PART FIVE
INTERNATIONAL AND GLOBAL THEMES

External and Internal Factors in Theories of Social Change

Neil J. Smelser

One of the hallmarks of human history in the late twentieth century is the increasing internationalization of the world: in production, trade finance, technology, threats to security, communications, research, education, and culture. One major consequence of this trend is that the mutual penetration of economic, political, and social forces among the nations of the world is increasingly salient. And it may also be the case that the governments of nation-states are progressively losing degrees of direct control over the global forces that affect them. For social scientists the phenomenon of internationalization poses a conceptual challenge: to rethink the fundamental assumption, long established in our disciplines, that the primary unit of analysis is the nation, the society, or the culture.

In light of these circumstances it might be helpful to take a look at a number of theoretical strands in the study of social change over the past century to see how theorist have addressed the issue of the relative importance of external and internal factors in the genesis, course of development, and consequences of social change. This is what I propose to do in this chapter. I examine these strands in the broadest sense and will not consider theoretical details or empirical studies that have flowed from them. One of my conclusions is that the history of the theory of social change in the past century has been something of an oscillation—perhaps even a dialectic—between theories stressing the endogenous and theories stressing the exogenous. Toward the end of the chapter I turn to the theme of increasing internationalization and give an indication of the major dimensions involved in the study of external and internal forces of change.

Initially, I would like to clarify the use of the terms "external" and "internal"—or "endogenous" and "exogenous." Some theorists use "external"

to refer to nonsocial determinants of social change, determinants such as climate, availability of resources, and biological forces. My usage differs from this. I use the term "external" to refer to influences emanating from the presence of other societies in a given society's environment, and I concentrate on international, intersocietal, and intercultural forces. By "internal" I refer to the mutual interrelations of values, social structure, and classes as they are institutionalized in a given society. In making this external-internal distinction, however, I would like to be clear that it cannot be regarded as a fixed, dichotomous one; some of the most interesting questions to be raised about the two kinds of forces are how they interact with each other and how the distinction sometimes breaks down as the two kinds of forces fuse to generate or block social change.

1. The Starting Point: Classical Evolutionary Theory

The fundamental presumption of evolutionary theory, which has dominated social thought in the last half of the nineteenth century, is the notion that civilization has progressed by a series of stages from a backward to an advanced state. The characteristics of the stages differ from theorist to theorist—Comte, Maine, Bachofen, etc.—but the central idea of progress informs them all. To distill out the essential themes of this approach, I sketch the line of argument taken up in Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society ([1877] 1963).

The subtitle of Ancient Society reveals its essence: Researches in Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization . Morgan, like other evolutionists, regarded human history as advancing through several stages. These stages constitute "a natural as well as a necessary sequence of progress" ([1877] 1963, 3). The main defining characteristic of each stage is the type of inventions that society used to gain its subsistence. Thus, the lower stage of savagery extends from the beginnings of the human race to the time that people began to rely on fish for subsistence; the middle stage of savagery began with fish subsistence and the use of fire and moved into the upper status of savagery with the invention of the bow and arrow. The analysis continues in a similar fashion through three stages of barbarism to the state of civilization, which began with the use of a written alphabet. In addition to technology, other institutions also developed by stages. In the period of savagery government was organized into gentes, or clans, and "followed down, through the advancing forms of this institution, to the establishment of political society" ([1877] 1963, 5). And a parallel story of progress is to be found in religion, architecture, property, kinship, and other institutions. In

fact, most of Morgan's efforts were devoted to presenting evidence of "human progress … through successive periods, as it is revealed by inventions and discoveries, and by the growth of ideas of government, of the family, and of property" ([1877] 1963, 6).

For the purposes of this chapter the characteristics of this kind of theory are the following:

1.     The linearity and regularity of change through distinct stages.

2.     The presence of a mechanism (for example, technology) that is internal to society as the impetus to change.

3.     The assumption of a functional fit in society such that different institutions cluster consistently at each stage and substage.

4.     The absence of assumptions regarding any kind of influence of one society on others. In fact, Morgan was not interested in societies but rather society considered as a whole.

5.     The implicit compression of comparative study and the study of social change. Other contemporary societies (for example, aboriginal Australia or tribal North America) are regarded as resting at some earlier stage of evolution when compared with the more advanced societies.

One interpretation of the works of Marx is that his theory shares many of the fundamentals of classical evolutionary thought. His thinking is characterized by a distinctive number of stages (Asiatic, feudal, capitalist, etc.), and there is a distinct internal mechanism for transition from one stage to another. This mechanism, the development of economic and societal contradictions, is of course very different than that stressed by others. In his work on the evolution of the family and the state, Engels ([1884] 1969) relied heavily on Morgan's evolutionary scheme. Elsewhere in Marx, as I note later, we see evidence of his appreciation of the international dimension of economic forces.

2. Reactions to Classical Evolutionary Thought and New Formulations

One does not choose classical evolutionary thought as a starting point because of its theoretical sophistication or its empirical adequacy (indeed, it is one of the few identifiable traditions of thought that can be said to have been definitely discredited); one chooses it because of its intellectual dominance at the time, and because its distinctive features set the agenda—the issues to be addressed—for a great deal of theoretical work in social change that has been created since that time. This latter point is more clearly observed by the range of theories of social change

that appeared in the early part of the twentieth century. Consider the following illustrations:

2.1. Diffusionism

The implication of an evolutionary theory like Morgan's is that a cultural item or institutional complex appears when a given society is "ready" for it in terms of its evolutionary stage. The diffusionists' challenge to this point of view was to demonstrate that many cultural items did not develop independently in different cultures but were borrowed from abroad, sometimes at a great geographical distance. Very painstaking studies were made, showing how myths, calendars, costume styles, maize cultivation, and other items have traveled in intricate paths around the world. Kroeber (1923, 197–98) summarized the force of the principle of diffusion as follows:

The vast majority of culture elements have been learned by each nation from other peoples, past and present … even savages shift their habitations and acquire new neighbors. At times they capture women and children from one another. Again they intermarry; and they almost invariably maintain some sort of trade relations with at least some of the adjacent peoples…. There is thus every a priori reason why diffusion could be expected to have had a very large part in the formation of primitive and barbarous as well as advanced culture.

Viewed in relation to classical evolutionary thought, diffusionist theory constituted simultaneously a polemic and a revision along three lines: first, consistent with the positive upswelling in the early decades of the twentieth century, it eschewed the speculative heights of evolutionism and insisted on careful, limited, empirical descriptions; second, it constituted a fundamental critique of the linearity of evolutionists' conceptions of change by arguing that stages could be modified or even skipped through the borrowing and adopting process; and third, it explicitly introduced an intercultural dimension, showing that change was a product of importation. That emphasis has survived to the present; it is evident in studies that are preoccupied with the transfer of technology.

Yet the emphasis on the borrowing of things led the diffusionists toward a very limited conception of social change. They seldom asked why certain items diffused and others did not, how items were modified after being incorporated into a new cultural setting, or what new internal changes were stimulated by borrowed items, even though a theorist such as Lowie (1937) was aware of these issues. I short, diffusionists inquired very little into the social-system contexts of either the originating or the borrowing cultures. In particular, other types of intercultural or intersocietal

influences on change, such as economic or political domination, were almost completely absent from diffusionist theory.

2.2. Classical Functionalism

The classical functional anthropologists and sociologists shared with the diffusionists the conviction that evolutionary theory was speculative and ignored actual history, but their chief polemic was of a different sort. They believed that the evolutionists were asking the wrong kinds of questions in their efforts to explain the presence, absence, or clustering of cultural and institutional elements in societies. It is not important, functionalists argued, to know about the historical origin of a particular element; this tells us nothing about how the structure fits into and contributes to the ongoing life of the society. It tells us little about the structure's current functions. Radcliffe-Brown stated the functionalist argument in general terms as follows:

Individual human beings … are connected by a definite set of social relations into an integrated whole. The continuity of the social structure, like that of an organic structure, is not destroyed by changes in the units. Individuals may leave the society, by death or otherwise; others may enter it. The continuity of structure is maintained by the process of social life, which consists of the activities and interactions of the individual human beings and of the organized groups into which they are united. The social life of the community is here defined as the functioning of the social structure. The function of any recurrent activity, such as the punishment of a crime or a funeral ceremony, is the part it plays in the social life as a whole and therefore the contribution it makes to the maintenance of structural continuity (1952, 180, emphases mine).

The criticisms of the position of the functionalists from the standpoint of the study of social change are well known. Because of their stress on stability, integration, and social equilibrium, functionalists were not interested in theories of social change and lacked the conceptual tools to analyze or generate such theories. (Radcliffe-Brown [1953, 395–97] contended that this criticism was not justified because there is no more reason why the functionalist approach precludes the study of the growth of civilizations than there is reason why physiology—the study of functioning organisms—precludes the study of embryology, paleontology, and evolution.) Also because of these preoccupations, functionalists were less likely to study various kinds of conflict in society, especially conflict as a particularly powerful engine for change. The same preoccupations also intensified the functionalists' focus on the internal relations of culture and institutions in the life of a society. External impingements played little or no role in their theory or empirical studies. Be that as it may, it might be instructive to refer to two theorists with functionalist

presuppositions: Ogburn and Malinowski. Both of these theorists were interested in processes of social change and one, Malinowski, incorporated both a dimension of conflict and a dimension of international domination (colonialism) into the picture.

Ogburn was hostile to classical evolutionary theory, asserting that "the inevitable series of stages in the development of social institutions has not only not been proven but has been disproven" (1922, 57). He further argued that the basis for the disproof is found in the hard facts of history and ethnography, which show that the evolutionists' generalizations are faulty (1922, 66). Furthermore, any conclusions about evolution must rest not on impressionistic history and anthropology but on a review of the "actual facts of early evolution" (1922, 66).

In place of grand theories of evolution Ogburn proposed a theory that was simultaneously positivistic and functionalist. It was positivistic because it stressed measurable facts and trends, eschewed speculative theory not based on these, and insisted on theories of limited range. It was functionalist because it stressed the systematic interrelatedness of social institutions. In addition, Ogburn's theory discarded the functionalist theory of short-term equilibration and substituted for it the notion of "cultural lag," summarized as follows:

Not all parts of our organization are changing at the same speed or at the same time. Some are rapidly moving forward while others are lagging. These unequal rates of change in economic life, in government, in education, in science, and religion, make zones of danger and points of tension. (President's Research Committee on Social Trends 1933, xiii)

More particularly, Ogburn argued that changes in "material culture" (technology and economic organization) forever outrun changes in "adaptive culture" (religion, family, art, law, and custom), and the consequences of this chronic lag are a parade of social problems and the danger of social disorganization.

The Ogburn formulation is instructive for the student of social change because it demonstrates how the elimination of one fundamental functionalist premise and the substitution of another permits Ogburn to generate a theory of social tensions or contradictions that is not totally removed from Marx's theory of contradictions, which, although derived from a different set of first premises, also involves the notion of increasing discrepancy and the relationship between material and institutional forces. At the same time Ogburn retained the functionalist view that society is bounded. Although he acknowledged the international diffusion of technology, the dominant thrust of his theory is on the internal consequences of change and social stability in societies.

Malinowski, one of the founders of classical functionalism and not

especially noted for his contributions to the theory of social change, turned his attention to cultural change in his last work (1945), published posthumously. The setting of this work as intersocietal, dealing with the subject of culture contact and change in the African colonial societies. In his analysis Malinowski retained one assumption of the functionalist perspective, namely, that cultural traits cannot be studied as if scattered and unrelated to one another because they cluster in institutions that have interrelated material, legal, and cultural elements. This assumption implies that change occurs in patterns of elements, not single elements alone. At the same time, however, he admonished against treating a colonial society as a "well-integrated whole"; it is a multiplicity of contrasting and conflicting cultural elements. Any conception of a well-integrated community in the contact situation would "ignore such facts as the color bar, the permanent rift which divides the two patterns in change and keeps them apart in church and factory, in matters of mine labor and political influence" (1945, 15).

The first basis for instability in colonial societies is that they are dominated politically, which refers to the "impact of a higher, active culture upon a simpler, more passive one" (1945, 15). But this impact is not a matter of the simple transfer of Western prototypes or the retention of African prototypes. Rather it is a dynamic fusion of the two types into qualitatively new forms:

The concept of the mechanical incorporation of elements from one culture into another does not lead us beyond the initial preparatory stages, and even then on subtler analysis breaks down. What really takes place is an interplay of specific contact forces: race prejudice, political and economic imperialism, the demand for segregation, the safeguarding of a European standard of living, and the African reaction to this. (1945, 23)

Accordingly, Malinowski viewed colonial societies in terms of what he called his "three-column approach," which delineated three kinds of social forces: (1) "the impinging culture with its institutions, intentions, and interests"; (2) "the reservoir of indigenous custom, belief, and living traditions"; (3) "the processes of contact and change, where members of the two cultures cooperate, conflict, or compromise" (1945, vii).

Malinowski viewed the relations among these several forces as unstable for two reasons. First, the intruding European culture and the surviving African cultures are not evenly matched. He described the European culture as "higher" and "active" and the African cultures as "simpler" and "passive." Second, the existence of conflicting institutional patterns makes for cultural contradictions and pressures for change:

The African in transition finds himself in a non-man's land, where his old tribal stability, his security as to economic resources, which was safeguarded

under the old regime by the solidarity of kinship, have disappeared. The new culture, which has prompted him to give up tribalism, has promised to raise him by education to a standard of life worthy of an educated man. But it has not given suitable and satisfactory equivalents. It has been unable to give him rights to citizenship regarded as due an educated Westerner; and it has discriminated against him socially on practically every point of the ordinary routine of life. (1945, 60)

Malinowski predicted that the incessant pressures of European culture and the various forces of culture contact and change would "sooner or later … gradually … engulf and supersede the whole of [the surviving African tradition]" (1945, 81).

