Center and Periphery Introduction

7/27/2019 Center and Periphery Introduction

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Selected Papers of Edward Shils, II

E d w a r d S h i l s

C e n t e r a n dP e r i p h e r yE s s a y s i nM a c r o s o c i o l o g y

s *

T h e U n i v e r s it y o f C h i c a g o P r e s sChicago and London


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The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London 1975 by The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved. Published 1975Printed in the United States of AmericaInternational Standard Book Number: 0-226-75317-4Library, of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-87309

C o n t e n t s

/ H A R V A R DU N I V E R S I T YL I B R A R YMY 2 1975

Introduction viiI Society

1. Center and Periphery 32. Society: The Idea and Its Sources 173. Society and Societies: The Macrosociological View 344. The Integration of Society 485. The Theory of Mass Society 91

II Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus6. Primordial, Personal, Sacred, and Civil Ties 111 *7. Charism a 1278. The Meaning of the Coronation, by Edward Skils and Michael

Young 1359. Ritua l and Crisis 15310. Consensus 164- 11. Tradition 182 v12. The Sanctity ofLife 219III Status and Order

13. Power and Status, byHerbert Goldhamerand EdwardShils 23914. Class 24915. C harisma, Order, and Status 256 *K16. Deference 27617. The Stratification System ofMass Society 304

IV Expansion and Dependence of theCenter:Privacy and Primary Groups18. Privacy and Power 31719. Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmachtin World W ar II, by Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz 34520. Primary Groups in the American Army 384

k / o / c ^


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vi ContentsV Aspirations and Fragility of the Center:

Traditional Societies and New States21. The Concentration and Dispersion of Charisma: Their Bearingon Economic Policy in Underdeveloped Countries 40522. Opposition in the New States of Asia and Africa 42223. The Fortunes of Constitutional Government in the Political

Development of the New States 45624. The Military in the Political Development of the New States 483

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I n t r o d u c t i o n

iThe members of the educated part of any society know how they are tobe designated; they are designated by the name of their society. They areAmericans, British, Frenchmen, Italians, Indians, Japanese, or whatever.They know that they share that nameor a minor variant of itwiththeir government and the territory on which they live and with all or mostof the other human beings who live on that territory. Many educatedpersons do not approve of this type of designation. Yet, if they callthemselves lawyers or machinists, fathers or sons, whites or blacks,Protestant Christians or Hindus, or several of these together, there stillremains a sense of incompleteness. It is thought that they have to bearalso the name of their "society." The "society" is that most inclusive yetbounded collectivity of which they are seen to be only parts. It is thewhole 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 outermoststructure, and with how it is maintained and changed. They deal with theinfluence of the outermost structure on the lives of the groups, strata,and individuals who live within it and of the limit of its influence overthose component parts. This outermost structure is an intermittentlyappearing part of the lives of its members. It is also that which bindsthem in various ways and degrees into being a society. It is a necessaryemergent of the existence of hum an beings. Every human being is borninto and lives within an aggregation of other human beings who arebound within an outermost structure.The penetration of the outermost structure of society into the lives ofthose living inside it is limited by the influence of certain characteristicsof human existence suxh^aTHn^erences in proximity, personal and eroticattachments, 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 between the outermost structure and those other constituents of society.The ebb and flow of this process is therefore a theme which dominatesthe essays in this collection. *&The fact that I refer to the ^putermosfNir the "inclusive" or the"larg er" structure of society for lack of ab ett er term bears w itness to thedifficulties of delineation of my subject and to the extent to which it hasbeen neglected in educated discourse and social science, particularly insociology. Economists, working within the limits of their own concerns.


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viii Introductionhave analyzed economies or economic systems, by whichunless otherwise statedthey mean the economic system operating within the-boundaries of a national state. At one time economists entitled theirsubject matter "national economy." More recently, "macroeconomics"has been a fairly well-defined branch of economic analysis. Students ofpolitics, dealing with the sovereign state, the national state, or the centralgovernment, have HkewisenoTexperienced greater difficulties than haveeconomists in defining the largest of the entities with which they deal.When they deal with "international relations," they postulate theexistence of more or less autonomous political systems. Just as economists have taken "the economy" as their subject matter, so someacademic students of politics have even revived the old term "polity" toshow that they deal with a phenomenon of the same extension andinclusiveness as "the economy."

It would appear from this that my subject matter in these essays is"society," and so it is. But saying that does not bring us very far.Economists have the market, all the arrangem ents and conditions whichfoster and distort it, as the major objects of their attention. Those whocontemplate the polity have as their major object the ce ntral governmentand all that is done by it, and all those actions and arrangements whichattemp t to control it and to change it as well as the efforts which flowfrom it. But it is more difficult, at least in our present state of knowledge,to conceive of a society on the same scale and to define it clearly. Greatwriters like Tocqueville in De la Democratie en Amirique, and Macaulayin the first volume of the History of England, and Hal6vy in the firstvolume of L'Histoire du peuple anglais au dix-neuvikme Steele, have alldealt with whole societies, but they did not specifically confront the taskwhich I have repeatedly attempted in the papers in this volume. Thegreat sociologists have come near the subject but never confronted itdirectly. The tradition with which they have endowed us does not speakclearly on this poin t That is one of the reasons why the approach takenhere is so tentative and provisional. It is an attempt to elucidate thingswhich have seemed to me to be of very great importance but which arevery obscure. It is terribly difficult to describe and analyze the processesand structures which form families and classes, neighborhoods andregions, schools and churches, factories and ethnic groups into a singlesociety.

Whatever the reason for this difficulty, whether it lies in the inherentdifficulty of the task or whetherand this is closely related to thatdifficultythe tradition of thought about "society" as having a characterparallel to but not identical with "polity" and "economy" has skirtedthis subject, it need not be determined here. The very name of "macro-sociology," which has recently come into wider usage and which isperhaps derived from the parallel "macroeconomics," is evidence of an

Introduction beawareness that there is a legitimate, indeed a very important object whichhas not yet come into full focus.When one seeks to discover this "larger society," various simplestrategems present themselves. One of these is simply to refer to onefeature of the economyto refer to it, for example, as "capitalisticsociety." This permits its location in time and space, bu t the intellectualvalue"of such a designation is negligible. Or, one can call a society by thename of its political system"democratic society" or "totalitariansociety." These two, like "capitalistic society" or "communistfesociety,"evoke certain significant features, but they are a shorthandjodescribe anobject wjuch eludesJhe grasp of understanding. Another procedure"is toassert that the "larger society" is the society which resides in the territorygoverned bylhe_sovereign national state. This means designating it bythe name of the state"or by tKename orthe nationality which presumablycomprises the human beings living on that territory. This is certainly themost common practice. And it is not by any means wholly incorrectfarfrom itbut it is certainly not adequate. It raises a question about the"^>importance of nationality in the formation of society; it also raises aquestion about the significance of territorial boundaries and of anominally sovereign authority over all that goes on within those boundaries. It certainly does not resolve the difficult problems which I haveapproached from various angles in the essays contained in this volume.

To speak of a society implies that there are certain properties which"constitute the various groups, strata, and individual members of thatsociety as a single inclusive entity which is not simply an additive list ofall the different groups, strata, and individuals. These groups, strata andindividuals are linked with each other into a society. Democracy andtotalitarianism refer to certain features of that linkage, but they are toonarrowly limited in their reference. The linkage is more ramified andpervasive than that produced by the actions of a monopolistic party in atotalitarian society or by those of an elected government in a competitiveparty system. I do not wish to commit myself to the proposition that*"societies can or cannot be characterized by a single term. If they can, itwill have to be one of a very differentiated family of terms a nd not one ofthe alternatives of a simple dichotomy, which is so common a method ofcharacterization in social science and in lay thought. I have tentativelychosen the term "integration" to bear the burden of our vague thoughtsabout the constitution of the parts of society into a whole society. Inrecent years, the term became widely used to refer to the relationship ofethnic minorities to the society in which they live.

