmission par excellence. While preparing his thesis, Cooley became intrigued by the "psychic mechanism"; he was especially concerned with the transmission and modes of recording language through space and time. He studied these processes in their historical and contemporary forms until he developed a conception of communication that was consistent with his organic view of society. In his lectures and studies he continually related his findings to such major aspects of the social process as conflict, survival, and adaptation. Cooley transcended the Darwinian climate of opinion by becoming a social psychologist. He came to the realization that he could never actually see the social life of humankind unless he understood the processes of mind with which society was indissolubly linked. He observed the mental-social development of his children as a method of organizing and expanding his theoretical insights. After beginning to teach, he read Walter Bagehot, William

James, Gabriel Tarde, and Mark Baldwin and readied himself for his first book, in 1902, Human Nature and the Social Order. Cooley preferred a life of contemplation and continued to teach at his midwestern alma mater all his life. He turned down a professorship at Columbia, although he did consent reluctantly to serve as president of the American Sociological Society in 1918. COOLEY'S SYSTEM Cooley's social thought encompasses several interrelated dimensions: (1) His approach was organic; (2) his viewpoint was evolutionary; (3) his outlook was moral and progressive; and (4) his ideal was democratic. His organicism rested upon the theoretical assumption of the reciprocity of the individual and society. In his first book he systematically debunks the alleged antithesis of the individual versus society on the grounds that the latter is a psychical whole of which the individual is a particular expression. As the separate individual is a myth, so is society an illusion when conceived of apart from individual members. For Cooley "society" and "individuals" are collective and distributive aspects of the same thing rather than empirically separable phenomena. Thus, society becomes a living whole, or organism, composed of differentiated members, each of which has a special function. A university, for example, is composed of administrators, faculty, and students, with each status group having particular roles to perform within the organizational structure. This approach was a predecessor of the emerging functionalist system. Cooley's evolutionary viewpoint suffuses his system; yet it differs from the social evolutionism of Spencer and the leading nineteenth-century anthropologists in its emphasis on individual rather than collective aspects of development. Cooley is more concerned with the evolution of the individual's social being (how the growing organism acquires a sense of the "I") than with grand historical sequences or stages of cultural evolution. His view encourages the student of human nature to believe in life as a creative process of which the human will is an integral ingredient. Far from being a passive element of society, each individual does his or her unique share in the work of the common whole. Cooley perceived each individual as a "fresh organization of life," which flows from the hereditary and social past. He envisioned each life history as containing a stream and a road; he discerned the stream as heredity, which comes through the germ plasm. He apprehended the road as "communication or social transmission," including language, interaction, and education. The road, which contemporary sociologists might call "culture," is a later development than the stream. Cooley's moral outlook is expressed in his equation of rationality with the judgment of right. By rationality Cooley meant more than the product of formal reasoning; he pointed to the more profound rationality of conscience as an outcome of the social life of a person, including one's interac-

tions with others and imaginary conversations with oneself. By locating society in the mind, Cooley, in his ethical treatise "The Social Aspect of Conscience," was able to explain the moral nature of confession as the opening of oneself to another, higher, more ideal person from whose vantage point one is able to obtain an outside view of oneself. Cooley's morality was thus rational, social, and progressive. While he did not feel, like some ethnocentric evolutionists, that twentieth-century culture was the apex of civilization, he did believe in the necessity for humankind to have a high and vivid image of personality that was morally edifying. One's reach, so to speak, should exceed one's grasp. He discerned three practically universal ideas of right: loyalty to the group, kindness to group members, and adherence to the customs of the tribe. Whereas his contemporary, Max Weber, understood the rationalization of the world in terms of continual disenchantment (for example, the recent demystification of the moon), Cooley stressed the possibilities for personal growth in a right (that is, rational) society efficiently organized according to democratic principles. His conception of democracy embodied a philosophy of mind-enlarging consciousness. Cooley found the earliest forms of democratic unity in Western civilization among the pre-Roman Teutonic tribes, especially in the social units of the family, clan, and