E d w a r d Shils

Selected Papers of Edward Shils, II

C e n t e r a n d

P e r i p h e r y

E s s a y s i n

M a c r o s o c i o l o g y

s *

T h e U n i v e r s i t y of C h i c a g o P r e s s

Chicago and London

 Contents

v/

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 Introduction vii

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
1975 by The University of Chicago I Society
All rights reserved. Published 1975
Printed in the United States of America 1. Center and Periphery 3
International Standard Book Number: 0-226-75317-4 2. Society: The Idea and Its Sources 17
Library, of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-87309 3. Society and Societies: The Macrosociological View 34
4. The Integration of Society 48
5. The Theory of Mass Society 91

II Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus

6. Primordial, Personal, Sacred, and Civil Ties 111 *'
7. Charisma 127
8. The Meaning of the Coronation, by Edward Skils and Michael
Young 135
9. Ritual and Crisis 153
10. Consensus 164
- 11. Tradition 182 v
12. The Sanctity of Life 219

III Status and Order

/HARVARD 13. Power and Status, byHerbert Goldhamerand EdwardShils 239
UNIVERSITY 14. Class 249
LIBRARY 15. Charisma, Order, and Status 256 *K
MY 2 1975
16. Deference 276
17. The Stratification System of Mass Society 304

IV Expansion and Dependence of the Center:

Privacy and Primary Groups
18. Privacy and Power 317
19. Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht
in World War II, by Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz 345
20. Primary Groups in the American Army 384

k / o / c ^
vi Contents
Introduction
V Aspirations and Fragility of the Center:
Traditional Societies and New States
21. The Concentration and Dispersion of Charisma: Their Bearing
on Economic Policy in Underdeveloped Countries 405
22. Opposition in the New States of Asia and Africa 422
23. The Fortunes of Constitutional Government in the Political i
Development of the New States 456 The members of the educated part of any society know how they are to
24. The Military in the Political Development of the New States 483 be designated; they are designated by the name of their society. They are
Americans, British, Frenchmen, Italians, Indians, Japanese, or whatever.
They know that they share that nameor a minor variant of itwith
their government and the territory on which they live and with all or most
of the other human beings who live on that territory. Many educated
persons do not approve of this type of designation. Yet, if they call
themselves lawyers or machinists, fathers or sons, whites or blacks,
Protestant Christians or Hindus, or several of these together, there still
i remains a sense of incompleteness. It is thought that they have to bear
also the name of their "society." The "society" is that most inclusive yet
bounded collectivity of which they are seen to be only parts. It is the
whole formed of parts. But to say what that whole is is a hard task.
The essays in this volume deal mainly with the properties of the larger,
most inclusive structure of societies, with the varieties of this outermost
structure, and with how it is maintained and changed. They deal with the
influence of the outermost structure on the lives of the groups, strata,
and individuals who live within it and of the limit of its influence over
those component parts. This outermost structure is an intermittently
appearing part of the lives of its members. It is also that which binds
them in various ways and degrees into being a society. It is a necessary
emergent of the existence of human beings. Every human being is born
into and lives within an aggregation of other human beings who are
bound within an outermost structure.
The penetration of the outermost structure of society into the lives of
those living inside it is limited by the influence of certain characteristics
of human existence suxh^aTHn^erences in proximity, personal and erotic
attachments, differences of cognitive interest and imaginative power,
which are ineluctable constituents of the existence of society. There is,
therefore, a continuous process of interdependence and antinomy be-
tween the outermost structure and those other constituents of society.
The ebb and flow of this process is therefore a theme which dominates
the essays in this collection. *&
The fact that I refer to the ^putermosfNir the "inclusive" or the
"larger" structure of society for lack of abetter term bears witness to the
difficulties of delineation of my subject and to the extent to which it has
been neglected in educated discourse and social science, particularly in
sociology. Economists, working within the limits of their own concerns.
ff

viii Introduction Introduction be

have analyzed economies or economic systems, by whichunless other- awareness that there is a legitimate, indeed a very important object which
wise statedthey mean the economic system operating within the- has not yet come into full focus.
boundaries of a national state. At one time economists entitled their When one seeks to discover this "larger society," various simple
subject matter "national economy." More recently, "macroeconomics" strategems present themselves. One of these is simply to refer to one
has been a fairly well-defined branch of economic analysis. Students of feature of the economyto refer to it, for example, as "capitalistic
politics, dealing with the sovereign state, the national state, or the central society." This permits its location in time and space, but the intellectual
government, have HkewisenoTexperienced greater difficulties than have value" of such a designation is negligible. Or, one can call a society by the
economists in defining the largest of the entities with which they deal. name of its political system"democratic society" or "totalitarian
When they deal with "international relations," they postulate the society." These two, like "capitalistic society" or "communistfesociety,"
existence of more or less autonomous political systems. Just as econo- evoke certain significant features, but they are a shorthandjodescribe an
mists have taken "the economy" as their subject matter, so some object wjuch eludesJhe grasp of understanding. Another procedure"is to
academic students of politics have even revived the old term "polity" to assert that the "larger society" is the society which resides in the territory
show that they deal with a phenomenon of the same extension and governed bylhe_sovereign national state. This means designating it by
inclusiveness as "the economy." the name of the state"or by tKename orthe nationality which presumably
It would appear from this that my subject matter in these essays is comprises the human beings living on that territory. This is certainly the
"society," and so it is. But saying that does not bring us very far. most common practice. And it is not by any means wholly incorrectfar
Economists have the market, all the arrangements and conditions which from itbut it is certainly not adequate. It raises a question about the"^>
foster and distort it, as the major objects of their attention. Those who importance of nationality in the formation of society; it also raises a
contemplate the polity have as their major object the central government question about the significance of territorial boundaries and of a
and all that is done by it, and all those actions and arrangements which nominally sovereign authority over all that goes on within those bound-
attempt to control it and to change it as well as the efforts which flow aries. It certainly does not resolve the difficult problems which I have
from it. But it is more difficult, at least in our present state of knowledge, approached from various angles in the essays contained in this volume.
to conceive of a society on the same scale and to define it clearly. Great To speak of a society implies that there are certain properties which"-sita*
writers like Tocqueville in De la Democratie en Amirique, and Macaulay constitute the various groups, strata, and individual members of that
in the first volume of the History of England, and Hal6vy in the first society as a single inclusive entity which is not simply an additive list of
volume of L'Histoire du peuple anglais au dix-neuvikme Steele, have all all the different groups, strata, and individuals. These groups, strata and
dealt with whole societies, but they did not specifically confront the task individuals are linked with each other into a society. Democracy and
which I have repeatedly attempted in the papers in this volume. The totalitarianism refer to certain features of that linkage, but they are too
great sociologists have come near the subject but never confronted it narrowly limited in their reference. The linkage is more ramified and
directly. The tradition with which they have endowed us does not speak pervasive than that produced by the actions of a monopolistic party in a
clearly on this point That is one of the reasons why the approach taken totalitarian society or by those of an elected government in a competitive
here is so tentative and provisional. It is an attempt to elucidate things party system. I do not wish to commit myself to the proposition that*"
which have seemed to me to be of very great importance but which are societies can or cannot be characterized by a single term. If they can, it
very obscure. It is terribly difficult to describe and analyze the processes will have to be one of a very differentiated family of terms and not one of
and structures which form families and classes, neighborhoods and the alternatives of a simple dichotomy, which is so common a method of
regions, schools and churches, factories and ethnic groups into a single characterization in social science and in lay thought. I have tentatively
society. chosen the term "integration" to bear the burden of our vague thoughts
Whatever the reason for this difficulty, whether it lies in the inherent about the constitution of the parts of society into a whole society. In
difficulty of the task or whetherand this is closely related to that recent years, the term became widely used to refer to the relationship of
difficultythe tradition of thought about "society" as having a character ethnic minorities to the society in which they live.
parallel to but not identical with "polity" and "economy" has skirted The integration of the black sector of American society is only orit
this subject, it need not be determined here. The very name of "macro- particular variant of the more general class of relationships between j
sociology," which has recently come into wider usage and which is center and periphery. In their various forms and intensities, the phenom- /
perhaps derived from the parallel "macroeconomics," is evidence of an ena of integration operate in every sphere of the life of society. The term /
 x Introduction Introduction xi
is often used to refer to local communities, for example, a "well- the consensus of many other persons; this setting might be real or
integrated community," or a "highly integrated family," or the integra- presumptive. The threat of the exercise crf)erCtj)nwhich is more often
tion of states in a region or continent It has been used to refer to in operation than actual coerciondependsfor its effectiveness on a
relationships of smaller radius; in all these usages, there are certain belief on the part of the threatened and the threatener that there is some
features which are common. But when I speak of the integration of consensus regarding the legitimacy of the threat of coercion among/
society, I refer not only to the conformity of expectations and perfor- "third parties." The relations between consensus and coercion are
mances and the acceptance of distributions of rewards, to boundaries, numerous and subtle and it is urgent to analyze thm. I do not, however,
and to collective self-designations but also to the center in its relations with do that in the essays which follow.
its various peripheries. Thus whether the term "integration" is used or not I have directed my attention primarily to consensus, because it is so
in the essays which follow, I refer to the linkages of the parts of evidently a major element in the integration of society, and it has
societychurches, military units, friendships, business firms, trade despite numerous treatments in passingsnot often been made the object
unions, neighborhoods, familiesto the institutions, roles, or symbols of persistent investigation. Furthermore, a very important strand of /
which are thought by their members to be characteristically constitutive modern social thought has emphasized, as the chief characteristic of
of, and therefore central to, the "inclusive" or "larger" or "whole" society. modem society, the dissolution of consensus and consequently the
Integration, in its most abstract sense, is the articulation of expecta- disintegration of society. Very much of the intellectual tradition in which
tion and performance. It can occur in a relationship between two I grew up put the dissolution of consensus into a very prominent position.
persons, it can occur in the structure of a whole society. It can be As I began to find my own way, the inadequacy, descriptively and
produced by coercion, payment, or consensus about moral standards. It theoretically, of this view of modern society became apparent to me. On
is not always direct in the sense of linking a person, a group, or a stratum the other side, many of those writers who discussed consensus in a way
directly to something emblematic or representative of the larger society. which did not entail disintegration, spoke of it in such a schematic and
Integration is a very heterogeneous affair. It is very unevenly distributed even simplifying way that it was clear that nothing like the consensus
in any given society, and it is also an intermittent thing; it fluctuates they described existed in modern societies. What they described was too
within and among the parts of society. A given society might be highly explicit, too stable, too comprehensive. That is why a considerable 1
integrated in some sectors, poorly integrated in others. Given sectors of amount of what follows in this volume is given over to stressing the 1
society might vary through time in their degree of integration into the shifting, vague, intermittent, and indirect character of consensus; assess- ^/ \
larger society. The threat of coercion might be very significant at one ing its powers and limitations, its fragmentariness and fragility, its i
point in time, at another it might fade and yield to payment or persistence and its intermittence; and then attempting to discern its I
consensus. existence and working in modern societies. . i
I do not deal much in this volume with payment, that is, the market, as It has never been any different and it is not likely to be different in the
a means of integration; nor do I, except in passing, discuss the very future. Such consensus as exists in any society is, moreover, never shared
important phenomenon of coercion, which plays a significant part in by all its members; nor is each of the numerous consensual solidarities
forming the action or individuals and groups into a condition of among the various strata and groups within society congruent with
integration and in maintaining that condition. In attempting to arrive at certain others to such an extent that they are in effect self-contained.
a more just assessment of the actual state of affairs prevailing in modern There is an infinitude of criss-crossing and overlapping. But alongside
societies and to elaborate the categories appropriate to this just assess- this tenacious and penetrating intertwinement and ramification there are
ment, I am incessantly and acutely aware that exchange and coercion are also pockets of the far-reaching isolation of certain groups from most of
parts of the "macrosocial" phenomenon. Nonetheless, these essays deal the rest of society. Even those which are not isolated in this way are
mainly with the variations and mechanisms of~cdnsensys. partially isolated from each other. They would not be groups with a
There are various reasons for this choice. For one thing, e^xchangt^has distinguishable character; they would be boundaryless and therefore not
been very elaborately analyzed by economists, and its place~m the recognizable by their members or by observers as groups with distinctive
integration of society requires, so it seemed to me and so it still seems, properties. This is one aspect of the limitation on consensual integration
that the consensual setting of the market be analyzed more adequately to which some of the papers in this volume are devoted. I have wished to
than it has been hitherto. Coercjaajs a marginal phenomenon which show that Leviathan can never have things entirely his own way for any
cannot possibly integrate nfiich of a society over an extended period of considerable length of time. There are always some parts of society which
time. Its effective exercise over certain persons depends on a setting of he cannot swallow up and assimilate.

