<6-n
;3 /^
CHARACTER
AND SOCIAL
STRUCTURE
n
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
Hans Crertll university of Wisconsin
C. Wright Mills COLUMBIA university
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, NEW YORK
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Since this volume is in every way a shared
endeavor, we have placed our names on its
title page in alphabetical order. We are equally
responsible for whatever merits or shortcom-
ings it may contain.
We wish to thank the Social Science Research
Council of Columbia University for generous
financial support; our publishers, Harcourt,
Brace and Company, for their extraordinary
patience; and Robert Merton for a careful and
helpful reading of the manuscript.
COPYRIGHT, 1953, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be re-
produced in any form, by mimeograph or any other
means, without permission in writing from the publisher.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
.a-8-53
C O ]^ T E ]\ T S
Foreword vii
Preface xi
Pfl/t One Introductory
I. PERSPECTIVES 3
1. The Biological Model 4
2. The Sociological Model— 10
II. CHARACTER AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE 19
1. Components of Character Structure 19
2. Components of Social Structure — 22
3. The Tasks of Social Psychology 32
Fart Two Character Structure
III. ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE 37
1. The Social Relevance of the Organism - 37
2. Impulse and Purpose 44
3. Feeling and Emotion 48
4. Impression and Perception 64
5. The Interrelations of the Psychic Structure 68
6. The Social Unity of the Psychic Structure 72
IV. THE PERSON 80
1. Language, Role, Person , 81
2. Images of Self 84
3. Unities of Self 91
iv CONTENTS
4. Generalized Others 95
5. The Social Relativity of the Generalized Other 98
6. Types of Persons 106
^fy^THE SOCIOLOGY OF MOTIVATION 112
1. The Sociological Approach 112
2. Vocabularies of Motive 114
3. The "Real" Motives 119
4. Awareness of Motives 125
VI. BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD 130
1. The Organism 131
,'A 2. The Psychic Structure 133
3. Learning 135
4. Language and Person 137
5. Four Theories of Biography 139
6. The Theory of Adolescent Upheaval 142
7. The Relevance of Childhood 147
8. The Social Relativity of Childhood Influences 157
Part Three Social Structure
VII. INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS 165
1. The Institutional Selection of Persons 165
2. The Institutional Formation of Persons 173
3. The Theory of Premiums and Traits of Character 176
4. Anxiety and Social Structure 183
VIII. INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS AND SOCIAL ^
J CONTROLS, I 192
1. The Political Order , 192
2. Nation and State 197
3. Democracies and Dictatorships 206
CONTENTS V
4. Economic Institutions 213
5. Types of Capitalism 215
6. The Military Order 223
7. Characteristics of Six Types of Armies 227
IX. INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS AND SOCIAL
CONTROLS, II 230
1. Religious Institutions 230
2. Characteristics of World Religions 241
3. The Kinship Order 245
4. The Educational Sphere 251
5. Types of Social Control 256
6. Orientation to Social Controls 266
(S^YMBOL SPHERES 274
1. Symbol Spheres^ in Six Contexts 278
2. Monopoly and Competition of Symbols 287
3. Communication ^-^.^^^^ 294
4. The Autonomy of Symbol Spheres 298
XI. STRATIFICATION & INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS - 306
1. Occupations 3°^
2. Class Structure 310
3. The Status Sphere 315
4. Class and Status 322
5. The Status Sphere and Personality Types 325
6. Power 328
7. Stratification and Institutional Dominance 330
8. Stratification and Political Mentality 339
XII. THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES ^ 342
1. The Unity of Sparta 344
2. Units and Their Relationships 349
Vi CONTENTS
3. Modes of Integration 354
4. Why Rome Fell 366
Part Four Dynamics-r
XIII. SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE 375
1, Six Questions 377
2. The Range of Theory 380
- 3. The Technological Sphere 388
4. Social-historical Change — 398
XIV. THE SOCIOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP 405
1. The Leader as a Man: His Traits and Motives 406
2. Images of the Leader and Motives of the Led 408
3. Three Functions of Authoritative Roles 413
4. Contexts and Roles 416
5. Role Dynamics and Leadership 419
XV. COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 427
1. The Structural Contexts of Collective Behavior 428
2. Aggregates, Crowds, and Publics 432
3. Movements, Parties, and Pressure Groups 438
4. Revolution and Counterrevolution 441
5. Anticapitalistic Movements and Parties 450
XVI. MASTER TRENDS 456
1. The Co-ordination of Political, Economic, and
Military Orders 457
2. Psychological Aspects of Bureaucracy 460
3. The Decline of Liberalism 464
4. Character Structure in a Polarized World 472
Bibliographical Note 481
Index 4^6
Foreword
NEW findings and new ideas in a field of knowledge, especially
when they come rapidly, generally produce numerous efforts to work
out new theoretical formulations. Various perspectives develop, each
differing in its view of the central problems of the field and the major
conceptions that illuminate these problems. This is plainly the dy-
namic and hopeful condition of social psychology today.
Among this varied array of perspectives on social psychology,
there is one which, while acknowledged to be important, has been
greatly neglected in systematic expositions. This approach considers
not only the psychological nature of social interaction but also, and
primarily, the psychological nature of the major social institutions
that constitute the historically significant forms of such interaction.
It is the chief objective of this book to present a systematic statement
of just this approach, one in which political, economic, military, re-
ligious, and kinship institutions, and their historical transformations,
are connected with the character and personality, with the private
as well as the public lives, of those living in the society. This book
might therefore be described as an historically oriented psychology
of social institutions.
Of late general works of social psychology have paid scant atten-
tion to the historical changes of social institutions. This has hap-
pened, it seems, not so much by design as by inadvertence: the
emphasis— quite understandably— has been upon experiment, direct
observation, and statistically controlled comparisons of behavior.
This book should help restore the balance. Whether use of the book
precedes, accompanies, or follows intensive study of the short-run
present in the laboratory, field, and clinic, it should broaden the
horizon of the student who generally comes into social psychology
Viii FOREWORD
either through the gateway of psychology or of sociology. It should
help him cultivate his powers of observation and analysis to under-
stand the behavior of men, not merely in small groups literally be-
fore his eyes, but also in relation to the larger institutional structure,
with all its complexity and historical meaning. And the wide range
of comparative materials included in this book should do much to
curb any tendency on the part of the student toward the provin-
cialism of thinking in terms only of his own society or his own time.
For all their emphasis on the shaping of character by the social
structure, the authors avoid dogmatism. They refuse to be drawn
into the position, rapidly grown archaic, of maintaining that every-
thing about human conduct must be explained by the organization
of social institutions, or of assuming that even differences in the
native endowment of men must be denied as a fact in order to lend
seeming support to the sociological approach as an idea. On occa-
sion, the authors do examine, compactly and fairly, some of the
theoretical controversies which have raged in the field— for example,
the long-lived debate over the use of instinct as an explanatory con-
cept. In this way a new generation of students becomes acquainted
with these early victories of the mind and is kept from unwittingly
resurrecting some of these controversies in the mistaken belief that
they have come upon a genuine intellectual problem. As the authors
remind us, such spurious problems are usually solved by being out-
grown.
Any book with a theoretical focus must select its materials and
problems in terms of that focus, and selection of course involves
omissions as well as inclusions. Omissions, therefore, do not neces-
sarily constitute defects. The important thing is to inquire whether
an omission is the result of careless and faulty thinking or of a con-
sidered judgment that the material is not directly germane to the
logical structure of the book. The omissions in this book are of the
second kind. On some matters, treated at length in other books of
social psychology, the authors maintain deliberate silence; on some
matters, found not at all in other books, they expound at length.
Thus, if they make only passing reference to the experiments on
social factors in perception, to learning theory, or to recent studies
of voting behavior, they pay close and systematic attention to the
comparative psychology of political and military life, of religious
institutions, social stratification, and business enterprise. And they
make use of every species of social psychological data.
FOREWORD IX
The authors lay no claim to having achieved a fully rounded
synthesis which incorporates all the major conceptions of psychology
and sociology that bear upon the formation of character and per-
sonality in the context of social structure. Such a goal, they make it
clear, is still a distant objective rather than a currently possible
achievement. Nevertheless, they have systematized a substantial
part of the field and have provided perspectives from which to ex-
amine much of the rest.
But perhaps above all else this book has the merit of giving the
reader a sense of the intellectual excitement that comes from using
the trained imagination to study the psychological meaning of social
structures. In the world of social psychology as we know it, this is
no small accomplishment.
ROBERT K. MERTON
Columbia University
July 30, ig53
Preface
I
THE shock of world events has hit the social sciences harder than
many social scientists recognize. In most areas of the world, historic
changes have been apparent to anyone who wished to look at them;
if they have been attended to more by journalists than by social
scientists, that has been to the loss of the social sciences. During
the last half century there have been two world wars, and in
Europe several political revolutions. The social structures of Russia
and of eastern Europe have been thoroughly revolutionized; great
changes continue to shake Asia, Africa, and South America. If
the people of the United States have not known the tang and feel
of revolution, it may be due to the fact that elections have con-
tinued to take place here within a political order that is over one
hundred and fifty years old. In the meantime, the United States has
become the creditor country for half the world and the naval and
military protector of all her debtor states. It would, accordingly,
be provincial of Americans not to think about the diverse possi-
bilities latent in all modern social structures. For war has widened
our view, and now the whole world lies before us, polarized be-
tween the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. Before such world events as we
have known, it is not surprising that there is an uneasiness con-
cerning the adequacy of the viewpoint and the equipment of the
social scientist.
World War II and its aftermath compelled thinkers in the
United States toward a larger \'iew of the range and conditions
of mankind. For better or for worse, the mind has followed the
army and navy. Members of academic institutions who, till now,
had never considered Europe and Asia in connection with their
Xii PREFACE
respective social studies have found themselves teaching courses
about the peoples and resources of these areas. Social scientists
have been asked questions which they cannot answer, and some
of them, even as all thoughtful men, have asked themselves such
questions.
Along with the historical transformations of whole societies,
what mvist be described as a vacuum of loyalties, as a deep-seated
malaise, has come about in the public life of the Western democ-
racies.^ Whatever its social-historical foundations may be, this
malaise is of course experienced on the psychological plane. So-
cialism's theoretical crises, for example, are held by many to rest
upon psychological misjudgments rather than upon misjudgments
of the course of economic affairs. The radical and the liberal in
America today are often more interested in psychological than in
material exploitation, more interested in problems of soap opera
than of child labor.
Due in part to the rise of totalitarian societies, we have become
acutely aware of patterns of external constraint which are in ten-
sion with the impulses of man as a willful animal. Various schools
of sociology have viewed man as a mechanism adjusting, or trying
to adjust, to all sorts of overpowering "environments" and "condi-
tions"; whereas positivist - psychologists have increasingly tended to
lose sight of the individual man as an actor in the larger social and
historical scene. Those schools of psychology, especially Gestalt
and Psychoanalysis, which do try to bring man as an understand-
able actor into focus are not primarily interested in sociological
problems. They are, however, greatly suggestive to the social sci-
entist who while looking at social constraints is thinking about
human freedoms.
1 For an elaboration of this theme, see C. Wright Mills, White Collar: the
American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford, 1951); Leo Lowenthal and
Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the
American Agitator (New York: Harper, 1949), esp. pp. n-20; and Karl
Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, Edward Shils, tr.
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940).
- For one meaning of "positivist," we refer the reader to the jingle allegedly
written by the distinguished T. H. Huxley:
"There was an ape in days which were earlier;
Centuries passed and its hair it grew curlier;
Centuries more and its thumb gave a twist,
And he was a man, and a Positivist."
PREFACE Xlll
Problems of the natvire of human nature are raised most urgently
when the life-routines of a society are disturbed, when men are
alienated from their social roles in such a way as to open them-
selves up for new insight. When social affairs proceed smoothly,
"human nature" seems to fit so neatly into traditional routines that
no general problem is presented; men know what to expect from
one another; their vocabularies for various emotions and their
stereotyped motives are taken for granted and seem common to
all. But when society is in deep-going transformation and men are
pivots of historic change, they challenge one another's explanations
of conduct, and human nature itself becomes problematic.
Several twentieth-century schools of psychology originated in
conHict-ridden Central Europe, centering on notions of Gestalt or
the Unconscious, or in types of body builds or in the projective
tests of specialists like Rorschach. And there is the philosophical
legacy of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche which lives on in the psy-
chiatric work of Karl Jaspers and Ludwig Binswanger. Nietzsche
—in one sense a precursor of Freud— felt himself to be in intel-
lectual kinship with the psychological essayism of such French
thinkers as Montaigne and La Bruyere, La Rochefoucauld and
Pascal, who had observed men and their ways in comparably
profound periods of transition. And we should not forget that the
social psychology of such a man as Le Bon concerned the revo-
lutionary action of man in crowds and mobs.
II
In our historical situation the hybrid, "social psychology," has
come increasingly to appeal to those who are eager to understand
social structures in such a way as^ to see how they" "have shaped
the character of individual men and women.
Back of the interest in social psychology is the desire to answer
simple yet momentous questions: What do given societies mean
for men? What sort of creature is man in this or that political and
economic condition? Are there limits to his manipulatability?
Many of the new strivings and demands of social science seem to
us to come to fruition in a psychology that is relevant to the proc-
esses of history and to varying types of social structures.
The challenge of social psychology, and its great appeal to mod-
ern scholars, is that in a time of intellectual specialization and of
social and political disintegration, it promises a view of man as an
XIV PREFACE
actor in historic crises, and of man as a whole entity. These prom-
ises and challenges become all the more compelling as social life
becomes a set of abstracted specialities, which various authorities
would motivate for the disciplined mass conduct of war and peace.
In such a context, it is one of the special obligations of the social
psychologist again and again to bridge the departmentalized gap
which unfortunately separates the sociological and psychological
approaches.
Our general purpose Js to study the personalities of men in con-
nection with types of social-historical structure. We wish to analyze
conduct and character by understanding the motivations of men
who occupy different positions within various social structures.
And we wish to understand how creeds and symbols contribute to
the motivations required for the enactment of given roles by per-
sons within institutional structures.
Ill
No matter how we approach the field of social psychology, we
cannot escape the idea that all current work that comes to much,
fits into one or the other of two basic traditions: Freud, on the
side of character structure, and Marx, including the early Marx
of the 1840's, on the side of social structure. Of course, we use
both "freud" and "marx" as uncapitalized adjectives: they refer to
great perspectives and great bodies of work rather than solely to
the books of Freud and Marx. We have no objection, if the reader
prefers, to use the names George H. Mead and Max Weber, al-
though of course they differ from Freud and Marx in many impor-
tant ways.^
The reason we are drawn, again and again, to Sigmund Freud
and George Mead, is that they try, more effectively than others,
to show us man as a whole actor— instead of man as a set of traits,
as a bundle of reflexes. It was Freud's contribution to raise the
question of the nature of human nature in its larger framework.
That is also the reason, from the sociological side, that we are
drawn, again and again, to such men as Marx and Weber, who
would do no less than articulate a society as a whole inside an his-
torical epoch.
Both the structural sociologist and the depth psychologist prom-
^ The relevant books of these four thinkers will be found in the Bibliograi^hi-
cal Note, pp. 481-85.
PREFACE XV
ise to help us locate modern men— and ourselves— as historical
actors. This promise motivates modern social psychologists, whose
present theoretical task is set by the availability of two such per-
spectives—of character and of social structure— and by their own
desire to see man intimately, yet as an historical actor. If their
theoretical task is to roimd out and to bring these two perspectives
together, then the theoretical significance of recent work in this
field must be judged accordingly: detailed research must be viewed
as contributing to one or the other of these two conceptions, and
at the growing edge, contributing to the linking of them into a
working model of man and society.
IV
On the psychological side, the explanations that have been ad-
vanced in the brief history of our discipline fall into two main
types: on the one hand, there has been the attempt to reduce social
regularities to universal constants, rooted somehow in man_as
man; and on fhe^otHerTthe alteiiTpt to conrrecrmarTs conduct and
nature with the social roles which he enacts.'^
THe idea of some constant, lying back of conduct and in man's
universal human nature,* has been the most frequent and persistent
error of psychology, including that of Freud. It is as if this quest
for some constant elemeiit has served as a compensation for the
enormous relativity of human nature which anthropology and
world history make so evident. It runs through the older eight-
eenth- and nineteenth-century rationalist psychologies, to reach its
climax in the instinct school. Half of the American life of our
young discipline has been spent debating the notion of instinct in
all its various guises.
Nowadays, however, the idea of immutable biological elements
recedes and is no longer a problem engaging all our energies. We
did not solve the problem; 'we outgrew it. At best, all we learn ,
when we study man as a mere animal are his limitations when
stripped of all technologies. If we are imaginative, we learn also
that his "dispositions" are open-ended and capable of develop-
ment. We learn that his "human natiue" is not given to him once A
and for all, but as a continual series of tasks. The establishment
* See Chapter I: Perspectives, Section i: The Biological Model.
XVI PREFACE
ol the reality of the social and plastic nature of man is a major
accomplishment of U.S. social psychology."^
The function of American behaviorism in the history of our
discipline is found precisely here: it opened up the problems of
human nature, by allowing us to see the great modifiability of
man; it opened up our minds for explanations that are not tauto-
logical blind alleys. But the behaviorist's image of man "adjusting"
to all sorts of overpowering circumstances is also in line with the
modern temper of those who would manipulate without under-
standing closely. Behaviorism, as advanced by John Watson, elim-
inated instincts, but in the process social psychology was often
made shallow. For as an explanatory model, behaviorism lowered
our chance to understand motivations. Behaviorism's most fruitful
outcome was George Mead's work, especially his daring effort to
anchor personal consciousness itself in the social process.
Mead's concept of the generalized other, and Freud's super-
ego—their closest point of contact '"'—enable us to link the private
and the public, the innermost acts of the individual with the widest
kinds of social-historical phenomena. From a logical and unhis-
torical point of view, Freud's work at this point may be seen as
a specification of the social and biographical locus of the gener-
alized other. For he indicates how, in the early phase of develop-
ment, the family is important for the social anchorage of con-
science, and thus makes his central hookup of love and authority.
Various philosophical assumptions that had crept into Freud's
work have been torn out with little or no damage to what remains
as usable heritage. More importantly, the conceptions of Freud
have been made socially relative by the work of such writers as
Bronislaw Malinowski," Abram Kardiner,® Karen Horney,^ and
Erich Fromm.^" Instincts have been formalized into "energy," in
5 See Fay B. Karpf, American Social Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1932), for a detailed account.
6 See Chapter IV: The Person, Section 4: Generalized Others and Section
5: The Social Relativity of the Generalized Other.
■^ Cf. The Father in Primitive Psychology (New York: Norton, 1927) and
Sex and Repression in Savage Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927).
8 Cf . The Individual and His Society (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1939)-
'* Cf. The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York: Norton, 1937)
and New Ways in Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1939).
^° Escape from Freedom (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941).
PREFACE XVU
order that we can better understand how various goals of conduct
are socially fixed and socially changed. Indeed, that is why we
believe Kardiner's and Fromm's work, as well as Harry Stack
Sullivan's " on the significant and the authoritative other, is so
much in the central stream of what is most promising in recent so-
cial psychology. In fact, work on the superego or generalized other
is now at the growing edge of our studies, for such conceptions
enable us to link traits deep in the individual with facts that lie in
a widespread sociological perspective.
George Mead had no adequate notion of emotions and motives,
no dynamic theory of the affective life of man; Freud's notion of
the personality certainly tends to be socially inflexible. And neither
Freud nor Mead presents a conception of social structure that
makes it inherently, directly, and intimately relevant to psycho-
logical problems.
But from the side of depth psychology and of the mechanisms
of personality formation and change, enormous advances have
been made. Freud and George Mead, when appropriately in-
tegrated and systematized, provide a well-articulated model of
character structure, and one of the most fruitful sets of ideas avail-
able in modern social science. It is our aim, especially in Parts I
and II of this book, to construct a model of character structure
that enables us to systematize some of these ideas and make them
available for more sociologically relevant use.
From the other side, that of structural, comparative, and his-
torical sociology— although there are notable exceptions— less has
been recently accomplished. The tradition of Marx and Sombart
and Weber, as well as of the late Karl Mannheim, who met so
many of these problems with such great insight, has not advanced
as we might wish. Yet, the urge to compare large social entities
in their historical epochs with one another is one of the bequests
of the founders of modern sociology, of August Comte and Her-
bert Spencer,^^ no less than of Marx and Weber. Quite apart from
the problem of how much and what portions of their work are of
11 See Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry (Washington: W. A. White
Psychiatric Foundation, 1947).
1- See especially the great, much neglected work of Spencer, Principles of
Sociology (New York: D. Appleton, 1896).
\
\
XViii PREFACE
merely historical interest, the impetus and the breadth of focus of
such men should not be lost in otherwise legitimate and necessary
criticisms of their work. In our endeavor to share the reawakened
interest in studying world societies comparatively, we look to the
outstanding work of such contemporaries as Arnold Toynbee,^"*
A. L. Kroeber,^* and P. A. Sorokin.^^
If it seems to be a shortcoming of many eminent Europeans to
be absolutist in certain phases of their work, it is a distinct con-
tribution of American pragmatists to purge sociological thinking of
such rigidities and to open our minds to the exploration of reality.
As Karl Mannheim has written, "There were hardly ever two dif-
ferent styles of study as fit to supplement each other's shortcomings
as are the German and American types of sociology." ^*^
We think a signal danger to further advance in much good work
now going on in social psychology is the use of inadequate notions
of "society." In place of social structure, many students would use
the concept, "culture"— one of the spongiest words in social sci-
ence, although, perhaps for that reason, in the hands of an expert,
enormously useful. The concept, "culture," is often more a loose
reference to social milieu than an adequate idea of social struc-
ture.^^ Nevertheless, unhindered, as they have been, by aware-
13 Cf. A Study of History, 6 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946).
1* See his Configurations of Cultural Growth (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1944).
15 See, for an introduction to the sociology of history, the good summary
of doctrines in Sorokin's Social Philosophies of an Age of Crisis (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1950).
16 Cf. Karl Mannheim's review in the American Journal of Sociology, Sep-
tember 1932, p. 281.
i'^ We do not wish to dispute the various conceptual distinctions in\'olving
"society," "culture," and "civilization," as severally paired with "personality."
To us, the term "culture" and its derivations refer to "nature worked over
by man," which of course includes man's own nature. A gymnastically de-
veloped body and an intellectually trained mind are "cultural" attainments;
so are various forms of interpersonal relationshif)s, social institutions and
organizations of all sorts. Indeed, all the "works" that man builds in his
exchange relations with nature as well as in his endeavor to expand the
meaning of his world, are part of "culture." And in all this work, man is
himself shaped. For man's nature is not given; it is a task and a challenge.
During recent decades, scholars in all the social studies have by their work
brought out the social-historical determination of man's ideas and works, as
well as of man himself.
It is one thing to accept, as we do, this very general perspective; it is
PREFACE XIX
ness of "complexity" and of "methodological" difficulties, cultural
anthropologists have sought to grasp the interdependence of pre-
literate cultural wholes.
! What is needed to make such work more usable is a conception
of social structure as an articulation of various institutional orders
and functions; we must study each segment of a social structure
psychologically, as Freud studied the kinship institutions of the
upper classes in certain Western societies. We need to study men
enacting roles in political, economic, and religious institutions in
various societies; we need to form theories of how, on the one
hand, types of personalities are variously anchored in each of these
institutional orders; and, on the other hand, how the institutional
orders themselves are variously combined, to form historical types
of social structures. In the course of this book we shall set forth a
general model of social structure which will help us carry out
these aims.
VI
Intellectually, social psychology has become the main area of
contact between the decisive intellectual traditions of our time;
politically, this field is crucial, because now, when profound crises
shake mankind, our urgent interest in the larger problems of man
and society requires that we understand man as an historical actor.
The structural and historical features of modern society must
be connected with the most intimate features of man's self. That
is what social psychology is all about. And that, we think, cannot
be done by dealing only in microscopic observations. If ever there
was a field needing above all else imaginative theory, that field is
American social psychology today. Only by such work, rather than
by delving into unrelated specialities, can we at once avail our-
selves of our intellectual opportunities and avoid slivering our
image of man.
Our book is intended to offer some ways into the central issues
of social psychology. We deliberately omit any discussion of nu-
merous sidelines, and we do not attempt to offer encyclopedic
quite another to try to use the term "culture," which we do not, for more
technically precise constructions. For an unduly depreciative assessment of
recent literature, see Alfred R. Lindesmith and Anselm L. Strauss, "A Critique
of Culture-Personality Writings," American Sociological Review, October 1950,
PP- 587-600.
XX P R E F A C E
information, which no single volume can embrace— not even a one-
volume encyclopedia. We wish to teach, not to engage in com-
mentaries, polemical or complementary, on what others have writ-
ten or left unwritten. And we do not offer a history of ideas and
concepts; accordingly, we have not burdened our pages with his-
torical references to theoretical literature, which professionals al-
ready know and laymen often do not need. With all diffidence, we
hope not to swallow up, but to contribute to an on-going work.
In our work, we do not make any formal distinctions among the
several social sciences or their varying national manifestations.
Indeed, we have constantly felt the need to think through various
problems with the aid of all viewpoints which seem available,
regardless of their departmental or national source. This does not
mean that our explicit aim is to show how the concepts of the vari-
ous human disciplines may be theoretically related, or how their
"fields" might be integrated. Social scientists, although perhaps
not deans, have got beyond the need of such formal discussions,
or at least have come to believe that such discussions are no longer
adequate. What we are trying to do is actually think about con-
crete problems of social structure and personality, with a set of
perspectives drawn from the work of the various social sciences.
For such thinking is necessary if we are to face up to the type of
questions which confront us.
The range of data with which we attempt to answer these ques-
tions is thus wider than Western society and the world fringe of
preliterate groupings. In time, it includes examples from ancient
China and modern Russia; in location, it extends to Japan and
Latin America, the United States, and the several European coun-
tries. Our central aim is to build a working model in terms of
which we can use the data of world history and the perspectives
of the social sciences and psychologies in an effort to understand
the types of human beings that have risen in varying kinds of social
structure.
Our book is arranged in four parts, in the first of which we
introduce our general manner of explanation and lay out in a
preliminary way the major components of our working models of
character and of social structure.
In Part Two we analyze the conception of character structure,
breaking it down into its elements, discussing each of them, and
PREFACE XXI
indicating how they are variously related to one another. In this
connection, we pay particular attention to problems of motivation
as well as to the development of character structure as a whole.
In Part Three, we turn to social structure, taking up, first, the
general mechanisms by which persons and institutions are related
and then examining, in turn, the range of institutions in the politi-
cal, the economic, the military, the religious, the kinship, and the
educational areas of a society. After relating these institutions to
systems of social stratification, we suggest and illustrate various
ways in which institutions may be integrated to form going social
structures.
In Part Four we deal with social-historical change, explaining
how our idea of social structure leads us to construct a model of
social change, and how within this model we are able to locate such
dynamic forces as leadership and the various forms of collective
behavior, including crowds, publics, movements, and parties. We
end by a general consideration of the world trends that now seem
most importantly to shape the types of character that prevail in
modern social structures.
P A K T ONE
INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTER
I
Perspectives
THE social psychologist attempts to describe and explain the
conduct and the motivations of men and women in various types
of societies. He asks how the external conduct and inner life of one
individual interplay with those of others. He seeks to describe the
types of persons usually found in different types of societies, and
then to explain them by tracing their interrelations with their
societies.
The explanations generally offered by social psychologists have
proceeded either from the side of biology or from the side of
sociology.
The biologist, as George Mead said of Watson, writes with the
animal before him, viewing the individual primarily as an organ-
ism, a live creature of bones, muscles, and nerves, each of which
fulfills certain animal functions. To the biologist, the organism is a
more or less unitary system, and so in explaining its behavior, he
pays attention to what goes on inside that organism— to its biologi-
cal and physiological mechanisms. The guiding thread of his work
is the physiological process, the biological conditions of behavior.
The sociologist, on the other hand, tries to "locate" the human
being and his conduct in various institutions, never isolating the in-
dividual or the workings of his mind from his social and historical
setting. He explains character and conduct in terms of these insti-
tutions, and of the total social structure which they form. He
draws upon the experience of people as social persons rather than
upon the physical and organic facts about people as animal organ-
isms. Since he is interested in the social setting and motivations
of conduct, rather than its physical conditions and organic mecha-
nisms, he does not attempt to explain conduct as if it were the
realization of some fundamental condition within the individual.
4, INTRODUCTORY
The sociologist tries to explain character and conduct as a ful-
fillment of social function within an already established, although
usually open-ended, network of social relations.
These two viewpoints— within which the explanations of the
social psychologist are developed— are not mutually exclusive; nor
do we believe it wise or fruitful to understand them as competing
schools of thought. In the end, we can— in fact we must— use both
viewpoints; but in the beginning we must think in oversimplified
ways, in order the better to see just how to complicate our view-
point most profitably. We must, therefore, examine the biological
and the sociological models of conduct, each in its turn.
1. The Biological Model
The biologist is interested in what goes on in man's animal or-
ganism when it acts in certain ways or reacts to certain experi-
ences; he reconstructs certain elements and sequences of internal .
events which are then >used to explain the external behavior
observed.
One of the simplest explanations from this general point of view
proceeds in terms of the "conditioning" of reflexes. Here is an or-
ganism equipped with certain reflexes; there are certain changes
in the environment which stimulate these reflexes to action. If a
bright light is flashed into a human eye, the pupil of the eye will
mechanically contract; if a blow is struck just below the kneecap,
the lower limb will spring out; if an edible object is presented to
a dog with an empty stomach, the dog will salivate; or if a small
object is shoved into or near an infant's mouth, the infant will
start sucking. Such automatic reactions, or reflexes, occur because
the organism is a mechanical structure of muscles, chemistry, and
nerves. Difterent animal species have different sets of such reflexes.
They are simply built that way.
Now, if a light is flashed into the human eye and at the same time
a little puff of air is shot at it, eventually the puff of air by itself
will evoke the pupillary reflex. The puff of air replaces, so to speak,
the light as the stimulus that makes the pupil contract. Such re-
placement of a biologically adequate stimulus by an artificial one
is known as conditioning.
One may generalize this idea of conditioning— these mechanical
PERSPECTIVES 5
changes in the reactions of the organism— and attempt to explain
all of man's behavior in terms of various series of conditioned re-
sponses. Even such complex actions as getting married or planting
corn are then broken down into intricate sets of conditioned
responses. According to such explanations, man is a complex
mechanism: when a given button is pressed a given action follows.
Since man is an animal organism, we may well believe that all
changes in conduct and experience are accompanied by neuro-
logical changes. From the biological viewpoint, at any rate, it is
assumed that mental processes are based on physiological processes
—though much of the physiology is actually unknown. This does
not, however, mean that the conditioning of reflexes is necessarily
the most important, much less the only, mechanism by which
changes in behavior take place. Many experiences of the human
being are not readily explained or understood in such terms.
As a matter of fact, actual work on conditioning has, in the
main, been limited to attempts to explain smalj. "involuntary ac-
tions," like the eye blink, or of certain animal behaviors and the
activities of small children who have not yet acquired speech. A
generalization of "conditioning" into an over-all explanation of
human behavior— which overreaches the delimited conditions and
actions on which it is observationally based— confuses the biologi-
cally necessary conditions of animal behavior with the sufficient
conditions of specifically human conduct. By "explaining" the dif-
fering activities and experiences of Panamanian politicians and
Chinese children, Spanish generals and French peasants as due
to the "difterent conditioning" of their originally similar reflexes,
we are really explaining away the specific problems which each of
these types of persons present to us. Qonditiouing as a masterO^
explanation of. human conduct is so general that it accomplishes
little Tiiore than to inform us that all animals, the human as well
as the ape and the rat, have neural biographies, that all men are
neuromujscular structures, and that these change as men are con-
fronted with different physical environments.
But the mechanical changes in neuromuscular behavior which
conditioning explains are not all there is to man. The idea of
man as a mechanism is useful in understanding the how of his
physical activity, but for the why of his conduct, and for the why
of the mechanism itself, we must look further. In this search we
can learn one point from the view of man as "nothing but" an ani-
b INTRODUCTORY
mal organism. If man is a neuromuscular structure, all his con-
duct is controlled, in the sense of being limited, by the mechanical
structure of his skeleton, muscles, and nerves. Without mechanical
aids, man cannot fly; he cannot sit down upon his own stomach.
The range of his possible actions and the co-ordinations of his
body are limited by the kind of animal structure that he happens
to be. Different species of animals are variously limited. The
grasshopper, unlike most men, is not equipped to distinguish red
from yellow objects; his world is probably all gray. But the grass-
hopper can hear sounds that men (without mechanical aids) can-
not, for his ears are differently made. Later we shall see that all
"•men do not realize the structurally possible range of perception
to the same degree or in the same way— that the possibility, for
example, of color discrimination is variously realized according to
such social conditions as the vocabularies we learn. But to explain
such varying sensitivities, we must avail ourselves of sociological
as well as biological explanations.
In their common biological limitations, then, men differ from
members of other animal species; yet man's own structural range
is quite broad. Within the limits of man's animal form lie the rich
diversities of conduct that make up history and differentiate men
from one another in different societies all over the world. Insofar
as such constitutional differences, inherited by men in specific or-
ganic structures, may be used in general explanations of behavior
and personality,^ we must rest content with the view rather widely
held among clinical psychiatrists: "It is with mixed feelings of dis-
trust and uneasiness that psychiatrists introduce factors of consti-
tution into a case study. If, after what is believed to be a 'dynamic
approach' has been exhausted and found wanting, 'constitution'
becomes an insecure refuge." - What is here referred to as a "dy-
namic approach" definitely involves a sociological model of expla-
nation.
'--> Within the strictly biological viewpoint, then, we see that man
as an animal species is structurally limited. The species limits the
motor behaviors which its members are capable of performing
1 We shall discuss such organic or constitutional differences as they affect
differing character structures in Chapter III: Organism and Psychic Structure.
~ Fritz Kant, M.D., "Integration of Constitution and Environment in
Psychiatry and Psychotherapy," Diseases of the Nervous System, Vol. IV,
No. 9 (September 1943).
PERSPECTIVES 7
and the range of sensory perception to which they are open. Fur-/
thermore, these structural limitations vary from one individual or-
ganism to another within the species, according to individual con-
stitutional differences.
When we say that man is an organism, we imply that he is some-
thing more than a mechanical structure with differing limitations.
Seeing the infant wiggle and twitch about, we impute impulses or
will to it; and as its wigglings and twitchings become more definite
and co-ordinated, we tend to ascribe various urges, instincts, or
drives as lying within the organism and impelling it to action. The
fact that the organism sets itself in motion is then explained by
one or the other of these driving forces which we have imputed to
be naturally within the organism. Such an explanation, as Gordon
Allport has put it, is intended to answer the question: "What is
it that sets the stream of activity into motion?" ^ It is the problem
of motivation taken in general, usually put on the level of biological
factors. It is, as John Dewey has said, "absurd to ask what induces
a man to activity generally speaking. He is an active being and that
is all there is to say on that score." * The very asking of the question
in such a general way assumes that the organism is naturally in a
state of rest, and hence, like a machine, requires an "external" force
to move it, to push "it" into action.
But man is not an inert machine: organism implies movement;
our characterization of it as possessing impulse or will is an essen-
tial inference.
This spontaneous movement characterizes not only the organism
but also each of the various organs that make it up. Even in sleep
man seldom rests like a log, and when he is awake his perceiving
eye is naturally in motion. By altering the direction in which he
looks, and by changing his focus to cover near or distant objects,
he scans his world. He must learn to fix and manage his gaze, like
the lens of a camera. The school child does not naturally hold his
eyes on the teacher nor keep his hands at rest. To sit still is an
accomplished effort for which he must be disciplined.
The explanation of conduct by "instinct" carries us beyond the
general inference that the organism is impulsive. If we observe
^Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Holt, 1937),
p. 110.
'^ Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Holt, 1922), p. 119.
8 INTRODUCTORY
the organism engaging in sexual behavior or the ingestion of food,
we may say that these specific activities are caused by instincts:
biologically fixed ways of behaving which are innate within the
organism. The term instinct thus includes more meanings than
any one term properly should: it is used to refer to (i) the cause
of an activity; (2) the goal of the activity; and (3) the rigid
activity itself.^
The theory oi instincts, v^^hen logically assessed, does not possess
any explanatory value. First, one observes men engaging in a cer-
tain activity. From this observation one infers the existence of an
instinct. Then, this inferred element is separated from the observed
activity and posited in the organism as a force or cause of its activ-
ity. By this procedure one treats an alternative name for some
activity as an explanation of it. Thus, if we say that men eat because
of the "instinct to eat," or build houses because of the "instinct to
build houses," we are merely giving another name to the observed
activities of eating and building. Such "explanations" are tautolog-
ical. Instincts, once supposed to be biological entities, are actually
hypothetical inferences from observed activities. As such, they
cannot be taken as logical explanations, nor held to be "causes"
of behavior.*^
The notion of instinct encompasses awareness of the goal of
activity. Thus, since instincts are held to be biologically innate,
goals must be biologically innate." And this cannot be the case.
For while normal men are everywhere quite similar physiologically,
the conduct patterns which make up the behavior of men are
everywhere quite different. The biological structure and capacities
of man seem not to have changed conspicuously for some thousands
of years, yet man's behavior and feelings have varied widely. One
5 Abram Kardiner, The Individual and His Society (New York: Columbia
Univ. Press, 1939).
^ This statement draws upon A. F. Bentley, who in 1908 saw clearly the
logical deficiencies of explanation by instinct. See his The Process of Govern-
ment (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1908), Section 1. A brief but acute
resume of the argument against the conception was written in 1921 by Ells-
worth Faris, "Are Instincts Data or Hypotheses?", reprinted in his book, The
Nature of Human Nature (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937).
" Thus, VVilHam James defined the term as follows: "Instinct is usually
defined as the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends,
without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the
performance."
PERSPECTIVES 9
returns from a survey of ethnography and history with a fuller
realization of the relativity of men's acts and experiences. "Homo
sapiens of the modern type," Morris Opler puts it, "has changed
physically hardly at all in the 30,000 years or more of his existence,"
yet, especially in the last 6,000 years of this period, men's behavior
and character, his technical accomplishments and social techniques
have changed in deep-going and rapid ways. The cultural may
not be reduced to, and hence explained by, the organic."*
The enormous variety of specific activities which make up the
histories of biologically similar men forces us to acknowledge that
the objects and goals of behavior are not biologically given, but
are derived from the environment in which men act. Both ends
and means of conduct are diverse and changeable. Neither man's
values and purposes, nor his ways and means of achieving them
are common to all men, nor stable in the sequence of generations.
Indeed, such regularities of behavior as we may observe in men
are best described in terms of their goals or end-situations rather
than in terms of any constant set of "urges" somehow "lying in"
the organism and "back of" their conduct regularities. What we
are aware of through our bodily senses is limited by the specific
societies in which the human animal is born and how and what
this society trains him to see and hear and act toward. To act one
must have the proper apparatus; but this apparatvis only limits and
facilitates; it does not determine man's actions.
There is usually a direct correlation between an act and its ob-
ject: we act towards something when it is a goal, away from it
when it is not. As we have seen, the range of objects to which
an organism is sensitive varies from species to species and varies
further within given species. These objects involve, as George
Mead has said, a "content toward which the individual is sus-
ceptible as a stimulus." ^ It is these objects, toward which man
learns to be sensitive, that are important in explaining the diver-
sities and regularities of the specific conduct of man. No inventory
of conveniently catalogued biological elements in man's organism
* See Morris Opler, "Cultural and Organic Conceptions in Contemporary
World History," American Anthropologist, Vol. 46, No. 4, October-December,
1944, which contains an excellent discussion of A. L. Kroeber's classic 1917
essay, "The Super-Organic."
9 "Social Psychology as Counterpart to Physiological Science," Psychological
Bulletin, Vol. VI, pp. 401-08.
lO INTRODUCTORY
will enable us to predict or account for the varied and changing
activities in which men in different societies engage. The diversity
y. of conduct cannot be adequately explained by a study of men
I merely as individual organisms. At an early age, infants lose the
ability to discriminate between poison and edible food. Possibly
man— like domesticated animals— has lost the complex instincts of
his "natural" orientation. At any rate, domestic animals differ from
their "wild" counterparts essentially in that domestication has
disintegrated the instincts which linked them to their natural
habitats.
From the biological point of view, then, man as a species and
men as individuals are seen as organisms ( i ) whose action is
structurally limited, who are equipped with certain mechanical
^ responses, and (2) who possess undefined impulses, which may be
defined and specified by a wide range of social objects. What
these objects may be is not determined by man as an organism.
2. The Sociological Model
If we shift our view from the external behavior of individual
organisms and from explanations of such behavior in terms of
physiological elements and mechanisms, and view man as a person
who acts with and against other persons, we may then ( 1 ) examine
the patterns of conduct which men enact together, and (2) avail
ourselves of the direct experiences which persons have of one an-
other and of themselves. At its minimum, social conduct consists
of the actions of one person oriented to another, and most of the
actions of men are of this sort. Manjjs agtion \s_ inj£fpersonal. It
is often informed by awareness of other actors and directly oriented
to their expectations and to anticipations of their behavior.
Out of the metaphors of poets and philosophers, who have
likened man's conduct to that of the stage actor, sociologists have
fashioned analytical tools. Long-used phrases readily come to mind:
"playing a role" in the "great theater of public life," to move "in
the limelight," the "theater of War," the "stage is all set." More
technically, the concept "role" refers to ( 1 ) units of conduct which
by their recurrence stand out as regularities and (2) which are
oriented to the conduct of other actors. These recurrent interactions
form patterns of mutually oriented conduct.
^ By definition, roles are interpersonal, that is, oriented to the
PERSPECTIVES 11
conduct and expectatiorLS_ of _others. These others, who expect things
of us, are also playing roles: we expect them to do things in cer-
tain ways and to refrain from doing and feeling things in other ways.
Interpersonal situations are thus^bui]t^ujg^and_ sets of roles held in
line by mutual expectationjapprQbdtiQnja:nd disfavor.
Much of our social conduct, as we know from direct experience,
is enacted in order to meet the expectations of others. In this sense,
our enemies often control us as much as our friends. The father
of a patriarchal family is expected by his wife and children to
act in certain ways when confronted with given situations, and he
in turn expects them to act in certain regular ways. Being ac-
quainted with these simple facts about patriarchal families we
expect regularities of conduct from each of their members, and
having experienced family situations, we expect, with some degree
of probability, that each of these members will experience his
place and his self in a certain way.
Man as a person is_an historical creation, and can most readily v,
be understood in terms of the roles which he enacts and incorpp- n
rates. These roles are limited by the kind of social institutions in
which he happens to be bom and in which he matures into an
adult. His memory, his sense of time and space, his perception, his
motives, his conception of his self ... his psychological functions
are shaped and steered by the specific configuration of roles which
he incorporates from his society^
Perhaps the most important of tbese features of man is his image
of his self, his idea of what kind of person he is. This experience
of self is a crucially interpersonal one. Its basic organization is
reflected from surrounding persons to whose approbation and criti-
cism one pays attention.
What we think of ourselves is decisively influenced by what
others think of us. Their attitudes of approval and of disapproval
guide us in learning to play the roles we are assigned or which
we assume.'lBy internalizing these attitudes of others toward us and
our conduct we not only gain new roles, but in time an image of
our selves. Of course, man's "looking-glass self" may be a true or
a distorted reflection of his actual self. Yet those from whom a
man continually seeks approval are important determinants of
what kind of man he is becoming. If a young lawyer begins to
feel satisfaction from the approval of the boss of the local political
machine, if the labels which this boss uses to describe his behavior
12 INTRODUCTORY
matter a lot to the lawyer, he is being steered into new roles and
into a new image of his self by the party machine and its boss.
Their values may in time become his own and he will apply them
not only to other men but to his own actions as well.^" Xhe_self,
—^ Harry Stack Sullivan onga said, is made up of the reflected ap-
pK^isalsjiE-etfe^w:^
^ The concept of role does not of course imply a one person-one
role equation. One person may play many different roles, and each
of these roles may be a segment of the different institutions and
interpersonal situations in which the person moves. A corporation
executive acts differently in his office than in his child's nursery.
An adolescent girl enacts a different role when she is at a party
composed of members of her own clique than when she is at her
family's breakfast table. Moreover, the luxury of a certain image
of self implied in the party role is not often possible in her family
circle. In the family circle the party role might be amusing, as a
charming attempt at sophistication "beyond her age and experi-
ence," but at the party it might bring prestige and even the adula-
tion of young males. She cannot, usually, act out the self-conception
of a long-suffering lover before her grandfather, but she can when
she is alone with her young man.
The chance to display emotional gestures, and even to feel them,
varies with one's status and class position. For emotional gestures,
expected by others and by one's self, form important features of
many social roles. The Victorian lady could dramatize certain emo-
tions in a way that today would be considered silly, if not hysterical.
Yet the working girl who was her contemporary was not as likely
— *^ (i lo^The mechanism by which persons thus intemahze roles and the attitudes
of others is language. Language is composed of gestures, normally verbal,
which call forth similar responses in two individuals. Without such gestures
man could not incorporate the attitudes of others, and could not so easily
make these attitudes a condition of his own leiiming and enactment of roles
of his own image of self.
These conceptions will be discussed in greater detail in Chapters III:
Organism and Psychic Structure and IV: The Person. Here we are only
concerned with setting forth in the most general way the sociological model
of explanation.
11 "Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry," Fstjchiatnj, Vol. Ill, No. i ( Febru-
ary 1949), pp. 10-11. Compare also C. H. Cooley's Human Nature and the
Social Order (rev. ed.; New York: Scribner's, 1922). The tradition is well
documented by Fay B. Karpf, American Social Psychology (New York:
McGraw-HiU, 1932).
PERSPECTIVES 1^
to faint as was the lady; there would probably not have been any-
one to catch the working girl. During the nineties in America it
was expected that women who were also ladies, that is, members
of an upper status group, would faint upon very exciting occasions.
The role of the delicate and fainting lady was involved in the
very being of a lady.^- But the "same" occasions would not elicit
fainting on the part of the ladies' maid, who did not conceive of
her "place," and of her self, as a fainting lady; fainting requires a
certain amount of leisure and gentlemanly attention, and accord-
ingly offers opportunities to the gentleman to demonstrate that
chivalry is not dead.
The roles allowed and expected, the self-images which they ")
entail, and the consequences of these roles and images on the ^
persons we are with are firmly embedded in a social context. Inner I
psychological changes and the institutional controls of a society are /
thus interlinked.
(_An institution is an organization of roles, which means that the
roles carry different degrees of authority, so that one of the roles—
we may call it the "head" role— is understood and accepted by the
members of the other roles as guaranteeing the relative permanence
of the total conduct pattern. An institution is thus ( i ) an organiza-
tion of roles, (2) one or more of which is understood to serve the^ ^
maintenance nf thfi_Jotal set of jroles.
The "head role" of an institution is very important in the psychic
life of the other members of the institution. What "the head" thinks
of them in their respective roles, or what they conceive him to
think, is internalized, that is, taken over, by them. In a strictly
patriarchal family, the head, the father, is looked up to; his is that
most important attitude toward the child that may determine the
child's attitude toward his, the child's, own conduct and perhaps
toward his self: in taking over this attitude the child builds up an
"other" within his self, and the attitude he conceives this other to
have toward him is a condition for his attitude toward his own self.
Other persons in other roles also have attitudes toward him and
each of these may be internalized, and eventually form segments of
his self-conception. But the attitude of the head of the major insti-
tution jn which we play a role is a decisive one in our own matura-
tion. If "he says it is all right," we feel secure in what we are doing
1- Cf. Ralph Linton, The Study of Man (New York: Appleton-Century,
1936).
14 INTRODUCTORY
and how we are conceiving our self. When his attitudes are taken
over into the self, this head constitutes in a concrete form, a "par-
ticular other." But he is not seen merely as a particular person; he
is the symbol and the "mouth piece" of the entire institution. In
him is focused the "final" attitudes toward our major roles and
our self within this institution; he sums them up, and when we
take over these attitudes and expectations we control our institu-
tional conduct in terms of them. It is by means of such internalized
others that our conduct, our playing of roles within institutions,
is "self-controlled."
JU By choosing the social role as a major concept we are able to
reconstruct thejnner experience of the person as well as the insti-
tutions which make up an historical social structure. For man as
a person (from the Latin persona, meaning "mask" ) js composed
of the specifiin^jT)^|es-which- h<»-ftRac^t.s and of the effects of enacting
these roles upon his self. And society as a.^ocial structure is com-
posedL_Df_CQljes-as segments variously eomhiiie.d in its total circle
of institutions. The organization of roles is important in building
up a particuTar social structure; it also has psychological implica-
tions for the persons who act out the social structure.
/ Most of the various interpersonal situations in which we are
involved exist within institutions, which make up a social structure;
and changes of social structure make up the main course of human
history. In order to understand men's conduct^aod experience we
must recnnstrnnt the historical social stiaictLires in which they play
roles and acquire selyejS..EQr such regularity of conduct, and of the
motives for this conduct, as we may find will rest upon the his-
torical regularities of these social structures, rather than upon any
suprahistorical, biological elements assumed to be innate and con-
stant within the organism. From the sociological point of view, man
as a person is a social-historical creationTTf his view of his self
and of his motives is intimately connectecFwith the roles which are
available to him and which he incorporates, then we may not ex-
pect to learn much that is very concrete about individual men
unless we investigate a number of his specific roles in a number
of varied social-historical settingsT^
Rather than constant elements within a physiological organism,
the sociologist rests his primary model of explanation upon the
interpersonal situations, and in the last analysis, the social struc-
tures within which persons live out their lives.
PERSPECTIVES 1$
If, due to changes in the organization of institutions in a society,
the patriarchal family should decline in importance, the weight
of the father as a social control in the inner life of family members
would decline. Thus, the institutional center of social control within
ourselves may shift. This is what happens as a child matures,
grows up. For, sociologically, "growing up" means the relinquishing
of some roles and the incorporating of others. With this objective
shift in the institutional roles we play, there is an accompanying
shift in the institutional center of social control within the person.
The child may no longer look only to his parents, but also to the
leader of a gang or to a star of sports or movies to sanction his
new roles and the conception of his self which goes with them.
The inner feelings, the entire psychology and outlook, of mem-
bers of a stratum of small entrepreneurs may vary enormously ac-
cording to the historical positions and changes of such strata. In
the growing cities of the American Middle West, in the middle of
the nineteenth century, the hopeful outlook and expansive view
which small enterprisers possessed were functions of what was
occurring in the social, and especially the economic, structure of
which they were a segment. The twentieth-century members of
such strata may experience anxiety and depressive fear of being
engulfed and pushed down in the social scale by the increasing
power and scope of large corporations and big government. To
grasp these different inner feelings— self-confidence or deep anxiety
— reqiirres a reconstruction of the historical shift from one phase of
capitalist economy to another. For it is this shift that carries with
it changes in the psychological process:es~ of -members of various
strata/'T^rsir^as economists often trace the shiftings of tax loads
among various income groups in the processes of economic change,
so, in a similar way, the social psychologist may trace the shiftings
of psychic strains and stresses which are deposited in various
groups within a society by the structural changes which it under-
goes. V^.^A.»^^' - A-'— ■'
The difference between the primary interests of the social psy-
chologist and the physiologist becomes obvious if we consider, as
an example, their respective approaches to the matter of hunger.
To the physiologist, hunger is always hunger; his task is to trace
the possible connections bet\veen the cravings of hunger as stated
by the subject and the physiological processes apparently going
l6 INTRODUCTORY
on in the organism. And he does this quite irrespective of the
institutional context and social evaluation of "hunger" by the per-
son. "Hunger" involves a relation betv^een the tremblings of the
stomach wall and the feelings of its pangs, but such hunger proc-
esses are relevant to the social psychologist primarily in specific
varieties of social contexts. For whatever the physiological proc-
esses of hunger may be, the social psychologist is interested in the
meaning of hunger to the persons involved. The use of hunger
strikes by suffragettes in prison or by political criminals as a
weapon against instituted authority, the famine imposed on inmates
of concentration camps, the organized and periodic fasting of
monks and nuns in occidental religious orders, the old-fashioned
hunger of the poor and destitute, the commercial records of forty
days and forty nights of hunger piled up by competing hunger
artists, the feasts of a northwest Indian potlatch or of a Southern
political barbecue, or a medieval European coronation meal— all
of these types of feasting and fasting involve a wide range of
meanings and hence of motivations, irrespective of the similarity
of the gastric juices involved.
In similar manner, the anatomy and physiology involved in sex
become of interest to the social psychologist only as the prerequisite
for behavior. They must be mediated through love, eroticism, types
of passion, or other institutionally elaborated patterns of conduct
or feeling. In the perspective of physiological psychology, legiti-
mate and illicit love involve identical processes, whereas to the
social psychologist these two kinds of situations involve conven-
tional and legal definitions which make for significantly distinct
motivation and conduct.
Aging is a physiological process, as is hunger. But age is im-
portant to the social psychologist not as a chemical and biological
process, but as the object of insurance tables or as relevant to the
chances of being employed in given occupations. Old age, in short,
is sociologically interesting for what people make of it, whether
they honor the grand old man, or despise the mean old fogey.
Certain biological capacities and traits, of course, often become
particularly relevant to the demands set up by new roles. Thus, if
a society needs aviators in order to fight an air war, those individ-
uals who have good biological capacities for "balance" have in-
creased chances to assume these roles. The sense of balance is
located in the biology of the ear. Swiftly changing atmospheric
PERSPECTIVES 1/
pressures also aflFect in rather different ways different types of
luiman organisms. In societies witli such teclmologically deter-
mined social roles, such organic differences become relevant pre-
requisites, whereas in preindustrial societies the same individual
differences would be irrelevant. What specific aspects of man's
biological nature become prerequisites for role-taking are socially
and technologically determined, and accordingly, those aspects
which become relevant to our explanations of conduct, are thus
determined.
In a somewhat similar way the biological differences between
men and women are taken into account by the social psychologist
only insofar as they become relevant to conduct by virtue of their
evaluations in different societies. A woman is not only a woman:
she is a wife, a nun, a railway conductor, or a parachutist with a
bright new deadly weapon. She may drive a four-ton truck or nag
an unsuccessful husband. There are greatly differing roles for men,
too, ranging from those which gain a living, and which the Jap-
anese honor with a two-handed sword, to the eighteenth-century
fop with his effete gestures and niceties of taste. No doubt there
are roles which women cannot fulfill and others which men are
incapable of enacting. Although a man may be the sociological
mother of a child, catering to its needs, he cannot actually give
birth to one— although he may, in practicing the couvade, hysteri-
cally experience birth pangs. Most women cannot stand physical
exertions of bodily work as long or as intensively as can most men.
Yet many statements about psychological traits believed to be due to
sexual differences appear on second thought to be ideologies which
identify or at least confuse social traits with biological differences.^^.
For apart from the reproductive functions and extremely heavy
work, the range of conduct patterns which are interchangeable be-
tween the sexes is very broad, and it may become broader as social
history unrolls.
The differences between biological and sociological types of ex-
ploration may be further revealed in the matter of authority and
leadership. In an external, behaviorist manner, the term authority
describes a situation in which one or several organisms will obey
'3 See Viola Klein, The Feminine Character (New York: International Uni\s.
Press, 1949)-
l8 INTRODUCTORY
another one. Thus, groups may jump to rigidity when one man
shouts "atten-tion." This is a purely objective definition. It grasps
what is observed in the behavior of two or more individuals. This
might be further explored biologically: We might try to correlate
the size of the organism who is obeyed with the probability that
he will be obeyed; the larger he is, the higher the probability is
that he will be obeyed; or we might try to compare some measure
of the vitality of the leader's constitution with the hypothetically
lesser vitality of the bodies of the followers. Such external observa-
tions and physiological hypotheses are about all that we can do
with animals and with prelingual children.
We have, however, another source of information when we deal
with persons who possess language, and we would be foolish not
to avail ourselves of it. It is simply the direct experience such per-
sons have of the authority situation by those who enact it. Why
do they obey? What feelings do they experience when they do so?
Do they feel compelled to obey, do they experience fear? And, if
they do not obey, are they full of enthusiasm or anxiety, remorse
or elation? Such questions as these cannot be answered merely
by observing the external behavior of the organisms, nor by probing
their physiology .(We must study the inner experiences and feelings
of the persons who play various roles in the interpersonal situa-
tions of authority. And to do this adequately we must reconstruct
the roles of followers and leaders in different societies, and the
symbols they use and believe in.
The view that the biological or constitutional aspects of man are
irrelevant and that everything depends upon social acquisitions and
training may be just as dogmatic— however fashionable— as the view
that such biological features are the major determinants of man's
character. The conflict of these two viewpoints is not resolved
merely by the slogan that personality is, "after all," an integra-
tion of biological constitution and sociological environment.
"Though proportion is the final secret," E. M. Forster has remarked,
"to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility." What we want
to know is precisely how one or the other of these two general
forces influences the total individual.
CHAPTER
I 1
Character and Social Structure
BIOLOGICAL explanations of human nature and conduct cen-
ter upon the notion of the organism; sociological explanation upon
that of the person. In connection with the organism, we have dis-
cussed conditioning and instinct as explanatory mechanisms; in
definin^and elaborating the notion of the person we have discussed
roles and institutions. Now, both organism and person— or other
terms standing for similar viewpoints— must be understood and
used in any adequate conception of the human individual. But each
of them must be broken down and linked with other terms, and
each must be more precisely linked with the other. If we did not
so elaborate and refine them, we would find that our vocabulary
was too gross for the sort of work we want to undertake. In this
chapter, which completes our introduction, we shall lay out, in an
over-all and hence a rather general way, other features of character
and of social structure, which will enable us to complete our first
view of these conceptions.
1. Components of Character Structure
To try to understand the individual only as organism and as
person is to leave out an area of experience and observation that
is very much a part of any adequate portrayal: the direct world
of emotion and will and perception, of rage and determination and
anger, of sight, sound, and fury. Physiologists,^ of course, do study
such phenomena, but psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have been
most directly concerned with man as an emotional and willful crea-
ture, in short, as a "psychic structure."
1 See Chapter III: Organism and Psychic Structure, Section 3: Feeling and
Emotion.
20 INTRODUCTORY
X We shall use this term, psychic structure, to refer to man con-
ceived as ^n integratiQn of perception, emotion, and impulse. Of
course there are other psychic functions, memory and imagination,
for example; but we shall limit our term at this point. For our pur-
pose, "psychic structure" will refer to when, how, and why man
feels, perceives, and wills.
If the human organism did not possess a chromatic eye, it could
not distinguish colors; if it were not equipped with a certain
glandular and nervous apparatus, it probably could not experience
rage and hate; without undefined impulses, what is experienced
as purpose or willfulness could not occur. Clearly, sensation, im-
pulse, and feeling are in some way rooted in the animal organism
and in its specialized organs; it may not be so apparent that they
are also linked to man as a person, where they are revealed to
u&^as perception, purpose, and emotion.
\Jp In order for inner feelings to become emotions, these feelings
must be linked with socially recognizable gestures, and the person
must become aware of them as related to his self. The same physical
environment and the same physiology, for all we know, may be
present, but in one case these conditions may lead to fear and
flight, and in another, to rage and attack. The difference be-
tween the two experiences and behaviors cannot be adequately
explained physically or organically. [The social definition of the
occasion, the meaning it comes to have for certain types of per-
sons, provides the clue to which emotion and which conduct will
arise.j
JI. For sensation (the physical and organic event, for example,
of light waves impinging in a certain way upon a certain kind of
eye) to become perception (the seeing of the object as a red light)
certain meanings must be added. The sensation must come "to
stand for" or to represent something: stop the car— a rather com-
plex sequence of near-automatic behavior which as an aspect of
a social role must be learned by the person as a driver. Sensations
are organized into perceptions, and this organization goes on in
close unity with the social organization of the person as an actor of
roles.
\III.J For impulse (the undefined and generalized urge to move-
ment) to become ^purpose (the more or less controlled striving
toward a specific object) the objects so specified and defined must
be learned. Impulses are specified and directed in terms of the
CHARACTER AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE 21
expectations of others; they are socially defined, linked with socially 4r
available goals and thus sustain the person in enactment of his
roles, and in turn, the institutions of which these roles are a
going part.
The way in which each of these three elements of the psychic
structure is joined to the other elements in some sort of unity;
the way each is linked to activity; and the way each element, and
thus the psychic structure as a whole, is socialized in man as a
social actor— these linkages must be examined if we are to under-
stand the integration of the organically based psychic structure
with the person and his social experiences.
With the acquisition of language, we learn to experience our
conduct and ourselves in relation to the expectations of others. We
learn to distinguish ourselves from objects and from other persons
by referring to ourselves by the personal pronoun, "I." With these
distinctions, we acquire a self-awareness which henceforth accom-
panies many of our psychic acts; in fact, if our perceptions and
impulses are experienced as alien, automatic, or compulsive— as
not emerging from our self— we speak of the pathological phenom-
enon of "depersonalization." A sense of our own unity, of our iden-
tity, in time, and of our contrast to the world outside us, is char-
acteristic of our very awareness of self. The person, accordingly^ )j^
should be understood to involve two things: toward the outside
world and in relation to others, we act out roles which, by virtue
of our own feelings and consciousness, we ascribe to ourself. At
the same time, we "enrich" our self by accepting the challenges of
external tasks and by taking over into our selves the expectations of
others.
In our attempt to understand the human individual, we shall
find four key conceptions useful. Each of these conceptions stands
for one aspect of man; no one of them exhausts our interest;
together they may be adequate to form understandable models.
In discussing the ways in which they may be integrated, we will
also be assessing more precisely the relative weights of biological
and sociological elements making up different types of human
beings. The four key terms are organism, psychic structure, person,
and, finally, character structure itself.
I. The human organism refers to man as a biological entity. The
term invites attention to structural mechanisms and undefined im-
pulses.
22 INTRODUCTORY
II. Psychic structures refers to the integration of feeling, sensa-
tion, andTlmpulse. These elements are anchored in the organism,
but their specific integrations into emotions, perceptions, and pur-
poses must be understood with reference to man as a person.
III. Person refers to man as a player of roles. Under it we view
man as a social actor and try to grasp the results of this social act-
ing and experience upon him. By liis experience in enacting various
xoles, the person incorporates certain objectives and values which
steer and direct his conduct, as well as the elements of his psychic
structure. Viewing man as a person we try to understand his con-
duct in terms of motives rather than to explain his behavior, in
terms of stimuli and responses, or as an expression of physiological
constants in the organism.
"/ IV. Character structure, in our vocabulary, is the most inclusive
term for the individual as a whole entity. It refers to the relatively
\ , i stabilized integration of the organism's psychic structure linked
' with the social roles of the person. On the one hand, a character
structure is anchored in the organism and its specialized organs
through the psychic structure: on the other hand, it is formed by
the particular combination of social roles which the person has
incorporated from out of the total roles available to him in his
society. The uniqueness of a certain individual, or of a type of
individual, can only be grasped by proper attention to the organi-
zation of these component elements of the character structure.
Each of these four terms represents an abstracted dimension of
man, a manner of looking at him, a suggestion of what to look
for. Such differences as are found among men may be attributable
to the constitution of their organisms, to the specific role-con-
figurations incorporated in their persons, or to the peculiar integra-
tion of their perception, feelings, and will within a psychic struc-
ture. An adequate portrayal will direct our attention to all three
as they come together to form a character structure within the
limits of a given organism and the institutional confines of a
specific social structure.
2. Components of Social Structure
~^ The concept of role, the-Jf^ term in our definition of the person,
is also the key term in our definition of institution. It is, therefore,
CHARACTER AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE 2;^
in our definitional_model, the major link of character and social ^
striicture;_We have already examined the formal components of
"cTTaracter structure; we must now elaborate and classify the organi-
zation of roles into institutions.
We speak of roles as orRgnized or instituted when they are
guaranteed by authority.^ Thus, the cluster of roles enacted by
the members of a hotrsehold is guaranteed by "parental authority":
the "head" of the household may use sanctions against infractions
of the role pattern. Thus, employees are subject to the control of
owners and managers; soldiers are subject to the authority of the
commanding officer; parishioners stand under the jurisdiction of >
church authorities. Whatever ends the organized and interacting
partiiers^nay_pursue and whatever means they may employ, "au-
thority" exists: and whenever a role configuration is so guaranteed
or^tabilized by a "head" who wields authority over the "members"
who enact the roles, the configuration may be called an institution.
The head of the_ institution, the king of a political order, or the
father of a patriarchal kinship system is the most significant "other," \ /
of the pcTsons following the institutional patterns. The kind of /
external sanction this head may take against those who do not 1
meet their expected roles in expected manners may range from *
disapproval to expulsion or death. His expectations are treated as
most important by persons so long as they are really involved in
the institution as a going concern. In this way, then, as well as in
others which in due course we shall take up, institutions are deeply
relevant to our understanding of the person, and in turn to the
entire character structure.
Just as role is the unit with which we build our conception of T"
institutions, so institution is the unit with which we build the
conception of social structure. There is more to a social structure
than the interrelations of its institutions, but these institutions, in
our view, do make up its basic framework. Our immediate aim,
then, is to classify institutions in such a way as to enable us to
construct types of social structure.
There are many possible classifications of institutions; in fact,
the main concern of sociologists has often seemed to be the making
- The conception of authority will be explained more fully in Chapter VII:
Institutions and Persons; it will be elaborated in Chapters VIII and IX.
24 INTRODUCTORY
^ of such classifications. Many of these classifications are descriptively
useful; they help us sort out many items of social conduct and
experience and thus to handle them more neatly. But we need
more than this; we need a classification that will be relevant and,
we should hope, fundamental to our general concern in understand-
ing character structure on the one hand and social structure on
the other.
First we shall briefly examine two very simple classifications of
institutions: a classification by size and a classification by recruit-
ment of members.
I. If we classify institutions according to size we end, for example,
with large families ( households comprising three generations under
one roof— as among the Chinese), small families (comprising two
generations— parents and children ) , and incomplete families ( of one
generation only— the childless couple). Even such a simple classifi-
cation as this may be relevant to the types of social structures as a
whole, as well as to the milieu in which persons grow up and live.
Classifications of institutions by size, in fact, are sometimes used
as a basis for far-going descriptions, for example, the shift from
business institutions of very small size to those of great proportions.
The difference between the classic laissez-faire capitalist and the
monopoly capitalist eras rests upon this simple numerical fact. It
is also clear that the types of entrepreneurial roles typical of small
business institutions differ from those of the giant firm; and hence
the personalities of men, selected and trained for their roles, vary.
Classifications by size, then, can be very important: a sense of
numerical proportion is always indispensable for the understand-
ing of social structure and character. But size by itself does not
seem to us useful enough to be a fundamental classifying device.
The size of institutions is more often a subsidiary than a funda-
mental distinction.
II. Institutions may be classified according to the way in which
their members are recruited. Compulsory institutions— those which
enroll members without the members' choice— include churches
which recruit their members essentially through infant baptism and
modern states, in whose territory we are "born" as citizens subject
to state authority. Where "compulsory education" exists we become
CHARACTER AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE 2^
members of a "public school," from which we can steer clear only
under special regulations.
Voluntary institutions— those which one may join or not, accord-
ing to one's will— include the modern childless family, as well as
most American civic societies and clubs. Indeed, most of the insti-
tutional drift of postmedieval society has been in the direction of
an enlarged area of voluntary associations in social life as a whole.
The United States is distinguished by the wide range and number
of such voluntary institutions; it is with reference to them that
Americans are known as joiners.
It is obvious that personality development in a society based
primarily on voluntary associations differs from that in a society
based primarily on compulsory institutions. In the former, one
has to make many decisions on his own, for better or for worse;
in the latter, one has no opportunity to make such decisions and
hence is not burdened with the personal responsibilities which they
may entail.
There are other ways of classifying institutions that are descrip-
tively useful. For instance, the roles composing institutions may
be permanently or only temporarily played by given individuals;
they may be provisional or at once secure. But there is no need
to parade additional classifications. Although we shall introduce
and use them for various purposes as we need them, we do not
believe they are adequate for our general purpose.
III. The classification of institutions that we shall take as funda-
mental to our model of social structure is a simple classification ^
according to objecti\e function, that is, to the ends which institu- /^
tions serve. .
An institutional order, as we shall use the phrase, consists of
all those institutions within a social structure which have similar
consequences and ends or which serve similar objective functions. 1
However institutions may vary in size, recruitment, and composi- '
tion of membership, in forms of control or proportions of per-
manent and transitory roles, as we examine the advanced societies
of the modern Western world we can distinguish some five major
institutional orders.
At least at first glance, we may classify most of the institutions
as having to do with such ends as power, goods and services,
violence, deities, and procreation. All those institutions which deal
26 INTRODUCTORY
with the recurrent and collective worship of God or deities, for
instance, we may call religious institutions; together they make
up the religious order. Similarly, we may call those institutions that
have to do with power, the political; with violence, the military;
with procreation, the kinship; and with goods and services, the
economic order. By delineating these institutional orders, which
form the skeleton structure of the total society, we may conven-
iently analyze and compare different social structures. Any social
structure, according to our conception, is made up of a certain
combination or pattern of such institutional orders.
In the course of Part Three of this book, we shall concern our-
selves with the social psychology of each of these orders in topical
detail. In the present introductory statement we shall only present
some of the mechanisms that hold generally for institutional con-
duct and some of the linkages of institutions with character struc-
ture.
( 1 ) The political order consists of those institutions within
which men acquire, wield, or influence the distribution of power
and authority within social structures.^
(2) The economic order is made up of those establishments by
which men organize labor, resources, and technical implements in
order to produce and distribute goods and services.*
(3) The military order is composed of institutions in which men
organize legitimate violence and supervise its use.*^
(4) The kinship order is made up of institutions which regulate
and facilitate legitimate sexual intercourse, procreation, and the
early rearing of children."
(5) The religious order is composed of those institutions in
which men organize and supervise the collective worship of God
or deities, usually at regular occasions and at fixed places.^
2 See Chapter VIII: Institutional Orders and Social Controls, I, Section i:
The Political Order; Section 2: Nation and State; and Section 3: Democracies
and Dictatorships.
4 See Chapter VIII, Section 4: Economic Institutions; and Section 5: Types
of Capitalism.
^ See Chapter VIII, Section 6: The Military Order; and Section 7: Char-
acteristics of Six Types of Armies.
^ See Chapter IX: Institutional Orders and Social Controls, II, Section 3:
The Kinship Order.
^ See Chapter IX, Section i: Religious Institutions; and Section 2: Charac-
teristics of the World Religions.
CHARACTER AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE 2/
Some four qualifications or cautions about this way of classifying
institutions must be kept in mind at all times, and although they
will become clearer as we proceed with our work, we must state
them at once:
i I. The conception of social structures in terms of such functional
institutional orders is, of course, suggested by modern society in
which various institutional orders have reached a high degree of
autonomy and in which the relative differentiation of ends has
gone very far; so far in fact, that business men often engage in
the pursuit of profits without consideration for the effects of busi-
ness institutions upon other institutional orders; that is, they pos-
ture as purely economic man. Yet few, if any, modern claims for
the pure autonomy of an institutional order have been realized.
If they were, it would mean that one order was wholly segregated
from all others; no social structure is so mechanically composed.
Moreover, during the last half century, modern social structures
have definitely tended to become more tightly integrated, and
their various orders interlinked under more total control.
There are social structures in which the specialization of ends
and institutions has not been pushed as far as in modern society.
Business and private life, or the economic and kinship orders, are
not segregated in peasant society. Farms provide members of
peasant families with a household way of life in which economic
production and family living are not only interrelated but in many
respects identical. We may isolate one aspect of a society from
another for the sake of analysis, but we have to realize that often,
as in the peasant village and the garrison state, this analytical isola-
tion is not experienced; life is an inseparable fusion. For example,
the fact that ancient Israel had no distinct term for "religion" did
not mean that there were no religious functions; on the contrary,
there was little in this society that was not at least indirectly related
to Yahweh and his commandments.
Therefore, our first caution is: In "less developed" societies than
the mid-nineteenth-century West, as well as in more developed
societies, any one_of th.e_fimctioiis we have isolated may not have
autonomous institutions serving it. Just what institutional orders
exist in a more or less autonomous way is a matter to be investi-
gated in any given society. In some societies the institutions of
the kinship order may perform functions which, in more segmented
societies, are performed by specifically political institutions. Any
28 INTRODUCTORY
classification of institutional orders in terms of function should be
seen as an abstraction which sensitizes us to the possibilities and
enables us to construct and to understand the concrete segments
and specific functions of any given social structure.
II. The classification of institutional orders according to the
dominant ends of the institutions composing them should not bltiiH
us to the fact that the activities and and functions of an institution
are not exhaustively characterized by its primary end. A religious
institution, such as the Catholic Church, employs numerous special-
ized functionaries who devote themselves to the financial and
property affairs of the institution; a monastery may specialize in
the production and sale of "Chartreuse," an exquisite French
liqueur; or it may engage in the brewing of beer, the printing of
books, and so on. Yet, we shall not call such institutions "economic
institutions"; for it is hardly satisfactory to account for the exist-
ence and shape of a "monk order" in terms of its economic pur-
suits, no matter how relevant economic activities may be for the
religious organization. Monks who brew beer do not thereby con-
stitute a brewery which just happens to recruit tonsured and celi-
bate men as employees. The financial transactions of the Vatican
do not make it a bank. That an army or a factory may employ
religious leaders for morale-building purposes does not mean that
the army or the factory becomes a religious institution, but rather
that the military order is able to use religious personnel for its
own ends. That the dispute concerning the dogma of the Trinity
was settled at Nicaea in a.d. 325 by monks armed with clubs does
not make "military institutions" out of monasteries. Neither is the
employment of practitioners of violence by business corporations
or trade unions sufficient to turn such institutions into elements of
the "military" order. An institution may enroll numerous agents
and may comprise many specialized roles for the implementation
of its dominant goal.
Many and varied activities are required to operate large insti-
tutions, and these activities often overlap with those of other or-
ders; accordingly, the ends of one order often serve as the means
'-^ of another. Nevertheless, we must first set up a scheme in which we
attempt to define and classify institutions by their dominant func-
tions before we can consider such problems of "overlap" and in-
tegration in a fruitful and systematic way.
CHARACTER AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE 2g
III. Our classification of institutions into orders is in terms of
their objective, social functions, not subjective, personal meanings
of their members or leaders. jConcretely, this means that whether
or not the persons who enact roles making up the institutions
within an order are aware of the order's ends, nevertheless, their
conduct is so oriented. A Catholic cardinal, for example Richelieu,
may have been personally motivated to win political power, and
may even have spent most of his life in political rather than reli-
gious activities; but this does not make the churches under his
authority part of the political order. Nor does it necessarily mean
that the more political bishops are less eflective in their religious
roles than "more religious" bishops. The motives that are typical
of persons playing roles in a given order are matters to be investi-
gated in every case; they are not in any way settled by any ob-
jective definition of the dominant functions of institutional orders.
IV. Not all social experience and conduct are included in this
scheme of institutional orders. The "dating" of young lovers and
the behavior of "the man in the street" are not institutional con-
duct—although, of course, they are aftected by several institutional
orders. Yet, if we aim to grasp total societies, it is convenient to
focus first on institutions and their settings rather than on the more
amorphous and ephemeral modes of social interaction, however
crucial these may at times be.®
There are several aspects of social conduct which characterize
all institutional orders, the most important being: technology, sym-
bols, status, and education. All orders may be characterized by
technolog' 7al implements, by the modes of speech and symbols
peculiar to them, by the distribution of prestige enjoyed by their
members, and by the transmission of skills and values. We shall
arbitrarily call these "spheres," in contradistinction to "orders," be-
cause they are, in our view, rarely or never autonomous as to the
endsJdiey serve and because any of them may be used within any
one of our five orders.
( 1 ) "Symbols" may be visual or acoustic; they may be signs, sig-
nals, emblems, ceremonial, language, music, or other arts. Without
such symbols we could not understand the conduct of human
actors, and normally, their belief in and use of these symbols oper-
ate to uphold or justify the institutional order. The religious order
® See Chapter XV: Collective Behavior.
^O INTRODUCTORY
has its sphere of theology, the elaboration, attenuation, and justifi-
cation of God or deities; the military order has its startle com-
mands; and the political order has its political formulae and
rhetoric, in the name of which its agents exercise authority.''
(2) "Technology" refers to the implementation of conduct with
tools, apparatus, machines, instruments, and physical devices of all
sorts. In addition to such instrumentalities, the technological sphere
refers to the skill, dexterity, or expertness with which persons meet
their role demands. In this sense, "technique" is used by the violin-
ist as well as by the skilled soldier; it is revealed by the surgeon's
use of his tools, as well as by priest handling such paraphernalia
of worship as the chalice or the prayer wheel. Whenever we con-
centrate on the degree, or the absence, of skill with which roles are
enacted, we may speak of the technological sphere, regardless of
what the institutional context may be. Technology is never auton-
omous: it is always instituted in some specific order or orders. In
modern industrial society, it is centered primarily in the economic
and military orders, which not only stimulate it and "supervise"
its production and distribution to other institutions, but are the
orders in which it is most often used.^°
(3) The "Status" sphere consists of agencies and means of dis-
tributing prestige, deference, or honor among the members of the
social structure. Any role in any institutional order may be the basis
for status claims, and the status sphere as a whole may be anchored
primarily in any one order or in many specific combinations of
institLitional orders.^^
(4) The "Educational" sphere consists of those institutions and
activities concerned with the transmission of skills and values to
those persons who have not yet acquired them.^-
A social structure is composed of institutional orders and spheres.
The precise weight which each institutional order and sphere has
with reference to every other order and sphere, and the ways in
9 For the public role of symbol spheres, see Chapter X: Symbol Spheres;
for the private role of symbols, see Chapter V: The Sociology of Motivation.
10 See Chapter XIII: Social-historical Change, Section 3: The Technological
Sphere.
11 See Chapter XI: Stratification and Institutional Orders, Section 3: The
Status Sphere; and Section 4: Class and Status.
12 See Chapter IX: Institutional Orders and Social Controls, II.
CHARACTER AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE ^^
which they are related with one another— these determine the unity
andthe composition of a social structure. ^^
The analysis of social structure into orders, as we have said,
does not decide what "orders" exist; only concrete investigation of
different societies can do that. We shall not be surprised, of course,
when we have to elaborate or simplify the classification of insti-
tutional orders sketched here. SgciaL-strufctures aie^ i}i>t_ijpzen,Jthey
may^ be static or dynamic, they have beginnings, duration, varying
degrees of unity, an3l:hev may disintegrate.
These problemsof the interrelations or institutional orders and
of social change will be dealt with in due course. Here it is per-
haps enough to remark that the warp of one institutional order may
be the woof of another. Military men, for instance, becoming con-
scious of a scarcity of manpower, may be concerned about the
declining health of the working classes because they anticipate an
increasing percentage of men unfit for military service— a thought
that may not enter the mind of the businessman, still thinking
of the abundance of labor force. Similarly, businessmen, interested
in educated labor for clerical jobs, may become much concerned
with tax-supported high schools.
In their ramifications, then, institutional orders have definite
bearings upon each other; tensions and conflicts arise, and practices
lead to results which the practitioners neither intend nor foresee.
It is often convenient to examine these interrelations of institu-
tional orders in terms of ends and means; often the activities which
fulfill one institutional order's ends serve as means to the dominant
ends of another order. When we focus upon such subsidiary
aspects of institutions, we may see the ramifications of another
order. What dominates in one order may, in a different order,
merely implement. The political activities of businessmen and
corporations may thus be understood as "political ramifications of
the economic order." The religious order or the educational order
may also have political ramifications: the political activities of
religious and educational institutions and personnel. Similarly,
we may speak of the educational and religious ramifications of the
political order when focusing upon educational activities of politi-
cians in party schools or the role of prayer and other religious
13 See Chapter XII: The Unih' of Social Structures.
32 INTRODUCTORY
activities in politics. Any given order may thus become the ramifi-
cation of any other order. "Ramifications" may thus be defined as
those activities which are ends in one order but which are used
as the means of another institutional order. In total war, for ex-
ample, all orders become ramifications of the military state, for the
military impinges upon all other orders which thus become pre-
requisites for realizing or for limiting military ends.
3. The Tasks of Social Psychology
Throughout this book we shall be engaged in elaborating and
refining the various elements noted in our general model of char-
acter and social structure, and in tracing the possible linkages con-
necting one element with another. The various components of
character and social structure are diagrammed in the following
chart:
ORGANISM
character psychic
Structure structure
PERSON
ROLE
INSTITUTIONS
KINSHIP
ORDER
Social Structure
RELIGIOUS
ORDER -
SPHERES
SYMBOLS
TECHNOLOGY
STATUS
EDUCATION
POLITICAL
ORDER
MILITARY
ORDER
ECONOMIC ORDER
CHARACTER AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE ;^;^
With this model in mind we wish to construct features of various
institutional orders and their interrelations, in connection with the
psychology of the individual. Now that we have presented the gen-
eral features of our model, we are in a position to set forth, in a
preliminary way, the tasks which it allows and invites.
I. The numerous roles organized into various institutional orders
must be analyzed. Obviously, our goal cannot be the examination
of all the roles, past and contemporary, which men have enacted.
This would involve a complete rewriting of the universal history
of mankind! Nor would a formal dictionary of possible roles be
tied closely enough to institutional orders and social structures to
be revealing and realistic. We shall have to use two general criteria
for our selection of roles, and of persons formed and selected by
them, which we shall analyze:
First, we shall selecL_thQse roles which are ^ pivotal signifi-
cance _iii_jJie-nwixxtenance_aad^.transformation of given types of
institutional orders. Of course, what order or orders we think most
important in historical transformations will influence our selection
of roles. Va^^l ^i«A^■^^X>J^-'^a,Q-
Second, the roles we select for analysis will represent the polar
or extreme types within given institutional orders, thus affording us
a chance to see the.3d.destj:aftge-ef possible conduct.^^jyv/iMUA;"'*^-" i
II. We wish to focus upon the type of person selected and^-
formed by the enactment and internalization of the roles which we
analyze. Since a person participates in the roles of various institu-
tional orders, and the dominant roles of given types of persons may
be role-segments of one type of institution within a given institu-
tional order, we shall pay attention to the various effects on the
persons so formed and selected by institutions.
Our expectation of finding regularities in human conduct, experi-
ence, and motives is keyed to the role configurations forming insti- ■'\
tutions. We seek (a) to analyze roles as segments of institutions;
(b) to discern the typical motivations which are required by indi-
viduals as necessary and sufficient for the enactment of these roles;
and (c) to show how the central ideas and beliefs of a society, its
communications and symbols, contribute to the formation, main-
tenance, and effectiveness of these motivations.
III. With reference to each institutional order, we need more
adequately to characterize the primary and secondary functions
which it may fulfill in the full range of social structures. In order
34 INTRODUCTORY
to do this in an historically adequate way, we must lay out the range
of institutional types which are available in each order. We shall
then find it convenient to select polar extremes and analyze them
in some detail. In this way we hope to grasp the possible scope
of the character and functions of political and military, kinship
and economic, educational and religious institutions.^*
IV. We need also to gain a view of the major ways in which
various institutional orders are related to one another in different
types of social structures,^" and changes in these relations. ^"^ For
types of social structure may be constructed and compared by
examining the specific combinations of institutional orders which
make them up, the varying importance each of these orders has,
and the definite ways they are interrelated. In a parallel way,
working models of various kinds of historical change can be devel-
oped by viewing types of social structure in terms of their dynamic
movements and shifts rather than in static cross section. For history
is of course only the changes of social structures and their com-
ponent parts.
■^Our general aim, then, is to display, analyze, and understand
types of persons in terms of their roles within institutions in given
orders and social structures within various historical eras; and we
want to do this for each institutional order. We cannot, for example,
rest content with the assumption that the kinship order, with its
tensions of early love and authority, is necessarily the basic and
lasting factor in the formation of personality; and that other orders
of society are projective systems from this until we have studied
the selection and continued formation of personality in the eco-
nomic and religious and political institutions of various social
structures. The father may not be the primary authority, but rather
the replica of the power relations of society, and of course, the
unwitting transmitter of larger authorities to his spouse and chil-
dren. We must set forth institutional orders in a systematic way,
relate them to one another within a social structure, and trace their
impact upon persons and psychic structures.
1* See especially Chapter VIII: Institutional Orders and Social Controls,
I; and Chapter IX: Institutional Orders and Social Controls, II.
15 See Chapter XII: The Unity of Social Structures.
10 See Chapter XIII: Social-historical Change.
P A U T T W »
CHARACTER STRUCTURE
CHAPTER
III
Organism and Psychic Structure
TO understand the psychic structure we must understand how
it is both rooted in the organism and hnked with the person. For
there is nothing within the psychic structure itself which enables us
to understand how impulses are transformed into purposes, im-
pressions into perceptions, feelings into emotions. These psychic
elements are linked with one another, and each of them, as well
as the unity they form, is socialized in such a way as to sustain
or to restrict the social roles that the person enacts.
1. The Social Relevance of the Organism
Human organisms are different in size, shape, and color. People
who are lean and tall, with flat, narrow chests, who seem to be
thinly made with bonelike arms and legs, have been called lepto-
somes. Others, whose organic constitutions appear to center around
their abdomen, who have plump bodies, rather short limbs, deep-
vaulted chests and magnificent paunches, have been called pyknic.
And then there are the athletic men, tall and broad of shoulder,
thick-skinned and coarse-boned, with big hands and feet. In sum,
different individuals may be classified according to such body
types. But can we go further? Can we state that these constitu-
tional types are correlated with types of character, temperament,
or with specific traits of personality? Is the appearance of the indi-
vidual "expressive" of different psychic traits and qualities?
The physical signs of aging appear to us as signs of physical
change, just as the trembling, sweating, swollen features of an
alcoholic indicate somatic processes, and no more. But other bodily
features and processes are often "read" as indicative of spiteful
resentment, happy disposition, or other character traits. We ex-
28 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
perience our body externally by touch and sight, and internally by
feeling tone; our psychic and our somatic life are thus intimately
fused. But since, once we have grown up, our physical structure
changes very little, this structure serves as a reference point in
physiognomic observations of psychic life, in a twofold manner:
I. In observing the general appearance, the gestures, deport-
ment, and conduct of the individual, one can assume that they
are documentary evidence for an essential unit: The "nature" of
this or that man, comprising his organic, psychic, social, moral,
and other qualities. This current of romantic thinking has been
elaborated in a broad literature. Yet however plausible and attrac-
tive the morphological types constructed may seem, one has to
allow for so many exceptions and so many contradictions that the
endeavor always seems to break down.
II. In the morphological approach one tries to intuit the essen-
tial nature of a type of individual as a unit. In a second approach,
one measures certain traits, which one then correlates with one
another. These elements and their correlations do not always pos-
sess the plausibility of the unitary whole or Gestalt. For in the
process of such detailed research the idea of providing materials
for physiognomic documentation loses its symbolic overtones.
Now, physiognomic propositions usually follow one or more of
three principles: (i) Individual traits, being read as "signs," are
understood as "symptoms" of character. Karl Jaspers,^ whom we
follow in this matter, points out the absurdity of this approach,
which is perhaps best revealed in Lombroso's work, to be dis-
cussed presently. (2) By intuitive understanding, the observer tries
to grasp the totality of the body, which at the same time is held
to indicate a certain psychic type. The bodily form, the head and
the hands, are artistically composed into a configuration that is
"seen" as a whole of psychological quality. (3) The body build
provides the observer, not with any psychological meanings, but
with a form which the artist may take up and use in shaping his
image of man. The human form— the thick and the thin, the angu-
lar and the round, the tall and the short, the straight and the lop-
sided—is thus put to essentially artistic rather than psychological
use.
Much physiognomic literature— going back to ancient India and
1 Allgemeine Psychopathologie ( Berlin and Heidelberg, 1946 ) .
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE 39
Mediterranean antiquity— has since the eighteenth century been
subject to intellectual fashions. In the recent past, two such works
stand out: the "degeneration" literature connected with Lom-
broso's name, and the psychological elaborations of "bodily types"
of Kretschmer.
In Lombroso's conception,- bodily deviations— such as inordi-
nately long legs in comparison with the length of the entire body,
strange skull shapes, absence of a proper chin, excessive hairiness
or the absence of bodily hair, ingrown earflaps or big, protruding
ears— are considered as signs of the "degeneration" of the psychic
structure, and are alleged to stand for the degenerate nature of the
respective individuals, of their dispositions to neurosis and mental
disease and especially to criminal behavior. This sort of approach
brings physiognomic intuition into spuriously scientific form, the
"symbolism" of old assumes the form of "symptomatology," and
medically nothing can be proven.
Kretschmer's attempt is comparable.^ Its content differs, of
course, but the method of relating body build and psychic traits
allows us to place him near Lombroso, although he happened to
be more concerned with geniuses than criminals. He distinguished
three types— the leptosomic, the athletic, and the pyknic— and as-
signed the few unclassifiable individuals to the residual category
of dysplastic men.
One of the most recent large-scale and careful studies designed
to answer physiognomic type problems— the study of Sheldon and
Stevens *— concludes with this comment: "If anything is demon-
strated conclusively by the study as a whole, it is this: that neither
the somatotype [type of organic constitution] alone, nor any other
single factor, will suffice to 'explain' a personality. Persons of the
same somatotype frequently develop into singularly different kinds
of people. . . Furthermore, although the correlation between
somatotype and temperament [of two hundred young American
men], taken at large, is [moderately high] ... so many [appar-
ently secondary] variables are at work that the specific manifesta-
2 Cesare Lombroso, Crime, Its Causes and Remedies, H. P. Horton, tr.
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1911).
3 E. Kretschmer, Physique and Character: An Investigation of the Theory
of Temperament (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926).
* W. W. Sheldon and S. S. Stevens, The Varieties of Temperament: A
Psycliology of Constitutional Differences (New York: Harjjer, 1942).
40 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
tions of temperament can be predicted from the somatotype [only]
within very wide hmits , . ."
Such studies, we beHeve, do not result in more definitive find-
ings because ( i ) they do not succeed in isolating, or in making
fine enough distinctions among, the various elements of the total
character structure. Usually working with such "constitutional
traits," as size and proportions of abdomen and legs, on the one
hand, and with "temperamental" items such as "love of comfort"
or "desire for action" on the other, it is not odd that the results are
gross and generally unrevealing.
(2) The total character structure, in which such "tempera-
mental" factors are included, involves more than the organism.
If attention were paid to the specific social constellation in which
"love of comfort" was attributable to given individuals, it would
be realized that the person as well as the organism must be studied
if we are to grasp the integration of types of character structure,
or even of "temperament."
(3) We might say that the tall constitution is organically cor-
related with "traits" or "abilities" of leadership (Abraham Lin-
coln) and that the short physique is accompanied by a lack of
these social or psychic traits (Corporal Napoleon!). We would
then search for something about the organism that makes for
aggressive leadership or for its absence. So far, those who believe
in such organic correlations of constitution with psychic traits
have not isolated its mechanisms. And no statistical correlations
have been found to be adequate as long as the organic mechanisms
of the imputed influence were not set forth, for there are other
ways to explain any correlations which might exist between types
of constitutions and temperamental or personal traits.
Insofar as "leadership" is an accompaniment of big or of little
physiques, for example, the connection may be in terms of others'
reactions to such men, rather than through the organisms of the
individual leaders. Biological capacities and deficiencies, as me-
diated through the reactions of others to them, influence the
child's reactions to others and, in turn, his attitude toward himself.
In given societies, the "social burden" of some organic deficiency
may lead to the development of certain character traits. The per-
son with a deficiency of some organ may be more preoccupied
with himself than are organically normal persons. In compensa-
tion, he may increase his striving for superiority and supreme
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE 4I
recognition.^ On the other hand, defects, such as those of vision
may be the basis, not of compensatory striving for superiority, but
of ahbis and justifications for feehngs of inferiority." How organic
conditions are related to the development of personality traits and
conduct patterns depends on how the whole structure of the char-
acter is socially estimated.
For the social psychologist, those features of the organism
which are to be studied must be relevant to the social situation of
the actor and to the actor himself. For that seems to be the way
in which the type of body and other "constitutionally determined
characteristics need to be taken into account in any successful
effort to interpret a personality. " The same principle of interpreta-
tion holds for races.
Race refers to a statistical type of constitution which a group of
organisms approximate. The members of a race vary as individ-
uals, but they vary around a norm or type: they are characterized,
in E. A. Hooton's words," by a "certain combination of morphologi-
cal and metrical features, principally nonadaptive, which have been
derived from their common descent." The anatomical features
chosen as the bases of classification are biologically useless ("non-
adaptive"); they usually include the shape of the head as meas-
ured in various ways, the type of hair, the proportions of the
nose. Skin color is no longer generally used by biologists and
anthropologists as a primary classification trait.
Given the type of organic traits seized upon for racial classifi-
cation, it would indeed be fortuitous if organic correlations be-
tween these types of anatomies and any character or psychic traits
were discovered. So far, they have not been: there is no conclusive
evidence of difference in "native" intelligence or in types of per-
sonality between biologically defined racial types.*
The social and psychological irrelevance of the biological traits
used by anthropologists in classifying races does not, however,
abolish the "reality of race" or the "psychology" of races. It does
^ Cf. Alfred Adler, Understanding Human Nature (London: Faber, 1927),
pp. 69 fF.
•^ See I. E. Bender, et al.. Motivation and Visual Factors (Hanover, New
Hampshire: Dartmouth College Publications, 1942).
■^ Up From the Ape (rev. ed.; New York: Macmillan, 1946).
8 Cf . for e.xample, Otto Klineberg, Race Differences (New York: Harper,
1935)-
42 CHARACTERSTRUCTURE jj
change the bases on which these matters are open to fruitful study.
For if we use as racial criteria those anatomical traits characteriz-
ing a people, or even a portion of them, to which others pay social
attention, we do find types of "racial personality." The personality
traits which may become typical of members of races are then
sociological in origin and operation. They will be traits which are
socially visible and socially used as "badges" by other persons and
by members of the race itself in social relations. In the United
States, for example, color is obviously a primary criterion.
"Racial psychology" is most fruitfully understood as a social
psychology of racial relations.*^
Our emphasis on the causal irrelevance of the organism, indi-
vidual or racial, to character traits and conduct patterns should
not blind us to the direct intrabody effects of constitutional dif-
ferences which do exist. We have said that the emotions, purposes,
and perceptions which make up the psychic structure are "rooted
in the organism"; this means that constitutional differences and
changes in the organism may directly affect the elements of the
psychic structure:
I. Feelings and gestures, the alertness and clarity of perception
or the strength of impulse, may be changed by modification of
physiological processes. Thus, physical exhaustion and fatigue may
limit the control of one's speech in a court hearing or a police-
directed interview. The organism may be so exhausted, due to
prolonged worry and sleeplessness, as to be incapable of resisting
suggestion. The speed with which one thi'ows up his guard and
collects his wits may thus be reduced. In this way one's physiologi-
cal condition may be modified in order to open one up for ease of
psychic manipulation.
II. Toxics may be used so to modify the physiological process
and guarantee certain predictable psychic states. A candidate for
an examination may use unusually strong coffee in an effort to
heighten his alertness and forestall the slackening effects of fatigue
and overlong concentration. Resources are thus mobilized for a
supreme effort. The lowering of conventional inhibitions against
aggressive impulses by the use of alcohol is another case in point.
9 These matters will be examined in Chapter XI: Stratification and Institu-
tional Orders, Section 3: The Status Sphere; and Section 5: The Status
Sphere and Personality Types.
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE 43
It should be noted that the economic position of persons may
affect their type of diet, and deficiency in diet may lower the alert-
ness of their perception, the intensity of their emotions, or the
persistence of their will.
III. In certain role contexts, the physiological foundations of the
psychic structure become especially relevant. The opera singer
thus abstains from smoking, which is detrimental to the voice, and
athletes who are in training are exhorted not to spend their "energy"
with women. The history of religion is rich in examples of ascetic
practices which lead to psychic states which are appraised as holy.
There is the cultic chastity of the priest, and the abstentions from
food, sleep, and sex of a variety of monks and holy men. And
there are the practices of Buddhists which are productive of ex-
traordinary psychosomatic states, which, in turn, are subject to
elaborate interpretations.
IV. The general organic changes involved in maturation, pu-
berty, and aging determine changes in performance in emotional
state or perceptual clarity. But what is "childish" in the life-cycle
and what is "mature" and "senile" vary widely in different so-
cieties. ^° Yet this variation is limited, and in part may be consti-
tuted, by biologically fixed and directed processes of maturation
and aging. The link of physiological changes and psychic sequences
is not set by external or chemical manipulations of the physiologi-
cal state of the organism, but is rather a result and an aspect of the
natural conditions and changes of man's body in the cycle of its
life-span.
CHARACTER STRUCTURE
Organism
Person
PSYCHIC STRUCTURE
structural
limitations
impulse . . .
impression
feeling . . .
purpose
perception
emotion
roles,
meanings,
gestures
10 See Chapter VI: Biography and Types of Childhood, Section 7: The
Relevance of Childhood; and Section 8: The Social Relativity of Childhood
Influences.
44 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
The physiological foundations of the psychic structure, then, have
intrabody effects; and within certain social-historical conditions
they also have social effects. The way people feel, perceive, and
will is rooted in the animal organism, and is influenced directly
by its changing physiological conditions. The psychic structure is
also linked to the person, most crucially by the way in which social
expectations play upon the person to steer and control his im-
pulses, emotions, and perceptions. The psychic structure (how,
what, and when we feel, perceive, and will) is determined by the
total character structure, but the "executive" of the character struc-
ture, the person, is a result of social experience and training.
2. Impulse and Purpose
Man is not merely a machine reacting to physical stimuli; he
does not rest inert until he is jerked and pushed by outside forces.
The use of such terms as "will," "volition," or "impulse" signifies
the self-movement of the organism: the infant organism moves and
wriggles and, in due course, gains a purposive control over the
directions and objectives of its conduct.
From the rather abstract "standpoint of society," the question of
impulse is: How can a person be produced who wants, or "wills,"
what is socially approved, demanded, or premivimed? How can
impulse be trained to fit in with role-demands? The problem of
social control is not merely one of coercing persons to act against
their own wills, but rather to offer socially approved goals which
will be incorporated as objectives of the will.
When the impulses of a psychic structure are directed toward
socially approved objectives, they support and sustain the person
in his roles. Then he wants to do what is expected of him. These
roles of the person, many of which are segments of institutions,
are then supported by the trained impulses of the person.
There is a cycle involving undefined impulses and socially avail-
able goals; and, by repetition and suggestion, punishment and re-
ward, impulses are integrated with goals. Persons incorporate the
goals and link them with impulses, which then sustain the con-
tinued operation of the conduct patterns that form various institu-
tions. It is of course also true that persons may invent goals in order
to deal with challenges which frustrate their impulses, and these
may become social objectives.
ORGANMSM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE 45
The internal stimulation of hunger, thirst, or pain may excite
the infant organism to general action and sensitize its perceptions
toward certain classes of objects. This activity is impulsive and
blind; when it is defined by external objects, when animal restless-
ness fuses with social objects, it is socialized. And in due course, if
it becomes deliberate, it may be purposive.
At feeding time the baby raises its head, waves its arms, opens
its toothless mouth. Its mother says that it is hungry, inferring
"hunger" from the activity she observes. The correctness of her
imputation is shown b\' the eagerness with which the baby grasps
the nipple, firmly holds it, frantically sucks. By the choice and
control of the food that is offered, the baby's food preferences
are patterned. It learns what is "good" to eat and what is "bad,"
that food is good and feces are disgusting; and in due course, it
will want the one and reject the other. Impulses for food are thus
disciplined by sensations of sight and touch, of taste and odor, and
more importantly, by the norms of others expressed in the child's
presence: the social definitions of appetites and thresholds of dis-
gust. Through her expressions of disgust and her gestures of ap-
proval, the mother patterns the baby's "taste." Organic disposition
—the baby's "need" for food— its dependence upon whatever is pro-
vided, and the experience of gestured approval and disgust by
those who care for it merge into the formation of the appetite and
tastes of the social novice.
If^several activities are possible and the individual chooses one
and refuses the others, we ascribe will, purpose, or volition to him.
Such a mastery of one's movement, a use of it as a means of ac-
quiring what is wanted, involves the awareness and the anticipa-
tion of goals. Purpose, desire, or intention, as one stage in the
development of impulse, exists when impulses have found objects.
Such anticipation of goals, as distinct from the "pushes" of bare
impulses and needs, plays a decisive role in man's conduct. The
anticipation of goals which will realize our impulses is often in
terms of symbols. So purpose or intention may be termed "sym-
bolized impulse." Wishes or desires are for something. Impulses
which are not so attached to an object which would satisfy them
may be said to be irrational and/or undefined. We cannot fruit-
fully treat "desires" as standing in contrast with what is desired.
In desire, content and impulse form an intrinsic unity. When the
impulsive features of a psychic structure are not so linked and
^6 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
integrated with objects, they may burst asunder in wild and ran-
dom action or become attached to objects which are not socially
approved.
• The definition of impulses accompanies the definition of social
situations. Organic impulse and social situations become linked so
that impulse seeks the situation as an outlet, and the situation fur-
nishes the.. cue and sets the type of conduct that will satisfy the
impulse. Such social transformations of impulses into conduct pat-
terns are important aspects of the social integration of a psychic
structure. The internalization of social values and objectives gives
direction to impulses and, to some extent, even sets the intensity
of these impulses. When impulses are not disciplined into com-
municable purposes, conduct is irrational: it cannot readily be un-
derstood in terms of a rational calculation to attain some end,
although it may of course be predictable to the psychiatrist in ac-
cordance with his scheme of diseases. In fact, only certain areas of
social life, for example, the rational calculation of men bargaining
in a market, typically lend themselves to strict interpretation in
terms of the rational choice of expedient means for explicit ends.
Because undefined impulses become desires only by the impor-
tation of"sdctal values, we cannot take "desires" at large, nor lists
of speuific desires, as explanations for specific conduct. The con-
ditions of concrete desires and impulses must themselves be ex-
plained, and this explanation requires us to pay attention to inter-
personal situations which train and which steer impulses.
When the adult observes the baby's overt activity and then says
that it "manifests" desires, he is treating this activity as a symptom
or a sign of desire. For the baby, no connection between the activ-
ity and the goal may at first exist, and unless it does we cannot say
that the baby is acting "out of desire." Eventually, activity and
goal will be linked: the child will learn to elicit an activity on our
part which completes his impulsive activity. He will then be acting
"in order to" experience the satisfaction accruing as a consequence
of his action. He will be acting purposively. When his stomach is
empty the baby squalls impulsively. Later, he will link this squall
to the touch of the mother's breast and later to the visual percep-
tion of the mother. When the tactual and visual consequences of
the squalling are linked with the impulsive spasm of squalling,
the baby will have learned to cry purposively. He will experience
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE 4/
his cry as a sign, just as the mother had previously interpreted it.
We learn to desire by having our impulses frustrated; purposes
arise our'df~deprivations; they involve a duality; we strive against
something; to have will, as C. S. Pierce put it, we must encounter
resistance./^ But before the physiological deprivation of an impulse
can become a desire, experience must enter to connect the depri-
vation to a meaningful object that will satisfy it. The object of our
desires and purposes will obviously be selected from among the
objects that are socially available or offered to us, however oddly
they may be combined in fantasies which arise from lengthy
deprivations. Qui" desires for particular things are ofteTi placed in
us by the fact that others desire them. "EHiulutimi, \\rot(' Spinoza,
"is the desire of anything which is engendered in us from the fact
that we imagine others to desire it also." ^-
Objects which are offered to, or withdrawn from, the infant, be-
come the objectives of his impulses. Not having an adequate no-
tion of space and the limits and burdens which it places upon
man, the child will literally reach for the moon. A glaring dispro-
portion between the child's impulsive movements toward objects
that would hurt him and his insufficient fear of these objects
Ferenczi has called "the magical hallucination of omnipotence."
For the sake of the physical security of the child, his guardians
train him to avoid dangers and to acquire adequate fears. In his
interaction with others and with things, the child thus acquires
purposes which determine the direction of his conduct and per-
ception. Impulses are thus socially linked to perceptions of antici-
pated goals and are turned away from harmful traps.
The ascription of purposes to others on the basis of our own pur-
poses may be quite complicated, but in terms of our awareness
of our own purposes and our ascription of these purposes to our-
selves or to others, there are four types of situation. (I) We may,
in rational self-clarification, know our own purposes and ascribe
them to ourselves as ours. ( II ) Our purposes may be unknown to us,
although we ascribe them to ourselves, as in undefined states of
"longing" or "cravings" or "free-floating anxieties." (Ill) We may
^^ Collected Papers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1934), Vol. I,
Book 3.
1- Beiiedictus de Spinoza, Origin and Nature of the Emotions, Boyle's
translation (Everyman's Library, New York, 1934).
48 C^IARACTER STRUCTURE
know our purposes and yet deliberately ascribe them to others, as
imperialist statesmen in modern propaganda have been known to
do just before they launch their attacks. (IV) We may not know
our purposes and at the same time unconsciously ascribe them to
others. In this case, we speak of "projection," as when the anti-
Semite believes himself to be persecuted by a world conspiracy of
Jews, against which he then "defends" himself: he projects his ag-
gressiveness to Jewry, in order to be "free" or to be justified in
releasing his own aggressiveness.
The straightforward understanding of the purposes of others on
the basis of our own purposes is more likely to be accurate in so-
cially standardized situations. For if two persons are similarly
trained, the purposes which the one finds in himself are likely to be
similar to those in the other. But in a society composed of widely
variegated situations, ascriptions of purpose are more often mis-
taken.
Men may treat anything which proves beneficent as motivated
by benevolent purposes, and anything which hurts them as mali-
ciously motivated. This may also occur with reference to physical
objects, as when we curse a chair over which we have stumbled
in the dark, or with reference to impersonally caused social up-
heavals, as when men curse the revolution or the reaction coming
after a war.
3. Feeling and Emotion
All understanding of laughter and gaiety, of fear and trembling,
and other expressive phenomena is often said to be based upon
logical inferences from one's own psychic life to that of another.
Actually, however, we seem to understand such expressive acts
directly, we seem to understand even as we observe the activity.
In fact, before they have acquired language, infants— as well
as some domesticated animals— seem to "understand" the facial
expressions of adults. Rene Spitz, in exemplary experiments,^^
1=^ Rene A. Spitz with the assistance of K. M. Wolf, "The Smiling Re-
sponse: A Contribution to the Ontogenesis of Social Relations," Genetic Psy-
chology Monographs, Vol. 34, 1946, pp. 57-125. Cf. also, Weston LaBarre,
"The Cultural Basis of Emotions and Gestures," Journal of Personality, Vol.
16, pp. 49-68, reprinted in Personal Character and Cultural Milieu, Douglas
G. Haring, ed. (rev. ed.; Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 487-506.
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE 4Q
has shown that the smihng response can be elicited between the
second and sixth month by the direct presentation of "another hu-
man being," or what the baby takes to be another, regardless of the
facial "expressions" tliat are presented. After the second month,
the smile is "integrated into the nascent pattern of the child's emo-
tional needs on the social level. In the course of this integration
the purely motor pattern of the smile is endowed with the psycho-
logical meaning inherent in the child's emotional relations with
its human partners." In view of this, Dr. Spitz feels justified in
calling the smile a semantic pattern, a genuine communication.
Dr. Spitz, dealing with the exceptions to the normal smiling
response, holds them to be indicative of emotionally disturbed
child-mother relation, which seems to indicate that this gestural
pattern— the smile— is an acquired aptitude rather than the un-
folding of an "innate disposition." At any rate, after the sixth
month, the indiscriminate smiling response becomes more discrim-
inate. The baby distinguishes friendly and unfriendly faces.
Not all bodily movements accompanying emotions are expressive
phenomena. And we have no clear knowledge of which movements
are and which are not understandable expressions. We do not
necessarily and directly "understand" the dilated pupil as a phe-
nomenon of fear, but if we know this meaning and have frequently
observed it, then we seem to understand the enlarged pupil di-
rectly as fear.
Let us carefully sort out the various elements involved in the
whole phenomena of feelings and emotions:
I. In observing the conduct and appearance of other persons,
we notice on certain occasions that the postures of their bodies
change, their voices are modulated or hysterical, offensive or invit-
ing. Sometimes we see sweat break out on their faces. At others,
the face before us suddenly goes white, or the play of its features
is distorted. People look at us with aggressive eyes as if they
wanted to destroy us. These types of behavior are called gestures.
II. Such conduct obviously in\'olves physiological changes in the
organism. When someone "blushes with shame," the distribution
of blood within his body has concentrated in his face. When he
feels strong in rage, his adrenalin glands have brought about an
increased sugar content in his blood, thus strengthening his muscle
$0 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
power. In times of stress and danger the organism secretes adrena-
lin which, in co-operation with the sympathetic nervous system,
ehcits sugar from the hver and floods the blood with it; this sugar,
in turn, eliminates fatigue in the muscles and strengthens the action
systems of the organism. Within ten seconds the heart beats faster;
within three minutes after an "emotional experience" there is 20 to
30 per cent more sugar in the blood. These processes increase mus-
cular efficiency; physiologically, the body prepares for exertion in
anticipation of action.^*
III. From certain gestures and expressive movements we seem
to know that those who make them are experiencing certain feel-
ings, and looking within ourselves we experience the fact that our
own gestures often involve feeling states. These feelings of pleas-
ure, pain, or satisfaction seem to belong to the feeler alone. Our
feelings can only be ascribed to us by others on the basis of our
gestures and appearance. We do not read these signs unerringly
and thus know the feelings of others; sometimes, even often, we do
not know directly, nor can we name, what we ourselves feel.
Simple feeling states, or moods, or "affects," may be diffused: we
feel tiredness or buoyancy all over; or, these feelings may be local-
ized in the organism: we have an acute toothache. When feelings
are localized, we can sometimes deflect attention away from them,
and thus diminish the intensity of our awareness. Normally, feel-
ings of hunger and thirst are localized signals of general bodily
needs, but as hunger becomes starvation our whole psychic life is
affected, and all our declining energies are marshaled to serve our
craving for food. And as we sink into a state of general drowsiness,
food becomes the all-absorbing concern of our phantasy life and
thought, of our feelings and consciousness. Feelings of sexual at-
traction are usually diffused, but in severe tension they may be
heavily localized in specific erotic zones.
Both localized and diffused feeling states may be classified in
terms of their respective intensities of pain or pleasure. Thus:
There is the intense, localized feeling of a broken bone; the intense,
general feeling of starvation; the mild yet localized pain of a small
^* A good account of the physiological changes involved in emotions is
available in Walter B. Cannon, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and
Rage (2d ed.; New York: Appleton, 1929), pp. 194, 196, 220, 225, 343. For
a comprehensive examination of the literature, see H. F. Dunbar, Emotions
and Bodily Changes (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1935).
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE ^1
cut; the mild, general feeling of tiredness; the intense, localized
pleasure of the loving kiss; the intense, general feeling of bliss or
euphoria; the mild, localized feeling of a pleasant taste in our
mouth; and there is the mild, general awareness that we just feel
good. Of course there are thresholds of intensity: climactic pain
may become so unbearable that we faint to save ourselves from
further awareness. And with palliatives, drugs, and ethers, modern
medicine has made the intensities of pains and our awareness of
them more manageable. ^°
It is possible to approach "emotions" in terms of einotioiml ges-
tures, in terms of physiological conditions in the organism, or in
terms of our awareness of feelings in the psychic structure. To
understand emotions, we must avail ourselves of each of these levels
of description. We must see how they are each experienced, how
social factors are involved in the experience of their operations,
and precisely how the various levels may be linked.
One statement of the occasion and nature of emotions runs as
follows: If an organism acts immediately and adequately in the
presence of some stimulating occasion, no emotion is engendered.
The action proceeds smoothly and no gestures, no feelings, and
no physiological changes need occur. If, however, the response is
in some way blocked or the impulse behind it is frustrated, emotion
occurs; then gestures and feelings will make their appearance. The
urgency of the feelings may be reduced by the expression of emo-
tional gestures. Emotions occur, the statement runs, when the or-
ganism is disorganized; when it has no ready response. When be-
havior is running smoothly no emotional outbursts occur.
Such a formal physiological scheme does not tell us how we are
to distinguish between different emotions, nor does it inform us
15 There is another type of feehng which invoKes an awareness of our
self as well as of our body. We feel ashamed or guilty or generally insecure.
These experiences may be called self-related feelings: we shall call them emo-
tions. They involve the psychic structure, just as simple feelings of pleasure
do, but they also involve the person. Our image of our self, which is reflected
from the social experiences which form the person, is in^'olved in them.
(See Chapter IV: The Person.) The emotions which are related to this self-
image are linked with situations and social occasions in which emotional states
are experienced. They are related to the position of the self within the
social circle of others. Such self-related feelings, or emotions, may react
upon and elicit more simple awareness of general feelings.
52 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
of the social occasions which for different types of persons en-
gender the feehngs, gestures, and physiology of emotions. Emo-
tions, especially if they are intense, cannot be classified in terms
of differing physiological conditions, nor in terms of different ges-
tures. Both fear and rage may involve similar glandular secretions,
similar facial contortions, and even awareness of similar feelings.
Different emotions are identified in terms of the situations in which
gestures are expressed. The vocabularies which are used as a re-
sponse of others to our gestures define and give meaning to our
emotion.
As "different emotions " become more intense, their gestural and
feeling aspects become more similar. Psychic elements seem to
take over the whole character structure. The control of emotions
by the person is minimized, or even shattered. We cannot time and
shape the gestural expressions nor the feelings according to de-
fined occasions; we are overwhelmed. If the occasions which so
upset us recur, we may develop ways of meeting them. If we can
organize appropriate roles or rituals, and thus integrate and socially
steer our emotions, our psychic structures will be less likely to take
over the character structure as a whole and thus dominate our
conduct.
To understand what "emotional experiences" involve, and what
specific direction increased bodily power may take during such
experiences, we must consider not only the physiological organism
and the psychic structure, but also the person. In the face of "dan-
ger," flight is possible, but so is struggle and attack; fear, as well
as rage or hate, may be felt. Adrenalin does not decide which of
these emotions will be experienced and enacted. There do not, for
example, seem to be noteworthy differences in the visceral accom-
paniments of fear and anger. In anger and in rage, in fear and in
fury, there is adrenalin. The organism allows us, indeed helps us,
to become truly fearful or full of powerful rage. But there does
not seem to be any one stimulating condition in the physical en-
vironment of the organism that automatically produces awareness
of any given emotional feeling or the expression of certain emo-
tional gestures. We must go beyond the organism and the physical
environment to account for human emotions. Physiological psy-
chology has not reached a point at which it can claim to have
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE $2
established the identity or parallehsm of physiological processes
and specific emotional sequences and feelings.
"Emotional experiences" give the cue for physiological prepara-
tion; and after these experiences are under way the physical exer-
tion produces further bodily changes. Socially induced worry, ex-
citement, or anxiety, for example, may distm-b the digestive proc-
esses, or cause peptic ulcers in the walls of the stomach. The
mechanisms seem to include increased acidity as well as move-
ments of contraction in the stomach.
The brain does not have any direct control over the viscera.^''
The autonomic nervous system and the system of our glands, ac-
cording to modern medicine, are the links of physiology and the
study of conduct and experience: they make up the sphere of
the psychosomatic.^^
The chief access we have to the autonomic nervous system is the
experience of moods. These feeling-states, as Ives Hendrick has
said, are thought to be an awareness of "changes in the muscle tone
and blood supply of our internal organs produced by autonomic
nervous stimulation . . ." ^* At times we cannot control such feel-
ings. Physiologically this means that the central nervous system is
"immobilized" so that we cannot control the "panicky feeling," or
sometimes the excretory functions of the organism.