The integration of the black sector of American society is only oritparticular variant of the more general class of relationships between jcenter and periphery. In their various forms and intensities, the phenom- /ena of integration operate in every sphere of the life of society. The term /

-sita*


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x Introductionis often used to refer to local communities, for example, a "well-integrated comm unity," or a "highly integrated family," or the integration of states in a region or con tinent It has been used to refer torelationships of smaller radius; in all these usages, there are certainfeatures which are common. But when I speak of the integration ofsociety, I refer not only to the conformity of expectations and performances and the acceptance of distributions of rewards, to boundaries,and to collective self-designations but also to the center in its relations withits various peripheries. Thus whether the term "integration" is used or notin the essays which follow, I refer to the linkages of the parts ofsocietychurches, military units, friendships, business firms, tradeunions, neighborhoods, familiesto the institutions, roles, or symbolswhich are thought by their members to be characteristically constitutiveof, and therefore central to, the "inclusive" or "larg er" or "whole"society.Integration, in its most abstract sense, is the articulation of expectation and performance. It can occur in a relationship between twopersons, it can occur in the structure of a whole society. It can beproduced by coercion, payment, or consensus about moral stand ards. Itis not always direct in the sense of linking a person, a group, or a stratumdirectly to something emblematic or representative of the larger society.Integration is a very heterogeneous affair. It is very unevenly distributedin any given society, and it is also an intermittent thing; it fluctuateswithin and among the parts of society. A given society might be highlyintegrated in some sectors, poorly integrated in others. Given sectors ofsociety might vary through time in their degree of integration into thelarger society. The threat of coercion might be very significant at onepoint in time, at another it might fade and yield to payment orconsensus.

I do not deal much in this volume with payment, that is, the market, asa means of integration; nor do I, except in passing, discuss the veryimportant phenomenon of coercion, which plays a significant part informing the action or individuals and groups into a condition ofintegration and in maintaining that condition. In attempting to arrive ata more just assessment of the actual state of affairs prevailing in modernsocieties and to elaborate the categories appropriate to this just assessment, I am incessantly and acutely aware that exchange and coercion areparts of the "macrosocial" phenomenon. Nonetheless, these essays dealmainly with the variations and mechanisms of~cdnsensys.There are various reasons for this choice. For one thing, e xchangt hasbeen very elaborately analyzed by economists, and its place~m theintegration of society requires, so it seemed to me and so it still seems,that the consensual setting of the market be analyzed more adequatelythan it has been hitherto. Coercjaajs a marginal phenomenon whichcannot possibly integrate nfiich of a society over an extended period oftime. Its effective exercise over certain persons depends on a setting of

Introduction xithe consensus of many other persons; this setting might be real orpresumptive. The threat of the exercise crf)erCtj)nwhich is more oftenin operation than actual coerciondependsfor its effectiveness on abelief on the part of the threatened and the threatener that there is someconsensus regarding the legitimacy of the threat of coercion among/"third parties." The relations between consensus and coercion arenumerous and subtle and it is urgent to analyze thm. I do not, however,do that in the essays which follow.

I have directed my attention primarily to consensus, because it is soevidently a major element in the integration of society, and it hasdespite numerous treatments in passingsnot often been made the objectof persistent investigation. Furthermore, a very important strand of /modern social thought has emphasized, as the chief characteristic ofmodem society, the dissolution of consensus and consequently thedisintegration of society. Very much of the intellectual tradition in whichI grew up put the dissolution of consensus into a very prominent position.As I began to find my own way, the inadequacy, descriptively andtheoretically, of this view of modern society became apparent to m e. Onthe other side, many of those writers who discussed consensus in a waywhich did not entail disintegration, spoke of it in such a schematic andeven simplifying way that it was clear that nothing like the consensusthey described existed in modern societies. What they described was tooexplicit, too stable, too comprehensive. That is why a considerable 1amo unt of what follows in this volume is given over to stressing the 1shifting, vague, intermittent, and indirect character of consensus; assess- ^/ \ing its powers and limitations, its fragmentariness and fragility, its ipersistence and its intermittence; and then attempting to discern its Iexistence and working in modern societies. . i

It has never been any different and it is not likely to be different in thefuture. Such consensus as exists in any society is, moreover, never sharedby all its members; nor is each of the numerous consensual solidaritiesamong the various strata and groups within society congruent withcertain othe rs to such an extent that they are in effect self-contained.There is an infinitude of criss-crossing and overlapping. But alongsidethis tenacious and penetrating intertwinement and ramification there arealso pockets of the far-reaching isolation of certain groups from most ofthe rest of society. Even those which are not isolated in this way arepartially isolated from each other. They would not be groups with adistinguishable character; they would be boundaryless and therefore notrecognizable by their members or by observers as groups with distinctiveproperties. This is one aspect of the limitation on consensual integrationto which some of the papers in this volume are devoted. I have wished toshow that Leviathan can never have things entirely his own way for anyconsiderable length of time. There are always some parts of society whichhe cannot swallow up and assimilate.


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xii IntroductionSocieties are full of conflicts; conflicts are endemic in human existence. Scarcity is an unceasing fact of life, despite what the preachers ofplenitude say. Quite apart from the ecological situation of human life,human appetites and desires are expansive. Their subsidence is aphenomenon to be explained, but subsided or expanding, they are alwaysconfronting the fact of the scarcity of the objects they seek for theirsatisfaction. Conflicts are patently antithetical to consensus and, hence,

to integration. Still, conflicts within societies do not prevent the societiesfrom continuing to exist. The parties to these conflicts, despite thetemptations which conflict offers to hyperbolic rhetoric, seldom denytheir mem bership in those societies. Those wh^r^jn^csuflici^ith-eachother respond_toJhe namej>y which, they designate their^memb^rshipjntheir somehow encompassing-society, and they recognize some identitythroughthiie-and across the lines of conflict. They regard themselves asindisalubly-bound to their societies; and so, indeed^they are.Society, even an apparenthforderly and internally relatively peacefulsociety, is a great motley of activites, a tangled skein of an infinity of tieswhich, in ways difficult to formulate, constitute a whole. It has boundaries of which those within it and outside it are generally aware. It isan inchoate sprawling mass constantly spilling over its b oundaries andreceiving ideas, works, and persons from outside them, but whatevercomes within its bound aries becomes different in consequence of beingthere. Assimilation testifies to an assimilating society, resistance toassimilation testifies to the presence of society which grips whatevercomes within its boundaries. The grip is not necessarily one whichassimilates into a consensus; it is possible to be bound into society bybonds which are not predominantly consensual.

* One thing is clear: there are not and can never be any human societieswhich are wholly consensual; nor have there ever been societies so whollydisintegrated that there were no links at all binding many of their^individual members together.For a long time there has been a tendency among intellectuals inWestern countries to deny this obvious fact For some reasons, good andbad, they have accepted uncritically a tradition which has depictedmodern society as if it were on the verge of the state of nature accordingto Hobbes. This situation was not improved by the introduction of avulgar Marxism which unthinkingly made membership in society identical with subjugation by coercion. As a result of a very selectiveimagination and an almost deliberate blindness, the view has becomerather pervasive. It has come to appe ar self-evident It has taken holdeven among sociologists, who should, of all persons, know better. Thegreat tradition of modern sociology has always included this view as one

of its strands, and the increasingly "empirical" character of sociology hasnot been able to expunge it. Recently this extremely naive view has beengiven a new impetus in sociological thought by a number of writers who

Introduction xiiiregard themselves as the exponents of the "conflict model," which theycontrast with a "consensus model." Their polemical, even politicalinterest has thus far prevented them from pursuing their analysisseriously. Even if wrongheaded, a serious, unremitting analysis ofcoercion and conflict would throw up questions which would much moresubtly illuminate the subject which concerns us here, namely, the powersand influences of the inclusive society which subsists alongside numerousparochial loyalties and which survives conflicts. But there has been nohelp forthcoming from the friends of the "conflict model."

The problem remains: How are individuals, groups, and strata linked -vtogether to constitute a society, and not just all those alive at a single /moment but through time as well? The shape of all these society-forming flinkages has an existence of which time is one dimension. Time provides *not only a setting which permits the state of one moment to be comparedheuristically with that of another moment. Time is also a constitutiveproperty of society. Society is only conceivable as a system of varyingstates occurring at moments in time. Society displays its characteristicfeatures hot at a single moment in time but in various phases assumingvarious but related shapes at different and consecutive moments of time.It seems to me to be impossible to deal with the integration of societywithout regard to the vicissitudes of the "natural history" of society.These are the intellectual interests toward which the papers gatheredtogether in this volume have been moving over about four decades. Themovement has not been in a straight line. There has been m uch circlingabout the same point; much redoubling of steps, much going back to thebeginning and starting again. New ideas have occasionally been added;more often it has been the older ideas which have been put into a slightlydifferent intellectual context Some facets previously neglected have beenbrought forward. The aim has always been to make a little more explicitwhat was more dimly apprehended previously. Time and again I have

asked myself whether this search for the structure of societyof wholesocietiesis not a vain undertaking, perhaps even an idle one. Sometimes I ask myself whether the individualistic utilitarian interpretation ofsociety is not adequate, or why the Hobbesian-Marxian view is notadequate, when they not infrequently seem to account for the coordination of the actions of many groups, strata, and individuals into society. Iask myself these questions quite often, but I invariably come up with thesame answer, namely, that such views are not enough and that they arenot enough in an important way.In some respects all these papers say the same things, and they saythem in a way which to me is exasperatingly vague. Yet I think that it isnot unduly immodest to say that here and there the line has been pushed

forward a little. I shall now say something about how these ideasdeveloped, about their sources in books, teachers, and colleagues and inimmediate observations drawn from investigation and the experience of


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xiv Introductionlife. Retracing these steps might help to make more tangible theincessant objects of my intellectual striving of more than four decades.