Malinowski's theory of culture contact and change constitutes an especially interesting recombination of ingredients of the following sort: (1) the theories of classical evolution were largely irrelevant by now to his enterprise; (2) like the classical functionalists, he adopted the postulate of societal interrelatedness, but, unlike them, he built in a postulate of constant conflict and contradiction, with equilibrium never reached; and (3) like the diffusionists, he acknowledged the salience of intercultural or international contact as a determinant of change, but unlike them, he concentrated on patterns of culture rather than discrete cultural items, stressed the systemic context into which they are incorporated, and emphasized the dimension of political, economic, and cultural domination that colonialism implies.

2.3 Marx-Lenin

Earlier I noted some resemblances between classical evolutionary theory and Marxian thought, particularly on the internal genesis of change. That picture is clearly incomplete. Marx forever stressed the international character of capitalism and its bourgeois and proletarian classes. And he provided more specific insights than this. Competition provides the impulse for capitalist expansion, and the most potent strategy in the competitive struggle is to increase productivity through technological advance. Before this strategy reaches its ultimate limit, one final strategy is available. Marx found the limits for any given innovation—or set of innovations—in the size of the market. No market can sustain feverish overproduction and this inhibits a market's capacity to absorb increased production. Industrial expansion creates both the need for more raw materials for itself and the need for larger markets for its own products. The natural consequence is to internationalize capitalism. Capitalists destroy the handicraft industries of backward countries with their cheap products and force them into the production of raw materials. In this way a "new international division of labor, a division suited to the requirements of the chief centers of modern industry springs up, and converts

one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production, for supplying the other part which remains a chiefly industrial field" (Marx [1867] 1949, 451).

In applying this principle to India Marx interpreted the British efforts to unify that country politically and to build a network of railroads as a strategy to convert India into a supplier of cotton and other raw materials for British industries (1853a). Marx also predicted that the introduction of railways should set the stage for a more general growth in India that would, in turn, dissolve the caste system that had posed such obstacles to economic development. With respect to China, Marx (1853b) attributed the political upheaval in mid-nineteenth-century China to the economic penetration of the mainland by capitalism. In addition, Marx commented on the vulnerability of the international dependency that arises from the establishment of trade between the capitalist nations and their economic suppliers of raw materials (1853b).

Lenin ([1917] 1939) carried the theme of internationalization further. The starting point of his analysis was that competition as the driving engine of capitalism was disappearing. The main reason for this was the development of monopolies that controlled raw materials, prices, and production by virtue of the gigantic of firms. (Marx also foresaw this kind of concentration in his later works). Banks had also become monopolized and formed links with industry to create a system of finance capital. Through the export of capital—as contrasted with the earlier pattern of the export of goods—this system had "divided up the world" economically. This development was accompanied by a political division of the world through colonial domination, which completed the seizure of unoccupied territories on our planet" ([1917]) 1939, 76, emphasis in original). In keeping with the fundamentals of earlier Marxian formulations, however, Lenin described the imperialist developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as "the highest stage of capitalism" (invoking the evolutionary logic of Marx), found these developments to be "parasitic" and replete with contradictions peculiar to capitalism (such as the high cost of living and the oppression of the cartels arising from monopolization), and argued that imperialism was a transition "from the capitalist system to a higher social-economic order" (again reminiscent of the evolutionary imagery and ultimate optimism of Marx).

The Marx-Lenin perspective moves further in the international direction, envisioning the world as a single system at least temporarily dominated by a single economic system (capitalism). The viewpoint tends to regard internal economic and class developments—for example, the destruction of the Indian caste system and the "embourgeoisment" of the British working classes in the late nineteenth century—as a more-or-less

direct result of external developments occasioned by the internationalization of capitalism. The internationalism of the Marx-Lenin perspective differs from the internationalism of both the diffussionists and Malinowski with respect to the causal mechanisms involved: it identifies specific economic mechanisms (the export of goods, the export of capital) supplemented by specific political mechanisms (colonialism), whereas the diffusionist perspective rests on the imagery of borrowing or transfer and Malinowski's perspective envisions the operative mechanisms as mainly political domination (colonialism) and the accompanying cultural contact.

2.4 Weber

Weber, too, was engaged in a certain dialogue with classical evolutionary thought (including its Marxist variant). His particular complaint was that such formulations are too general and abstract (and therefore unrealistic) because they do not take the variations found in historical and comparative study into account:

[Weber's image of "economy and society"] drew the lines against Social Darwinism, Marxism and other isms of the time. Weber rejected the prevalent evolutionary and mono-causal theories, whether idealist or materialist, mechanistic or organicist; he fought both the reductionism of social scientists and the surface approach of historians, both the persistent search for hidden "deeper" causes and the ingrained aversion against historically transcendent concepts. He took it for granted that the economic structure of a group was one of its major if variable determinants and that society was an arena for group conflicts. (Roth 1968, xxix)

This polemical positions, of course, posed a challenge for Weber, namely, to formulate some kind of general statements about society and social processes while at the same time respecting historical and comparative variations. Weber took middle position in relation to this challenge, identifying relatively coherent historical constellations of economic, political, and social arrangements. With respect to process of social change, Weber identified a number of ideal-typical processes, which are best characterized as semiautonomous developments arising from particular group, institutional, or cultural constellations. Among these ideal-typical processes are (1) the tendency for charismatic leadership to become routinized; (2) the aggrandizing and leveling tendencies associated with bureaucracy; (3) the transformational tendencies associate with belief systems such as ascetic Protestantism; and (4) the general tendencies of coherent cultural systems (religious tenets, musical styles) to move in the direction of rationalization. Considerable controversy remains, however, as to how far these processes identified as typical should be interpreted as implying a more general or evolutionary emphasis.

All four for the developmental directions noted in the foregoing paragraph are internal in the same that they involve the unfolding of certain cultural or organizational principles, sometimes in relation to exigencies that are encountered. A broader reading of Weber's comparative-historical studies and economic sociology reveals, however, that he was fully sensitive to intersocietal and international influences and that he gave them a central place in his analyses. His historical analyses make reference to war, population movements, international economic developments, and the diffusion of religion as the directional forces of change. His "general economic history" (Weber [1920] 1950) lectures systematically included international factors such as the trade in antiquity and medieval times, changes in the prices of the "international" metals, gold, and silver, colonial exploitation in the eighteenth century and the rise of the great colonial companies. And, to give Weber equal time with Marx, his diagnosis of India in 1916 stressed the British penetration:

Today the Hinduist caste order is profoundly shaken. Especially in the district of Calcutta, old Europe's major gateway, many norms have practically lost their force. The railroads, the taverns, the changing occupational stratification, the concentration of labor through imported industry, colleges, et cetera, have all contributed their part. The 'commuters to London,' that is, those who studied in Europe and who freely maintained social intercourse with Europeans, used to become outcasts up to the last generation; but more and more this pattern is disappearing. And it has been impossible to introduce caste coaches on the railroads in the fashion of the American railroad cars or waiting which segregate 'White' from 'Black' in the Southern States. All caste relations have been shaken, and the stratum of intellectuals bred by the English are here, as elsewhere, bearers of a specific nationalism. They will greatly strengthen this slow and irresistable process. (Weber [1916] 1970, 397)

Even down to the peculiar importance of railroads, Weber's diagnosis bears a striking resemblance to Marx's even though there were divergencies in identifying causal mechanisms and the general dynamics of change.

This brief review of the major theories of social change and development, most of which had crystallized by the early decades of the twentieth century, reveals that they contained virtually all the elements of the theories of social change that were to develop in the post-World War II period. Among these elements are the neoevolutionary perspectives embodied in some versions of modernization theory, the consequences of irregular development, international political and economic domination, the crucial role of international finance and capital, and international dependency. The originality of the later period lies not so much in the discovery or invention of new elements of change but rather in novel

recombinations of elements that had been earlier appreciated and stressed.

3. The Interwar Hiatus and the Rise of Development/Modernization Theory

Despite the fact that some of the works referred to in the preceding section were written in the period between World War I and World War II, that period must be regarded as a barren one from the standpoint of social change theory. The two most notable contributions of the period were those of Kroeber (1944) and Sorokin (1937). Both of these theories had to do with the rise and fall of whole civilizations and both were "emanationist" in the sense that social and cultural change was regarded as the unfolding of possibilities contained in fundamental cultural premises or assumptions. The causes for the relative stagnation of interest in development and change are no doubt complex, but certainly among them are the fact that much of American social science was preoccupied with the short-term crises of economic depression and war and much of European social science was brought to a standstill, if not destroyed by the crises by economic depression, fascism, and war.

In the 1950s the social sciences witnessed a great birth of interest in the subjects of growth, development, and modernization, and much of this interest focused on societies that were referred to as "underdeveloped," "developing," or simply "new." Among economists there was a surge of interest in "growth economics." Sociologists theorized about the distinctive institutional characteristics of modernity. Political scientists expanded their comparative sights and included kinship, tribal arrangements, communities, and other "premodern" political arrangements in their scope of interest. Although development/modernization theory has been characterized as a coherent entity by subsequent critics, it was in fact quite diverse with respect to its identification of what is distinctively modern, what mechanisms make for modernization, and what the obstacles to modernization are.

One variant of modernization theory involved a kind of resuscitation of the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft distinction (or related distinctions, such as Weber's traditional-modern, Durkheim's mechanical-organic, or Redfield's folk-urban), which was then used to characterize the modernization process. Some (Hoselitz 1960; Levy 1966) made extensive use of Parsons's pattern-variables and regarded the essence of modernization as the displacement of ascriptive standards by achievement standards, particularistic ties by universalistic ones, and diffuse and inclusive personal personal relationships by more functionally specific ones, and so on. Parsons himself (1971) made some use of these distinctions in his writings on development,

but in the end the concept that played the most central role for him was the idea of structural differentiation—between the family and the workplace, between religion and the state, between the polity and the economy—as the hallmark of development (Parsons 1961). Subsequently, Parsons generalized his views of change into a neoevolutionary scheme that regarded evolution as adaptive upgrading through economic growth, structural differentiation, the inclusion of diverse social groups and classes, and the generalization of values (1971).

The modernization literature yielded a kind of composite picture of what is involved in the process: Traditional religious systems tend to lose influence. Often powerful nonreligious ideologies, such as nationalism, arise. Traditional privileges and authority become less important and the basis of the class system shifts to personal achievement and merit. The family ceases to be the main unit of economic production. Extended family and kin groups break into smaller units. Personal choice, not the dictates of parents, becomes the basis for courtship and marriage. In education the literacy rate increases greatly and formal educational institutions develop at all levels. At the same time, the mass media serve as a vast educational resource and information channel. Informal customs and mores decay as new techniques of social control and systems of formal law arise. New forms of political organization (for example, political parties) and more complex systems of administration develop. Some scholars made the theoretical and empirical case that there is such a thing as a "modern man," who is created by institutions such as the factory and the school.

[The modern man] is an informed participant citizen; he has a marked sense of personal efficacy; he is highly independent and autonomous in his relations to traditional sources of influence, especially when he is making basic decisions about how to conduct his personal affairs; he is ready for new experiences and ideas, that is, he is relatively open-minded and cognitively flexible. (Inkeles and Smith 1974, 290)

Modernization theorists also identified obstacles to the process, mainly in the traditional religious, communal, and kinship forms. Moore, for example, argued that the kinship system in nonindustrial societies "perhaps … offers the most important single impediment to individual mobility, not only through the competing claims of kinsmen upon the potential industrial recruit but also through the security offered in established patterns of mutual responsibility" (1951, 24).

One interesting variant of the growth literature of the 1950s was the psychological theory of entrepreneurs. Many observers regarded the entrepreneur as the major driving force of development. McClelland (1961), building on Weber's theory of the Protestant ethic, suggested that

the key motivation of entrepreneurs is a need for achievement, which involves an interest in exercising skill in medium-risk situations and a desire for concrete signs of successful performance. This need, moreover, develops in the period of early socialization, when the child is exposed to self-reliance training and high standards of performance. McClelland also argued that the combination of a loving mother with a nondominant father was important in fostering the need for achievement. Although it also relies on child-rearing patterns and motivation, the theory of Hagen (1962) is more complicated than McClelland's. Hagen argued that stable traditional societies generally employ authoritarian child-rearing practices that develop passive noninnovative personality types. When such societies are shaken by external disturbance (such as colonial domination), the first response is a kind of "retreatism" that manifests itself in the family as a decline of the father's status and an enhancement of the mother's status. This in turn "frees" the son from a repressive father in the subsequent generation and releases creative and innovative energies in the economy.

In the 1960s and the 1970s modernization theory was subjected to a vast array of specific and general criticisms. I list only those that have the most direct relevance for the themes of this chapter:

1.     Many observers argued that modernization theory is Western-centric and erroneously regards development as a process whereby developing societies will converge toward a common model. Certainly some of the statements and analyses of functionalist theories can be characterized in this way. Lerner, for example, defined modernization simply as "the process of social change whereby less developed societies acquire characteristics common to more developed societies" (1985, 386). The work of Kerr et al. (1960) on industrial relations systems argued that a number of historically distinct patterns were evolving toward a common one, despite the persistence of ideological and political differences among nations. Goode (1963) argued that, despite vast cultural differences in kinship, the modernization process—mainly industrialization and urbanization—pressed heretofore diverse family structures in the direction of the conjugal type and made for a narrowing of national differences in family-related behavior, such as divorce rates.