Whatever our theoretical assumptions concerning the complex
relations between physiological organism and psychic structure, we
know that externally produced physiological changes, for instance
the consumption of stimulants or drugs like coffee, alcohol, mari-
juana, or aspirin, often becomes relevant. A society may avail itself,
at conventionally and legally defined occasions, of these toxics; it
may manage to suppress, or indeed, to impose them. In colonial
societies, alcohol has been distributed to natives as a technique of
"domestication." And as we have already remarked, suitable meas-
ures of alcohol have also, on occasion, been used to reduce con-
ventional inhibitions, as between the sexes. Legal as well as con-
ventional norms may define the range and direction of permitted
consumption. In Western societies the habitual and medically un-
authorized use of cocaine is prosecuted, and accordingly, trade in
^^ Cannon, op. cit., p. 264.
i'^ Ives Hendrick, Facts and Theories of Psyclwanahjsis (2d ed.; New York:
Knopf, 1944), pp. 290-91.
IS Ibid., p. 289.
54 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
such stimulants is specifically licensed. Such norms have, of course,
been violated, as when the British under the slogan of free trade im-
posed opium upon defenseless populations in China, as did the Japa-
nese at a later date. When coffee was introduced into seventeenth-
century England, there were attempts to suppress its use. The au-
thorities feared the politically suspect sociability of literati and
businessmen in the coffee houses; the women wanted their men
to stay at home and away from the morally suspect female em-
ployees of such establishments.
The meaning of a situation to a person sets the experience and
the nature of emotion. These meanings vary according to the per-
son's past experiences; these experiences, in turn, must be explained
in terms of the person's position and career within given kinds of
social structure. Now, recurring situations become stereotyped in
their meaning for emotion.^" In some, it is "proper " to become fear-
ful and run; in others it is cowardly so to feel and act. The Ameri-
can father is conventionally expected to gush joyfully at sight of a
newborn baby; the Roman father could inspect it critically, de-
ciding to accept or reject it. Persons internalize these social ex-
pectations of emotional display, which thus, at the proper occasion,
are exemplified by the psychic structure. Even if we feel joy on
some occasions, we may suppress the gestures of joy, should the
occasion and our associates conventionally expect a display of sor-
row.
19 Gestures and mimic movements are of course socially and historically
determined; they have, as it were, a grammar of their own, although the
expressively gesturing person may know of this grammar as little as M. Jourdain
knew of the fact that he had been speaking prose all his life. D. Efron has
compared the gestural habits of East European Jews with that of first-genera-
tion Italian immigrants. He found that in Jewish arm gestures, the upper
arm and elbow are held close to the body, that the lower arm and the
hand are used at a close distance to the conversational partner; there is a
sort of turtle movement of the head, a poking with the finger, or across the
table with the fork; there are down strokes with the hand or chin and beard.
By contrast, Italian gestures seek the greatest possible amplitude for horizontal
movements of the outstretched arms and hands, to the right and left of the
bodily axis. Efron attributes these differences to the ghetto, with its physical
narrowness, in contrast to the Italian plaza, as delimiting and facilitating scenes
of expressive behavior. Subsequent generations of immigrant Italians and
Jews of course lose these gestural peculiarities as they take on the general
Amrican pattern of expressive behavior. See D. Efron, Gesture and Environ-
ment (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1941).
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE ^^
Gestures of sorrow— stylized according to expectation— may be-
come the basis lor feelings of sorrow. Thus the person regulates
the psychic structure, although of course psychic elements may
burst out in uncontrollable ways. By our facial, bodily, and verbal
gestures we make evident to others our psychic reactions. But
when our feelings are vague and inchoate, the reactions of others
to our gestures may help define what we really come to feel. For
example, if a girl has been jilted at the altar and is generally upset
about it, the responses of her mother may define the girl's feelings
of sadness and great grief, or of indignation and anger. In such
cases, our gestures do not necessarily "express" our prior feelings.
They make available to others a sign. But what it is a sign of
may be influenced by their reactions to it. We, in turn, may inter-
nalize their imputation and thus define our inchoate feeling. The
social interaction of gestures may thus not only express our feel-
ings but define them as well.
Moreover, our gestures may elicit or impose feelings which at
first were not present. For example, a child may playfully heave a
brickbat at another innocent youngster. The second youngster may
not take the act as a playful gesture but treat it as an indication
of meanness and aggression. This definition of the affective intent
by another on the basis of the gesture or act may lead to a fight
in which the first child acquires a feeling more socially appropriate
to his own gestures.-" The child thus links certain gestures and
acts with their conventionally ascribed feelings. Children, or adults
for that matter, may begin to feel angry while they are scuffling or
fighting. "Hostility," as Bovet has made clear, cannot be abstracted
and treated as a cause of fighting; it may just as well be an effect
of fighting acts and fighting gestures.
We know our own emotioi^ by observations of our gestures and
actions, and more importantly perhaps, by what other people ob-
serve and report to us, directly or indirectly by their responses and
gestures to the gestures we have made. Even if the external ges-
tures from which persons normally infer the emotions felt by others
are not available, as to the deaf or blind, the emotional agitations
of others may be detected by feeling the tensions in the muscles
of their arms and hands. -^
-"See Pierre Bo\et, TJie Fi^Jitinf^ Instinct, J. Y. T. Greig, tr. (New York:
Dodd Mead, 1923), pp. 23-27.
-1 Helen Keller, Stunj of My Life (New York: Doubleday, 1903), p. 353 ff.
^6 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
Normally, a certain skill of emotional expression is socially de-
manded. Because of traumatic shocks or slights, a person may at
an early time seek spurious emotional security by what seems to
him riskless withdrawal behavior. Accordingly, he may not learn
how to "deal" with people. But this does not necessarily mean that
he is insensitive, or has no feelings. On the contrary, he may be
hypersensitixe, and out of overwhelming fear of contact, prefer
withdrawal and isolation.
Out of the social interplay of gestures a vocabulary of emotions
emerges: the terms for the emotions and feelings which are sup-
posed to accompany certain gestures bring out the meaning of
those gestures for other persons. The vocabulary of emotions the
person acquires is usually limited to the more common emotions
experienced by all members of a language group in a similar
enough manner to have been given common names. It is no acci-
dent that such phrases as "that leaves me speechless" exist in several
different languages. At times, under severe emotional shocks, per-
sons actually do lose their power of speech and may even become
mute for life.
Skill groups, such as poets and novelists, specialize in fashioning
and developing vocabularies for emotional states and gestures; they
specialize in telling us how we feel, as well as how we should or
might feel, in various situations. Many terms for our emotions be-
come useless as they become banal or trivial through too frequent
use. Stale words may not serve to designate fresh feelings. Thus,
we find fashions in the vocabularies of emotion. We smile today
at the direct way in which books given to young Anglo-Saxon ladies
in the 1830's verbalized the sentiments of friendship and love, or
at how Dickens described his heroines' feelings about their mates.
We now shy at using words thus "Icmded" with the gush of emo-
tion of sentiment. Many twentieth-century European and American
expressions were taboo in the Puritan past. Certain terms may be
transferred from one sphere of emotion to another sphere in which
they lose their appropriateness: by the incongruity of such shifts
the terms are banalized and made "hollow." For example, political
slogans meant to engage public sentiment and to implement na-
tional efforts have often been exploited for private commercial
ends. Advertisements for eyeglasses have tried to exploit the emo-
tions of a war, the eyeglass manufacturer implying that those who
do not buy are saboteurs of the war effort.
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE ^J
Much contemporary literature and music deals with such "emo-
tional masks," by means of caricatures; "Yankee Doodle," for
instance, may be musically caricatured, distorting the harmonious
features of the tune or chords or substituting words to deliberately
produce incongruities. Prokofiev and e. e. cummings, Stravinsky
and Bert Brecht are masters of such effects, as, for that matter, is
Charlie Chaplin, in the incongruous opening of his Modern Times.
Daumier's sketches may be said to have "dethroned" the Olympian
figures before continental Europe. Karl Marx theorized about such
matters when he stated that the end of an epoch repeats in
comical form what at the beginning is enacted as heroic tragedy,
fie assigned a psychological function to this by stating that man-
kind could thus bid farewell to outlived forms, not with nostalgia,
but with gaiety, and he viewed in this sense Napoleon III as the
comical repetition of Napoleon the Great. If Beethoven's work
belongs in the Napoleonic age, Offenbach's, for good reasons, be-
longs in the age of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie.
There are vocabularies for gestures and other vocabularies for
feelings, but usually the two are combined. "Sadness" may thus
refer to both the feeling-state and the drawn-down mouth and
tearful eye. This double reference combined in a single term may
be one cause of the social coincidence of gesture and feeling. For
it symbolizes the expectation that the displayed feeling is genuine,
an expectation based upon observation of the person's gesture.
But often emotional gestures may be "put on" without any "cor-
responding" affective feelings being present. Ranging from the
expert professional actress to the insincere lover with the tender
look, the stylization of emotional gestures may proceed without
any development of corresponding feelings. We characterize as
"spurious" those emotions which are not felt but which consist
merely of gestural "expressions." Those gestures which do, in fact,
reveal feelings appropriate to them we call "genuine." It should be
remembered that the distinction is nice, and in many cases the
inference from gesture to feeling is very difficult to make. Further-
more, in observing the gestures of others we often come to a point
where our externally responsive gesturings invoke their feelings
within us. Thus, we experience borrowed emotions, which, like
our original gestures, may at first be spurious displays, put on
for the purpose of dissimulation, but later be internalized and
^8 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
thus become quite genuine. The diffusion of the Nazi salute in
Germany may be cited.
Emotional vocabularies of patriotism may be imposed upon
populations who are thus denied the public "expression" of their
own sentiments. Nationalist prospects may be sentimentalized as
"Missions," and nationalist history becomes the hallowed memories
of heroes and martyrs. In such cases, some persons may experience
the imposed sentiments as spurious, although they may make the
conventional gestures that express no emotion; others may with-
draw even from the gestures, and some may even actively criticize
and resist both the inner meaning and the outer expression.
For the degree to which persons can play roles involving emo-
tional gestures without feeling the emotions conventionally appro-
priate to them varies widely, in terms of types of individuals and
in terms of the frame of conventions. In the course of Western
civilization, the rising lower classes have attributed greater truth
and honesty in such matters to themselves than to the "sophisti-
cated" upper classes. The rising plebeian almost always places a
premium on "uprightness" and "candor" and "righteous indigna-
tion." Exclusive and high status groups, on the other hand, are
apt to feel that if they owe truthfulness and candor to anyone,
it is to their peers, but never to those "not on their level." Polite
speech generally seems more important to them than honest speech.
The language of righteous indignation is discounted as "rude" or
"tactless," and in any case, "beneath them." And yet, the sense
of responsibility of high decision-making circles in crisis situations
makes them inclined to ascribe to themselves an extraordinary
capacity to "face the facts," which they feel might unnerve the
contemporary Little Man or the Common Man.
Autobiographical statements of actors and actresses -2— experts
in gesturing— indicate that the artistic enactment of prescribed roles
may lead to an intense emotional identification of person and
psychic structure with role and hence to deep feelings appropriate
-- On the following autobiographical statements of actors, we quote from
the following, in the order given: K. E. Behnke, Speech and Movement on
the Stage (New York: Oxford, 1930), p. 166; John Barrymore, Confessions of
an Actor (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926), no pagination; Morton Eustis,
Players At Work (New York: Theatre Arts, 1937), pp. 26 and 45.
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE 59
to the role and the character played.-^ On the other hand, there
are actors who interpret the gestures with which they act out a
role in a detached and calculating manner; they do not feel that
their own personality and psychic structure is fused with the
enacted character, and they do not, therefore, experience the
emotions which their gestures spuriously display.-'
The fact that professional actors and actresses have different
attitudes concerning the emotional feelings appropriate to the
gestures of the roles they present has led to a variety of esthetic
norms, held by professional critics and laymen. The social psy-
chologist records the range and types of experiences and notes
that no doctrine or rule of the psijchic structure covers the mat-
ter. To understand the extent to which gestures correspond with
feelings, one must know something of the persons involved and
the conventions of the situation in which the gesture and emotion
are presumably linked.
Emotional masks may be said to have a "tighter" or a "looser"
fit for the social actor. Theatrical styles, as we have just seen, vary
in this respect. Nowadays it would seem that critics and audiences
prefer a "loose" fit and derive special enjoyment from realizing the
self-conscious distance of the person of the actor from his presented
mask. Bert Brecht has raised this attitude to a principle of mod-
ern staging, and has scored singular success with his performances
in postwar Europe. A specific ethos informs this stand, basically
holding that stage acting is after all "play," and that the art
consists in being quite serious about the playfulness of the play,
lest the presumption of sincerity become ridiculous. This whole
23 Ristori, the great Italian tragedienne, claims: "I throw my whole pas-
sionate soul into my emotional scenes, because I know that my technique will
ne\er desert me." John Barrymore, playing Galsworthy's Justice: "On the
opening night when I pounded with frenzy on my cell door, I broke right
through the wood grating which was painted black as an understudy for
iron."
-* Helen Hayes believes that she follows this pattern: "At some time or
other I must feel the role, but never in actual performance. There is usually
one rehearsal in which I go through the part with real feeling. Thereafter, I
simulate what I haxe felt." Such players as Alia Nazimova, Katliarine Cornell,
and Maurice Exans agree with Burgess Meredith who says: "You are conscious
of the effect that emotion should produce, but you don't let it affect you."
Ina Claire goes further: "The moment tlie actor lets himself feel the emo-
tions, he begins to wallow in a role, he becomes a ham."
6o CHARACTER STRUCTURE
tendency has undoubtedly been influenced by the development of
motion picture acting, which is best where the actor "acts" least,
and which has trained the movie audience to new levels of critical
appreciation, to the quick grasping of meaningful sights and
sounds, of the weight and significance of gestures and words. So
a slip of the tongue, which fifty years ago went unnoticed by all
but psychiatrists, nowadays is understood by millions, when pre-
sented close-up and on a magnified sound-track.
Certain occasions conventionally require certain gestures. A per-
son may cry and otherwise express grief, not because his relative
has died, but because he is at a funeral. Crying may be a ritual
of conduct, as is the wearing of black clothing. Gestures without
feehngs may also be simulated for the purposes of rational bar-
gaining, as when sororities on college campuses send their very
best "pleader" to a professor to inveigle better grades for a failing
pledge who is not so adept at crying.
The gestures supposedly accompanying various emotions may be
stylized without affecting any change of feelings. But this styliza-
tion of gesture may in time influence and stylize the effect. When
you begin the ritual gestures of a funeral you may not feel grief,
but in time the atmosphere of the funeral throng with its incanta-
tions of grief, its evocations of sorrow, may affect you quite
genuinely.
When we ascribe feelings to others in terms of what we our-
selves feel, the basis of our analogy is social. The correctness or
falseness of such imputations does not have to depend upon any
general biological similarity of human organisms. We can some-
times interpret correctly the behavior and gestures of others by
ascribing to them sentiments, emotions, or purposes similar to our
own because: (i) our interpretation of their external gestures, or
of the situation they are in, influences and helps to define for
them what they feel, and (2) because of the standardized expecta-
tion of certain gestures, and eventually of inner feeling-states, mo-
tives, and emotions, which are set up in recurring social situations
within given societies. The measure to which we are correct in
ascribing our feelings to others in any given case depends upon
the extent to which these two conditions hold true.
Today, under conditions of mass movie-attendance, the styliza-
tions of such emotions as tenderness, or various models of erotic
allurement or approach, tend to be standardized and fashioned
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE 6l
after the movie stars who speciahze in such matters. And there
are gestural fads which are related to fashions of clothing and
make-up; the bent head with the eyes looking slyly out from under
the brows goes with big brimmed hats or heavy bangs. Various
gestures have differing prestige values attached to them, and insofar
as inner feelings may develop from the repeated use of gestiu'es
in recurring roles, the emotions as well as the gestures of members
of various status groups may be stereotyped.
On the other hand, gestures may be conventionalized precisely
to hide inner feelings of one sort or another. In old Japan a code
of deportment was elaborated in which it was a "mark of disrespect
to betray, by look or gesture, any feeling of grief or pain in the
presence of a superior." The code exacted very much more than
impassiveness. It required not only that any sense of anger or pain
should be denied all outward expression, but that the sufferer's
face and manner should indicate the contrary feeling. Sullen sub-
mission was an offense; mere impassive obedience inadequate; the
proper degree of submission should manifest itself by a pleasant
smile, and by a soft and happy tone of voice. The smile, however,
was also regulated. One had to be careful about the quality of the
smile. It was a mortal offense, for example, in addressing a superior,
to smile in such a way that the back teeth could be seen. In the
military class especially this code was ruthlessly enforced. The
women of the Samurai, like the women of Sparta, were required to
show signs of joy on hearing that their husbands or sons had fallen
in battle; to betray any other feeling was a grave breach of
decorum.-'"'
A person whose conception of his own welfare is deeply in-
volved in the sacredness of religious objects will experience awe
in their presence. He will become enraged at their desecration or
destruction. A person who has not incorporated these objects as
sacred, however, may be not at all awed, but, although externally
respectful, amused at people who go mewling to the mosque. To
the person whose security of self is deeply involved in the approval
of a political party whose program includes atheism, the destruc-
tion of the sacred objects and the personnel who service them
-5 Cf. Lafcadio Ht-arn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (New York:
Macmillan, 1924), pp. 191 fF.
62 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
may produce the feelings, gestures, and the physiological changes
which accompany great triumph and exalted joy.
A soldier genuinely imbued with a belief in the honor and
correctness of his nation's cause and of the evil character of the
enemy may experience hysteric joy or elation in "killing"; whereas
two years before the "same man" as a clerk may have been revolted
at even the thought of "killing." There are all types of killing.
"You men are learning ranger fighting," said the lieutenant, accord-
ing to a New York Times report.-** "There are no rules of clean
fighting that apply here. The dirtier you are the better we like
it. A stab in the back is one of the finest principles we know of.
Every time you think of a Jap, say to yourself, 'We must be more
silent, cruel, and vicious than these little sons of b— ' " A general
". . . watching with approval whispered: 'And that lieutenant used
to be a clerk in Wall Street.' " The military training of the clerk for
the situation of killing in war has given the thought and the act
a difi^erent meaning to him. His immediate associates, and the
patriots of his nation, have placed an honorable premium upon
efficient killing.
Only rarely ia history, have spontaneous individual emotions and
their expression been socially approved. When this does occur it
is likely to be during great Social' trans^f©r«iations, such as the
waning of the Middle Ages, the revolutionary turns of Italian city
republics during the Renaissance, the upthrusts of the middle
classes in -Holland or in Cromwellian England, the peasant wars
of central Europe during Luther's time, the American Revolu-
tion, and the French revolutionary and Napoleonic epochs. In
such periods, the barriers of convention and status do not stand in
the way of enthusiastic solidarity, but are broken down by the
emancipated who spontaneously join with one another in the name
of friendship or patriotism. There is much weeping, both spurious
and genuine, and when such solidarity is religiously tinged, there
is a renewed affirmation of the brotherhood of man. Thus during
the 1820's mass revivals swept through the Western world, young
lovers learned to trust their own hearts, and love became the
prerequisite to marriage.
Such periods, however, soon give way to the re-establishment
of convention, often to the point of rigid etiquette as we know it
~" June 16, 1943.
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE 6,3
from Victorianism or the court societies of the anciens regimes of
prerevolutionary France and Tsarist Russia. Then elegant pro-
prieties, rigidly prescribed forms of etiquette with "perfectionist"
habituation of gesture and their ritual elaborations of spurious senti-
ments bespoke the underlying anxiety— in Western societies no
less than in Confucian China.
The roles men play affect their physiology; the meanings of situa-
tions may be pointed up by ritual and ceremony. Football games in
the United States are preceded by rituals which focus the players'
and their followers' emotions on the game. Incentives of acclaim
and censure are vividly presented to the players. An eminent Har-
vard physiologist has reported that such social keying-up of the
players may result in their feeling such an "excess of strength" as
to be able to crouch and then go breaking down a closed door.
The physiologist is interested in discovering that such experiences
increase the percentage of sugar in the player's urine; the social
psychologist is attracted by the feelings, verbalizations, and conse-
quences of such social interaction.
Many mass audience situations, with their "vicarious" enjoy-
ments, serve psychologically the unintended function of channeling
and releasing otherwise unplacable emotions. Thus, great volumes
of aggression are "cathartically" released by crowds of spectators
cheering their favorite stars of sport— and jeering the umpire. And
in tear-jerking motion pictures, in the dark, the release of other-
wise unwept tears is facilitated.
Eccentrist dances may have the same efiFects as football rallies and
motion pictures. Religious manias and the jumpings and jerkings of
the old Methodists may be more violent than "hysterical or epileptic
fits." And dervishes can sometimes dance for days. In many displays
of astonishing bodily strength, it has been noted that "crowds of
witnesses" facilitate the exertion "beyond consideration of personal
prudence." Music, especially martial band music and choral sing-
ing, may stimulate the physiology of emotion and bodily strength.-"
The meanings which the person incorporates from his expected
roles are thus linked to his gestures, produce changes in his body,
and influence the feelings of which he is aware.
-'' Cf. Cannon, op. cit., p. 233.
64 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
4. Impression and Perception
The senses are those speciaHzed parts or areas of the organism
that are particularly sensitive to changes in the environment. The
human organism, equipped with special kinds of sense organs,
along with the intensity, duration, size, and movement of various
stimuli, makes up the physical and organic conditions of perception.
We cannot see out of the back of our heads, although if we hear
a very slight sound and whirl swiftly we may imagine we can.
The body, insofar as it puts our senses in a position to record stimuli
(the cocked ear, the peering eye) is involved in the act of atten-
tion. We bend down to smell a rose; we turn our heads in order
to see to the side. These bodily postures put our sense organs into
"contact" with the sights, sounds, and smells to which our sense
organs are sensitive.
The pupil of the eye expands or contracts according to the
amount of light reaching it; the eardrum vibrates with condensa-
tions and rarefactions of the air, and transmits these vibrations,
tones, and noises, via three small bones, to the inner ear where
different little hair cells are stimulated by high and low frequencies.
The skin with which the organism is covered may be considered
an organ of touch, but scattered through it are spots more sensitive
than others to tactile pressure, pain, cold, or heat. When we move
our arms, legs, or trunk, we are aware of these movements and of
their extent, speed, and direction. The tastes of various substances
in our mouths are received by virtue of our sensitive tongues. Smells
come to us through our noses to stimulate olfactory areas. And by
means of the nervous system these various perceptions are con-
nected with the mechanisms of response and action, the muscles
of which are hung and stretched over our skeleton.
What become stimuli to us are limited by the sensitivity of our
sense organs. If sound waves are below or above a certain number
of vibrations per minute, they do not stimulate our ears. We thus
have physiological thresholds. The anatomy and physiology of the
eye and ear and finger are part of the structure of the organism;
how these organs are constructed limits and selects what we can
see, hear, and touch. Thus, the eye is not merely a photographic
lens which mirrors the world for the organism. Out of the total
world of external objects, the nature of the eye cuts those which
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE 6^
are visible to a particular organism. If the retina is not appropriately
equipped for the job, colors cannot be distinguished. What is per-
ceived is limited by the object itself and by the structure of the
organism doing the perceiving.
The sudden and intense nature of some changes in the physical
environment may completely dominate the organism so that the
reaction is quite uncontrolled by the person. A noise of this sort,
like a gunshot, will in most cases produce a definite pattern of
startle.-** Yet professional hunters or men very long in battle may
have gained some control over such stimuli and over their organ-
isms: they won't startle so easily. Within the limits of the organism,
our sense organs may become habituated to paying attention to
certain stimuli and to overlooking others. The crashing noises, fast-
moving sights, and "queer" odors of a metropolitan area are differ-
ent to men brought up there than to someone just arrived from
the country. The soldier dozing off under ceaseless cannon fire,
may be instantly alert to the faint signal of his field telephone;
the young mother wakes from deep slumber at her baby's slightest
whimper. What we are trained to pay attention to is related to our
patterns of conduct and to the furthering of our purposes. Through
repeated use of certain sense organs in connection with certain
activities, the different organs and the different impressions derived
from them become linked together or fused into a unit of social
activity and perception.
The sense of smell, for example, must be understood in varying
social contexts. There are, for instance, two ways of handling body
scent. Conventions may encourage the covering up of body odor
by artificially produced scents. This has been the historic way in
Latin countries, notably France and Italy. Ladies may then choose
a personalized perfume so as to have, as Georg Simmel has noted,
a subjectively characteristic "scent" in ballrooms and in opera
foyers. Or, in the second place, washing with soap may be the
conventional way. Since the eighteenth century in Great Britain
frequent use of the bathtub has been standard for certain classes
in Anglo-Saxon and British-influenced societies.
Our sense organs are specialized, but they are also closely re-
lated to one another. Our taste and our smell of a peach, for ex-
28 See C. Landis and W. Hunt, The Startle Pattern (New York: Farrar &
Rinehart, 1939).
66 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
ample, form a close blend of perceptions; the odors we inhale
stimulate the olfactory regions, but they also stimulate the gustatory
areas in back of our mouths. Other evidence of the interrelations of
our senses is shown when, one sense organ being defective, the
others, being used more, seem more keen. If a person is blind and
deaf, the sense of smell may become more discriminating and
hence more useful in the orientation of the individual. Such a per-
son may learn, as Laura Bridgram did, to select by smell her own
clothing from the clothing of a hundred other persons, or to
detect the differences between the recently washed socks of boys
and of girls. -^
In normal adults, "intersensory resemblances," as Charles Harts-
home has shown, ^° seem more typical than do isolated impressions
from any one sense organ. We have already noted that the taste
and the smell of a fresh peach may be closely blended. But that
experience was organically based; the matter goes further. Our
vocabularies themselves reveal two explanations of intersensory
resemblances:
I. When we speak of "high" or "low" pitched sounds, or of the
soaring, thin notes of the flute, we are translating perceptions of
sound into vocabularies of anatomical and tactual experiences.
When we speak of the "brightness" of high-pitched sounds, we
refer to an intersensory analogy of the eye and the ear. When we
speak of the "loudness" of certain colors or color combinations we
are transferring the negative prestige value of talking in a loud
voice in a "refined" atmosphere to visual perceptions that are "un-
refined" or in "bad taste." By calling it "loud" one means that it is
inappropriate. "Bad taste," used in this context, is itself an inter-
sensory analogy of vision and taste. The eye and the tongue, vision
and taste, are related when we speak of the darkness of bitter or
of the brightness of salty. The tactual sense is related to the audi-
tory in "the softness" or the "smoothness" of music. Poets and
novelists are expert at describing colors and smells in terms of
sounds, and sounds in terms of color, odor, or touch. But the matter
2" See M. S. Lamson, T/ie Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgram
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1881).
30 See his The Phihsop]iy and Psychology of Sensation (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1934), pp. 54 and 74. Our account is influenced by this
excellent monograph, although it should be noted diat the position taken
does not at all points coincide with his.
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE 6j
is not reserved to them. Anyone can look at something, and with-
out smelling it say, "It stinks."
II. But there is another view of such intersensory resemblances.
Some psychologists hold that when we experience sweet music or
sugary words, a sweet girl or a sour face, we are experiencing
synesthetically the qualities of sweetness and sourness in manifold
contexts. Thus, when we speak of a "cutting" remark, we do not,
according to this view, transfer inferentially or by analogy the
quality of cutting or sharpness from a knife to another context;
nor do we transfer by analogy from taste to ear when speaking
of a "bitter" tone or inflection of voice. Rather, the qualities of
sharpness or of bitterness are directly available to us in diverse
fields of experience. High life and "high-mindedness," "low think-
ing" and "base" feelings are in their contexts perceived qualities,
just as is the "high" soprano voice or the "low" basso.
For the purposes of the social psychologist, it does not seem
urgent that we commit ourselves to either of these views. Both,
especially the second, have been elaborated on in a rich series of
monographic work in technical psychology ^^ and none of the
inferences or constructions we wish to make rest upon explanations
which go beyond these alternatives.
At any rate, the movement of the human organism differs from
the physical movements of bodies in time and space. For, due to
our body build, the forward position of our eyes and of our gait,
as well as our upright postme, we experience our spatial world in
terms of forward and backward, of high and low, of left and
right. These dimensions have qualitative properties which differ
from the purely quantitative dimensions of the physico-mathemat-
ical space.^-
31 \\p refer to the work of Wertheimer, Kohler, KofFka, and Lewin. See
W. D. Ellis, Source Book in Gestalt Psychology (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1938).
3- Cf. Jerome S. Bruner and Cecile C. Goodman, "Value and Need as
Organizing Factors in Perception," in Readings in Social Psychology, Newcomb,
Hartley, et ah, eds. (New York: Holt, 1947), pp. 99-108; M. Sherif, "A
Study of Some Social Factors in Perception," Arch. Psychol., No. 187, 1935;
J. Piaget, Language and Thought of the Child (London: Routledge, 1948);
L. Postman and J. S. Bruner, "The Reliability of Constant Errors in Psycho-
physical Measurement," Journal of Psychology, 1946, XXI, pp. 293-299; A. I.
Hallowell, "Cultural Factors in the Structuralization of Perception," in Social
Psychology at the Crossroads, John H. Rohrer and Muzafer Sherif, eds. (New
York: Harper, 1951), pp. 164-95; and Robert R. Blake and Glen V. Ramsey,
Perception: An Approach to Personality (New York: Ronald Press, 1951).
68 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
Each of our sense organs contributes in its own way to our
articulation of our own organism in space and time. As we know
from studies of the bHnd and the deaf, the experience of space that
is mediated through our eyes differs from that mediated exclusively
through our ears. "The normal" way of locating our organisms in
space and time is a complex integrative process of diverse sense
experiences. Blind persons who learn to see have to reconstruct the
experience of their own bodies, because the visual experience added
to their previous tactile and acoustic orientations demands a new
and more complex integration of perceptions. Similarly, unless we
deliberately control our selves, we will not "naturally" walk in a
straight but rather in a slightly curved line; our "rhythmic" experi-
ences and activities (our gait, for example) will have more to do
with the nonmetric regularities of the heartbeat and the blood
pulsation, than with the chronometric exactitude of the pendulum
stroke. The rhythm of language and of music is not identical with
the metronomic "beat."
5. The Interrelations of the Psychic Structure
To understand how impressions are organized into perceptions
we have to understand the interrelations of all elements of the
psychic structure, for perception and feeling and impulse may be
so closely linked that in the active experiences of each of them
there is an element of the others.
By an act of attention, we connect our perceptions with our
impulses. What we see is connected with what we want to see,
and we tend to overlook what we dislike to see, or what is irrelevant
for us. If we are beset by an impulsive need, we often dream
the image of the object required for its fulfillment. We may see it
in everything, as a man dying of thirst sees water everywhere ini
the desert. "All things look yellow to the jaundiced eye." Suchi
mirages or hallucinations induced by our bodily deprivations are
a subtle part of our waking lives. In a child the impulse of the
moment will determine his action, his feeling, and even his per-
ception of various objects. With a sudden change of impulse and I
feeling he will react quite differently to the same objects. His
focus of perception will shift and race about as his impulse activities
change. Feeling tone will lead us to see or hear the "brighter" or
the "-darker" side of things. The unpremeditated emotional effects
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE 6q
that are socially trained into a person will determine his gestures
and other conduct when he perceives a combination ot colors in a
flag or hears a national anthem.
Perceptions often have affective significance. The feeling tones
of colors, sounds, and odors are imputed to them by virtue of the
feelings which we typically have when we perceive them."*^ Thus
we speak of the gaiety of yellow, the aggressiveness of red, the
coolness of green, the distance of blue— or blue moods, hot scarlet,
warm orange, and the melancholy of deep purple.
In live experiences not only visions but sounds seem to embody
feeling tones: "There is the stillness of a city street at three a.m.,
the stillness of a Sunday, the startling quietness of the country
after alighting from a train, or the muffling of sounds with a fall
of snow. In each of these the stimulus is the same, a contrast, a
lack of noise." ^"^ Yet each of these lack-of-sounds feels differently:
we have linked different feelings and activities to each of them,
and our psychic structure responds in a unity with the perceptions.
The interrelations of feelings, impulses, and impressions in the
psychic structure form dynamic trends. The linkages of feelings
with perceptions are parts of trends which involve expressive and
purposive action within social relations. Impressions received from
the various senses are fused with other features of the psychic
structure— and they are linked with the social purposes of the per-
son.
Just as our bodily postiu'es are trained so that we can better see,
hear, or smell different things, so are our senses trained by social
directives and personal expectations. Since perception is linked to
the values and norms incorporated by the person, the commands
which literally direct a person's focus of attention tell him what
to look for in a given field of perception. He will single this out
and organize the field around it; the social trainings of his pur-
poses and interests sensitize his view of the world. A carpenter per-
ceives a different house than does its prospective owner; he looks
33 On the affective significance of perceptions, see Charles Hartshome, op.
cit., where he discusses these experiences under the term "affective continuum."
The primary connection of sensing and feeling was suggested by C. S. Pierce
who pointed out that both may in\'oh'e relatixely simple unit qualities; pur-
pose, in contrast, is dual: we strive against something. See C. S. Pierce, Col-
lected Papers, Vol. I, Book 3.
3^ J. T. MacCurdy, The Psychology of Emotion (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1925), p. 52.
JO CHARACTER STRUCTURE
for those features of the house which will guide his construction
work, while the owner sees an image of his finished house born
of liis desires and expectations.
What we see and hear and smell today, determined in small or
larger part as it l§~by our social context and personal expectations,
helps determine what we see and hear and smell in the future.
The world we experience is in no small degree determined by our
past experiences and future expectations, which form a "frame of
reference" or "apperceptive mass," as it has been called.^^ Because
of this, man cannot be said to receive passively the world of sensa-
tions; he is an active determiner of what he perceives and experi-
ences. For not only his sense organs but his apperceptive mass, with
its social organization of feelings and impulses, is part of his per-
ception. In this sense, man as a person constructs the world that
he perceives, and this construction is a social act.
Although they all have the same kind of sense organs biologi-
cally, people in different societies perceive things differently. Those
who live on great plains develop visual capacities which inhabitants
of Paris may not possess. Writes de Poncins: "I strained and,
strained and saw nothing until one of the Eskimos pointed with his
whip and rather against my will I agreed that I saw what he saw'.
Soon what he saw became for me something as big as a pin-head;
in a quarter hour the pin-heads were fly-specks; and in the end I
could see that the fly-specks were in truth a camp." '^^
Expertness at fulfilling some role often involves psychic training;
it involves learning what to look for as well as the meaning of
what is seen. To one unaccustomed to an Eskimo trail, it seems
that "nothing happens," yet for those who have long been on the
trail, there is always work to be done. Every perception suggests
something to do: "Watch the dog! She is getting ready to squat
and stop, and if she does, give her the whip as the sled passes her
(for her lead is long enough to allow the passage of the sled).
Mind that stone! If the runner strikes it, the coating of ice may
break . . ." ^'^
Moral and social taboos, as well as interests and skills, patterni
^^ Grace De Laguna, Speech: Its Function and Development (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1927).
•*^ Gontran de Poncins and Levi'is Galantiere, Kahloona (New York: Reynali
and Hitchcock, 1941), pp. 297-98.
^■' Ibid., p. 55.
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE /I
our perceptions. If the members of a group believe that children
should not resemble certain relatives, it is unlikely that within
the group any such resemblances will ever be remarked. The
Trobriander, Malinowski has indicated, will not see resemblances
between female parent and children, nor between two brothers.
These resemblances are taboo and it is an insult to say that .they
exist."'' These social norms may, in time, be internalized and
actually block out the perception of resemblances. Proud mothers
in American society will "see resemblances " between their offspring
and themselves where the uninterested onlooker will merely see
another infant. What- we expect to sec and what we should not
see are selected and patterned 1)\ the yarioits social norms that
we liave intt'niali/x'd.
Of all our social acquisitions, perhaps our vocabulary is most di-
rectly geared to our perceptions. Our perception is organized in
terms of symbols, and our vocabularies influence the perceptions
to which we are sensitive. The classifications we learn for colors,
for example, enable us to distinguish between them, to pick out
red from pink, lavender from gray. The Eskimo has so elaborated
distinctions in his language that he is able to discriminate between
types of "snow" which to the English or the Chinese seem to be
the same.^** Socially equipped with a color classification different
from that of the West, natives of New Guinea, Margaret Mead
asserts, "see yellow, olive-green, blue-green, grey, and lavender
as variations of one color." ^° And a metropolitan woman, intensely
interested in clothing fashions, can detect that slight difference in
shade of blue which marks the difference between last season's and
this season's style.
"In acquiring the vocabulary of his day," Grace De Laguna has
written, "each adolescent youth is being fitted with a set of vari-
ously colored spectacles through which he is to look at the world
about him, and with whose tints it must inevitably be colored . . .
The lenses we acquire with language are not merely colored, but
38 Bronislaw Malinowski, The Father in Primitive Psychohgy (New York:
Norton, 1927), pp. 87 fF.; and Sex and Repression in Savage Society (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927).
•^3 See Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan,
1927), p. 119 ff.
^" "The Primitive Child," Handbook of Child Psychology, Carl Murchison,
ed. (2d ed., rev.; Worcester: Clark Univ. Press, 1933), p. 638.
J 2 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
blocked out in more or less regular designs, so that the world we
see through them is patternized to our earliest view." ^^
6. The Social Unity of the Psychic Structure
We have not been able to confine our analysis of emotion, pur-
pose, and perception to the organism and the psychic structure.
We ha\e had also to examine the person and the roles and
vocabularies he has acquired, and accordingly, we have had to
discuss many relations between the different features of the char-
acter structure.*"
At this point it is convenient to examine the psychic structure
as a whole with a minimum of attention to the person. Points of
view from which we may hope to observe the operations of the
psychic structure in a relatively autonomous condition include:
I. the child; II. severe organic deprivation; III. social crises, when
" Op. cit., pp. 287, 288-89.
■*- We are able now to make more precise a rather \ague term— tempera-
ment—often used to refer to individuals. We speak of phlegmatic, melancholic,
sanguine, or choleric temperaments. Such characterizations seem to in\olve
two general facts about "the psychic structure": (a) the degree and manner
in which it is socialized, and (b) the constitutional strength of the organism
in so far as this affects the level, speed, and persistence of psychic reaction.
The common denominator of all types of temperament and of temperamental
actions seems to be the level of psychic reactivity. If it is generally high,
emotional and impulsive reactions are quick and spontaneous. To slower paced
individuals, the degree of emotionality experienced and expressed seems to
be disproportionate to the occasion. In contrast to elation, when he is de-
pressed, the individual loses this capacity for spontaneous feeling and impulse.
The level, speed, and persistence of psychic reactivity, in relation to standard-
ized situations, is the basis upon which we gauge and characterize types of
temperament. Although these degrees of reactivity are limited in their speed,
and certainly in their persistence, by the constitutional strength of the organ-
ism, they are also set by the degree to which and the manner in which the
psychic structure is socialized. For it is only in terms of socially expected
reactions to given situations that we can gauge temperament. Thus, if an
emotional reaction to a given situation is disproportionate to the occasion's
conventionally expected reaction, we speak of excitable or of flighty tempera-
ments. If emotion or feeling is less intense than is expected, we speak of mild
or of phlegmatic temperaments. Thus, although temperament involves the
constitution of the organism, it is by no means an innate or wholly organic
feature of the character structure. It is closely related to both organism and
person.
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE y;^
instituted routines collapse; and IV. certain unsocialized aspects of
particular individuals.
I. The psychic structure of the prelingual child has not yet been
integrated with the person. And since its elements are not firmly
integrated with one another, it is highly plastic. The unification of
these elements is not a ready-made affair, but involves a long proc-
ess; both the unification and the socialization of the psychic struc-
ture are major processes of human maturation.^ ■
The psychic structure of the infant is more quickly translatable
into activity than that of the normal adult. The infant has more
immediate impulses which may be more immediately satisfied. If
he is drowsy and you wake him up, he may begin to scjuall; but
if you adjust his thumb back in his mouth he may quickly go to
sleep again. His impulses have a limited range of objects and these
objects easily satisfy. The pushes of impulse result in random
moxements and convulsive grasping at anything placed before him;
if impulse and satisfaction are not tightly and quickly joined, he
is upset. There is little or no poise in the gratification of his im-
pulses, for they are not yet purposive.
Plis perceptions are not focused clearly upon definite objects, so
he is easily distracted. The slightest sound may engage his attention
in another direction. Since definite perceptions are not linked to
impulses, his activities are not only random but they do not carry
through. Stray impressions of sound or sight easily entice him, and
his impressions of one thing are not linked to his impressions of
another; impressions are not patterned into meaningful perceptions.
He cannot see what is coming up. Perceptions of taste, for in-
stance, may dominate the entire animal infant. A stick of candy
will be slobbered over and bitten at with eager impulsive motions
and gestures. When you take it from him, he will squall, with
his mouth open and drooling, eager to engulf it again in an infant
frenzy.
The reactivity of the infant's psychic structure is high, random,
and very responsive. Since its various elements are not integrated
into unities, its feelings, impressions, and impulses are not linked
firmly with one another. It is, in short, not yet internally co-
*3 See Chapter VI: Biography and Types of Childhood, Section 2: The
Psychic Structure.
74 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
ordinated, nor linked with activities, and much less with the per-
son.
Bodily discomfort is not yet a sign for the motor apparatus to
move into another position. All the baby can do is cry and maybe
wriggle at random a little. That is what we mean when we say he
is "so helpless."
The unification of impulse, feeling, and impression into a psychic
structure occurs before the child has acquired language, by means
of the interrelations of the various senses. An infant, or an adult
for that matter, cannot visually perceive all the parts of his body.
Usually he cannot hear his own heartbeat nor, without mirrors,
see the middle of his back. Nor can he hear the beat of his own
pulse. But what is not available through one sense organ may be
experienced through another: not being able to see his rearward
portions the individual can touch them with his hands and thus
finding them to be round can see the image. Out of the feeling-
awareness an image of the body develops.
Of many feelings and parts of his body the individual has access
in two or more ways: he can feel his toe wiggle and he can see
it wiggle. Just as he learns his motor capacity— what he can do with
his arms and legs and trunk, through feeling them in action— so
he can learn by vision, by seeing distances between what he grasps
for and what he actually grasps. By the consequences of various
bodily movements upon his feelings, he learns and his movements
are integrated. The sight of his toes wriggling may become a sign
to him for the bodily feeling which usually accompanies this sight.
Thus a network of intersensory signs is set up.
The feeling-states which are consequences of various action also
operate as signs. Through the systems of such signs the infant in-
dividual's psychic structure becomes unified. Impulses are linked
with positive and negative feeling-states in the early history of the
organism. The range of the infant's feeling-states, which follow
from acting out various impulses, is probably set by and limited
to the motor experiments which he has made.
Just as impulses are steered and limited by the circle of the
baby's feeling-states, so is the horizon of his perceptions. Bright
colors may feel gay to the baby, dark shades feel threatening. The
positive and negative feeling-states accompanying acts of percep-
tion are circumscribed by the ranges of the stimuli, especially by
the thresholds of sense perceptions and the "saturation points" of
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE "/^
the organism; after a certain point what was "sweet" becomes
"gaga." The increased sphere of a child's perception is steered by
the hmitations which the accompanying feehngs set up.
Gradually, habituated feelings channel impulses and impressions
into aversions and likings; the world is learned and divided into
things for which to grasp and things from which to draw away. If
impression, feeling, impulse, and motor behavior are linked and
habituated into a positive unit, a channel of action is set up and
we may expect a willful repetition of the unit. As it is repeated,
sometimes over and over again, the psychic structure of the baby
is being set into a "dynamic trend." Such repetitions, often rhythmic
in the child, form patterns of impulse, impression, and feeling as a
unit and as a part of a locomotion: they are often experienced as
pleasure. And they are, in fact, the beginnings of play; for play
begins when the baby beats his hands together regularly, or when
he utters rhythmic noises.
Learning is anchored in the feelings and impressions which are
both prerequisites and consequences of actions. We learn to ex-
perience our self as an organized and mobile unit in opposition to
inviting and challenging features of the environment. The realities
of the world and the capacities of our own bodies are learned
together; both come to us in terms of resistance and mastery, limi-
tation and capacity. We get an image of what can be done with
our organic equipment by learning what can't be done and some-
times suffering from the consequences of trying.
II. In severe organic deprivation the impulse that is deprived of
an object of gratification may temporarily dominate and shape the
entire psychic structure. It may even operate autonomously, casting
off the social inhibitions, patterning, and pose of the person. Thus,
feelings of hunger, as we have seen, are intrabody signals that the
stomach is contracted for ingestion. When we eat, gastric juices
begin to flow and the feelings disappear. Eventually, if we fail to
eat, this state of deprivation may dominate not only our bodily
feelings but the entire field of our external perception. We will
see and smell food everywhere as we walk about the city; all
people may begin to look plump to us. We see objects that would
satisfy the deprived impulse. Eventually, we may invent sights and
sounds and smells; in sleeping, if we can, we may dream of suc-
culent foods or even scraps of edible objects. Our experience, in all
y6 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
its phases, night and day, is dominated by the deprivation. In
many ways, we are Hke the child, who does not have a unified
psychic structure under the control of the person.
The norms which have been internalized and which have con-
trolled the psychic impulses and regulated their operation may
no longer be eflFective. Our pride, our sensitivities to what others
will think, are drastically minimized or eliminated; we may simply
go "all out" to satisfy our want. We will snatch food, eat garbage,
go on the dole. The one deprived element of the psycliic struc-
ture controls our conduct.
To what degree the person may lose control is shown by various
accounts of cannibalism due to starvation. In California in the
winter of 1846-47 a party of pioneers were trapped and isolated
in the Sierra mountains. They were starving. Cannibalism oc-
curred, even between members of the same family. When the sur-
vivors were rescued, one man, having lost the social prohibitions
of the person, was so dominated by the bare psychic structure
that he had apparently come to prefer the flesh of infants to that
of mules, leaving the latter until he had consumed his supply of
the former.**
On the other hand, there is ample evidence that concentration
camp survivors facing extreme situations of mass starvation and
death may regularly share what is to be had and "take it" together.
They have been known to develop intense group solidarity and
friendship, and to invent new codes of conduct to meet the chal-
lenge of traumatizing events, such as transportation to the camp
and induction into its routine. Held together by religious faith or
political conviction, the members of such groups jointly resist all
attempts to strip them of man's natiire as a "political animal," and
reduce them by twentieth-century techniques to Hobbesian wolves.
The available evidence of survivors strongly suggests that the
chances for survival in the extreme situations of the concentration
camp universe were greater for the socially attached person than
the competitive lone wolf.
During prolonged sexual deprivation, a domination of the emo-
tions, perceptions, and social incorporations of the person may
4* For documentation on the Donner party, see C. F. McGlashan, History
of the Donner Party (San Francisco: Bancroft, 1881) (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1940), especially pp. 88, 106, 129, 211 ; see also Quinn Thronton,
Oregon and California in 1848 (New York, 1848), Vol. II.
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE //
occur. The whole environment and most bodily feehngs become
sexuahzed. All the members of the opposite sex, regardless of their
condition, look attractive, for their attractiveness is linked with
deprivation. Conventional ways of winning the erotical partner
may give way to bold aggression and physical coercion. In such
deprived states, the sexual object to which the sexual aim is socially
directed may be replaced by another, which may be a member of
his own sex, or it may be himself. Every touch of his hand upon
his own body may excite him sexually. In the prolonged absence
of the socialized object the impulse of sex thus shifts its aim and
tries to achieve another target. On the other hand, religiously mo-
tivated asceticism may condition celibate life to the point where
sexual stimuli, objects, and impulses shrink and wither away.
III. In crises of institutional orders, as during a peasant revolu-
tion, when suppressed feelings of anger and aggressive impulses
toward the landlord flame into cruel action, the social steering and
traditional controls of the person may become ineffective, indeed,
quite swept away. Peasants seem more likely to revolt when the
lord is not present in person, that is, under conditions of absentee
landlordism. The atmosphere of prestige and power which sur-
rounds the lord is probably too strong an anchor of dutiful conduct
for the repressed anger and aggression to be released directly
upon him. His presence enforces the social roles which the peasant
must enact; but in his absence, inhibitions collapse and repressions
are removed.
During the enthusiastic phase of mass movements there may
occur a mass transformation of character structures. Hitherto un-
socialized and repressed psychic impulses may emerge on the field
of social conduct. New norms are incorporated as new obligations,
as features of a new duty and conscience, thus forming a stabiliza-
tion and integration of character in terms of the new conduct pat-
terns. Changes in the objective social structure are paralleled by
changes in what psychic elements are accentuated in the character
structures of man.*^
IV. It should not jje supposed that all the elements of the "nor-
mal" adult's psychic structure are socialized in terms of approved
•15 See Chapter XV: Collecti\e Beha\ior, Section 2: Aggregates, Crowds and
Publics; and Section 4: Rexolution and Counterrex olution.
j8 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
social roles. Various impulses and feelings which have been set
into a psychic structure, perhaps before the emergence of the per-
son, may not have become institutionalized, and cannot be socially
placed in the roles available to the person. The steering process
provided by role incorporations and social conditioning may not
take care of all that there is in man; that is, the person's roles may
not include all that is involved in his psychic structure. Through
its specific systems of premiums and taboos, approbations and dis-
approvals, the social context may rule out the display of some fea-
tures of the psychic structures of some persons.
Due weight must be given to that in man which institutions do
not "place." To the conservative such impulses and darker emo-
tions usually appear as destructive of organized social conduct.
But they may also be viewed as the conditions of new beginnings
in social organization and in man himself. These elements, upon
which society places no premium, or places a negative premium,
form the psychic stuff covered by the term "repression."
Now impulses, when they are socially disapproved, may not
have become linked with social objects and roles. The emotion
which wells up within us and for which we have no vocabulary
nor outlet in conduct may form an extraconscious or an uncon-
scious part of our character.*^ Nevertheless, such forces may influ-
ence our conduct. Blocked at one outlet, psychic elements may be
directed through another; hatred and aggression toward economic
and social superiors may enter into a man's cruel conduct toward
his wife and children.
An easy socialization of impulses requires that their outlet be
ordered in time and with reference to certain occasions. Thus,
among their institutions most societies provide special occasions
for the release of psychic elements not otherwise placed. Mass
sports may thus be seen as a vicarious discharge of latent aggres-
sion, as well as a feeder of it. In other contexts, such aggression
may come out in mass political rallies. But whether in sports or in
politics, the expression of the latent aggression is socially chan-
neled. By being released in these special ways, the psychic struc-
ture, experiencing catharsis, is relieved of otherwise unplaced im-
pulses. The deflection of such mass emotions through the scape-
^'^ For problems of the "unconscious," see Chapter V: The Sociology of
Motivation, Section 4: Awareness of Motives.
ORGANISM AND PSYCHIC STRUCTURE yg
goat mechanism or through warfare waged by tottering regimes
has frequently been noted.
In discussing how the various elements of the psychic struc-
ture are rooted in the organism, we have found it necessary also
to discuss the person and the society in which he lives. The organic
features of men— individual or racial— do not in themselves enable
us to explain man's psychic traits; in fact, we cannot adequately
define psychic traits without reference to the social milieus and
trainings of the person. This is not, of course, to say that the or-
ganism is not relevant to the development of psychic traits as well
as of the person; it is to say that the organism is relevant only
within the meanings assigned it in the roles men play.
Our undefined impulses are defined by goals that are socially
acquired. Our perception is decisively conditioned by the social
organization of our organic sensations in accordance with accepted
symbols and vocabularies. And our feelings are socially transformed
into the emotions of the developing child. We recognize such emo-
tions by the gestures that are socially associated with them. Dif-
ferent societies and different social units have their verbal and ges-
tural vocabularies of emotions which define approved feeling
states: the emotions that individuals feel on given occasions are
often socially stereotyped.
The development of the psychic structure— of impulse, percep-
tion, and emotion— thus involves the social roles that the person
acquires and enacts. But in order to view the organization of the
psychic structure with a minimum of social complication, we have
examined it in the child, in severe organic deprivation, in social
crisis, and in certain unsocialized areas of individual development.
And, among other things, we have found out that nothing we can
learn of the naked psychic structure necessarily enables us to un-
derstand the conduct of the person; that, in fact, we must interpret
the psychic structure within the larger frame provided by the char-
acter structure as a whole.
CHAPTER
I V
The Person
IN discussing the psychic integration of emotion, impulse, and
perception, we found it necessary to consider man as a person as
well as man as an animal organism. The conception of the psychic
structure is closely linked to that of the person, and the person as
such, in turn, is predominantly a creature of interpersonal situa-
.tions. Indeed, this integration of person with others— that is to say,
/the roles that persons play— is the key to the understanding of the
' I concept ^- the jgerson is composed of the combination of roles that
\he enacts..
Awareness, or consciousness, is a reference to the field of our
experiences at any given waking moment; it is what we are aware
of. Thus we may experience a crowd of people, or a forest of trees;
or we may experience a certain body tone, a diffuse feeling of
tiredness, the localized pangs of hunger, or a knife cutting our left
hand. To be conscious of external events in just the way that we
are, requires an organism with certain kinds of sense organs; the
anatomy and physiology of these organs are as necessary for our
consciousness of a brown dog as is the dog as a brovvTi physical
thing. Anyone who is equipped with the appropriate kind of eyes
can be aware of the dog. But awareness of our toothache, hunger
pangs, or body tone of buoyancy is restricted to each of us individ-
ually. Yet, our awareness of external and of internal events, is pri-
marily rooted in the organism and the psychic structure.
In seZ/-consciousness, or *e//-awareness, however, the person is
also involved. Although our bodily feelings and our awareness of
our toes, hands, and noses are involved in our image of self, or at
least often color it with feelings and sensitivities, our total self-
4 image involves our relations to other persons and their appraisals
of us.
THEPERSON 8l
1. Language, Role, Person
-*^he use of language is the most important mechanism of inter-
personal conduct, and the major source of knowledge of our selves. -
The speech apparatus of the organism is a necessary condition
for the acquisition and use of language. As an organism, man can
make a wider variety of articulate noises than any other animal.
Moreover, he can control his noises, varying them according to
tone, pitch, percussion, inflection, and intervening silences; he can
gurgle, goo, squeak, and grunt in a wonderfully flexible manner.
From this wide variety of sounds, certain patterns of articulate
sounds are selected and socially fixed as units with definite mean-
ings. Strictly speaking, there are no "organs of speech"; rather, as
Edward Sapir put it, there are "organs that are incidentally useful
in the production of speech sounds." ^ The controlled sounds of
speech require delicate co-ordinations of an elaborate muscle and
nervous structure; they involve the teeth, tongue and lips, the
larynx and the lungs, as well as the auditory senses.
Yet these organic conditions are not sufficient for human speech.
The human organism isolated from all other human beings probably
would not develop intelligible speech, even though it had all the
organically required equipment.
All men are biologically similar in their speech equipment, yet
they learn variously to speak Chinese, Portuguese, Brooklynese, or
English, according to which is spoken in the community in which
they grow up. No doubt the larynx of a North Chinese peasant is
not very different from the larynx of an East End Londoner, but
the language they come to understand and use is quite diflFerent.
When we say that the Londoners and the Chinese cannot "under-
stand" the different articulate noises they have respectively learned
to make, we refer to the fact that the sounds which one makes do
not "mean" the same thing to the other. Now, what is meant by
"mean the same thing"?
When a sound which one person utters calls out similar responses
in those who hear it as in those who utter it, then the sound has a
common meaning. It is then, as George Mead terms it, a significant
symbol. When a given symbol means similar things to a group of
persons, we may say that these persons make up a community of
^Language (New York: 1939), pp. 7-9.
82 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
discourse. In general, symbols will mean similar things to this
community in so far as they are used by persons acting in co-ordi-
nation.rif one person interprets a symbol differently than another,
the common behavior in which they are involved may become unco-
ordinated. This mixup of conduct, arising from the symbol's failure
to co-ordinate the actions of two or more persons, will check the
wrong interpretation— that is, the one which is not usual and com-
mon to most of the participants. In this way, the meaning of a
symbol, the response which it typically calls out in various persons,
is kept common.
'^n^ community of discourse thus normally coincides with a com-
inlmity of co-ordinated activities. For tUe prime function of lan-
^guage is to co-ordinate social conduct. J^^ery little truly human
conduct could be successfully performea if for even a single day
we could not speak or understand the speech of others.
Traditional theorists of language have held that the primary
function of language is the "expression" of some "idea," or some
feeling already within the individual. Although it is true that lan-
guage enables the mature person to express ideas and feelings,
modern theorists no longer agree that the prime function of lan-
guage is expressive. It has been found more fruitful to approach
linguistic behavior, not by referring it to prior states or elements
in the psychic structure or even in the person, but by observing its
objective function of co-ordinating social behavior.-
— Language is primarily a system of signs which are responded to
2 The shift in the general approach to language has been summarized by
Edwin Esper in "Language," Handbook of Social Psychology, Carl Murchison,
ed. (2d ed., rev.; Worcester: Clark Univ. Press, 1935). The shift is part
of the larger drift to a sociological psychology, a connection traced by John
F. Markey, The Symbolic Process and Its Integration in Children (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1928). From a philosophical viewpoint, the neatest and
most useful analytic scheme for the study of language is probably C. W.
Morris, Foundations of the Theory of Signs, International Encyclopedia of
Unified Science, Volume 1, No. 2 (Chicago: 1938). Among the many scholars
responsible for the newer viewpoint toward language, see: Grace De Laguna,
Speech: Its Function and Development (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1927); Bronislaw Malinowski, Appendix in Ogden and Richards's, The
Meaning of Meaning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927) and Coral Gardens
and Their Magic (New York: American Book Co., 1935), Vol. H; George H.
Mead, Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1934); and
John Dewey, Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court, 1925), Chapter 4.
y
THEPERSON H^
! by other persons as indicators of the future actions of the person
i speakingrA given symbol can thrs mediate conduct only if it calls
out a similar response in the one as in another, that is, if it has a
common meaning. This point of view toward the function of lan-
guage invites us to pay attention to the social context of language
behavior, for the same sound may have different meanings when
uttered in different contexts.
I Words take on meanings from the other words with which they
/ are associated. The United States Senate has been known to argue
for several days over the insertion of the word "an" in a formal
document.
But the context which lends meaning to words is social and ^
behavioral, as well as linguistic. This is indicated by the meaning-
lessness of words which we hear without being aware of the context
in which they are uttered or written. Most language situations
carry unseen and unspoken references which must be known if
the utterances are to be meaningful. In the case of the Senate de-
bate, the full meaning of the inclusion or omission of "an" may
require an understanding of the connections of various senators
with their respective state organizations, and of pronouncements
previously made by Republican and Democratic party officials.
""A person is composed of an internalization of organized social
roles; language is the mechanism by which these internalizations
occur.' It is the medium in which these roles are organized. Now,
we have 'defined role as a conduct pattern of a person which is j
typically expected by other persons.- It is an expected pattern of
conduct, Xhe roles a person plays thus integrate one segment /
of his total coiiduct with a segment of the conduct of others. And /
this integration of persons, and of the roles they expect of one an- /
other^ occurs by means of language. For it is largely by a language
of vocal gestures that we know what is expected of us. We meet
the expectations of others by calling out in ourselves a response
similar to the response which the other person has called out in/
himself . . . that is, both respond similarly to the same vocal ges-
ture.
When we are learning a new role and do not know what is ex-
pected of us, our correct and incorrect moves are indicated to us
by the approval and disapproval of others. By their vocal expecta-
tions they guide us into the conduct pattern. Various nonvocal ges-
84 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
tures may also guide our performance: The frown and the smile
deter or encourage us. But the vocal gesture is more explicit, for
the gesturer himself is more readily affected by speech than by
any other kind of gesture he can make. We can hear ourselves talk
more easily than we can feel our eyes blink or our foreheads
wrinkle. This means that we can manage the performance of our
'" own roles by our own vocal gestures.
/ ' When we have internalized the vocal gestures^ of others, we
/ have internalized, so to speak, certain key features of an inter-
personal situation. We have taken over into our own person the
I gestures which indicate^to us what others expect and require. And
vthenTwe^^n make certain expectations of ourselves. The expecta-
/tions of others have thus become the self-expectations of a self-
/ steering person. The social control and guidance which the gestures
/ ! of others provide have thus become the basis for self-control— and
VjFor the self-image of the person.]
2. Images of Self
The self-image develops and changes as the person, through his
; social experiences, becomes aware of the expectations and ap-
[ praisals of others. He acts one way, and others reward him with
food, warmth, and attention; he acts in another way and they pun-
ish him with inattention; when he fails to meet their durable ex-
pectations, they deny him satisfaction and give him their disap-
proval. "The approbation of the important person is very valuable,"
Harry Stack Sullivan has written, "since disapprobation denies satis-
faction [psychic structure] and gives anxiety [person], the self
becomes extremely important." ^
If, as a child, the person does not meet the roles expected of
him, he may be faced with two results: (1) Such impulses as impel
him will not be satisfied, for other persons will not cater to his
needs unless he meets the requirements they exact. He is de-
pendent upon these others for nutrition and warmth and other
bodily requirements. (2) He may also, in the course of his experi-
f ence, know anxiety or insecurity, for he is dependent upon others
for approval of himself as a person,
^Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry (Washington: W. A. White Psychiatric
Foundation, 1947).
THEPERSON 8^
As he matures, the person's image of self is taken over from the
images of him which others present to him, by their gestures of
approval and of disapprobation. This general statement, however,
must be qualified in two ways:
I. For the adult, it is more accurate to say that the attitudes
and expectations of others facilitate or restrain the self-image. For
by the time the person is adult, the image of self, although depend-
ent in varying degrees upon the current appraisals of others, is nor-
mally strong enough to exist autonomously. This is possible because
the person has already built his self-image on the basis of a long
sequence of previous appraisals and expectations which others
have presented to him.
The person learns to follow models of conduct which are sug-
gested to him by others; in addition, as he comes to read, he
chooses such models from the store of socially organized memory.
These latter models, as well as those he imagines for himself, may
be at variance with those whom others immediately around him
appraise favorably. His own expectations and appraisals of self
thus acquired may enable him to accept, refract, ignore, or reject
the expectations and appraisals of the current others. Indeed, if
this is not the case, if there is not some autonomy of self-image and
the adult person is completely and immediately dependent for his
own self-image upon what others may currently think of him,
he is considered an inadequate person.* The self-image which we
have at any given time is a reflection of the appraisals of others
as modified by our previously developed self.
* Erich Fronim has aptly called such a person "the automaton": being com-'
pletely dependent upon tlie appraisals of others the person conforms to \
their expectations in a compulsive manner; he does not have "a center in I
himself." Both Fromm and Karen Homey attempt to resolve the problem by I
invoking components of the psychic structure as "tlie real self." This does j
not seem to us an adequate solution: The psychic structure, if it is to operate
in a manner harmonious to a social order, must itself be quite socialized inv
specific directions, even stereotyped in some. The answer to the "fagade self" \
and the "real self" dichotomy is found not by trying to jump past the /
socialized portions of the personality and finding something more "genuine"/
in the psychic or organic "foundations," but by viewing tlie social process om
the self in a longitudinal way, and "finding" a "genuine self' that is buriedj
by later socializations. See Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York:
Farrar & Rinehart, 1941).
86 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
II. The social idea of the self must be qualified in a second
( way: by consideration of who the "others" to whom we respond
\ are. Only the appraisals of those others who are in some way
Significant to the person count for much in the building and main-
tenance of his self-image. In some societies and families "the
mother" is the most significant other to the infant and r'hild, since
she caters most directly to the bodily needs and by her actions
completes the impulsive beginnings of the child's activities. In
such cases, the image which the child has of himself is perhaps at
first the image which his mother has of him. But as the person
grows up, a variety of significant others begins to operate. If we
y know who has been and who is thus significant to the person's
image of self, we know a very great deal about that person.
Three general principles seem important in determining this
selection of significant others:
( 1 ) Cumulative Confirmations. The image of self which a person
already possesses and which he prizes leads him to select and pay
/Attention to those others who confirm this self-image, or who
[ offer him a self-conception which is even more favorable and at-
\ tractive than the one he possesses. This principle leads the person
to ignore, if he can, others who do not appreciate his prized or
aspired-to self-image, or who debunk his image or restrain the
development of it. A circle of friends is typically made up of those
who further, or who at least allow the -ether persons to retain,
their respective- self-images. .As the ancients put it, "The friend
is my other self." One avoids as best he can the enemies of the
self-images one prizes. The cumulative selection of those persons I
who are significant for the self is thus in the direction of confirming ;
persons, and the more he succeeds in limiting his significant others \
to those who thus confirm his prized self-image, the more strongly
he will seek such persons as significant in the future. So there is a
tendency in the biography of the person for a sequence of con-
firming persons to accumulate.
Now if this were the only principle involved in the selection of
significant others, life might perhaps be a happy and spontaneous
affair; but other considerations do interfere with its single action:
^ a person cannot choose all his relationships. The child, for example,
is less selective than the adult of the others to whom he pays at-
tention—which is one reason that children are so easily "hurt."
^Trusting children frequently experience disappointments, rebuffs,
THEPERSON 8y
and slights, until they learn to stem their confident approach with ^
some degree of "shyness^'j If the balance tips in the direction of I
withdrawal, a scale of orientations and traits are observable, from /
reserve through suspicion toward the friendliest guest; anyone '
and anything that is new may become fearsome, until the child is
frequently misunderstood as "insensitive." In fact, he may not
have learned how to deal with the new, and hence be relying upon
total avoidance of all new challenges.
The image of self built up during childhood may thus contain
negative elements so firmly integrated that they are never gotten
rid of. During adolescence in Western societies, the child is "catch-
ing on" to the selection of confirming others as significant, and
this involves the development of sensitivities to little cues which
other persons present and which warn the person whether or not
someone is likely to confirm or to threaten prized self-images.
Between the polar opposites of the fear of always being "left out"
and of "never being left alone," the maturing person seeks to win
and move in his own "elbow room." The adult often sees a man
and immediately "takes a dislike to him." Other persons he imme-
diately likes; they are felt to be "considerate," which means that
they defer to him in the direction of his desired self-image. They
treat him as he would like to be treated: they are confirming
others. But the child may not be so aware of those often unspoken
cues which aid the strategic adult in his selection of significant
others according to the principle of the confirmation of his desired
self-image,
(2) Selection by Position and Career. In the construction and
maintenance of a prized self-image, the selection of significant
others is limited by the institutional position of the person and
by the course of his career from one institutional position to an-
other. This selection is not, of course, a simple mechanical process;
in most positions there are various possibilities. The position of a
nobleman within the status levels of a feudal society in revolt, and
of a factory worker within the occupational hierarchy of modem
capitalism may each be examined in this connection:
A nobleman may be (a) insulated against the harsh and nega-
tive appraisals of serfs or peasants by childhood segregation in
which a strong and exalted self-image was built— an image which
later enables him to deem the peasants' approval and disapproval
as equally irrelevant. Only the judgments oQiis status_peersjcount^__^^
88 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
(b) The noble may interpret the peasants' negative appraisals in
a wholly different way than they are intended. He may have be-
come aware of the peasants' attitudes only from other nobles, and
thus his self may refract and modify the appraisals before they
are incorporated into his self-image. He may, indeed, force the
obedience of the peasants to him, and then interpret their obedient
gestures as confirming and facilitating his honorable image of self.
(c) Under certain conditions, the noble may not be able to stand
the real or imaginary disapprovals of the peasants. He may then
change his own self-image, and the conduct which it involves, so
as to permit kindness to the peasants, which liis previous self-
image permitted only to other nobles. , He thus seeks to modify
their negative appraisals and in the process of doing so, he gets
from their appraisals another image of himself. In turn, he will
y now strive "to live up to it": the line of his confirming other has
shifted, and the strategies employed by him to win such confirma-
tion from persons who become significant have shifted. So did
certain Russian noblemen in the nineteenth century "humble them-
selves," go among the peasants, and, on humanitarian grounds,
seek to co-operate with them politically.
(The class and status positions of a person may thus be restric-
'^ tions upon his selection of significant others, as well as determi-
nants of the degree and kind of significance and of the angles of
refraction which other persons of differing status may possess for
the person of a given status position.
If a factory worker rejects, on ideological or other grounds, the
appraisals of members of the employing class, his image of self
may not directly reflect their appraisals of him. If working-class
parents proudly tell their children tales of how they, and their par-
ents before them, were imprisoned for heroic violence "against the
capitalists and their state apparatus," then upper-class appraisals
are less likely to be positively significant to the construction and
retention of a self-image of the child of the workers. Under such
conditions we may speak of "class consciousness." Such class tradi-
tion and consciousness may be said to have considerable weight
when it restricts to one's own economic class the community of
others who are significant for the self-image.
On the other hand, if the upper classes monopolize the means of
communication and fill the several mass media with the idea that
all those at the bottom are there because they are lazy, unintelli-
THEPERSON 89
gent, and in general inferior, then these appraisals may be taken
over by the poor and used in the building of an image of their
selves. The appraisal of the wealthy, privileged children may then
be internalized by underprivileged children and facilitate negative
self-images. Such images, if impressed early enough and continually
enough by all persons who are significant to these children may
cripple their chances to better their social position and thus ob-
tain economic and social bases for more favorable self-images. An
outstanding example of such restriction in the selection of signifi-
cant others as determined by class and ethnic position is found in
the self-images of many American Negroes.^ If, on the other hand,
the Negro child is able to exclude the appraisals of various public
others, he may build up a more favorable self-image on the social
basis of the more intimate others of his ingroup of fellow Negroes.
It is worth noting that there are several ways in which self-
respect and social respect may be related:
Self-valuation and valuation by others may be in positive agree-
ment. For example, a proud group of rulers may also be admired
by others— the feudal lords of the Middle Ages or the Roman
emperors come to mind.
The self and the other may be in agreement— but negatively;
an inferior group may accept the negative images imposed on it by
their status superiors. All ruling groups seek to impose such senti-
ments upon subject groups. Stereotyped images and unwarranted
generalizations from the worst case, which make him "represent-
fitive" for all, are among the means used to breed inferiority feel-
ings. Exacted deference is another. Thus, the despised serf comes
to think lowly of himself and of his fellows. The slave is despised
as chattel and, being powerless, seeks to hold his own by fraud,
which is despicable to those who esteem only violence.
I Self-respect may be high, but the social esteem of others may
be low. Thus, the posturing of the "misunderstood" or "unknown"
genius and the dictum that the prophet is not known in his own
home town. In such cases, an invented or imaginary other may
be used to compensate for the denial of respect by a public and
thus high self-valuation be maintained. The misunderstood genius
assures himself that "posterity," if not his present colleagues, will
5 See Chapter XI: Stratification and Institutional Orders, Section 5: The
Status Sphere and Personality Types.
go CHARACTER STRUCTURE
surely come to honor and respect him and his work. Behind such
a secularized theology of martyrdom there is often religious imag-
ery of various sorts. Such sentiment may be entirely adequate to the
situation— as it was for Schopenhauer, who published in 1819, but
gained esteem only after 1848; or for Arnold Schonberg whose
works for long years were not fully appreciated. On the other
hand, a mere megalomanic, and hence groundless and spurious,
attitude is also possible.
Finally there are situations in which, despite the great esteem
of others, a man deprecates his own worth, and, in the eyes of his
God he may— as did young Luther— go to extraordinary length in
his sense of humility and his moods of penance.
(3) The Confirming Use of the Intimate Other. Thwarted in his
public search for a confirming other, the person may restrict his
search for confirming others to a few intimate others. Perhaps this
is especially true of persons who occupy inferior institutional posi-
tions, who thus try to build durable, intimate relations with which
to counteract public depreciation. The number of intimate others
may even become drastically restricted and at times become a sole /
significant other. The person may then attempt to derive the image
of his or her self entirely from the appraisals of this one particular "^
/ other. These two withdraw socially: as far as other people are
concerned, they are "in a daze." They integrate themselves in a
situation of intimacy, and together face the broad and alien world
which "does not understand." Fed by the warmth and security of
such intimate closure, they have this larger world at their mercy
and can discuss, debunk, and ignore it. This strategy may be
temporarily successful— and in fact, expected— during certain phases
of adolescence, when many others crowd in upon the person with
new and less favorable appraisals than his family and school have
offered.
Such a condition cannot usually last forever. Nevertheless, in
the modern industrial metropolis in which private and public roles
are rigorously segregated, a certain degree of such exclusion and
refraction of public appraisals by intimate circles, and a more or
less exclusive acceptance of the desired approval of intimate others,
may be integrated into a rather enduring basis for personal images
of self.
^ r These three principles involved in the selection of significant
^ \Qthers may be linked in this way: the social position and career
THEPERSON 9^"^
of the person set limits, more or less broad, for the selection of
significant others. Within these limits, the selection will proceed
in the direction of those others who are believed to confirm the
prized or aspired-to image of self. If the institutional position and
career prohibits the selection of such others from public life, the
quest for such confirmation of self-image by significant others may •
be narrowed down to a sequence of intimate others.
These principles do not, of course, exhaust the determinants
of the process of selection. We shall encounter others, and further
examples of these, in their proper institutional contexts.''' For it is,
in some major part, through the line-up of significant others that
institutions form personalities in often intricate ways.
3. Unities of Self
"It has been said," writes Frank Jones in commenting on the
contemporary painter, Marshall Glasier, "that everyone is three
persons: what he thinks he is, what others think he is, and what he
thinks others think he is. The fourth— what he really is— is un-
known; perhaps it doesn't exist." ' ^^ a
If a man is what he thinks he is, his image of himself has a '
controlling function: he shapes himself in terms of his own self- .
image. But others may hold diverse images of a man, according
to their own perspectives and roles. Both hatred and love may lead
to exaggerated emphasis upon despicable or upon lovable features.
The fighting caricaturist and the build-up specialist, like the dis-
illusioned lover and the adoring lover, know this well. There are
as many images of us in circulation as there are people who take
note of our past, our present, or_our potential relevance for their
own actions_and expectations. Some of these images may be of
no concern to us— we may not even know of them; others we may
"overlook" as irrelevant. Or a series of images may be known to us,
and may matter to us in quite varying extents. Our awareness of
the fact that others hold views about us, and our eagerness to be
well thought of by those who matter to us most, naturally influences
6 See Chapter VII: Institutions and Persons, Section i: The Institutional
Selection of Persons; Section 2: The Institutional Formation of Persons; and
Section 3: The Theory of Premiums and Traits of Character.
^ Reed College Brochure, 1952.
Q2 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
J our behavior; and that is why to quite some extent we are what
"others think of us."
But we are also to some extent what we think others think of
' L, us. For often there is a difference between what we think others
/ think of us and what they actually do think. The entire machinery
of "conventional lies" and "tactful proprieties"— along with the fact
that most people do not feel any particular incentive to "tell the
truth" to others— allows for a considerable, and often a typical,
disparity between what people actually tliink of us and what they
allow us to know of their true opinion. "Flattery," as we all know,
is widespread in a society where people crave to be "popular.^ , ,
Consider some of the ways by which other persons may have
gotten the image of us which they hold : ( i ) Other people may
get an image of us in terms of the role we play in a given stratum
or group. Thus, no matter what other roles he may have played
or may currently be playing, an American Negro is often viewed
as a Negro. The image held of the person's self is based on experi-
ence with him only as a member of some social category, and no
other aspect of the self which may exist outside this segmental
role is considered. (2) Another person may "make allowances" or
modify his image of us in terms of the manner in which we play
some role. Variation in our enactment of even the most stereotyped
role often results in another's calling us a "very intelligent Negro,"
or in our having some personal characteristics which lifts us out
of the segmental role of the Negro. (3) Others may experience us
in an intimate situation and build their image of us as we present
it in this situation. We sometimes tend to believe that those with
whom we are intimate accept our self-image, but this may be very
far from the case! The concept of intimacy has to be handled
with care. Mere intimacy does not guarantee that we know an-
other's image of his or her self: There are many ways in which
we can let our hair down, and we may appear differently in each.
Two persons can integrate their selves in a most intimate— and
quite false— manner; indeed, quick and mutual acceptance of
^ presented or stylized selves, or of aspired-to selves, may be a
\_ requirement for certain kinds of intimacy.
We can have an adequate image of ourselves and it can be
shared by our friends; but we can also share with them a false
image of ourselves and tlius be self-deceived hypocrites. Then
again, we can have a true image of ourselves which is rejected by
THE P E R S OTSI — ■ g3
our friends— and thus be the misunderstood woman, the unknown
genius or prophet. Finally, we can have a false image of ourselves
which is^ rejected by our friends: we deceive ourselves but not
other^
At any rate, the scale of impersonal, personal, and intimate does
not seem to provide us with an adequate basis for predicting the
chances of one person to know the self-image of another., The self-
image we hold and the image we present to others are complicated
by the appraisals of significant others with whom we are currently
integrated, and by such appraisals as have carried over from our
previous integration. A total view of even the presented images
to current others would require us to tag along with a person and
observe the selves he presents in all the situations in which he is
integrated with other persons. But even if we had access to every
image the person presented in every one of his relations, we would
still have to choose which of these segmental roles in which the
self is presented is the one most likely to coincide with "the genuine
self-image," if any, held by the person himself.
The question of what really lies beyond all the imagery of self
and of others, of what the individual really is— clearly that is one
of the great puzzles of man. So the Buddhist pronounces his tat
tvam asi, "Man become who you are"; so Socrates finds it a hard
task for man "to know himself"; and so Nietzsche proclaims "Man
is most remote from himself."
At any rate, we do know that in some situations the image a
person holds of himself is more or less integrated with the images
which significant others hold of him. The image of self which he
presents to others and which he is trying to have them accept or
confirm is identical with the image to which he aspires. In other
situations, there may be great differences between self-image, pre-
sented image, and aspired-to image.
Such difi'erences and similarities, though they often arise in the
direct experience of the person, are determined by sociological con-
ditions. We may attempt to systematize those varied conditions
under which the difi^erent images coincide; and those under which
they may collide.
To know another's self-image we have to study the others who ^
are significant to him. It is convenient to refer to the circle of
current significant others as "the position" of the person, and to L^
refer to the sequence of previous significant others as "theyareer"
g^ CHARACTER STRUCTURE
of the person.* These terms enable us to simplify our terminology.
With them— "position" and "career"— we knit interpersonal situa-
tions into social structures. For these concepts help us to locate
types of persons within social structures.
Unity of self, occurring when all the images of self held by_
the person and by others coincide, will most likely occur when
the position and the career of the person is composed of significant
others who are harmonious in their appraisals and expectations.
In a society where roles are stereotyped and each man "knows
his place," as do others, there is not much chance for differences
to arise between self-images and the images others hold of hirnT]
The techniques of self-presentation, the problem of what others
really think of us, and the possible differences between what they
say to others about us and what they say to us, all compared with
what they really think of us, do not arise. In such a society, the
changing self-images which occur along the career are fairly well
set,^and hence calculable. The roles which different age groups are
\ '. (expected to play are well known by all significant others and are
0 adhered to traditionally. So previous self-images do not conflict
\^ but blend with later self-images, just as the expectations and
appraisals of others smoothly shift as the person passes through
stereotyped stages of his career. Aspiration is also traditionally
stereotyped, publicized, and accepted by everyone as appropriate;
indeed, there is no alternative available. Both the self and all
significant others know what the person would like to be at the
next juncture, and what, under optimum conditions, he probably
will be.
The type of society in which we may imagine various images
of self to conflict is characterized by the fact that both the position
and the career of the person involves conflicting expectations and
appraisals by persons who are significant to him.
In such a society, according to the principle of the confirming
other, persons will present themselves in one way to one set of
persons and in another way to another set. The ways in which the
person presents his self will vary according to what he believes
these various others think of him. In general, his style of self-
presentation will be a bridge from the image of self which he
s See Chapter VI: Biography and Types of Childhood.
THEPERSON 95
believes others hold of him and the self-image he would like to
have them confirm.
If he has the power, like the nobleman discussed above, the
person may force others to defer to the image of his self which
he desires, and then interpret their deference as a confirmation of
this image. If he does not have the power and is not certain that
someone accepts the image he wishes to publicize, he may run
little tests, or have third persons spy for him in order to find out
if his presented self has been accepted.
Hypocrisy and posing— the stylization of self-presentations— are
the results of the status-ridden man's frantic attempt to get others
to confirm his self-image in a society in which there is no common
career pattern, no harmony in the shifting expectations and ap-
praisals by others. Diversity of ascent and aspiration is thus pos- '
sible; there is freedom to choose occupational roles and intimate
others; there are many and often conflicting alternatives. People
learn to feel that certain others would never accept the stylization
of self to which they aspire, and so they refrain from presenting,
it, lest laughter hurt the image. In short, pri\ate persons go in
for "public relations."^ "
4. Generalized Others
The attitudes of significant others toward the person leave their
mark upon his self-image; they form a residue from social experi-
ence which he may re-experience and use in evaluating his own
self-image; when thus internalized, they form his "generalized
other."
The experience of this generalized other— the experience of
"conscience"— is not the experience of a self-image; it is the experi-
ence of the appraisals of others who are not immediately present,
but who, nevertheless, restrain or facilitate our own appraisals and J
images of our self.
Significant others, as we have remarked, are those to whom the
person pays attention and whose appraisals are reflected in his
self-appraisals; authoritative others are significant others ^hose^
appraisals sanction actions and desires. The generalized other is
composed of an integration of the appraisals and values of the
significant, and especially the authoritative, others of the person.
96 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
The generalized other of any given person does not necessarily
represent the "entire community" or "the society," but only .those
who have been or who are significant to him." And some of those
who have been significant others may not operate in the gen-
eralized other, but may have been excluded from awareness— a
fact that is in line with the principle of selecting as significant those
others who confirm the desired image of self.
The content of a person's generalized other generally depends
upon the normative attitudes of "the society" only as these attitudes^
have be^n selected anr) ref ranted _by those who have been and. who
are authoritatively significant to the person. Accordingly, persons
who have moved along different career lines will accordingly feel
quite diff^erent "pangs of conscience" in regard to given actions.
And, on the other hand, persons who have occupied similar insti-
tutional positions will have similar generalized others. ^°
Both Sigmund Freud and Max Weber have attempted to ex-
plain the rise of conscience. Freud believed that the primordial
parricide by the "brother horde" was the fateful event leading to
religion and morality, to law and guilt feelings. Despite the in-
9 This term, generalized other, is an invention of the late G. H. Mead.
Our use of the term differs from Mead's in one crucial respect: we do not
believe that the generalized other necessarily incorporates "the whole society."
It may stand for selected societal segments. See George Herbert Mead, op.
cit., pp. 154 ff. For a preliminary statement of our use of the term see
Mills, "Language, Logic, and Culture," American Sociological Review, Vol.
IV, No. 5 (October 1939), p. 672, footnote 12. Abram Kardiner, working with
a modified version of Freud's concept of the superego, has made several
very provocative remarks concerning the relativity of what we here call
the generalized other to certain social relations bearing on the child; see
his The Individual and His Society (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939),
pp. 74, 124, 130, 134.
1° We may express the jjosition of some Freudians by saying that they
restrict the significant others who by their appraisals deposit a generahzed
other (or "superego") to one or two persons, and locate these influences in
the childhood phase of the career of the person. The generalized other is
thus believed to be composed of the forbidding or authoritarian parent. See
Chapters IV and V on the temijoral autonomy of motives, self-images, and
generalized other. Freud's own position excluded such bases of the superego
as we are considering. Only when social influences remain "properly within
its assigned realm . . . [and] follows the path sketched for it by the organic
determinant" are they to be considered. See Freud, "Three Contributions to
the Theory of Sex," in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, A. A. Brill, tr.
and ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1938).
THEPERSON 9/
formed criticisms of anthropologists and historians, Freud did not
modify this view.
Max Weber sought to trace the rise of conscience in the history
of ancient Judaism and in the Judeo-Christian tradition. He exam-
ined the ethical and religious compromises of this tradition, its
reformations and revivals, and its sequence of martyrs, saints, and
priests. In his work, Weber highlighted the Torah teachers (the
Levites) and the great scriptural prophets of Jewish antiquity, as
well as the Puritans who, because of their "activist" concerns, in-
fluenced mass behavior in everyday life.^^ To this Western se-
quence, Weber juxtaposed that of the East. There religious elites,
as aristocratic intellectuals in despotically ruled societies, withdrew
to practice apathetic contemplation. These elites failed to shatter
the massive growth of popular magic and to displace it by religious
and ethical systems of action. In other words, for most people in
such societies, the generalized other remained narrowly circum-
scribed by the particular groups— castes or ancestral families— to
which the individual referred himself.
In the generalized other, the appraisals of many particular others
are organized into a pattern. The contributions of any particular
other are fused with the contributions of these various others, and
thus form the generalized other. Accordingly, when the person
performs an act that is out of line with expected norms he may
experience a general disapproval of his self, which means that the
generality of his significant and authoritative others expected an
alternative act. He may not be able to locate and specify just which
other forbids this act, for this particular other has become part of
his generalized other.
If the others who have been most significant to a person have
been very forbidding, the person may be burdened by feelings
of unbearable guilt. In a restricting parental situation he may have
incorporated a generalized other that is too narrow for the require-
ments of the larger institutional world of business and pleasure,
and he may not have been able to integrate the appraisals and
expectations of later others which are more appropriate to his adult
roles. With psychiatric aid the person may be able critically to
review his internal behavior and escape his generalized feelings of
11 See Chapter IX: Institutional Orders and Social Controls, II, Section i:
Religious Institutions.
g8 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
guilt by specifying and recomposing the significance of particular
others within his generalized other. He may be able to add (or
evenTto substitute) the authority of the psychiatrist to his general-
ized other in such a way as to gain genuine independence for ra-
tional determination of self.
As new appraisals are added to older ones, and older ones are
dropped or excluded from awareness, the generalized other nor-
mally changes. Such changes in the composition of the generalized
other may occur as an aspect of the person's growing up or matur-
ing, which we shall discuss in a later chapter; '- or the generalized
other typical of an entire stratum or of an entire society of persons
may change. If, for example, the norms of a society are smashed,
new significant and authoritative others may emerge who define
new values and loyalties, and there is a crisis in every person's
conscience as his authoritarian others change. The person is re-
appraised, and he reappraises himself as well as the selves of others.
Such "crises of conscience " ^'^ have occurred several times in the
course of Western history, for example, in cases of political revolu-
tions and religious revivals and conversions. In fact, crises of this
sort are quite widespread in contemporary society, in connection
with totalitarian parties. Such a recomposing of the content of
generalized others may conceivably be initiated in any area of
society. In political and economic revolutions, the authoritarian
other of public figures and leaders may begin the process of re-
appraisals which gradually spread into other segments of the so-
ciety so that parents and teachers will imbibe them and present
them to the social novice. Or, changes of interpersonal conditions
may force such reappraisals, which will then be transmitted to
public figures and political leaders, so that a revolution in these
institutions may be forced.^*
5. The Social Relativity of the Generalized Other '
V Since the generalized other is relative to those others who have
been and who are significant to a person, any area of the person's
1- See Chapter VI: Biography and Types of Childhood.
1'* This phrase is used by H. D. Lasswell in a lecture reprinted in Public
Opinion and World Politics (Chicago, 1933).
1* We shall examine these processes in Chapter XV: Collective Behavior,
Section 4: Revolution and Counterrevolution.
THEPERSON gg
life may contribute to its content. This is so whether or not their
appraisals have been presented in a sequence of interpersonal
situations, or in various secondary symbols, in movie, play, or book.
""The content of the generalized other changes with shifts in the
person's career and with changes in the norms of those institutions
which the person enacts. -
We may imagine certain sequences of roles in which no gen-
eralized other would be deposited, and, quite apart from such
constructions, there are historical societies in which the generalized
other is so minimized that its effects seem negligible. By inquiring
into the types of condition which bear upon the chances for a strong
and for a weak generalized other to develop, we are able to under-
stand the concept in a more adequately sociological manner: 1
I. The most important of the conditions which favor the chances
for an effective generalized other to emerge are found in the
childhood and adolescent phases of the life history. To consider
the mechanisms involved we must consider both the career of
the person and the maturation of the psychic structure. For the
infant and the child is typically helpless in both zones of his devel-
oping character structure.
The disciplining of the child's impulses by the appraisals of au-
thoritative others may be internalized as expectations by which the
child will come to control his own impulses. Although normally the
psychic structure is socially integrated, its socialization may not
direct all the impulses which are available, and accordingly some
are excluded from the child's awareness. In this case, there might,
in time, be no tension between the psychic structure and person.
But if it is not the case, and authoritative others continue to forbid
the realization of the impulse, the tension between the child's per-
son and his psychic structure may in time lead to the experience
of a repressive generalized other.
/ In terms of this view, we may say: look for a society in which
the impulses of the child are typically allowed free sway, or even
allowed to govern the conduct of others toward him— in such situ-
ations, the chances of a generalized other to develop are minimized,
and the operations of the generalized other that may be deposited
are, in turn, minimized. Or, to put it another way, which carries
us beyond childhood: when the proportion of authoritative others '
100 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
to the total of significant others is high, the chances are increased
for a maximum generahzed other to develop.
lIL^A generalized other arises only with g.eat difficulty when
many contradictory expectations are exacted of the person--for
under such conditions a given performance will be appraised by
one significant or authoritative person quite diflFerently than by
another. When expectations and appraisals thus conflict, the person
may choose between alternatives— or he may reject both. In the
latter case, he may project a new generalized other in the name
of new and wider groups, real or imaginary; or he may withdraw
from the larger society into "criminal" behavior; or, in case of
extreme tensions and value conflicts, into a privatized world of
behavior disorders defined as pathological.
[III. On the other hand, a conscience does involve a degree of
individuation, which in turn requires a detachment from roles, a
distance from the expectations others exact when we play these
roles. Such detachment and individuation come about when there
are conflicting expectations exacted, along the sequence of our
careers and currently among our circles of significant others. Indi-
viduation of the self results from the variety and scope of voluntary
actions which we undertake. It involves the reality of individual
decision and being held responsible for personal choices. ~
Personal or joint "responsibility" exists socially when the indi-
vidual, as an individual or as a member of a group, is held account-
able for his activities, in short, when his acts are ascribed to his
self or his group. In a society where roles are quite stereotyped,
this reality of alternatives, and such conceptions as personal respon-
sibility, may not exist. Only if they do may a person come to
address himself in an attempt to secure "consistency" and unity
of self-image on the basis of self -expectations; There must be an
area of voluntary action, which normally involves the perception
of open alternatives or of conflicting expectations. The chances for
an individual to emerge and to control himself by a generalized
other are decreased as the variety of \oluntary choices and de-
cisions which confront persons diminish.
In a society in which the roles certain persons may play are
consistent, and in which few choices exist, the problem of the
consistency of the self is socially solved. For then no one person
may take it upon himself to achieve an individual integration of
self. But in a society where there are inconsistent expectations
THE PERSON 101
exacted of the person, and hence alternatives oflFered, each person
will have to achieve such consistency and unity of self as he can.
In this process, man is individuated, and this individuation in-
volves the building of a generalized other from the conflicting
expectations of significant others/'
IV. One person may be integrated with another because they
both feel themselves to belong together. -This kind of relationship
may be called "communal." But they may be integrated because
both think that their special interests are facilitated by collabora-
tion—the individual purposes of each are thought to be furthered
by the other, and each thus uses the other. This kind of relationship
may be called "societal." Nations and families, religious orders,
and intimate playgroups are generally communal. Business corpo-
15 The accountability of the indi\ idual refers to the ways in which societies
ascribe responsibility to their members. They may do so ( i ) by ascribing the
acts of the individual to a subcommunity, and holding all of its members
responsible for what any single member does. In such cases, we speak of
"joint responsibility." Thus, an army officer may punish a whole company for
the misconduct of one GI, a school teacher may punish her school class for
the misdeeds of one child, family clans in old Kentucky still engage in tlie
blood feud, that is, punish the family for the behavior of one of its members.
Ancient Jewry felt jointly responsible to angry and jealous Yahweh. It has taken
Western civilization centuries to emancipate the individual from such joint
responsibility. Among the forces involved have been Roman jurisprudence,
canonical law, revolutionary movements of urban middle classes, the cumula-
tive work of professional jurists, academicians and free intellectuals, as weU
as all the individualizing social, intellectual, and economic forces. All these
stand behind (2) a situation in which no son should be punished for the
trespasses of his father, no parent for those of their children, no wife for
those of her husband. Indeed, not persons but specific acts of persons should
be prosecuted under due process of law and punished with pedagogical or
preventive intent rather than in vengeance or annihilative interest.
Much of the history of legal technology in the West is associated with this
interest in ascribing responsibility strictly to the individual, only to acts proven
to be his by due process of law. In many other ways the "crisis" of our
times also means a recession from individual responsibility in favor of joint
responsibility. Peace treaties and their punitive stipulations hold an entire
nation responsible for war. Thus, the Nazis punish families for the political
acts or thoughts of one of its members. During the late war, American-bom
citizens of Japanese descent were placed behind barbed wire. Thus citizens
have to prove their loyalty to authorities, who may discriminate administra-
tively against them as a group, without bothering to prove individual guilt,
and without giving the individual information about, nor occasion for defend-
ing himself against, his civic disability.
102 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
rations and special interest organizations are generally societal.
There may, of course, be elements of each type present in cases
which are placed under the other/ '^
Now, if a society is predominantly composed of communal rela-
tionships, so that interpersonal integrations throughout the person's
career are communal, there is less chance of experiencing a gen-
eralized other than if the careerline contains first communal and,
at a later juncture, societal integrations. The mechanisms at work
in this latter type of biographical sequence are as follows:
The career of the person will at first be composed of significant
others with whom he is integrated communally. Their harmonious
expectations will coincide with his roles, and each person will be
his own end and his own means. The center of the self will thus
coincide with the center of social expectations. But at a later stage
of his career, the person will have to integrate the self so built
with societal others, and in these societal integrations he will have
to use these others— to be sure, under enforceable rules— for his own
purposes; and he, in turn, will also be used by others for their
purposes. Accordingly, there are more chances for conflicts be-
tween others' expectations and the purposes of the self. Out of
the calculations involved in successfully meeting these conflicts, and
out of the differences between the societal integrations and the
previously integrated communal roles, a generalized other may
emerge.
V. All the interpersonal conditions which lower or raise the
chances for a generalized other to develop are themselves facili-
tated or restrained by broader conditions of social structure. When,
for example, the rate of social change is so low that during their
careers the members of one generation are not aware of significant
changes, the career patterns of persons will not significantly change.
Hence, no conflicting expectations arising from changing careers
are experienced. In such stable societies communal relations are
also more likely to prevail.
It is also true that where all persons are on very similar eco-
!'• Community ( Gemeinschaft ) and society ( Gesellschaft ) were invented
as technical terms by F. Tonnies. See his Fundamental Concepts of Sociology,
C. P. Loomis, tr. (New York: American Book Co., 1940). See also the twist
given these concepts by Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic
Organization, A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, trs. (New York: Oxford,
1947), P- 136 ff.
THE PERSON 10^
nomic, political, and social levels, the individual cannot easily
experience the drastic inflation and deflation of self-image involved
in dramatic social ascent and descent. Since all positions involve
similar deference, competition for status position does not exist.
On the other hand, somewhat similar personal consequences, in
terms of our problem, may occur where there is very rigid stratifica-
tion. For if positions are fairly equal (no sigiuficant stratification)
or hereditarily closed and endogamous (rigid stratification), the
careers of all persons are likely to be settled and known. In neither
case is there competition for positions, or status alternatives be-
tween different careerlines. As soon as the person is old enough
to realize, he knows rather precisely what his future will be, and
so does everyone else. Hence, the expectations exacted of him by
various others are homogeneous and coincide with the person's
image of self, realized and aspired to.
But where stratification is steep and open enough to permit
ascent and descent, the chances for the development of a gen-
eralized other are increased. For then there are likely alternatives
between the conflicting expectations of various significant others,
along the different careers open to the person, and confronting him
in the choice of positions for which he may strive. It becomes
necessary to control the strivings for success and to train the
failure to "be a good loser."
When the total society is stable, social change being so slow
that the members of no one generation are aware of it; and when
there are no strata in society or the strata are absolutely rigid and
fixed by level of birth— then the norms of conduct are likely to be
positive, and the approved virtues to be specialized. This occurs
in Indian Hindu society, hereditary castes, or in some periods of
feudal Europe with its legally privileged status groups— its Chris-
tian saints and kings, its lords and gentlemen, its Christian burghers
and peasants down to its honorable prostitutes and Christian hang-
men. There is, thus, little opportimity for any given person to face
the stri\'ings of ascent, the discomforts of descent, or the insecur-
ities either may involve. The image of aspiration coincides with
the image achieved, and in fact, there is little awareness of such
a distinction. Auguste Comte of nineteenth-century France ad-
mired Indian caste society for its excellent integration, cohesion,
and wondrous stability.
104 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
In summary: A strong conscience is likely to emerge when group
controls are continuous, rather than sporadic, and when they ex-
tend over the entire way of life, rather than to only segments of
it. This is most likely to be the case when the group's members
are "up close" to one another in everyday life and hence, as in a
small community, know one another well. It is also likely to be
the case when to belong to the group is prestigeful or otherwise
worthwhile for the member, as it is, for example, for the husband
to be a good provider, or for the businessman to have a good
credit rating. To be "a member in good standing" must be seen
as a competitive task for the person. For example, he may be
admitted only after investigation of his character and his record,
threatened to be excluded for failure to abide by the code. More-
over, he must gain the respect of the group's members by follow-
ing the code in all his roles; that is, the code must be total. In addi-
tion, all his merits and demerits, gained in various roles, should
be ascribed by other group members to the role of the member
in this group; it is his master role which, as it were, co-ordinates
his motives for and his enactment of roles in other social areas.
The collective aspirations of this co-ordinate group, which forms
the frame of reference for the member's strong generalized other,
should be to subject the rest of the world to its standards. Thus,
although it is "exclusive," it must be actively exhortative or at
least exemplary, seeking to extend its jurisdiction or to withdraw
in exemplary perfectionism.
We may thus speculate about typological conditions for the gen-
eralized other, but we do not have available the kind of sensitive
field and clinical observations necessary to discuss the matter in
full detail for any given society. We can, of course, apply general
conditions and mechanisms to various societies in an effort to see
how they may approximate the typical conditions.
Certain of the conditions for the "particularization of conscience"
seem to be present in the old Chinese peasant village. We do not
hold that the Chinese peasant villager did not have a generalized
other, but we do suspect that his chances to develop one beyond
the enlarged kinship group were drastically minimized by the
roles which his society laid down for him, and that if developed, his
generalized other was not a leading feature of the person.
The peasant of classical China was so bound to his roles, so
THE PERSON lOg
closely tied to rigidly conventionalized situations that the question
of a center of self-expectations which would form the basis of an
individuated self did not typically arise. So the Chinese never
experienced a prophetic salvation religion which might lead him
to self-repentance or train him for feelings of personal guilt. He
never felt the need to "redeem the times because the days were
evil." The growth of an individualized conscience in the Occident
has been, to a very large degree, the result of Christian endeavor.
The Chinese peasant of course experienced occupational, social,
and residential mobility, but he did not experience any prophecy
of salvation— either salvation of the individual soul or of a suffering
people. Therefore no ethical code shattered magic practices and
ancestor worship. He was forever bound to his extended family,
wherever and however high he managed to climb. His successes
and failures, no matter how competitively won, were not "counted
to his righteousness" but to the honor or blame of his family name.
The multiplicity of functional deities and the ritualistic magical
techniques which were professionally offered in the market for pay
provided no central and unified anchorage for an ethical code.
It is also significant for our problem— the conditions under which
the generalized other is minimized— that the significant others of
the peasant's childhood phase, his extended kinship group, re-
mained predominant among his significant others until he died.
This continuity of homogeneous expectations throughout his life
was extended by the cult of ancestor worship. Elaborate polite-
ness and the "conventional lie" were socially secured and enforced
patterns; they reinforced the stability and harmony of the expecta-
tions exacted of him. They enabled persons to avoid shaming one
another, that is, from presenting an image of self to the person
which would conflict with his self-image. The conduct of the per-
son could thus be controlled by prudence and fear, but not by
the internalized expectations of self which we know as the gen-
eralized other.
A man would accept another as significant only if this other was
a member of his sib and local in-group. People from outside these
circles, such as an imperial tax collector, had to perform their work
without benefit of tax morality on the part of the peasant: tax
collecting involved raids and flogging.
Were we to develop our point in detail we would have to con-
sider the different sequences of roles played by men as compared
106 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
with women, and of both men and women reared in households
owning different quantities of land, and so on. The order of birth
of the siblings and their sex would also claim our attention.
We should seek interpersonal conditions typical of Chinese so-
ciety which would favor or disfavor the development and opera-
tions of a generalized other. For instance, when a woman was
married she went to live in the husband's family abode and took
the role of a daughter to his parents. The man stayed at home
after his marriage and, although the wife became one of his others,
her significance was precisely conventionalized, just as were the
expectations she exacted of the husband. The woman, however,
changed households and thus came into a new circle of significant
others. If the expectations exacted of her were drastically shifted
at this juncture, we might expect her to become aware of these
conflicts and out of them to strengthen her generalized other.
Operating against this was the fact that the pattern of her parental
family was probably very similar to that of her husband's. Because
of the conventional similarity of family integrations, the expecta-
tions along her careerline were harmonious, and thus permitted a
ready transfer, or substitution, of one circle of significant others for
a previous circle.
6. Types of Persons
When we speak of types of persons we do not mean types of
character structure. Of course, any conduct regularly perfomied
by the person doubtless involves the integration df his roles with
components of his psychic structure; nevertheless, by types of per-
son we mean only the variations of roles which compose the per-
son, and the person's way of reacting to these roles. Here are
three dimensions in terms of which types of persons may be con-
structed:
I. If in all his social relations, a person is subordinate— a sub-
ordinate bureaucrat, a henpecked husband, a docile newspaper
reader, a willing soldier, a gullible consumer, or an avaricious
absorber of advertisements— we may say that from a formal point
of view this type of person is unified. This means that we can
state a principle— submissiveness— which seems to underlie all of
his reactions to the roles expected of him. Other persons, who react
THE PERSON lO"/
differently to their own roles, might consider such a man a dupe
or a "sucker"; by still others this term of opprobrium might be
sophisticated into the term "conformity neurotic," while for still
others, and perhaps for the man himself, this type might be sup-
posed to represent "Christian humility," as the man willingly shoul-
ders all the crosses which others and he himself place upon his
back. /
If in all his social relations a person is domineering— self-assertive
on his job, a tyrant of his family, a critical newspaper reader, a
scoffer at advertisements-^we may also say that he is unified. The
principle of his unity is that of domination, which all his conduct
and feeling seem to follow. He is a imified person, and if he is
not a unified character structure he may become such should he
continue to enact roles according to the unifying principle of his
person.
L There are, on the other hand, types of persons who have ex-
tremely diverse reactions to various roles. A man who is a self-
assertive authority on the astronomical movements of the universe
may, in the smaller orbit of his family circle, be a mere satellite
of his wife. The subordinated and ingratiating peddler who has
doors slammed in his smiling face all day may himself slam doors
all the more viciously as his family trembles in fear. These types
of persons seem to make up in one context what they give up in
another. By exploiting their chances at self-assertion in one role,
they "compensate" for the frustrations inflicted upon them in an-
other. The organization which connects their reaction to one role
with that to another is a network of compensations, and with this
principle they achieve a sort of balance. "^
II. The reactions of a person to the requirements of a role may
be classified in terms of the role's powers to make him feel re-
stricted, or, on the other hand, anxious that he cannot meet the
expectations upon him.
A man may feel restricted in playing certain roles; he may not
be able "to place" all his energies, push, and drive within the con-
ventionalized expectations fiis roles require. The image of self
reflected from other roles (currently and previously enacted) may
conflict with the image reflected from enactment of the restricting
role. Hence, the person cannot "put his all" into their enactment, ^
for by doing so he would be damaging his own image of self. Or
lo8 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
some component of his psychic structure, whkh had been socially
channeled, may now be blocked by this role. /Hence, as the person
strives to perform it, this role restricts his accustomed impulses
and emotions. Or, his feeling of restriction may be due to am-
bition: the referral of his self to larger tasks ahead by anticipation.
"^On the other hand, the person may feel that in performing* a
certain role he must do his very utmost in order to satisfy its
requirements. This reaction may arise from the fact that others
involved in the role are very significant, yet their expectations are,
from the person's standpoint, very hard to meet. Enactment of the
role may, for instance, require energies and habits which his or-
ganism is not capable of developing, or it may require a type of
temperament which his psychic integration does not enable him to
develop, or again, it may be that he does not have the education
or intelligence to meet the demands. Yet, since they are very
significant to him, he continues to try, and hence he continually
feels the strain. It is also possible that he is a "perfectionist" and
thus holds an exaggerated view of the role demands exacted of
him, even if others encourage him to "take it easy."
(jHEither incongruity— the restricting or the straining role— may lead
to personal dissatisfaction; -in either case, frustration and anxiety
may result. These mechanisms may, of course, operate in any
role context— in the home no less than in the diplomatic confer-
ence.
(^III. However similar different men's external reactions to the
requirements of their roles may seem, they may, in truth, have
internalized different roles in quite varying degrees. The image
of self reflected from one significant circle may be so satisfactory
that men do not accept the significance conventionally assigned to
appraisals by other circles.
A professional man, for example, may be so absorbed in his
work, and be so satisfied with the self-image reflected by his col-
leagues that his love life may remain quite undeveloped, his reac-
tions to it remaining quite stereotyped. Such men are among those
who at the age of sixty speak to their wives in the same flowery
vocabulary of romance that was current in their high school days.
On the other hand, a man may dedicate his life to his intimate
other, whom he has "chosen from all the world," and she may be
the center of his life and of his person. His occupation may thus
THE PERSON lOQ
be a mere means of economic support for her, and for himself. It
may be that when one has no such intimate other, he will be all
the more sensitive to the appraisals of his professional role, since
it is the deepest internalized;] then those who are significant to
him in this role will form the social basis for his central self-
expectations. But if we were to take any one type of role, say the
occupational, and attempt to classify persons solely in terms of
that one type, we should fail to grasp what is essential to the kind
of man whose job is merely a means of support and not significant
to his self-image and personal integration.
Roles, we know, may be segments of various institutions and at
the same time components of persons. --The relationship between
different roles may be construed as a scheme of means and ends.j
Certain political roles or family roles, for example, may be enacted
in order to achieve or facilitate ends which lie in other institutional
orders. [Now, the integration of the roles which compose a given
person may also be grasped in terms of such a means-end scheme.
If, for example, political ends are all that matter to a man, he
may act the role of the clerk only in order to make money in order
to have pamphlets printed in behalf of a political movement. His
personality is integrated around his political role, and the other j
roles he has incorporated facilitate this political role. The signifi- ^
cances of family and of occupational others are instrumental, and i
his image of self and his conscience are primarily reflections of his \
political others.,
Suppose, on the other hand, a professional career is the most
significant basis for a man's self-image; then he may be willing to
play the role of the husband in order to secure a typist. Or a
woman may be willing to play the role of a wife because this
role guarantees her membership in the household of a man who
is a good provider and whose position enables her to borrow
prestige.
TjOf course, the person— as built of roles and of his reactions to
them— is not the complete character structure. The psychic struc-
ture, as we have seen, is linked with the person, and the two, along
with the organism, form the dynamic whole of character. As we
have just seen, one type of person may be more or less dominated
by a key role, which is thus the hub of his character. But there is
also the contrasting type of person in which no one role predomi-
nates^^In all post-Renaissance societies, for example, the upper
110 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
classes have produced certain models of representative men. The
British gentleman, the Italian cortegiano, the French cavalier—
these are images of men who are 7iot dominated by any one role,
but rather maintain a certain distance from all roles, even while
playing them all with proficiency. Such excellent performances
would seem possible only when the demand for special skills is
not too rigorous. Whether they involve generalship or erotical con-
quest, statesmanship or economic bargaining, their contexts must
be sufficiently personalized to permit what nowadays would seem
amateurish. The images of such representative men, including as
they do psychic elements as well as external demeanor, transcend
any one role, and yet enable men to play all the roles required
by their social position.
There is also what may be called the experimental man, who
like Saint-Simon, takes up, one after the other, many roles, and
puts the whole force of his character into each of them in turn.
Such a man does not try to integrate himself in terms of all these
roles, but rather to conquer all of them and to be above any one
of them. Thus Bismarck asked: "Why should I be a harmonious
personality?" ^^
In the analysis of institutional orders and social structures, one
encounters many types of persons, integrated with roles in various
degrees and in various ways. The discernment of such types, in
fact, is a major part of the social psychology of institutions. For
the perscinjs_related— to society by the roles he acquires. These
ToTes, in turn, are related to his psychic structure, primarily by the
language of his group. The acquisition of language requires a cer-
tain kind of organic equipment, but the function of language is
to co-ordinate the social activities and roles which the person
enacts, for it is primarily by means of language that we learn
what is expected of us in all the varied roles we play.
©ur images of our self are facilitated and restrained by the ex-
pectations of others; we are sensitive to the expectations of those
who are most significant to us. But oiir selection of significant
others is limited by our positions in the varied institutions of which
!''■ Alfred von Martin, Sociology of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford,
1944), P- 95-
THE PERSON 111
we are members. Within these institutional Hmits, however, we
will generally turn towards those whom we believe will confirm
the desired image we would have of our self. And, if others' ex-
pectations and images of us are contrary to our desired image, we
will try to reject them, and seek only confirmation among more
congenial others.
Our unity of self— the secure feeling of what we really are—
ideally occurs when the various images of our self— held by us
and by others— are in some way reconcilable. In some societies,
all the roles we play are stereotyped, so that it is easy for us
to experience unity of self. In other societies, there is no set pat-
tern, and we spend much of our life trying to get the images we
hold of our self confirmed by others.
Our conscience— the generalized other or superego— is the prod-
uct of all expectations of significant others in our life history. Many
of these expectations are internalized during our childhood, and .
are below the level of our awareness; hence, in later life, as we 4^
become sensitive to new significant others, we often encounter
conflicts of conscience. Social conflicts among the expectations and I
demands of various significant others thus become conflicts within
the person. The consciences of men can only be similar in so far
as they have experienced similar types of significant others. And,
as we have shown, not all human beings have a strong conscience.
Types of persons can be deduced from the various roles that
different persons play and the various ways they react to those
roles. They may make up for restriction in one role by aggressive
activity in another; they may expend more energy in some roles
than in others; and, even though one person may seem to play
a role in a similar way to another, he may have internalized this
role in his psychic structure very differently. Accordingly, the
similar objective social role may carry very different meaning in
his character structure. In order to understand types of persons,
we must know something of the motivations which prompt the
acquisition and the enactment of various roles. ^'
CHAPTER
V
The Sociology of Motivation
OUR threefold division of character structure enables us to set
forth three theories of motivation. We can locate the center of
motivation primarily in the organism, in the psychic structure, or
in the person.
On the level of the organism, we might assume that "all organic
processes are initiated by the need to restore a physio-chemical
equilibrium which is experienced as health."
In terms of the psychic structure we might assume that "psycho-
logical processes are initiated by the need to restore an emotional
equilibrium which is experienced as pleasure." ^
In terms of the person, we might assume that conduct is mo-
tivated by the expectations of others, which are internalized from
the roles which persons enact, and that important aspects of such
motivation are the vocabularies of motive which are learned and
used by persons in various roles. Motivation thus has to do with
the balance of self-image with the appraisals of others.
1. The Sociological Approach
When motivation is viewed on the level of the organism, the
processes and elements of the psychic structure are likely to be
seen as mere epiphenomena, or at best, means to the attainment
of some physiological condition. On the other hand, many who,
1 These two quotations paraphrase the positions of the physiologist, W. B.
Cannon, and of the psychologist, Sigmund Freud, respectively. They are
from Ives Hendrick, Facts and Theories of Psychoanalysis (2d ed.; New York:
Knopf, 1944), pp. 206 ff. See W. B. Cannon, The Wisdom of the Human
Body (New York: Norton, 1932), pp. 306 ff. The formal similarity of the
two writers is the more striking when we realize that they worked inde-
pendently of each other and used very different methods.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF MOTIVATION II3
like Freud, consider the psychic structure as a fairly autonomous
and somewhat closed system, ascribe what they cannot otherwise
explain to "the constitution" of the organism. "Organism" is thus
used as a residual category to "explain" what cannot otherwise be
explained. Operating on either of these two levels, the impact of
the social roles of the person upon the psychic structure and
organism is minimized or omitted.
For Freud, the psychic structure;-^ "drives") may be socially
canalized, but is not itself subject to basic social modifications.
The concept of "sublimation," for instance, implies that role-con-
ditioned forms of psychic drives are epiphenomena of "the basic
drives." These "real drives" are assumed somehow to lie in the
psychic structure or in the constitution of the organism. The split
between man's primordial biological nature and man's cultured
personality is thus retained and a metaphysical accent is placed
upon the biological or the psychic level. Emotions, urges, or vari-
ous physiological processes are "the real" motivating factors of
conduct; the rest is sham, or at any rate distorted and ungenuine
expressions of the real motives of the 'tear' individual.^
If we drop this''metaphysical *accent on the biological and the
psychic and treat the person as just as "real" as, and in many ways
more important than, the organism and the psychic structure, we
are able to enlarge our conception of motivation. Although we
shall give due weight to organic and psychic factors of motivation,
we shall approach the topic primarily in terms of the person:
It should be clear from previous chapters that by "the prob-
lem of motivation" we mean the understanding and explaining of
why and how human conduct takes a specific direction. It is a
problem of steered conduct rather than a problem of motive power.
And we stand a better chance of solving this problem in terms
of the person than in terms of the unsocialized organism or psychic
structure.
Moreover, only on the level of the person can we expect to deal
with understandable motives. The restoral of the organic equilib-
rium of health or the impulsive squirmings of emotional balance
experienced as pleasure are not understandable in terms of the
2 The new psychoanalysis of Karen Homey and Erich Fromm, e.g., has not
succeeded in entirely o\ercoming Freud's biological metaphysic. See below,
this section.
iij^ character structure
organism or the psychic structure as such. Motives may be ex-
plained in part in terms of these levels, but they cannot be under-
stood.-It is clear that when we speak of understandable motives
or intentions, we must pay attention to the social function of
language in interpersonal conduct; we can speak of understanding
something only if it is meaningful, and language, a social acquisi-
tion and a personal performance, is the prime carrier of meaning.
Even dreams have to be deciphered or interpreted as a language
of "unconscious impulses."
We have also seen that the organism is relevant to our under-
standing of conduct and character only when its effects are me-
diated by the social evaluations of other persons; and that the
impulses, emotions, and perceptions of the psychic structure are
patterned and channeled by the social organization of the person.
"^Therefore, insofar as the organism and psychic structure enter into
understandable motivations, they may be most readily and signifi-
cantly grasped in terms of the person, for it is in such terms that
emotional or organic equilibria are organized and attained.—
The person acting out his roles in various situations is the
most immediately observable aspect of character structure. Al-
though, like the psychic structure and the organism, the person is
an abstraction with which we conceive one aspect of the total
reality of man, it is that aspect which is typically what-is-to-be-
explained-and-understood. In ordinary life situations we do not
deal directly with the psychic structure or with the organism. We
deal with these indirectly, often without being aware of doing so;
we deal with them as they manifest themselves in man as he pre-
sents himself to us, and he presents himself as a social person.
Our "final" theory should be a model within which we can locate
M:he other theories, which is adequate to everyday experience and
to known data, and which allows and even suggests lines of reflec-
tion that are open to research test.
2. Vocabularies of Motive
Motives are generally thought of as subjective "springs" of ac-
tion lying in the psychic structure or organism of the individual.
But there is another way to think of them. Since persons do
ascribe motives to themselves and to other persons,— ^ve may con-
sider motives as the terms which persons typically use in their
THE SOCIOLOGY OF MOTIVATION 11^
interpersonal relations^To explain some line of conduct by re-
ferring it to an inferred and abstracted motive or to some psychic
element is one thing; to observe the function of motive imputation
and avowal in certain types of social situations is quite another.^
We have already seen that we cannot treat "desires" at large as
motives, and yet, since persons do talk about their own and others'
desires in this way, we cannot afford to ignore them. These avowals
and ascriptions of motives— the differing reasons men give for their
actions— are not themselves without bases. Rather than throw
these reasons aside as "mere rationalizations, " we may use them in
understanding why men act as they do.