village group. Without indirect communications media such as the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television, people had to come together in face-to-face contact to experience the rising tide of social excitement that led to higher levels of consciousness. The people of old held feasts, games, and public assemblies and ceremonies as occasions for group exaltation and as opportunities for the expression of public opinion. Modern-day Americans celebrate the astronauts' space flights through the mass medium of television; the Romans fed Christians to the lions in stone stadiums; and the ancients chanted, sang, and danced festively around the campfire. Rock concerts and jazz, gospel, and country festivals are contemporary examples of a return to primitive modes of togetherness, with the added thrill of amplified sound made possible by recent technological and cultural developments. Cooley stated that although "democracy as a spirit is spontaneous," it could only have a large-scale spiritual effect with the liberation of the creative faculties of the members composing the body politic. He saw in the present epoch the potentiality for a "higher and freer consciousness" and understood democracy as the general phase of that enlarged consciousness. Cooley comprehended institutions as definite and established products of the public mind which were the outcomes of the organization and crystallization of thought around the forms of customs, symbols, beliefs, and lasting sentiments. He perceived such institutions as language, the family, industry, education, religion, and law as continually responsive to the needs of human nature. He saw them as "apperceptive systems" of the public mind, which were inseparable from, and unreal without relation to, one another. Here again one can notice glimmerings of functionalism; Cooley, however, did not make the mistake of reifying the social system

and locating needs in it rather than in the people who created it. Since sociality is mental, the institution is an individual habit of mind that is largely unconscious because of its commonality. The individual is not merely a passive effect of the social order; he or she is an effective cause as well. The Looking-Glass Self and the Primary Group In Human Nature and the Social Order Cooley presents his theory of the social self. Drawing upon Wilhelm Wundt and especially upon William James, he discusses the meaning of the "I" as observed in daily thought and speech. This "I" is the empirical self that can be verified by observation; it is neither an a priori Cartesian assumption nor a metaphysical entity. Cooley observed that this primal idea referred least often to the body and most often to either the "my feeling" or to the "looking-glass self." He regarded the self as a feeling state that is more or less consistent with ideas as they arise in our experience. The former "my" attitude refers to the individual's sense of appropriation toward various objects and people. He gives the example of gloating as a reflective self-feeling state in which the person who has either accomplished or acquired something that is pleasing thinks "mine, mine, mine" with a warm sensation. Cooley extends James's definition of psychology as the study of states of consciousness by establishing the sociality of selfhood as it relates to the thought of others. The social self emerges as an idea taken from the communicative life that the mind treasures as its own. It was from this line of reasoning that the concept of the looking-glass self was born. In order to grasp this germinal idea, one should bear in mind Cooley's dictum: "The imaginations people have of one another are the solid facts of society." The dimensions of the looking-glass self are threefold: First, we imagine our appearance or image in the eyes of the other; second, we imagine some judgment of that appearance; and finally, we experience some sort of self-feeling such as pride or mortification. In other words, "I feel about me the way I think you think of me." For example, a person would be ashamed to appear ignorant in the presence of a learned man, or glad to be recognized by a celebrity. This phenomenon pervades our everyday existence in the social arena at even subtler levels than shame or joy. All the little looks and gestures that happen in daily encounters with others constitute the very fabric of society. This aspect of Cooley's sociology has been developed in the social thought of Erving Goffman, a man whom we shall meet in a later chapter. In Cooley's primary theory of social psychology, that we are the imaginations that we have of one another, and that society is the organic whole of which all imagining individuals are parts, he asserted that these imaginations are the solid facts of society. In the relation of self to society, individuals project images of their selves, which, as James said, are basically of the modes of self-denial or self-affirmation. From the latter group come the stars in the institution of entertainment (or "show business"). The star sys-