IIWhen I first began to think ab out problems which later were classified associological, I did not know about the position which I now tentativelyhold. It was on the basis of study of nineteenth-century literature,especially French literature but also Russian, German, and American,that I began to reflect on the intellectuals' withholding of their approbation from their own societies and their complaints and counsels abouttheir isolation. As I recall, I did not really believe in their assertions ofisolation from society; I saw them as connected with it in all sorts of ways.I also at this time began to read the literature of Marxism and was madeaware of the enormous aspirations of Marxism to transform the largesocieties of Europe and America into communities which combined totalindividual freedom with a total absence of conflict. Rousseau's Contratsocial and especially the notion of a volonte generate aroused myappreciation and abhorrence. The idea of the absorption of the individualwill into a higher will which transcends that of the individual intrigued me,as it still does, and much of what I have thought since th at time has beenimpelled by a desire for a better understanding of that idea. The completeabsorption of the individual which Rousseau appeared to me to desire wasboth repugnant to me morally and unrealizable as well.

Georges Sorel was another of those writers who made an unpleasantbut nonetheless deep impression on me. I thought that his justification ofthe execution of Socrates was wrong, but at the same time I also hadsome sympathy with the notion that a society has a set of moral andcognitive beliefs, adherence to which is a condition of its survival. In hiscontempt for what he conceived to be the moral abdication of thebourgeoisie of his time I saw a conviction that the participation of theelite of a society in a consensus of beliefs with the rest of the society is acondition of the continuation of that society in its existing form. The firstvolume of Taine's Origines made the same impression on me.

Yet, at the same time, I was not ready to be convinced that societieswere such flimsy and easily disruptable affairs. There was apparentlyalready some reality in the volonte generate in the society I knew. Ithought that it possessed an envelopingness and a tenacity whichrendered it obdurate to the jolts of ordinary life and intellectuals'criticism. At around this time, I read Sumner's Folkways, which dealtwith this obduracy to intentions of change, but I thought the idea of the"mores" much too amorphous as an account of the tenacious structureof society.Even earlier, when I was quite young, I was struck by the tenacity ofthe attachment of individual human beings to their societies and by the

Introduction xvway .in which they reached out to hold on to those societies. I hadobserved immigrants to the United States from Eastern Europeancountries, where they had not fared at all well, refer to "the old cou ntry"as "home." I was struck by the strength of their unreflecting belief intheir membership in societies in which they were no longer activelyparticipant; I was struck too by the way this belief descended withoutreflection to their offspringswhich was one of the grounds of the rash of"fellow-traveling" among young intellectuals of Eastern European Jewish origin in the 1930s in the United States. I was no less equallyimpressed with the way in which they had become enmeshed in their newsociety. (This was one of the reasons why, when I later read the writings ofW. I. Thomas and especially Robert Park, their observations on theassimilation of immigrants called forth such a sympathetic response.)I had also been impressed by the obstinacy with which some of theforces of union in the A merican Civil War refused to allow the Sou thernstates to secede. When I first began to entertain the problem of "whatmakes a society stick together and what causes it to come apart"whicha delightful old London bookseller once defined as the subject matter ofsociologythe society which had once been ruled by. the Romanovs hadbeen brought together again as the extensive disintegration of the civilwar receded. Thefirst rials of the late 1920s had already occurred, and itwas clear already that Soviet society was not being held together by thenatural harmony of freie Menschen auf freiem Boden as Max Adlerformulated the socialist ideal. These crude and patchy thoughts abouthow societies became reconstituted as societies after civil war or revolution also gave me occasion to think about what it was which was beingreconstituted. Except for the separation of Norway from Sweden, therehad been no breakup of a stateapart from the dissolution of the multinational, multiethnic Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, which I did notlook upon as single societies. I could see the conflicts and miseries ofsocietiesthe United States was showing fissures in the early years of theDepression of 1929, and the Weimar Republic, of which I knew only verylittle, was apparently the scene of frequent and intense conflicts. Yet theopposite was no less present in my mind.

I also noticed fairly early that societies which had expanded continuously on a surface unbroken by water or other societies were regarded asmorally unexceptionable by persons who criticized the expansion ofsocieties overseas ordiscontinuously over land. I did not make much ofthis at the time although in later years I saw that it said something abou tthe significance imparted to territory and boundaries.At every stage of my life over the past forty years, the grip of society onits members and the attachment of individuals to societyand by this Ido not mean the grip of the immediately present group on its m embers orthe attachment of the members to that group or the government's gripexercised through its capacity for coercionhas been borne in upon me.


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xvi IntroductionAnd just as impressive to me has been the amorphous inarticulatenessof this grip and clingingness. To practically all of those who haveparticipated in these attachmen ts, they have seemed ineffable.1 What ismore, they have existed alongside dissatisfaction and resentment againstthe objects to which they have been attached, and together with activeantagonism against other groups and individuals within that samesociety to which they were so attached.

When I came to the University of Chicago, I began to read the w ritingsof Simmel. He had asked the question: "How is society possible?" ("Wieist Gesellschaft moglich?")3 He answered it in a way which even at thattime was not really satisfying; he said that it exists through theinteraction of individuals, and, in saying so, he avoided the problem ofthe "unseen hand" working through a multiplicity of interactions.Simmel postulated the formation of the larger society from the multiplication of interactions in face-to-face relationships. It is true that he oftendealt with things other than these, but in principle this was what he wascommitted to. I was attracted by the possibility of constructing adescription of society by the differentiation and mu ltiplication of interactions between two persons and by extending these interactions to everlarger numbers of participants in networks of interaction, so that apicture of an entire society would be constructed from direct, face-to-facelinks. Society was, nonetheless, not formed simply by interaction,however important that was. The interacting groups or strata might bethe means of communication or connections with parts of the societywhich were not interacting with each other. The connections of theselatter groups or strata or individuals which were mediated throughface-to-face interaction were as important as those which were constituted by the face-to-face interaction.

Simmel was in fact not asking the question to which I have beenseeking an answer. He was trying to elucidate the most elementaryproperties of interaction. Max Wober was doing a similar thing in thefirst chapters of Wirtschaft un d Gesellschaft. Beginning with the elements of the action of a single actor, he advanced into a social actionwhich he then elaborated into four types of social action, and from thereonwardby the addition of further elements, which emerged mainlyfrom the most elementary definition of actionhe moved into thegrandiose analyses of the charismatic, traditional, and rational-legalforms of authority.For a time, I imagined that this was how the idea of a whole societymight be constructed. I was probably wrong. Max Weber did not arrivewhere he did by multiplying and differentiating the most elementary

1. Simmel, in an offhand way said: "Awareness in principle that he is forminga society is not present in the individual" Simmel, Georg, Soziologie (Leipzig:Duncker und Humblot, 1908), p. 31.2. Ibid., pp. 27-45.

Introduction xviiforms of social action. His analyses of large societies were done before hebegan to build complex structures out of the most elementary constituents ofaction. It might well be that the task is not hopeless, but even if itcould be done, it could be done only after the distinctive features of thelarger society have been discerned on their own. They cannot beconstructed deductively as I thought they could be.

Although the intellectual air of the 1930s was filled with talk about"capitalism," "totalitarianism," "the free society," and the like, therewas scarcely any explicit discussion on a more general plane of the bondswhich constitute society. Max Weber's writings were beginning to beknown in English-speaking countries, but bureaucracy as a mode oforganization of authority characteristic of large-scale societies was whatattracted attention. The more fundamental and potentially more fruitfulanalysis of legitimacy was not pursued. The increased popularity ofMarxism contributed nothing to the problem, since its interpreters andproponents were, oh the whole, so unserious intellectually and so eager tofind easy recipes. When Karl Mannheim's Mensch und Gesellschaft imZeitalter des Umbaus appeared in 1935, it thrilled me by its largeperspectives. Mannheim proposed the total planning of societywithwhich I was not at all sympatheticbut he did not really say what thewhole society which was to be "totally" planned had been before it fellinto the crisis which he purported to describe. His view of the "laissez-faire society" which was to be replaced by the totally planned society wasnot much different from the traditional conception of the market Hefound it easier to describe the nonexistent, fictitious society which was tobe createdas a societythrough planning than to analyze the workingof the existing society. Like other famous figures in the history of modernsociology, he had an eye which was quicker to detect and penetrate into"breakdowns" than into the "ongoingness."