^Avowals and imputations of motives seem to arise in interper-
sonal situations in which "purposes" are vocalized and carried out
with close reference to the speech and actions of others; in situa-
tions in which one's conduct or intentions are questioned by other
men or by one's selfr-We tend to ask questions in situations which
in\'ol\e alternative or unexpected purposes or conduct. Sometimes
we refer to such situations as crises, however minor they may be.
Men live in immediate acts of experience and their attention is
directed outside themselves— until their conduct is in some way
frustrated or fails to receive an expected response from others.
Then there is awareness, questioning by others, self-questioning,
and justifications to others and to self. And it is then that state-
ments of motive perform their important function.
Conversations may be about the facts of a situation as they are
seen by the participants, or they may be attempts on the part of
various persons to co-ordinate social conduct.^ By means of con-
versation, different roles are geared to patterns of expectations,
but when a person does not respond to the expectations of signifi-
cant others, he will typically begin to explain or justify his own
conduct.*JSJow it is in such conversations that statements of motive
are often brought into operation. The function of such statements
•'■ For a preliminary statement of the point of \iew expressed here, see
C. Wright Mills, "Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive," American
Sociological Review (October 1940). Cf. K. Burke, Permanence and Cliange
(New York: The New Republic, 1935).
^ On the "question" and on "con\ ersation," see Grace De Laguna, Speech:
If.s Fnnction and Development (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1927),
p. 37. For motives in "Crises," see J. M. WiUiams, The Foundations of Social
Science (New York; Knopf, 1920), pp. 435 ft.
Il6 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
is to persuade others to accept our act, to urge them to respond
to it as we expect them to, and to make them beHeve that our act
sprang from "good intentions."
Sociologicallyr as Max Weber put it, a motive is a term in a
vocabulary which appears to the actor himself and/or to the ob-
server to be an adequate reason for his conduct-.^ This conception
grasps the intrinsically social character of motivation: a satisfac-
tory or adequate motive is one that satisfies those who question
some act or program, whether the actor questions his own or an-
other's conduct. The words which may fulfill this function are
limited to the vocabulary of motives acceptable for given situa-
tions by given social circles.
Conceived in this wayr-«iotives are acceptable justifications for
present, future, or past programs of conduct,— But to call them
^■' "justification" is not to deny their efficacy; it is merely to indicate
L their function in conduct. Only by narrowing our view to the point
where we see the isolated individual as a closed system, can we
treat verbalized motives as "mere justifications." By examining the
social function of motives, we are able to grasp just what role mo-
tives may perform in the social conduct of individuals. We know
that even in purely rational calculations acceptable justifications
may play a rather large role. Thus, we may reason, "If I did this,
what could I say? And what would they then say or do?" Deci-
sions to perform or not to perform a given act may be wholly or in
part set by the socially available answers to such queries.
But the problem of the social function of motives goes deeper.
A man may begin an act for one motive; in the course of this act
he may adopt an auxiliary motive which he will use to explain his
act to others who question it, or whom he feels may question it in
the future. The use of this second motive as an apology does not
make it inefficacious as a factor in his conduct.-4n such after-the-
event explanations we often appeal to an acceptable vocabulary of
motives, associated with expectations with which the members of
the situation are in agreement^-Accordingly, our statement of mo-
tive serves to integrate social conduct, in that the reasons we give
for an act are among the conditions for its continued performance.
By winning allies for our activities the motives we verbalize may
•"' The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, A. M. Henderson and
Talcott Parsons, trs. (New York: Oxford, 1947), Chapter 1.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF MOTIVATION llj
even be controlling conditions for the activity's successful perform-
ance. And by winning social acceptance, such motives often
strengthen our own will to act. For the performance of many roles
requires the agreement of others, and if no reason can be ad-
\ anced which is acceptable to these others, such acts may be aban-
doned. Diplomacy in the choice of motives thus controls the con-
duct of the diplomatic actor. Strategic choice of motive is part of
the attempt to motivate the act for the other persons involved in
our conduct. Carefully chosen and publicized motives often re-
solve social conflicts, potential and real, and thus effectively in-
tegrate and release social patterns of conduct.
""-When a person confesses or imputes motives, he is not usually
trying to describe his social conduct, he is not merely stating rea-
sons for it-r^Iore usually he is trying to influence others, to find
new reasons which will mediate the enactment of his role— and in
so trying to influence others, he may often influence himself. The
verbalization of motives for an act is itself a new act; it is a phase
of role playing which lines up the role with or against the expec-
tations of others. In such cases, accordingly, it is not necessarily
wise to seize upon the differences between the conduct and the
verbalization as a discrepancy between action and speech. There
is simply a difference between two kinds of action, one verbal, one
motor.
In terms of motives, cqnceiyed^s acceptable groimds.^
action^ persons will alter, deter, or reinforce their individual con-
duct. To speak, for instance, of someone as having "scruples" is
of course to indicate a complex type of internal behavior, but one
index to it is that a moral vocabulary of moti\ es is effective in
controlling their conduct.
In the course of our biography, our motives are imputed to us
by others before they are avowed by ourselves.^Such vocabularies
of motive then become components of our generalized other; they
are internalized by the person and operate as mechanisms of so-
cial control. -^hus the mother controls her child by imputing mo-
tives to him; by having certain actions called "greedy" and others
"good," the child learns what conduct he may perform with ap-
proval; and he learns what he cannot get away with socially. He
is also given standardized motives which sanction and promote
some acts by placing a public premium on them, and which dis-
Il8 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
suade or prohibit him from other acts by pubhcly disapproving
them.
Along with the conduct patterns appropriate for various occa-
sions, we learn their appropriate motives, and these are the mo-
tives we will use in dealing with others and with ourselves. The
motives we use to justify or to criticize an act thus link our con-
duct with that of significant others, and line up our conduct with
the standardized expectations, often backed up by sanctions, that
we call norms. Such words may function as directives and incen-
tives: they are the judgments of others as anticipated by the actor.
Accordingly, when new roles are taken on, old motives may need
to be modified or new motives learned. For new motives may be
conditions for the enactment of new roles. Wejcoatrol another man .'
by manipulating the premiums which the other accepts; we influ- L
ence a man by naming his act in terms of some motive which we ;
ascribe to him. / _
Vocabularies of motives have histories, as their various institu-
tional contexts undergo historical change. The motives accom-
panying the institutional conduct of war are not "the causes of
war," but they do promote continued participation in warfare,
and they do vary from one war to the next. For vocabularies of
motive are modified, as the institutions in which they are anchored
undergo change.
Examine the shift from the laissez-faire to the monopolistic phase
of modern capitalism. The profit motive of individual gain may be
widely espoused and accepted by businessmen during a relatively
prosperous and free economic era, but such commercial vocabu-
laries of motive may undergo severe modifications during monopo-
listic phases of the economy. For then, a vocabulary of public
service and efficiency may be added to the public motives of busi-
nessmen. Now, if a man finds himself unable to engage in business
conduct without joining a "liberal" business organization and
proclaiming its public-spirited vocabulary, it follows that this
particular vocabulary of motives is an important reinforcing fea-
ture of his social conduct.
The choice of a motive which is ascribed to some conduct pat-
tern reflects the institutional position of the actor and^pf those
who ascribe motives to him. For example, the vocabulary of mo-
tives used by privileged groups for the conduct of persons in minor-
ity groups is different from the motives used for members of high
THE SOCIOLOGY OF MOTIVATION lig
prestige groups. "Aggressiveness" on the part of a Jewish child may
be "impertinence" or "pushing" to anti-Semites, who may entitle
the same conduct, when it is displayed by a Gentile child, "inde-
pendence" and "initiative."— By thus ascribing different motives to
similar acts, status lines are upheld. -
The "success" or the power of an actor may drastically influence
the vocabulary used in describing his character and motives. Lord
Byron put the fact of these dual vocabularies of motive for identi-
cal conduct neatly in speaking of
"Firmness in heroes, kings and seamen,
That is, when they succeed; but greatly blamed
As obstinacy, both in men and women.
Whenever their triumph pales or star is tamed . . ." "^
"Events" may decide between which of two vocabularies of mo-
tive are used. Only great men can leave their reasons to the crea-
tive hands of their apologists, and some are famous because they
have found apologists." Yet, there may be a way to go behind
the event and, by using the acceptable vocabularies of motive,
understand successful-men-with-apologists as well as those who
failing descend into the limbo of anonymity.
3. The "Real" Motives
Thus far we have been examining motivation on the level of
the explanations people use and accept to account for their ac-
tions. But now we must ask whether such explanations are "the
real motives" of the persons using them.
• — -We have first to abandon the notion that merely because vocabu-
laries of motives are acceptable they are necessarily deceptive
shams.^he very fact that many "sophisticated" persons doubt the
validity of such motives is itself an historical phenomenon which
must be explained. The Freudian theory of motives, for example,
has been summarily stated by Ralph Barton Perry as the view "that
the real motives of conduct are those which we are ashamed to
admit either to ourselves or to others." * We can admit the truth
^ Don Juan, Canto XIV, pp. 89 fF.
^ See Chapter XIV: The Sociology of Leadership.
^ General Theory of Value ( New York: Longmans, Green, 1936), pp. 292-93.
For another criticism of Freud on this point, see Karen Homey, New Ways in
120 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
in this statement in a more fruitful manner: the vocabularies
which persons choose for their statements of motive tend to be
those which are accepted by others. But whether this means ( i )
that these acceptable motives, stated to others and to self, are
inefficacious in social conduct, or (2) that they are not to be con-
sidered "the real motives" of the person using them are further
questions, the answers to which cannot be inferred from the prin-
ciple governing the social choice of vocabularies of motive.
We have already indicated thal^-acceptable vocabularies of mo-
tives may be controlling factors of social conduct, but under what
conditions may they be considered "the real motives"2^We may
assume that the more deeply internalized in the person, and the
more closely integrated with the psychic structure, a vocabulary
of motives is, the greater is the chance that it contains "the real
motives;^LJn fact, that is what "real motives" may be assumed to
mean. We must, in order to "test" motives, therefore, attempt to
find out on what level of character structure a given vocabulary
of motives is integrated.
But how can we find this out?*^hat are the optimum conditions
for the fuller integration of a vocabulary of motives with the
psychic structure?^
"Those vocabularies of motive which are consistently used by
the person when in public, when in private, and when alone
have the highest chance— other things being equal— to become
fully integrated with the psychic structurer^f difl:ering vocabu-
laries are used by the person when with his wife than when with
his coworkers, and still another vocabulary is used when he is by
himself, we do not know what his motive may be.
Moreover, in terms of his life history, to the extent that the
vocabularies of motive now used by the person are the same as
those which were used in the socialization of his psychic struc-
ture, the chances are higher that they are integrated on deeper
psychic levels of his character.
In other words: to probe for motives requires us to observe the
function and the context of vocabularies of motive. It is from such
observations that we may infer how deeply given motives are
Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1939). The present discussion is not, of
course, intended as a comprehensive statement or criticism of Freud's theory of
motivation.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF MOTIVATION 121
integrated with the character structure, and thus how "real" they
may be.
Now, whether the same vocabulary of motives for given types
of activity is used frequently in the life history and widely in con-
temporary contexts depends not only upon the internal condition
of the individual but also upon the typical social-historical situa-
tion that prevails. Accordingly, we can imagine sociological con-
diticms which favor or which work against the psychic integration
of vocabularies of motive; we can in fact construct two contrasting
types of society— (I) in one of which conditions maximize the
chances, and in the other ( II ) minimize the chances that a vocabu-
lary of motives coincides with "real" motives. We know that so-
cieties, as well as institutions within societies, differ in the extent
to which the roles of their members may be classified into different
sectors of the private and public. At one extreme, we may think
in a simplified way, of a small preindustrial village; at the other,
of a modern industrialized metropolis.
I. In the village the various situations in which men play roles
are not so widely different from one another and are transparent to
all. Even in his family group a person's talk and actions may not
be very different from his talk and actions while working with
other family heads. The variety of roles which any given person
plays is not very wide, and each is translatable into the others.
In such a society a single vocabulary of moti\ es may be used by a
person for all his roles, or at least he will use the same motives in
speaking of some conduct pattern to his wife and to his neighbor,
to his working mates and to the village head. His children will
learn these same homogeneous vocabularies of motive. And these
vocabularies of motive are not likely to be questioned, for they are
used in public, in private, and when alone, and their chances of
being integrated firmly and smoothly with the psychic structure
of the character will be high.
In such a society, if a variety of motives is used, each set of
motives is likely to remain associated in a stable way with its
respective roles. The motives used to explain why one works will
be the same before one's wife and friend as before one's working
mate and village chief. So, different vocabularies for different situa-
tions are easily understood and relatively unquestioned by the dif-
ferent members of each situation.
122 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
The motives of a person are thus compartmentahzed and or-
dered without conflict to their respective institutional compartment.
So motives stabihze and guide conduct; the expectations of the
several others with which the person is confronted are not in con-
flict when he uses the vocabulary of motives appropriate to a given
occasion. Being typically unquestioned and being intertranslatable
—and hence usable before everyone— the chance is great that stable
and acceptable vocabularies of motive will be used when alone and
that they will be linked with impulse and emotion during the
socialization of the psychic structure. Appearance and reality are
one; or if such be the case, the cant is completely shared and
socially effective.
II. In an industrialized metropolis, the person is confronted with
a variety of roles and situations. Not only is there a typical split
between his more intimate roles and his more public appearances,
but the differences between any two intimate roles or between
any two public roles may be very wide. Different motives may be
employed for roles involving one's wife and for those involving
one's acquaintance on the commuter train.
This segmentalization of conduct means that the person will
internalize many vocabularies of motive which may very well be
in conflict. Then the individual must keep one set of motives secret
from the others, for they may appear "silly" to some, even though
"beautiful" to others. He compartmentalizes not only his conduct
but also his reasons for it, and insofar as he cannot do so, his
motives may be in conflict. He may have difficulties deciding
whether he does this or that for love or for duty, for "selfish"
economic gain or for civic betterment; perhaps he will not be sure
whether he is marrying this woman because he loves her and she
has such a pleasant voice, or because she is so wealthy.
No one vocabulary of motives is accepted by everyone, so the
alert individual must use one or the other tentatively, until he
finds the way to integrate his conduct with others, to win them as
allies of his act. Different motives may integrate roles and release
conduct in the same situation, and similar motives may integrate
roles and justify conduct in very different situations. Then others
and the person himself may be confused and not know just what
motive does prevail.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF MOTIVATION 12^
Vocabularies of motive which are historically associated with
one type of institutional conduct may spread to other institutions.
The motives which are acceptable for economic enterprise may
gain partial or entire acceptance in other institutions. And such
spreading motives may become universally accepted as the com-
prehensive motives of man. The intricate motives of business con-
duct in America have spread in this way to other types of con-
duct. They have encroached upon the Victorian vocabulary of the
virtuous relations of men and women: love, duty, kindness. Among
certain strata, the romantic and virtuous vocabularies of motive
have been "confused" with the pecuniary. To ask whether a woman
or man is marrying "for love or for money" is to point to this over-
lap. The decline of the family relative to other institutions in-
voh'es a questioning of the vocabularies of motive which accom-
panied the more stable family patterns. And Max Weber has re-
marked that what formerly was thought of morally is in our time
thought of esthetically or psychiatrically. Whereas formerly maidens
and ladies spoke of "wicked" men and of "good" and "bad" con-
duct, today they speak of "decent" and "indecent" conduct, or of
"neurotic" and "stable" persons.
— Due to the great weight which the economic order has in the
American social structure, pecuniary motives tend to form a sort
of common denominator of many other roles and motives. Other
vocabularies are treated as shams, fa9ades, and "rationalization,"
and "ihe wise guy" knows that the real motive is the desire for
money which, as is commonly said, may not be everything but is
almost everything.—
--Back of the motive-mongering and the self-doubts of persons as
to their own motives is the fact that in modern life there is often
no stable or unquestioned vocabulary of motives available. And
back of this is the fact that the institutional arrangements of roles
demand that we rapidly give up and take on roles and along with
them, their socially appropriate motives. - Back of these "mixed
motives" and "motivational conflicts" there is going on a competi-
tion of varying institutional patterns and of their respective vocabu-
laries of motives. Shifting and borderline situations, having no
stable vocabularies of motive, may contain several alternative sets
of moti\ es originally belonging to different systems of roles.
Such institutional conflicts are internalized and, accordingly, are
revealed in the confusion and self-doubt of institvitionally marginal
124 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
persons.^Institutional conflict, in short, threatens the sense of unity
and even the identity of the modern self^~The rival demands of
conflicting roles, brought to self-awareness, call forth the com-
plex internal behavior called "conscience," a term literally mean-
ing "shared knowledge." If this "conscience," that is our general
other, passes in review all the particular role enactments, there is,
as it were, an internal court which will let "the left hand know
what the right is doing." Compartmentalization of roles and of role
demands will work so long as the generalized other is not con-
cerned, that is, so long as no ethical universals are involved. The
Sunday Christian who professes to be an honest dealer may no
longer be able to jab his business partner, without discarding or
trying to cheat his own conscience. The same goes for the "high
minded citizen" who may vote for higher taxes— for others, but
not for him, to pay. If he has internalized the professed values of
his Christian community or of his nation, his generalized other
is bound to saddle him with guilt for whatever acts fall short of the
professed demand level.
What is expedient for the purpose at hand is not necessarily
high-minded, law abiding, or moral, however successful we may
be in deceiving ourselves and others, and however intense and
widespread the tacit consensus of a group. Uncertainty continues
to exist so long as there are critical out-groups that are ready and
capable of pointing to disparities between expedient practice and
ethical professions. Victorian cant is painfully transparent to every-
one—in retrospect; for Karl Marx, for example, it was plainly ob-
vious at the time. When what is done cannot be undone, self-
expurgating behavior is a ritual; the motto "now it can be told"
usually prefaces such retrospective and harmless exercise. It is the
sequel to twentieth-century cant which H. Nicholson has defined
as the tribute vice pays to virtue. t
The speed with which decision makers, in their sixties today,
have repeatedly written off presumably universal principles pro-
duces mass skepticism and cynicism and the increasing realization
that'Wirs is indeed a secular age in which the exjDloitation of moral
values for expedient interests is quite standardf^he motto, wrought
on the gate of the Dachau concentration camp— "Labor Means
Liberty"— dramatically highlights the condition of "moral man"
who in malaise, drifts in "immoral society."
THE SOCIOLOGY OF MOTIVATION I25
4. Awareness of Motives
Two experiences lead us to beliexe that there are motives which
operate but of which the individual himself is not aware:
I. We may arrange a special type of interview with another per-
son and decide about real and sham motivations on the basis of
this interview. This interview may be a variant of a highly per-
sonal or intimate situation; but in addition to privacy it may con-
tain the authority of both scientist and physician— the psychiatrist.
By systematic and skillful questioning, the psychiatrist may so
arrange and conduct the interview that the person will confess
motives which he comes to believe are his real motives yet of which
he was previously unaware. In the interview he loosens up the set
vocabularies which he has typically used and which he had come
to ascribe to others. He may now use this new vocabulary in the
presence of self; he may also publicize it to chosen others, or to a
wider public.
The new motives thus emerging from the psychiatric interview
may come to approximate more closely the true state of the psychic
structure, and they may, in time, be used in resocializing this
psychic structure. Such interviews do not occur only in psychiatric
work. Rather sudden shifts in motivations may occur in intimate
life situations, as well as in the police interview, where regular
techniques have been worked out to detect the lie or sham. Of a
Gestapo agent, Anna Seghers has written: "He arranged the slips
of paper, looked over his notes, sorted them, underscored words,
and connected various items by a certain system of lines. . . . His
notes for an examination were comparable only to intricate musi-
cal scores." ^
n. The phenomenon of motives which operate, yet of which the
person is not aware, appears even more convincingly in hypnotic
situations. If several persons are hypnotized and while in this state
it is suggested to them that they breathe faster while reading every
other page of a book, they will do so in the posthypnotic period,
without being aware of doing so or of the planted motives which
impel them.^°
9 The Seventh Cross, J. A. Galston, tr. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), p. 156.
1" See E. R. Kellogg, "The Duration and EflFects of Posthypnotic Suggestion,"
Journal of Experimental Psychology (1929), Vol. XII, pp. 502-514. Compare
126 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
On the basis of the psychiatric interview and the hypnotic ex-
perience, one must suppose that many motives operating in social
Hfe are outside the awareness of persons. AVe may approach this
fact by asking: What conditions favor the operation of motives
of which the person is unaware, even when he is alone?
fli an act can be typically construed by the actor in such a way
as to have others and himself ascribe it to an acceptable motive,
then a premium has been placed upon the act. Other feelings and
actions are typically tabooed by virtue of the motives to which they
are usually ascribed. Tabooed actions and the impulses and emo-
tions associated with them may be restricted to private occasions
by the actor, or he may seek to represent them in terms of some
more favorable vocabulary of motives. But there is another way in
which such motives may be handled: the conduct, feeling, and
discussion of them in a tabooed vocabulary of motives may be
repressed, which simply means that they cannot be recalled by a
simple act of attention.
There are topics and feelings for which vocabularies exist and
are used in all public situations, just as there are feelings and im-
pulses, which can be discussed openly in most conversations. Other
topics and feelings are restricted to intimate occasions, and still
others which may be available only to the person when alone.
Finally, there are topics and feelings which the person will not
discuss even with himself. These situations, in brief, range from
those in which a vocabulary of motives is quite socialized to those
in which given topics or feelings are not verbalized even by the
person when alone.
As we descend this scale of conventionally premiumed to per-
missible topics and to those which are conventionally tabooed,
we also descend into those spheres which are most likely to be
"unconscious." For the prime meaning of "unconscious" is that
which is unverbalized, or sometimes even, unverbalizable. j
/Just as a man who is writing a note for his own future reference
may abbreviate it so that only he can understand its meaning, so
our internal speech follows a grammar of its own, in which symbol
condensations and images may call forth whole streams of thought.
I This inner speech may be very important in the person's self-
Erich Fromm's discussion of motives planted during hypnosis: Escape from
Freedom (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941).
THE SOCIOLOGY OF MOTIVATION 12J
understanding. To communicate our inner speech to others we have
to translate it into discursive, outer speech, and it is this explain-
ing to others which gives rise to "objectivity." The terms which
the person uses to refer to his own feelings are socially confirmed
by their use by other persons. -Self-knowledge that is not socially
confirmed, not yet disciplined by interaction with others, is not
secine knowledge. ^^
'If we do not publicize the vocabularies we use for our motives
and feelings, we may develop little areas of private speech which
we use only with very intimate friends or perhaps only in intro-
spection and soliloquy. Sometimes two persons who are very inti-
mate will share such patterns, although no one else can under-
stand the meanings which these two use privately. In this way,
the unconscious may be made articulate and partially shared
with a few selected others "who understand." For sometimes in
these intimate conversations, using very private cues and innuen-
dos of motive, a person will suddenly become aware of motives
which he did not know as his own. Then what was unconscious is
no longer unconscious but privately conscious. /
The becoming aware of previously unconscious feelings and
impulses proceeds by just such socialization. But the social area in
which th^se elements of the psychic structure are socialized may
still be restricted. From the standpoint of the urbane character
structure, only the yokel or the fool will give away his "private"
motives in "public." Urbane "maturity" involves a specialization of
displayed motives in varying degrees and according to private and
public appearances.
t" Those topics which are excluded from public conversation with
others will more likely be part of the private world of the indi-
vidual, and if the taboos are strong and morally enforced by
significant others, they will tend to become unconscious. ^Then
the person will not discuss them even with intimate others, and
he will not be able to discuss them with himself. •■ —
That which the person is unaware of is related to that which is
11 George H. Mead has done much witli the cjiiestion of the social character
of objectivity in his Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: Uni\'. of Chicago Press,
1934). See also C. S. Pierce, "How to Fix Belief," Vol. V, of Collected Papers
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1934). Vigotsky has systematized this
matter and has introduced the distinction between inner and outer speech. See
his essay "Language," Psycliiatry, 1940-41.
120 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
tabooed in his society. The approved motives which are typically
ascribed to conduct are sanctions which reinforce that conduct.
Disapproved motives are sanctions which discourage the conduct
to which they are typically applied. Vocabularies of motives are
thus a special class of premium or taboo. ^-
When we are motivated by impulses that are disapproved, we^'
sometimes cannot stand the image of ourselves, and so we Iceep
these motives out of our awareness. \"arious impulses which we
thus "repress" pop up in our daydreams, or in our dreams at night.
But we do not face them when we are alert; the mechanisms of
awareness exclude them in the interests of self-security; they catch
us only when we are alone and our level of consciousness is lowered.
The subjective is what the person presents only to himself. When
he communicates it to another it is no longer subjective, but ob-
jective, no longer private but socializedv-We may communicate such
private feelings, moods, and motives in intimate relations, or even
sometimes among perfect strangers. And as we do so we are learn-
ing about ourselves. As we tell our motives to others, we become
aware of new aspects of ourselves. For by telling them even to one
significant other, we may justify our having them or seek relief
from them. We are developing or using a vocabulary of motives
with this particular other, and on the basis of this vocabulary we
understand our own motives in a more socially acceptable way.
We can integrate these motives and moods into our own self by
socializing them to others, even to a few others, who understand.
Thus making others understand us, we can understand ourselves
and reconstruct our image of self. If we faced our motives alone,
our sense of unity and identity of self might be tlireatened. Just
as we repress a motive, an act, a mood, a feeling from public
display, we may also repress it to the point where we ourselves
are not aware of it. It may be that we cannot by an act of atten-
tion recall some motive or some feeling until it is put into a vocabu-
lary of motives which we might use before some others without
loss of self-esteem and security. The vocabulary in terms of which
our motives are thus phrased may not be approved by many others,
indeed it may be a vocabulary which we can accept only because
of the authority of the one psychiatrist who gives us the words,
tells us that it is all right since at times "others" feel the same way.
^2 See Chapter VII: Institutions and Persons, Section 3: The Theory of
Premiums and Traits of Cliaracter.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF MOTIVATION 12g
Motivation may be discussed in terms of the organism, the psy-
chic structure and the person. Although we have paid attention
to each of these, we have approached the problem primarily from
the standpoint of the person. So approached, motives are viewed
as social justifications for one's own conduct, and as means of per-
suading others to accept and to further one's conduct. Such state-
ments of motive arise when we are faced with alternatives, with
unexpected choices, or when there is opposition to one's role, for
in routine conduct our motives are often not questioned.
When there are many vocabularies of motives, it becomes diffi-
cult to know the "real motives " of persons. The more closely in-
tegrated our vocabulary of motives with our person and our psychic
structure, the greater the chance that it contains our real motives.
Such integration is most often present when we use the same mo- ;
tives in public, in private and when alone. In some societies this is '
generally the case; in others it is not. And when it is not, when
various institutions and roles compete with each other, there is a
confusion of motives, as we have shown by contrasting the problem
of motivation in a preindustrial village and an industrialized
metropolis. ,
All this does not mean that there are not motives which affect
conduct but of which the person involved is not aware. We have
suggested, with due regard to individual comiplications, that these
unconscious motives may be explained primarily in terms of unver-
balized areas of feeling and conduct.
CHAPTER
V I
Biography and Types
of Childhood
SOMATIC development refers to the growth of the organism;
maturation, as we shall use the term, to changes of the psychic
structure; biographical development, to the development of the
person, to changes in the roles that are taken up and cast off in the
passage from one age group to another.
These three lines of somatic, psychic, and biographical develop-
ment proceed together and each is involved in the course of the
others. Yet, in their interplay there is no universal pattern or se-
quence. Changes in the vegetative system and the use of the motor
mechanisms of the body require an appropriate integration of
sensory organs and psychic components. The person cannot per-
form certain roles without properly developed psychic and organic
functions and prerequisite dispositions. The emotions of the psychic
structure are timed and shaped in their expressions according to
the roles required of the person.
Thus one sequence of these three lines of development limits
arid facilitates another, but no one of them determines what oc-
curs in the other two.
Development of any sort involves differentiation and integration.
The unco-ordinated and "mass activity" of the infant becomes dif-
ferentiated into specialized verbal responses and motor skills, and
these specializations— of organism, psychic structure, and person-
are integrated with various kinds of human character and conduct.
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD i;^l
1. The Organism
Everyone begins life as part of another; birth is a biological
separation: the infant is ejected and cut off from the mother. Then
it begins its slow movement through infancy, childhood, preado-
lescence, adolescence, and adulthood. Soon after adulthood, the
organism begins to decline, it passes through middle age and be-
gins its senescence, until finally, it dies. If birth is a biological sepa-
ration, death is a social separation. After we are biologically dead
we "live" only in the memory or ancestor worship or imagination,
or— if we were important enough— in the legends of others.
The history of the human organism is one of very rapid growth
during the first year of life, of more gradual growth up to ma-
turity, and then a gradual decline in vigor, alertness, and capacity.
From conception imtil birth the weight of the organism increases
about a billionfold; during the rest of the entire lifetime it increases
only about twerityfold, a great deal of it during the first three years
after birth. ^
Regardless of race or creed, the biological history of every man
is limited by his animal ancestry. During the first year after birth,
it is scarcely proper to distinguish organic from psychic matura-
tion, and it is unknowledgeable to speak of personal development,
although other persons and their activities do, of course, influence
the maturation of the organism and the psychic structure. Ex'en
while it is in the uterus, the organism does not unfold according
to an unalterable pattern. It interacts with the uterine environ-
ment which thus facilitates or retards its growth. Moreover, the
economic environment, as registered in the family's class position,
vitally influences the fetus and the birth of the child, with or
without professional service. In typical United States cities, in the
1930's, the infant's chances to stay alive immediately after birth
were three times as great if its family earned $1,250 a year than
if they earned under $450 a year.- Thus, even though there is as
yet no person, social-historical influences bear vitally upon even
the prenatal organism.
1 B. T. Baldwin, The PJujsical Growth of Children from Birth to Maturity
(Iowa City: The University, 1921).
- Robert Woodbury, "Infant Mortality in the United States," Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science (November, 1936).
1^2 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
Some eight weeks after conception, the unborn child responds
to external stimulation; the skin around the areas that will become
its nose and mouth being sensitive to tactile stimulation. Later,
definite reflexes appear and other skin areas become sensitive. By
six or seven months, all the reflexes needed for postnatal life have
appeared.^ The birth of the infant may occur as early as twenty-
four weeks and as late as forty-eight weeks, and a variation of
some three lunar months is quite frequent. Yet the pattern of
organic maturation proceeds irrespective of such irregularities of
birth.*
As a little animal, the child is equipped with certain invariable
responses which occur when given stimulations are presented.
These reflexes, as we have already seen, may be transferred in such
a way that they will occur as reaction to stimulations other than
the ones which at first evoke them. Such conditioning is perhaps
the bottom level of what may be called development in the infant.
Habits, once learned, may become quasi-automatic. The stereo-
typing and restereotyping of reflexes and of habits enable the in-
fant to meet situations which recur; they do not enable him to
meet new situations. Conditioning, and the learning of habits, are
subject to conscious modification by others, and, in time, even by
the child's own will.
The infant does not at first distinguish persons from inanimate
objects, and even for children, physical things often seem to be
animated— as the content of fairy tales, nursery stories, and movie
cartoons witness. But by continually doing things to him, other
persons stimulate the infant more and more; they elicit more re-
sponses and more changes of bodily feelings than do the objects
of the inanimate environment.^ Soon they become identified as
3 Based on D. Hooker, "Reflex Activities in the Human Fetus," Chapter -2
of Child Behavior and Development, R. G. Barker, J. S. Kounin, and H. F.
Wright, eds. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1943).
4 Arnold Gesell, "Maturation and Infant Behavior Pattern," Psychological
Review (1929), 36, pp. 308-19.
■'' See the precise studies of Orvis C. Irwin, "Tlie Amount and Nature of
Activities of New Born Infants Under Constant External Stimulating Condi-
tions During the First Ten Days of Life," Genetic Psychology Monograph
No. 1, 1930, pp. 1-92. See also M. A. Ribble, "Clinical Studies of Instinctive
Reactions in New Born Babies," American Journal of Psychiatry (1938), 95,
p. 149; and F. Peterson, "The Beginnings of Mind in the New Born," Bulletin
of the Lying In Hospital of the City of New York ( 1910), 7, p. 99.
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD 1^;^
sources of food and warmth, the first image of the mother prob-
ably centering about the feel of the breast. The fact tiiat persons
are a source of vital stimulations, and the fact that persons are
active and move by themselves, form the basis of their being dis-
tinguished from mere things,
2. The Psychic Structure
As the child matures he engages in a greater variety of be-
havior, of motor skills, of displayed feelings and interests, of psychic
abilities. As the "mass activity" of the infant develops into seg-
mental activities and functionally segregated acts, his psychic ele-
ments are linked with them. So perception, touch, and grasp come
to form the child's total image of given objects; he links the sight
with the taste with the feel of these objects. The normal adult can
wiggle his big toe without waving his entire foot; the infant is not
so able; he has les^ poise, less "distance" from internal stimulation
as well as from environmental influences. An impulse is directly
and quickly translated into activity; a simple frustration is likely
to affect the whole inner condition and external activity of the
infant.
The feelings of the newborn infant seem to be undifferentiated.
At first, they may be described simply as "excitability," but gradu-
ally this capacity becomes differentiated and, as it is linked to
bodily movements, two "emotions" may be socially distinguished:
distress and delight— terms which may describe slight visceral dif-
ferences in the infant, but, more importantly, indicate differences in
the provoking situations and in observable behavior and gesture.
Whether they indicate a distinct awareness of feeling on the part
of the infant is an open question. As differentiation continues,
what may later become fear and anger arise from a sort of general-
ized distress: fear at sudden shock, anger at interference. Delight,
in due course, becomes joy and affection."
Any "marked interference" with the normal functioning of the
infant's organism seems to lead to "impleasant emotions" which
appear to be a reaction to the restraining of the child's free action
—as John Watson observed— of infantile rage.
During early phases of development, the clinging and sucking
s For this \'ocabulary of infant emotion, see K. M. B. Bridges, "A Genetic
Theory of Emotions," Journal of Genetic Psychology ( 1930), 37, pp. 514-26.
i;^^ CHARACTER STRUCTURE
reflexes of the infant are linked; later the act of clinging becomes
more purposive, more deliberately aimed at support. In fact, cling-
ing for support occurs when the child experiences his own bodily
weight as a challenge and, as Paul Schilder puts it, "strives to
make himself independent of others in preserving his equilibrium." '
The motor actions of the child move him toward the world of
objects around him, which is full of danger and the possibility of
physical trouble. His fear of danger is a response to what happens
to him when he reaches and falls. He may also fear loss of food,
or of bodily support, or even of the stroking of his skin by another.
Parents may, of course, play upon these fears in a great variety
of ways. "The Kaffirs terrorize their children with tales of horrid
monsters. The Manus try to evoke evil bush demons, but the chil-
dren, trained to self-reliance, physical bravery, and the experi-
mentation necessary for effective physical adjustment to their pile-
dwelling life, take very little stock in these bogey-men. As adults,
they are the only Oceanic people I know of who are not afraid of
the dark." *
The contents of fear, as well as of other emotions, undergo
change as the psychic structure matures. The infant exhibits what
may be taken to be fear in response to intense or sudden stimuli,
to unexpected or unfamiliar events. During their first year after
birth, one group of children belonging to urban, upper-income
American families experienced fear in response to noises and events
associated with noises, to falling or sudden, unexpected move-
ments, and to persons or objects associated with pain. From be-
tween two to six years of age, the fear of noise, of falling, and of
strange persons tends to decline.
As their spheres of social activity are enlarged, the fears of
children involve more complex and wider circumstances. They no
longer fear some of the things they previously feared, but they
become afraid at signs of danger, and they experience imagined
fears. Signs of fear seem to appear when the child knows enough
to recognize possible danger, but cannot understand nor control
it. The proportion of their fears in response to being left alone—
especially in the dark— of imaginary creatures, and dreamed of
" "The Relation Between Clinging and Equilibrium," International Journal
of Psijchoanalysis, Vol. 20 (1939), p. 62.
'^ Margaret Mead, "The Primitive Child," Handbook of Child PsijcJiology,
Carl Murchison, ed. (2d ed; rev.; Worcester: Clark Univ. Press, 1933), p. 682.
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD I.35
events tend to increase. With his enrollment in school, the Ameri-
can child meets competitive situations and is subject to many
achievement ratings. At about this age, he also experiences fear
relating to personal prestige and achievement, as shown by his
tear of social exclusion and personal inadequacy. And as he grows
older, the proportion of such fears increases.
The immature psychic structure does not yet have organized and
effective outlets. A temper tantrum— in which the child bursts into
disorganized mass behavior, kicking the floor and screaming— may
be the only way in which he can let out his anger or aggression
against adults. Later, as the psychic structure is more integrated
and disciplined by foresight of consequences, the style of rage and
of aggression usually becomes more pointed and effective. In this
respect, there are differences in children's psychic development
according to the class position of their parents. In New York City,
as L. B. Murphy has shown, the chance for children to display
and express such traits as affection and helpfulness is apparently
freer and greater in lower economic groups than in children from
professional families with higher incomes.^
3. Learning
The development of habits requires a chance to practice them.
Boys who grow up on a flat desert do not develop so readily as
mountain boys the network of habits, the postural swing and the
leg work, required in skiing. And what is true of motor skills is
also true of psychic traits and social conduct. Many traits which
are often thought of as "inborn" may be traced back to the simple
fact of ample and early opportunity for practice.
We may thus ask of the total situation of a child— his home and
school and the play space provided— what opportunities are given
for the practice of this or that skill or trait? Opportunity for prac-
tice is a very important feature of the child's development. The
more the child can practice some skill or trait, the more will op-
portunities for further practice be given him. Whereas children
who have had less practice and so less skill will often be afforded
still less practice. The structures which we build up facilitate and
limit the functions we can later learn to perform. Other people
^Social BeJuwior and Child Personality (New York: Columbia Univ. Press,
1937)-
1S6 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
often let us put our best foot forward; that is why the worst foot
often fails to develop.
"The Samoan child is taught to sit cross-legged almost as soon
as it can sit at all. . . . The baby's hands are clapped to the dance
rhythm while it is an infant in arms, and as soon as it can stand
it is taught to dance. Ten-year-old Samoan children are so set in
their postural and rhythmic patterns of their conventions that I
found it impossible to teach them so simple an activity as skipping,
and sitting upon a chair for any length of time is torture to them.
Manus children, however, taught physical skill and agility rather
than any formal set of postures, could adapt themselves to new
physical activities with ease." ^°
In modern Western societies there is not so heavy a weighting
of early successes and failures. Premiums and taboos are often re-
laxed in recognition of the child's immaturity. Yet premiums and
taboos are used to facilitate and retard certain lines of develop-
ment. If crying and whining are "rewarded" by social attention
and fondling, crying and whining will become more and more used
as infantile tools. But if whining goes unrewarded it will not be as
likely to develop into a stable bid for attention.
Such techniques and traits as are successful in the cradle and
home may become firmly integrated and used in the school. When
some such pattern as whining is established and linked with satis-
faction, this habit may prove an obstacle to further and more inde-
pendent learning. We do not readily undo patterns of behavior
which achieve satisfactions. Habituation enables the child effec-
tively to meet certain situations, but it narrows the versatility of
response to these situations. Training may thus incapacitate one
for further learning, as well as provide a basis for it.
The repeated performance of identical tasks leads to routine
practice. With the security which habits lend the individual in
these situations, the attention and feelings at first involved are now
minimized; they become available for an expanding area of new,
not yet routinized, experiences. The novice at handball is painfully
aware of the way he holds his hands and body; the expert can keep
his eye on the ball.
The young child finds few fields for early triumphs of learning
in the mastery of self-chosen tasks. But as his attention and feelings
1" See Margaret Mead, op. cit.
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD l^J
are freed by the automatic service of habit, he can then strive
further to "stand on his own feet." Development is more an achieve-
ment than an unfolding, but the general direction of conscious
learning shifts as the integration and organization of automatic
activities proceed.
4. Language and Person
The first vocal sounds of the baby are aspects of a more gener-
alized "mass activity" involving almost all portions of the organism.
This mass activity and crying modifies the baby's social environ-
ment: persons are stimulated to do things for and to the infant.
At first, the infant's movements are "an amorphous mass of activ-
ity"; later, specific or segmental activities are articulated, which
involve only local parts of the organism. Although both generalized
and segmental movements may be consequences of internal phys-
iological stimulation, from an early period the responses of other
persons are likely to be differentiated according to the infant's
movements. These different responses of others help the infant
to articulate segmental movements; in time, he learns to use his
movements and cries as instruments for the control of others.
The growth of language in the child is undoubtedly the most
important single feature of his development as a person. ^^ Lan-
guage becomes his most important tool in dealing with others and
with himself. The infant's cries, signaling others to attend to it,
are components of mass actions in response to internal or environ-
mental discomforts; later the child babbles, thus engaging in seg-
mental action— the use of the voice. Sometimes babbling seems
like an outlet of exuberant energies, at other times like a response
to irritations, and at all times it is rhythmic. Thus babies play with
their voices, if we may call babbling vocal play.
The first spontaneous cries of the infant and child are not socially
meaningful, but others respond to certain of these noises, thus
^1 On the language de\'el()pment of the child, see Frank Lorimer, TJie
Growth of Reason (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929); G. H. Mead, Mind,
Self, and Society (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1934); J. Markey, The
Symbolic Process and Its Integration in Cliildren (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1928); Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1926); and especially D. McCarthy, Language Development
■of the Freschool Child, Institute of Child Welfare, Monograph series, No. 4
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1930).
138 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
socially confirming them. In time, the sounds become fixed units
calling forth adult actions which bring the child bodily comfort
and social attention. The baby who cries ends up with a com-
fortable diaper.
The babblings of the child become socialized speech when he
addresses his hearers in an expressive efi^ort to influence them, when
he becomes aware that a given sound which he makes is going
to call forth a certain response in another. As the talking experience
of the child increases, his speech becomes more socialized and
comprehensible to others. The early incomprehensible babbling
is split into "internal speech" and comprehensible "outer speech."
The vocal sounds of American children of both sexes at one and
one-half years are only about one-fourth comprehensible; but com-
prehensibility increases until at four years practically all that the
child says is understandable. What begins as a component of mass
activity in response to organic discomforts becomes, after three
or four years, a chief feature of a little person, who has several
hundred words with which to ask naively simple and penetratingly
disarming questions about himself and the world.
There are, of course, differences in the rate and type of chil-
dren's linguistic developments, and these differences often corre-
spond to the social and economic position of their families. Thus
an early study asserts that "the child of the rich understands more
words and less actions, and the child of the poor less words and
more actions." More recent studies have indicated that the "ex-
pansion of a child's environment , . . tends to increase nouns rela-
tively to other parts of speech. Conversely, with a constant or
relatively constant environment, the other parts of speech will
increase relatively to the nouns." Upper-class children tend to do
better than lower-class children on tests which involve linguistic
ability, the differences between the educated and the working
class sometimes being the equivalent of about eight months in
linguistic development. These differences in linguistic development,
corresponding to economic and educational level of family, are
not to be attributed to differences in "intelligence." ^-
1- Summary of results obtained by Cliamberlain, Drever, and Descoeudres,
Stern and Markey, Handbook of Child Psychology, D. McCarthy, pp. 303-04.
Cf. also Frank J. Kobler, "Cultural Differences in Intelligence," The Journal
of Social Psychology (1943), Vol. 18, pp. 279-303-
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD l^g
Some time, usually rather late in childhood, the child appears
to need persons who are on his level, who have similar attitudes
and feelings toward the adult world. He is no longer content to
live with more or less authoritarian adults, and more or less com-
plaisant toys and pets. He requires an environment of persons
significantly like himself, and with these equals he learns to com-
pete, co-operate, and compromise.
As the child becomes a person— acquires language and begins
to enact roles— these social acquisitions interact with the maturing
features of the organism and the psychic structure. Emotion, per-
ception, and impulse are caught up in the integration of his childish
roles, and these roles pattern his impressions into focused percep-
tions, elicit and style his gestures and feelings, discipline his im-
pulses into purposes.
The manner in which perception is socially stereotyped ranges
from admonitions in specific situations ("look this way," "pay atten-
tion to this") to a more subtle building up of sensitivities by means
of vocabularies for color or social relations. The perceptions thus
socially directed are accompanied by feeling tones of pleasure or
displeasure with which they are integrated.
The impulses of the psychic structure tend to be disciplined
into those activities which are socially held to be "proper" conduct.
By assuming roles under the guidance of others, we form and re-
form the elements of our psychic structures: some are shaped by
our sensitivity to what others think, as well as by the tribulations
caused by our own impulses. "When a young man," E. M. Forster
once remarked, "is untroubled by passions and sincerely indiffer-
ent to public opinion his outlook is necessarily limited." ^^ It is nec-
essary, although sometimes difficult, to link our passions with the
opinions of others, and during early adolescence the stress and
strain of the attempt may become quite acute.
5. Four Theories of Biography
There are at least four general conceptions of "the crucial stage"
of the human biography. They include: I, the cross-sectional view
of functional autonomy; and the polar opposite: H, the genetic
view, which emphasizes infanthood. Between these two are HI,
^^ Howard's End (New York: Knopf, 1921), p. 24.
1^0 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
the autonomous hierarchal view and IV, the theory of the adoles-
cent upheaval.
I. According to the strictly cross-section view, the motives and
traits of the adult character structure are "self-sustaining." To un-
derstand them we have only to examine the contemporary posi-
tion of the person, and the function of traits and motives within
his total character. For although these traits and motives may have
"grown out of antecedent systems," they are at any given moment
viewed as "functionally independent of them." The tie between
earlier experiences and the present character is thus seen as strictly
"historical, not functional." Although contemporary features of
character are continuous with earlier experiences, they do not in
any sense depend upon them. To understand a given character
and its traits, we must study its present structure and position.^*
II. At the other extreme, the adult character structure is viewed
longitudinally or genetically. Everything, no doubt, has a history,
and it may be thought that everything about a character structure
is present in seed-form at birth. Maturation is then conceived as
a more or less mechanical unfolding of what was already there.
To understand a character structure and its traits, according to
this view, we must grasp it in its beginnings. This view tends to
place great weight upon biological factors, and it conceives of
the experiences of infancy and childhood as the most important
features of the biography of a character structure.^^
III. Between the attempt to understand all features of a char-
acter in terms of its contemporary structure and situation, and the
attempt to know all contemporary features in terms of its genetic
development, there is the position that at each of several age
levels of experience a system of traits, feelings, and experiences
develop. The experiences belonging to adult life are then under-
stood as occupying a position higher than those assumed by the
1* This position has been taken by Gordon W. Allport with reference to
motives; he terms it the theory of "functional autonomy" in his Personality: A
Psychological Interpretation (New York: Holt, 1937), pp. 190-212, especially
P- 194-
15 This position, of course, owes much to the work of Freud; although it
is a position which many nonfreudians share with Freud. See below, this
section.
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD I4I
experiences of youth, and these, in turn, stand above the experi-
ences of childhood. The more recently acquired experiences are
assumed to control the experiences of earlier phases of the biog-
raphy. Each such level is thus a "storehouse" of the experiences
of each phase of the biography, and each of these levels "preserves
in its mode of action the characteristics of the mentality in which
it had its origin." When we dream of infantile experiences or feel-
ings, the later levels have temporarily lost their controlling function
and we regress to re-experience the earlier formations. Just as we
may lose control of our motor habits as when the skilled craftsman
ruins his carving by a clumsy slip of the chisel, so may we let
infantile or adolescent feelings or self-appraisals slip into aware-
ness when the control of a later level of experience and integration
of the psychic structure or person lapses. What is normally con-
trolled becomes for an instant controlling.^'^
IV. Another theory of development holds that the leading char-
acteristics of the adult character structure arise and are set at the
adolescent juncture of the biography. Adolescence is viewed as a
new birth, or, in G. Stanley Hall's words, as "the infancy of man's
higher nature." ^^ Although the child may be father to the man,
in adolescence a new child is created. The individual, Hall con-
tinues, is "reduced back to a state of nature, so far as some of
the highest faculties are concerned, again helpless . . . The flood-
gates of heredity are thrown open again somewhat as in infancy."
Childhood unity and integrations are "broken up" and "powers and
faculties, essentially nonexistent before, are now born." Some older
impulses are reinforced and greatly developed; others are subor-
dinated and lost. The self finds a new center. "Love," according to
Hall, "is born with all its attendant passions— jealousy, rivalry . . ."
The "old level" of childhood is "left forever." Like milk teeth juve-
nile interests fade away, and the "well matured . . . [have] utterly
lost all traces and perturbations of the storm and stress period, be-
cause they are so contradictory and mutually destructive, and
because feelings themselves cannot be well remembered."
16 This position has been set forth by W. H. R. Rivers in "Freud's Concept
of the Censorship," reprinted in Psychology and Ethnology (New York: Har-
court. Brace, 1926), pp. 21-35.
1" The view summarized in tliis paragraph is tliat of G. Stanley Hall. See
his Adolescence (New York, D. Appleton, 1904), Vol. 2, especially pp. 70-73.
1^2 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
The strictly cross-sectional view treats experience and character
as functionally autonomous at any given moment of the biography.
The relations of past experience to present character are simply
historical, and not connected in any functional way.
The extreme genetic view treats the present traits of character
as simply unfolded features of what was given at birth in seed-form,
or alternatively, as experiences which in later life operate as prec-
edents or models structuring new experiences in their terms.
The third view which we may call the theory of biography as an
autonomous hierarchy accepts the genetic emphasis upon child-
hood and the identity between early experiences and later regres-
sive traits, but also accepts the cross-sectional view of each age
level of experience as autonomous in its respective action. To these
acceptances, it adds the autonomy and retention of earlier systems
of experience and the view that these earlier ssytems may be re-
experienced when the controlling function of later systems relaxes,
as in dreams and various phenomena of the unconscious.
In the fourth view— the theory of adolescent origins— we see the
adult orientation and the leading features of a character structure
as arising from an adolescent upheaval. We take this period in the
life history as the most important for the formation of adult char-
acter.^^
What shall we make of these theories? How can we best realize
the truth, if any, in each of them?
6. The Theorij of Adolescent Upheaval
The theory that adult character is "born" in adolescent upheaval
is open to two major criticisms, one of principle and one of ade-
quate fact.
I. The principle is that of selective and cumulative development.
Although it is not feasible to telescope all contemporary trends and
traits of a character structure into its past, it is necessary to see
past organizations of conduct, feeling, and attitude as setting a
limit within which later developments may occur. In this sense,
our past does limit and select our present, and in turn these selec-
1^ Our brief statement of these four views is an intentional simplification of
Allport, Freud, Rivers, and Hall, respectively. We are not writing a history or
a systematic account of positions held by various scholars. Hence, we select
and stress basic ideas without quahfications in order to set forth sharp contrasts.
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD 14^
tions become part of the total selective structure. Development
is thus cumulative. To be sure, there are rapid accelerations and
sudden conversions and traumatic reverses, but these, too, are
explainable in terms of diverse, often inadequate, integrations and
selectivities in the line of biographical development.
II. The most telling criticism of the theory of adolescent up-
heaval, however, has to do with fact. The theory assumes that
adolescence is always an upheaval, and of course this is not the
case. It takes as universal the rather extreme experience of adoles-
cence in the modern West, and more specifically the middle-class
experience with its prolonged gap between organic capacity for
and actual assumption of the adult roles of marriage and of the
job. From the standpoint of an adequate comparative sociology,
we see at once that ours is merely one possible way in which a
society may handle the changes of puberty. Some societies are so
organized that these organic changes are passed through with
no upheaval at all.
Biologically, adolescence extends from puberty to physiological
maturity. Chronologically, it may begin as early as eight years
and last until as late as twenty-five. The individual's growth is
accelerated and, sometimes to a lesser degree, his co-ordination
improved. Some organs, such as the heart and the organs of
reproduction, grow in size very rapidly, while others, such as the
brain, do not perceptibly increase. During puberty the voice tends
to fluctuate, "changing" before it settles down.
Since "the further one moves from birth," as Sullivan has written,
"the less relevant an absolute physiological chronology becomes,
the epoch of adolescence is the least fixed in terms of bodily
changes. Adolescence varies from culture to culture, and its actual
time of appearance in young people among us is very widely
varied." Interactions with significant others "are the predominating
factors in bringing about delays . . . and accelerations ... in
the later stages of personality development." ^"
The "quiet miracle of preadolescence" in American society usu-
ally occurs between the ages of nine to twelve. It is not a sudden
happening but the continuation of a trend toward a fuller social
integration. Early adolescence is marked by the fact that "the
19 Harry Stack Sulli\an, "Conceptions of Modern Psycliiatr\ ," rsychiatry
(February 1949), Vol. Ill, No. 1.
144 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
satisfactions and the security which are being experienced by some-
one else, some particular other, begin to be as significant to the
person as are his own satisfactions and security." Indeed, one's
own satisfactions and security are facilitated by the satisfactions
and securities of the loved one. Perhaps at this point the approval
of a significant other takes on its sharpest significance. This fact
goes far to explain the usual and much discussed social behavior
of adolescence in American society. The social upheaval of adoles-
cence—especially typical of the middle-class young man or woman
—results in large part from this intensified need and awareness of
the approval of others.
But why this awareness and this need? The roles played by the
American adolescent approximate adult roles, yet the adolescent
seems only to play them. In two key roles in particular, the boy
is not yet fully adult: he is not integrated with a durable mate
by marriage, and he does not fulfill a regular occupational role.
Economically and emotionally he is still a dependent, and because
of this he often strives all the harder to be accepted as an adult.
He shaves the downy cheek, and plays the man with girls, older
girls if possible, to the fullest extent of his abilities and opportuni-
ties, and for want of sexual gratification he masturbates.
In American society, adolescence is a juncture at which childhood
roles are abandoned and adult ones not yet fully available or
internalized. Adolescence is a major point of social reorientation
and since the person is in this transition, previous integrations of
person and psychic structure are likely to be loosened. Often these
integrations undergo such extreme modification that it is no wonder
some students view it as a social rebirth.
Among the typical features of adolescence in modern Western
societies, especially among middle-class children, are an increase of
inner absorptions and reverie, of self-criticism and sometimes a
drastic tightening up of scruples; there is frequently an extreme
assertion of individuality, a susceptibility to poses, mannerisms,
affectations; there are all-absorbing friendships.
These general characteristics may be summed up by the state-
ment that imitation ^° and identification -^ as processes of develop-
-0 Imitation is the conscious patterning of behavior upon a model afforded
by otlicr persons. It is learning by example.
-1 Identification is the unconscious taking on of traits which another dis-
plays. It refers to a development, without awareness, in the direction of an-
other person.
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD 14^
ment and learning are often at their height during adolescence,
or at least they are more open to our observation.
Conceivably, one could coast through childhood under guard
and guidance without ever being absorbed in one's self. But at
adolescence one must make decisions on one's own, and face many
models which would guide one in these self-scrutinies of develop-
ment. The rest of one's life as a person will consist largely of getting
in and being accepted and getting out of voluntary associations,
and such decisions must now be faced in some earnest. The middle-
class adolescent, in deciding the general directions that this cumu-
latively selective process of his social career will take, wants to
find out what kind of man he seems really to be. And so he will
usually experiment with the models and self-stylizations available
to him.
In ancient Sparta and in many preliterate societies definite tests
of fitness for adult roles were specified and known to adolescents.
In the modern West the very standards of adulthood are often
contradictory, various, and not readily accessible to youth. During
the teen age, the requirements for adult roles are often temporarily
lowered. This allows the psychic structure an increased opportu-
nity: One can be inebriated without the use of intoxicants, as
sensitivities and emotionalisms expand and hot and cold feelings
may alternately flood the adolescent. So he is the more easily
carried away by total euphoria or equally total despair.
It is characteristic of modern Western societies not to have a
generally understood and clearly demarcated "threshold" between
childhood and adulthood. Religious rites such as "confirmation"
remain segmental, as they do not coincide with the transition from
school years to employment and marriage. As we have noted, two
major choices are expected of the individual, the choice of occupa-
tion—more and more closely connected with problems of educa-
tion—and the choice of a mate. Having the "freedom" to make
these choices for himself, the individual also takes on the respon-
sibility for his choices, that is, "he has no one to blame but him-
self." During times of mass unemployment it is difficult to say who
feels more at a loss for advice, the parents or their grown-up chil-
dren.
The pressure on adolescents to commit themselves to vocational
choices varies according to the social and economic status of the
parents; the higher the class position of the youth's home, the
146 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
longer time he has to make up his mind. The social elevator of
higher education carries the youngster past entire fields of inferior
occupational choices, up to vantage points from which he may
assess opportunities which otherwise would not be concretely vis-
ible, much less available. Thus, the well provided student "can
wait." Similar differences in the time of waiting have been shown
to differentiate lower- and upper-class youth with regard to sexual
conduct. Whereas the lower-class youth comes to consummate nor-
mal sexual activity at the biologically adequate age, middle-class
youth waits until presumably the attainment of the coveted social
and occupational status position permit things "which can come
later." In the meantime, there are the widespread substitute grati-
fications of adolescence— masturbation and necking— and the accom-
panying frustrations incited further by the imageries of eroticism
that are ubiquitous in advertising, the pulps, and slick celluloid.
One result of all this is often an inarticulate giggle pattern among
middle-class youngsters, especially the girls. --
~- Cf. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia and London: Saunders, 1948),
which contains data on the sexual behavior of 5,300 white American men,
who co-operated in interviews. Regardless of allowances that may have to be
made with regard to precise details and small differences in proportions, Dr.
Kinsey 's major findings concerning the differences between lower- and higher-
class members are so great that we do not believe more precise and rigorously
controlled studies are likely to change their direction and therewith their
significance. The following facts are from "The Kinsey Report":
The working class adolescent engages in sexual intercourse earlier, although
frequently more promiscuously than the middle- and upper-class youth, who
more frequently seek substitute gratifications through masturbation, homo-
sexual activities, petting, or involuntary although experienced nocturnal emis-
sions. Youths between sixteen and twenty years of age with grade school
educations find less than 30 per cent of dieir "sexual outlet" in masturbation
and 57 per cent in intercourse; college men, however, find 66 per cent of
their outlet in masturbation, and 10 per cent in intercourse. High school boys
of the same age stand midway between the two groups. Among college men
up to twenty-five years of age, petting to a climax accounts for nearly half
as much of the total outlet as does intercourse. Such petting is the compromise
which allows the college girl to preserve technical chastity and at the same
time to be helpful in granting her lover substitute gratification. College men
rank lowest in homosexuality, with 2.4 per cent of their sexual outlet in
this form; grade school and high school boys find 6.9 and 10.8 per cent of
their total outlet in homosexual activities.
Such figures indicate that different values and attitudes prevail among
lower and higher classes in matters of sex which in turn reflect broader
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD 14-/
Biological adolescence is over with the completion of puberty.
Social adolescence is over when the person is regularly expected to
enact, and does enact with greater or lesser conformity, the roles
which adults of his social position typically perform. But when is
"psychological" adolescence over and full adulthood established?
The psychiatrist Stack Sullivan held that the adult is one who has
established "durable situations of intimacy such that all the major
integrating tendencies are freely manifested within awareness in
the series of one's interpersonal relations." -' ' This is an adequate
definition of adulthood. It is also an expression of a philosophy of
life for free men and women living in modem society.
7. The Relevance of Childhood
We must reject the philosophical assumption of the extreme
genetic theory that a biography is simply, or even primarily, a
mechanical unrolling of traits already present at birth in seed-form.
This mechanical theory of growth must be rejected even for the
organic features of character; and we have already seen that both
the person and the psychic structure are formed, developed, and
integrated very largely through the mediation of other persons.
The maturation of character structure is not determined by inner
features of development, just as it is not shaped altogether by the
characterological differences. Eli Ginzberg has stressed that "these essential
differences between the two classes" re\'ol\e around the fact that the entire
environment of the poor boy operates to place a premium on current gratifica-
tion, for the future is not propitious, at least no more so than the present.
There is little or no rational basis for his "delaying gratification." But the
college boy's "entire existence is in the nature of a postponement. He is
using up parental capital rather than adding to it; he is studying today in
order to profit tomorrow. He has been trained to accept postponement in
gratification and he has also been encouraged to seek gratification from other
experiences— his studies, his sports, his extracurricular acti\ities. By recourse-
to masturbation and petting, he manages to reach a tolerable, if not a de-
sirable, equilibrium. He can wait: for him the future is propitious." See Elir
Ginzberg, "Sex and Class Behaxior" in About the Kinsey Report, Observations
by 11 Experts on "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" Donald Porter
Geddes and Enid Curie, eds. (New York: Signet Special, 1948), p. 136; cf.
also: Morris L. Ernst and David Loth, American Sexual Behavior and the
Kinsey Report (New York: Bantam, 1948). The detailed tabulations are taken
from the Kinsey Report, pp. 374-83, 417-48, 488-93.
-■^ "Conceptions of Modern Psychiatr>'," op. cit.
148 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
external forces of the environment. The human biography results
from the interplay of inner features of character previously given
and acquired, w^ith the external world of man and nature, and
with hopes and fears, demands and expectations of the future. We
caU this interplay "experience," and we know that it continues,
although at different pace and with differing intensity, throughout
the individual's biography.
In our attempt to answer the question of how much weight
we should assign infant and childhood experiences in the adult
character, we must pay attention to two questions:
I. What types of infant and childhood experiences are most likely
to be important in influencing the formation of an adult character
structure?
II. How do these experiences "influence" adult character? Or,
what are the mechanisms that connect earlier experiences with
later traits of the character formation?
I. Two general and interrelated types of infant and childhood
experience may be especially important in forming the structure
of childhood character: (a) The impact of the social constellations
of the family and the child's reactions to them; and, (b) the sanc-
tions and regulations of such organic functions as feeding, excre-
tion, and the sensations of sex.^*
All experiences of the infant and of child are socially limited, or
even determined, by the kinship structure, for it is the personnel
of this structure who administer to the organic needs of the young
member, and it is their relations to one another and to the child
that are his first social contacts. The infant must be covered and
warmed and cooled, lest he die from inappropriate temperatures;
he must breathe air through his own mouth and nose; others must
feed him. Biologically, the child is helplessly dependent upon
others, and particularly upon those who have most to do with his
creature comforts, as well as his privations and discomforts.
The infant-mother relationship is often intimate to the point of
24 For an excellent summary and critique of the literature on "infant care
and personality" see Harold Orlansky's article of that title, Psychological Bul-
letin, Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 1-48. His conclusion is generally negative. See also
W. H. Sewell, "Infant Training and the Personality of the Child," Amer. Journ.
of Sociology, Vol. LVHI, No. 2, September 1952, pp. 150-59.
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD I49
forming an emotional communion. If the mother did not want the
child, or is frightened or disturbed about something, there are
often endless feeding difficulties. And if the child is breast-fed, the
slightest indigestion on the part of the mother will be "chemically
communicated" to the infant. Long before any explicit understand-
ing between mother and child could emerge, Sullivan has noted,
there seems to be an emotional contagion between them.-^
The very biological dependency of the infant and child upon
some adult is of great aid to the infant's becoming a full-fledged
human being. He becomes a person because others are indispen-
able to him as an organism; his helplessness qualifies him for great
modifications and vast learning. His helplessness is due to the
fact that the human animal is singularly devoid of rigid, innate,
instinctive patterns of behavior. "Instinct," wrote Paul Schilder,
"is a diminishing, if not a disappearing category in higher animal
forms, especially in the human." -®
The mother is a social instrument of the infant's organic satis-
factions: she is also a source of insecurities and anxieties. The
satisfactions of such privations as hunger depend upon significant
adults, who usually want the child to develop those traits they
think well of and to avoid those patterns which they taboo. If he
does not meet their expectations, the adults may deprive him of
organic satisfactions as well as social attention. Since the child,
according to L. L. Bernard, "does not think that deprivation may
occur in the natural course of events, but is rather the result of
ill-will," deprivation seems "equivalent to aggression and vio-
lence" and often the child will react with counteraggressions.^^
Child clinicians, psychiatrists, and nursery students have taught
the social psychologist the important role childhood experiences
may play in the early formations of emotional life. In this connec-
tion, of course, one overlooks the contributions of Freud only at the
risk of serious omission. Whereas pre-Freudian psychologists saw
early childhood as a psychological state of paradisaical Innocence,
Freud taught us to view this stage as problematic and crucial for
the formation of character. What Freud did, in brief, was to con-
25 Cf. Harry Stack Sullivan, op. cit., pp. 7, 8.
26 See Paul Schilder, Goals and Desires of Man (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1942), p. 79-
-~ Instinct (New York: Holt, 1924), p. 509.
1^0 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
nect the formation of character with the structure of authority in
the family.
Within the kinship structure, there is an interplay between depri-
vations and satisfactions, between the organic needs of the child
and the authoritative agency of socialization which provides for
these needs. The family upon which the child is dependent is thus
the early context of his insecurities and of his gratifications. The
child's experience of the organs of his body and his recognition of
what he can and what he should not do with them is guided by
adults, who try to regulate the rhythm of such functions as excre-
tion and sexual sensations as well as his attitude toward them.
The regulations of organic functions and the social impact of
family roles upon the child are closely related experiences. For
what Freud called the Oedipus and Electra complexes— attraction
for the parent of the opposite sex and jealousy toward the other-
is, as Karen Horney notes, simply "engendered by the parent's care
of the physical needs of the child," -® and by the child's dependency
upon the parent for this care.
The decisive childhood drama of man's psychic life was schema-
tized by Freud in terms of the identification of the male child
with the father of the family who establishes for his boys his model
of primary aspiration. As the father loves the mother so does the
son, who thus becomes, as did Oedipus, the father's competitor for
the exclusive love of the mother. For the female child a similar
early triangle is supposed to be repeated, which Freud called
the Electra complex. These complexes may originate from the end
of the first year up to the age of four or five: however, the critical
age, according to most psychoanalysts, is between three and five.
Schemes of this sort have the great merit of showing early char-
acter formations in the social context of the family. By knitting
together such strong motives and mechanisms as love, identifica-
tion, and authority, they provide useful explanatory models. It is,
however, a model that is open to much abuse— even in the hands
of its originator.
One of Freud's greatest shortcomings is that he understood this
process as at least quasi-biologically set, and hence a universal
occurrence; but this is a universalization of a partial observation,
for it overgeneralizes the psychic impact of a particular type of
^^ New Ways in Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1939), p. 791.
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD 1$1
kinship organization— that of the occidental, patriarchal family.
Freud, as a sociological thinker, was thus handicapped by Freud,
as a medical man. His formulation pointed toward an important
sociological phenomenon, but it was not itself sociologically in-
formed. Yet the internalization of a family constellation by the
character structure of its youngest member was an important point
to observe.
Preliterate as well as historical societies show a great variety
of kinship structures, of which the patriarchal organization repre-
sents only one. In the absence of the patriarchal family one cannot
very readily expect the Oedipus complex to develop in the child's
character, much less exert an influence upon the later adult. And
even within patriarchal families, this complex is probably not uni-
versal. "Restrictive discipline and companionship," Meyer Nimkoff
has shown, "are two . . . factors of importance in determining the
child's relations to his parents. In general . . . that parent will be
preferred who offers more in the way of companionship and exacts
less in the way of discipline." ^^ The preference for the mother may
thus be connected with that type of patriarchal family in which
the mother is a source of maternal tenderness and care and the
father is the more severe disciplinarian. The development of an
equalitarian family in which the parents are equally responsible
for discipline and for companionship leads to the child's equal
preference for, or equal independence from, both parents. The
connection of types of child preference and identification with
types of family structure is not, of course, completely uniform.
The Hopi child shows no marked preference for either parent,
having agreeable relations with both. The Samoan child, who like
the upper-class English child does not typically reside with his
parents, has a minimum relation with, and is usually emotionally
independent of, them. Marquesan children of both sexes prefer
their fathers, who are their adult companions; their mothers, be-
ing specialized as courtesans to the limited number of males,
neglect or even abuse them. In the Marquesan situation there are
29 "The Child's Preference for Father or Mother," American Sociological
Review, August 1942, pp. 517-25. Several of the cases which are given
below in the te.xt are taken from citations in this excellent summary article.
Others are from Margaret Mead's article, op. cit., and her Coming of Age in
Samoa (New York: Morrow, 1928); and from Wayne Dennis, The Hopi Child
(New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1940).
152 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
more males than females, a definite maternal neglect, few restric-
tive regulations on the sex life of the child, and no punishments.
There does not occur in this society any Oedipus complex, and
females are usually represented in a hostile manner rather than as
inflated images of maternal tenderness.^*'
In Freud's formulation, the father is the child's sexual rival and
has the most potent authority. Yet these functions are, after all,
determined by a particular kinship structure.
The peasant father often exploits his sons in work, whereas the
prosperous middle-class fathers may treat theirs as sources of
pleasure and display. In some societies, family relations locate
family jealousies between brothers, rather than between father and
son; in other societies in which there are strong brother-sister
taboos, jealousies are likely to occur between brothers over their
sisters, rather than over their mother.
Authority certainly does not stop with the father; the authori-
tarian regulation of impulse and of conduct may begin in the fam-
ily and with the father, but they are continued in later epochs of
the biography by sanctions of the school, church, and job, and ulti-
mately by the state.
Bronislaw Malinowski has compared the Oedipus complex of
European patriarchal society with the situation among the Tro-
briand Islanders. In the latter case, the husband of the mother
is not the authoritative male in the life of the child. The mother's
brother, or the child's maternal uncle, is the authoritative male,
while the child's father is merely a kindly counselor, a helper and
companion. The Trobriand father does not support his wife and
child, but rather his sister and her children. The wife, therefore,
is economically dependent upon her own brother, who, as a ma-
ternal uncle, is the arbiter and disciplinarian of the child.^^
In United States society, the child's dependence upon the mother
is used by her to enforce certain regulations upon the child. Among
the Marquesans, such dependence is frustrated by the absence of
the mother's care, but no restrictive regulations of organic and so-
cial activity are imposed. Children are more independent at an
•*° Abram Kardiner, The Individual and His Society (New York: Columbia
Univ. Press, 1939), p. 248.
31 See Sex and Repression in Savage Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1927) and H. D. Lasswell's critique of Malinowski's work in Methods in
Social Science, S. H. Rice, ed. (Chicago, 1931), pp. 480 ff.
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD l^^
earlier age than in the United States and acquire a self-confidence
which contrasts sharply with the lack of confidence in similar age
groups in Western societies.
The Oedipus constellation, with its close blend of dependence
upon and craving for the mother, occurs most frequently, accord-
ing to A. Kardiner, "in societies where the sexual goal is interfered
with in childhood. In societies where Oedipus attachment does
occur, it should be viewed as the result of kinship organization and
restrictive regulations on childhood sexual tendencies which tend V^
to prolong and complicate the dependency of the child." ^^
Tha imprint of family roles upon the child's character thus varies
with the kinship arrangement. The social conditions which the
child experiences and his psychic reactions to them must be care-
fully reconstructed if we are to understand his early character
formation.
II. To the individual himself, the most obvious manner in which
any earlier phase of his biography may influence later phases
is memory. Memory seems to be an inner connection between
events and experiences along the biographical line. It also seems
to be closely connected with language. Memory is past experience
regained by an act of attention.
The young child lives in the immediate present, and probably
does not have much conception of the past or of the future. His
impulses demand immediate gratification and he cannot delay and
wait upon the future to satisfy them. He cries. For the adult,
experience is a conjunction of past memories, present situations,
and anticipations of the future. To recapture the past by memory,
surmount the immediate present, and anticipate the future by
imagination, requires the guidance and use of signs. "In studying
infantile situations and infantile experiences," Paul Schilder has
written, "we should not forget that it is difficult to come to clear
conclusions transcending the mere observational, since language—
the most reliable sign system— is either absent or not developed in
the child." 33
•^'- Op. cit., pp. 481-82.
^^ Goals and Desires of Man (New York, 1942), p. 129. For a wonderfully
sensitive account of memory— which unfortunately we came upon only after
this book was in press— see Ernest G. Schachtel, "On Memory and Childhood
Amnesia," reprinted in A Study of Interpersonal Relations, P. Mullahy, ed.
(New York: Hermitage Press, 1949).
1^4 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
Language gives us the pegs upon which memories as well as
future anticipations may be fixed. Stenographic reports of the
two- to three-year-old child indicate this connection of memory
with symbols and verbal processes. Once linked to organic habits,
psychic feelings, or segments of experience, symbols may be con-
stantly reorganized in memory and imagination.
We remember others from whom we have been separated ac-
cording to our desires and fantasies, and the same is true of our
memories of our own past selves. The photographs and the stories
'^old us by others limit this work of reconstructive fantasy, but
not altogether, for the act of perception is also a construction that
-is often influenced by our fantasies and anticipations, and the
stories our mother and other relatives tell us, to which we listen,
■md which we remember, are not usually the whole story. Mothers
are not notable as scientific observers of their children.
Although patterns formed by the impressionable experiences of
the childhood epoch may be difficult to dissolve by subsequent
experiences, their influences upon the adult do not seem to be
primarily transmitted by explicit memory. Those experiences, actual
or imaginary, which were not explicitly nor adequately symbolized
are more likely to be the bearers of our past which influences our
present and future. But just how do these early formations influ-
ence later formations of character?
The conditioning of reflexes and the development of habits dur-
ing the childhood phase of the organism may carry over into later
life. It is doubtful that they persist in identical form, though they
may persist in newer integrations and they do limit the later habits
that can be acquired. There is continuity and development, not
mere repetition; there is a cumulative selection exerted by previ-
ously organized habits. Habits, developed in one phase of the biog-
raphy, are thus often unconscious determinants of later habits.
We may be quite unaware of them, until they get us into trouble
or limit our learning of new ways. Habits are among the persistent
heritages from the training and history of our bodies.
It is the psychic structure that is perhaps most crucial in this
question of the adult burden of childhood experiences. Given
societies, for example, do not conventionally symbolize many phases
of emotional experiences. Sexual interests and sensations may thus
remain outside the verbalized areas of the character, and yet de-
termine conscious conduct and psychic life. For the childhood feel-
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD 1^^
ings and imagination that are not socialized and anchored by ver-
bahzation may nevertheless exert an influence upon later psychic
life. In fact, the influence of such unconscious elements and linkages
may be all the more controlling because they are not normally
remembered and brought to awareness. No symbolic organization
is socially provided for them. And, like the mass activities of the
infant, such elements may avalanche upon the person during
severe crises or strains.^*
Fears which the child experiences with reference to sex may be
tabooed in conversation and hence remain unverbalized, unana-
lyzed, and subject to the constructions and modifications of imagi-
nation. Because of the conventional taboos and inadequate vocabu-
laries on the part of the parents, a verbal lag— as far as the psychic
structure is concerned— is typical in Western societies. It has been
noted, by Norman Cameron, ^"^ that among some strata in Western
civilization "sexual attitudes enter relatively seldom into social
communication. The ratio of sexual attitudes functioning in private
to those freely and genuinely shared with the community is dis-
proportionately high when compared with most other commonly
held attitudes." That is why the imagery, motives, the day and
night dreams, and uncontrolled ve/balization in the authoritatively
controlled yet intimate interview, are likely to reveal a large per-
centage of sexual content. And yet, as we have already noted, the
ready availability of sexual imagery and themes in public life—
in magazines and movies, as well as in "unwritten literature," in
highly informal channels— naturally attracts the child's attention
and concern. It is fair to assume that most children of any given age
are more "knowing" than most parents (and teachers) think they
are.
The verbal lag is facilitated by conventional suppression and
lack of a happy rapport with parents during later epochs of the
biography. The experience and the imagination of the child and
later of the adolescent continue to interplay with, reinforce, or
repress these emotional cravings and impulsive squirmings of the
psychic structure, which show up in the giggles of girls and the
3* See A. Kardiner, The Traumatic Neuroses of War (London: Hoeber,
1941). See also the acute remarks on \erbal organization in Lorimer, op. cit.,
pp. 185 fr.
'■^•' See "The Paranoid Pseudo-Community," American Journal of Sociologtj,
July 1943, p. 36.
1^6 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
whistles of boys. They may therefore be unintegrated aspects of
the adult character, and may be repeated in the adult character in
a form identical with their childhood shape. More typically, how-
ever, they are modified and fulfill some contemporary function
within the adult's integration. Yet they may not be adequately
integrated, and hence may be in conflict. In trying fully to under-
stand the adult character, as Karen Homey has held, we must
grasp these so-called infantile elements as they function contem-
poraneously.
To think of infantile trends of the psychic structure as being
repeated in identical form in the adult is to assume that they re-
mained "isolated and unaltered " by subsequent developments. Ob-
servations—such as the child's tendency to repeat previous experi-
ences, the re-experience of traumatic incidents in similar or iden-
tical detail, the practice recall of past experiences under condi-
tions of the psychoanalytic interview— these observations can be
adequately explained on grounds other than that of a supposed
persistence in the adult of childhood experiences.^*^ Moreover, the
undue genetic emphasis is open to the criticism that it does not
explain why the childhood trends and traits persist. Normally, the
person "grows out of them," or at least they do not seem to oper-
ate within the adult character. But why do they persist in certain
cases? ^^y V:gQ^c\si^^^
To answer this we have to examine the whole adult psychic and
character structure and find out what role they perform in their
dontemporary setting. In the adult character supposedly childish
emotions and techniques of conduct may have a meaning and ful-
fill a function quite different than in the child. A woman may cry
like a child, but her crying after all may not be very childish.
The influence of children's ex-perience upon their adult char-
acters may leave a residue which can be directly discerned. Thus,
we "spontaneously" like or dislike a person because this person is
linked with early memories of people whom as a child we experi-
enced pleasantly or unsatisfactorily. More importantly, the influ-
ence of the childhood experience may be due to the simple fact
that the adult character structure develops from the one formed
in childhood. It is in childhood that the character is first formed
■'" This position is taken by Karen Homey, see op. cit.. Chapters 4, 8, and
9, especially pp. 136-38 and 158.
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD I57
and the adult one is thereby started. Although one may not often
draw a straight and isolated line from an adult trait back to a spe-
cific childhood experience, one can see that the experiences which
formed the adult character include the childhood structures and
developed from them. If early traits fit in with, and reinforce pres-
ent trends of character, they are all the more likely to exert an
influence upon the adult's conduct and experience.
The general direction and the degree of this development de-
pend upon the adult functions which traits acquired in childhood
may come to have. And as we shall now see, the answer to this
psychological question also depends upon distinctively sociological
factors.
8. The Social Relutivitij of Childhood Influences
To answer the questions of how much weight we should assign
to the childhood phase of the biography, and what adult features
of character are most likely to be infantile in origin, we have to
know something about the full biography and something about
the society in which it is lived out. We have to consider entire
biographical patterns, not only as they are lived out but as they
are laid down in different social structures. Let us first discuss
several types of societies which permit very different answers to
our general question.
If the pace of social change is rapid, then the world of youth is
more likely to be different from the adult world. Historical tempo
is not of course the only condition leading to such differences
between child and adult. Even if the rate of social change is slow,
the age stratification of the society may be very rigid and the
things expected of the child very different from those expected of
the adult. Still another factor favoring differences in roles played
by the youthful and by the mature is the extent of the societies'
complexity. For this means that there may be complicated roles
which take time to learn to enact in an acceptable and mature
manner.
Yet this need not be the case, for a complex society may be
specialized in such a way that any one person need only learn his
specialty: the child may have to develop beyond the youthful roles
only in one or two respects— such as the job; the remainder of his
roles may not be so very different from those he learned in child-
1^8 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
hood; these roles may continue to work quite well throughout the
person's biography.
An extreme division of labor and specialization may block the
development by practice of features other than those held suitable
to childhood. Only in the skills required for the specialty will de-
velopment occur. Thus the theoretical expert may be relatively
undeveloped in manual skills, not knowing how to use a snow
shovel or lathe, or he may be "deficient" in the capacity for mature
love and affection, experiencing throughout his life an adolescent
embarrassment in front of all women.
If in a society there are many large differences between the roles
expected of the child and the roles of the adult world, then pat-
terns acquired during childhood are less likely to be successful if
they persist in the adult. Accordingly we may ask of any given
society, how many psychic or character traits which "worked," in
childhood continue to secure satisfactions and security in adult
life?
A narrow gap between the child and the adult world may be
due to a lack of complexity, the intrinsic difficulties and diversities
of the roles in the adult society, or to the fact that the expectations
for adults are from a very early period focused upon the child.
Societies differ greatly in the degrees to which childhood roles
approximate those of adults. Thus, among the Chuckchees, child-
hood seems "largely an imitation of the life of elders." ^^ "The
plains Indians constructed for their children miniature camps,
encouraged them to enact the scenes of adult life; the Samoans
banish children from even imitating adult conditions and give
them small tasks graded to their skill; the Kaffirs give their chil-
dren unpleasant jobs and lie about the facts of life, and the chil-
dren retaliate by developing a small outlaw state with a secret
language and spy system of its owai. The Manus use play only to
develop physical proficiency, no attempt to instill the cultural con-
ventions or the industrial techniques is made." ^^
To view anxiety in an adult as an infantile attitude is "to con-
fuse two different things, to mistake for an infantile attitude an atti-
tude merely generated in childhood. With at least as much justifi-
cation as calling anxiety an infantile reaction one might call it a
3^ See Abram Kardiner, op. cit., p. 121.
38 See Margaret Mead, "The Primitive Child," Handbook ... p. 680.
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD l$g
precocious attitude in a child." •^'•' It is, in large part, a question of
the size of the social gap between child and adult with reference
to specific traits and roles.
Infant or childhood patterns which are successful in satisfying
the infant or child are less likely to be modified or dropped. If
many childhood patterns are not agreeable to an adolescent's peers,
he will cling to them only at the risk of losing prestige. In America
the modifications and rejections of childhood patterns are accom-
panied by a good deal of the pose of toughness and the mannerisms
taken to be the adult swagger. A society that not only contains a
large gap between the expectations on various age groups but
which is also very rapidly changing, thus accentuating this gap,
will typically require many changes of trait and mannerism in the
course of the biography.
If the early adolescent cannot find new alternative patterns
which can replace the gratifications of the older patterns he is more
likely to cling to childhood ones. If the sequence of life experi-
ences permits gratifications to accrue from these early patterns,
repeated in adolescent and adult worlds without much modifica-
tion, we may speak, not of repetition, but of social lines of facili-
tation.
These lines are just as important in understanding the persist-
ence of childhood or adolescent traits as are the original experi-
ences of childhood or adolescence during which the traits were
acquired. Indeed they may be more important, and they are cer-
tainly more immediately relevant to the understanding of the func-
tion of the trait within the adult character structure.
The conception of social lines of facilitation permits us to indi-
vidualize our discussion of the differing bearings of such social
factors as age stratification upon the adult persistence of traits
acquired during childhood. Of any given person and his society
we may ask: Has this person found adult roles which permit or
even encourage the continued use of traits acquired during child-
hood?
There are certain types of marriage, for instance, the success of
which rests upon tacit agreement to allow the husband or the
wife, or both, to play the child or adolescent in certain roles and
aspects of personality. Housewives may thus successfully employ
39 K. Homey, The Neurotic Personalitij of Our Time (New York: Norton,
1937), P- 78.
l6o CHARACTER STRUCTURE
the infantile tear, or the temper-tantrum, or the form of hysteria
known as the crying-jag, in order to achieve their ends. In popular
songs, phrases like "sugar daddy"— social expressions and facilita-
tions of infantilism— are explicitly revealed: "O! Daddy!" one such
"incest song" runs, "You ought to get the best for me!" And an-
other: "While knocking off, a game of golf, I may make a play
for the caddy; but when I do, I don't follow through, 'cause my
heart belongs to daddy."
The weight of childhood in adult character is conditioned by
regression under traumatic experience, the adult function of traits
within the adult character, the spread of the age-structure of a
society, and by the availability and use of social lines of facilita-
tion for given character traits and formations.
Character structure, as we have seen throughout Part Two, refers
to the unique individual. It stands for the individual variations
of the types of persons usual in given societies or strata within
given societies. These variations arise because of different constitu-
tions and because of the different ways in which the psychic struc-
ture is integrated with the person. The uniqueness of the indi-
vidual—the particular composition and unity which he achieves—
arises from his differing experiences and from his cumulative or-
dering of these experiences. Although the roles which two persons
play and have played may seem identical, the way in which they
have each played them and the different sequence in their respec-
tive biographies means that very different character structures are
formed.
Yet all of the uniqueness and unity of a character structure may
not be telescoped into the past. Experience and its effects involve
an interplay of past, present, and future. Unique traits may arise
from differences in life goals and anticipations, as well as from
past experience and present situation. The future as well as the
past and the present need to be taken into account in explaining
a given character structure.
We do not simply remember isolated events in our past. We
remember events fitted into a framework. This framework is given
us By our society, and that which fits into it and fills it out may
be remembered better than what we cannot thus locate. It is re-
ported by Bartlett that after several members of a Zulu tribe
visited London the one thing which stood out vividly in their
BIOGRAPHY AND TYPES OF CHILDHOOD l6l
memories was the image of an English pohceman standing in traffic
with uplifted arm. This gesture happens to be the sign of greeting
among members of their tribes; it was one of the few images that
fitted immediately into the social framework of their memories and
was retained.^"
In similar manner, the life plan of the individual, his philosophy
of life, and his expectations and specific goals, normally fit into a
large social framework, which is typical of members of his social
position, and which limits the scope of his construction of a pos-
sible future. To limit, however, is not to determine. The structure
of a man's future as he sees it is subject to marked individual
modification from the life plan suggested by his social position in a
particular society at a given time.
Problems occur and decisions must be formulated which involve
anticipations of the future as well as habits of the past. Conflicting
expectations exacted of us by others do not necessarily end in a
deadlock or in mere drifting, but often in a redirecting of our
conduct and sometimes of our life plan. Some major goal of our
life plan may be the rallying point of present conduct. This selec-
tion of goal and the arrangement of present activities as means to
its realizations are, of course, a distinctive form of the conscious
and intelligent character. In varying degrees we control our pres-
ent conduct by the future which we anticipate and desire, and
just as we respond to the cut of the knife before we are cut by it,
so we take roles in anticipation of the reactions of others, in order
to avoid anxieties or to gain ends wanted.
By anticipation, the future operates in the present; we act now
in terms of that future. These anticipations are the conditions of
our present conduct and stylizations of self. All experience prob-
ably has such elements of the anticipated future in it, for we re-
spond to the present signs of future objects: we run when there is
smoke, although we have not seen fire. And when we are frustrated,
we seek out such signs, items available in the present which indi-
cate the future. By selecting these signs and changing our be-
havior in terms of them, we use future consequences as guides for
present conduct.
Were we fully to trace out the biographies typical of a society's
*oF. C. Bartlett, Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1932),
p. 248.
l62 CHARACTER STRUCTURE
members, from before birth until after death, we would also have
to study a great deal about the roles and institutions of the society.
For the biography of a person consists of the transformations in
character which result from abandoning roles and taking on new
ones.
P A K T T II It E E
SOCIAL STRUCTURE
CHAPTER
VII
Institutions and Persons
IN the present chapter, we shall elaborate some of the ways in
which persons and institutions may be related, thus attempting
to make clear the psychology of institutions and the sociology of
persons. For we believe that the psychological results of social
relations often provide the necessary and sufficient motivations for
personal conduct, and since social relations occur within societies,
if we are to understand the single human being, we must develop
a general view of institutions and of social structures. In terms of
our model of man and society, then, what are the more or less
direct ways in which character and social structure are related?
1. The Institutional Selection of Persons
" Institutions select and eject their members in accordance' with
a wide variety of formal rules and informal codes: Formal pre-
requisites for assuming and relinquishing roles may be specific
criteria of age, sex, health (as in recruitment for the United States
armed forces ) ; they may involve elaborate examinations of special-
ized skills or aptitudes or tests of "personality traits" (as in the
civil service or in many larger corporations). Churches may recruit
their members hereditarily, by infant baptism, or they may demand
self-conscious choice and personal commitment, indicated by "con-
version experiences," as necessary qualifications for adult baptism.
Such formal rules may be supplemented by informal codes of en-
trance; in fact, it is quite usual for both formal and informal types
of qualifications to operate in the institutional selection of persons.
Birth is ^necessar}^ but not always a sufficient, condition for the
assumption of institutional roles^The ancient Greeks and Romans,
l66 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
for example, practiced infanticide. The Spartan magistrate sur-
veyed the newly born and selected those fit to survive; infants
which this eugenic-minded military man thought unfit were con-
demned to death by exposure. The Roman paterfamilias considered
the newly born "his child" only after having ceremoniously ac-
knowledged it to be such; without this religious act the unwanted
progeny was subject to infanticide. Thus, in pre-Christian an-
tiquity, the child neither had a "right to be born" nor a "birth
right" to be reared. Only after religious induction by the father
did it become a "person" endowed with "rights." Similarly in cer-
tain regions of India there are strikingly imbalanced ratios of male
and female children because high castes practice female infanti-
cide, leaving it to lower castes to rear brides for their sons.
Birth alone, then, does not guarantee that the newly born will
be incorporated into a family,- and if he is, he may be only a provi-
sional member of the household. Should he prove to be handi-
capped, physically or mentally, to a degree unsatisfactory to the
relevant institutional orders, the authorities of these orders may
"institutionalize" him in another order.
Birth also places the Western infant in a particular social stratum
and milieu of a national state, and, where "infant baptism" exists,
into a rehgious institution^ All of this, in Western societies, is un-
derstood to be part of "the accident of birth." In the United States,
whether one is "born with a silver spoon in one's mouth" or is the
descendant of a Negro slave is considered to be a matter of blind
fate. But in India, where the child is born into a caste society and
there is belief in the "transmigration of souls," no such "accident
of birth" exists. The highborn and the lowborn are believed to have
"merited," in compensation for a previous life, their respective
fates at birth.
The more a society gauges people in terms of their "backgrounds,"
the more fateful for them as individuals will be their descent or
"birth right." Thus, the child does not enter social life as an "orig-
inal man." The stage is set for him; with his birth cry he an-
nounces merely his claim to be admitted to a drama that has long
been underway. During his life cycle he learns to assume and to
discard roles, and each phase of his life offers role opportunities of
its own.
Age often determines what we may and may not do^-What the
child plays in earnest, the adult may play for fun; what the adult
INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS l6y
plays in earnest is beyond the child's ability and understanding.
As adults we become "too old" for some roles; as children we are
"still too young" for others.
The same is true for sexual differences^ In most societies girls
and boys, women and men play certain widely different roles.
Among adults we speak of the "sexual di\'ision of labor." We speak
of the "housewife" (but not of the "househusband"), and when we
speak of the "provider" we are usually thinking of the male rather
than the female. Of course, the interchanging of role does occur,
as during the depression of the thirties. Then quite a few women
learned to earn money after their husbands had given up any hope
of finding gainful employment. Again, in the forties, many a young
woman was gainfully employed— she, "the provider," and he, her
"dependent"— in order to see her G.I. husband through college.
Before World War II, when men spoke of "women in arms" they
thought of ancient Amazons or of goddesses like Pallas Athena
with lance and shield, or of Diana with bow and arrow. So when
Russian women made their appearance as tank-riding soldiers in
the Finnish-Russian war of 1939, the Western world was taken
by surprise. But the incorporation of women into the United States
armed forces, as Wacs or Waves, may be only the beginning of
"equality in arms." Once it was held that women had to be silent
in church, but they fought for and gained the right of prophesying.
Once it was held that woman's place was in the home, that she
had no right to higher education and professional employment;
but she "emancipated" herself from such restrictions and gained
such rights. By the end of World War I, throughout the Western
world (with the exception of France) women had gained the right
to vote, although they still receive less compensation for the same
work than men receive. Social differences bet^^'een men and
women, it is clear, are due less to "natural differences" than to
differences in institutional opportunities.
-Man's weakness in childhood, and again in old age, binds him
close to the household. He begins by learning to play his roles in
a few "primary groups," in the family, the play group, the neigh-
borhood.-When he is enrolled in kindergarten and grammar school,
in Sunday school and youth associations, he is introduced into
"secondary groups." He learns to compete for grades, to struggle
for impersonal standards of achievement, to abide by the "rules
of the game," to "take his defeat," to be a "good loser," and to en-
l68 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
joy his triumphs. He acquires physical and symbolic skills; and he
learns to identify with Our Classmates, Our School, Our Town,
Our Religion, Our Nation.
To grow up, as we have said, means to discard specific child-
hood roles and to assume an expanding range of adult roles. These
roles make up the social content of our mature personalities.
—Men assuming identical roles are variously esteemed for the
ways in which they play them.-*Thus, we speak of great presidents
and of weak ones, of eminent and of not-so-eminent teachers and
scholars. We rate persons who are assuming provisional roles, as
promising or not so promising, in anticipation of their future con-
tributions. These estimates of the ways men play their roles should
be distinguished from our estimations of the roles themselves—
whether these roles are more or less important, of central or of
peripheral significance; whether in terms of social visibility they
allow the actor a conspicuous or an inconspicuous position. When
focusing upon such aspects of the role as such, we often refer to
"status position," which we shall later discuss in its psychological
aspect.^
Individuals often experience the roles they assume as a series
of tasks, according to the demands and expectations which others
address to them. -They may completely identify themselves with
certain roles, and so "put their hearts into" enacting them>.This
is likely to happen when they have deliberately chosen their roles,
say as lover and spouse of this particular partner, or as militant
fighter for this cause and for no other: "Here I stand, I can do no
other, so help me God," said Luther at the end of his speech before
the Reichstag at Worms. Similar postures may occur when men are
born into their roles, as members of nations, churches, language
communities— and so take them for granted— or when they take
authoritative roles assigned them by superiors, much as children
in patriarchal families will "honor" their parents by accepting the
marriage partner or occupation chosen by them.
— But in a society which expects its youthful members to choose
their roles "freely," that is, at their own risk 'and accovmtability,
the internalization of roles will vary greatly in depth^-This is espe-
cially so in a dynamic context of competitive values and contro-
versial ideas, for then some people may become confused and dis-
1 See Chapter XI: Stratification and Institutional Orders, Section 3: The
ir Status Sphere.
INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS l6g
cover that they lack the capacity to "make up their mindsr^ Others
may discover that it does not pay to identify themselves with their
roles too closely or too intensely^-^nd that a relatively loose fitting
of the role— while on the look-out for the next chance— rather than
fixed attention to the task at hand is more rewarding and oflEers
more "bargaining power." * \ O^^jJU/tP-,-^^'- - '
Where their skills are scarce and in demand, persons may seek to
drive home their "indispensability" by constantly threatening to
cease enacting the roles involved. Where many workers or staff
members actually do come and go, we speak of a high turnover
of labor or of staff. At some given point such turnover may prove
wasteful, since those who leave take with them their experience
and those who come have to be "broken in on the job." Thus, when
the distribution of skills is unmanaged, labor shortages may exist
side by side with unemployment.
It is in such contexts that men learn to see themselves "dis-
tanced" from any particular occupational role. They face their
occupational life in terms of a multiplicity of opportunities, with
only segmental involvement in any one of them. They are ready
to take up different jobs, finding fulfillment in all and in none,
that is, allowing none to take firm hold of their entire personalities.
German humanists of the Napoleonic age protested, in the name of
universal man, against vocational specialization. And economically
secure nobilities may consider aloofness from any special occu-
pational role their privilege, and so busy themselves only with
occasional political, administrative, or military tasks, never allow-
ing any single pursuit to fix them into an enduring role.
On the other hand, the old-world peasant and artisan, as well
as the modern professional career-man— the teacher, army officer,
artist, minister, doctor, or lawyer— is more likely to identify him-
self with his vocational role intensely and for life.
"Roles in voluntary associations are often stratified as perma-
nent, provisional, or transient. Where there is a premium on "se-
niority," those with permanent roles may successfully claim pres-
tigCr-In political parties such claims are usually raised by the "old
vanguard," "Fascisti of the first hour," "Old fighter of the Nazi
party," "Charter member," and the like. In local communities, the
corresponding phrases are: "old families," the "pioneers," "old set-
tlers," or "old timers," in contrast with "newcomers," "new resi-
dents," or "new members." Transient members of communities and
IJO SOCIAL STRUCTURE
organizations are frequently called "footloose" or "floaters"; in
political parties, they are frequently called "fly-by-nights" or "drift-
wood." In the family we speak of "the newly married" and we
honor long marital companionship by celebrating a "silver" and a
"golden" wedding anniversary. In the economic order, honorific
distinctions are made in favor of "old wealth," in contrast to re-
cently acquired wealth. In most modern societies, inherited wealth
ranks higher than newly accumulated wealth; the heir or the heiress
of the economic royalist ranks higher than the "self-made man"
who, at least in some circles, is made to feel a parvenu by those
having more exalted "backgrounds." In this, as in many other re-
spects, the countries of the New World no longer differ from those
of Old Europe.
Man's resignation from institutions is variously patterned.- Some
organizations, such as churches, monastic orders, or totalitarian
parties, acknowledge death as the sole legitimate exit for their
members. The formal act through which an individual is elim-
inated from his role in an economic institution usually takes the
form of a "notice" or a "nonrenewal" of contract, or a retirement
from business or assignment to the status of the temporarily un-
employed or permanently unemployable. In the religious order,
loss of membership may be voluntary or may occur against the
will of the member. In the latter case, in the Catholic church, we
speak of "excommunication," or in certain Protectant churches and
sects, of "being dropped from membership." In the political order,
especially the state itself, the person may be deprived of "civic
rights"; if naturalized he may be "denaturalized," and if an immi-
grant, he may be "deported" to his country of origin, or banned
as an "outlaw."
In a world of national states, to be expelled from one state for
political or religious reasons often makes admission to the territory
of another quite a problem. Leon Trotsky, after his expulsion from
the Soviet Union, for instance, found himself in "a world without
visa"; many other earlier fugitives from Bolshevism found them-
selves "stateless" and received a special status through the League
of Nations' "Nansen Pass." Since the advent of Hitlerism, no com-
parable instrument has been created. Jews driven from Germany
to the East found themselves for months in a no-man's-land, for
Poland refused to admit them. -The age-old right of the political
fugitive to asylum in another country is no longer honoredv- Nowa-
INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS IJl
days in Europe, eight years after "the shooting war," there are
still millions of "displaced persons," that is, "stateless persons,"
without civic rights, who have found no country willing to accept
them as "new citizens."
In the kinship order we speak of the "divorcee" and of the "lost
son." In the military order, of the "veteran" or the "reservist" who
has received" his "honorable discharge," or of the man who has been
tried by "court martial," of the man who absentees himself without
permission as "having gone AWOL," and finally of the "deserter."
If such men escape court jurisdiction, we speak of "fugitives from
justice." The disloyal party member is called a "renegade"; the dis-
loyal religious believer an "apostate." Hitler was ruled out of Chris-
tendom by President Roosevelt, although the Pope— an expert in
divine matters— did not declare him an "apostate," however sinful
a Christian he may have been considered.
~So, during their active lives, do men enter, play, and leave roles.^
During their declining years they see their friends drop out of
their lives; then opportunities to mourn become more frequent
and opportunities to continue their roles with their age peers
diminish. In time, they "retire" from vocational life; and as the
range of their active roles slirinks, they become housebound, and
finally they die. For although in industrialized nations more people
live longer than formerly, we shall all have to die although no
one knows when he personally will have to go. This knowledge is
biographically acquired, and like all thoughts of "unpleasant facts"
it is not always fully accepted.
In one of his most ingenious, although as usual problematical,
papers,^ Freud has interpreted the heroic valor of the soldier who
"goes over the top" as a regression to an archaic psychic state in
which the individual acts as if nothing could ever happen to him,
that is, a state in which he is basically convinced of his own im-
mortality. Freud's "hero" is thus a soldier who has "forgotten" that
he is mortal, risks his life in combat, and so unwittingly loses his
life. This may well be an oversimplification: some soldiers may
knowingly seek death in combat. For example, the "crusader" who
knows what he fights for and fights for what he knows may mini-
mize his fear of personal death to the zero point, and accept his
death as inevitable and near. The image of the last stand of the
- Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," Collected
Papers, Vol. IV (London, 1946), especially pp. 307 fF.
1/2 SOCIALSTRUCTURE
Spartan warriors at Thermopylae also comes to mind, and we
should remember that the Romans summed up their military mo-
rale by the saying: "It is sweet and becoming to die for one's coun-
try," which would seem to characterize men who realize that they
are mortal yet are willing to risk and, if need be, lose their lives
in combat. And there is the ideal image of the Christian martyr,
who, though he died for a different cause, was in general agree-
ment with this Roman view. The same holds for pioneers of modern
ideas, such as Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake, or
for Communists such as Levine, court martialed at Munich in
1918, who referred to himself, in the language of expressionism, as
a "corpse on vacation."
At any rate, we do not experience our death: it is the end of all
experience. Yet whatever we experience just before death can be
known to us only if the decline of our life does not end in death
but in recovery. Man's knowledge of death does sometimes add a
component of fear to his image of death, but even after the loss
of consciousness— since anesthesia— man may "fight death" and re-
cover. On the other hand, men may reconcile themselves to death
and die as Abraham did, "full of days"; and some may even seek
death in suicide. Yet what testimony we have concerning the
alleged "experience of death" is the testimony of those who, like
Dostoevski before the firing squad, were "close to death" but some-
how continued to live. They did not experience death itself, and so
they report their attitude toward death, not their experience of it.
.-Though-death is man's final exit from all worldly roles^Jiis corpse
remains to his relatives, and to a variety of experts. In funeral rites
and in sanitary services, funeral directors, cemetery wardens, grave-
diggers or cremators, are in charge. The mummification of ancient
Egyptian pharaohs and, in our time, of Lenin; the royal tombs in
the form of Egytian pyramids or the mausoleum in Moscow's Red
Square, the Christian cross and its alleged remains in the form
of relics, the organized care of soldiers' cemeteries, the memorial
rites for the Unknown Soldier of World War I at the Cenotaph in
London, the Arc de Triomphe of Paris, and the Arlington Cemetery
in Washington— all these serve to "immemorialize" the memories of
men who are felt to have cast long shadows through history. Re-
ligious and filial piety, biographical interest and secular hero wor-
ship, thus monumentalize the memory image of the deceased after
men cease to play any live role.
INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS IJ^^
2. The Institutional Formation of Persons
"^Institutions not only select persons and eject them; institutions _
also form them.-HEn our discussion of the biography, we have indi-
cated some of the ways in which this occurs. Institutions in the
several orders, as we shall see, may also have^pecial educational
spheres by means of which people are socially trained to enact the
roles of the institution; ^ and, of course, in the informal context
of any institution,'-«ducation— even to the point of a social trans-
formation of the person— may proceed. Impulse and sensitivity are
channeled and transformed into standard motives joined to stand-
ard goals and gratifications. Thus, institutions imprint their stamps
upon the individual, modifying his external conduct as well as his
inner life. For— ©ne aspect of learning a role consists of acquiring
motives which guarantee its performance.4.
"^ But the-key mechanism by which institutions form persons in-
volves the_circle of significant others which the institution estab-
lishes.4>.This is important because it in due course leads, for full
institutional members, to changes in the generalized other. By
internalizing the expectations of institutional heads, as particular
others, the persons who enact the institutional role, come to con-
trol themselves— to pattern and to enact their roles in accordance
with the constraints thus built into their characters. As they develop
as institutional members, these constraints are often generalized,
and are thus linked psychologically with particular institutions.
There are two general ways in which persons may be attached
to institutions, and only one of them involves the generalized other, y
socially anchored in the institution and internalized by persons
who are its members.
^J)iJnstitutional heads may appeal to their members in terms of \
the generalized other, and so make it a religious or moral duty
for them to develop sentiments of attachment to the institution. —
So Jews and Christians teach their children "Honor thy father and
3 See Chapter IX: Institutional Orders and Social Controls, II, Section 4:
The Educational Sphere.
^ See Chapter V: The Sociology of Motivation.
5 See Chapter IV: The Person.
T!
l-J/^ SOCIAL STRUCTURE
thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the
Lord thy God giveth thee." Christian parents are unlikely to teach
Jesus's words "Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead," or
"I am come to set a man at variance against his father and the
daughter against her mother." Thus is institutional solidarity ex-
plicitly trained and upheld. ( II ) - Those in control of an institution,
or acting within it, may appeal to the sense of expediency of the
members.- Affiliation with or adherence to the institution is then
regarded as a rationally calculated advantage.
In the first case, where the generalized other is trained, the indi-
vidual is expected to maintain membership "for better or for worse";
in the second, where rational calculation is the rule, the mainte-
nance of the individual's membership is dependent upon his advan-
tage in the maintenance of the institution, or upon the mutual ad-
vantage of the several members. Accordingly, the nature of solidar-
ity and of its sentimentalization differs, which is what Ferdinand
Tonnies had in mind when he spoke of the differences between
"communal relations" with their moral sentiment, and "societal rela-
tions," with their expedient calculations of interest. -
Different institutional orders seem typically to vary as to which
type of attachment prevails : communities of actual or alleged com-
mon descent— such as the family, clan, sib, tribe, nation— are char-
acterized by solidarity sentimentsjiiaking it a magical, sacred, or
moral obligation of the members to give such sentiments priority
over all considerations of expediency. Nationalism, to be sure, is
a modern mass sentiment of great complexity and variation, but
the slogan, "My country, right or wrong" places the attachment to
one's nation "beyond good and evil," and thus corresponds to the
valuation of the king as the head of the nation who "can do no
wrong." ^
The intensity of such solidarity is based upon its foundation in
the superego of persons, combined with rationalizations of power
*' Since the end of World War I this evaluation of the heads of states has
been widely renounced. In articles 227-30 of the Versailles Peace Treaty,
the allied powers placed Wilhelm II under public accusation because of
infractions of "the international moral law and the sanctity ot treaties." After
World War II a new international law was proclaimed which is based upon
"natural law" and introduces the principles of retroactivity and guilt by
association. It does not define "aggression," and so, given the present power
constellation, one can only conclude that among modern nations, "the victor
can do no wrong."
INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS IJ,^
and prestige which enlist a variety of private interests— economic,
mihtary, and bureaucratic. Hitler summed it up in the phrase "Right
is what benefits the German people," which may be said to mark
one end of all universalist standards, whether religious, moral, or
legal. The intensity of such loyalty sentiments is relevant for the
degree to which a social structure is politically cohesive; and the
scope of the values which institutional leaders can successfully at-
tach to such loyalty patterns— by holding their particular institu-
tions to be the depository of all possible values— is of course rele-
\ ant for social cohesion, because the individual who is confronted
with such claims may be too weak to define his own value position
in the face of such a "total opposition." Accordingly, such loyalties
are decisive for the sacrifices which individual members are ex-
pected to be ready to make for the common cause.
Totalitarian societies and regimes seek to build up such total
loyalties by their programs of "cadre training." Hitler, however,
despite the aid of his "German Christians," never succeeded in
breaking Christian universalism. Stalin, on the other hand, after
having made his peace with the Eastern church, has been more
successful: the juxtaposition of a "dialectical science of nature" (as
against, for example, "bourgeois genetics"), of "proletarian or
socialist realism" in the fine arts and in literature (as against
"bourgeois formalism" and other deviations), and of "Soviet Man"
(against all other types of man— feudal, bourgeois, cosmopolitan,
or petty-bourgeois) divides sharply the value preferences and
thoughtways of the communist ingroup from all those on the out-
side. Universalist criteria of the true, the good, and the beautiful
are thus discarded, and in fact considered quite unavailable.
One of the features of this new orthodoxy is that no institutional
order is permitted to develop prestigeful roles on its own ground.
For all loyalties, and thus for all prestige and for all authority,
there must be one fountainhead. Success in any field may thus be
ascribed to the head of the state, who in turn distributes all honor.
So there are medals for warriors and for workers, for artists and
for the mothers who bear many children. All achievement is pre-
conditioned by the correct course of the totalitarian leadership,
and hence all achievement is credited to its wise and infallible
course. Criticism may be made only of its inadequate means, not—
once they are officially promulgated— of its ends. And no one can
iy6 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
deviate from whatever "line" has been defined for each field of
endeavor.
The modern totalitarian leader thus resurrects the image of the
ancient patriarch who was supreme judge, chief provider, military
leader, and head religious functionary, all in one. The individual
member of his family had no alternative orientation, and func-
tionally specialized motives met on the common basis of all obliga-
tion, defined in terms of filial piety. Such obligations included the
obligation to honor one's father and mother, to provide for them
to the end of their days, to be devoted to their memories and to
care for their burial and their grave, to obey their expressed wishes
with regard to the disposition of the inheritance, to take over the
blood feud as a right and an obligation of successorship, never to
depart from the God of the fathers and His ways, and to respect
one's wife, chosen by one's father.
If the-private integration of persons and the public cohesion of
institutions may be achieved by (a) personal leadership, (b) by
eliciting co-operation in common tasks, or ( c ) by joint utilization of
things— such as the house and its contents— then we may say that
the patriarchal family of old, as well as the totalitarian society of
the Soviet Union today, is "integrated" on all three levels. For such
societies make all the instruments of production, administration,
and warfare a "common property," develop a cult of the leader,
and define common tasks for all in terms of the "quota fulfillments"
set forth in the "plans" promulgated from on high.
3. The Theori/ of Premiums and Traits of Character
The chief mechanism by which persons are formed by institu-
tions has to do with the way types of persons are "built" by the
combinations of various roles which compose them, and by their
cumulative reactions to these roles.) In Chapter IV, as well as in
the present chapter, we have discussed some of the relevant mech-
anisms as they involve images of the self and the generalized other,
(In this section, we want to display a further way by which indi-
vidual phenomena— specific "traits" of the individual's character-
may be linked with institutional contexts, j
-^Traits of the individual may usefully be classified according to
the scope of the occasions on which the trait appears, and the zone
INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS IJJ
or zones of the character structure in which the trait is integrated/-^
These two points of observation may be related. For example, if
a tiait is a feature of the organism, the scope of its appearance may
coincide with the appearance of the individual, and it may in one
way or another, become integrated with all zones of the character
structure, ^hus the roles available to a man born with a hunched
back will he restricted, and the way he combines and reacts to
these roles, as well as the self-images reflected from them, will be
modified. These facts about his roles and his self may in turn affect
the opportunities of given components of the psychic structure to
be socialized, in which case the organic trait of his hunchback may
be integrated with traits in all zones of his character structure.
Such traits may thus cue a pattern of other traits in other zones
of character, restricting and shaping whatever traits are to become
part of the total character. )
There is no general principle of character structure in terms of
which any one trait always leads to the selection of other traits.
The reason for this is that character traits are presented by and
through the medium of interpersonal relations and most traits are
relative to the institutional and other interpersonal contexts in
which they are presented. The traits of a person should not, there-
fore, be ascribed merely to that one person, as if he were a turkey
into which different traits were stuffed. What is "selfishness" to
one circle of persons may to another circle be "initiative," or to
either circle the trait may be selfishness or initiative according to
when, how, and where it is revealed.
"frhere are two considerations involved: first, the context of the
trait's occurrence, and second, the different way or ways in which
it may be evaluated by different personst-Those traits which appear
in the enactment of a limited number of roles we may call specific —
traits; those which are presented in a wide variety of roles enacted
by the person we may call general traits^i a trait is evaluated
positively by significant others, we may say that a preiniiim-^is
placed upon its development and presentation. If the trait is evalu-
ated negatively, or if the person is in any way restrained from
presenting it, we may say that the trait is tabooed.
A premium or a taboo may itself be used generally or specifically.
Thus, if selfishness is generally tabooed, it means that all its appear-
ances are interpreted as selfishness and are tabooed. If it is specifi-
cally tabooed, only in certain roles will its presentation be tabooed.
iy8 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
In like manner, a trait may be generally or specifically "premi-
umed," that is, a premium may be placed upon it no matter when,
where, or by whom it is displayed, or, a premium may be applied
only when the trait is displayed by certain persons enacting certain
roles on certain occasions.
Taboos or premiums may be applied by coercion— by actual re-
straint of the bodily movements which are involved in presenting
the trait; by co-operating socially with the performance or failing
to do so; by the use of gestures— the smile, the frown, the flicker
of an eyelid— to encourage or to restrain the presentation of the
trait; or by using words which designate the trait in question in
a positive or in a negative manner. Systems of premiums and taboos
need not be verbalized, but if they do become fixed in the language,
this fact may stabilize the system and facilitate its diffusion from
specific to generalized application. An eulogistic term for some trait
may thus increase the chances that people will approve it.
There are no general psychological traits which exist as universals
in the character structure, irrespective of specific contexts. The
only meaning we can usefully give "general trait" is: used in all
or most contexts. We can then ask: -What are the sociological con-
ditions which favor the development in persons of general traits?
And, conversely, what are the conditions under which we may
expect specific traits to be developed?^
We must emphasize this specialization of character traits, because
a nonsociological psychology and an idealistic emphasis upon the
"harmony" of the human personality have caused some students to
underestimate, if not overlook, it. Character traits are not universals
within a character structure; they must always be seen and under-
stood by the social psychologist as tied to given ranges of social
situations.
The controversy as to whether or not a person has "general traits"
or only "particular traits" may be resolved with the aid of the con-
cepts we have presented. -Generalized traits are likely to develop
if the roles a person incorporates are all similar. And the fact
of such similarity is, of course, dependent on the kind of society
in which the person lives, as well as upon his choice of roles, from
all those available, at any given time.
Where a majority of the institutional roles making up a society
follow a similar principle, the character traits formed in one con-
INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS Ijg
text have a chance to operate in another. To this extent, the oppor-
tunity for general traits to develop in persons is maximized." In
many contexts, however, such a generalization of traits is not so-
ci'^lly possible. Perhaps it is true that a man who has acquired con-
trol over his body in dangerous sports is likely to be more sure of
his bodily control in dangerous physical work or in warfare,
whereas a man who lacks this readiness to risk his body may the
more readily ascribe "courage" to those who do have it. Yet, the
"courage" of the artist to brave for years the scorn of outraged
critics is different from the "courage" of the soldier. In fact, the
courageous man of the typewriter need not at all be the courageous
man of the machine gun— yet both may be "courageous," willing
to face risks.
^^23^hen the roles composing a social structure are specialized into
more or less autonomous institutions, the traits of men are likely
to be segregated and specific. A man may cheat his wife but not
his business partner, or vice versa. On the field of sport the foot-
ball player may be a ruthless tackier, but on the dance floor an
awkward partner and timid competitor. The political courage of
a local leader may or may not carry over to the courage of a na-
tional leader, the dimensions and requirements of the latter role
being enormously enlarged. Lenin is a case in point; Kerensky
represents the reverse. An American may be enraged at earlier
British treatment of the Burmese, but not upset at American treat-
ment of Southern Negroes.
Because of such facts, no general discussion of allegedly univer-
sal traits in terms of the isolated person is apt to be fruitful. In
any society, and with reference to given types of character struc-
ture, it is a matter for empirical research to determine how far
traits are generalized or hov/ far they are segregated according to
contexts. We may, however, contribute to the tools useful for
such work by considering various kinds of individual traits as they
are presented and evaluated by others:
I. A general trait that is generally premiumed has a high chance
to continue to be presented by the person and to be firmly organ-
ized into his character. A person predominantly composed of such
" The so-called "problem ot transfer ot training" has been gi\ en relati\ely
fruitless answers by many psychologists because they fail to consider the
sociological conditions that are involved. Experimental studies, in U.S. society
and laboratories, have usually indicated very little transfer.
l8o SOCIALSTRUCTURE
traits in a society of harmonious premiums is apt to be unified—
and static.
IlrA specific trait that is generally premiumed will tend to
spread, to become a general traiW-A person predominantly com-
posed of such traits in a society of high and ready premiums is apt
to be an expanding person, although perhaps suffering the tensions
of his growth. Suppose a general premium is placed upon the
specific trait of kindness; we would then expect that kindness would
tend to become general. Yet the general premium on kindness may
continue to be restricted to kindness toward certain kinds of per-
sons, for no premium is absolutely general: to be kind to Negroes
may continue to be tabooed in many contexts of Negro-white rela-
tions. General premiums of specific traits may even be turned into
specific taboos: during a war, to be kind to one of the enemy may
be tabooed, indeed, it may be treason.
