Political Sociology (1979)

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Bottomore, T. B.
NEW COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA (SF)
JA 76 .B67 1979b
Bottomore, T. B.
Political sociology
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BORROWER'S NAME
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S Bottomore, T. B. #12648
67 Political sociology / Tom Bottomore*
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Political Sociology
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Political Sociology
Tom Bottomore
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Contents
Introduction
Political sociology is concerned with power in its social context.

By 'power' is meant here the ability of an individual or a social
group to pursue a course of action (to make and implement
decisions, and more broadly to determine the agenda for
decision making) if necessary against the interests, and even
against the opposition, of other individuals and groups. This
statement is not intended as a full and adequate definition of
the concept of power, but only as a preliminary delineation
of a field of inquiry. There are diverse conceptualizations of
power,^* which have their place within particular theories of
politics, and in the course of this book some of the principal
conceptual difficulties in the construction of such theories will
be more fully explored. In addition to the questions that may
be raised about the central notion of 'power', there are others
concerning such cognate notions as 'authority', 'influence', and
'force' or 'violence', which will also need to be examined in the
context of particular theoretical schemes.
It is evident that power, in the broad sense that I have indi-
cated, is an element in most, if not all, social relationships - in
the family, religious associations, universities, trade imions, and
so on - and it is important to keep in mind this wider view of
the domain of political inquiry. Nevertheless, the principal
object of political sociology has been, and should be, the
phenomenon of power at the level of an inclusive society
(whether that society be a tribe, an empire, or
a nation state,
some other and the

type); the relations between such societies;
social movements, organizations and institutions which are
directly involved in the determination of such power. For it is
* Notes to each chapter will be found in the section beginning on p. 135,

8 Introduction
in this sphere that power appears in its purest, most distinctive

form, and only from this vantage point can its manifestations in
other spheres and in other forms be properly imderstood.
It is impossible, in my view, to establish any significant
theoretical distinction between
political sociology and political
science.At most there appear to be differences arising either from
traditional preoccupations, or from a convenient division of
labour; for example, the particular interest that political
have shown in what may be called the 'machinery of
scientists
government' - the apparatus and processes of legislation,
administration and legal regulation - considered to some extent
in isolation from the social context and treated in a mainly
descriptive manner. What might be argued, on the other hand,
is that modem political science (i.e. something indistinguishable
from political sociology) owes its characteristic development
since the eighteenth century to the establishment of a clear
distinction between the 'political' and the 'social', the con-
stitution of 'society' as an object of systematic inquiry, and the
consequent reflection upon the relations between political and
social hfe.2
This distinction was originally formulated in the contrast
between 'civil society' and the 'state', and it was expounded
in different ways in the works of the Encyclopedists and Saint-
Simon, in the studies by Scottish philosophers and historians,
notably in Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil
Society, and in Hegel's writings on the philosophy of right and
of the state. Subsequently it found a classic expression in
Marx's statement of the imderlying principle of his social
theory:
I was led by my studies to the conclusion that legal relations as well

as forms of state could neither be understood by themselves, nor
explained by the so-called general progress of the human mind, but
that they are rooted in the material conditions of life, which are
summed up by Hegel after the fashion of the English and French
writers of the 1 8th century under the name civil society, and that the
anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy.^
This new conception of politics developed along with the

Introduction 9
emergence of a new type of society, modem capitalism, in which

the system of production acquired a force and independence
much greater than it had had in other societies. Hence the partial
equation of 'civil society' with 'bourgeois society', the recogni-
tion of the fundamental importance of political economy as a
'pohtical' science, and the formulation, as a central problem of
the age, of the relation between the sphere of production,
property and labour on one side, and organized political power
- the state - on the other. These preoccupations, and the context
in which they appeared, were clearly expressed by Hegel in the
Philosophy of Right, when he argued that 'the creation of civil
society is the achievement of the modem world', and defined
civil society in terms of the economists' model of the free
market, in which the association of its members 'is brought
about by their needs, by the legal system - the means to security
of person and property - and by external organization for
attaining their particular and common interests'.* In Hegel's
view civil society poses a number of problems for resolution by
the state; above all, the problem of the interrelated growth of
wealth and poverty, and the social polarization and conflict
which this produces.
It is not difficult to see how important these conceptions were
for the development of Marx's theory. Marx's transformation
of Hegel's thought involves principally a rejection of the idea of
the state as a higher universal in which the contradictions of
civil society can be overcome, and an assertion of the dependence
of the state precisely upon the contradiction, within the capitalist
mode of production, between wealth and poverty, and hence
upon two classes - bourgeoisie and
the conflict between the
proletariat - which embody these contradictory aspects of
society. The state is thus conceived as a dependent element of a
total social process in which the principal moving forces are
those which arise from a particular mode of production.
But there is another style of political thought which treats the
relation between civil society and the state in a different way,
and contributes to a different version of political sociology. An
early expression of this altemative view is to be foimd in
Tocqueville's 'new science of politics [which] is needed for a new
10 Introduction
world', ^ a science which was concerned with the development of

democracy, and the formation of a 'modem' society (by
contrsLStrnththQancien regime) in France, England and America.
The distinctive nature of Tocqueville's conception can be
roughly indicated by saying that in observing the two revolu-
tionary currents of the eighteenth century - the democratic
revolution and the industrial revolution - which were creating
the 'new world' he, unlike Marx, paid more attention to the
former and attributed to a greater significance in the shaping
it
of modem societies. For whatever the sources of the democratic

movement might be, its consequences, he thought, were clear:
its main tendency was to produce social equality, by abolishing
hereditary distinctions of rank, and by making all occupations,

rewards and honours accessible to every member of society.
This tendency had, in his judgement, both desirable and im-
desirable aspects. A democratic government would be likely to
devote its of the greatest number, and
activities to the well-being
could establish a moderate and orderly society. On the
liberal,
other hand, the pursuit of social equality, 'an insatiable passion'

in democratic communities according to Tocqueville, may come
into conflict with the liberty of individuals, and in this contest
the former is likely to prevail, tending in the extreme case to
'equality in slavery'.
Tocqueville did not ignore the context of industrial capitalism
in which the democratic movement existed, as may be seen
especially in his analysis of the revolutions of 1848,^ but he
attributed to a democratic political regime, influenced by
geography, laws and traditions - and for that reason following a
different path of development in different societies (he was
above all in a comparison between America and
interested
France) - an independent effectiveness in determining the
general condition of social life. This idea of the autonomy of
politics was elaborated by many later thinkers, in a more

conscious opposition to Marxism, and came to constitute one
of the major poles of political theory from the end of the nine-
teenth century. In one form it is a distinctive feature of Max
Weber's political sociology, evident in his accoimt of the
concentration of the means of administration, which he regards
1
Introduction 1
as parallel to,and just as significant as, the concentration of the

means of production and more generally in his preoccupation
;
with the role of the nation state and with the independent
influence of various political tendencies - especially the socialist
movement - upon national politics. As Robert Nisbet has
observed, there is in temper of mind very close to
Weber 'a
Tocqueville','' and notably a perhaps more pro-

similar, but
nounced, pessimism in his appraisal of the future of individual
liberty in societies which are dominated, not so much by the
passion for equality (although this plays a part) as by forces of
rationalization.
The importance of independent political forces was asserted
in another form, embodying a more direct confrontation with
Marxism, in the theory of elites as it was formulated by Mosca,
and more intransigently by Pareto. According to Mosca:
Among the constant facts and tendencies that are to be found in all
political organisms, one is so obvious that it is apparent to the most

casual eye. In all societies - from societies that are very meagrely
developed and have barely attained the dawnings of civilization,
down most advanced and powerful societies - two classes of

to the
people appear - a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The first
class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions,
monopohzes power and enjoys the advantages that power brings,
whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and
controlled by the first, in a manner that is now more or less legal,
now more or less arbitrary and violent.^
Pareto developed a version of this theory in which the rule of

elites was presented as a universal, unvarying, and unalterable
fact of social life, the existence of which depended upon
psychological differences between individuals;^ but Mosca
qualified his initial conception by recognizing that historical
changes in the composition of the elite, and in the relation be-
tween rulers and ruled, could occur under the influence of
various 'social forces' which represented the numerous different
interests in society.^"
Each of the two schemes of thought that I have outlined can
be presented in an extreme form - as many critics have been
12 Introduction
concerned to show - to assert either a more or less total auto-

nomy of politics, or its more or less complete dependence upon
other social forces, particularly those which emerge within the
economic sphere. Thus Karl Popper, in The Open Society and
its Enemies, argues that the Marxist theory of society implies
the 'impotence of all poUtics', since the political system of a
particular society at any time, and its transformation, are alike
determined by non-political forces; and this view has been
reiterated, in a variety of ways, in subsequent writing. On the
other side, elite theories have often been interpreted as asserting
that there is a fundamental similarity between the political
systems of all societies - unaffected by the diversity of economic

and social circumstances - which results either from the uni-
between the positions of an organ-
versally occurring disparity
ized minority and the unorganized majority, or from some
general uniformity in human nature and in the unequal distri-
bution of talents.
For the most part, however, the ideas on both sides have been
expounded with many qualifications, and the fundamental
problem of the relation between the 'political' and the 'social'
has come to be conceived in a more complex fashion, taking
account of reciprocal influences and of historical variations.
Even so, this relation remains a focal point of controversy, in
which Marxist theory (notwithstanding its inner diversity and
the reappraisals of the role of the state undertaken by some
recent thinkers) is broadly opposed to those theories which are
more exclusively concerned with the independent effects of
poUtical institutions - with party systems or types of govern-
ment and administration - or which analyse political life in
terms of national communities rather than social classes.
This is not the only major issue which has given rise to con-
flicting theoretical schemes. In the political sociology of the
past few decades there has been a general opposition between
those who are mainly preoccupied with the functioning of
existing political institutions, conceived as one element in a
social system which tends toward a state of equilibrium and
;
those who concentrate their attention mainly upon the forces

which tend to produce instability and potentialities for change.
Introduction 13
The first of these conceptions is intimately associated with the

which was especially influential in sociology
functionalist theory,
during the 1950s and conveyed an image of society as an inte-
grated system which is maintained in existence by complemen-
tary relationships between its various elements, or sub-systems,
and upon a set of common values. It was in
rests ultimately
terms of this image or model that the notion of 'stable demo-
cracies' (which will be examined more closely in the following
chapter) was propoimded, and the same general model shaped
much of the discussion of 'development' and 'modernization',
which were conceived largely as a process whereby agrarian
societies gradually adapted to the conditions of Ufe, values and
institutions of the present-day industrial societies. Such a view
is vigorously expounded, for instance, in Samuel P. Hunting-
ton's Political Order in Changing Societies, which begins from

the proposition that 'the most important pohtical distinction
among countries concerns . . . their degree of government', and
then proceeds to distinguish between countries 'whose politics
embodies consensus, community, legitimacy, organization,
stability' and those which lack these qualities but display
instead such features as intense ethnic and class conflict, rioting

and mob violence, fragmentation of parties. In this manner,
stability is enshrined as the highest pohtical value, most fully
exemplified in the politics of the democratic industrial societies.
Such ideas have lost much of their persuasiveness since the
resurgence of acute pohtical conflict in the industrial societies
during the 1960s and the onset of conditions of economic and
pohtical crisis which still show no sign of reaching an end. As a
consequence there has been a marked renewal of interest in the
alternative model, broadly Marxist in inspiration, which takes
•as its starting point the existence of strains, contradictions and
conflicts in all social systems, and treats the maintenance of

order and stabihty as only a partial and temporary (though in
historical terms not necessarily short-lived) resolution of the
various antagonisms. It is^lsg^ a characteristic of this model
that it assigns a larger place to the use of force, as against a
general commitment to 'common values', in producing and
reproducing a particular form of society; while values them-
14 Introduction
selves,and the whole cultural system which they inform, may

be regarded as being constituted largely by the exercise of 'sym-
bolic violence V^ not by some uncoerced process of intellectual
agreement. This is not to say, however, that in such a model,
and more specifically in the Marxist theory, political domina-
tion has to be conceived as being based exclusively, or even
mainly, in most cases, upon the use of force; its effectiveness
in assuring the continuance of an established social system
arises from a complex set of conditions which may include
economic domination, control over the reproduction of cultural
values, and the superior organization of minorities. In short, the
model proposes, in one of its versions at least, a conception of
pohtical domination as being grounded in a more general
'social power'.
Taken together these two sets of opposed conceptions -
autonomy versus dependence of political forces; stability,
integration and determination by values versus mutability,
contradiction and the use of force as pre-eminent character-
istics of social systems - provide four possible models, to one
or other of which the theories and investigations with which I

shall be concerned in this book can be more or less adequately
assimilated. But this still does not exhaust the diversity of
conceptions prevalent in political sociology. The methodolo-
gical disagreements among social scientists find expression also
in political studies; and since commitment to a particular view
or method has important consequences for the choice of prob-
lems, the conduct of inquiryand the mode of reasoning, it is
desirable to examine here,
however briefly, the principal issues
involved, more particularly because they have often been
presented in a narrow and over-simple way.
One major, long-standing disagreement separates those who
think that there are no essential differences between the natural
sciences and the social sciences and hence aim to provide a
causal account of social events, from those who reject the idea
of a social science in and hold that the study of human
this sense
society consists in understanding the meaning of intentional,
rule-governed action.^^ The controversy has been carried on in
several forms in the criticism of 'positivism' from the standpoint
:
Introduction 15
of an method, notably in the debate

'interpretive' (verstehende)
among German and historians which began in the
sociologists
latter part of the nineteenth century and has been resimied in a
wider context during the past decade; in the recent extensive
criticism of the social sciences from a phenomenological
perspective; and, over a considerable period of time, in the
disputes among Marxist thinkers between those who incline
toward a natural science view - formulated in quite different
ways by the Austro-Marxists at the begining of this century and
by Althusser more recently - and those who conceive Marxism
rather as a philosophical interpretation of history, in the manner
of Lukacs, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and, with various
qualifications, such 'critical theorists' as Habermas.^' Although
in pohtical theory itself this methodological debate has not been
so extensively and systematically pursued as in sociology or in
the philosophy of science, much of the wider discussion im-
pinges upon problems in the study of politics, as for example
in the work of Poulantzas and others on the state and in
Habermas' discussion of legitimation. More specifically, the
'behavioural movement', which is often considered to have
brought about a radical reorientation of political science in the
past two decades, tends no doubt towards a natural science
view, but without being committed to such a position; for its
general prescription that we should pay attention rather to

actual pohtical behaviour than to the formal structure of insti-
tutions may be followed in different ways according to whether
'behaviour' is conceived as directly observable physical activity
which can be causally explained, or as intentional action, the
meaning of which has to be interpreted. In this sense a pheno-
menological analysis of everyday pohtical life would seem to
be just as acceptable as a strict behaviourist account along the
lines suggested in B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
A second methodological debate, in which the principal
contributions have come from recent Marxist and structuralist
thinkers, concerns empiricism. These thinkers, without by any
means entering into all the complexities of the problem,^* have
formulated various objections to the empiricism - defined as the
view that scientific knowledge is based upon, and testable by,
:
16 Introduction
the observation and collection of 'given' facts - which they

believe prevails in the social sciences. They argue, first, that a
science does not develop by the collection of directly observable
facts, but by the elaboration of concepts which define the facts
constituting its domain; and second, that this theoretical
activity involves the discovery and analysis of a reality beyond
what is immediately perceived. As Godelier remarks, con-
trasting empiricist and structuralist conceptions of social
structure
For Marx as for Levi-Strauss a structure is not a reality that is

directly visible, and so directly observable, but a level of reality that
exists beyond the visible relations between men, and the functioning
of which constitutes the underlying logic of the system, the subjacent
order by which the apparent order is to be explained.^^
Such ideas, which are by now quite familiar and widely accepted
in the philosophy of science, seem relevant mainly to naive
forms of empiricism and inductivism, and they are not very
helpful in dealing with issues of verification or falsification, the
assessment of rival theories, or the demarcation of science from
non-science. Hence the various attempts, some of which are
discussed in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by
Lakatos and Musgrave, to formulate more sophisticated
versions of the notion of empirical testability.
Structuralism sets itself in opposition not only to the cruder
forms of empiricism, as I have indicated, but also to historicism,
thus renewing the controversies about the historical method in
the social sciences. The question here does not concern the
contrast between a 'generalizing' and an 'individualizing'
science (as Rickert expressed it) which belongs rather to the
debate about natural science and social science, but the proper
character of a generalizing science of society whether its aim
:
should be to formulate universal statements about social

structures and their elements (for example, about the under-
lying structure of kinship, of political relations, and so on), or
about cultural codes (by a structural analysis of myth, for
instance); or, on the contrary, to frame historical laws, as was
the ambition of the social evolutionists. These rival views
Introduction 17
appear in a particularly interesting form in Marxist thought,

where the representation of Marxism as a philosophy of history,
or a 'theory of the historical process' (Lukdcs), is rejected by
structuralist thinkers, who conceive Marxism as a theory of
society, 'a hypothesis regarding the articulation of its internal
levels and the specific hierarchical causality of each of these
levels'i^, but who have nevertheless to confront the question -
posed by Marx's sketch of a definite sequence of forms of
society - as to whether there can be a science of history, i.e. a
causal account of the transformation of one structure into
another in some law-governed and necessary process.
This opposition raises the last of the methodological issues
that I intend to consider here: namely, whether there is in fact,
as is frequently claimed, a distinctive Marxist method, and if so,
how it is to be characterized. The preceding discussion may
already suggest a negative answer. There is not just one version
of Marxism, but several; and each version - elements of which
are certainly to be found in Marx's own work - presents a view
of method which agrees in some measure with the ideas of non-
Marxist thinkers, and is influenced by general movements of
thought in the philosophy of science. In broad terms, it is
possible to distinguish at least three main styles of Marxist
social theory: the Hegelian, which has afl&nities with the
'interpretive'method and with a phenomenological approach;
the positivist-empiricist, influenced in various ways by neo-
Kantian epistemology, by natural science models, and by
materialism; and the structuralist, which has its principal
sources in structural linguistics and anthropology, and in
French epistemological doctrines (especially the work of
Bachelard).
Faced with this diversity of methods we may claim instead
that what is distinctive about Marxism is a central core of
theoretical concepts and propositions; but this does not fully
resolve the difificulty, for theory and method are interconnected,
and the divergent Marxist conceptions express both conceptiial
and methodological disagreements. It is more instructive
perhaps to think of the diJBferent versions of Marxism as com-
peting paradigms,^' and then to ask whether the family resem-
18 Introduction
blances among them are nevertheless so great that at a more

general level they can reasonably be contrasted as a whole with
other paradigms that are distinctly non-Marxist. In my view
this is largely the case, although it has to be recognized that
there are other family resemblances which cut across this
and that the boundary between Marxist and
particular division,
non-Marxist social theory is in any case neither clearly nor
permanently marked. Marxism is not a closed scheme of thought

impervious to outside influences, and it may happen, for
example, that a phenomenological Marxist has closer in-
tellectual affinities with other phenomenologists than with other
Marxists.
In so far as Marxism can be distinguished more or less clearly,
as a general paradigm, from other paradigms, this seems to me
to involve two other features which are not primarily theoretical
or methodological. One is the relation of Marxist theory to
practical social hfe; the other is its ideological orientation. As
to the first, the difference between Marxism and other social
thought is not that in one case the connection between theory
and practice is consciously acknowledged and asserted, while
in the other it is not - for this connection appears in all social
thought, although with varying degrees of clarity - but that

practice is conceived, in Marx's phrase, as 'revolutionary,
practical-critical activity'. As Lukacs subsequently argued,
Marxist theory 'is essentially nothing more than the expression
in thought of the revolutionary process itself. This view of
theory and practice conveys, if only implicitly, a definite
ideology, A Marxist social scientist is not only intellectually
persuaded of the theoretical and methodological superiority of
Marxism; he also espouses - however varied and imprecise the
manner of doing so - a more general world view in which such
ideas as 'revolution', 'classless society', the 'end of alienation',
a new 'integral civilization' (for which, according
'socialism', or
to Gramsci, Marxism provides the fundamental elements)
express value judgements on existing forms of society, affirm
and desirability of a new kind of society
beliefs in the possibility
and hence stimulate and guide pohtical activity. In a similar
way, though not always so obviously, other social theories or
Introduction 19
paradigms express other values and beliefs, direct theory and

practice intoother channels, through their conceptions of
'democracy', 'nation', or 'liberal society'. These crucial
questions of the relation between political science and political
action arise inescapably throughout this book and will be more
closely examined in the last chapter.
The multiplicity of paradigms (briefly indicated in the
preceding discussion) which characterizes the social sciences
today excludes any possibility of setting out in a direct and
uncontroversial way the 'elements' or 'principles' of political
sociology. What the subject is, the problems and solutions which
constituteit as a field of scientific inquiry, its development
through the accumulation of knowledge and techniques, or

through scientific revolutions, can only be established by
confronting the different paradigms with each other and seeing
them in the context of a historical process that embraces not
only the progress of the science itself, borne along by diverse
groups of thinkers and researchers, but also the unceasing
transformation of its external environment as a result of eco-
nomic, political and cultural changes. Thus in the following
chapters I shall present competing paradigms and consider them
in their social and cultural settings; and I shall ask what dis-
tinctive, alternative or incommensurable views of the political
world, what judgements about its fundamental elements and
their interrelations,about the crucial questions that should be
posed and the methods of investigation that should be used,
divide the various groups of researchers and schools of thought.
1 Democracy and social classes
The pre-eminent themes of political sociology in its formative

period during the first half of the nineteenth century were the
Q emergence of democracy as a form of
social consequences of the
government, and the political significance of the development
of social classes on the basis of industrial capitalism. To some
extent, as Ihave suggested in the Introduction, these two themes
were conceived in ways which gave rise to antithetical theories,
in which either the influence of political forms and forces upon
society or the influence of various social elements upon
political forms was the more strongly emphasized. This opposi-
tion in the realm of ideas corresponds partly, it may be argued,
to an antithesis in s ocial reality, man

between as a citizen -
political man endowed with equal rights - and man as a member
of civil society - egoistic man whose situation is determined by
private interests, by his place in the economic system.^ In
whatever fashion the contrast is formulated (we might say, for
example, that the two revolutions - poUtical and industrial -

which had inspired the new political science began to move in
different directions, toward equality in one case, away from it in
the other) it embodies a large part of the substance of political
inquiry and of political doctrines from the nineteenth century
to the present time.
Hence a theory of democracy and a theory of social classes
afe~essential elements^ in the cocgtruction oâ ^s cience of
politics, and an examination of the development of these
theories will help to clarify its nature and problems. We can
take as one starting point Tocqueville's conception of demo-
cracy, which I have already briefly sketched in the Introduction.
It has often been pointed out by commentators that there is an
22 Political sociology
ambiguity in Tocqueville's discussion. At times he is chiefly

concerned with democracy as a form of government, when he
describes it as a regirne in which 'the people more or less
participate in their government', and says that 'its meaning is
intimately connected with the idea of political liberty'; while on
other occasions he uses the term 'democracy' to describe a type
of society, and refers more broadly to 'democratic institutions'
and by implication to what would later be called a 'democratic
way of life'.^ Nevertheless, it is fairly clear that he saw the
democratic political movement as the principal force creating
this new social order; for it is the democratic regime that assigns
pre-eminent value to the well-being of the greatest number,
establishesan open and mobile society by destroying the old
hierarchy of ranks, and encourages the development of trade
and manufacture. Of course, Tocqueville recognized that the
development of the industrial system itself might have important
effects upon the democratic regime, especially through the
emergence in productive industry of a new 'aristocracy', but he
was inclined to regard this as an exceptional and temporary
phenomenon which would not be able to withstand the general
tendency of democracy to bring about greater equality.
The theory of social classes, first comprehensively formulated
by Marx, approaches the same problem from the other side by
seeking to explain democracy as the consequence of changes in
society. According to this view the democratic political revolu-
tions were carried out by a new class - the bourgeoisie - which
was formed in the process of development of commercial and
industrial capitalism; and the future of democracy would be
vitally affected by the inherent tendencies of capitalist pro-
duction and the relation between the bourgeoisie and the other
new class in capitalist society - the proletariat. The crucial
political issue for Marx, and for those who were subsequently
influenced by his theory, was the 'social question'; that is, the
situation, interests and struggles of the working class in societies
which were both capitalist and democratic. Hence the question
of democracy is placed in a broader social context, in which a
predominant element is the interests and political orientations
of social classes which are engaged in class conflict. This does
Democracy and social classes 23
not mean that democracy is conceived only as the political form

assimied by the rule of the bourgeoisie, even though it is
historicallyan achievement of the bourgeoisie, a real advance

upon the preceding forms of government and a 'progressive'
feature of capitalism. Ma rx sees, rather, a tension or co ntra-
diction between the principle of democracy - the full partici-
pation of all members of society in regulating their communal
life - and the limited, even distorted form which democracy

assumes iha class society in which the bourgeoisie is dominant.
For Marx, democracy is a historical phenomenon which is far
from having unfolded all its possibilities, and the principal
agent of its further development is the working-class movement.
Although Tocqueville and Marx emphasized different features
in the development of European and North American societies
in the nineteenth century, they both recognized in some way the
Jntgrplay of economic and political forces Tocqueville by
:
associating democracy with the values of an agricultural and

commercial middle-class society, and by noting the possible
implications of the incipient class divisions within manufactur-
ing industry: Marx by giving prominence to the political
struggles of the working class as a movement to extend demo-
cracy, whether in his account (in 1852) of the Chartist demand
for universal suffrage as being, if reahzed, 'a far more socialist
measiu-e than anything which has been honoured with that name
on the Continent', or in his later analysis of the Paris Commime
as a new form of democratic government, as 'the political form
at last discovered imder which to work out the emancipation of
labour'. This developing interaction between d emocracy,
capitalism and social classes, further complicated by national-
ism, constitutes the political^story of the past century, and is
the subject matter of the most important political theories of

this period.
We should note, in the first place, how very slow the advance
o£demoaracyhas been^ and how many hindrances and setbacks
it has encountered. In those countries which have generally been
regarded as well-established democracies, manhood suifrage
was only achieved in most cases between the end of the nine-
teenth century and the First World War, while the attainment
of universal and equal suffrage came still later (in Germany in

1919, Sweden in 1920, France in 1945, Britain in 1948)* while
in most of the rest it was
of the world universal suffrage, where
introduced at all, came only end of the Second World
after the
War. There are still countries - Rhodesia and South Africa are
notorious instances - where the great majority of people have
never had more than a very restricted right to vote, and many
others in which this right has, at various times, been curtailed
or abrogated. In Europe between the wars fascist movements
destroyed democracy in several countries, and a number of
military dictatorships survived xmtil quite recently. At the
present time right-wing military groups are in power in most of
the Latin American countries, and various forms of authori-
tarian rule are to be found throughout Asia and Africa. In the
socialist countries of Eastern Europe the right to vote is largely
denuded of its meaning by the proscription of any opposition
parties, and even of dissenting groups within or outside the
single ruling party, while movements for democratic reform
which have emerged at various times since 1956 have been
suppressed by force.
It can scarcely be claimed, therefore, that the political
systems of the world in the late twentieth century reveal a very

widespread practice of democracy, even in the narrow consti-
tutional sense of the right of all adult citizens to choose their
political leaders by means of free elections. Democracy is a very
recentj delicate and sparse growth, continually t hrea tened and
often stifled by property-owning, privileged and dominant
groups who are always fearful of any autonomous, unregulated
incursion of the 'masses* into politics. This will become more
evident if we go on to consider democracy in its larger sense as a
state of affairs in which all citizens participate, and are en-
couraged to participate, as fully as possible in the organization
and regulation of their whole social life. Here we need to pay
attention to two aspects: first, the obstacles which have been
placed, and are continually placed, in the way of such partici-
pation in practice and second, the reinterpretations of democ-

;
racy, within political science as well as in pol itical doctrines,

which seek deliberately to restrict its scope.
The evidence of these obstacles and resistances is plain

enough, not only in the slow, uncertain, and frequently subverted
extension of the right to vote whichI have aheady indicated, but
and violence that has always been directed

in the bitter hostility
against the attempts of ordinary citizens and workers to organ-
ize themselves in trade imions, cooperatives, community action
groups, and similar bodies. The early history of the trade imion
movement, in particular, is one of intimidation and repression
by ruling groups, ranging from imprisonment and deportation
to the use of hired gunmen and military forces in attempts to
prevent the formation of trade unions or to break strikes; and
in some countries - notably in the USA^ - the use of violence,
though usually diminishing, has continued until recent times.
Other popular movements of protest and reform have often
been met by violence - for example, the civil rights movement
of the 1960s in the USA, and on a larger scale the diverse
movements in Eastern Europe, as well as in many parts
of the Third World, which have been suppressed by military
force.
But the use of violence tojrestrict democracy, though it is
very prevalent in the present-day world, is far from being the

only jmeans by which such limitations are imposed. There is,
even in those societies which have established democratic
institutions in the form of competing parties, free elections, and
a more or less independent (though not necessarily impartial)
judiciary, a persistent discouragement of any political action
which takes place outside the traditional framework of party
politics and^ct ofal contests. One example can be found in the
response of ruling groups and elites to the student movement of
the 1960s Even if we disregard the sporadic use of violence
.
against the movement, and its infiltration by spies and agents

provocateurs, it is clear that it was generally considered by the
controlling bodies of universities and by party politicians as an
illegitimate form of political action, though its principal aim
was to extend democratic participation in one of the most
important institutions (both economically and culturally) of
modem society, and in many cases it succeeded in enlivening
academic studies, and improving methods of teaching and
assessment. Movements for industrial democracy have been

similarly discouraged, and even^socialist governments, whether
reformist or revolutionary, have shown little enthusiasm for a
devolution of their powers which would permit a greater
involvement of ordinary people in the direction of their every-
day economic activities. On the contrary, with the exception of
Yugoslavia, where the system of workers' self-management has
done something to diffuse responsibility for decision making,
there has been a tendency towards increasingly centralized and
bureaucratic administration in economic and other spheres of
social life.^
The antipathy to any large-scale popular participation in

running public which shows itself constantly in many
affairs,
more forms than those which I have mentioned here by way of
illustration, has been incorporated in several different ways into

political science. Leaving aside here the more extreme version
of the theory of elites as expounded by Pareto, or by Ortega y
Gasset in his distinction between the inert masses and 'the
select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not
merely reactive',' we can identify two types of political theory
which, while accepting s ome aspect s of modem democracy,
a re concerned to l imit its significance.
In the first democracy is co nceived o nly as a means for
case,
selecting political leaders, and not as a regime in which there
Js some kind of direct rul e by the people. This conception was
formulated by Max Weber, in Economy and Society, though in
a rather fragmentary manner, and is expressed also in his
criticism of German politics in Parliament and Government in a
Reconstructed Germany. Accgrding^q_Weber direct democracy
is possible only in small and relatively simple societies, whereas
beyond which have become larger, more
this stage, in societies
complex, and more differentiated - and especially in modem
societies - dir ect rule b yjhep eople is out of the question. It is
replaced by representative democracy, and this means, in
Weber's view, that the people cease to have any real control
over political decisions, which become the prerogative, on one
side, of a bureaucratic administration and, on the other side, of
the leaders of political parties. Weber gives as reasons for this

power position of the bureaucratic and political elites their

possession of the means of administration and the fact that they
are small groups which can easily reach agreement upon any
action necessary to mamt ain power. ^ In any case, Weber
their
is not very much concerned about the absence of popular
control over the political elites. For him the val ue of repre-
sentative democracy res ides in the fact that it makes possible the
s election of effective p olitical leaders,' as well as providing a
trainin g for them. In the circumstances prevailing in industrial

with their mass parties, the only viable kind of
societies,
democracy is what he called a 'plebiscitarian leader^democracy',
in which charismatic leaders set goals 'w hich are then to be
m
achines", and after-
"sold" to the people at large byj^party
wards implemented with the help of administrative bureau-
cracies\^°
Weber's argument is presented more systematically and in a
somewhat different form, though with the same object in view,
by J. A. Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.
Schumpeter explicitly rejects the 'classical doctrine' of demo-
cracy,^^ according to which it embodies distinctive ideals
concerning participation in political and the relationship
life
between pohtical leaders and the people, and replaces it by

another theory of democracy as 'competition for political
leadership': '. the democratic method is that institutional
. .
arrangement for arriving at pohtical decisions in which indi-

viduals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive
struggle for the people's vote.'^^ ^\^q hzsis of his theory of
democracy is a theory of capitaHst enterprise, and Schumpeter
emphasizes the connection not only by discussing the historical
relation between capitalism and democracy, but by treating
political parties as analogous to business concerns engaged in a
competitive struggle (for power in one case, profits in the other)
the aim of which for each party/enterprise is to increase its share
of the market (constituted by voters or consumers). This con-
ception, in the form of an 'economic theory of democracy', was
further developed by later writers, and notably by A. Downs,^^
in whose scheme of analysis there are '. basically, only two
. .
kinds of actor. There are the parties, and there are the voters.'^*
This restrictive conception of democracy as a technique for

the selection of political leaders was one important influence
leading political scientists to devote their attention too ex-
clusively to electionsand voting behaviour. Indeed, this became
for a time a veritable obsession, giving rise insome academic
circles to the idea of a whole new field of study, to be called
'psephology',^5 and in the lower reaches of political communi-
cation to the massive television coverage of national elections,
in which precise calculations of 'swings' from one party to
another and predictions of the eventual outcome of the electoral
c ontest tend to overshadow any serious discussion of the
substance of political conflicts.
It is a further consequence of this conception that democracy
comes to be seen as a more or less perfected instrument which is
susceptible of only minor technical improvements; and in this
respect there agreement with a second notion of democracy,
is
elaborated mainly during the postwar decades, which was

expressed by the term 'stable democracy'. According to this
view the existence of stable or viable democracy in a particular
society depends primarily upon certain values being held by the
people in that society; that to say, upon the existence of an
is
underlying consensus, or, as was sometimes called, a common

it
value system. Without entering upon a detailed examination of

this idea,^^ let me simply observe, in the present context, that
it too takes for granted that democracy, in the instances con-
sidered, has reached a stage of more or less completed develop-
ment, and can thus be contrasted, as a distinct type of political
system, with other types such as totalitarianism, dictatorship,
or 'unstable' democracy.
What Schumpeter calls the 'classical doctrine' of democracy
difiers in several respects from the theories I have just outlined,
one of the crucial differences being that it conceives democracy
as a historical movement which aims constantly to extend the
area within which the members of a society can govern them-
selves by participatingand freely in the regulation of their
fully
coUective life. To a great extent this democratic movement has
to be seen as a class movement first of the bourgeoisie seeking
:
freedom from feudal constraints and aristocratic rule, and

subsequently of the working class seeking its liberation from

the domination of the bourgeoisie. Thus two stages of the
movement can be distinguished: a stage of liberal democracy
when a competitive pohtical system is introduced alongside the
market economy, and a stage of social democracy in which
there is expressed the idea of the political dominance of the
most numerous class - the working class - and of the

transformation of the market economy into a sociahst
economy.
From this perspective the nature of modern democratic
regimes,and the setbacks and limitations which they experience,
are intimately connected with the class structure and the
relations between classes as they have developed both in
capitalist and in what I shall call (for the moment) post-capitalist
societies. Marx's social theory, although it did not advance in
any beyond the analysis of capitalism as a mode of
detail
production to a study of the state and politics, did nonetheless
sketch a conception of political development which was
assimilated into the doctrines and practices of a large part of
the European labour movement. The main elements of this
conception can be set out very briefly in the following way.
With the development of the capitalist mode of production
there is an intensification of two principal contradictions
within capitalism; that between the forces of production and the
social relations of production, and that between the working
class and the bourgeoisie. The former contradiction, which
Marx describes as 'the fundamental contradiction of developed
capitahsm', is one between the social character of production,
with tendency toward unlimited development of the produc-
its
tive forces, and ihQ private ownership of the means of production