J
xii Introduction Introduction xiii
Societies are full of conflicts; conflicts are endemic in human exis- regard themselves as the exponents of the "conflict model," which they
tence. Scarcity is an unceasing fact of life, despite what the preachers of contrast with a "consensus model." Their polemical, even political
plenitude say. Quite apart from the ecological situation of human life, interest has thus far prevented them from pursuing their analysis
human appetites and desires are expansive. Their subsidence is a seriously. Even if wrongheaded, a serious, unremitting analysis of
phenomenon to be explained, but subsided or expanding, they are always coercion and conflict would throw up questions which would much more
confronting the fact of the scarcity of the objects they seek for their subtly illuminate the subject which concerns us here, namely, the powers
satisfaction. Conflicts are patently antithetical to consensus and, hence, and influences of the inclusive society which subsists alongside numerous
to integration. Still, conflicts within societies do not prevent the societies parochial loyalties and which survives conflicts. But there has been no
from continuing to exist. The parties to these conflicts, despite the help forthcoming from the friends of the "conflict model."
temptations which conflict offers to hyperbolic rhetoric, seldom deny The problem remains: How are individuals, groups, and strata linked -v
their membership in those societies. Those wh^r^jn^csuflici^ith-each together to constitute a society, and not just all those alive at a single /
other respond_toJhe namej>y which, they designate their^memb^rshipjn moment but through time as well? The shape of all these society-forming f
their somehow encompassing-society, and they recognize some identity linkages has an existence of which time is one dimension. Time provides *
throughthiie-and across the lines of conflict. They regard themselves as not only a setting which permits the state of one moment to be compared
indisalubly-bound to their societies; and so, indeed^they are. heuristically with that of another moment. Time is also a constitutive
Society, even an apparenthforderly and internally relatively peaceful property of society. Society is only conceivable as a system of varying
society, is a great motley of activites, a tangled skein of an infinity of ties states occurring at moments in time. Society displays its characteristic
which, in ways difficult to formulate, constitute a whole. It has bound- features hot at a single moment in time but in various phases assuming
aries of which those within it and outside it are generally aware. It is various but related shapes at different and consecutive moments of time.
an inchoate sprawling mass constantly spilling over its boundaries and It seems to me to be impossible to deal with the integration of society
receiving ideas, works, and persons from outside them, but whatever without regard to the vicissitudes of the "natural history" of society.
comes within its boundaries becomes different in consequence of being These are the intellectual interests toward which the papers gathered
there. Assimilation testifies to an assimilating society, resistance to together in this volume have been moving over about four decades. The
assimilation testifies to the presence of society which grips whatever movement has not been in a straight line. There has been much circling
comes within its boundaries. The grip is not necessarily one which about the same point; much redoubling of steps, much going back to the
assimilates into a consensus; it is possible to be bound into society by beginning and starting again. New ideas have occasionally been added;
bonds which are not predominantly consensual. more often it has been the older ideas which have been put into a slightly
* One thing is clear: there are not and can never be any human societies different intellectual context Some facets previously neglected have been
which are wholly consensual; nor have there ever been societies so wholly brought forward. The aim has always been to make a little more explicit
disintegrated that there were no links at all binding many of their what was more dimly apprehended previously. Time and again I have
^individual members together. asked myself whether this search for the structure of societyof whole
For a long time there has been a tendency among intellectuals in societiesis not a vain undertaking, perhaps even an idle one. Some-
Western countries to deny this obvious fact For some reasons, good and times I ask myself whether the individualistic utilitarian interpretation of
bad, they have accepted uncritically a tradition which has depicted society is not adequate, or why the Hobbesian-Marxian view is not
modern society as if it were on the verge of the state of nature according adequate, when they not infrequently seem to account for the coordina-
to Hobbes. This situation was not improved by the introduction of a tion of the actions of many groups, strata, and individuals into society. I
vulgar Marxism which unthinkingly made membership in society iden- ask myself these questions quite often, but I invariably come up with the
tical with subjugation by coercion. As a result of a very selective same answer, namely, that such views are not enough and that they are
imagination and an almost deliberate blindness, the view has become not enough in an important way.
rather pervasive. It has come to appear self-evident It has taken hold In some respects all these papers say the same things, and they say
even among sociologists, who should, of all persons, know better. The them in a way which to me is exasperatingly vague. Yet I think that it is
great tradition of modern sociology has always included this view as one not unduly immodest to say that here and there the line has been pushed
of its strands, and the increasingly "empirical" character of sociology has forward a little. I shall now say something about how these ideas
not been able to expunge it. Recently this extremely naive view has been developed, about their sources in books, teachers, and colleagues and in
given a new impetus in sociological thought by a number of writers who immediate observations drawn from investigation and the experience of
xiv Introduction Introduction xv
life. Retracing these steps might help to make more tangible the way .in which they reached out to hold on to those societies. I had
incessant objects of my intellectual striving of more than four decades. observed immigrants to the United States from Eastern European
countries, where they had not fared at all well, refer to "the old country"
as "home." I was struck by the strength of their unreflecting belief in
II their membership in societies in which they were no longer actively
When I first began to think about problems which later were classified as participant; I was struck too by the way this belief descended without
sociological, I did not know about the position which I now tentatively reflection to their offspringswhich was one of the grounds of the rash of
hold. It was on the basis of study of nineteenth-century literature, "fellow-traveling" among young intellectuals of Eastern European Jew-
especially French literature but also Russian, German, and American, ish origin in the 1930s in the United States. I was no less equally
that I began to reflect on the intellectuals' withholding of their approba- impressed with the way in which they had become enmeshed in their new
tion from their own societies and their complaints and counsels about society. (This was one of the reasons why, when I later read the writings of
their isolation. As I recall, I did not really believe in their assertions of W. I. Thomas and especially Robert Park, their observations on the
isolation from society; I saw them as connected with it in all sorts of ways. assimilation of immigrants called forth such a sympathetic response.)
I also at this time began to read the literature of Marxism and was made I had also been impressed by the obstinacy with which some of the
aware of the enormous aspirations of Marxism to transform the large forces of union in the American Civil War refused to allow the Southern
societies of Europe and America into communities which combined total
states to secede. When I first began to entertain the problem of "what
individual freedom with a total absence of conflict. Rousseau's Contrat
makes a society stick together and what causes it to come apart"which
social and especially the notion of a volonte generate aroused my
a delightful old London bookseller once defined as the subject matter of
appreciation and abhorrence. The idea of the absorption of the individual
sociologythe society which had once been ruled by. the Romanovs had
will into a higher will which transcends that of the individual intrigued me,
been brought together again as the extensive disintegration of the civil
as it still does, and much of what I have thought since that time has been
impelled by a desire for a better understanding of that idea. The complete war receded. Thefirsttrials of the late 1920s had already occurred, and it
absorption of the individual which Rousseau appeared to me to desire was was clear already that Soviet society was not being held together by the
both repugnant to me morally and unrealizable as well. natural harmony of freie Menschen auf freiem Boden as Max Adler
formulated the socialist ideal. These crude and patchy thoughts about
Georges Sorel was another of those writers who made an unpleasant how societies became reconstituted as societies after civil war or revolu-
but nonetheless deep impression on me. I thought that his justification of tion also gave me occasion to think about what it was which was being
the execution of Socrates was wrong, but at the same time I also had reconstituted. Except for the separation of Norway from Sweden, there
some sympathy with the notion that a society has a set of moral and had been no breakup of a stateapart from the dissolution of the multi-
cognitive beliefs, adherence to which is a condition of its survival. In his national, multiethnic Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, which I did not
contempt for what he conceived to be the moral abdication of the look upon as single societies. I could see the conflicts and miseries of
bourgeoisie of his time I saw a conviction that the participation of the societiesthe United States was showing fissures in the early years of the
elite of a society in a consensus of beliefs with the rest of the society is a Depression of 1929, and the Weimar Republic, of which I knew only very
condition of the continuation of that society in its existing form. The first little, was apparently the scene of frequent and intense conflicts. Yet the
volume of Taine's Origines made the same impression on me. opposite was no less present in my mind.
Yet, at the same time, I was not ready to be convinced that societies I also noticed fairly early that societies which had expanded continu-
were such flimsy and easily disruptable affairs. There was apparently ously on a surface unbroken by water or other societies were regarded as
already some reality in the volonte generate in the society I knew. I morally unexceptionable by persons who criticized the expansion of
thought that it possessed an envelopingness and a tenacity which societies overseas ordiscontinuously over land. I did not make much of
rendered it obdurate to the jolts of ordinary life and intellectuals' this at the time although in later years I saw that it said something about
criticism. At around this time, I read Sumner's Folkways, which dealt the significance imparted to territory and boundaries.
with this obduracy to intentions of change, but I thought the idea of the At every stage of my life over the past forty years, the grip of society on
"mores" much too amorphous as an account of the tenacious structure its members and the attachment of individuals to societyand by this I
of society. do not mean the grip of the immediately present group on its members or