     Gusfield (1967) was one of the most forceful critics of the modernization perspective. He challenged statements found in the modernization literature that traditional societies are static and unchanging; he pointed to the heterogeneity of different traditional forms. Most important, he argued that the old and the new are not always in conflict. He argued that modern institutions do not simply replace

     traditional ones; often the two types reinforce each other. He stressed the blends and compromise that different cultures achieve in processes of development. His critique echoes the "historicist" elements of Weber's earlier polemic against classical evolutionary theory. Bendix, also criticizing the implicit evolutionary conceptualizations of modernization as a uniform process, defined modernization as "a type of social change which originated in the industrial revolution of England, 1760–1830, and in the political revolution of France, 1794" ([1964] 1977). Modernization is a historically specific process that contrasts sharply with the experience of "follower" societies who struggle to narrow the gap between themselves and those nations that have already modernized. And Dore, focusing on factory organization and labor relations in Japan, argued that because more advanced technology was available in the case of Japan—among other resources—it could skip, as it were, many of the historical processes pragmatically worked through by Britain in its development of factory organization (Dore 1973). The notion that the developing countries have a range of technology, educational techniques, types of mass communication, etc., potentially at their disposal—and that the developing West did not—is a position reminiscent of the diffusionist critique of classical evolutionary theory, and, similarly, results in a greater stress on the historical diversity of development processes.

2.     Other observers have argued that modernization theory ignores the political dimension, particularly group conflict. In one respect development/modernization theory can be regarded as a kind of dynamic part of the functionalist perspective, namely, it regarded both traditional societies and modern societies as having more-or-less coherent and consistent cultural and institutional. Insofar as the functionalist perspective in general came in for the criticism that it was either incapable or unwilling to deal with domination, dissensus, and conflict (Coser 1956; Dahrendorf, 1959), that criticism spilled over to development/modernization theory. Applied to modernization, such a criticism appear to have only partial merit. The "political system" approach adopted by Almond and Coleman (1960) focuses on "input functions," such as interest articulation and political communication, and "output functions," such as rule-making, rule application and rule adjudication. This focus connotes a lesser place for domination and coercion than in some other types of political theory. But many theorists who might on general grounds be regarded as functionalists stressed the political dimension of modernization. Eisenstadt (1964), for example, traced "breakdowns in modernization" to the specific failure of

     elites to consolidate integrative mechanisms and symbols, and in general he gives a central role to political elites in the developmental process. Hoselitz (1960) drew a fundamental distinction between developmental patterns that were "autonomous," that is, relatively free from governmental intervention, and those that were "induced" by government. And Smelser, in a general essay on the process of modernization, characterized it as a conflictual process: "a three-way tug-of-war among the forces of tradition, the forces of differentiation, and the new forces of integration" (1963). One suspects that the real animus in this critique is not the complaint that the political dimension in general is ignored, but rather that a particular type of political situation—the domination of one economic class over others—is understressed, absent, or denied.

3.     Yet another group of observers assert that development/modernization theory ignores external factors in social change. Bendix rejected the three evolutionist assumptions that closed systems (1) are either traditional or modern, (2) undergo internal differentiation, and (3) inevitably develop. These assumptions, he argued, are especially inapplicable to newly developing nations:

If we want to explain the historical breakthrough in Europe, our emphasis will be on the continuity of intra-societal changes. If we wish to include in our account the worldwide repercussions of this breakthrough and hence the differential process of modernization, our emphasis will be on the confluence of intrinsic and extrinsic changes of social structures. ([1964] 1977, 433)

     Frank asserted that most studies of development and underdevelopment "fail to take account of the economic and other relations between the metropolis and its economic colonies throughout the history of the worldwide expansion and development of the mercantilist and capitalist system" (1969, 3). The same critique underlies the basic premises of world-system theorists as well.

     Although possessing some merit, this line of criticism also seems overdrawn, Hoselitz, the "developmentalist" bête noire of Frank's polemic, systematically incorporated two international dimensions into his analysis of economic growth: whether growth takes place in the context of political expansionism or in an intrinsic way, and whether the country is politically and economically dominant or satellitic. And Rostow, another target of Frank's criticisms, made a fundamental distinction between early and late developing countries:

As a matter of historical fact a reactive nationalism—reacting against intrusion from more advanced nations—has been a most important

and powerful motive in the transition from traditional to modern societies, at least as important as the profit motive. Men holding effective authority or influence have been willing to uproot traditional societies not, primarily, to make more money but because the traditional society failed—or threatened to fail—to protect them from humiliation by foreigners. (1960, 26–27)

     And Parsons, commenting on the postwar economic situation, observed the following:

World industrialism must affect the problem of political independence for former colonial areas. It is also primary source both of markets for may of their products and of competition for their own attempts at new lines of production. It can also be a source of technical and managerial help and financial support, and the degree and nature of control which may go with such help is always a complicated and touchy problem. (1960, 117)

     Again, one suspects that the true complaint is not that development/ modernization theorists were unaware of the international dimension or that they failed to stress it; the true complaint is that they failed to acknowledge what critics regarded as one type of international relationship, namely, the continuing domination of world capitalism over the dependent areas of the world.

4. The Resurgence of the Internationalist Perspective

The positive result of this critique of development/modernization theory was the generation of a number of alternative versions of the process of development and change. One example is Bendix's notions regarding the greater role of states and innovative ruling elites in "follower" societies than in those Western European countries that developed initially ([1964] 1977). Probably the most influential theoretical developments that emerged, however, came from a group of social scientists in Latin America. (A more general observation can be made here: as semi-autonomous academic social-science traditions develop in the Third World countries, one evident result is that international factors will receive heavier stress.) In the 1950s number of economists associated with the Economic Commission on Latin America, notably Prebisch (1950), generated a perspective based on the primary assumption that the underdevelopment of Latin American countries rested not primarily on internal factors but on the fact that these countries were an integral part of the world economy. Prebisch proposed that the world economy could be regarded as having a "center" and a "periphery." Neoclassical

economic analysis suggest that the terms of the trade should be more favorable to the periphery because the increased use of technology in the center lower prices on industrial products in relation to the agricultural products from the developing countries. The reverse has happened, however, and Prebisch thought the reason was that unions in industrialized countries prevented wages from falling and that oligopolies in the center kept prices on industrial products artificially high.

A more general perspective,"dependency theory," grew out of this approach. It is associated with the names of Cardoso, Dos Santos, Frank, and others. Cardoso's definition of dependency is as follows:

Capitalist accumultion in dependent economies does not complete its cycle. Lacking autonomous technology, as vulgar parlance has it, and compelled therefore to utilize imported technology, dependent capitalism is crippled…. It is crippled it lacks a fully developed capital goods sector. The accumulation, expansion, and self-realization of local capital requires and depends on a dynamic complement outside itself. It must insert itself into the circuit of international capitalism. (1973, 163)

Dependency, then, involves a reliance on outside capital, and the more this reliance is concentrated on one or a few others nations, the greater the vulnerability and dependency of the dependent country. Furthermore, this dependency causes the internal fragmentation of the economy's sectors. The most sophisticated dependency theorists, however, argue that only the grossest information can be gathered by focusing on only the international phenomenon of economic penetration:

The expansion of capitalism in Bolivia and Venezuela, in Mexico or Peru, in Brazil and Argentina, in spite of having been submitted to the same global dynamic of international capitalism, did not have the same history or consequences. The differences are rooted not only in the diversity of natural resources, not just in the different periods in which these economies have been incorporated into the international system…. Their explanation must also lie in the different moments at which sectors of local classes allied or clashed with foreign interests, organized in different forms of state, sustained distinct ideologies, or tried to implement various policies or defined alternative strategies to cope with imperialist challenges in diverse moments of history. (Cardoso and Faletto 1969, xvii)

The dependency perspective marks not only clear focus on international factors but also a resuscitation of the perspective of economic and political domination found in the works of Marx, Lenin, and Weber. In these sense it contrast in another way with development/modernization theory, which lays greater stress on institutional and cultural patterning.

Another major international theory of change is "World systems theory," associated with the names of Brunel and Wallerstein. Although

this approach also distinguishes between core and periphery, it identifies a semiperiphery between them as well. These formations set the stage for patterns of economic domination and competition. Wallerstein has divided the history of the capitalist economy into three broad phases, each characterized by different patterns of relations among the core, semiperiphery, and periphery, with these relations largely determining the internal economic fates of the nations in each category.

The influence of these internationalist perspectives, cast mainly in a neo-Marxist framework, has increased greatly in the social sciences in the past two decades. In 1980 the Executive Committee of the Research Committee on Economy and Society of the International Sociological Association circulated a questionnaire to all its members asking about their areas of research and perspectives used. About one hundred responses were received from scholars in a large number of nations.The areas of research most commonly mentioned were (1) the relations of social classes or groups to the economy, (2) institutions, the state, and the economy, and (3) the world system. And topics listed under the first two headings frequently referred to the international dimension. When asked, "What theoretical position do you believe is most often used in the study of economy and society?" 90 percent of the respondents responded "Marxist or neo-Marxist" (Makler, Sales, and Smelser 1982).

5. Summary

Although the foregoing glimpse of the geography of social-change theory reveals a great diversity of strands that defy any simple overall characterization, it is possible to identify two cycles that bear some overall similarity to one another. The first cycle (corresponding to classical evolutionary and development/modernization theory) begins with a view of development and change that, with all the noted qualifications, tends to have the following characteristic:

1.     A stress on the internal determinants of societal change.

2.     A stress on the regularities and uniformities of change.

3.     A stress on the convergence of developing societies toward a common model, that of the developed West.

4.     A stress on institutional patterning.

5.     At least implicit political conservatism.

These theories are then subjected to polemical attack and give way to a new range of emphases that contrast with the former on each count:

1.     A stress on the external determinants of societal change.

2.     A stress on the diversity of patterns of change.

3.     A stress on the divergence and the many paths of development, with a resulting relativism.

4.     A stress on economic and political domination.

5.     At least implicit political radicalism.

Not all of these ingredients hang together in every subbranch of theory I have referred to. Nor are they connected to one another by a larger logic. They do, however, constitute recurrent themes. Some of the themes are quite general and occur in debates throughout the behavioral and social sciences—the themes of universalism versus relativism and general laws versus historical specificity are examples—but the dimension of internal versus external appears to be especially salient in the study of societal change.

This chapter is not the place for a sociology-of-knowledge analysis of these apparent trends, but a few speculative reflections might be in order. At one level the parade of perspectives can be seen as a partial reflection of historical trends. The colonial consolidation of the last part of the nineteenth century was, in fact, a great step in the internationalization of the world in that a multiplicity of new connections—economic, political, and cultural—were established between the colonizing and the colonized societies. One of the ideological significances of classical evolutionism was that it served as a kind of apologia, a justification of colonial domination. Theorists such as Hobson, Lenin, and Malinowski took note of this situation of international domination and built it into their analyses. Development/modernization theory grew and flourished in the immediate wake of the great decolonization period following World War II, and in one sense perhaps represented a kind of ideological hope held out to—and in many cases, adopted by—the newly independent nations of the world. Of course the hope proved to be a false one. The realities of international production, trade, finance, and politics since World War II have in fact demonstrated that the developmental fate of most countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia is not entirely in their own hands but is dependent in large part on the strategies of firms, banks, and nations that impinge on their economies and polities. The subsequent surge of internationalist theory reflects these realities and simultaneously represents the disillusionment of those who have in earlier decades embraced the more optimistic development/modernization perspective.

It could well be the case that we will witness similar oscillations of emphasis on the internal and external when it comes to efforts to explain the dynamics of our past. With respect to understanding change in the contemporary world, however, it appears that the international dimension is here to stay and that the proper strategy is to work toward

the development of interactive models that (1) pinpoint the precise kinds of international influences that are most salient: production, markets, finance, migration, the media, the threat of war; (2) identify the precise mechanisms by which international influences impact on nations' economies, institutional structures, political processes, and cultures; and (3) examine how these internal changes shape the strategies of leaders in these countries and how these strategies themselves spill over as influences on other nations of the world. We do not have such models of change readily available, in part because of the tendency of proponents of internally and externally based theories to polarize in polemical opposition to one another. The most appropriate agenda for the future, however, is to work toward the development of these kinds of synthetic or integrative models of change. To this end, I conclude by sketching what I regard as the most important dimensions of internal-external penetration and interaction in the contemporary world.

6. Conclusion

I focus on four dimensions of internationalization: economic, political, cultural, and what I refer to as the growth of international societal communities. In regarding the contemporary world scene, it seems essential to begin with the economic dimension, largely because it is so conspicuous and so salient. This dimension must be subdivided into several partially separable subdimensions. One subdimension is the increasing internationalization of the world economy through trade: the vicissitudes of national economies that are buffeted by international competition and fluctuating currency rates are the most evident manifestations of the magnitude of this trend. Another facet, closely related but not identical, is the internationalization of production, which refers not only to firms that open up the production of goods and services in many countries in the form of "multinationals" but also to independent firms that manufacture and export parts that are assembled elsewhere into final products. Another subdimension is the increased internationalization of capital—finance and credit—with its own distinctive set of vicissitudes. Finally, much of the migration of persons, both international and within countries, is determined by international economic forces, as opportunities open and close with changing patterns of international employment and unemployment.