(and therefore private appropriation of the product) from which
derives the aim of maintaining and increasing the value of capital
itself,and hence setting limits to the expansion of production.^'
The contradiction shows itself in the phenomena of under-
consimiption and in periodic crises; and it provides the main
groimd for Marx's expectation of an eventual breakdown of the
capitalist system. Nevertheless, the breakdown is not seen by
Marx as a fully determined and automatic consequence of
capitalist economic development; on the contrary, as Nicolaus

has observed, Marx's theory of the breakdown is characterized
by 'its great latitude and flexibility'.^^
It is at this point that the second contradiction - between

working class and bourgeoisie - which differs from the first in
expressing an opposition of interests rather than an incompati-
bility of structures, assumes great importance. The demise of
capitalism can only be the consequence of a political struggle,
and it is the course of this struggle between classes, in the
conditions created by the development of the capitalist mode of
production, which we have now to examine. Marx's own theory
of the class struggle was hardly more than sketched, in occa-
sional passages which are scattered throughout his writings, and
it was never presented in a systematic way. Moreover, the
material upon which he had to work was that of the early
stages of industrial capitalism and of the working-class political
movement, so that in any case it would be essential to review
his theory in the light of subsequent historical experience. This
task, in any comprehensive sense, is beyond the scope of the
present book, and I shall confine myself to a very schematic
presentation of a few salient issues.
There are two broad sets of problems to be considered: first,
the political impact of the working-class movement in capitalist
societies as they have developed since the late nineteenth
century; and second, the political systems that have emerged
from revolutions carried out under the banner of Marxism as
'proletarian revolutions', in Russia, China and other countries.
As to the first question, it is evident that the working-class
movement has had a profound influence upon the extension of
the suffrage and the creation of mass parties (which will be
examined further in the next chapter), and hence upon the
establishment of a democratic political regime as it now exists
in the advanced capitalist countries. Furthermore, the pressure
of working-class parties and trade unions has helped to produce
a much more substantial intervention by the state in the
economy, and this situation, although it can be interpreted
from one aspect as the emergence of a new type of 'organized'
or 'managed' capitalism, does also constitute a degree of
1
protection of working-class interests against the power of

capital through the general regulation of economic activity and
the provision of an extensive network of social services, how-
ever imperfectly this may be done.
But it is equally obvious that the working class in the advanced
capitahst societies has not been, for the most part, revolutionary
in its outlook and action; least of all in the most advanced
country, the USA. It is not that revolutionary movements have
been absent (and they will be considered in more detail in a later
chapter) but that they have failed to elicit sustained and
effective support from any large part of the working class. Of
course, there have been historical fluctuations in revolutionary
activity,^^ as well as considerable variations between societies -
with revolutionary parties having a much greater influence in
France and Italy than in the rest of Western and Northern
Europe or in North America - but the predominant style of
working-class poUtics everywhere has been reformist, directed
toward a gradual attrition of the unregulated market economy.
There has not occurred that stark polarization and revolutionary
confrontation of the two principal classes - bourgeoisie and
proletariat - that Marx, at least in some parts of his analysis,
seemed to anticipate.
How is this historical development to be explained? In the first
place, perhaps, as many social thinkers from Bernstein to
Schumpeter and beyond have suggested, by the economic
successes of capitalism. Although there have been periods of
economic stagnation or crisis, including the exceptionally
severe crisis of the 1930s (which itself failed to engender
large-scale revolutionary movements in most of the capitalist
countries), the general tendency of capitalism has been to
promote a continuous, and sometimes rapid, improvement in
material levels of living, in which a large part of the working
class, if not the whole class, has shared. This factor of material
prosperity, which was already cited by Sombart at the beginning

of this century as a partial explanation of the absence of any
large-scale sociaUst movement in the USA,^'' acquired particu-
larly great importance in the period following the Second
World War, when economic growth took place more rapidly
than ever before, and the question could be posed as to whether

the United States did not simply show to capitalist Europe the
image of its own future - a future that would be characterized
by a decline of the socialist movement, and indeed of all ideolo-
gical revolutionary parties and movements.^^
This increasing prosperity is not, however, the only factor
that can be adduced to explain the absence of successful
revolutionary movements, or of such movements altogether, in
Western capitalist societies. The class struggle, it may be
argued, has been moderated by the incorporation of the working
class into a modified and reformed capitalism through the
extension of political, social and economic rights, and the
elaboration of a complex structure of contestation, bargaining
and compromise within the existing form of society.
The class struggle is further moderated, and turned
increasingly into reformist channels, by changes in the nature
of the class structure, and notably by the growth of the middle
classes.
Working-class action in the economic sphere, through the
trade unions, necessarily takes place in the context of a factual
interdependence between employers and workers, and this
interdependence is reinforced by the institutionalization of
industrial conflict.Durkheim, in his discussion of the 'abnormal
forms' of the division of labour, 22 long ago drew attention to
what he regarded as a condition of 'anomie' in the sphere of
production, characterized by the absence of a body of rules
governing the relations between different social functions -
above all, between labour and capital - and saw as both prob-
able and desirable a growing normative regulation of industrial
relations. This has in fact occurred in the advanced capitalist
countries, and one main consequence has been to limit in-
dustrial conflict to economic issues, as against larger issues of
the control of the enterprise, and to bring about a substantial
degree of integration of workers into the existing mode of
production. 2^ Hence might be argued (as Marcuse and others
it
have done) that a large part of the Western working class has
been effectively incorporated into the economy and society of
advanced capitalism, not only in the sphere of consumption, as
a result of increasing prosperity, but also in the sphere of

production, through the increasingly elaborate regulation of
industrial relations by law and custom, and through the
apparent technological imperatives of a high productivity, high
consumption society.^ The outcome may thus be seen as a
situation in which there is considerable trade-union mihtancy
with respect to wages, hours of work and related issues, but
relatively little expression of class consciousness in the broader,
more revolutionary sense of a profound awareness or conviction
of living in a society the nature of which is predominantly
determined by class relations, and of being engaged in a con-
tinuing intense struggle to estabhsh an alternative form of
society.
There can be little doubt either that the development of
working-class conseiousness has been profoundly affected by
changes in the class structure. The emergence and growth of new
middle-class strata in the Western capitalist societies is a
phenomenon which has raised questions for both Marxistand
non-Marxist social scientists since the end of the nineteenth
century. It was one important consideration
. in Bernstein's
'revision' of Marxist theory,^^ and the problem was later
analysed more fully by the Austro-Marxist thinkers, who came
to recognize the pohtical significance of the growing complexity
of the class structure,^^ and in particular the influence of what
Karl Renner called the 'service class'. ^'^ Among non-Marxist
writers, especially during the 1950s, the expansion of these
middle strata was often interpreted as marking the advent of
middle-class societies in which there would be no fundamental
cleavages or conflicts.^^ It is clear in any case that the growing
size of the middle class must change fundamentally the image of
capitahst society as one in which class antagonisms are simpli-
fied, and 'society as a whole is more and more splitting up into
two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing
each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat', which Marx and
Engels depicted in the Communist Manifesto and which Marx-
ists and other socialists generally accepted without much
questioning until the early years of the twentieth century. The

need arises to analyse and evaluate the probable political
attitudes and actions of various middle-class groups in relation

to the working class and the socialist movement, to right-wing
parties and movements (more particularly, in the context of
European politics in the 1920s and 1930s, and of Latin American
pontics in recent years, to fascist movements), and to diverse
types of independent politics in the form of liberal or populist
parties, A number of different answers has been given to the
questions thus raised. One, already mentioned, envisages a
gradual consolidation of a new kind of middle-class, post-
industrial society,^^ based upon advanced technology, a mixed
economy, and a broad consensus of opinion about social and
political goals, which would be peaceful, liberal, and in a
certain sense 'classless'.^" Another foresees a more conservative
role for the middle class, expressing itself in active opposition to
socialism as a process of increasing public ownership or
control of industry and expanding welfare services, and in a
reassertion of the desirability of a more laissez-faire type of
economy.^^
A third kind of analysis conceives some sections of the
middle class (technicians, managers, engineers, professional
employees in the public service and in private industry) either
as constituting an important part of a 'new working class'
which is likely to participate in its own way in a refashioned
socialist movement,^^ or as forming one element - alongside
the old industrial working class - in a new class, which is
becoming involved in a new type of struggle, directed against
those who control the institutions of economic and political
decision making, and who reduce it to a condition, not of
misery or oppression, but of restricted and dependent partici-

pation in the major public affairs of society.^^
One common theme in these varied accounts of the changing
economy and class structure of the advanced capitalist societies
is a questioning of the pre-eminent role of the industrial
working class in bringing about a fundamental, revolutionary
transformation of society from capitalism to socialism. But
there is now also a wider questioning of the whole conception
of a transition to sociaHsm.^^ What J. A. Schumpeter, in
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, called the 'march into
socialism' seems to have slackened its pace; and socialism,

which appeared in the nineteenth century as the ideal image of
an alternative society, providing an indispensable imifying
element in working-class consciousness, has become in the
twentieth century a problematic reality. It is not simply that
socialist societies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the world
are characterized, to a greater or lesser extent, by economic
backwardness and and consequently
political authoritarianism,
have little appeal as models for the future development of any
advanced industrial society, but that the democratic socialism of
social democratic and labour parties in the capitalist world,
despite its real achievements in improving the conditions of
life of the working class, has come to be more critically judged
as tending to promote an excessive centralization of decision

making, growth of bureaucracy and regulation of the lives of
individuals, and has lost something of the persuasive character
itonce had as a movement aiming to create a new civilization.
Such changes in social and political thought clearly have
important consequences for the character and goals of political
action in the late twentieth century,^^ and their effects are re-
inforced by the emergence of new problems and new movements
- concerned with such issues as the environment and the use of
natural resources, the subordination of women - which arguably
have little connection with class politics; as well as by the
renewed vigour of ethnic and national consciousness, expressed
in independence movements of various kinds.^^
Elsewhere^' I have distinguished, and tried to assess in rela-
tion to more traditional class politics, four new styles of
political action: that of elites committed to rationality in
production and administration, who justify their dominance by
the benefits of sustained economic growth; that of various
movements, notably the student movement of the 1960s, which
attack technocracy and bureaucracy, and assert the counter-
values of 'participation' and 'community' that of regional and
;
nationalist movements which also proclaim the value of

community, founded upon a cultural identity; and that of
various supranational movements - for example, Pan-African-
ism, or the European Community - which attempt to organize
whole regions of the world in terms of historical traditions,

economic interests and cultural similarities. To speak of these
'new styles' of politics is not, of course, to say that political
struggles between classes have ceased, but only that they may
now be modified by other kinds of political action and be less
predominant in political life as a whole, or to argue that the
nature, aims and strategies of the principal classes have changed
substantially, as Mallet and Touraine have done. Undoubtedly,
the two interrelated movements - the democratic movement
and the labour movement - which developed so vigorously in
the nineteenth-century continue to have a major influence in
politics. However, the relation between them has changed
during the present century, in a way which is also relevant to
the character of more recent movements. In large measure, the
nineteenth-century labour movement could be regarded - and
regarded itself- as a continuation of the democratic movement,
this continuitybeing expressed even in the name 'social demo-
cratic' which was generally adopted by the political parties of
the working class. The idea which lay behind the use of the term
'social democracy' was that the working-class movement would
not only complete the process of achieving political democracy
by establishing universal and equal suffrage (and this itself
required a long struggle), but would also extend democracy
into other areas of social life, in particular through a demo-
cratic control of the economy, and would thus create new

democratic institutions. One of the most important of these
institutionswas the workers' council, which made its appearance
in the early part of this century as a method of establishing
direct working-class control of production, in opposition to
both capitalist ownership and centralized state control. The
'council movement' was especially vigorous, and was widely
debated among socialists in the years immediately preceding and
following the First World War;^^ and in the past two decades
it has again aroused growing interest, as a result of the experience
of workers' self-management in Yugoslavia (and some tentative
steps in that direction in other East European countries), and
of the formulation of ideas about 'participatory democracy' in
the new social movements of the 1960s.^^
While they advocated and worked for such extensions of

democracy the European social democratic parties, whether
or not they claimed to be Marxist and revolutionary, were also,
for the most part, firmly committed to political democracy in
the narrower sense; and where the necessary conditions existed -
the legal existence of socialist parties, elections conducted on the
basis of (at least) universal male suffrage, and participation in
parliament and government - they made plain that although
they did not renounce extra-parliamentary forms of class
struggle they envisaged the transition from capitalism to
socialism as coming about through the will of a majority of
citizens, clearly and publicly expressed in elections. These
issues were perhaps most thoroughly discussed, and the idea of a
peaceful and democratic conquest of power by the working
class most adequately expressed, by the Austrian Social Demo-
cratic Party, at its annual conferences and in the writings of its
leading thinkers.*" But the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the
subsequent development of Soviet society produced an em-
phasis upon another strand in Marxist thought about the
transition to socialism (one which had not hitherto been given
much prominence) involving the idea of the 'dictatorship of the
proletariat'; and in the specific conditions prevailing in Russia,
which differed entirely from those in Western Europe, this soon
evolved in practice into the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party,
then the dictatorship of the party's central committee, and
finally the dictatorship of a single individual. For several
decades, therefore, one important section of the working-class
movement and one school of socialist thought became identified
with an authoritarian - and for a time tyrannical - form of
government. Only since the death of Stalin, with the emergence
of movements of opposition, and rebellions, in the Soviet
sphere of influence has this situation begun very gradually to
change; and the events in Eastern Europe, together with the
continuing changes in the Western capitalist societies, have led
to a considerable reorientation of ideas and policies in the
European Communist parties which were formerly closely,
and uncritically, attached to the theory and practice of Bol-
shevism.
What is most significant in the doctrinal and political changes

which can be subsumed under the expression 'Eurocommunism'
- abandonment of the concept of 'dictatorship of the proletariat',
and more recently of 'Leninism' as a imiversal guide to political
action - is that democracy is now assigned an independent
value as an objective of working-class struggle. This new outlook
is well formulated by Santiago Carrillo (General Secretary of
the Communist Party of Spain) in his book 'Êurocommunism'

and the State, where he writes:
The generations of Marxists who have hved through the grievous

experience of Fascism and who, in another order of things, have
experienced Stalinist degeneration, appraise the concept of demo-
cracy in a different way [from Lenin], and not in opposition to
socialism and communism, but as a road towards them and as a main
component of them [p. 90].
and further:
As regards the political system established in Western Europe, based

on representative political institutions - parliament, political and
philosophical pluralism, the theory of the separation of powers,
decentralization, human rights, etc. - that system is in essentials
vahd and it will be still more effective with a socialist, and not a
capitaUst, economic foundation. In each case it is a question of
making that system still more democratic, of bringing power still
closer to the people [p. 105].
This refashioning of political doctrines has gone along with a

substantial revision of Marxist theory, by Marxists of very
different schools, in which the relative autonomy of politics is
similarly emphasized. Structuralist Marxists, inspired largely
by the work of Louis Althusser, have argued broadly that four
different 'spheres' or 'levels' can be distinguished in any society
(or to use their preferred term, 'social formation') - economic,
political, ideological, and theoretical or scientific - and that
each of these levels has a certain autonomy, hence a capacity to
influence independently, within limits, the reproduction or
transformation of a social structure.^^ According to Nicos
Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, it is only 'in the
last instance' that the economic level has a determining influ-

ence; and this obscure, imprecise notion allows great flexibility
One recent version of
in the interpretation of political action.
thiskind of analysis abandons altogether the idea of economic
determination (even in the last instance), asserts that 'there is
no general economic over other levels of the
priority to the
and concludes that 'the current debates
social formation', . . .
on the nature of the state and the political level reveal . . .
fundamental ambiguities and difliculties in the basic concepts

of Marxist theory'.^^ similarly, the later expositors of the
'critical theory' of the Frankfurt School reject in various ways
the idea that the political system and pohtical action are wholly
or even mainly determined by class relations rooted in the mode
of production. Albrecht Wellmer rejects the notion of 'an
economically grounded "mechanism" of emancipation' - in his
view 'thoroughly discredited' - and argues that 'in order to
reformulate Marx's supposition about the pre-requisites for a
successful revolution in the case of the capitahst countries it
would be necessary to include sociahst democracy, socialist

justice, socialist ethics and a "socialist consciousness" among
the components of a socialist society to be "incubated" within
the womb of a capitalist order'.*^ From another aspect Claus
Offe has argued that what distinguishes late capitalist societies
from their original bourgeois forms is 'the comprehensive state
regulation of all the processes vital to society', and that in order
to analyse the organization of social power in such societies it is
necessary to replace the old conception of the 'interests of a

ruling class' by a view of the objective requirement - trans-
cending particular interests - for the pohtical system to deal
effectively with three kinds of fundamental problems, concerned
with economic stability, foreign pohcy, and ensuring mass
loyalty. In these societies of state regulated capitalism, 'all-out
class conflict is no longer the driving force of social change';
disparitiesand conflicts between vital areas emerge into the
foreground, and diverse interest groups seek to obtain the
intervention of the state to support their claims.^ These
analyses have an aflfinity with Touraine's interpretation of the
new social movements of the 1960s, which manifested them-
selves by 'direct political struggle ... by revolt against a system

of integration and manipulation. What is essential is the greater
emphasis on political and cultural rather than economic
action. This is the great difference from the labour movement,
formed in opposition to liberal capitalism.'*^
2 Social movements, parties and
political action
In analysing political action - that is to say, struggles for power

- we need to look primarily at the activities of social groups
rather than the actions of individuals, even though the influence
of particular individuals may sometimes have to be taken into
account in studying specific situations. A preliminary step in
this analysis is to distinguish the various ways in which social
groups may engage in politics,and the nature of the groups
involved. Clearly, there is very great diversity, ranging from
sporadic protests, riots and rebellions or coups d'etat, to the
more continuous activities of organized pohtical parties,
pressure groups, or politicized military officers; but most of
these phenomena can, I think, be subsimied under two broad
categories which I shall refer to as 'social movements' and
'organized pohtical formations'.
Since the 1960s, when a number of new social movements -
among them the student movement, various national and
ethnic movements, and the women's movement - became
extremely active in political life, a great deal more attention has
been given by sociologists to such forms of political action,

which may be seen not only as constituting a basis or context
for the development of more highly organized political activities,
but also as political forces in their own right, existing alongside
and sometimes in conflict with, established parties and pressure
groups. We may define a social movement, in broad terms, as a
collective endeavour to promote or resist change in the society
of which forms part;^ but this statement needs to be qualified
it
in some way if we are to retain a clear distinction between a

'movement' and a 'party'. One way of doing this is to point out
the less organized character of a movement, in which there may
be no regular or easily identifiable membership (no 'party card'

or dues), and way of a central office or staff. Belong-
little in the
ing to a movement is more a matter of sympathizing
with a particular social outlook or doctrine, expressing it in
everyday political debate and being ready to participate in
occasional activities such as demonstrations or 'riotous assem-
blies'. It may also be argued that whereas organized political
formations such as parties are directly engaged in the struggle
for power, in the sense of seeking to retain or capture the govern-
ment of some political unit, social movements act in a more
diffuse way and if they are successful establish preconditions
for changes of policy or regime by bringing into question the
legitimacy of the existing pohtical system (in part or in whole),
creating a different climate of opinion, and proposing alterna-
tives.
The distinction between a movement and a party, or other

organized group, is shown also by the fact that large-scale
movements tend to produce within themselves a variety of
more or less directly political groups, as did the nineteenth-
century labour movement; and the subsequent course of
political action has then to be understood partly in terms of the
relation between the broader movement and the various organ-
ized groups. In Marxist thought and practice this relation is
posed as one between class and party, and it has been a matter
of controversy since the end of the nineteenth century, expressed
in the most diverse forms, extending from Michels' reflections
upon the 'iron law of oligarchy' to Lenin's conception of the
Bolshevik Party, theoretically elaborated by Lukacs,^ and to
the most recent 'pluralist' declarations of Eiirocommunism.
Having established a distinction between social movements
and organized pohtical formations, and indicated in a prelimi-
nary way the characteristics of social movements, it would not
be too difficult to construct a typology of such movements, as a
number of writers have attempted,^ in terms of their size
(number of participants), range (local, national, international),
duration, objectives (specific or general, directed toward
transforming individuals or supra-individual systems) and so
on.* But although such classifications may sometimes be useful
Social movements, parties and political action 43
in guiding empirical research they do not seem to me to take

up directly themost important questions, which are those
concerning the significance of social movements in the process
of reproduction and transformation of total social systems.
They do not, that is to say, make a very large contribution to a
theory of social movements.
In order to understand how such a theory might be construc-
ted we should begin by recognizing that social movements are
essentially a phenomenon of modem societies. The term
itself only began to be generally used in the early nineteenth
century in Western Europe, and one of the first systematic

discussions is book by Lorenz von Stein,
to be found in the
History of the SocialMovement in France from 1789 to the
Present Day,^ where the social movement is portrayed as a
struggle for greater social independence culminating in the class
struggle of the proletariat. Stein's book may have influenced
the initial formulation of Marx's conception of the proletariat
in capitaUst society,® but whether that is so or not it did un-
doubtedly express in a very clear and forceful way ideas which
were very widely held about the dominant political issues in
nineteenth-century European societies; to such an extent that
the social movement came to be largely identified, especially in
Germany, with the labour movement. Of course, the identi-
fication was not complete, for as we have seen, Tocqueville
attached greater importance to the democratic movement,
animated and sustained by the middle class rather than the
working class, but the impact of the labour movement grew
steadily and to a large extent it was represented as a prolonga-
tion of the democratic movement, as the term 'social democracy'
indicates.
Beyond any such difierences of interpretation, in any case,
there was a common recognition that in one form or another
large numbers of people in the post-revolutionary societies of
Europe and North America had begun to take part actively and
consciously in the construction and reconstruction of their
societies. We can describe this historical situation as the beginn-
ing of an era of mass movements, among which, in the latter
part of the nineteenth century, the labour movement appeared
as the paradigm of a social movement. From this time, at first in

Europe and North America, and subsequently in the rest of the
world, a great nimiber of social movements developed -national-
ist movements in Central and South-Eastem Europe, and later in
colonial territories women's movements which were concerned

:
initially with the right to vote; youth movements; and a host of
smaller, more sectional movements advocating particular

causes - while the labour movement continued to advance and
engendered a variety of new organizations on a national and
international scale.
It is on the basis of this historical experience of modem social
movements, and with the aid of concepts which were introduced

in order to understand them, that social scientists and historians
have gone on to study movements of a similar though more
restricted kind in other societies; for example, millenarian
movements,'' peasant rebellions,^ the actions of 'crowds' and
'mobs'.® The value of such studies is that they show plainly the
ubiquity of popular political action, which may be diffuse,
episodic, lacking any clearly formulated doctrine, or expressing
itself mainly in religious or cultural terms, but always provides
a matrix from which political organizations can emerge in
favourable circumstances.
Nevertheless, the gap between movements of this kind
(which have sometimes been called and modem
'pre-political')
social movements remains large, for the latter exist on a vastly
greater scale, are more directly involved in political conflict, are
influenced by more rigorous and elaborate ideologies, and have
as a mlea more enduring, less ephemeral, character. Their
specific significance is that they form a cmcial element in what
has been called the 'self-production' of modem societies.
According to this conception societies have now come to
recognize themselves '. . . as the result of a social action, of
decisions or transactions, of domination or conflicts'.^" In this
process of self-creation social movements are the forces which
contest an established system of historical action and seek to
development of society into a different channel. ^^
divert the
This idea of the innovative power of movements obviously
owes a great deal to the events of the 1960s when there appeared
quite suddenly large-scale movements which expressed massive

discontent with, and opposition to, the existing social and
pohtical order. These followed two decades of consolidation
of the 'stable democracies' in the Western capitalist world, and
of the presimiably 'stable autocracies' in the socialist world of
Eastern Europe, as well as the emergence of a 'Third World'
(including many newly independent states) which was conceived
by most Western political scientists as having embarked upon
a process of gradual 'modernization' and 'industrialization'.
The leading element in this upheaval was the student movement,
and although students became independently active in political
life all over the world - in Eastern Europe and in the Third
World just as much as in the West - the principal expression of
a distinctive radical doctrine and mode of political action, which
became to a large extent a model for the whole international
movement, was to be found in the USA, in the Students for a
Democratic Society.^^
SDS began modestly in 1959 as the revived youth section of
the old League for Industrial Democracy, but it soon began to
grow as part of a general renaissance of radical ideas and
movements in the New Left, and more particxilarly through the
participation of students in the civil rights movement. Its first
manifesto, the Port Huron Statement,i^ launched the idea of
'participatory democracy', which was translated into political
practice first in community action projects and subsequently in
various forms of direct action in the universities (beginning with
the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964) and against the
Vietnam war. The membership of S D S grew rapidly from about
4000 in 1965 to some 100000 three years later, and throughout
this period it had much larger numbers of supporters who
identified themselves in some way with 'the Movement'.
The peak of the student movement, in Europe as well as in
the USA, was reached in 1968, marked most dramatically by
the May revolt of the French students, which was supported
brieflyby a large part of the working-class movement.^^ There-
after, the movement began to decline almost everywhere,
largely as a result of repressive measures, which included such

actions as the Soviet military occupation of Czechoslovakia, de
Gaulle's threat to use the French army in a full-scale civil war,

and a general harassment of radicals, particularly in the USA
and in West Germany (where police interrogations and the
exclusion from public employment of individuals connected
with radical organizations have continued up to the present
time). It was not only the student movement that suffered in
this way; the Black movement in the USA, especially when it
took a revolutionary form in the Black Panther Party, was
violently suppressed, and in Latin America democratic and
radical movements were destroyed, and military dictatorships
were installed, often with American help, notably in Chile.
Like the labour movement in its formative period - like
Chartism, or the early trade unions, or the Utopian commimi-
ties - the socialmovements of the 1960s were movements of
liberation seeking an adequate doctrine and mode of political
action to combat the most oppressive features of the societies
in which they developed; thus they directed their activities
variously against colom'al rule, domination by external econo-
mic powers, the rule of feudal-military elites, ethnic subordi-
nation, the subjection of women, or the domination of society
by a rigid, centralizedand bureaucratic apparatus. It seems
unlikely that the present eclipse of these movements will be long
lasting, for the conditions which they contested still exist and
have still to be transformed. Moreover, some of the movements
have continued to develop, though in less dramatic ways; some
nationalist and separatist movements have become stronger, as
in Scotland and Quebec, and the women's movement has had
an increasing influence, although it is far from accomplishing
its larger aims.
To some extent the political apathy which was noted in many
countries, and especially in Britain, in the mid-1970s, was itself
an indication of the instability of existing political regimes, for
it expressed a disenchantment with established political organi-
zations and their policies. Moreover, this disenchantment has
continued to take more active forms. There have been important
political movements and changes in Spain, Portugal, and
Greece, while in France and Italy powerful sociahst movements
have been gaining momentum; and in all these political actions
the influence of the movements of the previous decade is strongly

felt, just as it isyouth sections of social democratic parties
in the
in other European countries. This does not mean, however,
that there is at present a very widespread inclination to embark
upon fresh experiments in political action on the scale of the
1960s, The 'self-production' of society, involving the mass
participation of its members, is a complex and difficult under-
taking, which perhaps requires a more buoyant and optimistic
mood thannow prevails. The rapid development of social
movements in the industrial societies during the 1960s depended
in part upon sustained economic growth, full employment, the
expansion of higher education, and a general feeling that these
societies had entered what was often called a 'post-scarcity' era
in which the fundamental problems of production had been
solved and the conditions created for the development of a
new society of leisure and enjoyment. This radical faith in
affluence has now waned; there is a more profoimd concern
with the use of natural resources and increasing scepticism
about the possibiUty of unlimited economic growth, which was
an unexpressed premise of much jwhtical debate a decade ago.
I shall return to some of these questions in a later chapter.
The long-term success of social movements depends also

upon several general conditions. In the first place, it is essential
that such movements should formulate a doctrine which is

capable of arousing enthusiasm and commitment to sustained
pohtical activity. The doctrine, which may be concerned with
national liberation, the emancipation of a class, the emancipa-
tion of women, or some other general aim which is felt to be
important by large numbers of people, has to include of be
founded upon a social theory which can elucidate the principal
issues, clarify the objectives and ways of attaining them, and
outhne alternative forms of society. It was along this path that
the labour movement, and within a narrower framework,

nationaUst movements, developed in the nineteenth century.
The social movements of the 1960s were relatively unsuccessful
in producing such doctrines; and the student movement, in
particular came to an end in a welter of conflicting views about
the agencies and objectives of radical social change, beset by
arguments about its own relation to the working-class movement,

about tlie importance of cultural as against economic and
structural changes in society, and about the role of violence in
movements for social change. The Black movement in the USA
was also divided, not only about its relationship with White
radicalism, and about the use of violence, but also more
fundamentally about whether its ultimate objective should be
full American society on equal terms with
assimilation into
other ethnic groups or some form of separation and indepen-
dence.^^
There is a second important requirement for the success of a
social movement. At some point in its development it must
create more organized political groups, or convert or capture
existing political organizations, which are able to engage
directly in a struggle for power and have the capacity to use
power when they have gained it in order to reconstruct society.
Many of the movements in the 1960s were reluctant to take this
step, largely because of their hostility to the bureaucratic
character of traditional parties, and they seem to have formed
no clear idea of how the desired transformation of the economy,
the political system, and cultural patterns (including education)
could actually be carried out in an effective way. Frequently,
they expressed a sympathy for guerrilla activities and direct
action, without recognizing that successful guerrilla movements
were either controlled by an organized and disciplined party (as
in China) or turned themselves into a traditional type of party
(as in Cuba) when it became necessary to consolidate their
rule and implement their policies. In many Third World
countries national liberation movements which failed to create
effective political parties were either taken over by military
elites or else the governments which they formed were over-
thrown by military coups.^^ On the other hand, nationalist

movements within industrial countries have had some success
when they have been able to establish strong party organiza-
tions, as in the case of the Scottish National Party or the Parti
Quebecois.
While many of those who were active in the social movements
of the 1960s were distrustful of parties, and in some cases
viewed society - an ideal society - as an unending process of

imaginative creative activity, without any permanently estab-
lished institutions, those who were deeply engaged in party
politicswere often inclined to regard the movements as merely
disruptive and irresponsible. In those societies of the late
twentieth century in which there exists at least a minimal
freedom of expression and association social movements are a
means by which members of society can express dissent and
opposition in a direct and immediate way, and can challenge
the indifference, remoteness or negligence of party machines.
Parties, on the other hand, are the indispensable means for
achieving or retaining power and thus for being able to imple-
ment and administer, over long periods, complex social policies.
Between these two forms of political action there is a per-
petual tension, the nature of which will become clearer when we
have examined the development of parties themselves. Like
social movements, political parties are a modem phenomenon.^'
They came democracy - with the
into existence along with
development of parliaments and elections - after the American
and French Revolutions, and were at first 'parties of notables',
that is composed
to say, relatively small electoral committees
of individuals who had and wealth in their own con-
prestige
stituency or electoral district. With the gradual extension of the
franchise, and the growing powers of elected assemblies, parties
acquired a more permanent organization, on a national scale;
but the next major development came only toward the end of
the nineteenth century, with the advent of labour and socialist
parties (first in Germany and Austria) which aimed to recruit
a mass membership, not only as a way of financing election
campaigns and other activities, but also as a means of political
education and involvement. From this time the permanent
mass party became the dominant factor in the politics of
Western capitalist societies, and during the twentieth century
it has spread throughout the rest of the world, though in diverse
forms. It is important to distinguish the various ways in which

mass parties were created. In the case of socialist parties, which
gave the original impetus, the party was very largely an exten-
sion of an existing mass movement into the sphere of electoral
politics,whereas conservative and liberal parties, which already

had a strong representation in parliament and government,
created their mass organization mainly from above, under the
control of the parliamentary leaders.^^
These divergent courses of development embodied different
conceptions of politics and of poUtical institutions. The sociahst
parties thought of themselves as the avant-garde of a class which
was striving to bring into existencea new kind of society, and
for them the struggle for power of the working class was, in
principle, more important than any existing institutions. From
this perspective, electoral politics were only one aspect of the
struggle, and the parliamentary leaders were considered subordi-
nate to the leadership of the mass party, which was at the same
time the leadership of the class itself. Conservative and liberal
parties, however much they in fact represented class interests,
saw themselves as parties functioning within an established
social orderand a system of poUtical institutions in which
parliament was supreme. Hence the parliamentary leaders
dominated the mass party, which was conceived only as a means
for contesting elections.
The socialist conception of a party was very clearly expressed
in the early development of the German Social Democratic
Party. The political situation in Germany before 1914, in which
parties had no direct role in the formation of the Imperial
Government, which functioned independently of them, meant
that the SPD had no reason to think of its activities mainly in
parliamentary terms. Instead, it grew rapidly, after the period of
illegality from 1878-90, as a mass party (with more than a
million members by 1914) outside the existing poUtical system,

engaged in what Nettl has caUed 'non-participating opposition',
and by 191 1 it had acquired 'aU the appearance of a state within
a state'.^^ At this time it was, to use Nettl's term, an 'inheritor
party' ;2" that is to say, a party which expects to inherit power
following the decUne and overthrow of the existing poUtical
system and its socio-economic basis. Not only have many such
parties appeared on the scene during the present century - the
communist parties and anti-colonial parties such as the Indian
National Congress^^ - but there is in all sociaUst parties (as well
as in some right-wing parties, such as the fascist parties of the