Even earlier, when I was quite young, I was struck by the tenacity of the attachment of the members to that group or the government's grip
the attachment of individual human beings to their societies and by the exercised through its capacity for coercionhas been borne in upon me.
xvi Introduction Introduction xvii
And just as impressive to me has been the amorphous inarticulateness forms of social action. His analyses of large societies were done before he
of this grip and clingingness. To practically all of those who have began to build complex structures out of the most elementary constitu-
participated in these attachments, they have seemed ineffable.1 What is ents of action. It might well be that the task is not hopeless, but even if it
more, they have existed alongside dissatisfaction and resentment against could be done, it could be done only after the distinctive features of the
the objects to which they have been attached, and together with active larger society have been discerned on their own. They cannot be
antagonism against other groups and individuals within that same constructed deductively as I thought they could be.
society to which they were so attached. Although the intellectual air of the 1930s was filled with talk about
When I came to the University of Chicago, I began to read the writings "capitalism," "totalitarianism," "the free society," and the like, there
of Simmel. He had asked the question: "How is society possible?" ("Wie was scarcely any explicit discussion on a more general plane of the bonds
ist Gesellschaft moglich?")3 He answered it in a way which even at that which constitute society. Max Weber's writings were beginning to be
time was not really satisfying; he said that it exists through the known in English-speaking countries, but bureaucracy as a mode of
interaction of individuals, and, in saying so, he avoided the problem of organization of authority characteristic of large-scale societies was what
the "unseen hand" working through a multiplicity of interactions. attracted attention. The more fundamental and potentially more fruitful
Simmel postulated the formation of the larger society from the multipli- analysis of legitimacy was not pursued. The increased popularity of
cation of interactions in face-to-face relationships. It is true that he often Marxism contributed nothing to the problem, since its interpreters and
dealt with things other than these, but in principle this was what he was proponents were, oh the whole, so unserious intellectually and so eager to
committed to. I was attracted by the possibility of constructing a find easy recipes. When Karl Mannheim's Mensch und Gesellschaft im
description of society by the differentiation and multiplication of inter- Zeitalter des Umbaus appeared in 1935, it thrilled me by its large
actions between two persons and by extending these interactions to ever perspectives. Mannheim proposed the total planning of societywith
larger numbers of participants in networks of interaction, so that a which I was not at all sympatheticbut he did not really say what the
picture of an entire society would be constructed from direct, face-to-face whole society which was to be "totally" planned had been before it fell
links. Society was, nonetheless, not formed simply by interaction, into the crisis which he purported to describe. His view of the "laissez-
however important that was. The interacting groups or strata might be faire society" which was to be replaced by the totally planned society was
the means of communication or connections with parts of the society not much different from the traditional conception of the market He
which were not interacting with each other. The connections of these found it easier to describe the nonexistent, fictitious society which was to
latter groups or strata or individuals which were mediated through be createdas a societythrough planning than to analyze the working
face-to-face interaction were as important as those which were consti- of the existing society. Like other famous figures in the history of modern
tuted by the face-to-face interaction. sociology, he had an eye which was quicker to detect and penetrate into
Simmel was in fact not asking the question to which I have been "breakdowns" than into the "ongoingness."
seeking an answer. He was trying to elucidate the most elementary Forty years have passed since Mannheim wrote Mensch und Gesell-
properties of interaction. Max Wober was doing a similar thing in the schaft. There are still no societies in the West which are "totally
first chapters of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Beginning with the ele- planned," but somehow these societies have persisted, although with
ments of the action of a single actor, he advanced into a social action many changes. Mannheim did not help to discern the process through
which he then elaborated into four types of social action, and from there which these societies were able to persist as societies without recourse to
onwardby the addition of further elements, which emerged mainly such a drastic, disjunctive change of structure as he proposed. He made
from the most elementary definition of actionhe moved into the another attempt in a long paper which he presented to "The Moot"1;
grandiose analyses of the charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal there he explored the significance of paradigmatic images. This was the
forms of authority. closest he came to dealing with the consensus of beliefs connected with
For a time, I imagined that this was how the idea of a whole society the center, but he did not continue this line of inquiry. (Unfortunately,
might be constructed. I was probably wrong. Max Weber did not arrive although I saw him frequently during and after the Second World War, I
where he did by multiplying and differentiating the most elementary did not have the problem sufficiently in focus in my mind to be able to
1. Simmel, in an offhand way said: "Awareness in principle that he is forming
a society is not present in the individual" Simmel, Georg, Soziologie (Leipzig:
Duncker und Humblot, 1908), p. 31. 3. See Diagnosis of our Time (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner Co
2. Ibid., pp. 27-45. 1943.) ' V
xviil Introduction Introduction xix
draw him into discussion about it I regret this very much now because I widely used in the English-speaking countries for the first time. Although
think this would have benefitted his own work and mine. But I was too it was acquired from the Marxist writings, which were then being more
ignorant to know just how to take hold of the problem.) widely read than heretofore, "ideology" was given a wider meaning,
broader and less derogatory, than it was in its specifically Marxist sense.
It was used to refer to an all-embracing belief which answered all
Ill questions and which offered the individual a belief that he had a "place"
Things were intellectually at loose ends during the 1930s. Harold in that larger order of things which was explained by the ideology. Much
Lasswell was a young teacher at the University of Chicago. He was the importance was attributed to the function of these totalitarian "faiths"
most sophisticated of all the teachers there in his knowledge of the main or "ideologies," which, in giving each individual a "place" in the
European literature which interested me, and he was very daring too. He movement of history, also gave him a sense of his own dignity in
spoke often about what he called "configurative analysis," which must consequence of that legitimated "place."
have been something like what I would now call macrosociology. I was not sympathetic with this view; I suspected and in some cases
Unfortunately at that time, his conception of power seemed to knew that it hid an unworthy admiration of wicked societies. Yet I did
concentrate on manipulation and coercion. Nonetheless, he had a not counterpose an alternative to it I agreed that beliefs were of
remarkable sensitivity and a widely ranging curiosity which disclosed the consequence.
relevance of beliefs which were not exclusively political in their content for At the beginning of the thirties while I was still an undergraduate I
the distribution of power in society. In those years, the University of read through all of Durkheim's works. The one thing in all his writings
Chicago Press had published a series of works on "civic training." These which appealed to me was his discussion of "anomie." My first readings
were the fruits of Charles Merriam's interest in the beliefs which sustain in Max Weber made more receptive my sensitivity to the varieties of beliefs
and change regimes. Harold Lasswell was his most original student; his about "serious" things. I had too much experience in the observation of
originality consisted in bringing the insights of the newer generation of religious and political sects and I had studied too much theology and the
European writers and psychoanalysis to the study of the matrix of history of the Christian churches and sects to regard belief simply as
political activity. Lasswell did not deal with legitimacy in his treatment of "error," "rationalization," "reflection," or as an uncomfortable ir-
political power; he did, however, speak about myths. I thought this was relevanceas so many social scientists of my generation did. I had the
disparaging toward the deeper implications of the conception of legiti- good fortune when I came to the University of Chicago to become more
macy. Lasswell also knew a lot about the history of nationalism in familiar with Frank Knight's ruminations about the tenacity of beliefs.
modern times, and he had an extraordinarily lively mind and very much Knight was a rationalist who detested many of these beliefs, but he was
else. I gleaned from him a few grains of ideas which grew a little in insistent that they be recognized. Unlike Pareto, whose Traiti I studied
different settings. I owe to him my interest in "deference," which I soon about this time, he did not regard the rationally or scientifically
began to connect with the "moral order." unjustifiable beliefs with levity. I also attended Robert Park's last course
Outside the university and the books I was reading, events in the world at the University of Chicago, It was on "Collective Behavior" and dealt
were forcing my attention into the same direction in which my thought with revivalist movements, panics, riots, and other phenomenon of "mass
was already tending. In the 1930s, the United States and the liberal emotion." From Park's lectures and from the conversations which we
capitalistic democracies of Western Europe were under the strain of had when I sometimes accompanied him on his way home from the
large-scale unemployment, and there was much pessimism about the university after class, I got a clearer, understanding that very little could
recuperative prospects of these societies. It was common among pub- be accounted for in society unless beliefs were considered. Park often
licists and some academic social scientists from about 1932 onward to referred to the "moral order" and to "norms." W. I. Thomas's concep-
contrast the dilapidated, ramshackle condition of the North American tion of the "definition of the situation," undifferentiated and unclear
and Western European societies with the solidarity and eagerness for though it is, also suggested that belief was important Academic social
concerted, authoritatively directed action which they said was the scientists and intellectual publicists would readily have granted this for
prevailing feature of society in the Soviet Union, National Socialist all societiesoriental, African, ancient and medieval Europeanbut
Germany, and Fascist Italy. The solidaritythe term "integration" was they were reluctant to acknowledge it when they dealt with modern
as popular then as "charismatic" is nowof the latter societies was Western societies.
attributed to the fact that their members "had something to believe in." As a result of all this, although I was repelled by the admiring
It was said that they had "a faith"; the term "ideology" began to be overtones of those writers who emphasized the beneficent beliefs of Nazis
)
w