The dynamics of change in this economic arena are complex and combine internal and external factors. Some shifts along the subdimensions can—in keeping with the Leninist and contemporary internalist perspectives—be laid at the door of "internal crises" of national systems of capitalism that may result from increasing costs, diminishing opportunities,

and class conflict that induce firms to relocate their activities. At the same time, such crises may partially be determined by international influences, as national economies fall victim to the forces of international competition. Once these international forces are in motion, they penetrate individual economies and influence inflation, unemployment, and the general course of economic growth, stagnation, and decline. No economy is invulnerable to these effects, as both the impact of the oil shocks of the 1970s on the developed industrial economies and the impact of the flattening of the oil market on the producing countries—including the Soviet Union—demonstrate. The contemporary debt situation in the world tells the same story. Generated in part by the flow of petrodollars into Western banks and then their channeling to countries like Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Poland, and Yugoslavia, the great burden of international debt has in one respect brought the debtor countries to their economic knees as they have had to divert much of their national income to debt servicing. At the same time, this debt has generated a precarious situation for the lender banks and countries, who face imminent crisis if defaulting becomes widespread. The result is a kind of mutually dependent standoff, held in place by the uneasy mutual interest that all parties have in avoiding unmanageable financial instability, if not collapse.

If we assume that the contemporary international economy and the various national economies constitute one system, this system is operating according to a semiautonomous logic of its own. Such an observation, however, fails to notice the essential political dimension of that system. In many respects the state is a kind of fragile balance wheel between the international and national economies. Not immediately responsible for fluctuations in import-export ratios and with very limited control over the international fluctuations of currency rates, states—as guarantors of the integrity of the national economy—must meet accumulated obligations either directly or through borrowing. In addition, in the newly industrializing and Third World economies the state is the agency to which falls the task of executing and implementing—or resisting—the strictures imposed by other national governments and international banking agencies, such as the International Monetary Fun. In this role the state has less control over the fate of its economy—and therefore its own political fate—than before.

However, the state has also become a stronger agency. Because it is cognizant of its own vulnerability, the state tends to insert itself into the economic process with greater assertiveness in the interests of its own survival: assertiveness with respect to encouraging the productivity and exporting capacity of its industries, with respect to maintaining monetary stability and low rates of inflation, and with respect to regulating

and working out a symbiosis with foreign firms and banks that are established on its own territory.

The state has another delicate balancing at to perform as well. Although national economies have become increasingly internationalized, national politics remain national in character. The result is that the state finds itself, more and more, the arbiter of economic contradictions and tensions and the political conflicts that are fueled by them. National elections and political infighting are conducted as if the most important political issues were domestic because the national state remains the agency that is defined as being responsible for political problems. This constitutes a peculiar squeeze on national states. They must respond to forces that are neither of their own making nor of their own society's making. These international forces work themselves out in various ways. First, as previously mentioned, external political and financial agencies join the domestic political arena as they attempt to influence economic policy; these agencies also enter domestic politics as they are singled out as politically responsible agents. Second, another source of the internationalization of politics is the presence of international political movements—human rights, peace, environmentalist, and others—which often constitute political pressures on domestic governments. Third, the development of systems of international politics in the United Nations and in various regional federations and coalitions involves an interplay among national political interests and international processes.

The third dimension of internationalization is cultural. The most conspicuous elements of this dimension are technology and science and their diffusion. This diffusion occurs by a number of mechanisms, including the internationalization of science in universities, academies, and international science-based associations. Competitive mechanisms also play a role, as firms, militaries, and governments make deliberate efforts to discover and appropriate technology in the interests of augmenting their economic competitiveness and military positions. The effect of technological and scientific diffusion and acquisition, however, depends above all on how effectively it is applied in the institutional context. A second type of cultural diffusion, often out of the hands of national governments, is cultural diffusion through the mass media. This diffusion influences consumer tastes and expectations, popular attitudes, and political understandings and sentiments. Even those countries whose governments resist the infusion of cultural influences regarded as alien have difficulties in doing so; and once a society has opened the door to international exposure through the mass media, it is difficult to shut it again. S. N. Eisenstadt, in the final chapter in this volume, identifies a peculiarly global kind of international cultural diffusion, evident in earlier eras in the international spread of the great religions and cultures

but today manifesting itself as a kind of "culture of modernity," that envisions economic development, political participation, cultural pluralism, and other values as cultural ideals. The cumulative force of this diffusion has been profound throughout the world. Each of the cultural influences I have mentioned, however, is shaped by domestic traditions, values, and interests, once again illustrating the interplay between external and internal processes.

For lack of a better term, the final dimension of internationalization might be called the growth of multiple international societal communities. Partly cultural in character, this term refers to the development of normative rules and understandings that emerge in the course of increased international interaction. Perhaps the most important—albeit precarious—focus for this kind of growth is in the arena of international security, involving the nuclear superpowers above all but other countries as well. This term involves the evolution of understandings and symbolic meanings of, for example, what international lines may not be crossed without threatening to precipitate international nuclear destruction, what actions are available to back down in confrontations without losing face, how to interpret both threats and friendly gestures, how to understand when bluffs are bluffs and when they are not, and so on. In the atmosphere of almost permanent international tension in the security arena these normative elements are often lost sight of, but they nonetheless have developed. Similar rules, agreements, and understanding emerge in other settings as well—in diplomatic circles, in the international banking community, among economic competitors, in international scientific and scholarly associations, and in educational exchange programs.

In the recent past scholars have made distinctions such as center versus periphery in national cultural traditions, cosmopolitan versus local in cultural orientations, and "big traditions" versus "little traditions" in cultures, stressing the differences in the polar terms and the ways that each term stands in tension with the other. It may be time to draw a similar distinction between "international" and "national" or "local" because the international dimension seems to have evolved to a position of independent significance in the contemporary world.

I hope that this brief discussion of some of the multiple dimensions of international life may contribute to the development of the complex, integrative kinds of models that appear to be called for in order to understand the contemporary world situation. Certainly the discussion about how to understand the contemporary world calls for abandoning the either-or polarization in contemporary scholarship and debate with respect to the relative roles of external and internal factors in the explanation of social change. This kind of polarization is as outdated as many of the older theoretical positions considered in this chapter.

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Globality, Global Culture, and Images of World Order

Roland Robertson

The general concern of the following discussion is the phenomenon of globality. I propose that the process of globalization—involving, from one perspective, the implosion of the world and, from another perspective, the explosion of societally and civilizationally situated cultures, institutions, and modes of life (Robertson and Chirico 1985)—should be regarded in sociological-theoretical terms as subsuming the classical concern with the transformation of societies, which was analytically centered largely on the processes of industrialization, development, and modernization (Nettl and Robertson 1966).

Previously, I tried to demonstrate that there is an unappreciated global perspective in the work of the classical sociologists and some of their precursors, particularly in the view that the transformation of Western societies has been but a part of a general trend toward globality (Robertson and Chirico 1985). In other words, the passing of premodern society itself involved a strong shift toward globality, which I define as the circumstance in which the entire world is regarded as "a single place." The globalization perspective is not merely an extension of what can (for the sake of convenience and simplicity) be called the "Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft " theme. Rather, the phenomenon of the world as a single place may fruitfully be viewed as both an extension of the Great Transformation, as Polanyi (1957) called it, and a subsumption of it. Put another way, the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft contrast has been relativized diachronically and synchronically by processes of globalization so that rather than speaking of processes of societal change in an objective, directional sense, we are now constrained to think increasingly of the

tensions between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as quotidian images of sociocultural organization anywhere in the contemporary world. More specifically, the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft theme has itself been globalized: first, with respect to images of how societies should be patterned; second, with respect to how the world-as-a-whole should be structured.^[1]

In this chapter I am concerned with two closely related aspects of globality (centered on the perceived facticity of a single world) and globalization (the set of processes that yields a single world). First, I consider the degree to which a direct interest in globality and globalization makes a significant difference to the ways in which sociological theorizing, especially the analysis of large-scale and long-run change, is undertaken. Second, I focus on a specific application of the globalization perspective: images of world order and the potential for social movements developing in terms of these images.

The Global Circumstance: Prior Treatments

It has become commonplace, almost a cliché, in recent years to speak of "the global village." Certainly the mass medial in various parts of the world have used this term (which is, of course, highly problematic from a disciplined sociological vantage point) with increasing frequency and have seemingly subscribed to the McLuhanist claim that it has been wrought largely by technological changes in the media of communication. It is as if the printing press largely promoted Gesellschaft, and the satellite dish—and its potential miniaturization—is promoting a global Gemeinschaft . Notwithstanding the severe shortcomings of this point of view, not to speak of its self-serving features, the use of the term "global village" is a remarkable indicator of the degree to which a consciousness of the world-as-a-whole has crystallized. Indeed, the explosion of the use of the adjective "global" is an indicator in its own right of the process of globalization.^[2] Further evidence of this process can, of course, be found in the readily perceivable and much-noted interlocking of sociocultural phenomena across societal boundaries on a global scale, particularly in economic respects; the rapid expansion and increase in the number of global institutions; the proliferation of global

[1] Dumont has made a major attempt to distinguish between Western and Eastern worldviews (what he calls ideologies). In the course of his analysis he relativizes Tönnies's Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft distinction as an intra-Western version of a much more general East-West difference. See Kavolis 1986.

[2] A word of warning is necessary here, for quite a lot of "globe talk" does not directly address the world-as-a-whole. "Global" is sometimes used—particularly in the United States—as a synonym for international or comparative. Nevertheless, I believe my general claim to be valid.

events and representative gatherings; the increasing concern with globe-threatening military, chemical, medical, and ecological problems; the considerable expansion of so-called international or global education; the aspirations of the leaders of some contemporary societies—most explicitly and conspicuously, the Japanese—to make those societies "global"; and so on. Also, the legitimacy of societal actions, attributes, and trends has increasingly become an issue that is cast in global terms, and terms such as "global public" and "world citizenry" have become part of contemporary public discourse.

Interest on the part of sociologists in the global circumstance as a definite theme did not crystallize until the 1960s. At that time social scientists mostly situated their concern with the world-as-a-whole within the then-thriving debate about societal modernization, and did so as a revamped version of the original Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft problem (Robertson and Lechner 1985).^[3] The thematization by social scientists (as opposed to specialists in international relations) of what later came to be widely (but not unproblematically) called the world-system was thus from the beginning largely centered on the theme of societal-structural change, specifically in reference to the differences between the societies of the "Third World" (itself a concept that had crystallized only a little earlier) and those of the West and/or the Soviet bloc. However, even at that time steps were being taken toward the analysis of culture at the global level. In our rejection of the prevailing conceptions and theories of societal modernization Nettl, Tudor, and I called for an approach that viewed modernization as a process of catching up with or surpassing another society or set of societies with attributes deemed to be, in whole or in part, desirable (Nettl and Robertson 1968; Robertson and Tudor 1968). Employing a mixture of Parsonian action-and-system theory, symbolic-interactionist ideas concerning (societal) identity and (societal) reflexivity, Schutzian ideas about multiple realities, and emerging conceptions of the structure of the system of intersocietal stratification, we attempted to refocus the field of modernization theory. Thus, we opposed to all intents and purposes what poststructuralists and postmodernists now call a "grand narrative" account of the past, present, and future—although that does not mean that the resulting perspective can be described, in the recent meaning of the term, as postmodern (Lyotard 1984). In place of theories that stood more or less directly in line with the nineteenth-century philosophies of history that indicated a definite, progressive movement of societies and civilizations along a particular (mainly Western) path, we offered a view of what, at the time, we continued

[3] Much of the relevant literature of that period is discussed, or at least cited, in Nettl and Robertson 1966, Robertson and Tudor 1968, Nettl and Robertson 1968, and Robertson 1968.

to call the "international system" as a place in which societies (or, more accurately, influential elites within societies) construct their own identities in tandem with the invocation and construction of ideas concerning the system as a whole. In this perspective societal modernization was not to be pivotally analyzed as an advance in a "progressive," Western direction or even as a move in the direction of either the First or Second worlds. Rather it was to be regarded analytically as indicating a field of definitions of the global situation, on the one hand, and self-societal definitions, on the other.

Generally speaking, the theory of modernization that we proposed in the 1960s was voluntaristic in the sense that Parsons (1937) had introduced that term. Although acknowledging—indeed emphasizing—that the global intersocietal system possessed its own structural properties and, thus, that societies acted under external-systemic (as well as internal) constraints, we also maintained that there was a strong element of "choice" involved as to the ideal direction or directions of societal change and the form or forms of global involvement. That element was seen to be centered on an emergent global culture, a global culture that demanded that all extant societies adopt an orientation to, if not necessarily an acceptance of, the idea of modernization. Thus, what was taken to be modern—or, more loosely, what was taken to be a worthy direction of societal aspiration—was something that was constructed in the global arena in relation to the constraints on (most) societies to maintain their own identities and senses of continuity in relation to the "international system." It was not just a case of the First or Second worlds presenting images of trajectories of modernization to Third (or Fourth) World societies but rather a much more complex situation of globewide "reality construction," in which intra- and intercivilizational and intra- and intersocietal traditions and circumstances all played important parts.

What placed the study of the global scene very firmly on the social-scientific map was, of course, the publication of Wallerstein's first extended statement on the making and history of what he called the modern world-system and the ensuing elaboration of his standpoint and debates about it (Wallerstein 1974). This chapter cannot be the place for a comprehensive analysis of the Wallersteinian program or its numerous extensions, variations, and rival perspectives.^[4] However, what does need to be noted is that it was, as quite a few critics have pointed out, remarkably economistic in its genesis but that in recent years there has been an increasing acknowledgment in Wallersteinian and neo-Wallersteinian circles of the significance of culture (Robertson and Lechner 1985). Wallerstein's

[4] Among the numerous and still proliferating discussions, see the following: Robertson and Lechner 1985, Chirot and Hall 1982, Worsley 1984, Markoff 1977, Berger 1986, and Gold 1986.

own program seems to be following the path taken by a number of Marxist theories: it started in an economic-deterministic mode and then, when impediments to the transition to (world) socialism were found to be very formidable, it turned to "the problem of culture" (Robertson 1985; Robertson and Lechner 1985).

