The Self-Produchon of Society

>\m?/- il :l) W DEREK COLWlkN

The Jnversity of Chicago Press go and _or Mcoao and _onccn

Alain Touraine is professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He is co-founder of the journal Sociologie du travail and past president of the French Sociological Society. Among his previously published works are Sociologie de I 'action (1965), La conscience ouvriere (1966), May Movement (1968, English translation 1971), Post-industrial Society (1969, English translation 1971), The Academic System in American Society (1972, English translation 1974), Pour la sociologie and Lettres a une etudiante (both 1974). The present work was First published as Production de la socidte; © Editions du Seuil, 1973.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1977 by the University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1977 Printed in the United States of America 81 80 79 78 77 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congref s Cataloging In Publication Data

Touraine, Alain. The self-production of society.

Translation of Production de la societe Includes index. 1. Sociology. 1. Title.

HM51.T6713 301 76-611 ISBN 0-226-80858-0

CONlHSirS

1

2

Foreword by J. W. Freiberg Preface Introduction

Historicity

A. Society Turns Back upon Itself B. Historical Action C. The Cardinal Points of Sociology D. The Birth of Sociology E. From Orientations to Practice F. Actors and Systems

The System of Historical Action

A. The Dominion of Historicity B. Locating the System of Historical

Action C. The Functioning of the System of

Historical Action D. The Configurations of the System of

Historical Action

XI

xvii 1

15

15 27 32 48 53 60

65

65

72

79

91

VII

Contents

3

4

5

Class Relations 117

A. Historicity and Social Classes 118 B. Classes as Historical Actors 134 C. Types of Class Systems: Industrial

Society 149 D. Postindustrial Society 155 E. Alienation 166 F. Concluding Remarks 170

The Political or Institutional System 175

A. Institutions 175 B. Institutionalization 197 C. Between Historicity and Organization 206 D. The State 216

Social Organization 235

Introduction: Where Sociology and History Meet 235 A. The Organizational System 239 B. Administrations, Enterprises, Agencies 249 C. The Categories of Social Practice 270

Contents

6

7

Social Movements 298

A. Four Kinds of Collective Conduct 298 -B. The Nature of Social Movements 310 C. The Natural History of Social

Movements 336 D. Level s of Project 343 E. Formation of Social Movements 355 F. Social Movements and the State 364 E. Concluding Remarks 371

Social Change 374

Introduction: Historicity, Conflict, Change 374 A. The Temporality of Social Systems 383 B. Rupture Conduct 389 C. Conduct of Internal Transformation 411 D. Forms of Development 424 E. Concluding Remarks 443

Conclusion 446

A. The Sociologist and His Society 446 B. Analysis and Action 449

Contents

C. Decline or Binh of Sociology 453 D. The Internationalization of Sociology 454 E. The Author Quits His Book 456

Glossary 459 Index 465

FOREH/ORD

When I was a graduate student at UCLA in 1969, Alain Touraine came to teach tor a semester. He had just come from Santiago de Chile, where he had taught for the previous semester. Although 1 did not know it at the time, Touraine was in a self-imposed exile—a sort of modern Hegira. The events of May 1968 had been difficult for him; he had been one of very few major professors to become deeply involved. When the events came to a summary end, he found himself in limbo. He had been too involved for most of his colleagues and friends of his generation, and not involved enough for most of his students and friends of my generation. He needed to distance himself from Paris, from the barricades and recriminations, and to take the time to think about what it all meant and what were the implications for the grand theoretical model he had envisioned creating of the 'events'—the student activism, the old-left conservatism, the Gaullist repression.

In Los Angeles Touraine gave a graduate seminar on the subject matter of what has become, in this book, the chapters on historicity and the system of action. The class began with about twenty graduate students and three or four professors in attendance. Two weeks later about eight students re­mained, including one from Argentina, one from Chile, and one from Alabama. Those who fled found the class i4too theoretical," "too abstract/' "too philosophical." Indeed the material presented was radically different from most American sociology. Yet I remember so well the feelings of the smaller group who stuck with it; each one of us felt after the semester that wre had had the most powerful intellectual experience of our graduate career. For the first time we were able to put in sociopolitical perspective the individualistic, psychologistic, scientistic bits and pieces that had been presented to us in our more usual courses and texts. We had read some

xii Foreword

predigested Marx, of course, in our survey theory course, but the paradigm in which we thought and were taught—and thus in which we read Marx— was hopelessly reified. We memorized bits of theory and bits of methods, a touch of demography, a hint of history, all with a pinch of salt. We were not being educated. We were being minestrone'd.

That is why Touraine's seminar was such a salient experience for us. For the first time we met a sociologist who operated from a unified, theoretically sophisticated perspective that added together for him what to us seemed like the nearly infinite and essentially unrelated events of the world. We had been wanting, I would even say hungering, for a theoretical model that would add together for us all that we experienced so poignantly—Vietnam, the student movement, the Black rights movement, the new values on patterns of interpersonal relations, the repressiveness of the military, espionage and police machinery of the United States, and so on.

We learned much from Touraine, but he learned from us, also. He was fascinated by the spontaneity of our newly found, nondoctrinal critique of modern society, and by the counterculture we were creating to permit us to live more humanistic, more cooperative lives personally, while we acted as we could to support the liberalizing movements of our day.

In 1970-71 I had the opportunity to live in Paris and to study again with Touraine. 1 was to learn that the difference between him and most of my professors in California was simply a manifestation of the differences between European and American thinking in general. I was shocked, frankly. In place of the professional, highly "specialized" American sociolo­gists, the Europeans were intellectuals, far more likely to be concerned with broad issues, and to be able to situate the issues of their research both philosophically and historically. Instead of viewing the social world as a haphazard collection of independent events, the Europeans searched for the unity hidden beneath the surface of everyday phenomena. 1 had been brought up to equate totalitarianism with thought control; it had never occurred to me that in a liberal, reasonably pluralistic society, the general thought patterns of an entire people could be so effectively structured.

1 sat in on Touraine's seminar at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Of the twenty-five students, few were French; they came from three or four Latin American, two or three African, three or four European and two Asian countries (1 was the only American). We all spoke French, but what a wild cacophony of accents! Ever)' other week, we heard from Touraine the early versions of what are here the chapters of the political-institutional system, class relations, and social movements. On the odd weeks, we tried with each other to apply his theoretical models to the varied experiences of our different backgrounds. We sat around an enormous old table trying to come up with

Foreword x , ' j

an understanding of the world we were inheriting and the generation of our parents who were running it so inadequately. One thing became particularly clear. There was a total rejection of the positivist, functionalist modete of American sociological theory that were based on the assumption that society was a grouping of capable adults making rational decisions, and that, but for a few deviants, things were pretty good and getting better all the time. The consensus was that only an analysis of society in terms of class relations could possibly explain the origin and dynamics of poverty and exploitation, of rebellion and repression. We saw the only possible sociology to be one which saw society not as a given state of affairs which was to be protected and preserved, but as the result of social action—including discussion and decision, but also conflict and struggle.

Touraine's social theory was respected by that multinational seminar, though we critiqued it endlessly. He listened—and defended it—but also changed it and incorporated much of the critique. Again the seminar was an exciting experience, in part because the theoretical material presented provided a model within which we could gain insight and communicate with each other about the events of the world which swirled around us. But in part, as in the Los Angeles seminar, what made the experience lively was to watch Touraine incorporating our critique and the perspective of our generation into his theoretical work.

Out of these seminars, and others like them, came the present book. At the same time this book incorporates the critique and advice of so many students and colleagues, many of its ideas can be seen in embryonic form in Touraine's thesis^ Sociologie de I action. Although the present work is highly abstract and theoretical, its models are immediately applicable and enormously useful in specific empirical studies. While the general thrust of the book is clear to anyone with a basic knowledge of the traditional literature of sociological theory, much of the discussion is original and ground-breaking.

Several years ago Touraine andJDaniel Belj almost simultaneously pub­lished books on what they called "postindustrial society." It is certainly critical to examine how different are the paradigms within which the sociologists work, for the somewhat similar notions of postindustrial society take on radically different meanings for them. Both are arguing that, especially since World War II, there have been significant changes in the social processes of production and reproduction in industrial society. Somehow we must account for the increasingly important roles of science, the public sector, mass education, etc. Bell's perspective leads him to interpret these changes essentially in an "end of ideology" direction, whereas Touraine's model suggests, in brief, that we are indeed moving into a new

xiv Foreword

phase of social relations, and that we therefore should be prepared to examine and understand the new social classes, conflicts, and ideologies that will be developing. Bell's postindustrial concept is a polemic against dialectical thought, while Touraine's concept is a call to sharpen our dialectical wits in order to comprehend new actors—new social classes—in a new situation.

The chapter on the political-institutional system presents a model for political sociology that to my mind dialecticafly overcomes the current debate between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas as to what degree of unity one ought to suppose exists between the ruling class and the state. The model provides for a simultaneous appreciation of the relative autonomy of a political system within the structured confines of a class society. That is, we are asked to see the real, operating dialectic between a ruling class's prepolitical determination of the boundaries of possible politics on one hand, and the partly autonomous political action of opposed interest groups (some of which directly represent the ruling class perspective) within these bound­aries, on the other. So the model clarifies the double entry of the ruling class into politics; it both formulates a prepolitical structuration of possible political action, and at the same time acts within the political arena through interest groups and politicians who propose and support specific legislation and administrative action which furthers ruling class interests.

Another function of Touraine's political sociology in respect to his scheme taken as a whole is the transitional role the political-institutional level plays in mediating between historicity at one extreme, and the organizational phenomena of everyday life at the other. The historicity of a society is seen as an abstract, ultimately general determination of what the phenomenal experiences of an empirical society will actually be like. To be an industrial society as opposed to a preindustrial or postindustrial society is, after all. determinant of many things; there are widely differing possibilities in institutional processes and organizational structures for three such differing historicities. Yet everyday life can be radically different in two industrial societies; the relative autonomy of both the institutional and organizational levels within a given society provide for a relatively wide range of possible political and organizational patterns.

The political-institutional level, then, is seen as the active transformational agent between the vague definitions of the situation provided by the historicity (mode of accumulation, definition of the cultural model, model of knowledge, pattern of class relations), and the hyperspecificity of the regies du jeu of everyday life. That is what is so fascinating about Touraine's political sociology. It is at once an abstract theoretical model, and an effort to be speci­fic about the transformational role of politics in structuring social reality in respect to patterns of production and power structuring the historicity of a

Foreword

given society. It is a model of political sociology to be directly opposed to those political analysts who argue for the total autonomy and final causality of political process (mainstream American political science is the guiltiest of this). But, on the other hand, it is equally opposed to those analysts who find the state to be nothing more than a complex ideologically sophisticated mechanism of ruling class hegemony. Touraine refuses to see society as a large and essentially happy family, as in the former image, where pluralistic decision making determines the definitions and direction of social reality. But he equally refuses to see society as a large organization, managed by the reigning ruling class along the lines of an upper-class Victorian household, as in the latter image. Touraine asks us to appreciate the complex interrelations between the production system and class relations, between class relations and the relative autonomy of the political-institutional system, between the ruling class as prepolitical determiner of the political system and the ruling class as a political actor, between the popular class as agent of rebellion and social changeand the popular class as willing participant in everyday life and thus the active agent of stability and passivity.