xx Introduction Introduction xxi

and communists, I had some common ground with them. I shared ianism. The reduction of men to "isolated atoms" in mass society was
certain of their postulates. At that time, I still accepted much of the said to be an affront to their needs for solidarity and for belief; such a
conception of modern liberal society which was to be found in Tbnnies, situation would be unbearable. "Political religions" were the result of the
and in Simmel's "Die Grossstadt und das Geistesleben" which I admired beliefless, excessively individuated condition of man in the liberal
so much that I translated it into English.41 accepted that beliefs v/ereT democratic society. The hunger for solidarity drove human beings to seek
.constitutive-part.o_society and that modern Western societies had out or form and adhere to groups and societies to which such an
undergone a dangerous attrition of belief. attachment was possible. Whatever man's fundamental needs for norm-
From Tonnies and Simmel I assimilated the view that the development i atively legitimate order, modern liberal-democratic, capitalistic societies
of the large-scale, urban, capitalistic, individualistic society was one in failed to meet them. In contrast with this situation, the totalitarian
which the larger society with its moral order had dissolved into a societies, by presenting a comprehensive scheme of ultimate values
multiplicity of individuals and small groups, each with its own purposes intelligible and persuasive to everyone, were meeting fundamental
and interests. These, at most, allowed compromise but not the sense of_ human needs.
identity and attachment to symbols of the whole which, it was implied, This made no sense to me. It did not correspond with what was
had characterized the society of the preceding stage of Western history. observable. I could see, in the United States in the 1930s, how, despite the
R. H. Tawney, although he was writing the history of thought and demoralizing influence of the Depression, great numbers of persons
opinion, was actually expressing a view of what modern society was when remained attached to their society. One could scarcely avoid being
he wrote: "Religion has been converted from the keystone which holds impressed with the part played by President Franklin Roosevelt in
together the social edifice into one department within it, and the idea of strengthening attachment to American society. The president was bit-
the rule of right is replaced by economic expediency as the arbiter of terly criticized in some circles, but even in those circles there were many
policy and the criterion of conduct." "Society . . . is a joint-stock com- whose attachment to the country could not be doubted; they were not
pany rather than an organism and the liabilities of the shareholder are merely seeking to protect their own property and status. In intellectual
strictly limited."5 circles too there was a renewal of civility after its absence for many
I held this view ambivalently. It contradicted my conception of decades; this too gave evidence of attachment to the society without the
conduct as "normatively oriented." The "theory of mass society" was adduction of an explicit, comprehensive, and coherent doctrine or
beginning to take form. The publicistic admiration for the all-embrac- ideology. The consensual element in American society was very far from
ing consensus of German society under the National Socialists and of extinction. This was quite obvious although it was much more difficult to
Soviet society was receiving a more intellectual formulation in the writings delineate its form and force. In National Socialist Germany and the
of Paul Tillich, Emil Lederer, Karl Mannheim, and Erich Fromm. The Soviet Union, the two societies which were being held before us as being
Frankfurt Institut fiir Sozialforschung was the source of many of these wholly consensual, very great numbers of persons were being imprisoned,
notions. A consensus was forming. Marxists, refined and vulgar, liberals interned, done to death, exiled, or menaced. One could not, unless one
of faint heart, and other haters, high-and low-brow, of modern society, was already a determined partisan or a complaisant victim of propa-
supported each other. The great tradition of sociology which saw the ganda, fail to notice this. The appearance of consensus was maintained
world in the dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft was beginning by the coercive segregation of dissenters and by murdering or intimi-
to join forces with these other blocs of opinion. dating them. I did not doubt that: there was a good deal of consensus
The condition alleged to exist in the Western countries was declared to around the centers of these two societies, but it was certainly far from
be a prelude to totalitarianism. The incipient "theory of mass society" complete.
was both an ostensible description of liberal, democratic societies in the In addition to the frivolous, who were driven along by the currents of
twentieth century and an analysis of their transformation into totalitar- opinion, and those who were simply malicious, there were also the decent
persons who had experienced National Socialism at close hand or who
4. At the end of the decade 1 used it for my undergraduate students. More had observed it with penetrating understanding and who were alarmed
than thirty years later, after I forgot that I had translated it, Professor1 Donald by the danger of its spread to Western Europe and America. Some of
Levine reprinted it in Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, edited them thought that the German situation was prototypical for all of the
by Donald Levine (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971) pp. liberal-democratic societies of the West. There were also less engaged
324-39.
5. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: John Murray, scholars who asserted that liberal political democracy and the rule of law
1933), pp. 279, 189. rested on consensus. Carl Joachim Friedrich was one of the best and
 xxii Introduction Introduction xxiii
most learned of these, but their thought was too schematic for me. They contradiction and ambivalence regarding the criteria on the basis of
did not venture onto the structure of the required consensus; they did not which esteem was accorded. These data were very useful to me.
attempt to delineate its actual condition. I was on their side, but I did not Alongside my interest in the "whole society" and its presumed
make any progress through this alliance. Their definitions of consensus consensus, I was reading the literature on religious dissent and toleration
gave a monolithic impression of a body of beliefs consensually held, jn seventeenth-century England; I was also interested in the literature on
equally and simultaneously, throughout the society. Their belief that friendship. In 1941 I also undertook an investigation on the North
some agreement was a precondition of the peaceful resolution of Side of Chicago of small associations intended to propagate or sustain
disagreement was correct, but it seemed too general. They never gave any National Socialist and American "nativisf' views.. The seventeenth-
illustrations, or at least none that I understood at the time to be century debate on religious toleration, particularly John Locke's Letters
pertinent They did not go into the pattern of coexistence of conflict and Concerning Toleration, and the observation of isolated "pockets" in
consensus, although their conception of consensus as a limitation on the society posed a problem for my understanding of societywide consensus.
intensity of conflict placed this task on their agenda. The religious and political sects which I had been interested in were
The coming of the Second World War did not improve my thought on antagonistic to the rest of their society while claiming that the other
these matters. My ideas were vague, loose, and contradictory; their members of that society should act toward them as if they were fully
vagueness and looseness obscured their contradictoriness. On the one qualified members of that same society. I was not interested in scoring
side, 1 accepted, more or less, the modern sociological version of the points against their logical inconsistency but rather in fathoming this
Hobbesian description of the state of nature in its application to Western simultaneous rejection and affirmation of membership in society.
societies. Yet I was also convinced, in principle, that some minimal Then there was another side to the pluralism which I was discovering.
measure of consensus was required for the existence of any society. In the It was more positive, but it raised the same sort of question regarding the
few papers which I wrote on social stratification before the war, I amalgamation of diverse and separate groups and strata into a single
nroceeded on the belief that there existed a vague, unarticulated society.
/acceptance of certain criteria regarding the relationship between merit I had studied Charles Horton Cooley on "primary groups," Elton
\ and reward and that the criteria by which deference was accorded Mayo's The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, and T. North
received a fairly consensual affirmation. Yet I also knew of the Whitehead's Leadership in a Free Society. Simmel's insights into
antagonism between members of different strata and the conflicts, intimate attachments, and Durkheim's effort to establish a new civic
sometimes violent, conducted by some members of one stratum against moralityvaguely resembling, at least in intention, what I later called
members of other strata. At the same time that I was convinced that a "civility"to be mediated through independent "professional groups,"
minimal degree of consensus was necessary to the existence of a society, I and the "pluralism" of Leon Duguit and Mary Parker Follett came to life
was even stronger in my conviction that no large, differentiated society in my mind when during the years from 1942 to 1945 I pondered the
could ever attain or persist in the kind of consensus sought by totalitar- power of the German armed forces to resist disintegration under a fairly
ians and idealists. steady sequence of reverses in battle.
Two questions resulted from this. One referred to the patterns in the Freud's Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse was helpful to me in my
mind and in the culture of these conflicting elements; the other referred search for the lines of filiation which bound the individual to the larger
to the character of the consensus which could exist under those society or to the center as I later called it. My collaborator in these years,
conditions. Dr. (then Lieutenant-Colonel) Henry Dicks, was a psychiatrist sym-
pathetic with psychoanalysis and a man of warm and understanding
heart, even of enemy prisoners of war. He emphasized the need to
IV demonstrate manliness as the source of the German soldier's conduct
The period between the outbreak of the war in Europe and the entry of under arms. This was an attractive explanation, but it neglected the role
the United States into the war was one in which myxapproach began to of the soldier's immediate companions in training and combat and their
change. Early in this period, I wrote a long paper on "The Bases of role in sustaining his adherence to the ideal of manliness. It overlooked
Stratification in the Negro Community" for Professor Gunnar Myrdal's the content of manliness which included fidelity to comrades. It ne-
study of the Negro in America. Such data as I could obtain from direct glected the force of attachment to the larger collectivitiesthe Wehr-
observation and from documentary sources showed consensus riddled by macht, the Nazi party, the German state, and German society. The
xxiv Introduction Introduction xxv
psychoanalytic interpretation treated the elaborate structure of society behalf of the general goals set by their military superiors, near and
simply as the setting of sexual competitiveness. It raised no questions remote.
about the way in which that structure worked except to imply that it was This helped to settle for me the problem raised by the laudators of the
sustained by sexual competitiveness. This solution begged the question. I totalitarian societies when they wrote of the "faith to live for" or of.the
thought that I found the answer in the primary group as the mediator of "ideology" which allegedly pervaded those societies. It showed me that
beliefs and rules from the authority of the larger society. I recalled many of the soldiers were rather deaf to the ideological "beliefs" for an
Hermann Schmalenbach's description of the Bund in his essay "Die active acceptance of which they had erroneously been praised; it showed
soziologische Kategorie des Bundes."6 It was a Gemeinschafi without the me that some of the response which such beliefs aroused was the result of
ties of kinship and place. This was helpful because it made me more the presence in the soldiers' immediate environment of a person who
aware than I had been before of the role of certain types of primary espoused those beliefs and to whom the soldier was attached on personal
groups in affirming and supporting ideals for entities far wider than the grounds. This was a very simple observation once it had been made, but
primary group. It made me reinterpret the meaning of Cooley's hope that it was a step forward for me in my search for the integrating mechanisms
the ideals of the primary group would become the ideals of American of large societies and for the limits of "systems of belief in the working
society in its largest and least intimate structure. Cooley had hoped that of those mechanisms.7
the primary groups would become the centers of American society. I now
began to see the primary groups as the mediators of the beliefs and
symbols of the center. I also read Ernst von Salomon's Die Ge'dchteten
with its account of the fanatical nationalist youths who assassinated Through the second half of the 1940s, I continued to work on primary
Walter Rathenau and who found in the Freikorps a way to sustain their groups in armies. I reinterpreted the tradition which I had inherited,
ideal of the German nation and means to realize a "genuinely German fusing the tradition of reflection and investigation concerning primary
state." Later on, I saw this phenomenon in a different light, but at this groups with a long enduring concern with the function of primary groups
stage it was taken as another instance of the primary group as the in the maintenance and change of large collectivities and society.8
mediator of the symbols of the larger society and as the sustainer of its I delivered a series of Jectures on "The Primary Groups in the
value. Social Structure" at the London School of Economics in the autumn of
When his military service was over, Morris Janowitz, who had been 1947. (I did this a number of times at the University of Chicago too,
my close collaborator during the war, came to the University of Chicago beginning in 1956.) I also began to lecture and conduct seminars on "The
to complete his studies. There in the spring of 1946 we wrote the Structure of Large-Scale Societies," at the London School of Economics
"Cohesion and Disintegration of the Wehrmacht in World War II," in in the 1940s and at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. It was my
which the idea of interplay of attachments to the larger society and to the intention when I began this program of teaching to write two books, one
intensely experienced, small primary group was developed. The long and entitled "Consensus and Liberty: The-Social and Psychological Foun-
short of this was that the stout-hearted conduct in combat of most of the dations of Political Democracy"; the other on "Primary Groups in the
German soldiers with whom we dealt was only slightly, and then Social Structure." The former was written out in a complete draft; the
indirectly, influenced by the ideological espousal of the beliefs of latter was sketched out more roughly but at some considerable length. I
National Socialism. Vague attachments to German society and the ideal put both of them aside when I went to Harvard University to work with
of National Socialism mediated by personally acceptable zealots each Professor Talcott Parsons on what later became "Values, Motives and
played a part Above all, however, concern to maintain the integrity of, Systems of Action," and the general statement in Towards a General
and to remain firmly emplaced in, the primary groups provided the main Theory of Action.
ground for the continued obedience of German soldiers to the commands A number of things of some importance for subsequent phases of my
of their officers and for their exercise of initiative and resourcefulness on work came out of this collaboration. One of them was the inter-