Forty years have passed since Mannheim wrote Mensch und Gesellschaft. There are still no societies in the West which are "totallyplanned," but somehow these societies have persisted, although withmany changes. Mannheim did not help to discern the process throughwhich these societies were able to persist as societies without recourse tosuch a drastic, disjunctive change of structure as he proposed. He m adeanother attempt in a long paper which he presented to "The Moot"1;there he explored the significance of paradigmatic images. This was theclosest he came to dealing with the consensus of beliefs connected withthe center, bu t he did not continue this line of inquiry. (Unfortunately,although I saw him frequently during and after the Second World War, Idid not have the problem sufficiently in focus in my mind to be able to

3. See Diagnosis of our Time (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner Co1943.) ' V


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xviil Introductiondraw him into discussion about it I regret this very much now because Ithink this would have benefitted his own work and mine. But I was tooignorant to know just how to take hold of the problem.)

IllThings were intellectually at loose ends during the 1930s. HaroldLasswell was a young teacher at the University of Chicago. He was themost sophisticated of all the teachers there in his knowledge of the m ainEuropean literature which interested me, and he wasvery daring too. Hespoke often about what he called "configurative analysis," which musthave been something like what I would now call macrosociology.

Unfortunately at that time, his conception of power seemed toconcentrate on manipulation and coercion. Nonetheless, he had aremarkable sensitivity and a widely rang ing curiosity which disclosed therelevance of beliefs which were not exclusively political in th eir con tent forthe distribution of power in society. In those years, the University ofChicago Press had published a series of works on "civic training ." Th esewere the fruits of Charles Merriam's interest in the beliefs which sustainand change regimes. Harold Lasswell was his most original student; hisoriginality consisted in bringing the insights of the newer generation ofEuropean writers and psychoanalysis to the study of the matrix ofpolitical activity. Lasswell did not deal with legitimacy in his treatment ofpolitical power; he did, however, speak ab out myths. I thought this wasdisparaging toward the deeper implications of the conception of legitimacy. Lasswell also knew a lot about the history of nationalism inmodern times, and he had an extraordinarily lively mind and very muchelse. I gleaned from him a few grains of ideas which grew a little indifferent settings. I owe to him my interest in "deference," which I soonbegan to connect with the "moral order."

Outside the university and the books I was reading, events in the worldwere forcing my attention into the same direction in which my thoughtwas already tending. In the 1930s, the United States and the liberalcapitalistic democracies of Western Europe were under the strain oflarge-scale unemployment, and there was much pessimism about therecuperative prospects of these societies. It was common among publicists and some academic social scientists from about 1932 onward tocontrast the dilapidated, ramshackle condition of the North Americanand Western European societies with the solidarity and eagerness forconcerted, authoritatively directed action which they said was theprevailing feature of society in the Soviet Union, National SocialistGermany, and Fascist Italy. The solidaritythe term "integration" wasas popular then as "charismatic" is nowof the latter societies wasattributed to the fact that their members "had something to believe in."It was said that they had "a faith"; the term "ideology" began to be

)

Introduction xixwidely used in the English-speaking countries for the first time. Althoughit was acquired from the Marxist writings, which were then being morewidely 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 allquestions and which offered the individual a belief that he had a "place "in that larger order of things which was explained by th e ideology. Muchimportance was attributed to the function of these totalitarian "faiths"or "ideologies," which, in giving each individual a "place" in themovement of history, also gave him a sense of his own dignity inconsequence of that legitimated "place."

I was not sympathetic with this view; I suspected and in some casesknew that it hid an unworthy admiration of wicked societies. Yet I didnot counterpose an alternative to it I agreed that beliefs were ofconsequence.At the beginning of the thirties while I was still an undergraduate Iread through all of Durkheim's works. The one thing in all his writingswhich appealed to me was his discussion of "anomie." My first readingsin MaxWeber made more receptive my sensitivity to the varieties of b eliefsabout "serious" things. I had too much experience in the observation ofreligious and political sects and I had studied too much theology and thehistory of the Christian churches and sects to regard belief simply as"error," "rationalization," "reflection," or as an uncomfortable irrelevanceas so many social scientists of my generation did. I had thegood fortune when I came to the University of Chicago to become morefamiliar with Frank Knight's ruminations about the tenacity of beliefs.Knight wasa rationalist who detested m any of these beliefs, bu t he wasinsistent that they be recognized. Unlike Pareto, whose Traiti I studiedabout this time, he did not regard the rationally or scientificallyunjustifiable beliefs with levity. I also attended Robert Park 's last courseat the University of C hicago, It was on "Collective B ehavior" and dealtwith revivalist movements, panics, riots, and other phenom enon of "m assemotion." From Park's lectures and from the conversations which wehad when I sometimes accompanied him on his way home from theuniversity after class, I got a clearer, understanding that very little couldbe accounted for in society unless beliefs were considered. Park oftenreferred to the "moral order" and to "n orms." W. I. Thom as's conception of the "definition of the situation," undifferentiated and unclearthough it is, also suggested that belief was important Academic socialscientists and intellectual pub licists would readily have granted this forall societiesoriental, African, ancient and medieval Europeanbutthey were reluctant to acknowledge it when they dealt with modernWestern societies.

As a result of all this, although I was repelled by the admiringovertones of those writers who emphasized the beneficent beliefs of Nazis


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wxx Introductionand communists, I had some common ground with them. I sharedcertain of their postulates. At that time, I still accepted much of theconception of modern liberal society which was to be found in Tbnnies,and in Simmel's "Die Grossstadt und das Geistesleben" which I admiredso much that I translated it into English.41 accepted that beliefs v/ereT.constitutive-part.o_society and that modern Western societies hadundergone a dangerous attrition of belief.

From Tonnies and Simmel I assimilated the view that the development iof the large-scale, urban, capitalistic, individualistic society was one inwhich the larger society with its moral order had dissolved into amultiplicity of individuals and small groups, each with its own purposesand interests. These, at most, allowed compromise but not the sense of_identity and attachmen t to symbols of the whole which, it was implied,had characterized the society of the preceding stage of W estern history.R. H. Tawney, although he was writing the history of thought andopinion, was actually expressing a view of what modern society was whenhe wrote: "Religion has been converted from the keystone which holdstogether the social edifice into one department w ithin it, and the idea ofthe rule of right is replaced by economic expediency as the arbiter ofpolicy and the criterion of conduct." "Society . . . is a joint-stock company rather than an organism and the liabilities of the shareholder arestrictly limited."5I held this view ambivalently. It contradicted my conception ofconduct as "normatively oriented." The "theory of mass society" wasbeginning to take form. The publicistic admiration for the all-embracing consensus of German society under the National Socialists and ofSoviet society was receiving a more intellectual formulation in the writingsof Paul Tillich, Emil Lederer, Karl Mannheim, and Erich Fromm. TheFrankfurt Institut fiir Sozialforschung was the source of many of thesenotions. A consensus was forming. Marxists, refined and vulgar, liberals

of faint heart, and other haters, high-and low-brow, of modern society,supported each other. The great tradition of sociology which saw theworld in the dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft was beginningto join forces with these other blocs of opinion.The condition alleged to exist in the Western countries was declared tobe a prelude to totalitarianism. The incipient "theory of mass society"was both an ostensible description of liberal, democratic societies in thetwentieth century and an analysis of their transformation into totalitar-4. At the end of the decade 1 used it for my undergraduate students. Morethan thirty years later, after I forgot that I had translated it, Professor1 DonaldLevine reprinted it in Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, edited

by Donald Levine (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971) pp.324-39.5. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: John Murray,1933), pp. 279, 189.

Introduction xxiianism. The reduction of men to "isolated atoms" in mass society wassaid to be an affront to their needs for solidarity and for belief; such asituation would be unbearable. "Political religions" were the result of thebeliefless, excessively individuated condition of man in the liberaldemocratic society. The hunger for solidarity drove human beings to seekout or form and adhere to groups and societies to which such anattachment was possible. Whatever man's fundamental needs for normatively legitimate order, modern liberal-democratic, capitalistic societiesfailed to meet them. In contrast with this situation, the totalitariansocieties, by presenting a comprehensive scheme of ultimate valuesintelligible and persuasive to everyone, were meeting fundamentalhuman needs.