1920s) a persistent element of non-participating opposition.
Thus, one of the major criticisms formulated by the social
movements of the 1960s, and by radical groups within socialist
and labour parties, was directed against 'consensus politics'
which placed a high value upon the existing parliamentary
institutions and played down the commitment to radical
changes in the social system.
This distinction corresponds, to some extent, with that
between 'reformist' and 'revolutionary' parties, the former
being concerned to accommodate unavoidable changes (if they
are more conservative) or to bring about desirable changes (if
they are more radical) within an existing social and political
order which is broadly accepted, while the latter aim to estab-
lish a new order. In this sense all socialist parties are revolution-
ary, since their objective is to replace a capitalist form of society
by a socialist one; so also are nationalist parties which seek to
overthrow colonial rule, and perhaps in a more limited sense
right-wing parties, such as fascist parties, which attempt to
restore a more hierarchical and authoritarian type of society.
The characteristics of revolutionary, as against reformist,
parties have, of course, often been held to include, besides this
ambition to create a wholly new social order, a commitment to
rapid and violent social change. But these aspects, it seems to
me, are less fundamental. There is no contradiction in terms in
referring to a 'slow revolution', as Otto Bauer did, or to a
peaceful and democratic revolution, as many sociahsts have
done. The rate at which social change is accomplished and the
role of violence in political life which are con-
raise questions
ceptually distinct from that of revolutionary change and need
to be examined independently.^^
Even if we confine ourselves to the difference of aim between
reformist and revolutionary parties (or of social movements,
which can be classified in a similar way), the distinction cannot
always be made in an absolutely clear-cut fashion. An accumu-
lation of reforms may in fact bring into existence a very different
kind of society, 23 and reformist parties may be led, by circimi-
stances and by their responses to them, into advocating and
implementing more substantial changes in society than they had

originally envisaged. On the other side, revolutionary parties
may come to accept more of the existing social institutions
than they did in their first enthusiastic advocacy of a brave new
world. Something of the kind seems to have happened in the
case of the European communist parties; thus Santiago Carrillo,
in the passage quoted earlier, ^^ says plainly that '. . . the political
system established in Western Europe ... is in essentials valid',
and removed from the outlook of some earlier
this is far
-
Marxists and of the members of a few left-wing groupuscules
even today - who talk about 'smashing the bourgeois state'.
But although the distinction between reformist and revolution-
ary parties may thus become somewhat blurred - and the
sharpness of the distinction is further diminished by the
difficulty of determining precisely what is to count as a funda-
mental change in a social system - it remains an important one,
compared with which many other distinctions that have been
made between parties, and between party systems, seem to
have a relatively minor significance. Thus the distinction
between one-party systems and multi-party systems is to a great
extent only an aspect of the differences we have just considered,
for one-party or 'one-dominant party'^^ regimes are generally
the creation of 'inheritor parties', either socialist or nationalist.
Within the category of multi-party systems, whose existence is
connected with modem Western democracy, a further distinc-
tion can be made between those in which there are two main
parties (as in Britain, the USA, Canada) and those in which
there are several parties, each having substantial support (as
in France). But this distinction too is far from being precise.
There are important third parties in some two-party systems
(the Liberal Party in Britain, the New Democratic Party in
Canada), and in federal states there may be considerable
differences between the parties which are most prominent in
national elections and those which have considerable support at
the state or provincial level. Thus in Canada the Social Credit
Party has been an important force in Alberta and British
Columbia, the NDP is strong in British Columbia, Manitoba
and Saskatchewan, and in the last few years the Parti Quebecois
has become dominant in Quebec. Furthermore, a two-party

systemmay come to resemble a system with several parties if
each of the parties involved is itself a relatively loose assemblage
of diverse groups without strict voting discipline, as is to some
extent the case with the Democratic and Republican Parties in
the USA. On the other side, in regimes with several parties,
electoral alliances may bring about a situation which is close to a
two-party system, as has been the case in France in recent years.
The diversity of party systems in the Western democracies
is an outcome of social, cultural and historical influences, and
of electoral systems themselves. So far as the latter are con-
cerned it has often been noted that a simple-majority single-
ballot system tends to produce a two-party system, proportional
representation a system with several parties, and a simple-
majority two-ballot system a regime in which there are several
parties, but the formation of electoral aUiances may result in
something like a two-party system. It would be better to say
perhaps that electoral systems reinforce existing tendencies,
because such systems are themselves the products of diverse
and parties, and of changes
constellations of political interests
in those constellations. Thus two-party systems in the twentieth
century have become established where there has been a clear
division between two major classes (Britain providing a good
example), whereas systems with several parties have emerged
in conditions where such a division between classes has been
complicated by religious differences, by the existence of a
significantly large peasantry, by divisions in the working-class
movement between socialist and communist parties, and by a
variety of other cultural factors and historical legacies.
These circumstances are themselves historically changing,
and in response to the changes new social movements and
parties may emerge within the established political system, as
did the sociahst parties, and later the communist and fascist
parties, in Europe. The success or failure of such third parties,
or more generally of new parties is affected by many social
factors, as well as by the political system itself, including the
electoral system. In the USA, for example, where the socialist
party failed to establish itself as a major party after a fairly

rapid growth in the first two decades of this century, it has long
been argued that the presidential system is a major obstacle to

the development of third parties,^^ and undoubtedly these
constitutional factors have been important; but it is clear that
many other social and economic characteristics of the USA
have had a preponderant influence in determining the absence
of a large-scale independent socialist movement or party there.^'
In some European countries with a two-party system, in which
the parties have traditionally been closely associated with the
major classes in capitalist society, changes in the class structure -
such as were examined in the previous chapter - have made
possible the emergence or revival of 'centre' parties. The modest
revival of the Liberal Party in Britain during the past decade or
so is a case in point. Moreover, changes of this kind may well
have an impact upon the electoral system itself; one matter of

political controversy in Britain at the present time is the question
of proportional representation - an issue vigorously raised by
the Liberal Party, which receives up to 18 per cent of the
popular vote in national elections but under the existing simple-
majority single-ballot system wins at most 2 per cent of parlia-
mentary seats.
The foregoing discussion suggests that political parties can be

regarded in two different ways. They are, as I have emphasized,
highly organized political formations, which tend to develop a
life of their own, partly independent of the social interests
which originally gave rise to them and of their changing
environment, and which may acquire the character (or at least
the appearance) of permanent elements in the political system.
Social democratic parties have existed in Europe for a century
or more; the Democratic and Republican parties in the USA
and indeed have a certain continuity
are well over a century old,
with earlier parties dating from the time of the American
Revolution; conservative parties on a mass basis were created
soon after the emergence of social democracy in Europe and ;
communist parties were formed on a world scale after the

Russian Revolution. It was this aspect which engaged the
attention of Michels, in his study of socialist parties (and
especially the German Social Democratic Party),^^ in which he
argued that the party becomes personified in the full-time paid

officials - the bureaucracy - whose interests may diverge from
those of the mass membership, and still more from the wider
group, the class, which the party clauns to represent, and who
have an overwhelming influence upon party policy.
At the same time, however, it should be recognized that not
all parties retain their vitality, or even survive at all, that new
parties emerge, and soon become powerful, as happened with

the socialist parties in Europe, and that parties may change
their characterand their policies without necessarily changing
their names. In some measure at least, the immutability of
parties and party systems seems to be an illusion which results
simply from taking an unhistorical view. Leaving aside the
munerous examples of the rise and fall of parties over the past
century, there are many instances of change even in the rela-
tively short period of time since the end of the Second World
War. Especially in the 'new nations', political parties which
emerged from the independence movements have either
consolidated their position, or been destroyed by military coups,
or been challenged and replaced by still newer parties. In the
older nation states, after the war, fascist parties disappeared
(although they have begun to re-emerge on a small scale in
recent years), regional and nationalist parties have been formed
within existing states, there has been a succession of new
political parties(and destruction of them by military interven-
tion) in Latin America, and in some European countries there
has been a revival of liberal and 'centre' parties. Even where
there has been continuity in party organization changes of
orientation have occurred. In Europe, profound controversies
have taken place in many socialist parties about their ultimate
aims, and the importance attached to public owernship of the
means of production has been moderated in some cases, while
the communist seem to be engaged in a thoroughgoing
parties
revision of their doctrine and political practice. In the USA,
it has been argued by some political scientists, the Democratic
Party has evolved into something resembling the European

social democratic parties, and even includes a distinctly socialist
element.^"
The impression gained from observing the political events of

the present century is not one of great stability and permanence,
but rather of considerable turbulence and changeability in the
organization and expression of political interests. Of course,
political parties do provide an important element of continuity,
imuch more in some countries than in others, but everywhere
they are very much open to the influence of changing economic
conditions, changes in the composition of society in terms of
social strata and interest groups, and new cultural orientations.
here that the immense importance of social movements
It is
becomes apparent, for such movements - whether they are
large-scale and enduring, like the trade union movement, or
more specific,concerned with particular issues in some historical
period, like the unemployed workers' movements of the 1930s -
do not only establish, in some cases, the preconditions for the
emergence or transformation of organized political formations,

but also constitute an independent form of political commitment
and action which is an essential, often highly effective, element
in political struggles. Piven and Cloward, for example, in their
admirable study of^four lower-class protest movements in the

USA,^" attribute greater effectiveness to mass protests than
.to the efforts to build mass-based permanent organizations:
*Whatever influence lower-class groups occasionally exert in
American politics does not result from organization, but from
mass protest and the disruptive consequences of protest.'^^ A
similar view of the importance of social movements is taken by
Touraine in his account of the Popular Unity Government of
Salvador AUende in Chile^^ where, he argues, the activities and
influence of a variety of movements within the governing
coalition made it possible for the poor to express their grievances
directly and continuously, instead of having them diverted (and
perhaps stifled) in the official channels of a monolithic ruling
party.
What is perhaps most striking in the past two decades is the
way in which social movements of very diverse kinds have
become an accepted part of political life in the Western democ-
racies, and to some extent have provided models for movements
in countries where the expression of criticism, dissent and

opposition through formal political institutions is virtually

impossible (for example, the human rights movement in
Eastern Europe). In a somewhat schematic way it is possible, I
think, to distinguish three main phases in the development of
modem social movements. The first is that in which movements
such as the democratic movement and the labour movement in
Europe, the women's sufirage movement and independence
movements in colonial territories at a later time, or present-day
movements in autocratic states, provide the only effective means
for expressing grievances and seeking to bring about political
changes. A second stage emerges when the achievement of
representative government, imiversal and equal suffrage, and
free elections seems to diminish the importance of poUtical
action outside the formal institutional sphere, although in
periods of crisis social movements, such as the imemployed
workers' movements or the fascist movements in some European
countries, may develop. The third, present stage in the Western
democracies seems to me one in which there is a considerable
revivaland proliferation of social movements as a more or less
permanent feature of political life, reflecting a broader move-
ment to extend democracy. Representative government, parties'
and elections are now seen increasingly as providing an essential r
framework but as inadequate by themselves to establish a

democratic society in the more radical sense of government by
the people.
The general regulation of economic and social life at the ^
national level, and relations with other nation states, (|6qukp?a
complex apparatus of govermnent and administration, parties
with broadly formulated aims and poUcies, and competition
between parties; but there is also a need for more direct and
immediate means of political action, which would allow the
effective expression of particular grievance s and interests,
counter some of the consequences of centralization and burea-
cratic admimstration and make possible a more contjnuous
practical participation by large number of citizens in determin-
ing the quality of their lives. Another way of stating this point
would be to say that the revival and growth of social movements
in those societies which are both economically advanced and
have a fairly long tradition of democracy, is a major aspect of

that 'self-production' of society, referred to on page 44, which
exists in some degree already, but is still more an ideal representa-
tion of a future form of society, 'free of domination', in which
the collectivity would really govern itself, by procedures of
rational discussion among equal citizens.
How far present-day societies are likely to proceed along this
road is a matter of debate (and I shall return to the question in a
later chapter) but at the least it has to be recognized that in
recent years the idea of political action has been very sub-
stantially broadened, so that there is already a quite widespread
awareness of the variety of ways in which individuals and groups
of individuals can assert their dissent from the policies of
government at all levels (one much publicized recent mani-
festation, among the middle classes, being taxpayers' revolts)
and can bring into the arena of public debate alternative
policies.
3 Types of political system
Classifications of political systems have been undertaken in

diverseways and for a variety of purposes. From the point of
view of a science of politics classification can be seen as an
elementary form of theory construction which involves the
kind of generalization required in order to assign phenomena
to particular classes.^ As such it needs to make use of concepts
which define the political sphere, the nature of political rela-
tions and institutions, the state, government, law, etc.; and it
generally has as its point of departure a broader scheme of
thought about man and society. Many of the classifications
that were proposed in the nineteenth century rested upon a
conception of social evolution, which itself was understood in
various ways and was frequently connected with the idea of
progress. Other distinctions that were drawn - between democ-
racy and absolutism, between monarchy and republic, between
Western political institutions and 'Oriental despotism' -
expressed current political interests and ideological commit-
ments; and indeed all the atte mpts to construct a typology o f
political syst ems are marked to some degree by an intermingling
of scientific analysis and the value judgements which arise from
real political struggles .
This does not mean, however, that the scientific and ideolo-
gical elementscannot be distinguished; and a further distinction
may be made between those classifications which are more
descriptive and those which have a larger theoretical content.
PoUtical scientistswho were, or are, little influenced by socio-
logy have produced classifications which are mainly descriptive,
dividing political regimes, for example, into monarchies and
republics, federal and unitary states. For political sociology, on
the other hand, the principal question is the relation between a

form of society and a type of political system; and from this
point of view the foregoing distinctions may have little signifi-
cance. Modem attempts to classify political regimes have

begun for the most part from some general theory of society,
and as I have indicated they were strongly influenced at the
outset (and again in recent decades) by conceptions of social
evolution or development.
We may take as quite different examples of such endeavours
the theories of Spencer and Marx. Although Spencer worked
out an elaborate scheme of social evolution, in terms of the
increasing scaleand complexity of societies, his political
sociology was based mainly upon a fairly simple distinction
between 'militant' and 'industrial' societies, the former being
characterized by the predominance of activities concerned with
defence and offence (i.e. warfare), the latter by the predominance
of activities concerned with 'sustentation' (i.e. production and
trade). In the industrial type of society there is, according to
Spencer, a tendency for central regulation and coercive control
to decline and to be replaced by representative institutions and a
more diffuse system of regulation; but this view is then quahfied
in various ways, and Spencer finally concludes that representa-
tive governme nt depends ^^^^V upon the existence of a
particula r type of economy - the laissez-faire free-enterprise
economy - which creates the conditions in which '. multi- . .
tudinous objects are achieved by spontaneously evolved

combinations of citizens governed representatively'. This idea of
a connection between the capitalist economy and a democratic
political system appeared in various forms in accounts of the
transition that was seen as occurring in the nineteenth-century
European societies (for example, as a mo vement from status to
contrac t, or from authority to citizenshlpT and it has continued
,
to have an important influence in political theory to the present

day. Similarly, the notion of social development through
increasing differentiation and individuation has had a con-
siderable place in later sociological theories, although its
political implications have been judged in diverse ways; from

one aspect social differentiation may be seen as creating a
Types ofpolitical system 61
mutual dependence of individuals and gr oups which is a funda-

mental element in a stable_demq£ratic_S5^stem, while from
another aspect (as in Durkheim's theory) it may be regarded
as a danger to the political order if it leads to excessive indi-
vidualism, and then needs to be che cked by a moral consensus
embodied in the^tate.
Social development, in Spencer's conception, forms part of
an all-embracing process of cosmic evolution, and it is treated
in a very abstract and schematic way. Marx's theory, on the
contrary, deals directly with the actual history of societies,
draws upon historical studies and poses historical problems.
The basis of his account of social development is the distinction
between different economic structures, or modes of production -
comprising 'forces', or technical means, of production and
'social relations' of production, which include the distribution
of the means of production (property) and of the product, as
well as the social division of labour - to which different forms
of society and the state correspond. I n Marx's own comcise
formulation of his theory of history: 'The mode of production
of mat erial life det ermines the general character of the social,
political, and spiritual process of life. ... In broad outline we
can designate" the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the
modem bourgeois modes of production as progressive epochs
in the economic formation of society.'^ Earlier, in the Jfirst
systematic exposition of his new conception, Marx indicates
four stages of development in the division of labour and the
forms of property, in European societies, from tribal property
to the communal and state property of antiquity, then to feudal
or estates property, and finally to modern capitalist property.^ In
the Grundrisse manuscript of 1857-8,^ Marx discusses social
development in greater detail, on the basis of a wider historical
knowledge which is no longer confined to Europe; it is in this
work that the concept of 'Asiatic society' is introduced, and as
Hobsbawm remarks there now seem to be three or four alterna-
tive routes out of the primitive communal system: the oriental,
the ancient, the Germanic (or more broadly, feudal), and less
clearly articulated, the Slavonic.^ Marx himself, as is well

known, devoted the greater part of his historical studies to the
development of modem capitalism; his knowledge of some

other forms of society was limited, especially in the case of
primitive communal society which he began to study systemati-
cally only in the years 1879-82 after the publication of L. H.
Morgan's Ancient Society.^
Thus Marx's model of historical development was in many
respects only a sketch which left many problems unresolved.
Four issues stand out as being of crucial importance: how many
distinct 'modes of production' are there; in what order do these
modes of production succeed each other, and how is their
sequence to be explained; what forms of society necessarily
correspond with, arise from, or are determined by the different
modes of production; and lastly, what are the forms of state, or
political systems, that are characteristic of, or produced by,
different economic structures and forms of society? It can
scarcely be claimed that these questions have yet been answered
in such a manner as to transform Marx's very general model
into a systematic and well-supported theory of historical
development. Nevertheless, the model has inspired much
detailed historical research - indeed it has contributed sub-
of economic and social history - and in
stantially to the progess
the past two decades, partly as a result of the pubhcation of
previously inaccessible manuscripts of Marx, there have been
notable advances in Marxist scholarship addressed to the kinds
of problem that I have indicated, concerning modes of pro-
duction,' tribal (i.e. primitive communal) societies,^ historical
sequences,^ and the relation of political power to forms of

society.^"
In these recent studies the idea of a unilinear development of
society has been largely abandoned, even as representing the
view of Marx himself, and it is argued instead - as I have
indicated - that there are alternative forms of society which have
succeeded the primitive communal system. .One_imp_ortant
distinction_ between these types of society is that some may be
resistant to further development while others and
facilitate it,^^
thus a contrast is established between the development of

society in Western Europe, through feudalism to capitalism,
and the relative immutability of Asiatic societies. Further, it has
been argued in one recent work^^ that there is no 'Asiatic mode

of production', so that the distinctive history of the Orient has
to be explained in terms of influences other than a specific
mode of production; for instance, by the character and develop-
ment of political or rehgious institutions. In the same way, the
contrasting development of the Western European societies
may also become comprehensible only as the outcome of
distinctive political, rehgious or other forces working within
a particular mode of production. Thus there is no world history,
with clearly marked and universal stages of development, but
only separate histories of different areas of the world; and we
are led to a conception like that of Max Weber, in which the
imique features in the history of Western Europe, and especially
those which gave an impetus to the development of capitalism,
are emphasized.
There is a similar departure from the notion of a fixed sequence
of modes of production and their corresponding political and
cultural forms in recent works which concentrate their attention
upon of political regime which do not necessarily
specific types
fall within a single time span. A
good example is Anderson's
study of the absolutist state in Europe, where it is observed that
there is no uniform temporal medium: for the times of the
'. . .
major Absolutisms of Europe - Eastern and Western - were,

precisely, enormously diverse, The wide disjunctures in the
. . .
dating of these great structures inevitably corresponded to deep

distinctions in their composition and evolution,'^^ The historical
problem becomes, not how to establish a sequence of political
regimes associated with a universal process of socio-economic
development, but how to explain the interconnection of
different elements within a particular historical type of
society and state. The principal distinction that Anderson
makes is between capitalism and pre-capitalist social forma-
tions.
Capitalism is the first mode of production in history in which the

means whereby the surplus is pumped out of the direct producer is
'purely' economic in form. . . . modes of exploita-

All other previous
tion operate through extra-economic sanctions - kin, customary,
religious, legal or pohtical. ... In consequence, pre-capitalist modes
of production cannot be defined except via their political, legal and

ideological superstructures. ... A scrupulous and exact taxonomy
of these legal and political configurations is thus a precondition of
establishing any comprehensive typology of pre-capitahst modes of
production.^*
A similar conception, formulated in a more abstract manner,

prevails in the work of the 'structuralist' Marxists; notably in
Poulantzas' study of the capitalist state, where the object of
inquiry - politics in capitalist social formations - is constituted
by reference to a general concept of 'mode of production',
defined as being composed of different levels (economic,
political, ideological and theoretical) which form a complex
whole determined, in the last instance, by the economic level,

but in which the economic level does not necessarily have the
dominant role. What distinguishes one mode of production
from another is the particular articulation of the various levels or
elements.^^
One prominent tendency in recent Marxist thought, therefore,
has been to replace the relatively simple and precise evolution-
ary scheme of Marx's 1859 Preface by a more complex and
indefinite pictureof the history of society in which, beyond the
primitive communal stage, two broad types of society are dis-
tinguished - pre-capitalist and capitalist - each of which may
develop very diverse forms of economy, politics and culture.
At the same time, the teleological elements in Marx's thought
have been given up; there is no single line of development
passing through necessary stages to the attainment of socialism.
The breakdown of capitalism and the advent of a new form of
society are conceived and explained as the outcome of the way
a particul ar structure - the capitalist mode of production and
capitalistôciety - works, not as the product of a historical
process; and the post-capitalist societies which can be foreseen,
or which actually exist,may be as varied as were feudal societies
or the absolutist states. Furthermore, they may bear little
rese mblan ce to the ideological representations of socialism,

strongly marked By teleology, in terms of the end of ahenation
or_the overcoming of antagonistic forms of society.
This kind of anlysis has implications for the Marxist theory of
the state. It too can no longer be presented in a teleological form
as an account of a historical process which begins with primitive

'stateless' societies, then passes through a definite sequence of
class societies in which the state comes into existence and

develops, and concludes with a higher form of commimal
society which is again 'stateless'. Instead, the theory has to
relate types of state to distinct socio-economic structures,
without placing them as a whole in any historical sequence, and
to explain changes in the state by characteristics of the structure
of each particular form of society which engender a structural
transformation. But the theory still needs a general concept of
the state, and this may be elaborated in such a way as to retain,
covertly, the idea of 'stateless' societies existing at the beginning
and end of a historical process. Hindess and Hirst, for example,
write that
. Marxism establishes the necessity of a political level as a condition

. .
of existence of certain determinate modes of production, namely,

those in which relations of production impose a social division of
labour into a class of labourers and a class of non-labourers. In other
modes of production there is no state and no political level If the
appropriation of surplus labour is collective there are no classes, no
state power and no politics. Otherwise classes, politics and the state
are necessarily present.^'
But in the same context they refer to 'primitive communist' and

'advanced communist' modes of production and tacitly assume
a historical progress to a preconceived end.^' From a non-
evolutionist standpoint, however, the problems that can be
posed concerning the state, within a Marxist conception, are
limited to the following: the formation of the state as a conse-
quence of a structmâl transformation of primitive commimal
societies (so far as these can be properly located and studied);
the types of state which correspond with determinate, histori-
cally realized, modes of production, and the conditions which
produce a transition from one type to another; and in the case
of capitalist society, the structural characteristics, including the
contradictions,which may effect a transition to another
(unknown) type of society. There is no place in such an analysis
for the speculative concept of 'advanced communism' which

belongs to the philosophy of history.
It is an entirely dififerent question whether the Marxist
concept of the state as the necessary product of the division of
society into classes (which is also sufficient to produce it) is
itself adequate, irrespective of whether or not it is incorporated

into an evolutionist scheme. Two particular instances will
illustrate some of the difficulties. Let us assume, in accordance
with the Marxist concept, that in the earliest human societies
there was no political domination, in however rudimentary a
form (not even the domination of women by men), though this
may seem less probable than it once did, in the light of recent
studies of animal societies. The problem then is to explain how
the state came to be formedliistorically, through the dissolution
of the primitive communal group; and a broadly Marxist
account of this process (leaving aside here the diverse interpre-
tations and controversies among Marxist sociologists and
anthropologists) rests essentially upon the conception of a
change in the mode of production, involving a greater inequality
of property, which itself is brought about by a development of
the forces of production through technological progress. Marx,
especially in his notes on Morgan, mentions various factors,
including conquest, as playing a part in the creation of the
state,^^ but without examining the influence of warfare and
military organization as such,^^ or the consequences of the grow-

ing scale of societies.
These two elements are also important with respect to the
second instance; namely, the character and development of the
state in modern capitaUst societies, and in the various forms of
post-capitalist society. It is difficult, I think, with the experience
of such societies in mind, to attribute a theoretical sense to the
idea that a type of society will emerge in which the state and
politics no longer exist. The size and complexity of advanced
industrial societies, the diversity of interests within them, the
need to administer vast enterprises engaged either in production
or in the provision of transport, education, health services and
so on, and international rivalries and conflicts, all point to a
widening sphere of state activity in legislation, administration.
the legal regulation of disputes among individuals and groups,

and the promotion of what are seen as national interests.
Political power may be decentralized to some extent, made more
democratic, involve the active participation of larger numbers
of people, become less directly coercive, but there seems to be
no ground upon which to base a theory of the total 'withering
away' of the state and the whole poUtical sphere.
So far I have discussed two attempts to distinguish the
different types of political system in terms of an evolutionary
scheme; one of them (that of Spencer) being so abstract as to
have little value in establishing a precise historical sequence,
while the other (that of Marx) possesses less of an evolutionary
character than may at first sight appear and leaves unsolved
many problems in the construction of an adequate typology of
pre-capitalist and capitalist societies. In the last few decades the
interest shown by social scientists in such evolutionary schemes
has waned, notwithstanding the growing attention paid to
problems of 'development' for the latter notion is not usually
;
incorporated in any general conception of the history of human

society, and despite first appearances is largely unhistorical.
Development, or modernization, has been seen for the most
part in terms of a simple distinction between 'traditional' and
'modem', 'imderdeveloped' and 'developed', 'agrarian' .and
'industrial' societies, in the context of the present time, or at the
most of recent history.
In this respect, however, the distinctions that are made
resemble many others in political science which, as I noted at
the~5eginning of this chapter, frequently emerge out of the
dominant political concerns of the age. Thus in eighteenth-
century Europe the traditional typology of monarchy, oligarchy
and democracy, originally formulated by the Greeks, was given
a new sense in the writings of Montesquieu by the contrast
between 'Oriental despotism' and the monarchies of Western
Europe, which was further developed by Adam Smith, Hegel
and later economists and historians, and played a considerable
part in the formation of Marx's conception of the Asiatic mode
of production; one main feature of the contrast being the
'progressiveness' of Western societies as against the 'immobility'
of Asiatic societies.^" In the nineteenth century, after the

American and French revolutions, another distinction - be-
tween monarchy and republic - assumed great importance, and
republicanism developed as a radical political movement
directed against survivals or attempted restorations of the
ancien regime, merging to a large extent with the general
democratic movement. Later in the century, with the rise of the
labour movement, a different contrast was drawn, between
capitalism and socialism, between 'bourgeois democracy' and
^socialist democracy', and this distinction has largely dominated
political controversy up to the present time. Nevertheless, in
the course of the twentieth century, following the experience
of various forms of dictatorship some of which have developed
from socialist revolutions, this distinction has been overlaid by
another, between 'totalitarianism' and 'democracy', or as it is
sometimes expressed, between one-party and multi-party
systems.^^ A further contrast, as I have indicated, may be drawn
between the political systems of 'developed' and 'imder-
developed' societies, often in terms of the instabihty of the latter
as compared with the former ;22 an instability which manifests
the frequency of miUtary coups and the prevalence
itself partly in
of miUtary regimes in the non-industrial countries.