6. Walter Strich, editor, Die Diaskuren: Jahrbuch fur Geisteswissensckaften, 7. I was heartened in this view by the invocation by Professor Paul Lazarsfeid
vol. 1, (Munich: Meyer und Jessen, 1922). pp. 35-105. I first encountered in a lecture which he delivered in Oslo in 1948 very shortly after our paper
Schmalenbach when I translated the manuscript of Ernest Frankel's Der appeared and then a few years later by his adoption of this hypothesis in his and
Doppelstaat into English in order to help him to find his way in the United States. Professor Elihu Katz's Personal Influence (Glencoe, III.: The Free Press, 1955).
Frankel later became professor at the Free University of Berlin and struggled to 8. See my "The Study of the Primary Groups," in H. D. Lasswell and Daniel
save it from its assailants. My bread was not vainly cast upon the waters. Lerner, editors, The Policy Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951).
xxvi Introduction Introduction xxvii
dependence between systems and subsystems; this was one of the things communist movement He thought my analysis in that paper fitted into
which I had got from reading Pareto's Traite, but the environment was his own ideas about social movements. Lasswell encouraged me simply
not congenial to this kind of thought in the 1930s and I did not have the by his own interest in such mattershe was the only teacher at the
equipment to do more than respond favorably. My friendship with University of Chicago who was at home among the famous European
Professor Parsons provided this compelling intellectual environment. figures, such as Weber, Michels, Pareto, Sombart, who seemed to me in
Another benefit of this collaboration was the clarification of the distinc- my earlier years to be the repositories of whatever a young person of
tion between culture and social structure; still another was the threefold intellectual seriousness ought to know.
classification of cognitive, moral, and expressive actions. All these The political events of the 1930s in Europe and America and the
accomplishments were on an extremely abstract level, and they repre- associated rash of fellow-traveling among American and European
sented only more systematic and more explicit statements of ideas which intellectuals of the time inevitably kept my interest in these matters on
I had already possessed but had not thought through to anywhere near the alert. Thefieldworkwhich I did on the North Side of Chicago among
the same extent we were able to do together. Another product of this nativist and pro-Nazi groups enabled me to appreciate the sensitivity
period was the classification of the properties of objects of orientation.* about sharply defined boundaries which I later came to see as charac-
These distinctions and classifications, although rather scholastic in teristic of ideological primary groups. My studies of Germany during the
appearance, were helpful to me in developing my ideas about the limited war increased my awareness of the relationship between the demand for
capacity of many human beings to sustain a direct, continuous, and disjunctive boundaries in certain types of small groups and their
intense relationship to the center of their society. In a certain measure commitment to transform the larger society in all aspects in the light of
too they formulated in a very abstract way some of the things I had been an exigent ideal. It was, however, only when I tried in the early 1950s to
thinking about over the past decade. The interdependence between put together what I had learned about primary groups in armies, what I
system and subsystem was a restatement in very abstract terms of some had read in the then prospering field of industrial sociology, and what I
aspects of the relationship between the larger society or corporate body had observed and studied about religious and political sects, that I saw
and its primary groups. The classification of the properties of objects at that I was dealing with several sorts of things which overlapped in some
which we arrived in 1950 was a necessary condition for my discernment respects and which differed profoundly in others. I learned a lot from
of the distinctiveness of the primordial, the personal, the sacred, and thinking and reading about what was meant by Christian love, which I
the civil. concluded was different from both erotic love and personal affection. I
In the winter and spring of 1953, I read a lot on religious sects, was helped in this by reading Arthur Darby Nock's Conversion, Anders
heresies, monasticism, religious revivals, conversionphenomena which Nygren's Agape and Eros, Monsignor Martin D'Arcy's The Heart and
had interested me for many years. My studies of Marxism and the Mind of Love, Father Ronald Knox's Enthusiasm, and Denis de
communist movement had begun when I was an undergraduate and had Rougemont's L 'Amour dans VOccident. Knox's book was especially rich.
been encouraged in the 1930s by Robert Park and by Harold Lasswell. What was beginning to emerge from these diverse explorations was the
Park, on the basis of a seminar paper10 which I had delivered in his need to recognize that primary groups in which the members were
course on collective behavior, had in fact invited me to take up an attached to each other as the bearers of certain beliefs, were different
assistantship under his supervision in order to write a book on the from those in which attachments focused on personal qualities, qualities
of disposition, or properties constituted by a presumedly common
biological origin or territorial location. The primordial, the sacred, the
9. This was a generalization of the schemes toward which I had moved in the
late 1930s in several papers on the criteria on the basis of which status or personal, and the civil were beginning to emerge as separate modes of
deference were accorded. The paper for The Negro in America was one of these. attachment But it all remained rather obscure.
The work which we did together at Harvard was an extension of this mode of
analysis to relationships other than those of status. Originally, I was driven to this In the spring of 1953, I presented a paper at the Psychology Club of
by the unsatisfactoriness of Weber's treatment of classes and status groups and University College, London, on "Private Man, Political Man, Ideological
the utter disregard for the phenomenon of status in the Marxian literature. On the Man." This paper brought together in a way which I had not done
positive side, I was helped by reading Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu.
10. This was based mainly on the careful reading of the Daily Worker, to previously my ideas about the variety of spheres or circles within which
which I subscribed at that time. Sombart and Arthur Rosenberg were my guiding attachments occur and the antinomies and identities of the attachments
stars. The paper was formed around the contrast between the total and in these diverse spheres. Although I was living in Manchester at that
comprehensive electoral platforms of the Communist and Social Democratic
parties, primarily in New York and more generally in the United States. It was my time, I was much occupied with Senator McCarthy and his fellow-
first effort to formulate my conception of ideology. travelers. The paper undertook to order these observations. At about the
xxviii Introduction Introduction xxix
same time I wrote another long paper on "Institutional Specialization" Aristotle's Politics, particularly his consideration of the causes of revolu-
in which I again, from another angle, approached the dependence of tions. Above all, Aristotle's view of man as a "political animal" remains
civility on the pluralism of professional and institutional loyalties. for me one of those fundamental enigmas to which one can return time
As a result of these developments, I decided that my views about and again with the reasonable expectation of learning new things each
primary groups had to be thoroughly recast This was a time when the time. The Hobbesian account of the state of nature was invaluable to me
United States was in one of its recurrent states of enthusiasm, with because it gave me a clear picture of what an aggregation of human
unitary and unqualified loyalty to the central institutional and value beings without affectionate, erotic, or primordial ties, and without beliefs
systems being the main plank in the platform of the enthusiasts. in legitimacy, would be like. But one of the intellectual figures who
"Americanism" was the standard, "Un-American" was the criterion of meant most to me in all these matters up to the early 1950s was the
what was to be avoided. This enthusiasm, which at that time was given querulous and sagacious Frank Knight He was an often perplexing
the name of McCarthyism by its critics and victims, seemed to me to writer, with many idees fixes, but his writings in The Ethics of Compe-
present in very clearly defined form a phenomenon incompatible with the tition and Other Essays and many conversations with him deepened my
conditions of a civil societyas incompatible as the totalitarianism of sense of the importance of the "rules of the game," which restricted
communism, which was so esteemed by many intellectuals of my individual and sectional self-aggrandizement and which permitted the
generation and of the one just preceding, or the totalitarianism of relatively peaceful articulation of the various parts of society into a whole
National Socialism. with distinctive properties of its own. Frank Knight was an obsessive
From the time of my return to the University of Chicago from thinker who in his youth had renounced adherence to the religious beliefs
Manchester in the autumn of 1953 I began to revise my earlier in which he had been brought up. He was by intention a rationalist who
manuscript on primary groups. Practically nothing of it was left, because hoped without hope that men would become rational in the management
the macrosociological parts grew so disproportionately. In about fifteen of their affairs. He also knew that they would not, and this was a source
months I wrote an almost wholly new manuscript of about three of gnawing distress to him. Like any other mind of the first order in
hundred thousand words. I called it "Love, Belief, and Civility." "Love" thinking about society, he had an extraordinary gift for uttering enig-
referred to personal ties of affection and friendship, "belief referred to matic statements of great pregnancy. He used to say that "no society
ideas about sacred things and the structures in which they were would tolerate indefinitely the twisting of the tails of its sacred cows,"
embodied, and "civility" referred to the ethos and institutions concerned although he was himself aware that that was just what he was doing most
wtih the maintenance and adaptation of large-scale societies. The of the time. Stated over and over again in many very different contexts,
manuscript covered a tremendous range of subjects from religion and this statement and many others made a profound impression on my
politics to intimate personal relationships. I was not at all satisfied with it efforts to understand the rules of disagreement.
and I am still not satisfied with it. That is why it is still unpublished. It It was not just academic study which influenced me. Being as
did, however, bring into clearer focus the character of the beliefs and concerned as I was for the condition of my own country and of societies
relationships which operate in the vicissitudes of the integration of and cultures of France, Great Britain, and Germany to which I was
society. attached and on whose literature I had been brought up intellectually,
the political events of the thirties, forties, and early fifties continuously
drew my attention. The Great Depression of the 1930s, something about
VI which I learned from the experiences of my own family and of our
The stream of my ideas in the preceding decade had flowed through a neighbors as well as from my experience as a social worker in New York
meandering course but with a persistent direction. They were the and Chicago, was the first of these events. The rise and entrenchment of
resultant of a number of loosely interconnected strands in the tradition of National Socialism and Fascism were events of almost overwhelming
sociological thought; these strands were the writings of W. I. Thomas, significance. I learned a great deal about them and about much else that
Robert Park, Ferdinand Tonnies, George Simmel, and, above all, Max influenced my ideas from various exiled friends like Hans Speier, Karl
Weber. I must confess that although I had studied the works of Durkheim Mannheim, Nathan Leites, Alexander von Schelting, Franz Neumann,
while I was an undergraduate, they did not have much significance for Jacob Marschak, Leo Szilard, Michael Polanyi, and Ernst Frankel.
me. I was probably too callow to appreciate their depth. I came to The Second World War gave me the opportunity and the occasion to
appreciate them more after I learnedindependently of Durkheimto extend and deepen my knowledge of Germany and of military matters;
appreciate the place of the sacred in society. I owed a great deal to the antagonism between the Soviet Union and the Western societies gave
xxx Introduction Introduction xxxi
further material and experiences on which to ponder. "McCarthyism" addition to my work on intellectuals, some of which is reprinted in the
was an accompaniment of this antagonism but by no means its creation. first volume of this series, I took up once more the numerous questions
I would have criticized McCarthyism in any case, but my association with with which I had not dealt satisfactorily in "Love, Belief, and Civility."
the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists gave me a more immediate Much of what I have written since that time has been intended to develop