One of the most convincing pieces of evidence in support of the usefulness of this model of the transformational role of politics between the extreme generalities of historicity at one end of the scale and the extreme specifics of organized everyday life at the other, is the omnipresence of politics (in his sense of the word "politics") even in antipolitical societies. Clearly, on one level, totalitarian societies are sometimes without relatively autonomous political arenas. Yet Touraine predicts that what happens in such societies, and 1 think recent historical events bear him out on this, is that the ruling class effort to do away with politics succeeds only in displacing it, not eliminating it. Thus, when there is no openness at the political-institutional level, as when it is used as a transparent ideological mechanism providing no forum for dissent, political conflicts are displaced onto the organizational level. Thus organiza­tional structures become deeply politically involved and divided, with faction­alism, intrigue and even outright conflict. So if a ruling class attempts to run society as if it were merely an organization and represses political debate and dissent, it ends by displacing such conflict into its organizational structures— into the bureaucracy, the army, the universities, the hospitals, and so on. Such a model as Touraine provides seems extremely useful, for example, in studying the development of the political consciousness of the Portuguese army under the recent fascist regime.

Another provocative idea, which is introduced in this book and further developed in more recent writings by others, is an analysis of the state fundamentally as an agent of social change and not as an actor of social structure. Touraine emphasizes more and more the necessity to separate and then to coordinate a structural analysis organized around the concept of

Foreword

historicity and social class and a genetic analysis whose central concept is the state.

There is no question that this newest and I think most important book of Alain Touraine makes difficult reading, as does just about all French social-philosophy. Yet there is a remarkable richness of original ideas here; he who carefully explores these pages will not be disappointed.

J. W. Freiberg Boston University

PRB54CE

I undertook the writing of this book in the fall of 1966 at the University of Montreal. Having spent the years 1962-64 writing my Sociologie de faction, which was at the same time a study of social actors and an essay on the advanced industrial societies, I now wanted to go more directly to the essence of the matter by analyzing what is commonly termed social structure, and by-devoting all my efforts to defining a theoretical procedure. Those first texts were replaced by others, usually written for my seminars, especially at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, but also at the Facultad latino-americana de sociologia in Santiago, Chile, at the University of California in Los Angeles, and at the Institut d'e*tude du de\eloppment e*conomique et social in Paris.

My task was several times interrupted by other labors that seemed more urgent or that required less time. It was stimulated by the May 1968 crisis I lived through at the University de Nanterre and experienced as a social, Utopian movement that soon collapsed but that nevertheless heralded a new society and by its very occurrence demanded fresh thought from sociology.

Certain chapters have been published or distributed in versions predating this one and also, as is only too evident, very different from it. However, I think I had better indicate the following publication details: chapter 1, "Histor­icity," appeared in Vers une nouvelle civilisation? a tribute to Georges Friedmann (Paris, NRF, 1973). Chapter2,4iLe system d'action," appeared in the)ouma\Sociologieetsocie'te's 1, no.2 (1969):221-47. Chapter3, "Les classes sociales," appeared in Las classes sociales en America latina. Transactions of the Merida Conference organized by the Instituto de Estudios Sociologicos of the U.N.A.M., Mexico. Chapter 6, "Les mouvements sociaux," was pre­sented as a paper to the World Congress of Sociology held at Varna, September 1969, and published in part in the Rassegna italiana de sociologia, January-March 1972, pp. 11-60.

xvili Preface

I feel the greatest gratitude toward all those, whether colleagues or students, who have helped me throughout all these years with their comments and criticisms. Perhaps they have succeeded in rendering communicable thoughts that were at the outset very close to my personal experience, my life at work, and my place in society.

In particular I thank Werner and Maria Ackerman, Anouar Abdel-Malek, Michel Amiot, Fausto Ayrton, Guy Bajoit, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Manuel Castells, Maurice Chaumont, Jacques Dofny, Robert Fraisse, J. W. Freiberg, Jean Max Gaudilliere, Louis Maheu, Alberto Melucci, Edgar Morin, Serge Moscovici, Bernard Mottez, Jose* Nun, Francoise Quarr£, Melvin Seeman, Geronimo de Sierra, Silvia Sigal, Dominique Wolton, Francisco Weffort. Christiane Guigues helped me in gathering together the various books and documents I needed—and that I decided notto list at the end, since this book is something of a loner's effortv^£vett*4>ufIohelped me lfl a variety of ways. Colettef Dicfier transcribed manuscripts verging on the undecipherable with a competence and a sunny patience that I hope were not lavished in vain. Section VI of the £cole pratiques des hautes etudes, particularly its Centre d'£tudedes mouvements sociaux, once the Laboratoire de sociologie industri-elle, have provided me all these years with a working environment to which I am far too attached to attempt any banal expression of my gratitude.

The weight of this book has been born by Adriana, Marisol, and Philippe as much as by me. It belongs to them.

It is hard being a sociologist. We are too involved in the object of our inquiry notto be dependent upon our ideology and our passion. To forget them, in the name of empiricism and objectivity, results merely in a naive acceptance of the conservative ideology and its very basis: the status quo.

But we must liberate ourselves from this state of affairs by knowledge, by situating the actors and their ideology within the systems that are concealed behind the categories of social practice.

This book therefore imposes on its reader, as it forced upon its author, a great distance between himself and social practice as well as a sustained effort to construct an analytical tool that will be as simple and as useful as possible.

Perhaps it has overshot its aim and will be seen as too general in its notions. Let the reader at least know that the reason for its existence was to achieve exactly the opposite, and that I would not have labored over it if I had not seen in it a means of liberating us from the confusion of ideologies or biases, of piercing through to that most dramatic and most rallying fact of social life: the fact that society produces itself, by its work and its knowledge, by its class relations and its political interaction.

Montreal October 1%6-December 1972 Santiago de Chile Los Angeles Chatenay-Malabry

Preface xix

Note: Those interested only in the general orientation of this book can limit themselves to reading the Introduction, the first three chapters, and the conclusion. At the beginning of each of the last five chapters I have inserted a brief para­graph indicating its central theme.

Possibly the prospect of having to read less than half this work will attract some who would other­wise have been frightened off by its size and style. I hope that these tentative readers will in fact be spurred on to make a further effort and read the rest.

INTRODUCTION

1. Societies learn to know themselves sociologically when they recognize themselves as the product of their labor and their social relations, when what at first seems to be a set of social 'data* is recognized as being the result of a social action, of decisions or transactions, of domination or conflicts. This is why our own age, oriented as it is toward development, is gradually creating sociology. —- T

Long concealed by all the forms of social philosophy that related social \ facts to a nonsocial explanatory principle, whether providence, law, evo­lution, or "natural" needs, sociology is having difficulty' in freeing itself from the appeal to a creative force—energy, idea, values—that conquers and organizes an untamed nature. For that is in fact the most common form taken by the presociological thought associated with the triumph of industrialization, of industrial capitalism, and the colonial empires.

Today, this social philosophy of progress, whether optimistic or pessi­mistic, can no longer be entertained, since our industrialized countries have""" acquired a confused but solid certainty that they always had total power over themselves, including that of destroying themselves, that of subjecting themselves to totalitarian rule, or that of increasing their product by hitherto unheard-of proportions.

Having evaluated itself in the name of principles, having situated itself within an evolution, society is now coming to recognize itself as a network of actions and relations.

Moreover, in order to know its present it is turning less and less toward its past, since the importance of tradition is constantly diminishing in relation to knowledge newly acquired, and increasingly toward its future, in other words toward the decisions "rt makes and the debates or conflicts that accompany them.

Introduction

This picture is too simple, and the transformation 1 describe did not start yesterday. But it has by now become evident enough to create an ever stronger demand for sociological analysis. And need I add that this demand is being satisfied only very slowly, since even where sociology is not forbidden or domesticated it is still in continual conflict with the old categories employed for analyzing social reality?

It experiences difficulty in freeing itself both from appeals to the nonsocial for explaining the social and frorn_subjection^ to the "laws" or internal "logic" of a category of social facts. This violent rift between interpretation and positivist analysis ceases to be possible the moment when no metasocial authority or warrant is left to dominate society's functioning. It is no longer possible to avoid sociological analysis by subordinating it to a knowledge_pf divine order, of the essence of politics, or of homo oeconomicus. As these essences melt away, so they simultaneously dissolve the illusion that there can be nonsociological laws controlling certain social phenomena. We can no longer ask ourselves questions about the nature of society but only about its functioning, or about its orientations, its power, its decision-making mechanisms, its forms of organization and change.

2. Let us therefore accept that society rests upon nothing other thaii social action, that the social order has no metasocial warrant for its existence, whether religious, political, or economic, and is totally the product of social relations. This means that we have to accept thinking about society on the basis of the experience—a new form of experience but regarded here as exemplary—of those societies that act most profoundly upon themselves, both through economic growth and through social revolution. Such societies are defined no longer as creations of God or Prometheus but as systems of social relations.

We have recognized, then, that society is a system capable of transforming itself and not merely of reproducingjtself. Is our path sufficiently defined by this initial choice?

No, because from that recognition there stem two paths, whose divergence defines sociology's principal choices.

It is possible to think that the end of the old dualisms, the identity of society's being with its action, must lead to a reanalysis of everything that is generally termed social structure in terms of processes of change. This means

f that a society ought increasingly to be conceived of as a network of deciders, who possess a certain influence and by whose interaction the adaptation of the social whole in question to the modifications of its environment and internal changes is conducted, in an empirical, very imperfect, but ac­ceptable manner. The disappearance of the old social philosophies ought

s also to be accompanied by that of all recourse to values, to principles, and to

Introduction

absolutes in the theory and practice of social action. The more complex society is, the less mechanical it is, the more no-man's-land areas of uncertainty, of disorganization, of innovation, of deviance, of imagination it will include, while at the same time it must adapt itself increasingly to the ecosystem of which it is a part, and which is increasingly threatened by the destructive creativity of our industry.

How could one fail to recognize in all this the renaissance of those themes that accompanied the industrial revolution? The liberal appeal to prag­matism, to adaptation, to openness, to change, to the pursuit of diversity and heterogeneity, plus a new awareness of the limits of our natural resources and the dangers of industrialization?

It is true that the majority of sociological research does not explicitly invoke such a view, either because it is sheltering behind a dissection of reality it refuses to question, in the name of a naive objectivism, or else because it is guided by obsolete images of society, one in which there exists a social order based upon the consensus of values or, on the contrary, on an imposed domination. Yet it is in fact this neoliberalism that lies behind most o ( recent developments in sociological analysis. It has brought us a new knowledge of organizations, given central importance to decision analysis, seriously tackled the study of endogenous changes. Wishing to refer to it in a way that will invoke an approach rather than an ideology, I shall term it here "political" sociology, in order to denote not a chapter in sociology but an overall conception: society is the result of its decisions, which themselves^ refer back to the interests, arguments, conflicts, and transactions by means of which—in an always temporary and unstable way—there occur the changes that point in the direction of a greater diversification, ji growing flexibility, a relaxation of social norms, symbolic systems, and constraints.