Premiums thus have a life of their own, a dynamic by which
they become less general and turn into specific premiums, or even
change into specific or general taboos. Skill at welding may be
highly premiumed by everyone when it is done in the shop, but
the welder's wife may taboo it in the kitchen: it is a specific trait
generally premiumed but it is not likely to become a general trait.
III." A general trait that is specifically premiumed will tend to
become a specific trait, -or, if kept general, to be modified or
camouflaged in all contexts except the one in which it is specifically
premiumed. If a person presents traits that are evaluated as selfish
or grasping in all his roles, the lack of general premiums on these
traits may make him restrict their presentation to one or two roles,
such as occur in small business conduct, where there is a chance
that they will be specifically premiumed.
A person who is predominantly composed of general traits that
are specifically premiumed is like "a bull in a china shop." He has
not yet learned to segregate the display of traits according to ap-
propriate contexts; he is making too much of what, in its proper
place, might be a good thing.
IV." A specific trait that is specifically premiumed will tend to
be stabilized^-a person predominantly composed of such traits will
be a compartmentalized specialist—
'- A similar scheme of the social tendencies of personal traits is
possible in terms of taboos: I. The chances for a general trait that
INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS l8l
is generally tabooed to develop in the person are very lowfbut if
developed, its chances to disappear are very high. II. A specific
trait that is generally tabooed will tend to be given up in its specific
context and not to spread to other contexts. III."i\ general trait that
is specifically tabooed will tend to become less general or even to
become a specific trait.— IV.""A specific trait that is specifically
tabooed will tend to be repressed in the specifically tabooed con-
text.-^ it is firmly integrated in the person, he may try to realize
it in other contexts.
So far, in our discussion of the sociology of individual traits, we
have written in terms of the person, intentionally omitting con-
sideration of other zones of the character. We have stated several
general propositions on the assumption that "other things were
equal." We must now probe behind these "other things," for in
reality, economists not withstanding, other things are not "equal."
Omitting traits that are visible features of the organic constitu-
tion, there seem to be three general factors which select and refract
traits in any given character structure. To understand how a given
trait comes to be part of the character structure requires that we
pay attention to these factors:
!*»• Social premiums and taboos are applied to traits by currently
significant others, who by thus responding to them, determine their
meaning, and, as it were, socialhj refract the traits.-The premiums
and taboos that are applied by these significant others may be stable
or they may be unstable, and they may be in conflict or they may
be in harmony.
Where the unity of a social structure is disintegrating, the grip
of institutions upon men relaxes, which means that no general,
harmonious, and stable system of premiums and taboos operates.
The responses and traits of men are accordingly less predictable,
for then a greater range is open for traits to develop, and experi-
mental types of character may arise. Some of these types may later
set up a new system of premiums and taboos which will, in turn,
select and refract the development and presentations of traits in
other persons.
II. The premiums and taboos applied by currently significant
others are not the only ones which must be taken into account
in explaining the histories of various traits. For societies have his-
tories, and persons have biographies. We must pay attention to the
specific premiums and taboos to which persons have been exposed
l82 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
by previous others during the course of their biographies. These
previously internahzed taboos and premiums select and refract
those which may be currently effective. We point to this fact by
terming it the'- bio graphical refraction of traits^Ior it introduces a
certain depth into our considerations, the depth of the person's
biography.
III. There is another depth factor, which involves the matura-
tion of the psychic structure and its integration with the person.
In the interplay of social career and psychic maturation certain
traits which have been premiumed, and others which have been
tabooed, form a more or less stable configuration. ■<The psychic
structure may also have a certain dynamic of its own which is
involved in the selection and refraction of traits. And at any rate,
the premiums and taboos which have been applied to a person
select and accentuate certain components of his psychic structure
as well as of his person. So we must consider the psychic as well
as the social and the biographical refraction of traits. Analyzing a
specific character structure, the social psychologist tries to under-
stand its formation in terms of the acquisition of various traits in
their different institutional contexts, and to trace what happens
to these traits as they are integrated in this particular character
structure.
If in educational institutions there is a premium upon competitive
examinations as a means of selecting and evaluating students, then
competitive and individualistic traits may be developed in the
student. But if group and team work prevail and premiums are
placed upon such traits as co-operativeness, the student will be
encouraged to be helpful to his fellow students. Educational insti-
tutions may thus encourage individual competitiveness or co-opera-
tive teamwork. Such premiums and taboos need not be verbalized
as explicit rules, yet successful adjustment to the rules of the game
will necessitate traits of the type required by the objective insti-
tutional arrangements and its operating premiums and taboos.
In internalizing the going premiums and taboos, a person may
not be aware of the impact they are making upon his personal and
psychic structure. He may be a very self-conscious competitor
while not being aware of how he got that way or indeed that he
is. Intensified competition is apt to call forth anxieties in the persons
exposed to it. Then premiums upon such traits as generosity, light-
heartedness, and the ever-ready smile may be lessened in the
INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS iS^
scope of their application, and even transformed by some anxiety-
ridden persons into taboos. Thus do premiums stabiHze traits into
the person and into the dynamic trends of his character.
In order to understand what happens to a socially available trait
during its internalization and integration in the character structure,
we must grasp its angle of refraction, in terms of the biography
of given persons and in terms of their psychic structures, for these
modify the traits that are socially offered. The autonomous dy-
namics of both psychic structure and person may thus select from
and then organize what is socially premiumed.
4. Anxiety and Social Structure
We have been discussing some general ways in which institu-
tions select and form persons by means of the roles persons enact
and the traits they internalize. Persons are linked with social struc-
tures and with particular institutional orders in another way having
to do with what we have called the- symbol spheres— or more gen-
erally, the communication processes as a whole.
We shall now examine one type of emotion— anxiety and fear-
in order to illustrate how psychological states involving the psychic
structure as well as the person cannot be understood without refer-
ence to the institutional framework in which they go on, and in
particular, the communicational processes which often define them.
Freud has taught us to speak of anxiety rather than of fear
when the fear is out of proportion to the object or occasion which
arouses it. In pathologically extreme instances, psychologists speak
of "phobias," which are classified by object or occasion. Thus,
claustrophobia refers to an inordinate fear of closed-in places.
Where there is no concrete object or occasion discernible, one
may speak of "free-floating anxieties."
Public communications can be seen as psychologically relevant
to anxiety by means of the shifting definitions of loyalities and of
definitions of social reality itself which they provide. The level of
anxiety and of fear nowadays existing among American popula-
tions, for example, due to Soviet-United States tensions, is in some
part due to the great definitional shift in military perspectives: the
old categories of "land power" versus "sea power" have become
partially obsolete— due to developments of air power, atom bombs,
and snorkel submarines. Accordingly, there is a loss of firm defini-
184 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
tions of military reality, and for many people this is a source of
anxiety or fear.
So far as persons are concerned, we may classify their psycho-
logical state of security in terms of the institutional areas it involves
and the intervals during which it occurs. The areas of a person's
life in which he is secure are wide if he is secure in all his roles,
if he "knows where he is going" and what his situation is. They
are narrow if he has an adequate definition of his situation and its
wider context only in a few of his roles. Similarly, the interval of
security may be longer or shorter. The person may be secure all
the time, or such security as he experiences may be intermittent.
If we cross-classify these areas and intervals of security, we come
out with four possibilities:
Fully secure people are secure in all their roles all the time,
or at least for long periods of time. At the opposite end of the
scale are those whose area of security is narrow and even then,
intermittent— which, we might suppose, is the psychological coun-
terpart of Hobbes's state of nature, where life is "nasty, brutish and
short." There are also persons whose security rests on some nar-
row range of roles played, but within this range their security
endures. ("At least I don't have to worry about that.") And, in
the opposite situation, there are persons who are secure in all rela-
tions but only for short intervals.
This simple classification of types of security seems useful to
us, but of course it does not in itself establish any links between
security or anxiety and social structure. When we begin to exam-
ine more closely what we mean by "areas of security," and to dis-
cuss explicitly the emotion itself, we find that we cannot very well
do so without closely linking our discussion with given institutional
contexts. Emotions such as fear cannot usefully be divorced from
their objects— from what is feared; and these objects, involved in
the shifting anxieties of men, are historically given and socially
learned. "Man's fear," as Kurt Riezler has put it, "is fear of some-
thing or for something; of illness, loss of money, dishonor; for
his health, family, social status." ^
I. In the kinship order there may be fear of illegitimate chil-
dren, or of the marriage of daughters to class and status inferiors.
8 American Journal of Sociology, May 1944, p. 489.
INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS l8$
But whether there is or there is not fear of illegitimate pregnancy
of course depends on the institutional definition of pregnancy as
illegitimate, the severity of social sanctions against the illegitimate
child and its mother, or against the memlliance as defined by a
more or less rigid status code. The worries of fathers and mothers
thus depend on the existence of a status system and the competitive
craving for family respectability.
II. In the military order, there may be fear of death and fear
of defeat. But even the fear of death can be reduced, virtually to
zero, by intensive cowardice-courage programs of morale build-
ing. Since Napoleon, courage has been "taken for granted" in all
patriots, but in the twentieth century cowardice and courage have
become part of the manipulative technology of morale building.
Surely there are great differences in the anxieties which surrounded
mercantilist warfare, for which Voltaire depreciated courage, and
those which surround warfare in the hills of Korea.
III. In the economic order, the laissez-faire entrepreneur may
fear bankruptcy, and hence loss of respectability, as well as loss of
money. The employee may fear unemployment. But in the corpo-
rate economy, the risk of big business is often largely taken over
by the state. The fears thus become political rather than focused
on the laissez-faire market. As the old inscrutable market and the
business firm itself are rationalized so as to reduce entrepreneurial
anxiety, new anxieties about whether the corporation has a political
"in" give business fears a new focus and shape.
IV. In the political order, the politician may fear loss of office
in an election; the citizen may fear the loss of prestige of the state
with which he is patriotically identified, among the prestige striv-
ings of the great powers. But for the politician, the party machine's
fear may be the basis of his discipline. And "the citizen" who knows
anxiety from national loss of prestige is likely to be of the upper-
class gentry whose evaluation of self is closely joined with the
prestige of the nation, which he represents to representative men
of other nations.
V. Some sociologists— Herbert Spencer, for example— define re-
ligion as fear of the dead. Other thinkers, Freud for example,
l86 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
have stressed fear of guilty conscience and of death itself. The
symbol spheres of some religions, however, seem to have to do
with hope as well as with fear, indeed the two are frequently
interrelated in religious symbols and institutional life. If religious
institutions form a dominant order in the social structure, and if
the people are devout, all their fears and anxieties— no matter what
their social source— may feed into the religious order and its sym-
bols.
Agents of a religious hierarchy may fear demotion or reassign-
ment to less desirable parishes, and, like any office holder, they
may relieve their anxieties by knowing the ropes and pulling the
strings. What religious laities fear varies with the religion in which
they believe, and the demands raised by the religious leaders in
the name of its God. The level of anxiety— for example, conscious-
ness of sin— will vary with the level of demand that prevails.
Thus, typical fears and anxieties may be located sociologically in
each institutional order and sphere. Although some men may feel
that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, most men, in the long
history of mankind, have had better reasons to fear. In preindus-
trial times, when nature was still unconquered, many fears were
primarily based upon the calamitous consequences of that fact.
In modern societies, anxieties are more likely to have their sources
in the opaque and unpredictable drift of the social structure and
the similarly unstable dynamics of interpersonal relations.
Fifty years ago, "nervousness" was most frequently discussed in
connection with Victorian problems of love, prudery, and hysteria;
nowadays— after two world wars and a vast depression— insecurities
and anxieties are more likely to be seen as connected with social,
economic, and military securities, or their prevailing absence from
the life of men.
Just as sociological conditions lead to anxieties, so do they chan-
nel the compensations which relieve anxieties. A number of typical
mechanisms for such relief, which Karen Homey has called "crav-
ings," may be distinguished: " A person may compensate his anxi-
eties by becoming a perfectionist, eager to perform his roles in
such a way as never to lay himself open to criticism; accordingly,
" For an extended discussion of anxiety, love, affection, and power see Karen
Homey, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York, 1937), Chapters
3, 6, and 10.
INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS iS/
he may develop the traits of the exaggerated punctiho. Anxiety
may also be personally refracted by an increased craving for love
and affection and the development of the traits of the overly
affectionate person. In this craving, the person may allow himself
to be exploited "for love's sake" and thereby actually damage his
self in other roles. He may crave affectioti at all costs, in order to
gain protection, his motto being "If you love me, you will not
hurt me."
Closely allied to this type is the person who may be compulsively
submissive and comply with every wish of the other, "self-less" as
it were, lest he risk being hurt. The person ivithdraws from involve-
ment in the roles of an institutional order, giving up all psychic
concomitants. Again, the person may crave power, lest he have to
fear anything from anybody. In extreme cases, we refer to megalo-
mania, but ordinary job anxiety may lead to an inordinate develop-
ment of striving for family power, and accompanying traits may
be developed and premiumed by the person.
These compensatory mechanisms may of course be combined
in various ways. For example, inordinate cravings for power and
the accompanying traits, as a way out of anxiety, may be closely
related to inordinate cravings for love: in love, one lays himself
open to the powers of another; in power, one strives to dominate
the submissive other. An individual who oscillates between such
opposite tendencies, and their accompanying traits, is generally
called ambivalent. What is logically exclusive need not be psy-
chologically exclusive.^"
10 "Genuine lo\'e" differs from the raw impulse of sex in that the loved
partner is incorporated in the devoted lo\er's circle of significant others and
hence, self. The lover is eager to "gi\e" and to "surrender" his best to the per-
son he cherishes, and is far from considering his loving partner an "object to be
gotten" for he wishes to "give." Lcn^jind death are the great equalizers of
men^ By loving the weak, the strong learn to be tender and to control rather
than to exploit their strength lest they brutalize their weaker partner. For
loxe's sake, the more intelligent will not use their superior intelligence to
show up their beloved partner, lest they shame them, or are themselves
shamed. The rich who are in lo\e with poor partners will eagerly seek to
pro\e that "money- does not matter." So loxe leaps over all differences that
divide men, and if thfe- work of art has been called "a promise of happiness,"
the art of "making Io\e^in the Western World has served as an intimate
reminder oF the prophetic promise of a psychological state in which the
lion shall rest beside the lamb, and swords shall be made into plowshares.
l88 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
In order briefly to demonstrate some of these compensatory-
mechanisms, and especially to show how they may be combined
in specific types of character, we shall briefly discuss, as types of
men, the classic Puritan, the Confucian mandarin, and the noble-
man of France's ancien regime.
I. As we have already shown, the vocabulary of motives need
not coincide with the actual operation of the psychic structure.^^
The heroic Puritan of seventeenth-century England could methodi-
cally pursue his quest for salvation by disciplining himself for hard
work and thriftiness, and thus by his success assure his religious
worth and his salvation in the hereafter. He could, in short, relieve
his anxieties by hard work, by work for work's sake, and, under
the appropriate premiums, take great pains to develop a new "con-
tract morality" in business relationships. Thus perfectionism and
moral rigor, punctiliousness, and pleasure-denying work, along
with humility and the craving for his neighbor's love all combined
to shape the character structure of the classical Puritan who sought
,Jxuiuastei:Jthe jworld rather than adjust-te-it.^^
II. As an organization, the bureaucracy of gentlemanly literati
in ancient China was stable and weathered great political crises,
but as an individual the Confucian mandarin was highly insecure.
In his career, there existed no socially transparent link between
skill and merit and rewards for success. Pull and bribery, the
arbitrary favors and disfavors of superiors, and "luck" dominated
his bureaucratic chmb. He was exposed to great reversals of per-
sonal fate in a highly competitive context where many aspirants
pressed upon each office holder. The individual official was a
stranger in his administrative bailiwick, was subject to reassign-
ments to other provinces, and had to rely upon an unofiicial ad-
viser who, in fact, made decisions for which the mandarin was
held accountable.
These conditions, as well as others, produced an intensive and
lasting sense of insecurity and anxiety. And these anxieties, in turn,
were compensated by a great emphasis upon a rigid code of
etiquette and ceremony of great polish and finesse. The magical
significance attributed to the Confucian code or rules of propriety
seems to indicate its compensatory function in relieving anxiety
'1 See Chapter V: The Sociology of Motivation,
i-For further comments on the Puritan, see pp. 234-36 fiF. and 360-638^.
INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS l8g
states. In passing, we may mention that Confucius himself had
lost his office by the arbitrary act of his prince, and that he had
developed his teachings in a highly competitve context of itinerant
political intellectuals striving for power positions at the courts of
rival princes.
Alongside perfectionist, ritualistic tendencies, we observe the
intense power cravings of the competitive careerists who, after
all, were without specialized training for administration. These
administrators were saddled with the responsibility for anything
that went wrong in their bailiwicks, whether it was a harvest failure
due to flood or drought, a tribal invasion, or sheer administrative
negligence. For Confucian thought made no distinction between
nature and society— between the "acts of God" and the responsibili-
ties of men. And the mandarin, partaking of the supposedly magical
power of the "Son of Heaven" was accountable for more than what
men can control. Naturally this maximized his pompous sense of
megalomaniacal power and his stylized conceit— as well as his un-
derlying state of anxiety. Given ancestor worship as part of the
unwritten constitution of Chinese despotism, the disturbances of
social order— cosmic or human— were ascribed to the unrest of the
ancestral spirits, for which the mandarin bureaucrats— ultimately
the Son of Heaven himself— were blamed.
Thus, perfectionism in rigid ceremonial deportment was supple-
mented by intense cravings for power which emerged in an opaque
context of career striving. These two tendencies were further sup-
plemented by compulsive conformism with Confucian orthodoxy,
a system of "organized thought" based upon the hallowed classical
writings of ancient authors. This conformism was enforced by the
ubiquitous ideological agents of a powerful board of censors. How-
ever efficient this spy system may have been in guaranteeing the
disciplined cohesion of the bureaucracy as a whole, for the indi-
vidual bureaucrat it meant an additional source of great insecurity,
and the resultant anxiety was compensated for by the discourage-
ment of independent thought, intellectual initiative, and any direct
confrontation of the problems at hand. Whatever was thought
about or came up for decision was stated and elaborated in terms
of the sanctioned body of classical writings. ^'^
13 On the Chinese literati, see Max Weber, The Religion of China, H. H.
Gerth, tr. ( Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1951).
IQO SOCIAL STRUCTURE
III. The nobleman of the ancien regime stood on the shaky
ground of prerexolutionary France. Middle-class intellectuals had
debunked the justification of the divine right of kings as a mere
sanction of despotism, and the authority of the priesthood had not
gone unquestioned. Despotic coercion had forced the nobility to
become a leisured class, living as absentee owners and rentiers
divorced from all productive functions. The competition for the
king's favors— for offices and for politically profitable marriages-
was intense and led to great anxieties.
These anxiety states were heightened through the breakdown
of the dividing line between marriage and extramarital relations
with mistresses, between legitimate and illegitimate children of
kings and nobles. Since the king with his Christian and royal
mistress set the tone and established the model for all courtly be-
havior, the mistress became politically and socially indispensable
for the court noble. Good relations with mistresses were important
for getting the news behind the news.
Machiavellian attitudes and practices permeated the ruling strata.
EflBciency in dueling and cautious self-discipline at meals— where
poison cup and dagger might threaten and the lap dog as a pre-
tester of food was not always reliable— were needed. As in Chinese
mandarin society, a polished ritualism of conventional behavior
emerged, and froze into a rigid code of court etiquette.
The competition of cavaliers under the watchful eyes of hostesses
blurred the lines between influence and love, and made genuine
love a tool in the quest for power and influence, and influence
an opportimity for exploitative love. Love-making became a tech-
nology of psychic manipulation and seduction a fine art. Men
could never know whether love meant devotion or unwilling vas-
salage. The Liaisons Dangereiises by Laclos may be mentioned
as the great document of the perversion of love into power.
Intense craving for power and a ritualist etiquette in personal
relations which barred "genuine love"; the craving for love and
popularity as means for the furtherance of personal careers; flattery,
conformist attitudes, and posturing to win the favors of the absolute
and always suspicious despot— all these were so many compensa-
tions for the basic anxieties of a class whose spokesmen on the eve
of revolution proclaimed: "Apres nous le deluge." ^^
'* See, for a good acctnint of tlie old regime, Frantz Funek-Brentano, The
Old Regime in France, Herbert Wilson, tr. (London: E. Arnold, 1929). See
INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS IQl
In a comparable context, the Tsarist nobility was subject to in-
tense competition for the office appointments on which the noble
rank of the family in the social hierarchy depended. Some re-
sponded by an attitude of withdrawal which was implemented by
a mystic Eastern Christianity. Especially during the nineteenth
century, many Russian "repentant noblemen" went abroad, even
preferring to be expropriated by the government than to return.
This attitude has found a profound elaboration in the figure of
Goncharov's "Oblomov," who withdraws from competition with
his erotical competitor, dreams nostalgically of the patriarchal rela-
tions of old, and hence accomplishes nothing. In Russia, this state
of apathetic withdrawal and soulful quietism ■ has been known
as "Oblomovism."
In this chapter, we have discussed some of the major ways in
which man and society— character and social structure— are linked.
We ha\'e seen that institutions select persons by formal and in-
formal rules of recruitment and ejection, and form them by explicit
training and by means of the particular and generalized other,
which the person— in internalizing instituted roles— comes in time
to acquire. We have also explained how the traits of the person
may be socially premiumed, and thus reinforced, or socially ta-
booed, and thus weakened, by various institutional contexts.
We have suggested that the symbol sphere of institutional orders,
by socially defining situations that the person confronts, is often a
cue to his fears and anxiety as well as other psychic elements, and
we have illustrated this by examples from the kinship and military,
the economic, the political and the religious order. Finally, we
have discussed certain compensatory mechanisms as revealed in
the Puritan, the mandarin and the nobleman. - —
also L. Ducros, La Societe Frangaise an Dix-huitieme Steele (Paris: Haties,
1933).
CHAPTER
VIII
Institutional Orders
and Social Controls, I
WE wish, in the present and in the next chapter, to elaborate
our conceptions of institutional orders and spheres, as well as to
raise certain questions appropriate to each of these units of our
model of social structure.^ It is certainly not our intention to ex-
haust the topics which we discuss: even an attempt to do so would
require a many-volumed universal history of mankind. What we
do want to do is to define certain useful conceptions; to lay out the
range of institutions available to sociological observation; and to
describe certain pivotal types of institutions that have at various
times characterized political and economic, military and religious,
kinship and educational endeavors. In doing so, we shall pay par-
ticular attention to the social controls that often prevail in each
of these institutional orders or spheres and the types of persons
that they tend to select and form.-
1. The Political Order ^
The political order, we have said, consists of those institutions
within which men acquire, wield, or influence distributions of
^ For preliminary definitions of these orders and spheres, see Chapter II:
Character and Social Structure, Section 2: Components of Social Structure.
- For further statement of our guiding questions for such work, see Chap-
ter II: Character and Social Structure, Section 3: The Tasks of Social
Psychology.
3 The student will find the following readings of signal importance: Max
Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," From Max Weber: Essatjs in Sociology,
H. H. Gertli and C. Wright Mills, trs. and eds. (New York: Oxford, 1946),
pp. 77-128; il. D. Lasswell and A. Kaplan, Power and Society (New Haven:
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I \ IQ;^
power. We ascribe "power" to those who can influence the conduct
of others even against their will.
Where everyone is equal there is no politics, for politics involves
subordinates and superiors. All institutional conduct, of course,
involves distributions of power, but such distributions are the es-
sence of politics. In so far as it has to do with "the state," the poli-
tical order is the "final authority"; in it is instituted the use of
final sanctions, involving physical force, over a given territorial
domain. This trait marks off political institutions, such as the state,
from other institutional orders.
Since power implies that an actor can carry out his will, power
involves obedience. The general problem of politics accordingly
is the explanation of varying distributions of power and obedi-
ence, and one basic problem of political psychology is why men
by their obedience accept others as the powerful. Why do they
obey?
A straightforward, although inadequate, answer is given by those
who see men in the large as herd animals who must be led by a
strong man who stays out in front. The explanation of power and
obedience in terms of the strong man may hold in some primitive
contexts in which only the strong fighter has a chance to become a
military and political chieftain; ^ it may also hold in the "gang,"
where awe of the strongest holds the others to obedience, and con-
tests over power are decided by fist fights. Beyond such situations,
however, the problem of power cannot be reduced to a problem of
simple physical might.
In Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, the dauphin dryly remarks that
he lacked a great deal in almost everything because his ancestors
had used it all up. Yet, despite such personal weaknesses, other
men looked up to the dauphin and obeyed him. Physical and men-
tal weaklings are often found ruling proud and strong men. We
cannot therefore always explain authority and obedience in terms
of the characteristics of the power holder. Although Bismarck once
said that you can do all sorts of things with bayonets except sit
on them, obviously power and obedience involve more than dif-
Yale Univ. Press, 1950); H. E. Barnes, Sociology and Political Theory (New
York: Knopf, 1924); G. Mosca, The Ruling Class, H. D. Kahn, tr. (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1939).
* "And when Saul stood among the people, he was higher than any of
the people from his shoulders and upward" (I Sam., 10:23).
ig4 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
ferences in the biological means and the physical implements of
violence.^
The incongruity of strong men willingly obeying physical weak-
lings leads us to ask: Why are there stable power relations which
are not based on the direct and physical force of the stronger?
The question has been answered by political scientists and philos-
ophers in terms of a consensus between the subordinates and the
powerful. This consensus has been rationally formulated in the-
ories of "contract," "natural law," or "public sentiment." ** For the
social psychologist, such approaches are valuable in that they em-
phasize the question of voluntary obedience, for from a psycho-
logical point of view the crux of the problem of power rests in
understanding the origin, constitution, and maintenance of volun-
tary obedience.
There is an element of truth in Laud's assertation: "There can
be no firmness without law; and no laws can be binding if there is
no conscience to obey them; penalty alone could never, can never
do it." ' In any given political order, we may expect to find both
"conscience" and "coercion," and it is the element of conscience, of
voluntary obedience, that engages our attention, even though we
keep in mind the fact that regardless of the type and extent of
conscience, all states practice coercion.
An adequate understanding of power relations thus involves a
knowledge of the grounds on which a power holder claims obedi-
ence, and the terms in which the obedient feels an obligation to
obey. The problem of the grounds of obedience is not a supra-
historical question; we are concerned rather with reconstructing
those central ideas which in given institutional structures in fact
operate as grounds for obedience. Often such ideas are directly
stated and theoretically elaborated; often they are merely implied,
left inarticulate and taken for granted. But, in either case, differ-
ent reasons for obedience prevail in different political institutions.
•'' The extent of \ iolcnce in political orders \aries. Thus thirteen out of
fourteen nineteenth-century presidents of Bolivia died by \'iolence, but only
four out of thirty-tliree presidents of the United States. Cf. P. A. Sorokin,
"Monarchs and Rulers," Social Forces, March 1926.
® See Chapter X: Symbol Spheres, especially Section 1: Symbol Spheres
in Six Contexts.
^ Cited by John N. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (rev. ed.; Cambridge:
University Press, 1934), p. 265.
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I J 95
In terms of the publicly recognized reasons for obedience— "legi-
timations" or symbols of justification ^— the core of the problem of
politics consists in understanding "authority." For it is authority
that characterizes ^nduring_pohtical orders. The power of one
animal over another may occur in terms of brute coercion, accom-
panied by grimts and growls, but man, as Susanne Langer has
written, can "control [his] inferiors by setting up symbols of [his]
power, and the mere idea that words or images convey stands there
to hold our fellows in subjection even when we cannot lay our hands
on them. . . . Men . . . oppress each other by symbols of might." "
Power is simply the probability that men will act as another man
wishes. This action may rest upon fear, rational calculation of ad- ^
vantage, lack of energy to do otherwise, loyal devotion, indiffer--^
ence, or a dozen other individual motives. AiitJioritij, or legiti-
mated power, involves \'oluntary obedience based on some idea
which the obedient holds of the powerful or of his position. "The
strongest," wrote Rousseau, "is never strong enough to be always
master, unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience
into duty." ^°
Most political analysts have thus come to distinguish between
those acts of power which, for various reasons, are considered to be
"legitimate," and those which are not. We speak of "naked power"
as, for instance, during warfare, after which the successful tries to
gain "authority" over the defeated; and we speak of "authority"
in cases of legitimate acts of power, and thus, of "public authori-
ties," or "ecclesiastic" or "court authority" and so on. In order to
become "duly authorized," power needs to clothe itself with at-
tributes of "justice," "morality," "religion," and other cultural \'alues
which define acceptable "ends" as well as the "responsibilities" of
those who wield power. Since power is seen as a means, men ask:
"Whose power and for what ends?" And most supreme power
holders seek to give some sort of answer, to clothe their power
in terms of other ends than power for power's sake.
Machiavelli, to be sure, formulated a rationale of power for
its own sake, relegating all the alleged and professed purposes of
^ See Chapter X: Symbol Spheres.
^ Fortune, January 1944, p. 150. See also her Philosophy in a Sew Key
(Cambridge: Hanard Uni\'. Press, 1942), pp. 286-87.
^° J. J. Rousseau, Social Contract, rev. tr. by Charles Frankel (New York:
Hafner, 1947).
ig6 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
power to instrumental positions/^ He did this in an effort to ana-
lyze the necessary and sufficient means for getting and for holding
power. His name accordingly became despised and to this day
"Machiavellian" carries an infamous connotation, although it has
rightly been said that perhaps Machiavelli was the one honest man
of his age. His debunking of the moral purposes of rulers, and his
principled distrust of "power" as such, is carried on by the often
quoted dictinn of Lord Acton that "Power corrupts and absolute
power corrupts absolutely." This statement, however, seems to us
quite one-sided; we might assert with equal justice that "Power
ennobles and absolute power ennobles absolutely." We need merely
substitute "responsibility" for power to make the point obvious.
Persons in positions of authority are expected to make "respon-
sible decisions," and some men do grow with the tasks which they
take up. If men choose tasks, tasks make men; high or exalted
position sometimes provides more opportunities for a man to be-
come "high minded" and to act accordingly. As Ralph Waldo
Emerson, writing of the English nobility, put it,
"You cannot wield great agencies without lending yourself to
them, and when it happens that the spirit of the earl meets his
rank and duties, we have the best examples of behavior. Power
of any kind readily appears in the manners; and beneficit le talent
de bien faire, gives a majesty which cannot be concealed or re-
sisted." ^^
Decision-making groups in our time— with increasingly powerful
machines and far-flung organizations— necessarily hold more power
and more authority than ever before; accordingly, their corruption
seems more hideous, and their ennoblement more grandiose, than
in previous times.
In his Anthropology of 1789, Kant emphasized liberty and law
—which restricts liberty— as the two pivots around which civil
legislation turns. But he added that force has to be included as a
mediating element in order to make effective legislation according
to the principles of liberty and law. Kant imagined several combi-
11 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Frince; and The Discourses (New York: Mod-
ern Library, 1940).
1- Etifilish Traits, Chapter One, cited in The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emer-
son (New York: Modern Library, 1940), p. 622.
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I IQJ
nations of force, liberty, and law: thus, law and liberty without
force would seem to be anarchy. Law and force without liberty are
despotism. Force without liberty or law is simply barbarism. Force
with freedom and law are the bases of a republic. Only this last
condition, according to Kant, deserves the title of a "true civil
constitution," although he did not mean by republic that form of
state we call democratic, but any constitutional state. ^^
2. Nation and State ^*
The term "state" first became popular in sixteenth-century Italy.
There the Italian city-states first organized bureaucratic adminis-
trations, professional bodies of diplomats, and armies of citizens
who were ready if need be to forego the salvation of their souls—
as Machiavelli says in honor of the Florentine citizenry— in order
to preserve the liberties of their city.
A state is a political institution which successfully claims supreme
power over a defined territory. This claim can be realized when the
state effectively monopolizes the use of legitimate violence against
external and internal enemies, however the state-leaders may de-
fine "enemy."
A state capable of conducting wars against competing states
and of monopolizing legitimate violence within its own territory is
sociologically one state, even though legally it may be a confederacy
of substates. That the United States of America is one state, for
example, was decisively established by the American Civil War.
And it is the fact of a monopoly of legitimate violence that makes
the difference between the United States and such interstate crea-
tions as the late "League of Nations," or the prevailing "United
Nations."
A nation is a body of people which by cultural traditions and
common historical memories is capable of organizing a state, or at
least which raises the claim for such an autonomous organization
with some chance of success.
13 Paraphrased from Inimanuel Kant, Anthropologies in pragmatischer
Hinsicht (5th ed.; Leipzig: Karl Vorlander, 1912), pp. 286 ff.
^* The most informatixe xohmie on nationahsm is probably Hans Kohn,
The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1951). See also Max Weber,
op. cit., pp. 159-79-
ig8 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
The symbols by which claims to statehood, to the state-organized
cohesiveness of a nation are advanced and justified may be called
nationalism. After a state is organized, these nationalist symbols
may prevail as legitimations. Nationalism is thus the justifying
ideology of a nation-state or of a nation aspiring to become a state.
Nationalism expresses loyalties and aspirations, and tends to in-
\ol\e the feeling that the typical features of one nation may be
used as a yardstick of traits alleged to characterize other nations.
We have to distinguish between "patriotism" and "nationalism"
as complex sentiments differently related to the political order of a
societ)^ National sentiment incorporates patriotism, but, because
of its power reference to the nation-state, it involves more.
Patriotism refers to "love of one's country and people" without
necessarily involving emotional investment in the political order
and its institutional peculiarity. Patriotism is a pride in the culture
heritage of the nation devoid of aspirations to win "glory" (the
prestige of power) in international competition. In fact, to stay
out of international power contests, and to be left alone by others,
is the core of this sentiment, which is often most intense among the
smallest nations, such as Norway or Switzerland.
Nationalism is a specifically modern sentiment which binds the
mass of the citizenry to the political order in a common aspiration
to hold their own in power competition with other nations by or-
ganizing all institutional orders in the framework of a sovereign
state. Nationalism claims the right of the nation to determine its
own fate, that is to organize itself without intervention from the
outside. To the people, nationalist spokesmen address specific
expectations "in the name of the nation," and they define conduct
patterns and symbolic behavior normatively as "national," that is,
as conduct to be ascribed to the nation as a whole, and against
what is "alien." Nowadays such appeals are made to diverse aggre-
gates and organized publics by power holders in all institutional
orders. Thus, commercial advertising campaigns demand "Buy
American" or "Buy British." Purists may crusade against the bor-
rowing of foreign words and ideas. Nationalist Christians tend to
conceive of Almighty God as having distinct national preferences,
especially during world wars. Protestantism, particularly, has al-
ways had an intimate relationship to nationalism. Publishers and
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 199
literati, of course, promote "national literature" and "national art,"
and historians write "national history."
As the symbols of justification for the acts of a state, nationalism
promotes loyalty and obedience to state authority. Nationalist sym-
bols, however, may be highly elaborated. And in intellectual
circles they may be thought of as the very ground or embodiment
of the nation-state, rather than merely symbols justifying state
power. Thus Montesquieu's "national genius" and Herder's Volks-
geist have been used and abused in state propaganda for increas-
ing internal loyalty and external aggression.
Chauvinism is nationalism carried to the extreme of exclusive,
and hence fanatical, assertion of a nation's mission, and the studious
devaluation of all other nations. The term was put into circulation
because of Napoleon's political aide, M. Chauvin's, rather extrava-
gant glorifications of France,
Nation and state need not, of course, be identical, either in ter-
ritory or in political domination. The belief that national unity
should be the basis of state unity is, of course, a political choice
and not a universal historical fact. The existence of cultural and
national minorities in many states, the absorption of national com-
munities by larger, imperial states, and the existence of nationals
outside the state's dominion— these are facts which run counter to
the ideology of national self-determination. Indeed, the idea of
national self-determination is modern, involving liberal democratic
conceptions quite foreign to early dynastic states. During the
nineteenth century, the Polish nation was organized by three states:
partly by the Russian Tsar, partly by the German Reich, and partly
by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The latter state, indeed, or-
ganized several nations under one state. On the other hand, pre-
Bismarckian Germany was one nation organized in a plurality of
states. The principle of nationality (namely, that each nation
should correspond to an autonomous state) was propagated by
such men as Mazzini and Napoleon III; it was given grandiose
influence by President Wilson's late "self-determination" program
for Europe, and Lenin's for the colonial peoples.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, nationalism was the
sister creed of liberalism and defended one liberal goal: the re-
lease of peoples from the rule of alien states. Positively, nationalists
200 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
sought to establish constitutions. But of course, nationaUsm had re-
peatedly passed from defense to aggression and back again: rather
than the release of aspiring political communities from alien state
rule, nationalism came, in the nineteenth century especially, to
involve the attempt to subjugate other peoples to its rule. In many
places "National Unity" superseded "The Consent of the Gov-
erned." Thus nineteenth-century nationalism closed with a flower-
ing of imperialism.^^
When loyalty to a ruling house is replaced by loyalty to a na-
tional state, national symbols are propagated by means of public
educational systems. Concentrating upon the masses of the popu-
lation, magazine and novel, newspaper and radio and motion pic-
ture all help to disseminate favorable images and stereotypes of
the nation. Scholarly writings are organized in terms of national
histories. As the territory dominated by the nation is typically
larger than that dominated by, say, the tribe, and as the population
is not necessarily connected even distantly by blood or religion,
modern nationalism has had to rely more on mass education and
propaganda. The development of compulsory education, cheap
printing, and recently of radio and motion pictures may thus con-
veniently be viewed in connection with nationalism.^*^ It is clear
that the state of communication facilities affects the extent and
penetration of nationalism within the territory of the state. When
communication facilities are not universal in their coverage, the
sensitive spots will be the frontier or border zones and the na-
tional capital, the intervening areas remaining less affected.
Lack of correspondence between the territory dominated by a
state and the population composing a nation has stimulated the
search for other possible bases of nationhood. "Nation" has thus
been used to refer to feelings of loyalty among a population hav-
ing language, literature, folk heroes, historical tradition, culture,
race, or religious denomination in common. All of these factors, in
various combinations, may indeed be elements in the situation of
a nation, which is to say that they may increase the chance that
aspirations for national self-determination, for the setting up of an
!■''• See William A. Dunnigan, "Fundamental Conceptions of igtli Century
Politics," Congress of Arts and Sciences, St. Louis, IQ04 (New York, 1906),
Vol. VII, pp. 279-92.
i<^See Chapter IX: Institutional Orders and Social Controls, II, Section 4:
The Educational Si^here.
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 201
autonomous state, will be realized. The actual reasons, however,
for belief in the existence of a national community vary enor-
mously, and may change during the course of national history.
Rather vague ideas of common descent are often at the bottom
of nationality feelings. But such feeling need not exist at all, and
frequently does not. Nor do "races" by any means correspond with
nations. The population of modern Germany, for example, is com-
posed of diverse ethnic groups, and in such nations as the United
States, Brazil, and the Soviet Union practically all the major strains
can be found among the citizenry. "Race," used in reference to
Turks, Germans, or English, is, as Franz Boas put it, "only a dis-
guise of the idea of nationality." ^^
Most nation-states have been ready, willing, and eager to de-
clare themselves "a God-fearing people." The denominational varie-
ties of Christianity have been conveniently accommodated to this
eagerness. Religious and national differences and conflicts may be
very closely intermingled, as in the conflict of the Irish and the
English, and national heroes may be treated as saints, as among
the Serbs and other Greek orthodox nations. That Joan of Arc
was canonized by the Catholic church— after the Franco-Prussian
war of 1870-71— is a fact relevant to French nationalism.^*
A specific language, given its practical incompatibility with other
languages, is perhaps the most important common "social" feature
of a nation. Yet a national community organized under a state
may have several languages— as in the case of modern Switzerland.
In terms of feeling, the national identity means a specific kind of
pathos, which is more likely to develop where there is a common
language and religion, conventions and style of life, history and
destiny.
All these communal factors, as components of a national situa-
tion, tend to increase the idea of an autonomous power organiza-
tion or state, which may already exist or be ardently longed for.
The more this power or state aspect is emphasized, the more spe-
cific is the nation. To understand differences between nations, one
must examine the components of the national situation for every
empirical case, yet two general and closely related factors are
1^ Franz Boas, "Race and Nationality," Bulletin of the American Association
for International Conciliation, January 1915, p. 8.
^^^ See Max Hildebert Boehm, "Nationalism," Encyclopaedia of the Social
Sciences, Vol. XI, p. 236.
202 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
essential to the social psychologist who would understand "na-
tional differences":
I. It is important to understand the institutional composition
of the national social structure, and especially the relations of the
state to the several institutional orders. We shall in due course
specify the procedures which we think most useful for this task.
II. It is also important to understand the types of persons who
within a given national social structure are held up as models of
imitation and aspiration. These national types— the Prussian
Junker,^" the Japanese Samurai,-° the British gentleman,"^ the
French honnete hommc, the American self-made man, the Russian
Soviet man— serve to unify national images and may become the
stereotyped image of the nation itself.-^
The image of the nation, and the entire conception of national-
ity, will vary from one stratum to another within the national so-
cial structure. In the United States, for example, such status groups
as the D.A.R. and "Pilgrim societies" may stress Anglo-Saxon
descent, while industrial workers, liberal intellectuals, and immi-
grants think rather of the American Dream or "the melting pot."
Various images of the nation may be seized upon by vested inter-
ests or movements. Thus "Americanism" and "the American way
of life" may be identified with laissez-faire economics and a free
competition for workers (no trade unions) by capitalist groups.
The initial claim of a people to nationhood is typically advanced
by an intellectual vanguard who out of material and ideal interests
tend to sentimentalize their native language and to develop it into
1 " See Max Weber, "Capitalism and Rural Society in Germany" and "Na-
tional Character and the Junkers," op. cit., pp. 363-95; E. Kohn-Bramstedt,
Aristocracy and the Middle Classes in Germany (London: King, 1937); and
Paul Kosok, Modern Germany (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1933).
-" See G. B. Sansom, Japan- A Short Cultural History (rev. ed.; New York:
Appleton-Century, 1943); and Hillis Lory, Japan's Military Masters (New
York: Viking, 1943). For a sensible statement of difficulties, see John F.
Embrose, "Standardized Error and Japanese Character," World Politics, Vol.
II (1948-50), pp. 439 ff.
-1 See Wilhelm Dibelius, England, M. A. Hamilton, tr. (New York: Harper,
1930); G. J. Renier, The English: Are They Human? (New York: P. Smith,
1931); and Karl H. Abshagen, King, Lords and Gentlemen, E. W. Dickes, tr.
(London: Heinemann, 1939).
^- Walter Bagehot has laid stress upon the social selection and diffusion of
such types in his penetrating discussion of "Nation-making"; see Physics and'.
Politics (New York, 1912), Chapters 3 and 4.
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 20^^
a medium for a national literary expression. In this creative process
the pecuHarities of the language are discovered, elaborated, and
defended as superior or at least equal to any other. In these na-
tionalist endeavors intellectual prestige and the business interests
of publishers may clash or fuse with the interests of politicians.
Once it becomes the official language of educational, scientific, and
jurisdictional institutions, the national tongue acquires additional
prestige. A national literature as an art form is apt to emerge and
be democratized. As long as this literature sentimentalizes promi-
nent features of the territory, prominent folkways, and memories
of the people, we may speak of "cultural patriotism." From this it
is but a short step to modern nationalism, which embodies a spe-
cific political pathos for the community at large. Symbols of the
people's martyrdom— national heroes and founding fathers— in the
face of aggression stand opposite symbols of forthcoming libera-
tion, that is to say, autonomous statehood.
In the twentieth century, these processes of nation-building are
being repeated in dependent political areas in the Middle and
Far East, in the Caribbean, and in various British Dominions. Na-
tionals educated as clerks, lawyers, journalists, for purposes of
working in the domination structure of the Western powers, usually
form the vanguard of these movements, which are typically viewed
by the dominant country's leaders as "a handful of agitators" rather
than a revival or creation of a national community. In modern
nations, the middle classes usually become the most ardent fol-
lowers of the nationalist intelligentsia, although, especially during
wars, nationalist enthusiasm tends to be universal among all classes
of the political community.-^
Once a national community is fully a state, it monopolizes the
use of legitimate violence within its domain, defends its domain
against other states, and may attempt to expand it. The combat
range of modern armed forces and the range of communications
and transportation are important factors in determining the size
of the political territory of a state. Although, as Butler remarked,
the "sphere of action of . . . the greater part of mankind is much
-3 See, for example, Rupert Emerson, Lennox A. Mills and Virginia Thomp-
son, Government and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (New York: Institute of
Pacific Relations, 1942); and D. H. Buchanan, The Development of Capitalist
Enterprise in India (New York: Macmillan, 1934).
204 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
narrower than the government they hve under," -* the sphere of
action of the great jjower state is typically larger than its own
pacified domain. Pride in one's nation, as we have noted, often
involves an ethnocentric affirmation of the nation's peculiarities.
This sense of superiority typically feeds on the notion of the exem-
plary significance of one's own nation-state for other nations, if
not for "the rest of the world." This sense may exist without any
ambition to do more than propagate this prestigeful image. Any
nationalist expansion of power may thus be rejected by "isolation-
ist" sentiments and policies.
On the other hand, nationalism may inspire ambitions territor-
ially to expand the political influence of the nation so as to make
its actual or potential policies count heavily in international affairs.
Usually various spokesmen for the nation attribute a specific
"honor" to their nation, which forbids them to tolerate or "to take"
one thing or another from various other nations. Their policies of
expansion may take several forms:
I. When a state holds out diplomatic and, if need be, military
or naval protection to its businessmen, religious missionaries, and
so forth, who are living or working in a foreign territory, and when
the foreign political unit has no means of asserting its sovereignty
over these foreigners, we characterize the foreign territory as a
"sphere of influence" of the superior power.
II. When a weaker power relies upon the military protection of
a superior power against third powers, and accordingly is com-
pelled or willing to co-ordinate its foreign policies and their internal
institutional prerequisites with the demands of the superior power,
we speak of a "protectorate."
III. When a nation-state extends political protection to the trad-
ing areas of its businessmen we speak of "imperialism." -^ The
most explicit types of imperialism involve the acquisition of a
colonial empire by purchase, or conquest, or both. There are many
reasons for such expansion, and many techniques of accomplishing
2* Samuel Butler, "Sermons," Works (London, 1874), II, p. 154.
-° See J. A. Hobson's classic work, Imperialism (London, 1902); Nikolai
Lenin, Imperialism (New York: International Publications, 1939); Rosa Luxem-
burg, The Accumulation of Capital, A. Schwarzchild, tr. (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1951); and Fritz Sternberg, Capitalism and Socialism on Trial
(New York: Day, 1952); and J. A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes,
H. Narden, tr. (New York: Kelley, 1951).
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 20^
it. A country may seek colonies in order to settle "surplus popu-
lations," that is, people who cannot readily be absorbed in various
institutional orders. It may seek colonies in order to expand its
politically guaranteed market area; or in order to win and establish
a politically guaranteed monopoly over resources, raw materials,
and labor, or it may merely wish to deny access to such resources
to other powers. Again, and this is more modern, one power may
seek to expand its military area of control by establishing naval
and air bases abroad without assuming overt political responsibili-
ties in the face of foreign political bodies. It may prefer other
nations to adjust to whatever implications ensue from its establish-
ment of such bases. These nations, in turn, find it difficult to
acquire those "rights" which colonials in the long run have ac-
quired, as the history of the British Empire— now the British Com-
monwealth of Nations— shows.
The political process is thus a struggle for power and prestige,
for authoritative positions within each nation-state and among
various nation-states. Since the French Revolution, this competi-
tive system of sovereign states has led to the unification of Italy
and Germany; and since World War I, to the dissolution of the
feudal multinationality state of the Hapsburg empire into small
nation-states. In the nineteenth century, the several major states
were sufficiently equal to block the possibility of one of them vio-
lently upsetting the entire balance of power competitors. In addi-
tion, each of them was interested in maintaining this balance of
power; they seemed "saturated," as Bismarck remarked of the
Germany he unified. The "family of nations" was thus more or less
self-balancing, and the balance as a whole was guaranteed by the
power competition between the British and the Tsarist empires.
With rapid, although uneven industrialization, urbanization,
and population growth, the differences between the various Euro-
pean nations widened. The universal revival of imperialist tenden-
cies after the 1890's eventuated in World War I, which America
entered at the side of Great Britain and Russia. But after that war,
the United States abstained from the League of Nations, while at
the same time actively intervening in European affairs through
the Dawes and Young plan, thus combining active economic inter-
vention with minimal political responsibilities. All this, along with
the peacemakers' work at Versailles and the exclusion of the Soviet
206 OCIAL Sxiio/CTURE
Union from the League of Nations proved abortive and short-
sighted. The period between the two World Wars has aptly been
referred to as The Twenty Years' Crisis, When There Was No
Peace.'-'^
3. Democracies and Dictatorships
Since Aristotle, states have been classified into six types: Mon-
archy and tyranny, the good and evil types of one-man rule; aris-
tocracy and oligarchy, the good and evil types of the-rule-of-the-
few; and polity and extreme democracy, the good and evil types
of the-rule-of-the-many. In order to classify modern states, how-
ever, we must take into account the nature of their territory, the
terms in which they enlist the loyalties of the organizations and
people they would control, the type of political organizations man-
aging the integration of society with the power of the state, and
the nature and composition of their ruling groups.
When we examine the territorial base, we are able to distinguish
between the great river-states of the ancient Middle and Far East,
the "coastal states" of the Mediterranean polis— such as Athens,
Phoenicia, or Carthage— the states of the plains like the U.S.S.R. or
the U.S.A., and the "oasis state" of the Middle East. When we
examine the loyalty structure, we may address ourselves to politi-
cal formulae or legitimations such as "in the name of the King,"
"the divine right of Kings," the "sovereignty of the people," or "in
the name of the law," or the alleged charism of totalitarian leader-
ship states under Diice, Fiihrer, or Caudillo. When we examine
the integrative political organizations we may speak of the totali-
tarian one-party state, or of a multiparty parliamentary democ-
racy. When we examine the nature and composition of ruling groups
we may find a capitalist oligarchy supreme, as in France before
the storm of 1848; or a semifeudal group of agrarian capitalists,
militarists, and high bureaucrats, as in the Junkerdom under the
Kaiser; or a nobility, as in Russia under the Tsar, or party bureau-
crats, as after Lenin.
26 E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1949), is well
worth reading as a retrospective debunking of the diplomatic phraseology of
vain, frightened, short-sighted, and popularity-craving statesmen. H. F. Arm-
strong, in When There Is No Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1939), gives an
astute account of the war preceding the latest "shooting war."
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 20"]
The most diverse "social contents" may exist under the same
"political form." The term "democracy," especially as used in mod-
ern propaganda contests, has literally come to mean all things to
all men. The Soviet use of "People's Democracy" is characteristic
—literally it means "people's people's rule," which would seem one
too many. Dictatorships, as well as democracies, are ways of or-
ganizing political orders. They mean quite different things for men
in different social structures and in different historical eras. And
in particular, since the middle of the nineteenth century, political
choices have become inextricably involved with various economic
alternatives.
The civic sources of modern democracies are found, first, in an-
cient Athens, where for the qualified citizens there was direct
democracy. The "town meeting" was possible, for no city was larger
than perhaps 50,000. The affairs of the town were run directly,
foreign ambassadors, for example, reporting directly to the open
assembly. And there was no specialized staff of professionals.
The second source of democracy was the indirect democracy of
the medieval cities or guild communes. Decisions were made by
delegates from the guilds, in a manner not unlike UN delegates
today. These delegates had no real leeway and the organizations
they represented were very unstable. Some guilds were much
wealthier and stronger than others and accordingly tried to become
the bases of hereditary offices. Then minor guilds might make ur-
ban revolutions, and as in ancient city tyrannies, dictatorships arise.
The history of the Italian city-states dramatizes these develop-
ments.
The medieval form of indirect democracy evolved finally into
modern constitutional democracy. The parliamentary deputy, how-
ever, unlike the medieval guildsman, became a free agent, being
restricted only by his fear of not being re-elected and by the
"pressures" that are exerted upon his decisions.
And as the rule of law replaced the rule of men, loyalties were
attached to the authority of the constitution as the supreme law
of the land. Wherever kingship survived the middle-class revolu-
tions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was reduced
to "representation." The king was a figurehead, and the "kingdom
of prerogative" was reduced to a "kingdom of influence."
208 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
Regardless of constitutional forms, the modern state in an indus-
trial society is always an essentially bureaucratic state. This simply
means that its army, its executive departments, and its judiciary
consist of centralized offices that are arranged in a hierarchy, each
level having specified jurisdictions. To understand such states we
must understand how other political bureaucracies, the party ma-
chines for example, are integrated with the officials at the heads
of the state's various civil and military hierarchies. We must exam-
ine the party structure and its linkages to pressure groups and the
major strata of the social structure, and that we pay particular
attention to the integration within the political order of parties
with state machine.
I. Arthur Rosenberg has taught us to understand liberal democ-
racy as that phase of Western parliamentary government during
which the propertied and the educated shared political decisions,
the franchise being restricted by census qualifications and effec-
tively denied to the mass of workers as well as to women.
II. Imperialist democracy refers to parliamentary governments
which rule an empire consisting of such diverse units as dominions,
colonies, dependencies and protectorates, radiating finally into
spheres of influence. "Colonial democracy" refers to a territory
under a parliamentary government which is in fact dependent upon
the decisions of a great power. Such democracies are often debtor
states dependent upon the good will of the creditor country.
III. Totalitarian democracy refers to the absence of a division
between private and public life. Ancient Athens and the city-states
of the Italian Renaissance exemplify this absence of division, as do
the heroic episodes of democracies establishing themselves in war-
fare, during which there is no private retreat for the citizen. Non-
totalitarianism means that the political order permits its members
to keep part of their lives private, and to practice politics only
intermittently. A minority of the United States electorate elect
the president, although his legitimation is in terms of "majority
rule." For many people voting thus would seem to make little differ-
ence in many decisions of national consequence.-^ Insofar as de-
mocracy exists in such a situation, it is expressed mainly by com-
27 See W. E. Binkley, The Powers of the President (Garden City, N. Y.:
Doubleday, 1937) and Harold Laski, The American Presidency, An Interpre-
tation (New York: Harper, 1940).
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 20g
peting pressure groups and parties. As a type, totalitarian democ-
racy enables us to take into account the fact that in constitutionally
democratic states there has been a tendency, implemented by the
emergencies of war and peace, for controls to become increasingly
total.-'* The United States has been spared many controls, even
during World War II, for there was no mass evacuation of children,
no total civilian defense, and no intensive control of the kitchen.
IV. Socialist democracy refers to a parliamentary regime with
a democratic-minded labor party at the helm, engaged in socializ-
ing strategic industries and extending welfare services and housing
facilities to lower classes. Pursuing a policy of "full employment,"
socialists would displace capitalism's "anarchy of production" by a
policy of public planning. Such a regime would contain a strong
judiciary with legal guarantees, as well as parties which compete
but which are not strong enough to overrule juridical decisions.
Democratically accountable planners and managerial boards would,
according to this view of democracy, debate what products should
be made: there would be production planning on the basis of
consumer demands, explicitly linked with mass organizations. How
many television sets or houses should be made would thus be a
public decision, and consumption and production of the nation
would be considered as in one big household. Under such a social-
ized and planned economy— which would involve the confiscation
of private property— co-ops would own some industries, and vari-
ous public authorities— local, regional and national— would own
others. These bodies would appoint managers, and hold them
accountable. Inheritance would have nothing to do with who was
in charge. Co-ops and trade unions would have voices in the
places of decision, and at least a veto right over managers. Unions
would also propose, as well as veto, managerial decisions. Democ-
racy would thus involve both the political and the economic order.
In distinguishing various types of despotism, it seems conveni-
ent to classify them, first, as Oriental or Western. The Oriental
variety superseded feudalism by establishing a bureaucracy— of
Confucian gentlemen, as in China; or of priestly scribes, as in
ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. These bureaucracies controlled,
-8 See Franz Neumann, Behemoth; The Structure and Practice of National
Socialism (New York: Oxford, 1942); and Arthur Rosenberg, The Birth of
the German Republic, I. F. D. Morrow, tr. (London: Oxford, 1931).
210 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
among other means of life, the rivers, with which they managed
irrigation systems. Two types should be mentioned:
I. The Caesarism of Rome's empire was based upon an imperial
bureaucracy of army officers and tax farmers. The Diocletian Em-
pire is the clearest example of an imperial bureacracy led by
hereditary dynasties and punctuated by military usurpers. It was
a theocracy with Caesar as god. The military order was impor-
tant, as a chronic state of war was necessary to provide slaves for
the economy. Public financing was shifted from taxes to services
in kind. A money economy broke down as the area of domination
spread, so the center of gravity shifted inland. The rich, who pro-
vided the liturgies, fled from the cities and, going to country es-
tates, rusticated.
II. Sultanism operates with a harem: the despot, by prudent
choice of women, attached various sibs to his own ruling house-
hold. Within the harem, however, sib rivalry may be implemented,
as ambitious women join an opposition. The harem thus added
an additional element of unmanageability. The Chinese dynasties,
for example, went through cycles which regularly ended in the
un-Confucian rule of empress-dowagers and eunuchs, the so-called
"petticoat government." At any rate, in the typical cycle, the de-
cision-making center resolves into factions, and then a charismatic
peasant builds up an army and goes against the court. In his rise
to power, he gets training for the despotic role that .he will later
play.
In Western civilization, the following historical types of des-
potism have widely prevailed:
III. The feudal monarchy of the European Middle Ages, with its
permanent tensions between Pope and Emperor, was a loose set of
principalities, castled and self-equipped warriors, of fortified semi-
autonomous city republics, and corporate church and monastic
bodies. The emperor had no adequate administrative and techno-
logical means of enforcing sovereign rights from on high, and ac-
cordingly had to bargain with variously privileged estates, which
however were held together by a common faith in Christianity.
IV. The absolutist regimes of European kings and petty princes,
from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, introduced bureau-
cratic administrations which co-ordinated military and fiscal poli-
cies. Within this framework, territories have contested for prestige
and power through warfare and dynastic marriages. As the mer-
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 211
cenary army displaced the self-equipped feudal knighthood,
princely absolutism, based upon the "Divine Right of Kings,"
undermined the various feudal estates having varying degrees of
political and legal power. This absolutism centralized the scat-
tered prerogatives of feudal Europe, reduced the nobility to office
nobles and army officers; with cannon fire, it broke up their strong-
holds and castles. It reduced the status of quasi-autonomous cities,
and leveled men into subjects inhabiting the territory which it had
pacified. With the exception of the priesthood and the privileged
nobles, the subjects of princely absolutism were held to regular
taxes, which in the ancien regime of France, for example, were
collected by 30,000 privileged entrepreneurs, or, as in Prussia, by a
tax-collecting machine of military bureaucrats.
Princely absolutism was a type of police state which sought to
establish totalitarian control. It sought to increase its population
by having ministers exhort the people to "be fruitful and multiply,"
and by attracting privileged immigrant groups. It sought to steer
the economy by investing tax-income in schemes for technological
and industrial improvement. It sought to hoard precious metals
as a war chest, and to promote agricultural settlement schemes for
the sake of increasing the tax yield. It sought also to inculcate
loyalties to the state and to its prince. Thus Colbert had his stand-
ing army of mercenary soldiers dig canals during peacetime— an
early modern case of public works performed by "forced labor."
Yet with all this, given the level of preindustrial technology and
communications, princely absolutism was overthrown or reduced
by the industrial middle classes, who strove for democracy and
constitutional government, for a secure and calculable legal order
guaranteeing "due process of law," and thus for the opportunity to
orient themselves in a predictable way to competitive markets,
and other matters of income and property.
V. The middle-class revolutions of England and France brought
forth Bonapartism—a. Cromwell and a Napoleon— to stabilize their
revolutionary attainments. Kemal Atatiirk, regarded as the creator
of modern Turkey, might be compared with Napoleon. The mili-
tary juntas of Spanish-American countries, or Pilsudski's regime
of colonels in Poland between the wars, are different forms of dic-
tatorship in largely agrarian and debtor countries. "Bonapartism"
means a one-man rule on the basis of acclamation. Yet we should
remember that these despotisms are not totalitarianism: they are
212 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
not based on one single mass party, they do not manage the com-
plexities of a corporate capitalist economy in terms of a planned
economy set up for a chronic state of war.
VI. None of the pre-twentieth-century types of despotism has, in
fact, much in common with the totalitarian dictatorship of the
Soviet Union, or the Fascist regimes of Italy and Spain, or the
Nazi dictatorship. These modern despots mobilize industrialized
countries for imperialist wars in an attempt to redivide the world.
Modern dictators are revolutionary usurpers, usually going against
a center which is faction-ridden. Their usurpation is usually pre-
ceded by a condition in which there is a plurality of pressure
groups and parties, and no chance to establish a stable govern-
ment. The individual experiences fully his inability to meet the
public crises which intensify his anxieties. He longs for a center
of management. Nobody seems to do anything, although everybody
is busy. Both the right and the left may unite against the middle,
but they cannot form a stable government. So, the dictator— the
conspicuous man thrown up by crisis and eager to assume emer-
gency powers and responsibility for all public affairs— arises on the
basis of a party and establishes a one-party state.
The social content, the ruling elites, the justifying symbols and
ideologies— these vary with the social setting and the political aims
at hand. For example, where Hitler's regime sought to strengthen
the individual peasant farm as well as Junker landlordism by
organizing agrarian society into a compulsory cartel for purposes
of autarchy, the Bolshevists, after some detours, abolished indi-
vidual holdings and organized agriculture in a network of tractor
stations and state farms. They thus reduced the peasantry to wage
workers and so guaranteed greater efficiency of production and
a higher tax income from the land than would have been available
under private property.
Totalitarian states go beyond the bureaucratization of demo-
cratic states by subjecting all organized channels of communica-
tion, including concert hall and exhibition of art work, as well as
radio, print, and film to their control. This requires that various
skill groups— journalists, cameramen, film directors, artists, radio
men— be organized into quasi-bureaucracies, that is, transformed
into "officials" who have all the responsibilities of regular state
officials but not their decision-making functions, their rights of
tenure, their pensions, or their anonymity. Such skill groups must
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 213
then define and promulgate official images of the world and what
is happening in it, official "definitions of the situation."
Public opinion, as Hans Speier puts it,-'* involves the right of the
citizenry publicly to engage in critical communications to and
about the government and its policy decisions. Such public opinion
does not exist in totalitarian societies. There is only the precarious
role of the small-audience satirist, who, like the old court jester
or official fool, may speak the truth— within limits and so long as
no one takes him seriously.
4. Economic Institutions ^°
Economic orders are composed of institutions by which men
organize labor for the peaceful production and distribution of
goods and services. The dominant economic organizations as well
as their integration vary according to the particular economic ends
sought, of which there are generally two types: one may produce
for one's own household and thus belong to a "subsistence econ-
omy"; or one may produce for profits to be gained through indirect
exchange in a "money economy." Accordingly, we speak of the
"subsistence farmer," such as the old-time European peasant, and
of the "cash crop farmer," such as, predominantly, the American
farm operator. Modern industrial economies may also be classified
as composed of competing "private enterprises"; of "mixed" enter-
prises, in which public authorities and private enterprisers join
forces; or of "public enterprises."
Georg Simmel identified "rationality" with money exchange be-
cause money is a common denominator of qualitatively different
29 Paraphrased from Hans Speier, Social Order and the Risks of War ( New
York: Stewart, 1952), p. 323.
30 The reader will find the following to be important: Max Weber, General
Economic History, Frank Knight, tr. (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1950);
Karl Marx, Selected Wor/cs in 2 Vols. ( Prepared at the Marx Institute, Moscow,
by V. Adoratsky, edited in EngUsh by C. P. Dutt, New York); Thorstein
Veblen, Tlie Theory of Business Enterprise (New York, 1935); Georg Simmel,
The Sociology of Georg Simmel, K. Wolff, ed. and tr. (Glencoe, Illinois:
Free Press, 1950); Werner Sombart, "Capitalism," Encyclopaedia of the
Social Sciences, Vol. Ill, pp. 195-208, and The Quintessence of Capitalism
(London, 1915); J. A. Hobson, The Evolution of Modern Capitalism (London,
1926); and J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New
York: Harper, 1950).
214 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
goods. Money allows for the quantification of all qualities, and this
quantification, in turn, allows the analytic breaking down of quali-
ties into equal units, as well as for the translatability of one qual-
ity into another— and hence for calculation. For Simmel, capitalism
is therefore seen as a diffusion of the exchange medium, money,
and the concomitant mental attitudes of ( i ) rational calculation,
and (2) the objectification of personal properties and belongings.
In prepecuniary eras, all goods and artifacts were identified with
their owner; they extended the range of his personality, they em-
bodied his personality traits. But in pecuniary eras this intimate
psychic linkage of persons with the goods they own is broken, and
goods become objects circulating or ready to circulate among dif-
ferent persons. Hence economic goods become abstracted from
the personal work invested in them. Simmel thus defines capitalism
in terms of the money economy.
Werner Sombart, in contrast, emphasizes the rational calcula-
tion of profits, costs, and income as the constitutive element of
modern capitalism. Hence, for Sombart the emergence of modem
capitalism dates from the invention of double entry bookkeeping
by an Italian monk in the Italian city economy of early Renaissance
days.
For both Simmel and Sombart the sphere of distribution— the
market— is the decisive anchorage of capitalism. The ramifications
of technological changes implementing novel modes of production
are not of primary significance to them. Capitalism is the use of
the pecuniary principle in different fields of economic pursuits;
this principle gradually engulfs the economic orders of whole na-
tions and cultural areas, and in due course perhaps, permeates the
entire world.
For Karl Marx and Max Weber, in contrast to both Simmel and
Sombart, "modern capitalism" is anchored in the sphere of pro-
duction. Accordingly, the historical emergence of modern capi-
talism is not seen as a quantitative expansion of markets, but as
the emergence of the factory as the productive unit or, in Weber's
terms, of a rational organization of formally free labor for the con-
tinuous acquisition of profits. Because of his emphasis upon pro-
duction, Marx focused upon the labor supply and the exploitabil-
ity of the "reserve army of labor." Weber was more interested in the
origin and psychology of a stratum of middle-class entrepreneurs.
Marx believed that fraud and violence implemented the initial
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 215
phase of the primary accumulation required for capitalism. Yeomen,
small propertied groups, and artisans were brutally dislocated
from their traditional pursuits.
Weber also placed great emphasis upon noneconomic factors, but
his central problem became a psychological one: how is it pos-
sible that strata of enterprisers and workers emerge that are will-
ing to engage in methodically persistent, hard work and thereby
gain a competitive advantage over less principled, more tradition-
alist economic agents? These men forego the traditional enjoyments
of wealth— the expansion of their consumption, or the investment
of wealth in ostentatious ways. How is it, then, that men arise who
work hard, despite the fact that in the value terms of their eco-
nomic tradition and epoch they have no understandable motives
for doing so? Weber's answer lies in his reconstruction of the
religiously motivated asceticism, the inner-worldly or this-worldly
asceticism, of the heroic puritan.^^
In his causal analysis, Weber thus specializes in the problem of
modern capitalism. For him industrial capitalism is not sufficiently
defined by profit-making, because profits are made by Chinese
traders as well as by Armenian middlemen. Nor is capitalism a
matter of acquisitive instincts, which are revealed by all sorts and
conditions of men in contexts which lack the specific character of
capitalism— modern industry. In contrast to Sombart, Weber was
not interested in how profits are counted, but in the fact that they
are made.
For both Marx and for Weber, modern capitalism, therefore,
does not exist in the Italian Renaissance cities, or in the Roman
empire, or the Tokugawa epoch of Japan. In its modern sense,
capitalism is a specifically Occidental or Western economic order,
beginning primarily in England during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries.
5. Types of Capitalism
It is within the realm of comparative economics, however, that
Weber developed his "types of capitalism" which in reality consti-
tute a panorama of economies existing prior to distinctively mod-
31 See Chapter IX: Institutional Orders and Social Controls, II, Section i:
Religious Institutions.
2l6 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
ern capitalism. These types include pariah, political, booty, and
colonial capitalism. ^-
I. Pariah capitalism is the capitalism of despised marginal
traders who are originally strangers among host nations which
allow them to fulfill economically welcome but morally impugned
functions. Weber called such despised trading groups "pariahs"
when they were socially ostracized: excluded from intermarriage
and dinner table fellowship with members of the politically domi-
nant group. And he used the term "pariah capitalism" in order to
emphasize the marginal position which they typically occupy.
Christian traders in the midst of Mohammedan Turks, Chinese
merchants in Southeast Asia, the Parsee traders of India, and the
Greek middlemen in Africa are cases in point, as well as, of course,
occidental Jewry in the Middle Ages. Such pariah capitalists are
often commercial capitalists, accumulating profits by the control of
major trade routes for luxury commodities, such as spices, precious
metals, and silks.
II. Under certain conditions even pariah capitalists may be wel-
come servants of political or ecclesiastical rulers. As market experts,
they know how to raise credits for political and military enterprises.
When any capitalist, pariah or not, undertakes services of this kind,
we may speak of political capitalism.
Political capitalism tends to flower in states of chronic warfare
or revolution. Many of the Jews, as well as Gentiles, of the Euro-
pean Middle Ages were protected by courts and participated in
such capitalism. Thus the famous brothers Rothschild established
themselves in Frankfort on the Main, as well as London, Paris, and
Vienna, They helped finance the Napoleonic wars, on all sides of
the battle lines, thus minimizing possible losses of the family as a
financial community.
Political capitalism has assumed a number of different forms.
Political rulers for example, in a fiscal capitalism, have often
"farmed out" tax collection to private entrepreneurs. Such entre-
preneurial gatherers of taxes existed in the late Roman empire, in
which they enriched themselves by exploiting the provinces eco-
nomically and using their private fortunes as stepping stones in
political careers in Rome. Thus did Caesar squeeze Gaul. A similar
stratum of "tax farmers" became significantly unpopular in pre-
revolutionary France under the absolutism of the ancien regime.
22 Cf. General Economic Theory, op. dt., and Max Weber, op. cit.
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I SI/
Rulers have frequently farmed out the royal mint itself to private
enterprisers. The house of Mitsui, for example, floated the first
government currency after the reformation in Japan. The house
of Fuggers enjoyed minting rights as well as mining privileges.
Such opportunities as tax gathering and money-issuing are direct
state functions, which is why Weber called this type of capitalism
fiscal capitalism— the term fiscal referring to the state as an eco-
nomic agent.
Another kind of political capitalism involves the organization of
armed forces by private entrepreneurs. The condottiere emerges
when disciplined units of mercenary footmen prove superior to the
individualistic, undisciplined feudal knight-in-armor. The Italian
condottieri (Sforza), as well as the north Alpine organizer of mer-
cenary troops (Frundsberg and Wallenstein), are best known.
The later standing armies of absolutist European rulers were fi-
nanced by a slowly emerging technique of regular tax collection,
by political loans and subsidies from the outside (e.g., British
subsidies to Frederick II of Prussia during the Seven Years War).
In contrast to the devaluation of pariah capitalists, fiscal capital-
ists have enjoyed great esteem, which, in part, has been due to
their participation in royal functions and hence their borrowing of
status. Jacob Fugger of Augsburg, who financed the election of an
emperor was, and felt like, a kingmaker.
III. During the modern expansion of markets, overseas traders
typically met tribal or other political communities which denied
them access to harbor and trading opportunities. In such situations,
the trader, in the absence of maritime and international law, used
to go well armed, and if necessary open the door to trade at the
point of a gun. Where persuasion to trade is implemented by the
actual use or the threat of violence, one may speak of booty capi-
talism. The term is appropriate: under conditions of forced trans-
actions one can hardly speak of an exchange of commodities by
peaceful bargaining. The exchange is, in fact, a polite fa9ade for
direct appropriation by violence. Slaves have been one of the most
favored commodities appropriated in this fashion.
IV. It has been an old tradition of occidental merchants to estab-
lish trading posts and stable places abroad. Thus, the Hanseatic
League maintained trading posts on the Volga as well as on the
Thames. Trading companies have engaged in overseas trade, and
in due course acquired favorable sites, called "factories." Thus the
2l8 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
British East India Company established its factories in India. From
such a "trading" post, resident stewards expanded their operations,
and in due course, acquired considerable territorial domains. In-
creased holdings brought in their train increased tensions and
dangers, pohtical, military and economic. Accordingly, a military
estabhshment had to secure the colony. Westerners residing in the
trading posts and becoming acquainted with the problems of the
surrounding territories naturally discovered occasions and oppor-
tunities for further expansion by entering the politics of the par-
ticular region and exploiting them for their own advantage. In
short, booty capitalist adventures have led to colonial capitalism.
Colonial capitalism has typically established "the plantation
system," which thrives on an intensive cultivation of tropical and
garden produce such as tea, cotton, tobacco, sugar, and in the age
of the automobile, rubber. It is a further characteristic of the
plantation that it utilizes slave or forced labor. The most significant
areas of such plantation systems have been in the North African
grain belt, in the Portuguese, French, Dutch, and British domains
in India, and in the Southern states before the Civil War.
Modern capitalist entrepreneurs have struggled against all the
odds of jurisdictional handicaps, the closure policies of guilds and
politically privileged monopolists, and the mercantilist police state.
Their slogan, "laissez-faire," was directed against the feudal ves-
tiges of guild policies, as well as against politically privileged
monopolists. The autonomy of the pacified market appeared to
them as the ideal field of operations, and the establishment of such
a market as a fulfillment of freedom. The free market was thus the
economic precondition and result of the free enterprise; this
market became world wide and based in gold, and free migra-
tion of people knit together the system as a whole.
Nineteenth-century capitalism approximated the goal of an eco-
nomic order knit together by markets. To be sure, vestiges of
previous economic orders existed, especially in the rural economies
of continental Europe, and a good many artisan establishments
survived. But the dynamics of the economic order did not rest upon
these vestiges; it was controlled by market-oriented free entre-
preneurs. These agents enrolled a labor force in their expanding
capitalist enterprises, which gradually came to permeate all
branches of production and distribution. The right of the owner
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 2ig
freely to dispose of exchangeable goods came to include such
previously immobile items as land, and the initiative ol the enter-
priser fed upon continuously expanding business opportunities.
Legally guaranteed monopolies in trade, handicraft, and industry
were broken down. Legislation which confined itself to the formal
rules of the game replaced municipal statutes and guild rules that
restricted those who could play the game. Free mobility became
a recognized right of the citizen. Everyone could leave his place
of birth and move where he pleased; emigration and immigration
were legally facilitated through the free handing out of passports
and the relatively free admission of newcomers to all localities. All
national currencies had fairly stable relations to gold, and interna-
tional trade in capital and commodities flourished.
States minimized direct political intervention in the economic
order. For the implied assumption that ran through the laissez-faire
system was that the automatic steering of the whole process of
expansion would work out in the interest of all economic agents.
A harmony of interests between the individual profiting in the
process of expansion and the public weal was taken for granted
by the advocates of the system. At the dawn of the system, it was
possible for theoreticians like Adam Smith— the fountainhead of
the theory of economic liberalism— to think in terms of further in-
creasing the relatively equal distribution of private property. This
was the central meaning of equality of opportimity: that every man
of initiative and talent could enter the competitive race on equal
terms with his competitors. Since at the start of the race, men were
assumed to be more or less equally endowed, the different degrees
of their success could be ascribed to their personal merit, and
initiative. '
Such business depressions as occurred were declared to be tem-
porary aberrations of particular branches of industries; such de-
pressions in due course would be compensated for by a propor-
tionate expansion of more profitable fields. Public opinion was
optimistic to the point of enthusiasm, and the turbulent social un-
rest of the Chartist and similar movements was soon forgotten.
Critics like Ruskin, Marx, and Saint-Simon remained outside the
main drift. The severe human and social costs of this capitalism
were overlooked in the scramble to get rich quick. In such virgin
economic areas as the U.S.A., the unrestricted right of the private
property owner often allowed for short-sighted exploitation of
220 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
natural resources, profitable to the individual but costly to the
nation at large and to later generations.
Under modern capitalism, private enterprises are (i) passed on
as property to heirs and heiresses and (2) yield to these owners
"unearned income" beyond the entrepreneurial salaries paid to
managers and company directors, the interest due to investors and
creditors, and the funds set aside for replacement and renewal of
plant. Such properties are not the work-properties which Adam
Smith had in mind when he thought of "private enterprise." The
theorems of classical economics in fact have now become "ideolo-
gies" by means of which politically interested spokesmen apply the
small-shop thinking of laissez-faire days to the giant enterprises of
absentee owners in an age of monopoly capitalism.
The policies of the leading United States corporations today
determine the economic fate of most other economic units in the
United States, of many little businesses and family farmers, who
are all dependent upon the price policies of the corporations that
produce oil, farm machinery, electrical current, and artificial fer-
tilizer.^-^ The employment opportunities of employees— of wage
workers and of the white collar people also— depend upon the
strategic decisions of corporate managements. The structure of
these corporations is bureaucratic, and the bureaucracy of an oil
or a steel trust may be more powerful than that of many political
states. Their decisions concerning investment and price policies
pertain to far-flung production establishments, located in many
countries and so having international ramifications.
Under such conditions, the meaning of "private" as applied to
the leading American corporations means merely that their policy-
makers are not publicly accountable for their decisions— so long
as they "stay within the law," which is often loosely defined and
perhaps necessarily vague about the latest business practices.
In the big business establishment, all items of production, raw
materials, labor, interest charges, and so on, are carefully calculated
as "costs" and all income for goods sold is balanced against costs.
The goal of production is to maximize the total assets, which means
^3 For a good introduction to this subject, see Caroline F. Ware and Gardiner
C. Means, The Modern Economy in Action (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1936); and David Lynch, The Concentration of Economic Power (New
York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1946).
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 221
the long-run profitability of the corporation. This does not mean
that the entrepreneur or the manager is necessarily motivated by
"the profit motive." For he may take the profitablility of his opera-
tion for granted, and be motivated by the enjoyment of economic
power, realizing the extent to which smaller, less strategically
placed enterprises have to accommodate themselves to his price-
policy lead or technological and organizational advances. He may
enjoy the opportunity of providing jobs to so many employees, that
is, the dependence of thousands of families on his skillful operation
of the business. He may enjoy his freedom to brave government
orders and find himself, as did Sevvell Avery of Montgomery Ward
during World War H, gently carried from his office in the arms of
soldiers. The handling of colossal amounts of goods, the boom and
din of machinery, the impressive figures of output, may all feed
into a joyful sense of power, of the sheer momentum of the opera-
tion. Couched in moral terms, the powerful man of business may
see the total enterprise as a going concern "demanding him," and
so feel himself to be "indispensable." And in all these worries and
gratifications, the "profit motive" may be but a by-product, even
though, to be sure, analytically speaking, profitability is the in-
dispensable prerequisite for continuous operation of the big busi-
ness unit.
The principle of technological efficiency involves the solving of
given technical tasks by the most efficient means available. The
economic principle involves the attaining of optimum profits for
a given outlay. These two principles are fused in the capitalist
enterprise, and so capitalism has often been termed the embodi-
ment of "rationality." Many observers, however, have doubted the
"rationality" of the capitalist system as they have considered its
operations and results over long periods:
They have noted ( i ) the wastefulness of its operations, as dra-
matically revealed during depressions; (2) the systematic unem-
ployment of millions of men, as in post-World War H Europe,
(3) the costs of wars and of colonies for raw material monopolies;
(4) the costs of economic nationalism and protectionism; (5) the
periodic breakdowns which displace in an unplanned and uncon-
cerned way the careers of men, condemning some to permanent
"unemployment" at the age of forty-five unless they change their
vocations and "write off" their educational investments; (6) the
distributions of both property and income, without rational link-
2.22, SOCIALSTRUCTURE
age to merit or function; (7) the fairy-tale-like differences in con-
sumption; (8) the expropriation of large masses of fixed income
earners through inflationary processes benefiting the propertied;
(9) the bombardment of low-income groups with a never-ending
stream of advertised goods beyond their purchasing power; and so,
the inculcation of wishes not to be satisfied; (10) the assertion of
free consumers' choice to low-income groups who "have no choice."
Even Max Weber, who of course accepted capitalism as "economic
rationalism" incarnate, liked to cite Robert Wagner's phrase char-
acterizing capitalism as "this masterless slavery."
The economic order is obviously related to other institutional
orders. It is "costly" to build a church or to recruit an army. What-
ever ends may be pursued, economic means limit or facilitate their
attainment. When the state nationalizes or socializes the relevant
means of production— the big land holdings, factories and facilities
of distribution— and manages these establishments just as military
property is now managed in the United States, then economic and
political orders are fused. Even where there is private property,
this process goes on, as during wartime, for the planning and tech-
nology required by twentieth-century warfare increasingly pene-
trates the economy— even during times of nominal peace. There
are raw material allocations and a planned distribution of scarce
labor; there are priorities and price controls and the rationing of
consumers' goods; and there is possibly a control of private profits
as well as major production for state-defined needs. At such times
the production secrets of individual enterprises may be publicized
and communicated to less efficient units in the economy in order
to increase total output in the shortest possible time.^*
Wartime planning under private capitalism, in short, is a con-
siderable departure from "business as usual." It is when "all-out
production" is the order of the day that the irrationalities of "busi-
ness as usual," with its unused capacities and idle men, become
most embarrassingly obvious. Rather than a promise of a policy,
"full employment" becomes a fact. When men then consider such
mobilization of production for the sake of more efficient destruc-
tion, when millions of men are taken out of production for years,
8* Key books include: Alfred Vagts, The History of Militarism (New York:
Norton, 1937); Makers of Modern Strategtj, Edward M. Earle and others, eds.
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1943); and Speier, op. cit., pp. 223-323.
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 22^
and then millions of man-hours are spent for years for destruction,
the irrational factors seem to loom larger. At any rate, since the
1890's, the periodic armament races of industrial societies have re-
duced Spencer's assumption of the peaceful nature of industrial
societies to the bad joke of a "Little England" liberal.
6. The Military Order
The military order comprises the legitimate and institutionalized
practice of violence. In modern industrial societies this order is
of course a department of the state, but the practice of violence
has come to be of such outstanding significance that it is conven-
ient to single out the military order for separate analysis.
Arnold Toynbee has brilliantly outlined the sequence of pre-
industrial warfare in terms of footmen and horsemen, either of
which may be lightly or heavily armed. Accordingly, one may
speak of (a) light footmen or (b) of light horsemen, and of (c)
heavily equipped footsoldiers or (d) of heavily armed horsemen.
Tribal horse nomads (the Huns), for example, represent light
horsemen whose disciplined and swift attacks struck terror to the
hearts of the men in Christendom; since that time, the term,
"horde " has appeared in the vocabulary of all Western languages.
Toynbee sees in various civilizations a "David and Goliath pat-
tern" of warfare: the small, quick maneuvering kind of man beats
the massively armored giant. Toynbee's own materials, however,
seem to us to show that in due course, heavy armor is more likely
to be beaten by heavier armor— and heavier discipline. The Spar-
tan phalanx won for a while; then an Athenian swarm of David's
peltasts beat the phalanx, and then an improved phalanx, out of
Thebes, with a "formation in depth came to the fore. Later, every-
thing went down before the Roman legionnaire, who as a versatile
fighting man combined in his person a co-ordination of all known
military skills and weapons— the light infantry man or the heavily
armored hoplite, with throwing spear, sword, and huge shield. He
was able to combine— and to use as occasion demanded— the ma-
neuverability of the individual skirmisher with the driving force
of the drilled formation.
Yet the legionnaire fell before the light horseman with bow and
arrow and the heavily armed horseman with lance and shield.
And this armored lancer, according to Toynbee, "kept the saddle
224 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
for the next twelve hundred years . . . before he too, resting too
long on his oars and so becoming an armor-plated travesty of his
own beginnings, was decisively beaten by a David on horseback—
a light horse archer of Nomad type and agility from the 13th cen-
tury steppes." ^^
The alteration between the undisciplined hero— jousting as a
chivalrous knight— and the disciplined formation of footmen may
be repeatedly observed in military history. In ancient Greece the
Homeric heroes were displaced by the hoplite army; in medieval
Europe the feudal hero was displaced by armies of disciplined
mercenaries; in ancient China the charioteers of the feudal age
gave way to the army of footsoldiers; ^^ in Great Britain the un-
disciplined fighting of the feudal lords proved technically inferior
to the disciplined cavalry attack of Cromwell's ironsides.^^
Before the rise of nation-states, warfare in agrarian societies was
the privilege of princes. But since the American and French revo-
lutions, the state has made warfare the concern of the nation as a
whole. Mercenary armies, which were originally offered on a
competitive basis to princes and to city states, became attached
to the state as standing armies of mercenaries and impressed sol-
diers. Such armies, however, were costly, and the individual sol-
dier, particularly after defeats, was not necessarily loyal to the
respective prince or state. Men at war accordingly minimized open
battles in favor of exhausting the adversary economically, threaten-
ing and shadowboxing without readily risking all-out battle. This
military technique has been called the "strategy of attrition" a
strategy pursued during World Wars I and II by naval powers who
blockaded the central and Axis powers, blacklisted enemy-con-
trolled firms in neutral countries, and purchased commodities in
order to deny the enemy access to goods important for war.
Napoleon, however, revived and developed to new heights an-
other type of strategy, the "strategy of annihilation." Its precondi-
tion is a patriotic army which today is recruited by universal drafts.
The aim of the leader in annihilation warfare is to administer crush-
ing defeats to the enemy's armies, to occupy his economically im-
portant areas and his capital city, and then, after unconditional
•■'•'■' A ^tudy of History (London, 1951), Vol. IV, pp. 431 ff.
38 See Max Weber, The Religion of China, H. H. Gerth, tr. ( Glencoe, Illi-
nois: Free Press, 1951), pp. 24 ff.
3^ See Sir Charles Firth, Cromwell's Army (London: Methuen, 1902).
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 22.5
surrender, to impose the victor's will. As a type of military strategy,
annihilation has developed along with the political form of the
state and with the industrialization of the nation. All twentieth-
century warfare has been concluded by "unconditional surrender."
The mobilization of the modern nation's resources for war has
reached a total state— in scope, intensity, and efficiency. The age at
which soldiers are recruited has been lowered to eighteen years
and raised to sixty or sixty-five; women have been drafted for
military or production service; the difference between combatants
and noncombatants has been abolished through blockade policies
and the tabula rasa policy of the atomic bomb. Civilians behind
the lines of invading armies are expected to wage guerrilla warfare
and to practice sabotage. The co-ordination of all institutional
orders involved in modern war leads to totalitarian measures of
planning. All large-scale organizations in all institutional orders are
co-ordinated to further the supreme end of victory. Art and science,
religion and education are committed to the cause. The media of
mass communications help to concentrate fears and aggressions,
maximizing their intensity and directing them against the enemy
as the "total threat." Accordingly, economic, psychological, po-
litical, and military warfare are so many special aspects of total
war.
This co-ordination of a nation for war leads to unease and ten-
sion. For example, the lowering of the draft age, which is largely
technologically determined, comes into conflict with the legal defi-
nition of adult status and the political definition of voting age. The
Soviet Union and the states within her orbit have adjusted to this
conflict by lowering the legal definition of adult status to eighteen
years in Eastern Germany, to twelve years in the Soviet Union.
The privileged status of youth before the courts has been abolished.
In Russia a teen-ager in court is punished like an adult, rather than
like a "juvenile delinquent." In the United States, such problems are
still controversial.
Another tension results from the equal employability and com-
pensation of men and women in military and other war work, and
from the transferability of the worker to the army and of the
soldier to the factory. The cartoonist Bill Mauldin caricatured such
tensions expertly during the late war. As long as differences in
income and in risk accompany such transfers, psychic compensa-
tions have to fill the gap. The invention and manipulation of such
226 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
compensations require special policies and ejfforts, as well as large-
scale measures of psychological warfare, by which leaders seek to
control tension levels and insecurity feelings.
An increasing array of attitude, trait, and aptitude tests are
used to "screen" masses of recruits in order to assign men to their
most suitable roles. Moreover, psychological warfare now involves
the study of suitable propaganda addressed to partners of the
hostile coalition having diverse cultures and value preferences,
which is thus intended to divide them, to maximize whatever ten-
sion state exists between them, to foment disloyalty to leaders and
causes, to promote states of apathy and indifference, and finally, to
produce "crises of conscience" which will weaken the will to fight
or even induce a "change of sides."
The Russians were quite successful in such policies during the
late war against Hitler, winning over and organizing captured "free
German officers," and using them in their anti-Nazi propaganda.
The Nazis, on the other hand, organized an army of Ukrainians
under General Wlassow, who had deserted the Red army; al-
though no Nazi, he made common cause with them for reasons of
his own. During the same war, the United States and her allies
were able to persuade Mussolini's ace diplomat, Dino Grandi, to
abandon Mussolini and his regime, as well as the sinking Nazi ship,
and to come over to the side of Victor Emmanuel and his following.
With this, the Italian war was to some extent transformed into a
civil war, as well as a war of liberation from the occupying Nazi
army. Similarly, France was divided, the "Free French" under
General de Gaulle, being cut loose from the Petain-Laval regime,
attacking the Retain administration of Syria and Dakar.
The distrust characteristic of modern coalition partners is obvious
when we remember the clause in President Roosevelt's destroyer
deal with Great Britain which obliged his Majesty never to sur-
render the royal navy to Nazi Germany. The swiftness of events,
the changes of sides by leaders who thus write off decades of
verbalized sentiments and loyalties, the value cleavages by virtue
of which Churchill had to order the sinking of the French navy
"with a heavy heart," the transformation of Stalin's image from
"Uncle Joe" to a scheming enigma— all such policies and strategies
and images demand a subtlety of presentation to mass society and
a short memory during the numerous changes in line.
In our times, speed is indispensable to success in total war, but
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 22^
of late, the mass training of hatred and friendship runs up against
an ever-greater propaganda neurosis, and has had to overcome an
increasing psychic inertia.
In present-day warfare, machines seem more important than
men, who, in fact, often seem appendages to machines, rather than
the manipulators of machines as fighting tools. In the United States
air force during World War II, differences in the interacting per-
sonalities of the ten crew members of a bomber were irrelevant
to their efficiency. Their tight-knit roles, based on the requirements
of the plane, and their co-ordination to one another, shape indi-
vidual men into uniform role takers. A rigid, straightforward pa-
triotic feeling, and the ambition to be a proved hero are no longer,
in the view of military personnel experts, unquestionable assets, at
least not for all fighting men. Among bomber crews in the Eighth
Air Force, such feelings and ambitions operated to repress anxi-
eties, and so endangered performance as well as expensive equip-
ment and training. Accordingly, such feelings were, as a policy,
carefully discouraged in favor of a more candid admission of anxi-
eties. Among parachutists, however, the reverse held: strong super-
egos, and so heroic postures, were encouraged.
7. Characteristics of Six Types of Armies
In order briefly to reveal the range of phenomena in the military
order, we shall now discuss six quite different types of armies, in
each case setting forth the following social and psychological char-
acteristics: their legitimations and motivations for fighting, their
social recruitment and their financing or provisioning, the tech-
nological implements they typically employed and the form of or-
ganization usually followed, and their typical strategy and tactical
maneuvers. We believe that these are among the key typological
features required for the sociological understanding of any army.
I. The tribal formations of Teutonic warriors and of a variety of
nomads legitimated their wars for land and booty, or their migra-
tory expansions due to population pressure, in traditional and
charismatic ways. They are free men— although among their ranks
are also adopted prisoners of war— self-equipped with club and
sword, lance and bow, as well as, in the case of the Vikings and
Homeric Greeks, ships. Their strategy is the raid, or the quick
invasion, and their tactics include encirclement by swarms of
228 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
lightly armed camel or horse bowmen, and the wedge formation
of Teutonic warriors.
II. Patrimonial armies of the Eastern Roman Empire are re-
cruited from among slaves and justified traditionally. They are
organized in rational formations of legions or cohorts, and are
equipped and provided for by their master or prince. Their officers
are motivated by loyalty to the traditional head, and their ranks
are often compelled by harsh discipline. Shoulder to shoulder they
stand in a disciplined bloc— with lance, sword, and siege machinery,
as well as road and bridge building apparatus. Their objective is
to annihilate the enemy by frontal attack and envelopment, by a
variety of rationally elaborated tactics.
III. The feudal knight of the Occident is a professional warrior,
self-equipped from his fief; his violence is legitimated by personal
charism and Christian blessings. He is motivated by personal
honor, his oath of allegiance, and a sense of heroic adventure. He
is also motivated by his interest in conquering fiefs which thus add
to the domain and glory of Christian Knighthood. Since his tactic
is to joust as an individual in the open fields, the organization for
battle is a loose federation of individual fighting men. On horse,
carrying lance, sword, and shield, and armored by metal and
leather, his tactics include the individual duel and the taking
of prisoners for ransom.
IV. Oliver Cromwell's army, recruited from the Puritan gentry,
is legitimated by a religious cause. In part it is self-equipped, like
the feudal knights, and in part, like modern national armies,
provisioned by parliament. The men of this army are motivated
by a discipline based on an absolute belief in their religious cause.
They are organized in numerically defined units, in disciplined
formations with stratified ranks of officers. They are a cavalry
which, with pistol and saber, practice the tactics of the lineal
frontal assault as well as the assault in depth for the strategical
objective of annihilation.
V. The condottiere organizes soldiers of fortune, held by con-
tractional obligations with a city-state or a prince or any other
private or public body. The fulfillment of these contracts serves as
his legitimation. As a private military enterpriser, he recruits mer-
cenaries in a great variety of ways, including the shanghaiing of
vagabonds. He is both self-equipped and provided for by his em-
ployer. The mercenary army is rationally disciplined and motivated
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, I 229
by adventurous quests for profits and booty, including women;
ranks of such armies are held together by coercion and expectation
of wages and the general hatred of the population for these "stran-
gers in the land" and disdain of the upper classes exploiting them.
His implements vary with technological level, from pike and sword,
musket and cannon, to frigate and aircraft. His tactics accordingly
vary, as does the organization of the army, but his strategy tends
to be that of attrition, especially the cutting off of the enemy from
his base of operations and the financial exhaustion of the enemy.
VI. The violence of the modern national army is legitimated by
the symbols and sentiments of the nation and its cause; the men
of this army are disciplined for obedience to a hierarchy of staff
and line officers. Discipline rests upon acceptance of the nation's
cause and is guaranteed by sanctions— including loss of status and
career chances and, in the last analysis, capital punishment. Al-
though voluntary enlistments are permitted or encouraged, the
mode of recruitment is compulsory service for all citizens judged
fit. The national army is organized as a national bureaucracy,
equipped by the state or by the lend-lease of other friendly states.
Historically, equipment has ranged from rifle and cannon to the
machines of modern industrial war. Tactics include every type from
"Indian war" with rifle and grenade in small quick attack, to trench
warfare of position and maneuver and break-through, as well as
saturation bombardment from above. The strategical objective is
to wear down, and in the end, to obliterate the enemy, occupy
his territory and impose the victor's will. Since major wars are
global, the power blocs of nations aim at division and redivision
of the world, and in the last analysis at world domination.
CHAPTER
I X
Institutional Orders
and Social Controls, II
I. Religious Institutions
By "religious order," as we have already noted, we refer to all
those institutions in which men organize the collective worship of
God or gods at regular occasions and at fixed places. In religious
conduct men use supernatural means— prayer and sacrifice, for ex-
ample—in an effort to attain supernatural ends. In various ways
religion has to do with salvation from suffering or, as in many
Oriental religions, with mysticism— a fusion of the person with the
All-One.i
Magic, which is often associated with religion, involves the use
of supernatural means in an effort to control natural phenomena.
The ends of magic are thus naturalistic— for example, long life, or
good health, or many offspring, or victory in the hunt or in war, or
control of the weather. But the means or techniques of magic are
supernatural. Magic is used for occasions at hand: the chief is
sick and so the medicine man is called in. Magic is not usually
practiced at fixed establishments, but wherever it seems needed.
Today the great world religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism,
Christianity, Islamism, Confucianism, and Taoism) have super-
1 For systematic classifications of religions phenomena, see J. Wach, Sociol-
ogy of Religion (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1944). William Howells'
The Heathens (New York: Doubleday, 1948) is a good account. See also E.
Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Glencoe, Illinois:
Free Press, 1947), and Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,
II. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trs. and eds. (New York: Oxford, 1946),
Part III.
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 2^1
seded and largely transformed magical practices and beliefs. Ac-
cordingly, in our necessarily brief discussion we shall emphasize
the world religions.
The scriptural prophets of Judaism, from the ninth century B.C.,
were the first "men of conscience" about whom we have literary
documents and so historical knowledge. They stand out, in the
course of history, as the first men ready to obey God rather than
other men. They were active prophets, who considered themselves
instruments of God and, as divinely compelled men, volunteered
to bring forth their prophetic oracles and exhortations, in the form
of a divinely inspired mission, to their people and to their kings. -
It was characteristic of them to withdraw from society into
solitary states of brooding ecstasy or stolid trance, and then to
"return" to the market place, to the Temple of Jerusalem. There
they agitated as religiously motivated demagogues for true Judaist
conduct in daily life, for religiously inspired political isolationism
in the face of Egyptian and Assyrian aggression. Max Weber has
called such men "emissary" prophets.
In the canonical books of the Old Testament, Amos represents
the first, Zechariah the last "prophet," the prophet who prophesied
against all prophesying. Since then in Judaism only "false messiahs"
and "false prophets" have made their appearance. For a time a
temple priesthood was restored to power in Jerusalem; but under
the Roman Emperor Hadrian, this second temple was destroyed,
and since then the Diaspora existence has been decisive for the
course of Judaism as a world religion. The rabbi— the religious
teacher— became the decisive leader of this religion. The establish-
ment of the state of Israel marks a new epoch for Judaism.
Both Christianity and Islamism were developed out of Judaism's
legacy. The decisive event in the development of Christianity from
a Jewish sect into a world religion was Paul's success, over Peter,
in defining "liberty in Christ" as the renunciation of the ritualistic
commandments of Judaism. For this eliminated from Christianity
the self-segregating features of Judaism. In the orbit of the Roman
Caesars, Christianity was successfully propagated— in competition
with Judaism, with innumerable ancient cults, with local and func-
~ Cf. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, H. H. Gerth and D. Martindale, trs.
( Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1952).
232 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
tional deities of the Greek Olympia, with the Egyptian cult of Isis
and Osiris, and especially Mithras, as well as with the impersonal
godhead of Plato, Aristotle and the Roman Stoics. The following
major factors were decisive in Christianity's victory: ^
I. Like the Old Testament prophets, the Christian apostles made
it their rule to live for religion rather than to make their living off
religion.
II. The ethical code of the ten commandments— of course also
taught by the Pharisees and the synagogue— was readily taught
to children and to uneducated masses as the divine imperative
of an invisible, though personal and majestic, God.
III. And quite apart from its simplicity, the Christian message
proved attractive to the people of later antiquity. Jewish messia-
nism was mixed with the Greek and Oriental mythology of a dying
and resurrected God; its family model upheld the image of a
loving God who was the just and merciful Father of His faithful
children; and its majestic conception of an omniscient, omnipotent,
and omnipresent figure held out eternal salvation of the immortal
soul in a blissful beyond to the faithful— that is to the obedient-
believer, and eternal damnation in hell to the nonbeliever.
IV. The dropping of Judaist ritualistic prescriptions of diet, the
Sabbath, and circumcision— the self-segregating features, as we
have said— made joining the Christians much easier for the pagans.
V. Finally, during the centuries of persecution, when public
agitation by preachers and prophetic figures was impossible, the
Christians managed to transform each administrative hearing, and
each circus show of the death of Christian martyrs, into an impres-
sive public demonstration of faith in a world without hope. The
processional burial which followed was a highly visible testimony
of the inner-directed man of conscience who would obey God
rather than man, who would reject this world and not shy away
from suffering, who would in fact seek suffering in imitation of
Christ and for the status of sainthood, in order to gain eternal sal-
vation in the hereafter.
Since then, with the emergence of a Roman and a Byzantine
oriented priesthood, Christendom has been divided into an Eastern
3 See Karl Holl, "Early Christian Propaganda," H. H. Gerth, tr., which will
shortly be published by Beacon Press, Boston. See also Edward Gibbon's
famous chapters on the rise of Christianity in The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire (Modern Library Edition in 3 vols.).
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 233
and Western Church. And since Martin Luther (14S3-1546),
Ulrich Zwingh (1484-1531), and John Calvin (1509-1564), West-
ern Christianity has been differentiated into the Roman Catliohc
Church, the Calvinist and Lutheran Churches, as well as numerous
Protestant sects.
The religious monopoly of the Catholic (Jhurch was, in part,
broken because of Gutenberg's invention of printing by movable
types, about 1450. For this soon made possible thousands of edi-
tions and copies of the Bible. An intelligentsia, which was opposed
to the pope but found patrons in the princes, emerged. The crisis
within the church led to reform movements of poor friars and
cardinals, of students and other migrant propagandists. Two urban
strata arose which followed their own courses— smaller middle-class
entrepreneurs, who developed toward inner-worldly asceticism,'
and smaller artisans, who tended to mysticism and the perfection of
contemplation. In Central Europe all during the fourteenth century,
the peasantry was in revolt. The journeymen were in revolt against
the closing of the guilds, and they as well as the poor in the guilds
were against usury and political capitalism, and thus took sides
with the peasantry. German princes protected the heterodox move-
ments, which thus allowed them to emancipate themselves from the
Holy Roman Empire, under the Hapsburgs and the pope.
Today in America there are Mennonites and Catholics, Quakers
and Baptists, Old Order Amish and Methodists; the United States,
in fact, exceeds all other countries in the number of denominations
it embraces, there being between two and three hundred.'^ Since
the advance of the Red army into Central Europe, Protestantism
has been reduced to a minority status on the continent; Catholic-
ism, although suffering grievous losses in Eastern and Southeastern
Europe, prevails from Hesse to Spain.
It has been characteristic of Western religion that religious
leaders— saints and founders of monk orders, reformers, plebeian
prophets, and evangelizing artisans— repeatedly democratize and
reactivate Christianity. Tendencies toward an aristocratic intel-
lectualism of the cultured have been repeatedly submerged; ac-
cordingly, by numerous compromises and concessions, Christianity
* See below, pp. 360-63.
5 Cf. R. H. Abrams, ed., "Organized Religion in the United States," The
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, March 1948.
2^4 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
has permeated the daily Hfe of the masses hi quite diverse societies.
This is one meaning of the "emissary prophets" of Christianity,
who as active men seek to transform the v^^orld.
In this perspective, Protestantism, by renouncing the rehgious
aristocracy of the priesthood, and of rehgious orders, has ehminated
the spht between professionals and laity. Christian asceticism was
developed behind monastic walls for especially organized elites; it
was democratized by the code of "inner-worldly asceticism," which
was especially effective in Puritan Calvinist denominations and
countries.
Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capital-
ism,'^ ascribed world historical consequences to this turn of events.
Inaugurating one of the great intellectual debates of the social
sciences, he asserted that modern industrial capitalism could not
have emerged without the "inner-worldly asceticism" which con-
tributed to the personality formation of the entrepreneurial middle
classes. In these strata, systematic vocational work was religiously
hallowed; success in one's work was religiously interpreted as in-
dicative of one's place among those predestined by the hidden
God's inscrutable resolve. Hence, religiously motivated fears for
one's salvation were mobilized for the conscientious self-discipline
of the vocational man. This man sets out to "master" this world,
which at the same time he rejects, in order to help produce the
kingdom to come. He does not withdraw from the world into con-
templation, nor build a specialized monastic world withdrawn from
the larger world; on the contrary, he stays in this world yet is not
of it; he actively tackles the world by work in order to realize his
ethically inspired quest for mastery. Whether in his workshop, in
the market, or on the battlefield, he aspires to be a crusader for
the kingdom to come; and wherever he finds them, he fights the
devil and all evil.
Weber's explanatory scheme for the emergence of capitalism
among the rational bourgeoisie may be summarized in more detail
as follows:
The religious doctrines of Luther, and especially of Calvin, de-
fined anew the Christian's relation to his everyday work. In the
English and in the German languages— and in them only since
''See also R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1948).
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 235
Protestant Bible translations— the terms, "calling" or Beruf, refer
both to one's occupation and to one's religious destiny. According
to Calvin's doctrine of predestination each man was to be saved or
condemned by an inscrutable judgment of the stern Lord. This
doctrine released in the pious believer great anxieties lest he be
among the condemned, and these anxieties could not be relieved
by withdrawal from the world into monastery life or into extraor-
dinary religious conduct, like the medieval saint's. For these ave-
nues were blocked by the theory that God had placed man in the
world of his creation, coupled with the doctrine that the Lord
had chosen or condemned all men. Therefore pious works, like
donations to churches, extra prayers and pilgrimages, became sense-
less and frivolous attempts to interfere with God's inscrutable will.
There was indeed only one way to gain signs of one's state of grace
as a portent of one's being elect; namely, the methodical adherence
to a God-pleasing code of conduct in whatever position the pious
found himself.
This code of conduct, as historically developed by puritan sects,
Weber called "inner-worldly" or "this-worldly asceticism"— an ab-
negation of the enjoyment of worldly pleasures in the midst of the
world. The puritan thus undertook to live a quasi-monastic life
without becoming a monk, to carry forth the norms of this-worldly
asceticism, and so to "conquer the world" rather than to withdraw.
To follow through this program required the methodical and
systematic observation of self and an ever-renewed self-discipline.
The minimization of impulses and deviations from the religious
code served the pious pvuitan as an indication of his selected status
in, the eyes of God. The religious code, however, by denying in-
dulgence in joyful re\'elry and dancing, in sexual gratifications, and
even in sleeping (the ideal of the long hard day), left the puritan
the concentration on work as his major ascetic technique. The
pious man must always renew his efforts, because no final guarantee
or security is held out to him. In the face of possible condemnation,
any exertions and tribulations in this valley of tears weigh but
lightly. Accordingly, guilt spurs his intensified work: the vocational
man is nowjtbe man who pleases God.
The Religious ethic of the puritan makes it impossible for him to
invest the fruits of his work in ostentatious consumption, like horses
and carriages, mansions and feudal estates; on the other hand, he
believes that he who does not work shall not eat. Therefore, Cath-
2;^6 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
olic alms to beggars, vagrants, and the like are denied. For puritan
philanthropic enterprises organize uniformed orphans and vagrants,
beggars and the aged in institutions set up for the purpose. There
is only one way in which the puritan may use his private accumu-
lations of wealth: to invest and reinvest them in productive enter-
prises. For this allows for the extension of salvation opportunities
to so many more beggars. The puritan businessman thus saves their
souls by using them as his labor supply, and they, the labor supply,
acquire a new work discipline by becoming the employer's breth-
ren. For salvation's sake, they forego many popular and colorful
days, festivities, mysteries, and plays which were holidays from
work for the medieval Catholic worker. Thus the puritan becomes
the restless worker making sure of his state of predestination, and,
as a particularly saintly man, earning the respect of his fellow
believers the more he expands his establishment.
Weber's analysis reveals the impact of a creed upon the forma-
tion of a type of character. Religiously motivated insecurity and its
religiously designated escape place premiums upon specific psychic
attitudes and traits like thrift, hard work, control of "idle words,"
humility, continuous self-control, purposiveness. This character
structure, in turn, becomes economically relevant in that it guaran-
tees competitive advantage over traditionalist and less frugal eco-
nomic agents.
The necessity of the puritan to maintain himself in the eyes of
his sectariaii brothers allows for the emergence of the new morality
of everyday business. The puritan does not higgle in the market,
and contracts are sacred. Hence the puritan is a safe credit risk,
and has the highest credit rating in the business community. This,
in turn, fructifies his business advance, and the puritan sect thus
becomes a selective, and at the same time a breeding agency, for
that personality type best fitted to develop and propagate industrial
capitalism as a system.
Religious ideas became psychologically relevant to character
structure; they place a premium on specific traits, and these traits
become incentives for a new style of economic conduct. As religious
organizations, the sects are fit to stabilize such personality types
into an organized elite. Their conduct and religiosity can be prop-
agated, and hence expanded. The long-run result of these changes,
namely all that goes with modern capitalism's success, was neither
intended nor foreseen by its puritan pioneers.
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 2:^^
Religious developments seem to occur by revivals and by secu-
larizations, which alternate with each other. Accordingly, we speak
of the "great revival" of Protestantism in England during the late
eighteenth century, when the Methodist movement sprang up
and put an end to the "merrie old England" of the Restoration
period. Catholicism has also had its revivals, the most prominent
being the renewal of religious ardor during the Jesuit-led "covmter-
reformation," which recovered Southern and Southeastern Europe
from Protestantism, leaving only scattered islands of Calvinist and
Lutheran Protestanism in Hungary and Romania, which were
/eliminated by the advance of the Red army during World War II.
Catholic and Protestant revival movements occurred at the end
of the Napoleonic epoch. Romantic intellectuals were converted to
Catholicism under Metternich; and nowadays we witness the suc-
cessful endeavors of Catholics to win over such intellectuals as
Jacques Maritain, the late Heywood Broun, the ex-editor of the
Daily Worker, Budenz, as well as influential upper-class persons
such as Clare Boothe Luce and Henry Ford II.
The role of the convert merits special attention for his ardor may
be especially intense. He may be motivated more by his resent-
ment against what he leaves behind than by positive and loving
identification with what he has come to embrace, Tertullian is
the often quoted case of such "resentful" Christianity. This con-
cept of "resentment," as developed by Nietzsche," asserts, in fact,
that all Christianity is nothing but the uprising of the slaves in
morality, which means that since direct aggression is denied to the
slave, he must "repress" his aggression and thereby sublimate it
ijito a wish for delayed aggression, or revenge. This desire for re-
\enge, in turn, becomes conscious and is then repressed, but it is
repressed from a new vantage point, from a presumably higher
\alue positon resulting from a "transvaluation of values." Not the
strong, the high, or the mighty are accepted as highly valuable
types of men, but the lowly, the suffering, the meek, who "shall
inherit the earth." It is the uncomely and the despised of this world
who are the beloved of God.
According to this theory, the righteous can condescendingly
" For an excellent account of Nietzsche's thought, see Walter A. Kaufmann,
Nietzsche (Princeton: Princeton Uniw Press, 1950), especially Chapters 7,
8 and 10.
238 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
anticipate the dire fate of the godless and unrighteous— a fate
which God is preparing for them on "doomsday" or on "The Day
of Judgment," of which the Christians sing. Nietzsche, in thus con-
struing neighborhness and Christian love as a "compensation" for
denied aggression, takes up Hobbes's assumption that human na-
ture is "originally" evil and aggressive, and that profession of love
is a compensatory derivation of hatred and frustrated aggression.
One may, to be sure, readily discern features of resentment, as
well as resentful men, in the Jewish as well as the Christian tradi-
tion. But to "explain" these religions, in all their complexities, in
terms of "resentment" requires that we reduce their specific value
preferences and their ethos to a natiu-alistic bias concerning the
nature of love. Max Scheler has convincingly juxtaposed the con-
ception of Christian love with that of Greek antiquity's "eros."
The Greek philosophers conceived of love in terms of scarcity con-
sciousness: Men should allocate their scarce love to those men and
to those values that "merit" love; hence they should want to prefer
the "higher" value or the higher type of man to the "lower." The
Christian idea of a loving God, in contrast, is predicated on the
assumption that love is "infinite." The loving God and the loving
Christian are not thought to be striving, in a competitive context,
towards something higher and higher but rather from the outset as
standing high and holding out infinite love and mercy to the crea-
ture who is in his failings and in his weakness lowly. It is a con-
ception foreshadowed by Isaiah's hope for a new covenant with a
merciful God, who will consider "not the circumcision of the fore-
skin but the circumcision of the heart." It is foreshadowed also in
Isaiah's idea of the Servant of Yahweh. "Love " in Christianity is
thus conceived, not as a natinalistically limited impulse, but as a
spiritual and psychic act of unlimited capacity.
William James, in a quite different context,® gives expression to
this idea of loving empathy as being a prerequisite of discern-
ment rather than a compensation for a frustrated "will to power."
"Every Jack," he wrote, "sees in his own particular Jill charms and
perfection to the enchantment of which we stolid on-lookers are
stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth,
he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of
Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a
8 Sec F. O. Matthiessen, TJie James Family (New York: Knopf, 1947),
p. 404 fF.
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 2;^g
maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological anaes-
thesia as regards Jill's magical importance? Surely the latter; surely
to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill's pal-
pitating little life-throbs are among the wonders of creation, are
worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that
the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill con-
cretely, and we do not. He struggles toward union with her inner
life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding
her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately too; for he is
also afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods
that we are, do not e\'en seek these things, but are contented that
the portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were
not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way of taking
it— so importantly— is the true and serious way; and she responds
to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously too. May the
ancient blindness never warp its clouds about either of them
again."
The relevance of the religious order to other institutional orders
depends upon the organizational principles of the religion in-
volved, and in particular, upon whether or not the religion is
compulsory or voluntary. American democratic society, for ex-
ample, with its innumerable voluntary organizations, is greatly
indebted to Puritanism and to the multiplicity of denominations
and sects. At the opposite extreme, state and church are led by one
man who combines the roles of supreme priest and emperor. This
is Caesar-Papism, as exemplified by the Japanese Mikado, the Con-
fucian Emperor of ancient China, the Roman Emperors after
Augustus, the Russian Tsars after Peter the Great, or the German
Lutheran princes.
The oldest, and in the West, the largest, ecclesiastical structure
—the Roman Catholic Church— is headed by the Pope who is unani-
mously elected by a college of seventy cardinals. The Pope
legitimizes his claim to Catholicity, that is, to universal authority,
by the dogma of the apostolic succession from Peter, the first Bishop
of Rome. The authoritarian structm-e of this priestly organization,
however, has accommodated itself to constitutional democracy. If
the state shoidd attack the church, the church is likely to enter the
political order more explicitly than it has in the United States by
lending its support to the organization of a special Catholic Party,
240 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
as is to be found in Germany, Italy, Belgium, and other European
countries. If the state, in its public schools and universities, should
not allow religious instruction, the church is likely to organize a
parochial school system of its own up through the university level,
as in the United States where 15 per cent of the school population
is enrolled in such Catholic schools. Celibate monks and nuns can
compete effectively with more expensive secular teachers. Where
the legal order permits the free accumulation of property, the
church can add to its corporate wealth.
In those large cities in which the Catholic Church controls the
majority vote, the official "separation of state and church" is, in
a way, bypassed on the municipal level. Direct and indirect subsi-
dies can be allocated under diverse headings. In the United States,
Catholicism was originally a religion of plebeian immigrants— of
Irish, German, Italian, and Polish descent. During recent decades,
however. Catholics have added propertied and educated elites to
their ranks, who can and who do exert significant influence in for-
eign and domestic political decisions. The combination of the
Democratic Party, the Catholic clergy, and the trade unions under
the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt is a well-known political
coalition." In the face of attacks, the Catholic Church of course
claims democratic rights and liberties for itself, but where the
church is established and represents the great majority of the peo-
ple it is unlikely to grant Protestant minorities the right to prosely-
tize. The strife and tension in Italy, in Spain, and in Colombia are
recent cases in point. In France, the Catholic Church has twice
been disestablished— during the French Revolution, and in 1904-05
under the Millerand coalition of socialists and bourgeois liberals.
Under Petain, the church was re-established, a measure that has
been honored by postwar governments.
Where religious authorities take over the administration of the
state, we may speak of a "theocracy." World famed examples in-
clude the theocracies of ancient Jerusalem under Ezra and Nehe-
miah and later under the Pharisees; Calvin's rule at Geneva; the
rule of the Puritan divines in colonial New England; and the Jesuit
state in Paraguay in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
8 For a knowledgeable account of sucli matters, see Samuel Lubell, The
Future of American Politics (New York: Harper, 1952); and Paul Blanshard,
American Freedom and Catholic Power (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949).