connection which I might otherwise have lacked. Much of the obsession particular themes or topics which seemed to me to need improvement
with secrecy and the rancor about espionage was aroused by the existence before the larger work could be made fit for publication.
of the atomic bomb, and nuclear physicists of the "liberal" sort were One such theme was the basis of the various types of collectivities in
subjected to attack. The withdrawal of the privilege of secret knowledge which human beings participate. This entailed some reformulations of
from Robert Oppenheimer was an undignified epitome of the McCarthy- the work which I had done with Professor axscns_gn_ the classification of
ite view of the world. the properties of objects or orientation. The result of this was the paper
The various legislative committees concerned with the protection of on "Primordial, Personal, Sacred, and Civil Ties." "Ideology and
secrets and with the exposure of subversive conspiracies created much Civility," "The Concentration and Dispersion of Charisma," and "Cen-
disturbance by their inquiries. They represented a type of ideological ter and Periphery" all belong to this phase. In all these efforts I have
nativism as disruptive of a reasonable order of society as the totalitar- been encouraged by the forceful way in which Professor Samuel Eisen-
ianism which they allegedly sought to avert The traditional pluralism of stadt has elaborated these ideas and brought them to bear in his various
American society was being changed by the pressure of populistic works.
ideologists. My observations of this effort to reassert the primacy of the In a more roundabout manner, however, my experiences in the study
criterion of intense and unqualified attachment to the national society of Indian intellectuals provided me with a clue which has since proved
made it urgent for me to clarify my ideas about the pattern of consensus rather fruitful, although its character and scope are still not settled. This
of liberal pluralistic societies. is the idea that societies have a center to which their members orient
It was to draw the general lessons, theoretical and practical, of the themselves and which influences their conduct in a wide variety of ways.
McCarthyite rage that, in the autumn and winter of 1954-55,1 put aside This notion first came to me in consequence of my observation of the"
"Love, Belief, and Civility," which was completed in draft. I had gone as anglophilia of Indian intellectuals. The attractive powers of national
far as I could at the time and had a series of questions whichneeded center had already been touched on in the paper which I published on
further elucidation. I turned, therefore, to draw together my views of British intellectuals before going to India in 1955, but it had a wider
McCarthyism, to put that disorder into a wider setting, and to contrast it significance of which I was unaware before I went to India. After I
with alternative modes of integration. I did not intend to produce a returned from India and began to analyze what I had observed there, I
theoretical work: I wrote with a primarily polemical intention, but since recalled the ecological work on metropolitan dominance done by Robert
the book was a critique of the ideological mode of integration, it was Park and Roderick McKenzie about thirty years before. The still earlier
bound inevitably to be guided by my general conception of how societies studies of Charles Galpin regarding the ecological conformation of small
work. I wrote The Torment of Secrecy in a few months and sent it to the towns, villages, and the open country in the rural United States in the
publisher in the spring of 1955. Since it was written largely with a early decades of this century came back to me. An old paper by Edward
practical purpose, I did not take the leisurely attitude toward its Reuter on the ecology of Western expansion in the Pacific which I had
publication that I did with my other writings. Nonetheless, it was a read years before and which had Iain dormant in my mind came back
considerable advance over what I had thought previously about con- from memory. Of course, I knew something about the expansion of
sensus in a highly differentiated society with many conflicts. Looking Western civilization into Asia and Africa and a little about the responses
back at it later I found that in its contrast between ideological politics of the colonized peoples. But I had never put -these scattered bits
and pluralistic politics, it was elaborating the fundamental distinction together. Now I was moved to do so.
between Gesinnungsethik arid Verantwortungsethik made by Max We- Once I had digested the concept of center and periphery in the
ber. The power of the intellectual traditions which came together and intellectual community, its extensive applicability to the problems of the
which were extended by Max Weber was again manifesting itself in a new integration of society became apparent to me. The papers on "Center
setting. and Periphery" and "Society and Societies" represent this development.
The notion that societies have centers and peripheries enabled me to
lay to rest a troublesome aftermath of my intellectual inheritance. I have
VII already mentioned the view, to which I was not unresponsive in the
At this point I went to India for an extended period. On my return, in 1930s, that the urban, liberal-democratic, capitalistic society of the past
 xxxii Introduction Introduction xxxiii
century was in a process of increasing disintegration. It had not from the sacred as generally conceived by writers on the relations
disappeared during the war. Fromm's Fear of Freedom, which appeared between church and state or by the Durkheimian anthropology. I already
in 1941 and which was one of the first manifestations of the Frankfurt came up to this in my brief references to "sacred ties" in "Primordial,
Institut fur Sozialforschung before a wider public, was an extended state- Personal, Sacred, and Civil Ties." In "The Concentration and Dispersion
ment of this view. of Charisma," although it began by a consideration of economic policy in
The contention reappeared after the Second World War in an the new states of Asia and Africa, I began to reinterpret the charismatic
apparently new application. Throughout the 1950s, there was a rising phenomenon. Earlier in the decade I had begun to do something like this
chorus of complaint from literary and once radical intellectuals about the in "The Meaning of the Coronation," but I did not press it very far or
atrocious quality of "mass culture"; this criticism of "mass culture" was make it explicit (Looking back at that essay now makes me think that it
a variant of the received depiction of "mass society" with a few new implied much that I did not then perceive.)
twists. "Mass culture" was a contrived product, aiming at profit and My own reflections on the tendency of societies to develop centers and
power and destroying the moral substance of the human beings who were the corresponding tendency of human beings to seek and to reject centers
exposed to it. They themselves were defenseless against it; they were disclosed to me certain affinities between the charismatic or the sacred S
dehumanized by it, turned into automatons without will or imagination. and the center. Here again, once I had vaguely discerned the phenom-
I was opposed to this view because I found it morally obnoxious and enon of centrality, I also discovered that the disposition to attribute'
socially wrongheaded. I would not say whether one or the other of these charismatic qualities to persons, roles, or institutions was an element jn
considerations was uppermost in my mind when I began to write about the-process.by_which centers are formed, maintained, and changed.
the criticism of mass culture." I could not deal with the criticism of mass I had always been sensitive to 'trie~persislent presence of routinely
culture without dealing with the conception of modern society which it charismatic institutions in modern societies and, no less, to the inter-
, presupposed, and to do the former it was necessary to elaborate my own mittent seeking for more intense experience of the charismatic. For a
view about mass society. I did this along the lines of interpretation laid long time, however, I accepted the conventional distinction between the
out, by implication, in "Center and Periphery." holy and the profane, the sacred and the secular; this involved accept-
In developing my views about certain features of the mode and ance of the proposition that they were utterly disjunctive with respect to
measure of integration of Western societies in "The Theory of Mass each other. I had accepted this without question in my earlier studies of
Society" I took what seems to me to be a decisive step forward. I had the problems of religious toleration and religious oppression; the postu-
decided that the most pressing task in studying the integration of late of much of the literature was that the state was properly confined to
societies was the examination of the relationship between center and the secular sphere. I had also accepted, at its face value, Max Weber's
periphery. The result was a portrait of modern society which was distinction between the charismatic and the routine, with its intimations
different in a substantial respect from the one I had inherited from my that the routine is the antithesis of the charismatic and that the
intellectual tradition. I did not break away from it; rather, I retained "routinization of charisma" is the process whereby the charismatic
much "of it, but I also introduced into it something which had not been element is replaced by the routine.
present beforeat least not in a generalized way which I could detect I had not been quite satisfied with this position, but I had no available
when I studied the works which made up and carried the tradition. possibility of going beyond it It was only after the Second World War
that I began to move away from it My first step had been taken with the
aid of my friend Dr. Michael Young, when, after observing the corona-
VIII tion of Queen Elizabeth II, we wrote "The Meaning of the Coronation."
My awareness that societies possess centers which impose themselves by This paper did two things. It gave the sacred a wider scope and a different
means other than coercion and manipulation, and which are more than institutional location than the conventional confinement of sacred-
t places where decisions are made and coordinating functions are per- ness to religious objects and institutions had allowed. It also asserted the
formed, opened up to me new possibilities of dealing with problems I had proposition that the charismatic^ or sacred is capable of existence in
been unable to resolve in "Love, Belief, and Civility." Since the middle of attenuated and diffuse asTweJas intense arid concentrated"fofmsTThis
the 1950s, I had been trying to go beyond the conventional distinction led me to try to understand the" "secular" condition as"one inwnich the
between the sacred and the profane. The secular was clearly different sacred or charismatic elements were attenuated and dispersed. But as I
11. See "Daydreams and Nightmares," in The Intellectuals and the Powers said earlier, I was not really aware of the implications of what I said in
and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 248-64. that paper.
 xxxiv Introduction Introduction xxxv
Throughout the decade which followed "The Meaning of the Corona- tance. Psychoanalysts have given much thought to destructive impulses
g*1 / tion," I was searching for the hitherto unobserved manifestations of the and to the mechanisms of their inhibition. They have said much of
\ sacred. Some of these I perceived in aspects of the conduct of human importance on these matters, but they have taken much for granted and
s. beings toward past things. The attachment of human beings to past they have begun with assumptions about the mind which I do not share. I
) thingsthe recurrent, fluctuating, and shifting attachments to the past have no very clear ideas about the alternative which I would place in
[ in society, the incessant rediscoveries of the past and re-creations of the stead of the psychoanalytic view of this ultimate constituent of an
\ images of the past in individuals, families, and in institutions beyond the orderly, that is, peaceful, society. Having however gone so far along the
\ lineageappeared to me to be one instance of the variable attribution of path of exploration of the disposition to attribute sacredness, I decided to
charismatic properties. I had first written explicitly on this in ] "'Tradition try to connect this with the most fundamental property of the integration
and Liberty: Antinomy and Interdependence"'2 shortly after my arrival in of society, namely, the condition of peace within society.
India. I think that when I began to analyze tradition, it was not only the "The Sanctity of Life" is one representativeextremely tentative and
phenomenon of attachment to past things which interested me; I held at vague in its resultsof this part of my program. It also takes up in a
that time the mistaken belief that traditionality and the integration of somewhat different form the primordial attachment about which I had
society are very intimately and positively related to each other.13 Some begun to be concerned in the middle of the 1950s. In the course of this
serious reflection on the matter showed that although that hypothesis, so exploration, I came upon the standard of "normality," which defines the
simply stated, was wrong, there were many complicated connections range of acceptable variation in the manipulation of human life. In some
between the two. This brought the analysis of tradition onto my agenda. respects this has been very stable in a very wide range of societies; in