3. I could define this book by saying that it shares with this neoliberal political sociology the idea that society is a system of social interactions and that its functioning is the result of its action, but that given this basic conception, opposed as it is to all recourse to values and essences, it explores a line of analysis that is profoundly different, both in its actual orientation and in its ideological implications. Although it is clear that society is not just a system with a pilot who must maintain that system's equilibrium and continuity by using various mechanisms of social control, at once integrating and repressive, no more can society be reduced to a system capable of modifying its aims and organization by training mechanisms and controlled reinforcement of certian forms of conduct or organization. SocietyJs not just reproduction and adaptation: it is also creation, self-production. It has the capacity to define itself and thus, through the knowledge and investment it has achieved, to transform its relations with its environment, to constitute its

Introduction

milieu. Human society possesses a capacity of symbolic creation by means of which, between a "situation" and social conduct, there occurs the formation of meaning, a systemj£jmentation of conduct. Human society Is the only natural system known to possess this capacity to form and transform its functioning on the basis of its investments and the image it has of its capacity to act on itself. This distance that society places between itself and its_ activity, and this action by which it determines the categories of its practice, 1 term historicity. Society is not what it is but what it makes itself be: through knowledge, which creates a state of relations between society and its environment; through accumulation, which subtracts a portion of available product from the cycle leading "to consumption; through the cultural model, which captures creativity in forms dependent upon the society's practical dominion over its own functioning. It creates the totality of its social and cultural orientations by means of a historical action that is both work and meaning.

The image that takes shape, then, is that of a_sojnety which is not solely a system of internal and external exchanges but first and foremost an agent of its own self-production, an agent in the creation of orientations of social action on the basis of practice and consciousness of the production of work.

This image does not reintroduce the old dualisms; it does not set some Promethean energy in opposition to the inertness of matter, or the march of progress against the resistances of tradition. But it does stand in opposition to the image of a society reduced to its change processes.

Tf eliminates from its analysis all appeal to any "beyond" in nature, to essences, or to the march of history. It identifies society with its own action, then questions itself on that basis about the specific characteristics of social systems.

We are not bound to choose between, on the one hand, reducing society to a system of the same type as a machine or an organism, and, on the other, to

/ invoking a social vitalism that subordinates explanation to the intervention / of forces and energies, of a meaning in evolution, or of man's fundamental 1 needs. Sociology ought to reflect on the example biology offers and construct v the type of system that will enable it to provide an account of the specific

characteristics of social conduct—that it is oriented by ends—and recognize that any society constitutes and transforms its_own social jind cultural orientations.

It is essential to such a procedure that we do not reduce society to its y functioning and its exchanges but apprehend it primarily as a process of self

production. ^ - l n maintaining that society is always divided from itself, divided into

V self-production and self-reproduction, I am also defending two important ideas:

Introduction

First, that social evolution is not continuous, nor linear, and cannot be reduced to a general tendency Jo growing differentiation, complexity, and flexibility. On the contrary, what we need to do is differentiate between various systems of historical action all of which correspond to a particular mode of knowledge, type of accumulation, andj^ulto^mpdel, all qualita­tively different From others. This is even more important for a compre­hension of the present than for an ordering of the past, since what we are now entering is not a society of pure adaptation but rather a postindustrial sociely that is defined, like all others, by its orientations and its class relations, and therefore also by what it puts on display and what it pushes back into the shadows.

Second, that the orientations of the system of historical action define the field of social relations, of political relations, of the forms of social organization, and therefore also the "stakes," direct or indirect, of every kind of conflict or negotiation, and that these orientations do not, conse­quently, define a bod^^of^alue^Uiat make social integration possible by its diversification into norms and role expectations.

All sociology of values must be rejected, but this cannot be achieved by treating society as simply an apparatus of domination, since that would oblige us to presuppose the existence of some metasocial, "natural" order in the name of which that judgment was made; nor can it be achieved by limiting ourselves to a pragmatist vision of society, as though a dominant social order, seeking to irnpose_and reproduce itself, did not exist. The central problem of sociology UjJLMBd^stand how^asociety rests upon a set of orientations while at the same time being directed and organized by power, how it is one and also double, historicity and class relations. This problem cannoTtie resolved except be recognizing society's capacity^to determine itself by its own Historical action, by its work on its work, the orientations that govern its functioning. This distancing ofjelf from selfnec^^arily entails the division of society into two opposing classes: it is not society but a part of society, the"ruiing class, that takes over the responsibility for historicity and em_er es irorrnhe society's^ functioning in order to go beyond mere self-repro­duction—through the use of accumulation—to knowledge. Thus one partic­ular social^categor\r identifies itself with what is most general in society: its historicity. And this means that historicity has been made^the object of private appropriation. Those who belong noTTbThe~ruling class but to the popular class (as I shall term it) defend themselves against this domination, and against historical action itself, but also contest its private appropriation and seek to regain control of it by overthrowing the domination of the ruling class^ Thus the class conflict cannot be defined except as the strugjgle forjthg supreme "stake," which is the management or control of historical action.

Introduction

The orientations of the system^of historical action, instead_of^being translated directly into norms, are "stamped" by class relations and class domination, which enables us to reject the notion of values that introduces a direct correspondence between a society's cultural orientations and the judgments of actors on social conduct. Interposed between the former and the latter are class relations.

The problem of social classes, which has remained at the center of sociological analysis since the late eighteenth century, cannot be clearly stated until one recognizes that society is_not a totality or an order but a

i system, one whose principal characteristic is to produce its own orientations \ and therefore the conditions governing its functioning.

If, on the contrary, one^rontinues to envisage society as a social order, then onlTmust either refer that order to the unity of a social consensus maintained by social control and socialization, a unity that is given the lie by

/ the very existence of social conflicts and movements and is merely an I invention of the ruling classes, or else one is forced to accept that society in its

entirety is the work of domination, violence, and ideology, which presup-/ poses, I repeat, that one is invoking something beyond society, a nature that [ will some day be liberated from the contradictions of society. And this idea in

a great variety of forms did broadly dominate nineteenth century historicism. The development of sociology is only possible if one renounces any

identification of social systems with mechanical systems—as the legal mind has done for a long time—or even with organic systems, and accepts their particular nature: instead of being governed bv a code of laws they have the

/ capacity to arrive at orientations that then^via)class conflicts and political mechanisms, control the categories of their practice.ThTsTolriception must eliminate all representations of society as an actor—whether termed a system of values, spirit of the age, civilization, or more concretely the State— thought of as the sovereign manager of its various activities and of the conditions of its survival as an actor. It is in this respect above all that Marx's critical analysis retains all its value as an antidote to the optical illusion that leads each and all of us to perceive social relations as subject to some unifying intention or law.

4. These then are the three notions on which this analysis is based: 7 historicity, which defines the instruments of society's self-production; the

system of historical action, meaning that totality composed of social and cultural orientations, by means of which historicity exercises its dominion over society's functioning; and class relations, struggles for the control of historicity and of the system of historical action.

The first three chapters of this book are devoted to a presentation of these notions.

Introduction

The fourth and fifth chapters will explain the transition from this first level of the analysis to that of political decisions, the level I shall term the insti­tutional or —synonymously—the political system, then to that of social organization. The principal task of my analysis "will be to reconcile the hierarchy of these levels with each one's individual autonomy. This autonomy has two reasons for being: political collectivities or organizations are concrete social wholes limited by frontiers and thus possessing problems of inte­gration or adaptation that cannot be reduced to~those of historicity; on the other hand, they are also units defined historically rather than sociologically ;

and are therefore heterogeneous, so that, for example, even Great Britain in the late nineteenth century cannot be entirely identified with industrial capitalism.

As for the hierarchy of the systems, this signifies that institutions and organizations alike are domains of social life far from independent of the orientations of historical action, that on the contrary they are expressions of those orientations, so that in both of these two types of system^ we find occurring as essential elements both the state of the orientations of the system of historical action and the state of class relations.

Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to the actors rather than to the systems and their stracture/The first of these chapters deals with social movements, collective conduct situated at the level of the field of historicity or, in other words, at the level occupied by the system of historical action and class relations, the seat of the conflict over the control of historicity ./Chapter 7 then abandons synchronic analysis to provide an answer to the problem of social change—the most difficult problem to deal with in terms of the methodology of this book. Whereas neoliberal sociology immediately situates itself inside change, and rejects as inherited superstition everything that appears to be orientations or fundamental conflicts in a society—a position that does at least have the advantage of capturing the processes of change very directly—the priority that I accord to the study of how the field of historicity is produced, of political institutions and forms of social organi­zation, makes explaining change very difficult. It is a problem, moreover, on which sociology in the past, whether functionalist or otherwise, has shed very little light.

A theory of change must start from the tensions that exist between a field of historicity and the heterogeneous historical whole with which it is always associated. In a society where this tension is reduced to the minimum, the transition from one field of historicity to another can take place without hiatus, with "modernization" bringing about modifications in the social organization, then in the institutions, which then provoke the appearance of the necessary elements for a new system of historical action. But where there is a great deal of heterogeneity, as is the case with societies under

Introduction

domination, an inter-national class struggle arises, in which the dominant nation talks about its "modernizing action'' when it opens up markets for itself, takes its profits, imposes its culture, and in which the popular class is at the same time drawing support from its history and its individuality while also aiming, through its struggle against domination, at the creation of a field of historicity to which nothing in its experience can yet correspond.

This is a reminder that the most modernizing societies are not the most modern ones, and also absolutely rules out the sociocentric ideology of the dominating societies according to which all nations form a procession, with the dominating societies at its head, and must all eventually pass through the same stages. My concern to understand the divereityjrf the modes of social transformation is as constant in this book as that to follow all the manifestations of social movements, from the defensive withdrawal into collectiveT identity,_and explosion outward into violence and deviance, to the creation of societal countermodels and entry into a general conflict over control of historical action. For nothing reveals the self-production of society more directly than the confrontation of social movements and the politics of social change.

5. Each of the domains thus defined within sociology must be analyzed as a process, not as a response to functions. We have for too long contented ourselves with simply dividing social organization roughly into institutions— judicial, political, religious, educational, military, and so on—and then comparing the forms these institutions take in different societies, either by-constructing grids of classification or by trying to discover some general evolutionary line.

Even today, what arguments still go on about the functions of the political system, the nature of social classes, or the extent of religious practices. Dismembering society is not the best way of understanding how it functions and changes. Nor is ignoring the necessity for specialized research to remind ourselves that in sociology as in other fields the aim is to reach a knowledge of the fundamental mechanisms, and consequently to destroy objects as they are given in practice as rapidly as possible, so that one can then reconstruct the field of phenomena on the basis of a small number of general schemas and, at a higher level, of proven theories.

This book may therefore be classified as one of general sociology, on condition that the term is not misunderstood: you will find no chapter in it on the family, on religion, on economics, and so on, as you would in the more usual "general" textbook or manual. The vocabulary of such books has been replaced with a different one, one that may occasionally cause surprise—its individual words are given in the glossary at the end of the book with their redefinitions—but that is extremely small, because its purpose is to help in

w

Introduction

replacing the usual superficially objective descriptions with an attempt to reconstruct the various kinds of social interactions and the relations between the social systems: the system of historical action, the system of class relations, the political or institutional system, and the organizational system, whose concatenation constitutes the functioning of society, or in other words f the mechanisms by means of which society is able to produce itself, adapt j itself, and reproduce itself.

6. Because he is studying conduct that has a meaning for the actors themselves, the sociologist is always in danger of becoming a Royal Historiographer, of presenting the jotaHty_of^ocial relations coherently arranged in the light of the .dominant ideology. Nor does he avoid this difficulty by relating conduct to situations, as though it were^j)Qssible to understand social relations on the basis of other categories of facts,jsucrTjas the state of technology, say, or the average level of income. Since its earliest days", sociology has never tired of pointing out that such situations, if they are to form part of its analysis, must first be reformulated in terms of social interactions.

I intend to conform strictly to the central principle of sociological analysis: the meaning of conduct must be explained not by>the consciousness of J*he actor or by the situation in which he is ptoeetlf_butj>v the social interactions In whicJThe is involved. Sociology and analysis of social interactions are synonymous terms. However, we must of course distinguish various kinds of sociaTlnteractions, to which the broad chapters of sociology correspond.