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 24I
It is characteristic of Western Christianity that at various times
it has been in tension with political authorities and economic
powers, with military, scientific, philosophical, and artistic move-
ments. Christianity has held revolutionary as well as conservative
positions— at different times and in different contexts. Accordingly,
generalizations of the political orientations of Christianity are
hound to overlook or to bypass pertinent aspects and ramifications
of its varied adaptations to Western social structures. As Hegel has
observed:
"The Christian religion has sometimes been reproved, sometimes
praised, for its consistency with the most varied manners, charac-
ters, and institutions. It was cradled in the corruption of the Roman
state; it became dominant when that empire was in the throes of
its decline, and we cannot see how Christianity could have stayed
its downfall. On the contrary, Rome's fall extended ^he scope of
Christianity's domain, and it appears in the same epoch as the
religion of the barbarians, who were totally ignorant and savage
but completely free, and also of the Greeks and Romans, who by
this time were overcivilized, servile, and plunged in a cesspool of
vice. It was the religion of the Italian states in the finest period
of their licentious freedom in the Middle Ages; of the grave and
free Swiss republics; of the more or less moderate monarchies of
modern Europe; alike of the most heavily oppressed serfs and their
overlords: both attended one church. Headed by the Cross, the
Spaniards murdered whole generations in America; over the con-
(juest of India the English sang Christian thanksgivings. Christian-
ity was the mother of the finest blossoms of the plastic arts; it gave
rise to the tall edifice of the sciences. Yet in its honor all fine art
was banned, and the development of the sciences was reckoned
an impiety. In all climates the tree of the Cross has grown, taken
root, and fructified. Every joy in life has been linked with this faith,
while the most miserable gloom has found in it its nourishment and
its justification." ^^
2. Characteristics of World Religions
We may grasp the main features of a religion if we know the
following facts: its attitude toward the status quo, its representa-
■'A Georg Williclni Friedrich Hegel, Early Theological Writings, T. M. Knox,
tr. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 168 fF.
242. SOCIAL STRUCTURE
tive class or leadership; the sources of its religious authority; its
type of religious assembly and organization, the chief end of life
it holds out, its views of the superhuman and of life after death,
its sexual code, its magical features, if any, and its attitude towards
politics, work, and education. In the following paragraphs we
characterize each of the great world religions in these terms.^°
I. Confucianism accepts the present order as good, for the em-
peror who reigns is the Son of Heaven. It is the religion of cultured
erudites who find their source of religious authority in the writings
of Confucius and the Confucian tradition. It involves ancestral
and political festivals, and understands the major end of life to
be the preservation of the social order. A multitude of spirits popu-
lates its world, although Heaven is rather impersonally imagined.
Confucianisjjjn is not concerned with the salvation of immortal souls.
It scorns women, although it stresses the perpetuation of the fam-
ily. It officially disowns the magical beliefs and practices of wilgar
Taoism, which are widespread among the masses. It upholds filial
piety as a cardinal virtue, which ties it to ancestor worship. Dis-
couraging independent thinking, it glorifies rote learning and feats
of memory among its scholarly leaders. Man's work, according
to this creed, is and should be under the control of the tradition-
minded family, or when it is office work, under the control of the
Confucian hierarchy headed by the emperor as the Son of Heaven.
II. Hinduism, both classical and popular, looks upon its world
of castes as eternal and unchangeable, for there is no beginning and
no end of the immortal soul of man. Accordingly, it upholds and
at the same time makes more tolerable the caste system. Classical
Hinduism is represented by the Brahmins— an hereditary, intel-
lectual aristocracy; popular Hinduism, by the gurus (i.e. mendi-
cant monks) and by holy men of quite different caste origin. For
its classical form, the Brahmins interpret ancient writings and tra-
dition; for its popular form, the gurus interpret tradition and folk-
lore. Both forms involve pilgrimages to holy places. The Brahmin
identifies himself with the cosmic spirit— that is the chief religious
^o See E. J. Jurji, ed., The Great Religions of the Modern World (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1946); H. L. Friess and H. W. Schneider, Religion in
Various Cultures (New York: Holt, 1932), as well as the works of Max Weber
cited elsewhere in this volume.
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 24,3
end of his life; the masses seek to improve their status in their
next rebirth. For these masses, there is a vast pantheon of nature
and functional gods; for the Brahmin, a more or less impersonal
cosmic spirit. But both, as Hindus, believe in the transmigration
of souls, the next incarnation according to the karman doctrine
being determined by one's adherence to one's "dharma": the
ritualistically sanctioned code of one's hereditary caste. The
Brahmin scorns women, for they interfere with contemplation;
among the masses cults of various sorts prevail. Among both, magi-
cal features are in evidence, although much more so among the
popular than the classical forms of Hinduism. Education is limited
to the aristocratic class, with an emphasis upon classic writings in
Sanskrit. Work is completely controlled by the hereditary and
endogamous caste system, and all innovations are discouraged. 1 1
HI. Buddhism regards the present world as evil and unchange-
able. The Buddhist monks— the representative class of this religion
—interpret ancient writings and tradition, and religious assemblage
is limited to monasteries and to certain festivals. The chief end of
life is conceived to be the escape from suffering, that is, escape
from the wheel of life with its rebirths for more of the same. There
is a continual rebirth through desire, but if one escapes from de-
sire there is the eternal rest of nirvana. Celibacy and the avoidance
of all desire is sought by means of complex spiritual exercises
and the achievement of extraordinary psychosomatic states. There
is no image of the superhuman in classic Buddhism, although
spiritism is rampant in popular forms of the religion. Magic is
forbidden in the former, but abounds in the latter. Accordingly,
education is limited to the monasteries and to those trained there.
As routine work would distract from the holy path, it is despised
by the mendicant monks.
IV. Judaism views the present order with resolute hope for the
future. Its religious cohesion rests upon faith in being chosen by
Yahweh for a covenant fellowship with him as a party to the con-
tract. Its representati^'e religious leaders are Levites and Torah
teachers, charismatic prophets and hereditary temple priests. Of
special significance has been the demilitarized, pacifist, peasant,
shepherd, and plebeian strata of cities. Since the destruction of
the temple and its priesthood, the law and the prophets are its holy
244 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
books; its sources of religious authority and its religious assemblage
is the synagogue. Life is a waiting, a tarrying, for a new and better
social order; in ancient Judaism there is no idea of personal sur-
vival after death. There are relatively few magical features in
Judaism and its monotheistic God is personal and ethical. Aside
from some cult prescriptions of chastity, there is no asceticism;
priests, prophets, and rabbis marry— and the family is sanctified.
Education consists of general instruction in the Torah and in his-
tory. The orthodox Jew views work rationally and practically, al-
though since the exile, work has been hampered in various degrees
by ritualistic separation.
V. Originally Mohammedism was a prophetic creed of a cru-
sading order of warriors; now Islamic society largely accepts the
present order as fate. The individual interprets the Koran; there
are private devotions as well as pilgrimages and mass meetings.
The chief end of life is to realize the will of Allah, who is a per-
sonal and monotheistic God. Originally there was a conception of a
warrior's paradise, with houris and carousing. Nowadays there is a
crudely conceived heaven and hell, and magical practices and be-
liefs are much in evidence. Women are isolated, popular education
neglected, and the attitude towards work is indifferent.
VI. Christianity, in both its Roman Catholic and Puritan form,
conceives of man as in the present world but not really of it, as
forming a super-social fellowship. Catholicism is inclined to sup-
port each of the varieties of status quo in its vast domains; Puri-
tanism, to stand in defiance of the world and attempt to remake it.
The representative Catholic leaders are saints, celibate priests,
monks, and nuns; of Puritan sects, the "middle classes." The sources
of religious authority for Catholics are the Bible as interpreted by
religious, priestly guidance, and ex cathedra pronouncements of
the pope. For Puritans the Bible, as interpreted by the individual
who is qualified for sect membership by his "inner light," is the
source of authority. Catholics have a heaven, a hell, and a purga-
tory; Puritans— in fact, all Protestants— have only a heaven and a
hell. Both, however, entertain images of individual salvation, al-
though the Catholics' is in a future heaven, the Puritans' in a king-
dom to come. The Catholic assemblage is the mass; the Puritan,
common worship. Both are Trinitarian in their images of the god-
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 24!^
head, although the CathoHcs also revere the saints and the Virgin
Mary. Magic is much in evidence in Catholicism— the sacrament
being thought to work by virtue of the ritual. Puritanism has fought
and eliminated all magic as devilish. Sacraments, for example, the
Lord's Supper, is considered a festival in memory of Christ's last
supper; Catholic priests are professionally trained; other Catholic
education varies in level according to competitive or monopolistic
situation, and is determined by the interests of religious conform-
ity. Like Judaism, Puritanism lays great stress on and pays zealous
attention to mass education of the laity, and has encouraged ex-
ploratory thinking in science and technology, and education for
businessmen. In Catholicism there is celibacy for the holy, mar-
riage, though considered a sacrament, being a concession to hu-
man frailty and belonging to "the natural order." In Puritanism,
the same ethical demands hold for clergy and laity, marriage in-
volving a love of sobriety. Work, for the Benedictine monks espe-
cially, represents the burdensome legacy of man's fall. The re-
ligious zeal of Puritanism, as we have noted in detail above, is
channeled into work of this world.
-3. The Kinship Order
The kinship order— we have noted above— is composed of insti-
tutions which regulate and facilitate legitimate sexual intercourse,
procreation, and the rearing of children as well as the transmission
of private property. ^^
All social structures institutionalize sexual activities and thus
regulate them, but often such activities are accompanied by illegiti-
mate forms of relation that are more or less tolerated. When the
kinship order is taxed beyond capacity, the load is shifted to men,
women, or children not belonging to legitimate, domestic groups
but offering erotic services to its members. Hetaerae, mistresses,
concubines, prostitutes— male and female, sacred and profane— all
play such supplementary roles. The idea that only women have
honor (and hence can lose it) reflects thousands of years of male
dominance. If the gigolo were revealed throughout world history
'1 See W. Goodsell, A History of Marriage and the Family (rev. ed.; New
York: Macmillan, 1934); and A. W. Calhoun, A Social History of the Aineri-
can Family (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1945).
246 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
as is the female prostitvite, then men too could lose their honor,
and in this connection be equal with women. Illicit erotic rela-
tions are most likely to occur when economic conditions keep the
biological adult from assuming the role of provider. The socially
unplaced erotic overhead is thus transferred to erotic specialists,
to the prostitute, or on higher-class levels, to the mistress.
When we emphasize the economic aspect of the kinship order,
we speak of the "household"; when we stress the kinship aspect
we speak of the "family." " In the remote past, and in many con-
temporary preliterate societies, the economic and the kinship or-
ders are not differentiated. In fact, all "economy" was once "do-
mestic economy."
Max Weber has noted that the kinship order is generally com-
prised of sexually enduring communities of father, mother, and
children. Economic functions, although historically linked with
those of kinship, can of course be analytically separated from
them. Conjugal relations and parent-child relations are based on
the kinship order, but purely sexual relations are highly unstable
and problematic. In order to be enduring, they must be instituted,
and they have most frequently been instituted with reference to
economic conditions. Thus the father must provide for the mother;
and, until the child is able to provide for himself, the mother must
so provide. Relations between siblings are not necessarily impor-
tant until they involve attachments to a common source of provi-
sions. But even in societies where men are bound together com-
munally in bachelor quarters for military and economic purposes,
mother and children are likely to remain in common residence.
Marriage can only be defined with reference to larger organiza-
tions than the family; accordingly the kinship structure is usually
a dependent order. Marriage, as a legitimate sexual relation, pre-
supposes larger groups which sanction the relation, against the will
1- On tlie relation of economic functions and types of families, see Max-
Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Talcott Parsons
and A. M. Henderson, trs. (New York: Oxford, 1948), pp. 341-57- See also
the excellent articles by Alfred Meusel, "National Socialism and the Family,"
The Sociological Review (British), Vol. 28, 1936, pp. 166 fF. and 389 ff. "From
an economic point of view the family is ( 1 ) an institution to transmit private
property, (2) a system of productive relations directed by patriarchal au-
thority" (page 167).
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 24/
if necessary of one or both of the partners. These larger groups
which thus sanction marriage— we may call them "frame groups"—
may be sib or clan, or of political or economic, religious or status
nature. Only those descendants who are borne as full members of
such association involved may consider legitimate marriage. This
is the sociological meaning of legitimate or illegitimate birth.
There must be agreement by the frame groups and certain forms
must be met. Marriage thus takes its arrangement and content from
these associations, and not from the merely sexual relations of man
and woman, or the rearing of children.
Sexual relations are economically important because they lead
to the common concerns of a household. The household requires
a degree of planned production; in fact, it does not typically exist
in preagricultural societies. But the household is central in a so-
ciety where there are sedentary agriculturalists of relatively low
technological development. When agriculture is- more advanced,
domestic authority is placed under the jurisdiction of larger frame
groups. As members of these groups, individuals gain more rights
as family members, or even against domestic authority. For ex-
ample, when larger associations lend rights to the mother of the
house so as to separate her property from that of the husband,
patriarchal power declines.
The household is the most widespread economic community, and
at the same time is the bedrock of piety and authority, which, in
turn, are the substructures of many sentiments involved in other
institutional orders. For the cardinal sentiment of the domestic
group under patriarchal authority is a strong sense of piety, which
holds it together. Patrimonial duties for the women, and filial piety
for children and servants complement the tradition-bound author-
ity of the patriarchal head, who freely bestows his favors and chas-
tisements upon his "dependents." In extreme cases— ancient China
is the great example— this filial piety is elaborated into the belief
in ancestral spirits, and a family temple implements the worship
of ancestors. And almost everywhere the household unit stands
for in-group solidarity, for common residence is essential to the
domestic group in its pure type, and its locale is accordingly senti-
mentalized and the object of nostalgic and xenophobic attitudes.
On the basis of piety and common residence, there is in the
household a communism of consumption of every day goods. In
the economics of late medieval and Renaissance Italy, business
248 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
ventures were engaged in by several households, which are thus
prototypes of partnerships and joint liability.
For all their importance, we do not consider kinship institutions
as more "natural" than any other institutions. The bond between
mother and child may be "natural," yet, as we have seen, it may
be up to the father to determine whose offspring shall be ascribed
to his wife, whether her own or her maid's— witness the story of
Leah and Rachel. Throughout antiquity, the infanticide of un-
wanted infants was accepted as "natural." The "legitimate child"
is defined to be such by the rules and agents of the kinship orders,
and so there is a gap between "biology and human nature" which
institutionalizes the roles of father and mother.
In industrial and urban societies, kinship orders have tended
towards the small, two generation family, consisting of parents and
children. In such an institution, children do not have much con-
tact with older people, and respect for old age is at a discount;
even the patriarchal image of Santa Glaus may assume the char-
acter of just another funny man.
Today in America more people are married than was previously
the case, and they tend to marry earlier. Although monogamy is
guaranteed by legal and religious sanctions, the Kinsey report ^^
reveals that actual conduct deviates widely from professed norms
and moral codes. Even if we make allowances for shortcomings in
Kinsey's technique, and even if the figures are not perfect, the pro-
portions of illicit relations are impressive; they fit too well with
what is known from less formal data to be written off. The evi-
dence shows that premarital chastity is not strictly enforced for
women, and that men no longer place decisive weight upon it.
The emancipation of women, and the dissemination of contracep-
tive information, has brought about her sexual freedom. For them-
selves, men have never honored the demand for premarital chas-
tity; "sowing one's wild oats" has been tolerated as a "natural
privilege" of man. The monogamous family, in the meantime, is
psychologically upheld, positively by love, negatively by the "jeal-
ousy" of the lover against any threat by a third party to his or her
exclusive rights to the erotical services of the partner. Accordingly,
where jealousy is discounted or depreciated, "monogamous love"
is indirectly threatened.
13 Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual
Behavior in the lluinan Male (Philadelphia and London: Saunders, 1948).
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 24g
The combination of "love" and marriage is of course a specifically
modern linkage. We know from Thomas's and Znaniecki's study
of the Polish Peasant in Europe and America— and we may gen-
eralize the point for the Old World peasantry at large— that mar-
riage is closely connected with the property and status considera-
tions of the two families who are to be linked by marriage. The
couples themselves are not euphorically infatuated with one an-
other; on the contrary, they maintain a stylized respect in which
they see one another as "members" of their respective families
rather than as heroized individuals. In this, the peasant family is
comparable to dynastic and noble houses. King Edward VHI was
not permitted to be king and also to marry the "woman I love."
He might of course have had her in a "lefthanded" marriage, or
—possibly as a royal mistress— anything, but not for a queen. The
case is interesting— as Kingsley Martin in The Magic of Monarchy
has shown— for its revelations of the status sentiments of arrive
bourgeois society, which in its ascent has acquired an understand-
ing of proper background and status as being more relevant for
marriage than the "mere love" of movie fans and pulp magazine
readers.
The combination of modem marriage with love is a contribution
of the rising middle classes. Since the Italian opera and the eight-
eenth-century British novel, this linkage has been glorified and
widely diffused. What, by the way, do we mean by "love"? Cer-
tainly more than mere "sex," for sexual activity and gratification
is possible without "love." If sexual impulse is culturally stylized;
if it is spiritualized, refined, or "sublimated," we may speak of
"eroticism." Coquetry and flirtation are forms of erotic playfulness.
To have an "affair," however, still falls short of "true love'" in that
it lacks the permanent commitments of the loving partners.
Just as we find types of marriages without "love," we also find
true love relationships without marriage. Ever since the French
Revolution, in fact, the institution of marriage has been criticized
in the name of "true love," as over against the possibly mercenary
motives leading to "marriage without love," or the marriage a la
mode, or the "marriage of convenience." Anticapitalist movements,
socialists and anarchists of all sorts, including Marx and Engels, have
criticized marriage without love as "bad." Here is a recent voice:
"There are illicit and extramarital relationships which are in reality
more moral and more decent than those often found in marriage.
2^^0 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
Love without marriage is in its essence far more moral than mar-
riage without love." " Sometimes status inequalities may preclude
marriage, but not love; occasionally legal barriers— for instance bar-
riers against the emploxment of both husband and wife in public
employment, or on the same teaching staff— may make marriage
"inexpedient" for the lovers.
We thus find types of sexual relations consisting of ( i ) marriage
combined with love, (2) love without marriage, (3) marriage with-
out love, as well as (4) relations outside of marriage and devoid
of love— the transitory "purely sexual" partnership available in
houses of prostitution, which all over the world count soldiers
and sailors, traveling salesmen and itinerant artisans, as their fore-
most clientele.
The highest ideal of the modern marriage would seem to in-
volve the following elements: (a) the permanent and exclusive
attachment of the partners to one another, "for better or for worse,
in sickness or in health," the attachment implemented by a sense
of moral responsibility for one another; (b) erotic elements pres-
ent in the degree to which the partners "charm" one another; and
(c) sexual gratification. Where the puritan ideal of "sobriety" and
the ascetic factor remain strong, erotic elements are suppressed
as "idolatry," or as creature worship. Women must not "adorn
themselves," must not be proud of their "beauty," either in appear-
ance or in gestural behavior; dancing, for example, is out. Vestiges
of puritan society survive in rural America, especially in small
sectarian communities of Mennonite groups, or the Old Order
Amish.
Role-differences between men and women, and their concomi-
tant traits, may be ascribed to presumably "natural" differences of
sex: "Women are just naturally this or that"— "That's just the way
men are. . . ." Philosophers, from the time of Aristotle, have specu-
lated on "masculinity" and "femininity," in terms of man being
rational and discreet, women being "emotional" and given to "talka-
tiveness." The ideological legacies of patriarchalism and of male
dominance clearly extend into Sigmund Freud's psychology, which
makes "penis envy" the hub of "feminine character." ^'
1* A. L. Wolbarst, Generations of Adam (New York: Stokes, 1930), p. 240.
^^ For an astute analysis of the \arious ideologies revealed in schools of
psychology, see Viola Klein, TJie Feminine Character (New York: Interna-
tional Univs. Press, 1949).
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 25I
4. The Educational Sphere
In societies which allow or encourage special institutions for tlie
transmission of skills and values to the young, we may speak of an
educational "order." But the educational sphere, which comprises
schools of all sorts, is rarely autonomous, which is why we call it
a "sphere" rather than an "order." ^'^
There are in the political order, party schools and national com-
pulsory public schools; in the economic order, there are trade
schools, for in-service training; in the religious order, sectarian
schools, as well as official schools for the priesthood. The military
order has its own military academies; and the kinship order has,
for a long time, had as one of its aspects the training of the young.
In fact, all institutions train people for skills and loyalties.
Nevertheless, we may make a distinction between apprentice-
ship—in which the novice enters a respective role as a novice to be
trained as well as to work— and formal education which is a vicari-
ous set of roles available outside the institutional sphere in which
the student will eventually play them. The educational sphere is thus
a world of models. When such a world occurs and is autonomously
instituted, we have an educational order. Key sociological ques-
tions about education include the following: (1) Who gets edu-
cated? (2) By whom are they educated? (3) How are they edu-
cated? (4) For what roles are they educated? (5) When are they
educated? (6) Where are they educated?
Education is a deliberate attempt to transmit skills and loyalties,
as well as forms of inner cultivation and conventional deportment
required by status group membership. All education aims at de-
veloping loyalty towards the educator at the same time, for he is
a trustee of the group loyalties which he \\'ould impart. In a society
dominated by salon ladies, girls go to finishing schools; public
schools in England turn out gentlemen with an inner sense of bear-
ing and dignity.
16 See Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (New York:
Viking, 1918); I. L. Kandel, Essays in Comparative Education (New York:
Teachers College, 1930); E. H. Reisner, Nationalism and Education Since
1789 (New York: Macmillan, 1922); and Walter M. Kotschnig, Unemploy-
ment in the Learned Professions (London: Oxford, 1937).
2^2 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
In a very general way, we may speak with Max Weber of three
types of education: first, the attempt to call forth and to test
allegedly inherent traits of the individual, to allow them to un-
fold, to be realized.^' This is generally characteristic of charismati-
cally sanctioned institutions and status groups. Second, by rote
learning and moral exhortation, by drill and imposed habituation,
the attempt to stereotype the individual into line with tradi-
tional routines, which is generally characteristic of traditionalist so-
cieties. Third, the attempt rationally to transmit to the individual
certain traits, to train him for specific skills by challenging him to
think and act independently— which is generally characteristic of
educational spheres of rational bureaucratic organizations.
/
In the occidental Middle Ages, traditionalist educational insti-
tutions were attached to the religious order, to the upper-class
household of the warrior noble, to the middle-class household, and
to the workshop of the guild master. Nowadays, rationalist educa-
tional spheres are attached to political institutions, as in "public
school systems," as well as to the religious order, as in parochial
schools. Modern totalitarian regimes attach part of their educa-
tional spheres— charismatically oriented— by means of youth or-
ganizations, to the ruling party. There was thus the Hitler Youth,
and there are the Communist youth organizations in the Soviet
Union and other states of the Soviet bloc. Special educational
spheres of varied sorts in different social structures may thus be
attached to religious, military, economic, and other institutional
orders.
Only under quite special conditions do professional educators
emancipate themselves from the control of superordinate institu-
tional orders. The situation of "private universities," like Harvard
or Oxford, Yale or Cambridge; of independent artists' studios; of
various types of contemporary progressive schools; of the Athenian
philosophers' "circle of disciples"— these are rather the exception
than the rule.
In the United States in the middle of the twentieth century, some
84 per cent of all schools are elementary, 6 per cent of them being
"private"; 15 per cent are secondary schools, 4 per cent of them
being private; only 1 per cent of all schools are colleges, universi-
1^ See From Max Weber, op. cit., p. 426.
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 2.53
ties, or professional schools, but 65 per cent of them are "private." '"
It is characteristic of the United States that elementary education
rests in the hands of 853,967 "schoolma'ams" who do not always
make education their permanent careers, teaching in the interval
between the family of their descent and that of procreation.'''
Because of the steady increase of educational requirements for
an increasing range of specialized occupations, the opportimities
to climb the ladder of occupational success becomes more and
more dependent upon education. During the last half century the
educational level of the American people has risen accordingly;
enrollment figures indicate that in 1900 some 94,883 adolescents
graduated from high schools, but by 1940 their number had in-
creased to 1,221,475.-" This impressixe quest for higher education
is not due to any sudden outburst of intellectual enthusiasm but
may lai'gely be attributed to the function of education as a "social
elevator" in an epoch of scarcity-consciousness and social fence-
building. Degrees have become indispensable for entrance into
preferred occupations. Yet, at the same time, many people have
come to realize that education alone is not enough for "success."
The bitter phrase— "it's not what you know but whom you know"
—is indicative. The traditional Jeffersonian optimism about educa-
tion as the answer has given way to an increasing tendency to
view educational policies in connection with social stratification,
and to assess educational goals statistically in terms of their func-
tion for later adult life.
Since the great depression, there has been an awareness of social
rigidities and institutional strains in the United States. This aware-
ness has been reflected in a vogue of inquiries into the function of
the school in a democratic society, and the worthwhileness of edu-
cation as an investment of long years for hopes of social ascent.
Yet the gulf between the educated and the uneducated in the
United States is not felt so deeply as it is in Europe, or, in fact,
is not felt to be a gulf at all. To American eyes, a smooth broad
ascent leads from elementary to higher education. And, on the
whole, the smooth gradation of institutions of higher learning—
from the best to the not-so-good; from lower grades to higher—
1^ Computed from The World Ahuanac, 1951, P- 580.
^^Cf. Frances Dono\an, The Schoolmaam (New York: Stokes, 1938).
20 Table 154, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1947, Washing-
ton, D. C.
254 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
and the readiness of American educators to teach new subjects as
well as popular hobbies and fads, have made for a successful link-
age of higher education and the population at large.
The demand of the state and of corporations for trained civil
servants and qualified experts of all sorts has been decisive for the
modern development of universities. The displacement of patron-
age and spoils systems by the "merit system," and the decline of
administration by amateurs, however high-minded and notable,
has been one result of this. Lorenz von Stein correctly called the
modern university "a school for bureaucrats." Germany is a neat
case in point.^^
During the late eighteenth century, German princes "reformed"
the universities, using Gottingen as the model. The universities of
Bonn and Berlin were founded during the Napoleonic era, which
also witnessed the establishment of engineering colleges in Ger-
many. With industrialization and the expansion of administrative
functions of all sorts, universities were shaped to answer the needs
of a more complex and swiftly urbanized society. At the same time,
they became social elevators for the middle classes. Of course, wage
workers and small-holding peasants were sidetracked from that
educational ladder that led to the university, being given instead
vocational training, which was combined with apprenticeship sys-
tems, first in quasi-guilds of craftsmen, and later in big industries.
Under the Weimar Republic— in fact through 1935— a sociologi-
cally-minded census was taken of university students. This census
provides unique data on the social composition of the student
body in the twenty-five state universities of a major industrial na-
tion. In the years between 1928 and 1935, about one-third of the
students came from upper-class homes; about 60 per cent from a
middle-class background; and only between 4 and 8 per cent from
lower-class families. Over half of the students were the sons of
officials, army officers, or professional men. The universities thus
served as a means for the hereditary appropriation of bureaucratic
positions. Despite broad discussions of university reform in post-
■-' For details on school enrollments in Germany, see Deutsche HochscJnil-
statistik and Die Deutschen lloclischulen, Eine Uebersicht ueber ihren Besuch
(Berlin, 1936); ct. also Hans II. Gerth, "Germany on the Eve of Occupation,"
Problems of the Postwar World, T. C. McCormick, ed. (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1945), pp. 422 ff.
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 2,55
World War II Germany, as far as the question "who shall study"
is concerned, nothing essential has been changed in Western
Germany. The enrollment of the University of Miinster, in West-
phalia in 1947, conformed almost to the decimal point to the old
picture.
In Eastern Germany under Russian rule there has been a speed-
up of education developments, in accordance with tlie model of
the Soviet Union itself. The over-all slogan is "cadre training,"
which in sociological translation means the displacement of all
elites by loyal communist vanguards.
Eastern Germany is typical of all totalitarian regimes. Family
influence is weakened by remo\ing young children from their
homes and placing them in publicly sponsored kindergartens. The
number of kindergarten schools, teachers, and students has greatly
increased since 1946.'- This development provides young women
with semiprofessional opportunities; communist aspirants from
lower classes can readily be found and properly indoctrinated in
the new loyalties. The kindergarten development also permits the
increasing employment of housewives in industry.
Whereas the wealthy formerly sent their children to private
schools, now private schools have been abolished. Whereas middle-
and upper-class children once were separated from lower-class
children after four years of elementary education, they are now
separated only after eight years of public school education. A
minority of fee-paying students used to attend high school from
the time they were ten until they were eighteen years of age; they
then passed a stiff examination which was a prerequisite for uni-
versity attendance. Under Soviet occupation, most children now
leave school at the age of fourteen, and those who wish to be
apprenticed as "skilled workers" have to attend a vocational school
once a week.
By August 1949, the top administrator of Eastern Zone schools
stated that of the 65,000 teachers 80 per cent were "new teachers." '^
-- On schools in Eastern Germany, see Annemarie Jacobs, "Der Kinder-
garten als Vorstufe der Einheitsschule," Die Deutsche demokratische Schule
im Aufhau (Berlin, 1949), p. 7. Der Fiinfjahrplan zur Entwicklung der
Volkswirtschaft der DDR (1951-1955), Infonnationsdienst (Berlin, n.d.).
-3 These facts and figures are taken from various East German pubhcations,
cited by Erich Hoffman, Cadre Training in East Germany (unpublished MA
thesis. University of Wisconsin, 1952).
2^6 SOCIi^L STRUCTURE
All teachers must be organized in various communist organiza-
tions, and naturally party membership, though not compulsory,
suggests itself to the ambitious young teachers. The universities
offer compulsory training courses for teachers in Marxism-Lenin-
ism, and at all schools have been formed communist teachers'
groups which are affiliated with the Communist Youth. All educa-
tional institutions, in fact, are a sphere of party-controlled insti-
tutions.
All university students in Eastern Germany receive a monthly
salary, which is graded by class background and political activity
in favor of the active communistic, working-class student. Working-
class sons made up 40 per cent of the student body by 1949. The
total student body has been considerably expanded, and although
standards of instruction and learning have been considerably low-
ered, a new plebeian intelligentsia is emerging which fills the ranks
and the offices of the completely remodeled bureaucracies. The
impressive mass euphoria of the two and one half million youths
who in May 1951 were concentrated in Berlin to march behind
Stalin posters may in large part be ascribed to the opportunities
open to working-class youth under such policies. Thus may the
educational sphere be linked with dominant political and eco-
nomic institutions.
5. Types of Social Control
In the institutional orders and spheres of various societies we
observe certain uniformities of social conduct which represent
conformities with expected patterns, and may thus be said to be
"socially controlled." The major types and bases of such social
controls may also be classified according to their subjective mean-
ings to the individual actors involved, and according to the types
of sanctions, if any, employed against people who deviate from
them.2*
I. A custom, or a folkway, is a pattern of conduct which rests
upon long familiarity. If people do not follow such rules no exter-
24 The essentials of the definitions gixen below are abstracted and para-
phrased from various contexts of Max Weber. Cf. also, Karl Mannheim, Man
and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940),
pp. 311-66.
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 2$-/
nal sanctions will be called into play, although they may be incon-
venienced. People may not even be conscious of these customs;
if they are, they may merely feel that it is more comfortable to
conform than not to do so. Thus, although conformity is not
"demanded" by anybody, there is a general expectation that peo-
ple will do the usual things, and this in itself makes for the stabil-
ity of the custom.
The routine metropolitan day involves the interlocking of many
activities; it is customary to adapt to this routine. The times for
meals, the lunch hour for example, are of consequence for the rush-
hour traffic, and for peaks of demand on restaurants and news-
paper stands. The stray latecomer may be inconvenienced: this or
that item on the menu "is out." Other restaurants, in turn, adver-
tise "meals served at all hours" for the irregular patron. Economi-
cally determined routines of urban mass life make for an adjust-
ment of the program structures of the mass media to the peak
availability of specific mass publics and audiences. The statisti-
cally calculated coverage of leisure-time hours by mass media of
communication and other machinery of amusement— radio's soap
opera for housewives weekday afternoons. Metropolitan Opera
Saturday afternoons, NBC symphony concerts Sunday afternoons
—contributes to rigidly disciplined, routinized, and therefore pre-
dictable patterns of customary mass behavior.
In continental Europe the sharper differences in the ways of life
of diverse classes and status groups— folkways of village peasants
as against urban factory workers, of academicians as against bo-
hemian artists and intellectuals, of salesladies and other white-collar
groups as against civil servants and their wives, of rural nobles
and ladies of leisure as against artisans and craftsmen— these status
differences make for greater diversity of routinized schedules. The
parallel habituations of millions who adjust and accommodate to
the customary ways of doing things result in regularities of be-
havior which have caused thoughtful men such as Lord Bryce to
posit inertia as one of the fundamental traits of man. Social and
personality change stands out in such a perspective as the excep-
tion demanding explanation. Both the tradition-bound folkways of
agrarian societies and the interlocking matrix of time-clocked
metropolitan ways of life, in work and in leisure, seem to result in
equally predictable stability of what man takes for granted as the
usual thing, as the realm of the customary.
2^8 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
II, Fashion is a usage which rests on appreciation of new
appearance vakies as indicative of status claims in a dynamic and
stratified societ>'. Fashions are new enough to be discernibly dif-
ferent from "last year's model," yet old enough so as not to affront
conventions of propriety.
Both fashion and conventions, which we shall presently con-
sider, usually rest upon claims _ of prestige; when internalized
they are obeyed because of expectations as to_what is "proper,"
or what is "smart," :which means what is accepted in the style of life
of given stafus groups.
III. In the case of the customary you may "take it or leave it"—
part your hair on the right or the left side, eat your soup with or
without salt— but this is not true of "conventions" or, as William
Graham Sumner termed them, "the mores." Conventions are more
exacting than customs, for they rest upon the expectation that
deviation from them will result in a general reaction of disap-
proval. Conventions are generally recognized as binding, or at least
definitely expected, and are protected against violation by sanc-
tions of disapproval, including informal boycott and ostracism.
Convention is the "respectable thing to do" at the right time and
the right place, as against the things that "one just doesn't do."
The "enforcement agency" for conventions is not a specialized
staff, but rather community opinion at large, or at least the opin-
ions of one's status circle. The expectations of general disapproval,
if one breaks with convention, may be internalized, and then
form part of the generalized other, which thus operates as a fur-
ther psychological motive for conventional conformity. The motive
for adherence to convention, as to fashion, thus involves one's
status or prestige, for the violation of deeply internalized conven-
tions may lead to loss of self-esteem or self-respect.
Different ways of life are shot through with conventions which
all sorts of groups, communities, and institutions consider as bind-
ing for their members. Body hygiene in America is subject to con-
ventional standards of cleanliness and propriety— we use tooth-
brushes, mouth wash, and handkerchiefs, and we control body
odor by use of soap and perfume. The enjoyment of meals is a
purely biological process only in extreme situations; usually, we
eat just as much with our eyes and ears as with our mouths. Hence,
table manners and codes of propriety and esthetics serve to facili-
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 259
tate our appetites and our ways of "setting the table," of using our
knife, fork, and spoon in the proper ways, of taking in the proper
amount of the proper food at the proper tempo. We learn to sup-
press vulgar noises by chewing with our lips closed.
There are standards of sociabilit>% controlling, for example, the
preferable, permissible, and tabooed subjects for light or serious
conversations and requiring us to be sensitive to the personal
tempo of our partner's responsiveness of thought and feeling. The
demand to be "tactful" forms part of the conventional code of
"polite" behavior. Most of these conventions have been elaborated
by occidental court nobilities. The very words used for courteous
deportment— "curtsy" and "courtship," for example— remind us of
their social-historical origin: to behave as people do at court.
Where such conventions become rigid and complex we speak of
"codes of etiquette." In formal contexts, such as diplomatic func-
tions, or state dinners in high society, there may be a specialist—
the chief of protocol— who devotes his professional skill to ques-
tions of etiquette, determining who should be invited to what
functions, who might take offense at being "overlooked," who
can be left out without harm, who shall sit where, and so on.
The best sellers of Mrs. Emily Post and Miss Lillian Eichler
during the last thirty years indicate the spread of certain conven-
tions of high society, prevailing about 1900, to the growing mid-
dle classes.-^
Forms of intimacy are conventionally stylized to guarantee what
we demand as our "right to privacy" even from our marriage part-
ner or lover. To be sure, in the euphoric phase of courtship we
seek to minimize all social distance, taking offense and feeling
hurt at every distancing response of the intimate other.
The "conventional lie" serves the purpose of securing "distance"
from the other. "Tell him I am not at home" hurts less than the
candid "I don't wish to see him." "Young man, you are a genius
and I am afraid this job does not give the proper opportiuiity to
your talents" hurts less than "You are fired," although the occupa-
tional results are of course the same.
2t Lillian Eichler's The Book of Etiquette sold over a million copies between
1921 and 1945, Emily Post's Etiquette from 1922 to 1945 sold more than two-
thirds of a million copies. Cf. Arthur M. Schlcsinger, Learning How to Behave
(New York: Macmillan, 1946); and Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commer-
cials (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950), pp. 372-82.
26o SOCIAL STRUCTURE
IV. Law, as a type of social control, is distinguished by two
features: First, as a pattern of conduct it is upheld by the fact
that deviation will probably be met by sanctions aimed at com-
pelling conformity or by punishment. Second, these sanctions are
applied by a staff of agents who are especially empowered to carry
out this function. It is clear that in this rather broad sense, "law"
may exist in any institutional order; in modern societies, how-
ever, the legal order of the state is the most inclusive in jurisdiction.
The state, as the most powerful organization of contemporary
social structures, regulates through its legal apparatus the power
that may be wielded by and in other institutions. Thus a husband
may use force against his children or against his wife only to the
extent that administrative agents and courts permit it. In some
parts of the United States, divorces are granted for slight cases
of "mental cruelty"; in other nations, the husband or the wife just
has "to take it." A schoolteacher's use of the rod may be outlawed
or at least restricted by agents of the state. The laws of the state
mediate between the politically determined distribution of power
and the economic order, for the legal apparatus defines disposi-
tions over goods and services and other "assets" by the "owners"
of goods and the employers of men. It is one of the main functions
of law to guarantee, define, and endorse rights over "property"—
public, joint, and private.
Laws differ from conventions in that they are enforced by a
staff. In the case of deviation from conventions anyone may ex-
press disapproval, anyone may apply the sanction and thus publicly
represent the generalized other. Institutional patterns per se, as
we have seen, are guaranteed by an authoritative other, the head
of the institution. Law, as one type of institutional control, involves
a specialized staff. Or, in other terms, orientation to conventions,
as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber have pointed out, is guaran-
teed by socially diffuse sanctions, whereas orientation to legal
codes is guaranteed by organized sanctions. In the case of con-
vention, any member of a given group or institution may volun-
teer to "punish" a breach of conventional proprieties, of standards
of hygiene, of beauty, or truthfulness. In the case of law, it is the
agents or agencies of law enforcement that may take action. As
Justice Holmes said, "The prophecies of what the courts will do in
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 261
fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law." ^^^
Even in BibHcal days, we hear of the elders and judges sitting
"at the gates," that is, holding court on the town squares behind
the city gates. One of the great legacies of ancient Rome are the
■Roman Digests" which inform the "canonical law" of the Roman
Catholic Church, as well as Anglo-Saxon law, and which stand
back of modern legal codes. Among these modern codes, the Code
Napoleon has found the widest diffusion and the greatest author-
ity because of its lucidity and simplicity. On the European conti-
nent legal education became a university subject at an early time.
In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the bar, essentially a guild of the
-'"^^ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Collected Legal Papers (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1921), p. 167. Especially pertinent for the social scientist are the essays
of Roscoe Pound, "Interests of Personality," 28 Harv. L. Rev., pp. 343, 445
(1915); "A Survey of Social Interests," 57 Harv. L. Rev., p. 1 (1943); "A
Survey of Public Interests," 58 Harv. L. Rev., p. 909 (1945); "The Lay Tra-
dition as to the Lawyer," Mich. L. Rev., Vol. XII, No. 8 (June 1914); "The
Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice," Trans-
actions of the American Bar Association (1906); "Common Law and Legisla-
tion," Harv. L. Rev., Vol. XXI, p. 383 ( 1908). For his survey of tlie "Sociology
of Law" see Twentieth Century Sociology, ed. by Georges Gurvitch and Wil-
bert E. Moore (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945), pp. 297-341. Social
Control Through Law (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1942) presents a sum-
mary statement of the "Dean of American Jurisprudence." Simpson and others
in their three-volume Cases and Readings on Law and Society (St. Paul, Minn.:
West, 1948-49) have attempted to do what has been so much talked about—
correlate law with the social sciences. Of special value to the social scientist
are the essays of K. Llewellyn. See "Law and the Social Sciences— Especially
Sociology," Harv. L. Rev., Vol. 62, p. 1286 (1949).
The best one-volume history of American legal institutions in the perspective
of social history seems to us to be Willard Hurst's The Growth of American
Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950). A translation by Max Rheinstein of Max
Weber's monumental Sociology of Law is due to be published soon by the
Hanard Uni\ersity Press.
Gi\ en the instability of the American family and the wide interest of social
scientists in family and personality problems, we may draw attention to the
recent symposium of the Conference on Divorce, February 29, 1952, The Law
School of the University of Chicago Conference Series, No. 9. Cf. especially
the brilliant paper of Max Rheinstein, "Our Dual Law of Divorce: The Law in
Action \ersus the Law of the Books," pp. 39-47. The linkage between the
psychopathology of behaxior disorders and the law is well presented in Man-
fred S. Guttmacher and Henry Weihofen's Fsychiutry and the Law (New York:
Norton, 1952).
262 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
legal profession, has for centuries retained the transmission of
skills and knowledge in the form of legal apprenticeship. University
training has moved in the direction of textbook systematization;
apprenticeship has retained close contact with legal practice.
Conventions and laws may be quite intricately related, but,
briefly, here are four broad, possible combinations : ( 1 ) A con-
vention may be guaranteed by law, as in the case with most ordi-
nances enforcing proprieties of dress in public. (2) Both the legal
staff and the public may co-operate in suppressing "crimes" against
person and property. (3) A convention may rule out a legal con-
duct pattern. In Tsarist Russia, for example, it was a widespread
popular convention to protect revolutionary intellectuals against
the police, that is, "denunciation" in accordance with the law was
conventionally tabooed. It was considered "dishonorable" to de-
nounce a revolutionary. Hence, the political fugitive from the law
could "vanish among the people." (4) A legal code may conflict
with a convention, i.e., the lawmaker may seek to "break up" a
conventional code of conduct. Thus the Volstead Act was an at-
tempt to "outlaw" drink. Conventional behavior proved stronger,
to the point where the law was repealed. In Europe, laws against
dueling have by and large proved effective— although army offi-
cers, nobles, and some student fraternities, in Germany for in-
stance, take a chance and surreptitiously tiansgress the law.
If there is general moral indignation about someone's breaking
with an institutional pattern, we may say that conventions buttress
institutional controls. Institutional roles, however, may or may not
be thus upheld by conventions. What is essential to the institution
is that the roles it organizes are upheld by the power of the head
over institutional members.
Legal sanctions may be differently applied to persons of differ-
ent social standing. Where justice involves the "bail" and legal
counsel is costly, for example, lower-income groups are automati-
cally at a disadvantage. The motives for conformity to law range
from calculations and fear of possible sanctions to an absolute
belief in the justice or other ethical qualities of the law. The con-
victed offender may feel deeply guilty, or he may feel himself
to be the innocent victim of a "miscarriage of justice." Either ex-
treme of attitude may of course deviate widely from what the facts
warrant. Some people may take into account what courts are
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 26;^
likely to enforce as a rationally calculated cost factor; others may
view the law in all its majesty with simple awe.
Vigilantes, who "take the law into their own hands," or the
hooded men of the Ku Klux Klan, who practice "lynch justice,"
usurp the public prerogative of applying violent and coercive
sanctions. Where public authorities do not care to repress the de-
nial of justice to the underprivileged, we encounter situations
where conventional violence is honored by men who do not trust
the law to "take its course."
Responsibility for a breach of law or convention may be ascribed
informally, or by widely different trial procedures with varying
rules of evidence, to the individual actor or to one of his com-
munity, family, sex group, age class, school class, status group,
army unit, mass organization, or nation. Accordingly, we speak of
personal or of joint responsibility, of individual or of collective
guilt. In one African tribe, the Ila, all of the male population "may
be held responsible for any disparagement by the women of the
group." -*' The rules of conduct are thus enforced by a sexual
group. Moreover, the sanctions are not directed against the indi-
vidual directly "responsible" for the breach but must be borne by
the entire male population. Still another case is found in the pat-
terns of the old Japanese Kumi, in which some five family heads
were jointly responsible for public work and tax quotas. If any
one of these five ran away from the village, the other four had
to make up his work. Similar conditions of joint liability existed in
the Mir, the village commune of Tsarist Russia, as well as in
ancient China.
Max Weber has distinguished three main types of legal adminis-
trations and staffs, which parallel his types of political authority
and his types of education: charismatic, traditionalist, and ration-
ally bureaucratic.
A. The law of the charismatic leader is the law of the leader's
will. The justice of charismatic leaders is always "emergency jus-
tice"; it is by definition personal and arbitrary— if one wishes, it is
"justice without law." It does not follow precedents, but estab-
-•^ W. I. Thomas, Primitive Beliwior (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937),
p. 78.
264 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
lishes them from case to case, and its legitimation is the followers'
faith in the presumed extraordinary qualities of the leader.
This is the sort of justice meted out by successful revolutionaries
such as Robespierre and the Directoire, who did not feel bound
to traditional codes, time-honored rules, or precedents when deal-
ing with "enemies of the state." More recently, there was Hitler's
usurpation of judicial prerogatives when, in June 1934, he arrested
Rohm, the leader of the Storm Troops, at night in his home. Rohm
and other Storm Troop leaders were "court martialed" by the
Leader's bodyguard after ten-minute hearings. Other men, such
as Generals Bredow and Schleicher, were murdered by Elite
Guards in their homes, without form and in plain daylight.
The justice of Ibn-Saud, King of Saudi-Arabia, is similar.^'^ Ibn-
Saud takes his seat on the sun-lit steps of his palace, hears a case,
for instance, against a man who stole a saddle, convicts him and
promptly has one of his Negro slaves cut off the man's hand with
a sword and dip the arm in a bucket of hot oil.
B. Traditionalist justice has been called "cadi justice," for in this
legal system, the judges consider the case, as does the Moham-
medan cadi, with precise regard to the person. Cadi justice differs
from charismatic justice in that it usually follows religiously sanc-
tioned norms and time-honored precedents. There are no rational
rules of proof and evidence, and ordeals and duels may be con-
sidered magically significant tests of guilt or innocence. This realm
of traditional norms, in the absence of rational definitions of terms
and rules of evidence, is supplemented by a realm of personal
arbitrariness in which judicious wisdom and psychological astute-
ness enter the procedure and the verdict. King Solomon's justice
readily comes to mind, as does that of Chinese judges of old and
the Biblical "Elders at the Gate." Both charismatic and traditional-
ist justice bespeak the rule of men, not the rule of law.^^-*^
C. The rule of law, in a rational, bureaucratic manner, is a late
and specifically Western attainment, built on the legacy of Rome.
There a prestigeful group of legal practitioners— the jurisconsuls—
^^ Cf. H. C. Armstrong, Ibii Sa'ud, King of Saudi Arabia ( Penguin Edition,
1938).
2"A Said Elihu Root in his Presidential Address to the American Bar Asso-
ciation in Chicago, in 1916: "The vast ind continually increasing mass of
reported decisions which afford authorities on almost every side of almost every
(luestion admonish us that by the mere following of precedent we should soon
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 26$
emerged, who offered professional advice to their ch'ents. Roman
law demanded that the complainant file his charge in legal terms.
Court procedure allowed the court to judge the case only in terms
of the original charge, regardless of what facts might be disclosed
during the court hearings. This necessitated legal aid. Moreover,
under the Caesars, the bureaucratization of public authorities, and
the de\elopment of administrative and other laws of great subtlety,
made it necessary for the politically ambitious man to study law
as well as forensic rhetoric. This allowed jurisconsuls to establish
free schools of law and rhetoric. A practical bent of mind combined
with a ritualist traditionalism, reminiscent of peasant background,
made the Romans eager to state whatever new problems faced
them in terms of old norms by construing them with the necessary
interpretive twist. The hairsplitting finesse of legal definitions, the
logically unambiguous distinctions, and the deductions made are
all appraised by experts as unique and unsurpassed in legal his-
tory.
V. "Rational Uniformity" involves the orientation of persons to
similar, ulterior expectations; it is an action by which men strive
to exploit opportunities in their own self interest. Rational uni-
formities are only expediently oriented to norms, duties, or to felt
obligations. Their stability as patterns of conduct rests on the devi-
ator's running the risk of damaging his own interests. Although ra-
tional uniformities of conduct may be a feature of any institutional
order, the economic actions of agents in a free market, who by their
interpersonal calculation and bargaining determine the price of
commodities, are outstanding cases of rational patterns of conduct.
\T. Ethical rules are standards of conduct, or conventions, to
which men attribute intrinsic value. Ry virtue of this attribution,
they treat these patterns as valid norms governing their decisions
and conduct. Such rules may have profound influence upon human
action, even in the complete absence of external sanctions. If they
are really effective, abstractly formulated ethical rules become part
ha\e no system of law at all, but tJie rule of the Turkish cadi who is expected
to do in each case what seems to him to be right; and then the door would
be thrown wide open for the rule of men rather than the rule of law, and for
the exercise of personal injustice as well as personal justice. We are approach-
ing a ix)int where we shall riui into confusion unless we adopt the simple and
natural course of avoiding confusion by classification." [Our italics.]
M
266 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
of the conventional patterns, being supported by the danger of dis-
approval and the loss of prestige. They may even become part of
law, and accordingly be enforced by special staffs.
VII. Institutional controls are of course most important for our
conception of social structure. They are patterns upheld by the
heads of institutions or by their agents. The roles played by mem-
bers of a household for example, are guaranteed by parental au-
thority; employees are subject to the control of owners and man-
agers; soldiers are subject to the authority of the commanding
officer; parishioners stand under the jurisdiction of church authori-
ties. Whatever ends the organized and interacting partners may
pursue, and whatever means of "authority" or "leadership" exist,
sanctions against infractions of the "rules of the game" are expected
by those who to any extent deviate. Institutional controls are thus
upheld by the expectation and the fact that deviation will prob-
ably result in the head of the institution or his authorized agents
taking action of some kind against the person who deviates.
I In terms of internal sanctions, institutions mean that the gen-
I eralized other which operates in the persons involved is likely to
' include the head of the institution as a particular other. The king
of a political order or the father of a patriarchal kinship order are
particular others— the most significant others of persons who are
psychologically members of the institution. The kinds of external
sanction which this head will take against offenders have a wide
range— disapproval, expulsion, or death.
The types of social controls which we have defined ^nd illus-
trated often seem to cluster around or be limited by the institu-
tional framework. They specify and formalize institutional control
—as with law, which is of course a specific formalization of institu-
tional control in general; or they diffuse and generahze institutional
regulation— as with convention, which involves reactions to more
than specific institutional heads. InstitLitional orders form, as it
were, typical limits in accordance with which other social controls
normally tend to operate.
6. Orientation to Social Controls
Whether a code is sanctioned by staff action, as in law, or by
diffuse agents, as in ethical rule or convention, it may have a wide
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 26y
range of personal and social orientations. Wherever there are norms
and codes, ideals and aspirations, the social psychologist has
learned to expect "trespasses" and failings, and in the case of
religious commandments, "sins." We have accordingly to distin-
guish between behavior and attitudes with regard to norms:
broadly speaking, four such orientations to conventional, moral,
or legal codes may be located by means of this simple chart:
ATTITUDE TOWARD THE IDEAL OR NORM
+
CONDUCT WITH REFERENCE -j- I II
TO THE NORM OR IDEAL — XII IV
I. There is the type of man who cherishes or affirms a given
norm and in his behavior abides by his conviction. If he is given
to judge others, we may call him an ethical rigorist, with reference
to moral issues; a saintly man, with reference to Christian de-
mands; or a militant liberal, with reference to the American creed.-^
Such persons have successfully internalized the "codified" value
—whether it is a religious imperative, a standard of hygiene, a
conception of the beautiful, the true, or the good. Socially, such
internalization leads to standards of "good taste" and "decorum,"
of savoir-faire and "decency"; psychologically, it leads to the actor's
ascribing traits such as "politeness," "tactfulness," or "uprightness"
to others and to himself. Internally, the person of type I subscribes
to the respective values, verbally affirming them; externally, in his
conduct, he abides by these standards.
In matters of food, appropriate thresholds of disgust secure the
person against dropping below his dietary standards. So the pious,
orthodox Jew will not consume pork, will not enjoy the "blood"
in rare roast beef. He will be as "disgusted" as was the sober
Roman with drunkards, for the Roman identified drunkenness with
"barbarism," just as the Hindu Brahman identifies "beef eaters"
with Barbarians. Religious and ritualistic taboos, as well as hygienic
standards and simple childhood habituation to what is "usual," con-
tribute to the establishment of such thresholds of disgust. Men
like to eat what they are used to eating.
-s Robert K. Merton has applied this scheme to ethnic and racial tolerance
in his essay printed in Discrimination and National Welfare (New York: In-
stitute for Rehgious Studies, 1948).
268 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
Most peoples or groups sentimentalize certain food habits and
are even proud of them, and this is all the more so if they conceive
of these habits as badges of group distinction. The Britisher enjoys
being a "beef eater"; the Frenchmen conceive of the "Paris cuisine"
as a contribution to world civilization; the Spartan enjoyed his
"blacksoup," which disgusted the Athenian ambassadors; to the
Scotch-Irish, Woodrow Wilson attributed the whisky bottle, just
as the stereotyped German is assigned his "stein of beer," the In-
dian his "peace pipe," and the modern American his "cocktail." "Na-
tional beverages" and food preferences, and differences between,
for example, the tea-sipping salon society and the plebeian "beer
garden" folks come to mind, not to mention the "potato-eating
Irish" of the nineteenth century. Such standards and preferences,
with their accompanying images of "disgust," often serve then to
implement group hatreds. Thus the French consider the Boche
sauerkraut eaters; the Germans consider the Russians drunkards;
and Erasmus considered the British "dirty."
II. There is also the spurious conformist or opportunist. Out-
wardly he conforms to the code, inwardly he does not subscribe
to it. He conforms externally for reasons of expediency, or because
he deems it "cheaper" to do so. He "goes to church" in a kind of
Sunday obsequiousness although he does not believe in the creed.
Soren Kierkegaard thought that with the exception of himself all
Christians in his time were spurious Christians. The motivation of
this type of person is thus an attitude of expedient opportunism and
a fear of sanctions, not a love of the respective value.
Since the values involved in the code are not internalized in
moral contexts we may speak of this type as the pretender. Thus
there is the sham patient, the malingering soldier, the disguised
royalty, and many other masters of pretense, respectable and un-
respectable. No matter how outwardly correct his conduct, the
pretender's lack of conviction and integrity, the "mask-like" nature
of his role enactment is often discernible, in the "give away," the
slip, the inconsistency— no matter whether the actor "deceives him-
self" and others, or whether he is self-conscious about what he is
doing. Moral philosophers from Pascal to Nietzsche have con-
tributed to the discernment of such phenomena.
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 269
III. The person who subscribes verbally to a code but deviates
from it in conduct represents a third type. Here is the hypocrite
whose verbal cant is the tribute vice pays to virtue. When such
a person acts in good faith we speak, in modern terms, of "ra-
tionalization" whereby the actor substitutes a socially acceptable
vocabulary of motives for his socially unacceptable motives. The
pejorative connotation of the term "cant" implies the demand and
expectation that the verbalizer of "cant" potentially could and
actually should realize his double standard, the incongruity be-
tween his words and his deeds. Such disparities often emerge when
the horizon of the actor's awareness is restricted, and he does not
face up to the implications and ramifications of his conduct. Thus,
free enterprisers during a depression may discharge workers, deny-
ing them job opportimities. But regardless of whether the workers
by habituation then become lazy, or whether they are only too
eager to work, the entrepreneur may readily blame their unem-
ployment on their laziness. Or a similar situation may occur when
' the social structure does not offer to dependent workers adequate
incentives, when the experience of generations has taught them
that additional efforts remain fruitless. And it may, in fact, be so:
effort not paying off because it remains without compensation,
because geographical factors offer no opportimities to improve one's
lot, or because an oppressive tax system deprives the subject of
the fruit of his labor. The ruling class, at this point, may be only
too eager to vilify the slave, peasant, or worker, who thus has no
other means of retaliation than skillfully withholding his efforts.
Such a vocabulary of motives— of laziness and general no-good—
lends to the status superior the secondary advantage of implement-
ing his superiority of property and power by a sense of moral
superiority; it enables him to "rationalize" social differences into
"moral" differences, with all the moral benefits accruing to himself.
E\en the suffering patience of the downtrodden is held against
him as "lack of agility" and "stupidity," as "lack of initiative" and
as "docility." Thus do status snobbery and human pride often feed
on the misery of the others.
Criticism of upper classes and of the codes and motives they im-
pose also finds its point of attack. The professed values are played
off against those who profess them, as the intellectuals, acting as the
conscience of their time and society, contrast professed values with
2-/0 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
actual conduct, and thus "debunk" and "unmask" the hypocrite, the
"Tartufe," the "Elmer Gantry."
IV. This type represents the consistent deviationist, the noncon-
formist of word and deed. Here we find the rebel and the revolu-
tionary who openly renounce the dominant norm and break it in
their behavior. We also find the criminal, who differs from the revo-
lutionary in that he has no counternorms. Naturally "criminals" might
also belong in Type III, being persons who acknowledge the law
in words and often wish others to abide by the code, whereas they
do not feel bound by it: tax delinquents may, for example, readily
be found in this category. It is the difference between the role of
the "citizen" and that of the "bourgeois," in Marx's sense, that
we have, in mind here. One wishes to be considered a respectable
citizen— but such respectability must not cost too much. Abuses
of all sorts— from corruption in high office to food adulteration and
other evasions of government regulations— are due to the fact that
profit interests get the better of civic highmindedness. Whereas the
heroic citotjen of France criticizes the corruption of kings and
nobles and establishes his own rules after the revolutionary over-
throw of the ancien regime, once he is in the saddle and has de-
veloped into a plutocrat, his "republican virtues" may crumble and
disintegrate in the face of "tempting" or "unique opportunities."
On a large scale we also see repeated the cycle of many monastic
orders, whose members work hard for the glory of God, then be-
coming rich, succumb to the temptations that seem to go with
wealth. But, then, looking around them, they find another and
new movement, and begin the same cycle. Municipal administra-
tions also have their cycles of "reform" under the slogan "throw
the rascals out"; then comes the relaxation of civic endeavor and
the return to "taking it easy."
In Type IV, we also find principled opponents of the code, who
may be complete cynics, skeptics in the face of the respective value.
These opponents may even publicly uphold emergent counter-
values and thus be revolutionaries or precursors of revolutions to
come. In this case, such a person would be inspired by a rival
value to promote the establishment of "countermores," which are
usually linked to an actual or imagined "reference group" whose
members may supposedly or actually sustain him. Whether he
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 2-/!
actually is their "representative" or merely wishes to be, he may
think on "their behalf" or "in their interests."
Intellectuals and their activities deserve special attention in this
connection, for they often play important roles during periods of
transition from one social structure to another. They criticize as
already "dead" what actually exists, and they do so in the name
of the as yet unrealized, and perhaps even unrealizable, "utopian"
standards. Thus, during the decline of the Hebrew kingdoms,
solitary prophets arose who, in their religiously motivated dema-
goguery, developed grandiose eschatological expectations and
visions of divine punishments to come on the Day of Yahweh,
after which a pious "remnant" would be saved and its hidden
glory brought to light. Such Biblical eschatologies, combined with
the rational utopian construction of a "good society" for which
Plato provided the model in his "Republic" and "The Laws," were
fused in the postmedieval utopianism of Renaissance political
thinkers— such as Thomas More and Campanella— and in the work
of the Enlightenment philosophers of the dawn of democratic con-
stitutionalism, as well as in the socialist critiques of capitalist so-
ciety, from Saint-Simon and Robert Owen to Marx and the Marx-
ists.
The problems of subjective and objective orientation to norms
and codes become more complex when moral and legal codes
conflict. Sociologically speaking, as we have seen, such conflict
means that a staff-enforced code deviates from a group-cherished
convention which is guaranteed by diffuse or unorganized sanc-
tions. Such situations may occur where the lawmakers and their
staffs seek to break up certain special mores of particular groups.
Tliis simple fourfold scheme may be useful for any situation
containing norms; applied to marriage in Western societies, for
example, we would have under I the loyal, monogamous married
couple; under II persons who conform to the conventional regula-
tion of acceptable marriage partners although they do not "believe
in them"; the white girl who shrinks back from accepting the
marriage proposal of her Negro lover, or vice versa. Under III
we have the adulterous husband who "believes in monogamy," or
the adulterous Christian minister. And under IV there is the con-
firmed Mormon of old, or Goethe who in his drama "Stella" re-
solved an erotic triangle by a "happy ending" in bigamy. Goethe,
2/2 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
who married for the first and for the last time at the age of fifty-
seven, practiced the "freedom" he beheved in, and in his novel,
Elective Affinities, appraised monogamous marriage as a story of
tragic resignation.
In this as well as in the preceding chapter we have discussed
the range of institutions in each of the institutional orders which
comprise a social structure and some of the types of people which
may best be understood in terms of these institutions.
In discussing the political order, we have paid particular atten-
tion to various kinds of power— especially as power is organized
in the state and associated with the various sentiments of "national-
ism." And we have devoted attention to the major types of states
of the twentieth century: democracy and dictatorship. In regard to
the economic order, we have studied the development of capital-
ism, especially in terms of rationality, and described in brief its
major types and the kinds of roles men play in each of them. We
have tried in a brief account of the militarij order to relate some
of the historical practices of violence to types of military men, and
we have paid special attention to the sociological and psychological
characteristics of six contrasting types of armies. In discvissing the
religious order, we have pointed out selected aspects of the six
world religions, especially the type of generalized other they in-
culcate in their adherents, and their typical relations to the other
institutions existing in the social structures of which they have
been components. With respect to the kinship order, we have
discussed various types of families and the type of generalized
other they tend to form, as well as how the kinship order has been
historically related to the economic order in the "household," and
hence to role differences between men and women. We have also
indicated some of the intricate ways in which marriage and love
may be related. The educational sphere refers to those aspects of
any institution which transmit skills and values. Every institutional
order may to a greater or a lesser degree have an educational
sphere, the types of skills transmitted in each case being relevant
to the ends of the respective order. We have suggested that edu-
cational institutions are rarely autonomous, and illustrated the
services educational institutions may perform for the state by refer-
ence to the case of modern Germany.
In conjunction with these institutional orders, we have discussed
ORDERS AND CONTROLS, II 2-/:^
certain major types of social controls and norms which guide the
enactment of roles by persons. These controls include custom,
fashion, convention, ethical values, and the several types of law.
In connection with such controls, we have pointed out that persons
may react— objectively and subjectively— to such controls in a vari-
ety of ways, and that to understand these, as well as the motiva-
tions involved, we must observe both public conduct and private
attitude.
Persons accept or reject various roles— and leaders make known
their expectations— by means of symbols. Moreover, whether or
not persons accept the demands made upon them is in part de-
pendent upon their positions in the prevailing system of stratifica-
tion. Accordingly, before we consider how institutional orders are
variously combined into total social structures, which we shall
do in Chapter XII, we must elaborate the conception of symbol
spheres, in Chapter X, and we must relate our scheme of institu-
tional orders to systems of stratification, in Chapter XI.
CHAPTER
X
Symbol Spheres
LANGUAGE is central to the concerns of social psychology
because it has to do with the functioning of institutions as well
as with the socialization of the individual. By considering the
social and the personal functions of language we can relate intimate
details about the person and the psychic structure to broader
conceptions of institutional organization. To understand how any
given person strives, feels, and thinks we have to pay attention to
the symbols he has internalized; but to understand these symbols
we have to grasp the way in which they co-ordinate institutional
actions.^ Symbols mediate entire institutional arrangements as well
as the conduct and roles of persons.
In the psychic structure, language articulates and patterns the
objects and noises which we see and hear; we come to know many
of our feelings and wishes in terms of specific vocabularies. By
singling out targets for action, language helps turn impulses into
defined purposes, inchoate sensations into perceptions, vague feel-
ings into known emotions.
In the person, symbols lend motives to conduct, and signal the
expectations of others. Symbols provide the person with a frame
of reference for his experience, and this frame of reference is not
only "social" in general, it may be definitely related to the opera-
tions of specific institutions.
If we examine the content and functions of communication
within institutions, or within the various institutional orders of a
social structure, we notice that certain symbols tend to recur
more frequently than others in given contexts. This universe of
discourse— the vocabularies, pronunciations, emblems, formulas,
1 See Chapter IV: The Person, and Chapter V: The Sociology of Motiva-
tion.
SYMBOL SPHERES 2y$
and types of conversation which are typical of an institutional
order— make up "the symbol sphere" of this order.
Such symbols may be acoustic— as in music or in speech— or they
may be visual— as in written and printed imagery and signs. The
distinctions and symbols of a symbol sphere of a given institutional
order are related to the preoccupations and practices of persons in
that order. For since language helps us to co-ordinate social ac-
tivities, it reflects the objects with which persons of the order deal
and the conduct patterns with which they do so.
Thus the myths of religion, the incantations of magic, the tech-
nical jargon of an occupation, the high-brow pronunciations and
slang of status groups, the tete-a-tete of lovers, and the table-talk
of families— all these represent modes of speech which reflect dif-
ferent institutional contexts. We become more aware of this when
we examine foreign languages. Arabic, for example, "contains about
6,000 names for 'camel,' " or derived from camel— for breeding-
camels and running-camels and for female camels in all the various
stages of pregnancy.- The practices and objects involved in a
society of camel breeders are reflected in the content and dis-
tinctions which make up the symbol sphere of their society. The
Teutonic languages have terms for horse, steed, mare, stallion, all
of which to the Greek were simply hippos.
Religious institutions develop their own rhetoric and liturgy—
the hymn, the prayer, the sermon, the benediction. Similarly in the
political and economic orders we find genres of talk and of writing
—the sales talk, low- and high-pressure; the election speech, stump
or fireside. And, of course, the bulk of our modern fiction is a
symbolic elaboration of love and kinship relations. Not all societies,
of course, develop identical symbols for the same pursuit; the
increasingly precise notation, and hence the symbolic recording,
of musical sound patterns is peculiar to occidental civilization. In
like manner, not all institutions of the same order have identical
symbols. Puritanism, for example, suppressed instrumental music
as well as opera and the dance. Catholicism, however, has made
rich use of all the arts, with the exception of dancing, as symbolic
means of religious worship.
Certain emblems and modes of language not only recur in
2 See W. I. Thomas, Primitive Behavior (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937),
p. 68.
2^6 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
given social contexts but seem to be more important to the main-
tenance of certain institutions, to their chains of authority and to
the authoritative distribution of their roles. The contexts in which
these symbols appear may seem to be "staged"; they are dramatic,
solemn, weird. They carry more "weight." These symbols may be
repeated every day by everyone; or they may be used only on
extraordinary occasions and by specifically authorized persons.
As we have seen, the symbols which thus justify a social structure
or an institutional order are called symbols of "legitimation," or
"master symbols," or "symbols of justification."
By lending meaning to the enactment of given roles, these mas-
ter symbols sanction the person in re-acting the roles. When in-
ternalized they form unquestioned categories which channel and
delimit new experiences; they promote and constrain activities.
When public justifications are privately internalized, they make
up the stuff of self -justification, operating as reasons and motives
leading persons into roles and sanctioning their enactment of them.
Indeed, no self-justification is likely to be entirely private; unless
it is accepted by others it does not secure the private self in feel-
ing that all is well. If, for example, "individualistic" institutions
are publicly justified, then reference to self-interest may be accept-
able as justification for individual conduct. Personal reasons are
thus related to public legitimations.
While the symbols typically found in any order comprise the
symbol sphere of that order, those symbols that justify the institu-
tional arrangement of the order are its master symbols. To the
social scientist such master symbols are of special interest in that
they allow us to understand the cohesion of role configurations,
their permanence and change, and their function in the intrapsychic
life of persons.
The more refined symbol elaborations of the philosopher, theolo-
gian, publicity director, scientist, or artist may not be so immedi-
ately important for the understanding of a period and society as
are the doctrines which do not seem to be "doctrines" at all, but
rather facts. In the experience of men enacting the roles of their
time, they seem "inevitable categories of the human mind. Men
do not look on them merely as correct opinion, for they have
become so much a part of the mind, and lie so far back, that they
are never really conscious of them at all. They do not see them,
SYMBOL SPHERES IJ-J
but other things throug,h them. It is these abstract ideas at the
center, the things which they take for granted that characterize
a period." ^
Those in authority within institutions and social structures at-
tempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary
consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal for-
mulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized. These
central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the "votes of the
majority," the "will of the people," the "aristocracy of talents or
wealth," to the "divine right of kings," or to the allegedly extraor-
dinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself.
Various thinkers have used different terms to refer to this phe-
nomenon: Mosca's "political formula" or "great superstitions,"*
Locke's "principle of sovereignty," ^ Sorel's "ruling myth," "^ Thur-
man Arnold's "folklore," ' Weber's "legitimations," "* Durkheim's
"collective representations," ^ Marx's "dominant ideas," ^" Rousseau's
"general will," ^^ Lasswell's "symbols of authority," or "symbols of
justification," ^- Mannheim's "ideology," ^•' Herbert Spencer's "pub-
lic sentiments" ^*— all testify the central place of master symbols
in social analysis.
3 T. E. Hulme, Speculations (London: Routledge, 1936), p. 50.
*G. Mosca, The Ruling Class, H. D. Kahn, tr. (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1939), PP- 70-71-
5 John Locke, Two Treatises Concerning Government (London, 1924).
^Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, T. E. Hulme, tr. (New York: Vik-
ing, 1914).
" Thurman W. Arnold, The Folklore of Capitalism (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1937).
8 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Talcott
Parsons and A. M. Henderson, trs. (New York: Oxford, 1948), Chapters I
and HL
9 fimile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York:
Macmillan, 1915).
!'■ K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International
Publications, 1939).
11 Jean- Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (New York: Hafner, 1947).
12 H. D. Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1935), and Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1936). See also Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Towards His-
tory (New York: New Republic, 1937), Vol. H, pp. 232 ft.
1^ Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, Louis Wirth and Edward Shils,
trs. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).
1* Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology (London, 1882-1896), \'ol. H,
Book 1, pp. 319 ff.
2.jS SOCIAL STRUCTURE
1. Symbol Spheres in Six Contexts
In modern social structures, it is sometimes difficult to classify
the prevailing symbols according to the institutional orders which
they justify or according to the roles to which they lend meaning.
The modern expansion of mass communications has made for a
wide and rapid diffusion of symbols and vocabularies, which may
arise in local areas for special purposes. Nevertheless, if the inter-
relations of the different orders, in terms of their symbol spheres,
are to be grasped, one must attempt to sort them out.
Since the roles of an institutional order involve specific modes
of conduct and the social integration of these modes, it is only
natural that special vocabularies should arise. These vocabularies
are shorthand ways of referring to common tasks; they integrate
the behaviors which go on witliin the order more readily and
precisely than could symbols from general discourse. Thus, in
addition to master symbols (which justify and sanction the au-
thority of institutions and lend meaning and motivation to the
enactment of roles), symbol spheres also contain many generally
less important specifications and implications that are, in fact,
specialized ways of talk and writing.
In discussing some symbols which "belong to" the various orders
we are able to illustrate some of the general points we have made
about symbol spheres.
I. The vocabulary is a major element in the style of life which
sets off different status groups. It is one of the first things we notice
about a person. In terms of his speech, his choice of words and
pronunciation, we place a person in the hierarchy of the status
sphere. The words that may with propriety be used on given occa-
sions are circumscribed by status conventions, which may be main-
tained esthetically in terms of "good" and "bad" taste, or magically,
in terms of "foul" language, or religiously by taboos being placed
upon certain modes of speech, for example, cursing. Conformity
to the status conventions of the symbol sphere is upheld by the
formal and informal educations of status group members.
Such vocabularies change, and may even be subject to fads and
fashions. No matter how much formal education persons are ex-
posed to, they may never be able to learn the innuendoes of a
SYMBOL SPHERES 279
situation and respond to it with the proper symbols unless they
have imbibed it, so to speak, with their mother's milk. For there
are differences in enunciation and in the scope of vocabulary which
depend upon the variety of contacts and travel and dinner com-
panions over long periods of time. The conventionalization of
language^ by an upper-status group is usually conservative. It slows
up the drift of linguistic change, as does education, which makes
persons sensitive to "good form" and "usage. " Changes in language
therefore, tend to drift upward; the "uncontrolled speech of the
folk" today provides advance information about proper usage to-
morrow.^^
Where stratification is rigid, the vocabularies of the various strata
may not diffuse very readily. Social position is thus "closed" to
others by the development of an "exclusive" conventional language.
Then, by listening to conversations one can identify the speaker's
status level (in Confucian China, highly educated people could do
so by the calligraphy of the writer). In Java, five vocabularies may
be used in connection with the status stratification, and in old
Siam, as well as in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe,
the court-centered nobility spoke French rather than the national
language or the regional dialect of commoners, just as the old Rus-
sian court spoke French and, before 1914, English. In Polynesia,
among the Tonga, a similar situation prevails, there being three
vocabularies. Prince Hohenlohe, German chancellor around 1900,
wrote to his wife only in French; German for him was public
language, French was the private language. Frederick II of Prus-
sia, a contemporary of Kant, considered German a boorish and
vulgar idiom, which the king need not master.
A speaker may "emphasize the superiority of the person ad-
dressed by using the vocabulary above that of his rank, or his
inferiority by using that of the rank just lower." ^® In England,
"gentleman," a term designating a status type, has tended to spread
and include certain abstract character traits rather than all well-
born persons who need not engage in routine work for livelihood.
Yet status groups tend to close up their ranks by means of language.
The use of medieval Latin thus excluded the uneducated, just as
15 See Edward Sapir, Language (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), p. 167.
This point may require modification under mass communication conditions.
^^ W. I. Thomas, op. cit., p. 83.
28o SOCIAL STRUCTURE
the use of foreign languages by upper-status groups excludes lower
classes and status groups.
Germans in Goethe's time referred only to noble-born girls as
frdulein; today for Germans it is a common form of address for
unmarried young women; for many American soldiers it means
sexually available women. In the United States such terms as "sir,"
or even "Mr." reflect status stratification. In classic China, with
its ancestor worship, there was no word to designate "one who is
old" in a socially neutral, chronological way. The Chinese words
carried overtones of deference so that in this language it was
difficult to raise the ethical question of whether one should or
should not treat old men with respect.^^
The prestige of national languages may be implemented by the
prestige of works of art integrating language and music. Thus
Italians and Germans have profited from the diffusion of Italian
and German operas sung in the original language, especially Verdi
and Wagner, and the lied, from Mozart to Mahler. Together with
the works, star performers also have migrated: the Italian tenor
and the "Wagnerian soprano."
II. In the economic order, the jobs that men do together give rise
to specialized trade jargons. Changes in the technology connected
with the job give rise to new terms connected with novel tools and
their use (kilowatt. X-ray, video, static). Such terms may spread
to persons and to strata that are not connected with the new
technology. Most craftsmen and engineering groups develop spe-
cialized workshop vocabularies which may be quite seperate from
the terminology they are formally taught. Where speed is at a
premium, as in a news agency, "shop languages" tend to develop
which aim at a skeleton language that, for economic reasons,
drastically reduces the number of syllables, using only those that
are indispensable for comprehension. In part, the prose style of
Time magazine represents an overt cultivation and publicizing of
such normally shop-restricted language, thus giving readers the
illusion that they are "on the inside." This is a comforting feeling
at a time when, due to the concentration and secrecy of key de-
cisions, so many people feel "on the outside" and have learned to
1^ Cf. I. A. PUchards, Mencius on the Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1932)-
SYMBOL SPHERES 281
distrust the news organs to the extent of a "propaganda neurosis."
A good deal of American "common sense," for example, deals
with the necessity of a man's "earning a living," and the "practical"
is generally identified with the "pecuniary" or the profitable. The
pecuniary may also inform moral vocabularies: he is a sterling
character, worth his weight in gold. Some tombstones, in fact, in-
form us that a deceased child was "worth a million dollars."
In tho^ United States many master symbols of the social structure
are derived from and primarily legitimate the economic order.
"Free Enterprise" and "Private Property" are practically unques-
tionable symbols, even when they are not very skillfully used.
The autonomy and power of the laissez-faire economic order, as
guaranteed by formal law, has thus been a major factor in shaping
all U.S. symbol spheres.
For over a hundred years, lawyers and politicians, journalists
and academicians have taught, argued, and presented economic
issues in terms of the "competitive model" of laissez-faire capital-
ism essentially derived from Adam Smith. The disturbing facts of
an economic life now dominated by giant corporations has led to
a popular view of them as deviant institutions, as "monopolies,"
and the word has about it a ring of righteous indignation against
monopolistic "abuses" of power.
One of the characteristic legacies of puritan America is the
moral conception of property as stewardship. In early days, in
the face of the "roving Indian," this concept sanctioned the Ameri-
can seizure of hunting ground and the placing of it under the
God-willed plow. In the face of presumably "improvident" and
propertyless masses it has made philanthropy obligatory, at least
from the deathbed of the millionaire. Symbols of stewardship and
some accompanying practices ha\'e thus blended with other legiti-
mations of the dominant economic order.
III. Families may develop special terms understood only by its
members. Such terms or phrases may originate from some experi-
ence which the family feels to be unique and wishes to recall^ by
symbols that carry its overtone or mood. Or, a baby's mispronunci-
ation may be considered so cute that it is thought worthy of being
preserved.
Everyone knows that lovers develop little phrases so intimate
and subtle that only they could ever understand them. Some words.
282 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
like cute and nice, are specifically feminine. Others seem to arise
from the conduct of women in handling babies: dydee for diaper,
booties, goodies, teeny-weeny. Others refer to objects connected
with the tabooed sphere of sex: "unmentionables," or "lingerie"
for underwear.
An extreme instance of the segregation of language by sexual
groups is provided by the island Caribs who have "two distinct
vocabularies, one used by men and by women when speaking to
men, the other used by women when speaking to each other,
and by men when repeating, in oratio obligua, some saying of
women. . . ." ^® The institutions of exogamy and of exclusively
male war councils appear to underlie such sexual divisions of
vocabulary.
Words referring to "young girls" are likely to take on moral
connotations: "In French, one word after another that has meant
a young girl has dropped out of polite usage because words signify-
ing this sweet creature too easily take on the meaning of what
some of the weaker of the sweet creatures may become. Thus
Bachele, mescme, touse, garce and even fille have in succession
been demoted." In English one has similar trouble with words
like "mistress, lover, and even woman." ^^ The sociological analysis
of such shifts in meaning reveals the interdependence of words,
conduct, and conventions within given institutions.
In Western civilization the "sanctity of the home" is a legitima-
tion of the privacy maintained at the family abode. The political
order in the United States guarantees this feature of the monoga-
mous family, the fourth amendment to the Constitution holding
that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,
shall not be violated . . ." Although the practical expediencies of
local authorities have modified the interpretation of this amend-
ment it still stands as part of the formal sphere of political symbols
which guarantee privacy.
Reporters intent on making headlines with "the human interest
story" caused the Lindberghs to leave the country. Wire tapping
and the secret installation of equipment for overhearing and over-
ly Cf. the passage from The Mystic Rose. Reprinted by W. I. Thomas in
his Source Book for Social Origins (Boston: Badger, 1909), p. 521.
1" Cf. Isaac Goldberg, The Wonder of Words (New York: Appleton-Cen-
tury, 1938), p. 269.
SYMBOL SPHERES 28^
seeing what goes on in the home of suspects under pohce surveil-
lance often seem to make the legal rights to privacy quite tenuous.
Some private citizens disdain the verbal invasion of their neigh-
bor's legitimate privacy by dismissing it as "gossip."
The German equivalent of "gossip" is Klatsch, and it is perhaps
no less characteristic that one speaks of "Klatschbase"— a gossipy
woman— but not of a man. Hence one may wonder whether they
were not men who were in the lead in depreciating "gossip" in the
name of a "broader horizon" of public concerns in the light of
which women's housebound talk appeared "trivial." It is no less
characteristic that philosophers, like Aristotle and Bacon would
preferably ascribe "garrulity" to women.
At any rate, the demand for conventional protection of privacy
emerged along with the greater individuation of families and the
sharper definition of "private" and "public" segments of the per-
sonality. When the workshop and the home of the guildmaster
were still under the same roof, when the master's wife was an
important authority also in the workshop, such segmentalization
of "private" and "public " life could not emerge. It was the differen-
tiation of workshop and home, office and home, of private fortime
and business capital, of "bourgeois " and "citizen," which allowed
for the drawing of a line between "private" and "public" life.
For democratically elected leaders of the community the line
between public and private is differently drawn than for persons
having lower "representative value " to the community. The public
claims the right to know more about the leader's life than merely
the official aspect. Thus baby pictures of the President as well as
photographs of his home and hobbies are publicized to satisfy
"human interest." The moral conduct of teachers, ministers, civil
servants outside the class room, church, or office has a bearing on
their positions of public trust, yet this is not true for a salesman.
Another feature of the symbol sphere of kinship orders that is
associated with the political order is "the oath." Western civiliza-
tion generally has been guaranteed by religious and secular state
symbols, rather than by blood. Fealty, loyalty, and the magical
sanctions involved in the taking of oaths have centered around
these two orders, whose symbol spheres have been used to guaran-
tee the roles and contractual relations of other orders, including
that of kinship. Thus the marriage oath— a vow of constant and
exclusive love— is taken in terms of the state and on the Bible.
284 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
IV. The symbols of the political order may be visual or auditory,
like the flag or the national anthem, or they may be sentimentalized
places like "the Capital," or written documents as in the constitu-
tional states of modern democracies. In discussing political symbols,
our chief concern is with those which sanction political authority.
The party politician will, in one way or the other, use the master
symbols of the political order, and will also develop special rhet-
orics: both the content and the delivery of his speech will become
stereotyped around those modes that are felt to be efi^ectively
persuasive appeals. He names events and personalities in the
stereotypes of his viewpoint: "radical" or "progressive," "regimenta-
tion" or "regulation," "dole" or "home relief," "alien" or "foreign,"
the "New Deal" or the "Raw Deal."
The symbols which legitimate a political order may be so deeply
embedded in mass media and popular mentality that counter-
symbols are avoided— even if they stand for programs or policies
which people actually want. Thus a majority of certain groups
may be in favor of specific policies for which "socialism" stands,
but reject the "socialist party" or socialist terminology. Stereotypes
of the symbol sphere, and not issues, may thus determine political
orientation and conduct. -°
V. The symbol spheres of the military order and of the political
order are blended in the modern national state. This symbolic
integration follows the integration of the institutions making up
the two orders. The state monopolizes the instruments of violence
and permits only those who are authorized to wear the uniform
of the army, navy, or police to have access to them, and then
only when "under orders." The uniform is a symbol of this au-
thorized access and use.
In modern armies special premiums are placed upon such char-
acter traits as courage and bravery, and the risk involved is not
compensated in money to the same degree as it would be if
-** On the use ot stereotypes in political conduct, see the experimental study
of G. W. Ilartmann, "The Contradiction Between the Feeling-Tone of Po-
litical Party Names and Public Responses to Their Platforms," Journal of
Social Psychology, 1936, 7, pp. 336-57; S. S. Sargent, "Emotional Stereotypes
in The Chicago Tribune," Sociometry II, (1939), pp. 6qS.; Thurman W.
Arnold, op. cit.; and The Symbols of Government (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1935).
SYMBOL SPHERES 2$$
anyone ran the same risk in a civilian job. Therefore, special weight
and a heavy emotional aura are characteristic of the symbol sphere
of the military order. Medals and other tokens of honor become
important as psychic compensations and incentives which enable
and inspire men to risk their lives in the fighting role of the soldier
or sailor.
In addition to these honorific accentuations of the traits needed
for the soldier, most armies tend to develop specialized vocabu-
laries which reflect the feelings, situation, and needs of the sol-
diery. The organizational complexities of large-scale armies and
navies bring about special "command languages" which officer
candidates have to learn. It takes skill to write out unambiguous
"orders" with the utmost economy of words and yet perfectly lucid
simplicity. The speed of transmission and the choice of proper
"channels' of staff and line officers who have to transmit the
supreme command with the appropriately classified "military se-
crecy" have helped to influence and foster such developments in
the technology of means of communication, codes, ciphers, de-
ciphering. These developments in turn have been transferred to
other institutionalized orders. "Radio," as developed during World
War I, is only one, though a most telling, example. Since the age
of railroading and the telegraph, modern business needs and mod-
ern military requirements have often coincided.
An army is made up of diverse population elements; it contains
men who are performing new roles, segregated from ordinary
social routines; accordingly these men develop specialized view-
points and modes of protest. In the bureaucratically disciplined
army, there is repression of spontaneous impulses and individual
differences. That is why there is so much cursing and griping in
armies. Since the sexes are segregated, a major restraint upon
profanity is removed. Cursing in an army is a safety valve of men
in situations where obedience is stereotyped. The extent to which
such blowing oft of steam is necessary will vary with the levels
of the personnel. The sergeant in all armies, for example, has tra-
ditionally been a man of violent language. That is because he does
not formulate very many of the orders which he gives, yet he
must enforce them directly upon those who execute them.
VI. In the religious order the symbol sphere is very important,
since the contents with which religion deals and the sanctions it
286 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
employs are "psychic." The basic symbol which legitimates the
authority of any of the salvation religions is some image of God,
or of gods. All roles within the religious order— of prophet and
of priest or of believers— are justified in terms of some such sym-
bol. Theology is the doctrinal elaboration of the concepts of deity
to which the religion is bound. Religious symbols and the image
of God are manipulated and argued over, or silently accepted, by
those in pursuit of salvation. The modern sermon, which has been
considerably shortened, is still delivered with such tonal quality
and gesture as to make the sound of the voice identifiable as a
minister's, even without reference to content.
The extent to which religious symbols may be internalized and
linked to the psychic structure may be indicated by the follow-
ing: ". . . the very name of Jesus was of so sweet a taste in her
mouth [the mouth of the Venerable Sister Serafia] that on uttering
it she frequently swooned away and was therefore obliged to
deprive herself of this joy in the presence of others till she was
given sufficient robustness of spirit to repress these external move-
ments/' ^^
Language produces "action at a distance": from a distance it
"wakens hope or fear . . . excites the dangerous or useful action.
From this comes the belief in the fruitfulness of invocations, of in-
cantations, of all that is action by speech: thus came into being
magico-religious techniques. . . ." -^
The symbols of magic, if verbal, may not be in the grammar of
ordinary language, and may not refer to ordinary objects of the
tangible everyday world, "^ yet in the feelings and consciousness
of the believer they refer to extraordinary realities and weird
powers. The symbols which are thus used may be verbal— as in the
casting of a spell, like abracadabra or sesame; or they may be
manual acts— like the handling and eating of the dead brave man's
heart in order to garner bravery for oneself; or they may be both
—as when the verbal incantation is accompanied by the ceremonial
-^ See Norman Douglas, Siren Land, quoted by Isaac Goldberg, op. cit.,
p. 121. Cf. also J. VVach, Sociology of Religion (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1944).
22 Celestin Bougie, The Evolution of Values, H. Sellars, tr. (New York:
Holt, 1926), p. 154.
■'^•'' See B. Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic (New York: Ameri-
can Book, 1935), Vol. II, pp. 213-14.
SYMBOL SPHERES 28y
rite. Such wishful analogies may occur in the symbol spheres of
almost any order, although historically they have been most closely
associated with religious orders.
2. Monopoly and Competition of Symbols
The degree to which master symbols are publicly unquestioned
—and the depth to which they are internalized in persons— varies
from one institutional order or social structure to another. Two
contrasting situations may be constructed.
I. Where master symbols are not questioned or even invoked by
anyone except those authorized to do so, such key terms monopo-
lize the symbol sphere and, other things being equal, are likely to
be deeply internalized. Then they are so implicit in the prevailing
speech, feeling, and thought that they require no explicit justifi-
cation. Indeed, they do not require systematic articulation, much
less promotion. This deep internalization is characteristic of tradi-
tional societies with relatively homogeneous institutional composi-
tion. The chances for master symbols to remain unquestioned, and
hence internalized, are also increased by the extent that tlie com-
munication channels are monopolized by persons who secure and
justify authority by means of particular symbols.
When such conditions prevail there is not much need for taboos
against challenging the master symbols, for no one is likely to do
so. The symbols are part of the person's life, that is, so tied in with
his roles that he identifies himself with them as he learns his roles.
Giving meaning to his motives for role-enactments, they may be
linked in turn to his psychic structure, so that his very impulses
are mobilized to sustain the symbols and the roles which they
guarantee. They are the "existential " categories of which the pre-
vailing philosophers speak. If referred to at all, they are preceded
by "of courses" and they make up the higher "common sense" of a
period and order. It is difficult to examine them critically; as
alternative symbols, much less symbols of protest, do not exist.
There are no ideas available to compete with the master symbols
and a unity of style characterizes the symbol sphere of the whole
social structure and the reflective activities of its more articulate
members. "Happy indeed," Harold Lasswell once remarked, "is
that nation that has no thought of itself; or happy at least are the
288 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
few who procure the principal benefits of universal acquies-
cence." -*
II. If the master symbols are questioned and articulated by some
persons, but not by others, "countersymbols" may arise. These
countersymbols may not justify any actual institutional arrange-
ments, but in time those who hold them may project them as part
of an ideal community of the imagination. Then they may strive
to realize this community in actuality. With such competition,
the master symbols will be cognitively elaborated and thus re-
inforced. It is in controversies that symbol systems are tightened
up. Theology— the expert elaboration of the creed which legiti-
mates a religious order— emerges in response to controversies over,
or attacks upon, its symbols. The political treatise may serve a
similar function. The modern conservative thinking of Edmund
Burke, De Maistre, and Justus Moser crystallized only in answer
to the criticism of traditionalism by the philosophers of the "En-
lightenment."
The rise of competing symbols of protest and their interplay
with symbols of justification may take the following schematized
form: (A) There is doubt of the correctness of interpretation and
management of the master symbols. (B) This leads to a more deep-
going doubt, of the master symbols themselves, although this
debunking may not yet be in the name of any set of articulated
countersymbols. (C) The originally implicit master symbols will,
to meet this attack, be explicitly reshaped by apologists. Thus, what
was simply "traditionalist" becomes "conservatism": the self-reflec-
tion of traditionalism. And what was a simple piety becomes an
elaborated theological orthodoxy: a weapon against heterodoxy.
The critical themes of the opponent will in part be countered
directly and in part they will be "fruitfully misunderstood" and
thus taken over into the master perspective. Each major concept
will be answered by a counterconcept, each theme by a counter-
theme. Thus, the "spirit of the times" and the "awakening of the
people" was countered by the conservative romantic theme of the
"folk spirit" and the "slow and silent forces" of folk tradition.
Blind spots— that is, unanswered themes— are of course highly
^•^ Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936), p. 30.
SYMBOL SPHERES 289
symptomatic of bias.-'^ Thus, Max Weber— author of the major
critique of Karl Marx— was not interested in the problem of the
business cycle as crucial for capitalist dynamics, for it did not fit
his conception of capitalism as the apex of "rationality." (D) All
these developments, in turn, may tend to make what was merely a
protesting heterodoxy into an explicit rival creed.
If the rival creed cannot be liquidated and is itself not strong
enough to establish another monopoly in the symbol sphere, a
"duopoly" may arise. This is a situation of accommodation to a
tolerant though competitive co-existence. Both of the churches or
parties may unite against any newcomer and the newcomer may
make the most of this chance by playing off the first "two big
ones" against each other. The third camp may have more chance
to use the technique of general ridicule or cynical deprecation
("The Laughing Third").
In a territorially expanding society complete control of new
groups may be impossible because they have ample opportunity
to escape in a physical sense. The history of religious tolerance in
America, up to the Mormons, illustrates this tolerance by emi-
gration.
In the course of time, former conflicts recede and are forgotten.
Then new mergers become possible: differences which make no
difference in practice will in time be forgotten as differences in
theory. The interpretation of theological fine points is neutralized
—for the sake of institutional weight and the advantages of big-
ness. This is the more likely to occur in the face of a common foe:
United States Protestant sects, which once competed with one
another, may put up a common front in the face of an expanding
Catholicism. The Southern and Northern Methodists officially came
together two generations after the slavery issue had been settled.
Thus out of competition there occurs a move toward concentration.
One or several of the competitors increasingly wins out, and the
smaller units, eager to avail themselves of the prestige of the big
winner, will jump on the band wagon. Symbol cartels will thus be
formed. In such situations there will be a lowering of standards for
the sake of more effective and "open" propaganda. Another general
mode of concentration occurs by the alliance of a few big imits
25 Cf. Karl Mannheim, op. cit.
2g0 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
for the more eflFective suppression of a number of small fry who
are thus gobbled up.
On the other hand, a practically insignificant unit may make a
virtue of necessity. Its very lack of appeal may motivate its ad-
herents to consider their alienation and their withdrawn ways of
life and thought as superior. Rigid exclusiveness for the sake of
maintaining standards of purity and orthodoxy are frequently ob-
served among sectarians. With the expansion of adherents, leaders
may become more "broadminded," and viewpoints with previously
sharp profiles may become more diffuse and blurred.
Three factors are important in giving rise to competition among
symbols of legitimacy: (A) a diversity of institutional composition,
(B) a rapid turnover, or dynamic, of institutions, and (C) a rela-
tively easy access of persons holding differing opinions to the chan-
nels of communication. This latter condition may come about by
the rise of new media and techniques of symbol diffusion. Thus
Luther was able to capitalize on the invention of movable type
carried by itinerant printers and to outcompete the hand-copying
monk. Such conditions increase the chances that no one set of sym-
bols will monopolize and unify the orders which make up the
total society. They lead to the onset of the dialectic of competing
creeds which we have outlined above.
Institutional diversity and conflict may exist (A) among the
institutions which make up a single institutional order, as when
two religions compete for adherents, or when two revolutionary
parties agitate in and over the political order. The master symbols
which compete will then be different symbols yet of the same
order. The diversity and conflict may, however, (B) be between
different orders within a social structiu'e, as when religious institLi-
tions conflict with those of the political order. Then state and
church, secular and religious parties, compete for loyalties, and
specialists, as in totalitarian dictatorships, may seek to debunk,
prevent, hollow out, or otherwise take over for their own ends
those religious symbols that conflict with undivided allegiance
to the charismatic symbols of the dictator's claim. Finally (C) the
disharmony may be between two different social structures, as
when nations compete within each of their respective confines
and/or across a third country for the adherence to their respective
symbols of national loyalty.
SYMBOL SPHERES 2gi
When the roles men enact change more rapidly than the legiti-
mating symbols which lend meaning to them, individnals may be-
come alienated from the symbols and even abandon them for some
competing set. Dnring revolntions role strnctures may be broken
up and made meaningless to practice. Men wake up, the morning
alter, believing firmly in master symbols they had not thought of
during the time of terror and panic. Then self-elected elites may
say, with Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity." -°
If, through competition, the master symbols are made articulate,
symbols venerated as absolutely true by some may by others be
treated or even believed in as "mere opinions." It is in such a
situation, when beliefs are less absolutely held, that tolerance may
emerge. Tolerance and compromise as features of a symbol sphere
are found where former contrasts of either-or have become less
compulsive, and indeed, no longer vital to the persons involved.
When one set of religious institutions forms the only "religion"
available, and the religious order is dominant in the social struc-
ture, then its symbols will not be questioned: absolute adherence
to them is the only road to salvation.
But in a social structure where the religious order is not domi-
nant, and where the symbols of religious institutions are diverse
and contradictory, the tolerant belief arises that one set of symbols
may be as true or as wise as another, or at any rate that other per-
sons who hold differing symbols, or even none at all, may not be
entirely damned. Religious agencies such as "Bible Institutes" may
argue about whether Buddhism is worse or better than Cliiistianity,
or a Lessing (in his "Nathan the Wise") may expound tolerance
and the equal worth of the three rings. Christian, Mohammedan,
Hebrew. Many may feel that all the diversities are equally worth
while, and few will ostracize those who adhere to differing sym-
bols. Symbol experts fulfilling official roles in religious institutions
—teachers of theology, for example— may try to solve the problems
of the variegated symbol sphere by talking from such an abstract
level as to find that, after all, they are "basically," or in the last
analysis, the same.
And similar processes work in the political order. Wilsonian
-6 W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming," The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
(2nd ed.; New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 185.
2Q2 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
idealism of World War I could not be effectively renovated during
World War II, nor could it be revived in connection with the
United Nations. The disillusionment in the wake of World War I,
and the many crises between the two wars prevented it. Political
tracts advocating "faith for living" are usually more indicative of
the will to believe than of the actual faith.
If symbols are held as absolute, their adherents may be intoler-
ant of beliefs different from their own. Absolute belief justifies
and motivates the actions of the propagandist who would convert
others and thus spread his faith. On the other hand, the decline of
"crusading" democracy and the growth of a conscious propaganda
of democracy in the late thirties in America may mean that the
symbols of this kind of political order are not felt to be held with
sufficient surety in the face of the threat of war with dictatorial
political systems.
The tolerance and compromise allowed or available in given
symbol spheres vary according to the estimation and condition of
the orders in which the symbols are anchored. In a typical Ameri-
can town, tolerance of economic and labor-business differences
has "increased markedly in recent decades," whereas tolerance of
"deviant" religious creeds and practices has diminished." -^ If
men don't really care about the issues at stake in a given order,
they are likely to be tolerant in that order. Thus by examining
what men are intolerant about one finds out what really matters
to them. In contrast, when men believe that only their enemies
have the power to be successful bigots, they see the value of toler-
ance. Two religions, each claiming to monopolize the only toll
bridge to salvation, will tolerate each other if they are persuaded!
that they cannot destroy each other.
Tolerance in the symbol sphere must of course be distinguished i
from toleration of deviant and threatening practices. Symbol dif-
ferences may be tolerated only by those who do not expect them
to be translated into threatening practices. This means that those
who are thought to be less powerful ("ridiculous" and "harm-
less") may be the more readily tolerated. "Parlor Socialism" for
gentlemen may be permitted, even though labor unions for workers
are frowned upon or forbidden. A skillful ruler acting for the status
-^ See Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown in Transition (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1937).
SYMBOL SPHERES 293
quo may absorb new threats by the cynical opportunism of kindly
tolerance and adroit compromise. In conversation the pohtely
nodding head of tolerance may hide timid ignorance and that
genial hypocrisy which is the death of thought. The decisive ques-
tion of tolerance is always: tolerance in whose favor?
A strong ruler unafraid of some "tangential" challenge may
"tolerate" it and thereby "take the wind out of its sails." All mod-
ern constitutional regimes have "tolerated" more and more voters
to come to the polls— to the extent to which stronger party organi-
zations could effectively control such voting. The strategy of
British Empire politics may also be recalled, as well as the history
of compulsory education and the expansion of newspaper circula-
tion. The original sponsors of "equal rights for women"— socialists
and progressive suffragettes of bourgeois background— found that
many housewives, following patriotic and religious appeals with
prompt attention, vote more conservatively than do their husbands.
In this case, "tolerance" was an adjustment of authority which but-
tressed the dominating structiu'e rather than challenged it.
Tolerance may, however, work in favor of the intolerant; the
Weimar Republic and Nazism is a recent example. Hitler and his
movement were ridiculed as "playing the soldier," and were able
to profit by this minimization of their stature. Being tolerated they
could bide their time and wait for their opportunity, which was
provided by depression. The "playing soldiers" were thus held in-
tact and ready to capitalize on the decisive shift in votes. The
question of tolerance, therefore, becomes a question of what sort
of organization is built up under its protection. In England and
other countries there has been an intolerant outlawing of "private
uniforms" and political haberdashery.
Relative strength and the espousal of tolerance as a value may
be briefly systematized in this way:
I. A strong party can afford to be tolerant of deviation or even of
opposition— at least up to a point. This characterizes a ruling stra-
tum of multiple elites without over-all bureaucratic organization.
Or, as Madame de Stael once remarked, "If a nation is to have
the courage to laugh at itself, it must be conscious of its superior
strength." -" II. A strong party can also afford to suppress all oppo-
sition and criticism by organizing ruling elites and functions and
-* Cf. De L'Allemagne, critical edition prepared by Comtesse Leon de
Prange (Paris: Hachette, to be published).
2g4 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
all authoritative positions into a central machine; for example, the
totalitarian party. III. A weak party may plead for tolerance, which
means the freedom to continue in its own ways of conduct and
thought. Thus, during their struggle for power, totalitarian parties
will most jealously plead for "the democratic liberties" which, once
in power, they promptly suppress. IV. A weak party may be in-
tolerant of internal deviation, enforcing strict discipline upon the
in-group members, and imposing upon them a pattern of "organ-
ized thought" in order to increase their cohesion and striking
power.
In summary, symbol spheres may be monopolized by one set of
legitimating symbols which are so deeply internalized they do not
need to be defended. If they are questioned, persons become
articulate about them and jump to their defense as absolutes. The
existence of such symbol spheres is conditioned by institutional
harmony within and between various orders, by a slow rate of in-
stitutional change and by a monopoly of the channels of communi-
cation and persuasion. When the reverse of these three conditions
exists, the chances for countersymbols of legitimacy to emerge are
increased. When there is competition among symbols, some of
them may be debunked, and various persons may hold them merely
as "opinions," whereas others may be completely alienated from
them; indeed, whole populations may become alienated from one
set of symbols and shift allegiance to other symbols which make
more sense in terms of actual or expected practices. In certain
competitive situations, tolerance and compromise may emerge as
general features of the symbol sphere. Thus the legitimacy of pub-
lic competition in ideas has been part of the creed of parliamentary
democracy of the modern constitutional state. Totalitarian parties
and states have typically claimed "the freedom to propagandize"
in the name of "democracy" in order to overthrow this system.
3. Communication
Out of the total range of symbols socially available, each person
picks up certain symbols which he passes on to others. Each per-
son who faces the total volume of symbols transmits a selected
number and a selectively arranged portion of the total. Generally,
we speak of manipulation or management of symbols when this
SYMBOL SPHERES 2g,'^
channeling and rearranging of selected symbols is done consciously
and in an organized way. Competition among symbols referring
to given objects or legitimating different institutional roles may
lead to the purposive manipulation or management of the spheres
of symbols by symbol experts.
In a stratified society is it possible to debunk or to build up a
given stratum by selecting the symbols which are used to repre-
sent it. To de\aluate a religious, political, or ethnic group, one
selects the lowest representative of the group— of the Jewish com-
munity, e.g.— and generalizes him as "the Jew." To build up a
group or stratum one focuses upon the "best" representative, select-
ing those traits that are most approved of by those to whom one
would build up the group, and generalizes him as "the Jew." Such
images are known as stereotypes. They are symbols built out of a
selection of alleged traits yet represented as the whole truth.
Stereotypes which debunk or build up a group may not be set
forth in their totality at any one time. A newspaper, for instance,
may use the symbol "Negro" every time a Negro commits a petty
crime, but avoid mentioning "Negro" when a Negro performs some
meritorious act. The stereotype of "Negro" is thus built from an
accumulation of incidents with which the symbol is associated.
When a small-town youngster goes to a big city and does well,
the town's newspaper may carry the story: Podunk boy makes
good. But if he gets lost in the anonymity of the city and wanders
into crime, the local newspaper may not play the fact up. By select-
ing from the totality of world, national, and local affairs, the story
of the local youngster who grew up to make $50,000 a year, the
glory of his success is reflected on the symbol, Podunk. His success
is shared; ascribed in part to the community. His failures are ig-
nored, or ascribed to him alone. The stereotyped image of Podunk
is built up to the accumulation of such stories and by the omis-
sion of other types of fact. At the same time, a generally optimistic
tone of individual success is maintained in the sphere of symbols.
We may distinguish several ways in which conduct is positively
or negatively stereotyped, and ascribed to the individual alone or
to groups to which he belongs by virtue of actual or past member-
ship:
I. Meritorious conduct may be strictly ascribed to the individ-
ual, as in the case of Homer's build-up of Achilles, or as in the
modern cult of genius. In legend, the family of descent is often
2g6 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
entirely eradicated by means of an ascription of divine origin, or
by "foundling" sagas. II. Liabilities of conduct may be ascribed
strictly to the individual, as in contemporary democratic court
proceedings. III. Meritorious conduct may be ascribed to the in-
dividual as a representative of a group whose members are eager
to share in the prestige accretion of their outstanding members.
This occurs in the construction of self-images by groups and col-
lectivities, as when Americans see themselves as in the "land of
the free and the brave," or nineteenth-century Germans saw them-
selves as a "nation of poets and thinkers." IV. Conduct liabilities
may be typically ascribed by dominant groups to the individual
as a representative of despised lower or hostile out-groups. In the
Soviet Union and its orbit, "bourgeois" descent— for the failure-
is never an "accident," just as in Nazi Germany "Jewish descent"
was the reference point for alleged criminal dispositions, despite all
statistical evidence to the contrary.
In the selecting and editing of symbols referring to nations, all
these processes may be observed. Nations compete for prestige with
other nations in terms of symbols and events which are associated
by symbol manipulations, with stereotyped images of the whole.
To an inhabitant of nineteenth-century India, "the British" may be
an irate man with battleships, troops, and whipping canes; a beef-
eating barbarian who consumes alcohol on so supreme a religious
occasion as The Lord's Supper. But in the edited sphere of sym-
bols, "British" may appear to Englishmen as a rotund gentleman
surrounded by "tricky natives," or a nation of small shopkeepers
trying honestly to get along in the world. During wartime, "Uncle
Sam" gets a fierce compelling look in his cartooned eyes as he
points his finger at you. The superegos of some members of the
public may be stimulated by such compulsive figures. The guilt
feelings thus engendered may increase the participation of for-
tune, time, and life in the war effort.
A nation becomes "one and indivisible" through a continual
process of communalization. This communalization is directed by
those strata that successfully address their political expectations
to the rest of the population in the name of the "nation." To the
extent to which this process is successful, "a nation one and in-
divisible" exists. The most effective symbols implementing the
process are those of common historical fate, of common triumphs
of the past: national history bespeaking of grandeur; a national
SYMBOL SPHERES 2^J
mission; assurance of the nation's worth for mankind. The em-
phases, as between the past or the future, may shift. When the
"Americaji dream" is no longer stressed, or does not seem uni-
linear and unambiguous, the press may demand greater emphasis
on instruction in the nation's history as beneficent to civic morale
and patriotism. History teaching is, of course, subject to selective
emphases and stylizations stemming from patriotic loyalties rather
than scientific detachment.-^ Much of the national historiography
of the nineteenth century falls under the same heading: Germany
had her Treitschke, Great Britain her Seeley. The American Mahan,
as the philosopher and historian of "seapower," could hardly have
emerged on Prussian soil, and neither could a Delbriick, the Ger-
man historian of warfare, arise in a great maritime power. "His-
tory," it is often said, is concerned with the past that is "dead,"
but as an ongoing enterprise it is of vital concern to the living in an
age of nations with rival claims to disputed areas, new boundaries,
and opportunities seized and justified in terms of "historical rights."
In a world where primary experience has been replaced by sec-
ondary communications— the printed page, the radio, and the pic-
ture screen— the chances for those in control of these media to
select, associate, manipulate, and diffuse symbols are increased. In
the twentieth century, a unified symbol sphere, one monopolized
by certain master symbols, is more likely to be the result of a
monopoly of the channels of communications, and of a forceful
tabooing of countersymbols, than the result of any harmonious
institutional basis. It is more likely to be imposed than to grow.
But the symbols which are thus made masterful are not likely to
be so deeply and unquestioningly internalized as those arising as
adequate and meaningful expressions of a harmony of institution-
ahzed roles. Where there are deep antagonisms in the institutional
structure, men seeking to transform power into authority may grasp
all the more compulsixely for the channels of mass communica-
tion, but their monopolization of these media does not necessarily
mean that the symbols they diffuse will be master symbols.
-» See B. Pierce, Civic Attitudes in American School Textbooks (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1930).
2q8 social structure
4. The Autonomy of Symbol Spheres
In the scholar's study or the agitator's den the symbols which
legitimate various kinds of political systems may be rearranged,
debunked, or elaborated. But such logical manipulations of master
symbols by intellectuals do not of themselves change the legiti-
mating symbols to which the great bulk of persons are attached.
For changes in the legitimating symbols to be realized, masses
of people must shift their allegiances.
Hulme, from whom we have quoted above, believed that the
master symbols are "the source of all the other more material
characteristics of a period"; not "men" but "ideas" make history.
This is an unfortimate manner of statement; as a matter of fact, it
is magic. Unless symbols are tied to the roles enacted in institu-
tional orders, unless they lend meaning and even sacredness to
these roles, they will not even be master symbols. They will merely
be little marks on paper or breath going over vocal cords. Symbols
can "make a difference " only if they answer to some feature of the
character structure and the roles of individuals, and these character
structures and roles are shaped in large part by institutional ar-
rangements. To the extent that the symbol sphere is truly autono-
mous, it does not count in the dynamics of the institutional struc-
ture. An autonomous dynamics of the symbols sphere implies the
detachment of persons from it, and detachment is a step towards
alienation. To say that there is no symbol order, but rather a sym-
bol sphere, or symbol spheres, is to deny this "idealistic" theory
of history and society. And only if one set of symbols were success-
fully imposed upon virtually all of a population could we speak
strictly of "common values."
If the character of the master symbols sets the character of a
social structure, then a monopolization of the communication of
symbols would enable the monopolizers to create new institutions
by diffusing certain kinds of would-be master symbols. And we
know that this is not the case. Propagation of symbols is effective
only so long as they have some meaningful relevance to the roles,
institutions, and feelings which characterize a people. Symbols
cannot create these roles. It is in terms of their relevance or lack
of relevance to persons and institutions that the free competition
of autonomously developed symbols will be decided. Only in this
SYMBOL SPHERES 299
sense may we speak of the autonomy of symbol spheres in certain
kinds of social structure. "Governments" do not necessarily, as
Emerson put it, "have their origin in the moral identity of men."
This is to confuse the legitimations of government with its causes.
Just as often, or even more so, the moral identities of men have
their origins in governmental institutions which successfully im-
pose their symbol spheres.
One hundred years ago the matter was fruitfully discussed in
terms* of the assumptions typically made by many of those who
believe that the dynamics of the symbol sphere is self-determining
and that it may dominate history: "" (A) The symbols which justify
some authority are separated from the actual persons or strata that
exercise this authority. (B) The "ideas" are then thought to rule,
not the strata or the persons using the ideas. (C) In order to lend
continuity to the sequence of these symbols, they are presented
as connected in some "mystical" way with one another. The sym-
bols are thus seen as having an autonomous "self-determination."
(D) To make more plausible the odd notion that symbols are
"self-determining," they are "personalized" or given "self-conscious-
ness." They may then be conceived as the concepts of history or
as a sequence of "philosophers" whose thinking determine insti-
tutional dynamics.
Symbols which are often written about as "values" are histori-
cally and sociologically irrelevant unless they are anchored in con-
duct. They become relevant when they justify institutions, and/or
motivate persons to create or at least to enact roles. There is un-
doubtedly an interplay of justifying symbols, institutional author-
ity, and role-enacting persons. At times we should not hesitate to
assign causal weight to master symbols— but not as a, much less
the, theory of social unity. There axe ways of constructing unity
that are more flexibly geared to a lower level of generality, closer
to empirically observable materials. -^^
It seems to us the better procedure to build up to such symbolic
unity or "common values" as a social structure may display by
examining the symbol spheres of each of its institutional orders,
rather than to begin by attempting first to grasp "common sym-
30 Cf. K. Marx and F. Engels, op. cit., pp. 42 fl.
31 As we shall see below. Chapter XII: The Unity of Social Structures.
200 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
bols" and then in their Hght to "explain" the society's composi-
tion and unity.
There is of course a symboHc aspect to social integration. (If
all, or nearly all, members of an institutional order internalize the
order's legitimations} accept and adhere to these symbols, (we may
speak of "common values," or in other terms, master symbols of
legitimations^ Such legitimations do involve an evaluative aspect;
as the terms in which obedience is claimed, (master symbols are
used as yardsticks for the evaluation of the conduct of institutions
and actors!) Such symbols ramify throughout the institutional or-
der so as to "define the situations" of various roles. Social struc-
tures, which are thus integrated through universal adherence and
acceptance of such central symbols, are naturally extreme and
"pure" types.
(At the other end of the typological scale, we find societies in
which a dominant institution controls the total social structure
and superimposes its values and legitimations by violence and the
threat of violence] This need by no means involve a breakdown of
the social structure; all institutions and roles for technical reasons
simply involve the effective conditioning of persons by formal disci-
pline so that unless they accept the institutional demands for
discipline the majority of the actors do not have any chance to
earn a living. A skilled compositor employed by a reactionary news-
paper, for example, may for the sake of making a living and holding
his job conform to the demands of employer discipline. In his
heart, and outside the shop, he may be a radical agitator. Many
German socialists allowed themselves to become perfectly disci-
plined soldiers under the Kaiser's flag— despite the fact that their
subjective values were those of revolutionary Marxism. It is a long
way from symbols to conduct and back again, and not all integra-
tion is based on symbols.
The emphasis on such disparities does not of course mean a
denial of "the force of rational consistencies." Just as discrepancies
between words and deeds are often characteristic, so also is the
striving for consistency. The question whether or not discrepancy
or consistency is socially effective and predominant can be decided
a priori neither on the basis of "human nature" nor on the "principles
of sociology"; it must be decided in terms of socially and histori-
cally situated responses. We might well construe a pure type in
terms of perfectly disciplined social structure in which all domi-
SYMBOL SPHERES ^01
nated men, for a variety of reasons, cannot afford to quit their in-
stitutionally prescribed roles, but who nevertheless share none of
the dominator's values, and thus in no way believe in the legiti-
macy of the order. Such a social structure would be run like a
ship manned by galley slaves; due to the disciplined movement of
the oars, the individual is reduced to a cog in a machine, and the
violence of the whipmaster may only rarely be needed. The galley
slaves need not even be aware of the ship's direction under their
propulsion, although any turn of the bow might evoke the wrath
of the master who sees ahead and steers the boat.
(^Between these two polar typesj-of a "common value system"
and of a superimposed discipline incapable of being broken by
the institutionalized members of the structure-fthere are numer-
ous forms of social integration/ For example, it takes a long time
for a social structure to be totally revolutionized. Most occidental
societies have been able to incorporate many divergent value
orientations, as long as the legitimacy of the political order could
be successfully imposed. The origin of such a dominant order
has been quite various, ranging from forceful imposition to the
instituting of an order by a covenant of its beneficiaries. In the
former, the submission of the subjects to the superimposed order
may be a result of accommodation, compromise, or renunciation
of their own values; in the latter, joint agreement precedes the
order.
Such unity, involving various degrees and mixtures of legitima-
tion and coercion, may be found in any order, not only in the
political and economic. A father may impose a specific order over
all family members by threatening to withhold inheritance or his
necessary consent to a minor's wishes, or by the use of such force
as the political order may allow him. \But, in any case, "common
values," as a unified symbol sphere, are not necessary in order to
secure integration and unity.)
Fruitful questions about symbol spheres are usually quite spe-
cific: What kind of conduct or institution does this or that symbol
motivate and guarantee? In what orders are given symbols to be
found and what is their precise function therein? Symbols may
influence conduct if they are relevant to the roles men enact; roles,
in turn, are components of institutions. And the dynamics of insti-
^02 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
tutions, and of their component roles, determine the content, range,
and character of spheres of symbols more than the symbols deter-
mine institutional history.