More specifically, the world-system has come to be seen by Wallerstein himself as party guided and sustained by "metaphysical presuppositions" deriving historically from ideas developed during crucially formative periods of Western capitalism (Wallerstein 1983). These presuppositions—amounting to a kind of deep culture of and the capitalist world system per se—constitute, according to Wallerstein, an obstacle to the transformation of the world-system in a socialist direction. Hence, they need direct analytical (as well as political) treatment. Until the announcement of this view Wallersteinians had, more often than not, addressed the theme of culture by insisting that the variety of national and ethnic cultures produced in the world-system were epiphenomena of the shifting division of international-economic labor.^[5] Thus, the idea of a global culture was alien to the Wallersteinian school of thought, not least because it was, and still is, widely assumed by world-system theorists—and many other social scientists—that "culture" must always refer to a commonly held, relatively explicit body of ideas, values, beliefs, and symbols that constitutes a more or less binding consensus. Few would be so foolish as to assert that a global culture exists in this strong sense—with the important exception of those who strongly emphasize the force and significance of the global homogenization of popular culture, styles of consumerism, individual "life-styles," "global information," and so on—but it does not follow from the rejection of such an idea that culture must be regarded as inconsequential and usually epiphenomenal in the global situation. Regardless of the viability of Wallerstein's ideas about the presuppositions of the world-system, it is perfectly reasonable to think of global (or any other) culture as consisting in large part of contested and conflicting images and definitions of the global circumstance.^[6]

World-system theorists and researchers have clearly accomplished something of significance in emphasizing the idea that the world is a systemic phenomenon and that much of what has been traditionally analyzed

[5] What is sometimes called the Stanford school of world-system analysis has ventured much further than others in a cultural direction. See, in particular, Meyer 1980 and Thomas et al. 1987. See also Wuthnow 1980. Separately, the many contributions of Galtung since the early 1960s should be given special emphasis. Of particular relevance in the present context is Galtung 1980, not least because he has linked certain aspects of world-system theory to a discussion of possible forms of the world-as-a-whole.

[6] Other more specific layers of world culture are discussed in Nettl and Robertson 1968.

by social scientists in societal, or more broadly, civilizational terms can and should be relativized and discussed along global-systemic lines. That being granted, the fact remains that major difficulties arise from the Western-centeredness of the history of the Wallersteinian world-system. For this history, the issue of the making of the world-system is, empirically, a version of the problem of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which was itself a sociological precursor of, inter alia, the status-contract, Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft, mechanical-organic, and segmented-stratified Problemstellungen . But a more challenging and sociologically appropriate strategy is to relativize these Problemstellungen in such a way as to view the global system in a much more far-reaching perspective, one in which "the world" is not assumed to have been made simply from and out of the West (even though clearly in some respects it has).^[7]

Global Culture?

The long detour that Wallerstein took on his way to recognizing the significance of culture in the global system is all the more regrettable when we acknowledge that it was clear even in the 1950s and 1960s that a variety of images of desirable trajectories of societal change was available (Nettl and Robertson 1968). To be sure, there was a sense in which the notion of modernity itself was conceived both in social science and in the everyday world of national and institutional leaders along distinctively Western lines, but even in those decades the more general notion of what may be called societal improvement took different forms (of which "modernization" in the restricted sense was certainly one). By now, as a number of East Asian cases, in particular, clearly show, the term modernization itself has been so generalized in the real world that it carries much less specificity than it did at the time it fell out of favor in many social-scientific circles (largely in response to the Wallersteinian argument that the proper unit of analysis was not the national society but the world-system).^[8]

Thus Wallersteinian (and other Marxist or Trotskyist) theories of the world economy and its sociocultural ramifications have—at least until very recently—largely chosen to ignore (or, at least, play down) the idea that not merely are there ideal as well as material interests of great sociocultural significance but that "world images" play a crucial role in framing the directions in which these interrelated sets of interests are pursued. The concept of world images has to be taken very seriously and employed more literally than it was in Max Weber's work. I use the term

[7] On this point see Worsley 1984 and Bull and Watson 1984.

[8] The recent rapid economic growth of a number of East and Southeast Asian societies has been used to mount harsh critiques of the world-system and other closely related perspectives. See Berger 1986 and Gold 1986.

mainly—as I have already implied—in the sense of images of global order. In a more technical, neo-Kantian sense, I am addressing the issue of how the world is variously, and often conflictually, regarded as possible. Whereas Weber's concept of world images referred to very general orientations to and conceptions of the human condition (particularly, Weber was interested in the relationship between the intramundane and the supramundane aspects of the cosmos), the concept of world images as I employ it here refers mostly and more concretely to conceptions of how the intramundane world is or should be structured. That does not mean, however, that the wider cosmic aspect of the concept of world images is irrelevant.

Weber's work as a whole was, of course, directed largely at issues centered on the crystallization of modern rationalism. His interest in world images was largely dictated by his desire to comprehend the historical circumstances of the rise of rationalism in the Occidental world. A rather different, but not incompatible, orientation to the phenomena that were of central significance to Weber was promoted in one of Parsons's very last essays. In "Religious and Economic Symbolism in the Western World" Parsons (1979) discussed the cultural responses to what, for the sake of brevity, he called the industrial revolution. This topic constituted a very significant turn in Parsonian action theory, but one that has received exceedingly little attention. Parsons argued that the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century stood diachronically in line with the thematization of the erotic-sexual aspect of human life, which had occurred in the period of early Christianity and the shift from ancient Judaistic particularism to early Christian universalism. In ancient Judaism, he argued, the sexual-erotic dimension of life had been, so to say, hidden by laws and rituals concerning familial relationships and the Deuteronomic distinction between in- and out-group relations (Nelson 1969); however, the early Christian doctrinal obliteration of the in-group/out-group distinction involved a confrontation with the "dangers" of sexuality and eroticism. (This assertion is, almost needless to say, a controversial and fragile one in light of the actual history of Christian attitudes toward the Jews.)

Parsons claimed that the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century was both a diachronic-functional equivalent and an evolutionary upgrading of the mission to the Gentiles. It constituted another crucial stage in the odyssey of particularism-universalism, involving the "revelation" of the economy as a potentially autonomous realm. The market economy represented at one and the same time a vehicle of universalistic, potentially global social interaction and exchange, on the one hand, and a "dangerous" intrusion on traditional forms of sociality and solidarity, on the other. It was part of Parsons's argument that the general

character of modern social theory, ideology, and political culture was largely shaped during the early-nineteenth-century response to the thematization of the economy as a relatively autonomous realm of life.^[9] To this argument I add the claim that responses to globality are very likely to frame the character of social theory, doctrine, ideology, and culture in the decades ahead. The meanings ascribed to the "dangers" of the world as a single sociocultural entity (notably, concerns about threats to humanity as a whole, on the one hand, and the massive relativization of identities and traditions, on the other) constitute the crucible in which major ideas of great potential significance are being formed. More than that, responses to globality are potentially the focal point of the social movements of the future. The revelations of the productive forces of sex and the economy have been followed by the baring of the problem of the fate of the human species as a whole (Robertson 1982). However, this does not suggest that these productive forces have diminished in sociocultural significance. On the contrary, they have now acquired explicitly global significance—as AIDS and current problems of global economic justice clearly demonstrate.

To a small, but not insignificant, degree the perspective I bring to bear on the contemporary world-as-whole is in line with certain analytical trends within the general world-system theoretical framework. For example, Jameson—a literary critic and interpreter of culture who attunes much of his current work to Wallerstein's ideas—in his plea for "the reinvention, in a new situation, of what Goethe long ago theorized as 'world literature,' "argues that contemporary "cultural structures and attitudes" of relevance to the world culture scene were "in the beginning vital responses to infrastructural realities (economic and geographic, for example)" (Jameson 1968, 68). Such cultural structures and attitudes should, he insists, initially be seen as "attempts to resolve more fundamental contradictions—attempts which then outlive the situations for which they were devised, and survive, in reified forms as 'cultural patterns'" (Jameson 1986, 78). Jameson then goes on to argue that "those patterns themselves become part of the objective situation confronted by later generations, and … having once been part of the solution to a dilemma, then become part of the new problem." His argument is not unpersuasive, but at the same time it illustrates some of the problems in the world-system perspective on culture. In one sense Jameson's observations are clearly compatible with the way in which Parsons treated Western cultural responses to the onset of the industrial revolution. However, the term "infrastructure" gives the impression of cultural responses being

[9] Parsons's analysis appears in some respects to be continuous with Smelser's extended discussion (1959) of situational responses to structural differentiation in the early English industrial revolution.

essentially secondary to material factors. Moreover, Jameson appears to be trying to sustain the view that in globalized world the major point of reference is still the economic infrastracture rather than globality itself, which—as I have been insisting—transcends, although it still includes, the global economy. Furthermore, in a situation of increasing consciousness of the world-as-a-whole one would expect civilizational conceptions of the entire world that predate the emergence of the infrastructure to be activated. In other words, even though national, regional, and other cultural patterns have undoubtedly been partly formed as responses to the growth of the capitalist world-system, the contemporary concern with the world-as-a-whole recrystallizes, in varying degrees, the historical philosophies and theologies of ancient civilizations concerning the structure and cosmic significance of the world. The critical difference between, for example, traditional Islamic or Chinese conceptions of the world and present ones is that the modern worldviews, unlike the old ones, are being reformulated or upgraded in terms of a very concrete sense of the structure of the entire world in its modern (or postmodern) form.

At this point it is necessary to become more precise about the use of such terms as world-system, global condition, and so on. One of the major limitations of the world-system perspective is its concentration on the relationships between and connections among societies—and, of course, its casting of those relationships and connections in primarily economic terms. Moreover, even were the comprehension of intersocietal relationships to be more broadly conceived, the problem would remain that what Parsons (1971) called the system of modern societies is but one among a number of facets of the global-human circumstance that are clearly part of contemporary consciousness. Therefore, in trying to pinpoint for analytical purposes the very general structure of the global-human conditions I suggest (Robertson and Chirico 1985) that in addition to the world-system of societies there are three other major components: societies as such, individuals, and humankind. Together, the system of societies, societies, individuals, and humankind constitute the basic and most general ingredients of what I call the global-human condition, a term that draws attention to both the world in its contemporary concreteness and humanity as a species. Finally, as I noted before, globality refers to the circumstance of extensive awareness of the world-as-a-whole, including the "species" aspect.

The set of major components of the global-human condition that I specify may be used to treat responses to and symbolic constructions of the thematization of globality in the same analytical spirit as Parsons typified responses to the thematization of the economy in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I depart slightly from Parsons, however,

in producing a typology of general images of the contemporary world-as-a-whole (or the global-human condition) rather than the specific social-theoretic and ideological responses that he delineated in respect of the industrial revolutions (Parson's "types" included socialism in its more economic forms, Gemeinschaft romanticism, what I summarize as corporatism, and utilitarian individualism). Moreover, I do not press as hard as Parsons did the idea that each response, when it explicitly rejects the other three, constitutes a form of reductionism or avoidance of complexity in the mode of fundamentalism (cf. Robertson 1983). That is not because of disagreement with Parsons on this interpretive matter but rather because my primary concern is simply to map, described, and provide a rationale for the very idea of analyzing major general responses to globalization and globality.

Images of World Order as Cultural Responses to Globality

First, I present four images of world order in relatively formal terms. Having done this, I then add some empirical flesh.

Global Gemeinschaft 1 . This conception of the global circumstance insists that the world should and can be ordered only in the form of a series of relatively closed societal communities. The symmetrical version of this image of world order sees societal communities as relatively equal to each other in terms of the worth of their cultural traditions, their institutions, and the kinds of individuals that inhabit them. The asymmetrical version, however, regards one or a small number of societal communities as necessarily being more important than others. Those who advocate global relativism" based on the "sacredness" of all indigenous traditions fall into the symmetrical category; those who claim that theirs is "the middle kingdom," "the society of destiny" or "the lead society" fall into the second category. In the late twentieth century, both versions tend to seize on the idea that individuals can only live satisfactory lives in clearly bounded societal communities. However, this idea does not mean that either of these two versions emphasizes individualism or individually. Rather, they are particularly concerned with the problem of the "homelessness" of individuals in the face of the "dangers" of globalization.

Global Germeinschaft 2 . This image of the world situation maintains that only in terms of a fully globewide community per se can there be global order. Corresponding to the distinction between symmetrical and asymmetrical version of Gemeinschaft 1 , there are centralized.

     and decentralized versions of this image of the world as almost literally a "global village." The first version insists that there must be a globewide Durkheimian "conscience collective," and the second version maintains that a global community is possible on a much more pluralistic basis. Both versions of this second type of Gemeinschaft stress humankind as a pivotal ingredient of the wolrd-as-a-whole. Thus the dangers of globalization are to be overcome by commitment to the communal unity of the human species.

Global Gesellschaft 1 . This variant of the image of the world as a form of Gessellschaft involves seeing the global circumstance as a series of open societies, with considerable sociocultural exchange among them. The symmetrical version considers all societies as politically and equal and of reciprocally beneficial material and cultural significance; the asymmetrical version entails the view that there must be dominant or hegemonic societies that play strategically significant roles in sustaining the world and, indeed, that these societies are the primary mechanism of the world order. In both cases national societies are regarded as necessarily constituting the central feature of the modern global circumstance. Thus the problem of globalization is to be confronted either by extensive societal collaboration or by a heirarchical pattern of intersocietal relationships.