At the level of social organization, within a limited social whole governed by a central authority, we can isolate social interactions dependent upon roles, ' in other words upon conduct on the part of an actor in a given position that is recognized as legitimate by those with whom he interacts as occupant of that position. Relations between actors thus depend on their common partici­pation in a social order with a set of norms. On the one hand there is reciprocity of conduct between actors occupying complementary positions in the application of a norm; on the other there is stratification—a diversity of levels of participation in the emission, the diffusion, and the consumption of wealth and conduct assigned a value by society. Here relations are ones of reciprocity and of difference.

At the decision-making level, relations are of another kind. The actors are ^ no longer acting within a set^ojnorms; they are competing together in the decision-making process that establishes the legitimate norms and expec­tations. These therefore are relations of competition not of reciprocity' of influence not of difference.

I should add, before coming to social relations at the level of historical 3, action, that on both organizationallind political levels the actor also enters

10 Introduction

into relations with other actors situated within other social wholes, and with these actors he neither shares common norms nor is expected to arrive at common decisions. These intersocial relations are sufficiently different from the other kinds to have become the principal object of study of political science.

At the level of a society's field of historicity, relations are established among actors who are In a situation neither of reciprocity nor of compe­tition but of conflict, who are placed neither on a scale of participation nor in a position of influence, but in a relation of domination. Historical action, society's work upon its own work, is exercised solely through class conflict jn a struggle that is not a simple conflict of interests or values but a battle for the control of historicity and of the social and cultural orientations of the system of historical action.

These classes, these historical actors are not actors in any concrete or directly observable sense. History is not the epic tale of the capitalist class or the working class. Here as elsewhere one cannot define a social actorjrther than by analyzing his interaction with other actors. But this principle is more directly and more strictly applicable where classes are concerned. We cannot explain a particular example of conduct by saying that it belongs to a class but only by situating it in relation to the opposition between the classes and their antagonistic efforts to control the system of historical action. A sociology of action must never be identified with a reconstitution of the praxis of class actors; it is above all analysis of the relations of domination that determine conflicts, movements, and ideoiogiesT"ShTllay"relatio1fis'oT domination because the actions involved are governed by a stake, a prize, which is a set of social and cultural orientations, and beyond that historicity itself, which is an action and not a state of things.

7. These social relations are partly: openand partly hidden. They are open insofar as dominators and dominated are in conflict, struggling for_control of historicity. Society is therefore not an order, an organism; it is divided against itself; each of its orientations is the object of opposing attempts at appropriation. Hence the importance constantly given in this book to public debates, conflicts, social movements, and also the recurring criticism of illusions of social integration.

They are hidden insofar as a domination is being imposed that overlays popular contestation with oppression, with alienation, with propaganda, and either fragments it or reduces it to violence or retreat. The sociologist must not identify himself with the ideology of any actor, but in order to achieve this independence, without which his work is impossible, he must throw all his weight into the task of reestablishing the nature of the social relations thus concealed, in order to let those speak that have no voice, in order to illumine

Introduction 11

that which is hidden, forbidden, or locked away, in order to break the power of ideological discourse and the false evidence in the categories of social practice.

This is a task made all the more difficult by the fact that the closer one comes to the struggles and movements that animate the field of historicity, the deeper the collective actors dig themselves into their ideologies and the more determined they are to impose their values. The more ardent the struggle for social domination, or the more absolute the power, the more surely^the sociologist's critical analysis Is rejected.

Caught between a simultaneously superficial and conservative "empiri­cism"—since it reduces the actor to his behavior within the established order—and the passions of the struggles or the pressures of power, sociology has great difficulty in surviving and in maintaining or even discovering its unity.

This book in itself cannot completely satisfy either the researcher, who demands to be presented right away with methods and procedures, or the actor in collective life, who needs to situate his aims, his partners, his adversaries in time and space, and to identify himself with a group.

Is there any reason why it should not be understood by both, however? The sociologist does not study facts but documents. In order not to become the prisoner of a "reality" that he believes himself to be looking in at from outside when he is in fact part of it, he needs to subject himself to an intellectual ascesis that will lead him to the discovery, behind society's organization and discourse, of its social relations, m j>ther words of its conflicts and its domination, as well as what that domination keeps concealed in the shadows.

And the person who takes part in the battles or in the government of society, can he on his side understand his own action if he reduces society to the established order, or to a mere battlefield, or to a mere market? Can he be a stranger to a sociology whose principle object is to understand how men make their history, through their work and their social relations?

This book speaks of society through sociology. It is by reflecting on his own work of acquiring knowledge that the sociologist best answers the questions of the social actors themselves. Because his ta^k^is to\stri£jbare social relations and social processes by freeing himself from all the social and ideological forms of censorship that established power and order use to protect and justify themselves. Only in this way can sociology ensure its own continued existence. Every time it attempts to find order in real life and derive general laws from it, every time it attempts to explain structure and change with the help of the same notions, it is no more than an irrelevant embellishment of history. It must turn its face away without regret from both universal histories and general sociologies whose aim is to situate

12 Introduction

societies and explain them. And what better rallying ground against such a pseudoscience of societies could there be than a sociology of action? What could proclaim more clearly that there is no sociology of social situations but only of social relations? Sociology is not alone in its haste to take such a path. Other disciplines which have simple models of social relations to deal with, and economics especially, have progressed much more rapidly toward their formalization. Sociology is making slower progress because the wholes it has to deal with are more complex. Which is why it will continue to advance for a long while in two complementary ways: by isolating particular sets of social relations susceptible of a more detailed treatment, and by the construction of theoretical schemas, still not very formalized but representing progress in the definition of a procedure and the identification of the mechanisms studied.

8. This book begins with a study of abstract ensembles, such as historicity, the system of historical action, and class relations, then moves on in later chapters to more concrete collectivities such as a political system or an organization and mechanisms of change.

Why didn't 1 choose the reverse order? Why not start from limited but more detailed analyses in order to demonstrate the necessity for resorting to certain concepts that are then clearly set out in a conclusion? Because this book_ is not a presentation of fieldwork but is intended solely as an introduction to a sociological procedural method. The most urgent factor therefore was to follow the general line of that procedure, and its principal characteristic is that it does not take socia^ organization as its starting point but rather the production of society by itself, in otheFwords a set" oTsocial mechanisms not directly given to an observation that is in fact in danger of being imprisoned by the categories of social praxis, which are always impregnated with ideologies. If the type of analysis presented here seems interesting, then wluu will be needed, rather than seeking to make it more precise and to complete it by a revision of the reasoning itself, is to ask oneself more directly about the methods that need to be invented or applied in order to develop objects of research corresponding to the principles of the reasoning, and in order to verify the propositions deriving from it.

This book is therefore concerned not with presenting a sociological theory, which would be excessively ambitious, but only with putting the sociologist in a position to undertake analyses that may lead to the production of an integrated set of propositions.

Although it is rather long, and may look rather daunting, this book should be approached as a brief introduction to a set of possible investigations. More simply still, it is intended to contribute to the opening up of a domain of knowledge indispensable to societies that can no longer define themselves by their action upon a supposedly external nature, but must recognize that

Introduction 13

they are the product of the action they exert upon themselves, via their system of historical action, their class relations, their political institutions, and Jheir forms of social organization. In the longer term, it is trying to introduce readers to the quest for a new sociological practice, capable of making its way across the best lit and most closely controlled areas of social life in order to reach the conduct by which a society produces and transforms itself.

It should be said finally that this book, so far from appearing to be an analysis of social actuality, nevertheless sprang from reflections and unease aroused by the times in which it was written. Those who make economic and political decisions are increasingly aware that they must intervene in the totality of social life. Growth cannot be assured without social and political mobilization or, on the other hand, without an ideological campaign to boost the profits of enterprise.

These leaders impose their Utopia and their ideology on societies, identify themselves with "the satisfaction of needs/* with prosperity, with innovation and equalization of opportunity. The dominion of leaders over societies has increased to an enormous extent, and the outstanding features of our century, our trademark in times to come, will be that a whole society could be possessed by the word and the letter of a leader, that language became a material force, that incantation created organization.

Faced with this new power of society's decision centers, confusion reigns. / Some are drawn into the action of the apparatuses, others throw up ^ barricades that were originally intended for use against another enemy, yet \ others are questioning society in its entirety rather than simply its power. J

Must we renounce the belief that the new power will meet with new adversaries? It is already too late to sell that opium of the "end of ideologies/'

The universities, and above all the relatively small areas within them occupied by the sociologists, have been among the first to see the reap­pearance of social movements, or at least of their heralding signs.

How can the sociologist believe that what he writes is neutral, a matter of indifference, faced as he is with this great question that dominates our present: what are and what will be the actors, the fields, and rtie stakes ofthe social battles to be fought in those societies within which power extends to all the aspects of collective activity, so that it can no longer be called political or economic and must therefore be recognized as the management and appropriation of social organization and social change? This book is paving the way for a reply to that question. More, it is trying to prove that it is overwhelmingly important for it to be asked. But how can we fait to"Tecognize ^^JJL^L0-^!!-0^^^1^^ am* liberal European societies, which are those in which it is easiest to acquire information, to think, and to express oneself

14 Introduction

freely^arejilso those in which the demand for a liberating future is making itself rtie least heard. That is why this book is addressed not only to French readers but equally to all those in the world whose deepest experience is that of domination, and who believe both in the necessity to fight it and in the possibility that the masses of mankind will one day make their own history. It owes much on the one hand to the great intellectual movement that has renewed Latin-American sociology and to the new awareness achieved by the people of Quebec, and on the other hand to the questionings, the debates of American society and culture. It will at no point depart from its proper field, that of sociological reflection, and will not seek to draw false heat from the fire of events. But the author, who will be absent from the book, does have the right, at the moment of leaving it, to say why he devoted the midyears of his life to it.

HISDRICITY

1

A. Society Turns Back upon Itself

a. Beyond Function

Human societies cannot he sufficiently defined by their rules and the instruments by which they function.

They act upon their own functioning, either to modify it or to transcend it. 1. First, by applied experience, or in other words by politics. The norms that govern social interactions are not intangible; they are in large part the result of decisions and in consequence can be modified as the result of a change in the relations of force or influence between actors, and also as the result of modification occurring in the environment.

Modern analyses of organization and decision making have greatly ex­tended our knowledge of society's internal and external exchanges and consequently of the temporary and partial character of its norms, which are the products of interaction and transactions.

As a political actor society no longer resembles an organism ensuring its stability by homeostasis; it is constantly modifying its activities and its organization by adaptation. 2. Second, by what I term historicity. Human society cannot be reduced to an organism always reproducing itself immutably, dependent for any transformation in itself upon mutations brought about by internal or external events. Its capability is not limited to adapting itself to a changing environment and is constantly modifying the rules by which it functions.

It also has the capability of positing, beside the order of its activities, the order of its representations. It possesses a symbolic capacity that enables it to construct a system of knowledge together with technical tools which it can use to intervene in its own functioning.

15

16 Chapter One

But we must go further. This capacity for acting upon itself, this noncoincidence of society with its own rules of functioning, must be much more than just the creation of the order of words beside the order of things. This "double" of society must also have means of action, of intervention in the material functioning of society, and therefore means of investment. Lastly, this distance between society and itself is also apprehended by social consciousness. A tragic and arrogant apprehension, because it is simul­taneously apprehension of a wrenching asunder and of a dominion. Inventor of knowledge, agent of investment, creator of an image oj creativity that 1 term a cultural model, society j)roduces itself, imposes a meaning on its pj-actices, turns back upon itwljAt does not exist solely in nature; it does not possessa history only; it possesses historicity, which is the capacity to produce its own social a.nd_cjjl_tjural field, its own historical environment.