Faced with the great variety of distinctions that I have
indicated we may ask whether they can in fact be brought
within the compass of a single typology. It is evident, at least,
that this has not yet been achieved in any generally acceptable
way, and in this sense some of the basic elements in the theoreti-
cal framework of political sociology remain indefinite. The
evolutionist schemes are too abstract and simple to comprehend
the diverse political systems which have emerged within the
largely separate political histories of different regions of the
world; and in spite of all the qualifications that have been
introduced they are too closely bound up with the idea of
progress - if not unilinear then at least converging upon the
same end - to entertain the possibility that political systems
might be repeated, mutatis mutandis, in the course of history:
that new kinds of autocracy or new forms of empire might
succeed democratic regimes.
This is not to say that no general trends at all are discernible

in the development of political systems. In a long historical
and more particulariy since the rise of industrial
perspective,
capitahsm, there has obviously been - accompanying the
growth and internal differentiation of societies - an increase in
the scale of government, in the degree of political intervention
in the general conduct of social life and in organized political
activity; a growth of bureaucratic administration; and the
formation of a distinctive, now predominant type of political
unit - the nation state. Furthermore, the twentieth century may
be regarded from one aspect as the culminating stage in a
process whereby the world has been transformed, not into a
single political system, but into a single political arena in
which there are no longer isolated and autonomous units, but
all states and political movements are enmeshed in global
politics within which they exhibit varying degrees of dependency,

or independence.
Before proceeding to consider whether a more satisfactory
typology of political systems might now be constructed, it will
be useful at this stage to examine somewhat more closely the

ways in which the concepts 'state' and 'political system' are
employed. Let me begin by stating more fully the view I have
already intimated, that political activities - that is to say,
struggles for power among individuals and groups in relation
to their own interests and to the general regulation and orienta-
tion of collective life - occur in every human society. In this
sense, therefore, every society has a political system - a body of
rules and practices, however informal, rudimentary and im-
specific, which constitutes the framework (itself subject to
change) within which such struggles, involving confrontations

between different possible courses of action, normally take
place - and it seems to me entirely erroneous and misleading to
speak, as some Marxists have done, about societies in which
there is no 'political level'.
To say, however, that every society has a political system is not

to assert that every society has a 'state', in the sense of possess-
ing a quite distinct and separate political apparatus. 'Stateless
societies' have existed, in which political conflicts and decisions
are bound up with kinship relations, or with religious concep-

tions and rituals, and all or most adult members of society may
participate in these activities, without any specialized group of
people being able to claim a particular responsibility for
carrying them on. This situation has been described as
follows:
Stateless societies are so constituted that the kaleidoscopic succession

of concrete social situations provides the stimulus that motivates each
individual to act for his own interest or for that of close kin and
neighbours with whom he is so totally involved, in a manner which
maintains the fabric of society the lack of specialized roles and the
resulting multiplex quahty of social networks mean that neither
economic nor political ends can be exclusively pursued by anyone
to the detriment of society, because the ends are intertwined with
each other and further channeled by ritual and controlled by the
beliefs which ritual expresses.^*
Stateless societies are for the most part small tribal societies,
without any complex division of labour and economically poor,
but some featiu-es of their political systems may perhaps also
be found in other types of society, especially in village communi-
ties such as those of medieval Germany, or of India (where they
were once described as 'little republics'), although in these

instances there is some degree of subordination to a
already
state, however remote, and some element of stratification and
inequality of power in the local community itself. If we regard
stateless tribal societies as being in some measure representative
of very early human societies, we can then ask what causes have
brought the state into existence and assured its further develop-
ment. The answers to this question fall into two main categories.
One kind of answer refers to the increasing differentiation of
social functions as human societies become larger and more
complex, and to the need for a superior authority in society
capable of regulating conflicts of interest among individuals
and groups and of representing in some fashion the 'general
interest'. The alternative view is that the state comes into being
and is maintained as an instrument of domination, resulting

either from the internal differentiation of society into dominant
and subordinate classes (according to the Marxist theory), or
from thejDy)qsition of the rule of one group of people upon

another by conquest (as Oppenheimer argued).
These two conceptions of the state provide a familiar anti-
thesis in the history of political thought, and they are repeated
in various forms, often tacitly conveyed, in modem political
science. It does not seem to me necessary or desirable to adhere
exclusively to one or other of these theoretical positions.
Exactly how and when the first state emerged in the history of
human society is a problem impossible to resolve; and for that
matter it is by no means inconceivable that embryonic forms of
the state always existed as an inheritance from animal societies.
At all events, the early history of societies reveals that war and
conquest played an important part in the development of the
state, not only by creating clearly defined dominant groups, but
also by enlarging the scale of society, hence stimulating both a

greater internal differentiation of functions, and the growth
of a centrahzed apparatus of government and administra-
tion.24
For most of human history poUtical domination in the shape
of empires, hereditary rulers, aristocracies, has been largely
taken for granted, notwithstanding sporadic revolts, so that
Mosca's observation that 'in all societies - from societies that
are very meagrely developed and have barely attained the
dawnings of civilization, down to the most advanced and
peaceful societies - two classes appear - a class that rules and a
class that is ruled', is no more than the recognition of a historical
and, as he says, 'obvious' fact.^^ Only in modem times, since the
power of ruling groups was explicitly and widely challenged in
the name of democracy, and later of social democracy, has the
question of the nature and basis of the state become a matter of
acute controversy, giving rise to the two antithetical conceptions
which I have indicated. At the same time it is in the modem
democratic societies that this sharp antithesis between the state
as a system of domination and the state as a welfare system
becomes increasingly dubious, and it becomes necessary to
consider it from these two aspects simultaneously.
In the Westem democracies of the late twentieth century the
state has taken on an entirely different character from that

which it had in the period of laissez-faire capitalism, or in

earlier periods, when its functions were mainly confined to tax
collecting, internal repression, and external conflict with other
states; now it is responsible in addition for the operation of a
great range of public services as well as a general regulation of
the whole economic system. Among the developed industrial
countries generally it is mainly in the socialist societies of
Eastern Europe that the repressive functions of the state are
still prominent against a similar background of economic
planning and provision of welfare services. The world political
order has also undergone a change with the disappearance of
empires, even though various forms of more or less onerous
political dependence and subordination remain.
Looking back from the vantage point of the twentieth-century
'welfare state' we can also see, however, that every state, even
when it has had a primarily repressive character, has also
performed other necessary functions in the co-ordination and
regulation of complex societies, especially through the develop-
ment of a system of law, and in some cases - as with the Roman
Empire - has had a generally civilizing influence. Hence a view
of the state which emphasizes its pre-eminent character as a
system of domination may also recognize the need for some
kind of organized public power in every society, and come to
be concerned rather with the form of the state than with its
mere existence. There is a suggestion of such an approach in
Marx's briefly sketched political theory, not only in his early
criticism of Hegel's philosophy of the state as revealing the
'imperfection of the modem state', its representation of an
'illusory general interest' as against a real general interest, but
also in the later Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he
poses, but does not answer, the question what transforma-
'. . .
tion will the state undergo in communist society what social

. . .
functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to

present state functions?' Such reflections, of course, are counter-
balanced by equally sketchy references to the 'dictatorship of the
proletariat' during the period of transition from capitalism to
sociaUsm, and to the eventual 'abolition of the state', the
elimination of 'a political power properly so-called', and the
replacement of 'the government of men by the administration

of things' (the latter notion derived from Saint-Simon). These
fragmentary observations - some of them, like the contrast
between government and administration, misleading^^ - clearly
do not amount to a systematic theory of the political transition
from capitalist to socialist society, or of the eventual nature of
a socialist political system. Only in recent years has there been a
sustained attempt by Marxist thinkers to re-examine in a
thoroughgoing fashion the relation between the state, the econ-
omy, and social classes, or to analyse that historical experience
which reveals the emergence of a new type of authoritarian state
from the revolutionary process itself or from the centralized
control of a socialist economy.^'
There is another style of political sociology, much influenced
by Marxism, which has emphasized just as strongly the nature
of thestate as a system of domination; namely, the elite theory
of Pareto and Mosca. In this case, domination is regarded as a
universaland ineradicable feature of himian societies, explained
eitherby innate differences among human beings (Pareto)^^ or
by the superior power which an organized minority always
possesses in relation to the unorganized majority (Mosca),
although in Mosca's work some concession is made to the view
that the progress of democracy reduces the gap between rulers
and ruled.2^ Max Weber's political sociology has a close
aflSnity with the ideas of the elite theorists, especially Mosca, in
its acceptance of the universality of domination, its emphasis
upon the power of organized minorities, its addiction to
nationalism, and its refusal to conceive any real possibility of
ending, or even substantially limiting, domination through an
extension of democracy.^" Weber differed, however, in in-
corporating rather more of the Marxist analysis into his own
theory, in so far as he recognized social classes - and more
generally, various 'constellations of interest' in the economic
sphere - as important bases of domination, in his intense pre-
occupation with the growth of bureaucratic domination, and
in the concentration of his analysis upon the different ways in
which domination can make claims to 'legitimacy' and so con-
stitute itself as a moral authority.'^
Weber's theoretical scheme, while it recognizes diverse

of politics, in the manner of Marx (and also of
'social bases'
Mosca), at the same time attributes a degree of autonomy to
politics, and allows for a partly independent development of the
state itself. Again, like Marx and the elite theorists he conceives
the state largely, if not wholly, in terms of domination; and
him sharply from those social
this 'realist' view^^ distinguishes
who, while differing about what the role of the state
scientists
should be (how interventionist or laissez-faire), agree funda-
mentally in regarding it as an autonomous and neutral body,
which arbitrates among competing claims and expresses the
real consensus in society that underlies particular conflicts of
interest. As I have shown, the theory of the state as a system of
domination, in its Marxist form, is qualified in certain respects
and is at present being extensively revised, while the elite
theories have also been obliged to confront, however inade-

quately, the possibility that domination becomes a less salient
characteristic with the growth of democracy.
It is rather more doubtful whether there has been any
substantial revision of the opposed theory of the state as a

welfare system and an authentic embodiment of the 'general
will' to take account of real inequalities of political power or
the existence, throughout history, of evidently repressive

regimes. One well-known exponent of this theory, Talcott
Parsons, has written in a recent analysis of the concept of
political power that: 'Power, then, is generalized capacity to
secure the performance of binding obligations by units in a
system of collective organization when the obligations are
legitimized with reference to their bearing on collective
goals . P^ In this definition, and throughout Parsons' analysis,
.
'power' is identified with 'legitimate authority', and this

authority itself is assumed to arise from some kind of pervasive
agreement upon collective goals. Such a conception continues
to disregard entirely one of the principal elements in political
life, namely, the struggles that have taken place, and still take
place, precisely over the 'legitimacy' of any established system

of political power, and over the exclusion of some members of
society - frequently a majority of the population - from any
effective participation in the determination of collective goals

(often in fact, as Marx observed, representations of an illusory,
spurious 'general interest'), whether by a restriction of pohtical
rights (e.g. the right to vote), by coercion, or by ideological
manipulation.
The questions posed by these theories of political power and
the state - concerning the development of the state, its relation
to other spheres of social activity, its repressive or representa-
tive character - themselves suggest criteria for defining different
types of political system. - that of the origins of the
One issue
state - seems to me, however, unrewarding to pursue. Present-
day stateless societies are not necessarily representative of all,
or even most, of the earliest human communities, many of

which may have had from the beginning some differentiation
of political functions based upon age or gender; and in any
event inquiry into such questions remains largely speculative.
Moreover, stateless societies are either small tribal societies, or
small communities within a larger political system, and their
political arrangements do not tell us a great deal that is relevant
to the great majority of human societies. Only in one respect is a
consideration of their characteristics^^ illuminating, in em-
phasizing the fact that the state is not the only means by which
the cohesion of a society is assured, and so giving some support
to those liberal pluralist theories which treat the state as only
one association among others, not always the most important.
As Maclver claims:
under the most absolute state, use and wont, custom and tradition,
. . .
social authority underived from the state but instead the very ground
of political power, were far more effective forces in the organization
of communal life. . The organization of the state is not all social
. .
organization; the ends for which the state stands are not all the ends
which humanity seeks; and quite obviously, the ways in which the
state pursues its objects are only some of the ways in which within
society men strive for the objects of their desire.^^
But of course the pluralist view does not depend for its plausi-
bility upon, nor has it usually been related to, the evidence from
stateless societies.
A far more significant question than that of origins - one

which is also more amenable to historical inquiry - is that
concerning the actual development and organization of the
state in its diverse manifestations. Here, the items of contention
in the theories of the state appear as features which can be used
to characterize each particular state; for we need to consider
in every instance the extent to which the state is independent of
other social spheres, or on the contrary is subordinate to
'constellations of interest'which themselves have to be specified,
and further, the degree to which the state is a repressive agency
which dominates society (and what the sources of that domina-
tion are), or is rather the executive body of society as a whole.
These criteria, however, are still inadequate for constructing a
satisfactory typology of political systems. First, it is necessary
to take account of changes in the scale of societies, whether
brought about by a growth of population or by political and
mihtary means, as in the creation of nation states out of
numerous smaller imits in Western Europe between the six-
teenth and nineteenth centuries (which wiU be discussed
further in Chapter 5) or in the process of imperialist conquest
and expansion. Second, we must pay attention to the extension
of the activities of the state itself, which results not only from
the increasing scale of societies, but also from many other
influences that encourage state intervention; and to
take a specific example, those influences which effected
the transition from a 'night watchman state' to a 'welfare
state'.
The criteria mentioned above have often been employed, as

was noted at the begitming of this chapter, in the construction
of very broad evolutionary schemes, but these have been in-
- in Marxist thought as elsewhere - for their
creasingly criticized
excessively abstract depiction of the 'stages of development'
which seem to fit very loosely the actual changes in political
systems in different regions of the world and in determinate
historical periods. It now seems more fruitful to many political
scientists and sociologists to concentrate their analysis upon the

political structure and processes of change within fairly well
defined types of political system - tribal societies, city-states.

bureaucratic empires and other imperial regimes, absolutist

states, socialist or capitalist industrial states, and so on -
without attempting to locate them in some all-embracing
historical scheme. Of course, such studies need some general
concepts, which may be relevant in analysing any political
system, and they may also arrive at conclusions about the
universal importance of certain elements which aflFect its
character in greater or lesser degree - property rights, social

classes, myth and ideology as means of legitimating authority^® -
but they will also be likely to pay more careful attention to
distinctive cultural traditions and historical experiences, and to
the specific conditions and problems which a particular state, or
group of states, confronts. A good example of what is involved
in such studies is provided by a recent critical review of the
theories concerning Latin American pohtical development,''
in which the authors note the central importance of the con-
its various forms, and
ception of the 'developmentalist' state in
the insistence by many social scientists in recent years
upon the need to study the course of history with the
aid of categories which are 'historically relevant' to Latin
America.
This example is also relevant to another important feature in
the construction of a typology of pohtical systems. At the
beginning of this chapter I noted how the distinctions made
between pohtical systems often emerged from current political
conflicts and preoccupations, and this feature is very much in
evidence in the political sociology of recent decades. It is not
the case that we can or do simply distinguish, in a completely
neutral way, some major historical types of political system,
even in the non-evolutionist manner that I have suggested; for
on one side, what is seen to be significant in the past is influenced
by current concerns, and on the other side these concerns have,
in any case, a very great practical importance and are bound to
engage much of the attention of pohtical thinkers. There is
nothing siuprising, therefore, in the fact that new conceptions
should have been formulated - of the 'developmentalist' state,
the 'interventionist' state, the particular forms of the state in

'industrial' or 'post-industrial' societies - or that pohtical
development in the twentieth century and its antecedents in the

nineteenth century should have been reinterpreted in terms of
democracy and totalitarianism, and of the rise of the nation
state as well as the growth of the socialist movement.
4 Political change and conflict
Politicalchange of some kind goes on continuously in every

society, in response to a variet>' of changing internal and
external conditions, which include the relation to nature and
to other societies, the interaction of groups within each society,
and the unceasing circulation of personnel through the dis-
appearance of older generations and the rise of new ones.
Depending upon the t^pe of societj* concerned, more or less
significant political changes may result from the introduction
of a new technolog>'; from trade or warfare; from a palace
coup, a change ofdynasty, the accession of a competent or incom-
petent monarch, or the emergence of an exceptionally talented
poHtical leader; from cultural and intellectual movements;
from the rise and fall of particular social groups, among them
classes, rehgious and cultural groups, and elites which represent
distiQct social interests.
These diverse influences have received unequal attention from
and the particular significance accorded to
social scientists,
any one of them has varied. Economic changes have been
generally recognized as being very important, but their influence
has been conceived in diverse ways. Marx's theory of the major
historical transitions from one type of society to another
discovers their prime cause in changes in the 'mode of produc-
tion of material which result from the development of the
life',
forces of production and bring about a more or less rapid

transformation of the 'entire immense superstructure', in a
period of social revolution.^ In recent years there has been an
intense debate among Marxist scholars about the theor\' of
modes of production, the base/superstructure model, and the
relation between the structural characteristics (including
contradictions) of a particular form of society and the conscious

actions of social classes and other groups; a debate which has
led to quite extensive revisions of Marxist theory, and in some
cases to a critical reassessment of the fundamental conceptions
of the theory,^
An alternative theory, still concerned with major transitions
in relation to economic changes, is that which conceives the
turning-point in social life as being the emergence and develop-
ment of industrial society, in which the growth of modem

science and technology plays a crucial role;^ and a further
extension of the theory, in more recent discussions of 'post-
industrial' society, affirms even more strongly the overwhelming
importance in the economy and society of the production of
theoretical knowledge.* What is common to all these concep-
tions is the idea that economic development, based upon the
growth of science - and even some kind of 'technological
imperative' - has a pervasive and fundamental influence upon
the whole of social and cultural life, and hence determines to a
large extent the nature of political struggles, bringing into
prominence new social groups, changing the balance of power
between nations, and promoting an ever-growing intervention
of the state in the economy.
The theories so far considered deal for the most part with
major changes in the form of society, but it is evident that there
are more continuous, relatively small-scale changes which
affect political life. Thus Pirenne, in his study of the develop-
ment of capitalism,^ distinguished its various stages in terms of
the principal directions of economic activity and the social
groups which took the leading role at each stage; and many
historical studies of elites have similarly concentrated attention
upon the rise and decline of particular economic groups.^ So
far as I know, however, there have not been any comprehensive
studies of the rise and fall of various economic groups in more
recent times, nor has there been an attempt to provide, on a
broad scale, an economic interpretation of political events in
the twentieth century, although there are of course many
elements of such an interpretation in recent Marxist debates
about modes of production, in the analyses of development and
Political change and conflict 81
underdevelopment, and in the theories of industrial and post-

industrial societies. What at all events, from the avail-
is clear,
able studies of both earher and more recent periods, is that

economic and technological changes accompUsh their pohtical
eflFects through the actions of specific social groups which are
formed as a result of these changes. Hence we shall need to

examine, in due course, the formation and development of
social classes, diverse elites (economic, pohtical and cultural),
generational and other groups.
By comparison with the attention devoted to the economic
influences upon poUtics there has been relatively little sociolo-
gical analysis of the political consequences of war, in spite of
its manifest importance in the development of societies. Some
of the early sociologists regarded warfare as the means by
which the first great step in social development - the expansion
of human societies - was accompUshed,' while others have seen
it as the principal factor in the formation of the state itself.^ It
is evident that warfare has continued to be an important factor

in these processes of expansion and consohdation of state
power. In all periods of recorded history the pohtical order in
the world as a whole has been very largely a product of conquest
and the establishment of empires, armed struggles for national
independence, and conflicts among dynasties, empires or
nation states. War has frequently brought new nations into
existence, as did the American War of Independence and many
other wars fought for national liberation or unification, both
earher and later. Or it has brought about the downfall of old
World War destroyed the Habs-
pohtical systems, as the First
burg Empire, and the Second World War destroyed the National
Sociahst regime in Germany and the Fascist regime in Italy.
Conquest and the growth of empires have created larger pohtical
units, and even after their dissolution may leave behind as a
more enduring residue some elements of a distinctive civiliza-
tion, in such forms as Roman law or British parhamentary
democracy. In a less direct way war, and especially defeat in
war, may be a major factor in bringing about massive political
changes, by producing conditions favourable to a successful
internal revolution, as in Russia in 1917. This close association
between war and revolution will need to be examined more

fully at a later stage.
With the growth of societies war has tended to increase in
scale and intensity, reaching a peak in certain periods. One such
period was the seventeenth century in Western Europe, an age
characterized by the early development of capitalism and of
nation states, and by religious wars; another is the twentieth
century, during which wars of long duration and great destruc-
tiveness have been fought on a global scale. The warfare of the
twentieth century has some distinctive features first, it involves
:
'total war', in the sense that whole populations and economies
are mobilized for the prosecution of war; and second, it is

marked by extremely rapid technological advances in the
weapons employed. As a result, it may be argued, a certain
'militarization' of society has taken place in the major industrial
nations. Readiness for war, as well as the actual waging of war,
becomes a principal political concern, military leaders acquire a
more prominent place in the poHtical system, and the economy
is geared increasingly to military needs, giving rise to what has
been called the 'military-industrial complex' as one of the main

centres of power and of economic growth. A UNESCO
report of 1971 indicated that in 1967 the nations of the world
as a whole spent 7-2 per cent of their gross national product on
military needs, compared with 5-0 per cent on education and
2-5 per cent on health. More recently, however, there may have
been a decline in the proportion of government spending
allocated to the military, as a result of increased expenditure on
welfare, at least in some countries.^
The preceding discussion is not intended to suggest that war
is a wholly autonomous factor in political life. Clearly, war is an
instrument of policy, and the different forms which it takes are
influenced by social and cultural conditions. The various
theories of war have attempted to explain its incidence, scale
and intensity in terms of such influences;^" and in the case of
modem war Marxist thinkers have distinguished between wars
arising from imperialist rivalries, those resulting from conflicts
between sociaUst and capitalist coimtries, and anti-colonial
wars of liberation, while other social theorists have emphasized
the strength of nationalism and the rivahy between nation

states, pointing out that national interests may give rise to
military confrontations and the use of armed force even among
socialist countries, as was the case in Hungary (1956) and
Czechoslovakia (1968), and is the case now in the relations
between the USSR and China. But, however the causes may be
conceived, it remains that war itself is one of the major forms of
poUtical conflict, and that war has important and far-reaching
political consequences.
Even more than in the case of war, political sociologists have
tended to neglect the more subtle, less blatant influences which
affect political change. So far as the succession of generations is
concerned, the major analysis remains that of Karl Mannheim,
first published in 1927.^^ Mannheim argued that a generation
has 'a certain structural resemblance' to class position:
the fact of belonging to thesame class, and that of belonging to the

same generation or age group, have this in common, that both
endow the individuals sharing in them with a common location in the
social and historical process, and thereby limit them to a specific
range of potential experience, predisposing them for a certain
characteristic mode of thought and experience, and a characteristic
type of historically relevant action.
Mannheim recognized that the prominence given to genera-

tional differences, and the likelihood that organized genera-
tional groups would be formed, depended upon many other
social conditions. At various times in the past a 'younger
generation' has vigorously asserted its claims to cultural and
pohtical leadership a notable recent example, which reawakened
;
the interest of social scientists in the problem of generations,

being the youth movements (especially the student movement)
and 'youth culture' of the 1960s, which had, for a time at least,
and perhaps in a more enduring way, a considerable impact
upon cultural and political life in the industrial coimtries. Such
a phenomenon may be explained in various ways, but one
factor of acknowledged importance is certainly the rapidity of
economic and which tends to separate more
social change,
sharply the experience, expectations and outlook of older and
younger generations, as Margaret Mead has argued in a study

in which she likens the 'dissident young' to pioneers who are
exploring a new time rather than a new country.^^
Mannheim's comparison between belonging to a generation
and belonging to a class also provides a model for the analysis
of other important 'common locations', such as those constituted
by ethnicity or gender. The social movements based upon the
latter afl&liations, which were discussed in an earlier chapter,
have assimied much greater political importance during the
past few decades, and their development, like that of youth
movements, needs to be examined in relation to wider social
changes. Equally, however, they embody and express distinct
cultural orientations, and like all 'common locations in the
social and have to be seen also in the
historical process' they
context of cultural movements. The framework in which
political scientists usually consider these aspects of politics,
employing the notions of 'political culture' and 'political
socialization', is too narrow to encompass all the relevant

phenomena, and it is more fruitful, I think, to start from the
conception of 'cultural reproduction',^^ which has the great
merit of emphasizing that the ideas and values shaping political
action are not necessarily expressed in an overtly political
form, and of relating such ideas and values to the whole social
structure.
Reproduction, as the term is used by Marxist thinkers, refers
to the process whereby a given form of society, or social
formation, maintains itself - that is to say, is continually
re-created - in that form. In this process a particular economic
system or mode of production, a political system or form of the
state, and cultural norms, although they undergo a partly
autonomous development, are nevertheless connected with

each other in such a way as to reproduce a total society. From
this standpoint, the cultural system, even in its most 'un-
political' manifestations, is seen as an important element in
political domination. Thus Bourdieu and Passeron analyse the
role of what they call 'symbolic violence' in maintaining a
system of power, and investigate the subtle and complex
dependence of the educational system on class relations, in spite
of its relative autonomy;^* while Claus Oflfe examines and

criticizes the 'achievement principle' as a pervasive ideology
which legitimates inequality in a capitalist society.^^
Evidently, cultural reproduction in this sense is not an auto-
matic or uncontested process. Counter cultures may and do
emerge and establish themselves ;^^ 'legitimation crises' may
occur in which the prevailing cultural norms lose their persua-
sive force and political domination is endangered.^' What the
theory of reproduction brings to light, however, is the dense
network of economic, political and cultural ideas and practices
in everyday life - especially in modem industrial societies -
which constitutes a formidable obstacle to any large-scale
radical political change.
This preliminary discussion suggests a number of distinctions
which are indispensable for a more profoimd analysis of the
processes of political change and conflict. It is necessary to
distinguish between gradual and abrupt, minor and major,
peaceful and violent political changes; and so far as is possible
to connect these diverse phenomena with their causes or con-
ditions. Ashave already noted, some kind of political change
I
goes on at all times, produced by the succession of generations,

the rise and fall of dynasties, competition among various social
groups, economic and cultural developments, changing external
circumstances, and more idiosyncratic factors, which can only
be understood through detailed historical studies. In the
fully
modem Westem democracies such gradual changes are partly
institutionalized in the competition among political parties, and
in the influence upon government of a variety of social move-
ments and interest groups; and they are expressed, for the most
part, in a continually revised and expanded body of legisla-
tion.
PoUtical changes of this sort may be gradual and minor but,
they need not be peaceful. The replacement of a dynasty or
other group has frequently been accomplished by
ruling
political assassinations or otherforms of violence, yet without
producing any fundamental change in the pohtical system, still
less in society as a whole. More generally, however, we have to
pose the question whether in certain conditions gradual and

minor changes - disregarding the amount of violence they

involve - may not be cumulative, and lead eventually to major
transformations. One of the principal forms in which this
question has been discussed is the long-standing debate in
the socialist movement about and 'revolutionary'
'reformist'
political strategies. In broad terms, the division has been
between those who see an accumulation of reforms and a
gradual erosion of bourgeois dominance as leading to a
situation in which a relatively easy and peaceful transition to a
socialist society will be achieved; and those who regard
reforms largely as mere palliatives, value the struggle for reforms
mainly for its effect in developing working-class consciousness
and organization, and envisage the achievement of socialism as
a more abrupt event ensuing from a more or less violent final
confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. On
both sides, however, these views may merge into others which
are more starkly contrasted: the idea of a reformist path to
socialism may be
transformed into a total preoccupation with
reforming the existing society and a virtual renunciation of
socialism as the ultimate goal; the revolutionary approach may
develop into a rejection of every kind of struggle for reforms as
being positively inimical to the growth of a revolutionary
class consciousness, the adoption of a politique du pire and the
expectation of a catastrophic breakdown of capitalism from
which a band of dedicated revolutionaries will lead the masses
into sociaHsm.
There is and in the wider
implicit in this socialist debate,
discussion of reform and revolution, a specific conception of
what constitutes a major change in the political system. For
Marxist thinkers this has usually meant the accession to power
of a new class, involving the transformation of the whole social
system, as in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, or
from capitalism to socialism. It is in this sense that Marx
distinguished, initially in his 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
Right', between 'a partial, merely political revolution which
leaves the pillars of the building standing', and a social revolu-
tion; thereby changing the whole concept of revolution, as Max

Adler later argued,^^ 'from the merely political idea of the trans-
formation of the state, into the social concept of an economic

change in the bases of society'.
Liberal social thinkers, on the other hand, have generally
been less inclined to delineate quite so sharply vast historical
epochs in which distinct types of political system prevailed, or to
assert such a close relation between the political system and the
For the most part, therefore, they have
structure of society.^^
conceived major political changes as being produced in a more
autonomous way, and less abruptly, with the various stages
merging into each other; for example, in their accounts of the
growth and consolidation of individual liberty, or of the
development of modern democracy.
Some problems in the Marxist theory of history, and various
new interpretations of it which allow a greater autonomy to
political changes - for example, the emergence of the absolutist
state - were discussed earher;^" and in the present context I
would like to focus attention upon two more recent phenomena,
and to ask whether or not they can be considered as major
changes of political regime. First, are we to regard the welfare
state, which fits imeasily, if at all, into a Marxist scheme, as a
new type of state, which differs in fundamental respects from

the state as it existed in the laissez-faire capitalist societies of
the nineteenth century? Evidently, diverse interpretations are
possible. It may be argued, though I think with difficulty, that
there isno important difierence between the modem welfare

state and the nineteenth-century 'night watchman' state, in so
far as it is still an instrument of bourgeois domination; or that
the welfare state - involving a high level of government inter-
vention in the economy, the provision of extensive social services
and a considerable degree of national economic planning -
corresponds with a new stage in the development of capitalism,
which may be called 'organized capitalism' or finally, that the
;
welfare state is a particular stage in a general trend toward

collectivism, inspired mainly by the labour movement, and
from this aspect can be regarded as a transitional stage on the
way to socialism. 2^ The two latter accounts, which seem to me
much more plausible than the first, both recognize, in their
different ways, that the welfare state is a distinct type of political
regime, formed in societies which have experienced major

changes in their economic systems, social relationships and
cultural orientations during the past century.
A second instance of political change which can scarcely be
regarded as minor is the rise and fall of the fascist regimes in
Europe. There an immense difference between the political
is
systems of fascism and of liberal democracy, either of which

may exist in a capitalist society; and no one can doubt that the
history of the world would have been very different if the
fascist powers had been victorious in the Second World War.
But the distinctiveness of fascism has been variously interpreted.
In the 1920s and 1930s some Marxists - and particularly those
who adhered to Bolshevik views - conceived fascism as the
more or less inevitable form assumed by the rule of the bour-
geoisie in the monopolistic phase of capitaUst development, and
at the same time underestimated the strength of the fascist
movements. Such an interpretation now appears at best
inadequate, not only because monopoly capitalism (that is,
capitalism in which large corporations dominate the economy),
so far as it escapes regulation by the interventionist state, seems
quite compatible with a liberal democratic regime; but also
because the rise of fascism depended upon a number of other
factors. Certainly, the fascist movements emerged in conditions
of economic crisis and fierce class struggles, but their develop-
ment was also made by the existence of large numbers
possible
of declasses and discontented former soldiers and officers who
formed the fascist militias, by a rising tide of nationalism, and
in the countries where they were successful, by authoritarian
traditions of government. Hence, from one aspect the fascist
regimes in Europe (and the equally authoritarian, nationalistic
and militaristic regime in Japan) can be regarded as the means
by which a modernizing 'revolution from above' was effected in
societies which had not experienced successful bourgeois demo-
cratic revolutions.^^ From another aspect such regimes may be
seen as an embodiment of tendencies inherent in modem 'mass
from the increasing power of the state and
societies', resulting
the extension of its influence, from the growth of nationahsm

and international rivalries, and from the struggles among
who have acquired, in one way or another, a

political elites
mass following. This view has taken shape in the theories of
totalitarianism as a distinctive type of political system, exempli-
fied in the Stalinist dictatorship as well as in the fascist regimes.^
Both the development of the welfare state and the emergence
of fascism or, more generally, of totahtarian regimes, have to
be regarded, in my view, as major political changes. In the
light of this twentieth-century experience, but also taking into
account other historical transformations, I would define a
major political change as one which brings about a significant
reorganization of the apparatus of government, a change in the
relationsbetween government and people, and to a considerable
extent,a restructuring of other social relationships, including
modifications in the hierarchical ordering of various social
groups. How, then, are such changes related to the massive
changes in the whole structure of society, the passage from one
social formation to another, which are the crucial elements in
the Marxist theory of history? In certain respects, that theory,
notwithstanding its immense value as an intellectual scheme for
orienting some important kinds of historical inquiry, seems to
me profoundly misleading. Its source, in the thought of Marx
himself,was evidently a reflection upon the revolutions of the
eighteenth century, and upon the broad features of the transi-
tion from feudalism to capitalism. But that transition, in the
sharpness of its break with the past, its revolutionary signifi-
cance for the future, has perhaps no historical parallel, imless it
be the Neolithic revolution in the eariy stages of human history.
No other historical transformation has quite the same clear-cut
and definite character.
More important, although most Marxist thinkers have taken
it as a model, it provides no reliable guide to future social trans-
formations. We simply do not have any clear conception of
what form a transition from capitalism to socialism would
take, above all because there is no convincing historical experi-
ence of such a transition. To be sure, there is evident in the
modem world a trend toward collectivism, but this can assume,

and has assumed, very diverse forms : among them the fascist
corporate state; the Stalinist autocracy and the highly regulated
society, dominated by a which has succeeded it;

single party,
the 'mixed economy' of the capitahst welfare states, in which
some important sectors of the economy are publicly owned, a