Global Gesellschaft 2 . This conception of world order claims that world order can only be obtained on the basis of formal, planned world organization. The centralized version of Gesellschaft 2 is committed to a strong supranatural polity, but the decentralized form advocates something like a federation at the global level. Both variants take the world system of societies as constituting the major unavoidable dimension of the contemporary global-human condition. Both variants share the view that the only effective way of dealing with the dangers of globalization is by the systematic organization of that process.

In attempting to provide empirical nuance to each of the four major types of orientation to world order, I emphasize that I am particularly interested, given my continuing insistence on the fairly recent emergence of globality as an aspect of contemporary consciousness, in explicitly globe-oriented ideologies, doctrines, and other bodies of knowledge. I define an explicitly globe-oriented perspective as one that espouses as a central aspect of its message a concern with the patterning of the entire world. In so doing, I allow room for the perspectives that even though concerned about the phenomenon of globality may actually be militantly

opposed to those who urge studying or embracing the globality of contemporary life.

A significant example of what has been sometimes described by its proponents as "antiglobalism" is provided by recent attempts in parts of the American South to limit the exposure of the children in public schools to ideas that might involve relativization of American culture and citizenship. What is of particular interest about these occurrences is that they have grown almost directly out of a continuous reference to an older opposition to the alleged dangers of "secular humanism." Antiglobalism thus becomes a symbolic vehicle for generalizing beyond the dangers of intrasocietal secular Gesellschaft to the perceived threats from other cultures and the world per se. Initially, the objection was to a "national" secularity that was indifferent to religion and local custom; now the objection, in the face of the relativizing dangers of globalization, is also—perhaps even more—to the contaminating effects of the exposure to alien doctrines and philosophies, such as those of Islam. In other words, the shift from the problem of the making of the modern West to the problem of the world-as-a-whole is not simply a shift in the focus of intellectual social theory but of real-world practice (and certainly not only in the West itself).

Thus, antiglobal movements and sociocultural tendencies are to be included conceptually in the family of globe-oriented orientations. Their growth provides just as much evidence of the development of a consciousness of globality as is the more-often studied rise of movements that are concerned in one way or another with organizing what are perceived to be the crucial aspect of the entire world (such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, or the international women's movement) or, indeed, the world in its entirety (as is apparently the case with some religious movements such as the South Korea-centered Unification Church and the Japan-based Soka Gakkai). Moreover, even though antiglobal perspectives are not pivotally concerned with the theme of world order per se, they are surely held to a significant degree in "subliminal thrall" by that which they oppose. They address the problem of the world-as-a-whole negatively but nonetheless their attitude toward the latter tends to imply a conception of how the contemporary global-human circumstance is possible. (Although in the case of some American Christian fundamentalist groups there is evidence that the world-as-a-whole is considered to be impossible—a view that is expressed in apocalyptic symbolism.)

Views of the world-as-a-whole as consisting of a series of relatively closed societal communities (Gemeinschaft 1 )—with each community conceived of as preciously unique—became evident in the West toward the end of the eighteenth century, notably in the writings of Herder. The

symmetrical version of this view has found twentieth-century expression in anthropological relativism and within certain contexts of the apparently worldwide ethnic revival (Smith 1981; Lechner 1984). The asymmetrical version—which insists on the greater worth of one or a small number of societal communities in comparison to others—is much older; the paradigmatic case is the classical Chinese conception of China as the Middle Kingdom at the center of a world that is structured as a series of concentric circles of communal forms of life. Historically, there have also been strong parallel versions of this kind of conception in Islam. In the modern period of mature globality the asymmetrical dispersed Gemeinschaft worldwide is to be seen in the large number of politicoreligious fundamentalist movements that have arisen around the world. Many of these movements advocate the restoration of their own societal communities to a pristine condition, with the rest of the world being left as a series of closed communities posing no threat to the "best" community. This conception involves a kind of "apartheid" view of the world, although it does not necessarily rest on principles of racial superiority per se.

The idea of the world as being in and of itself a single community (Gemeinschaft 2 ), or at least having the potential for so becoming, has a very long history, having been expressed in such notions as worldwide earthly paradise and the Kingdom of God on earth. In the modern period a number of new religious movements have arisen that advocate, and in fact are taking, concrete steps toward nothing less than the global organization of the entire world. The movement that surely can lay legitimate claim to being the oldest significant globe-oriented organization—namely, the Roman Catholic Church—has recently become a particularly effective globe-oriented actor across most of the world, claiming humanity to be its major concern. Perhaps the most striking of the new religious movements in this regard tend to be of East Asian, particularly Japanese, origin, where the idea of harmonizing different worldviews has a very long history. For the most part such movements may be associated with the centralized version of global Gemeinschaft because they often appear to seek a global harmonization of existing worldviews under a theocratic umbrella of "absolute values" (such is the case of the Unification Church). The more decentralized version of the view of the entire world as a single community is to be found in many strands of the contemporary peace movement and in romantic Marxism. In such cases the response to globality is to argue, in effect, that the only way to save the world from extreme complexity and turmoil is to establish a global community that is highly respectful of local tradition and cultural variety. Thus whereas the centralized version of globewide Gemeinschaft seeks a "harmonizing theocracy" at the global level, the decentralized version is what might be called "concultural" in its

conception of world order (Mazrui 1976). The concultural view characterizes cultural traditions as constituting a set of indigenous variations on the condition and predicaments of humankind. Some of the numerous movements centered on theologies of liberation that have arisen in many parts of the world (often through emulation of the most solidly established liberation theology—namely, that of Latin America) appear to subscribe to this perspective on world order.

The image of world order that emphasizes the pivotal significance of national societies (Gessellschaft 1 ) involves in its symmetrical version the idea that we would see the world as a kind of aggregate of all societies. This image is what we might call the small society view of the world, although one finds strands of such thinking in societies that are certainly not small geographically or in terms of their resources (for example, Canada). This orientation seems to constitute a societal parallel to the decentralized version of Gemeinschaft 1 in that it advocates a kind of global consociationalism in which very different interests are more or less systematically combined so as to realize the interests of the whole. In contrast, as I have suggested, the asymmetrical version of Gemeinschaft 1 rejects the view of a world order centered on all societies. It stands in the tradition of international Realpolitik and needs no further elaboration. It may be added, however, that social movements can and do directly advocate this standpoint (quite apart from its advocacy by politicians and rulers in great-power societies). Certain religious and ideological points of view hold that the great-power arrangement of the world is the only thing that prevents cultural contamination. Thus, for example, Gesellschaft 1 in its asymmetrical form may be combined with the asymmetrical version of Gemeinschaft 1 , the former being instrumental in promoting a world of "greater" and "lesser" societal communities.

The Gesellschaft 2 image of world order conceives of the world primarily in its thoroughly systemic nature—or at least advocates that only formal systemicity can, so to say, save the world from the chaos of globality. In its centralized form this image involves a conception of strong world government, an idea that has been most frequently proposed during the present century by liberals, on the one hand, and Marxists, on the other. The difference between the two is that the liberals see a potential world government as mainly necessary to prevent global chaos, whereas the Marxists seek to use it to usher in and sustain world socialism (often leaving open the question of whether the world state should wither away in favor of another type of global order). Finally, the decentralized form of the image of the world as Gesellschaft 2 is best illustrated by the so-called world federalists, although, in ideological terms, the Wallersteinians' view of the present condition of the world also fits here. The major difference between the world federalists and

the Wallersteinians is, of course, that whereas the former aspire to overcome the problems of globality by federalizing a disorderly world-system, the latter see the present world-system as ordered but with dynamic contradictions that will eventually transform it to a higher and preferable form of order.

I have attempted to develop some ideas concerning global culture, particularly in the form of cultural responses to globality and globalization. My approach has used the term global culture in a way that, to a considerable extent, parallels the use of the term economic culture as a concept that refers to those aspects of a culture that have a specific bearing on economic action and institutions. Thus global culture refers particularly to culture that has a close bearing on the phenomenon of globality as a "dangerous" phenomenon of world-historical significance. Globality is a virtually unavoidable problem of contemporary life. The general images of world order that I have expounded have a number of further possible applications, including the analysis of the terms in which societies formulate (and display internal conflicts with respect to) their modes of participation in the modern global-human circumstance (Robertson 1987).

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A Reappraisal of Theories of Social Change and Modernization

S. N. Eisenstadt

In this chapter I reexamine theories of modernization in the framework of a more general reappraisal of the classical theories of social change, especially the evolutionary and semievolutionary theories. I first reexamine some of the basic assumptions of classical evolutionary theories of change and then proceed to the presentation of a somewhat new approach to the processes of social change—from the point of view of what can be called a "civilizational" perspective. I conclude with a reexamination of theories of modernization from this perspective.

1. Theories of Social Change

1.1 Some Assumptions of the Classical Evolutionary Perspective

The classical evolutionary perspective in social change was based on several assumptions. First, the classical perspective assumed that structural differentiation is manifest in the development of relatively specialized roles that organize the flow of resources and the consequent social division of labor in all institutional spheres: technological, economic, political, religious, and the like.

Second, the classical approach accepted a relatively closed systematic view of society. It strongly emphasized that the social division of labor is manifest both in different degrees of structural differentiation and in the development of specialized roles and institutional spheres that organize the flow of resources. The classical perspective held that these features explain the basic characteristics and dynamics of any given institutional structure.

Third, this perspective maintained that criteria similar to those already employed in the study of institutional differentiation could be

readily applied, without modification, to examinations of the cultural sphere.

Fourth, the classical evolutionary perspective assumed that there is a "natural" tendency toward the parallel development of differentiation in all spheres. Exceptions to this tendency, such as partial or delayed differentiation, were generally treated as unusual or problematic.

The major criticisms of this perspective, as they have developed in the social sciences, are well known and need not be repeated here. Rather, I attempt to point out some new directions for the analysis of social change from the point of view of a more general approach to the study of the construction of social order.

1.2. Elites, Cultural Orientations, and Systems of Control

This approach to the analysis of the construction of the social order and of the major social actors participating in it stresses that any institutional setting is brought into being by a combination of several major components. The first component is the level and distribution of resources among different groups in society, that is, the type of division of labor that is predominant in a given society. The second component is the institutional entrepreneurs or elites that are available—or competing—for the mobilization and structuring of such resources and for the organization and articulation of the interests of major groups generated by the social division of labor. The third component is the nature of the conceptions or, especially, ontological "visions" that inform the activities of these elites and that are derived from the major cultural orientations of codes prevalent in a society.

The institutionalization of these visions provides the arena for both concretizing the charismatic dimension of social order and striving for a meaningful social order. This institutionalization is effected and crystallized by the activities of the major elites. The most important among such elites are, first, the political elites, who deal most directly with the regulation of power in society, second, the articulators of the models of the cultural order whose activities are oriented to the construction of meaning, and third, the articulators of the solidarity of the major groups, who address themselves to the construction of trust.

The structure of these elites is closely related to the basic cultural orientations or "codes" prevalent in a society. In other words, different types of elites are carriers of different types of ontological visions and orientations. These elites tend to exercise different modes of control over the allocation of basic resources in the society in connection with their types of cultural orientation. In this way they combine the structuring of trust, the provision of meaning, and the regulation of power with

the division of labor in society, institutionalizing the charismatic dimension of the social order.

Such control is exercised by these elites (or rather by coalitions of elites) primarily through control over access to the major institutional markets (economic, political, cultural, etc.), control over the conversion of the major resources between these markets, and control over the production and distribution of information that is central in the structuring of the cognitive maps of the members of their society, that is, the members' perceptions of the nature of their society in general and of their reference orientations and reference groups in particular.

Different coalitions of elites, together with the modes of control they exercise, shape the major characteristics and boundaries of the social systems that they help to construct, namely, the political system, the economic system, the system of social stratification and class formation, and the overall marosocietal system. The differing modes of control shape the power aspects of the institutional structures in different societies. Especially important among these structures are the structure of authority, the conception of justice, and of political struggles, the principles of social hierarchy, and the definition of the scope of membership of different communities.

However, the concretization of these tendencies takes place in different political-ecological settings. Two aspects of such settings are of special importance. The first aspect, heavily stressed in recent research, is the importance of international political and economic systems. The places of societies within these systems and the different types of relations of hegemony and dependency are issues of particular importance. The second aspect is the recognition of the great variety of political-ecological settings of societies, including differences between small and large societies, their respective dependence of internal or external markets, and the like. Both of these aspects greatly affect the ways in which institutional contours and dynamics tend to develop.

The approaches developed here have several implications for the analysis of the systematic qualities of social life.

1.     The construction of the boundaries of collectivities and social and, above all, political system is a basic component or aspect of human social life.

2.     Such systems and boundaries do not exist—as has often been assumed in sociological, anthropological, and historical analysis—as natural closed systems. Rather they are continuously constructed, open, and very fragile.

3.     No human population is confined within any single such system. Rather human populations exist in a multiplicity of only partly coalescing organizations, collectivities, and systems.

4.     Such systems—and the division of labor that they entail and that is not naturally given—are constructed by special social actors and carriers, especially by carriers of different ontological visions. In the process of such construction, ideological, power, and material components are always closely interwoven.

5.     Such construction of boundaries denotes the delineation of the definite relations of the various collectivities or systems with their respective environments. However, such environments are not given in "nature"; they are themselves constructed by social actors through the construction of the boundaries of social systems.