This made no sense to me. It did not correspond with what wasobservable. I could see, in the United States in the 1930s, how, despite thedemoralizing influence of the Depression, great numbers of personsremained attached to their society. One could scarcely avoid beingimpressed with the part played by President Franklin Roosevelt instrengthening attachment to American society. The president was bitterly criticized in some circles, but even in those circles there were manywhose attachment to the country could not be doubted; they were notmerely seeking to protect their own property and status. In intellectualcircles too there was a renewal of civility after its absence for manydecades; this too gave evidence of attachment to the society without theadduction of an explicit, comprehensive, and coherent doctrine orideology. The consensual elem ent in Ame rican society was very far fromextinction. T his was quite obvious although it wasmuch more difficult todelineate its form and force. In National Socialist Germany and theSoviet Union, the two societies which were being held before us as beingwholly consensual, very great numbers of persons were being imprisoned,interned, done to death, exiled, or menaced. One could not, unless onewas already a determined partisan or a complaisant victim of propaganda, fail to notice this. The appearance of consensus was m aintainedby the coercive segregation of dissenters and by murdering or intimidating them. I did not doubt that: there was a good deal of consensusaround the centers of these two societies, but it was certainly far fromcomplete.

In addition to the frivolous, who were driven along by the currents ofopinion, and those who were simply malicious, there were also the decentpersons who had experienced National Socialism at close hand or whohad observed it with penetrating understanding and who were alarmedby the danger of its spread to Western Europe and America. Some ofthem thought that the German situation was prototypical for all of theliberal-democratic societies of the West. There were also less engagedscholars who asserted that liberal political democracy and the rule of lawrested on consensus. Carl Joachim Friedrich was one of the best and


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xxii Introductionmost learned of these, but their thought was too schematic for me. Theydid not venture onto the structure of the required consensus; they did notattempt to delineate its actual condition. I was on their side, but I did notmake any progress through this alliance. Their definitions of consensusgave a monolithic impression of a body of beliefs consensually held,equally and simultaneously, throughout the society. Their belief thatsome agreement was a precondition of the peaceful resolution ofdisagreement was correct, bu t it seemed too general. They never gave anyillustrations, or at least none that I understood at the time to bepertin ent They did not go into the pattern of coexistence of conflict andconsensus, although their conception of consensus as a limitation on theintensity of conflict placed this task on their agenda.

The coming of the Second World W ar did not improve my thought onthese matters. My ideas were vague, loose, and contradictory; theirvagueness and looseness obscured their contradictoriness. On the oneside, 1 accepted, more or less, the modern sociological version of theHobbesian description of the state of nature in its application to W esternsocieties. Yet I was also convinced, in principle, that some minimalmeasure of consensus was required for the existence of any society. In thefew papers which I wrote on social stratification before the war, Inroceeded on the belief that there existed a vague, unarticulated/acceptance of certain criteria regarding the relationship between merit\ and reward and that the criteria by which deference was accordedreceived a fairly consens ual affirmation. Yet I also knew of theantagonism between members of different strata and the conflicts,sometimes violent, conducted by some members of one stratum againstmembers of other strata. At the same time that I was convinced that aminimal degree of consensus was necessary to the existence of a society, Iwas even stronger in my conviction th at no large, differentiated societycould ever attain or persist in the kind of consensus sought by totalitar-ians and idealists.

Two questions resulted from this. One referred to the patterns in themind and in the culture of these conflicting elements; the other referredto the character of the consensus which could exist under thoseconditions.

IVThe period between the outbreak of the war in Europe and the entry ofthe United States into the war was one in which myxapproach began tochange. Early in this period, I wrote a long paper on "The Bases ofStratification in the Negro Community" for Professor Gunnar Myrdal'sstudy of the Negro in America. Such data as I could obtain from directobservation and from documentary sources showed consensus riddled by

Introduction xxiiicontradiction and ambivalence regarding the criteria on the basis ofwhich esteem was accorded. These data were very useful to me.Alongside my interest in the "whole society" and its presumedconsensus, I was reading the literature on religious dissent an d tolerationjn seventeenth-century England; I was also interested in the literature onfriendship. In 1941 I also undertook an investigation on the NorthSide of Chicago of small associations intended to propagate or sustainNational Socialist and American "nativisf' views.. The seventeenth-century debate on religious toleration, particularly John Locke's LettersConcerning Toleration, and the observation of isolated "pockets" insociety posed a problem for my understan ding of societywide consensus.The religious and political sects which I had been interested in wereantagonistic to the rest of their society while claiming that the othermembers of that society should act toward them as if they were fullyqualified members of that same society. I was not interested in scoringpoints against their logical inconsistency but rather in fathoming thissimultaneous rejection and affirmation of membership in society.

Then there was another side to the pluralism which I was discovering.It was more positive, but it raised the same sort of question regarding theamalgamation of diverse and separate groups and strata into a singlesociety.

I had studied Charles Horton Cooley on "primary groups," EltonMayo's The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, and T. NorthWhitehead's Leadership in a Free Society. Simmel's insights intointimate attachments, and Durkheim's effort to establish a new civicmoralityvaguely resembling, at least in intention, what I later called"civility"tobe mediated through independent "professional groups,"and the "pluralism" of Leon Duguit and Mary Pa rker F ollett came to lifein my mind when during the years from 1942 to 1945 I pondered thepower of the German armed forces to resist disintegration u nder a fairlysteady sequence of reverses in battle.Freud's Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse was helpful to me in mysearch for the lines of filiation which bound the individual to the largersociety or to the center as I later called it. My collaborator in these years,Dr. (then Lieutenant-Colonel) Henry Dicks, was a psychiatrist sympathetic with psychoanalysis and a man of warm and understandingheart, even of enemy prisoners of war. He emphasized the need todemonstrate manliness as the source of the German soldier's conductunder arms. This was an attractive explanation, but it neglected the roleof the soldier's immediate companions in training and combat and theirrole in sustaining his adherence to the ideal of manliness. It overlookedthe content of manliness which included fidelity to comrades. It neglected the force of attachment to the larger collectivitiesthe Wehr-macht, the Nazi party, the German state, and German society. The


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xxiv Introductionpsychoanalytic interpretation treated the elaborate structure of societysimply as the setting of sexual competitiveness. It raised no questionsabout the way in which tha t structure worked except to imply that it wassustained by sexual competitiveness. This solution begged the question. Ithought that I found the answer in the primary group as the mediator ofbeliefs and rules from the authority of the larger society. I recalledHermann Schmalenbach's description of the Bund in his essay "Diesoziologische Katego rie des Bundes."6 It was a Gemeinschafi without theties of kinship and place. This was helpful because it made me moreaware than I had been before of the role of certain types of primarygroups in affirming and supporting ideals for entities far wider than theprimary group. It made me reinterpret the meaning of Cooley's hope thatthe ideals of the primary group would become the ideals of Americansociety in its largest and least intimate structure. Cooley had hoped thatthe primary groups would become the centers of American society. I nowbegan to see the primary groups as the mediators of the beliefs andsymbols of the center. I also read Ernst von Salomon's Di e Ge'dchtetenwith its account of the fanatical nationalist youths who assassinatedWalter Rathenau and who found in the Freikorps a way to sustain theirideal of the German nation and means to realize a "genuinely Germanstate." Later on, I saw this phenomenon in a different light, but at thisstage it was taken as another instance of the primary group as themediator of the symbols of the larger society and as the sustainer of itsvalue.

When his military service was over, Morris Janowitz, who had beenmy close collaborator during the war, came to the University of Chicagoto complete his studies. There in the spring of 1946 we wrote the"Cohesion and Disintegration of the Wehrmacht in World War II," inwhich the idea of interplay of attachments to the larger society and to theintensely experienced, small primary group was developed. The long andshort of this was that the stout-hearted conduct in combat of most of theGerman soldiers with whom we dealt was only slightly, and thenindirectly, influenced by the ideological espousal of the beliefs ofNational Socialism. Vague attachmen ts to German society and the idealof National Socialism mediated by personally acceptable zealots eachplayed a part Above all, however, concern to maintain the integrity of,and to remain firmly emplaced in, the primary groups provided the mainground for the continued obedience of German soldiers to the commandsof their officers and for their exercise of initiative and resourcefulness on6. Walter Strich, editor, Die Diaskuren: Jahrbuch fur Geisteswissensckaften,

vol. 1, (Munich: Meyer und Jessen, 1922). pp. 35-105. I first encounteredSchmalenbach when I translated the manuscript of Ernest Frankel's De rDoppelstaat into English in order to help him to find his way in the United States.Frankel later became professor at the Free University of Berlin and struggled tosave it from its assailants. My bread was not vainly cast upon the waters.