tern represents a stratification of social selves—from the "superstars" to the less famous—in relation to the nonstars—viewers, audience, fans, or public. The old adage that stars are born and not made may be true; however, the promotion of the social self of a star is the secondary function of an effective agent with the right business connections and contacts in the industry as well as the charisma of the performer. The decline of the hero in our times has given rise in mass society to the phenomenon of the celebrity, a manufactured personality with or without talent. The celebrity's image is sold to the collectivity through advertising in the media (especially television, movies, radio, newspapers, and magazines). The Hollywood-derived star image is an economic commodity competing with other marketable image-commodities of packaged personalities. Perceptive commentators on America have observed that we, and many of the other high-tech countries, are living in the era of the cult of the personality. Movies are to the twentieth century what oil paintings were to the nineteenth, and such legends as Al Jolson, Maurice Chevalier, Jimmy Durante, Bette Davis, John Wayne, Jack Benny, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, Frank Sinatra, and Marilyn Monroe took time and space to magnify themselves in our imaginations. As the movies are replaced by television as the primary entertainment medium, the marketplace of the star system shifts from the public place of the theater to the private locale of the home. Since advertising remains a constant factor of American society, the star system maintains itself in a modified form. Still, the mind, in which the stars themselves exist, remains the locus of society in the Cooleyan framework. Hollywood has been the dream factory and the center of Romantic America. As the scene switches more to television, "TV Guide" has become the log of that civilization. And now we are entering a new era in the evolution of communications, as well as a transition from one electronic source-dyad of the definition of "reality"—the movies and radio—to another—television and the computer. In Social Organization (1909) Cooley introduced the concept of the primary group. Such an association is characterized by intimacy, face-to-face interaction, emotional warmth, and cooperation. These groups are the seedbeds of society in the sense that they are fundamental in forming the social nature of the individual and his or her primary ideals, including love, freedom, and justice. The outcome of a primary relationship involves a "we" feeling that makes for close identification of the self with the life of the group. Sociologically universal examples of this mode of association are the children's play group, the family, the neighborhood, and the council of elders. The basic experience of the primary group is the feeling of social unity with other members. In contemporary times primary groups have been emerging in the form of urban and rural communes, as people begin to band together with varying degrees of success for survival purposes and to reexperience a lost or shattered home life. For Cooley the self-governing, democratic village commune was the highest social form. He quotes

Tocqueville: "It is man who makes monarchies and establishes republics, but the commune seems to come directly from the hand of God." In contrast to the primary group the secondary group is impersonal, contractual, formal, and rational. Relationships are cool rather than warm. Professional associations, corporate bureaucracies, and nation-states are classic examples of this group type. But primary and secondary groups should not be taken as mutually exclusive categories. For example, primary groups may emerge within the secondary bureaucracies in the forms of boards of directors, academic cliques, circles of confidants, and like-minded associations. CRITICISM OF COOLEY Cooley's methodology was one of "sympathetic introspection." By this he meant the process of the social scientist putting himself or herself in touch with various sorts of persons, attempting to imagine how the world appears to them, and then recollecting and describing as closely as possible their particular feeling states. By this method Cooley essayed to understand the inner lives of rich and poor, criminals and children, conservatives and radicals, idiots and idealists. No phase of human nature was alien to him, so deep and wide were his sympathies. He took his own nature as a reflecting prism of the whole, and by examining his responses to others' presentations of self, he sought to pierce the invisible veil of society. Since Cooley's methodology was analogous to Max Weber's verstehen and Pitirim Sorokin's "logico-meaningful" method, it may be criticized on similar grounds. A major canon of scientific method is that its statements must be intersubjectively testable; otherwise, reliability of results becomes impossible. Indeed, one of the scientific dilemmas of Western sociology has been the immense difficulty of agreeing upon uniform methods and procedures. Since Cooley depended primarily on his personal powers of observation and drew his insights by an imaginative reconstruction of society from his peculiar vantage point, there would be no way for objective social scientists to test his conclusions empirically. Mead himself took Cooley to task for locating society in the mind instead of in the social world out of which psychical experiences arise. However, Cooley was breaking new ground by locating the self in consciousness rather than in behavior and therefore felt free to unload his mind of positivist baggage. Methodological precision concerned him far less than breadth of comprehension. Cooley was a sanguine practitioner, whose small-town sociology is suffused with the mores and attitudes of midwestern, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant liberalism. Cooley spent most of his life with his family and in the academic cloister at Ann Arbor, preferring not to venture into the flow of surrounding society. The prime advantages of this sheltered existence were the opportunities to meditate calmly and deeply on the quality of social life and to consolidate an expanding sociology department at the