vast network of publicly financed and administered social
services exists, and the national economy is regulated and
partly planned by the state, which now employs a substantial
and increasing proportion of the active population; and the
Yugoslav system of self-management in an economy which is
largely publicly owned. But there has also appeared, more
of
recently, a strong reaction against collectivism, in the shape
tax revolts, opposition to government prices and incomes
policies,and a general hostility to excessive regulation of social
lifeby public bureaucracies. Thus sociahsm, as the idea of a
future form of society, has to contend with a reassertion of
individualism, and of democratic rights against autocratic
rule; and the transition to a socialist society, if it occurs at all,
seems likely to take many different routes, depending upon the
kind of society in which it begins, perhaps involving very
substantial redefinitions of what socialism is, as the process of
change continues.^*
It is an important question how far political change, which
almost always involves some kind of conflict, also tends to be

accomplished by violent means. As I indicated eariier, even
minor pohtical changes may depend upon the use of force, in
coups d'etat or sporadic revolts. Equally, however, some changes
of a major character may be achieved more or less peacefully.
Marx's concept of a social revolution - that is, a major transition
from one type of society to another - says nothing directly about
the use of violence; although Marx, and later Marxists, un-
doubtedly thought that in most cases the political revolutions
through which such transitions are finally accomplished and
the new would require an armed
society securely established
struggle. The most probable outcome of all class struggles,
according to this view, is civil war; and it is the use of the term
'revolution' in this context by many Marxists, ^^ and by other
radical thinkers, which has given rise to the close association
in modem thought between the ideas of revolution and armed
conflict.
In fact, it is only too evident that major political changes have

very often resulted from violence, not only in revolutions and
counter-revolutions, but also in wars of conquest or of national
independence. Moreover, in modem times especially, war and
revolution been intimately connected. The Russian
have
Revolution, and the revolutions in Central Europe at the end
of the First World War, took place after military defeats; and
while in China the revolutionary movement led by the Commu-
nist Party was a civil war fought after the
finally victorious in
defeat of Japan in the Second World War, that victory was
nevertheless largely due to the earlier defeat and retreat of the
Chinese Nationalist armies in the war with Japan, and to the
success of the Communist Party in organizing guerrilla warfare
in the Japanese-occupied areas. At the same time, it is also
clear that there is not a strict and invariable relation between
war, particularly defeat in war, and political revolution. Much
depends upon the strength and cohesion of the state and of the
dominant class or elites in the defeated nations, and upon the
policies of the victorious powers. After the Second World War
there were no significant revolutionary movements in the
defeated countries; and in Eastern Europe, with the exception
of Yugoslavia, the major changes in political regimes did not
resultfrom indigenous revolutions but were largely imposed by
the USSR.
The consequences of war for political regimes are thus quite
diverse. It may be argued, for instance, that the 'total wars' of
the twentieth century, because they detach whole populations
from their accustomed ways of life, and at the same time
impose great sacrifices upon them, give rise to strong reforming
movements even in the victorious nations; and that they have
in fact contributed significantly to the development of the
welfare state.^^ In some other cases, for example in national
liberation struggles, armed conflict may lead even more directly
to the emergence of strongly reform-oriented or revolutionary
movements, and to changes of political regime which go
beyond the attainment of national independence.
But some important political changes, as I suggested, have
also been achieved by peaceful means. The welfare state,
although its development has been influenced by the wars
between nations, and accompanied by sporadic violence, is not

essentially the product of either war or violent revolution.
Similarly, many national independence movements, and
notably the Indian National Congress, have attained their ends
without any significant use of force. Even the establishment
of the fascist regimes in Europe, while it involved the use of
violence on a considerable scale, did not result from a massive
armed confrontation or civil war. In the postwar period, many
social thinkers, reckoning the terrible cost in death and suffering
of the wars and civil wars of the first half of the twentieth
century, have turned their attention increasingly toward the
possibilities and modes of peaceful change.
This reorientation of social thought, in new circumstances,
has also influenced Marxist thinkers. Engels, in an essay on
authority directed against the anarchists,^^ commented upon
violent political revolutions that 'a revolution is certainly the
most authoritarian thing there is', but he did not go on to
consider whether the authoritarianism of an armed revolu-
tionary struggle might not subsequently become firmly en-
trenched in the practices of a post-revolutionary government;
and he could not foresee that the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'
(a phrase which he and Marx occasionally used in order to
refer to the political dominance of the working class, conceived
as the vast majority of the population, in the initial phase of
sociaHst society) would be transformed into a plain dictatorship
and a reign of terror, turned against the people themselves.
Some Marxists, among them Rosa Luxemburg and the Austro-
Marxists, were early critics of the Soviet dictatorship, but it is
only in recent years that there has been a widespread and

fundamental questioning of the whole idea of dictatorship,
and a revaluation of peaceful, democratic forms of political
change, especially by those intellectuals and political leaders
associated with the Eurocommunist movement. ^^
This new concern, among social thinkers of different persu-
asions, with the opportunities for peaceful change no doubt
results in part from a revulsion against the extreme violence
characterizing the first half of the twentieth century, and against
the authoritarian political regimes which some kinds of violence

have brought into existence, as well as from a deep-seated and
pervasive apprehension of the ultimate consequences of
violence in the age of nuclear weapons. But there is also, I think,
a more positive acceptance of the idea of an increasing rational
control over the conditions of social life, which brings with it a
recognition of the possibilities which now exist for effecting
pohtical changes by rational persuasion and legislation, but
without ignoring the fact of substantial political conflict or
lapsing into a Utopian conception of social harmony. Ad-
mittedly, the situation I have just outlined is more apparent in
the internal affairs of present-day societies - and even then
principally in theWestern democracies - than in the relations
between nations, in spite of the persistent, and not wholly
unsuccessful, attempts to create an effective framework of
international law and procedures of negotiation.
Furthermore, none of the considerations I have- adduced
suggest that political violence will rapidly diminish, still less
disappear. Ruling groups are obviously prepared, in some

circumstances, to resist or reverse political changes by military
force, whether it be in Chile or in Czechoslovakia. And on the
other side, subordinate groups have no other recourse than
armed revolt if they are deprived of other means of exercising
may find themselves in a situation where
political rights; or they
their formal rightscan only be made effective in practice by the
use or threat of violence. In an earlier chapter I noted that a
study of poor people's movements in the US A concluded that
such influence as they had had derived from mass protests
rather than from participation in electoral politics ;2^ and a
irecent study of the economic progress of Black Americans
argues that was '.
it under the impetus of the civil rights
. .
movement and the ghetto revolts of the sixties, [that] blacks

gained access to new employment opportunities in business,
government, the media, and high paying jobs in the skilled
crafts'.3o
Any conflict, however, which confined

account of political
of rational persuasion on one side
itself to these limiting cases
and the use of physical force on the other, \/ould be seriously

incomplete. Between these extremes there is a whole range of

means which are employed to promote or resist political
change: the reproduction of a dominant ideology (which
Bourdieu and Passeron call 'symbolic violence'), and the
elaboration and diffusion of counter-ideologies; economic
coercion of various kinds, exercised on both a national and
international scale, by governments, large corporations and
international agencies (for example, through economic sanc-
tions against particular countries, through the lending policies
of such agencies as the International Monetary Fund, and
through the investment policies of banks and multi-national
corporations); protest movements, more or less peaceful
demonstrations, and political strikes. Every historical case of
political change or resistance to change has to be analysed,
therefore, in terms of a multiplicity of influences, which take
on a specific character and significance in particular countries.
But it is equally important, in the world of the late twentieth
century, to form a clear conception of how the processes of
political change in any one country or group of countries are
located in an international network of political forces. Un-
doubtedly we are living through a period of considerable
political instability, in which there is a complex 'crisis of
legitimacy' (to use Habermas' expression) not only in the
capitalist societies but also in the socialist societies of Eastern
Europe, and in many countries of the Third World; but the
crisis works out through an international system of
itself
and such events as the overthrow of President

relationships,
Allende's government in Chile, or the Soviet mihtary inter-
vention in Czechoslovakia, cannot be fully comprehended
unless they are seen in the setting of global political conflicts.
This international context is equally important in considering,
finally, who are the principal agents of political change. At
various points in this book I have referred to such agents -
among them nations, dynasties, social classes, elites of diverse
kinds, generational, ethnic and - and we have
cultural groups
now to examine more closely their role in political life and
especially the conditions under which one or other of them has a
predominant influence. There is, however, a preliminary
question to be discussed. In recent sociology, as I noted in the

Introduction, much attention has been given, especially by
those thinkers who can be regarded broadly as Marxist struc-
turalists, to an analysis of the hidden 'logic of structures', or
'structural causality'. This approach is well illustrated in
Maiu-ice Godelier's essay on and Contradiction in
'Structure
CapitaV,^^ and in the debate between Poulantzas and Miliband
on the state in capitalist society.^^ Godelier argues that two
principal contradictions are formulated by Marx in Capital: the
first being that between the capitalist class and the working
class, the second - the basic contradiction - being that between
the development and socialization of the productive forces and

the private ownership of the means of production. It is this
basic contradiction which determines the fate of capitahsm,

the breakdown of which, and the transition to a sociahst
society, are the necessary outcome of a structural contradiction,
not the result of human agency. Similarly, Poulantzas in his
criticism of Miliband insists strongly upon the character of the
state and social classes as 'objective structures', conceives
individuals only as the 'bearers' of 'objective instances', and
rejects those alternative conceptions which introduce the
purposes of conscious social actors into the analysis. In his
reply Mihband raises objections to what he calls 'structural
super-determinism', and argues implicitly - though he does not
-
use the expression for a dialectic of individual (or social actor)
and structure, a dialectic which is explored at length in Sartre's
Critique of Dialectical Reason.
In the following discussion I take the position that there are
present in every social system both objective and subjective
elements, objective structures and conscious social action; and
that any reaHstic political analysis requires an investigation of
these two elements and their interrelations. From this stand-
point, the two contradictions in capitalism which Godelier
distinguishes are to be regarded as being eqiially basic and
important. The structural contradiction does not produce its
effects directly in some mechanical and impersonal fashion, but
is the source of a conscious struggle between classes, and this
struggle is influenced by nimierous other social and cultural

factors. 'Structural causality', on this view, is something less
than the rigorous determination of a specific effect; instead, it
is conceived as the production of conditions and constraints

within which diverse, but not unlimited, alternative courses of
political action and development are possible.^^
A schema of this kind is applicable to every type of society,
and one particularly interesting question which it suggests is
whether there are also contradictions in socialist society; that is

to say, in those socialist societies which actually exist, and can
be studied, in the world today, not in some imagined future
society where complete social harmony prevails by definition.
It is not too difficult to form
discern such contradictions in the
of conflicts among various social groups, and in particular a
conflict - which appears openly from time to time in strikes,
protests or even insurrections, and is only with difficulty con-

tained and repressed - between those who control and direct
the overall development of society and those whose lives and
work are thus planned and regulated from above. Whether this
conflict, analogous to the class struggles in capitalist societies,
is related to some structural contradiction in socialist society

is a much larger question which cannot be pursued here.^'*
Our principal concern, in the present context, is to consider

how conflicts between social groups develop within the limits of
given structural conditions, how such conflicts bring about
political change, and what kinds of social group play a major
role in this process. In an earlier chapter I emphasized the
importance of social classes in the political struggles which take
place in modern capitalist societies, and outlined the changes in
class structure, as well as the diversity of the political move-
ments and organizations to which classes give lise, in relation to
recent politics.^^ The development of the welfare state, and the
twentieth century revolutions and counter-revolutions in
Europe, are all manifestations of a continuing class struggle in
which the labour movement confronts the representatives of
capital. But it is clear, too, that social classes have been one of
the fundamental elements in political conflict in many other
types of society; that slave rebellions, peasant levolts and the
bourgeois revolutions were so many instances of a continuous
struggle over the control of the labour process and the appropri-
ation of the products of labour.
Nevertheless, these historical manifestations of class action
took many different fonns, their effects were diverse, and they
were related in various ways to other social movements and
groups. Thus in the European feudal societies it was not the
conflict between lord and peasant which was decisive in bringing
about change (only in the twentieth century has it been possible
to organize peasants in effective revolutionary movements), but
the emergence and growth in those societies of an alien, in-
compatible element - the bourgeoisie. At the same time, the
rise of this new class, and the transition from feudalism to
capitalism which it accomplished in Western Europe, were
made by other transformations and political or

possible
cultural conflicts; by the establishment of centralized, effectively
administered nation states, and by the rehgious struggles from
which emerged the Protestant sects and the diffusion of the
Protestant ethic, which at the very least contributed to the self-
confidence and determination of the bourgeoisie, promoted a
climate of opinion favourable to its activities, and hastened its
triumph.
The great complexity of class struggles, of which only the
merest sketch has been given in this example, is still not the only
matter to be considered in assessing the role of social classes in
political change. It should be noted, first, that not every class,
in all circumstances, shows the capacity to create those organi-
zations which are essential if it
is to engage seriously in political
struggles. A
prime example of a class which is, in this sense,
non-political is the peasantry in Western Europe, which Marx
likened to a 'sack of potatoes'; and it is notable that even when
peasant revolutionary movements have developed in other
parts of the world in the twentieth century, they have almost
always been organized and led by urban politicians or urban-
based However, it may also be argued more
political parties.
generally, following Max Weber, that 'a class is not in itself a
community', that 'the emergence of societal, or even communal
action from a common class situation is by no means a universal
phenomenon', and that 'the extent to which "communal
action" and possible "societal action" does emerge from the

"mass actions" of the members of a class is linked to general
.'^* This especially relevant to the
cultural conditions . . is
position of the working class in the modem welfare state,

where differentiation within the class, social and geographical
mobility, changing relationships with other classes, the new
functions of the state and the development of 'citizenship',
together with a certain degree of cultural unification, tend to
weaken the sense of belonging to a sharply defined class with
distinct class interests, and still more the idea of any 'historical
mission' to create a new civilization.
Even more important, perhaps, in its effect upon class action

is the attachment which individuals have always had to some
tribal, ethnic, linguistic or national community, with which
they identify their own interests by contrast and often in con-
flict with other such communities. This social bond probably
reaches its greatest intensity in the modem nation state, and

it be discussed more fully in the next chapter. The propo-
will
sition that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles', expresses only a partial tmth, and
the existence of 'peoples' and 'nations', and the relations
between them, constitute, would argue, a largely independent
I
basis for a political world viewand political action, the effect

of which is to limit the significance and the practical conse-
quences of class membership.
5 The formation of new nations:
nationalism and development
In the modem world the nation state is the pre-eminent political

unit. Evidently, this was not always so. Tribal societies, city
states, ancient empires, feudal societies, are all organized on
some different principle, their political cohesion maintained
by other kinds of bond. The rise of the nation state to this
position of eminence is indeed very recent; in Europe a multi-
national state - the Habsburg monarchy - remained a major
power until 1918, while the empires of other European powers,
especially Britain and France, denied national independence to
peoples in much of the rest of the world until after the Second
World War. The membership of the League of Nations from
1919 to 1939 never exceeded fifty-four nations, whereas 151
nation states, covering almost the entire globe, are members of
the present United Nations.
The emergence of nation states, initially in Western Europe
and North America, depended upon two main conditions: one
was the development of modem centralized government, under-
taken by the absolute monarchs from the sixteenth to the
eighteenth century, while the other was the rise of nationalism,
embodying the idea of political self-determination for a social
group which inhabits a definite territory, conceives itself as
having a distinct ethnic and cultural character, and has em-
barked upon a stmggle to establish popular sovereignty in
place of dynastic rule. Hans Kohn, emphasizing this last
feature, observes that 'nationalism is inconceivable without the
ideas of popular sovereignty preceding - without a complete
revision of the position of rulers and ruled, of classes and
castes', and goes on to note the importance of the rise of a new
class, the third estate:
Where the third estate became powerful in the eighteenth century -

as in Great Britain, in France, and in the United States - nationalism
found its expression predominantly, but never exclusively, in
political and economic changes Where, on the other hand, the
third estate was still weak and only in a budding stage at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century, as in Germany, Italy, and among the
Slavonic peoples, nationalism found its expression predominantly
in the cultural field. Among these peoples . . . with the growing
strength of the third estate, with the political and cultural awakening
of the masses, in the course of the nineteenth century, this cultural
nationahsm soon turned into the desire for the formation of a nation-
state.^
In its beginnings, therefore, modern nationalism can be seen

as one aspect of a class movement which found political ex-
pression in a general struggle for democracy; manifesting itself
most American Revolution - interpreted by some

clearly in the
scholars as the formation of the 'first new nation'^ - and in the
French Revolution, which together established the model of a
new kind of political system embodying the ideas of 'citizenship'
and 'popular sovereignty'. The process of forming a nation
state did not, evidently, follow the same course everywhere. In
those societies where the third estate was initially weak - and
during its subsequent development in the nineteenth century
became more clearly divided into distinct classes - the bour-
by the labour movement, embraced
geoisie, already threatened
a more conservative type of nationalism, and the creation of a
modem nation state based upon the capitalist mode of produc-
tion was accomplished in a more authoritarian fashion by
what has been called a 'revolution from above'.^
Marxist theories of nationalism* have emphasized very
strongly this connection between the rise of the bourgeoisie and
the emergence of the nation state. Bauer, for example, argues that
everynew economic order creates new forms of state constitution and

new rules for demarcating political structures. with the develop-
. . .
ment of the capitahst mode of social production and the extension

of the national cultural community ... the tendency to national
unity on the basis of national education gradually becomes stronger
than the particularistic tendency of the disintegration of the old
The formation of new nations 101
nation, based upon common descent, into increasingly sharply

differentiated local groups.
And he concludes his discussion of the concept of the 'nation'

by saying:
For me, history no longer reflects the struggles of nations; instead
the nation itself appears as the reflection of historical struggles. For
the nation is only manifested in the national character, in the
nationality of the individual ; and the nationaUty of the individual
is only one aspect of his determination by the history of society, by
the development of the conditions and techniques of labour.^
The Austro-Marxists were also concerned to trace the later

development of nationalism, and in particular its transformation
into the ideology of imperialism in the latter part of the nine-
teenth century. Renner argued^ that as 'capitalism is now
passing from its industrial to its finance-capitalist stage' so the
old principle of nationality '. . . the democratic, nay revolution-
ary principle of the unity, freedom, and self-determination of
the nation, is over and doneand the dominant national
with',
idea is now that of 'national imperialism', promoted by the
ruling classes. At the same time, however, Renner feared that
the very widespread and intense national feeling which the war
had revealed might be leading to what he called 'social im-
perialism': the imperialism of a whole people.''
The accounts of nationalism given by liberal thinkers, who

associate it with the bourgeois struggle for democracy, and by
the Austro-Marxists who see it as one feature in the rise and
consolidation of the capitalist mode of production, merging at a
later stage into imperialism, do not exhaust the various con-
ceptions of the phenomenon. Some recent thinkers have placed
the emphasis rather upon intellectual and cultural influences,
or upon the processes of industrialization and modernization.
E. Kedourie, for example, finds the principal source of Euro-
pean nationalism in the philosophy of Kant and Fichte which
made self-determination a supreme good, and the incursion of
this styleof philosophical thought into German (and then
European) politics following the breakdown of traditional ways
of life and stable communities. This 'doctrine invented in
Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century' was then

exported to other parts of the world as a result of colonial
expansion, and this - rather than any popular revolt against
colonial rule - accounts for the nationalist movements of the
twentieth century, led by nationalist intellectuals who are
'marginal' to their own societies.^ But this analysis concentrates
imduly upon the intellectual content of nationalism, while
neglecting its social sources,® and it attributes to intellectuals an
exaggerated importance as leaders of nationalist movements.^"
The relation between nationalism and industrialization/
modernization has been formulated most fully by Ernest
Gellner,^^ in a model which brings together economic and
cultural factors. His main argument is that '. as the wave of . .
industrialisation and modernisation moves outward, it disrupts

the previous political units [which are] generally either small
and intimate ... or large but loose and ill-centralised'. The 'two
prongs of nationalism', he suggests, 'tend to be a proletariat
and an intelligentsia': the former is first uprooted and then
gradually incorporated in a new national community; the
latter provides new cultural definitions of group membership
which are widely diffused with the development of mass
literacy and a national educational system which industrializ-
ation itself makes necessary.
These recent theories, whether they deal with an intellectual
movement - the invention of a new doctrine - or with the social
process of industrialization, are obviously concerned mainly
with the nationalism of the twentieth century and with what are
claimed to be its roots in the social, cultural and political
changes which occurred in Western Europe during the nine-
teenth century. But it is evident that the development of the
idea of a 'nation' and the formation of nation states in Europe
began at a much earlier time,and in order to understand the
vigour of later nationalist movements in Europe and elsewhere
we need to look more closely at that historical process.
Charles Tilly, in his introduction and conclusion to a volume
which examines in detail some major aspects of the development
of national states in Western Europe,^^ considers the specific
conditions in which these states began to emerge from the
beginning of the sixteenth century, outUnes their distinctive

features,and reviews the causes of their development and
eventual dominance. The national state, as it took shape in
Western Europe, controlled a well-defined, continuous territory;
it was relatively centralized; it was clearly differentiated from
other organizations; and it reinforced its claims by gradually

acquiring a monopoly of the means of physical coercion within
its territory.
This new type of state expanded, as Tilly indicates, by means

of war, but there were some general conditions which facilitated
the absorption of the population of smaller political units;
notably the cultural homogeneity of Europe, the existence of a
uniform economy based on peasant agriculture and a small, but
widespread class of landlords, and an extensive, decentralized
but relatively uniform political structure. Among more specific
causes Tilly mentions the growth of cities, trade, merchants and
manufacturers, and observes that 'Later on a powerful recipro-
cal relationship between the expansion of capitalism and the
growth of state power developed . .'; a relationship which is
.
one of the principal themes in Femand Braudel's study of

Europe in the sixteenth centxiry.^^ This connection with
capitalist development is important in considering why some of
the efforts to build nation states succeeded whereas most of
them failed; for one essential element in success was the availa-
bility of resources which could be extracted from the popula-
tion and devoted to the construction of a state apparatus and

the prosecution of wars. The development of a small number of
powerful states was also intimately linked with the growth
of a large-scale economic division of labour, and the emergence
of what Wallerstein has called a 'European world-economy'.^*
In addition, however, there were specific political factors which
Tilly suggests contributed significantly to success; among them
a continuous supply of pohtical entrepreneurs, and strong
coalitions between the central power and major segments of
the landed elite. It is evident that success in war, which was
crucial in building large states, depended both upon the
availability of economic resources, and upon an effective
political mobilization and use of those resources.

This account of the formation of nation states in Western

Europe, and of the development of the sense of nationality as a
fundamental social bond, is far more comprehensive and
thorough than the rather abstract and historically restricted
theories which purport to explain modem nationalism and the
emergence of new nations in terms either of a reorientation of
European thought, or of some general process of industrializa-
tion. We have now to consider, as does Tilly, what light this
analysis can throw upon the phenomena of nationalism and
the development of nation states at a later time. Here, it is
necessary to distinguish between those conditions which may be

regarded as imiversally relevant to the creation of a nation
state,and those which are specijfic to a particular historical
period. So far as the latter are concerned it is evident that the
movements aiming at national unification or national inde-
pendence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have arisen
in circimistances very different from those which prevailed
when the first nation states were created. All these movements
have had before them as a model the existing nation states, and
have been influenced by nationalist ideas already formulated
and widely disseminated. The imification of Italy and of
Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century was a
belated achievement by the bourgeoisie in those countries of a
large, efficiently organized modem state, essential for the rapid
development of capitalist production, such as already existed

in most of Westem Europe and in North America. Other
nationalist movements in Europe had the character rather of
independence movements directed against a dominant empire,
such as that of the Habsburgs or of the Russian Tsars and as ;
Seton- Watson has observed, some of them - for example, those

of the Slovaks and the Ukrainians - began as cultural movements
resulting from the creation of a standardized literary language.^^
Other nations, such as Turkey, have also arisen on a linguistic
basis, while the modem Arabic language and its association
with the sacred language of religion is an important element in
Arab nationalism.^'
In the twentieth century, and especially since the Second
World War, nationalist movements have generally taken the
form of independence struggles against imperialist rule by

European powers, or against less direct types of control which
create a situation of dependency. The context in which they
have arisen is that of the capitalist worid economy and im-
perialism; hence there has also been, in most of these movements
a substantial socialist influence, and in some coimtries, notably
in China, nationaUst movements have culminated in a social
revolution. Nevertheless, the forms which nationalism has
assumed, and the poUtical regimes which it has brought into
existence, are extremely diverse. In Latin America a second
wave of nationalism, which may be regarded as a continuation
of the national independence struggles against the Spanish and
Portuguese empires in the early nineteenth century, has de-
veloped vigorously in the present century in opposition to
American economic dominance, and has been connected more
or less closely with socialist and reforming movements directed
against the internal domination of these societies by an upper

class composed of landowners, and more recently, of elements
of a national bourgeoisie.
But although socialist or liberal-reformist doctrines have
had an important influence in some cases - in the Cuban
Revolution, in the Popxilar Unity Government in Chile, and in
the Peronist movement in Argentina - it is a conservative
nationahsm, expressed through mihtary regimes, which has
largely prevailed. A similar situation is to be found in other
regions of the world. In India, the Congress Party, although it
had a socialist wing, was primarily a middle-class independence

movement; and the partition of India after the ending of British
rule created in Pakistan a state dominated by landowners and
the military, and in India a liberal democratic regime in which
there was a mixture of socialist and capitahst elements. In
Africa, some of the nations which have emerged from colonial
rule are socialist in diverse styles, but others, created by inde-
pendence movements in which there was an important populist
or socialist strain - as in Ghana - and which aimed to achieve
some form of 'African socialism', have developed subsequently
under military rule. The Arab nations, it is clear, are over-
whelmingly nationalist, not socialist, in their orientation, and
the ideology which not only prevails but is increasing its
influence especially among the intellectuals - to take a notable

example, among university students in Egypt and Iran - is that
of Islam. The tension between the ideas of nationalism and of
socialism, and the great strength of the former, can also be seen
in other, somewhat different contexts; in Quebec, for example,
the rise to power of the Parti Quebecois almost certainly owes
more to its nationalism than to the social democratic aspects
of its programme.^'
The nationalist movements and the new nations which have
made their appearance since the Second World War thus display
features which distinguish them in many respects from the
earliermovements which led to the formation of nation states
in Western Europe, because they have arisen in a very different
international context - in a highly developed capitalist world
economy, in the aftermath of a division of the world among
powerful imperialist nations, and in the midst of political
transformations resulting from the growth of the socialist
movement. At the same time, however, the formation of these
new nations resembles in some important respects the creation
of nation states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and
even earlier. In the first place, they are conceived by the peoples
concerned as an essential prerequisite to any major development
of their societies. This is not simply a matter of economic
growth, although that has become increasingly important and
perhaps dominant, but of a more general development of a
distinctive culture and way of life which would allow the
society to take its 'rightful' place as an autonomous, self-
determining unit among the other nations of the world.

Second, the new states, like their predecessors, are the
product of struggles among diverse social groups and classes,
and the different forms which their political regimes assume
depend upon the outcome of such struggles. Peasants, land-
owners, a nascent bourgeoisie, a relatively small industrial
working class, intellectuals whose doctrinal allegiances range
from a conservative, traditionalist nationalism to Marxism,
government officials, political party leaders, and military
officers are all potentially capable of influencing the construe-
tion of a new state. The most significant divergence from earlier

processes of state formation is probably to be found in the
active role of organized political parties which can mobilize

mass support, or of military ofl&cers whose strength lies in their
experience of modem technology and administration and their
control of the means of physical coercion.
Third, the rulers of new nations, by whatever means they
attained power, have to consolidate their central control over
the society, and reinforce the sense of national identity. And
again like their predecessors, as Tilly suggests in a comparison
with the eariier state-making efforts in Europe, it is their efforts
to 'build their armies, keep taxes coming in, form effective
coalitions against their rivals, hold their nominal subordinates
and allies in line, and fend off the threat of rebellion by ordinary
people' which have as an 'unintended outcome' the growth of
political participation.^^ The new regimes, of course, differ
widely in the kind of problems they have to confront. They may
be faced with tribal, linguistic or religious divisions, which
provide bases for alternative centres of power; their country
may be poor or rich in natural resources; its geo-political
situation vis-a-vis other nations may be favourable or im-
favourable; the differences between classes, and the intensity
of class conflict, may be more or less substantial. These difier-
ences influence success or failure just as they did in earlier

state-making attempts, especially through their effect upon
economic growth, which not only provides resources for extend-
ing the state apparatus and developing national education, but
is also a major factor in conferring legitimacy upon the regime.
Finally, national development may itself generate a more

intense nationalism - as it did in the case of older nation states -
and give rise to major international rivalries and conflicts. In
this respect, indeed, there is no difference at all between old
and new nations, and it would be quite misleading to concen-
trate attention exclusively upon the nationalism of the newly
independent countries. During the twentieth century two world
wars have resulted largely from the conflicts among European
nations, spreading in the Second World War to encompass the
rivalry between the USA and Japan; and although the Second
War may also be considered from one aspect as an ideological

confrontation between fascism and democracy, the influence of
nationalism was very great. It was a crucial element in the
still
political orientation of Germany, Italy and Japan, while in the

USSR a 'Soviet nationahsm' was increasingly emphasized as
the war progressed.
Since 1945 there have been renewed attempts to create
supranational organizations, not only on a world scale through
the establishment of the United Nations and its various
agencies, but also on a regional basis. Such organizations,
however, have had only limited success in restraining national
ambitions and in averting conflicts between states. The United
Nations largely ineffectual when it is faced with a clash of
is
interestsbetween major powers, or even in dealing with more

localized conflicts such as that between Israel and the Arab
states, where great power interests may also be involved.
Equally, the various regional organizations which have been

created do not overcome the vigorous pursuit of national
interests. The European Community, for example, actually
came into existence largely throughan acute perception of
French national interests by Jean Monnet, who was mainly
responsible for creating the European Coal and Steel Com-
munity - the precursor of the Common Market - as a means of
protecting French industry and especially French steel makers
from their more efficient German competitors;^^ and it is widely
recognized at the present time that national interests are
paramount in the debates and decisions of the Community,
while the prospects for a united Europe become ever fainter.
Even to the extent that regional organizations do succeed in
moderating the pursuit of purely national goals - and no doubt
one of the major achievements of the European Community
has been to mitigate the longstanding rivalry between Germany
and France - these organizations themselves may develop into
power blocs which transpose international conflicts on to
another level, in a manner which recalls the imperialist rivalries
of the earher part of this century.
Nor can it be claimed very convincingly that socialism has
been an effective counter-ideology to nationalism, or that the
socialist movement has in any substantial way curbed the

actions of nation states. Ever since 1914, when the great
majority of the leaders of social democratic parties in Europe
supported the war effort of their own nation states - under a
variety of influences, one of which was undoubtedly the
nationalist fervour of the peoples involved - the capacity of the
socialist movement to bring about a new kind of political
relationship among the peoples of the world has seemedmore
questionable; and the doubts have multiplied not only as a
result of the course taken by the revolution in Russia, culmina-
ting in the project of building 'socialism in one country' which
eventually led to the identification of socialism with the
national interests of the USSR, but also in the light of the
actual relations between socialist countries in the present-day
world.A major conflict now exists between two socialist states -
the USSR and China - and nationahsm is quite clearly a
powerful and growing force in the relations between the USSR
and the countries of Eastern Europe. Furthermore, in those
socialist countries which include different national groups
within their boundaries - for example, the USSR, Yugoslavia
and Czechoslovakia - there have also been manifestations of
nationalist feehng whenever political conditions allowed it to
be expressed.
This opposition and contest between socialism and national-
ism has probably been the most important general feature of
political life during the past hundred years. So far, as I have
intimated, nationahsm has to be proved to be, in any direct
confrontation, a stronger force; and it is undoubtedly the case
that the most extensive and devastating conflicts of the twentieth
century have been the wars between nations, not the struggles
between classes. There is evidence, moreover, that nationalism
is becoming even more powerful, in the case of both new and
old nations; and even within the latter, where one of the most
striking political phenomena of the past few decades has been
the emergence of vigorous separatist movements, such as those
in Quebec and in Scotland.
How is the continuing, and even increasing, strength of
nationalism to be explained? This is a complex question, and
1 10 Political sociology
one which has been greatly neglected by sociologists. Marxist

thinkers, beginning with Marx and Engels themselves, have
been inclined to relegate nationaUsm to a position of minor
importance by comparison with class struggles; to dismiss it (as
did Rosa Luxemburg in her statements on the Pohsh inde-
pendence movement)^" as a refuge of the petty bourgeoisie,
which would lose its pohtical significance with the growth of
the sociaUst movement; to connect it particularly with the
development of capitahsm in its imperiahst stage; or, finally, to
attribute a limited value to national struggles against imperial-
ism, as an adjunct of the fundamental conflict between the
working class and the bourgeoisie. The few Marxists who
devoted serious attention to the problem of nationahty and
nationahsm - above all, Otto Bauer and Karl Renner - also
approached it from a class standpoint. They saw nationaUsm as
a bourgeois movement, but also as a danger to the working-
class movement, which might become tainted by nationalist
tendencies. At the same time, however, Bauer and Renner
initially took an optimistic view of the outcome of the rivalry
between the two movements; the multinational Habsburg