Introduction xxvbehalf of the general goals set by their military superiors, near andremote.

This helped to settle for me the problem raised by the laudators of thetotalitarian societies when they wrote of the "faith to live for" or of.the"ideology" which allegedly pervaded those societies. It showed me thatmany of the soldiers were rather deaf to the ideological "beliefs" for anactive acceptance of which they had erroneously been praised; it showedme that some of the response which such beliefs aroused was the result ofthe presence in the soldiers' immediate environment of a person whoespoused those beliefs and to whom the soldier was attached on personalgrounds. This was a very simple observation once it had been m ade, bu tit was a step forward for me in my search for the integrating mechanismsof large societies and for the limits of "system s of be lie f in the workingof those mechanisms.7

Through the second half of the 1940s, I continued to work on primarygroups in armies. I reinterpreted the tradition which I had inherited,fusing the tradition of reflection and investigation concerning primarygroups with a long enduring concern with the function of primary groupsin the maintenance and change of large collectivities and society.8

I delivered a series of Jectures on "The Primary Groups in theSocial Structure" at the London School of Economics in the autumn of1947. (I did this a number of times at the University of Chicago too,beginning in 1956.) I also began to lecture and conduct seminars on "TheStructure of Large-Scale Societies," at the London School of Economicsin the 1940s and at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. It was myintention when I began this program of teaching to write two books, oneentitled "Consensus and Liberty: The-Social and Psychological Foundations of Political Democracy"; the other on "Primary Groups in theSocial Structure." The former was written out in a complete draft; thelatter was sketched out more roughly but at some considerable length. Iput both of them aside when I went to Harvard University to work withProfessor Talcott Parsons on what later became "Values, Motives andSystems of Action," and the general statement in Towards a GeneralTheory of Action.

A number of things of some importance for subsequent phases of mywork came out of this collaboration. One of them was the inter-7. I was heartened in this view by the invocation by Professor Paul Lazarsfeid

in a lecture which he delivered in Oslo in 1948 very shortly after our paperappeared and then a few years later by his adoption of this hypothesis in his andProfessor Elihu Katz's Personal Influence (Glencoe, III.: The Free Press, 1955).8. See my "The Study of the Primary Groups," in H. D. Lasswell and DanielLerner, editors, The Policy Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951).


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xxvi Introductiondependence between systems and subsystems; this was one of the thingswhich I had got from reading Pareto's Traite, but the environment wasnot congenial to this kind of thought in the 1930s and I did not have theequipment to do more than respond favorably. My friendship withProfessor Parsons provided this compelling intellectual environment.Another benefit of this collaboration was the clarification of the distinction between culture and social structure; still another was the threefoldclassification of cognitive, moral, and expressive actions. All theseaccomplishments were on an extremely abstract level, and they represented only more systematic and more explicit statements of ideas whichI had already possessed but had not thought through to anywhere nearthe same extent we were able to do together. Another product of thisperiod was the classification of the properties of objects of orientation.*

These distinctions and classifications, although rather scholastic inappearance, were helpful to me in developing my ideas about the limitedcapacity of many human beings to sustain a direct, continuous, andintense relationship to the center of their society. In a certain measuretoo they formulated in a very abstract way some of the things I had beenthinking about over the past decade. The interdependence betweensystem and subsystem was a restatement in very abstract terms of someaspects of the relationship between the larger society or corporate bodyand its primary groups. The classification of the properties of objects atwhich we arrived in 1950 was a necessary condition for my discernmentof the distinctiveness of the primordial, the personal, the sacred, andthe civil.In the winter and spring of 1953, I read a lot on religious sects,heresies, monasticism, religious revivals, conversionphenomena whichhad interested me for many years. My studies of Marxism and thecommunist movement had begun when I was an undergraduate and hadbeen encouraged in the 1930s by Robert Park and by Harold Lasswell.Park, on the basis of a seminar paper10 which I had delivered in hiscourse on collective behavior, had in fact invited me to take up anassistantship under his supervision in order to write a book on the

9. This was a generalization of the schemes toward which I had moved in thelate 1930s in several papers on the criteria on the basis of which status ordeference were accorded. The paper for The Negro in America was one of these.The work which we did together at Harvard was an extension of this mode ofanalysis to relationships other than those of status. Originally, I was driven to thisby the unsatisfactoriness of W eber's treatment of classes and status groups andthe utter disregard for the phenomenon of status in the Marxian literature. On thepositive 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, towhich I subscribed at that time. Sombart and Arthur Rosenberg were my guidingstars. The paper was formed around the contrast between the total andcomprehensive electoral platforms of the Communist and Social Democraticparties, primarily in New York and more generally in the United States. It was myfirst effort to formulate my conception of ideology.

Introduction xxviicommunist movement He thought my analysis in that paper fitted intohis own ideas about social movements. Lasswell encouraged me simplyby his own interest in such mattershe was the only teacher at theUniversity of Chicago who was at home among the famous Europeanfigures, such as W eber, Michels, Pareto, So mbart, who seemed to me inmy earlier years to be the repositories of whatever a young person ofintellectual seriousness ought to know.

The political events of the 1930s in Europe and America and theassociated rash of fellow-traveling among American and Europeanintellectuals of the time inevitably ke pt my interest in these m atters onthe alert. Thefieldworkwhich I did on the N orth Side of Chicago amongnativist and pro-Nazi groups enabled me to appreciate the sensitivityabout sharply defined boundaries which I later came to see as characteristic of ideological primary groups. My studies of Germany during thewar increased my awareness of the relationship between the demand fordisjunctive boundaries in certain types of small groups and theircommitment to transform the larger society in all aspects in the light ofan exigent ideal. It was, however, only when I tried in the early 1950s toput together what I had learned about primary groups in armies, what Ihad read in the then prospering field of industrial sociology, and what Ihad observed and studied about religious and political sects, that I sawthat I was dealing with several sorts of things which overlapped in somerespects and which differed profoundly in others. I learned a lot fromthinking and reading about what was meant by Christian love, which Iconcluded was different from both erotic love and personal affection. Iwas helped in this by reading Arthur Darby Nock's Conversion, AndersNygren's Agape and Eros, Monsignor Martin D'Arcy's The Heart andMind of Love, Father Ronald Knox's Enthusiasm, and Denis deRougemont's L 'Amour dans VOccident. Knox's book was especially rich.What was beginning to emerge from these diverse explorations was theneed to recognize that primary groups in which the members wereattached to each other as the bearers of certain beliefs, were differentfrom those in which attachments focused on personal qualities, qualitiesof disposition, or properties constituted by a presumedly commonbiological origin or territorial location. The primordial, the sacred, thepersonal, and the civil were beginning to emerge as separate modes ofattachment But it all remained rather obscure.

In the spring of 1953, I presented a paper at the Psychology Club ofUniversity College, London, on "Private Man, Political Man, IdeologicalMan." This paper brought together in a way which I had not donepreviously my ideas about the variety of spheres or circles within whichattachments occur and the antinomies and identities of the attachmentsin these diverse spheres. Although I was living in Manchester at thattime, I was much occupied with Senator McCarthy and his fellow-travelers. The paper undertook to order these observations. At abo ut the


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xxviii Introductionsame time I wrote another long paper on "Institutional Specialization"in which I again, from another angle, approached the dependence ofcivility on the pluralism of professional and institutional loyalties.

As a result of these developments, I decided that my views aboutprimary groups had to be thoroughly recast This was a time when theUnited States was in one of its recurrent states of enthusiasm, withunitary and unqualified loyalty to the central institutional and valuesystems being the main plank in the platform of the enthusiasts."Americanism" was the standard, "Un-American" was the criterion ofwhat was to be avoided. This enthusiasm, which at that time was giventhe name of McCarthyism by its critics and victims, seemed to me topresent in very clearly defined form a phenomenon incompatible with theconditions of a civil societyas incompatible as the totalitarianism ofcommunism, which was so esteemed by many intellectuals of mygeneration and of the one just preceding, or the totalitarianism ofNational Socialism.