I had to occupy myself with tradition with even more reason once I others it varies in exigency or tolerance. It imposes limits on the variety of
extended my interests to Asian and African societies. It came to form a activity which may be undertaken; it generates a measure of conformity.
major theme of my inquiry into the Indian intellectual. Many American Conformity is called forth not merely to avoid disapproval or sanctions
and British scholars were applying themselves to the study of Asian and but also because, in important things, the attribution of sacredness to a
African societies, and they invariably applied the term "traditional" to particular form or condition of the other person or persons requires it
them. When one sought to find out exactly what they meant by it, one Interestingly enough, the paradigm of integration which Professor
found that they usually meant agricultural, kinship-dominated, relig- Parsons and I had developed at Harvard at the beginning of the 1950s
ious, uneducated. They were singularly unhelpful when it came to showed its capacity to assimilate observations which had not been made
elucidating the traditional elements in allegedly traditional societies. when it was first formulated, and to be revised in the light of those new
Max Weber was of little help here; despite the richness of his treatment observations. The re-classification of properties perceived in or attribu-
of patrimonial authority as the major type of traditional authority, he in ted to other persons such as I made in connection with "Primordial,
fact made little effort to elucidate the nature of tradition, nor did he even Persona], Sacred, and' Civil Ties" was one such revision. This was now
specify wherein lay the traditionality of patrimonial authority. In this followed by a further revision of the paradigm with regard to its account
matter I have been left on my own in the effort to discover the of the content of and the grounds for responding to expectations. The
y/ significance attributed to the past in various societies and the conse- capacity for revision and for-the assimilation of new insights and
quences of images of the past for the integration of society.'* concepts confirms my view that we were substantially on the right track
Just as Hobbes's picture of the state of nature had early influenced my in that undertaking, however much we might have been mistaken in
reflection about the modes and magnitudes of integration of society, I proceeding so deductively.
was also stimulated by him to think of the widespread abhorrence of In these various concerns, I was no less interested in modern Western
violencewhich does not, of course, gainsay its frequency and impor- societies than I was in societies generally. Sacredness or the charis-
matic and the formation of ritual have always been thought to be
12. Ethics, vol. 68 (1957-58), pp. 153-65. associated wtih each other. Anthropologists have declared that ritual has
13. I was helped in my thinking about tradition by Halbwachs's Les Cadres an integrative function, and many observers of modern society have
sociaux de la memoire and by Kenan's "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" Tonnies's Die
Sitte was also stimulating. The rest of the literature of sociology, including Max thought that modern societies have lost many of their ritual features. In
Weber, was not helpful; neither was the large literature on tradition in Christian- "Ritual and Crisis" I raised a question about the generally held view of
ity and Islam. the integrative functions of ceremonial. This contention might well be
14. In 1972,1 wrote a draft of a small book on tradition. In that manuscript,
tradition is much more diff erentiatedly treated than it is in the paper published in correcttheoretically it would appear to be sobut it has been taken too
the present volume under the title "Tradition." much for granted, just as the character of the integration of society to
xxxvi Introduction Introduction xxxvii
which it is presumed to lead has been taken for granted. It has been my pational statistics of the United States census and more recently and
intention to place in question what has been taken for granted or much more sophisticatedly developed by a number of distinguished
disregarded. That was what I tried to do in this paper. sociologists. I thought then and still think that even in a relatively
"Ritual and Crisis" was also, just as "The Meaning of the Coronation" equalitarian society, and even in the usage of persons who regard
had been more than a decade earlier, an examination of the resurgence themselves as morally superior to the snobbery of "upper" and "lower,"
of the concentrated and intense experience and symbolic representation there is an appreciation of some activities, roles, and attributes as being
of the sacred from more attenuated beliefs and dispersed experiences. It intrinsically "superior" and others as being intrinsically "inferior," To
*was~an advance over the earlier paper because I had in the meantime refer to "occupational prestige," or to use the term "prestigious" as so
been able to distinguish the attenuated and dispersed modes of attri- many sociologists and others do nowadays, is simply to find another way
buted charisma from the intense and concentrated ones, and was thus of expressing these differences in status while avoiding the invidiousness
able to build another bridge between the secular and the sacred. of "upper" and "lower," "superior" and "inferior." On the one side I
Nonetheless, I think that I left things too much at loose ends in this was developing an analytical scheme which asserted the ineluctability of
paper, for I was not in a state of mind to do anything else. In contrast a moral order, which was to some extent consensual. On the other side, I
with this, I think that I made a real step forward in my reinterpretation was trying to account for the necessary incompleteness of that consensus.
of certain aspects of social stratification in the light of my belief that I had difficulty in bringing these two views into consistency.
centrality and sacredness were closely linked to each other and to the It was only when I began to write a paper for a celebration by the
integration of society. American Sociological Association of the one-hundredth anniversary of
Social stratification had long been one of my interests. The interest Max Weber's birth that I discovered the possibility of a basic relation-
arose first from my observations of the hierarchical society of Philadel- ship between the center of society, the charismatic, and the distribution
phia in which I was brought up as well as by an early reading of of deference. I had begun trying to analyze more thoroughly the
Bukharin's Historical Materialism. Some of my earliest writings of the character of dispersed and attenuated charisma. In the course of this
1930s dealt with the occupational structure of Chicago and of the United effort, I came to the hypothesis that relationship to the center was one of
States. At the end of the thirties, Herbert Goldhamer and I wrote the the underlying properties on the basis of which deference or status was
paper on "Power and Status" which is here reprinted. It was written granted. Rereading the National Opinion Research Center survey of
under the influence of Max Weber, in an atmosphere enlivened intellec- Occupations and Social Status, '* I saw that those occupations having most
tually by the presence of Harold Lasswell at the University of Chicago. I to do with the realm of the seriousfor example, the determination of
think that we brought a little order into the subjectat least on the most life and death, the mysteries of existence, and the custody of the
elementary conceptual level. But we did not go so far as to discuss the fundamental order of societywere accorded the most deference. Prox-
stratification of society. We treated the relationship entailed in stratifi- imity to the centers of cosmos and society seemed therefore to be among /
cation very schematically as if it were a relationship between two or at the most important qualities which attracted the esteem of human
least very small numbers of individuals who had no activities or beings.17
relationships other than those abstractly defined in our analysis. The The complex relationships between the image of the center of society
context of society was taken for granted. Our scheme of analysis was not and the image of the center of the universe which I had touched on but
wrong, but it did not locate the phenomenon of stratification in the not elaborated in "The Meaning of the Coronation" drew my interest
society. In not doing so, it failed to perceive certain crucial features of Rulers are ambitious to have their subjects believe that the two are in
stratification. I began to try to remedy that deficiency in the paper on harmony with each other; critics and antagonists of rulers are eager to
"Class" in which I laid emphasis on the status or deference element in show that the center of society is not in harmony with the center of the
the stratification of society. (It was Proust's portrayal of French society universe.
which gave me the conviction that status was part of the "moral order," My ideas on these matters moved slowly. In the first half of the 1950s
as Robert Park had called it.) This was the aspect which was obscured by 16. Paul K. Hatt, and Albert J. Riess, Occupations and Social Status (Glencoe,
the amalgamation of too many diverse things into the concept of 111.: The Free Press, 1961).
"social-economic status" used by Alba Edwards'* to analyze the occu- 17. I read Professor MirceaEliade's The Myth of the Eternal Return (London:
Kegan Paul. 1955), which interpreted rituals as reconstitutions of the moment of
15. At the end of the 1930s, I wrote an extended critique of Edwards's origin, only on the occasion of its appearance in English translation. This was
classification from this point of view. It was, however, wholly negative and did not about the time when I first began to think about center and periphery and about
make explicit the positive position apprehended only dimly at the time. the sacred overtones of centrality. It made my way somewhat easier.
xxxviii Introduction Introduction xxxix
I wrote a good deal about populism and the tension between populism was impelled by a conviction of the moral wrongness of a society which
and the working of representative institutions. It was in "Populism and denied the freedom of human beings to guide their actions in the light of
the Rule of Law"18 and in The Torment of Secrecy that I saw the connec- reason and experience, of their assessment of their own benefit, and of
tions between the dispersion of charisma, the shape of the distribution of piety toward their own ancestors and toward transcendent and earthly
deference and the integration of society. "The Stratification System of greatness, whether that greatness occurs in their own society or in other
Mass Society" was an attempt to bring my hitherto unconnected societies present or past.10 I have also been too aware of the megalo-
observations about mass society, centrality, and the destruction of maniac temptations of centrality and of the insuperability of many of the
deference into a single pattern." tasks accepted or undertaken by the center to believe that any center,-^
past, present, or future, could ever possess the wisdom and skill to rule \
society in its entirety and in all its aspects in a way which would not \
IX arouse resentment and resistance. It was to take account of the inevitable \\
In all these efforts to trace the lines of filiation which link the center of incompleteness arid insufficiency of consensus emanating from and
society with its peripheral zones and to discern the topography of concentrated on the center that I first interested myself in primary
consensus, I have never taken at all seriously those self-alleged radical groups. That too is why I have devoted so much of my thought to the
critics who have claimed ever since the 1950s that the kind of sociology structure and conditions of privacy.
ith which I have been associated denied the reality of conflict or change. I first occupied myself explicitly with privacy in the early 1950s when I
If all that they really meant to say was that I was not an adherent 61 . was attempting to understand the implications of an aspiration to a
Marxism, they were of course right But if they were taken literally, then unilaterial penetration into society on the part of the center. The growth
their views were nonsensical. Their classification of sociological analyses of technological means of extending this penetration aroused in many
into those which follow a "consensus model" and those which follow a persons a sense of affront. The infringement of the private sphere by the
"conflict model" makes as much sense as a physiology of the left side of enthusiasts of complete knowledgeMcCarthyism was one of these, so
the organism which denies the validity of a physiology of the right side. were the military intelligence and the later propagandists for omniscient
My interest in delineating the fluctuating shape of consensus and in "data banks"began to arouse resistance. From the contemplation of
tracing the conditions of its variation has always gone hand in hand with these matters, another aspect of the limits of the integration of society-
an understanding of thejimits of the capacity of the center to spread a became evident to me. Societies are too large and too differentiated for
cover of consensus aroundjtself and oyer theentire^sogjety. Given the the center to have complete knowledge about the rest of its society. There
inevitability of diversity, I have always found the vision of a complete are many obstacles to such cognitive saturation. There is, moreover, a