Empire, they thought, might be transformed into a socialist
federation of nations, in which the concept of a 'nation* would
itself change and the principle of nationality would begin to
lose some of its importance as a basis for the formation of

states.^^ In fact, the Empire was dissolved after the First World
War into several new nations, though this was due as much to
the policies of the victorious nation states as to the indigenous
nationahst movements.
But if Marxist thinkers have not, on the whole, contributed
very profoundly to the study of nationahsm, much the same can
be said of other major sociologists. Max Weber was an ardent
nationalist whose pohtical sociology was guided by the prin-
ciple of the 'primacy of the interests of the nation state', which
he enunciated vigorously in his inaugural lecture at Freiburg in
1895; but he did not set himself to examine with any thorough-
ness the grounds of such 'primacy'. As Mommsen observes:
*Weber never envisaged any other world than his own, which
was largely characterized by the rivalry of nation states.'^^ Only
1
late in his life did he undertake a theoretical analysis of modem

imperiahsm, and even then he brought together a number of
particular observations rather than formulating a coherent
alternative to the Marxist theory, such as Schumpeter produced
at about the same time.^^
In a rather similar way, though without such a strident
expression of nationahst fervour, Emile Durkheim's sociology
was guided by a concern with the 'regeneration of France', the
overcoming of profound internal divisions, especially between
classes, and the re-creation of 'solidarity'.^* Like Weber, Durk-
heim was extremely hostile to Marxism, both as a theory of
society and as a political doctrine, but he was rather more
sympathetic to a reformist kind of sociaUsm, although he
seems to have conceived it exclusively in a national context, and
he dismissed entirely the idea of working-class intemational-
ism.2^ Durkheim took for granted the existence of nation states;
indeed he emphasized the role of the state as the 'organ of
moral discipline', and the importance of national education as a
moral education of the young generation, preparing them for
their future tasks in the collective life of the nation. Even more
than Weber, he was indifferent to the historical contexts in
which nation states had developed, or to the possible conse-
quences of nationahsm, imperialism (which he does not
mention) and the rivalries between nation states. His two
pamphlets v^ritten during the First World War^^ show a total
disregard - astonishing in a sociologist - for the social causes of
the war; the first provides a brief diplomatic history of the
events leading up to the war, intended to demonstrate German
guilt, while the second naively analyses the 'German mentaUty'
as a 'system of ideas . . . made for war' arising from Germany's
'will to power'.
The much greater interest which sociologists have shown,
since the Second World War, in nationalist movements and
the formation of nation states is easily understandable, since it
coincides with an upsurge of nationalism directed specifically
against the economic and political dominance of the Western
nations - where the great majority of sociologists live and
work - which has created an entirely new situation, and new
1 1 2 Political sociology
problems, for those nations. But this fact has led, as I argued
earlier, to an undue concentration of attention upon twentieth-
century nationalism in the various attempts to construct a
theory of the phenomenon; and it has become apparent that a
much broader historical view needs to be taken if we are to
develop an adequate scheme of explanation.
Without attempting here to formulate such a scheme in any
comprehensive way I propose to consider some of the im-
portant elements which would enter into it. In the first place,
there are some universal factors which contribute powerfully,
in almost all cases, to the formation of a sense of nationality:
common descent (that is, the idea of belonging to a distinctive
'people'), the occupation of a definite territory, a common
language, and more broadly a common culture. These consti-
tute the basis upon which the very possibility of a nation state
rests. However, they also play an important part in other
types of political system - that of a tribe or a city-state - so

that it is necessary, secondly, to inquire into the more specific
conditions in which nation states emerge. And on the other
side, there are political systems (those of empires or of the
European feudal societies) in which these factors are less
important than allegiance or subordination to a particular
ruler or ruling group. Hence it seems right to argue, as does
Hans Kohn, that nationalism and the formation of nation
statesdepend upon the development of popular sovereignty ;2'
Europe and subsequently in other
that historically, in Western
parts of the world, they emerged in opposition to the existing
politicalarrangements of empires or feudal societies, as aspects
of a broad democratic movement.
This is not to say, however, that popular sovereignty requires
a nation Charles Tilly poses the important question of
state.
why development in Western Europe took the course

political
it did, when other options were still open; and as we have seen,
he singles out a number of specific circumstances which, in that
time and place, favoured the creation of nation states. Once
formed, this new type of state flourished, would argue, for two
I
closely connected reasons. First, it provided a most favourable

environment for the development of capitalism - a stable.
well-organized political system, with a rational and effectively

administered body of law, especially in so far as it related to
property and contracts. The growth and consolidation of the
nation state is intimately connected, in all its phases, with the
rise to power of the bourgeoisie.^^ Second, and in large measure
because of its association with the development of capitahsm,
the nation state has been extremely successful, in terms of
increasing wealth and power; its success being demonstrated
by the ability of the nations of Western Europe and North
America, during the nineteenth century and the first part of the
twentieth to establish their sway over the rest of the world.
Hence, there is little that is surprising, in my view, in the
when movements for popular sovereignty and democ-
fact that
racy began to develop on a large scale among colonial and
dependent peoples, in the course of the twentieth century, they
should have taken as their political model the established nation
states, and have become strongly infused with nationalism.
After the achievement of political independence this nationalist
fervour does not necessarily abate, and may even increase; not
only because, in many cases, the new nations remain eco-
nomically dependent within the capitalist world economy, but
also because their own development is conceived as a national
task, closely bound up with the policies of an efficient, inter-
ventionist state. This last factor, however, is not only relevant

to the experiences of the new nations. Everywhere in the present-
day world the strength of nationalism seems to be intimately
connected with the increasing power of the state as it assumes
ever greater responsibility for the stability of the economy and
for economic growth.
The greater attention given by sociologists, in recent years, to
nationaUsm and the nation state, has been accompanied, it is
often said by a more critical attitude toward these phenomena.
Anthony Smith, in his general study of the subject, observes
that 'The prevailing image of nationalism in the West today is
mainly negative . . .', and he continues by saying that this
negative evaluation '. . . contrasts with the favourable attitude
of nineteenth century liberals and radicals, and later conserva-
2*
tives, towards the doctrine of national self-determination'.
1 14 Political sociology
Much of the criticism, however, is directed against the national-

ism of the developing countries - against Arab, African or
Latin American nationalism, for example - which challenges in
various ways the dominance of the industrial, and especially the
Western nations; yet it is evident that nationalism is just as
strong in the latter countries, though for good historical
reasons (they are long established, accepted nation states) it
may be less vehemently expressed. Furthermore, the national
rivalries of the industrial countries, and especially that between
the USSR and the USA - which has to be seen, I think, as a
clash of empires rather than a struggle between capitalism and
socialism - are potentially much more dangerous to the well-
being, and even the survival, of mankind.
The present international system of nation states, in each of
which nationalism is a powerful force, is inherently likely to
produce serious conflicts. These possibilities, and from time to
time actualities, of conflict may be observed in many different
spheres: in the strains which arise from the redistribution of
economic resources between industrial and developing coun-
tries - one aspect of which is the growing competition in world
trade as the latter increase their output of manufactured

goods - and from the scarcity of some natural resources, which
will become more acute as industrialization proceeds in the
developing countries; in the difficulties of controlling the spread
of nuclear weapons; in the more directly political struggles for
power and prestige in some regions of the world (for example,
in the Middle East and among Latin American countries) and
above all between the two super-powers. The bleakness of the
prospect disclosed by this view of the present situation is not

relieved by the existence of any significant social movement
which is clearly capable of diminishing the appeal of national-
ism, or substituting a new and persuasive political ideal for that
of the nation state. No form of socialism has yet prevailed in a
contest with nationalism, and no other social movement has
directed its eff'orts against nationalism at all on a world scale.
In practice, moreover, socialist regimes have not succeeded in

establishing a new pattern of international relations; and the
pattern which has been created in Eastern Europe over the past
quarter of a century scarcely provides a model to be emulated

elsewhere.
The foregoing account confirms the idea implicit in the
theoretical scheme which I sketched earlier: namely, that
nationalism is an immensely powerful force, first, because it is
sustained by a deep-rooted sense of belonging to a territorial
and cultural commimity, and, second, because this sense of
belonging has become firmly attached to the nation state in a
process of political development which is now several centuries
old, and has taken on the character of a sacred and unalterable
principle of political organization. Nevertheless, the more
scepticaland critical attitude toward nationalism which has
grown up in recent years among some groups of intellectuals,
and the fresh attempts to create (even within a limited area)
supranational organizations, or to revive local communities,
may eventually help to redirect the sense of belonging, at least
to some upon poUtical imits other than the nation state.
extent,
At all can be no doubt that this is now a supremely
events, there
important issue both for political analysis and for political
action, and I shall return to some aspects of it in the next
chapter.
6 Global politics in the twentieth
century
Frequently, in the course of this study, a question has arisen

concerning the relation between theory and practice in political
life. It is evident - and
have emphasized the fact - that new
I
political ideas have veryoften been formulated in direct

response to the situations confronted by movements, parties
and poUtical leaders; and the pohtical thought of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries has been exceptionally fertile in this
respect. On the other side, however, we need to consider how
such ideas in turn affect pohtical life; how the analyses and
interpretations provided by political scientists enter into the
struggles between different interest groups, and either help to
define more clearly the nature of the conflicting interests or
claim to discover ways of reconcihng them.
The intermingUng of theory and practice is shown in the first
place by the fact that the systematic study of politics is far from
being confined to institutions of higher learning, even though
academic pohtical studies, like the social sciences generally, have
undergone a remarkable expansion during the present century.
Many important political thinkers have produced their ideas
outside the academy while being deeply involved in political
struggles. This is notably the case with Marxist thinkers, from
Marx to Mao Tse-tung, but it is equally apparent in some other
influential styles of political thouglit; for example, in the work
of the Fabians, or of Gandhi and Nehru. In most societies, and
more particularly in modern societies, there are many different
centres of pohtical thought and experience: educational
institutions of various types; party organizations (including
party schools and research institutes); the mass media; more or
less oflacial 'think tanks'; the central offices of trade unions and
Global politics in the twentieth century 117
employers' associations; international agencies; and a con-

siderable number of private associations devoted to political
research and education, many of which have grown out of
social movements and remain more or less closely connected
with them. Among recent movements, the student movement
of the 1960s, the women's movement, and various national
movements have all produced new political concepts. Some
of the most important political texts of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, which present not only a doctrine but a
theory of pohtics, have originated outside the academy; among
them, notably, that most influential of tracts, the Communist
Manifesto.
The general question which concerns us, then, is the relation
between intellectuals and politics.^ The scope of this relation is,
from one aspect, very wide; for, as Gramsci observed, *all men
are intellectuals' in the sense that all members of society reflect,
in some fashion, upon their social life, including political life,
and this is an essential part of their everyday existence. Never-
theless, a distinction should be made - as Gramsci further
indicated by adding that 'all men do not have the function of
intellectuals in society' - between this everyday level of political
observation and reflection, and the more systematic and
rigorous elaboration of ideas about society and politics which
constitutes the principal activity of more specialized intellectual
groups.
In the case of such groups there are, I think, three main
types of relation to practical politics. The first is that which
arises in the case of a thinker, or a group of thinkers, who
formulate the principles of a new political theory, usually within
the framework of some broader social theory. Bentham and
the utilitarians, Marx and Engels, Pareto and Mosca, the
Fabians, the American pragmatists, provide examples of
political thinkers - admittedly differing widely in the power and
range of their theories - who have influenced political life by
giving a new orientation to the actions of classes, elites or other
groups in their societies, partly by shaping opinion, partly by a
direct involvement in social movements and political parties.
A second kind of relation is to be found in the interpretations
of current political situations and trends by thinkers who, while

they do not contribute an original theory of pohtics, may
nevertheless draw upon extant theories in ways which are
especially pertinent in the existing conditions. Some of these
thinkers - Trotsky, the Austro-Marxists, Nehru or Mao
Tse-timg - have been directly involved in politics as leaders of
political movements; others, less clearly affihated with political
organizations - Sartre, the philosophers of the Frankfurt
School, modem exponents of liberal-conservative thought such
as Popper and von Hayek - have exerted a more diffuse influence
upon movements of diverse kinds. Much academic political
sociology has had a similar relation to political life. Max
Weber's political analysis, mainly directed against Marxist
sociahsm, may be seen as having encouraged in the German
middle class, to a certain extent, a liberal poUtical outlook, and
much more obviously, strongly nationalist views. In the case of
Durkheim, whose political sociology is less conspicuous, there
is apparent nevertheless a strong commitment to republicanism
(most explicitly at the time of the Dreyfus affair) as well as a
cautious sympathy with the reformist wing of the sociahst
movement and a pronounced hostility to Marxist ideas of class
conflict.Durkheim's sociology as a whole, and in particular his
view of the need for a new moral authority in society, not only
provided general support for the political ideas of the Third
Republic in France, but had a direct influence upon educa-
tional policy and the attempts to create a 'secular morality'. In a
more limited way, perhaps, the sociological studies of political
parties and elections, from Michels onwards, have had some
influence upon the manner of conducting political campaigns,
and even upon the prevalent conception of democracy.
Schumpeter's theory of democracy, which was discussed in an
earlier chapter, shows the influence of elite theories, and has
itself influenced later political views.
is a close and continuous relation between the
Third, there
work of political scientists and the routine conduct of govern-
ment and administration. Senior state officials, and to some
extent political leaders, very often receive an education in
political history, constitutional law, and administrative prac-
Global politics in the twentieth century 1 19
become advisers to government depart-

tice; political scientists
ments and agencies; sociological research is carried out to

making policy decisions. Indeed, it may be argued, as
assist in
Habermas^ and others have done, that there is a strong tendency
in the advanced industrial societies for political issues to be
transformed into technical problems, thus enhancing the role of
social scientists as 'experts' who can provide technical solutions.
But as the critics also point out, this trend itself has a pohtical
character, and may be interpreted as the consequence of the
rise to power of a new technical-bureaucratic class or ehte.' In
effect, all problems then become 'routine affairs' of a technical
kind - controUing inflation, increasing productivity, imple-

menting an efiective incomes pohcy, or finding a solution to the
instability of exchange rates - on the basis of a presimied
pohtical consensus which obscures the real existence of domi-
nant and subordinate groups in society. What is proposed as an
alternative to this conception is a recognition of the existence of
conflicting interest groups, some of which have a much greater
capacity to pursue their interests successfully, and of the need
for widespread political debate about the allocation of social
resources among these groups, or in a broad sense, about
justice and the meaning of a 'good society'.
This is not to say that the contributions which social scientists
may make to solving particular technical problems, or en-
larging the sphere of rational decision making, should be
dismissed altogether; only that they have to be seen in the
wider context of pohtical contestation and choice. In any
conceivable form of society with a developed industrial economy
and a wide range of social services there will be a vast array of
routine affairs of state which need to be dealt with in as efficient
and informed a manner as is possible. It seems very likely,
indeed, that the extension of democratic and decentralized

planning would lead to an even larger role for the social sciences
in the formation of public policies, if one may judge from the
expansion and the greater utilization of them which has already
occurred in the short period during which the present welfare
states have developed.
Of the three types of relation to practical politics which
intellectuals generally, and political scientists in particular, may

have, the most important for further consideration here is the
second - that which consists in the interpretation of current and
short-term political trends, in the light of some general theory
or conception of political life. For as I have tried to illustrate
above, the third kind of relation - technical and advisory -
exists in the context of broader political notions which them-
selves depend upon such interpretations. On the other hand, the
first type of relation is one which has little significance for the
present time, since there are no new political theories on the
grand not
scale. Political sociologists, in so far as they are
engaged in mainly descriptive and historical studies, now

devote much of their effort either to analysing methodological
problems of the kind which I outlined in the Introduction, or
to reappraising and reinterpreting those nineteenth-century
theories in which the ideas with which I have been concerned
throughout this book - democracy, class, capitalism, socialism,
the nation - were originally formulated and diffused.
Marxist theory, in particular, has been subjected to an intense
critical scrutiny, from which it has emerged considerably
changed. From being a comprehensive Weltanschauung, in

which there were to be found, according to Gramsci, all the
elements that are needed for the construction of a new 'integral
civilization', it has come to be regarded by many thinkers as a
much more restricted and tentative body of thought, which is

far from being able to predict, in any detail or with any cer-
tainty, the future development of society, or to offer anything
but the roughest of guides to political action. In short, it has
become pluralistic. For some, this revaluation of Marxism has
led to a total disillusionment with the 'god that failed', with
Marxism as *a caricature and a bogus form of religion [which]
presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system'.*
In the main, however, the reassessments have not led to a
complete rejection of Marxist theory, but to lively controversy
about, and substantial revision of, some of its central concepts -
those of class, party, ideology, the state, the capitalist mode of
production, the transition to socialism - in the course of which
Marxism has been greatly influenced by recent work in the
and the philosophy of science. These revisions

social sciences
have already had political consequences, exemplified in the
Eurocommunist movement. In an earlier chapter I referred to
the changed attitude among the leaders of Eurocommunism
toward the institutions of Western democracy; and this has
been accompanied by a reconsideration of the Leninist con-
ception of a revolutionary working-class party. No longer is
the Bolshevik Party, which developed in specific historical
circvmistances, an unquestionable model for the communist
parties in the Western capitalist societies, and it is clear that a
complex and difficult process of adaptation to new conditions
has been going on in these parties during the past decade.
At present it is difficult to see clearly what the eventual con-
sequences of these changes will be, even in a medium-term
future of a few decades; but two possibilities deserve attention.
The first is that the communist parties will gradually come to
resemble more and more the various social democratic and
labour parties, and that there will be a tendency toward a
reunification of the socialist movement, already dimly fore-
shadowed in the electoral alliances and common programmes of
left-wing parties in several European countries. This process
may even be conceived as leading ultimately to a complete
reimification; for just as the division in the socialist movement
after 1917 had its source in a particular set of historical events -
the actions of sociaUst parties during the First World War and
the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia - so a different
historical situation, already discernible in outline, in which
disenchantment with the Soviet form of socialism had become
still more widespread, while social democratic parties had
succeeded in making a more substantial advance toward a

democratic socialist society, might well result in the division
being overcome.
In that case, the pre-eminent working-class party of the
future, in the Western countries, is most likely tobe one of a
social democratic type; that is to say, a party which is itself a
coalition of diverse groups and intellectual tendencies, rather
than a centralized, monohthic organization, held together by

strict discipline and an authoritatively interpreted ideology, on
the Bolshevik model. Such a development would be consistent

also with a second possibility; namely, that political conflict in
the mediimi-term future will involve many social groups
besides classes - movement, for example,
in the environmental
or in the women's movement - so that any radical political
theory, as well as radical political action, will have to take
account of those new forces emerging in response to new
situations and problems of the late twentieth century.
But Marxism is not the only nineteenth-century political
theory which has been presented in new forms during recent
decades. The framed in terms of the
liberal evolutionist theory,
advance of democracy, and of the emergence of a political
system based upon what L. T. Hobhouse called 'citizenship',^
has reappeared (though in a truncated form) in theories of
political development and modernization. These theories have
been much more restricted in their scope in several ways first :
by confining the notion of development to the 'developing

countries', and at the same time taking as their model of a
'modem' developed society the existing Western industrial
countries, as if these countries had reached the limit of their
historical development; and second, by concentrating attention
too exclusively upon economic growth while neglecting other
aspects of development. More recently, however, and especially
since the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, such
theories have been extensively criticized; the concept of develop-
ment has been broadened again to take account of social and
cultural, as well as economic, features and more attention has
;
been given to development as a world-wide process in which

there is a close interrelationship between events in different
regions.® At the same time there has been a growing recognition
of the fact that development may take different courses, and
be directed to different ends, in diverse cultural and political
contexts. Like Marxism, the theories of development have
become pluralistic and tentative.
Conservative political thought has also undergone some
changes in recent decades, but it has been less fertile, I think, in
producing new ideas or engendering theoretical debate in

political sociology. As Mannheim observed in a well-known
essay,' conservative thought - asfrom simple tradition-

distinct
alism - was from the outset a counter-movement in con-
'. . .
scious opposition to the "progressive movement'". Initially

this oppositional thought was directed against the rationahsm
of the Enhghtenment as it was expressed in the doctrines of
the French Revolution and in the practices of the developing
capitalist economy; and in Germany especially, it was associ-
ated with the Romantic movement.^ But following the period
with which Mannheim was concerned (the first half of the
nineteenth century) conservative political thought developed
mainly as a defence of capitalism against the rising socialist
movement, and so became more sympathetic to rationalist
views, especially in the economic sphere. Schumpeter indeed
argued that capitalism provided a most favourable environ-
ment for the growth of a rational and critical outlook which
could then be turned against the capitalist social system itself.'
There are diverse strands in recent conservative thought -

among them nationalism and traditionalism (which is directed
precisely against rationalism)^" - but one of the most important
is still that which asserts the superiority, in terms of rationality,
efficiency, and the promotion of individual liberty, of the
capitalist economic system over the planned economy of
socialism. Thus there is today a reiteration of long established
themes, only proclaimed more insistently as socialist planning
has spread; opposition to the increasing, more ubiquitous and
more centralized power of the state, and to the concomitant
growth of public bureaucracy, and on the other side advocacy
of decentralization and of what Robert Nisbet has called *a
new laissez-faire'.^^
In the preceding discussion I have quite deliberately dis-
tinguished various types of political theory in terms of the

doctrines which, in a broad sense, dominate political life in the
late twentieth century. For in fact political theories, doctrines
or ideologies, and political action are inextricably bound up
As I have noted elsewhere, in a study of North
with each other.
American radicalism,^^ gygj- since the end of the eighteenth
century most of the movements of social criticism have been
based upon a theory of society; and on the other side, every
major social theory which attempts to provide a new intellectual

framework for imderstanding political life embodies at the same
time a particular orientation to the important political issues
of the age, whether in the form of Marx's allegiance to the
working-class movement, Max Weber's identification with the
German middle class, or Durkheim's commitment to the ideas
of the Third Republic in France.
Both political theories and doctrines are affected by political
conditions and the needs of practical action, just as they
influence them in turn; and changes in these conditions are
largely responsible not only for the more or less continuous
process of reinterpretation of the ideologies of political
parties and movements, but also for the more profound
revision of theoretical conceptions. We need, therefore, to
consider next what are the most important practical issues, in
the closing decades of the twentieth century, which political
sociology has to represent in thought and embody in some new
interpretive scheme. The can be grouped in three main
issues
categories: first, those which have a general significance for the
future development of all present-day societies; second, those
which arise from the relations between societies; and third,
those which are specific to particular types of society.
The global issues can be summed up in the now widely used
expression 'limits to growth'. Robert Heilbroner, examining
the human prospect,^^ refers to an 'erosion of confidence' as
characteristic of the mood of our times and attributes it in
part to 'a fear that we will be unable to sustain the trend of
economic growth for very much longer', to a recognition that we
face 'a hitherto unimaginable prospect - a ceiling on industrial
production'. This is not simply a matter of becoming uncom-
fortably aware that the rapid increase of world population and
accelerated industrialization pose a threat to the environment
both by the massive consumption of finite material resources
and by the emission of man-made heat into the atmosphere; a
situation dramatically portrayed in a report, subsequently much
criticized, by the Club of Rome, which concluded that: 'If the
present growth trends in world population, industrialization,
pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue
unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached

some time within the next one hundred years.'^* It may also be
argued that some limits to growth - what Fred Hirsch has called
'social limits'^ ^ - are akeady operating. In brief, Hirsch's
argument is that 'as the level of average consumption rises, an
increasing portion of consumption takes on a social as well
as an individual aspect ... the satisfaction that individuals
derive from goods and services depends in increasing measure
not only on their own consimiption but on consumption by
others as well', and '. beyond some point that has long been
. .
surpassed in crowded industrial societies, conditions of use tend

to deteriorate as use becomes more widespread'.^^ Hence the
situation we confront is one in which there are somewhat un-
certain (in the sense of being not precisely calculable) physical
limits to growth,which may be placed in a more or less distant
and social limits to growth which are
(but not indefinite) future,
already manifest in a deteriorating 'quality of life', which
attracts increasing attention from social scientists, and its
attendant frustrations.
The poUtical implications of this situation can easily be
seen. The legitimacy of present-day regimes depends to an
overwhelming extent, and has so depended since the end of the
Second World War, upon the effective promotion of a high
rate of economic growth; and if that rate becomes increasingly
difficult to sustain, and tends to decline, as a result of both
social and physical limits to growth, what will take its place as
a legitimating purpose for governments? In the past three
decades we might say that, in Scott Fitzgerald's words, '. life . .
was being refined down to a point', in this case the point of

increasing material consumption; or, to put the matter in more
political terms, that the industrialized societies, both capitalist
and socialist, were developing the kind of narrow and obsessive
orientation which R. H. Tawney criticized when he wrote
that
. . . the burden of our civilization is not merely, as many suppose,

that the product of industry is ill-distributed, or its conduct tyranni-
cal, or its operation interrupted by embittered disagreements. It is
that industry itself has come to hold a position of exclusive pre-

dominance among human interests, which no single interest, and

least of all the provision of the material means of existence, is fit to
occupy.^'
Postwar economic growth has generated a more or less universal

acquisitiveness, and it is far from evident that in circumstances
in which the desires which have been aroused cannot be gratified,
or their pursuit breeds disillusionment, socialism, historically
grounded in the labour movement, does or can now provide a
new direction. For, as Hirsch observes and as I shall discuss
more fully later, the mass organizations of workers - the trade
unions - have themselves become assimilated into the capitalist
market system: they are oriented increasingly to the immediate
material interests of their members, rather than to any wider
political objectives.^^ What is clear is that if economic growth -
which has aheady slowed down in most of the industrial
countries - continues to decline, while the claims of govern-
ments to legitimacy remain founded primarily upon their
abiUty to promote such growth, then we can anticipate a period
of increasing political instability and turbulence, the potential
for which was shown aheady in the events of the late 1960s.
The second type of political problem which I have indicated,
concerning the relations between societies, can be regarded
from several aspects. There is, fixst, the relationship between
rich and poor nations, which may be conceived in terms of
neo-imperiahsm and dependency (but in that case imperialism
has to be seen in a wider perspective than that which treats it
exclusively as a stage in the development of capitalism, import-
ant though this latter process is), or in terms of the current
preoccupation of the United Nations with the 'North-South
dialogue', which is becoming not so much a dialogue as a con-
frontation. It is evident that, however the relationship is
conceived, it contains many elements of disorder and conflict ;^^
and that if there is not a substantial movement, in the mediimi-
term future, toward greater economic equality among the

nations of the world, the prospects for peaceful international
cooperation will become still more discouraging.
But it is not only the relations between North and South
which give rise to serious problems. There is a more general
competition and conflict among nation states, some aspects of

which I discussed in the previous chapter, that has proved so
far impossible to overcome, or even to moderate substantially.
The various regional associations which have been formed in
Eastern and Western Europe, in Africa, in the Middle East, or
in Latin America, rest either upon the predominance of one
nation state over others in the region, or upon a limited agree-
ment about a framework within which national economic
interests can be more effectively pursued; and they have all
shown themselves incapable of controlling, in critical situations,
the vigorous expression of such interests. The European
Community, to take one instance, is simply not a community
in any usual sense of the term, but a more elaborate form of
customs union, which serves the particular economic interests
of at least some of its members, and functions adequately only
so long as that is And even if one or more regional
the case.
associations were to make some genuine advance toward a
supranational form of pohtical organization, that would not
necessarily bring about a reduction of international tensions,
for the new pohtical unit might well act as yet another power
bloc in the international arena, in the kind of role that some
advocates of European unity have envisaged for the 'new
Europe'.
Within the general array of conflicts arising from the pursuit
of national interests there is one predominant conflict, crucial
so far as the possibihty of nuclear war is concerned, between the

USA and the USSR, and their respective allies, which afiects
directly or indirectly all international relationships. This is,
which political thought and pohtical

therefore, a central issue to
action should be addressed. But what, in effect, can political
sociologists say about such a vast, intractable problem? First,
I think, on a very practical level, that much greater pohtical
resources should be devoted to the efforts to hmit, and eventu-
ally reduce, the levelof armaments (and more generally, of
'military preparedness') on both sides; for if there is any
generalization about the causes of war which is supported by
some empirical evidence, it seems to be that which estabhshes a
connection between an arms race and an increased probability
of war.2*^ It appears likely that if substantial progress could be

made in limiting arms, some degree of Jwarma-
as a step toward
ment, however modest in scale at the outset, there would be a
reduction in international tensions which would facilitate the
growth of cooperation in various fields. Second, these considera-

tions can be applied more widely by suggesting that much
larger resources, both of personnel and of money, should be
allocated by the rich countries directly to the solution of world
problems, in order to shift the balance away from the excessive
preoccupation with national and regional interests. The United
Nations and its agencies are vastly more important, on any

reasonable assessment of the major issues in world politics, than
the institutions of the European Community or similar organiza-
tions; and it would be sensible to recognize this by a reallocation
of resources to the former.
The most discouraging aspect of the relations between nations
at the present time is that there is scarcely any indication of a
decline in nationalist sentiment or in the fervour with which
national self-aggrandizement is pursued. On the contrary, the
economic crisis in the rich countries has led, not surprisingly,
to a still greater preoccupation with national economic issues
and national development. One aspect of this situation is that
aid to the developing countries by the Western nations who
are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) has continued to fall as a percentage
of their gross national product, while the various protectionist
measures which they have taken in recent years have had an
adverse effect upon the trade of the developing countries. It is
probable that this situation will become very much worse in the
long term as some of the physical limits to growth which I
discussed earlier take effect; and there will then be a much
greater likelihood of serious conflict between poor and rich
countries as well as among the rich nations themselves in the
struggle for natural resources, aggravated by economic collapse
^^
in some of the poorest developing countries.
This analysis points unmistakably to the need for a more
deliberate planning and regulation of the global economy, on
the basis of new institutions and new policies which would have
as one of their principal aims a more equitable distribution of

wealth and income among the nations of the world. In short,
what is required is some positive advance, however modest at
the outset, toward a welfare state on a world scale. But it is all
too evident that there does not exist anywhere at the present
time an active political movement which would be capable of
initiating such a development, and if it came into existence it
would encounter immense difficulties. Nor should we overlook
some of the dangers that would attend any movement toward a
more organized world system - dangers of yet more onerous
bureaucratic and a still greater centralization of
control,
political ahke inimical to individual liberty.
power, both
By any reckoning, the path into the future is an ex-
ceptionally perilous one for this generation, and political
sociology, I fear, can at best illumine it for only a short distance
ahead.
examine some of the major political problems
Finally, let us
within present-day societies. Each society, of course, has to
deal with many specific problems arising from its own culture
and history,22 but there are also more general issues to be faced,
and the two which seem to me still to be pre-eminent are those
which I indicated at the beginning of this book namely, in- :
dustrialization and democracy. In the low-income developing

countries,^^ such as India, the achievement of a fairly high rate
of economic growth and the expansion of the industrial infra-
structure are clearly of overwhelming importance, but they also
depend, as have argued, upon international conditions with
I
and aid. Much the same can be said, concerning

respect to trade
the importance of economic development, about those middle-
to high-income developing countries which are in the lower
ranges of the income scale, such as China or Nigeria. On the
other hand,some countries in this category face rather different
problems. The oil-rich countries of the Middle East have,
about ex-
certainly, to use their available resources to bring
tensive industrialization, but in many cases
major political
their
problems result from the enormous interjial inequalities of
wealth, from their autocratic regimes, and the growing oppo-
sition expressed by democratic and radical movements. A
some Latin American countries - for

similar situation exists in
example, in Brazil, Argentina and Chile - where industrializa-
tion is well advanced and political life is now dominated by a
struggle between classes, the outcome of which will decide
whether their regimes are to remain autocratic, predominantly

military, and repressive, or to become democratic and eventu-
ally, in some form, socialist.
In the industrialized countries political problems have a
different character, for although, as I have shown, economic
growth an extremely important objective, this does not
is still
involve the kind of social upheaval which accompanies rapid

industrialization and the transition from agricultural to in-
dustrial production; and it is pursued in a context of other
political concerns. So far as the capitalist, or mixed economy,
industrial societies are concerned the major political issues can
be posed, I think, by asking: what is the future of the welfare
state? In all these societies there are contradictory movements,
either to limit or to expand the social services; movements
which take place in what are still substantially free market
economies, but raise the question whether there can be any
further development of the welfare state without restricting still
more the operation of the market and eventually creating a

predominantly socialist economy.
William Robson, in a recent book,^^ has formulated the issue
by contrasting the welfare state, as a means of providing
services to the needy and underprivileged members of the
commimity, with the welfare which 'welfare is of
society, in
imlimited scope', involving conditions of work, income, the
character and scope of social services, the quality of the en-
vironment, recreational facilities, and the cultivation of the
arts, as well as freedom of expression and movement, and the
protection of individuals against abuses of power. In his view,

it isthe failure to develop the social and political attitudes
appropriate to a welfare society, which could also be called a
democratic socialist society, that is responsible for the limited
success in building a welfare state. This failure is well illustrated,