[A person may incorporate, believe in, and use a symbol which
motivates a role which he does not enact, or legitimate an institu-
tion to which he does not belongjit is not necessary to be a priest
in order to repeat the formula about the doctrinal infallibility of
the pope. Yet this formula is important primarily in the college of
cardinals, where it insures against open dissent and unwanted dis-
cussion. Wage workers in modern capitalist states may repeat the
formulae of laissez-faire, although these symbols may be against
the economists' imputation of the workers' rational interest, that is,
his interests as "adequate" to his economic and pohtical position
within the whole system were he to act "rationally" as an "eco-
nomic man." [Such "mislocated" adherences are increased by mod-
ern techniques of mass communication) which are, on the one
hand, monopolized in favor of some one type of institution, sys-
tem, or authority, and on the other, used to satisfy irrational
fantasies and distract from both art and reality.
The institutional patterns of different orders are not equally or
evenly implemented by means of symbols. The dominant symbols
of a whole social structure will tend to be in the symbol sphere'
of its dominant institutional order. These symbols will legitimate
the symbols and practices of other orders as well as those of its
own. If the economic order is the weightiest one within a social
structure, the legitimating symbols of the whole structure will
likely be related to the economic order.
\Specilic interests of different institutions are defined in terms
of specialized symbols appropriate to their respective contexts.
There are, however, symbols which with but slight modifications
may hold for various institutions serving quite different ends"^ By
our definition, all institutions contain a distribution of authority.
The head of the household, the principal of the school, and the
army officer have "authority" over the household, the school, and
the army unit. The symbols implementing this distribution of au-
thority may be the same in all these institutional contexts: the
"democratic" process may be stressed in which the head claims
no more than the position of the first among equals, or an authori-
tarian discipline may pervade the relations of institutional leader
SYMBOL S P H E R E S ^^O^
and subordinates. The father may be the stern family despot to
his children, as the officer may be to his soldiers and the teacher
to his x'l^'pils. In the latter case "orders are orders," and there is to
be "no back talk," only harsh silence.
The parallelism of such symbols in different institutional orders
may result from the fact that one institutional context is acknowl-
edged as the model for others. /By identification of teacher with
military officer, or of officer with {ather)-by studious imitation of
the higher prestige bearer's conduct-ithe diffusion of types of au-
thority and their concomitant symbols is effected. Which institu-
tional order sets the model for others and to what extent depends
upon special historical and social situations.JAt any rate, our anal-
ysis, to be complete, must proceed as a search for such "transmis-
sion belts of authority."
The rich symbols of medieval Europe were anchored as a sphere
of the religious order, and the institutional structure of that society
was in part dominated by religious institutions and in part by
decentralized hierarchies of knights bound by oaths to their feudal
superiors and their Christian emperor. Out of the religious order
and its symbols, the master images and preconceptions of a whole
society were elaborated. Symbolic elaborations which were thought
irreconcilable with those of the religious order were tabooed or
repressed. This anchorage of the institutions and the master sym-
bols of a society in the religious order has affected most philo-
sophical work in Western societies, and may still be seen in the
attempts of various symbol experts to !'reconcile" the symbols
of modern science and modern modes of living and dying with
subtilized and attenuated symbols and images of the Christian
religion. An order thus seeks to extend its symbols and publicize
them as applicable to all conduct. In their competition with other
agencies for the use of increased leisure time, modern religious
institutions have striven to publicize and adapt their symbols to
changing circumstances. Books have been written to show how
Jesus was after all a businessman in mentality and outlook, thus
attempting to adapt religious symbols to those of the dominant
economic order. On the other hand, an order may seek to hide
its sphere of symbols: a priesthood may hide its formulae and
doctrines as too esoteric and holy to be broadcast, wliile at the
same time developing an exoteric set of symbols for the laity.
;^04 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
We may note in passing that much of the symboHc materials of
the twentieth century are created for the complex equipment of the
communication industries, for radio, phonograph, television, and
movies. The movie actress does not play before an audience, but
before a small committee of visual and acoustic experts; the poet
reads, and the musician plays not before an audience of apprecia-
tive laymen and journalists, but before committees of recording
experts.
The distributed product, whether it is seen on the screen or
heard from a disk, is a performance that has been carefully se-
lected from a series of less flawless trials. The mass availability of
such performances by star actors, orchestras under star conductors,
and so on require the communication and amusement industries
to establish and market their products as "brands," to command
attention by the excellence of performance and reproduction stand-
ards. In fact, these items often gain ascendancy over the content
or message of the work of art itself. Interest in mass marketing also
promotes the selection of what is "safe"— the accepted and proved
work. The established work of art— that is, the noncontemporary
or the "classical"— stands in the center, and enjoyment of art is not
enjoyment of the unheard of and hitherto unseen, of the experi-
mental thrust and the eye opener, but of the acoustically stereo-
typed and soothing brand, in terms of which the recognition of
the composer, opus number, and star performer become conversa-
tionally prestigeful, and accordingly train for regressive listening.
The reduction of a Beethoven symphony or a Verdi opera to the
acoustic dimension of a living room, the photographic "blow up"
or enlargement of a pictorial detail, or the photographic reduction
of life size to pocket-book size, immerse twentieth-century men in
a great stream of mechanically reproduced visual and acoustic
images which tend to treat the cultural legacy of the ages as raw
material for industrial processing. The original work, torn from its
context and aura, tends to be swept away by the flood of its varied
reproductions. For this is the age of the mechanical reproduction
of art.
In the face of all this, the contemporary artist unless he turns
to "commercial art" (which is to say, the implementing of the
advertising interests of business or the propaganda interest of
political groups) is pushed to the sidelines. The more his work
uncompiomisingly expresses the agony of the sensitive individual,
SYMBOL SPHERES 2'^);^
the more it is felt to be shocking, perverse, or intellectually man-
nerist. Business advertising, however, like totalitarian propaganda,
flatters the escape-seeking, untutored masses by endorsing their
regressive nostalgia under the slogan, "the customer is right."
Language is the major key to an understanding of many problems
of both character and of social structure. We have seen, par-
ticularly in Chapter V, that it provides us with many clues to
the motivations of the person. In the present chapter, [we have
seen that language— conceived as a sphere of symbols— is necessary
to the operations of institutions. For the symbols used in institu-
tions co-ordinate the roles that compose them, and justify the
enactment of these roles by the members of the institutionJ Our
discussion has thus involved the various ways in which such master
symbols justify and sanction institutional authority and at the
same time motivate personal conduct in the economic and kinship,
the political and military and religious orders.
CHAPTER
X I
Stratification
and Institutional Orders
IN New York City some people taxi home at night from Madison
Avenue offices to Sutton Place apartments; others leave a factory
loft in Brooklyn and subway home to an East 'Harlem tenement.
In Detroit there is Grosse Pointe, with environs, but there is also
Hamtramck, without environs; and in a thousand small towns
people live on either side of the railroad track. In Moscow, lead-
ing party members ride cautiously in black cars along well-policed
avenues to well-policed suburbs; other people walk home from
factories to huddle in cramped apartments. And in the shadow of
swank Washington, D. C, apartment houses there are the dark
alley dwellings.
In almost any community in every nation there is a high and
a low, and in some societies, a big in-between.
If we go behind what we can thus casually observe and begin
to examine in detail the twenty-four-hour cycle of behavior and
experience, the twelve-month cycle, the life-long biographies of
people in various cities and nations, we will soon need to classify
the people and their behavior. Otherwise we cannot easily under-
stand our observations. We might well decide to make our classi-
fication in terms of valued things and experiences; to find out just
which people regularly expect to and do receive how many of the
available values, and in each case, why. Such classifications are
the basis of all work in stratification.
Whatever the value may be that most jieople seem to want,
some people get more of it than others, and some do not share
in it at all. The student of stratification is bent on understanding
the ranking of people with respect to such values, and in finding
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS I^Oy
out in what respects these ranks differ and why. Each rank or
stratum in a society may be viewed as a stratum by virtue of the
fact that all of its members have similar opportunities to get the
things and experiences that are valued: things like cars, steady
and high incomes, toys, or houses; experiences, like being given
respect, being educated to certain levels, or being treated kindly.
To belong to one stratum or another is to share with the other
people in this stratum similar advantages.
If, again, we go behind these strata of people having similar life-
chances, and begin to analyze each stratum and the reasons for
its formation and persistence, sooner or later we will come upon
at least four important keys to the whole phenomenon. We call
these "dimensions of stratification." Each provides a way by which
we can rank people in accordance with the specific opportunity
each has to obtain a given value. And all together, these dimen-
sions, if properly understood, enable us to account for the whole
range of these different opportunities. These four dimensions are
occupation, class, status, and power:
By an occupation we understand a set of activities pursued more
or less regularly as a major source of income.
Class situation, in its simplest objective sense, has to do with
the amount and source (property or work) of income as these
affect the chances of people to obtain other available values.
Status involves the successful realization of claims to prestige;
it refers to the distribution of deference in a society.
Pawer refers to the realization of one's will, even if this involves
the resistance of others.^
Each of these four "keys" may be related to our conception of
institutional orders and spheres, and in turn, to social structure.
In fact, these dimensions of stratification may be understood as
ways of focusing upon certain features of certain roles in quite
various institutional orders.
1 These definitions are loose fornuiUitions of Max Weber's terms. In the
course of tlie present chapter we shall make them more elaborate and
precise. See E. Shils and II. Goldhammer, "Types of Power and Status,"
Atnerican Journal of Sociology, September 1939, and C. Wright Mills, White
Collar: The American Middle Class (New York: Oxford, 1951), especially
Chapters 4, 13 and 15.
2o8 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
The conceptual relations of dimensions and orders are not, how-
ever, neatly "systematic"; class and occupation are, of course,
ways of referring to selected aspects of certain roles in the eco-
nomic order. But each may be deeply and intricately involved in
the other orders.
As a sphere (not an order), status may be based on, expressed
in terms of, and cashed in or realized in any order, and each aspect
of status may involve different institutional orders. Status is not
necessarily anchored in any order; it is often the shadow of them
all and always the shadow of one or the other. A man's status may
be based primarily on his military occupation but he may express
his status claims in the educational sphere, and cash in on these
claims in the political order; thus a general, on liis way to the
Presidency becomes a college president. The top positions of
N-arious institutional orders and occupational hierarchies may in-
creasingly be interchangeable— just as are the bottom, unskilled
roles. When social structures are in fluid change, status has less of
a chance to determine conduct; when society is, as it were, frozen,
status may become a major determinant.
As with status, so with power: all roles that are instituted, no
matter in which order, involve authoritative relations— the family
no less than the political, military, economic, and religious orders.
The power of a person thus depends on a great variety of possible
roles, in any one or more of the available institutional orders and
spheres.
The availability of the two schemes (institutional orders and
social strata) invites us to elaborate the very intricate range of pos-
sible relations that may exist among these dimensions of stratifica-
tion, as well as between them and the institutional orders char-
acterizing any concrete society.
4
1. Occupations
As a set of activities which provides a livelihood, occupations
are economic roles, part of the economic order. Yet these economic
roles may at the same time be part of any of the other orders. Any
role in any other that is "paid for" may be an occupation. Occupa-
tional roles may thus at once be oriented to a job market, providing
goods or services, and yet serve by their enactment the functions
of other than economic institutions. The civil servant as well as the
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS 3OQ
political boss are "gainfully occupied." The professional general and
the draftee fill occupations in the military order. The priest and the
minister pursue occupational roles instituted in the religious order
and paid for by religious devotees; and teaching is, of course, a
job in the educational sphere. Even in the kinship order, the
household servant, the private tutor, and the governess may be
included in the domestic circle. The "unpaid family labor" of chil-
dren and wives is an important borderline case, especially in many
small businesses and on farms.
From the individual's standpoint, occupational activities refer
to skills that are marketable. These skills range from arranging
mathematical symbols for $1,000 a day to arranging dirt with a
shovel for $1,000 a year.
From the standpoint of society, occupations as activities are
f mictions: they result in certain end products— various goods and
services— and are accordingly classified into industrial groups within
the economic order.
As specific activities, occupations thus ( 1 ) entail various types
and levels of skill with which roles are performed, and (2) their
exercise fulfills certain functions within a system of functional
specialization.
We speak of occupations only when (a) there is a division of
labor in which distinct, functional roles have been developed—
such as farmer, artisan, scribe, priest, warrior; (b) when a certain
regularity exists— an enduring linkage between the person and
what he does for a living, his "routine"; and (c) when what he
does is intended to win for him a regular income.
If an urban patrician of Rennaissance times once in a while made
a profitable deal, he was not necessarily a "merchant"; if a covetous
man "wins" even large sums of money at cards, he is not necessarily
a "professional gambler." A man who happens to save a drowning
man for the sake of winning a "reward" does not thereby become
a "lifeguard."
On the other hand, a gentleman who likes to spend his leisure
working at masonry (like Churchill) is not thereby a "bricklayer,"
nor is he a professional artist because he regularly plays the piano,
or paints pictures. A hobby is not an "occupation." This distinction
between the two does not reflect the "seriousness" v. the "lightness"
of the pursuit, for some men take their \ocations "lightly" and their
hobbies "seriously." Similarly, play— an acti\ ity enjoyed for its own
'^10 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
sake— may be taken quite seriously. Some men, in fact, may feel
a defeat in a game of chess more severely than defeat in their
work.
In industrial nations today the most publicly obvious strata con-
sist of members of similar occupations. However it has been and
may now be in other societies, in contemporary United States
occupations are the most ostensible and the most available "way
into" an understanding of stratification as a whole. For most peo-
ple spend the most alert hours of most of their days in occupational
work. What kind of work they do not only monopolizes their wake-
ful hours of adult life but sets what they can afford to buy; most
people who receive any direct income at all do so by virtLie of
some occupation.
As sources of income, occupations are thus connected with class
position. Since occupations also normally carry an expected quota
of prestige, on and off the job, they are relevant to status position.
They also involve certain degrees of power over other people, di-
rectly in terms of the job, and indirectly in other social areas.
Occupations are thus tied to class, status, and power as well as
to skill and function; to understand the occupations composing any
social stratum we must consider them in terms of each of these
interrelated dimensions. And we must understand how they limit
or even determine the noneconomic roles and activities open to
their occupants.
The most decisive occupational shift in the twentieth century
has been the decline of the independent entrepreneur (the "old
middle class") and the rise of the salaried employee (the "new mid-
dle class"). During the last two American generations the old
middle class has declined from 33 to 20 per cent of the total
occupied, the new middle class has bounded from 6 to 25 per cent,
while the wage workers have leveled off, in fact declining from
61 to 55 per cent. In the course of the following remarks we will
pay brief attention by way of illustration to these three occupational
levels in the United States.
2. Class Structure
Classes are anchored, by source and amount of wealth, to the
property institutions and occupational roles of the economic order.
But the laws of property are part of the political order of a society
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS ;^11
and the income from work may be, as we have seen, a feature of
occupational roles in any order. Property classes could not exist
solely in term.s of economic institutions; they are facts of a political
economy. The "bourgeoisie" and the "proletariat" are social cate-
gories corresponding with the economic categories of "entrepre-
neur" and "wage worker." Moreover, as with occupations, belong-
ing to one class or to another may be a prerequisite or a tacit con-
dition for the assumption of selected roles in other orders. The unit
of the property class is the family and "the firm" rather than the
individual; wealth and family coherence are often, as in latter-day
capitalism, most intimately related.
Even the world religions, especially their economically relevant
ethics, are decisively related, in origin and development, to specific
strata. As Max Weber has pointed out,- Confucianism was classi-
cally the status ethic of the mandarin stratum, of men educated in
literary and secular rationalism, although their "religion" pro-
foundly influenced the styles of life of other strata. Early Hindu-
ism was carried hereditarily by a caste of literati, the Brahmans,
who constituted the stable reference group for all status stratifica-
tion in their society; whereas Buddhism was carried forth by
migratory begging monks, and Islam, during its earliest period,
by "a knight order of disciplined crusaders." Since the exile, Juda-
ism has been carried by marginal strata of urban plebeians, and
led by intellectuals trained in literatiue and ritual. Christianity,
beginning as a doctrine of itinerant journeymen which spread in
ancient cities, only slowly invaded rural society. "Paysan," "peas-
ant," and "villain" bespeak of the Christian burgher's disdain for
the rustic pagan and villager.
The specific combinations of strata which have embraced reli-
gious creeds are by no means accidental, and every change in the
socially decisive strata has been of importance for every religion.
It is well known that in twentieth-century America the members
of various Christian denominations are recruited along class and
status lines: Episcopalians and Presbyterians tend to be upper class;
Unitarians and Lutherans middle class; revivalist sects, Holy
Rollers, Jehovah's Witnesses, lower class. Churches characterized
by crowd ecstasy and euphoria seem typical of lower-class groups;
-See Chapter IX: Institutional Orders and Social Controls, II, Section 2:
Characteristics of the World Religions.
S12 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
churches emphasizing ritual observances, of higher-class groups.
Shintoism is a cult for a warrior nobility. American Catholicism
now combines upper and lower classes— the recruitment of high-
class persons to augment the urban plebeian Catholics is a recent
trend of note.
In the United States today, as in most advanced industrial coun-
tries, occupation rather than property is the source of income
for most of those who receive any direct income. The possibilities
of selling their services in various labor markets, rather than of
profitably buying and selling their property and its yields, now de-
termine the life-chances of over four-fifths of the American people.
All the things money can buy and many that men dream about
are theirs by virtue of occupational level. In these occupations men
work for someone else on someone else's property. This is the
clue to many differences between the older, nineteenth-century
American world of the small propertied entrepreneur and the occu-
pational structure of the new society. If the old middle class of
free enterprisers once fought big properties in the name of small
properties, the new middle class of white-collar employees, like
the wage workers in latter-day capitalism, has been, from the
beginning, dependent upon large properties for job security.
Wage workers in the factory and on the farm are on the property-
less bottom of the occupational structure, depending upon the
equipment owned by others, earning wages for the time they spend
at work. In terms of property, the white-collar people are not "in
between "capital and labor; they are in exactly the same property-
class position as the wage workers. They have no direct financial
tie to the means of work, much less any legal claims upon the
proceeds from property. Like factory workers— and day laborers
for that matter— they work for those who do own such means of
livelihood, or for public agencies.
Yet if bookkeepers and coal miners, insurance agents and farm
laborers, doctors in a clinic and crane operators in an open pit
have this condition in common, certainly their class situations are
not the same. To understand the variety of modern class positions
we must go beyond the common fact of source of income and
consider as well the amount of income.
In terms of property, white-collar people in America are in the
same position as wage workers; in terms of occupational income
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS ;2i:^
they are "somewhere in the middle." Once they were considerably
above the wage workers; they have become less so; in the middle
of the century they still have an edge, but, rather than adding
new income distinctions within the new middle-class group, the
o\er-all rise in incomes is making the new middle a more homoge-
neous income group. Characteristically, the income pyramids of
white-collar employees and wage workers overlap. Thus, the in-
comes of skilled miners and die cutters considerably exceed those
of schoolteachers and salesladies.-^
Distributions of property and income are important economically
because, if they are not wide enough, piuchasing power may not
be sufficient to take up the production that is possible or desirable.
Such distributions are also important because they underpin the
class structure and thus the chances of the various ranks of the
people to obtain desired values. Everything from the chance to
stay alive during the first year after birth to the chance to view
fine art, the chance to remain healthy and grow tall, and if sick to
get well again quickly, the chance to avoid becoming a juvenile
delinquent— and very crucially, the chance to complete an inter-
mediary or higher educational grade— these are the chances that
are crucially influenced by one's position in the class structure of
a modern society.
These chances are factual probabilities of the class structure. It
does not follow from such facts that people are aware of them or
in similar class situations will necessarily become conscious of them-
selves as a class or come to feel that they belong together. Nor
does it follow that they will necessarily become aware of any like
interests that may objectively be attributed to their condition as
rationally expedient. Nor need they define like interests as common
interests or organize to pursue them in a movement or in a party.
Nor does it follow that they will necessarily become antagonistic
to people in other class situations and struggle with them. All
these— class consciousness and awareness of common interests, or-
ganizations and class struggle— have existed in various times and
places and, in various forms, do now exist as mental and political
fact. But they do not follow logically or historically from the
objective fact of class structure. Additional factors have to be
^ On compensation by "honors" ratlier than "wages," on "pecuniary" t.
"psychic income," see Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter lo.
^1^^ SOCIAL STRUCTURE
adduced to explain why people become or do not become class
conscious, that is, raise demands and share articulate hopes and
fears in response to special class situations.
There are many reasons for lack of class consciousness. ( i ) Class
situations are not always transparent to the people in them. Lower-
class people, for example, may live in a widely dispersed way and
thus lack the opportunity to come together in any solidarity. (2)
They may also lack leadership capable of articulating their griev-
ances. (3) Issues other than those of class may hold the attention
and preoccupy the minds of people. (4) We should also remember
that what is conceptually available to modern men, trained in
economic thoughtways, was not so available to people of past ages.
(5) Most people, in fact, tend to identify with "their betters":
lower groups see themselves as their educated and wealthy supe-
riors see them, and frequently there emerges socially split images
among groups which co-operate in functionally different positions
in feudal manor, artisan's shop, and factory. (6) Many people may
hold certain class situations only in periods of social and economic
expansion, migrations, and vertical mobility. Those who rise suc-
cessfully by finding themselves in advantageous positions (for in-
stance, around 1900, in the oil, the motion picture, and the electrical
industries) are apt to ascribe their success not to "good luck," or
to "circumstance" but to their intelligence, foresight, and personal
excellence, with the concomitant implication that others lack com-
parable traits. They consider good fortune as compensation for
excellence and, as did the successful of the ancient world, consider
themselves as the "darlings of the gods." The implication of this
view for the disadvantaged requires no elaboration.
In any case, whether or not class consciousness and class action
arise from class situations is a matter of empirical study. The de-
velopment of interest organizations along class lines is one of the
outstanding trends of twentieth-century society. In all industrial-
ized nations labor has developed trade union organizations and co-
operatives, and under special conditions, labor parties. Farmers are
organized in a "farm bloc," and industrialists are organized in
chambers of commerce and join forces in trade associations and
the NAM.
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS ;^1$
3. The Status Sphere
Prestige involves at least two persons: one to claim it and an-
other to honor the claim. The bases on which various people raise
prestige claims, and the reasons others honor these claims, include
property and descent, occupation and education, income and power
—in fact, almost anything that may invidiously distinguish one per-
son from another. In the status system of a society these claims are
organized as rules and expectations governing those who success-
fully claim prestige, from whom, in what ways, and on what basis.
The level of self-esteem enjoyed by given individuals is more or
less set by this status system.
There are, thus, six items to which we must pay attention: From
the claimant's side: (i) the status claim, (2) the way in which
this claim is raised or expressed, (3) the basis on which the claim
is raised. And correspondingly from the bestower's side: (4) the
status bestowal or deference given, (5) the way in which these
deferences are given, (6) the basis of the bestowal, which may
or may not be the same as the basis on which the claim is raised.
An extraordinary range of social phenomena are pointed to by
these terms.
Claims for prestige are expressed in all those mannerisms, con-
ventions, and ways of consumption that make up the styles of life
characterizing people on various status levels. The "things that
are done" and the "things that just aren't done" are the status
conventions of different strata. Members of higher status groups
may dress in distinct ways, follow "fashions" in varying tempi and
regularities, eat and drink at special times and exclusive places
in select society. In varying degrees, they \'alue the elegant appear-
ance and specific modes of address, have dinner together, and are
glad to see their sons and daughters intermarry. From the point of
\'iew of status, the funeral, as a ritual procession, is an indication
of prestige, as is the tombstone, the greeting card, the seating
plan at dinner or the opera. "Society" in American cities, debutante
systems, the management of philanthropic activities, the social
register and the Almanach de Gotha— noble titles and heraldic em-
blems—reflect and often control the status activities of upper circles,
where exclusiveness, distance, coldness, condescending benevo-
lence towards outsiders often prevail.
2l6 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
Head roles in any institution may be the basis of status claims,
and any order may become the social area in which these claims
are realized. We can conceive of a society in which status rests
upon economic class position and in which the economic order is
dominant in such a way that status claims based on economic
class are successfully raised in every order. But we can also imagine
a society in which status is anchored in the military order, so that
the person's role in that order determines his chance successfully to
realize status claims in all, or at least in most, of the other orders.
Thus the military role may be a prerequisite to honorific status
in other publicly significant roles.
Of course, men usually enact roles in several orders and hence
their general position rests on the combinations of roles they enact.
Claims for prestige and the bestowal of prestige are often based
on birth into given types of kinship institutions. The Negro child,
irrespective of individual "achievement," will not receive the de-
ference which the white child may successfully claim. The immi-
grant, especially a member of a recent mass immigration, will not
be as likely to receive the deference given the "Old American,"
immigrant groups and families being generally stratified according
to how long they and their forebears have been in America. Among
the native-born white of native parentage, certain "Old Families"
receive more deference than do other families. In each case— race,
nationality, and family— prestige is based on, or at least limited by,
descent, which is perhaps most obviously a basis of prestige at the
top and the bottom of the social ladder. European royalty and
rigidly excluded racial minorities represent the zenith and nadir
of status by birth.
Upper-class position typically carries great prestige, all the more
so if the source of money is property. Yet, even if the possession
of wealth in modern industrial societies leads to increased prestige,
rich men who are fresh from lower-class levels may experience
difficulty in "buying their way" into upper-status circles. In the
southern states, in fact, impoverished descendants of once high-
level old families receive more deference from more people than
do wealthy men who lack appropriate grandparents. The kinship
may thus overshadow the economic order. The facts of the nouveau
riche (high class without high prestige) and of the broken-down
aristocrat (high prestige without high class) refute the complete
identification of upper-prestige and upper-class position, even
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS 327
though, in the course of time, the broken-down aristocrat becomes
simply broken-down, and the son of the noiiveau riche becomes a
man of "clean, old wealth."
The possession of wealth also allows the purchase of an environ-
ment which in due course will lead to the development of these
"intrinsic" qualities in individuals and in families that are required
for higher prestige. When we say that American prestige has been
fluid, one thing we mean is that high economic-class position has
led rather quickly to high prestige, and that kinship descent has not
been of equal importance to economic position. A feudal aristoc-
racy, based on old property and long descent, has not existed here.
Veblen's -theory ' was focused primarily upon the post-Civil War
periQd_Jn_the_Lhiitccl States and the expressions of prestige claims
raised in lavish consumption by the noiiveau riche of railroads,
steel, and pork. In a democratic society equipped with mass media
we are not surprised to find that many images of upper-status
types are diffused. It is also well known that in contrast with feudal
elites the American upper classes have not shied from publicity.
Society columns and obituary pages chronicle the activities and
connections of conspicuous members of the high-status groups.
The prestige of the middle strata in America is based on many
other principles than descent and property. The shift to a society
of employees has made occupation and the educational sphere
crucially important. Insofar as occupation determines the level of
income, and different styles of life require different income levels,
occupation limits the style of life. In a more direct way, different
occupations require different levels and types of education, and
education also limits the style of life and thus the status success-
fully claimed.
Some occupations are reserved for members of upper-status
levels, others are "beneath their honor." In some societies, in fact,
having no work to do brings the highest prestige; prestige being
an aspect of property class, the female dependents of high class
husbands becoming specialists in the display of expensive idleness.
But only when those who do not need to work have more income
than those who must, is idleness likely to yield prestige. When
work is necessary but not available, "leisure" means unemployment,
•* See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of tlic Leisure Class (New York: Viking,
1924)-
^l8 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
which inay-Jbring disgrace. And income from property does not al-
ways entail more prestige than income from work; the amount and
the ways the income is used may be more important than its
sQurce. Thus the small rentier does not enjoy an esteem equal
to that of a highly-paid doctor. Status attaches to the terms for
income, to its source and timing of payment. Socially the same
number of dollars may mean different things when they are re-
ceived as "rent" or "interest," as "royalties" or "fees," as "stipends"
or "salaries," as "wages" or as "insurance benefits." Men striving
for status may prefer smaller salaries to higher wages, meager
royalties to substantial profits, an honorific stipend to a large bonus.
Among the employed those occupations which pay more, and
which presumably involve more mental activities and entail power
to supervise others, seem to place people on higher prestige levels.
But sheer power does not always lend prestige: the political boss
renounces public prestige— except among his machine members— for
power; constitutional monarchs, on the other hand, retain and pos-
sibly gain public prestige but lose political power. In offices and
factories, skilled foremen and office supervisors expect and typically
receive an esteem which lifts them above unskilled workers and
typists. But the policeman's power to direct street masses does
not bring prestige, except among badly frightened drivers and
little boys.
The type of education, as well as the amount, is an important
basis of prestige; "finishing" schools and "prep" schools turn out
ladies and gentlemen fit to represent their class by styles of life
which, in some circles, guarantee deference. In other circles the
amount of intellectual skill acquired through education is a key
point for estimation. Yet skill alone is not as uniform a basis for
prestige as is skill connected with highly esteemed occupations.
All the variables which underpin status— descent, skill (on the
basis of education and/or experience), biological age, seniority
(of residence, of membership in associations), sex, beauty, wealth,
and authority— may be quite variously combined and usually in
typical ways. These combinations may be and often are quite
intricate. For example, the cross-tabulation of descent, wealth, and
skill alone logically yields the following types: where wealth and
high birth is combined with skill we may find, for example, the
experienced statesmanship of a Churchill; but where there is
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS 329
wealth and high birth but no skill, perhaps a publicized heiress,
or an hereditary successor to throne. The self-made man of the
nineteenth century in the United States had wealth and skill but
low birth; the ignorant Negro woman who suddenly wins the
sweepstakes, has wealth, but low birth and no skill.
Sir Walter Scott, a heavily indebted nobleman who tlid well as
a writer, had no wealth but both high birth and high skill. And
famous artists, such as Beethoven, or famous scholars such as
Albert Einstein, do not have wealth or high birth, but excel in
-skill. The Russian refugee nobleman who becomes a waiter in a
Paris hotel lacks both wealth and skill although he has high birth.
Finally, the Jewish Luftmensch,^ the hobo, the tramp, or the Negro
farmhand have no wealth, no birth status, and no skill.
Such a panorama may serve to indicate the manner in which one
raises questions and classifies observations about the status sphere
of given social structures.
We cannot take for granted that to claim prestige is automatically
^to recei\e it. Status conduct is not so harmonious. The status
claimant may in the eyes of others "overstate" his "true" worth,
may be considered "conceited." If he understates it, he may be
considered "diffident" or "humble." The conceited status claimant
may of course receive the deference he claims, but it is likely to be
"spurious deference" for "spurious claims." His conceit in fact, is
often strengthened by flattery, sometimes to the point of mega-
lomania, as with despots in a context of priestly or courtier byzan-
tinism or organized mass adulation.
In cases of mistaken judgment people may give genuine defer-
ence on the basis of spurious or pretended claims; there are the
false Messiahs, the false prophets, the false princes, and the profes-
sional charlatans.*^
Spurious deference for misconstrued claims may be illustrated
by referring to the mock coronation of Christ as "the King of the
Jews" with the crown of thorns. Genuine respect for genuine claims
needs no particular elaboration.
5 A man without an occupation, fonnerly found among Eastern European
Jews.
•^ On professional charlatans, see Crete de Francesco, The Power of the
Charlatan (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939).
220 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
False humility is often transparent as a technique for eliciting
deference. We call it "fishing." The bid for good will, with which
speakers often open their talks, is often no more than thinly veiled
flattery of the audience. Once upon a time kings were flattered;
today more often "the people" are. To be sure, such flattery of
the people goes hand in hand with open disdain for the European
"masses" or the American "suckers." Hitler proved highly success-
ful in allocating to German Gentiles the rhetorical certificate of
presumably high birth and ancestral background by calling them
each and every one "Nordics."
Thus the extent to which claims for prestige are honored, and
by whom they are honored, varies widely. Some of those from
whom an individual claims prestige may honor his claims, others
may not; some deferences that are given may express genuine
feelings of esteem; others may be expedient strategies for ulterior
ends. A society may, in fact, contain many hierarchies of prestige,
each with its own typical bases and areas of bestowal; or one
hierarchy in which e\'eryone uniformly "knows his place" and is
always in it. It is in the latter that prestige groups are most likely
to be uniform and continuous.
Imagine a society in which everyone's prestige is clearly set
and stable; every man's claims for prestige are balanced by the
deference he receives, and both his expression of claims and the
ways these claims are honored by others are set forth in understood
stereotypes. Moreover, the bases of the claims coincide with the
reasons they are honored; those who claim prestige on the specific
basis of property or birth are honored because of their property
or birth. So the exact volume and types of deference expected be-
tween any two individuals are always known, expected, and given;
and each individual's level and type of self-esteem are steady
features of his inner life.
Now imagine the opposite society, in which prestige is highly
unstable and ambivalent: the individual's claims are not usually
honored by others. The ways in which claims are expressed are
not understood or acknowledged by those from whom deference
is expected, and when others do bestow prestige, they do so un-
clearly. One man claims prestige on the basis of his income, but
even if he is given prestige it is not because of his income but
rather, for example, because of his education and appearance. All
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS ^^1
the controlling devices by which the volume and type of deference
might be directed are out of joint or simply do not exist. So the
prestige system is no system but a maze of misunderstanding, of
sudden frustration and sudden indulgence, and the individual, as
his self-esteem fluctuates, is under strain and full of anxiety.
American society in the middle of the twentieth century does
not fit either of these projections absolutely, but it seems fairly
clear that it is closer to the unstable and ambivalent model. This
is not to say that there is no prestige system in the United States;
given occupational groupings, even though caught in status ambiv-
alence, do enjoy typical levels of prestige. It is to say, however,
that the enjoyment of prestige is often disturbed and uneasy,
that the bases of prestige, the expressions of prestige claims, and
the ways these claims are honored are now subject to great strain,
a strain which often tlirows ambitious men and women into a
\ irtvial status panic.
As with income, so with prestige: white-collar groups in the
United States are differentiated socially, perhaps more decisively
than wage workers and entrepreneurs. Wage earners certainly do
form an income pyramid and a prestige gradation, as do entrepre-
neurs and rentiers; but the new middle class, in terms of income
and prestige, is a superimposed pyramid, reaching from almost tlie
bottom of the first to almost the top of the second.
People in white-collar occupations claim higher prestige than
wage workers, and, as a general rule, can cash in their claims with
wage workers as well as with the anonymous public. This fact
has been seized upon, with much justification, as the defining
characteristic of the white-collar strata, and although there are
definite indications in the United States of a decline in their pres-
tige, still, on a nationwide basis, the majority of even the lower
white-collar employees— office workers and salespeople— enjoy a
middle prestige place.
The historic bases of the white-collar employees' prestige, apart
from superior income, have included ( i ) the similarity of their
place and t>'pe of work to those of the old middle classes which
has permitted them to borrow prestige. (2) As their relations with
entrepreneur and with esteemed customer have become more im-
personal, they have borrowed prestige from the management and
the firm itself, and in exclusive stores, from wealthy patrons.
322 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
(3) The stylization of their appearance, in particular the fact
that most white-collar jobs have permitted the wearing of street
clothes on the job, has also figured in their prestige claims, as have
(4) the skills required in most white-collar jobs, and in many of
them the variety of operations performed and the degree of au-
tonomy exercised in deciding work procedures. Furthermore, (5)
the time taken to learn these skills and (6) the way in which they
have been acquired by formal education and by close contact with
the higher-ups in charge has been important. (7) White-collar em-
ployees have "monopolized" high school education— even in 1940
they had completed twelve grades to the eight grades for wage
workers and entrepreneurs. They have also (8) enjoyed statiis
by descent: in terms of race, Negro white-collar employees exist
only in isolated instances— and, more importantly, in terms of
nativity, in 1930 only about 9 per cent of white-collar workers, but
16 per cent of free enterprisers and 21 per cent of wage workers
were foreign born. Finally, as an underlying fact, the limited size
of the white-collar group, compared to wage workers, has led to
successful claims to greater prestige.
4. Class and Status
Statiisrnay be said to "overlay" class structures. Each has its
peculiarities and its relative autonomy, yet the first is dependent
upon the second as a conditioning and limiting factor. One of the
great perspectives of social thinking has been the formulation of
the transition from feudalism to capitalism in terms of the shift
from "status" to "contract," or from "feudal estates" to "class so-
ciety." One of the aspects noted in this formulation is that, since
the great middle-class revolutions, legally privileged and under-
privileged estates of feudalism and absolutism have been leveled
down, for "equality before the law" meant doing away with legal
status barriers. This of course does not mean the doing away with
status groups, nor with all grounds upon which status distinctions
rest. But it does mean that status dimensions are more closely tied
to the economic order and that class dynamics are automatically
transformed into status dynamics.
The leading groups devoted to military, political, juridical, and
religious pursuits stand out in all societies. So among top status
groups are found warriors and priests, kings, lords, and gentlemen.
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS ^^2;^
To these have been added the "merchant princes" and "oil kings" as
well as "lumber kings," "railroad czars"— in short, as Franklin D.
Roosevelt called them, "the economic royalists." A variety of status
groups may emerge on the basis of one class. Upper-class youths
may thus be divided into "the smart set" and "the steady con-
servative set." The smart set may "sow their wild oats," take up
eccentric faddish behavior, and seemingly break with the old ways
of their steady parents, who may smilingly remember their own
"crazy days," and rely on their wellborn children to "find their
way" back. The steady set may remain sober in mind and body,
take early to correct family routine, and play a quiet game of cards
with a moderate drink. Among working classes, one set of men
may devote themselves to labor union activities and possibly to
politics; they may accordingly feel different from and superior
to workers who are nothing but sports fans and movie addicts.
When Jewish traditions and cosmopolitan milieu combine, a special
group as, for example, the Garment Workers Unions of the Eastern
United States may create cultural activities of all sorts wliich bring
special and general public prestige. But regardless of status prolifer-
ation, any basic change in class position usually does exert its
restrictixe or its facilitating influence. If mass unemployment dur-
ing a world depression reduces income levels, heightens feelings of
insecurity, intensifies competition for jobs, reduces family savings
and earnings— then status differentiation among the lower classes
is minimized, there is no money for educational pursuits and mass
luxuries, for leisure-time hobbies, and membership in many organi-
zations.
Industrialization and applied science have increased man's mas-
tery of nature to a previously undreamt extent, but they have
also made mankind interdependent, and dependent upon the func-
tioning of the world economy as a sort of "second nature." Ac-
cordingh', concern with economic life has become public and the
control of strategic economic institutions has gi\'en rise to public
distinction. Captains of industry have thus attained high prestige
positions. The Kaiser was behind the times when he mocked at
Mr. Lipton as a "tea merchant" who did not quite qualify for royal
friendship. On the other hand, he did seek to "ennoble" Alfred
Krupp, the cannon king of the Ruhr, and it was possibly a sign
of the times that Krupp felt a noble title could add nothing to
the prestige of his name, based on his steel plant and its output.
324 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
Power over the political and military, the economic and the
religious community brings prestige to those who legitimately
make or pronounce the key decisions, or to those to whom the
key decisions are ascribed by the community. Such power is today
exercised at the tops of large-scale, far-flung, and steeply graded
organizations of government, army, church, and business. All the
staff members of such organizations are likely to enjoy prestige,
whatever prestige the world at large gives to the respective or-
ganizations. When the state is highly sentimentalized— usually be-
cause the church has been closely allied to state power and the
prince once stood at the head of the church— a religious halo is
bestowed upon "the state" and upon all who serve it. And when the
ecclesiastic structure is the one stable and ancient organization
in a history of changing state constitutions, then ecclesiastic pres-
tige may overshadow that of the state, and a cardinal or "prince of
the church," holding life-long tenure of office, may rank higher
than an ephemeral president of a republic. Big power carries in its
train big prestige. Powerful nation-states in the long run get
greater prestige for their members than do small states. Thus the
American passport secures to its bearer greater respect in the
world than the Hungarian passport.
And yet this statement must be qualified, for prestige based
purely on power may in fact rest on "fear" rather than on sympa-
thetic respect. Power as such may be sought as an end by many
men, but most men sooner or later will ask, power for what? They
will not accept power as an ultimate end, and whenever power is
"naked" it is likely to be questioned as "abusive." In order to be
respected, power must be disguised as estimable ends; it must
be thought to serve the alleged ends of justice and freedom and
other aspirations. It must be sanctioned and implemented by cre-
denda and miranda in order to be admired.^ Only then will it
exercise its "spell" over man. Such a spell may be elaborated by
specialists, and when the elaborated values are widely shared we
may speak of "cultural prestige." Power and culture prestige com-
bined fascinate man and secure the glory of power, or "majesty."
" See Chapter XIV: The Sociology of Leadership. Cf. C. E. Merriam, Folit-
ical Power (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1950), Chapter IV.
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS 325
5. The Status Sphere and Personality Types
Of all the dimensions of stratification, status seems the most
directly relevant to the psychology of the person. This is not of
course to say that it is the most important; in fact it is so often
dependent upon other roles in various orders, and upon other
dimensions of stratification, that in most causal sequences status
must be seen as a dependent variable. Nevertheless, in its psycho-
logical effects and meanings it is "close up" to the person. For
the level of self-esteem is rather immediately a function of status
position, and the type of self-image as well as styles of conduct
defining types of persons may often be most readily understood
in terms of the status spheres.
We shall illustrate these general points by a typology of person-
alities among minority group members. We choose this area be-
cause racial and ethnic "minorities," in our scheme,^ are primarily
status phenomena, and, moreover, status phenomena of an extreme
enough character to permit rather sharp disclosure of the me-
chanics of the status sphere as they affect character structure.
A minority group, as we shall use the term, refers to a status
group based on descent, whose members are denied status equality
with nonminority people, irrespective of individual achievements.
In the United States, the Negro, the Jew, and immigrants of various
nationality extractions find themselves in this position. There are
of course many differences between these varied minorities: Negro
status is no mere matter of racial descent, but represents the harsh
legacy of slavery; the immigrant's, of nationality origin and the
length of time his kinsliip group has resided in this country; the
Jew's status as a Jew is often of mixed basis, including religious,
nationality, and ethnic factors.
The major historical basis of status differences between Jew
and Gentile is in the religious order. Insofar as civic, military, and
political functions required the Christian oath, Jews did not qual-
ify; and in a complementary way, on religious grounds, since the
days of the Babylonian exile, the Jewish people have segregated
themselves from their social surroundings by rituals of food, cos-
tume, circumcision, and holiday. In early periods, all this meant
conventional and often legal definitions of Jewish status and of
^26 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
Jewish styles of life. In the economic order, for example, Jewry
has been excluded from all esteemed and established occupations,
which the dominant society monopolized. In twentieth-century
America, however, many of these occupations are now once more
open to Jews, and in addition, the religious and especially the
ritualist conduct of Jews has broken down. So, the possibilities
for many quite complicated marginal situations for Jews now exist
in the status sphere of American society.
The status of any minority is revealed by their exclusion from
specific occupations, educational opportimities, social clubs, pre-
ferred residential areas, as well as by resistance to their inter-
marriage with members of the majority society. It is in this situa-
tion that the minority child comes to awareness of his status. In
time, he also comes to experience its conflict with majority groups
as his conflict— as others significant to him reveal hostile stereotypes
based on it. „ Finally, he attempts to come to terms with the
status situation in which he finds himself; and in the process he is
organized into one of several types of personality."Whatever traits
he has as a mature person of minority status will be a product of
his status situation and of his cumulative reactions to it and inter-
actions with it.
The points in terms of which personality types may be con-
structed are, first, the groups in terms of which the minority group
man or woman seeks status— his own minority group or the ma-
jority society; and the status symbols by means of which he strives
to claim status— again, those of his minority group or those of the
majority society. In terms of these two points, we can gain a view
of four types:
The Symbols and The Groups in Which Status Is Sought
Styles by Which in his own in the majority
Status Is Sought minority society
Of His Own Minority I II
Of the Majority Society III IV
Within each of these four situations there are many possible
varieties and types of men and women. Perhaps most Jews in the
United States, for example, are in none of these situations: they
seek status among both groups and with the symbols of both.
Still, they are sociologically differentiated by means of the propor-
tion of their relations and roles that are based on Jewish or on
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS ;^2J
Gentile symbols, and which involve Jewish or Gentile contexts.
The compromises are many and result in a range of types from
the utterly bewildered, caught in bitter conflicts of self-esteem
and guilt, through the embittered and disillusioned, to those who
feel secure in strict segregation.
In situation I, in which status is sought among ones minority
by means of minority group symbols, we find the ultraorthodox
Jew, whose time is spent in a ghetto-like world, who withdraws
from and minimizes all contacts with the outside, and has no sig-
nificant others among Gentiles. Or, he may be a middleman who
confines his contacts with Gentiles to strictly segmental business
relations; unlike the ultraorthodox, he faces the two worlds but
chooses the Jewish as his status area. Socially and psychologically
he is unavailable to outgroups.
In situation II we find those personality types that have been
formed by identification with Jewry as a whole and who seek
status from this identification, but among Gentiles. One finds here
resentful, militant anti-Gentiles who in extreme cases may accu-
rately be called Jewish chauvinists. For they ascribe all Jewish
ills to the anti-Semitic Gentiles. There is also "the crusader" who is
understandably touchy and "out to see that Jewish toes are not
stepped on"; and on higher ethical and intellectual planes there is
the individual who seeks to build up the culture of his people and
their prestige by fruitfully using their cultural symbols in a Gentile
world.
In situation III, we find those "emancipated Jews" who use the
status symbols of the larger society in order to gain status among
their own minority group. In status situation IV are those Jews
who successfully escape Jewish status by using Gentile symbols
and styles among Gentile groups. Here overreaction is not infre-
quent; on the one hand, there is "the social climber" who by his
conspicuous economic success and sometimes fawning conduct
would buy the respect of the majority community and, on the
other hand, "the lOo per cent American" who is conspicuously
attached in a kind of superloyalty to Gentile ideals and status sym-
bols. And in the extreme, there is the person who chooses not to
be a Jew, and who, in completely successful cases, is not a minor-
ity type of personality at all; he has left not only minority status
but its marginality as well.
228 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
6. Power
By definition, all roles that are instituted, no matter in what
institutional order, involve distributions of power. But the power
dimensions of a social structure involve the power relations of
roles in one order with the roles in another order. The power
attendant upon one's role in the religious order may not be con-
fined to the religious order. In fact, religious bodies frequently
serve as frame organizations, at least for the kinship relations of
their members. Where the religious order is dominant among or-^
ders, and hence "theocracy" exists, one's religious role will ramify
into all other orders, even determining effective power level in
economic or political or educational institutions. This matter of
the "dominance" of orders will be systematically discussed in the
following chapter.®
The power position of institutions and individuals typically de-
pends upon factors of class, status, and occupation, often in intri-
cate interrelation.
Some occupations involve formal authority and de facto power
over other people in the actual course of their work; and certain
occupations by virtue of their relations to institutions of property
as well as the typical income they afi^ord, may lend social power
even outside the job area. Members of other occupations are super-
vised by other employees, many of them contingent of a man-
agerial cadre. They are the assistants of authority: the power they
exercise is a derived power, but they do exercise it.
Entrepreneurial classes, through investment decisions and the
right "to hire and fire," hold power over job markets and com-
modity markets, directly and indirectly. They may also support
power, because of their property, over the state, especially the
state that is saddled with internal or external debts and in need
of good credit standing in the business world. As Franz Neumann
has neatly indicated, each of the powers of property may be
organized for execution, in employer's association, cartel, trust,
and pressure group. From the underside of the property situation,
propertyless wage workers may have trade unions and consumers'
co-ops which may contend for "more" or for "co-determination"
8 See Chapter XII: The Unity of Social Structures.
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS 329
in a struggle with the organized powers of property on labor and
commodity markets.
When we speak of the power of classes, occupations, and status
groups, however, we usually refer more or less specifically to
political power. This means the power of such groups to influence
or to determine the policies and activities of the state. Direct means
of exercising such power, and signs of its existence, are organiza-
tions that either are composed of members of certain strata or act
in behalf of their interests, or both. During wartime, even more
directly, business executives fill positions in the army and other
state agencies, from which they decide, within the law, what the
government shall buy from whom at "cost plus." The power of
various strata often implies a political willfulness, a "class-con-
sciousness" on the part of members of these strata. But not always:
there can be, as in the case of "unorganized, grimibling workers,"
a common mentality among those in common strata without or-
ganizations. And there can be, as with some "pressure groups," an
organization defining and representing the interests of those in
similar situations without any single purpose or attitude being
shared by those represented.
The accumulation of political power by any stratum is generally
dependent upon some four factors: will and purpose, objective
conditions or opportunities, the state of organization, and the poli-
tical skill of leaders. Opportunity is limited by the group's struc-
tural positions, which is to say, its functional position as a stratum
in the institutional stnicture.
New York harbor pilots or Manhattan elevator boys— not to
mention miners, steel workers, and railroad workers— hold in hand
more crucial links in the multiple chains of interdependent func-
tions that constitute modern society than do musicians, barbers,
textile workers, or small-scale farmers. Obviously, the functional
place of workers is not simply a question of skill: to push the
button of an elevator and count the floors requires less skill than
to play the violin or to operate a barbershop. The question is:
What links in the interlocking chains of acti\ity are broken by the
group's withdrawal of effort? Strikes in the mining or steel indus-
tries are automatically national issues rather than local events.
Similarly, coal and steel prices are of national concern, because
coal and steel "go into everything" and thus affect the cost of a
wide range of commodities. It is during critical strikes and cost-
S30 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
price-profit decisions that fonnally or legally "private" decisions
are revealed to the public as substantively "public" in nature and
consequence. Bargaining strength and veto power are wielded by
groups and leaders in such command positions. Often the height
and significance of such positions become transparent to those
who hold them— and to the public— only in crisis. Then men on
all sides learn "the facts of life."
The best of opportunity, however, will be lost without the will
and capacity to make the most of it. This is dependent upon the
group's sense of cohesion, its consciousness and definition of com-
mon interests and objectives, and the practicability and skill of
realizing them. In these matters the few have an advantage over
the many. Both functional position and consciousness interplay
with organization and skill; organization and skill, in turn,
strengthen or weaken consciousness and are made politically rele-
vant by the functions they perform.
When social structures change rapidly, because of technological
or economic shifts, military conquests, or migrations, then those
established status positions which are remote from the centers of
power are displaced by those that are closely anchored to the
sources of power. During warfare, for example, the status of mili-
tary pursuits is enhanced and with it that of youth: "In the clang
and clash of arms, the muses are silent." When he conquered
Italy, Napoleon was only twenty-eight years of age. The turn-
over of generals during World War II— in Germany, the Soviet
Union, and the United States— meant a "rejuvenation" of military
leadership, though not as drastic as in preindustrial warfare.
The roles geared to the control of the instruments of destruction,
administration, communication, and production in stormy periods
stand out as centers of power, and accordingly of prestige. The
revolutionary "nation in arms" identified its cause with that of
mankind, and developed a sense of a universal mission which has
justified French imperialism ever since General Bonaparte pro-
claimed: "Peace to the huts! War to the palaces!"
7. Stratification and Institutional Dominance
We have "abstracted" the dimensions of stratification from more
concrete institutional roles in order ( i ) to be able to discuss
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS ;^:^1
separately each dimension and its relations with the other dimen-
sions, and (2) to discuss how, in terms of these dimensions, insti-
Hitional orders are related to one another."
That institutional order which is dominant in a social structure
(power) will usually be the order in which status is primarily
anchored and upheld. High class position and preferred occupa-
tions will also, given sufficient time, be acquired by those who are
"heads" of the most powerful institutional order. This point may
be illustrated by brief examination of the stratification systems of
the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union.
I. In the United States, especially during the nineteenth cen-
tury, the economic order was dominant in the social structure.
Capitalist economy and the inheritance of property by kinship
groups set the dominant class structure. High economic agents
successfully claimed the greater prestige, and were powerful actors
behind the scenes, as well as on the stage, of the political and other
orders.
A. Increasingly in the United States, class and status situations
have been removed from free market economic forces and ha\e
been subject to more formal political rules. Over the last twenty-
five years the political order has gained increasing weight and
influence upon the economic bases of stratification. Governmental
regulation of the economic processes has become a major means
of alleviating inequalities and insuring the risks of those in lower-
income classes. Not so much free labor markets as the bargaining
power of political and interest groups now shape the class posi-
tions and privileges of various strata in the United States. Hours
and wages, vacations, income security through periods of sickness,
accidents, unemployment and old age— these are now subject to
many intentional political and economic pressures, and, along
with tax policies, internal and external loans, transfer payments,
tariffs, subsidies, price floors and ceilings, and wage freezes, make
up the content of "class fights" in the objective meaning of the
phrase.
The "Welfare State" in the United States now attempts to re-
lieve class tensions and build a mighty defense force without
9 This second point will be discussed more s> stematically in Chapter XII:
The Unity of Social Structures.
33^ SOCIAL STRUCTURE
modifying basic class structure. In its several meanings and types,
this kind of state favors economic policies designed to redistribute
life-risks and life-chances in favor of those in the more exposed
class situations, who have the power or threaten to accumulate
the power to do something about their case. Labor union, farm
bloc, and trade association dominate the political scene of the
Welfare State, and contests within and between them increasingly
determine the position of various groups. The state, as a frame
organization, is at the balanced intersection of such pressures,
and increasingly the privileges and securities of various occupa-
tional strata depend upon the bold means of organized power.
Pensions, for example, especially since World War II, have been
a major idea in labor union bargaining, and it has been the wage
worker who has had bargaining power. Social insurance to cover
work injuries and occupational diseases has gradually been re-
placing the common law of a century ago, which held the em-
ployee at personal fault for work injury and the employer's lia-
bility had to be proved in court by a damage suit. Insofar as such
laws exist, they shape the opportunities of the worker. Both privi-
leges and income level have thus been increasingly subject to the
political pressures of unions and government, and there is every
reason to believe that in the future these pressures will be in-
creased even more.
B. There have been changes in the interrelation of status with
educational, economic, political, and military institutions.
The drift to bigness in business and to an enlarged and cen-
tralized government has meant the rise of the civil service state
and of corporate bureaucracies in business. Accordingly, the de-
mand for the expertness of the bureaucratic careerist has been
met by an enormous expansion of educational facilities. The
college degree has become the ticket of admission to many pre-
ferred middle-class job opportimities and their status prerequisites.
C. This trend has been reinforced by the decision of the United
States to translate her power potential into diplomatic bargaining
strength, by underpinning it with "military force in being." The
unified defense forces have made the status rivalry between gen-
erals and admirals a mere holdover from the past, and the United
States is now a permanently "all-around military power." The
educational bonus for veterans has reinforced the weight and
the prestige of the military service by the translatability of military
crt'-
corps
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS ^33
credit into educational opportunities which, in turn, serve as a
neans of social ascent which increases the prestige of the officer
"orps and veteran into other status channels. During the Civil
War, William Graham Sumner could deem himself too good for
irmy service and could have himself bought out of army service
by a friend. But in an age of world wars the claim of civilians to
status superiority over the military can no longer be realized with
comparable success.
D. Since the end of mass immigration and the relative closing
off of the nation through a system of quota immigration admitting
only "token" numbers of qualified immigrants, the fusion of na-
tionality groups with the main body of the population has greatly
advanced. These assimilation and acculturation processes have
both permitted and been facilitated by the emergence of mass
organizations of labor under the benevolent legislation and ad-
ministrative policies of the "New Deal." The congeries of craft
unions, comprising only 2^> million members in 1933, has been
numerically overshadowed by the new industrial unions of both
the AFL and the CIO, which have swelled the ranks of organized
labor beyond the 15 million mark.
With this, the multifarious "immigrant neighborhoods," with
their petty group competitions of ethnic organizations, old world
cultural emblems, and patterns of status segregation have been
leveled and even superseded by mass organizations along class
lines. New and attractive channels for power and status ascent
have thus come to the fore. The benevolent support of organized
labor by the largest integrative organization of immigrant urban
labor— the Catholic Church— has helped in this. So, for some sec-
tions of the metropolitan masses, it has become more relevant to
status whether the family head is a "union man" than whether
he is a "Hungarian" or an "Italian," a "Pole" or an "Irishman."
Association with a functional class organization has thus for many
overshadowed affiliation with organizations along nationality lines. -
E. Yet all this does not mean that status by descent is no longer
a factor in American stratification. In a way, a central group of
undisputed "old American stock" still finds itself surrounded by
a plurality of more recent Americans of immigrant stock. These
peripheral groups strive, by assimilation, to slough off behavior
items and symbolic practices which permit the central group to
refer to them by national descent. These ethnic groups gain or lose
234 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
status externally by the friendly or hostile position of the nation
of their descent with reference to America, and their prestige
thus rises and falls in accordance with the power constellation of
nations. They gain or lose status internally by their position in the
sequence of immigrant generations; longer residence in America
makes for their reception into the undisputed "American" center.
Thus during the late war Americans of Greek or Slavic back-
ground experienced prestige increments, whereas Americans of
German, Japanese, and Italian background experienced status
deprivations— for which they sometimes sought to compensate by
professions of loyalty and extraordinary contributions to the war
effort. After the war, when the position of China and Japan, of
Germany and the Slavic countries, changed, so did the distribution
of prestige: German, Italian or Japanese descent no longer was
such a status burden, and Slavic or Chinese descent no longer se-
cured the prestige it once did.
F. For upper- and middle-class groups of undisputed "Ameri-
can" standing, however, the background of descent seems to have
become a more attractive feature of status imagery and self-styli-
zation. Bric-a-brac, family heirlooms, and furniture rate with
pedigree organizations of the sons and daughters of this and that.
In eighteenth-century England antiquarianism underpinned a new
sense of historical continuities culminating in Edmund Burke's
work; in America today the preference of upper middle classes
for genuine colonial homes and the interest in "Americana," family
heirlooms, and old American glass underlies the renewed interest
in the national past rather than the elaboration of the future as
"the American dream." "Looking backward" no longer leads to a
vision of a future Utopia. Courses in American history are increas-
ingly considered obligatory for all university students. Members
of the living generation come to consider themselves the heirs of
an illustrious tradition rather than newcomers and pioneers. The
days when the successful businessman could claim status as a
"self-made man," rather than an "upstart," may be a bygone phase
of American social history. For everywhere established and cul-
tured status groups have ridiculed the parvenu in terms of Mo-
liere's model of the bourgeois gentilhomme. And, in this respect,
American society is being "Europeanized." During the war, Henry
Kaiser was hailed as a "dynamic constructionist" in the face of
the "Big Five"; after the war he was considered by many highly
bvt
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS 335
placed men an intruding parvenu. The status heights are attained
by those of estabhshed wealth who combine military, diplomatic,
and/or top administrative roles with leading positions in the big
business community, such as Dawes, Young, Harriman, Hoffman,
and Wilson.
II. Status, in due course, follows power. By observing twentieth-
century Germany, for instance, we can see how a sequence of
political regimes has led to corresponding redistributions of pres-
tige. 1°
A. In Imperial Germany, the Hohenzollern and other princely
dynasties, the Prussian Junker nobility of military officers, career
diplomats, civil servants, and conservative party leaders of the
Prussian parliament occupied top statTis positions. A system of
class suffrage guaranteed their monopoly of political power over
Prussia and, through Prussia's position, over the confederacy of
princely states that was Imperial Germany.
This group was set off from the rest of the nation by member-
ship in a university duel corps, as displayed by facial scar and
colored ribbon. Its members held the status of reserve officers, and
their caste conventions of dueling and ceremonial beer-drinking,
their speech, postures, and mannerisms made them the conspicuous
target of caricatures. The conventional demarcations of this status
group cut through university staffs, the Protestant clergy, the civil
service, liberal professions, and business communities of town and
country.
Yet the representative man of this group could not serve as a
model to be popularly followed (like that of the British gentle-
man) in an industrial and urban society engaged in world affairs.
Important sections of the business elite, Jewish bankers and Han-
seatic merchants, scholars and writers, professional men, and poli-
ticians developed status roles of their own. As the Austrian court
nobility under the Hapsburgs sought to enlarge their basis by
granting spurious titles to newly risen business elites, so the Ger-
man upper-status groups emphasized bureaucratic rank as status
badges. Formal modes of address, calling cards, mailboxes, and
even tombstones were used to indicate titled ranks. The correct
1" See H. H. Gerth, "Germany on the Eve of Occnpation," Problems of the
Post-War World, T. C. McCormick, ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1945).
p. 422 S.
336 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
title mattered more than correct initials and served to diffuse this
prestige gradation through all public institutions, such as state
hospitals and university clinics, state theaters and state opera
houses, the business community and the liberal professions. It
was characteristic of this status system that all roles were geared
to vocational specialization, and that the pride of even the Junker
was attached both to noble descent and to his military, diplomatic,
or bureaucratic rank, his academic degree or his role as manager
of a farm. Prussian poverty and pride in vocational efficiency never
allowed a representative stratum of "cultured gentlemen," cour-
tiers, or bourgeois patricians to emerge as a nationally represen-
tative status group.
Below the top layer and its bureaucratically ramified satellite
groups stood the broader middle classes of small businessmen,
craftsmen, and peasants, and finally class-conscious labor, organ-
ized in the largest political party, controlling one-third of the na-
tional vote, rallying the largest trade unions and co-operative
societies in a Social Democratic movement under the leadership
of a socialist intelligentsia, a machine of political professionals and
union organizers.
B. After the collapse of Imperial Germany, the ffight of the
Kaiser and his paladins, and the abdication of the ruling princes,
a trade-union leader up from the ranks became the first president
of the Weimar Republic. Labor found itself at the top. But the
class structure was but little affected by the establishment of the
Weimar Republic. The displacement of the feudal status system
did not affect the institutional anchorages of class or status. When,
by 1925, the upsurge of political reaction had brought Field
Marshal von Hindenburg— now in mufti— to the presidency, and
the four years of business prosperity brought corporate wealth
and the Junker-led farm bloc to the fore, labor lost what prestige
it had held in the immediate postwar years.
But the keynote, so far as prestige goes, is that in the Republic
no universally accepted status symbols firmly attached to this or
that group really emerged. The status sphere was not one uni-
lateral distribution but a plural affair and internally competitive.
In the meanwhile, paralleling, as it were, this prestige fragmenta-
tion, concentration of power in the economic order went forward
swiftly.
C.
with
plo}i
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS ;^27
C. With the economic collapse and world depression of 1929,
with mounting bankruptcies and foreclosures, with mass unem-
ployment and despair spreading through the old and the new
middle classes, loyalties to the Weimar Republic were under-
mined. The "J^^s ^"d ^^^ "Marxists" were made scapegoats by
the plutocratically financed Nazi movement, which revived pan-
Germanic ideologies, raised anti-Semitism to a frenzy, and carried
the "unknown" soldier of Austrian descent into the Reichs chan-
cellery of Bismarck's creation.
After Hindenburg's death. Hitler, as "Fiihrer and chancellor"
with his national socialist part\' and its octopus-like mass affilia-
tions, organized all institutional orders for total war and aggres-
sion. Hitler became the number one recipient of honor and the
fountainhead of everyone else's honor. A quasi-military status
model of uniformed, party-disciplined Nazis was imposed upon all
occupational groups, through regimented mass organizations of
youth, women, labor. All of them were headed by the ubiquitous
Nazi plebeian and his assimilated types. With the advent of war,
the dynamics of status operated in favor of the practitioners of
violence, the Gestapo terrorist of the Elite Guard and the army.
D. Under the occupation regimes, after Germany's defeat, the
conquerors from West and East naturally overshadowed German
society. There were administrative and juridical purges of or-
ganized Nazism. In the West the political reorganization has been
based upon the bureaucracies of the several states, and rested on a
reconstituted bourgeois party of middle-class notables, financed
by reconstructed big business. Veteran organizations of officers
have emerged, and the general restoration policy under such slo-
gans as the "social market economy, ' meaning essentially laissez
faire, seems to be reproducing a status stratification not so differ-
ent from the system that preceded the great depression— but, of
course, on a generally lower economic level and in a truncated
state of 47 million people.
In the East, Germany has undergone a social revolution, involv-
ing the communist-managed liquidation of the Junker estates, the
socialization of strategic industries, the establishment of a quasi-
totalitarian one-party state, the displacement of the old bureaucra-
cies by newly trained Gommunist cadres. The ruling party thus
proceeds to manage class and status developments by totalitarian
plans— all in the direction of the Soviet model.
238 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
III. In the Soviet Union, the economic order is fused with the
pohtical order, and subjected to the planned management by poH-
tical agents. Within the dominant poHtical order, in turn, power,
status, class, and occupation have come in large part, directly
and indirectly, to depend upon political party membership. In
Russia, membership in the Communist party, combined with execu-
tive positions, "replaces," as it were, property ownership as a
central basis for status and class.
The Soviet system has abolished private property in the means
of production and with it the hereditary transmission of power
based on property. Stability and the status quo are maintained
without these by means of politicized, rather than primarily eco-
nomically based, ruling groups. As Karl Mannheim has put it, the
problems were "how to produce a new ruling group ... to guar-
antee a stable social order, how to discover new status defining
factors other than income and property, and how to provide new
work incentives." The general answer to all three was found by
shifting the dominant institutional locus of stratification from the
economic to the political order and thus instituting "new power
and status" gradations in place of the "old inequalities of wealth
and income." But income differentials were introduced and oppor-
tunities to save by state bonds were opened up. To these economic
incentives were added the rivalrous incentives and rewards of
status, as well as coercive punishments.
There are honorific distinctions for the vanguards and stars
of various occupational groups. There are "heroes of labor," Stak-
hanov and shock workers of all sorts, as well as state-honored
writers and actresses, composers, schoolteachers and soldiers, and
the mothers of many children. Each functionally significant group
serves as a base for a conspicuous vanguard of Stalin-decorated
"heroes," of this or that routine pursuit brought to extraordinary
perfection.
The star performers serve as universally publicized pacesetters;
they receive special emoluments in money and in kind, and oper-
ate in especially planned competitive fields built into the over-all
plan of the managed social structure. Thus a Stalin-honored
shock worker may receive a considerably higher income and have
higher status than an undistinguished plant manager under whose
jurisdiction he works. Individual competition, group competition,
and institutional competition are utilized in a planned way to
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS 339
maximize effort and efficiency. Tfie competitively selected winners
are received into the ruling party by co-optation— if they did not
already belong. Their public prestige is thus partially ascribed to
the fact that they are pre-eminent communists or exemplary "Soviet
men and women." The party, in the last analysis, sets the tasks,
awards the premiums, and in turn cashes in on individual perform-
ances.
The party is thus at once the fountainhead and the depository
of all prestige and status. Personal merit is premiumed through
the "star system," which, with its prestige halo, seemingly spells
out "equal opportunities for all," deflects attention from the un-
known (and in fact only statistically assessable) differences in
life-chances of the various groups.
In any case, differences in status and power, mediated by the
one-party state, are definitely established, as well as income in-
equalities. The "ruling class" is the Communist party (and its mass
of affiliations), a political fact; and not high propertied classes,
an economic fact. This system of domination is anchored in large
bureaucratic organizations of trade unions and trusts, in addition
to the branches of a state apparatus usual in Western democracies.
The source of power and its distribution thus has to do with mass
organizations which monopolize the means of administration and
communication, production and destruction. "The totalitarian
party," Mannheim puts it, "is the ruling class in a world of total
syndicalization." ^^
8. Stratification and Political Mentality
What is at issue in theories of stratification and political power is
( 1 ) the objective position of various strata with reference to other
strata of modern society, and (2) the political content and direc-
tion of their mentalities. Questions concerning either of these
issues can be stated in such a way as to allow, and in fact de-
mand, observational answers only if adequate conceptions of strati-
fication and political mentality are clearly set forth.
Often the "mentality" of strata is allowed to take predominance
over the objective position. It is, for example, frequently asserted
11 See Karl Mannheim, Freedom, Power and Democratic Phinninp. ( New
York: Oxford, 1950), p. 82 ff., from which we have drawn in this subsection.
240 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
that "there are no classes in the United States" because "psychol-
ogy is of the essence of classes" or, as Alfred Bingham has put
it, that "class groupings are always nebulous, and in the last anal-
ysis only the vague thing called class consciousness counts." It
is said that people in the United States are not aware of them-
selves as members of classes, do not identify themselves with their
appropriate economic level, do not often organize in terms of
these brackets or vote along the lines they provide. America, in
this reasoning, is a sandheap of "middle-class individuals."
But this is to confuse psychological feelings with other kinds of
social and economic reality. Because men are not "class conscious"
at all times and in all places does not mean that "there are no
classes" or that "in America everybody is middle class." The eco-
nomic and social facts are one thing; psychological feelings may
or may not be associated with them in rationally expected ways.
Both are important, and if psychological feelings and political
outlooks do not correspond to economic or occupational class, we
must try to find out why, rather than throw out the economic baby
with the psychological bath water, and so fail to understand how
either fits into the national tub. No matter what people believe,
class structure as an economic arrangement influences their life
chances according to their positions in it. If they do not grasp the
causes of their conduct this does not mean that the social analyst
must ignore or deny them.
If political mentalities are not in line with objectively defined
strata that lack of correspondence is a problem to be explained;
in fact, it is the grand problem of the psychology of social strata.
The general problem of stratification and political mentality thus
has to do with the extent to which the members of objectively
defined strata are homogeneous in their political alertness, out-
look, and allegiances, and with the degree to which their political
mentality and actions are in line with the interests demanded by
the juxtaposition of their objective position and their accepted
values.
To understand the occupation, class, and status positions of a
set of people is not necessarily to know whether or not they ( i )
will become class conscious, feeling that they belong together or
that they can best realize their rational interests by combining;
(2) will have "collective attitudes" of any sort, including those
toward themselves, their common situation; (3) will organize them-
INSTITUTIONAL ORDERS ^4^
selves, or be open to organization by others, into associations,
movements, or political parties; or (4) will become hostile toward
other strata and struggle against them. These social, political, and
psychological characteristics may or may not occur on the basis
of similar objective situations. In any given case, such possibilities
must be explored, and "subjective" attributes must not be used
as criteria for class inclusion, but rather, as Max Weber has made
clear, stated as probabilities on the basis of objectively defined
situations.
Implicit in this way of stating the issues of stratification lies a
model of social movements and political dynamics. (^The important
differences among people are differences that shape their biogra-
phies and ideas; jwithin any given stratum of course, individuals
differ, but if their stratum has been adequately understood, we
ought to be able to expect certain psychological traits to recur.
Our principles of stratification enable us to do this. The proba-
bility that people will have a similar mentality and ideology, and
that they will join together for action, is increased the more homo-
geneous they are with respect to class, occupation, and prestige.
Other factors do, of course, affect the probability that ideology,
organization, and consciousness will occur among those in objec-
tively similar strata. But psychological factors are likely to be
associated with strata, which consist of people who are character-
ized by an intersection of the several dimensions we have been
discussing: class, occupation, status, and power. The task is to
sort out these dimensions of stratification in a systematic way,
paying attention to each separately and then to its relation to each
of the other dimensions.
CHAPTER
XII
The Unity of Social Structures
EVER since men came to suspect that Adam Smith's "Unseen
Hand" was no longer the hand of a harmony-loving God, students
of society have had to recognize and examine the disunity as well
as the unity of societies. In our times, we can no longer assume
that friction and strain, tension and stress are on the automatic
decline. In fact, their pressure, as we know full well, may accumu-
late to the breaking point: whole societies may be disrupted, masses
of men as well as statesmen astonished, and no hopes exist for
a new harmony or "equilibrium."
On the other hand, "common values" held in "harmony" may
to some men seem as frightful as great disharmony seems to be
to others. For harmony as well as common values may of course
be imposed, not by any unseen hand, but by the hubris of a dic-
tator. There is a price to pay for harmony, as well as for dis-
harmony.
In the main, however, academic students of society have tended,
in one way or another, to place great value on harmony and unity.
The unity of a social structure, for example, has frequently been
conceived as in some way a "manifestation" or "expression" of an
underlying "geist," "theme," or "style." Spengler's "geist" is an
outstanding case,^ and deriving from him— and from Nietzsche—
the late anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, who attempted to subsume
and understand whole societies as "Dionysian" or "Apollonian." -
Sorokin's "logico-meaningful" imity, reminiscent of Georg Simmel's
formal analogies, is a quite sophisticated example of this type of
integration.'^
1 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, C. F. Atkinson, tr. (New York:
Knopf, 1926).
-Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934).
3 Sorokin's unity, in fact, comes in four major types— spatial or mechanical
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES ^43
There is no doubt but that such morphological notions do often
allow us to grasp, sometimes in a suggestive way, the structural
features of total societies. The interpretation of variegated details
in the light of a general, pervasive principle is fascinating and
suggestive, and much imaginative work has been done with the
aid of such conceptions. But they do present certain difficulties: '
( 1 ) Because these "wholes" are often formally composed of
quite variegated materials, their construction tends to blur the
various parts of the social structure, or at least, does not invite
discriminations of variations among the parts. (2) In particular,
the interest in such morphological wholes often blunts attention
to all those tensions, conflicts, and contradictions of interests and
values that may exist in heterogeneous institutional structures. (3)
In these models, the linking of one part of a society with another
is quite often by analogy, and accordingly, we are distracted from
the central task of finding adequate and sufficient causes for the
various phenomena we observe. Because they allow us to deal,
in the beginning, with the whole society, such schemes do not
encourage us to trace ramifications from one part of the society
to other parts.
It is possible to use what is sound in such conceptions of "stylis-
tic" unity— and to control their assumptions— by our notion of sym-
bol spheres. In these terms, what this mode of interpretation
amounts to is the assumption of the unity and the autonomy of
symbol spheres and of the causal weight of master symbols in ex-
juxtaposition: a random group of people in the street; association due to an
external factor: rain drives them to shelter; causal or functional unity: they
assemble for a movie; and "logico-meaningful" unity: their underlying com-
monalities in conduct due, in modern society for example, to the role of
money, punctuality, and mechanical mo\ement.
We may also place in this type of theory Morris E. Opler's "themes," which
"denote a postulate . . . declared or implied, and usually controlling beha\ ior
or stimulating activity, which is tacitly appro\ed or openly promoted in a
society." American Journal of Sociology, November 1945, p. 198.
* Most of these drawbacks also hold of the popular "dicliotomy views." We
refer to Sir Henry Maine's distinction of "status and contract," which is
perhaps the father, even if often quite far remoxed, of Tonnies' "community
and society," Spencer's "military and industrial societies," Durkheim's "organic
vs. mechanical," Redfield's "Folk and Urban Society," Becker's "sacred and
' secular." Often, in fact usually, the dichotomy is also used as a trend model:
societies move from status to contract, from sacred to secular, from military
to industrial.
244 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
plaining the details of individual conduct and institutional struc-
ture.^
In this chapter, in which we attempt to grapple with the prob-
lem of social unity, we shall briefly review those aspects of our
model which bear upon the statement and solution of the general
problem. We shall present this "review" by setting forth a recom-
mended procedure for analyzing total social structures, and, on a
more general level, by advancing four types in accordance with
which social structures may be unified. In order, however, that
the reader may have in mind concrete materials, we shall begin
with a brief account of the integration of Sparta, and end with
an account of the disintegration of Rome.
1. The Unity of Sparta
Whenever rigid and militarized societies have emerged in the
West, the image of unified Sparta, with its common values enforced
by military co-ordination, has been resurrected. Men such as Jean-
Jacques Rousseau implemented the revolutionary upsurge of demo-
cratic enthusiasm by raising up images of the stern virtues of the
Roman Republican and disciplined Spartan warrior. Nazi intel-
lectuals were fond of trying to add a somber glamour to their
ranks by providing flashbacks to the stand of the Spartans at
Thermopylae.
From the time of the second Messinian War during the eighth
century B.C. ancient Sparta was organized as a totalitarian democ-
racy of warriors on a permanent war footing.'' The original three
tribal subgroups, or phtjles, had been superseded by five phijles
subdivided into "dining clubs," each comprising fifteen professional
warrior athletes. These heavily armed men were in constant train-
ing or in constant action, from the time of their initiation into the
army at the age of twenty years— which was reminiscent of the
bachelor houses of archaic tribes— to the veteran's retirement to his
household at the age of sixty.
■"' We have already criticized these assumptions above in Chapter X:
Symbol Spheres, Section 4: The Autonomy of Symbol Spheres.
" Cf. Our account is based upon Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
( Tubingen, 1921 ), pp. 567 fF. and 591 ff.; and Arnold Toynbee, A Study of His-
tory (London, 1951), especially Vol. III.
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES 345
At the head of the political community there stood two kings,
hence two royal families, who were accountable to five soldierly
magistrates, or ephors, elected to their offices for annual terms
by the acclamatory shouts of the lined-up army formations. The
kings were annually sworn in by tliese ephors, who may be com-
pared to the Roman tribune of the people, to political commissars
like Saint-Just, who purged the revolutionary French army of
unreliable ancien regime officers, or to the commissars of the Red
Army.
The Spartan army was led in the field by one of the kings, who
was responsible to the five ephors, to the point of exile or death,
for the conduct of war. Apart from this perilous function, the
kings were representative figureheads, restricted to the perform-
ance of rituals.
This ruling class of warriors led a rigorous and austere life.
Military honor, eligibility for admittance to the crack fighting unit
of 300 elite guards, for the ephorate and, after retirement, for the
council of elders, formed the goals of their aspiration. To be pub-
licly shamed— and by husky women at that— for having lost one's
shield, for having flinched in combat, for not having stood to the
last by one's comrade-in-arms and one's homosexual partner was
the object of fear. Disputes among these peers were settled by all-
out wrestling duels in which anything went— from the gouging of
eyeballs, the splitting of nostrils, to the biting of genitals. An
ascetic code controlled the personal deportment of these war-
riors. To say a great deal in a few words and without fuss has
become famous as "laconic" speech. Gold and silver were despised,
as were all bodily comforts. The famous one-pot-menu of "black
soup"— probably made from oxblood mixed with buckwheat— was
not enjoyed at Spartan state dinners by Athenian ambassadors.
The two kings, the five ephors in charge of the five phylcs, a
council of elders, and the assembled army thus constituted the
political and military order of Sparta, which is known as the Lycur-
gean system. Its rational features seem to indicate a planful en-
actment by a series of statesmen rather than a cresci\'e emer-
gence. The fact that Homer has Ulysses's son receive a chariot horse
as a farewell present after his visit to the Spartan king, as well
as the known differences in dress between nobles and commoners,
allow us to infer that this warrior community resulted from the
34^ SOCIAL STRUCTURE
democratic leveling down of an older stratum of charioteering
nobles into a homogeneous army of disciplined footmen, who de-
ployed their phalanx in full view of the enemy.
This political-military order was linked to the economic order
through the economic role of the warrior's wife. She had to pro-
vide for her economically expendable husband who, living in his
bachelor club, could not share her table. The warrior needed a
land-rent to pay for his equipment and upkeep in the syssitia, or
"officers' mess." Upon initiation into the army he received an allot-
ment of land and, being in training, he could not farm it and was
obliged to find a spouse capable of managing his farm with helot
labor. The helots were the bottom stratum, the conquered popu-
lation who had been reduced to serfdom. Each year the ephors
ceremoniously declared war upon them in order to keep them in
their places.
The Spartan bachelor chose his wife from among the young
women engaged in athletic contests, which thus served as a bridal
show. Exclusion from the ranks of the spectators was a severe pun-
ishment for the young man. As the Greeks displayed themselves
nude in the sports field— which is unique for any upper class—
we may infer that the physical strength and endurance of the
amazon rather than presumably superior sensitivity, premarital
chastity, or status badges of wealth determined "good looks" in
the warrior's eyes. Women had no other educators than men.
They were prepared, if need be, to bend a helot to erotic service,
or to cut him down if "uppity." In all this, the Spartan farmwife
found aid and succor in the activities of youthful bands of Spartan
adolescents, who were economically and pederastically attached
to the warrior syssitias. They were encouraged to rove the coun-
tryside for food. Their generalized other was confined to the war-
rior community, and, in their chronic fighting relation to the helots,
force and fraud were meritorious. To have a dead helot to his
credit gave prominence to the member of a Spartan youth gang.
What chance would a helot have if a Spartan woman put the
finger on him?
The life of the Spartan wife was not easy. Besides her economic
role of extracting a sufficient rent for her absentee warrior hus-
band from the land-tilling helots, she was expected to bear and
to rear many children, preferably all boys. (In passing we should
remark that the father of four boys was freed from all obligations
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES 3^/
to the state.) As in other ancient societies, infanticide was cus-
tomary in Sparta. Given the interest of the warrior community in
the quantity and quahty of population, pubhc officials inspected
the newly born and selected those fit for survival. Spartan wi\'es
offered themselves or helped themselves to the erotic services of
men other than their husbands, if the husbands were not up to
eugenic par.
At the age of seven, children were removed from maternal care
in the home and enrolled in gangs, which combined children of
different ages in such a way that the older led the younger, up
to the final hurdle of unanimous co-optation by a syssitia. As at
birth, so during his educational career, selective elimination threat-
ened the Spartan youngster. Life in the successive boy-gangs se-
lected and reinforced those traits required by the he-man warrior.
Birth and inheritance were not sufficient for admission into this
highly organized ruling class. Exclusion and ostracism by one's
peer group threatened the boy who was lacking in physique, cour-
age, or astuteness and skill in aggression, in self-discipline or
obedience of the austere warrior code of this garrison state. These
boys and their gangs were attached to the men's "messes," and
formed "fan" relationships with the warriors, which included
pederastic practices.
With the old nobility, the old priesthood had gone. Unlike other
Greek states, Sparta left no temples or priestly sponsored art to
posterity. Priests and poets, artists and philosophers were singularly
out of place in the midst of these military professionals, who as
is usual for such men, despised intellectuals as at best unmanly
"penpushers," and at worst likely to import alien ideas and dis-
tract men from the proper business at hand. These warriors, who
accepted death in battle as man's usual fate, craved neither salva-
tion for their souls nor spiritual comfort in suffering, for they were
proud to "take it" without e\en the rationale of stoic philosophers.
Their motivation and control was a conventionally enforced code
of honor, and in this they compare with the Confucian erudite.
The difference is that the first was a code for warriors, the second
a code for pacifist literary officials.
In brief, then, this is the structural scheme for the miit\- and
disunity of Spartan societ}': in this warrior democracy, the military
and the political orders are fused. The household and economic
production are not differentiated, but form one unit. Formally, the
^^8 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
military-political controls the economic through kinship relations.
For the ruHng Spartans, the division of labor thus coincides with
sexual differences: women take over the household and farm man-
agement; men fight. The wives therefore reside in the countryside
among the helot farm labor; the men are concentrated in their
garrisoned city. Thus, when a man enters military service he must
at the same time enter marriage, in order that his wife may pro-
vision him.
In the eighth century B.C., some 8,000 warriors were set up in
this way.
But by the fourth century B.C. only 400 warriors were fully quali-
fied for action.
Why? Why did Sparta decline?
Although the warrior allotments were not negotiable, economic
and social differentiations did slowly advance. A dowry system
seems to have allowed for the accumulation of landholdings, and
as the Spartans did not aim at imperialist expansion and territorial
gain, they did not compensate for this gradual shrinkage of the
economic base for warriors qualified to equip themselves and meet
their syssitia obligations in kind or in iron money. During the
fourth century, the concentration of holdings was reinforced, ac-
cording to Plutarch, when legislation enabled "the holder of a
family property or an allotment to give it away during his lifetime
or to bequeath it by will, to anybody whom he chose." The de-
pendence of the warrior on his wife and her role as "heiress"
would seem to account for the high status of women in the end.
Arnold Toynbee has also pointed to the demoralization of the
Spartan warrior when he attempted to enact leadership roles in
wider contexts than those of his native society.
In summary, then, the general reasons for Sparta's disintegration
are found in the concentration of land holdings to a point where
not enough warriors, given their military tasks, were provisioned.
Thus, autonomous processes in the household and the economy
ramified into the military and political orders, and undermined
them. These processes of quantitative change ( fewer but larger eco-
nomic bases for warriors) made for a smaller army because family
size (especially sons) did not increase in proportion to the in-
creased sizes of the holdings.
We have briefly articulated the social stiucture of Sparta in order
—as we have already remarked— that the reader may have in mind
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES 249
some concrete materials. We shall now "back off" from these ma-
terials, and consider more abstractly and in terms of procedures,
the general problem of social unity.
2. Units and Their Relationships
It is easy to believe that each section of a society is related to
every other section, that society is in some manner a whole of
busily interacting parts. But this assumption does not tell us very
much. As a beginning point it is useful, but by itself it is an unin-
formative truism. For what it does, at best, is advise us to be on
the lookout for specific connections between specific parts and their
relations to the whole. Whatever models of integration we end
up with, much less whatever theory, there is a descriptive task at
hand for anyone who would intelligently describe social structures
as "wholes." This task will be governed in the first instance by the
units of social structure that are used. So our first question is:
I. Units: How shall we articulate a society— that is, what unit or
units shall we seize upon or abstract as "parts" which we would
relate to other "parts"? And, specifically, for any given society, how
articulated or autonomous are these units?
We cannot claim, and in this social psychology we cannot at-
tempt, a detailed coverage of world history; we obviously seek
to transcend ideographic details and to use them in search for gen-
eralizations and regularities; so we give up the simple canon of
"complete description." We must acknowledge that we have to
select, and we must therefore become the self-conscious masters of
our canons of selection. What are these canons? We must con-
sciously select a set of units which will enable us ( i ) to proceed
systematically in our descriptions of the internal compositions of
each society we would examine and thus (2) give ourselves a
maximum chance for comparisons between social structures. (3)
Moreover, the unit chosen must not only permit economy of
systematic description, but it must be a description adequate for
causal imputations. To do this requires that we find a fruitful
level of generality, which means a level that is flexible, or that
has a shuttle from high to low built into it. (4) Our level of gen-
erality must be low enough not only to allow but to invite con-
crete descriptions, for there is no substitute in "theory" for pains-
250 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
taking mastery of detail; it must equip us to see what we other-
wise might miss. And (5) it must be high enough to allow com-
parisons across all known societies. These, along with (6) the re-
quirement that the units be open to psychological analysis, are the
criteria which we have kept in mind in choosing our units and
constructing our scheme of social structure. Our unit, the institu-
tional order (with its subunits of specific institutions and finally
of role), along with the idea of spheres, satisfies in a provisional
way, we feel, these critieria.^
II. Relations: The second question we face is of more immediate
concern to the problem of integration: Precisely how are these
units interrelated, that is, what is the "dimension," or what are
the dimensions, in terms of which we would relate them with one
another? The relations of our units are conveniently construed in
terms of a means-ends schema, which involves the dimension of
power. Thus we are interested in finding to what extent, if any,
events in one institutional order may be considered preconditions
of events in other orders. We are also interested in tracing the
ramifications of trends in one order with other orders, and in under-
standing how such ramifications may facilitate or limit activities
and policies in other orders. In short, our units— institutional orders
—may be related with one another causally in a variety of ways
and degrees. Given orders may be functionally independent or
dependent of one another.
III. Procedural Scheme: Let us make our answers to both of
these questions more concrete, and thus begin to illustrate why
we feel that the scheme invites description of prevailing units and
of the causal relations obtaining among them.
In examining a specific society our first decision has to do with
whether we will use as our prime units institutional orders, insti-
tutions, or roles. This decision should rest upon the degree to
which the society is, upon examination, found to contain autono-
mously existing orders of institutions. Now, our scheme of dis-
tinguishable institutional orders is obviously derived from observa-
" Tlie reader may wish at this point to reread Chapter II : Character and
Social Structure, Section 2: Components of Social Structure, and Chapter VII:
Institutions and Persons, Section i: The Institutional Selection of Persons,
and Section 2.: The Institutional Formation of Persons.
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES 35I
tion of modern Western society, and only in a society which has
a relatively autonomous development of these functions (or of
others) can we best proceed with this unit.
We can conceive of societies (for example, the nomadic sib) in
which there is only one coherent institution— in this case, the extant
kinship group— which provides in its organization all the roles
required to fulfill such functions as are served in the society. In
such a case, we should seize upon roles as our basic units which
are to be related.
On the next "level," we might imagine a society (for instance a
tribal confederacy of nomadic sibs) in which there was more than
one institvition, but in which these did not differ from one another
in terms of function. For example, in this case we ha\e a society
in which kinship units also performed all other functions. Accord-
ingly, we should seize upon institutions as the basic units to be
related.
We thus have three levels of unit, as it were, to choose among
as our first level of description. We say the first level of description
because obviously in cases where institutions are the units we shall
also handle the roles, and where institutional orders have been un-
folded as articulate units, we shall also handle the institutions
that prevail in each and the kinds of roles that in turn compose
them.
Why do we always choose the "higher" of these three units that
exist for our first description? Because the roles in which we are
most interested are part of an institution and can be understood
only with reference to its institutional context; and, institutions,
if they are part of an institutional order, can most readily be under-
stood as part of the order in which they occur. This contextual
guide-line is important; for example, apparently identical institu-
tions may be found in different orders, but qualitative differences
may occur to what, in isolation, may appear to be identical. The
monopoly factory in Tsarist Russia differed in origin as well as in
its position among the totality of Russian institutions from the fac-
tory in 1912 America. In Russia such a factory often results from
political concessions to foreign capital; in America, as a more indig-
enous development of a laissez-faire economy. The "same" insti-
tution "means" different things with reference to the order to
which it belongs and with reference to the relation of this order
to others comprising the social structure of which it is a part.
S52 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
Because of the usefulness of this simple contextual principle, we
are prompted, wherever possible, to proceed in the first instance,
on the level of institutional order. In fact, we sometimes do so
even when such an articulation of institutions is a purely heuristic
assumption rather than a discoverable fact. This means that we
might so proceed even in a society in which no functional differen-
tiation has produced identifiable orders, or in which they have
been "fused" so closely that the actors do not experience their
behavior as placed in different orders. In such cases, obviously the
conception of institutional order is an "artificial" imposition. Yet,
to distinguish for analytical purposes is not to overlook their unity.
Only if we do proceed thus analytically can we understand such a
society as, in fact, representing one type of unified integration.®
As is well known, each of the institutional orders of the sort we
have presented here begins to form and to become autonomous
with the Western Renaissance and Reformation. From that time,
politics emerges from the all-pervasive religious order, as the prince
emerges as a wielder of secular power. Then also, in the symbol
sphere, philosophy, science, and art gradually cease to be hand-
maidens of theology. Then Machiavelli discerns "pure power prob-
lems" of the political man, who treats all life as means of getting,
holding, increasing, and wielding power. With the emergence of
the factory, i.e., the segregation of enterprise from household dur-
ing the eighteenth century, the economic order begins to acquire
autonomy, the police state increasingly withdraws from the mer-
cantilist intervention in the economic order. Only then could eco-
nomic science conceive of the economic man— and his rationally
expedient behavior in markets— as a suitable model for analyzing
the economic order in industrial society. The general process of the
unfolding and autonomy of orders perhaps reaches its extreme
when in the symbol and technological spheres (which thus made
pretenses to be autonomous orders) men speak seriously of "sci-
ence for science's sake," of "art for art's sake." Thus segregated
activities and ends are fetishized.
The problem of the unity of a social structure, especially as it
bears upon the unit chosen, obviously diff^ers for differently artic-
ulated societies. The first empirical task, in approaching any given
society, is to discover the most convenient units that prevail, in
8 See below, this chapter, Section 3: Modes of Integration.
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES 353
terms of which the problem of structural unity or integration may
best be stated.
Having due regard to this, we will nevertheless assume institu-
tional orders as our unit, and use that unit in presenting our
procedural scheme, for this enables us to handle, at least formally,
the salient problems of unity encountered in societies that are
not articulated into orders. For a society in which all five orders
are autonomous enough to permit separate delineation and thus
relationships, one must "fill in" the following boxes:
INSTITUTIONAL SPHERES
EDUCATION
STATUS
ORDERS
POLITICAL 1
SYMBOLS
TECHNOLOGY
ECONOMIC 6 2
MILITARY 7 10 3
RELIGIOUS 8 11 13 4
KINSHIP 9 12 14 15 5
POLITICAL ECONOMIC MILITARY RELIGIOUS KINSHIP
First, the range and the basic characteristics of the institutions
prevailing in each order are determined: 1 through 5. This first
task includes a description of the spheres of each of these orders:
education, status, symbols, technology.
Second, the relations between each of the orders with each of
the others are described: 6 through 15. This second task consists
of a detailed tracing of the ramifications and other relations of
each order upon all others. So much is basic: Only when this is
done on a purely descriptive level do we have ( 1 ) a basis for
comparing different social structures and (2) a basis for causal
imputations in explanation of \ arious roles, institutions, or the shape
of the social structure as a whole.
"Ramification" refers to the operation of one order within other
orders: or, to the use of one order for the ends of the ramifying
order. The "ramifications" of any order refer to its total range of
such operations in all other orders. The political order may thus
ramify into kinship most closely and brutally when all intimate
relations and locales of the kinship unit are used by police agents
S54 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
who see them as "a network of living traps" for the suspect or
prisoner of the poHtical order. When poHtical relations— for ex-
ample, international affairs— are carried on by competing dynastic
families, women, as shrewd manipulators of men in the kinship
order, may exert considerable influence upon key political decisions.
The economic order may ramify into the political, as in modern
capitalist societies; for example, as economic institutions, corpora-
tions seek to influence the content and administration of laws in
order to gain or to retain economic privileges. Their political actions
are thus means for an economic end. Ramifications has to do with
the relative powers of orders, and the use of one as a means for
the other's end.
From the more or less descriptive level, executed as concretely
as time and information allow, and with the aid of typologies found
relevant for each institutional order, we move by examination and
comparison to explanations of the integration of social structures
as wholes.
3. Modes of Integration
From a somewhat formal standpoint, we can observe certain
general ways in which the institutional orders composing a social
structure are integrated. These modes of integration are, for us,
analytic models which sensitize us to certain types of linkage of
one order with another. They may also, of course, be viewed dy-
namically, as processes of social-historical change.
By a milieu we understand the social setting of a person that is
directly open to his personal experience. It is a surface of his daily
social life. In his day-to-day life, he acts in a variety of milieus—
the home, the place of work, the scene of amusement, the street.
In these milieus he of course observes changes, but most people
do not often ask why these changes occur. When we do reflect
upon such changes in milieus— such as our neighborhood over a
thirty-year period— then we must go beyond the milieu itself to
explain the change observed in it. And this means that we come
upon the idea of structures.
By a structure, in the present sense, we understand the modes
of integration by which various milieus are linked together to form
a larger context and dynamics of social life. These modes of Integra-
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES 35,5
tion may be stated as principia media, as middle principles, ena-
bling us to link what is observable in various milieus but caused
by structural changes in institutional orders. Thus the neighbor-
hood town of 1850, with its well-known milieu, appears in 1950
as a scatter of milieus, none of which is recognizable as the old:
the dirt path is now an asphalt strip, and the railroad connects
the daily work of the inhabitants with the world market.
We have found some four principles of structural change useful f f
in understanding the integration of a society:
I. By correspondence we mean that a social structure is unified
by the working out in its several institutional orders of a common
structural principle, which thus operates in a parallel way in each.
II. By coincidence we mean that different structural principles
or developments in various orders result in their combined effects
in the same, often unforeseen, outcome of unity for the whole
society.
III. By co-ordination we refer to the integration of a society by
means of one or more institutional orders which become ascendant
over other orders and direct them; thus other orders are regulated
and managed by the ascendant order or orders.
IV. By convergence we mean that two or more institutional
orders coincide to the point of fusion; they become one institutional
setup.
It is quite difficult to isolate concrete societies which fully and
exclusively exemplify each of these types of integration because
reality is usually mixed. The integrations of some areas of a society
can often best be understood in terms of one mode of integration,
while other parts can best be understood by application of an-
other mode. Nevertheless, to make clear what is involved in each
type of integration, we can, in a brief way, sketch cases in which
each seems to predominate.
I. Correspondence. The handiest case of correspondence is per-
haps the model of a classic liberal society, best exemplified by the
society prevailing in the first half of the nineteenth century in the
United States.^ The meaning of "laissez-faire" for the economic
9 Cf. Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (rev. ed.;
New York: Macmillan, 1933); and A. Lowe, Economics and Sociology (Lon-
don: Allen, 1935).
S56 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
order is a demand on the part of economic agents for freedom
from political dominance. It is paralleled by the religious demand
for autonomy from political or state control or even sponsorship of
any one type of religious institution; moreover, here too, one
Protestant man faced his God, free of any hierarchy of inter-
preters. In the political area, as in the economic market, there
is a free competition for the individual's vote. In the kinship order,
also, marriage is a contract between the marriage partners into
which they enter of their own free will; marriages are not to be
arranged by parental collusion of economic or status sort. Just as
free individuals compete economically, so do they in the status
sphere: "the self-made man" stands in contrast to "the family-made
man" of the kinship order's status sphere, just as a much as to the
man who moves on his own across the autonomous economic
markets. So status styles are often represented as conspicuous con-
sumption of the self-made businessman.
On the highest level of abstraction, in the symbol sphere, the
idea of human freedom, of the spontaneity of thinking, acting, and
judging, is proclaimed and elaborated. In particular, the conception
of human genius, of the prerogative of free creativity, becomes cen-
tral, and even sets an ideal model for the nature of human nature.
So educators attempt "to make the student think for himself."
The basic legitimation of instituted conduct in each of these
orders is very much the same: the free initiative of the autonomous
individual for rational and moral self-determination. Thus the
symbol spheres of the various orders run in parallel or correspond-
ing fashion. In each order free individuals could institute new or-
ganizations according to the principle— or at times even the expecta-
tion—of voluntary associations. Independent decision-making and
organization thus unify what on the surface might appear as merely
the unplanned complexity and enormous variety of nineteenth-cen-
tury "causes."
The correspondence of diverse and relatively autonomous orders
is the outcome of processes in which all significant orders develop
in the direction of an integrative principle of competition or laissez
faire. In all orders competition means that individuals act in a
field of action which impersonally disciplines them for uniform
strivings and motives, and in its terms free men find their places.
This principle also secured a rather smooth and gradual transferal
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES ;^$y
or shift in power within and between orders. The translation of
economic into pohtical power is particularly relevant.
Of course, the model of a liberal society does not contain only
elements that correspond to the principle of individual freedom of
choice. In fact, definite compulsions are introduced in the political
order which, although enacted by free men, nevertheless are com-
pulsions: in Europe (since the time of Napoleon) there has been
universal compulsory military service. And there has been com-
pulsory taxation and universal compulsory education up to various
standards. In these respects, the modern state has advanced beyond
any previously known political controls, for only in modern times,
with modern technology and special techniques of communications
available, have such large-scale and intensive administrative accom-
plishments been possible. These, although most important, have
been quite uneven in their application, and in the case of property,
given its wide distribution, have really been a sort of anchor of
the basic freedom. Accordingly, such compulsions are important
for the model of classic liberal society as exceptions to the integra-
tion of the whole by autonomously choosing individuals.
Many other examples of correspondence come to mind: the occi-
dental feudal principle of an "exchange" of personal allegiance for
protection, as displayed in the psychology of vassalship in political,
economic, military, religious, and kinship orders with the "lord,"
in the first four, and, in the upper ranks, with "the occidental lady"
emerging in the noble household. The psychological link of per-
sonal loyalty and sworn allegiance between lord and \assal allows
for the coherent although decentralized domination of rather large
territories. And this same mechanism, giving rise in the kinship
order to the knight and the occidental lady— the wife of another
knight, to whom the knight must prove his love and worth, in
vassal-like manner. In the religious order, the Christian knight's
orientation was similar: faith and vassalship to Christ, the Lord
in whose name he crusaded against heathen and barbarian. Thus,
the three orders— politics, kinship, and religion— correspond in the
psychology of vassalship under the code of loyalty, love, and
honor. ^°
1" Cf. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London: Arnold,
1949); H. O. Taylor, The Medieval Mind (London, 1938), 2 vols.; and
Eileen Power, Medieval People (Boston: Honghton Mifflin, 1924).
35^ SOCIAL STRUCTURE
II. Coincidence^. We are not aware of any society that is inte-
grated solely in terms of coincidence: different structural and
psychological tendencies in each of the different orders bringing
about a unified end product. But there are many instances at hand
of the partial operation of coincidence as a mode of integration,
which represents the unplanned, unforeseen, and "fortuitous" result
of institutional dynamics. Every coincidence is of course causally
determined, but insofar as causal ascription to material or ideal
interests has to be made, such interests might well be heteroge-
neous, and, being anchored in different orders, perhaps even ulti-
mately conflicting.
The breakdown of feudal codes of privilege and the develop-
ment of an administrative and legal framework which facilitated
the rise of capitalism is an outstanding example. When the absolut-
ist prince breaks the power of feudal status groups he sets up,
or at least calls into being, modern bureaucracy. The prince is
interested in using his officials in any part of his territory in order
to cheapen the costs of his administration, and to rotate officials
so as to promote uniform administration and to secure his central
control. This interest of the prince, however, is blocked by the
legal peculiarities of different regions, cities, and provinces which
for the oflBcial mean an unlearning of local statute and a new learn-
ing.
The bureaucrat, on the other hand, finding extended career op-
portunities in the increase of his usefulness because of his universal
transferability, has a material interest, which fuses with his purely
intellectual interest in a rationally consistent set of guiding prin-
ciples. The oflBcial's interest is in legal norms that are consistently
applicable as reinforced by the university teacher's interest in
systematic organization of his teaching routine, course repetition,
and textbook presentation. Hence, for quite different reasons, the
interests of the prince, the bureaucrat, and the academician coin-
cide in the direction of a rational systematization and codification
of legal rules.
In the meantime, there is another causal series which coincides
with these to support this process: in the economic order, the rising
entrepreneurial middle class promotes a rational legal order. Due
to the expansion of their market operations the entrepreneurs are
interested in a homogeneous law, for this would allow them to
calculate the legal consequences of their economic actions and
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES 3,59
the chances of contracts being enforced by court action. This inter-
est of the economic agent in the calculabiHty of law ob\iously
coincides with the interests of the bureaucrat in the rationaHty and
standardization of legal rules, and the interest of the prince in the
cheapness of administration and his control over it. A second
and allied motive of the enterpriser is an interest in legal security.
The arbitrariness of the enlightened despot's "cabinet justice" was,
in the eyes of the enterpriser, an irrational, incalculable risk. His
interest in security of contract coincided here with the bureaucrat's
interest in security of tenure. Hence both the bureaucratic per-
sonnel and the middle classes were interested in reducing the ele-
ment of despotic arbitrariness in favor of fixing and systematizing
a set of unambiguous legal norms. This phase of legal history and
the coincidence of different orders is the unforeseen, unplarmed,
and "blind" result of heterogeneous interests; at a later juncture
of the historical process, the constellation of these interests naturally
breaks up.
A comparable point of coincidence between eighteenth-century
despotism and entrepreneurial capitalism in the making may be
adduced. Princely absolutism for politico-military reasons sought
to increase the tax yield of its subjects by all sorts of mercantilist
policy schemes, including subsidized enterprises of privileged per-
sons, technological and industrial training institutes, travels of
officials for espying teclmical advances in Great Britain, in Berlin
the hiring out of soldiers to textile manufacturers, in France under
Colbert the digging of canals by the army. The subsidized enter-
prises mostly fell by the wayside (only fiscal porcelain manufactur-
ing establishments such as Sevres, Dresden, Meissen, and Berlin
have remained). And taxes and their princely investment de-
flected otherwise available private capital into unprofitable, hence
uneconomic, channels; these aspects of mercantilism hence con-
flicted with the entrepreneurial interest. The promotion of tech-
nological innovation, however, i.e., the French canals, or later the
improvement of the Rhine River and the construction of militarx'
roads, under Napoleon, proved invaluable to capitalism, as did
the general bearing down of princely absolutism on traditionalist
petty routine.
Within a latter-day liberal capitalist society, such as the United
States during World War H, the military order wants recruits in
26o SOCIAL STRUCTURE
order to build an army; educational institutions want students in
order to maintain schools as going concerns. These different pur-
poses coincide in army and navy student training programs, in
which the armed forces gets men in uniform being trained for
special roles, and the educational plant stays open. Like other
cases of coincidence, the various groups of people whose institu-
tions have coincided may have set forth legitimations for participa-
tion in the same conduct pattern: the war officers believe that it
is part of military preparation; the educators feel that, however
that might be, it is also good for nonmilitary, general educational
ends. And again, as with many coincidences, the results outrun both
formal legitimations. Such a program may be seen as part of the
breakdown of voluntary liberal education on higher levels and the
reaching of compulsory practices into these areas. In order to sur-
vive as going concerns the higher-education plants become in
many ways ramifications of the military order. Quite a few phys-
icists and atomic scientists were bewildered after the war when
executive departments for reasons of security considered the pub-
lication of "secrets of nature" as dangerous and possibly disloyal
disclosures of "secrets of state."
The most striking and detailed case of a coincidence of orders
is provided by Max Weber's work on Protestant religion and capi-
talist economics, on the role of Puritanism in the character forma-
tion of the economic vanguard of modern capitalism. ^^
The theology of Calvinism emphasizes the view that man is evil
and that due to the inscrutable will of a stern and hidden God only
few men are predestined for salvation. This interpretation of Chris-
tianity at once reinforces and resolves intense anxieties in the be-
liever as to whether he is or is not among the elect. Out of this
situation two possibilities derive: fatalism or intense activism.
Puritanism interprets man's Christian conduct in everyday life as
being an indicator though not a guarantee of his salvation chances,
so a religious significance is attributed to everyday work. Whereas
formerly only certain monastic orders had used work as a means
of religious asceticism, now every believer has to prove his religious
worth by self-denying work in this world. He must work not for
profits, not out of enjoyment of his work, nor yet of its fruits. His
11 We have discussed this in other connections; see pp. 188 and 234-36.
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES ^^1
work must be an ascetic exercise pursued methodically for the
sake of the kingdom to come. His work becomes his "calling," and
only those who have consistently proved themsehes in their callings
can claim to be "elected." Those who successfully claim to be
among the elect associate themselves in sects, and admit new mem-
bers, by adult baptism, only after a scrutiny of the applicant's
total record of conduct. The earliest sects adopted anabaptism,
meaning the rebaptism of qualified adults and their reception into
an exclusive, voluntary association.
The economic consequence of such motivation is the emergence
of a type of person who, in the economic order, will not readily
consume the profits he makes— as an entrepreneur or middleman.
Suspicious of ostentatious wealth and luxury, he considers his
accumulation of wealth as Cliristian stewardship. He has only one
course open: reinvestment in his business for extended production.
This in turn gives the Puritan enterpriser the opportunity to employ
additional men, in religious terms to extend opportunities to an-
guished souls who in an age of enclosures and vagrancy, crave to
prove themselves as God-fearing Christians. Thus, the entrepreneur
provides institutional opportimities under Puritan control to unem-
ployed and dependent groups. From his perspective, wages increase
the workers' opportunities to prove themselves as frugal and sober
and hard working. High wages would only constitvite temptations
to wander from the ascetic path. The worker, in turn, knows that
what counts is to prove himself in whatever workaday life God
has placed him.
Admission to the elect and recognition by sect members gi\'e
each member a claim for brotherly help from economic distress
which is not his own fault. This relevance of sect membership
for credit, based upon religiously trained character, facilitates eco-
nomic ascent. For the observance of new ethical standards in ex-
change behavior, of honest dealings, of charging the same "fair
price" to all buyers, of avoiding higgling as "idle words," of reliabil-
ity in the fulfillment of contracts— all this lent business prestige to
the sectarians. This prestige, translated into good credit standing,
in turn, added to the Puritan business, and at a later time, allowed
Benjamin Franklin to state as a rule of experience: "honesty is the
best policy."
Thus: The psychology of the religious man furnishes motives
for his economic roles. This psychological coincidence may be
;^62 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
traced in the kinship order, where unpurposive erotic play and
enjoyment is suppressed by a code of sobriety, and in the pohtical
and mihtary orders, where the spontaneous release of agression
is inhibited. The disciplined attack of Cromwell's Ironsides gave
these "men of conscience," who "fought for what they knew and
knew for what they fought," the superiority of machine war over
the personalist combat of the feudal cavaliers. Cromwell's army was
held together after victory, and pursued the routed enemy rather
than wasting time in carousing and plundering.
The inner-worldly asceticism does not withdraw from this world
but proves itself in the midst of worldly affairs and temptations.
It is based upon a religiously motivated character structure inte-
grating the pious man's conduct in all orders of life. In extreme
cases, it may lead to complete withdrawal from political and mili-
tary orders, as is shown by Quakers, Hutterites, and Mennonites
who refuse to hold office, will not take oaths, and remain "defense-
less."
The importance of such a psychological type for modern capital-
ism is evidenced by the fact that even after the universal process
of secularization and the disappearance of the specific theological
symbols— voluntary associations and clubs, fraternal societies and
the like— prestige premiums are still placed upon such character
traits, which they justify in terms of convevitional middle-class
morality.
The ramifications of Puritanism, and hence of a primarily reli-
gious phenomenon, fed into the great economic transition from
feudalism to modern industrial capitalism. The decline of the
guild system and of its restraints on competition, the technological
and organizational advances of the workshop, were reinforced
by the migration of persecuted Protestant minorities who estab-
lished themselves outside urban jurisdictions. The parceling up of
markets by politically privileged monopolies was successfully
fought by Puritan businessmen. Thus numerous technological,
monetary, and organizational changes in the age of discoveries,
and changes in trade routes from the Mediterranean to the At-
lantic, found an area of coinciding changes in religion, in personal-
ity formation, and in new religiously motivated ways of playing
the crucial roles instrumental in the emergence of modern indus-
trial capitalism.
But, in due course, the Puritan businessman experienced what
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES 363
all monastic orders, in their contexts, have experienced in the face
of the riches resulting from the asceticism of hard work without
consumption of its fruits. The "inner- worldly asceticism" suc-
cumbed to the temptations of this world. And repeated vogues
of religious revivalism have not changed decisively the big trend
toward a phase in which as Weber put it, "Once in the saddle,
capitalism could dispense with religion." In short, it could rely
on pecuniary incentives for work and openly proclaim "the chase
after the dollar," or in the words of the "bourgeois king," Louis
Philippe, "enrichissez vous!"
III. Co-ordination. In co-ordination unity is achieved by the
subordination of several orders to the regulation or direct manage-
ment of other orders. This in twentieth-century "totalitarian" so-
cieties unity is guaranteed by the rule of the one-party state over
all other institutions and associations. But these societies also
involve correspondence and coincidence.
The general schema— for the integration of Nazi Germany, for
example ^^— runs like this: during the 1920's the economic and po-
litical orders develop quite differently: within the economic order
institutions are highly centralized; a few big units more or less
control the operations and the results of the entire order; within
the political order tliere is fragmentation, many parties competing
to influence the state but no one of them powerful enough to con-
trol the results of economic concentration. So, there is a political
movement which successfully exploits the mass despair of the great
depression and brings the political, military, and economic orders
into close correspondence; one party monopolizes and revamps
the political order; it abolishes or amalgamates all other parties
that would compete for power. To do this requires that the Nazi
party find points of coincidence and/or correspondence with mo-
nopolies in the economic order and certain high agents of the
military order. In these three orders there is a corresponding high
concentration of power; then each of them coincides and co-oper-
ates in the taking of power. The army under President Hindenburg
is not interested in defending the Weimar Republic by crushing
the marching columns of a popular war party. Big business circles
help finance the Nazi party, which, among other things, promised
to smash the labor movement. And the tliree types of chieftains.
i-Cf. Franz Neumann, Behemoth (New York: Oxford, 1942).
264 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
join in an often uneasy coalition to maintain power in their respec-
tive orders and to co-ordinate the rest of society. Rival political
parties are either suppressed and outlawed, or they disband volun-
tarily. Kinship and religious institutions, as well as all organizations
within and between all orders, are "politicized," infiltrated, and co-
ordinated, or at least neutralized and subdued.
The immediate organization by means of which certain high
agents in each of the three dominant orders coincide, and by which
they co-ordinate their own and other orders and institutions, is
the totalitarian party-state. It becomes the over-all frame organiza-
tion which imposes and defines substantive policy goals for all in-
stitutional orders instead of merely guaranteeing government by
law. The totalitarian party extends itself by prowling everywhere
in "auxiliaries" and "affiliations" to other orders. It either breaks
up or infiltrates, and so controls, every organization, even down
to the family.
The legal order is reduced to an adjunct of the police state, with
its terrorist organizations of elite guards and police forces. The
individual has no "constitutional rights" which courts would or
could enforce against arbitrary acts of men in high places. The
individual does not count; the ruler abolishes "the rule of law" and
proclaims "the rule of men." In the military order, the party leader
establishes an autonomous bodyguard subject only to his personal
command, and the army is duplicated by the elite guard of about
half a million men who are sufficiently segregated in composition
and command as to be a party-controlled army, existing alongside
of the mass army of the nation. The kinship order and educational
institutions are controlled through a compulsory organization of
all youth in a "state youth," which in turn is controlled by a youth
auxiliary of the party. A voluntary mass organization of women
controlled through a party auxiliary guarantees control of the
management of the household, which in turn steers the consump-
tion of rationed ersatz. The state party acquires economic enter-
prises through expropriation (of Jews and politically disloyal own-
ers ) . Outstanding examples are the Goring works, the Eher publish-
ing house, the numerous party papers owned by the party, and
numerous municipal enterprises and public utilities which either
are directly appropriated by the party or are under the manage-
ment of party members.
A system of state and hence party controlled "chambers" is or-
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES 365
ganized, membership in which is compulsory for all entrepreneurs
and corporations. Farming is organized into a compulsory cartel,
the Reich's Food Estate. The labor market is controlled through
the compulsory organization of all gainfully employed persons in
the Labor Front. The free professions in addition to their traditional
state control are organized in party controlled chambers of culture,
seven of them, under the direction of a propaganda ministry. Thus,
with the partial exception of the churches, the symbolic sphere of
all orders is centrally managed.
There is more than one official hierarchy, and this fact, through
the resultant competition and overlapping of ill-defined authority,
allows for periodic purges, as well as quick changes of the oflRcial
line. This fact also means that the Fiihrer, and his inner circle,
are relatively independent of the pressure of his own staffs. His
personal decisions are ultimate and are enforceable by the effective
use of his bodyguard, which reaches into the army and into the
police. When most of the institutions in an order cannot be super-
seded by an organizational monopoly, the state party tries to oc-
cupy at least the strategic institutions or to co-ordinate the insti-
tutions under a superimposed party auxiliary.
The symbolic sphere of all orders, as we have said, is controlled
by the party. With the partial exception of the religious order, no
rival claims to autonomous legitimacy are permitted. There is of
course a party monopoly of all formal communications, including
the educational sphere; and all symbols are recast to form the basic
legitimation of the co-ordinated society: the principle of absolute
and magical leadership in a strict and unilateral hierarchy is widely
and increasingly promulgated.
IV. Convergence. Two different orders may coincide, often in
completely unplanned ways, to the point of fusion or convergence.
In a rapidly expanding society, for example, the frontier zones of
the nineteenth-century United States, the institutional articulation
of different orders in the East may peter out on the vanguard
edges. So, for lack of functional specification, certain Eastern insti-
tutional orders converge in the West. The frontier farmer is thus
a military agent as well as an economic man, and the household
becomes a small military outpost as well as a familj- abode. "Neigh-
borliness"— or the relations between contiguous kinship units— fills
in the gaps of institutions not yet organized. There is no church.
S66 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
there are no police, there are no schools— so, in this kinship-cen-
tered society, these functions converge in and are carried by the
family. The roles of women as wife and mother come also to in-
clude the nurse, the midwife, and the teacher; the roles of men as
husband and father, to include the lay religious leader and, if
needed, of the vigilante and militiaman.
It should, of course, be understood that in any concrete social
structure, we may well find mixtures of these four types of struc-
tural integration or structiiral change. The task is to search within
and between institutional orders for points of correspondence and
coincidence, for points of convergence and co-ordination, and to
examine them in detail. The presence of one type does not exclude
the possibility of others. We do not believe that there is any single
or general rule governing the composition and unity of orders and
spheres which holds for all societies. Reality is not often neat and
orderly; it is the task of analysis to single out what is relevant to
neat and orderly understanding.