6.     Of central importance in the construction and maintenance of such systems are different integrative mechanism that acquire an autonomy of their own. The assurance of the working of these mechanisms is of crucial importance in the maintenance and change of societies or civilizations.

7.     Such integrative mechanism becomes more important and autonomous the more complex social and political systems and civilizational frameworks become.

8.     Such complexity is manifest not only in the different levels of structural differentiation and the division of labor but also in other dimensions, such as the degree of overlap or coalescence of the degree of difference among different organizations and collectivities. These dimensions, in turn, are influenced by different ideological and power elements.

Thus the process of the construction of collectivities, social system, and civilizational frameworks is a process of continuous struggle in which ideological, material, and power elements are continuously interwoven. These processes are structured, articulated, and carried by different social actors. The boundaries of these systems and frameworks are defined by different coalition of such actors.

Several types of social actors or carriers have to be distinguished. First, there are those who structure the division of labor in a society, that is, its economic differentiation and ecological setup. Second, there are carriers who articulate ideologies and political control. Finally, there are carriers who are extremely important in the study of the construction of boundaries of collectivities, namely the carriers of solidarity for different ascriptive groups.

Among these different carriers there develops a very complex interaction

that goes beyond what has been assumed in sociological, anthropological, and historical analysis in general and in the literature that deals with collapse in particular.

1.3. Protest, Conflict, and Change

Thus different coalitions of elites construct the boundaries of social systems, collectivities, and organizations. Yet no such construction can be continuously stable. The crystallization and reproduction of any social order, of any collectivity, organization, political system, or civilizational framework is shaped by the different forces and factors analyzed in the preceding section and generates processes of conflict, change, and possible transformation.

Conflict is inherent in any setting of social interaction for two basic reasons. The first reason is the plurality of actors in any such setting. The second reason is the multiplicity of the principles inherent in the institutionalization of any such setting—the multiplicity of institutional principles and of cultural orientations—and the power struggles and conflicts among different groups and movements that any such institutionalization entails.

Any setting of social interaction, but particularly the macrosocietal order, involves a plurality of actors—elites, movements, and groups—with different levels of control over natural and social resources. These elites continuously struggle over the control, ownership, and the possibility of using such resources, generating ubiquitous conflicts on all levels of social interaction.

The ubiquity of conflicts in any setting of social interaction is intensified by the interweaving of the plurality of actors with the basic characteristics of the social division of labor and the establishment of institutional principles. Such specification entails conflicting principles, premises, and prerequisites, each of which is carried by a different social actor who may also carry different cultural orientations. Different actors may stress the centrality of their respective spheres and develop their own autonomous dynamics at the expense of others, thus generating different types of systemic contradictions.

The processes of institutionalization of any social order entail a certain heterogeneity and pluralism. Such heterogeneity is above all rooted in the multiplicity of actors and cultural orientations inherent in any such institutionalization and in the incipient tendencies toward the development of alternative ontological visions mentioned above.

Accordingly, whatever the success of the attempts of any coalition of elites to establish and legitimize common norms, these norms are probably never fully accepted by all those participating in a given order. Most groups tend to exhibit some autonomy and differences in their attitudes

toward these norms and in their willingness or ability to provide the resources demanded by the given institutional system. Some groups may be greatly opposed to the very premises of the institutionalization of a given system. Others may share its values and symbols only to a very small extent and accept these norms only as a necessary evil and as binding on them only in a very limited sense. Still others may share these values and symbols and accept the norms to a greater degree but may look on themselves as the more truthful depositaries of these same values. They may oppose the concrete levels at which the symbols are institutionalized by the elite in power and may attempt to interpret them in different ways. They may not accept the models of cultural and social order that they think are upheld by the "center" as the legitimator of the existing distribution of power and resources, and they may uphold cultural orientations different from or counter to those upheld by the center. Other groups may develop new interpretations of existing models.

In any social order, then, there is always a strong element of dissension about the distribution of power and values. Hence, as we have seen, any institutional system is never fully homogeneous in the sense of being fully accepted or accepted to the same degree by all those participating in it.

Even if for very long periods of time a great majority of the members of a given society may identify to some degree with the values and the norms of the given system and be willing to provide it with the resources it needs, other tendencies develop in connection with intergroup conflicts, demographic changes, and the development of heterodox ontological visions and these changes may give rise to changes in the initial attitudes of any given group to the basic premises of the institutional system.

Thus "antisystems" may develop within any society. Although the antisystems often remain latent for long periods of time, they may also constitute, under propitious conditions, important foci of systematic change. The existence of such potential antisystems is evident in the existence in all societies of themes and orientations of protest. These social movements and heterodoxies are often led by different secondary elites. Such latent antisystems may be activated and transformed into processes of change by several processes connected with the continuity and maintenance, or the reproduction, of different settings of social interaction in general and the macrosocietal order in particular. Such processes include, first, shifts in the relative power positions and aspirations of different categories and groups of people, second, the activation in members of the new generation, particularly in young members of the upper classes and elites, of the potential rebelliousness and antinomian orientations inherent in any process of socialization, and third, several sociomorphological or sociodemographic

processes through which the biological reproduction of the population is connected with the social reproduction of settings of social interaction, and fourth, the interaction between such settings and their natural and intersocietal environments, such as movements of population, conquest, and the like. The crystallization of these potentialities of change usually takes place through the activities of secondary elites, who attempt to mobilize various groups and resources in order to change some aspects of the social order as shaped by the ruling coalition of elites.

The possibility of the failure of integrative and regulative mechanisms is inherent in any society. Every civilization and every type of political and economic system constructs some specific systematic boundaries within which it operates. But the very construction of such civilizations and social systems also generates within them various conflicts and contradictions that may lead to change, transformation, or decline, that is, to different modes of restructuring their boundaries.

Although these potentialities of conflict and change are inherent in all human societies, their concrete development, their intensity, and the concrete directions of change and transformation they engender differ greatly among different societies and civilizations. Societies vary in their specific constellation of the specific forces analyzed here, that is, different constellations of cultural orientations, elites, patterns of the social division of labor, and political-ecological settings and processes.

My approach makes four assumptions. First, at all levels and in all types of technological and economic development and structural differentiation, the interaction between various aspects of the social division of labor and the activities of the major elites generates the different patterns and the different dynamics of centers and institutional formations. Second, at any given level or in any given type of differentiation or social division of labor, a very wide variety of such patterns may have developed in different circumstances. Third, the differences in such dynamics are principally shaped by the crystallization of different coalitions of elites. And fourth, some aspects of these dynamics may be relatively similar (even if they can never be exactly the same) across the different levels and types of the social division of labor and social differentiation.

1.4. The Perspective of International Systems in the Study of Social Change

A crucial component of my approach is the importance of international systems. Such an approach, however, entails a reappraisal of the initial literature on this subject. In this reappraisal I criticize this literature's assumptions that the modern capitalist world system is the most important single determinant of the dynamics of all contemporary international systems, that the dynamics of the modern capitalist world system epitomize the dynamics of all contemporary international systems, and

that this system is the embodiment of a full-fledged international system. The reappraisal also criticizes the literature on international systems for its tendency to reify the (capitalist) international system. This reification is often made in terms similar to those allegedly employed by the structural-functional school in its analyses of social systems, which has been the butt of many of the criticisms of the scholar who have stressed the new international perspective.

The international systems approach has not recognized (1) that any single dominant, hegemonic international system, such as the Roman Empire, exists in close ecological relations with other systems or political units; (2) that within the confines of any seemingly single international framework, there may in fact develop several different international systems—political, economic, cultural, etc.—each with some autonomy of its own; and (3) that the interrelations among these systems are of crucial importance for the understanding of other dynamics.

Also, this approach, because of its emphasis on the international system and its neglect of the internal structure of both the hegemonic and the dependent units, has been unable to analyze fully the different types of impact of the various hegemonic centers, the different responses of potentially dependent units to the impact of the hegemonic center, and the shifts of power in different international systems or the possibilities of their internal transformation.

2. A Reappraisal of Theories of Modernization

2.1. The Development of the Problem in Modern Social Analysis

The problem of the distinctive characteristics of modern societies in general, and of the first such society—Western Europe—in particular, and of the differences between modern and other societies has constituted a basic concern of modern social thought from its very beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries observers emphasized the uniqueness of modern Western society in comparison with other societies, but even then the exact nature of this uniqueness constituted a rather difficult problem.

To the evolutionists this uniqueness seemed to lie in the fact that modern European societies were the apogee of the evolutionary potential of humanity, an apogee that had not been reached elsewhere. For Marx European society was the only society in which capitalism developed. Although he sometimes could be interpreted as believing that all societies would go through the same basic stages of evolution, his concern with the Asiatic mode of production shows that he was aware of the distinctiveness of Western civilization,—the only one that had generated

a capitalist system and the one from which this system was spreading throughout the world.

Perhaps the most articulate formulation of the uniqueness of Western civilization can be found in the work of Max Weber. At the same time, however, Weber's work contains some of the more problematic aspects of this approach, especially when it is applied to the study of the spread of modernization beyond Europe. Weber's basic Problemstellung was to explain the specificity and uniqueness of European modernity, to explain why the "radical" tendency to rationalized the world developed in the West and not in other civilizations. Weber saw this specificity in the tendency toward the overall rationalization of social life. Major manifestations of this tendency occurred in all spheres of social life: in the emergence of capitalist civilization, in the bureaucratization of different forms of social life, in the secularization of the world view, and in the development of modern science and the so-called scientific world view, which bears within itself the radical tendency toward Entzauberung, the disenchantment of the world. He saw the roots of all these processes in the potentially rationalizing tendencies of the Protestant religious orientations.

In order to understand the specific transformative potentialities of these orientations, Weber compared Protestantism with other world religions. He attempted to combine the analysis of world religions and the analysis of the internal dynamics of their civilizations, especially the tendencies toward rationalization inherent in them. He then compared these dynamics with those that had taken place in the West. He stressed (and this is indeed one of his great contributions) that the non-Western modes of rationalization, together with their related institutional systems, differed greatly from the Western mode. Thus he recognized, at least implicitly, that each mode of religious rationalization develops its own pattern of dynamics.

However, because of is comparative starting point and his major concern with the uniqueness of the West, Weber did not fully explicate these implicit comparative orientations. He tended to minimize the internal dynamics of these civilizations and the full explication of his implicit recognition of such specific dynamics, and instead to stress in different ways the "traditional", seemingly nondynamic aspects of these civilizations. On the one hand, Weber emphasized the uniqueness of the West and its role, as it were, as the model for the world; on the other hand, he recognized the specificity of the dynamics of other civilizations. This contradiction, although not fully visible in Weber's or Marx's own times when the spread of capitalism and modernization beyond Europe and the West were only in the incipient stage, became much more visible in the later stages of the development of modernization studies after the Second World War.

2.2 Studies of Modernization after the Second World War

In the first stages of the burgeoning of modernization studies after the Second World War, a burgeoning that signaled the revival and fuller systematic development of macrosociological and comparative historical studies, the contradiction between the uniqueness of the West and the specificity of other civilizations became perhaps even more dimmed than in Marx's or Weber's original works. This development occured because these studies of modernization and development involved a very far-reaching shift in their basic orientations compared with earlier "classical" studies. Instead of stressing the specificity of European civilization and European modernity, these studies assumed that the development of modernity constituted the apogee of the evolutionary potential of mankind and that the kernels of this process are in principle to be found in most human societies. Hence they asked questions about which conditions facilitate and which conditions impede the development of such modernization in all human societies. At the same time, however, they took for granted that the European (and perhaps also the American) experience constitutes the major paradigm of such a modern society and civilization. One of the most important offshoots of these studies was that of the convergence of industrial societies, perhaps best illustrated in the work of Clark Kerr.

In these works observers attempted to combine studies of micro settings and various social processes—communication, urbanization, value-transformation, and the like—with a broader macrosocietal framework. The first studies of modernization and the development, and many later ones that continued in this vein, evaluated societies by various indices of modernity, development, and modernization. They then tried to determine either the extent to which the societies studied approximated the model or models of modern industrial society or the factors that impeded their advance in terms of these indices. The possibility that a modern social order might develop from within various societies was recognized and explored.

Although with the passing of time there developed a growing recognition of the possible diversity of transitional societies, observers still assumed that such diversity would disappear in the final stage of modernity. This assumption was evident in the theory of the convergence of industrial societies. To quote Goldthorpe:

The diversity within the industrializing process which he [Kerr] emphasizes turns out to be that evident in the relatively early stages—in Rostovian language, those of the "break with traditionalism," "take-off," and the "drive to maturity." And when the question arises of the "road ahead"— for already advanced, as well as developing societies—Kerr's view of the logic of industrialism is in fact such as to force him, willy-nilly, away from a

multilinear and towards a unilinear perspective; or, to be rather more precise, to force him to see hitherto clearly different processes of industrialization as becoming progressively similar in their socio-cultural correlates. As industrialism advances and becomes increasingly a world-wide phenomenon then, Kerr argues, the range of viable institutional structures and of a viable system of value and belief is necessarily reduce. All societies, whatever the path by which they entered the industrial world, will tend to approximate, even if asymptomatically, the pure industrial form. (Goldthorpe 1971, 263)

Behind these theories there loomed a conviction of the inevitability of progress toward modernity—be it political, industrial, or cultural—and toward the development of a universal modern civilization.

The ideological and institutional developments in the contemporary world, however, have not upheld this vision. The fact the great institutional variability exists among different modern and modernizing societies—not only among the transitional but also among the more developed and even the highly industrialized societies—became more and more apparent. The growing recognition that great symbolic and institutional variability and different modes of ideological and institutional dynamics attend the spread of modern civilization gave rise to a search for a systematic explanation. Two major approaches have developed in response to the disintegration of the initial model of modernization. The first approach stresses the importance of the traditions of different societies. The second approach referred to above stresses the dynamics of the international, especially the capitalist, system as the major factor explaining the variability and dynamics of different modern or modernizing societies.