University of Michigan. The main disadvantage was Cooley's failure to come into direct or frequent contact with people of diverse modes of life. He understood the problems of social organization in terms of personal degeneracy; his analysis, while penetrating, was more speculative than empirical. His uplifting armchair sociology rings with a kind of idealization of the real, which disdained the painstaking task of data gathering. Unlike Freud, Cooley was relatively out of touch with the world of unconscious wishes and motives. Cooley accepted Goethe's notion of the individual as a unified whole and rejected both biological and psychological determinism. The underlying theme of Cooley's theory of self was the metaphor of growth. His faith was in the individual's untapped potentialities, or what Dewey called "the infinite perfectability of man." Cooleyan sociology was a rationalistic blend of the provincial and the universal. The former attitude was a reflection of an isolationist America that had yet to be swept onto the international scene by a world war, while the latter pointed to the essentially Christian foundations of American civilization and the subsequent emergence of the national drive to "make the world safe for democracy." THE LIFE AND WORK OF MEAD George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts, the son of a pastor. He studied at Harvard under the tutorship of Josiah Royce and William James. He traveled widely and took courses at overseas universities, mainly in Germany. In 1893 he was awarded a recently founded chair in philosophy at the University of Chicago, where John Dewey became a colleague and personal friend. Mead taught there until his death in 1931. He exercised a tremendous influence on several generations of students, principally through his oral teaching; his publications during his life consisted of scattered articles, notes, and critical studies in various philosophical, psychological, sociological, and pedagogical journals. All those who knew Mead personally were unanimous in remembering him as a rare, high, and disinterested spirit. He was a professor who knew how to charm as well as interest his students. He had a manner well suited to the exposition of ideas; he reasoned in a spiral by returning to what he had already said and then integrating it at a higher level of understanding. He made a new point with each line of reasoning, weaving previous threads into a larger and more comprehensive fabric of thought. Colleagues and students admitted, moreover, that conversation was his medium; writing was a poor second best. Despite the pressure of the academic world to "publish or perish," Mead became chairman of the University of Chicago's philosophy department without having published a single book. Four volumes of lecture notes gathered by pupils and friends were issued posthumously under the titles of The Philosophy of the Present (1932), Mind, Self, and

Society (1934), Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936), and The Philosophy of the Act (1938). Like Georg Simmel, he was a philosopher turned social scientist, and in order to get a clearer portrait of Mead's social psychology within the history of sociological theory it helps to consider his philosophical perspective. MEAD'S SYSTEM Mead's social thought is relational, evolutionary, and pragmatic. Upon reading Mead one is struck with a sense of what Alfred North Whitehead called "the interrelatedness of things." As a philosopher of science Mead understood the mechanical and atomistic bias of the nineteenth century as an outcome of past systems of ideas. The chemists and physicists of the preceding century were mainly preoccupied with the notion of matter as composed of static, solid, self-sufficient particles. Their focus was on the structure rather than on the activities of the atom. With the recent emergence of relativistic theories in the natural sciences, atoms were perceived in terms of "eigen states" or "patterns of stability." This shift in emphasis, which provided a wider theoretical frame of reference for explaining physical events, was paralleled in Mead's social psychology by the dissolution of the implicitly atomistic image of humankind of much nineteenth-century sociology. The sociologies of Comte, Marx, Spencer, and even Durkheim apprehended the relationship between society and the individual primarily in a deterministic manner. The locus for action resided almost wholly in the social or economic system such that "the invisible hand of society" totally controlled human behavior. The human individual was portrayed as a kind of self-contained molecule within the larger social organism. Mead's rela- tionism consisted of his theoretical joining of self and society in the ongoing social process such that the individual was neither isolated from his or