Society produces itself. This cannot mean that it creates the conditions of its existence starting from an idea. For where would this idea come from, and how could it be conceived of other than as a metasocial warrant for social organization—divine providence, human nature, idea, march of history? But nor can it mean that these representations and these orienta­tions have been formed on the basis of a material experience that could be defined independently of them.

We must not search here for any first cause. Labor is a state of the forces i of production determined by historicity, that is to say by a model of

knowledge, by a type of accumulation, and by an image of creativity or cultural model; but these components of historiciTy~always appear as""a" distancing of society from itself and from the reproduction of its func­tioning. The specific characteristic jyf jiuman society is precisely this distance between the totality oj[ the activities that define a society's functioning and

I the system of meaning that simultaneously determmes it anTVsTorrried on X the basis of it. in a circle that will only appear vicious if one is looking for a

first cause, and which on the contrary defines the particularity of society as a system when compared to other concrete systems.

To sum up, a certain historicity expresses itself through certain charac­teristics of the social organization, a level of productivity, a capacity for growth, and a technical division of labor. It is on the basis of this organization of labor that accumulation makes it possible to emerge from the economic cycle and that the cultural model occupies the gap formed be­tween historicity and functioning. Historicity is always linked to a material situation; it gives it meaning, informs it.

One must reject equally both the idea that the forms of social life are determined by a material situation, such as the state of technology, and also the contrary idea that society imposes culture upon nature, writes civilization on the virgin page of an untamed natural world.

Historicity 17

Historicity is neither idea nor material situation; it is the specific characteristic of social action, which constitutes its experience through the meaning it gives to it.

Human activity, on all levels of technical development, is the organization of a technical environment and not integration into a natural whole. From first hunter to missile builder, man is the producer of techniques. Analysis must start from this action, which is simultaneously instrumental, economic, and ideological, to use terms that are at the same time in everyday use yet laden with obscurities; which is a model ot knowledge, accumulation, and cultural model, to use the terms 1 shall employ here, referring to the organization of a field of experience, the setting aside of a proportion of the resources available for consumption, and an image ol creativity.

Historicity is not transcendence; it is not that which escapes from society conceived of as a system. On the contrary, it is that which makes it possible to conceive of society as a system, but without having to reduce it to another and less complex type. Through historicity activity becomes meaning and meaning once more becomes practice.

It is this double movement, up toward historicity and—even more important—down from it, through the system of historical action, society's institutions and organizations, that will constitute one of the two central themes of this book. The second is an investigation of the forms of social interaction linked with historicity and with the production of society by society itself: class relations.

It is a mistake to criticize the functionalist sociologies of integration and values by confronting them with the histoiy of societies or by the forces of conflict and change with them. One runs a great risk of being forced back into presociological interpretations.

1 do not blame functionalist sociology for having represented society as a ) system; that is its great positive contribution. Its error was to conceive that ( system in accordance with mechanistic ororganistic images so inadequate that they simultaneously force one back to an evolutionist vision, inherited \ from nineteenth-century liberal and positivist optimism, impregnated with , the most unacceptable kind of idealism and ethnocentrism.

b. The Components of Historicity: Knowledge, Accumulation, Cultural Model.

1. Serge Moscovici {Essai sur Vhistoire humaine de la natures Paris: Flammarion, 1%8, and more recently, la socike comre nature, Paris: Union g£n£rale d'exlitions, coll. 10/18, 1972, see also "Le marxisme et la question naturelle," L'hommi* et la sotiete, July-September 1969, pp. 59-109) has pointed out with some force that society is not in opposition to nature and that it is consequently false to distinguish between the natural

18 Chapter One

order and social values, between the body and the soul of social activity. Nature is a cultural definition of matter. Thus we ought not to speak of nature but of "states of nature", which is to say, of systems of knowledge.

This work of knowledge is never identifiable with economic activity. Production and consumption are economic categories that always pertain to a study of exchanges. But any system of labor also includes the intervention of "natural forces," of an activity of knowledge. Science, for example, is not an economic element, does not in itself have a price, because it does not produce goods but. rather, endows society with a nature, as religious thought did in another type of society.

This first component of historicity, the model of knowledge, is at the same time the most fundamental and the one that will play the most limited role in our analysis of society. It is fundamental because it manifests most directly the human capacity to create through knowledge an image of the world and social relations and an image of the nonsocial.

Before coming to any particular piece of sociological analysis we encounter the primary fact that human language orders a universe organized by technique, thus permitting the turning back of experience on itself that enables man—and man alone—to have a history, in other words, to produce not only his changing but his situation itself. However, the fundamental role of this component also makes it dependent. It does not govern the orientations of social and cultural action or the forms of accumulation and relations of production directly. Itself a force of production par excellence, it appears both at the very beginning and at the very end of the analysis: a set ot means and technical operations on the one hand, and on the other a sign oi society's distance in relation to its own functioning.

2. This separation between the two orders of phenomena lumped together under the name of work is not conceivable without a recognition of the economic forms of historicity. The existence of work on work presupposes a process of accumulation.

One part of the consumable product is set aside and invested in works that bear the stamp of the cultural model. The closer one comes to industrialized

"societies the more this accumulation is identifiable with productive invest­ment. Whereas, on the other hand, in societies with a weak historicity, with only a slight capability of action upon themselves, the uses to which the accumulated resources are put are not directly productive: temples and priests, castles and courts absorb the surplus withdrawn from consumption. But accumulation always has economic uses, since those who control it, even if their central role is a religious or political one, are filling a role essential to production. The greater the amount of accumulation the greater the extent to which it transforms the conditions of production. When it is small, the

Historicity 19

surplus collected is set aside from economic activity and used for the realization of major constructions or works. On the other hand, an impor­tant share of the resources accumulated in an industrialized society is used to transform the conditions of labor directly and to produce labor, which is the role of technology. Investment modifies the organization of work and thus its productivity.

3. A society is not adequately defined by the state of its productive forces; such a definition ought to be derived from the relations between its activity and its capability of acting on that activity. This distance is apprehended culturally: every society is oriented by this apprehension of creativity, which 1 term its cultural model. In a society with a strong historicity, which is to say one in which the production of labor exercises a strong control over the production of wealth, this apprehension of creativity is practiced: science is recognized as creativity, as the force directly transforming the state of nature. In a society with a weak historicity, on the other hand, creativity is apprehended only abstractly, not as praxis but as /<>gus. as a rnetasocial order./! his cultural model is not a representation of the model of knowledge but of tlie~ distance between trie production and the reproduction of work, and thus of society's capability of acting upon itself.

1 therefore use the phrase "cultural model" in a very specific sense, not in order to describe such and such an orientation or observable value within a society, but to define, within A conceptual system, that essential aspect of historicity by means of which the society "reflects" upon itself by appre­hending its own capability of action in a way that defines the field of social relations and what I shall call in the next chapter the system o\% historical act ion ./Let me say right away, however, that even when historicity is most completely controlled by the ruling class, the cultural model is not reducible to the dominant ideology. Ideology pertains to specific actors; the cultural model pertains to a type oj society as totality, it contributes to a definition of the field of social relations. The actors, however much opposed to each other they may be. interact and enter into conflict within a cultural model.

All this shows that a cultural model cannot be situated other than qualitatively in relation to other cultural models. Each cultural model contributes toJhe definition ofji type of society, not to that of a specific collectivity.

This cultural model is not a system of values. It entails no judgment as to what is socially good or bad. It defines a cultural field. Let one example suffice: to recognize science as the contemporary form of creativity * does

* Which is the specific characteristic of postindustrial society in which science is at the same time model of knowledge, cultural model, and even instrument of accumulation. In the sentence above, science is viewed soleK as a cul'.urcl model.

20 Chapter One

not in itself entail any judgment on the positive or negative aspects of a society dominated by science. One may say with equal justification either that science creates plenty or that it is threatening humanity with total destruction. It is in this sense that science is not a social value, that it does not distinguish positive conduct from negative conduct.

The orientations of historical action do not constitute principles enthroned at the center of society and directly defining forms of social organization, because society is not an actor, a sovereign, a legislator. They define the thematic of a society, not its government.

c. Society Torn Apart.

The fact that a society produces itself and is not reducible to its functioning leads directly to the existence of opposing social classes and the conflict between them.

It is not society as a whole that turns back upon jtself in-order to orient itself. It is always Utopian to think that a collectivity transforms itself, is capable of simultaneously acting in accordance with certain forms and transcending them, of providing for investment as well as for consumption.

The class that manages society's accumulation, its model of knowledge, and its cultural model is the society's ruling class. This class identifies itself with the society's historicity. But since it is no more than one part of society, it is therefore also identifying historicity with its private interests, confusing the cultural model with its own ideology. The ruled class reacts to this domination both defensively, by insisting on its own social and cultural identity, and offensively, by contesting the power of the ruling class, by appealing to the very historicity that the ruling class is appropriating. It is

/therefore clear that the orientations of historicity do not by themselves I determine rules of conduct, because between them we find interposed the

class conflict and the nature of social domination. The orientations of historical actionare the^stake"' in the class struggle. Which means both that they are not the ideology of the ruling class and that they are not independent of class relations, which otherwise would be no more than a mode of social stratification.

Class relations are linked to forces of production, to a state of economic activity and technical division of labor; but they are more than this: they are the expression of historical action itself in terms of social actors, the

/ expression of society's capacity to act upon itself by its investment of the 1 resources accumulated in activities selected by a cultural model.

But it is the state of class relations that governs the mechanisms of decision in a society, and thus too the formation of the rules that in their turn govern social organization, thereby enabling us to reject any sociology of values.

Historicity 21

A long chapter (3) will be devoted to class relations; but the main lines of it need to be indicated here.

We cannot present the ruling class as purely creative, as the class that makes it possible to step aside from routine and the defense of immediate interests in order to tackle long-term projects, general ideas, complex strategies. That would obviously ignore the fact that the ruling class defends private interests and privileges and, even more important, the fact that it dominates the lower classes, the workers. But nor can one reduce accumu­lation to a class relation, that of exploiter and exploited. In particular, the closer one approaches to the industrialized societies the more productivity of work is defined not by individual work alone or even that of the team, but by the forms of organization, of the overall programming of production, and by the application of science, technology, and mathematics to economic activity. A simple observation, but one that prevents us from presenting labor relations as simply a confrontation between worker-producer and profit taker.

The essential thing is to recognize that the always present, always essential relation of domination to exploitation is not separable—if we are to understand the functioning of society as the conduct of actors—from society's relation to its historicity. It is not enough to say that the ruling class performs the task of developing the forces of production. For to say that is stating a material fact but telling us nothing about its social significance. But if we try to see what lies beneath it, we discover the tug the ruling class exerts on the whole of society toward a particular type of historicity.

Of the three components of historicity, accumulation is the one that makes possible the wrenching away of historicity from activity, the distancing of society from its own functioning. The mode of knowledge posits the fact of society's noncoincidence with its being: beside those shackling activities governed by the requirements of the collectivity's survival and its adaptation to the environment from which it draws its subsistence, it sets the wrorld of the image (to use the word adopted by Kenneth Boulding in The Image: Knowledge and Life in Society, University of Michigan Press, 1956). Accumulation gives a material content to this distancing.