4. Whij Rome Fell
Those historians who emphasize the military order as decisi\'e
for the fall of Rome have made much of the "invasion of the bar-
barians" and the allegedly declining military virtues of a Roman
mercenary army. Others, especially schoolteachers of the nine-
teenth century, have found fault with the morality of the ruling
stratum before the advent of Christendom; they have made the most
of luxuries, debauchery, lack of hard work, and so forth. Anti-
Christians, such as Nietzsche, have emphasized the asceticist ideal
of the Christians as corrosive of the lordly virtues, and even Gibbon
attributed much of the population decline to the spread of mo-
nastic celibacy and hermitage life. A Communist historian makes
the most of the uprising of slaves in Sicily and Africa, but Nietzsche
has made the most of the uprising of the slave in morality. Whereas
Toynbee and Rostovtsev make much of the Roman proletariat,
external or internal, Friedrich Engels makes much of the alleged
inability of freemen to work because of their leisure-class attitude
and self-respect in the face of degrading slave labor. Obviously,
as one observes the total decline of a civilization as complex as
Rome, many causes and aspects can be highlighted. However, it is
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES ^^J
possible to locate a number of contradictions which cut more and
more widely through the Roman social structure and which pro\ed
insoluble to the Caesars."
I. The plantation economy of Roman agriculture was based upon
slave labor, which did not reproduce itself, as the masters garri-
soned the field slaves by sex, interdicting reproduction as an un-
welcome risk to their investment. As in the American old South,
the plantation economy resulted in deforestation and soil erosion,
in extensive cultivation, and in increasingly barren land in Italy
and Sicily. The prime objectixes of chronic Roman warfare, in
fact, were the conquest of rent-yielding land and of slave labor.
As prisoners of war became slaves, the military campaigns were
in the nature of slave raids. Roman imperialism was economically
necessary; the military and the economic orders were functionally
linked. As the economy shrank in productivity and production, tax
yields to support the military and political excursions also shrank,
which in turn, failed to provide new labor forces of slaves.
II. The displacement of the free peasantry by slaves on planta-
tions (the htifunda) brought with it a decline of population, and
since the defeat of the Gracchi (who for military reasons fought
against the extension of the latifunda into conquered lands), the
army had increasingly to rely upon paid soldiers rather than upon
drafted freemen. The decline of agriculture, however, as we have
just seen, caused a decline in tax yields, since the land tax, as in
all agrarian societies, was the major source of public income. A
strain was thus placed upon the state, due to the increasing mili-
tary burdens accompanying the great expansion and pacification
of the empire, and the decline of money taxes. These tendencies
were reinforced by the technique of collecting taxes through tax
farmers, who squeezed their respective provinces for private profit
with a short-run view, considering that "in the long run we are all
dead." These private speculative gains, even though partially used
to defray the public expenses of office-holding, should the man
of wealth later take office, could not compensate for the diminution
1'^ Our account draws upon Weber's essay "The Social Causes of the Decay
of Ancient Ci\ ihzation," Journal of General Education (Vol. V, No. i, Oc-
tober 1950, Christian Mackauer, tr. ). Cf. M. I. Rostovtzeff, The Social and
Economic Histonj of the Hellenistic World (London: Oxford, 1941), 2 \ols.;
and Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vols. 5 and 6.
^68 SOCIAL STRUCTURE
of the tax yields from the provinces. In addition, more and more
of the costs of a competitive poHtical career were unproductive
expenses for ostentatious pomp and luxury, circuses and sumptu-
ous buildings.
III. In due course, the state sought a solution to its fiscal prob-
lems by paying officials in kind, and by levying forced labor upon
the productive classes of artisans and middlemen. Guild associa-
tions were made compulsory and hereditary for certain trades-
such as traders shipping grain to Rome— and these associations were
obliged to contribute their services, as a joint liability, to the pub-
lic weal.
Veterans who had served with the colors for a certain number
of years received a soldier bonus in land located along the public
water mains, military highroads, and— after the defeat of Varus's
legions and the stabilization of the frontiers— along the line of forti-
fications and camps running along the Danube and the right side of
the Rhine. These veterans received hereditary and non-negotiable
land allotments, which were mortgaged hereditarily and forever
with the maintenance services or even with obligatory military serv-
ices in case of need.
All of this bespeaks of a decline of the money economy and of
the fiscal system; as the greater cohesion of the economic order is
fragmented, payments in kind replace soldiers' wages and official
salaries.
IV. The big consumer cities, especially the city of Rome itself,
also represented a financial burden for the state. The bulk of the
population, the so-called "proletariat," i.e., "men rich in children,"
went idle. They were free Romans having the right to vote, who
had been displaced from their farms, served in the army, and sold
their votes to the highest political bidder. Much of the payment
was in bread and circuses, and Roman circuses were anything but
cheap.
V. As all these fiscal strains mounted, speculative middlemen
and capitalists in the grain trade were displaced, the provision of
grain was made a public business, the imperial bureaucracy took
in hand the overseas grain shipments and their allocations to cities
—in order to control the price of grain and to take the private profit
out of the grain trade. This was the greatest blow which capitalist
middlemen received in Roman antiquity, for the rest of the much
vaunted commerce between ancient trade emporiums actually con-
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES 369
sisted of luxury trade across the Mediterranean, linked to the cara-
van trade across the Middle East which brought Chinese silk and
tea, spices and other specialties to the West, and whatever gold
the West had to the East, to India, where it was wrought into
temple and princely treasures. "International trade," in short, repre-
sented a thin and widely spun network of consumers' goods and not
bulky raw materials or production resources. Given the small size
of the ships, which were unable to sail against the wind and which
were mainly propelled by expensive slave-power, only high-priced
luxury goods could be profitably transshipped.
VI. In the economic order, in summary then, we find an in-
creasing contradiction: land rents diminish with the decreasing
productivity of the land, and the increasing price of slaves as the
frontiers are stabilized and no new slaves brought in. So the costs
of production generally rise, the accumulation of great private
fortunes slows down, and tax burdens become onerous. Given the
liturgical obligations of office-holding, to be voted into office is
like being popularly expropriated, for the elected office holder
had to defray the costs of his office out of his private means.
A "flight from the city" got underway. Those who had landed
wealth and could afford to do so, retreated to their landed estates,
taking their treasures along and establishing themselves in the
countryside and thus escaping the coercive environment of prole-
tarian consumers' cities. The center of gravity of the Mediter-
ranean coastal civilization gradually shifted to the hinterlands;
upper-class families became rusticated and sought to live self-
sufficiently by organizing all essential services in their rural house-
hold economy. The thin network of tiade broke up; both pri\ate
and public economy reverted increasingly to subsistence economy.
Slaves, who could always revolt, required costly supervision and
management, and were accordingly set up as self-moti\'ated workers
who could work their way to freedom by paying off stipulated
annuities, i.e., the slaves were treated as a source of rent rather
than as implements of larger economic institutions. Thus socially
low freemen and socially ascending slaves merged into a homo-
geneous plebeian stratum— to which Christianity made its greatest
appeal. The larger the city and the poorer the people, the greater
the number of Christian converts. Paul is credited with ha\'ing
established the first Christian cells in the provincial capitals
of the Roman orbit. This new set of values, coming from the
^yO SOCIAL STRUCTURE
Middle East, thus met the great needs of a society that was drifting
without hope to its ending.
In brief summary, then, Rome in the course of three centuries
(from Augustus to Diocletian) disintegrated for these reasons:
The economic order was technologically static because of the
undue investment risks entailed by a harshly controlled slave labor
force. Slaves who were threshing grain, for example, were forced
to wear muzzles in order to restrain their unauthorized eating.
The water mill, although known, was never installed. Agricultural
production declined: Jatifunda were allowed to run down as their
hired managers "worked them out" for short-run returns.
Thereafter there was a search for new land and new labor power,
which was realized by imperial warfare and conquest. This, in
time, failed to meet the economic demands because, as the con-
quered territories became more distant from Rome, the fiscal bur-
dens of administration and defense increased to the point where
consolidation of the existing boundaries replaced attempts at new
conquests. But such consolidations, given point i above, were no
solution, and attempts to shore up the failing system all proved
abortive.
In Rome's unity, the economic and the military were func-
tionally dependent; in Rome's disunity, their developments failed
to correspond. And so in the dynamics of the two orders, the scissors
opened, until the pivot of the two blades of Rome broke.
The institutions composing a social structure may be unified
by correspondence (the several institutional orders develop in ac-
cordance with a common principle), by coincidence (various insti-
tutional developments lead to the similar resultant ends), by
co-ordination (one institutional order becomes dominant over the
others and manages them), and by convergence (in their devel-
X)pment, one or more institutional orders blend).
In describing each of these modes of integration we have given
brief examples. But in trying to make clear some of the complex-
ity and variety of total social structures, we have also discussed
some of the sociologist's methods of constructing social structures,
and, in desperate brevity, we have attempted to illustrate these
procedures by describing the structural unity of ancient Sparta
and— the classic case of disunity— Imperial Rome.
THE UNITY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES ^Jl
Neither Sparta nor Rome endured. Regardless of how unified a
social structure may seem, its unity is part of history, and history
is change. Our examination of the integrations and disintegrations
of Sparta and Rome thus point— like all social psychological topics
—to the problem of socio-historical change.
P A H T F O i; It
DYNAMICS
CHAPTER
X I 1 1
Social-historical Change
FROM folklore as well as philosophic reflection and esthetic
experience we inherit a rich legacy of often paradoxical axioms
about change. From an old Roman adage we learn that "Times
change and we change with them," but from an old French say-
ing, that "The more it changes, the more it remains the same."
In our music the mathematically measurable "beat," the metrical
articulation of time, is distinguished from "rhythm," the pulsation
of a melodic flow of energy, which has more to do with our heart-
beat and the right-left swing of the human gait than with the
mechanical exactitude of the metronomic tick-tock.
There is in the Western mind the idea of "Chronos"— the mathe-
matically divisible extension of time as a pure quantitative series
of equal measures; and there is "Kairos"— the time for fateful deci-
sions, the climactic moments which alternate with stretches of time
during which nothing seems to happen. In the history of social
thought we find that thinkers have often been preoccupied with
what seems to them the incomparably unique moment at which
man faces novel decisions. These scholars have been concerned
with those situations in which man finds himself at vmknown "forks
in the road," where no signposts map out future means and ends.
"History teaches that history teaches nothing," wrote Hegel, the
philosopher of the Napoleonic age, who believed that it was im-
possible to stand in the present and yet penetrate the future. For
man's past, by definition, is dead; it has fallen behind in the
inexorable march of the world spirit.^ Other no less powerful minds
—Nietzsche and Freud— have sought to master the shock of the new
by denying that there is really anything new under the sun. Ac-
1 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (rew ed.; New York: Wiley,
1944)-
;^y6 DYNAMICS
cording to them, what matters for man and his Hfe has already
happened in the archaic and closed past which still impregnates
the present. What lies ahead is always the return of the same.
For Freud, the primeval crime is the son's killing the primordial
father of the primitive horde in order to possess the mother. This
crime is transmitted through time and repeatedly asserts itself in
the changing costume of surface appearances. It is the core of man's
constant nature. Lamarckian assumptions concerning the heredi-
tary transmission of once-acquired psychic traits support this no-
tion of constant elements to which change is analytically reduced.
The history of the Judeo-Christian religion, for example, is to
Freud a text revealing the repeated drama of parricide and original
guilt. This fact is revealed in the Freudian process of reducing
changing behavior to constant instinct, changing symbolic elabo-
rations to the constant pressure of the guilt complex.
Man's history is thus stripped by the psychoanalyst of presumed
surfaces and turned into immutable nature. For, as with Aristotle,
change is spurious, and only the constant is genuine. So the bur-
den of the past holds sway over the future. As man's biography,
when correctly understood, represents the recapitulation of the
initial childhood constellation, so the historic drama of mankind
is but the unfolding and reassertion of the initial archaic crime
and of its burden.
One wonders why parricide rather than, let us say, fratricide
should thus be posited as the primordial theme by Freud; why the
story of Oedipus Rex rather than that of Cain and Abel should
be seized upon as the mythological axis of human nature. The
latter might be as serviceable for a Hobbesian construction of
basic human nature as the former. At any rate, anthropologists,
especially Malinowski, have shown the limited bearing of Freud's
discernment of the Oedipus complex on non-Western societies,
kinship structures, and personality formations.
Nietzsche's idea of the Will to Power, and its basic implementa-
tion by the psychic resentment of the socially weak against the
high and mighty, is out of place when we deal with Buddhism,
and holds true only partially for Jewish and Christian traditions.
Moreover, it requires an unwarranted reduction of all love to the
quest for power, of all giving to getting, of all unselfishness to
selfishness.
In a different way, the construction of all human history in ac-
SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE ^JJ
cordance with Marx's historical materialism is apt to block open-
minded inquiry, for it reduces selected aspects and phases of social
history to a series of selected illustrations in proof of the alleged
sovereignty of the economic order. It has been established, for
example, that the military needs of Christian Europe in the face
of the Mohammedan threat from across the Pyrenees made for
feudal landlordism with its economically expendable, professional
horsemen. And again, it requires a metaphysical affirmation of the
"economic basis" as "the real" kernel of social life to construct
recent economic changes of competitive war economics in terms
of impulses from the economy, rather than from military "neces-
sities" and their technological requirements. At the same time, it is
of course obvious that economic and technological conditions limit
and facilitate what man can do in the roles and contexts of non-
economic institutions.
Such great intellectual constructions are fascinating; the inter-
pretative work of the system builders who would answer the ques-
tion of "Whither Mankind?" in terms of the hidden labor of "the
world spirit," man's "will to power," the "instincts of life and
death," or the "productive forces and relations" are intriguing.
But the complexity of themes now available in human knowledge
has repeatedly proved that all such over-all constructions in their
bold emphasis are apt to close rather than to open further inquiry
into the rich variety of human thought and experience.
i. Six Questions
Every model of social structure implies a model of social-his-
torical change; history consists of the changes which social struc-
tures undergo. When we discussed various institutional orders, and
especially their types of integration in Part Three, we had also to
analyze social changes. In the present chapter, we will systematize
and elaborate the implications of our model of social structiuc for
the analysis and understanding of social-historical change.
I. Our first question is the same as the question posed by prob-
lems of integration: What is it that changes? What unit is to be
observed in change? A conception of social structure as an articu-
lation of institutional orders provides, as we shall see, a set of
answers to this question.
3/5 DYNAMICS
II. The second question is how this unit changes, which points
to psychology as well as to the social sciences in general. It points
to psychology for it leads us to seek for the mechanisms which
allow the person to redefine his situation, to perceive alternatives,
to choose new goals, to raise new demands, to communicate new
hopes and fears in the face of challenging tasks and obstacles; in
short, to learn new ways of doing things.
The question of how changes occur points to the social sciences
in general, for we must ask for the mechanisms which allow
newly invented roles to establish themselves in institutional orders
alongside previously existing roles and institutions, displacing some,
forcing others to adjust, and so on. Borrowing and diffusion, in-
vention and imitation, integration and disintegration, expansion
and contraction, acculturation and deculturation, advance and
retrogression, and many other such paired terms of social analysis,
may prove useful in this connection.
III. We may ask, what is the direction of change? At this point,
there is a rich vocabulary of value-laden terms, centered around
"progress" and "decadence," "integration" and "disintegration,"
"rise and fall." What from one perspective, for example, appears
to be the "decline" of Rome, from another point of view appears
to be the "emergence" of feudalism. From the perspective of feudal-
ism, the fact that the Roman colonus is tied to hereditary land
mortgaged to public services in roadways, water mains, or military
fortifications seems like the emergence of serfdom.
IV. What is the tempo of change? We are able to discern two
different situations in sequence, and the number of discernibly dif-
ferent situations per time-unit may naturally vary. In some parts of
some societies, changes may occur in slow-motion, the actors them-
selves not even being aware of change, which overtakes them un-
willing and unaware. In other parts of the society one phase may
follow another at baffling speed. It may, for example, be difficult
for many Europeans to revise their definitions of the swift redis-
tributions of world power after World War II— until it is brought
suddenly into the open by powerful actions.
Psychologically, social changes may thus range from instances
of slow-motion which go unnoticed by the participants, to the
SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE {^"/g
opposite extreme of historical situations in which the participants
take universal change for granted and are surprised at the affirma-
tion of anything allegedly constant other than flux itself. The
simple alternative of static v. dynamic accordingly gives way to a
series ranging from the relatively constant (for nothing is "abso-
lutely" static) through gradualist drift, deliberately piecemeal and
cumulative reforms, through a \ariety of breaks, discontinuities,
and leaps, to total crises and revolutions, with their often incon-
gruous rise and fall of institutions and leaders, symbols and prac-
tices.
V. All of these questions about social change, however, even if
satisfactorily answered, would not satisfy our explanatory interest.
About any given historical epoch we do wish to know what changes,
how it changes, in what direction, and at what tempo. But we also
wish to know why such change is possible and why, in fact, it
occurred. Accordingly, we must ask for the necessary and sufficient
causes of historical change.
VI. We must also answer certain questions which have to do
with how "objective" and "subjective" factors in any given historical
sequence balance each other. These may conveniently be broken
into two questions: (A) What is the causal importance of the
individual in history? And (B) what is the causal role of ideas in
history? Just as a model of social structure is needed to under-
stand "objective factors," so is a model of character structure and
its linkages to social structure needed to understand "subjective"
factors.
Under European despotism, historiography was largely coint
and dynastic historiography; the great decision-makers appeared
to be "absolutist" princes and their small circle of generals, cabinet
officers and counselors, possibly mistresses and camarillas. Ilero-
ized individuals thus appeared to observers as sovereign decision-
makers who by "divine grace" or "right" seemed to determine the
direction and tempo of history. In his monumental essay on "cul-
ture history," Voltaire proposed to pay attention to broad and
deep and epochal changes of societies and cultures, and with each
periodic upswing of democratic sentiment for the last two centuries
his emphasis has been reasserted. It is no accident, incidentally.
280 DYNAMICS
that whenever great crisis situations bring doubt about "the world
we live in" and large scale and protracted warfare among large
political units brings statesmen and generals into the center of
world-wide attention, the "role of the individual in history" became
a topic for discussion. Hegel during the Napoleonic age, and
Mommsen under Bismarck, focused on Julius Caesar to illustrate
their theories of genius. Sidney Hook under Franklin D. Roosevelt
focused upon Lenin and Hitler in illustration of his ideas of event-
making and eventful men.'-
These questions and points of emphasis will be kept in mind as
we briefly lay out the existing range of theory, develop a general
explanatory model of social-historical change, and consider the
dynamics arising from the technological sphere.^ Moreover, we
accept the requirement that a model of social-historical change
must enable us not only to understand the units and mechanics of
historical sequence, but to locate and to explain, as well as use,
other theories of social change. As sociology has absorbed much
of the old concerns of philosophy of history, a brief reflection on
the available theories is appropriate. We can emancipate ourselves
only from what we know to be a fetter.
2. The Range of Theory
From a somewhat formal standpoint, theories of social-historical
change may be classified into two major types :
I. There are principled 7nonistic theories, in which all institu-
tional orders are reduced to one institutional order, and accord-
ingly, a metaphysical accent is placed upon one kind of human
behavior and all other institutional behavior is derivative. Vulgar
Marxism, many varieties of racial and geographical theories, and
vulgar Freudianism illustrate the type.*
-The Hero in History (New York: Day, 1943).
^ We shall consider the role of "the great man" in history and the character
of movements and revolutions below, Chapter XIV: The Sociology of Leader-
ship, and Chapter XV: Collective Beha\ior.
^ It is usually tlie fate of outstanding intellectual work to be banalized in
the process of its mass diffusion. Qualifications are dropped in favor of black
or white assertions, unsolved intricacies are ignored, open-ended speculations
are closed and stereotypes, uncertainties become orthodox credos. So, instead
of thinking as did Marx or Freud, epigoni are busy with quotations from
their works. All sucli banalization, we refer to here by the adjective "vulgar."
SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE ^^1
Vulgar Marxists thus reduce all phenomena to an economic
base; economic institutions are thought to be the reality of which
everything else is a mere expression. Yet, the fact that religious
institutions in Rome draw pilgrims and tourists to Italy and hence
affect the Italian currency situation does not make the N'atican an
economic institution. Noneconomic institutions are thus 'Veduced"
by analysis to other orders, overlooked, or their causal influence
understated. In all such monistic theories there is an implied image
of the nature of human nature; in vulgar Marxism, for example,
man is seen merely as someone who follows economic interests.
II. There is also principled and dogmatic pltiralism, which is the
more popular theory in current social science. It aims at presumed
a priori exhaustiveness, and thus tries to explain something as due
to all possible causes, rather than by a statement of adequate
cause.
We of course assume that social structures are causally bound.
Events and transformations, if they are sufficiently known, can
always be causally explained. The historical "accident" is not un-
caused, but merely, as Sidney Hook once put it, "not deducible
from the data of the original system. For example, the breakdown
of the rice economy in Japan was determined by the preceding
social development; the visit of Commodore Perry by certain politi-
cal considerations. The conjunction of both was relatively acci-
dental. One event could not have been deduced from the other
nor both from a third." ^
Several factors and mechanisms of social change may of course
operate at the same time, and moreover, in various directions. But
not all changes are "cumulative," in fact, some are quite jerky and
discontinuous. And all phenomena do not result from a great
plurality of causes: some are due to unilateral jerks and jolts.
Many thought models of historical change may be useful for
discerning types of change in specific historical sequences. Some
institutional orders, and no doubt whole social structures, go
through what may seem like cycles; other sequences seem linear,
while still others seem like the fluctuations of a pendulum. And
of course, which model one discerns is in part dependent upon
the time-span one uses. We do not believe that any unilateral form
5 "Determinism," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. V, p. iii. Cf.
the remarks on "coincidence," above. Chapter XII: Tlie Unit>- of Social
Structures, Section 3: Modes of Integration.
^82 DYNAMICS
of change is applicable as a guide to, much less as formal ex-
planation of "history"— even of only Western history. But even
though such formal conceptions do not possess explanatory value,
it is good to know as many of them as possible. For the plethora
of history no doubt exhibits at some time and in some society all
of them.
Any one of the institutional orders or spheres, which we have
segregated may be (and, in fact, each of them has been) taken as
the dominant order from which change springs.
I. There are technological theories of history in which machine
industry, scientific enlightenment, and efficiency values are the
prime movers— and all else lags behind or adjusts. Naturally, dur-
ing the rise of industry in the nineteenth century, this process was
a major, if not the dominant, experience of Western societies, and
so an increasing accentuation was placed upon the technological
sphere of the economic order as of crucial importance. We shall
presently consider the technological sphere in detail."
II. To construct a theory of history on the basis of the kinship
order is to make the growth of population the hub of historical
dynamics. Thus Malthus saw a difference between mankind, which
procreated according to the Biblical principle of abundance ("Be
fruitful and multiply") and the rest of nature, which followed the
principle of scarcity. Man's increase is geometric; his food supply
only algebraic. Accordingly, the need for food lags behind the
growth of population, and this disproportion leads to a growing
consciousness of scarcity in the face of niggardly nature. Thus,
according to Malthus, if man does not act "responsibly" by cur-
tailing his procreative activity and turn away from Biblical fun-
damentalism to "adjust" himself to natural scarcity, mass pauper-
ism, infant mortality, and death will effect the appropriate balance
between burgeoning population and scanty resources.^
When population pressure is posited as the prime historical
mover, economists often discern industrial dynamics as one result.
The enormous population increase in China since the eighteenth
century, under static technological and agricultural conditions, may
8 See below, this chapter, Section 3: Tlie Teclinological Sphere.
^ T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (6th ed., 2 vols.;
London, 1826).
SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE 1^8^
be referred to as sufficient to disprove the universality claimed for
such "laws."
III. Closely connected with technological and population the-
ories is Marx's view, which posits class antagonism as the prime
engine of historical change. Of course, Marx's emphasis had its
"precursors," and since Marx a broad literature of historical mate-
rialist interpretations of various periods has been developed. Thus
Karl Kautsky has interpreted early Christendom; Eduard Bern-
stein, the Cromwellian Revolution; and George Lukacs has de-
voted much effort to analyzing literature in materialist terms. **
Today, from East Germany to China, school children learn his-
tory from the textbooks of Russian authors. One of these books,
which we have had an opportunity to examine, deals with ancient
societies, with China, Egypt, the Middle East, Greece, and Rome
under the recurrent heading of "slave states." Regardless of whether
this or that formulation can stand up, it is characteristic of the
emphasis that the religion and literature of ancient China— Con-
fucianism and Taoism— receive three lines, and that in a section on
ancient Palestine the Bible is mentioned, as it were, in passing—
as if ancient Jewry would merit any attention at all without it.
In such a vulgarized perspective, man's relation to nature is
reduced to instrumental and efficiency values, social relations to
those of master and slave; and the legacies of ancient civilizations
in art, religion, and literature, which astound sensitive minds and
motivate intellectual reassessments of their social-historical set-
tings, are pushed to the side and obscured. The humanist horizon,
which during the last 150 years the moral and cultural sciences
have extended to global scope and prehistoric depth, is reduced,
and the thematic range adjusted to the mentality of future pro-
duction managers. Recent history, which is so important for in-
formed perspectives on the future, is of course rewritten with an
artistic freedom beyond the boldest imagination of a Seeley or a
Treitschke. Faust's dictum against the historians still holds against
such historians as these: "What you call the spirit of the times is
in the last analysis your own spirit in which the past is mirrored."
8 See especially, George Lukacs, Studies in European Realism, Edith Bone,
tr. (London: Hillway, 1950); and die two wonderful volumes by Arnold
Hauser, The Social History of Art (New York: Knopf, 1951 )> which pertain
to much more than art.
^84 DYNAMICS
Max Weber has correctly pointed out that in applying historical
materialism many authors fail to distinguish between what is eco-
nomic, what is economically determined, and what is merely
economically relevant. Modern social science as a whole has given
increasing attention to the economic determination of all sorts of
noneconomic institutions and activities. Economic institutions are
understood to facilitate and/or to limit religious and artistic, mih-
tary, and educational activities.
We agree with Weber's evaluation of Marx's emphasis upon the
economic order in the modern capitalist era: '' It is a heuristic
choice which holds that the economic order is the most convenient
way to an understanding of this specific social structure. So much
is fruitful in the Marxist perspective that, although it has not been
accepted, much of it has gradually become taken for granted.^"
In Marx's perspective, the economic order has a unique methodo-
logical position among the institutions in capitalist society. For it
is the order in terms of which the stratification of the whole society
is instituted. Accordingly it is the best point of departure for any
realistic examination of instituted stratifications. We also accept
the principle of historical specificity, which today means that the
problems we face are set by conflicting elements in a specifically
capitalist social structure. And we should not forget that Marxist
( or Marxist influenced ) conceptions of social change have fruitfully
corrected those views which dramatize political decision-makers
and their work but stop short of asking about the limiting condi-
tions of their power.
IV. E. A. Ross once remarked that the theory of economic de-
terminism needs to be rounded out by a theory of military deter-
minism. There is of course a large literature on militarism which
» See tlie introduction to From Max Weber, Essays in Sociology by H. H.
Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford, 1946).
1" The original work of Marx was translated for U.S. academic publics, for
example, by Thorstcin Veblen, who came to the notion of "lag, leak and
friction" between, specifically, business institutions and industrial techniques
and institutions. William Ogburn later generalized this so as to take Veblen's
leak and friction out of it: the specificity of the tension between business
institutions and industrial technology. He generalized it in such a way that
he leaves unanswered the ciuestion of which elements lag culturally, and
specifically why they do. See W. F. Ogburn, Social Change (New York: Vik-
ing, 1922).
SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE ^^j^
the social scientist ignores at the peril of missing very crucial fac-
tors in contemporary change.'^
Admiral Mahan's essay on seapower opened new and larger
perspectives on the great conflict between Napoleon and Great
Britain. In brief, the admiral showed that the relative cheapness
of sea transport, as compared with the costliness of land move-
ments of mass armies, the cheapness of the blockade plus the
acquisition of overseas possessions by Great Britain in her two
decades of struggle to down France, in the end proved superior to
Napoleonic landpower, no matter how brilliant Napoleon's gener-
alship, no matter how high the morale of revolutionary armies who
fought under the sun in Egypt, in the mountains of Spain, or on
the snowy plains of Russia. In the contest between a strategy of
annihilation and that of attrition, seapower employing attrition
proved superior to land power and annihilation. Mahans brilliant
analyses thus brought the economic factor to bear on the contest
between sea and land power.
Since then, the world scene has changed, but the general prob-
lem has remained. Industrialism has lent greater mobility to land
armies. In the railroad age, General Grant understood the condi-
tion of victory as he fought for mastery of the railroad lines. And
at about the same time, during the war of Prussia and Austria for
the hegemony of central Europe, Grant's counterpart in Europe,
Hellmuth von Moltke, replaced old-fashioned maps with railroad
maps.
Since the end of World War I, a still closer "integration" be-
tween industrial technology and the art of warfare has come about.
Mass armies are motorized, as is military personnel, in the air and
under the sea. Trucks and submarines, tanks and airplanes have
reopened the problems of the Napoleonic strategy of annihilation
on the European continent. Yet sea power and the blockade weapon,
along with superior airpower based on U.S. industry, have proved
on a now global scale that Mahan's ideas are still pertinent.
Meanwhile, all single-track theories of war that rely on "one
weapon" as the last word— on the infantry or artiller\- (Stalin),
on sea power (Mahan) or "air power" (Douhet, Seversky). on
the "superiority" of the defense (Liddell Hart, Maginot) or the
11 See Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism (New York: Norton, 1937) and
Makers of Modern Strategtj, E. M. Earle and others, eds. (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1943) and tlie references contained therein.
^86 DYNAMICS
offense ("the offensive is the best defense"), on the wisdom of
trading time for space and "winning the last battle"— have been
proved to be partial, and in some contexts to be fallacious.
The theater of world wars is now the world, and the deployment
of means and stratagems is total. Whatever destructive and pro-
ductive capacities men develop they seem likely to use in war. No
fear or warning has ever deterred men from hoping for the triumph
of their side by use of "superior" force. Thus during the Middle
Ages the pope of Christendom condemned the tactics of the Eng-
lish yeomen who with crossbows ambushed unsuspecting knights.
During World War I, submarine warfare appeared to the great
naval powers as a criminal breach of all the rules of international
law and Christian morality. But in the middle of the twentieth
century the dropping of atomic bombs has caused no effective
moral upheaval, and since the distinction between combatants and
noncombatants by all sorts of weapons of destruction has been
eliminated, we may safely expect that men will use all weapons
at their command in any war to come.
V. There are thinkers who view ideas as the ultimate core of
human will and action and who, accordingly, assume that "ideas,"
"public opinion," or "propaganda" are the prime movers in his-
tory. Arnold Toynbee, for example, in his monumental study of
twenty-six civilizations reaches the conclusion that Western civili-
zation is doomed without a Christian revival. ^-
, During the eighteenth century, intellectuals experienced the
formation and rise of a new mass public for their works, which
were distributed by the press, the novel, and pamphlet. Their ideas
aroused and inspired those middle-class movements of the Western
world that accompanied the industrial revolution, and they came
to feel that they were supported by an increasingly broad and self-
conscious public. In turn, they legitimated the "rights of man"
in the name of "public opinion," which accordingly became the
master formula for a complex network of solidarizations in the
reading halls and coffee houses, the salons of philosophers and
the political clubs of factions. "Public opinion" became a master
symbol for the demands of the middle class, and the intellectuals
1^ See A Study of History (London, 1951), Vol. VI, p. 278.
SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE ;^8y
experienced their own role in terms of the historical force of ideas.
Although he broke with this tradition in the early 1840's, Karl Marx
stated, "Theory, too, becomes a material force as soon as it takes
hold of the masses." ^^
Out of the experience of modern liberalism there arose the con-
ception that the ideas of "exceptional individuals" are essential
in historical dynamics; that public opinion makes history; that his-
tory is a sequence of ideas. The classic liberal statement of such
an ideological theory of history or of progress is given by John
Stuart Mill, who in this respect was influenced by Comte:
"Now the evidence of history and that of human nature com-
bine, by a striking instance of consilience, to show that there really
is one social element which is thus predominant, and almost para-
mount, among the agents of the social progression. This is, the
state of the speculative faculties of mankind: including the nature
of the beliefs which by any means they have arrived at, concerning
themselves and the world by which they are surrounded.
"It would be a great error, and one very little likely to be com-
mitted, to assert that speculation, intellectual activity, the pursuit
of truth, is among the more powerful propensities of human na-
ture, or holds a predominating place in the lives of any, save de-
cidedly exceptional individuals. But notwithstanding the relative
weakness of this principle among other sociological agents, its
influence is the main determining cause of the social progress; all
the other dispositions of our nature which contribute to that prog-
ress, being dependent on it for the means of accomplishing their
share of the work ... in order that mankind should conform their
actions to any set of opinions, these opinions must exist, must be
beheved by them. And thus, the state of the speculati\e faculties,
the character of the propositions assented to by the intellect,
essentially determines the moral and political state of the com-
munity, as we have already seen that it determines the physical.
"These conclusions, deduced from the laws of human nature,
are in entire accordance with the general facts of history. Every
considerable change historically known to us in the condition of
any portion of mankind, when not brought about by external force,
13 See his "Criticism of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right" ( Selected Essays
by Karl Marx, H. T. Stenning, tr. New York: International PuliHsliers, 1926),
p. n.
^88 DYNAMICS
has been preceded by a change, or proportional extent, in the state
of their knowledge, or in their prevalent beliefs." "
We have already criticized this view in Chapter X: The Symbol
Sphere.
S. The Technological Sphere
By the "technological sphere" we refer to tools and machines
as well as to the ways in which they are used. In this sphere we
find wheelbarrows and prayer wheels, flint knives and rosaries,
bulldozers, carbide tipped lathe chisels, plywood, and atom bombs.
But beyond these material objects, the term also covers the im-
plementation of human conduct by such tools and machines, which
means that it refers to the various skills required of those using
such artifacts.
I. Technology and Institutions. Many modern theories of social
change, as we have seen, stress technological developments, and
many statements of the major phases of history are constructed as
levels of technology. Classifications of technology may be put in
several ways, each no doubt useful for some purposes. In terms of
the dominant raw materials employed, we have ages of stone,
wood, copper, bronze, iron, steel. In terms of the source of power
that is used, we have men and beasts, coal and steam, gasoline
motors and electrical power, and finally, atomic energy. Each of
these, alone or in combinations, is a useful empirical classification.
For our purposes, however, we find a third way of classifying
technologies more promising: in terms of the institutional con-
text(s) in which they are primarily anchored and the social context
in which the use and management of a societies' technology appear
to center. All institutional orders have their technologies, the reli-
gious no less than the economic order or the symbol sphere. There
are techniques for playing the piano just as there are techniques
for handling a die-casting or a chalice. The ends to which the
techniques serve as a means will obviously be determined by the
order in which the technique is instituted. Accordingly, the devel-
opment of the technical sphere in any order is steered and limited
by the ends of that order.
I'A System of Logic (7th cd.; New York: Longmans, 1930), Vol. II,
pp. 523-24-
SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE 3S9
If the end is salvation and Buddhist monks bcHeve that mam
prayers serve better than one prayer, then the technique of pray-
ing may proceed by the construction of prayer wheels. Slips car-
rying a short prayer are fastened to the spokes of the wheel and
one full turn of each prayer-carrying spoke is counted as one
prayer in behalf of the salvation seeker. One step toward greater
efficiency involves the addition of more spokes built into the wheel,
or making it spin faster, and finally instead of man's tired hand,
wind and waterpower are harnessed to the prayer wheel. This in-
creased prayer output ramifies into a sort of salvation economy.
Rivers and streams are valued according to their water flow, for
swift currents make for more prayers in one's lifetime. The owners
of fortunately placed prayer wheels thus have an abundance of
prayers to their credit and may come to feel that they actually
have surplus prayers, that is, more than is needed for their saha-
tion. They may then respond to their less fortimate brothers by
transferring surplus prayers to their credit.
In modem society, technological spheres range from simple
gadgets to complex machines. Kinship roles are modified by the
level and type of household technology available, especially in
cellar, bathroom, and kitchen. Military roles now involve quite
elaborate machines and techniques: modern war technology is not
imaginable without a fusion with industrial technology. In the
religious order, there are above all great cathedrals, with their
pulpits and altars; and in many religious units, more elaborate and
specialized implements of worship. In the pohtical order, in addi-
tion to palaces and parliaments, there are flags, seals, and files,
which implement roles technically and symbolically.
But it is in the economic order's units of production that modern
technology is centered and anchored. Indeed, so much is this the
case, that most theories of technology as the prime mover and
shaker of history tend to shade, often imperceptibly, into an eco-
nomic determinism.
Now, however accurate the quasi-identification of technology
and economy may be for modern history, we run the risk of un-
warranted historical generalization when we take it as a unixersal
fact. There has been no steady onward push of technology in the
course of world history. It is well known, or should be, that be-
tween the third millennium b.c. and the eleventh century a.d., no
basic technological dexelopments occurred in the West. In fact.
SQO DYNAMICS
only the earliest river-valley civilizations of neolithic Egypt, Su-
meria, China, and the West's modern era (especially the eleventh
century and then from the sixteenth to date) have witnessed strik-
ing technological progression.
In our formal model of social-historical change, and the role of
technology within it, we must remain carefully open-minded and
historically specific. The technological sphere is not self-determin-
ing; it is not autonomous; it does not develop "all by itself. " On the
contrary, to be part of history, technology must be instituted— it
must involve men in skilled roles— and it may be primarily insti-
tuted in orders other than the economic. Today we observe in
leading industrial societies a shift in the center of technological
initiative and guidance from the economic to the military. In con-
trast to the nineteenth century, nowadays military, as much as
economic, orientations and goals determine how technology pro-
gresses; which features of the culmination of invention and mate-
rial uses will be pushed further, and which held back; which roles
in which orders will be implemented by technology and which
will not; and thus what social effects technology has. Thus atomic
power is being developed for propelling a submarine, not an ocean
liner. In modern war, as we have already remarked, all orders
and spheres— including the technological— tend to become ramifi-
cations of military and political orders.
Due to religious constraints, technological implementation of
the household— from kitchen utensils to drawing room comfort-
is not found among the Old Order Amish. But the very same
religion, in its inner-worldly asceticism, places a premium on active
technological ingenuity and inventiveness in the sphere of produc-
tion. Early in the eighteenth century the ancestors of the Amish
along the Rhine invented crop rotation and the winter feeding of
livestock (clover); later, as the Pennsylvania Dutch, they aston-
ished their neighbors by putting artificial fertilizers on their fields.
Today the Amish install telephones outside their homes in the
yard or workshop for business calls, but they will not use them
for social calls; they install electricity in their carpenter shops, but
they will not wire their homes; they accept the internal combustion
motor when it is used in a tractor, but not in a private car. They
accept technology only in production, not in consumption.
In the classical Oriental civilization, priestly and quasi-religious
bureaucracies have guided technological developments. In India
SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE 39 1
and in Egypt there were colossal temples and pyramidal tombs;
and in China, in addition to the Great Wall, there were the Im-
perial Canal and other irrigation projects, instituted and governed
politically, upon which the economy depended.
In the Mediterranean epoch, technological advance was anchored
in and restricted to the military, religious, and political orders and
the realm of consumption. But in the production zones of the
economy, technological advance was deterred. Thus in ancient
Rome;, the hand and stone mill was never displaced by the water
mill, despite the fact that the water mill had been described by
Strabo. The risks of slave labor on the plantations, the constant
danger of rebellious sabotage, made more complicated and costly
machinery unprofitable. The Romans never learned to make effec-
tive use of more than two draft animals, for they never learned
to hitch teams head-to-tail; hence large teams could not be used
for draft work, and the Quadruga drawn by four horses hitched
shoulder-to-shoulder was more for show than for efficiency. On the
other hand, descriptions by Caesar, as well as by others, reveal
that the Roman legions were capable of using fairly complicated
siege machinery and of great engineering feats in military highways
and bridges. And the Romans developed an extensi\'e and colossal
technology in the sphere of consumption: aqueducts, complicated
circus buildings, and hot water in bathrooms.
Whereas in the case of the Old Order Amish technological ad-
vances for four centuries remained strictly confined to production,
in ancient Rome technological advances were confined to con-
sumption and warfare, and did not influence the technique of pro-
duction. Therefore, it may be said that technological spheres do
not advance simply on the basis of available knowledge of tech-
nical possibilities, but that institutions must raise eftecti\e demands
for the incorporation of technical implements.
There is no automatic causal relation between the technological
sphere and any institutional order, and there is no automatic har-
mony among the technological spheres of different orders. It has
been repeatedly observed during the last fifty years that tech-
nological advances of progressive munitions makers ha\'e been
blocked by the conservatism of military personnel. Alfred Krupp's
fight against the Prussian officer corps for the introduction of his
superior products was successful only after a German ship carrying
the older guns had been sunk by a vessel making use of Krupp
S92 DYNAMICS
guns. The biographies of Count von ZeppeHn or Alfred Nobel
provide similar illustrations, as do those of Samuel Colt and Billy
Mitchell in America. Were military chieftains as conservative as
the plantation heads of old Rome, we might conceive of a social
structure in which disproportionate technical advances worked in
favor of the economic, and to the disfavor of the military. But mili-
tary conservatism is not the whole story. We meet just as frequently
with military demands for technological advances. The develop-
ment of the medieval gun foundry, the tank, the radio, as well as
the subsidizing of modern aeronautics and the production of under-
water vessels and atomic energy plants, would probably have been
greatly delayed without the demands of war.
II. Skill Levels and Role Changes. The technological sphere of
an institutional order determines the levels and types of skill re-
quired for the enactment of its various roles. As technology and
technical roles change, so do the required skills. If we take the
role as our unit of change, and focus upon its skill aspect, we are
able to understand, up close as it were, the social implications of
technological change.
A. Technology may force the formation of new roles as well as
the obsolescence of old ones within an institution; it may also
prompt the instituting of educational spheres for training the
players of these roles.
B. Technology may determine the adequate criteria to be used
for the selection of persons to enact the roles it has prompted or
reshaped.
C. Finally, technology may split one role into two or more
roles, or force the convergence of many complex roles into one
simplified role.\ These positive and negative effects upon required
skills and upon the selection and formation of persons to exercise
them may, of course, occur in given institutional contexts, and
accordingly their "timing" will vary.
In a market for skilled labor, those persons who are playing
skilled roles for pay and who cannot effectively claim scarcity value
for their skill may gain permanent roles only after they have suc-
cessfully filled provisional ones. On the other hand, those who,
on the basis of the irreplaceability of their skills, monopolize key
positions may haggle and bargain for job security as a condition
of their employment. This is typically true of eminent scholars or
^ SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE 393
die-casters, highly paid executives or professional soldiers, diplo-
mats or administrative officials.
Loss of skill may result in loss of the role requirinif it; such
loss of adequate skill may be due to bodily injury or aginti or to
technological innovation. If institutional demand for certain skills
should decline, due to technological or economic changes, inten-
sified competition for the shrinking opportunities may lead to loss
of skills by those who have no opportunity to practice them. This
is one of the consecjuences of mass unemployment during business
depressions, or of defeat in war, with the discharge of military
professionals. After some time, such competitively disadvantaged
actors may lose their hopes ^i ever marketing their skills and so
of returning to their former roles; if this should happen, the objec-
tive relinquishment of the role is subjectively completed.
Specialization of skills is involved in specialization of roles. What
was formerly done by one man may, in a division of labor, be
divided, and two men perform it. A new skill role thus de\elops.
In the mass production of music for motion pictures, the role of
the composer is split into those who think up tunes, those who
arrange accompanying chords, those who make the instrumental
arrangements, and so on. Institutional mechanics may also take
the opposite course, by setting up a demand that one man com-
bine two skills in one role. One man now does what was formerly
done by two. Thus a household, finding itself in economic difficul-
ties, may save money by replacing its gardener and chauffeur by
one person who takes care of the lawn and also drives the car,
or the roles of maid and cook may be merged.
Technological changes thus eliminate and create roles; in fact,
entire institutions, with their varying roles, may be eliminated by
the introduction of new techniques. Such changes naturally in\ ol\ e
hopes and fears which must be understood in their precise role
context. New roles which carry higher status or income or power
create and channel ambitions and hopes. The contraction of roles
in any institutional order tends to produce scarcity consciousness
and insecurity feelings on the basis of which one may observe
heightened competition among job holders who seek to displace
one another. Or, in contrast, the pressures may call forth solidarity
sentiments in defense of jobs which the threatened workers or mili-
tary men have come to consider as "theirs" by right of years of
service. Anxieties or frustrations aroused in this way may appear
S94 DYNAMICS
in other contexts of the person as aggressions. Thus the anxieties
of small manufacturers originating in the technological sphere of
an economic order may cause cumulative hostilities which may be
"free floating" or which may be expressed in the political order or
in family life, in mass spectator sports or in a seat on the aisle
in the dark of a movie. To the extent to which the helpless person,
under the guidance of a severe generalized other and lack of in-
sight, suppresses such hostilities, he may develop guilt feelings
and hence punish himself. In extreme cases, such "masochist" tend-
encies to self-punishment may tempt a desperate man to suicide,
or, by a curious inversion of cause and effect, it may compel the
actor to "ask for it" by committing a grime. The new transient role,
that of the criminal, "makes sense" to him. Technological changes,
understood sociologically, may thus have many complicated conse-
quences. But then no causal sequence in a social structure, when
adequately traced, is simple.
Although technique is not linked exclusively to economic insti-
tutions, since the seventeenth century, science, technology, and eco-
nomic institLitions have become firmly linked. Since then, the tech-
nique of production has circumscribed the limitations and possi-
bilities of all technical implementation. ^r Without the modern glass
industry, astronomy could not have its giant telescopes; without
the production of photographic equipment, modern microscopic
observation would be impossible. Without the skill of the carpenter,
the occidental violin would be impossible; crafts and skills are
thus necessary preconditions for the development of instrumfental
music. Whatever else his music may express, Bach composed The
Well Tempered Clavichord to prove the adequate range and pos-
sibilities of the instrument when tuned in this way.
The priest and the artist as well as the die-maker must acquire
facility with routines— routines which are required for adequately
handling the instruments each uses. Insofar as imagination is tech-
nologically oriented, it is to be found in all spheres of social life.
There are musical "inventions" just as there are electrical inventions.
There may of course be differences in tempo between the develop-
ment of human skill and the production of instruments. A new
instrument is a challenge to old skills: it was thirty years after the
perfection of the violin by Stradivari and Guarnieri before Corelli
invented and established the role of the violin virtuoso. But the
reverse may also hold: human skills may confront problems the
SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE 395
solutions to which become possible only if suitable technological
inventions are available. Beethoven's compositions and style of per-
formance demanded that the piano pedal be de\ eloped. He did
not develop his technique of composition because the concert grand
piano had been invented; the concert piano was promoted by
Beethoven, who told the instrument makers what he needed. Some-
times skills lag; sometimes technologies do.
W. H. E. Lecky wrote: ^^ "The causes which most disturbed or
accelerated the normal progress of society in antiquity were the
appearance of great men, in modern times they have been the
appearance of great inventions . . . The leading characteristics of
modern societies are in consequence marked out much more by
the triumphs of inventive skill than by the sustained energy of
moral causes." This might lead us to believe that "the inventor" as
a type of man has in modern times replaced "the great man" of
antiquity. Such an inference would be incorrect. For the inventor—
as a free-lance man combining industrial ingenuity and scientific
ability— was, in fact, a short-lived type, existing between the era of
static technology, which ended in the eighteenth century, and the
era of bureaucratized science and bureaucratized industry of the
twentieth century. The origins of the inventor lay in the Renais-
sance of Leonardo and of experimental artisans; his end was al-
ready adumbrated in the early nineteenth century, for example,
in Balzac's image of David Sechard.^*^
III. The Autonomy of Technology. We have remarked that tech-
nology does not advance automatically, of its own force; that before
technology can effect historical changes, institutions must raise
effective demands to incorporate it; that institutional orders \ary in
this respect; and hence that the technological spheres of different
societies are differently anchored. Nevertheless, does not technology
have some causal autonomy? Does it not exert a long-run causal
force, even if unevenly, upon human institutions everywhere, at all
times? These are the rhetorical questions of "technological deter-
minism," perhaps nowadays the leading theory of social change,
and there is something to them.
15 See his History of European Morals (New York: Appleton, 1929), 1897,
Vol. I, pp. 126-27.
16 See his Lost Illusions (Temple ed.; New York: Macmillan, 1910), especi-
ally Part II.
396 DYNAMICS
One aspect of the conception of technological development as
autonomous deserves particular attention: many discoveries have
not been made out of regard for any usefulness. Of course they
have been adapted with great ingenuity to given demands, but
the discoveries themselves were the results of combinations play-
fully made out of the existing stock of technologies and ideas. It
is the impact of one discovery or invention upon scientific workers
in other contexts of discovery that forms the internal interaction of
the quasi-organized workmanship and idea-ship of science and
technology. It is this "immanent logic" of playful or systematic
combinations that is concretely meant by the "idle curiosity" of
the scientist, or the pursuit of science for science's own sake.
Now the phrase, "science and technology," stands for an in-
tricately specialized division of labor. Agents well entrenched in
the given institutions— modern manufacturers, for example— con-
stantly scan the world scientific output for items useful to their
own marketable product. Other agents— those of the military order
of the victorious nations of World War I— rested on their oars and
had to have some technologies useful to their ends forced upon
them by the new model armies of the defeated. But, according
to the theory of the autonomous technological continuum and the
logic of combinations, neither manufacturer or general can go
further than the continuum permits. Of course, by supporting or
failing to support the work, they can slow it up or speed it along.
Atomic energy research, for example, had quite different settings
in the United States and in Hitler Germany. Whereas President
Roosevelt promptly responded to Einstein's letter in 1939 and was
ready to set aside substantial funds and facilities. Hitler proved
less available to the counsel of physicists who were of course unable
to guarantee results within six months, as he demanded. Hitler
operated in a context of "autarchy" and scarcity; Roosevelt, as far
as resources for military requirements are concerned, in an economy
of comparative abundance.
In and of itself, the technological continuum is socially, eco-
nomically, and morally blind; it is no Messiah; it has no other aim
then to allow man to implement any given end he may have,
with less physical effort in a shorter time. "Radio" can broadcast
music or it can teach that the world is flat. But institutions are not
blind. The institutional "market" for science takes up the discov-
SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE ;^gy
eries of science at various stages of the ongoing process of science,
and turns them into commodities, weapons, and tools. Oil men
gave geologists a hearing, Franklin Giddings '" once remarked,
because geologists make money for them. And there is often a
great institutional gap, especially in mature capitalist societies,
between scientific discoveries and their public use: legal and busi-
ness institutions often hold back this "rational" and apparently
easy transition. And if we consider "technological unemployment"
in the long run as "irrational," surely we have learned that what is
technically efficient and economically profitable is not necessarily
socially rational. Science is not automatically "at the service of
mankind."
But that does not mean that profit-making or war-making or
monopolist restriction of in\ention and frozen patents, "set the
ends" of science and technology. There has been, in modern times,
a complicated interplay between industry and technology, busi-
ness and science. Both sides of the interplay reached their modern
scale and tempo together. New industries grew from a complex of
inventions, and industries have subsidized the development of new
leaps forward in technical skills and big gadgets. Inventors have
made money-makers possible; money-makers have subsidized in-
ventors, and exploited their work.
Necessity or purpose is the mother of adaptive inventions; but
invention is also the mother of necessity. There is nothing in the
logic or in the course of science that dictates that its results will
be used for any particular end, or indeed that it will be used at
all. The growing points of the technological continuum may or
may not coincide with the growing points of institutional demand.
Both shift, pass one another, coincide for a moment, move on.
The person may become attached to the skill aspects of his
roles in such a way that his feelings transcend the orienting func-
tion of the institution of which his role is a part. Such internalized
standards are involved in all "craftsmanship," and groups, such as
the guild, may have ethical and status codes which keep standards
of skill high. Craftsmanship also refers to the joyful experience of
mastering the resistance of the materials with which one works, or
the solution of self-imposed tasks— an experience that might occur
^'^ Civilization and Society (New York: Holt, 1932), p. 164.
SgS DYNAMICS
irrespective of the opinions of other persons or of any rule that
exists.^*
The technological sphere has an inner dynamic just as all spheres
do, but the chances that technological advances will be instituted
by given institutions are not determined solely by the state of
technology. They are also determined by the premiums which given
institutions place upon the incorporation of such advances. The
technology of any given time is a necessary condition for the
technical dynamics of an institutional order, but not a sufficient
cause for their explanation. In order to have a steamboat it is
necessary to have a boat and a steam engine, but to institute a
steamboat in the economic or military orders, the boat must be
recognized as a serviceable means to the ends of these orders.
Napoleon, we recall, refused Fulton's offer.
4. Social-historical Change
By social change we refer to whatever may happen in the course
of time to the roles, the institutions, or the orders comprising a
social structure: their emergence, growth, and decline. Our model
of social structure thus provides us with several interconnected units,
each of which may undergo quantitative as well as qualitative,
microscopic as well as macroscopic, change.
When we focus upon the concept of role as the unit of social
change, we ask how many people play a given role and, at what
tempo is one role displaced by another. The first point of observa-
tion may be illustrated by the decrease of independent producers
in certain industries. The displacement of one role by another may
be illustrated by the shift from entrepreneurial to managerial roles
in the economic order.
The institution may be taken as the unit; again the number of
IS One economic aspect of tliis technical quality is that only relatively
wealthy patrons can pay for handicraft; the masses have to do without them.
High standards of skill demand long years of apprenticeship, hence the
social exclusiveness of the guilds, the worker insisting upon controlling his prod-
uct from raw material to its completion. Thus we find helmet-makers, sword-
makers, shoe-makers, glove-makers. Industrial technology follows a different
principle of specialization. In its coiuse from raw material to finished product,
the product passes, as it were, through numerous plants, and one firm, such as
General Electric, may produce more than 30,000 differently priced products
by incorporating a great variety of skill groups in one enterprise.
SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE 399
any given type of institution— churches or sects, factories or farms—
as well as the types of institutions that most generally prevail.
Thus, individual enterprises in the economic order are replaced by
corporations; and there is a decline of independent entrepreneur-
ships.
We may use the institutional order as our unit of change, and
thus speak of the changing numbers of institutions of given t\'pes
that exist in that order, the types of institutions that have become
dominant or secondary within an order, and finally, the shifting
relations of this order to other orders. If there are disproportionate
changes of one type of institution within the order, as o\er against
another, we might observe a shift from quantitative to qualitative
kinds of changes. Thus, when the small independent enterprise is
displaced by the giant corporation as the dominant institutional
type, the whole order,, as it were, has undergone a basic change.
The social structure itself can be "overturned," as in total revolu-
tion or other epochal transitions. This means that in each institu-
tional order we observe a shift, not only of personnel, but in the
type of institution that prevails. It also usually means that the
orders composing the social structure, the way in which they are
articulated and related, are recomposed so that a new social struc-
ture emerges. And most important, such revolutions mean that the
legitimations and their ideological elaboration change.
Microscopic and macroscopic changes may occur inside the social
structiue as a whole, inside given orders, or inside institutions, and
these changes may occur at disproportionate rates, in quantitative
and in qualitative ways.^'^
1^ Of course, other units of change may be chosen. For example, perhaps
the simplest observable change is the purely quantitative increase or de-
crease of the biological units composing a society. An increase in the
average weight of a newly bom infant, or of the height of the average
man, is not, of course, in and of itself social change, but neither is it a
purely "natural process." Such changes can often be ascribed to changed
social conditions, such as standards of li\ing or effecti\e diets. Socially con-
ditioned biological changes of this sort, in turn, become socially rele\ant;
the size of army vmiforms must be changed, school benches become cramped
or obsolete.
Only insofar as social actions are oriented to biological data are such data
of direct sociological account. In Germany, for example, kinky hair has not
been of public concern, but under Nazism, die distribution of blond hair
and blue e\es became relexant, spurious status premiums ha\ing been
ideologically placed upon Uiem. With the motorization of the modern army.
400 DYNAMICS
Many changes in society may be tabulated as changes in quan-
tity. A jDrice curve symbolizes the changing prices which at differ-
ent times result from price-fights bet\veen buyers and sellers com-
peting in, or monopolizing, specific markets: such curves present
in concise brevity the points at which on-going interest conflicts
were settled by compromise. Any occupation may increase or
decline in its membership; and in like manner, the number of
institutions in any order or structure may wax or wane.
Such quantitative changes often have qualitative aspects. If the
same number of persons live in a scatter they will behave differ-
ently and feel differently than if they live huddled together. In
the family and in the factory, an increase in the number of actors
who are playing given roles will affect all the actors. A small nation
of 1 million differs from a large nation of loo million in a quantita-
tive way, but also in its qualitative position among nations: only
large nations are "great powers." The same positional difference
may hold for institutions within any order: The Roman Catholic
Church is a church of the Western World; the Norwegian Lutheran
Church is confined to one nation.
The uneven growth of institutions in the same order changes
the composition of that order.-" If such a structural change occurs
with a corresponding change in the composition of other orders,
we may speak of proportionate change; if it occurs without such
correspondence, we may speak of disproportionate changes be-
tween these orders. There may be disproportions in the growth
of roles within an institution; or of different types of institutions
belonging to the same order. Laissez-faire capitalism is based upon
a large number of small competing enterprises; monopoly capital-
ism results from the disproportionate growth of certain enterprises
which finally transform given industries into a handful of great
enterprises.
In Germany, during the 1920's, the economic order was in-
creasingly dominated by monopoly corporations, but the political
order disintegrated into a competitive scatter of parties, which
were superseded during the great depression by the Nazis. Such
flat feet become of less re]e\ance than they were for walking armies. See
Chapter III: Organism and Psychic Structure, Section 1: The Social Relevance
of the Organism.
'" See Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction
(New York: Ilarcourt, Brace, 1940).
SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE 4OI
quantitative changes in one order, without corresponding changes
in other orders, may provide the recomposed order the opportunity
to exert increasing influence within a social structure. If such influ-
ences are lasting, and no correspondence takes place, the position
of the order within the social structure often changes significantly:
the social structure is recomposed.-'
It is typical that in the process of institutional recomposition,
actors interested in the advancement and expansion of their own
orders, will subjectively experience other orders as an encroach-
ment upon their interests. The rise of economic liberalism, in
opposition to the prerogatives of the mercantilist state, may again
serve as a brief illustration:
The mercantilist prince used part of his tax-income to benefit
certain manufacturers through subsidies, tax exemptions, and char-
ters, guaranteeing to such establishments a production monopoly
and/or a market. Such privileged enterprises typically handled lux-
ury products for court society (chinaware, tapestries, silver), as
well as military provisions. In the meantime, middle-class indus-
trialists, especially their vanguard of textile entrepreneurs, pro-
duced for civilian mass consumption. From their point of view,
mercantilist enterprises and state-managed enterprises (for exam-
ple, spinning in prisons) constituted unfair competition, facilitated
through what seemed to them an uneconomic investment of the
taxes they helped pay. For such taxes raised their costs of produc-
tion and hence restricted their sales. Insofar as taxes upon the rest
of the population served state mercantilist activities, they drained
off purchasing power which otherwise, as consumers' demands,
might encourage nonmercantilist enterprise. As production for
profit on the basis of calculations of costs and prices is identified
with rationality, so mercantilist tax policies and other interferences
in the economic order appear as an irrational encroachment of
the political order upon the economic. From this irrationality, the
bourgeoisie wished to be freed. Hence, "control of the budget"
became their battle cry and the first princely prerogati\e which,
by their parliamentary parties, they sought to curtail. --
-1 See Chapter XII: The Unity of Social Structures, Section 3: Modes of
Integration.
-- They may succeed in these aspirations witliout recourse to \ iolence as
in the case of England's Reform Bill of 1832, or in the face of such aspira-
402 DYNAMICS
To analyze historical change, we have said, requires that we
find out what it is precisely that changes, how it changes, in what
direction, at what rate of speed, and why. These apparently simple
questions, as we have seen, involve many contentious theories.
There are no satisfactory over-all answers, but there are general
ways of questioning which we find convenient to map out in terms
of our working model of social structure.
We cannot accept any universalist theory of history based on
any one institutional order or upon the type of personality prevalent
in it. At any given historical time the precise scope of each of the
institutional orders— and their relations to all others— must be deter-
mined. These weights and relations are empirically open questions,
and we should keep them open, in such a way as to enable us
to construct any given epoch in terms of its dominant mode of his-
torical change.
There are many examples of how given institutional orders are
variously involved in historical change. The shift from war to peace,
or from peace to war, obviously sets different relations between
the military and other institutional orders.
The shift from peace to war in industrial nations tends to make
the military order supreme, and hence gives the expert in military
administration and violence at least veto power over anything he
fears might impede the war effort. It also alters status relations,
for prestige seems always to cluster around that order which is
most authoritative. The supremacy of the military order tends
to raise the prestige of the armed forces.
Since modern war requires mass armies, it entails the removal
tions, the political order may prove to be inelastic, and agents of the status
quo may threaten to maintain and enforce their prerogatives violently. Then
a disrupture of the social structure becomes possible, and in such crises, the
middle classes may establish armed forces of their own. Against the divine
right of kings, they posit the "sovereignty of the people" or of the nation.
If the king is successful in restoring his authority, disarming the insurrectionist
forces, expelling, arresting, or otherwise punishing the intellectual, political
and military leaders, then we speak of i^utsch or rebellion: the European
"revolutions" of 1848. If, however, the insurrectionist forces are successful,
seize power and establish a new political constitution (witli or without the
old king) we may speak of political revolution: The English Revolution of
1649, the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789.
For further remarks on revolutions, see Chapter XV: Collective Behavior,
Section 4: Revolution and Counterrevolution.
SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CHANGE 40;^
of large numbers of men from gainful employment (or from un-
employment), and from the kinship order. Thus, there are fewer
husbands available; many families are without fathers, many
mothers without sons, many girls without boys. An increasing num-
ber of women assume employment roles formerly enacted by men.
The war effort provides the framework for all orders; the expan-
sion of any order is encouraged only to the extent to which such
expansion may contribute to victory. Technological development
follows this pattern: uniforms and soldier's diets, microfilm cor-
respondence and motorized army chapels, barracks and bomb
shelters undergo intensive and extensive development. But durable
consumers' goods— houses and motor cars, refrigerators and tele-
vision—are out for the duration. There are heavy jet fighters, but
no civilian helicopters.
The great elasticity of modern social structure is indicated by
the rapidity with which institutional orders may be recomposed
and millions, of people accommodated to the recomposition. The
disciplinary aspects involved are important psychological features
of such processes. They involve new rules and regulations, enacted
and decreed, which are enforced by various agencies, and chan-
neled through the mass media, as well as educational, religious and
other institutions. Consumption patterns are adjusted to rationing
and price control, priority and war production; the free job mo-
bility of workers and of people in "defense areas" is legally cur-
tailed; compulsory labor service, civilian defense and national
youth organizations are successfully introduced. Millions of people
are evacuated from metropolitan areas, school children segregated
from their families. And in so far as men identify with the "will
to win," the executive-enforced codes lead to new con\entions
which underpin them.
When we try to answer questions about the transformations of
a total society, we must realize that every social area is connected,
directly or indirectly, with every other, in short that institutions
and roles are interdependent. But we must also realize that that
is not saying much: we must find a "way into" these many inter-
connections. The easiest "way in" involves examination of those
institutional orders in which roles are implemented by control over
things that require joint acti\ities: the means of production and
communication, the means of destruction, the means of administra-
404 DYNAMICS
tion, or in other words, the economic, the mihtary, and the poHtical
order.
The economic order is the starting point for the analysis of roles
connected with the level of technology, the degree of specialization
of labor, and the class structure of the respective society. It offers
us an approach to the big structural dimensions of a society.
The political order, with its various specifications of executive
functions, offers us an approach to distributions of power and pres-
tige and, via the staff-enforced distribution of "rights" among all
members of the society, especially to "property rights" in which
we find a convenient linkage between political and economic
affairs.
In interpreting contemporary social change, we have found our-
selves more and more interested in those roles and technologies
that involve violence and which involve economic production. Like
many other observers we believe that revolutions in these orders
are now crucial to the course of world history. Tools and arms, in-
dustrial machines and military weapons, factories and armies, skill
levels and practices of violence— how these interplay with each
other seem to us most immediately relevant to the course of twen-
tieth-century societies.
When we consider types of change characterizing an entire social
structure, we already have at hand modes of integration. For
correspondence, coincidence, co-ordination, and convergence, as
we have noted,^^ are not only useful in analyzing integration, but
also sequences of historical change; in fact, these modes of integra-
tion appear, in dynamic perspective, as principles of social-histori-
cal change.
The problem of a "theory of history" is neither one of monistic
hunches or principled pluralism, but rather a search for the causes
of specific historical sequences: those causes which according to
experience and the conventional standards of scientific evidence
satisfy our curiosity. In any given historical epoch, we must dis-
cern shifts within and between institutional orders, and then we
must search for their adequate causes. The mode of historical
change characteristic of a given epoch will thus be more or less
an inference from the types of integration which prevail in the
social structure we are examining.
^•'^ In Chapter XII: The Unity of Social Structures, Section 3: Modes of
Integration. 1
r
CHAPTER
XIV
The Sociology of Leadership
AN adequate model for the analysis of leadership inust enable
us to understand Nicolai Lenin on his way to the Finland Station,
as well as the girl next door who advises our daughter on make-up;
what happened to Rousseau's ideas and how Tolstoi's general com-
manded; why a radio songstress influences the intonations of a
million high school girls, as well as what happened when Stalin
met Ribbentrop. It must enable us to understand those epochal
turning points of history in which some individual seems to be
the pivot, as well as the trivial, casual, day-to-day influences of
everyday life: the genius who is worshipped from afar as a hero,
the opinion leader who lives next door.
Leadership, most broadly conceived, is a relation between leader
and led in which the leader influences more than he is influenced:
because of the leader, those who are led act or feel differently than
they otherwise would. As a power relation, leadership may be
known to both leader and led, or unknown to either or both; it
may be close-up or long-distance; it may occur at a single cross-
road in the lives of both, or only in the life of the follower, after the
leader is long dead; it may affect only a momentary decision, or
it may dominate the life of the led.
How can we sort out all these rather vague phenomena of leader-
ship in order to gain a view that is at once empirically adequate
and analytically suggestive? Along what dimensions can we sim-
plify what is involved into types which can then be studied sys-
tematically? To understand leadership, we must pay attention to
( 1 ) the traits and motives of the leader as a man; ( 2 ) the images
that selected publics hold of him, and their motives for following
him; (3) the roles he plays as a leader, their salient characteristics,
and how the leader reacts to them; and (4) the structural con-
406 DYNAMICS
texts in which his roles, as well as those of the led, are involved.
We must analyze each of these aspects of leadership in order to
group their possible ranges; and we must systematically relate
them— in order to understand their logically possible connections
in various types of leadership.
It may not be fruitful to treat all situations of power as involving
leadership; perhaps we should delimit leadership to certain kinds
of authority.
A bicyclist may adjust to the movements of the motorist, but
the power of the motorist over the bicyclist does not bespeak of
"leadership." It is also true that not all men who are interested in
having their way are also interested in having others follow them.
And, in turn, the weak man may accommodate to the moves of
the strong lest he be crushed, but not in order to follow his lead.
Coercion of the weak by the strong, whether physical or economic,
does not constitute relations of leader and follower, although such
relations may emerge from originally naked power situations.
To be called a leader one must wish to have his way accepted,
and the direction of the follower's behavior must be in agreement
with the leader's own course. Where the led accepts the leader's
"right" to influence his course of conduct we attribute not merely
power but "legitimate power" or "authority" to the leader.
There are of course all sorts of constellations of authority and
power relationships. Should we call a patriarchal father the
"leader" of his family? Should we consider a railroad official who
advises us about which train to take a "leader"? Not every "supe-
rior" is a leader in that he "leads us on" to some goal, and not
every ruler has a goal or need have one, beyond maintaining exist-
ing routines. Yet to limit "leadership" in some such way would
mean to eliminate attention to traditional leaders as well as to
underlings who merely execute the will and intention of policy-
makers who actually "lead on."
1. The Leader as a Man: His Traits and Motives
It is more fruitful in the beginning to study the social roles of
leaders in various contexts than the individual traits of leaders in
social isolation. The traits so far discerned by students of leader-
ship are either so formal as to be useless and unrevealing, or, if
specific, as varied as the different groups led by the leaders. Some
THE SOCIOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP 4OJ
putative traits have been supposed to be organic, so that history
is reduced to nature, society to biology; others have been, sup-
posedly, socially acquired. We now know that the first is a fruitless
error of reduction and the second inadequate sociology— unless the
search for leadership traits is closely united with depictions of the
roles of leaders in different groups, in particular with the way these
roles select, reinforce, and form the traits of leaders.
This is not to say that there are not personality traits, and even
types of personality, historically associated with different leadership
roles. It is to say that these traits and types can be generalized
out of their contexts only when the personal demands of one
leader-role are quite similar to those of another. When this is so,
then individual traits and capacities may have carry-over value.
The army sergeant and the industrial foreman; the government
official and the corporation executive; the labor leader of a certain
type and the personnel manager of a certain type— men enacting
these roles may interchange roles the more easily because of the
formal similarity of the demands and recruitment patterns involved,
and hence, of the types of men recruited and formed by them. But
to so relate individual traits and leader roles, we must pay atten-
tion to the institutional dynamics affecting roles: both armies and
factories are hierarchies requiring morale builders and human
whips; public administration no longer represents "pedantocracy"
or business corporations a series of "ventures"; the modern union
comes to perform many pacifying, integrating functions similar to
the personnel department of the company. As the functions and re-
lations of institutions shift, so do the roles of their leaders— making
individual character and personality traits more or less, as the case
may be, transferable from one institutional context to another.
It is the same with the motives of leaders as with other traits:
motives vary by type of role, indeed, motixes are often understand-
able only as part of the role itself. The gratifications that roles
provide— prestige, authority, income, or realization of superego
ideal— become the motives of men to enact the role. Motixes for
leadership are thus as varied, on the one hand, as human motivation
itself, and on the other, as the contexts of leader-roles.
Motives for leadership may be given in terms ( 1 ) of the sub-
jectively intended aims of the leader, hence in terms of his overt
vocabulary of personal values and goals. These may, in turn, be
imputed to (2) covert psychic "needs" or aspirations in terms of
408 DYNAMICS
Freudian or Nietzschean mechanics, compensation, displacement,
and so on, or to (3) objective social forces and opportunities, re-
quirements and contradictions.
The points we wish to make in this connection are, first, that
many motives of many types of leaders may be linked in the super-
ego to articulated "causes," and second, that these motives and
causes may or may not have to do with denied expediences, frus-
trations, or deprivations. Mere calculations, disguised as "gratifica-
tions," are not all there is to the motivation of leaders. The prophet
Elijah shuns income, forgoes existing opportunities for prestige,
and plays out his role even while he hates its demands— he served
only "his God." And the point, made by Sombart, and again by
Lasswell, that if a Prussian university had given Karl Marx a secure
post he might not have been launched on his revolutionary career,
seems to us unfounded. There is no evidence to suppose that this
young doctor of philosophy wished to become a professor; more-
over, as his brother-in-law was the Prussian minister of the interior,
he might well, if he wished, have been appointed. The case illus-
trates this point: We can often explain the motives of leaders as
due to superego formations, to the embracing of a cause, with no
reference to personal frustrations and expediences.
We should study the traits and motives of leaders in close con-
nection with their roles, appropriately related to their social-his-
torical contexts. An extremely important aspect of this context is
the more or less immediate followers of the leader and the images
they hold of him.
2. Images of the Leader and Motives of the Led
Since there can be no leader without the led, in order to make
a transfer from one context to another, the leader, regardless of
his traits and motives, must be able to engage the loyalties of
those in the new context. The relations of leader and led have
often been put pragmatically in terms of the needs of the led.
But we are by no means ready to accept such easy formulae as
"the leader satisfies the needs of the led" or "the leader articulates
what the led want and cannot articulate or don't know how to
get." All such formulas, as well as Max Weber's more sophisticated
typology of legitimations, we may approach generally in terms of
THE SOCIOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP 409
the images which the led hold of their leader. The question of
leadership, as Max Weber set it up in terms of authority, is the
question of why the led follow. Weber answers the question in
terms of three types of legitimation: ^ charismatic, traditional, and
legal. These represent formal reasons for more or less voluntary
obedience, the first, charismatic, because the led impute to the
leader extraordinary personal qualities; the second, traditional,
because they feel that the leader has always been followed and
rightly so; and the last, legal, because they feel that the leader
has attained his position according to legal rules which the led
accept. This classification is quite useful; but as an over-all model
it is, of necessity, highly formal and leaves untouched many aspects
or dimensions of leadership to which we should like to pay sys-
tematic attention.
Images of instituted leaders, especially those images that are
relevant to why they are followed, vary by institutional order. In
fact, as part of the symbolic features of institution, these images
justify the leader's roles, and often the role of its occupant. If he
is a legitimate leader, he rules, as in Saudi Arabia or a modern
totalitarian party, by virtue of the charismatic gifts claimed by him
and imputed to him as a presumably extraordinary individual; as
in patriarchal family or peasant village, by virtue of wealth, cus-
tomary family repute, and the presumed or actual wisdom of "the
grand old man." Or, as in the constitutional state, by virtue of hav-
ing met legally enacted qualifications, including that of being "duly
elected or appointed." These images uphold the leader's authority
among the institution's members— they are the formal motives for
their obeying him. They are his formal claims to leadership, which,
when he has internalized them, are, with individual variations, his
motives as a leader.
Any institutional structure needs to regulate the generalized others
of its members. One of the functions of the leader is to import
larger codes into the subgroup which he leads. The "leader" is
a mediator between the members of his group and the larger social
structure. As the responsible head of his family or of his enterprise,
1 The Theonj of Social and Economic Organization, Talcott Parsons and
A. M. Henderson, trs. (New York: Oxford, 1948). Chapter I. See also
Chapter VIII: Institutional Orders and Social Controls, I, Section 1: The
Pohtical Order, and Chapter X: Symbol Spheres.
410 DYNAMICS
for example, he is to some extent held responsible for what goes
on in his family or business; he represents family members, em-
ployees, and their conduct before out-groups, especially before
larger and more powerful frame groups— the police, the church, the
state. The father is thus responsible to the public school teacher for
the behavior of his children.
Such a representative position exerts pressures upon the subgroup
leader to build into the "generalized other" of the subgroup mem-
bers elements of the generalized other of "frame groups"— of the
state, of the church, and of wider status group codes. Thus he is
made the "transmission belt" for the importation of larger group
values and codes into the little universe of the subgroup. The father,
for example, has to install in his family value preferences which
will assure that his daughters will have the properly delimited
preferences for acceptable husbands.
This position of the leader toward the outside has a further
aspect: the leader may be proud of the attainments of his group
members. The father of a family, for example, is credited by out-
siders with the successes of his children, receives congratulations
for the successful marriage of his daughter or the brilliant achieve-
ments of his son. He is held responsible for what goes on in the
unit he leads, and he is blamed and credited for the successes and
failures of its members. Thus, the deference which leaders receive
in their roles as leaders is sometimes quite elaborate (gun salutes,
flag hoistings, and other pompous ritual) because through them
their group is honored.
This deference -often refers to the role rather than to the man
who plays it. The man may not personally be highly esteemed for
his style of acting out the role, but nevertheless the role is ranked
high as being the vessel of the cumulative prestige of the entire
group which he leads. We must distinguish between prestige at-
tached to roles and personal esteem bestowed upon role-taking
men. Accordingly, different constellations are possible: a role with
high prestige may be filled by a lowly esteemed man ( Harding ) ; a
high-prestige role may be filled by a highly esteemed man (F. D. R.,
Wilson, Washington); a low-prestige role may be filled by a highly
esteemed man (Al Capone); or a low-prestige role may be filled by
a lowly esteemed man (a "lazy" ditch-digger).
Of course there may be shifts in these evolutions of men and
THE SOCIOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP 41I
roles. At the beginning of his State and Revolution - Lenin has a
nice commentary on the changes in attitude towards the revolu-
tionary: "During the life time of great revolutionaries, the oppress-
ing classes have visited relentless persecution on them and received
their teaching with the most savage hostility, the most furious
hatred, the most ruthless camp)aign of lies and slanders. After their
death, attempts are made to turn them into harmless icons, to
canonize them, and surround their names with a certain halo for
the consolation of the oppressed classes and with the object of
duping them, while at the same time emasculating and vulgarizing
the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their
revolutionary edge." With appropriate modification, Lenin's state-
ment may be extended to the iconography of certain Tsars in the
Soviet Union since the 1930's. It is well known that Stalin has
adopted Peter the Great as a somewhat distant "colleague," or pos-
sibly "precursor." And at Teheran, when Churchill presented Stalin
with the honorific gift of His Majesty's sword, Stalin, in apprecia-
tion of the distinction, took it in the style of Tsarist protocol by
kissing the sword. One task a leader performs for liis group is
to provide "official" sanction to the definition of the group situation
in social space and historical time.
Images of leaders are not, of course, always adequately adjusted
to the objective significance of the leader. But, in fact, such ade-
quacy of image to man during the man's lifetime may occur: per-
haps it did, positively, in the case of Goethe, "the poet-prince" and,
negatively, in the case of the late United States Secretary of De-
fense Johnson. There are inflated images— small leaders with big
images; and deflated images— big leaders with small images. These
•atter are often known to us by their later ascendancy: recall
Mozart, buried among the paupers; or Shakespeare at such low
ebb in the eighteenth century.
There are of course all sorts of "incongruities" of image and man;
for example, one cannot attribute all the consequences which fol-
lowed Columbus' "discovery" of America— including the rise to
world power of the United States— to Columbus' greatness as a
man. His relatively low intelligence and poor nautical leadership,
his religious superstition and irregular ways with money, pro\ ided
2 Nikolai Lenin, Collected Works (New York: International Pubs., 1932).
Vol. XXI, p. 153.
412 DYNAMICS
more or less good reasons for his being jailed by his king. "Great-
ness," as Wilhelm Lange has indicated,^ is more often an attribute
of a man's image, held by various publics who "need" to worship
the majestic and fascinating, the energetic and the mysterious, the
sublime and the overpowering than it is an attribute of a man or
of an objective assessment of the historical consequences of his role
and deeds. The elaboration of images of Columbus was determined
by factors having little or nothing to do with the work Columbus
did; in fact, they have obscured the ramifications of his action,
which, by the way, Columbus himself never got quite straight.
We do not believe that the uniqueness and irreplaceability of
great men can either be proved or disproved. We cannot, for exam-
ple, prove or disprove the argument that had Napoleon not arisen
to act as he did, another man or men would have so met "the de-
mands of the hour." What has endured from the Napoleonic context
are the legal code and centralized administrative system, and
Napoleonic strategy and tactics as military models— all borrowed
in accordance with his model by other nineteenth-century societies.
On the other hand, the historical process of Western society did
not, as it were, require Napoleon's enterprise to conquer Russia;
that, so to speak, is part of the "overhead" of Napoleon's deeds.
The idea of genius, or of the great man, has to do not only with
the man and his work, but also, and often more importantly we
think, with his images, with his fame. It is sometimes quite a prob-
lem in particular cases to weigh the two, but that is what must be
done in each case. We shall have more to say about this general
problem of great men presently.
Among leaders there is self-advertising, in which the leader's
self-image is advanced by his own posturing; and there are fame-
makers, others who advance the leader's image. But regardless of
how they are diffused, self and other images may conflict or coin-
cide:
Napoleon, as well as Goethe, held strong self-images, and so did
others of them. But some scriptural prophets deemed themselves
unworthy and were detested by contemporaries. Some leaders
whom others esteem highly esteem themselves very little: public
images are inflated in comparison with the insufficiency feelings
•^ The Problem of Genius, E. and C. Paul, trs. (New York: Macmillan,
1932).
THE SOCIOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP 4!^
of the leader. And there is the opposite: leaders whom others
esteem very little but who esteem themselves very much, whether
due to quiet pride (Kierkegaard) or bombastic vanity (the Ger-
man Kaiser).
All these possible images of the leaders are of course relevant to
their motives and to the motives of the led. Today both images of
the leader and motives of the led are subject to intensive manipu-
lative cultivation. Images and reality are often so closely joined as
to make difficult their analytic separation; in fact, they pass from
one to another. But the immediate context of leader, led, and image
can best be set forth in terms of the functional demands of power-
wielding roles.
3. Three Functions of Authoritative Roles
Regardless of who wields it, and of why others follow it, author-
ity seems to have three major functions to which we should pay
close attention.^ (I) There are the imagery, the representations
of power, the pomp and the circumstance, the handling of the flag,
the scepter, the crown, the Presidential smile, the tireless, glad
handshake, and the master formulas, "in the name of the king," or
"in the name of the people," in terms of which orders are given.
(II) There is the legitimation of power, an ideological elabora-
tion and specification of the representation or halo; the "miranda"
is elaborated into "doctrine," to the simple piety for emblems is
added theology. (Ill) There is decision-making and the manage-
ment of the instrumentalities of power, of staffs, allies, followers,
enemies, and neutrals, in order^to put decisions into effect.
Both representation and legitimation are at once possible aspects
of the leader's role and important features of the authority-context
in which he plays it. When we say that they are aspects of his role,
we point up the fact that he may modify or even create them;
when we say that they are important features of his context, we
point up the fact that they lie in the context in which he acts and
must be carried by the led and, in fact, form their reasons for fol-
* For distinctions of the functions of authority, see C. E. Merriam, Political
Power (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934) and Systematic Politics (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1945); H. D. Lasswell and others, The Language of
Politics (New York: Stewart, 1949), p. 9ff-; and H. D. Lasswell and A. Kaplan,
Power and Society (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1950).
414 DYNAMICS
lowing him. His decisions and managements also have this dual
reference to his own activities and the context and motives of the
led. It is for these reasons that the concept of role is so important
in the study of leadership.
If we cross classify the presence or absence of these three func-
tional demands of power-wielding— representation, legitimation,
and decision-making— we get eight situations:
REPRESENTATION
YES
NO
LEGITIMATION
LEGITIMATION
YES
NO
YES NO
YES
1
2
3 4
NO
5
6
7 8
DECISION-MAKING
( 1 ) Some leaders successfully combine all three functions : Lenin
and Mussolini, Peter the Great, Shih Huang Ti, the "First Emperor"
of China. Napoleon proclaims among his representations "the rule
of the genius," gets the Pope himself to come to Paris to anoint
him, marries a Hapsburg princess to tie himself in with dynastic
and Catholic legitimations, sets up a new army model, a new
code of laws, new internal administrative and educational systems.
In terms of these three functions. Napoleon is a total leader.
(2) Other leaders may carry representations of power and
wield power, but not be active developers of legitimations. Crom-
well, "The Lord Protector," for example, leaves the theoretical work
of legitimating his rule to others, among them, for a while, John
Milton.
(3) Machiavelli, as a political secretary of the prince, manages
affairs and is an active creator of legitimations, but does not em-
body or display the representation of power. Leaving that to the
prince, he works out a legitimation for and enacts the role of "the
political man" who with rational efficiency tries to win, hold, and
increase power for power's sake, reducing all other values to in-
strumentalities for that immediate end while, at the same time, of
course, having in mind the more distant goal of the unification of
Italy.
(4) The American political boss neither represents nor legiti-
mates power, but actively makes decisions and manages their en-
actment. He gives up honor and doctrine, if necessary, for power.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP 41^
(5) The polar opposite type of leader who does not manage
decisions at all, but legitimates and displays representations is
diflBcult to illustrate, but perhaps the Romantic poets symbolize the
French Revolution to an English public and elaborate one strain of
its doctrinal legitimations. Also, John Reed operates in America
with reference to early Russian Bolshevism. And, in classical Rome,
the poet Vergil, as a member of the Roman ruling class, writes his
Georgics and Aeneid at the request of what moderns might now
call a propaganda industry.
(6) The "ruler" who displays representations and nothing else
is more frequent, for example, all the cases of charismatic chil-
dren: the child king of Egypt, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, as well as
kings, queens, and rulers who are "mere figureheads." Also, Tol-
stoi's general has as his role "appearing to be in supreme control"
of the chaos of the battlefield. Since unplanned events decide his
armies' dispositions, he is primarily a representational leader.
(7) The pure case of the ideologist, who only legitimates— as
did Rousseau for the French upheaval, Marx for the Russian Re\'0-
lution, or Milton for Cromwell's regime— exists wherever a man's
thought is used by power wielders, but who does not himself dis-
play power or wield it.
( 8 ) The man, finally, who neither legitimizes, displays, or wields
power is, of course, no leader, although, as in the case of Edward
Vni, who fell down on all three functional role-demands and abdi-
cated, he may have been expected to enact at least the represen-
tational role.
These three functional demands of power wielding, and the
types of power wielders they invite us to examine, have primarily
to do with large-scale institutional contexts. By itself, the eightfold
typology is not an adequate model of the analysis of leadership; it
is merely a descriptive range of what leaders may do. We want to
spell out in more detail the possibilities of leadership roles in con-
nection with a range of types of contexts in which they may occur.
So, rather than attempt to construct our model purely in terms
of traits or personalities of the leader, or in terms of the motives or
reasons of the led, we do so with reference to the role-denjands
on the functions of leadership, as begun in this section; and with
reference to institutional contexts and dynamics back of these roles,
as presented in the next two sections.
416 DYNAMICS
4. Contexts and Roles
By definition, all institutions of any permanence involve leaders;
for institutions, as we have noted, are constellations of roles graded
in authority in such a way that the members look to the occupant
of the head-role to guarantee, externally and internally, the total
role constellation. Externally, the instituted leader, or his agent,
applies sanctions against those who fail to meet instituted expec-
tations, ranging from the lifted eyebrow of the club leader to the
death penalty imposed by the state. Internally, the members in-
corporate the institutional head's expectations as a more or less
crucial component of their particular or generalized others, and
then punish themselves when they are out of line. For it is not
only that the patriarchal father, as Freud has shown, is thus in-
corporated into the "original" superego; all instituted heads may
be so incorporated, and, in fact, incorporated in their own psycho-
logical right.
Types of instituted leaders are as various as the types of institu-
tions they lead. The patriarchal father and the gerontocratic elder,
the pope and the parish priest, the army captain and the trade
union leader, the school master and the corporation manager-
each plays a role more or less in accordance with the expectations
institutionally exacted of him as the head. The types of men re-
cruited for these roles and the effects of enacting these roles upon
their character structures also include a wide range of possibilities.
But as men they are selected and formed as leaders by the insti-
tutional contexts in which they play their parts.
This depiction of the instituted leader rests upon the assumption
that such leadership is role-determined. It is normally the insti-
tuted context in which he leads that selects and forms him as a
man, that more or less sets the role he plays, that provides images
of him which justify his authority and motivate men to follow
him, and him to lead. Some writers, for example, Richard Schmidt,
refuse to call such institutional heads leaders, but refer to them as
"agents of authority," and to their followers as "subordinates."
We do not see the full justification of this, although it does suggest
three important points: first, it points us to the crucial distinction
between role-determined and role-determining leadership; second,
to the fact that the role-determined, the instituted head, may be
THE SOCIOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP 4IJ
more or less determined; and, third, that he is probably more deter-
mined when his institutional sphere is stable, less determined when
his sphere is breaking up or at least changing rapidly.
The institutional head as such does not usually satisfy our image
of "the leader" because we often think of leaders as men who create
not only their roles but the institutions in which they will play
them. This does not mean that such leaders stand alone before
institutions; they also have a context or else they could not be
leaders. But the prime context of the role-determining leader is the
movement or the party, which is at once an instrument of leader-
ship and an immediate context of the roles which its leaders are to
play.^ One of the major aspects of a leader's role in a social move-
ment is to establish his role, as he organizes the internal structure
of the movement and tries to adxance its power relations with the
institutional structure and with other contending movements.
It is probably not wise to split "institutions" from "collective
behavior" and conceive of the first as stable and controlling, and
the second as dynamic, and, as it were, intrusive. The bureaucrati-
zation of modern government, of corporate business life, the spread
of totalitarian, one-party states may be more dynamic than all the
riots, mobs, and crowds of the last fifty years put together from
all over Western civilization. And in these institutional processes
new roles have come about, as well as role-determining men of
enormous consequences for modern historic change.
The lead roles of many institutions are prescribed, hemmed in
by rules of recruitment and office conduct; but in many "insti-
tuted" contexts, the role of the leader is less set, more open to
variety of elaborations by different leaders. Moreoxer, in the latter
the allegiance to the leader is less set, and must often be won and
held by the leader, whose relations with the led must thus be struc-
tured by the leader himself.
The context is less a structure than a milieu, and as a milieu,
more open to the leader's structuring. When, in due course, the
movement is more firmly instituted, then the leader may not ha\e
to remold in this way the new members who are selectively re-
cruited; in addition, the deputy leaders, staff members, the mo\'e-
ment's old timers may do this job, for there is then hierarchy and
^ For a discussion of mo\ements and parties, see Chapter XV: Collective
Behavior, Section 3: Movements, Parties, and Pressure Groups.
4l8 DYNAMICS
and specialization of roles for different levels and types of leaders.
But leadership in this context very often must begin by the neces-
sity of the leader's attracting and holding the voluntary loyalties
of the led.
What is needed is a statement of the phases of leadership, as
it moves from a small, informal circle around a leader, through
innumerable transitions, to a prescheduled role in an institutional
order firmly set into a social structure. No formal, universal scheme
seems worthwhile: the phases vary by epoch and institutional set-
ting. As the contexts become less formal, the nature of the leader's
role usually becomes more personal, but not always: there is the
style of playing highly formal roles in highly formal and personalist
manners.
The way movements and parties, as major contexts of leadership,
are related to institutional orders shapes the way leaders in the
one context are related to the second. The party or movement, in
attempting to influence decision-making, may ( i ) put its leader in
the lead-role of the institution, as in modern constitutional parties
and the state; (2) change the institutions and thus its lead-role, and
then put its leader in; or (3) create a new institution and install its
leaders at its head.
In terms of leadership, there is, first, the conquest of leading
positions, by revolutionaries or reformers; second, the holding and
the routinization of these positions in the generational sequence by
(a) customary rights and rules of precedence and successorship,
and by (b) enacted rights which supersede personal ways of
doing things and give issue to impersonal rules and regulations.
It seems rather clear that the chance of role-determining leadership
is maximized in the first phase, in which men's traits are more
important; whereas in the later phases, recruitment patterns are
more important.
There are contexts, which deserve detailed descriptions, other
than those of institutions and movements.'' But these are perhaps
sufficient to indicate this fact: in examining this range of contexts
we do not find a correlation with the possibilities of role-determin-
ing rather than role-determined leaders. But we do locate the zone
in which role-determining leadership seems to have its major
"See Chapter XV: Collective Behavior, Section 2: Aggregates, Crowds, and
Publics.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP 419
chances: it is the zone of all those types of voluntary associations
which are not (yet) firmly a part of more established institutional
orders and spheres.
5. Role Dynamics and Leadership
To ask whether leadership is a function of the traits of the leader
or of the motives and images of the led is not a fruitful question.
The answer, of course, is that it is both, but that is an answer that
does not help much. It does help, however, to conceive, as we
have, both the traits of the leader and the motives of the led as
part of the role which the leader plays. Then we may restate the
question in these terms: Does the leader determine the role he
plays or does the role determine the leader? This should, of course,
not be taken as a general question to be answered in general, but
as a question leading us to precise examination of concrete cases.
The general answer is that different leaders are quite differently
related to the roles they play.
It is not true, as Theodore Newcomb would have it,' that "all
leaders are motivated to take whatever kinds of roles are called
for (or are permitted) by their position in the role system." It is
precisely their positions and the demands upon their role that
leaders sometimes put into question. Nobody "called for" (or per-
mitted) General Napoleon to chase Parliament home on the iS
Brumaire, or later to transform his consulate into an emperor-
ship. Nobody called for or permitted Adolf Hitler to proclaim
himself "Leader and Chancellor" the day President Hindenburg
died, to abolish and usurp roles by merging the presidenc\' and the
chancellorship. Far from being utterly dependent upon a "role
system," the leader may smash it and set up another in which his
role is differently structured. In fact, such social destruction and
creation is what is typically involved in one major type of "great
leadership." This is not to say that it is not socially determined;
it is to say that there are often temporal lags between the deter-
mination and the shift in leadership.
This is a complex question, which is to say that it is difficult to
identify the keys which when properly ranged and interrelated
■Theodore M. Newcomb, Social Psychology ( Xew York: Dr>clen, 1950),
p. 656.
^20 DYNAMICS
might best lead us to observation of the determining factors in any
given case. But here are three attempts to sort out such keys:
I. Flexibility of Role and Reactions of Leader to It. From the
side of context: the roles of leaders may be quite flexible or quite
rigid in the latitude they allow the leader; ® moreover the leaders
recruited for these roles also vary widely in the personal way in
which they enact them. In terms of these two factors— the flexi-
bility of the role and the reaction of the leader to it— there is clearly
a range. At one end is the role-determined leader: the role is rigid
and the recruited man fulfills it exactly as required, in the image
of the punctilious bureaucrat. At the other end is the role-deter-
mining leader: the role is flexible and the man enacts it in a highly
personal style, exceeding what is expected, making the most of
his opportimities.
The President of the United States, for example, has more lati-
tude in the way he plays his role than the bureaucratic chief of a
unit in a division of a department, or the palace-confined Mikado
under the Shogunate before 1868. The president can take his role
big or little in all three aspects of authority. If he takes it big, as
Franklin D. Roosevelt or Wilson did, he can modify features of the
instituted role, as well as create new lead-roles in the governing
structure as a whole, which action in turn selects and forms new
types of men as leaders around him. He is more than a creature of
authority: in all three aspects of leadership, he is to some extent
a role-determining man. If he takes it little, as Harding did, enact-
ing it in an understated way, he can sit back and take it easy,
performing the expected actions but not creating any new ones.
8 This scale of roles includes each of the three major functional demands
on leadership: Representation functions may range from the hierocratic
rigidity of court ceremonial under a theocratic emperor, as in Oriental despot-
isms and ancient Roman Caesarism, to the studied informality of the British
king at a Boy Scout jamboree and the personable horseplay of Franklin
Roosevelt with liberal intellectuals. Legitimation functions may be strictly
orthodox, as in the case of Stalinism's invention of "theoretical heresies," or
Confucianism's hatred of all sahation religions, to the free market in ideas
where rival definitions of democracy itself are tolerated as legitimate within
the limits of national loyalty. Decision-making finally may range from a
Leadership) Principle, as with Hitler, with the "authority of every leader
downward and responsibility upward," to a maximum sharing of all decisions
and participation of virtually all citizens.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP ^21
He is, then, a symbol of authority ("guardian of the constitution")
and a role-determined man.
Whether a man takes his instituted role big or little depends
not only upon what he as the occupant brings to the role but also
upon the institutional context of the role. "Great leaders" may
create new roles or expand old ones; they are likely, as Hei!;el
already knew, to emerge when the societies they lead are at points
of epochal structural transition. For then flexibility of role and
creative reactions to it are most likely to coincide.
The possibilities open to the leader vary with the flexibility of
the role-demands; if they are inflexible, so long as he stays within
the role he must play it as expected, although he may fall short;
if the role is flexible, he will have more difficulty meeting it exactly,
less difficulty making the most of it.
This scale, constructed from flexibility of role and reactions of
leader, has implications for the imagery of the leader: the role-
determining man, since he modifies a received role of decision-
making, may be more likely, as part of that modification, to shift
the imagery and legitimations of the authority he wields than is
the role-determined man, who in the extreme case finds an imagery
and legitimations already there, and merely continues to enact
their requirements along with other features of his receixed role.
II. Modifications of Functions and Scope of Role. A social struc-
ture is composed of \arious institutional orders, each objectively
oriented to more or less dominant ends, the political, economic,
religious, kinship, and military. Now, the head of an institution
within any order may expand the scope of his command by creat-
ing new features of his role or creating viitually new roles, by ( i )
expanding the functions of the institution of which he is head, or
(2) combining previously separate roles into one head role, or (3)
by combining roles across institutional orders. The contrary is also
true : the leader may shrink in scope and power if ( 1 ) his insti-
tution shrinks in size or leverage in the social structure, or (2) if
the leader's role is split, or if (3) a new institution arises to com-
pete with an old one.
Leaders, then, who take a role that is instituted to ser\e some
function may modify the role, the function, or both.
John L. Lewis, as president of the Committee on Industrial
Organization within the AFL, increased the scope of his role as
422. DYNAMICS
chairman and the function of the organization, turning it from a
Committee to a Congress. So did FrankHn D. Roosevelt as President
of the United States: he expanded the role of the President as well
as the function of the executive branch, and, in fact, of the gov-
ernment as a whole.
Lenin, with his conception of a party of professional revolution-
aries, greatly reduced mass-oriented activities, the winning of mass
membership to the cause, in favor of very strict standards for
smaller circles of full-time members. In this way, by his party of
experts— rather than of experts, amateurs, and sympathizers— he
centralized command in the hands of professionals, gained speed
in shifting strategy and tactics, and gained greater security for
conspiratorial work; in short, greater revolutionary efficiency.
In the face of an ever-growing complexity of a bureaucratic
state apparatus of experts, the absolute monarch in the early mod-
ern period was reduced in role to the position of an amateur de-
pending upon the advice of his experts. The function which he
served increased, but his role was reduced.
Finally, both function and role may be reduced: the king may
come to rule, but not govern; the king of prerogative may be re-
duced to a king of influence, in short, a figurehead having officially
representative functions and, if capable, wielding unofiicial influ-
ence.
These expansions or contractions of function and of roles may
come about by the merging or the splitting of existing roles, and in
either case, of course, there may be an increase or a decrease in
power:
If, for example, the supreme priest and the emperor merge into
one role, as in Caesar-papism, the new role carries increased power
by the merger. So Peter the Great reorganizes the Russian Church
and appoints the chairman of the synod; or in modern coali-
tion warfare, a supreme command is established; or the president
assumes war powers in a "constitutional dictatorship."
The merger of roles may also mean a decrease in power: in
wishing to do much, the leader becomes an amateur who blunders.
In different ways, both the German Kaiser as diplomat and Der
Fiihrer as supreme commander may be examples.
If roles are split or divided into specialties, power may increase
for one of the roles: the most obvious case is the creation of staff
roles and delegation to them of various aspects of power wielding.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP 42,3
The role left is that of co-ordinating the divided roles. So the
premier, as chairman of a cabinet, presides over a committee of
policy co-ordinating ministers, who in turn are served by various
department heads. Specialization of functions in this way is an
infinite variety, and forms, in fact, the major subject matter of much
of descriptive political science and institutional sociology.
Roles may also be divided and their power weakened; for ex-
ample, when empires are decentralized so that the center is weak-
ened—as happened in the rise of British colonies to dominions, or
Alexander's governors to satraps, or repeatedly in the Chinese em-
pire in which the original functionaries of the central authority
developed into warlords and governors in their own right.
It is worthwhile to systematize such possibilities because to do
so alerts us to the range of role dynamics possible in any social-
historical situation we may wish to analyze. The major point is
that the leader's creation of roles can only be understood in the
full context of social-historical dynamics. For the institutional con-
text not only provides an apparatus for leadership, but sets the
scope of the command and modifies the reasons for men's alle-
giance to it. The "great leader" has often been a man who has
managed such institutional dynamics, and thus created new roles
of leadership.
The rise and decline of institutional structures invohe the rise
and decline of leaders. Thus, in the latter evolution of capitalism,
the appointed manager of the large corporation supplants, in some
part, the self-made entrepreneur of his family enterprise. And this
shift in key economic institutions, and hence in their head roles,
ramifies into other institutional areas— the political sphere, the
status hierarchy, and even the kinship order, as selected family
circles rise to the top.
When capitalism came to Japan, it came as corporate capitalism,
without any individualistic epoch; and it found a point of coinci-
dence with already existing feudal kinship units; the leaders of
these top cousinhoods, with their sib loyalties, expanded their roles
to include the management of corporate enterprises.
In the transition from peace to war, large numbers of men are
transferred from economic and kinship institutions to the military
order. The expanding military order tends to override the demands
of other institutional orders; its symbols of legitimation become
master symbols of political decisions, and it borrows or appro-
42.4 DYNAMICS
priates the symbols of other orders, especially the religious and
political; its leaders become more powerful in deciding the pace
and shape of the total social structure. It is, today especially, obvi-
ous that such structural shifts do not guarantee the emergence of
role-determining men adequate to the contextual demands and
opportunities.
III. Creation of Roles in and out of Contexts. We may finally
consider whether or not the leader creates the role he plays, that
is, modifies existing roles as virtually to reconstitute them, or
merely assumes an already existing role and enacts it within the
generally expected limits; and whether the individual finds an
available institutional context for his role, or is limited in his
playing of it to small informal groups, but mainly among a pub-
lic. If we combine these two, we get three possible types of leaders:
A. the routine institutional head "the routineer"; B. the creative
institutional head "the innovator"; and C. "the precursor."
A. The routine leader creates neither his role nor its institutional
context, but merely steps into a pre-existing setup containing the
lead-role which he plays. The role to be played is already avail-
able and the leader comes to it merely to enact it within the gen-
erally expected limits. Such leaders are usually formally or heredi-
tarily recruited, and need not create loyalties to their leadership,
for they are already available in the context of the role which is to
be played. The leader may, of course, enact the role rigidly as it is
set up. Or, he may, although within the general expectations,
personally stylize his enactment of it. But, in general, the major
problem of such leadership is the problem of the recruitment
pattern.
B. The innovating leader, within an existing institutional con-
text, creates a new role and then plays it. The leader here elabo-
rates a role to the point that it no longer is recognizable. He may
expand it by creating new features of it, or by merging two or
more existing roles. In either case, he monopolizes functions of
leadership within the existing context. He may split an existing
role into two and only play one of them, delegating or giving up
the other. Any number of mechanisms of creation are possible, and
any number of reasons for their creation. He may be figuring out
new ways to satisfy expectations or sensed wants of the group in
THE SOCIOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP 42;^
context, or he may create a new role and by so doing create new
wants at the same time as their means of reahzation. This kind
of leader may be formally or informally recrnited, and he must
create or transfer the loyalties of the led to the new role w hich he
has created for himself.
C. The leader as precursor creates a role, but there is no insti-
tutional opportunity for him to play it. So Thomas Miinzer, left-
wing leader of German Protestantism, is to be hailed later by Marx
and Engels as a visionary of communism. So Rousseau remains a
leader only in symbolic context with publics, for the time is not
yet ripe for action.
Such leaders are usually self-appointed and their performance
of their roles as decision-making leaders is imaginary. They are
preparing themselves, by pre-enactment, for the day when appro-
riate contexts may be available. By those who "take readily to
existing roles," many such men are judged as crazy, or at least out
of joint with their times. But such internal preparation is often
part of the leadership phenomenon of the prophet type. If they
are successful as leaders, they come in time to represent to smaller
inner circles and later to larger publics and then to movements and
parties, certain values or models to be imitated and with which
to identify. In the meantime, they are abstracted from such con-
texts and are leaders only in their own minds, and symbolically,
but not in terms of power, to publics who hold images of the man
with the new role he cannot yet play as a symbol of a context not
yet existing. Such leaders are of course self-recruited and must
create loyalties among those they would lead.
It follows from this scheme, as well as from our descriptions of
the several contexts of leadership that, if we would understand
any given leadership phenomenon, the following are important
questions to raise:
1. Context: In what context does the leader arise? How is it
structured? Did this particular man "create" it by modifications
of existing contexts, or did he simply become a leader in it as it
existed?
2. Role: What are the salient traits of his role as a leader? In
what social orders and spheres does he lead others?— only in opin-
ion, or in activity as well? Did he invent this role? \Miat modifi-
426 DYNAMICS
cations, if any, has he made in it, and how? Has he elaborated it as
he received it, constricted its scope, amalgamated other roles with
it?
3. Man: How did this man come to be in this role? How was he
recruited for it? What character traits were relevant to his assum-
ing or inventing this role? What traits are relevant to his continu-
ing to enact this role?
4. Images: What images do those he leads have of him as man
and as a leader? Why do they obey him? What techniques does he
use to diffuse this image, these legitimations?
CHAPTER
X V
Collective Behavior
NO ONE observing the awful turbulence of twentieth-century
history can believe that all human affairs are neatly contained
within institutions, or that existing institutional orders necessarily
endure. Wars and revolutions have turned over social structures;
dictators have risen and fallen within great nations, and even
within regions of great nations. Masses of men— as well as small
conspiratorial groups, alienated from institutions, and living, for a
while, outside stable and stabilizing institutional structures— have
smashed whole societies, and promptly built vast new domains.
In various ways, in various countries, some periods of history
have seemed to proceed by plots, others by polemics. And now no
one can believe that all social conduct is ordered within institu-
tions, or that what is now instituted has always been or always
will be.
Within and between institutional orders and their spheres is the
problem area known loosely to sociologists as "collecti\'e behavior,"
which, in current usage, includes everything from totalitarian one-
party states to the ephemeral mob that hangs a colored man for
allegedly looking too closely at a white woman; from quiet little
groups of neighbors who go bowling together, to religious sects and
to fads that appear and disappear in Southern California.
There is no problem area for which both deficits and assets have
been so often remarked. If this area contains "mass phenomena"
associated with the breakdown of social order— hysterical rages and
euphoric ecstasies, during which men act as they never did before
and never will again— it also contains those associations which are
acknowledged to be major seedbeds of free men of Western
nations.
The prototype of modern voluntary associations, as Max Weber
428 DYNAMICS
has shown, is the Protestant sect, which is "a union of specifically
qualified people" rather than an established and compulsory insti-
tution. Such associations, when secularized and difl^used in various
strata, form a pluralist field of units within and between which
the individual, for his own self-esteem, must "put himself over."
In the process of doing so, he is naturally stamped by the values
and models carried by the associations. In such free associations,
moreover, the individual can obtain his anchorage and make his
stand against "majority domination." And in these smaller circles
there occurs a social selection and training of leaders for larger
tasks.
1. The Structural Contexts of Collective Behavior
The range of phenomena in this area may best be stated in terms
of the degree of explicit organization: at one end of the scale there
are what appear to be purely spontaneous activities; at the other,
there is a merging of "collective behavior" with institutional or-
ganization itself. Ephemeral crowds spontaneously releasing a
pent-up tension, as well as tightly organized class and status parties
calculatedly making their way within and between major insti-
tutional blocs; a barely discernible drift from year to year in the
shade of lipstick color, the shift in the atmosphere of street throngs,
as well as the farm bloc representative arguing and entertaining-
all these belong to the domain of "collective behavior."
Some of these phenomena are already institutions in the same
sense as a family or a church; others do not display such struc-
tural characteristics at all. But as we examine such activities and
social forms over longer spans of time, there does seem to be a
sort of drift exhibited by all collective behavior, if it endures be-
yond the momentary, towards institutionalization. Furthermore, all
forms of collective behavior, no matter how momentary, are related
to various institutional orders and spheres: they cannot be ex-
plained without reference to them. For institutional structures are
the precipitants and the foci of collective behavior of every sort;
they are the larger frameworks within which such behavior arises
and through which it runs its course.
But this does not mean that collective behavior does not modify
(sometimes, as in revolution, grievously) the institutional struc-
.ture. It does mean that the interplay must always be closely exam-
COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 42Q
ined, and the specific contributions to history of structural shifts
as well as of the more fluid, amorphous forms of social dynamics
carefully weighed. It is not fruitful, as we have already noted, to
conceive of social structures as somehow inert and static, and of
collective behavior as providing the dynamic. Such a conception,
in fact, is a triple misconception: of the nature of structural change,
of collective behavior, and of the typical relations between the two.
It is in epochs of transition, like that of the waning Middle Ages
or of the French and Russian revolutions that the established
institutions of society lose their hold over their members. In-
ternally, pressures seem to pile up, and externally misgi\ ings and
public criticisms are rife. Codes and norms are no longer accepted
unreflectively and without dispute, and to an increasing number
of persons they may pro\ e to be unworkable.
Every society in such decline provides us with the indexes of
its coming apart. When the privileged feudal nobles of Europe
closed their ranks by demanding more rigid tests of "blue blood"
descent; when the guilds jealously closed their master positions
against the increasing pressure of journeymen and apprentices,
by demanding a "masterpiece" and by adding an obligatory year
of itineracy; when there were not sufficient churches to absorb the
students of theology who, as intellectual vagrants, joined the itiner-
ant artisans; when the various intellectual groups organized by
"nations" at medieval universities engaged in heightened group
competition for church prebends— then established institutional ar-
rangements were on the decline.
Although the specific indexes of disintegration vary by societies,
all such epochs of transition may be formally characterized b\- the
fact that old institutional orders, for a variety of reasons, lose their
hold over their members. Conduct deviates from the sanctioned
norms, and newer ways of doing things are no longer felt to be
sinful or criminal. In fact, quite a few men may accept the new as
the only possible way of getting things done. Uninstitiited or loosely
instituted men make their appearance but find no place in the old
order. Old ways of conduct with their conventional, legal, and
ideological elaborations are available to fewer people, and those
who cannot follow these ways lose their stake in the old order, and
with it they lose their identifications and loyalties, without, how-
ever, promptly finding new ones. Such social transitions may be
long endured, or passed through swiftly.
430 DYNAMICS
Western medieval society knew a partial breakdown of its insti-
tuted ways during the pestilence, and during the threatened con-
quest, when Mongolian armies penetrated to the gates of Vienna,
and disciplined men on swift horses struck terror to Christian
hearts. Since these times the word "horde" has remained in all
Western languages. It is during such periods of transition— when
old institutions break down and new ones are not yet available—
that mass movements and collective forms of behavior are likely to
appear. In them and in terms of them new forms of organization,
of leadership, and of conduct are developed. So there is the en-
lightenment movement of the Renaissance, the North Alpine Ref-
ormation, the emergence of the counterreformation of Catholic
revivalism. And, in this broad perspective, is not our time of wars,
revolutions, and slumps comparable?
In such periods sensitive minds usually experience stress and
strain, and formulate problems long before broad masses of men
experience them consciously or act collectively in response to the
mounting tensions accompanying what Weber called "times of
distress" or Emile Durkheim called "anomy," that is, a state of
"normlessness." Then occurs in intellectual circles trial and error,
criticism and countercriticism, self-searching and doubt, skepticism
and enlightenment, desperate attempts to revive and to reaffirm
what proves in the end to be outlived and hollow. Words and deeds
fail to jibe, and boredom overcomes many who feel weary of vm-
inspiring days. Others crave forgetfulness and intoxication, and
still others see the day of judgment on a sinful age which thus
comes to its doom.
The most ambitious effort, since Le Bon,^ to use concepts of col-
lective behavior in an explanatory way is that of the late Emil
Lederer, who sought to interpret nazism as "an attempt to melt
society down to a crowd." - For him society is organized into a
pluralism of interested groups, each of which is more or less
homogeneous and thus partial, yet capable, especially if small, of
supporting reasoned opinions and reasonable actions. But the crowd
or mass is amorphous, emotional, given to sudden outbursts; it is
not articulated but fragmented, and it is without goals of its own.
1 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (new ed.; New York: Macmillan, 1925).
- The State of the Masses (New York: Norton, 1940), see especially pp. 28,
45, 50, and 66.
COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 4^1
Hence it is ideal material for strong leaders and is, in fact, accord-
ing to Lederer, for nazism the "permanent basis of a political
system." Before our times, up to 1914, the economic theory of his-
tory, Emil Lederer believed, was approximately correct: political
orders corresponded in due course to economic de\elopmcnt, classes
were the units of history-making; and groups rather than individ-
uals entered the nineteenth-century political order. The "present
crisis," however, "is not a manifestation of class struggle but a sub-
stitution for society of institutionalized masses," at the center of
which is a corps of violent gangs who turn all discussion groups into
demonstrative political crowds. These crowds, in turn, have no
tradition and no connection with other parties; they dominate the
streets, and as they mass the citizenry they dominate the politi-
cal minds of men and women. So, the real opposites today are
"states based on stratified society" (which may be "progressive"
or "reactionary"), and "states based on masses." In this view there
was in nazism only amorphous mass and ruling party, and no other
structures.
This theory, which we believe mistaken, confuses the deliberate
breaking up of autonomous associations standing between the state
and the various strata of a society with the dissolution of such a
society into a mass. It overlooks the continuing fact of propertied
classes in German society and their strengthening by Nazi policies.
It is true that strata and organizations, especially those of labor,
were smashed and atomized, but this was accomplished by bu-
reaucracies which prowled out from the top, intervening to co-
ordinate almost every institutional order and sphere, and regi-
menting voluntary associations into compulsory cartels and "Labor
Fronts." Each of these sectors was controlled by reliable party
personnel in charge of a thoroughly organized, propagandized,
and terrorized society. Whatever spontaneity or "sudden out-
breaks" occurred were less a result of spontaneity than of the
managed or manipulated discharge of mass fears and trained
hatreds under the oppressive weight of the ruling structure which
thus consolidated its domination and ensnared the underlying
population.^
Adequate explanation of "collective behavior" usually requires
that we pay attention to three sorts of phenomena: (A) the larger
^ For an excellent criticism of Emil Lederer, see Franz Neumann, Behemoth
(New York: Oxford, 1942)^ P- 365 ff-
43^ DYNAMICS
framework of institutional structure; (B) the more or less struc-
tured and managed associations, movements, or parties; and (C)
collective behavior on its own "spontaneous level. "
2. Aggregates, Crowds, and Publics
Ever since Le Bon, the term "masses" has been used to cover a
great variety of processes and phenomena, and accordingly its
meaning is not always clear. In various forms and with various
qualifications, Le Bon's ideas have been used by Ortega y Gasset,*
Emil Lederer, E. A. Ross,^ and Karl Mannheim, as well as a host
of less eminent writers. Such terms as "mass society" or "mass
movement," "mass media" or "mass publics," "mass sales" or "mass
demonstrations," "mass orgies" or "mass spectacles," and so on,
are indicative of the very wide range of phenomena covered. We
shall use the term "mass" simply to signify large numbers of men,
and distinguish, for convenience, aggregates, crowds, mobs, and
publics.
I. When people exhibit like behavior, when they "go in various
directions" and do not share any goal, we may speak of an aggre-
gate, or of an aggregation. Aggregates, as in a street scene,
are simply people in the same locality but not in communication
or live contact with one another; such regularities as they display
are due to common stimuli, such as stoplights or signals of police-
men.
Among these there is no joint or common motivation, no lead-
ership, no common focus of attention, no sense of cohesion bind-
ing them together. Thus do automobile drivers return on Sunday
evening to the big city, or masses of women go shopping during
the seasonal sales or holidays, or masses of employees go to work
or leave for home in the daily ebb and flow of the metropolis.
Everybody acts for himself, competing for scarce parking space
and economic bargains, and all these aggregates of drivers and
shoppers, commuters and transients— by their parallel behavior—
* Jose Ortega y Gasset, Tlie Revolt of the Masses (London: Allen, 1932).
^ See his great books, Social Control (New York: Macniillan, 1904) and
Social Psychology (New York: Maemillan, 1908).
COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 4^3
exhibit uniformities of conduct to which traffic regulations, adver-
tising campaigns, radio warnings, and so on, address themselves.
II. When such aggregates, in physical proximity, find a common
focus of attention they may become a "crowd" or a "mob." Thus
crowds of spectators gather around the scene of a traffic accident,
or form casual audiences around Sunday speakers in Hyde Park,
or slowly mill in the streets, watching mobs (which are crowds in
action) of hoodlums beat up Negroes in "race riots," or watching
stormtroopers and Hitler Youth details hunt down and beat up
Jews in Berlin's boulevard cafes. In such situations, the focused
attention of the massed spectators readily lead to shared responses,
ranging from the encouragement of mob activities, through sullen
silences, to hisses and boos of protest.
The people in a crowd are in contact with one another, but
usually in a random way: they are unco-ordinated and mill about.
Mobs are crowds that are actixely oriented by emblems or slogans
to some goal. Crowds as such have no shared ends, no leaders;
mobs are crowds that are incited to specific action by self-appointed
leaders or "rabble-rousing" shouters. Such spontaneous collecti\ ities
seemingly represent ephemeral, transient outbreaks of tension.