These approaches have indeed pointed to very important factors that influence the dynamics of modern or modernizing societies. Yet they have also encountered many difficulties in their attempts to explain systematically the great variability of the dynamics of these new modern civilizations, the concrete patterns of change that have been taking place in different traditional societies, and the relations of these patterns to their respective historical experiences and the new situations created by the spread of modernity.

2.3. New Indications—Modernity as a New Civilization and its Differential Expansion

Out of these various controversies emerge some indications of a possible new perspective for the understanding of the contemporary world. This perspective is based on a particular combination of elements from the classical paradigms of modernization, from Marx (especially his analysis

of the Asian mode of production), from Gramsci, but, above all, from Weber, especially from his powerful insights about the internal dynamics of different civilizations. This perspective recognizes, on the one hand, the uniqueness of the civilization of modernity and its component of economic development and, on the other hand, the great variability of the symbolic, ideological, and institutional responses to it and the variability of the ways in which different civilizations and societies interpret different symbolic premises of modernity and different modern institutional patterns and dynamics.

This perspective entails a far-reaching reformulation of the vision of modernization and modern civilization. It does not view the process of modernization as the ultimate end point of the evolution of all known societies. It does not assume that the process of modernization brings out the evolutionary potential common to all societies. And it does not assume that the European experience is the most important and succinct manifestation and paradigm of the modernization process. Rather it considers that modernization or modernity is one specific type of civilization that originated in Europe and spread throughout the world, encompassing—especially after the Second World War—almost all of it.

The cyrstallization of this new type of civilization was not unlike the spread of the great religions or the great imperial expansions in past times. But because the expansion of this civilization almost always combined economic, political, and ideological aspects and forces, its impact on the societies to which it spread was much more intensive than in these other historical cases.

This perspective also entails the recognition that when historical civilizations expand, they challenge the symbolic and institutional premises of the societies that are incorporated into them. This challenge calls for responses from within these societies, which has the effect of opening up new options and possibilities. A great variety of modern or modernizing societies have developed out of these responses. They share many common characteristics but also evince great differences among themselves. These differences crystallized out of the selective incorporation—hence also the transformation—of the major symbolic premises and institutional formations of the original Western civilization as well as of their own civilizations.

This perspective necessitates the analysis of the basic characteristics and premises of this new, modern civilization, that is, the basic premises of European and Western civilization. The most salient of these premises, from the point of view of my concern, has been, first of all, the "revolutionary" origins of its visions and orientations. The revolutionary orientations that were at the root of most breakthroughs to modernity

have been oriented toward a far-reaching transformation of the nature and content of the centers of the social and cultural orders, the rules of participation in them and access to them, and the relations between these centers and the periphery. For these centers the major transformation that occurred concomitantly with modernity was the growing secularization of the centers, the rejection of the "givenness" of the centers' traditional contents and symbols, and the spread of the assumption that these contents and symbols can indeed be reexamined. These changes were closely connected with the growing autonomy of the political, cultural, and societal centers and above all with the changes in the relations between these centers and the periphery. They were also linked to the growing impingement of the periphery on the center, the periphery's increased access to the center, and the permeation of the periphery by the center, all of which often culminated in the obliteration of the differences between center and periphery, and made membership in the collectivity tantamount to participation in the center.

These processes were also closely related to changes in the basic orientations toward tradition and the bases of the legitimation of authority. The sanctity and givenness of the past as the major symbolic regulator of social, political, and cultural change and innovation gave way to the acceptance of innovation and an orientation to the future as the basic cultural dimensions.

Such changes were of course very closely connected in Europe with the assumption that the human and natural environments can be directed, and even mastered, by the conscious effort of man and society. Indeed, the central premise of European modernity was the possibility of the active transformation of crucial aspects of social, cultural, and natural orders by conscious human activity and participation. The fullest, although not the only, expression of these premises could be seen in the transformations and repercussions of the Protestant ethic in the economic, scientific, and political spheres and later in the impact these transformations had on the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Accordingly, the special characteristics of European modernity were initially focused on attempts to form a "rational" culture, an efficient economy, a civil (class) society, and nation-states where these rational tendencies could become fully articulated and within which major social actors, leaders, and influences could create a social and political order based on freedom.

The new civilization of modernity, which emerged from this background, was based ideologically and politically on the assumption of equality and the growing participation of the citizens in the processes of the center. These trends were most clearly evident in the establishment of universal citizenship and suffrage and some semblance of a "participant" political and social order, which gave rise to ideologies of participation.

Such goals were aimed at the establishment of a social and cultural order characterized by a high degree of congruence between the cultural and the political identities of the territorial population, a high level of symbolic and affective commitment to the centers, a close relationship between these centers and the more primordial dimensions of human existence, and a marked emphasis on common, politically defined, collective goals for all members of the national or class community.

In many ways these characteristics of the European nation-state were derived or transmitted from several parts of their premodern sociopolitical traditions: from their imperial traditions and from their city-state and feudal traditions. They combined the strong activist orientation of the city-state, the broad conception that the political order was actively related to the cosmic and cultural orders of many imperial traditions and the traditions of the great religions, and the pluralistic elements of the feudal traditions. In the European (especially Western European) traditions these various orientations were rooted in a social structure that was characterized by a relatively high degree of commitment by various groups and strata to the cultural and political orders and their centers and a high degree of autonomy in their access to these orders and their respective centers.

The ideology of economics development, which became an important component of this civilization, developed out of the combination of the strong sanctification, under the impact of Protestantism, of economic activity as an arena of salvation, the conception of human mastery of the human and nonhuman environments, and the development of science and technology. This emphasis on technological and economic development became one of the major premises of European civilization.

These ideological or symbolic developments in Europe were very closely connected with the processes of economic development, which was evident first in commercial and later in industrial expansion, and with the unprecedented growth of technology and economic expansion. These trends culminated in the first self-sustained industrial system, that of industrial capitalism.

The structural-economic and the more symbolic aspects of development and modernity were very closely connected. Yet even in Europe, a single, one-to-one relationship between them did not exist. They developed to some degree independently of one another, but they always constituted continuous interrelated challenges to the societies in which they developed and on which they impinged.

2.4. The Construction of Multiple Modern Civilizations

The new civilization that developed in Europe later spread throughout the world, creating a series of international systems. Each system was

based on some of the premises of European civilization, but at the same time each system had its own internal process of change. The expansion of European civilization resulted in a tendency toward the development of universal, worldwide institutional and symbolic frameworks. Such frameworks are unique in the history of mankind. The expansion of Europe also resulted in not one but several worldwide systems developing. Although these different systems originated in the same place—in Western Europe—and were closely interrelated, the centers of power and influences within each system were not identical. Each developed a dynamic of its own and each often reacted to the others. Most important, within the international ideological and cultural systems, very strong reactions developed against the problems generated by the international economic system. These reactions were most evident in a variety of national and social revolutionary ideologies.

The spread of the various modern ideologies and premises of European civilization throughout the world has been accompanied by far-reaching structural and organizational changes, especially in the economic and political fields. This diffusion took place through a series of social, political, and cultural movements that, unlike movements of change and rebellion in many other historical situations, tended to combine protest with strong tendencies toward institution-building and center-formation. As a result of this combination, it has been difficult to isolate the different international systems from one another and to maintain any one of them in a continuous equilibrium. The interrelations among systems are never static or unchanging in any given international setting. Indeed, the dynamics of such settings give rise to continuous changes in the interrelations among the different systems and the forces created by them, thus generating various processes of change in these systems.

At this point it is important to recognize the nature of the historical process by which modernity spread beyond Europe and how it differs from the development of modernity in Europe. Within Western Europe, modernity, despite great differences among different societies, largely developed indigenously through the fruition of the internal transformative potentials of some of its groups and through a continuous interaction among these groups. In contrast, the spread of modernity beyond Europe was much more in the nature of the impingement of the external Europe on traditional societies and civilizations. Hence the premises of Western European societies constituted the major challenge to which different responses developed. Needless to say, within the various Asian, African, and Latin American civilization different modes of response developed.

2.5. Some New Indications: Problems and Possibilities

The continuous expansion of international systems and movements gives rise to the incorporation of societies and civilizations that do not share either the basic symbolic premises of this new civilization or most of its specific institutional contours. Such an expansion also, of course, undermines the symbolic and institutional premises of these non-Western societies, opens up new options for various groups within them, and generates within them far-reaching processes of change, responses to these changes, and the concomitant crystallization of new symbolic and institutional formations.

These responses are shaped by the continuous interaction among several basic factors. First, the patterns of response are affected by the "point of entry" of any society into the new international systems and the specific aspects of its institutional structure that are undermined by this entry, the options that this entry opens, and the continuous development and changes of these processes. Second, the patterns of responses are influenced by the modes of technology and economic formation existing in these societies. Third, the responses are shaped by the basic premises of the civilizations and societies on which they impinge, that is, by the basic perceptions of the relationship between the cosmic and the social orders, the social and cultural orders, and hierarchy and equality that are prevalent in them. They are also shaped by the structure of the predominant elites that are the carriers and articulators of these perceptions and visions and the modes of control that these elites exercise. Fourth, the responses are shaped by the tradition of responses to the historical situations of change that have developed in most of these civilizations. In the "great" or "axial age" civilizations, particular experiences or traditions of external and internal changes, and of responses to these changes, have crystallized.

Here it might be fruitful to follow Weber's emphasis on the great importance of heterodoxies in the dynamics of different civilizations. Such heterodoxies are of course found in Europe and Weber concentrated on the split between Catholicism and Protestantism and especially on the innovative and transformative potentialities that developed.

Heterodox groups and movements vary according to the cultural orientations predominant within them, the structure and autonomy of the religious institutions and organizations prevalent in their respective societies, and their internal cohesion and relations to broader strata of the society. The relationship of these aspects of the different heterodoxies to the respective orthodoxies of their civilization greatly influence the direction and the transformative capacities of different civilizations, their responses to change, and their innovative directives. Such was also the

case with respect to the development of modernity in Europe. The different innovative potentials that are carried and articulated by different primary and secondary elite groups in different orthodoxies and heterodoxies within these civilizations are not only of one kind. They are always varied and heterogeneous and often move in different directions. This variety indicates that the different transformative potentials of any civilization may move in different directions, depending on concrete historical situations that facilitate or favor some lines of development and not others.

The continuous interaction and feedback among all these processes—the basic premises of the civilizations and societies on which the new modern international systems impinge; the points of entry of these societies into these international systems; the types and models of technology and economy prevalent in these civilizations; the tradition of response to situations of change; and the traditions of heterodoxy, rebellion, and innovation that have developed in the history of these civilizations has generated the varying institutional and symbolic contours of different modern and modernizing societies, their dynamics, and the different patterns of economic development within them. Out of these processes crystallize, in different societies and different modes of incorporation and reinterpretation of the premises of modernity, the different symbolic reactions to modernity. And from these processes develop the different modern institutional patterns and dynamics, or conversely, the different modes of reinterpretation of the premises and historical traditions of these civilizations. These different symbolic and institutional constellations develop with respect to the interpretation of the basic symbolic conceptions and premises of the different modern civilizations. They develop according to the ways in which these basic symbolic premises modernity are selected and reinterpreted in relation to the new "modern" traditions, according to these societies' conceptions of themselves and their past, and according to their new symbols and collective identity and their negative or positive attitudes toward modernity in general and to the West in particular. In other words, within different modern societies there develop different cultural meanings and programs of modernity.

Such processes of reinterpretation also apply to the basic conception of economic development. Although the emphasis on economic and technological development has become part of each modern or modernizing society, they differ greatly with respect to the meaning of such development in the context of their overall cultural and social premises. Above all, they vary in the degree to which the emphasis on economic development is connected with an emphasis on the mastery of the environment

rather than adaptation to it, in the relative importance of economic goals in the panorama of human goals, and in the conceptions of the social order. The vary in having productive or distributive economic orientations, in their type of political regime (authoritarian, pluralist, or totalitarian), in their major modes of political protest and participation, and in their conceptions of authority, hierarchy, and equality.

Similarly, the crystallization of different constellations has been continuously taking place, in close relation to those on the symbolic level, with respect to the different modes of modern organizational and institutional levels. Although such processes as urbanization, industrialization, and the spread of modern communications are common to all these societies, the concrete institutional answers to these problems tend to vary greatly. This variation is closely related, of course, to the basic conceptions of social and political order that have developed within each society.

As in all cases of historical change, the crucial element in the process of the crystallization of new symbolic and institutional formations is old and new elites, that is, the leadership groups on different levels of the social structure in continuous interaction with broad social sectors, the visions they carry, and the various coalitions among them, including coalitions with different external forces in the new international systems. These groups are of crucial importance in shaping the different responses to the continuous challenges of modernization. As in the case of the different heterodoxies analyzed above, these groups are not uniform. They are indeed quite variable, and even the new elites that have developed are much more influenced by the various traditions of response to change and the heterodoxies and innovation existing in any society than has often been assumed.

The systematic comparative exploration of all of these processes is still very much before us, but it constitutes a very important—even if every difficult and arduous—part of the agenda on the comparative sociological and historical research of modernization, modern civilizations, and the contemporary world.

Reference

Goldthorpe, John H. 1971. Theories of industrial society: Reflections on the recrudescene of historicism and the future of futurology. Archives Européennes de Sociologie 12:263–88.