Economic activity is not reducible to the production-consumption cycle; what is subtracted from that cycle is used in the service of society's transcendence of itself, whether it be a transcendence toward the future, a process of growth, or a transcendence directed toward a principle of order and unity, either of a religious or of a political type.

It is now easier to see what historicity is. In order to define it, must we make a hypothesis about the orientations of

human action? Must we set up an image of a man drawn by his will to creation, his desire for enrichment, or more generally still by a need to work?

22 Chapter One

It is normal that there should emerge a favored image of man in every society, a type of hero. But this very fact, which would become less clear on closer examination, shows plainly that it cannot constitute a principle of explana­tion, since these human types change from one era and one society to another. To speak of human nature in this sense is a roundabout way either of introducing an ideology or of describing certain aspects of one society. If we try to explain society by means of social conducts, then we condemn ourselves to the inability to produce anything but interpretations of society, since we have introduced at the outset that which must be explained.

But it is equally impossible to look upon social situations as material "facts," when by their very definition they are sets of conducts and of social relations, in other words of actions.

For the sociologist, to posit an opposition between the network of social relations and the priority of "material" activities—the activities of production and reproduction of individual and collective existence—can have no meaning. Such an idea belongs merely to historicist thought; whether one posits over and above society the development of the mind or the priority of "natural" needs and the activities intended to satisfy them, one is still explaining society by the nonsocial; it is obvious that this method is as unacceptable today as it was when Durkheim condemned it.

We must also eliminate other, less crude concepts of society that equally omit all recourse to the concept of actions.

We cannot consider a society as an organism endowed with balancing mechanisms that is able to transform itself in the direction of a growing complexity simply under the influence of external stimuli. Even less can we consider it as a being endowed with a sort of built-in code that will modify itself as a result of mutations occurring during its transmission, change then being the result of individual actions sanctioned by their efficacy, their material success, and reacting on the social code to transform it. We are bound to recognize that human collectivities are systems defined in their specific and essential characteristics not by their code of functioning but by their capacity to be oriented by a cultural model.

What I term historicity is thus the particular nature of social systems which, above and beyond their reproduction combined with any accidents "that might make them change, and also beyond their possibilities for trial-and-error and adaptation, have the capacity to act upon themselves through the intermediary of a set of cultural and social orientations.

All societies are at the same time activities and a ''reflection" upon those activities, which in its turn governs the orientations of social action, the mechanisms of decision and the modalities of functioning in concrete societies.

Their capacity to modify their relation with the environment is manifested

Historicity 23

in a model of knowledge, in a type ot accumulation, and in a cultural model that together constitute historicity. This latter governs a system of orienta­tions that controls the systems of functioning and adaptation. The content of historicity depends upon the society's type of activity, on its labor, but transforms that activity into culture and into social organization.

Society governs its activity by the molding of knowledge, by accumulation, by awareness of creativity, so that all aspects of its organization become at the same time means in ihe service of that production of society by itself. Social organization as such is not exclusive to the human species, but mankind is the only species that possesses sufficient symbolic capability to produce the sense—both meaning and direction—of its experience; the only one for which nature is culture, creation, and normative orientation, in the name of which triad its organization is organized, transformed, and, I re­peat, produced.

Human societies are open systems not only capable of modifying their goals, but also possessed of the capacity to create normatively oriented conducts, to produce and to destroy their social order.

This capacity does not entirely define social life. Scciety functions on three levels: it produces itself, but it also adapts itstlfand consumes itself. And these three levels 1 shall term in Ihis book: the field of historicity, the institutional system, and the social organization. But if historicity must be the central theme of sociology, that is because only human societies possess such a capacity of self-transformation, which is linked to the human being's symbolic capacity, in other words tohis ability to aci upon his relation to his environment and upon his social organization.

It is possible that a society might lose its historicity, that it might sink into mere reproduction or divide itself totally into a mass and an elite; it is also possible that it could cease to be capable of adaptation, in other words that it might reduce itself wholly to its political system, to the strategies of its members and to its own strategy with regard to other societies. A human society can be a system of historicity; it is not driven along as though in spite of itself by a force running through it, by the march of history or some transhistoric essence. Historicity is neither a typeof conduct nor an impersonal force: it is the production of society by society.

The evolutionist philosophies of history which made use of notions of force and energy must be completely replaced by the study of historic action, in other words of the elements whose interrelations define the action of society's self-transformation. There is no question of introducing a theory of social change at this point; it is neither convention nor coivenience that has made social change the theme of this book's final chapter. A society's historicity is not the process that causes it to pass from state T to state T-FL It is a concept strictly defined within a synchronic analysis. A society constitutes in

24 Chapter One

terms of its resources an image that is not a representation but a set of schemas of cultural and social orientations that mold the collective expe­rience: model of knowledge, type of accumulation, cultural model. This historicity is realized in a system of historical action and in class relations, in a political system and in forms of social organization.

Rather than placing a society in history, we are talking about placing historicity in the heart of society as the organizing principle of a field of practices and relations./Thus, not only is an analysis of change inappro­priate, but, further, in many ways this approach makes such an analysis more difficult, since it cannot then be undertaken other than on the basis of research into the tensions and noncoincidences between the historicity of a society and the nature of the forms of social practice that are informed by it while at the same time escaping from it as concrete, complex, 4*historicaT,

social unities. Change cannot be understood except on the basis of the opposition between structure and event.

Historicity, as the foundation of social structure, is neither an idea nor a material force. It is useless to ask oneself whether it falls into the category of economics, politics, or ideology. Those terms themselves merely produce confusion, or, even worse, refer back to a separation between subject and object absolutely incompatible with the task of sociology, which is to study social action. For social action is at once labor and consciousness, practice and orientation, mechanisms and finalities, all always inseparable.

d. Tensions and Conflicts

Having placed the theme of historicity at the outset of this analysis, I had better also take precautions against possible misunderstandings. Certainly, J^ have no intention of intoning a hymn of praise to the creative power of man, governing and ordering an untamed nature and led by his own inspiration, the impulse of his soul, or divine grace, beyond the everydayness of the world.

Such a vision of things—which can take less crude forms—expresses the presociological thought that cannot be transcended until the moment society discovers that it in fact possesses virtually unlimited power over itself. By separating society's soul from its body, this vision is presupposing that the existence of that soul has a warrant in some essence—Man, God, History— and that social facts have no meaning other than the actor's intention and internal life, which impose themselves upon an inert nature. When one disencumbers oneself from all recourse to idealist notions, then nature ceases to be either savage or paradisiac; it is simply a set of natural systems, open or closed, functioning in accordance with laws which it is the business of science to discover.

The further we move away from an abstract humanism, the vaster the field

Historicity 25

of these natural systems within human existence reveals itself to be. Hence the steady extension of the natural sciences. But we cannot separate this recognition of "human nature" from the formulation of the specific charactenstics of society and the human species. Man molds his environment and his social organization; he does not insert himself into an ecological whole; he organizes that whole on the basis of his own transforming activity.

In a word, he has a history. It is this capacity to produce his own transformation that I call historicity, and which is at the same time activity and self-consciousness, work of knowledge and cultural model. This his­toricity does not give form to the formless; on the contrary, it is linked to existing natural systems: the biological being, including the human mind, the interpersonal relations through which personality is formed, and the forms of sociability. Corresponding to each state of historicity there is a certain "nature" that is its complement and its opposite, but it is not in ' historicity's power to determine the characteristics of the natural systems that organize the activity on the basis of which historicity is formed, and which it in its turn governs.

All reflection on historicity should shed light on the close bond between two apparently opposed ideas whose complementarity must be understood.

First, I the relation between social activity and historicity is circular. Historicity comes into being on the basis of a state of collective activity: its content is determined by the form of that activity. In the other direction, social organization always results from the dominion of sociocultural orientations and class relations—themselves governed by historicity—over resources and sets of means.

Why should this be called a vicious circle? On the contrary, it is a question of positing the most elementary condition of all for the existence of any sociological analysis. Once that circle is broken, idealism will flood in. Historicity is not an idea but a concept introduced with the sole purpose of destroying, root and branch, all appeal to any metasocial warrant for social order. Society is what it makes itself be on the basis of what it is, and not on the basis of principles or values that cannot be anything, for the sociologist, but ideologies pertaining to particular actors.

Second, this interdependence of activity and historicity, of work and of work uporTwork, is tension and distancing. Hence the emphasis I put upon providing a sociology of historicity, m actionalist sociology, in opposition to current work inspired by functionalism, even though the latter^no longer appears today as anything more than a somewhat vague orientation, lacking the academic power it had at the time when I first began my fight against it.

It is a constant tendency of sociology, often in the name of empiricism, to accept the social order as being neutral and to see each individual occupying his place within it, entering into relations with others, in order to realize a

26 Chapter One

series of exchanges within that order in conformity with the rules of the social game. The actor carries his status and his role around with him, justTs the laborer wears on his coveralls the name of his firm, which is taken to be his group and therefore his social being. It is a naively conservative sociology in consequence, one that examines with the minutest attention how society functions while taking pains at least equally great to avoid asking itself what is functioning.

Society viewed in its historicity, and consequently social actors too, as participants in that historicity, cannot be defined by their content but, primarily, by the gap, the distance, separating the production of society by itself from the reproduction of its activity. This means in the first place that analysis of society is not built up directly around the content of historicity but around the tension between historicity and the natural systems mobilized by social activity. We shall encounter this fundamental tension, in changing forms, at every level of society, and its recognition imposes a critical procedure diametrically opposed to that of positivism.

This means in turn that no actor is alone the bearer of this tension. It is a system oj social interactions or class relations that constitutes the unity of action within which this tension manifests itself. It is impossible to single out each individual's place, or to insert each individual in a proper place, because society is not a game in which there are pawns that have rights and are subject to constraints. Social relations govern the relations^etyveen historicity and society's functioning. And in parallel to this, as I have already pointed out, the most fundamental social interactions of all, class relations, cannot be understood except as historicity at work.

One might wonder at this point what mark historicity stamps upon the social actors. My analysis of social movements will answer this question in essence, since such movements are the confrontation of agents of the social classes seeking control over historicity and over the mode of society's production of itself. This is a theme that corresponds to the circularity of activity and historicity that I have recognized as being one of the faces of the sociology of historicity.

What is there that corresponds in the same way to its other face, to the recognition of tension and rending? The ultimate mark jof ^participation in historicity is the distance that remains between the actor and the roles he plays, not only in social exchanges of all kinds, but even within social movements, insofar as these latter have no concrete existence unless they are also political—or even military—organizations and units.

Instead of the call to liberty referring to some human essence beyond all social determinisms, a procedure both unacceptable and incomprehensible to the sociologist, instead of liberty being no more than the uncertainty lying at the intersection of a number of independent series, liberty is trans-

Historicity 27

cendence toward a historicity that no actor ever has the right to appropriate completely, that no form of social organization, no system of political decision making, no system ot class relations can totally exhaust, because they are all stages of historicity's redescent toward the functioning of society.

Transcendence and not possession. The moment the actor identifies himself with historicity he is confusing it with an organization, which may be without social consequences if that confusion is perpetrated merely by an individual actor enclosed within a personal Utopia, but which produces the most dramatic effects when the holder of a power, reversing the movement of analysis, identifies historicity vith order and identifies himself with that now sanctified order.

B. Historical Action

a. The Historical Subject

Actionalist sociology reminds us that a society does not coincide with its functioning, its norms, its rules, and its sanctions, that it carries its own self-transcendence within itself.