I by the outlook and policies of trade unions, which have
think,
constituted the mass basis of all socialist movements, but which
now seem to have, at least in some countries, a more tenuous

connection with socialism.
In Britain, especially, the political ideas of trade union
representatives are extremely confused; on one side, these
representatives assert their general support for the Labour
Party, and thus for the idea of a socialist society, however
vaguely conceived, while on the other side many of them have
accepted the principles of a market economy in the emphasis
which they place upon 'free collective bargaining'. What seems
to be emerging, in practice, is an American-style, non-pohtical,
'business trade unionism', but in an economy which entirely
lacks thedynamism of the American economy. Britain, however,
may be an extreme case, and in other European countries the
relations between the trade unions and the socialist movement
are much closer. Thus, a study of the unions and politics in
Sweden concludes that, with the strengthening of their collective
power base, the levels of aspiration of wage-earners are likely
to increase (in a political sense), 'extending to issues of control
over work and production' ;2^ while another study brings out
important differences between British and French workers in
their attitudes to the present system of industrial production,
with the latter taking a much more political view 'The French
:
felt that the existing structure of power was illegitimate, and a

clear majority would have been prepared to see an extension of
worker control over management's powers of decision. ... In
contrast, the British workers showed a high level of contentment
.'^^ Thus
with the existing procedures of decision making . .
there are quite wide variations in the political attitudes and

involvement of workers; and the form which these attitudes
eventually take, among both white-collar and blue-collar
workers, and in which they become embodied in trade union
poUcies, is going to be crucial for the future development of the
existing welfare states.
Those industrial which are centrally planned,
societies
coUectivist or socialist, have to cope with somewhat different
problems, although they too have been afiFected by the economic
crisis, and face some of the same difficulties in maintaining
economic growth. One of their major problems arises from the

development of what can be called broadly the 'democratic

movement', the general aim of which, in the East European
countries (and now in China), is to create a more open society
by ending censorship, establishing more firmly basic human
rights, especially the rights of free expression and movement,
and extending the economic reforms with a view both to decen-
tralizing decision making and to satisfying more adequately
consumer needs. ^^ In the USSR the democratic movement is
still mainly confined to relatively small groups of intellectuals and
professional workers,^^ but in other countries of Eastern Europe

it has on occasion - notably in 1956 and 1968 - assumed more
of a mass character, with intellectuals and workers uniting in a

demand for greater political freedom; and it seems probable
that this struggle for democracy will be intensified in the future
unless the whole movement is suppressed by force. How a
transition to a more democratic system might be accomplished,
without bringing major upheavals and a period of considerable
political instability, is still difficult to foresee.
What, then, are we to conclude about the objectives of
political sociology and its significance for practical life in
relation to the array of problems which I have sketched above?
Very briefly, I would say, that it sets out to define problems in a
rigorous fashion, to describe as accurately as possible the
circumstances in which the problems arise, to understand their
significance in the context of broader structural and historical
conditions, and to indicate, in an imaginative rather than a
restrictiveway, alternative possible courses of action. And its
practical bearing follows from the pursuit of these aims; for
by constructing concepts, modes of discourse, forms of argu-
ment, and criteria of evidence which attain some degree of
objectivity and universality, political sociology, as it is diffused
through society, has an upon the prevailing ideologies
effect
and upon political consciousness more generally, and so makes

its own distinctive contribution to the shaping of political
action. The main theme of my own analysis in this chapter has

been that the major problems of the present age centre upon
the transition to a democratic socialist world system, which will
make available to all human beings the benefits of a mode of
production based upon advanced science and technology,

within limits set by both the physical and the man-made
environment. Whether this diagnosis is correct or incorrect,
whether action informed by it would be reasonable or un-
reasonable, is something that can only be decided by further
political analysis, by a continuing effort of sociological thought,

inquiry and argument.
^
Notes and references
Introduction
1. See, for example, the discussion in Steven Lukes, Power:

A Radical View (Macmillan, 1974).
2. See W. G. Runciman, Social Science and Political Theory
2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 1959), ch. 1. This
argument has a wider bearing. If it is claimed that a new science
of politics was brought into existence by the definition of a field
of inquiry concerning the relation between 'politics' and
'society', then it has to be recognized that this occurred over a
period of time in a number of scholarly disciplines, so that the
new science came to involve not only traditional political
thought and sociology, but also jurisprudence, the sociology of
law, political economy and political anthropology. Political
sociology thus draws upon the methods and results of several
disciplines, and is only a convenient descriptive title for a
specific domain of investigation, a set of theoretical problems,
which could perfectly well be referred to by some other
name.
3. Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy (1859; various EngHsh edns).
4. There an excellent discussion of Hegel's conception of
is
civil society and its relation to the state in S. Avineri, HegeVs
Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge University Press, 1972),

especially pp. 141-54.
5. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835-40;
English translation, Oxford University Press, 1946).
6. See J. P. Mayer (ed.). The Recollections of Alexis de
Tocqueville (Harvill Press, 1948), and the comparison between
136 Notes to pages 11-17
the views of Tocqueville and Marx in Irving M. Zeitlin, Liberty,

Equality and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville (Little, Brown
& Co., Boston, 1971), pp. 97-120.
Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (Basic
7.
Books, New York, 1966), p. 292.

8. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (revised and enlarged,
1923; English translation, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1939),

p. 50.
9. Vilfredo Pareto, Treatise on General Sociology (1916;
English translation, 2 vols, Dover Publications, New York,
1963).
10. For a further discussion of the elite theories see Chapter
3 of this book, and T. Bottomore, Elites and Society (C. A.
Watts, 1964).
11. See, especially, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passer-
on, Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture (Sage
Publications, 1977).
12. There is a useful account of these opposing views in
G. H. von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Routledge

& Kegan Paul, 1971).
13. For a fuller discussion of the 'interpretive' method, its
later development, and the general context of the controversy,

see William Outhwaite, Understanding Social Life (Allen &
Unwin, 1975). On positivism see Anthony Giddens, 'Positivism
and its Critics' in T. Bottomore and R. Nisbet (eds), A History
of Sociological Analysis (Basic Books, New York, 1978).
14. These complexities are well conveyed by the papers in
I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds). Criticism and the Growth of
Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1970).

15. Maurice Godelier, Rationality and Irrationality in
Economics (New Left Books, 1974), Foreword, p. xix.
16. Godelier, Rationality and Irrationality, Foreword, p.
xxviii.
17. In the sense proposed by Thomas Kuhn in his Postscript
to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd enlarged edn
(Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1970), where a paradigm
is said to comprise the symbolic generalizations, models
(ranging from the heiu"istic to the ontological), values, and
Notes to pages 21-5 137
exemplary problem-solutions, which are shared by a community

of specialists - the producers and validators of scientific
knowledge in a given field - or by a sub-group of such a
community.
1 Democracy and social classes
1. This is how Marx formulated the issue in his essay 'On

the Jewish Question' (trans, in T. B. Bottomore, Karl Marx:
Early Writings, C. A. Watts, 1963, pp. 1-40), at a time when he
still thought of himself as a participant in the democratic
movement, but was becoming aware, as were other thinkers,

of the limitations of that movement.
2. But not the only elements; it will be necessary later to
consider especially the concept of 'nation' and the theories of

nationalism.
3. In The Old Regime and the French Revolution, quoted in
Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought (Basic
Books, New York, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 186-7. See also the general
discussion of this question in Irving Zeitlin, Liberty, Equality
and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville (Little, Brown & Co.,
Boston, 1971), ch. 2.
4. See, for further details of the extension of the suffrage in
Western Europe, Stein Rokkan, 'Mass Suffrage, Secret Voting

and Political Participation', in Archives Europeennes de
Sociologie, II, 1 (1961), pp. 132-52. In the USA manhood
suffrage was gradually extended during the nineteenth century,
but the right to vote in federal elections was accorded to women
only in 1920 (19th Amendment); and many black Americans,
especially in the South, as well as some other groups, were
prevented from voting by literacy tests and other devices, until
the civil rights movements and the resulting Civil Rights Act
of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought about sub-
stantial reforms.
5. See for a general account the essay by Philip Taft and
Philip Ross in Hugh Graham and Ted Gurr (eds). The History
of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspec-
tives. (Bantam Books, New York, 1969), pp. 281-390.
6. The various sources of this centralizing tendency, and

the movements which oppose it, are examined more fully in
Chapter 6.
7. Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930; English
translation, 1932; new & Unwin, 1961), p. 49.

edn, Allen
8. This is identical with Mosca's view that the 'organized
minority' will always dominate the unorganized majority; and
there is no escape from this trap, for if the majority begins to
organize it will merely create another organized minority.
9. Effective, that is to say, in achieving national goals, in
establishing Germany as a 'great power'.
10. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The Age of Bureaucracy (Basil
Blackwell, 1974), p. 79. This chapter of Mommsen's book (pp.
72-94) provides a good short account of Weber's conception of
democracy. For a critical analysis of this conception, to which
I shall refer again later, see Paul Q. Hirst, Social Evolution and
Sociological Categories (Allen & Unwin, 1976), pp. 110-
23.
11. J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,
5th edn (Allen & Unwin, 1976), ch. XXI.
12. Schumpeter, p. 269.
13. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy
(Harper & Brothers, New York, 1957).
14. Brian Barry, Sociologists, Economists and Democracy
(Collier-Macmillan Ltd, 1970), p. 14. Barry provides a useful
critical analysis of the later versions of this type of theory.
1 5. The name has since disappeared along with the obsession.
16. It is analysed in some detail, and contrasted with the
'economic theory of democracy', in Brian Barry, especially
ch. Ill and ch. IV where the theories of Almond and Verba,
Eckstein, Lipset and Parsons are discussed.
17. Marx's notion of contradiction, as it is set forth in Capital
and in the Grundrisse, is examined more
two essays fully in
(which somewhat in their approach):
differ Martin Nicolaus,
'The Unknown Marx'; and Maurice Godelier, 'Structure and
Contradiction in Capital' Both essays are reprinted in Robin
.
Blackburn (ed.). Ideology in Social Science (Fontana/Collins,

1972).
Notes to pages 20-3 1 39
18. Nicolaus, p. 328.

19. See pp. 45-7, 97-8
20. Werner Sombart, Why is there no Socialism in the United
States? {\90S', English translation, Macmillan, 1976).
21. The idea was formulated by S. M. Lipset in an essay on
"The Changing Class Structure and Contemporary European
Polities', in S. R. Graubard (ed.), A New Europe? (Houghton
Mifilin Co., Boston, 1964). During the 1950s there was wide-
spread debate among social scientists about this 'embour-
geoisement' of the Western working class and about the 'end of
ideology' ; fortwo different analyses of some of the main issues
see John H. Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer,
Jennifer Piatt, The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure
(Cambridge University Press, 1969), and Herbert Marcuse,
One-Dimensional Man (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).
22. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society
(1893; English translation, Macmillan, New York, 1933), part
III.
23. See the discussion of this question, and some related

issues,by Michael Mann, Consciousness and Action among the
Western Working Class (Macmillan, 1973).
24. This last feature is particularly emphasized by Marcuse,
One-Dimensional Man.
25. See Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (1899;
English translation, Schocken Books, and the New York, 1961)
study of Bernstein's views by Peter Gay, The Dilemma of
Democratic Socialism (Columbia University Press, New York,
1952).
26. See especially the discussion in Rudolf Hilferding's last,
unfinished work, Das historische Problem (First published, with
an introduction, by Benedikt Kautsky in Zeitschrift fiir Politik
(new series), vol. 1 (1954), pp. 293-324).
27. For Renner's study see Tom Bottomore and Patrick
Goode (eds), Austro-Marxism (Oxford University Press, 1978),
pp. 249-52.
28. See, among others, the writings of Raymond Aron,
Daniel Bell and S. M. Lipset. The idea is well expressed in
Aron's observation that '. . . experience in most of the developed
countries suggests that semi-peaceful competition is gradually

taking the place of the so-called deadly struggle in which one
class was supposed to eliminate the other' {Progress and Delusion,
Pall Mall Press, 1968, p. 15), I have discussed the diverse
interpretations of the changing class structure more fully in two
essays, 'In Search of a Proletariat' and 'Class and Politics in
Western Europe', reprinted in Tom Bottomore, Sociology as
Social Criticism (Allen & Unwin, 1975), chs 6 and 8.
29. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society
(Basic Books, New York, 1973),
30. See the illuminating discussion of 'non-egalitarian
classlessness' in Stanislaw Ossowski, Class Structure in the
Social Consciousness (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963),
ch. VII.
31. This kind of analysis is works
best exemplified in such
as Milton Friedmann, and Freedom (Chicago
Capitalism
University Press, Chicago, 1969) and F. A, von Hayek, Law,
Legislation and Liberty (3 vols, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1973-8). It was also formulated, in a more qualified way, in
the course of a critical assessment of socialist policies, by
J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 5th
edn (Allen & Unwin 1976).
32. Serge Mallet, The New Working Class (Spokesman
Books, 1975).
33. Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society (Random
House, New York, 1971).
34. See the discussions in Bhikhu Parek (ed.). The Concept of
Socialism (Croom Helm, Leszek Kolakowski and Stuart
1975),
Hampshire (eds), The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal (Weiden-
feld & Nicolson, 1974) and Svetozar Stojanovic, Between Ideals
and Reality: A Critique of Socialism and its Future (Oxford
University Press, New York, 1973).
35. For a more extensive discussion of this question, see
Chapter 6.
36. See Chapter 5.
37. Tom Bottomore, Sociology as Social Criticism (Allen

& Unwin, 1975), pp. 129-31.
38. See Branko Pribicevic, The Shop Stewards' Movement
and Workers' Control 1910-22 (Basil Blackwell, 1959), and the

study by Karl Renner, 'Democracy and the Council System',
part of which is translated in Tom Bottomore and Patrick
Goode (eds), Austro-Marxism (Oxford University Press, 1978),
pp. 187-201.
39. For general accounts of the Yugoslav experience, set in a
wider context, see Paul Blumberg, Industrial Democracy: The
Sociology of Participation (Constable, 1968) and M. J.
Broekmeyer (ed.), Yugoslav Workers' Self-Management (D.
Reidel Publishing Co., 1970).
40. See especially Otto Bauer's study of the Austrian revolu-
tion; and for a general view of the Austro-Marxist position,
Tom Bottomore and Patrick Goode (eds), Austro-Marxism,
Introduction.
41. For a short, clear exposition of a structuralist view see
Maurice Godelier, Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology (Cam-
bridge University Press, 1977), Introduction and ch. 1.
42. Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, Mode of Production and
Social Formation (Macmillan, 1977). In another work. Social
Evolution and Sociological Categories (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1975), pp. 110-23, Paul Hirst has argued, in a criticism of
Max Weber, that, 'even within modem capitalist society, less
repressiveand authoritarian forms of administration and more
democratic forms of government are possible', and can be
achieved by political action.
43. Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society (Herder &
Herder, New York, 1971), pp. 121-2.
44. Claus Offe, 'Political Authority and Class Structures -
An Analysis of Late CapitaUst Societies', International Journal
of Sociology, II, 1 (1972), pp. 73-105.

45. Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society (Random
House, New York, 1971), p. 74.
2 Social movements, parties and political action
1. This definition is adapted from the one proposed by
Ralph H. Turner and Lewis M. Killian, Collective Behavior

2nd edn (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N J, 1972), p. 246.
Most general studies of social movements offer similar defi-

nitions, though with some differences in emphasis. A valuable
earlier study is that by Rudolf Heberle, Social Movements
(Appleton-Century-Croft, New York, 1951), in which a
'movement' is said to connote '. a commotion, a stirring
. .
among the people, an unrest, a collective attempt to reach a

visualized goal, especially a change in certain social institutions'
(p. 6) and is contrasted with a party or pressure group, for
although 'containing among theirmembers certain groups
that are formally organized, the movements as such are not
organized groups' (p, 8).
2. See especially the essay 'Class Consciousness' in G.
Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (1923; English trans-
lation,Merlin Press, 1971). On the general subject of class and
party see the discussion in Ralph Miliband, Marxism and
Politics (Oxford University Press, 1977), ch. 5.
3. One good example is the chapter 'A Classification of
Social Movements' in David F. Aberle, The Peyote Religion
Among the Navaho (Aldine Publishing Co., Chicago, 1966),
pp. 315-33, where a social movement is defined in a somewhat
different way as 'an organized attempt by a group of human
beings to effect change in the face of resistance by other human
beings', and is distinguished from purely individual efforts, from
crowd action, and from technological change (which is directed
upon the material world); and such movements are then
classified in terms of the amount of change (total or partial) and
the locus of change (in individuals or in some supra-individual
system).
4. It would be possible to establish a very elaborate typology
of social movements by using the fifteen criteria of classifica-
tion of all which was proposed by Georges
social groups
Gurvitch, La vocation actuelle de la sociologie (Presses Uni-
de France, Paris, 1950),
versitaires vol. 1, ch. 5 'Typologie des
groupements sociaux'.
5. Originally published in 1842 under the title Socialism and
Communism in Present Day France, the third, greatly expanded
edition appeared in 1850 (Bedminster Press, Totowa, NJ,
1964).
.
Notes to pages 43-S 143
6. See the discussion in S. Avineri, The Social and Political

Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1972),
pp. 53-5.
7. See Vittorio Lantemari, The Religions of the Oppressed
(Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1963), which surveys messianic
movements among tribal peoples, especially in the context of
colonial rule,and N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 2nd
enlarged edn (Oxford University Press, 1970).
8. See E. J. Hobsbawn, Primitive Rebels, 3rd edn (Man-
chester University Press, 1971), and Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars

of the 20th Century (Harper & Row, New York, 1970), as
well as studies of such earlier notable peasant rebellions as the
Peasants' War in Germany.
9. See George Rude, The Crowd in History (John Wiley, New
York, 1964). The author notes how recent is the serious study
of popular movements, and how widely diffused until lately was
the ruling class view that riots and rebellions are simply the
result of 'conspiracy'.
10. Alain Touraine, The Self-Production of Society (Chicago
University Press, Chicago, 1977), p. 1.
1 1 Touraine understands by social movements 'the conflict
action of agents of social classes', but this is too restrictive. Of
course, classes have been a major source of social movements,
and the labour movement has remained until now the prime
example of a comprehensive, innovative, revolutionary move-
ment; but there are other kinds of social movement, and it does
not seem possible to reduce all of them - for example, the
women's movement, or nationalist movements - to a class
movement without serious distortion.
12. For a detailed history of the movement, including many
documents see Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (Vintage Books, New
York, 1974).
13. Sale.
14. Among the numerous of these events see

analyses
especially Alain Touraine, The May Movement (Random House,
New York, 1971) and Alfred Willener, The Action-Image of
Society (Tavistock Publications, 1970).
15. There is a good analysis of these problems in Harold
Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (William Morrow

& Co., New York, 1967).
16. On this subject see Peter C. Lloyd, Classes, Crises and
Coups (MacGibbon & Kee, 1971), especially ch. 8, and Morris
Janowitz, The Military in the Political Development of New
Nations (Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1968). Some other
aspects of the role of the military in politics are examined in
later chapters of the present book.
17. Before the nineteenth century parties could be said to
exist, if at all, only in an embryonic form, without any perma-
nent organization or stable membership (for example, the
Whigs and Tories in the eighteenth century British House of
Commons, or the Jacobins and Girondins French revolution-
in
ary assemblies). For a general account of the development of
parties see M. Duverger, Political Parties, 2nd edn (Methuen,
1959).
18.For a discussion of this point, with reference to British
Robert McKenzie, British Political Parties, 2nd edn
politics, see
(Heinemann, 1963), Introduction.

19. Peter Nettl, 'The German Social Democratic Party
1890-1914 as a Political Model', Past and Present, 30 (April

1965), pp. 67, 78.
20. Nettl, The German Social Democratic Party', p. 67.
21. On the latter, Nettl observes: 'As these protest parties
develop, they increasingly prohibit participation in colonial
government, except as a clearly defined prelude to the departure
of the colonial power. In all these cases, there is a strong
element of inheritance expectation . .
.' ('The German Social
Democratic Party', p. 67).
22. They are discussed further in Chapter 4.
23. There is considerable scope for argument, and has indeed
been much argument, about whether the present-day societies
of Western Europe and North America can properly be
described as post-industrial, post-capitalist or neo-capitalist,
and what degree of difference from the nineteenth-century
societies in this region of the world is represented by the
'welfare state'. At all events it has to be recognized that these
societies exhibit some quite new features.
24. See p. 38.

25. The term was used by W. H. Morris-Jones, The Govern-
ment and Politics of India, 3rd rev, edn (Hutchinson, 1971), to
describe a situation in which, especially following a successful
movement for national independence, there may be several
parties, but one of them has such overwhelming support that
its rule is not seriously challenged by any of the others. The
recent history of India, and of other new nations, shows,

however, that this situation may not be long-lasting, and that
there may emerge from it either a genuine multi-party system or
rule by a single party or military group. See the further dis-
cussion in Chapter 5.
26. The point was emphasized by Engels in 1893, and by
Morris Hillquit, a leader of the American socialist party, in
his History of Socialism in the United States (1910; 5th edn,
Dover Publications, New York, 1971). For a recent discussion
of this question see S. M. Lipset, 'Radicalism in North America:
A Comparative View of the Party Systems in Canada and the
United States', Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada,
series IV, XIV (1976), especially pp. 36-43.
27. For an early comprehensive analysis see Werner Sombart,
Why is there no Socialism in the United States? (1906; English
translation with a valuable introduction by C. T. Husband,
Macmillan, 1976). A more recent, wide-ranging discussion is to
be found in the contributions to J. H. M. Laslett and S. M.
Lipset (eds). Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of

American Socialism (Anchor/Doubleday, Garden City NY,
1974).
28. Robert Michels, Political Parties <1911; English trans-
lation. Free Press, New York, 1966).
29. Michael Harrington, Socialism (Saturday Review Press,
New York, 1972).
30. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor
People's Movements (Pantheon Books, New York, 1977). In
their first chapter the authors also provide an excellent general
analysis of the institutional factors which constrain and limit
lower-class protest and rebellion.
31. Piven and Cloward, p. 36.
32. Alain Touraine, Vie et mort du Chili populaire (Editions

du Seuil, Paris, 1973).
3 Types of political system
1. R. B. Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation (Cambridge

University Press, 1953), calls this the 'natural history' stage of a
science, and S. F. Nadel, The Theory of Social Structure
(Cohen & West, 1957), refers to the 'less ambitious' sense of
theory in which 'the propositions serve to classify phenomena,

to analyse them into relevant units or indicate their inter-
connections and to define "rules of procedure" and "schemes
of interpretation".'
2. Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy (1859; various English edns).
3. Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1846; various English
edns). The relevant section is translated in Bottomore and
Rubel (eds), Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and
Social Philosophy (C. A. Watts &, Co., 1956), pp. 126-30.
4. See especially the section edited with an introduction by
Eric Hobsbawm under the title Pre-Capitalist Economic Forma-
tions (Lawrence & Wishart, 1964).
5. Hobsbawm, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, p. 32.
6. See Lawrence Krader, The Ethnological Notebooks of
Karl Marx (Van Gorcum & Co., Assen, 1972).
7. See Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist
Modes of Production (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).
8. In particular, the work of Maurice Godelier, Rationality
and Irrationality in Economics (New Left Books, 1974) and

Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology (Cambridge University
Press, 1977).
9. See especially the study by Perry Anderson, Passages from
Antiquity to Feudalism (New Left Books, 1974) and Lineages of
the Absolutist State (New Left Books, 1974).
10. For example Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and
Social Classes (New Left Books, 1973).
11. See Hobsbawm, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations,
p. 33.
12. Hindess and Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production.

13. Perry Anderson, Lineages of The Absolutist State,
p. 10.
14. Ibid., pp. 403^.
15. Poulantzas, pp. 14-15.
16. Hindess and Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production,
pp. 32, 37.
17. Hindess and Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production,
p. 22.
18. SeeL.Krader.
19. Ferry Anderson raises this question in connection with
the absolutist state and observes that'. There has hitherto
. .
been no Marxist theory of the variant social functions of war

in different modes of production' {Lineages of the Absolutist
State, p. 31). The major discussion of the part played by
warfare and conquest in the formation of the state is to be found
in the somewhat neglected work by Franz Oppenheimer, The
State (English translation. Free Life Editions, New York,
1975). There is now perhaps a growing recognition of the
importance of this element in the development of political
systems; thus, Charles Tilly, in discussing the formation of
nation states out of a multitude of smaller political units in
Western Europe, observes that '. most of the political units
. .
which disappeared perished in war', and concludes that 'War

made the state, and the state made war'. See Charles Tilly,
'Reflections on the History of Europe and State-Making', in
Charles Tilly (ed.). The Formation of National States in Western
Europe (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975), p. 42.
20. There is a good account of the development of ideas
about 'oriental despotism' in Perry Anderson, Lineages of the
Absolutist State, note B, pp. 462-549.
21. Further distinctions can be made in these terms. For
example, India was characterized by W. H. Morris Jones, The
Government and Politics of India (Hutchinson, 1971), as having a
'one-dominant-party' system, and although this is no longer the
case it represents a state of affairs that existed not infrequently
in countries where nationalist movements gained independence
and acceded to power.
22. See the work of Samuel P. Huntington discussed on

p. 13.
23. Aidan Southall, 'Stateless Society' in International
Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (Macmillan, New York,
1968), vol. 15. See also the discussion in John Middleton and
David Tait (eds), Tribes Without Rules (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1958).
24. For further discussion of the political significance of
warfare see pp. 81-3.
25. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (1896; rev. and
enlarged, 1923; English translation, McGraw-Hill, New York,
1939).
26. Economic and social administration in modem industrial
societies manifestly involves political choices, among diverse
policies thatmight be adopted, and alternative allocations of
resources - hence necessarily 'the government of men'. More
generally, it may be claimed that there is, and can be, in human
societies, no administration of kind
'things' as such, for every
of interchange with nature - even in terms of Marx's own con-
ception - occurs within a framework of interpersonal communi-
cations and relationships.
27. An exception should be made for the Austro-Marxists,
who devoted much attention to the problem of the Soviet
dictatorship in relation to democracy, and in the case of Karl
Renner emphasized the opportunities for a peaceful transition
by using the existing state apparatus (transformed
to socialism
in its political orientation) to extend public ownership of
economic enterprises, and to expand and develop in new
directions the welfare services already provided by the bour-
geois state. For Renner's views see particularly his essays
'Problems of Marxism', written in 1916, and partly translated
in Tom Bottomore and Patrick Goode, Austro-Marxism
(Oxford University Press, 1978).
28. Yilfredo Pareto, A Treatise on General Sociology (Dover
Publications, New
York, 1963), ch. 11.
29. Mosca. Mosca's conception of the 'organized minority'
also plays an important part in Michels' analysis of the relation
between party leaders and members, discussed in the previous
chapter, and in other subsequent studies. I have examined the

elite theories more fully in Elites and Society (C. A. Watts &
Co., 1964).
30. In all these respects Weber shared the views of Michels
and also of Sombart, although they, unlike Weber, reached
their conclusions as a result of a growing disillusionment with
the socialist movement.
31. However there is obviously some affinity between
Weber's concept of 'legitimacy', Mosca's 'political formula',
and Gramsci's 'hegemony', all of which are intended to draw
attention to, and interpret, the non-coercive elements in any
system of domination. In recent political sociology these
relatively precise concepts have largely been replaced by the
vaguer general term 'political socialization', usually without
reference to domination or to any theory of the state, although
an important exception is to be found in the neo-Marxist
conception - now widely debated - of 'cultural reproduction',
as formulated, for example, in Pierre Bourdieu and J. C.
Passeron, Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
(Sage Publications, 1977).
32. It is so characterized by Steven Lukes in his study of the
diverse conceptualizations of political power, which examines
in a more comprehensive fashion many of the questions briefly
discussed here; see Lukes, 'Power and Authority' in Tom
Bottomore and Robert Nisbet (eds), A History of Sociological
Analysis (Basic Books, New York, 1978).
33. Talcott Parsons, Politics and Social Structure (Free
Press, New York, 1969), ch. 14 'On the Concept of Political
Power'.
34. As outlined by Southall; see the passage quoted on
p. 70.
35. R. M. Maclver, The Modern State (Oxford University
Press, 1926). This work one of the major statements of a
is
pluralist view, which was also expounded in the early writings

of H. J. Laski, notably in Authority in the Modern State (Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1919). From a similar standpoint,
there is a profound criticism of the opposed conception of the
state, especially in its neo-Hegelian version, as the supreme
1 50 Notes to pages 77-80
embodiment of the moral unity of society - 'the march of God

in the world' - by L. T. Hobhouse in his much neglected
Metaphysical Theory of the State (Allen & Unwin, 1918). This
criticism, however, should be read in the light of Shlomo
Avineri's recent study, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State
(Cambridge University Press, 1972), ch. 8, which contends that
Hegel's own theory was essentially pluralist.
36. See especially with respect to the significance of such
elements in tribal societies, and the important similarities
between these societies and others, including modern societies:
Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society
(Basil Blackwell, 1965); Georges Balandier, Political Anthro-
pology (Allen Lane, 1970), particularly the conclusion; and
Maurice Godelier, Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology
(Cambridge University Press, 1977), part IV, on myth and
ideology.
37. Jorge Graciarena and Rolando Franco, 'Social Forma-
tions and Power Structures in Latin America', Current Sociology,
26, 1 (Spring 1978), pp. 1-266.
4 Political change and conflict
1. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political

Economy (1859; various English edns), Preface.
2. See the discussion in Chapter 3, pp. 62-5.
3. See the expositions of this view by Raymond Aron, The
Industrial Society (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), and by
Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1964); and the discussion on pp. 80-1.
4. In spite of this common ground there is considerable
diversity in the interpretations of 'post-industrial' society,
especially with regard to its political consequences; see, for
example, Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society (Random
House, New York, 1971), The Coming of Post-
and Daniel Bell,
Industrial Society (Basic Books, New York, 1973). These
debates have also led to some reassessment of Marx's writings
on the development of capitalism, particularly in certain
passages of the Grundrisse, where Marx seems to envisage the
Nc tes to pages 80-2 1 51
gradual emergence within capitalism of a society based upon

advanced science and technology.
5. Henri Pirenne, 'The Stages in the Social History of
Capitalism', American Historical Review, XIX, 3 (1914).

6. For one good example, see Peter Burke, Venice and Am-
sterdam: A Study of Seventeenth Century Elites (Temple

Smith, 1974).
7. For example, Comte and Spencer. On the former, see
Raymond Aron, War and Industrial Society (Oxford University

Press, 1958), who quotes from the Cours de philosophic positive
Comte's observation that '. there was no other means, in the
. .
early stages, to bring about the indispensable expansion of

human society . . . except the gradual incorporation of civilized
populations into one conquering nation'.
8. Especially Franz Oppenheimer, The State (Free Life
Editions, New York, 1975), who writes: 'The State ... is a
social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a
defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion
of the victorious group over the vanquished, and securing itself
against revolt from within and attacks from abroad.' See also
the discussion on pp. 67-71.
9. Morris Janowitz, The Last Half-Century: Societal Change
and Politics in America (Chicago University Press, Chicago,
1978), pp. 185-9, indicates that this is the case in the USA,
where military expenditure as a proportion of total government
spending fell from 30 per cent in 1967 to 16 per cent in 1975,
although it is still much higher than it was in the 1930s. For
a more extensive discussion of these questions, see the article
'War, Theory of in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edn,
Macropaedia, vol. 19.
10. The most comprehensive work on the subject is that
by Quincy Wright, A Study of War (Chicago University Press,

Chicago, 1965); but see also Raymond Aron, Peace and War:
A Theory of International Relations (Doubleday, New York,
1966); Leon Bramson and George W. Goethals (eds), War:
Studies from Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology (Basic Books,
New York, 1978) and Alastair Buchan, War in Modern Society:
;
An Introduction (C. A. Watts & Co., 1966).