consensus in society, such as is found in the anarchist and communist tension between the center's aspiration to know, the periphery's aspira-
idea, a factual impossibility which has also been utterly repugnant to me tion to protect itself from being known, and the "countercenter's" desire
ethically. I am too sensitive to the diversity of human beings, to their to penetrate the arcana imperium held by the center. I took these
tastes, ideas, and situations, and to the ineluctability of scarcity to think problems up again several times in the 1960s and have returned to them
that any given or imaginable order could integrate them all equally into a again in the 1970s in a long introduction to the reissue ofTTre Torment of
single society wholly free of mutual indifference, disagreement, and Secrecy.21 The distribution of knowledge in society in which I have
conflict. recently begun to try to work out my ideas is another aspect of the
My critique of the ideological politics of Senator McCarthy and the integration of society.
other persecutors of "un-Americanism" in the decade following the end
of the Second World War, and of the intellectually more elaborate and
20. By the end of the 1940s, partly in connection with my long study of the
really more destructive ideologies of Marxist communism and fascism, ideas of Georges Sorel which began when I was an undergraduate, and then on the
basis of observation and a detailed study of The Authoritarian Personality by
Theodore Adorno and others, the affinities and identities of the ostensibly
18. In Conference on Jurisprudence and Politics, Conference Series, no. 15 different types of ideological politics became evident to me. The earlier expression
(University of Chicago Law School, 1955), pp. 91-107. of this perception may be found in my introduction to Sorel's Reflections on
19. This paper was written very early in the 1960s for a collection of papers in Violence (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1950), and "Authoritarianism: 'Left' and
honor of the late D. P. Mukerji, who had for many years been a deeply revered 'Right.' " in R. Christie and M. Jahoda, editors, Continuities in Social Research:,
teacher of the University of Lucknow in its greatest days. It was published only Studies in the Scope and Method of "The Authoritarian Personality" (Glencoe,
about Five or six years after it was written. It precedes in time of writing Illj.Ihe Free Press, 1954), pp. 24-49. -*L //
"Charisma, Order, and Status" and "Deference." 21. Carbondale, 111.: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1974. ) (
xl Introduction Introduction xli
We succeeded in gaining the adherence first of Professors Clifford Geertz
and Lloyd Fallers and then, in quick succession, of Professors Morris
I should add a few words about the way in which my ideas about the new Janowitz, Leonard Binder, Bernard Cohn, Arnold Anderson, Philip
states ramified so that the papers treating them may be seen in the Foster, McKim Marriott, Harry Johnson, Nur Yalman, and others. This
setting of intellectual development represented in this collection. I first remarkable assemblage was reinforced from time to time by able
became interested in India because I was generally concerned about the colleagues from other universities in the United States and abroad. The
political propensities of intellectuals, first in Europe and America and weekly seminars of the committee dealt over the years with a wide range
then in recently emancipated and newly sovereign countries. My interests of topics, but the concern with integration was always present whatever
gradually became extended to the wider range of problems of political the subjectwhether it was economic policy; the relationship between
liberties, public order, and economic development in societies which were central and local government; educational and cultural policy; the
acquiring sovereignty, I began with a combination of scholarly and learned professions, both traditional and modern; or the armed forces.
practical interests. My sympathies with and personal affection for the The continuing interest of this committee coincided with my own interest
intellectuals of these countries as I came to know them and my sense of in the vicissitudes of the integration into a single society of disparate
fellow feeling with their impoverished and uneducated peoplesalthough societies brought together initially in consequence of their subjuga-
I have known the latter very little at first handgave additional impetus tion by a single colonial ruler and subsequently through administrative
to my intellectual curiosity. But the problems which formed themselves amalgamation. The features of the minimal consensus required in the
in my mind were shaped by my own intellectual traditions and my own conduct of a society given shape primarily by the activity of a central
idiosyncratic efforts to improve what I received from those traditions. government were a little easier to discern in these newly established states
My intellectual interests were also fortified by the institutions in which than in the longer established states of Europe and North America. The
I was involved. My years at the London School of Economics brought integration of society became an urgent practical concern of the centers
Asia and Africa much closer to me than they had ever been before. When of these states and of their still rudimentary national societies, whereas it
I came back to the University of Chicago, I was invited by Professor was a much more intermittent and implicit concern in the older states.
Hoselitz to speak on the "sociology of knowledge" in his seminar on The sharpness of the contrast between the mode of integration desired by
economic development and cultural change. I said I could not do this but the center and that which they already possessed made the phenomenon
would instead prepare a paper on the position of intellectuals in colonial of integration somewhat clearer to my mind.
countries. I did a'lot of reading about India and a little on the West In the past few years there has emerged a new parochialism which
Indies and Africa. It was from this paper that my interest in India grew asserts that the ideas developed for the study of Western societies are
from seeing India as an instance of a general problem to a major and unfitted for the study of societies in other continents. Sometimes this
continuing study. Shortly after my return from India in 1956, I joined criticism is associated with ill-conceived accusations of "intellectual
Professor Milton Singer and several other colleagues in the social neo-colonialism." Sometimes it is free from this polemical blemish. But
sciences and humanities at the University of Chicago in forming the whatever the motives of the critics, I must confess that the criticism
South Asian Studies Committee. We soon added some very eminent seems wrong in fact and in principle. I had heard it all before in the old
younger scholars such as McKim Marriot, Myron Weiner, Edward German debate about "historicism," which asserted that everything,
Dimock, Bernard Cohn, and Hans van Buitenen. This committee every society and every epoch, is so unique that no identities can ever be
prospered intellectually and financially and in the quality of the students established and no concepts or categories of general applicability are ever
and the Indian colleagues whom it attracted. It helped me greatly to attainable. (As far as I was concerned, Max Weber's criticism of Eduard
broaden and to deepen my knowledge of India, to which I returned Meyer's ideas about historical explanation had settled the matter.)
annually with one gap from 1957 to 1967. It is not the social scientists of the Western countries who have
Then at the beginning of the 1960s, Professor David Apter and I prompted the demand that the societies of the new states be more highly
founded the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations at the integrated. It is rather the centerspoliticians, civil servants, publicists
University of Chicago. I never liked the name because it seemed to be a and intellectuals, and more recently the militarywhich demand and
misnomer; the states in which we were interested had not yet found seek to establish a more inclusive and permeative integration of their own
nations which would be coterminous with them. The name begged the societies. The observation that they have not been as successful thus far
question. Nonetheless I was very lucky in the first steps of this committee. as they have wishedor the possibility that they might never succeed to
xlii Introduction Introduction xliii
that degreeonly presupposes the relevance and applicability of the issue of integration will be less urgent. If human beings cease to seek to
concept of integration and those which are related to it This historicist give meaning to their empirical, earthly existence by placing themselves in
contention is self-contradictory and it is otherwise baseless. a setting larger than that they know from their immediate day-to-day
Integration is a real and practical problem for those who live in and experience, the need to study integration will become more faint. Neither
take respoTTsiBility for the control over state and society in new states. of these two great changes is imminent.
Whether they are for or against it, the variant degrees and modes of
integration are both realities and objects of contention. Many of the
"problems" which trouble thoughtful members of these societies are in XI
fact problems of integration. Separatist movements, corruption, section- One cannot speak about society without, at the same time, making
alism in extreme forms seem to me to be problems which have arisen and statements about the integration of society. That is what a society is.
become acute because those who had been brought together into a single What I have tried to do in these essays is to place the integration of
state have in fact remained members of societies largely separate from society more visibly in focus than it has been hitherto and to indicate
each other. some of its complexities.
It is true that the societies of Africa and Asia are different from the Of course, a statement about the state of integration of a society does
societies of Europe and America. So are the members of single families, not give an exhaustive account of it The genetic self-reproduction of a
and so are the families of any single society. As long as human beings society, for example, is one of the important ecological prerequisites for
live in societies, there will be many practical problems of integration. the existence of a society, but the society exists as such only by virtue of
Those who wish to understand their own societies or any others, or who its integratedness. The existence of technology for the gathering or
wish to understand what engages the human mind, are under obligation production of nutriment is another prerequisite. The organization of the
to interest themselves in the integration of society. That in fact is what society around the technology is, on the other hand, a constituent of its
they do, under many names and under the guidance of many diverse integration. This integration might be great or it might be small. There is
intellectual traditions. nothing in the analysis of integration which implies that all societies must
^ The very conception of society entails integration. To say that an be highly integrated or that they are all integrated equally. All that I
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aggregate of human beings forms a society is to invoke their integration would say is that some measure of integration must exist for a society to
as an essential component of that formation. The coming together of exist. Beyond that it is a matter of delineating the pattern or structure, its
individuals, of families and lineages, of regions, of towns and country- limits and its variations.
sides, of numerous villages and cities is nothing other than integration. That is why the variations in form or pattern and in the intensity of
The binding together of social classes into a single "national" system of integration present a problem of the most profound importance to those
distribution, despite hostility and numerous and often bitter conflicts who would understand society. Integration is a phenomenon of extra-
and despite the divergence of "interests," is also integration, just as is the ordinary complexity. The inherited ideas on the subject, although they
binding together into a market of those who participate in processes of have set us on the path, are undoubtedly too simplifying to enable us to
the division of labor and exchange. The categories which we use in do justice to that complexity. At present we are groping in a very
describing these phenomena are in principle applicable to all societies, tentative manner toward a better understanding. Center and Periphery is
whatever their particular variations. They are the categories necessitated intended as a collection of fragmentary contributions, unified by an
by the universal experience of human beings, by the existence which is enduring and pervasive aspiration, to that better understanding.
thrust upon them in consequence of their being born, experiencing the
growth of their powers, acquiring the culture of their predecessors, and
their efforts to cope with the practical problems thrown up by the
niggardliness of nature and the incommensurateness of wants to the
resources available to satisfy them. But even if all these problems were
solved, human beings would still experience the need to transcend them-
selves, to be fused into an entity which appears to them, at times, to be
superior to their ordinary, earthly, empirical selves. If mankind ever comes
into a realm of plenitude in which every want can be satisfied without the
diminution of the satisfaction of other human beings, then the practical