her fellows nor wholly determined by any abstract system. Mead's theoretical achievement was arrived at inductively by observation of what happens in the daily lives of human beings. For Mead the society in which we interact with one another in sundry groups constitutes an empirical reality. It is a product of evolution and is divisible into many modes of social reality, which are dependent upon variable definitions of the situation. He distinguished between Aristotelian and Darwinian ideas of evolution; according to the former doctrine, evolution is the development of the existing plant or animal species (which is the Latin word for the Greek term "form") without reference to the environment. In contrast, the theory presented in Darwin's Origin of Species is not concerned with the development of a particular species as such; rather, it is interested in showing how various forms evolve and survive in response to environmental pressures. Those forms survive that can best adapt themselves to changing life conditions. Behind this post-Aristotelian conception is the idea of a life pro-

cess that takes on various forms (or species), which arise and decline through space and time. The human form is a relatively recent evolutionary development. It was the German romantic idealists, culminating with Hegel, who formulated a philosophy relevant to the human life form in terms of the reflexive experience of ourselves as actors in the social world. According to this tradition the self is not a static unity that exists in vacuo; it is a dynamic, historical process that involves a subject-object relationship and arises as a result of interaction with other selves. The more we become aware of ourselves in the continuing social process, the more we increase our "species consciousness." In other words, we become more able to understand our human form as a consequence of life and social processes. As a pragmatist philosopher Mead is heir to James and Dewey. Mead viewed modern research science, with its mathematical and experimental methods, as both a cultural outgrowth of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment and an emergent evolutionary tool whereby humans might intelligently control their social institutions. He was in agreement with Dewey that scientific method applied to the problems of society was the key to the door of progress. Mead interpreted pragmatist doctrine as having three phases and two primary sources. The former included the following assumptions: (1) that a hypothesis is "true" if it works when tested, (2) that the process of knowing lies within human conduct, and (3) that knowledge is a process of acquiring the necessary "scientific apparatus" (including ideas, concepts, units of analysis, theoretical models, paradigms, equations, and so forth) to carry out the desirable task of social reconstruction in a democratic state. He understood the sources of pragmatism to be (1) behavioristic psychology, which enables the social scientist to apprehend intelligence in terms of human activity, and (2) the process of research or scientific method, which is self-revising and tests an hypothesis by how it works. Mead recognized the French Revolution as the pivot of modern history; it built the principle of revolution into social institutions by incorporating the people's right to change or amend the constitution upon which the state is founded. The fundamental scientific problem that emerged in Mead's mind, then, was how we become selves in a rapidly changing and seemingly chaotic world. How to preserve order and at the same time accommodate change was Mead's perennial question. The Social Self That the human being has a self is the major supposition of Mead's theoretical framework. It is no mystical conjuration but an empirical exercise to observe that human beings make indications to themselves in the course of everyday life. Mead defined these "self-indications" as anything of which one is conscious, such as a ringing telephone, a friend's remark, the lyrics of a song, a thought, the recognition of a familiar figure, and so forth. The im-

portance of discerning the existence of these self-indications is twofold: (1) An object (physical, abstract, or social) may be extricated from its setting and acted upon; and (2) the fact of human self-indication enables the individual's action to be constructed rather than simply released. Mead distinguished between the stimulus and the object. The former does not have an intrinsic character that acts upon individuals. In contrast, the meaning of the object is conferred upon it by the individual. Human beings react to a stimulus (for instance, an unexpected pin prick), but they act toward an object (for example, the determination not to flinch at an injection). Individuals are not surrounded by a world of preexisting objects that coerce them; rather, they build up their environment of objects according to their ongoing activities. From a myriad of prosaic everyday acts, such as getting dressed or preparing food, to major life decisions, such as choice of vocation or mate, the individual is making self-notations of objects, assigning them meaning, assessing their utility in reaching various goals, and then deciding what to do on the basis of such judgments. Mead understood this interpretive or self-conversational process as acting on a symbolic basis. Mead made fuller