. :
1 1 Karl Mannheim, 'The problem of generations', in Essays

on the Sociology of Knowledge (Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1952), pp. 276-322.
12. Margaret Mead, Culture and Commitment: A Study of
the Generation Gap (Bodley Head, 1970).
13. See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Repro-
duction: In Education, Society and Culture (Sage Publications,
1977).
14. Bourdieu and Passeron.
1 5. Claus Offe, Industry and Inequality (Edward Arnold, 1 976.)
16. As
have remarked elsewhere, socialism has been for
I
more than a century the effective counter culture of capitalism.

17. See Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Heinemann,
1976).
18. Max Adler, 'The Sociology of Revolution', in Tom
Bottomore and Patrick Goode (eds), Austro-Marxism (Oxford
University Press, 1978), pp. 136-46.
19. Although L. T. Hobhouse, for instance, in his account of
the development of political institutions, employed a scheme
of classification according to which three major types of society,
which succeed each other historically, are characterized by
having, respectively, as their fundamental social bond, kinship,
authority and citizenship.
20. See pp. 62-7.
21. For a more extensive discussion of these issues, see
especially Claus Offe, 'Political Authority and Class Structures
An Analysis of Late Capitalist Societies', International Journal
of Sociology, II, 1 (1972), pp. 73-105.
22. For an interpretation along these lines see Barrington
Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Allen
Lane, 1967).
23. One major analysis of these tendencies is Hannah
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Meridian Books, 1958).
For a later re-examination of such conceptions see Carl J.
Friedrich, Michael Curtis, and Benjamin R. Barber (eds),
Totalitarianism in Perspective: Three Views (Pall Mall Press,

1969).
24. For further discussion of this point, see Chapter 6.
25. But not by all; the Austro-Marxists, for example, em-

phasized very strongly the possibility and the advantages of a
peaceful transition to socialism, and defined their own attitude
to the use of force in the concept of 'defensive violence'.
26. See especially the essay by Richard M. Titmuss, 'War
and Social Policy' in Essays on the 'Welfare State' (Allen &
Unwin, 1958), and also the symposium 'On the Welfare State'
in the European Journal of Sociology, II, 2 (1961) where Asa
Briggs, for example, refers to the '. . . close association between
warfare and welfare'.
27. First published in 1874 in Italian.
28. See pp. 38-9.
29. See pp. 56.
30. Robert C. Smith, 'The Changing Shape of Urban Black
Politics: 1960-1970', in The Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science, 439 (September 1978), p. 20.
31. Reprinted in Robin Blackburn (ed.). Ideology in Social
Science (Fontana/Collins, 1972), pp. 334-68.
32. Blackburn, pp. 238-62.
33. See also the discussion in Chapter 1, pp. 38-9.
34. One example of such a contradiction might be that
between civil society and the state, which emerges in the
attempts to establish their unity; on this subject see the interest-
ing discussion by Leszek Kolakowski and Stuart Hampshire
(eds). The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal (Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1974), pp. 18-35. The concept of 'contradiction'
itself - whether it refers to some kind of contradiction in the
'logic of a structure', or to opposed tendencies in 'structural
causality' - evidently requires to be elucidated much more
fully than has been done by those writers who use the concept.
35. See pp. 30-5.
36. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Bedminster Press,
New York, 1948), part III, ch. IV.
5 The formation of new nations: nationalism and development
1. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (Collier Books, New

York, 1967), Introduction, pp. 3-4.
2. See especially S. M. Lipset, The First New Nation

(Anchor/Doubleday, Garden City NY, 1974).
3. Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy (Allen Lane, 1967). See p. 88 of the present book.

4. The most substantial expositions are those by the Austro-
Marxists, Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, who had to confront the
problems of national sovereignty and nationalism in a particu-
larly acute form in the Habsburg Empire. Bauer's work Die
Nationalitdtenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (Wiener Volks-
buchhandlung, Vienna, 1907; enlarged edn, 1924) has been
widely regarded as the most important Marxist study in this
field, although it is frequently neglected in the general accounts
of nationalism. In Anthony D. Smith's Theories of Nationalism
(Duckworth, 1971) Bauer and the other Austro-Marxists are
barely mentioned.
5. Bauer.
Karl Renner, Marxismus, Krieg und Internationale
6.
(J.H. W. Dietz, Stuttgart, 1917).

7. For a critical discussion of the Austro-Marxist theory of
nationalism and imperialism, see E. M. Winslow, The Pattern

of Imperialism (Columbia University Press, New York, 1948),
pp. 159-69, 179.
8. E. Kedourie, Nationalism, 3rd edn (Hutchinson, 1966).
9. See the criticisms along these hues in E. Gellner, Thought
and Change (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), pp. 151-3 Anthony ;
D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism, pp. 30-40; and Bryan

Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism (Allen & Unwin,
1978), pp. 54-7.
10. Robert Brym, Intellectuals and Politics (Allen & Unwin,
1979), ch. 3, notes that military officers have played an im-
portant role, particularly in the nationalist regimes that are
eventually established ; and he shows more generally that there
is little evidence for treating either revolutions or national
independence struggles as intellectual coups d'etat (as Lasswell,
for example, has done) rather than as broad social movements
with which some intellectuals ally themselves.
11. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1964), ch. 7.
Notes to pages 102-1 f 155
12. Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in

Western Europe (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975).
13. Femand Braudel, La Mediterranee et le monde medi-
terraneen a Vepoque de Philippe II (Collins, 1972).
14. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System:
Capitalist Agriculture and of the European World-
the Origins
Economy in the Sixteenth Century (Academic Press, New York,
1974).
15. Hugh Seton-Watson, Nationalism and Communism
(Methuen, 1964), pp. 9-10.
16. Seton-Watson, pp. 10-11.
17. A study of the political attitudes of young people in
Quebec in the early 1960s, when the independence movement
began to develop on a large scale, showed that while socialist
ideas were quite widely diffused, no one was a socialist without
being a nationalist, and in the group as a whole national
consciousness predominated very clearly over class conscious-
ness; see Marcel Rioux, 'Conscience nationale et conscience de
classe au Quebec', Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, XXXVIII
(1965), pp. 99-108.
18. TiUy, p. 633.
19. Jean Monnet, Memoirs (Doubleday, New York, 1978).
20. See the discussion in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg
(Oxford University Press, 1966), especially pp. 91-4, 845-
62.
21. Later on as we have seen, Renner modified his ideas
somewhat, and recognized that nationaUst and imperialist
doctrines, in some circimistances, might gain such an ascendancy
as to shape the political outlook of a whole people.
22. Wolfgang Mommsen, The Age of Bureaucracy (Basil
Blackwell, 1974), p. 37.
23. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Bedminster Press,
New York, 1968), vol. 2. See also the discussion in Mommsen,
pp. 41-6. J. A. Schumpeter's monograph 'Zur Soziologie der
Imperialismen' was published in 1919 (English translation.
Imperialism and Social Classes, Augustus M. Kelley, New
York, 1951).
24. See the discussion of Durkheim's 'nationalism' and
'patriotism' in Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and

Work (Allen Lane, 1973), pp. 41-2, 338.
25. Lukes, Emile Durkheim, pp. 320-7.
26. fimile Durkheim, Qui a voulu la guerre ? Les origines de la
guerre d'apris les documents diplomatiques (Colin, Paris, 1915),
and VAllemagne au-dessus de tout: la mentalite allemande et la
guerre (Colin, Paris, 1915).
27. See pp. 99-100.
28. This process was analysed in some detail by Max
Weber, General Economic History (Collier Books, New York,
1961), especially chs. 28 and 29, who concluded that '. it is . .
the closed national state which afforded to capitalism its

.'
chance for development. . .
29. Anthony D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism (Duckworth,

1971), pp. 8, 9.
6 Global politics in the twentieth century
1. In the following discussion I shall consider primarily the

upon political action, not the various
influence of political ideas
ways in which intellectuals become attached to particular
movements and parties, or the specific role that they play in
them. On the latter subject see Robert Brym, Intellectuals and
Politics (Allen & Unwin, 1979).
2. See especially the essay on 'Technology and Science as
"Ideology" ', in Jiirgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society

(Beacon Press, Boston, 1970).
3. An argument along these lines is presented by Alain
Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society (Random House, New
York, 1971) and The May Movement (Random House, New
York, 1971), where he writes: 'Now French society knows once
again that its decisions are political choices, even when they
rest on the best technical studies and when they take account of
the demands of economic coherence. Behind the ideology of
rationality, the power of special interests has been laid bare;
not so much those of speculators or even private capital as of the
massive structures that control production and consumption.'
4. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (Claren-
Notes to pages 122-3 1 57
don Kolakowski's argument in

Press, 1978), vol. Ill, p. 526.
volume, on the 'breakdown' of Marxism, is a vigorous
this third
exposition of one major form of criticism of Marxism, first
systematically presented in Karl Popper, The Open Society and
its Enemies (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1945).
For a succinct exposition of his theory, which points
5.
clearly toward a conception of the modem welfare state, see

especially L. T. Hobhouse, Social Evolution and Political
Theory (Columbia University Press, New York, 1911).
6. One important current of thought in this revision of
theories of development has led to the formulation of new
conceptions of 'under-development' and 'dependent develop-
ment' as active historical processes which arise from the
complex economic and political relations between 'metro-
politan' (advanced capitalist or, more generally, industrial)
coimtries and 'satellite' or 'peripheral' (non-industrial, in many
cases previously colonial) countries. For a useful review of these
issues,see Henry Bernstein (ed.). Underdevelopment and
Development (Penguin Books, 1973), especially the essay by
T. Dos Santos, pp. 57-80. In recent years these new conceptions
have entered prominently into political and scientific debate
at an international level in what is called the 'North-South
dialogue', and in the UNESCO programme of studies of the
New Economic Order.
International
7. Karl Mannheim, 'Conservative Thought' (1927), English
translation in Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology

(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953).
8. At this stage conservative thought had an important
formative influence upon sociology, as Robert Nisbet has
shown; see especially his essay 'Conservatism', in Bottomore
and Nisbet (eds), A History of Sociological Analysis (Basic
Books, New York, 1978).
9. J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
(Allen & Unwin, 1976), chs. XI and XIII.

10. See, for example, Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in
Politics and Other Essays (Methuen, 1952).

11. Robert Nisbet, Twilight of Authority (Oxford University
Press, 1975), concluding chapter.

12. T. B. Bottomore, Critics of Society (Allen & Unwin,

1967), ch. VIII 'Criticism and Ideology'.
13. Robert L. Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human
Prospect (W. W. Norton & New
York, 1974).
Co.,
14. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen
Randers, William H. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth (The

New American Library, New York, 1972).
15. Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1977).
16. Hirsch, pp. 2-3.
17. R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (Bell, 1921), pp.
106-7.
18. Hirsch, pp. 171-2.
one view of this situation, the interview with

19. See, for
Shridath Rampal, Secretary-General of the Commonwealth,

S.
in Third World Quarterly, I, 1, (1979), pp. 1-17.

20. See L. F. Richardson, Arms and Insecurity (Boxwood
Press, Pittsburgh, 1960).
21. See the comments on this point by Shridath S. Rampal in
Third World Quarterly, and the discussion by Robert L.
Heilbroner, An the Human Prospect (W. W.
Inquiry into
Norton 8c Co., New
York, 1974).
22. These include problems of political unity, in the face of
divisive tendencies arising from tribal, linguistic or religious
differences, which may be particularly acute in some developing
countries, though they are not confined to such countries.
23. Using, with some modifications, the classification
proposed in the World Development Report 1978, I distinguish
here between low-income developing countries (with a per
capita gross income of US $250 or less) and middle- to high-
income developing countries (with a per capita gross income
above $250).
24. William A. Robson, Welfare State and Welfare Society
(Allen & Unwin, 1976).
25. Walter Korpi, The Working Class in Welfare Capitalism
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 332.
26. Duncan Gallic, In Search of the New Working Class
(Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 299.
Notes to page 132 159
27. See, for example, the proposals made by Andrei Sak-

harov. Progress, Co-existence and Intellectual Freedom (Andr^
Deutsch, 1968).
28. See the account of various dissenting groups in David
Lane, The Socialist Industrial State (Allen & Unwin, 1976), pp.
104-19.
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;
Index
absolutism, 59, 63, 64, 77, 87 65, 66, 68, 69, 72, 88, 89, 95-7, 101,
Adier, M., 86 123, 125, 126, 130
administration, 8, 10-12, 35, 69, 71, Carrillo, S., 38, 52
73, 107; centralized, 26, 57, 66, 118, change: economic, 19, 83, 85, 100;
119 peaceful, 91, 92; political, 19,
Africa, 105, 114, 127 79 (influences effecting),
alienation, 18 79-98, 100; revolutionary, 51;
Althusser, L., 15, 38 society in, 12, 48, 51, 52, 56, 65,
anarchy, 92 76, 77, 79, 80, 90
Anderson, P., 63, 66 Chile,46, 56, 93, 94, 105, 130
apathy, political, 46 China, 30, 48, 83, 91, 105, 109, 129,
Arab states, 105, 106, 108, 114, 127, 132
129 'citizenship' political theory, 122
Argentina, 105, 130 civil society: creation of, 9; definition
Austria, 37, 49 of, 9; related to political economy,
authoritarianism, 7, 35, 37, 51, 73, 8, 9; relationship with state, 8, 9
88, 92, 93, 100, 123 class: changed role of, 36; democracy,
authority, moral, need for, 118 and, 21-40, 45, 47, 48, 53-6, 83-5,
autocracy, 89, 90, 129, 130 94-8, 120; industrial capitalism,
autonomy, 10, 12, 14, 38, 74, 84, 85, and, 9, 10, 21-3, 32, 33; ruled, 11,
87, 106 27, 70, 71,73, 96, 99; ruling, 11,
Avineri, S., 9 25,27,39,70,71,73,91,95,96,
99, 101, 105, 106; service, 33;
Bachelard, G., 17 structure, changes in, 32-4, 54, 89
Bauer, O., 51, 100-1, 110 96; struggle, 9, 13, 22, 30, 32, 33,
Bentham, J., 117 36, 37, 39, 43, 50, 88, 90, 95-8, 106,
Bernstein, E., 31, 33 107, 109-11, 118, 130; theory of,
Bolshevism, 37, 42, 88, 121, 122 22; third estate, the, 99, 100
Bourdieu, P., 84, 94 Cloward, R. A., 56
bourgeoisie, 9, 22, 23, 28-31, 33, 39, Club of Rome, 124
61, 68, 86-8, 97, 100, 101, 104-6, collectivism, 87, 89, 90, 131
110,113 colonialism, 102, 105, 113
Braudel, F., 103 communism in capitalist societies, 121
bureaucracy, 26, 27, 35, 46, 48, Communist Manifesto, 33, 117
55, 57, 69, 73, 77, 90, 119, 123, 129 community, value of, 35
conflict: industrial, 32; international,
Canada, 52; see also Quebec 108, 114, 126-8; new nation,, 107,
capitalism: breakdown of, 64; 126, 127; political, 13, 40,44, 56, 59,
development of,61-3, 80, 82, 88, 69-70, 74, 77, 79-98, 109, 114,
103, 110, 112, 113, 123, 126; 116; social, 9, 70; social group, 122
organized, 30, 87; reformed conservatism, 122, 123
structure of, 32; state-regulated, 39; consumption factors, 32, 33, 125
transition to socialist society, 37-9, coups, military, 48, 55, 68, 93
51, 63, 64, 72, 73, 85, 86, 89, 90, Cuba, 48, 105
95, 120 culture factors, 14, 19, 79, 84, 85, 94,
capitalist society, 9, 10, 21-3, 27, 98, 100-2, 104, 106, 122
29-34, 37, 40, 43, 45, 54, 60, 63, Czechoslovakia, 45, 83, 93, 94, 109
Index 173
decision-making, 7, 26, 34, 35, 69-70, European Economic Community, 35,
119, 131, 132 108, 127, 128
democracy: class, and, 21-40, 71, evolution, 59-67, 76, 77, 122
100; classical doctrine of, 27, 28,
34, 35, 118; consequences of, 10; Fabians, 116, 117
destruction of, 24; development of, fascism, 38, 51, 53, 55, 57, 81, 88, 89,
9-11,21-3,49,87, 101, 129; 92, 108
direct rule by people, 26; economic Ferguson, A., 8
theory of, 27-9; emerging from feudalism, 62, 64, 86, 89, 97, 99,
social change, 22; industrial, 26; 112
libera], 88, 122; multi-party Fichte, J. G., 101
system, 68; 'plebiscitarian leader-', Fitzgerald, S., 125
27; representative, 26, 27; social, force: political, 7, 13, 14, 20; use of
10, 20-40, 43, 47, 54, 55, 68, 71, in Marxist theory, 13, 14
106, 109, 121, 122, 132, 133; France, 10, 31, 45, 46, 49, 52, 53, 68.
stable, 13, 28, 45, 61 ; struggle for, 100, 108, 111, 118, 123, 124, 131
132; threatened by dominant Frankfurt School, 15, 39, 118
groups, 24; unstable, 28, 68 free market, 9
demonstrations, 42
determinism, super-, 95 Gandhi, M., 116
development: future, 124-9; national, Gasset, O., 26
128, 129; social 13, 60-3, 67, 80-1, Gellner, E., 102
122 generation factors, 79, 83-5, 94
dictatorship, 28, 37, 38, 68, 72, 92; Germany, 26, 27, 43, 46, 49, 70, 81,
military, 24, 46 100,101,104,108, 111, 118,123,
domination factors, 14, 66, 71-4, 76 124; Social Democratic Party, 50, 54
Downs, A., 27 global politics, 69, 94, 98, 116-33
Durkheim, fi., 32, 61, 111, 118, 124 Godelier, M., 16, 95
Duverger, M., 49 government: machinery, 8, 89, 99,
118; /people relationship, 89;
economic: coercions, 94; collapse, representative, 60
128; crisis, 13, 31 Graciarena, J., 77
economy: capitalist world, 105, 106, Gramsci, A., 15, 18, 117, 120
113; free enterprise, 60; growth of, Greece, 46
31-2, 35, 47, 80, 82, 106, 107, 113,
122, 125, 126, 129, 130; influence Habermas, J., 15, 94, 119
of, 39,79-81 ; limit to growth of, Hegelian theory, 8, 9, 17, 67, 72, 86
124-6, 131 political control of, 8,;
; Heilbroner, R., 124
9, 36, 57, 72, 73, 123; stability of, Hindess, B., 65
39, 113; state intervention in, 30, Hirsch, F., 125, 126
80, 87, 88, 90 Hirst, P., 65
education, 48, 82, 84, 100, 102,
7, 47, historicism, 11, 16, 17, 19, 28, 30, 31,
107, 111, 116, 118 36, 44, 53, 61-7, 76, 77, 79, 85, 87,
electoral system, 53, 54 89, 97, 101, 104, 111, 114, 121, 122,
elitism, 11, 12, 26-8, 46, 48, 73, 74, 126, 132
79-81,89,91,94, 118, 119 Hobhouse, L. T., 122
empiricism, 7, 15-17, 72, 81, 104, 105, Hobsbawm, E. J., 61
110, 112 Hungary, 83
employment, full, 47 Huntington, S. P., 13
Engels, F., 33, 92, 110, 117
environment, 35, 124, 125, 130, 133 imperialism, 76, 101, 105, 106, 108,
equality, 10, 11, 18,21,22,85; 110,111,126
economic, 126, 129 independence, 105, 113
Eurocommunism, 38, 42, 92, 121 India, 70, 105, 129; National Congress
Europe: Eastern, 24, 25, 35-7, 45, 52, Party, 50, 92, 105
57, 72, 91, 94, 109, 114, 115, 127, individualism, 90
132; Western, 31, 32, 37, 38, 43, 44, inductivism, 16
52, 62, 63, 66, 67, 76, 82, 97, 99, industrial relations, 32, 33
102-4,106, 112,113, 127 industriali2ation, 26, 102, 104, 124-6,
European Coal and Steel Community, 129, 130
108 integration, social, 18
; ; ; ;
174 Index
intellectualism, 14, 102, 106, 117-20, military leaders, 105-7, 130
132 Mommsen, W. J., 110, 111
Italy, 31,46, 81,100, 104, 108 monarchy, 59, 67
Monnet, Jean, 108
Japan, 88, 91, 107, 108 Montesquieu, C. de S., 67
Morgan, L. H., 62, 66
Mosca, G., 11,71,73, 74, 117
Kantian theory, 17, 101 movements, 39, 84, 88, 97, 116, 119;
Keddurie, E., 101
behavioural, 15; Black, 46, 48, 93;
Kohn, Hans, 88, 112 class, 28-30, 100; cultural, 79, 84,
94, 98, 100-2, 104, 106; democratic,
labour factors, 9, 29, 32, 61, 65, 97, 10,21-3,36,43,46,57, 112, 132;
103, 131 effecting change, 79; environmental,
language factors, 104, 107, 112 122; guerrilla, 48; independence, 35,
Latin America, 24, 34, 46, 55, 77, 105, 104, 105, 110; innovative power of,
114, 127, 130 44, 45; labour, 36, 42-4, 46, 47, 57,
League of Nations, 99 68, 87, 96, 100, 126; liberation, 48,
legislation, 8, 9, 85, 113, 118 57 ; middle class, 58 millenarian, 44
;
Leninism, 38, 42, 121 nationaUst, 35, 44, 46-8, 104, 106,
L6vi-Strauss, C, 16 111, 112; political, 46, 96, 118, 129;
liberty, individual, 10, 11, 22, 35, 87, protest, 94, 96; reforming, 91
123, 129, 130, 132 regional, 35; revolutionary, 31, 32,
Lloyd, P. C, 48 91, 97; separatist, 46, 48, 52, 53,
loyalty, ensurance of, 39 106, 109; social, 7, 39-49, 51, 53,
Lukacs, G., 15, 17, 18, 32 56-8, 85, 117; socialist, 11, 46, 54,
Luxemburg, R., 92, 110 78, 86, 105, 106, 108-10, 118, 121;
student, 25, 26, 35, 41, 45-7, 83,
Maclver, R. M., 75 117; supemational, 35, 36, 108,
McKenzie, R., 50 115, 127; women's, 41, 44, 46, 47,
Mallet, S., 36 57, 117, 122; working class, 45, 47,
Mannheim, K., 83, 84, 122-3 48, 56, 57, 121, 124; youth, 44, 83,
MaoTse-tung, 116, 118 84
Marcuse, H., 32
Marx, Karl, 17, 62, 64, 75, 86, 89, nation states conflict, production of,
:
90,92,97, 110, 116, 117 114, 127; creation of, 7, 11, 76, 78.
Marxism, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 62, 82, 97-115; emergence of, 69;
65, 66, 79, 80, 87, 95, 106, 120, 122, popular sovereignty, and, 99, 112,
124; 'Asiatic Society', 61-3, 67; 113; success of, reasons for, 111-13,
capitalist production, and, 29, 30, 115
33; class, and, 12, 18, 30, 31,42, nationalism: 23, 35, 44, 46-8, 73, 81,
70, 73, 80, 86, 120; concept of, 83, 88, 91, 92, 94, 99-115, 118, 123,
revised, 120-2; contrast with 128; critical elements of 1 1 3-1 5
,
non-Marxist ideology, 17, 18, 38; of developing countries, 1 14;

labour theory, division of, 61 increasing strength of, 109, 110,
nationalism, and, 100-1, 110; 115; /sociaUsm tension, 105-10;
pluralism of, 120, 122; revision of strength over socialism, 114
theory, 31, 33, 38; revolutionary nations, new, 126, 127; creation of,
approach of, 18; social evolution, 105-7; leaders of, 107
and, 60-7, 80; social th«ory of, Nehru, J., 116, 118
8-18, 22, 29, 33, 39, 74, 82, 84, 111; Nettl, P., 50
society, theory of, 12, 17; state, Nicolaus, M., 30
concept of, 13, 14, 64-6, 72, 73; Nigeria, 129
working-class survival in Nisbet, R., 11
democratic society, and, 22
Mead, Margaret, 84 OECD, 128
Michels, R., 42, 54, 118 Offe, C, 39, 85
middle class, 58, 118, 124; attitudes oligarchy, 67
to political movements, 33-4, 43; Oppenheimer, F., 71
role of in economy, 34; size of organizations: party, 116; political,
increasing, 32-4 118; regional, 108
Miliband, R., 95 Oriental despotism, 59, 67
; ;
Index 175
Pakistan, 105 Qu6bec, 46, 48, 52, 53, 106, 109

Pareto.V., 11.26, 73, 117
Parsons, T., 74 rationalism, 123
participation, democratic, 24-6, 28, reform, democratic, 24, 31, 51, 86,
35-7, 45, 47, 50, 51, 57, 67, 74-5, 118
107 relationships, inter-society, 1J4, 115,
party systems, 12, 52-4 124, 126-8
Passeron, J.-C, 84, 94 religious factors, 7, 53, 63, 82, 97,
peasantry, 44, 96, 97, 106 104, 107
persoimel, change of political, 79 Renner, K., 101, 110
Pirenne, H., 80 repressive regimes, 74
Piven, F. F., 56 republicanism, 59, 68, 70, 118
Poland, 110 resources: allocation of, 114, 128;
policy, changes in, 42 natural, use of, 47, 114, 124, 125,
political action, A\-5% passim, 124-33 128, 129
passim revolution: democratic, 10; political,
political crisis, 13 10,21,22,37,49,51,54,68,73,
political impotence, 12 81, 82, 86, 88-92, 96, 100, 109, 121,
political instability, 56, 126, 132 123; social, 90, 105
political institutions, significance of, Rickert, H., 16
12, 59, 60, 63 Robson, W., 130
political intervention, 69 Runciman, W. G., 8
political leaders, 26-8, 50, 79, 83, 106, Russia, 30, 37, 54, 81, 83, 91, 92, 108,
109, 116,118 109, 114, 127, 132
political parties, 41, 48-58, 107, 116,
118; communist, 53-5, 65; Saint-Simon, H. de, 73
competition between, 85, Sartre, J.-P., 95, 118
conservative, 50, 54; emergence of, Schumpeter, J. A., 27, 28, 31, 34, 35,
49, 50, 55; liberal, 50, 52, 54; 111,118,123
national policy, effect on, 1 1 sciences, natural versus social, 14-17
nationalist, 51, 52, 55; reformist, Scotland, 46, 58, 109
51, 52; regional, 55; revolutionary, self-determination, 101
51, 52; rise and fall of, 55; Skinner, B. F., 15
socialist, 49-55, 131 Smith, Adam, 67
political science, 8, 9, 14-16, 18, 19, Smith, Anthony, 113
118-21 social bonds, 94, 98
political stability, 12-14, 94 social classes, development of, 81
political systems, 59-78, 113 factors of, 20-40, 81
political thought, centres of, 116, 117 social forces and their effect, 11, 20
Popper, K., 12, 118 social system, contradictory elements,
population, world growth of, 124, 125 95-7
Portugal, 46 socialism, decline of, 32, 35
positivism, 14, 17 societies: developed, 68; stateless, 65;
Poulantzas, N., 15, 38-9, 64, 95 underdeveloped, 68
poverty, growth of, 9 society: affluent, 47; classes in, 66;
power, concept of, 7-9, 1 1 , 27, 37, 38, communal, 61, 62, 64-6; formation
41, 48, 50, 62, 65, 67, 69, 70, 72, 74, of, 38; industrial, 60; militant, 60;
75, 80, 82, 84, 108, 114, 130, 131 modern, self-created, 44, 47, 58;
pressure groups, 41 political level in, 69; post-industrial,
private ownership, industrial, 29 80, 81 ; recreation of, 84, 85;
problems, present-day, 129-32 stateless, 69, 70, 75; theory of, 123,
production, 9, 11, 22, 29, 30, 32, 33, 124; see also civil society
35, 36, 39, 47, 60-7, 79, 80, 84, 95, Sombart, W., 31
100, 101, 104, 120, 131, 133; Spain, 46
control of, 36, 55 Spencer, H., 60, 61,67
proletariat factors, 9, 30, 31, 33, 37, stability:Marxist theory, in, 13;
38, 43, 72, 86, 92, 102 state of, 12-14
property, 9, 61, 66 stagnation, economic, 31
protectionism, 128 standard of living, rising, 31-3
•psephology', 28 state: concept of, 8, 69-77;
public ownership, 55, 90 development of, 66, 70, 71, 75-7;
176 Index
state — CO/7/, transformation, 9, 12, 17, 19, 38, 43,
disappearance of in society, 66, 67, 46, 48, 56, 65, 72, 79, 86, 87, 89, 92,
72, 73; involvement, increasing, 30, 97, 101, 106
39, 57, 66, 76, 80, 87, 88, 90, 103, Trotsky, L, D., 118
113, 119, 123. 129, 132; origins of,
75, 76; role of, 8, 9, 12, 72, 95 United Nations, 99, 108, 126, 128
structuralism, 16, 17 USA, 10, 23, 25, 31, 32, 43-6, 48,
Students for a Democratic Society 49, 52-6, 68, 81, 93, 99, 100, 104,
(SDS), 45 105, 107, 113, 114, 123, 127, 131
suffrage, 23-5, 28, 37, 49, 57, 75, 93;
extension of, 24, 25, 30, 36, 44, 57 violence factors, 7, 11, 13, 14, 25, 41,
Sweden, 131 48,51,85,86,90-4
von Hayek, F. A., 118
Tawney, R. H., 125 von Stein, L., 43
technical aspects of political issues,
119, 120 Wallerstein, I., 103
technocracy, 35 warfare factors, 66, 71, 79, 81-3, 91,
technological progress, 66, 79, 80-2, 92, 103, 107-9, 111, 127, 128
107, 133 wealth/poverty conflict, 9
Third World, 25, 45, 48, 94, 114, 122, Weber, Max, 10, 11, 26, 27, 63, 73,
126, 128 74,97-8, 110, HI, 118, 124
Tilly,C, 102-4, 107, 112 welfare system, 31, 71, 72, 74, 76, 82,
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 9-11, 21-3, 43 87-92,96,98, 119, 130, 131;
totalitarianism, 28, 68, 78, 89, 90 world-wide, 129
Touraine, A., 36, 39-40, 56 Wellmer, A., 39
trade, development of, 22, 60, 79, 114, workers' council, 36
128, 129 working class, 22, 23, 29-34, 36-8,
trade unions, 7, 25, 46, 56, 116, 126, 43, 50, 53, 86, 92, 95, 98, 106, 110,
130, 131 influence of, 30, 32;
; 111, 121
militancy, 33; political ideas of,
131 Yugoslavia, 26, 36, 90, 91, 109
traditionalism, 123

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1* Political sociology* Title

25 JAN 93 6260207 NEWCxc 79-3043

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Political sociology is concerned with power in its social context.

some other and the

* Notes to each chapter will be found in the section beginning on p. 135,

in this sphere that power appears in its purest, most distinctive

I was led by my studies to the conclusion that legal relations as well

This new conception of politics developed along with the

emergence of a new type of society, modem capitalism, in which

world', ^ a science which was concerned with the development of

of modem societies. For whatever the sources of the democratic

hereditary distinctions of rank, and by making all occupations,

other hand, the pursuit of social equality, 'an insatiable passion'

politics was elaborated by many later thinkers, in a more

as parallel to,and just as significant as, the concentration of the

Tocqueville','' and notably a perhaps more pro-

political organisms, one is so obvious that it is apparent to the most

down most advanced and powerful societies - two classes of

Pareto developed a version of this theory in which the rule of

concerned to show - to assert either a more or less total auto-

systems of all societies - unaffected by the diversity of economic

those who concentrate their attention mainly upon the forces

The first of these conceptions is intimately associated with the

ton's Political Order in Changing Societies, which begins from

instead such features as intense ethnic and class conflict, rioting

conflicts in all social systems, and treats the maintenance of

selves,and the whole cultural system which they inform, may

or other of which the theories and investigations with which I

of an method, notably in the debate

general prescription that we should pay attention rather to

the observation and collection of 'given' facts - which they

For Marx as for Levi-Strauss a structure is not a reality that is

should be to formulate universal statements about social

appear in a particularly interesting form in Marxist thought,

blances among them are nevertheless so great that at a more

permanently marked. Marxism is not a closed scheme of thought

thought, although with varying degrees of clarity - but that

paradigms express other values and beliefs, direct theory and

through the accumulation of knowledge and techniques, or

The pre-eminent themes of political sociology in its formative

to an antithesis in s ocial reality, man

example, that the two revolutions - poUtical and industrial -

ambiguity in Tocqueville's discussion. At times he is chiefly

not mean that democracy is conceived only as the political form

historicallyan achievement of the bourgeoisie, a real advance

life - and the limited, even distorted form which democracy

associating democracy with the values of an agricultural and

the subject matter of the most important political theories of

of universal and equal suffrage came still later (in Germany in

systems of the world in the late twentieth century reveal a very

pation in practice and second, the reinterpretations of democ-

racy, within political science as well as in pol itical doctrines,

The evidence of these obstacles and resistances is plain

and violence that has always been directed