But it has fallen into error if it apprehends this trandscendence as an absolute that is transcending social contingencies and determinations, if it sets up a philosophy of liberty in opposition to social determinisms. Because there is in fact nothing that enables sociological analysis to distinguish between this creative transcendence and the disorganization of the crisis. One cannot set the frozen and instituted against an instituting spontaneity without running the risk of being unable to distinguish this suprasocial from an infrasocial, from those organic energies Parsons speaks of which con­stitute for him the lower environment of social action.

The failure here comes from the fact that reflection remains purely polemical. It starts out from social organization, taken to be closed and totally controlled, in order to rebel against it.

My procedure is different h starts quite deliberately not from the rejection of that closed society but from an affirmation of historical action. This action is not an endless transcending of social determinations but the construction of a field of action. It introduces not a philosophy of the subject but an actionalist sociology.

Instead of opposing subject to society, what is aimed at here is a direct analysis of society not as consciousness of self but as work upon self.

When I employed the terra historical subject in Sociologie de I'action (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965). it was in order to define, not an actor involved in his struggle to apprehend himself in his creativity and beyond his alienations, but a society as a historical field, as a model of knowledge, a

28 Chapter One

mode of accumulation and a cultural model defining creativity the three elements present in every social constitution and transformation.

The historical subject is not a new avatar of God, of the Sovereign, or of the laws of the market. It is not a personage but another name for a society's field of historicity; it is the totality of cultural orientations and social conflicts through which a society constitutes itself as an agent of historicity.

If I believe this term to be useful, despite the misunderstanding it could give rise to, it is as a means of emphasizing that sociological analysis cannot have its foundation in the search for structures that are like those of the human mind or of exchanges that will permit the survival of a collectivity. Sociology is different from anthropology both in the type of societies k studies and even more in its method of approach. It views society as the work of an action, which is not that of an empirical actor, nor a collective consciousness, but a working of society upon itself. All other aspects of social life, decision making as well as the functioning of the social organization, are determined by historicity, which constitutes the sociocultural field within which class relations, political decisions, and the mechanisms of social control come into play.

If the use I make of the word "subject" is going to lead to a belief that I am~representing society as a will, as an actor, then T renounce the word forthwith; sociology studies nothing other than systems of social relations. The historicity I talk about is not the work of an actor; it is the characteristic of society at the level 1 define as that of the production of society by itself, or, which is the same thing, of society as historical subject.

The nearer one approaches this level of analysis the more one must leave behind any subjective meaning of conduct. If one looks at things from a functionalist viewpoint, then analysis naturally bears upon social conduct and upon the representation that the actor provides for himself of the system and the place he occupies within it.

Society then appears as a datum from the actor's point of view, as a set of interiorized rules for guiding conduct. A sociology of historical action, on the other hand, is at the opposite pole from a study of subjectivity. Instead of looking at actors as defined by their roles, it examines the elements that constitute a field of historical action, which is to say the social and cultural models on the basis of which a society is organized.

The actor is defined by the social and cultural movements that cause him to intervene on the level of historicity. Functionalist analysis has the apparent advantage of examining *4men as they are," in other words, of observing the "normal" functioning of society. Actionalist analysis, on the other hand, has a greater awareness of the domination exercised by a class or

\ by holders of pow^rand of conflicts over the control of historicity. It analyzes I not only the various combinations of innovation and repression on the part of

Historichy 29

the ruling classes but also, on the part of the ruled classes, the always living presence of movements aimed at the collective reappropriation of historicity, and of the various forms of rejection, of withdrawal, of defense against the ruling order. It knows that history is never epic, that actors are never completely conscious and organized, that the meaning of events never coTricKTes with the consciousness of the actors, and that its battles cannot be described like those in an eighteenth-century engraving. The actors, though they may be aware of being engaged in a historical action and social conflicts, cannot be viewed as bearers of that action's meaning in their individual representations.

b. Between Integration and Contradiction

We can now return to our point of departure and redefine the place of actionalist sociology within sociological analysis as a whole. One of its principal objectives is to rescue sociology from the false choice situation in which it too often becomes enmeshed. For it does look, superficially, as though it is bound to choose between an ideal5t"phTTosbphy of values and an analysis of the internal contradictions of an economic and social system and of the all-powerful apparatus of a class domination.

I will give one example only. If we examine the sociology of development, it seems to be divided into two schools: on one side the school that talks about modernization and observes both the progress of rationality or organic solidarity and the traditionalist resistances to change; on the other, the school that reduces the dynamic of the underdeveloped nations to the effects of domination exercised upon them by the great capitalist powers.

This second school seems to me more securely based than the first; it puts its emphasis on a social relation of essential importance instead of artificially placing dominant and dominated societies on a scale of development a la Rostow that is too ethnocentric not to be an ideological tool for use on behalf of the colonizers.

But why should there be this gap between modernization and dependence? Is not the essential thing, rather, to understand the independence move­ments, the nationalisms, the popular or messianic groupings, the union and political movements, and also the formation of a ruling class and its links with foreign capital or the state, through which an action of development arises that either struggles against dependence or, on the contrary, reinforces it and cannot be reduced to simply modernization, since it is determining the type of tkmodernized'* society being built?

/ refuse to chtmse between the reduction of social conduct to roles or adaptation to change, on the one hand* and, on the other, an image of society as a system motivated by the logic of domination alone. Other social conducts, other social relations exist. Political relations exist—at least where

30 Chapter One

totalitarianism is not supreme—a plurality of influences, a certain autonomy of decision within a society. Above all there exist social conflicts and movements, and therefore, even beyond political institutions, an "openness'* of society, a debate on the orientation of change.

The long period of exceptional growth experienced recently by the industrial societies—to which the great majority of sociologists have be­longed until now—has given an extreme force to the ideology of the ruling class: all the talk in our part of the world has been about modernization, about adaptation, even about a decline in conflicts and ideologies. And, against that ideology and the class domination it reinforces, it is natural that criticism, lacking support from the organized action of new social movements, should have torn itself away from the dominant discourse in order to pass judgment from outside on the objective reality of domination. However, although that step was politically indispensable, we must make certain we know how to go beyond it and to rediscover in our society, as in any society in movement, the conjoined realities of cultural orientations and social con­flicts. Society is not merely a system of norms or a system of domination: it is a system of social relations, of debates and conflicts, of political initiatives and claims, of ideologies and alienations.

Sociology is never faced with a choice between an analysis of subjectivity and an analysis of objectivity, because the very nature of the conduct it studies is to belong to neither of those two orders. Men make their history not by their intentions and their values but by the meaning of trie action tHat society exercises upon itself, an action that is simultaneously subjective and objective, defined conjointly by an accumulation and a cultural model.

There lies the central domain of sociological analysis. It is not all of sociology however. For the domination of the ruling class is always gTeat enough for its innovative action on the one hand to give a certain autonomy to the theme of modernization, and on the other for its power to constitute a system of domination, of repression, of exploitation, that possesses its own specific logic; this domination is also often sufficiently limited for the political process to possess a space of its own within it. We must keep the autonomy of these social processes in mind in order to protect actionalist sociology against the ever-present risk it faces of being turned into a philosophy of freedom and an epic vision of history.

But this autonomy cannot be independence. One is never justified in defining a society as modern or traditionalist, as universalist or particularism or in affirming that social organization can be reduced to the pure implementation of domination, since the dominant class is not in a position to define the mode of knowledge, the type of accumulation, and the cultural model that constitute the historicity within which it acts: in sum, one cannot

Historicity 31

consider a society's evolution to be the result of its political decisions, since those decisions are limited both by the society's historicity and by class domination.

Actionalist sociology ought to occupy a central position in sociological analysis, because it carries sociological method—that is, analysis of conduct by social relations—to its highest level, that of historicity, the level of society's work upon itself. But those entering upon this path must always be aware of how inadequate their knowledge is bound to be in relation to the difficulty of the task they are taking on.

Perhaps 1 should reiterate that the central importance 1 give to the concept of historicity has nothing to do with any vague exhortation to "see social facts in relation to history." Nothing could be more innocent, on the surface, than such friendly reminders about the usefulness of situating observed phe­nomena in time and space, of examining their development, of taking account of their particularities. Is not sociology's number one sin socio-centrism, we are often asked, when a little historical and geographical awareness could safeguard it so easily against anachronisms and errors of interpretation? Such admonitions are indeed apposite when it is a matter of analyzing a historical situation; but too often, beneath a thin layer of "good sense," they conceal what is in fact an outright rejection of sociological analysis, or recourse to a historicism that sociology has always had to fight against, and to which the concept of historicity is intended to deliver the last and fatal blow. Sociology's object is never a concrete historical whole; even if one carries one's analysis to the furthest limits or macrosociology, as I myself am doing, what is involved is always analysis of social mechanisms and relations, mechanisms and relations that must be isolated from the historical settings in which they were first observed. If we look for the meaning of social conduct in the evolution of societies or in that of any one of their particular aspects—their techniques or their values for example—then we are falling into historicism, in other words, on the far side of an absolute relativism that destroys all possibility of knowledge, into the ideathat through history there is being manifested, being realized, a meaning, a human nature, or a natural and stable type of social organization. 1 must say-it again: the principal reason for the concept of historicity is to eliminate all historicist recourse to^sejices, that last avatar of the metasocial warrants of social order. It is time to recognize that it is in the mode of sociology that our societies must now know themselves, by apprehending themselves as systems and no longer as evolutions. Those we call historians have contributed to the effecting of this change no less than those we call sociologists.

32 Chapter One

C. The Cardinal Points of Sociology

a. Functions, Controls, Decisions, Actions

The study of society is confronted from the outset by certain choices that orient it, that determine the division, if not into schools, then at least into orientations various enough to force us into redefining general sociology as an analysis of the relations among these diverse orientations.

It is therefore desirable that the present sociological inquiry, like any other, should be aware of the starting point it adopts, even though it may subsequently strive to achieve freedom from it.

These general orientations are defined by the preference given to one of the two possible replies to each of the two questions that the sociologist encounters from the very start.

A unit termed ''society" must possess an organization, a continuity, and therefore mechanisms for the maintenance and transmission of orientations, norms, or power. But it is also the producer of its history and must possess means of adapting itself to the modifications of its environment or of acting upon its own transformation. The sociologist thus faces a first choice: he will be asking questions either about the problems of society's production or about those of its reproduction, either about order or about movement.

Second, a society is a unity, an actor, determining its internal functioning and its relations with the outside; but it is also the locus of social relations that may appear to be more fundamental than values, norms, or mechanisms of socialization. The sociologist must necessarily give priority either to the unity of societal action or to social relations, and above all to relations of domination. He conceives society either as a field of decisions oriented by objectives, adapted to the environment, or on the other hand as a field of social relations, of conflicts, of ideologies, and conse­quently places more emphasis on what it excludes, represses, or manipulates.

A sociological school or orientation is defined by the intersecting of these two choices. It is not necessary to suppose that every sociologist consciously decides to adopt one of the four cardinal points thus defined as his particular starting point. But these four points nevertheless make it possible to situate the branches of sociological thought in relation to one another and conse­quently to make them more aware of the choices—often implicit—that they make, and the limitations to which they are subjected.

Let us quickly summarize these four fundamental orientations.

1. A sociology of order that gives priority to society's relations with its environment will define the Junctions that must be organized within it. Society must feed itself, defend itself, reproduce itself, ensure its stability and its continuity.

Historicity 33

2. On the other hand, a sociology of order more aware of internal social relations sees order as containing a domination exercised by some and imposed on all. Here the concern is no longer with functions but with controls, with an apparatus of repression and social and cultural integration, functioning in the service of a power.