From the time of my return to the University of Chicago fromManchester in the autumn of 1953 I began to revise my earliermanuscript on primary groups. Practically nothing of it was left, becausethe macrosociological parts grew so disproportionately. In a bout fifteenmonths I wrote an almost wholly new manuscript of about threehundred thousand words. I called it "Love, Belief, and Civility." "Love"referred to personal ties of affection and friendship, " be lie f referred toideas about sacred things and the structures in which they wereembodied, and "civility" referred to the ethos and institutions concernedwtih the maintenance and adaptation of large-scale societies. Themanuscript covered a tremendous range of subjects from religion andpolitics to intimate personal relationships. I was not at all satisfied with itand I am still not satisfied with it. That is why it is still unpublished. Itdid, however, bring into clearer focus the character of the beliefs andrelationships which operate in the vicissitudes of the integration ofsociety.

VIThe stream of my ideas in the preceding decade had flowed through ameandering course but with a persistent direction. They were theresultant of a num ber of loosely interconnected strands in the tradition ofsociological thought; these strands were the writings of W. I. Thomas,Robert Park, Ferdinand Tonnies, George Simmel, and, above all, MaxWeber. I must confess th at although I had studied the works of Durkheimwhile I was an undergraduate, they did not have much significance forme. I was probably too callow to appreciate their depth. I came toappreciate them more after I learnedindependently of Durkheimtoappreciate the place of the sacred in society. I owed a great deal to

Introduction xxixAristotle's Politics, particularly his consideration of the causes of revolutions. Above all, Aristotle's view of man as a " political anim al" remainsfor me one of those fundamental enigmas to which one can return timeand again with the reasonable expectation of learning new things eachtime. The Hobbesian account of the state of natu re was invaluable to mebecause it gave me a clear picture of what an aggregation of humanbeings without affectionate, erotic, or primordial ties, and without beliefsin legitimacy, would be like. But one of the intellectual figures whomeant most to me in all these matters up to the early 1950s was thequerulous and sagacious Frank Knight He was an often perplexingwriter, with many idees fixes, but his writings in The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays and many conversations with him deepened mysense of the importance of the "rules of the game," which restrictedindividual and sectional self-aggrandizement and which permitted therelatively peaceful articulatio n of the various p arts of society into a wholewith distinctive properties of its own. Frank Knight was an obsessivethinker who in his youth had renounced adherence to the religious beliefsin which he had been brought up. He was by intention a rationalist whohoped without hope that men would become rational in the managementof their affairs. He also knew that they would not, and this was a sourceof gnawing distress to him. Like any other mind of the first order inthinking about society, he had an extraordinary gift for uttering enigmatic statements of great pregnancy. He used to say that "no societywould tolerate indefinitely the twisting of the tails of its sacred cows,"although he was himself aware that tha t was just what he was doing mostof the time. Stated over and over again in many very different contexts,this statement and many others made a profound impression on myefforts to understand the rules of disagreement.

It was not just academ ic study which influenced me. Being asconcerned as I was for the condition of my own country and of societiesand cultures of France, Great Britain, and Germany to which I wasattached and on whose literature I had been brought up intellectually,the political events of the thirties, forties, and early fifties continuouslydrew my attention. The G reat Depression of the 1930s, something aboutwhich I learned from the experiences of my own family and of ourneighbors as well as from my experience as a social worker in New Yorkand Chicago, was the first of these events. The rise and entrenchment ofNational Socialism and Fascism were events of almost overwhelmingsignificance. I learned a great deal about them and ab out much else thatinfluenced my ideas from various exiled friends like Hans Speier, KarlMannheim, Nathan Leites, Alexander von Schelting, Franz Neumann,Jacob Marschak, Leo Szilard, Michael Polanyi, and Ernst Frankel.

The Second W orld W ar gave me the opportunity and the occasion toextend and deepen my knowledge of Germany and of military matters;the antagonism between the Soviet Union and the Western societies gave


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xxx Introductionfurther material and experiences on which to ponder. "McCarthyism"was an accompaniment of this antagonism but by no means its creation.I would have criticized McCarthyism in any case, but my association withthe Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists gave me a more immediateconnection which I might otherwise have lacked. Much of the obsessionwith secrecy and the rancor ab out espionage was aroused by the existenceof the atomic bomb, and nuclear physicists of the "liberal" sort weresubjected to attack. The withdrawal of the privilege of secret knowledgefrom Robert Oppenheimer was an undignified epitome of the McCarthy-ite view of the world.The various legislative committees concerned with the protection ofsecrets and with the exposure of subversive conspiracies created muchdisturbance by their inquiries. They represented a type of ideologicalnativism as disruptive of a reasonable order of society as the totalitarianism which they allegedly sought to av ert The traditional pluralism ofAmerican society was being changed by the pressure of populisticideologists. My observations of this effort to reassert the primacy of thecriterion of intense and unqualified attachment to the national societymade it urgent for me to clarify my ideas about the pattern of consensusof liberal pluralistic societies.

It was to draw the general lessons, theoretical and practical, of theMcCarthyite rage that, in the autum n and winter of 1954-55,1put aside"Love, Belief, and Civility," which was completed in draft. I had gone asfar as I could at the time and had a series of questions whichneededfurther elucidation. I turned, therefore, to draw together my views ofMcCarthyism, to put that disorder into a wider setting, and to contrast itwith alternative modes of integration. I did not intend to produce atheoretical work: I wrote with a primarily polemical intention, but sincethe book was a critique of the ideological mode of integration, it wasbound inevitably to be guided by my general conception of how societieswork. I wrote The Torment of Secrecy in a few m onths and sent it to thepublisher in the spring of 1955. Since it was written largely with apractical purpose, I did not take the leisurely attitude toward itspublication that I did with my other writings. Nonetheless, it was aconsiderable advance over what I had thought previously about consensus in a highly differentiated society with many conflicts. L ookingback at it later I found that in its contrast between ideological politicsand pluralistic politics, it was elaborating the fundam ental distinctionbetween Gesinnungsethik arid Verantwortungsethik made by Max Weber. The power of the intellectual traditions which came together andwhich were extended by Max Weber was again manifesting itself in a newsetting.

VIIAt this point I went to India for an extended period. On my return, in

Introduction xxxiaddition to my work on intellectuals, some of which is reprinted in thefirst volume of this series, I took up once more the numerous questionswith which I had not dealt satisfactorily in "Love, Belief, and Civility."Much of what I have written since that time has been intended to developparticular themes or topics which seemed to me to need improvementbefore the larger work could be made fit for publication.One such theme was the basis of the various types of collectivities inwhich human beings participate. This entailed some reformulations ofthe work which I had done with Professor axscns_gn_ the classification ofthe properties of objects or orientation. The result of this was the paperon "Primordial, Personal, Sacred, and Civil Ties." "Ideology andCivility," "The Concentration and Dispersion of Charisma," and "Center and Periphery" all belong to this phase. In all these efforts I havebeen encouraged by the forceful way in which Professor Samuel Eisen-stadt has elaborated these ideas and brough t them to bear in his variousworks.

In a more roundabout manner, however, my experiences in the studyof Indian intellectuals provided me with a clue which has since provedrather fruitful, although its character and scope are still not settled. Thisis the idea that societies have a center to which their members orientthemselves and which influences their conduct in a wide variety of ways.This notion first came to me in consequence of my observation of the"anglophilia of Indian intellectuals. The attractive powers of nationalcenter had already been touched on in the paper which I published onBritish intellectuals before going to India in 1955, but it had a widersignificance of which I was unaware before I went to India. After Ireturned from India and began to analyze what I had observed there, Irecalled the ecological work on metropolitan dominance done by RobertPark and Roderick McKenzie about thirty years before. The still earlierstudies of Charles Galpin regarding the ecological conformation of smalltowns, villages, and the open country in the rural United States in theearly decades of this century came back to me. An old paper by EdwardReuter on the ecology of Western expansion in the Pacific which I hadread years before and which had Iain dormant in my mind came backfrom memory. Of course, I knew something about the expansion ofWestern civilization into Asia and Africa and a little about the responsesof the colonized peoples. But I h ad never pu t -these scattered bitstogether. Now I was moved to do so.

Once I had digested the concept of center and periphery in theintellectual community, its extensive applicability to the problems of theintegration of society became apparent to me. The papers on "Centerand Periphery" and "Society and Societies" represent this development.The notion that societies have centers and peripheries enabled me tolay to rest a troublesome aftermath of my intellectual inheritance. I havealready mentioned the view, to which I was not unresponsive in the1930s, that the urban, liberal-democratic, capitalistic society of the past


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xxxii Introductioncentury was in a process of increasing disintegration. It had notdisappeared during the war. Fromm's Fear of Freedom, which appearedin 1941 and which was one of the first manifestations of the FrankfurtInstitut fur Sozialforschung before a wider public, was an extended statement of this view.