They provide outlets and targets for psychic forces not placed
socially in a more usually legitimated ways.
Back of the crowd, and especially of the mob, there is the larger
social context, which usuallv generates conflicts, hatreds, fears, and
tensions, to which the mob now gives vent. Old expectations guid-
ing the usual role conduct of the members have temporarily col-
lapsed, and the mutual, immediate expectations of the crowd are
focused, or even fixed, upon the leader, who thus takes o\'er. This
is more easily accomplished if the usual roles and expectations of
the more routine areas of life become ambivalent or surcharged
with psychic and emotional elements.
Mobs may act before friendly or before hostile crowds of on-
lookers. Accordingly, the relationships between acti\e mobs and
spectator crowds vary greatly. Mobs may emerge spontaneously
from an excited and milling crowd when self-appointed leaders
incite the crowd to action. Usually in such cases, mobs of youths
come to the fore and in a loose gang formation swing into action.
A broadening field of many gangs and mobs may come to the
434 DYNAMICS
fore, under the eyes of wildly cheering masses of spectator crowds.
Again organized gangs like those of the Russian Black Hundred
or the Hitler Youth may terrorize the community by their program
activities, and attract crowds of more or less friendly, more or
less excited, spectators who may themselves be drawn into the
fury of sadistic street terrorism.^"^
There is a fluid transition between the aggregate masses of men
in the street, the spectator crowds, and the wildly moving mobs
which may emerge spontaneously or who may follow the lead of
organized terrorist squads under central direction. In our century
we are no strangers to the mob directed from radio-equipped staff
cars and motorcyclists who provide disciplined cohesion for active
knots of scattered people throughout metropolitan areas. In such
cases, running battles with the police, swift changes of the point of
attack, retreats and provocative feints, a devastating, simultaneous
sweeping down on carefully mapped-out targets in selected cities
throughout a nation— what all this reveals is a virtually warlike
discipline. So in the November days of 1938 in Nazi Germany
were synagogues burned, Jewish businesses destroyed and looted,
and Jewish homes raided. The intermingling of collective behavior
and officially organized action, of cloaking the machine-organized
terrorism by alleging that irresponsible mob activities, motivated
by "righteous indignation," is the cause— is revealed in Goebbel's
contradictory formula: "the organized spontaneity of the people."
The mobilization of massed aggregates for less violent action
may also be a response to the policies of specific institutions. Thus
the shopping sprees and bargain counter crushes of metropolitan
housewives are responses to advertised sales. The rush hour traffic
of millions of employees are results of the definition of the working
day in factory and office; the rush of the voters to the polls results
from the definition of voting times and the exhortations of political
parties and mass media. Thus, the policies of various institutions
-religious, political, economic-are likely to call forth unorganized,
although patterned, mass behavior of predictable volume and regu-
larity.
5A Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago ( Chicago,
1922); Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (New York: Macmillan, 1944);
Franz Borkeneau, The Spanish Cockpit (London: Faber, 1937)-
COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR ^35
III. Publics are composed of people who are not in face to face
relation but who ne\'ertheless display similar interests, or are
exposed to similar, although more or less distant, stimuli. The
public of a leader may be the only context of his leadership; he
offers himself, or at any rate is available, as a symbolic model. The
best formal definition of the political public is that recently given
by Hans Speier: a public exists whenever people outside a gov-
ernment have the right to give public advice and criticism to the
gONernment.*^
This obviously ties the concept in with the notion of institu-
tional structure, specifically with the state. The leader in such a
context is one who can mediate, as it were, between public and
state. Such leaders often coincide or are closely related to leaders
of movements and parties.
But there is a distinction between three types of public which
we must recognize, especially in view of the rise of mass media of
communication and the frequent impossibility of realizing in fact
the formal right stated in Speier's definition:
( 1 ) In simpler, early-modern times, the public might be ade-
quately imagined as a "primary public": circles of people in dis-
cussion with one another. This is what the older literature of pub-
lic opinion— using the term as a legitimation of democratic forms
of go\ernment— meant by "the public": discussion groups con-
fronted by issues. And it is further imagined that for e\ery li\e
issue there is a self-activated public. The leaders of such a public
are informal "opinion leaders" who guide opinion in their informal
spheres, refract media communications to others, and make legiti-
mate the influences from other sources.
Speier, in his definition, has tried to save this aspect of the
notion of public at a time when democratic institutions are exter-
nally under attack and internally decaying. He does this In- ex-
plicitly linking the notion of public to the power structure, and
more importantly by formalizing the conception of public in a
statement of a right rather than of a going fact. This becomes
clear when we seriously ask, \\'ho can lead public opinion today?
What are its leaders like? What are their chances to fulfill the role
assigned to them by this definition?
(2) At other times, such public as exists seems to be adequately
described as a set of "media markets": people reached more or less
<^ Social Order and the Riska of War (New York: Stewart, 1952), p. 323.
43^ DYNAMICS
regularly by a given medium of communication. On such markets,
no informal leadership as in the primary public seems possible:
the only "leaders" who can arise in this context are those in charge
of or with ready access to the mass channels of communication.
(3) Moreover, as we know from totalitarian societies, the older
primary publics may be infiltrated and regimented by organizations.
From the aggregate activities of multitudes of migrants and spec-
tators, buyers and sellers, voters and readers and radio listeners—
we may distinguish mass audiences and mass publics recruited by
the sale of tickets of admission. If such mass organizations as trade
unions, book clubs, educational institutions, army units, churches,
parties, or civic organizations "book the show" or sponsor the pub-
lication, we may speak of "organized publics and audiences." This
pattern would seem to be on the ascendancy in industrial nations
during the twentieth century. A whole technique of "audience
building" has emerged. The availability of masses at factories and
in office buildings and public conveyances provides opportunities
to co-operate with religious or political or cultural organizations,
by offering employees or passengers as "captive audiences." In
totalitarian regimes this availability of people in masses is seized
upon by the ruling party during propaganda campaigns to regiment
crowds to demonstrations, to endorse government policies by plebis-
cite and to discipline men to follow th6 party line. The techniques
Americans know as commercial advertising have been centralized
and co-ordinated by the single-party state, which thus— through its
mass organizations, publicly owned enterprises, collective farms,
public carriers and conveyances, mass media, schools, and ubiqui-
tous "agitators"— reaches into every nook and cranny of the social
structure.
What happens to men in crowds and mobs?
Negatively, the norms and motives which they have incorporated
as features of their instituted roles collapse. If this is complete, or
at least extreme, the result is panic or ecstasy. Internally, the gen-
eralized other no longer works as it did, and, in extreme, the person
is unavailable. Out of fear or out of ecstatic joy, man is "beyond
himself." This is the key psychological meaning of "anomy"—
the situation of normlessness.
COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR ^;^y
Positively, behavior is then more open to two sources: the eon-
tents of the unconscious become the leading predispositions,' and
the individual is sensitized to others immediately around him.
The established person— in short, the more routine seH-images and
conscience— are minimized; the features of the psychic structure,
maximized. Mass panic is thus the extreme opposite of institutional
order. And if we take seriously the term "crisis," as applied to
institutional orders, we mean a collapse sufficient to put men into
panic.
Now, movements may accomplish the same process as crowds,
but more gradually; it is, in fact, within the context of a continuing
movement or party that crowd phenomena are more likely to oc-
cur, and when occurring, to have more lasting psychological ef-
fects. Many collective phenomena which appear "spontaneous" may
in reality be adroitly managed or manipulated, and all of them,
in their causal explanation, rest in one way or another upon going
institutional structures.
Men in power, especially if they obtained institutional power
by means of a movement in which the masses played a part, may
try to keep them, as J. B. S. Hardman put it," "in a state of sus-
pended mobility, immune to the solicitations of the opposition and
yet potentially" ready, when necessary, to support the authority.
Contenders for power and office appeal to the aggregate masses
(which as such have no common goals or loyalties) in an effort to
identify themselves with the interests and sentiments of the masses,
and at the same time to bargain with or threaten concessions out
of existing authorities. Masses may be transformed from "a state
of passive, if intensely nervous, suspension to one of aggressive
activism . . . ," into not a mob but the Violent yet structured point
of action for a movement that has prepared for the day and hour.
On the other hand, when the structural framework is weak,
crowd behavior may even shape the policies of instituted leaders.
Thus, of one of the crises in the Middle East during the early
fifties, Anne O'Hare McCormick wrote that foreign policy is now
being made in the streets.
^ See Sigmund Freud, Group PsycJiology and tlic Analysis of the Ego,
J. Strachey, tr. (London: Internation Psycho-analytical Press, 1922), p. 9 ff .
s "Masses," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. X, pp. 198 and 200.
438 DYNAMICS
3. Movements, VaHies, and Pressure Groups
No one has yet classified in an adequate way all those types of
voluntary institutions or associations, which lie between the family
on the one hand and the state and alliances of states on the other.
But it does seem, as we have already indicated, that it is in this
zone that leadership of the most interesting sort arises.^ It arises
here because this context permits the invention of leader roles and
the expansion of the scope of existing roles by leaders. Here we
find the attempts to co-ordinate, in Nazi-like manner, by inter-
locking memberships and the infiltration of leaders into key roles of
other voluntary institutions. Here we find parties that are the or-
gans of a movement becoming so dominating as to eliminate other
parties, and turn the movement into an extension and instrument
of the party. Here we find several movements represented in one
party, as in major political parties of the United States; as well as
several parties within one movement, as in European labor move-
ments. Obviously such intricate overlapping provides opportimi-
ties for modification of roles and functions at the hands of those
who would lead.
(a movement attempts to change institutions, from the outside,
from the inside, or from bothj Like institutions, movements are or-
ganized enough to permit a turnover of members without loss of
identity as movements, and their members are more or less aware
of themselves as having common interests and/or principles./ It
recruits members, usually from selected class and status levels,
who are more or less ready to act in certain ways, and it lends to
them its orienting aim: in some way to change some institutional
setup.) Whether based on interest, on principle, or on both, people
are united in voluntary associations in a more or less energetic
struggle for power, which, so far as the leadership is concerned,
means power of an instituted sort for the leaders.
There are many variations and overlaps between movements,
parties, and pressure groups; clean-cut definitions are more likely
to be arbitrary limitations than helpful descriptions. (Party pro-
grams,] Heberle comments,^"! are more likely to consider several
'•> We have discussed this in Chapter XIV: The Sociology of Leadership, Sec-
tion 4: Contexts and Roles.
1" Rudolf Heberle, Social Movements (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1951)-
COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 439
important issues; pressure groups, only limited, specific issues)
(i^arties,) as Schattschneider puts it,^^ (try to mobilize majorities^
^jressure groups to organize minorities/) Such a distinction seems
more or less adequate for Anglo-Saxon countries, but not for move-
ments such as the Catholic center party in Germany, which as a
principled "minority party" had no chance to win a "majority"
and hardly was so optimistic as to feel that such aspirations made
sense: they never polled more than 20 per cent and generally hov-
ered around 15 per cent of the total vote.
There may exist strict "class parties" who advance merely their
specialized demands, attract only a following of special interests
and orient their platform only to them, and without any particular
ideological generalities for a "cloak"; otherwise they are organized
like any other party with parliamentary party, machine, and press.
Schattschneider in his definition unduly generalizes the United
States model, which in many ways is unique. There have been
special status group parties— in Hungary, Austria, and Germany—
of agrarian nobles, who proudly called themselves small but strong.
Moreover (if one wishes to speak of "majorities-minorities") a
"pressure group," such as the German Trade Unions under the
Weimar Republic, may be an enormous affair, as opposed to the
state party of bourgeois liberalism.
[Pressure groups are associations which use political means for
the promotion of strictly economic, usually class, interests; parties
do the reverse; even declared "class parties" use economic means,
as well as political, for both economic and political ends. /'Labor
parties" generally differ from bourgeois "class parties" in that they
aim by reforms or by revolutions to attain a new social structure,
hence not at "getting out of capitalism" what they can get, but
transforming capitalism in one way or another. M The party struc-
ture of the United States, in spite of the heterogeneous composi-
tion of each party, would seem at least temporarily to drift toward
class alignments:) "the vested interest" u. wage earners, family
farmers, and new and old middle classes in the big city.
It should be clear that all sorts of interrelations, and hence
opportunities for leaders to elaborate their roles and expand the
11 E. E. Schattschneider, Politics, Pressures and Hie Tariff ( Xew Y(irk:
Prentice-Hall, 1 935 ) •
12 Cf. C. Wright Mills, The New Men of Power (Xew York: Harcourt, Brace,
1948).
440 DYNAMICS
scope of their commands, exist in the context of voluntary asso-
ciations.
I Movements are composed of people who are attempting to
change their position with -reference to the personnel or the struc-
ture of institution^;. The people involved need not share common
values; land they may be quite variously motivated in such a way
as to converge or coincide in the movement's direction. But
whether or not the people involved are conscious of common ends
or are propelled by similar motives is not necessary to their defini-
tion as a movement, but must be determined in any given case.
Thus the European crusade represented a movement having quite
heterogeneous sources, motives, and objectives: ^" there was Pope
Urban II's desire to integrate the Greek and Roman church with
himself as head; there was the feudal lord's willingness to make
war, which was their trade, and which, for all warriors, was a
supremely prestigeful activity; there were the new lands to con-
quer and fiefs to be established for noble scions; there was the
desire of the trading classes, especially of the Italian cities, to
benefit from shipping services and the luxurious plunder of the
East; there was also the spiritual interest of all Christians to con-
quer the Holy Land from the Mohammedans; and in the asceticist
atmosphere of the age, there was the desire of men and women to
do penance by the long, dangerous pilgrimage, and thus to save
their souls.
I Movements may be located in any one or in several of the insti-
tutional orders.) If their orientation has primarily to do with the
personnel, structure, policies, or symbols of the religious order of
institutions, they may be understood as religious movements; if
they seek to influence state power, who wields it and how, they are
political movements. If they seek to change the status system or
the class structure we may speak of status movements, such as
those of youth, women, and the aged, or of class movements, such
as those of middle classes, farmers, and labor. Movements may
be specialized by institutional orders and spheres, or they may
lude several or all orders within a social structure.
The great ideological movements of liberalism, nationalism, and
socialism have generally tended to operate in a total way\ their
^■' See "Crusades," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. IV, p. 614 flF.
inc
COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 4^1
goals and policies have to do with extensive modifications of the
structure of all orders and spheres— religious and political, kinsliip
and economic, military and technological, status and educational.
In liberalism, for example, we speak of "economic liberalism" when
referring to "Manchesterism" and free trade; of "political liberal-
ism" when referring to constitutionalism v. despotism; of "cultural
liberalism" when referring to the symbol and educational spheres,
to the elaboration of personality models in the arts, and so on.
Movements may also be classified in terms of how far-going
their aims may be: if they seek to modify existing arrangements,
we speak of reform movements, if they seek to change the struc-
ture and the ruling legitimations of institutional orders, we speak
of revolutionary movements.
Therefore, in examining a social moxement one may first locate
it at each phase through which it runs, within institutional orders
and spheres, and within classes and status levels— in terms of at
least three aspects: (1) its professed goals and policies, whether
they are reformative or revolutionary and what their specific con-
tents are; (2) the recruitment and composition of its members and
leaders; and (3) its objective functions; that is, one must ask cui
bono?— to whose benefit does its existence and operation redound?
4. Revolution and Counterrevolution "
As the term implies, a revolution may be generically defined as a
qualitative turnover of institutional orders. Movements or parties
which aim to transform and replace the legitimations and institu-
tions of an order, or of several orders, may be called re\olution-
ary. With such exceptions as "industrial revolution," the temi is usu-
ally used only for relatively rapid transformations. The scope of
such movements may be delimited in terms of which orders the
1* For good introductory accounts, see Crane Brinton, The Atuitiutiy of
Revolution (New York: Norton, 1938); L. P. Edwards, TJw Natural Hidonj
of Revolution (Chicago: Univ. of Chiciigo Press, 1927); E. II. Carr, Studies
in Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1950); Edmund Wilson, To the Finland
Station (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940); but above all, Leon Trotsky, The
History of the Russian Revolution, Ma.v Eastman, tr. (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1936); Franz Borkenau, The Comtnunist International (New York:
Norton, 1938); Franz Neumann, Behemoth (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1942); Alfred Meusel, "Rc\olution and Counter-Revolution," Encij. Social
Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1937), Vol. \'II, pages 367-76.
442 DYNAMICS
movement is aimed at: it is "partial" if it operates only in some
orders, it is total if it aims to transform all orders. It is probably
only with the advent of modern, extensive techniques of communi-
cation, domination, and manipulation that total revolutions become
possible. The Russian is thus more "total" than the French revolu-
tion. We may also define the scope by determining whether the
movement comes to operate in more than one natural unit. We do
not wish to include the occurrence of violence in our definition of
revolution, although it is an historical fact that most revolutions,
both ancient and modern, have involved violence, on behalf of the
status quo as well as against it.
For full-scale revolution there must be more than a change of
values; the ruling structure and its legitimations must change. Thus,
without revolution, men of various classes and with definite aims
and policies may come and go in cabinets, but a state run by cabi-
nets may endure. Revolution involves a turnover in personnel; but
such a turnover is not by itself a revolution. A circulation of elites
is not enough; there must also be a restructuring of a system of
domination and authority.
A revolution, loosely conceived, appears as a profound change
in a social structure occurring suddenly and with violence. But it
is sudden only in its appearance to the unprepared. And it is not
always "with violence"— even in the political order; moreover, the
major violence involved is usually an effect of the success of the
revolution, when the new regime comes to grips with counterforces
who would by violence defend or restore the old structure.
If law, in practice, is what the courts are likely to enforce, and
if the courts are of the established order, revolutions are of course,
"illegal"— being beyond what courts can enforce. But revolutions,
if successful, establish new legal orders. It is, in fact, a definitive
characteristic of revolutionary transitions that they mark a gap in
legality: old legitimations and laws no longer can be enforced;
new ones are as yet not established.
From the point of view of the old regime a revolution is an illegal
or a "criminal" change in the conditions of legality. From the point
of view of the new regime the agents who enforce or try to en-
force the old legitimations are "criminals."
In "palace revolutions," usurpers— often from within the ruling
stratum— dispkice the ruler (King Farouk of Egypt, 1952), or his
legitimate successor (Edward VIII, 1936), or the entire dynasty
COLLECT! V^E BEHAVIOR ^^3
("The Glorious Revolution," 16SS)— without changing the master
symbols. And by the so-called coup d'etat rulers may change the
political system and the legitimation formula, as did Napoleon III
in 1851, or Hitler upon the death of Hindenburg.
If in a political order changes in the legal order of private prop-
erty rights, as from one class to another, are instigated, which in
turn lead to qualitatively new institutions coming to predominance
in the economic order, we may speak of political and economic
revolution. In the status sphere of the political order, revolution
occurred when the Constitution of the United States outlawed titles
of nobility and disclaimed any citizen who accepts a title from
another government. This blow against descent prestige cleared
the way for the estimation of men on other terms: effort, personal
merit, election to office or wealth. The Jacksonian era carried
through this status revolution, for many of the phenomena asso-
ciated with Jackson's administration are more properly considered
matters of status than of economics.
The experience of classic bourgeois revolutions was theoretically
formulated by Marx, who saw the connection between the eco-
nomic and the political order in terms of class struggle. This strug-
gle was anchored in the economic order, but culminated in a strug-
gle of the ascending middle classes for the state. The political
revolution was thus explained in terms of changes in the economic
order. Such economically anchored political revolutions, guided
by class parties, bring about a new correspondence between the
economic and the political orders. Previous disproportions between
the two orders are eliminated in favor of the ascendant class in
the economic order. Such political revolutions are visually preceded
and accompanied by ideological and status changes: the newly
established authorities claim status for themselves and for their
supporters. The political symbols turn over. Roundhead and sans
culotte replace long curls, wigs and breeches. Monuments of old
Tsars and generals are torn down, new heroes monumentalized;
old street names and old flags, old emblems and oaths give way
to new ones. Into the bonfires go the cultural symbols of past
power as the zeal of the iconoclast has its heyday.
So during the heroic period of Puritanism, Cromwell's army
proclaims itself an army of saints. Inspired soldiers, "the agitators,"
mount pulpits without waiting for ordination. Puritan bibliocracy
444 DYNAMICS
is thus established. Similarly, in the French revolution, every
deputy of the revolutionary parliament is sworn in with his hand
upon Rousseau's Contrat sociale. During the climax of the revolu-
tionary enthusiasm the cult of the goddess of reason is proclaimed
and in majestic public demonstrations a nude virgin on a flower-
bedecked float symbolizes the new deity of political enlighten-
ment. Revolutionary operas glorify the new regime, David stages
and directs the festival, immortalizes the revolutionary hero
(Marat's death). The new class abolishes old customs, creates new
forms of exuberant mass enthusiasm. The ceremonious minuet— the
show dance of the elite— is swept away by the uproarious passionate
whirling of waltzing masses. Then this exuberance is tinged with
proletariat vigor when in 1830 the cancan, with its high kicking
becomes publicly acceptable.
Broad masses expand and, under the impact of enthusiastic
revolutionary terrorism, old status groups go into hiding and exile,
maintaining their esteemed self-conceptions through snobbish deri-
sion of the vulgarity of the political parvenus. They compensate
for their loss of power by strictly emphasizing the symbols of
status, the good name of the deserved ancestors, the well-mannered
and soft-spoken conventions of the educated, the refined tastes of
the sophisticated. Marginal figures from these upper groups who
shift political sides are the most hated of men. Intellectuals ( minis-
ters, artists, political secretaries) who theoretically elaborate the
nostalgic hope for a return of the "good old days" are cordially
welcome. Refugees who have found asylum at foreign courts call
for war against the revolutionized country and hope for the return
of the lost holdings. And to the extent to which the new order re-
laxes in zeal and watchfulness, conspiratorial activities increase
among the deposed.
New leaders of a counterrevolution are appraised as past experi-
ence is rationalized. New theories are developed which dispute
the legitimacy of the revolutionary regime and debunk, psycho-
logically, theoretically, and politically, its new measures and styles
of life. So after the first revolutionary shocks have been overcome,
fatalism and defeatism tend to wane and give way to political
plotting, inspired by the observation of incipient cracks and points
of strain in the new structure. Out of informal gatherings grow
nuclei of political and perhaps eventually military organizations.
Their leaders play on the sentiments of the disappointed, woo
COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 4^5
the good will of foreign governments who nia\' hesitate to grant
recognition to the rexolutionary regime.
In brief, the forces of reaction organize for connterrexohition.
One member or another of the ranks who side with the revolntion,
feeling the pulse of impending crises, may— as did Talleyrand-
change horses and exploit his official position in the new order for
political intrigue in favor of a "restoration." By counterrevolution
we mean the organized and successful endea\'or of previous rul-
ing groups to re-establish themsehes in power in the name of the
old or newly wrought legitimations.
The defeat of such attempts constitutes the supreme test of the
new regime: it is at this point that we find the organized use of
revolutionary terror. Political enemies, actual or suspect, are out-
lawed, their property confiscated, their families executed or ex-
pelled, their friends hunted down. The secret police operates in the
midst of wild rumors, harsh denunciations, veiled threats. If the
incipient counterrevolution cannot be nipped in the bud, military
emergencies and states of siege are proclaimed. If the army is politi-
cally suspect, the revolutionary vanguard organizes a new revolu-
tionary army controlled by "political commissars" ( Saint-Just, Crom-
well's agitators, the Commissars of the Red Army). If the counter-
revolution should succeed, a still stronger terrorism is organized.
Revolutionary leaders and fighters may be shot en masse ("The
ten thousand" after the French Commune of 1S71, the White
Terror in Hungary after World War I).
In all cases there is a rapid turnover of prison populations. The
release of prisoners may be equivalent to the Christian glorifica-
tion of martyrs. Schiller, the court intellectual of Weimar, argued
that "man is free, e\'en if born in chains," which may hold for the
inner spirit of the intellectual; but for political movements, man
is free only when his chains are broken. The storming of the Bas-
tille on July 14, in itself a political bagatelle, has become the date
for the annual celebration of the French Revolution. The chorus
of the liberated prisoners in Beetho\'en's Fidelio is the re\olntion-
ary symbol of political liberation and freedom.
It is convenient to grasp the psychological and ideological aspects
of revolutionary movements by focusing upon their definition of
historical time and reality and upon their conception of freedom.
44^ DYNAMICS
As Karl Mannheim has demonstrated/^ these aspects of mentaHty
allow for a convenient approach to some of the underlying and
implied categories tlirough which the revolutionary actor's experi-
ence is structured, but which are themselves rarely experienced
self-consciously.
I. Time: As the charismatic leader and his followers are not
bound by communal traditions nor by a legal order, but rather are
the initiators of radical beginnings, they experience their time as a
crisis. They feel detached from what appears to them as old and
dead, although they live in the midst of such death. An epoch
is coming to an end, a time is ceasing, the old book is closed. But
new gates are opening and they feel themselves at the threshold
of a new epoch, and from this their enthusiasm springs. Moses sees
but does not enter the new land. The transition from Pharaonic
bondage to this new and liberated land is on the way, Christ acts
"to fulfill the time" and his birth marks the beginning of Occidental
Christendom's history. So the France of 1789 and the Russia of the
October revolution attempt to institute new calendars, which begin
with their deeds. The leader as well as his followers thus experi-
ence their time as the beginning of all time. Karl Marx's dismissal
of the last 2,000 years of history as mere "prehistory," and Engel's
expectation of the "leap into freedom " indicate the temporal discon-
tinuity experienced by revolutionaries. Not the gradual transitions
of a continuum, but the historical hiatus, expressed by many and
various symbols, is typical.
II. Reality: The charismatic experience of reality shows the same
abrupt dichotomy radically separating the black from the white,
the dead from the living, and light from darkness. Schiller, as
a revolutionary enthusiast, cries out, "And new life springs from
the ruins . . . ," an image to be found in many paintings of the
period: young mothers and babies playing amidst broken and an-
cient columns, or, indeed, hanging diapers on them. Traditional
forms of life and conventions appear as hollow and doomed; they
are as masks of death itself: they are visualized as threats. Institu-
tions, however outwardly firm, are built on foundations of sand.
If the doomed aristocrat, in a fleeting moment of self-conscious-
ness, cynically shrugs his shoulders and mutters, "After us, the
'■"' See his Ideology and Utopia, Louis Wirth and Edward Shils, trs. (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).
COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 4^7
deluge," the revolutionary group is full of hope in feeling itself
embarking upon a new era. The heir to the past feels that he would
make the most of what is left of the old time; the charismatic actor
feels that all can be had if what is left would but fall. Facing up to
what blocks his way, he is eager not to support but to push over
what is already tottering. "And what is this class struggle? It is over-
throwing the Czar, overthrowing the capitalist, destroying the capi-
talist class. . . . We subordinate our Communist morality to this
task. We say: 'Morality is that which serves to destroy the old ex-
ploiting society and to unite all the toilers around the proletariat
which is creating a new Communist society.' " ^^^
A keen sense of a new unheard-of mission inspires the charis-
matic leader and his followers. Feeling at one with the rush of
time, his days are not counted; he sees his days to come. For him
there is no end in view; the new reality appears to him under the
aspect of infinity. The optimistic image of the new age of har-
mony, the golden age, the end of darkness, the rising sun, spring,
and the end of winter— these celestial allegories and symbols ex-
press experiences of a discontinuous reality. Or, there may be
organic symbols: the image of the pangs and travails of birth,
which Marx uses often, lends itself readily to this experience. Opti-
mism, of a previously unheard-of surge, lifts up the followers of the
charismatic leader. With eyes fixed on the distant yet foreshortened
goal, they move ahead with the certainty of the sleepwalker, often
immunized against the costs of blood, self-sacrifice and terror
which the deliberate destruction of the old entails.
III. Freedom: These experiences of time and reality dovetail
with those of the freedom which is to come through detachment
in action. Freedom means liberation, and with the increasing size
and power of the charismatic following, freedom is felt to increase.
For freedom is seen and felt to be a sharing in the expanding
movement of the leader. The enthusiasm of the faithful follower
is experienced as essential to freedom. Loyalty to the leader and
to new actions increasingly widen the gap between what is to the
follower the restraint of a doomed world and a series of obstacles;
so the charismatic groups in active pursuit of their resolution
experience this resolution as providing a new freedom for all. Their
13A Nikolai Lenin, Collected Works (New York: International Pubs., 1923),
Vol. XVIII, p. 322 ff.
4^8 DYNAMICS
enthusiasm is aggressive and inclusive. They wish to embrace and
incorporate all things.
It is this sense of an expanding generalized other which inspires
their sense of "mission." Hence this experience of freedom is far
from a privatizing of the person. On the contrary, freedom as the
withdrawal into privacy is derided as indifference, egoism, and
selfishness. Freedom for what? is answered by the charismatic group
in charismatic action. The leader challenges the old: in Christ's
phrase, "it is written, but / say unto you." To the extent to which
it binds followers, the leader's word also dissolve their bonds to
outsiders.
It would be futile to go beyond some such statements as these,
which cannot fail to be relatively abstract, as the symbolic context
of any charismatic revolutionary group is of course influenced by
the era and the society in which it emerges. Yet these somewhat
general comments may suffice to characterize the directions which
detailed studies of different types of revolutionary movements might
have to consider.
The proletariat play a part in all the classic bourgeois revolu-
tions; actual fighting forces are usually recruited from among
its ranks, but they are not necessarily led by wage workers and
their aims are often different.
We understand by "proletarian revolutions" those which aim at
the conquest of the state for the declared purpose of abolishing big
private property in the means of production, however indistinct,
confused, hazy, or romantic this implied goal may be in its varied
formulations. The insurrection of the Paris proletariat in 1830 is
thus the first autonomous revolt of the proletariat. Similarly, the
revolution of 1848 and the establishment of the short-lived Paris
Commune, the revolution of Germany of 1918 in part, the October
revolution in Russia in 1917, China in the forties are outstanding
examples.
These revolutions are historically specific in that they are
planned. Modern revolutions involve specific problems of ideologi-
cal and political organization, political strategy and tactics and
insurrectional technique. It is with reference to such questions-
that different proletarian parties emerge. A staff of leaders is typi-
cally recruited from outside the class for which they speak but
with which they identify; they have included aristocratic intel-
COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 449
lectuals and officers (Bakunin, Chicherin, L. Renn), bourgeois in-
tellectuals and Maecenases (F. Engels, Paul Singer). The party
fund which helped the Russian socialists to hold their historic 1903
party congress in London, at which the Bolshevist party under Lenin
emerged as the "majority," was financed by Lloyd George. School-
teachers and seminarists (like Mao Tse-tung and Joseph Stalin),
self-educated migratory journeymen (Wilhelm Weitling, Eugene
Debs), and declasse, plebeian intelligentsia (such as Lenin), the
numerous party secretaries, radical journalists (like Lincoln Stef-
fens), runaway students (like John Reed) have also entered revo-
lutionary parties.
Those strivings which eventuate in revolutions have historically
been conceived as national in context and origin. Twentieth-cen-
tury revolutions, however, are characterized by the fact that they
occur in the wake of military defeat and subsequent military
interventions. Lenin is the author of a special elaboration of this
fact and, based upon it, of a set of tactics to "transform imperialist
war into civil war" by "revolutionary defeatism," and "the dictator-
ship of the proletariat," which legitimates the establisliment of the
vanguard's power.
There is one fact about the course of one of these modern pro-
letariat revolutions, and its ensuing counterrevolution, that is so
psychologically striking that we must attempt to understand its
wider psychological meanings. We refer to the "confessions" of the
old Bolshevik vanguard during the thirties.
The brilliant intellectuals, primarily of middle-class background,
who in 1917 led the Bolshevik revolution succumbed to brutally
efficient administrators, primarily of such background— rising from
peasant milieu through party schools and up the bureaucratic lad-
der—that to them the telephone was a prime symbol of power. The
old polemic leaders did not last in the era of bureaucratic plots,
but the mediocre, as Victor Serge has written, reconciled their
convictions with the situation in which they found themselves:
"long live our beefsteak, long live our chief, ice are the re\olu-
tion . . ,"
Since 1917, some twenty-seven men have at one time or another
been members of the Russian Politburo-the top power unit of the
U.S.S.R. Lenin died of natural causes in 1924, ending by his death
the period of the old Bolsheviks; from then until 1938, when the last
^^O DYNAMICS
big purge trial ended, is a transition era. The third era, from 1938
to date, is the era of the entrenched Stahn administration. Nineteen
of the total of twenty-seven are no longer members of the Polit-
buro: eight were executed, two murdered, one was a suicide, one
was just dropped, and seven died of natural causes. ^'^
The remarkable psychological aspect of this shift has to do with
the "confessions" of the old Bolshevik vanguard. They "confessed"
to actions which there is reason to believe they did not commit.
Why? They had been members of the party for major portions of
their lives; they had given up all else for party work. Their circle
of significant others, in brief, was confined to party members, and
the party formed, as it were, the only social locus of their general-
ized others. So, it may be that their confidence in themselves, in
their ability to think and decide, was tied to their faith in the
party, the I and the Me having no clear-cut border-line in their
conscience. Therefore: no thought, no feeling, no consciousness
outside the party. In liberal terminology, their commitment was not
provisional or partial; it was permanent and absolute. And since
they had no social anchorage for individual behavior outside the
party, their last individual act was to sacrifice themselves for the
party.^' One thing we have learned by the Soviet shift "from
Lenin to Stalin" is that ideologies can blind as well as guide think-
ing, feeling, seeing, remembering.
5. Anticapitalistic Movements and Parties
There have been some four general movements in the tsventieth
century which have so overshadowed other movements that in
Europe their struggles and victories and defeats, their reforms and
revolutions, have made up "The Social Question." In intellectual
circles, their debates and issues have formed the live content of
political discussion. In the world scene, their rise and fall have
been the keys to world wars and international tensions. They have
^''' These figures are drawn from George K. Schueller, Tlie Politburo (Stan-
ford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1951). But compare Paul Scheffer, "From Lenin ta
Stalin," Foreign Affairs, April 1938, pp. 445-53.
^^ See Philip E. Mosely's "Freedom of Artistic Expression and Scientific In-
quiry in Russia," Tlie Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, Vol. 200, November 1938, pp. 254-74; and especially F. Beck and
W. Godin, Russian Purge and tlie Extraction of Confession ( New York: Viking,
1951)-
COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 45I
each striven to operate in all institutional orders, although the
political and economic areas have been their central locales, and
they have each been an opposition movement, especially in the
economic order— for all but one of them have been generally anti-
capitalist.
We can describe them systematically, as we can describe any
movement or party, by examining their (1) ultimate goals and
(2) typical ways of attaining them, (3) their immediate expecta-
tions and (4) demands, (5) their general conception of history
and (6) the organizational levers they would use, (7) their domi-
nant mode of action and (8) the composition of their predominant
membership, ( 9 ) the types of leaders and staff they have displayed
and (10) their objective political results.
I. Anarchism and Syndicalism— as displayed by Spanish and
Italian anarchism, by France's syndicalist movement and in the
United States by the I\VW; by Russian nobles, like Bakunin and
Kropotkin, by nihilism and earlier in what is known as Blanquism
—are now largely insignificant as political movements. As mo\e-
ments, they are now significant for us only as precursors in this
or that detail of doctrine or technique for later, more successful
movements. The historical aim of these movements has been a
stateless society or congeries of societies composed of free brethren,
which they sought to attain by "propaganda of the deed" (Baku-
nin), the promulgation of the "myth of the general strike" (Sorel)
—by, in short, a spontaneous insurrection of the exploited. They
have been eschatological, expecting an immediate and universal
crisis in public affairs, and so they have demanded action-imme-
diate and direct. For them all history has been full of evil power,
for all power is evil, the existing state being an incarnation of sin-
ful exploitation, and civilization a great progress towards a hubris
of the powerful. In the course of history, the state is doomed. The
organizational levers with which they would cause its downfall
have been loose federations of sectarian type under charismatic
leaders, as with Blanqui's especially, small and vigorously disci-
plined fighting clubs. They wished to engage in individual terror-
ism, in nihilism, in the propaganda of the deed; or, as in Barce-
lonean syndicalism, in strikes of spontaneous masses; or in Blan-
quistic coup d'etat. They have recruited both men and women,
especially people working in small sweatshops, as among Swiss
^52 DYNAMICS
watchmakers or French embroidery workers, or as in the United
States, among various types of migratory laborers in the western
states. Their leaders have been seen as extraordinary men and
women and as both high- and low-brow intellectuals.
II. One may define socialism, generally, as the demand for a
planned economic order, producing for use rather than profit, and
subject to central administration and budgetary accounting. This
involves the fusion of economic and political orders by the exten-
sion of democratic practices to the economic order, which, in turn,
makes for the elimination of property and income class privileges
in favor of economic equality. As a movement, socialism must be
divided into at least three types, the first two of which— "social
democracy" and "left-wing socialism" we shall describe together.
Social Democrats combined their parties in the Second Inter-
national; its outstanding examples are the German Social-Demo-
cratic party operating up to the Nazi era, and reconstituted in
Western Germany since 1945. Left-wing socialism has been repre-
sented by the Austrian Socialists under Otto Bauer or by the left
socialists in Italy under Pietro Nenni. Both types have aimed at a
Socialist economy, by which is meant one in which no private
property in the basic means of production exists, and in a demo-
cratic political order; and both would achieve these ends by the
constitutional means of parliamentary democracy. They would win
over the exploited classes by their political program and propa-
ganda, engage in election fights as a duly constituted party, and
would maintain this organization continuously by linking party
with trade unions and consumer co-operatives, as well as other
affiliated associations. With these organizations they would come
to state power and so enact their program. Their immediate de-
mands have varied according to the going situation, to which they
would rationally orient their tactics. Originally, the demand of the
Social-Democrats was the universal and equal franchise, for with
this gained, they supposed, their movement would flourish; later,
their demands were put into detailed petitions and bills for attain-
able legislation in favor of the anderprivileged and in defense of
democracy. Left-wing socialists have shared these demands, but
to them have added possible coalition with Bolshevik parties and
the formation of semimilitary party auxiliaries, for left-wing social-
ists would not shrink from th ; use of violence in order to achieve
COLLECTIVE BEHAN'IOR ^53
or to defend a democratic order. Thus, in the thirties, when central
European democratic constitutions were being smashed, the Aus-
trian sociaHsts' military wing fought back with machine guns to
be put down by Dollfuss' howitzers.
Social Democrats have conceived of history as a gradual pro-
gression in the direction of the enlightenment of the masses, of
rising living standards, and, in the international area, of peaceful
compromises among labor governments. Left-wing socialists have
foreseen breaks in history and, in xiewing the past, ha\e glorified
the revolutionary traditions of various proletariats. Their organiza-
tional levers have been pretty much confined to the party, but
those of the Social Democrats have also included varying constel-
lations of parliamentary factions involving party, trade imion, and
co-op, with an over-all trend towards the ascendancy of trade
unions over parties. The Social Democratic dominant mode of ac-
tion has thus been the building of mass organizations and the mass
indoctrination of party press, the electoral campaign and the lobby-
ing for legislation, and has not failed to include formation of coali-
tion governments with nonsocialist, or "bourgeois" parties. The
left-wing socialist's activity has sti'ongly emphasized disciplined
party formations with total, or even totalitarian, organization of
wage workers, and has moreover included lower middle-class
movements. The backbone of the Social-Democratic movement has
been the unions of organized labor. Left-wing socialism has en-
rolled the same elements, as well as descending middle-class ele-
ments. The types of leaders and staff ascendant in both types ha\e
included parliamentary demagogues, and party and trade union
officials.
in. All socialist movements are anticapinlist, and they have
aimed in their ultimate visions at a classless si ciety in which power
and "politics" would be abolished in favor of the technical and
rational planning of society. Bolshevisins poh "u-al and economic
results have, in fact, been the rise to complete ^x)wer of the Bol-
shevist party, the abolishment of private property in the means of
production, a planned war economy, in a totalita/an state, domi-
nating the "Third International" and later the Cominform in \ ary-
ing ways outside the Soviet Union. The means with which it would
gain its ultimate end, which resulted in the present Russian state,
was revolution, and as a moxement its immediate expectations
454 DYNAMICS
and tactics have been oriented to the presumed presence or absence
of a "revolutionary situation." It has therefore raised detailed
"shock demands," which are intended to attract and unite under-
privileged classes and groups of all sorts, and which have often
been slanted and timed so as to be impossible of fulfillment short
of revolution. Its conception of history has been that of a dialectical
struggle of the world bourgeoisie and the world proletariat, and its
organizational lever has been a small, select party of active and
disciplined revolutionaries led by skilled and dedicated profes-
sionals. Their leaders and staff have historically thus included
revolutionary intellectuals, both low- and high-brow, but they
have tended, outside of Russia, to be unstable, and in and out of
Russia to be punctuated by purges from the top. The modes of
Bolshevist action have included all those practiced by left-wing
socialists and Social-Democrats, as well as active preparation for
uprising, and various types of illegitimate, illegal activities. The
membership recruited for the Bolshevik movement has consisted
mainly of men, especially of highly skilled groups of the unem-
ployed, labor youths and a radical intelligentsia. It has consisted
of a hard, persisting core of veterans, and a larger membership
that has been unstable and peculiarly high in turnover.
IV. Fascism, as in Italy and Germany, has not been an anti-
capitalist movement, although its rhetoric has borrowed heavily
from Marxian vocabularies. It has been, in its composition and
aims, an antilabor movement of chauvinist middle classes, a mili-
tary bohemia of officer veterans, and elements of the metropolitan
dregs. In its results it has been a totalitarian imperialism of mo-
nopoly capitalistic base with modifications and extensions of big
business, jurisdiction il areas, social controls, and personnel. Fas-
cism's ultimate aim has been world empire; its dominant means,
world war; its im' .^diate expectations, the crises of parliamentary
democracy and .'isting capitalistic economies. Its promises and
demands have I 3en: power to us, and then we'll detail the pro-
grams—all other demands set forth by its leaders have seemed
to be a conflic' 'ng but Machiavellian hodge-podge of incitements.
Its conceptioi of history has been of a process of racial pollution
and decadent of nations, which may be saved by racially pure
elites; all hist ry is thus seen as a circulation of elites and a suc-
cession of e- -pires. The fascist lever of organization, the totali-
COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 455
tarian party and its innumerable officials, have included semi-
military auxiliaries— as with Bolshevism. This rather miscellaneous
party has been led by Fiihrer, Duce, or Caudillo— and in accord-
ance with the leadership principle, merged with and upheld by
bureaucratic machines under military discipline.
Collective behavior— a phrase that refers to the revolutionary
overturn of social structures as well as the peaceful milling about
of casual street throngs— is obviously a catchall for various phe-
nomena that do not readily fit into conceptions of institutional
order. And yet, none of these movements, parties, crowds, aggre-
gates or publics can be understood or explained without sensitive
reference to the social structure that is their context. For collective
behavior, after all, is the behavior of the same people who in their
more usual, everyday lives enact the routines of more or less stable
institutions. And it is within the master trends of institutional struc-
tiu-es that such people, in their collective behavior, may place their
imprint upon an epoch of history.
CHAPTER
XVI
Master Trends
IN reflecting upon the basic transformations of twentieth-century
societies, we may first examine those institutional orders in which
the distribution of power is most visible. We do not intend by this
approach to imply that "power" is the highest value, for men in
general or for us; it is simply expedient to approach modern social
structures from this point of view, for it is from this vantage point
that we may best hope to understand the ground swell of our age.
The "revolution of our time," as it is called in contemporary tracts,
is certainly most readily discernible in the military, political, and
economic orders. Moreover, from the point of view of "social con-
trol," "staff controlled" sanctions offer the easiest way to an under-
standing of the master problems of a society as a whole.
The development of technologies of production and of destruc-
tion—from the stone ax to the atom bomb— has now reached a new
threshold of efficiency in both the economic and the military orders
of the great powers. With these developments, the institutional
units which incorporate these technological developments are^ enor-
mously expanded. In the United States, for example, a handful of
corporations centralize decisions and responsibilities that are rele-
vant for military and political as well as economic developments
of global significance. For nowadays the military and the political
cannot be separated from economic considerations of power. We
now live not in an economic order and in a political order, but in a
political economy and moreover a political economy that is closely
linked with military institutions and decisions. This is obvious in
the repeated "oil crises" of the Middle East, or in the relevance of
Southeast Asia and African resources for the Western powers.
Thus, an American state governor, upon his return from the Far
East in 1951, spoke casually of "our tin" and "our rubber" when
MASTER TRENDS ^57
speaking of French Indo-China, British Malaya, and tlie Indone-
sian RepnbHc. In the perspective of the naxal powers, the Mechter-
ranean, as well as the North and the Baltic Seas, are but extensions
of the Atlantic Ocean. A network of looser or firmer treaties now
extends throughout the "Western world," from the eastern Mediter-
ranean to the borderlands of Asia on the Pacific coast.
1. The Co-ordination of Political, Economic and
Military Orders
Various tensions and bargains now implement a world drift
whose direction in the postwar era has been unmistakably towards
an increasing integration of economic, military, and political struc-
tin-es, on both sides of the di\iding lines running through Central
Europe and Korea. At the same time, ideological and diplomatic,
and economic and military conflict has been increasing. This is
what is meant by the cold war that is characteristic of a world of
nations increasingly polarized between the United States and the
Soviet Union.
The enormous range and the destructive capacities of modern
weapons has by itself made for a great increase in the power
wielded by central decision-making units. This process was al-
ready forcefully under way during the depression of the thirties,
for at that time the various efforts of central governments to plan
rather than drift were inaugurated on some scale. This enhance-
ment of central executi\e power has occurred, as it were, blindly,
and it has been acti\ely implemented by the deliberate centraliza-
tion policies of public authorities. The result is an ever-increasing
bureaucratization.
In each of the two major crises of modern capitalist societies—
in world depression and in world war— central planning and regu-
lation and the enforcement of big decisions lead men of power
to an increasing awareness of the interdependence, and accord-
ingly of the need for co-ordination, of all major institutional orders.
In order to control the ramifications of key decisions in one field—
for instance, the unixersal peacetime draft for an army— the au-
thorities have promptly to consider the cumulative effects in the
educational sphere: the decreasing enrollments of institutions of
higher learning, the threats of bankruptcy for small colleges, the
long-run scarcities of trained professional personnel in strategic
458 DYNAMICS
skill-groups, and so on. Or, the ramifications into the economic or-
der: How do the armies' demands for equipment affect industry?
the state's demands for "big hardware" and the public's demands
for consumer goods? How will the draft affect the labor force, in
agriculture, in industry? How about the equality of men and
women— shall both be drafted? If so, in what ratio? at what age?
for how long? What of allies? What is their economic and military
potential? What about their internal cohesion and political relia-
bility?
The tensions of policy alternatives reverberate throughout the
value structure of modern societies. Religious institutions are also
affected, as clergymen enter the discussion with teachers and other
professionals concerned with marriage and population policies.
"Moral problems" thus come to the fore, and decision-making
groups realize that their decisions touch directly or indirectly
upon all institutional orders of society. Accordingly their decisions
must, it seems, be "total."
Under laissez-faire conditions of the nineteenth century the vari-
ous institutional orders were, so to speak, left alone, and it was
taken for granted that harmony would win out in a process of
dynamic oscillations, of minor frictions and adjustments, that
would end up in a new "equilibrium." Today such a spontaneous
balancing can no longer be assumed, nor can harmony be left to
chance. Hence, the top decisions tend increasingly to be "co-
ordinated" decisions and to ramify throughout institutional orders;
so decision-makers, when speaking of "calculated risks," anticipate
long-range consequences. The decision to "go all out" in an arma-
ment race, for example, goes together with purchasing programs
for stockpiling strategically significant raw materials in the hegem-
ony area, and the U.S. demand, as the universal protector of the
Western orbit, to blockade the Soviet orbit. These decisions, in
turn, affect the weaker economies of other nations:
Raw material countries may raise their price levels. Weak im-
porting industrial countries may feel their export opportunities
threatened under conditions of rising costs of production. Debtor
nations may see their relation to creditors badly affected, as well
as fear for their economic, pohtical, and psychological stability,
should mass unemployment emerge. These national fears are due
to cumulative international processes often beyond the control of
the nations involved.
MASTER TRENDS 459
It is because of such specific consequences as these that deci-
sions tend to become total, and the pohtical decisions of parties
and cabinets to become key decisions. Certain goals stand out in
relatively clear focus, as military and economic targets, and the
time required for their realization can be predicted within rela-
tively narrow limits. Up to a point, moreover, their ramifications
into various institutional orders can be assessed. But beyond a
given point, chances have to be taken. It is then that trained and
imaginative judgment seems scarce, is highly premiumed, and leads
to plaintive feelings among executives in political, military, and
business life about the shortage of qualified successors. This feel-
ing, in turn, leads to an increasing concern with the training of
successors who could take over as older men of power retire.
The repeated experience of "boomerangs"— the unintended and
unstated consequences of key decisions— leads to mass disillusion-
ment and to the apathetic withdrawal of groups whose willing
support, or at least readiness "to go along," is indispensible for
implementing expected changes. In postwar Germany, Hitler's
phrase, "The Thousand Year Reich" has become a stock phrase for
deriding his twelve-year rule. The disillusionment of the American
public with Wilsonian idealism shortly after World War I, and with
the starry objectives of the Atlantic Charter, even during the course
of as well as after World War II, also comes to mind. In fact,
one must realize that the mass acceptance of false or insufficient
definitions of reality— and subsequent disappointment— is now a
recurrent feature of the opinion processes and symbol spheres of
the great powers.
Continent-wide publics lack the flexibility of mind which char-
acterizes the ruling few; besides, these masses are expected to ha\e
"faith" in these changing definitions and frequent revisions of
images of reality. For such publics, the rapid succession thus con-
stitutes a process of profound disillusionment, comparable to
changes of creeds in other times. And since, nowadays, these
changes occur within the living experience of a single generation,
the demand for forgetfulness and for learning new definitions of
reality make many men lose the capacity wholeheartedly to accept
publicly sponsored or official definitions of their situation. At the
same time, "the will to believe" may increase, as the successful
mass propagation of demonologies and world conspiracy myths
seems to indicate. Thus, propaganda neurosis on the one hand.
460 DYNAMICS
and fanatical superstition on the other, tend to be widely diffused
and always to threaten the "small still voice of reason."
The great increase in the volume of official secrets, or secret
diplomacy, of security demands, reduces the amount of relevant
information available to the mass public. "News behind the news"
becomes a ubiquitous advertising slogan, aimed at the suspicious
public; "newsletters" are addressed to small circles of decision mak-
ers in business, political, and military affairs. The U.S. mass media,
under corporate business control, often fail to "represent" public
opinion, as is evidenced by the frequent disparity between the
stand taken by "the organs of public opinion" and the electorate
during presidential elections since 1936.
Instead of free competition and unco-ordinated "adjustments,"
there are planned "relay systems" which ramify across entire insti-
tutional orders. Hence "co-operation" is at a premium, and more-
over, co-operation from a multiplicity of leaders all of whom cannot
always be informed of the whys and the wherefores of key deci-
sions. Rivalry makes for secrecy; it is, for example, in the nature
of modern warfare to launch formless "surprise attacks" and to
exploit old-fashioned diplomatic forms as mere means and shadow
boxing. Accordingly, there is much competition for superior morale,
a competition open to the eyes of world-wide literate groups and
their publics, organized as well as in aggregate condition.
The nature of key, national decisions, in summary, involves long
range perspectives and targets, and extended and complex means-
ends schemes. These decisions are of global scope and they cross
institutional orders into which they ramify and which implement
them. There is about such institutional mechanics in our time an
unheard of "momentum," and the decisions, accordingly, are
weighty and grave, and often frightful. They affect no less than the
future of mankind.
2. Psychological Aspects of Bureaucracy
All these bureaucratic developments, so central to modern so-
ciety, may be accompanied by psychological phenomena, which, in
brief, result from increased stresses upon the person and from
problems he cannot solve by "individual adjustment."
I. An increasing number of employed persons find themselves
in a position which does not give them an opportunity to take stock
MASTER TRENDS 461
of their whole situation. Their working environment is a mere
fragment of a hierarchal structure, on whose total proper func-
tioning they are dependent, even though the total structure and its
movements are not intellectually accessible to them. Modern em-
ployees—the worker, the salesmen, the clerk— know that they are
dependent on the decisions of others, and that few persons have
opportunities to attain the key positions from which day-to-day
decisions are made. Moreover, the specialized knowledge necessary
for decisions makes the ordinary individual's intelligence just as
fragmentary as is his environment. He does not choose the ends,
for they are set for him; his rational knowledge is of a predeter-
mined character and has to do with means. The traditionalist
peasant, in contrast, understands "his business, " knows many of
the factors which affect him, and the rest he leaves to God or to
other supernatural forces.
II. At the same time, the bureaucratic organizations tend to
become more and more interdependent, partly because the politi-
cal community cannot allow for the breakdown of large-scale insti-
tutions under private management and motives— such as the profit
considerations of the strongest competitor. In an expanding econ-
omy of relatively small enterprises, the free market did not lead
to such cumulative repercussions in the entire social structure.
But in our time breakdowns of industrial corporations or big banks
and markets have enormous consequences for all members of so-
ciety. The government is therefore increasingly obliged to inter-
vene and to support by special political measures whole industries
and sectors of social life. This interventionism, in turn, tends fur-
ther to centralize controls and to increase the interdependence of
the large structures.
III. Should crises disrupt the social process, as in the world
crisis of the thirties, mass unemployment and world-wide insecurity
are among the consequences. Even a "recession" of the American
economy causes anxiety in Western Europe. Given the instability
and difficulties of the debtor countries, the psychological and politi-
cal consequences of a major crisis would be unpredictable, but in
any event disastrous for democratic regimes based on uneasy coali-
tions of weak, middle parties. As long as unemployment or bank-
ruptcy was experienced as a selecti\e process eliminating the in-
efficient and strengthening the efficient, the adversities of crises
were ascribed to personal shortcomings. The underprivileged per-
462 DYNAMICS
son might seek to extricate himself, and by and large each strove
as best he could to find his way out of the strain and duress.
But when in such crises the breakdown is of the scope of the
last world slump, individual avenues of escape are insignificant,
and the anxieties of underprivileged persons become the basis for
collective readjustment. In due course, the unemployed person may
give up the hope of finding any job, his former aspirations break
down, and with them, the hopes and policies of the family of the
breadwinner. In modern society insecurity tends to be experienced
not as a personal mishap or misfortune, nor as an irrevocable fate
due to supernatural forces nor even to natural forces. And men,
full of the tension of insecure positions correctly blame social fac-
tors for personal defeat.
IV. It is under such conditions that beliefs in traditional social
and political values may be shattered. "Freedom," for example,
may be derided as "freedom to starve," and unless democratic
leadership succeeds in reconstructing the social order, or in pro-
viding substitutes for former institutions, general despair, skepti-
cism, and a debunking type of agitation are likely to spread. This
was, for example, the course German society took during the eco-
nomic crisis of the early thirties.
V. If militantly organized political parties succeed in attracting
general attention, if they play successfully on the frustrations of
socially descending and disappointed masses, if at the same time
they promise "miracles" and "salvation," then fascist-type move-
ments find their opportunity, especially if they couple revolution-
ary tactics with nationalist propaganda— if they succeed in using
frustrations and anger in such a way that scapegoats can be offered.
The scapegoat provides for tension release, makes for strong group
loyalties, and heightens the belief in the "reality" of the propa-
gandist symbols. It thus makes action, such as terrorist attacks
against Jews and working-class organizations, psychologically pos-
sible and politically effective.
VI. Such revolutionary or pseudo-revolutionary activities give
the fighting individual new aspirations and new self-esteem, now
built around his identification with the new organization and its
"leader." As the individual breaks away from all formerly held
values, cuts off many former social obligations, he feels "free" al-
though, in fact, he is enthusiastically subjecting himself to a rigidly
disciplined organization, a political demonology, and a sanctioned
MASTER TRENDS 46;}
image of reality. However, by virtue of the undemocratic character
of its organizational pattern, this kind of movement gives the indi-
vidual feelings of security. He need neither make decisions nor
think for himself. He has merely to have faith and carry out the
plans and commands of the party. These plans and commands,
embodied in "the party line" as defined from on high, often zig
and zag in incredible patterns. For Communists all over the world,
for example, the last war was an "imperialist war"— during the
Stalin-Hitler alliance of 1939 to 1941. Then Hitler was no aggressor
and the military offensive presented not "aggression," but merely
"the best defense," as though it were a mere tactical question. But
with Hitler's attack upon the Soviet Union, the previously "im-
perialist war" was quickly transformed into a "people's war," and
despite the Russian annexation of half of Poland, Romania, Bess-
arabia and what was formerly Czechoslovak Carpatho-Ukraine, the
Baltic states, Konigsberg, Finnish Karelia— the Soviet Union by
Communist definition never practiced but only fought imperialism.
Since the war, the retrospective definition of "all peace-loving na-
tions" (never including neutral countries such as Switzerland, Ire-
land, and Sweden) excludes the naval democracies of the West
and includes all former allies of Hitler once they are inside the
Soviet orbit and so reorganized into "People's Democracies." Such
are the changing images of reality, defined from on high and offi-
cially sanctioned. Deviations from them are conventionally and
administratively punished as indicating disloyalty, submission to
petty bourgeois or to ultra-rightist or ultra-leftist thoughtways.
The totalitarian party state is not oriented to the pursuit of
personal happiness; it demands "sacrifice." Life is serious; "en-
circlement" is the claustrophobic theme. The Fascist party is con-
cerned with the attainment of political power, with the distribution
of spoils, and the reorganization of society for military conquest.
With the attainment of political power and the organization of
social life in a totalitarian manner, the problems it poses become
international. For as long as the party member feels that there is
any power which might possibly check his, he remains an aggres-
sive person with the one objective of power.
The frustrated party spreads its psychology of anxiety and its
compensatory craving for power. There is a characteristic emotional
cycle observable. During the phase of preparatory surprise coups
—Hitler, for example, timed them on week ends— the hate cam-
464 DYNAMICS
paigns are built to a mounting crescendo. At the same time, in-
tense secrecy places all official personnel and the party machine
on guard. The irritability and nervousness of men of responsibility
increases. The metropolitan men-in-the-street sense an ominous
atmosphere of mounting danger, without being able to discern its
source. This sense of ominousness heightens mass anxieties inside
and outside the party. Then suddenly, once the coup has been suc-
cessfully completed, diffuse awareness is replaced by maximum
publicity and information; the leader triumphantly proclaims his
deed, and the anxieties give way to a public orgy of boisterous
heils, jubilation, and frenzy. It is then that "internal enemies" are
hunted down, rounded up, and thrown into concentration camps.
3. The Decline of Liberalism
It is in this world context of total integrations and bureaucratiza-
tion that we must understand the decline of liberalism as a style of
thinking and the rise and spread of totalitarian slogan manipula-
tion and opinion management. For the problems of mass insecur-
ity and of anxiety levels, of mental imbalances and unclear defi-
nitions of unstructured situations now form the sociological context
of political and economic psychology.
As one of the great thought systems of the Western world,
liberalism is rooted in the "enlightenment movement" of the Occi-
dental middle classes and their intellectual vanguards; it incor-
porates the legacy of Greece and of Rome— a legacy which has been
reassimilated by various renaissances since the waning of the Mid-
dle Ages.^
Liberalism has made its greatest and least questioned headway
in the United States. In Europe it has met with older and more
entrenched patterns having elaborate defensives of their own.
Among these have been Catholic and Protestant orthodoxies, often
linked with modern conservative thinking, and anticapitalist in-
tellectuals and parties. From the "right" and from the "left" anti-
capitalist thinking has emerged: European liberalism has been
identified with "the middle." But no such position and no such iden-
1 See L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (New York: Holt, 1911); and G. De-
Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism ( Collingwood Tr., London,
1927)-
MASTER TRENDS 465
tification occurred in the United States, where hberahsm has be-
come, at least as rhetoric, a common denominator.
This diflFerence between hberahsm in Europe and America is
due to many factors, but the most important of them is the fact
that in Europe capitahst societies developed from older feudal
structures, which were never entirely displaced but which, in a
number of ways, were transformed and adapted to new societies.
The nobility moved from the military camp to the court, becoming
an "office nobility"; and to this day nobles play a significant part
in the high ranks of ecclesiastic dignitaries in the Roman Catholic
Church, of royalty in Lutheran Scandinavian countries, and in the
established church of England. Landlordism in Italy and Spain,
in France, Great Britain, and Germany, although affected by the
complex history of capitalism, has allowed strong feudal elements
to adapt themselves and so survive in complicated forms.
The rise of capitalist society in Central Europe and in large
areas of Eastern Europe did not involve the tiansfer of political
and military power to the economically most powerful group— the
urban capitalist middle class. Because of the failure of the 1848
revolutions, and the complexities of national formations in Italy,
Germany, and Japan during the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, princely power, although reduced in prerogative, maintained
itself in the status structure and retained its prestigeful influence
among intellectuals. The cultural patronage of petty courts and
nobles continues to exist in some European societies right into
the present.
To all this the United States is the great exception, for here there
was no feudal age, and from their beginnings the middle classes
combined economic ascendancy and expansion over a continent-
wide territory with unhampered dominance of economic wealth
and monopoly of status structures. Their monopoly of status was
facilitated by their financing of numerous prestigeful institutions:
art collections and museums bound intellectual and cultural elites
to the "donors" and "philanthropists." Educational institutions,
libraries, colleges, universities, and research institutions were im-
pressively endowed, sponsored, and controlled by wealthy "private"
citizens, and the dependent personnel became indebted to them;
if they were not sycophantic, they were at least grateful.
Wealth in the United States also asserted itself through politics
as the ascending middle class became the upper class without hav-
466 DYNAMICS
ing to compromise with ecclesiastic or monarchal elements or with
wealthy elites of older standing. Nor did they need to compromise
in military, diplomatic, and cultural areas with the standards or
traditions of feudal or semifeudal groups clustering around the
courts of landed princes and nobles or state university chairs. One
has of course to make allowance for the "slavocracy" of the southern
plantation society as quasi-feudal, but the Civil War and the recon-
struction period eliminated it as a setup not having clear-cut capi-
talist aspect.
Political and economic power, religious and educational institu-
tions, military and judicial elements as well as status dominance-
all these could be vested in the hands of a ruling class of bourgeois
extraction and composition. Accordingly, the United States became
the great scene for an unadulterated capitalist society and a busi-
ness civilization built in its image.
The unique situation of a geographical area which allowed
continental expansion until the turn of the twentieth century, and
the growth of a nation of 5 million into one of 150 million in the
short span of 150 years— this made liberalism uniquely fit the reality
of American society. For liberalism is "generous": it requires and
assumes a friendly universe of equal and open opportunities, and
it assumes that men are born "free and equal." Here, the coming
of the immigrant coincided with "unlimited opporti_mities" and a
"consciousness of abundance." Liberalism thus found its affirma-
tion in the daily experience of millions of people living in an ex-
panding society.
Instrumental and efficiency values could be and were readily seen
as one with moral values. Characteristically, the obvious problem
of the double-edged nature of technology— capable of working for
good or for evil— was profoundly and insistently impressed upon the
American public mind only after the dropping of the atom bomb.
In America the marriage of science and technology, and the joy-
ful reliance upon the values of efficiency, did not entail the destruc-
tion or the displacement of cultural legacies, which in Europe
aroused the esthetic and nostalgic reactions of men in "romantic
agony." Here there was no sense of tragic loss, for on virgin territory
such romantic sentiments could at best be attached to the lure of
distant horizons and the image of the "noble savage," who, at any
rate, upon closer view seemed more savage than noble. The supe-
riority of the white man's advancing efficiency over the primitive
MASTER TRENDS 467
ways of the Indian never led to doubts about God-willed steward-
ship. Besides, "these illiterate savages" could neither work steadily
in the fields nor read the Bible or the catechism; hence all the
easier the slogan, "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." Their
displacement led to no more travail than that of other preliterate
societies on the widening colonial frontiers of the "expansion of
Europe."
The widening of economic opportunities and the extension of
the territorial setting of United States society went hand in hand
and reinforced each other, as did technical progress and the rising
levels of skill and education. Entrepreneurial, propertied groups,
in urban as well as rural sectors of the society, pulled in the same
direction: both have been money-minded groups which took the
competitive market for granted.
In this setting, the social costs and liabilities of capitalism could
be overlooked, in fact, many of them could be socially defined as
ethnic peculiarities of immigrant minorities, and hence not truly
American. The anticapitalist sentiments of protesting intellectuals
such as John Ruskin or Thomas Carlyle could not perturb the
onrushing multitude in its "pursuit of happiness."
The dominance of Puritanism, with its conception of property as
"stewardship," cast a religious halo about the successful, and the
secularization of Puritanism could easily make for the self-righteous
identification of "success" in this world with the complacent sense
of being "blessed by God." This was all the more possible as prop-
erty was for a long time work-property, and the linkage between
such personal virtues as diligence and initiative, persistence and
hard work, with property was highly and widely visible. Mass
literature, from juveniles to human interest stories and novels, suc-
ceeded in publicizing the lore of success and the romance of those
who had made it: the titans, the tycoons, the robber barons, the
founding fathers, the pioneers, the technological heroes. Such men,
standing at the center of popular attention, have proxided popu-
lar models of aspiration. In American society nothing has been able
to rival such affirmations of the efficient, successful heroes of
liberalism.
In other countries, Germany for example,- the middle-class in-
2 See Paul Kosok, Modern Germany (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1933);
Max Weber, From Max Weber . . . , op. cit., pp. 363-85.
^68 DYNAMICS
dustrialists who had economic power did not thereby have status
and power in pohtical, educational, or religious orders. For princely
power continued, entrenched in Bismarck's constitution of 1870-
1918, that underpinned the position of nobles in diplomatic and
officer corps, in Protestant church, and student association. Access
to such positions was denied (he bourgeoisie, which accordingly was
forced to adapt feudal and bureaucratic prestige models, to seek
intermarriage with nobles, to purchase titles: in short, to renounce
liberalism.
The course of Japan is comparable, except in its case, the lower
nobility absorbed capitalist business and, in the absence of a
productive middle class in the Western style, assimilated the
corporate phase of capitalism to the feudal ways of noble and
military clan.^
In Britain,* repeated compromises between landed gentry and
court society, on the one hand, and the political and economic
ascendancy of the new entrepreneurial class on the other, led to an
integrative process in which rentier strata of feudal aristocrats and
urban patricians could fuse in exclusive clubs and hold their own
in navy and army, in "society" and diplomacy. In this they were
aided by the "public school" pattern and a widespread system of
scholarships which implemented educational opportunities and
made for the staying power of feudal elements as well as for the
ascending bourgeois elements. The liberal heritage was thus assimi-
lated to the reconstructed conservative thinking of Edmund Burke
and his successors.
In Russia, capitalism was tied in with foreign (largely French)
political and strategic loans. ^ In the short period from the eman-
cipation of the serfs in 1861 to the revolution of 1917, this capitalism
did not allow an economically independent and politically self-
reliant middle class to emerge. Moreover, the agrarian problems of
Tsarist Russia coincided with the oppressive social evils of early
industrialization. The peculiarities of the Russian agrarian com-
mune, and the quasi-religious fervor of the intelligentsia provided
3 See the excellent monograph, E. Herbert Norman, Japan's Emergence as
a Modern State (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1946).
* See Wilhelm Dibelius, Eng,land: Its Character and Genius, M. A. Hamilton,
tr. (New York: Harper, 1930).
^ See Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Max Eastman,
tr. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936).
MASTER TRENDS 46g
a barren soil for the ideas of Western liberalism. In addition to the
illiterate peasant masses, there was the Eastern Orthodox Church,
and the oppressive weight of the Tsarist office and court nobihty.
There was the anti-Western turn of writers such as Tolstoi and
Dostoevski, of the Slavophiles and populists, whether repentant
noblemen, or proletarian writers such as Maxim Gorki; and there
was the anticapitalist turn of the nihilist, anarchist, and socialist
intellectuals, acting as the conscience of their time and people.
Accordingly, liberalism as a temper of mind or as a political system
had little ground in which to take root.
Since World War I, the international scene, as it bears on the
fate of liberalism, has been greatly changed: Nationalist restriction-
ism and economic protectionism has led to increasing stress and
strain.'' The United States, as well as the dominions and colonies
of the British Empire, closed their doors to immigration, and so the
great nineteenth-century mobility of populations ceased. Currency
policies and protective tariffs fenced off economic areas against
unwanted competitors and deadlocked the market system. The rise
of large corporations and monopolistic practices made for a new
scene, which no longer lent itself to liberal models of social reflec-
tion. There was a "scarcity consciousness" in regard to educational
and to job opportunities, in regard to migratory opportunities, and
e\'en the marriage opportunities for women in the war-decimated
nations after the two world wars. "Free and open competition,"
instead of rationing and planful administration of market processes,
now becomes— as in postwar Germany— a mechanism for distribut-
ing what is to be had, in which the physically weak, the morally
scrupulous, the politically unorganized are pushed to the side.
Those who in the eastern areas of Europe have lost everything they
once had— their farms, houses, businesses, and skilled jobs— were the
last to find jobs for themselves and opportunities for their children
in the west. As "new citizens" they are unwanted competitors,
walled out by the competitive endeavor of the older residents to
build fences where\'er possible around preferred opportunities.
Liberalism under such conditions means free competition for all
vested groups— from trade unions to businessmen's associations,
6 See E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis (London, 1949) and The New
Society (London: Macniillan, 1951).
^JO DYNAMICS
from villages to metropolitan communities and new states— to build
fences. The highminded endeavors of welfare bureaucracies might
soften and mitigate and channel the pressures, but they have not
prevented the emergence of irate, embittered mass movements
among the "disinherited." Mass unemployment and impoverish-
ment remains a lasting threat, despite the phoenixlike upswing
of the Western German economy with American aid.
Such facts can no longer be viewed as temporary or exceptional;
in present-day contexts the incongruity of liberal ideologies with
modern social facts are glaringly evident. The sense of an open
horizon of unlimited opportunities is gone; competition as a fair
and equitable way for mating merit and compensation is no longer
believed in. The competitive group pressures of society appear to
many as "rackets," and freedom takes on the attributes not of
rational and moral self-determination among neighbors but of a
Hobbesian jungle where the "elastic man," the man without con-
science, fends for himself with tooth and claw, a lone wolf in an
unfriendly universe.
Such sentiments and feelings of bitter frustration are greatest
where "competition among unequals" prevails— in the commodity
market, where little and big units, with quite different capital assets
and capacities for risk, meet in "free and open competition"; where
the little man risks his all and the big corporation risks practically
nothing; where economic heavyweights are free to knock out fly-
weight competitors.
In international relations, the economically strong country trans-
fers the burden of unemployment to weaker countries by maintain-
ing an active balance of trade in its favor, and by attracting what-
ever capital takes to "flight" from the pressured nation. Thus, in the
"family of nations" economic nationalism disintegrates. Interna-
tional trade dwindles, a common currency standard does not exist,
weaker nations are indebted to strong creditors, who refuse to
accept imports which alone can serve as payment. Hence debtor
countries mortgage or sell their land and other capital assets to
creditor nations, and are virtually reduced to colonial status.
As in trade, so in war and diplomacy: a weak state may be
peacefully carved up— as was Czechoslovakia at Munich by Hitler
and Mussolini with the assistance of Chamberlain and Daladier.
Strong powers do not deem it honorable to live up to treaty com-
mitments unless it is expedient to do so. In 1914 the Kaiser's chan-
MASTER TRENDS 4/1
cellor still expressed guilt feelings about the invasion of Belgium
and the breaking of neutrality treaties, but great powers now
project alleged acts of "aggression" upon the prospective victim,
however helpless and weak, of their attack. In the world of na-
tions today might makes right and all is fair in war. And when
the shooting pauses, not moral and legal norms but the de facto
principles of action and power in a world at war is the order of
the age.
Industrialized peoples adjust to these changes by building up
huge "pressure groups" which emerge out of the upward and down-
ward shifts in economic opportunities for the aggregates of people
in common class situations. These pressure groups seek, on various
levels, to translate their organized power into policy decisions. The
price of bread thus becomes as much a political price as are the
rents of tenement houses. "Bloc competition" and "bloc bargaining"
replace the competitive scatter of small units; strivings for security
replace the sense of joyful individual initiative; feelings of solidarity
become more important than self-reliance. Self-help becomes a joke,
and "breaking out of line," that is, lack of loyalty to one's organized
comrades or colleagues or the "business community" becomes just
short of a crime. The term "self-made man" becomes slightly em-
barrassing; inherited wealth is believed a prerequisite for high
status; and the glamour of "the heiress" becomes equivalent if not
superior to the majesty of an old-world princess.
In the face of all these changes, Liberalism as an ideology be-
comes "formalized"; it becomes a political rhetoric which is in-
creasingly meaningless and banal to large masses. The prereq-
uisites for the classic "freedoms" espoused in its name are often
simply not available, and hence its classic tenets are easily per-
verted.'
Social and psychological changes of a wide and deep sort thus
undermine the moorings of liberalism. In the face of such changes,
cynical upper classes may be ready to discard the democratic
legacy and allow or support policies that end in a totalitarian so-
ciety of Fascist or Nazi type. In industrial societies, such move-
^ See John Hallovvell, The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology ( Berkeley
and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1943). For countertendencies,
however, see Morton G. White, "The Revolt against Formalism in American
Social Thought of the Twentieth Centur>-," Journal of the History of Ideas,
Vol. VIII, No. 2, April 1947, pp. 131-52.
^^2 DYNAMICS
ments have arisen at times when the power of labor was dechning,
as in Italy after the revolutionary upsurge of the post-World War
I, and in Germany, as labor's strength was enervated by depression,
and unemployment led to mass agony. On both occasions, terrorist
organizations were subsidized and turned loose on labor, and the
labor press suppressed, as chauvinist frenzy replaced rational public
debate. Hero worship drowned the competition in rational ideas
and arguments in public. The policy of the street, the assassination
of leaders, the orgiastic howling and pogroms against scapegoated
minority groups implemented the transitions. A political landslide
occurred among the masses, and after some bargaining and com-
promising, the old elites fused with the ascending political move-
ment, which established its own brand of dictatorship. Society was
put on a war footing.
Totalitarianism is an imperialist response to the impasse of cor-
porate capitalism. It is a twentieth-century response, occurring in
a time when scarcity consciousness prevails and when to many
liberal ideologies seem hollow. Despite its destruction in Central
Europe by the last war, neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi tendencies have
appeared in Western Germany and Italy. Nobody could call Peron's
or Tito's or De Gaulle's program liberal democracy; and nobody
can call Franco Spain anything but a fascist dictatorship. In France
and Italy close to one-third of the electorate demonstratively and
persistently votes Communist. Only the complacent and the unin-
formed can feel assured of liberal and democratic developments in
the world today.
4. Character Structure in a Polarized World
On the one hand, there is the U.S.S.R., the world's greatest land
power, extending its sway across the Eurasian land mass, from the
Thuringian mountains to the Pacific coast and including in its orbit
the vast areas of China. On the other hand, there is the U.S.A., the
world's greatest industrial and naval power, including in its con-
tinental reach the greatest agricultural production basin on the
globe, and rallying the somewhat unstable British Commonwealth
of Nations, France and her shaky empire, Western Germany, Italy,
and other Mediterranean countries. By their existence and policies,
MASTER TRENDS 4/3
such hegemony powers as the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. define new
"in-group" and "out-group" situations within and between nations.
There are, to be sure, anxious endeavors to "build bridges, " to
find "common ground," to prevent conflict from spreading, to win
peace. The British have been eager— and successful in spite of the
United States' misgivings— to maintain trade relationships with the
Soviet Union and with Communist China. Yet "the war of words,"
the voting patterns of governmental representatives in the United
Nations meetings and other diplomatic conferences, have made the
una\ailability of "harmonious co-existence" obvious. The big powers
have shown a competitive eagerness to integrate their respective
alignments. The minor powers, in their fear, have sought protection
under the air umbrellas of the leading powers, and such "protec-
tion" is of course secured only by the "obedience" of the weak.
All countries are now interdependent, but all countries are also
now directly or indirectly dependent upon the dollar or the ruble
standard, upon what the United States or the Soviet Union does or
fails to do. Each can rely on a "voting discipline" among its minor
partners, debtor states, satellites, and proteges. The "United Na-
tions" are disunited and engaged in "cold war." The Eastern bloc
uses the legal veto and the Western bloc the de facto veto by
majority vote; and some powers, great and small, remain outside
the "United Nations." There is no undivided court of "world
opinion," and in our time, long before a shooting war begins, the
propaganda and prestige battles are underway to put the potential
enemy in the wrong, to win the sympathy of potential allies, to
secure at least benevolent neutrality from the rest. Since industrial
nations have become literate, and ever larger masses of people
have come into the political order— regardless of constitution— an
increasing array of values and institutions has been used for po-
litical purposes.
World War II revealed war leaders who would state neither
their war aims nor their peace aims, beyond "victory" or "uncondi-
tional surrender," which meant the same thing. In fact, since World
War I, statesmen, for the benefit of mass sentiments, haxe vilified
one another as war criminals and threatened to hang one another.
Since \\'orld War II they Jiacc hanged one another. To be sure,
the victors give the vanquished a fair trial before they hang them,
but then, soon after the trial, the judges, falling into disagreement.
474 DYNAMICS
may accuse one another of being "war criminals," and retroactively
revise their wartime roles. ^
Let us consider this polarized world in its military and in its
industrial aspects and as we do so, let us keep in mind that these
are not far-flung structures alien to the human beings of the twen-
tieth century, but that they are in fact crucial parts of the condi-
tions that make and are made by men and women.
Since the Louisiana purchase and the definition of its north and
south borders, the United States has been practically free of mili-
tary neighbors. Its growth into the mightiest sea power was more
or less certain. World War I ended with naval parity between Great
Britain and the United States; World War II led to U.S. industrial
and naval dominance. Today global strategy for the West is worked
out in Washington; Great Britain has become an indebted junior
partner.
"The West" represents naval and air power opposed to "the
East's" land power. The East cannot hope to conquer the West
without sea power; the West cannot hope to conquer the East
without land power.
The industrialization of Europe, its urbanization and population
growth despite emigration losses during the nineteenth century,
made Europe less and less autarchic, more and more dependent
upon raw material areas overseas. Hitler shouted, "Germany must
export or die," and in fact, this holds for all the industrial countries
of Europe. They have to import food and raw materials from out-
side Europe.
It is this fact that accounts for the efficiency of naval wars of
attrition against the central powers during World War I, and
against the "Axis" during World War II. Germany's conquest of
the larger part of European Russia, of Northern and Eastern
Europe, could not compensate for the blockade. Naval blockade,
combined with war purchases of what was to be had in neutral
countries, proved unbeatably effective weapons of attrition in the
^ Thus, a Congressional committee of the United States hears testimony
of a hooded Pohsh immigrant, of a Polish officer, of a German general,
against Russia to prove Russian war crimes in the forests of Katyn. The
Russians resume their early war-time tlieme of "imperialist powers" being
guilty of aggression all along— the military offensive being but a technical
question. See the New York Times, April 20 and 21, 1952, and Milton R. Kon-
vitz, "Will Nuremberg Ser\e Justice?," Commentary, Vol. I, No. 3, January
1946, pp. 9-15.
MASTER TRENDS 4/5
hand of the West. The miHtary coup de grace could be adminis-
tered through the invasion of Europe when a weakened mihtary
structure was crumbling in the East, and disintegration was aided
by a saturation bombing of cities that greatly softened the re-
sources, disrupted railroad communication and the industrial foun-
dations of military strength.
But: this constellation of sea power versus land power, which
was elaborated theoretically by Mahan and demonstrated prac-
tically to pre-industrial Europe during the Napoleonic age, differs
from the present confrontation of American sea power and Rus-
sian land power.
The Soviet orbit is not necessarily economically dependent upon
outside resources. It contains all the vital raw materials— food, fiber,
metal, and oil. And it can— as the history of Russia's industrial de-
velopment has shown— develop its own resources. To be sure, skill
levels are comparatively low, but so are the costs of labor and the
levels of mass consumption. There has been and will be "compul-
sory savings" for the formation of capital, forced upon agrarian
masses by bureaucratically planned decisions.
Military power depends upon industrial power, and so the t\vo
power blocs of the world are now engaged in an armament race
and in an industrial race. The West realizes that the nonindus-
trialized areas— long exploited as raw-material areas— are socially
unstable, economically deteriorating, politically shaky, and ideolog-
ically open to Soviet influence. They can be "Western" in orienta-
tion only at the cost of industrialization under Western aegis.
Africa, India, and the Middle East are crucial, and development
projects in Africa such as the Point Four Program— and schemes
to develop skills in the Far East— indicate the drift.
Regardless of the enormity of institutional diversity and psycho-
logical types, the trend with the widest scope and the most far-
reaching ramifications is the industrialization of the world. The
key importance, in fact, of the rise of the Soviet Union to great
international stature lies in this simple fact: for the first time in
the intricate history of the industiial revolution men can now see
that this industrialization does not require capitalism as an institu-
tional framework, that it can be accomplished without depending
upon private initiati\e, and that when it is carried out by state
bureaucrats, industrialization can even be a more rapid and orderly
476 DYNAMICS
process than when carried out by private capitaHsts running private
firms for private profits.
Russia has reversed America's industrial sequence: Whereas un-
planned industrialization under free, private initiative has pro-
ceeded from "light" consumer goods industries to heavy industries,
Soviet planning has assigned priority to electric power, metallurgy,
and other war-important industries. In Russia, modern industrial
civilization did not emerge autonomously as a slow-motion process
from medieval guilds and burghers, with the rise of a middle class.
Industrialization, in its late nineteenth- and twentieth-century
phase of corporate or monopoly capitalism, entered the "back-
ward" agrarian society of Tsarist Russia in the usual forms of
political capitalism, governmentally promoted and subsidized.
Under Stalin's leadership, industrialization has been imposed in
the great pushes of the "Five-Year plans." Soviet men and women
have been rallied behind the party and its plans by propaganda
campaigns and excessive orders. An agrarian revolution from above,
at the price of a famine costing two and a half million lives, has
accompanied this industrialization. But the industrialization has
been accomplished, not in any cumulative, competitive, and adap-
tive way, but in the form of centrally enacted and imposed changes
under the leadership of a totalitarian one-party state, engaged in
successive campaigns to transform traditionalist agrarian societies,
primordial tribes, and congeries of nations in varied stages of
cultural development. The last war allowed the Soviet Union to
emerge as the world's greatest land power, and this power is now
reinforced by Bolshevized Eastern European countries and revo-
lutionized China. For we must remember that Russia lost a war
with Japan in 1904-05, and again, with Germany, in 1914-17. The
triumphant advance of the Soviet Union and her "indefinite occu-
pation" of Central Europe with a boundary line only eighty-five
miles from France has made her victory over Nazi Germany a
victory over old Europe. The Nazi drive to the East has resulted
in the Soviet drive to the West.
The United States, on the other hand, consummated its indus-
trialization and nation-building in the span of one and a half cen-
turies under conditions that were ideal for the rise of the entre-
preneurial middle class under laissez-faire conditions sanctioned
by liberalism."
» Cf. above, p. 355 fF.
MASTER TRENDS 47/
Technologically, the United States may be the fulfillment of the
Soviet dream, but this does not mean that the United States is
therefore an ideal image and model for the Soviet world. In fact,
the Soviet Union has many assets of its own as an industrial leader
of borderland areas.
Stalinist communism, in the phrase of G. F. Achminow,^" is
"substitute capitalism." For many peoples of the world the master
problem of our time is simply how to overcome "backwardness,"
which means, how to industrialize and make their populations
literate. This world problem of rapid industrialization becomes
acute when there is war, or when there is the loss of a war, or
when war threatens, or when dependency upon more advanced
states becomes for any reason unbearable.
The success of communism, in those areas where it has been
successful, may be due to the simple fact that capitalism— seated
primarily in Northwestern Europe in the nineteenth century, and
in the United States, Europe, and Japan in the twentieth— has not
been able to put through this rapid industrialization. It has not
been able to industrialize such areas, because it has not put through
the "primary accumulation" necessary for building up a productive
apparatus among nations composed of the preindustrial masses of
the world. But communism— as the shadow of a capitalism that
has defaulted— is able to do so by virtue of its public management
of investment policies. The communists thus flourish on the failure
of capitalists to solve this world historical task.
Everywhere that communists have come to power we find a '
condition in which, contrary to nineteenth-century expectations,
there is no politically effective and economically strong bourgeoisie.
In Russia such a bourgeoisie as existed was dependent upon the
political commissions of a despotic state and on foreign loans.
Wherever capitalism has passed beyond such weakling beginnings
and become of sizable stature and deep political entrenchment—
as in Britain, the United States, and Germany— communism has
not, even during severe depressions, become strong.
The success of communism has not been due to the senescence
of mature capitalism; it has been due to its insufficient develop-
ment.
1" Die Macht im Hintergrund: Totengrdber des Kommunismus (Spatenveriag
Greunchen, Ulm: 1950). In the following pages, we have drawn upon this in-
teresting although contradictory book by a postwar Russian refugee.
478 DYNAMICS
After a hundred years of railroad building in China, the Western
nations had not built much more mileage than exists in tiny Bel-
gium. India, enjoying British rule and guidance for over 150 years,
has built few cities of more than 100,000 population. Since profits
were taken out of these countries, there was no investment capital
of sufficient size for the task, and there were not sufficient political
guarantees nor will to attract private investment in suitable
amounts.
But the Communist Mao Tse-tung may well accomplish "primary
accumulations" by transforming his army into a labor force, under
military discipline, to do all that is required for the industrializa-
tion of China. Mao Tse-tung takes up where the old Confucian
emperors left off: his tax policy in labor contributions, however,
does not result in the building of big stone walls or imperial tombs,
but in the industrialization of China. If his policy is brutal— and
it is— one must bear in mind Colbert's use of the French army and
the other methods used by European civilizations in their time of
primary accumulation.
There are apparent exceptions to the idea of communism as
substitute capitalism. There is the voting strength of communism
in pre-Hitler Germany, in postwar France, Czechoslovakia, and
Italy. France, however, was liberated, after defeat in a six weeks'
war, only by her allies, who made her a victor— and the French
know it. Italy, especially southern Italy, is still semifeudal in its
agrarianism, it lacks raw materials, and it has had to pay dearly
for Mussolini's dream of a "Third Rome." Communism failed re-
peatedly and disastrously in Germany. Only when the Red army
stood in the country or close by, as in Czechoslovakia, has com-
munism come to power in a country with a developed capitalist
economy.
When it has taken over, communism has co-ordinated all efforts
by dictatorial imposition; it has destroyed pluralist and open-ended
economic and jDolitical endeavors. Fascism gathered the old rulers
together, even if they did not like it, and supplemented them by
newer, gangster types; communism has replaced the old ruling
groups by new ones from below.
In Achminow's view, three conditions are necessary and sufficient
for the rise to power of communism within a society:
( 1 ) The society must be on a level of development in which
the most urgent national task is the overcoming of the backward-
MASTER TRENDS 479
ness of rural society sweating under the burden of feudal rulers,
usurious capitalists, and a national debt. Russia of 1917, and China
of between the last two wars certainly fulfill this condition. (2)
The existing ruling stratum must be incapable of solving this task.
Either the old ruling elements misread the signs of the times and
offer desperate resistance to change, or they become cynically cor-
rupt and so incapable of any consistent policy that might solve the
tasks they confront. (3) There must be people who are able to
take over the management of the state, but who under pre-com-
munist conditions have had no chance to do so. This means a
closure policy on the part of the old rulers, or simply the absence
of a qualified counterelite.
Whenever these three conditions are met, there is a chance for
communist upheaval; the absence of any one of them precludes
the victory of communism, although for strategic reasons, of course,
the armed force of the Soviet Union could, and might, try to impose
it from without.
In the conflict of East and West— of the United States and the
Soviet Union— Europe occupies an especially important position,
if only because of its cultural, religious, and historical ties with the
white populations of the Western Hemisphere. It is also important
because of the 250 million population that are settled on this
peninsula of Eurasia, which is militarily weak in the neighborhood
of a great land power controlling the Baltic Sea and producing
atomic bombs. Europe is a major "prize" of the contest of the
two great powers. Were Europe to drift or to be shoved into the
Russian orbit. Great Britain would be open to atomic attacks at
close range, and the addition of skilled populations and of the
Ruhr industries to the East might possibly be sizable enough to
make the decisive difference. Inside Europe, rival nations and
states— which have been variously realigning themselves for cen-
turies and which have known climactic heights of prestige and
power— must now redefine their respectixe positions as well as
their hopes and expectations for the world's future.
In almost all orders and spheres, leading policy-makers are hav-
ing to learn to share European problems and to educate Europeans
to the appreciation of American decision-making contexts. Accord-
ingly, we may say that a great process of social and cultural fusion
is underway, a fusion comparable only to the spread of Hellenism
after Alexander in the Eastern Mediterranean, or to the blending,
480 DYNAMICS
in the leading urban strata of late antiquity, of the legacy of Athens
and Rome under the Caesars. Militarily, economically, and polit-
ically, there is going on a struggle for the world, of which there
is a portentous psychological meaning: We witness and participate
in an historic contest which will decide what types of men and
women will flourish on the earth.
Man is a unique animal species in that he is also an historical
development. It is in terms of this development that he must be
defined, and in terms of it no single formula will fit him. Neither
his anatomy nor his psyche fix his destiny. He creates his own
destiny as he responds to his experienced situation, and both his
situation and his experiences of it are the complicated products
of the historical epoch which he enacts. That is why he does not
create his destiny as an individual but as a member of a society.
Only within the limits of his place in an historical epoch can man
as an individual shape himself, but we do not yet know, we can
never know, the limits to which men collectively might remake
themselves.
Bibliographical Note
In this brief bibliography we Hst only books in English which we have
found profitable and enjoyable in the production of the present volume.
Although we do not wish to impose this list on others, we cannot help
but feel that as a selection it does suggest the major legacy available to
the student of man and society.
We should note that we are constant perusers of The Encyclopaedia
of the Social Sciences and of the eleventh edition of The Encyclopaedia
Britannica. Students who wish detail on any of the factual or historical
topics we have discussed should first consult these wonderful volumes.
Those who wish further listings of books by historical topic or event may
consult the Library of Congress file catalogue, to be found in most uni-
versity libraries. In the following, we cite the latest, or the most con-
venient, editions available to us.
Albright, William F., From the Stone Age to Christianity (2nd ed.; Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins Press, 1946).
Bagehot, Walter, Physics and Politics (New York: D. Appleton, 1912).
Beard, Charles, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the
U.S. (New York: Macmillan, 1935).
, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Mac-
jnillan, 1915)-
"Berle, A. A., Jr., and Means, Gardiner C, The Modern Corporation and
Private Property (New York: Macmillan, 1933).
Borkenau, Franz, World Communism (New York: Norton, 1939).
Bovet, Pierre, The Fighting Instinct, J. Y. T. Creig, tr. (New York:
Dodd, Mead, 1923).
Bryce, James, The Americat\ Commonwealth, 2 vols. (New York: Mac-
millan, 1895).
BiJcher, Karl, Industrial Evolution (New York: Holt, 1901).
Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, S. G. C.
Middlemore, tr. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1945).
Calhoun, Arthur W., A Social History of the American Family, 3 vols.
(New York: A. H. Clark, 1917-19).
482 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Carr, E. H., The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919-1939 (New York: Macmillan,
1940).
Cash, W. J., The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941).
Commons, John R., Legal Foundations of Capitalism (New York: Mac-
millan, 1924).
Cooley, C. H., Social Organization (New York: Scribner's, 1909).
, Human Nature and the Social Order (rev. ed.; New York: Scrib-
ner's, 1922).
Dewey, John, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Holt, 1922).
Dibelius, Wilhelm, England, Mary A. Hamilton, tr. (New York: Harper,
1930)-
Dorfmann, Joseph, Thor stein Veblen and His America (New York:
Viking, 1934).
Durkheim, Emile, The Division of Labor in Society, George Simpson, tr.
(Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1947).
, Suicide, John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, trs. (Glencoe,
111.: Free Press, 1951).
Earle, E. M., and others, eds.. Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1943).
Fenichel, Otto, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York:
Norton, 1945).
Freud, Sigmund, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, A. A. Brill, tr.
(New York: Modern Library, 1938).
, Civilization and Its Discontents, Joan Riviere, tr. (London: Anglo-
books, 1952).
, Collected Papers, vols, i-iv (London: Hogarth Press, 1946).
, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Joan Riviere, tr. (rev. ed.;
Garden City, N. Y.: Garden City Pubhshing Co., 1943).
, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, James Strachey,
tr. (London: Hogarth Press, 1948). ___^
Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom (New York: Farrfjr & Rinehart,
1941)-
Hauser, Arnold, The Social History of Art, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf,
1951)-
Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of History (New York: Wiley, 1944).
Hendrick, Ives, Facts and Theories of Psychoanalysis (2nd ed., rev. and
enl.; New York: Knopf, 1939).
Hobson, John A., The Evolution of Modern Capitalism (new and rev.
ed.; New York: Scribner's, 1926).
Homey, Karen, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York:
Norton, 1937).
Huizinga, J., The Waning of the Middle Ages (New York: Longmans,
1949)-
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 48;^
Isaacs, Harold, Tlie Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (London: Secher
& Warburg, 1938).
James, William, Psychology: Briefer Course (New York: Holt, 1923).
Kardiner, A., The Individual and His Society (New York: Columbia
Univ. Press, 1939).
Kohn, Hans, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1944).
Korsch, Karl, Karl Marx (New York: Wiley, 1939).
Kosok, Paul, Modern Germany (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1933).
Kroeber, A. L., Anthropology (new rev. ed.; New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1948).
, Configurations of Cultural Growth (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1944).
Lasswell, H. D., World Politics and Personal Insecurity (New York:
Whittlesey, 1936).
, The Analysis of Political Behaviour (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1948) .
, and Kaplan, A., Power and Society (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1950).
LeBon, C, The Crowd (new ed.; New York: Macmillan, 1925).
Lenin, \. 1., State and Revolution (New York: International Pubs.,
1932).
, Two Tactics (New York: International Pubs., 1935).
, What Is to Be Done? (New York: International Pubs., 1929).
Lippmann, Walter, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1927).
Lukacs, George, Studies in European Realism, Edith Bone, tr. (London:
Hillway, 1950).
Luxemburg, Rosa, The Accumulation of Capital, Agnes Schwarzschild,
tr. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1951).
Lynd, Robert S. and Helen M., Middletown (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1929).
— —^,^^iddletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937).
Mannheim, Karl, Ideology and Utopia, Louis Wirth and Edward Shils,
trs. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).
, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, Edward Shils, tr.
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940).
Marcuse, Herbert, Reason and Revolution (New York: Oxford L^niv.
Press, 1941).
Marx, Karl, Capital, 3 vols. E. Untermann, tr. (Chicago: Kerr, 1906-09).
, Selected Works in 2 Volumes (New York: International Publishers,
1933)-
, and Engels, Friedrich, The German Ideology (New York: Inter-
national Publishers, 1939).
484 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Mead, George H., Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1934).
Mead, Margaret, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
(New York: Morrow, 1935).
Mencken, H. L., The American Language (4th ed., rev. and enl.; New
York: Knopf, 1936).
Michels, Robert, Political Parties, Eden and Cedar Paul, trs. (Glencoe,
111.: Free Press, 1949).
Mills, C. Wright, White Collar: The American Middle Class (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1951).
Mosca, Gaetano, The Ruling Class, H. D. Kahn, tr. (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1939).
Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1934)-
Myrdal, Gunnar, The American Dilemma (9th ed.; New York: Harper,
1944)-
Neumann, Franz, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National
Socialism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1942).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Complete Works (Levy ed.; New York: Mac-
millan, 1896-1930).
Norman, E. Herbert, Japan's Emergence as a Modern State (New York:
Inst, of Pacific Relations, 1946).
Oppenheimer, Franz, The State, John M. GitteiTnan, tr. (rev. ed.; New
York: Viking, 1926).
Ostrogorskii, M., Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties,
Frederick Clarke, tr., 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1908).
Piaget, Jean, The Moral Judgment of the Child (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1932).
, The Language and Thought of the Child (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1926).
Powdermaker, Hortense, After Freedom (New York: Viking, 1937).
Power, Eileen, Medieval People (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924).
Rosenberg, Arthur, Democracy and Socialism (New York: Knopf, 1939).
Ross, E. A., Social Control (New York: Macmillan, 1904).
Sa]>ine, George, A History of Political Theory (New York: Holt, 1937).
Sapir, Edward, Language (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921).
Schumpeter, J. A., Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (3rd ed.; New
York: Harper, 1950).
Simmel, Georg, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Kurt Wolff, ed. and tr.
(Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1950).
Sombart, Werner, The Quintessence of Capitalism, M. Epstein, tr. (Lon-
don, 1915).
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 48$
Sorokin, Pitirim, Social MohiUttj (New York: Harper, 1927).
, Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols. (New York: American
Books, 1937-41).
Speier, Hans, Social Order and the Risks of War (New York: Stewart,
1952).
Spencer, Herbert, Principles of Sociology, 2 vols. (New York: D. Apple-
ton, 1896).
Sullivan, Harry Stack, Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry (Washington:
W. A. White Psychiatric Foundation, 1947).
Tawney, R. H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (new ed.; New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947).
, Equality (4th ed. rev.; New York: Macmillan, 1952).
Thomas, W. I., and Znaniecki, F., The Polish Peasant in Europe and
America (New York: Knopf, 1927).
de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York:
Knopf, 1945).
Toynbee, Arnold, A Study of History, 6 vols. (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1951).
Troeltsch, E., The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, 2 vols.
(New York: Macmillan, 1949).
Trotsky, Leon, The History of the Russian Revolution, Max Eastman, tr.
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936).
Vagts, Alfred, A History of Militarism (New York: Norton, 1937).
Veblen, Thorstein, Absentee Ownership (New York: Viking, 1923).
, Tlie Place of Science in Modern Civilization (New York: Viking,
1919)-
Wallas, Graham, The Great Society (New York: Macmillan, 1914).
, Human Nature in Politics (3rd ed.; New York: Knopf, 1921).
^^eber. Max, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth and
G. Wright Mills, trs. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946).
, General Economic History, Frank H. Knight, tr. (Glencoe, 111.:
Free Press, 1950).
, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons,
tr. (New York: Scribner's, 1930).
, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Talcott Parsons
and A. M. Henderson, trs. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947).
, The Religion of China, H. H. Gerth, tr. (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press,
1951)-
, Atjcient Judaism, H. H. Gerth and D. Martindale, trs. (Glencoe,
111.: Free Press, 1952).
Wellek, Rene, and Warren, Austin, Theory of Literature (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1949).
Inde
X
Actor, 58 f ., 304
Adolescence, 87, 99, 141 ff., 159
Advertising, 56, 436, 460
Age, 16, 157, 159, 166, 248
Aggression, 63, 78, 149, 394
Aggregates, 432 ff.
Alienation, 298
Anarchism, 451
Anomy, 430, 436
Anxiety, 15, 63, 84, 108, 149, 158,
183 ft., 227, 360, 462 ff.
Art, 63, 241, 275, 280, 304, 444
Asceticism, 43, 215, 233 ff., 244, 360,
362, 390
Athens, 207
Attention, 65, 68
Audience, 63, 436
Authority, def., 195; 17, 23, 152, 247,
266, 276, 297, 302 f., 406, 413 ff.
Banalization, 56, 380
Bible, 233, 244, 383
Biography, 139 ff., 182
Birth, 165 f., 346 f.
Boss, 318, 414
Bureaucracy, 188, 209 fF., 220, 254,
332, 358, 417, 420, 457
Business, 218 ff., 293, 363, 456
Capitalism, 118, 218, 236, 289, 359,
439> 467, 477; types of, 214 flf.;
and religion, 363; and war, 22 f.
Career, 93 f., 99, 109
Caste, 103, 242 f.
Character structure, def., 22; 19 ff.,
160, 177 f., 236
Chastity, 146, 248
Child, 45, 73 f., 84, 100, 117, 130 If.,
148; illegitimate, 1841., 247 f.;
tribal, 134, 136, 151, 153, 158
China, 104 ff., 188 f., 247, 279 f.,
382, 390 f., 478
City, 90, 368 f.
Class, 307; consciousness, 88, 329,
340; organization, 333, 439; strug-
gle, 331, 383, 431, 439, 443, 447;
ruling, 339, 345; middle, 15, 144,
259, 270, 328, 358 f., 386, 394,
402, 454
Coincidence, def., 355; 358 ff., 361 f.,
404
Collective beha\'ior, 427 ff.
Communism, 183, 205, 221, 337 ff.,
383, 447, 449 f-, 453 f-, 463,
472 ff.; of consumption, 247
Compensation, 107, 238
Competition, 123 f., 182, 290 f., 303,
338 f., 356, 401, 460, 470 f.; of
symbols, 294, 298
Compromise, 292 f., 400
Conditioning, 4 ff., 132 —
Conflict, 102, 117, 123 f.
Conscience, 96 ff., 100, 124, 437
Conservatism, 288, 392
Conventions, 62, 65, 258, 260, 278;
and law, 262; conventional lie, 92,
105, 259
Con\'ergence, def., 355; 365 ff., 404
Conversation, 115, 127, 293
Co-ordination, def., 355; 363 ff., 404
Corporations, 15, 220 f., 456
Correspondence, def., 355; 404, 443
Coup d'etat, 443, 451
Courage, 179
Craftmanship, 397 f.
Credit rating, Puritan, 236
Criminal, 270, 394, 473 f.
Crisis, 219 f., 293, 437
Crowd, 428, 431 ff.
Crying, 156, 160
Cumulative selection, 154
Custom, def., 256 f.
Cynic, cynicism, 124, 270
Czechoslovakia, 470
Death, 171 f.
Decision-making, 413 ff., 458
Democracy, 206 fF.
Denunciation, 262
Depersonalization, 21
Depression, 219 f., 293
Depri\ation, organic, 75 ff.
Despotism, 209 ff., 239, 422
Determinism, 389, 395
Diet, 43, 267 f.
Discipline, 151, 294, 300 f.
Disgust, 267 f.
Disillusionment, 292, 459
Di\'orce, 260
Dogmatic pluralism, 381
Donner party, 76
Dream, 114, 128, 334
Durkheim, E., 260, 277, 430
Economic order, clef., 26; 213 ff.,
302, 352, 369, 377, 389, 404
Education, 251 ff., 293; German com-
munist, 255 f.; legal, 26 1; religious,
240, 242 fT.; Spartan, 347
Elite, 236, 293, 442, 454
Emotions, 20, 51 f., 56 ff., 62 f.
Ends and means, 27, 31, 45, 109
Enthusiasm, 444, 446 ff .
Equilibrium, 112 f., 147, 458
Expectations, 70, 84, 100, 112
Experience, 67, 68, 70, 75, 153
Factory, 351 f.
Faith, 292, 459, 463
Family, 123, 148, 150 ff., 246, 248
Fashion, 71, 258, 278, 427
Fear, 133 f., 184 ff.
Feeling, tone, 68 f.; -states, 50, 74
Feudalism, 210, 357, 377, 440
Figurehead, 422
Flattery, 92
Fragmentation, 363
Fratricide, 376
Freedom, 356, 447 f., 462, 471
Freud, S., 96, 149 ff., 171, 183, 185,
250, 375 f-> 380, 408, 416
Fromm, E., 85, 113, 126
Gangs, 347, 431, 433
Genetic development, 142, 147
Genius, 89, 93, 295, 356, 412
Gentleman, 110, 251, 279
Germany, 293, 335 ff ., 383, 400
Gestures, 12, 20, 49 ff., 54 f.
Growth, 143, 147
Guild, 397, 429
Guilt, 97, 124, 263, 296, 376
Habit, 132, 136, 154
Harmony, 343
Hegel, G. W., 241, 375, 380, 421
INDEX ^Sy
Hero, 171, 338, 467, 472
History, 296 f., 379, 382, 386 f., 404,
45 1> 454
Hobbes, 184, 238, 378, 470
Honor, 30, 175, 245 f., 285, 338 f.,
347
Homey, K., 113, 119, 150, 156, 158,
186 f.
Household, 246 f., 266
Hunger, 15, 75, 149
Hubris, 342, 451
Hypnosis, 125 f.
Hypocrisy, 95, 124, 269 f., 292
Idealism, 292, 459
Ideas, 386 f.
Identification, 144, 150
Imagination, 153 f., 155, 395
Imitation, 144
Immigrant, immigration, 333
Imperialism, def., 204; 200, 330, 367,
463
Impulse, 20, 45, 133
India, 103, 166, 369, 390 f., 478
Individual, 100, 379 f., 387, 409
Infanticide, 166, 248, 347
Instinct, 7 f., 10, 149
Institution, def., 13, 416; 11, 22 ff.;
controls, 266; dynamics, 290, 301;
members, 165, 170, 173 ft.; types,
24 f .
Institutional order, def., 25 ff., 353 ff.;
31, 174 f-, 302 f., 307 f-, 350 ff.,
391, 441, 456 f.; and antagonisms,
77, 297, 443
Integration, 100 f., 176, 299 f., 352,
354 ff., 404; (dis-), 348, 370, 429
Intellectuals, 54, 256, 269, 271, 298,
344, 386 f., 444, 448 f.; Russian,
262, 469
InteUigence, 138, 461
Intimacy, 92, 147, 259
In\ ention, inventor, 394 f., 397
James, W., 238
Japan, 61, 381, 423, 468
Jealousy, 248
Jewry, 170, 325 ff., 337, 433 f.
Joint liability', 248, 263, 368
Kardiner, A., 96, 152 f., 155, 158
Kingship, 207, 249, 442
Kinship order, def., 26, 245; 152, 184,
245 ff., 402
Labor, 87 f., 169, 302, 329, 333, 368,
403, 407, 431, 438, 472
Lady, 12 f., 65, 357
Laissez faire, 281, 302, 356, 458
488 INDEX
Language, 12, 21, 81 ff., 114, 137 ff.,
155, 274 f., 278 ff., 304
Lassvvell, H. D., 152, 277, 287, 408
Law, 260 ff., 263 ff., 412, 442
Leadership, 40, 176, 330, 365, 405 ff.,
409, 4^4 S., 418 ff., 423 ft., 435 f->
455> 462; charismatic, 210, 263 f.,
446 f., 448 f.
Learning, 75, 83, 117, 132, 135 &•;
rote, 242, 252
Leisure, 63, 257, 303
Lenin, N., 411, 422, 449
Liberalism, 199, 355 f., 401, 439,
441; decline of, 464 ff., 468 f.
Literature, 57, 275, 411, 415
Love, 141, 146, 187, 190, 238 f.,
248 ff., 376
Loyalty, 175, 226, 251
Machiavelli, 195 ff., 352, 414
Magic, 97, 230, 242 ft., 286
Malinowski, B., 71, 152, 376
Mannheim, K., 277, 338 f., 432
Marriage, 159, 246 ff., 250, 259,
271 f., 356
Martyr, 90, 172
Marx, 214, 249, 377, 383, 384, 387,
443, 446 f.
Mass media, 212, 257, 278, 284 f.,
294, 297, 302, 304, 436, 460, 467
Masses, 62, 70, 137, 304, 363, 427,
431, 434
Maturation, 73, 127, 130, 147
Mead, G. H., 3, 9, 81, 96, 127
Mead, M., 71, 134, 151, 158
Memory, 85, 153 f., 156, 161
Milieu, def., 354; 417
Military order, def., 26; 185, 223 ff.,
2S4 f., 423
Mill, J. S., 387
Mission, sense of, 447, 448
Mistress, 190, 245 f., 249
Mob, 427, 432 ff.
Models, 85, 110, 303, 412, 425, 467;
explanatory, 150; Soviet, 337
Money, 123, 213 f., 368, 397
Monistic theories, 380
Mores, 258, 271
Motives, 29, 112 ff., 118 ff., 125, 262,
269; of leaders, 407 f.; pecuniary,
123, 221, 270
Movements, 77, 249, 341, 386, 417,
437 ff., 440 f., 445 f., 450 ff.
Music, 63, 68, 90, 160, 280, 304, 393,
394 f., 411, 445
Nation, Nationalism, def., 197 f.; 200,
203, 296 f.; and language, 201 ff.;
and state, 199, 470
Nazism, 293, 337, 363 ft., 399, 454
Negro, 89, 92, 271, 295, 433
NeighborHness, 365
Nietzsche, F., 237 f., 342, 375
Nobility, 87 f., 190 f., 259, 279, 335 f.,
465, 468
Nomadic sib, 351
Oath, 283 f., 362
Obedience, 193 f., 300, 473
Occupation, def., 307, 308 ff.; 145 f.,
169
Oedipus (and Electra) complex,
150 ft"-, 376
Old Order Amish, 250, 390 f.
Opportunities, 307, 408
Organism, 3 f., 7, 9 f., 21, 40 ff.,
49 ff., 64 f., 112, 130 ff.
Ostracism, 258, 347
Other, authoritative, 97, 260; confirm-
ing, 87, 94; generalized, 95 ff.,
98 If., 124, 173 f., 258, 260, 410,
450; intimate, 90, 109, 127, 259;
significant, 86 f., 143, 173, 181,
266, 450
Panic, 436 f .
Parricide, 376
Party, 294, 422, 428, 438, 439
Patriarch, 176, 250; ( -al family), 11
Peasant, 249, 257, 461
Perceptions, 6, 20, 68 f., 70 f., 73, 79,
139
Person, def., 22; 14, 43, 106 ff., 112,
114
Pierce, C. S., 47, 69, 127
Piety, 242, 247
Plantation, 218, 367, 466
Political order, def., 26; 192 ff., 207,
363, 404; symbols of, 284
Population pressure, 382
Power, def., 195, 307; 192, 308,
328 ff., 413 ff., 456 f.; economic,
221, 357, 475; and status, 335, 407
Premiums, 118, 128, 136, 177 ft-, 39^
Pressure groups, 329, 438 ft'., 471
Prestige, 30, 159, 25S, 266, 280, 289,
296, 307, 321, 330, 334 ft-, 410 f-,
473; -descent, 318, 333 f., 443; i"
Germany, 335 ff.; military, 332; in
U.S.S.R., 338 f.
Pretender, 268
Prisoners, 445
Pri\ acy, 259, 282 f., 362, 448
Proletariat, 368, 448
Propaganda, 292, 436, 451, 459, 462,
473, 476
Property, 170, 245, 260, 281, 328 f.,
338, 361, 445, 448, 467
INDEX
489
Prophet, 89, 93, 231, 238, 240, 243,
271, 286, 425
Prostitute, prostitution, 244, 250
Psychic structure, clef., 22; 20, 43,
69, 72 ff., 112, 130, 133 ft., 139,
154, 182 f., 286
Psychic traits, 79, 140, 176 ii., 182,
236, 252, 257, 284, 405, 406 ff.
Pubhc opinion, 139, 213, 219, 386,
435 ff-
Purge, 365, 450, 454
Race, 41 f., 201, 433
Radio, 285, 304, 396
Ramification, def., 32; 328, 353, 360,
362, 390, 457, 458
Rationality, 213, 221, 265, 269, 289,
401
Reflex, 4 ff., 134, 154
Regression, 160
Religion, 97, 230 ff., 239, 241 ff., 289,
292, 376; Buddhist, 243, 291, 415;
Confucian, 242, 383; Christianity,
232, 241, 244 f., 291, 360, 369;
Hindu, 242 f.; Jewish, 231 f., 243 f.,
(v. prophet); Mohammedan, 244;
Protestant, 168, 188, 198, 228,
233 f-, 235 ff., 244 ff., 250, 275,
281, 288 ff., 360 ff., 428, 467;
Catholic, 28, 170, 201, 233, 237,
239 f., 244 f., 261, 275, 289, 302,
333, 363, 386, 414, 427, 430, 440
(v. priest)
Religious order, def., 26; 230 ff., 285,
303
Renaissance, 395, 430
Repression, 78, 128
Resentment, 237 f.
Responsibility, loo f., 263
Re\i\als, 98, 237, 363, 386, 430
Re\ olution, def., 441 f.; 98, 270, 337,
386, 399, 404, 422, 429, 442 ff.,
476; counter-, 444 ff.; French, 415,
444 f-
Rome, 166, 172, 264, 366 ff., 378, 391
Ross, E. A., 384, 432
Routine, 136, 257
Sanctions, 256, 258, 260, 262 f., 266,
416
Scapegoat, 78, 462
Secrecy, 460, 464
Security, 84, 144, 149, 184, 462 f.,
471
Self, 12, 21, 51, 75, 80, 128, 258,
296, 394; -image, 11 f., 84 ff., 89,
91 ff., loo, 103, 109, 176, 202, 286,
411 ff.
Self-made man, 334, 356, 444
.Sensation, 20, 64
Serfdom, 378
Sex, 16, 77, 146, 155, 245, 248
Skill, 251, 309, 388, ,392 ff.
Sla\e, 89, 366, 367, 369
Smiling response, 49, 84
Sobriety and toxics, 42, 53, 250, 262,
267, 362
Social change, def., 398 ff.; 102, 157,
271, 37.5 ff-, 381, 384, ,386 f., 429,
451; theories of, 382, 404, 454
Social control, 15, 44, 84, 117, 256 ff.
Social mobility, 219, 253, 333 f., 361,
403, 443
Social role, def., 10 ff.; 22 f., 107 ff.,
122, i66ff., 308, 392 f., 394, 398;
contexts of, 416 ff.; change of, 291,
393, 420 ff.; of leaders, 405, 407;
of staff, 422
Social psvchologv, 3, 15 f., 32 ff.,
41 f., 378
Social structure, 22 ff., 30 f., 298 ff.,
330, 342 ff., 349, 403
Socialism, 284, 336, 452 f.
Sparta, 166, 172, 344 ff.
Specialization, 158, 309, 398, 423
Speech, 126 f., 138, 275, 278 f., 345
Spheres, 29 f., 204, 274, 353, 365,
388 ff.
State, def., 197; 26, 193, 199, 208,
240, 328 f., 331 f., 347, 364
Status, def., 307 f.; 119, 249, 257 f.,
269, 278 f., 280, 318, 330, 332 ff.,
338 f., 397, 399, 402, 410, 412,
439, 443 f-; V. honor, prestige
Stereotype, 284, 295
Stratification, 279 f., 306 ff., 331 ff.,
.340 f.
Structure, def., 354; 429
Success, 467
S>-mbols, 29, 71, 81, 274 ff., 2S7 ff.,
294 ff., 302 f.; of legitimation,
276 f., 281, 287 ff., 298 ff.; politi-
cal, 284, 443; of status, 444
Symbol sphere, 274 f., 298 ff.
Taboo, 70 f., 126, 128, 136, 149, 155,
177, 180 f., 267, 278
Tax, 270, 367, 401
Technology, 30, 280, 285, 388 ff.,
396 ff., 456, 466
Terror, 76, 124, 365, 434, 444, 445,
450, 454
Tolerance, 291, 292 f.
Totalitarianism, 98, 211 f., 213, 251 f.,
294, 364, 433 f., 436, 463, 472
Trade union, 332 f., 336, 338, 421,
439
Unemployment, 145, 393, .397, 461,
470
422
472. S.
4gO INDEX
U.S.A., 183, 197, 205, 331 fF., 465 f
472 f., 476
U.S. president, 240, 396, 420. '""
U.S.S.R., 183, 338 f., 468 f., 4
Values, 237, 299, 300 f., 306 f., 342,
440
Village, 121, 260
Violence, 223, 263, 300, 442
Vocabularies, 71, 278 ff., 282, 407
Voluntary associations, 145, 356, 419,
428, 438
Voting, 208, 225, 293
War, 79, 118, 296 f., 390, 392, 402 f.;
atomic, 386, 390, 396, 466; crim-
inals, 473!.; economics, 377; Ro-
man, 367; strategy, 384 fF., 474 f.;
types of, 223 f., 225 ff., 229, 284 fF.;
and youth, 330
Women, 17, 71, 148 f., 152, 245 fF.,
250, 283; emancipation of, 167,
248, 293, 366; and religion, 242 ff.
Work, 236, 360, 467
Youth, 71, 252, 330, 346 F., 364,
433 f-
V
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