sense of Dewey's notion of language as the sensorium of society by delving into the symbolic processes of human communication. He distinguished between gesture and symbol, deriving his concept of the former from Wundt's Volkerpsychologie and from Darwin's psychological classic The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. By the term "gesture" Mead meant a social act that operates as a stimulus for the response of another form engaged in the same act. He presents as an example of a "conversation of gestures" the dogfight, in which the forms interact with one another on a nonsymbolic basis by growling, baring the teeth, and nipping the flanks. In such a situation each dog does not stop to ascertain the meaning of the other's aggressive behavior. One dog's response of growling to the other's baring of teeth is not made on the basis of what that gesture stands for. The first dog does not respond to the meaning of the second dog's gesture, because it does not indicate to itself the hostile intentions of that gesture. The adjustive behavior (that is, the ensuing fight) is called forth by the character of the stimulation, without any intermediary process of interpretation of meaning. Human beings respond not to the gesture but to its meaning; thus, human language or communication is symbolically interactive. Take, for example, the baseball situation of "at bat." The pitcher peers down from the mound to receive the signal from the catcher as to what type of pitch to throw, while the batter checks with the third-base coach for hitting instructions relayed from the manager in the dugout. The catcher may indicate a curve ball by extending, say, two fingers, and the third-base coach may order a bunt by touching his ear and tipping his cap. Thus, before the delivery of the pitch, the situation has been structured according to prearranged signal systems, which have a common meaning (that is, evoke similar responses) for the actors involved. That the pitcher has the option of calling for another pitch and that the batter might be guessing that a curve will be

thrown mean that the players are not merely reacting like dogs to gestures; they are interpreting symbolically the meaning of the signs, thereby organizing their activity to act intelligently toward the situation confronting them. When the gesture evokes the same attitude in the receiving as well as the sending form, it is a significant symbol. When the bodily or vocal gesture (speech) reaches that stage, it has become what we call "language." What enables human beings to interact meaningfully (that is, symbolically) with one another in the ongoing social process is the primary mechanism of role taking. As human beings become objects to themselves and learn to act toward themselves in various ways, they also learn to assume the roles of others in constructing their behavior. They learn to cast themselves imaginatively into the other person's frame of reference and to assume an attitude toward themselves that reflects this sympathetic understanding. For example, a parole-board officer attempts to ascertain the prisoner's fitness for parole on the basis of his moral and sympathetic judgment of the prisoner's current attitude toward the law. The self is reflexive in the sense that it coils back upon itself in the communicative process, and it is social in the sense that it is built up continually in the course of daily encounters with other human beings. The social self is a product of a series of defining situations which arise in the life of the individual. In addition, the social self is an emergent process within society, which Mead construes as the fitting together of individual lines of action in human groups via role taking. The social self is neither a static intellectual monad like Descartes' cerebral "I" nor a defense structure such as Freud's executive "ego"; rather, it is a dynamic and changing transaction between the individual and others. Mead described the contents of the social self in terms of "I" and "me" aspects. The conception of the self as binary rather than unitary was mentioned by James and developed by Cooley, but it found its fullest expression in Mead. Mead understood that the social act itself is phasic in that the human being delays his or her action toward other forms. In preparing the act, the individual can consider the possible responses of the other in lieu of reacting wholly on impulse. Furthermore, the self that organizes its behavior within the social act in relation to other forms is composed of conditioned and spontaneous phases. Mead identifies the former as the "me" and the latter as the "I." The "me" represents the organized set of group attitudes that the member assumes. It is the conventional, habitual, and routinized aspect of self that is always there. The "me" determines our self-consciousness insofar as we are able to take the role of others within the larger community of selves. Each member of a choir, for example, knows the score he or she is supposed to sing, and the resulting harmony of sound is a product of cooperation among the sopranos, tenors, and basses. The "I" stands for the response of the individual to the organized attitudes of others. It is aware of the social "me" in the sense that the "I" of one moment is present in the "me" of the next. In other words, the "now" or what Mead called "the present" is the