The contention reappeared after the Second World War in anapparently new application. Throughout the 1950s, there was a risingchorus of complaint from literary and once radical intellectuals abo ut theatrocious quality of"mass culture"; this criticism of "mass culture" wasa variant of the received depiction of "mass society" with a few newtwists. "Mass culture" was a contrived product, aiming at profit andpower and destroying the moral substance of the hum an beings who wereexposed to it. They themselves were defenseless against it; they weredehumanized by it, turned into automatons without will or imagination.I was opposed to this view because I found it morally obnoxious andsocially wrongheaded. I would not say whether one or the other of theseconsiderations was uppermost in my mind when I began to write aboutthe criticism of mass culture." I could not deal with the criticism of massculture without dealing with the conception of modern society which it, presupposed, and to do the former it was necessary to elaborate my ownview about mass society. I did this along the lines of interpretation laidout, by implication, in "Center and Periphery."

In developing my views about certain features of the mode andmeasure of integration of Western societies in "The Theory of MassSociety" I took what seems to me to be a decisive step forward. I haddecided that the most pressing task in studying the integration ofsocieties was the examination of the relationship between center andperiphery. The result was a portrait of modern society which wasdifferent in a substantial respect from the one I had inherited from myintellectual tradition. I did not break away from it; rather, I retainedmuch "of it, but I also introduced into it something which had not beenpresent beforeat least not in a generalized way which I could detectwhen I studied the works which made up and carried the tradition.

t

VIIIMy awareness that societies possess centers which impose themselves bymeans other than coercion and manipulation, and which are more thanplaces where decisions are made and coordinating functions are performed, opened up to me new possibilities of dealing with problems I hadbeen unable to resolve in "Love, Belief, and Civility." Since the middle ofthe 1950s, I had been trying to go beyond the conventional distinctionbetween the sacred and the profane. The secular was clearly different11. See "Daydreams and Nightmares," in The Intellectuals and the Powersand Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 248-64.

Introduction xxxiiifrom the sacred as generally conceived by writers on the relationsbetween church and state or by the Durkheimian anthropology. I alreadycame up to this in my brief references to "sacred ties" in "Primordial,Personal, Sacred, and Civil Ties." In "T he Con centration and Dispersionof Charisma," although it began by a consideration of economic policy inthe new states of Asia and Africa, I began to reinterpret the charismaticphenomenon. E arlier in the decade I had begun to do something like thisin "The Meaning of the Coronation," but I did not press it very far ormake it explicit (Looking back at that essay now makes me think that itimplied much that I did not then perceive.)

My own reflections on the tendency of societies to develop centers andthe corresponding tendency of human beings to seek and to reject centersdisclosed to me certain affinities between the charismatic or the sacredand the center. Here again, once I had vaguely discerned the phenomenon of centrality, I also discovered that the disposition to attribute'charismatic qualities to persons, roles, or institutions was an element jnthe-process.by_which centers are formed, maintained, and changed.I had always been sensitive to 'trie~persislent presence of routinelycharismatic institutions in modern societies and, no less, to the inter

mittent seeking for more intense experience of the charismatic. For along time, however, I accepted the conventional distinction between theholy and the profane, the sacred and the secular; this involved acceptance of the proposition tha t they were utterly disjunctive with respect toeach other. I had accepted this without question in my earlier studies ofthe problems of religious toleration and religious oppression; the postulate of much of the literature was that the state was properly confined tothe secular sphere. I had also accepted, at its face value, Max Weber'sdistinction between the charismatic and the routine, with its intimationsthat the routine is the antithesis of the charismatic and that the"routinization of charisma" is the process whereby the charismaticelement is replaced by the routine.I had not been quite satisfied w ith this position, but I had no availablepossibility of going beyond it It was only after the Second World Warthat I began to move away from it My first step had been taken with theaid of my friend Dr. Michael Young, when, after observing the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, we wrote "The Meaning of the Coronation."This paper did two things. It gave the sacred a wider scope and a differentinstitutional location than the conventional confinement of sacred-ness to religious objects and institutions had allowed. It also asserted theproposition that the charismatic^ or sacred is capable of existence inattenuated and diffuse asTweJas intense arid concentrated"fofmsTThisled me to try to understand the" "secular" condition as"one inwnich the

sacred or charismatic elements were attenuated and dispersed. But as Isaid earlier, I was not really aware of the implications of what I said inthat paper.

S


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xxxiv IntroductionThroughout the decade which followed "The Meaning of the Corona-/ tion," I was searching for the h itherto unobserved manifestations of the

\ sacred. Some of these I perceived in aspects of the conduct of humans. beings toward past things. The attachment of human beings to past) thingsthe recurrent, fluctuating, and shifting attachments to the past[ in society, the incessant rediscoveries of the past and re-creations of\ images of the past in individuals, families, and in institutions beyond the\ lineageappeared to me to be one instance of the variable attribution ofcharismatic properties. I had first written explicitly on this in ]"'Traditionand Liberty: Antinomy and Interdependence"'2 shortly after myarrival inIndia. I think that when I began to analyze tradition, it was not only the

phenomenon of attachmen t to past things which interested me; I held atthat time the mistaken belief that traditionality and the integration ofsociety are very intimately and positively related to each other. 13 Someserious reflection on the matter showed that although that hypothesis, sosimply stated, was wrong, there were many complicated connectionsbetween the two. This brought the analysis of tradition onto my agenda.I had to occupy myself with tradition with even more reason once Iextended my interests to Asian and African societies. It came to form amajor theme of my inquiry into the Indian intellectual. Many Americanand British scholars were applying themselves to the study of Asian andAfrican societies, and they invariably applied the term "traditional" tothem. When one sought to find out exactly what they meant by it, onefound that they usually meant agricultural, kinship-dominated, religious, uneducated. They were singularly unhelpful when it came toelucidating the traditional elements in allegedly traditional societies.Max Weber was of little help here; despite the richness of his treatmentof patrimonial authority as the major type of traditional authority, he infact made little effort to elucidate the nature of tradition, nor did he evenspecify wherein lay the traditionality of patrimonial authority. In thismatter I have been left on my own in the effort to discover thesignificance attributed to the past in various societies and the consequences of images of the past for the integration of society.'*

Just as Hobbes's picture of the state of nature had early influenced myreflection about the modes and magnitudes of integration of society, Iwas also stimulated by him to think of the widespread abhorrence ofviolencewhich does not, of course, gainsay its frequency and impor-12. Ethics, vol. 68 (1957-58), pp. 153-65.13. I was helped in my thinking about tradition by Halbwachs's Les Cadressociaux de la memoire and by Kenan's "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" Tonnies's DieSitte was also stimulating. The rest of the literature of sociology, including MaxWeber, was not helpful; neither was the large literature on tradition in Christian

ity and Islam.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 inthe present volume under the title "Tradition."

Introduction xxxvtance. Psychoanalysts have given much thought to destructive impulsesand to the mechanisms of their inhibition. They have said much ofimportance on these matters, but they have taken much for granted andthey have begun with assumptions abo ut the mind which I do not share. Ihave no very clear ideas about the alternative which I would place inthe stead of the psychoanalytic view of this ultimate constituent of anorderly, that is, peaceful, society. Having however gone so far along thepath of exploration of the disposition to attribute sacredness, I decided totry to connect this with the most fundamental property of the integrationof society, namely, the condition of peace within society.

"The Sanctity of Life" is one representativeextremely tentative andvague in its resultsof this part of my program. It also takes up in asomewhat different form the primordial attachment about which I hadbegun to be concerned in the m iddle of the 1950s. In the course of thisexploration, I came upon the standard of "normality," which defines therange of acceptable variation in the manipulation of human life. In somerespects this has been very stable in a very wide range of societies; inothers it varies in exigency or tolerance. It imposes limits on the variety ofactivity which may be undertaken; it generates a measure of conformity.Conformity is called forth not merely to avoid disapproval or sanctionsbut also because, in important things, the attribution of sacredness to aparticular form or condition of the other person or persons requires it

Interestingly enough, the paradigm of integration which ProfessorParsons and I had developed at Harvard at the beginning of the 1950sshowed its capacity to assimilate observations which had not been madewhen it was first formulated, and to be revised in the light of those newobservations. T he re-classification of properties perceived in or attributed to other persons such as I made in connection with "Primordial,Persona], Sacred, and' Civil

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Center and Periphery Introduction