3. The sociology of movement, when it examines the problems involved in a social unit's adaptation to a changing environment, gives greatest impor­tance to the decisions by means of which an actor responds in a coherent manner to the stimuli of that environment.

4. Last, a sociology of movement that gives the greatest importance to the oppositions and conflict within society may be termed a sociology of action. Movement is not a decision taken by a "government" within the society; it is the result of social relations that are never fully institutionalized and that express the constant opposition between rulers and ruled, an opposition linked with accumulation and with the concentration of the power of decision.

Sociological endeavors, in their essence, can thus be divided into four domains studying functions, controls, decisions, and actions (see fig. 1).

interactions of society with environment

internal social relations

order

functions

controls

movement

decisions

Figure 1

Each of the rows and columns is associated with certain attitudes that are not purely scientific. And this explains why a certain aspect of sociological analysis will be given preference by a certain society, social group, or individual.

At the risk of painting in over-bold colors, these various images of the sociologist must be roughed in. Those situated on the upper line are more "optimistic." They also pay more attention to what takes place at the "top" of society. They are more interested in the legislator, in the government, in the managing director, than in prisoners, minorities, or wage earners. The

34 Chapter One

others tend to look more for the hidden forces within society, are mistrustful of its discourse and rationality in which they think they detect the dominion of an ideology, a mixture of integration and repression.

The order column contains those who are sensitive primarily to social continuity, those who see in today the weight of the past, of its values or its heritage. In the movement column, on the other hand, it is the future that seems to govern the present, and the resulting analysis lays stress on new trends, forces, and conflicts.

But we can go even further in the political localization of sociology's main themes. The problems I have presented in a general form, attributing them to society in general, also correspond more directly to the preoccupations of opposing social classes.

The ruling class, steward of social order, concerned with ensuring the transmission of its own privileges and of social inequality, is more responsive to the theme of functions because it is more interested in maintaining the established order than in questioning its values and its power. Whereas a working class chafing at the barriers raised in the domain of consumption, education, etc., by the ruling class, and aiming at seizing or sharing its power, will clearly be more responsive to any criticism of the ruling class and of existing mechanisms for the reproduction of inequalities.

Inversely, it is a new ruling class that analyzes society most directly in terms of decision making. It is much less interested than an old ruling class in the values and principles to be defended; much more interested than an old ruling class in the efficacy of a strategy that will enable it to control society's transformation. As its principal adversary it finds new forces of opposition, concentrating on new problems and new social conflicts, in revolt against the ruling ideology and filled with passionate enthusiasm by the creation of a collective protest action.

The study of Junctions examines social roles, the conduct of the actor legitimately expected by his partner in a specific social activity. The role/expectation-of role dyad is a transcription in terms of social interaction of a norm, and thus an element of order. This functionalists moves away from the domain of sociology if it replaces these networks of relations with conformity or nonconformity to principles, to values, to essences embodied in a sovereign.

The study of decisions devotes itself to relations of influence, to the actor's comparative capacity to modify the behavior of his partner or to be modified by him as to his own behavior. It moves away from the field of sociology when the actors do not seem to belong to the same social whole, when their strategies can thus be analyzed in terms of "game theory,'* a situation met with in varying degrees in the whole study of intersocial relations and, more particularly, international ones.

The study of actions is sociological insofar as it examines structural

Historicity 35

conflicts and above all class conflicts, conflicts over the control and appropriation of society's capacity to transform itself by its work; it ceases to be sociological either if it sets up human values or a human nature in opposition to social domination, or if it conceives of this conflict as escaping from the order of social relations and as being, for example, purely economic.

The study of controls highlights alienation, the contradiction between the dominated actor's conduct corresponding to his situation and the conduct imposed upon him by institutions and socialization in the service of the ruling order. It moves away from the domain of sociology if its fails to recognize the existence of anything other than that order, which it thus supposes to be closed, or of that domination, which it supposes total, and recognizes no other social dynamic than in the dissociation of that internal order and the demands of the environment.

My classification here is of themes, not of works. The sociologist who could be fitted precisely into any one square of this

tabulation would be better defined by an ideological label than by a sociological school. In reality, all sociological thought of any importance represents an effort to integrate a variety of themes, to escape from one ideological vision by replacing the theme it gives priority to into a more general analysis.

It would be just as false to believe that the sociologist can evade the choices indicated here with an appeal to * 'objectivity'' as to enclose him rigidly inside one ideological school. But no progress can be made toward a specifically sociological analysis, defined by its coherence and by the interests it represents, except insofar as we recognize that each and every one of us comes^U^jiowlejjgepf society through a particular door, a door conditioned by our specific social situation, our political choices, our life stories. Everyone must know at the outset where and what his first base is.

What makes it possible to transcend the limitations from which we start is first and foremost a recognition of the unity of sociological reasoning. In other terms, what imprisons sociology within ideology is the refusal to recognize the specificity of a sociological point of view. This pons asinorum can be defined very simply.

The specific task of sociology is to explain social conduct by the nature of the social interactions of which that conduct is one of the terms. Each of our four principal themes leads to sociology because it is studying a type of social interaction. It departs from sociology if it is a pretext for turning to other types of reasoning.

1 shall attempt in this book, like most sociologists, to emerge from one of my "boxes" of sociological analysis with the aim of formulating the elements of a general procedural method. But 1 must start by indicating the cardinal point toward which my face is turned as I stand on the starting line.

36 Chapter One

Itis actionalist sociology that seems to me to be the best point of departure and to provide the most central contribution to general sociology-

This advantage is connected first with the particular features of the most highly industrialized societies. Almost everything in them occurs as the result of decisions or social relations. It is difficult to see how the knowledge of societies undergoing rapid change could assign a central place to an analysis of principles, of values, and of their transmission, since these are things that conjure up societies with a very slow rate of change rather than industrial or postindustrial societies. This observation clearly favors both the sociology of decisions and that of action.

One can in fact view these two as inseparable; each is the others "secret enemy." But the sociology of decisions necessarily identifies itself with the ruling c/uss\ it does so by refusing to look beyond political mechanisms, by refusing to recognize the existence of class relations and a system of domination, by imposing an image of social conduct as self-interested calculation and strategies favoring the decision makers, by turning away from whatever the social order rejects and excludes, by denying the existence of social movements. Actionalist sociology alone places itself directly on the level of social relations, upstream from that of political decisions, and is thus just as aware of what is excluded as of what is effected, of what is dominated as of what dominates.

Actionalist sociology is most directly opposed to the sociology of functions. Nothing could seem further from an analysis of society as an actor guided by values and norms, establishing and controlling his inner order and his relations with the environment, than the analysis of action and the conflicts by means of which society acts upon itself in order to lift itself outside its functioning, toward a beyond in the present, toward objectives that can be cither inside history or outside it.

Actionalist sociology is close to a sociology of controls, since the latter criticizes the sociology of functions by recognizing the power behind the rules and the inequality behind the differentiation. But it stands apart from it insofar as it apprehends the present as being more directly governed by the future or the beyond than it is by the past.

Actionalist sociology is thus the furthest removed from being a description of the social order, from identifying itself with the discourse of society itself whereas the sociology of functions is the nearest to that discourse and most easily confuses sociological analysis with a reconstitution of the image a society forms of itself through its institutions and its dominant ideology.

All of which should give the sociology of action the motive role in the construction of sociological analysis. The sociology of controls teaches how to unmask the social order; the study of decisions throws sociology into the vanguard. Actionalist sociology could link these two kinds of progress and

Historicity 37

construct a critical sociology of the production of society by itself, at the opposite pole to the positivist analysis of society's consumption of itself by its members which defines a functionalist sociology.

But by its very role, actionalist sociology is exposed to greater dangers than are the other currents of sociological analysis. Any critical sociology is in danger of becoming the prisoner of the ideology opposing the ascendancy of the dominant one, since the latter has the advantage of greater instru­mentality, of possessing the "realism'' of any actor actually managing a social whole. The critical sociology runs this risk more directly than a sociology of controls, which is applying its criticism to observation of a consolidated established order. Actionalist sociology, on the contrary, is nearer to the actors and their relations, more tempted in consequence by the dangers of a historicist analysis of the praxis and, more simply, by those of an epic philosophy of history. As a result, the theoretical advantages that I attribute to the procedure or approach 1 am going to expound are never separable from the practical obstacles it encounters. The closer one approaches to action, the more one risks being more rejected, more deceived, and more manipulated by the actors themselves; and the more too one is tempted to confuse the meaning ot the action and the consciousness of the actor.

Which is why the actionalist sociology came late into the field, em­barrassed by its very ambitions and by the resistance it is doomed stir up. At least it is useful to sociology as a whole to hear the objectives that this approach assigns itself, the concepts it employs, and the social phenomena to which it gives form and visibility through its analysis.

One can accept that certain kinds of research are not conscious of the theoretical orientations on which they are based. But sociology is too closely involved in the world of opinions and ideologies easily to dispense with the constant effort to define its approaches and criticize its own limitations.

b. From Functionalist Sociology to Actionalist Sociology

The formation of sociology has accompanied the development of Western societies during the course of their industrialization. Because that industrial­ization was dominated at first by a capitalist bourgeoisie whose economic achievement turned society topsy-turvy, but whose action was subjected to almost no social and political control, those who defined themselves as sociologists were often^reoccupied firsthand foremost with the reestablish-ment of a certain social integration^ and thus of a social control over economic activities. If economic analysis could throw light on the movement of society, was it not the task of sociology to discover the necessary conditions of order? The question that haunted, and which still haunts, what we might call classical sociology is this: On what conditions, through all its transfor-

38 Chapter One

mations and struggles of interests, does a society maintain the unity that enables it to define laws, make its institutions work, form new generations, and manage its internal conflicts?

In Western Europe, this line of questioning developed along with a progressive institutionalization of labor conflicts. The action of trades unions, the introduction of social laws and labor codes helped reintroduce the idea of solidarity to which Durkheim gave an importance that has been shown to be durable. In the United States, a nation formed by the more or less complete integration of successive waves of immigrants, and one that succeeded in riding its greatest crisis, the unity of society—supported in this instance by the tremendous development of its judicial and political institu­tions—appeared to many as the extraordinary fact whose explanation must give sociological thought its direction. In Soviet society, and in countries whose development is controlled by a communist party, it is, rather, the force of an ideological and political system that imposes itself first on the observer and that places the themes of integration, of participation, of citizen training in the forefront. No sociologist thinks that this order and this integration presuppose a perfect agreement between all the parts; conflicts of interest must still exist, insofar as social roles are differentiated and a hierarchy-exists. But classical sociology considers that such conflicts occur within institutional mechanisms which themselves rest upon a body of values and norms. The historic conditions of sociology's formation thus explain why it has more often than not viewed society as an actor exercising a certain control over its activities and organization, defining rights and duties, forms of authority and organization.

This social and intellectual tradition has contributed a great deal to our knowledge of society. But that contribution cannot be isolated and assessed except at the price of a critical analysis, an analysis that will reveal not only how classical sociological thought belongs to a particular, historically defined cultural field, but also its political role.

Parallel to this, the critique we need to make of it is governed by a change in the position of the sociologist himself, and by a change in the political situation. Just as classical sociology developed alongside the progressive institutionalization of the conflicts produced by capitalist industrialization, so any critique of it is inseparable from the appearance of new social rifts, new problems, new social movements.

This renewal of_sociology has two main aspects: first, the increased extent of the area covered by sociological thought, and more broadly by political 4levents." Sociology, like history, confined itself for decades to study of the more "advanced" societies. We are still far too inclined to call someone who studies Africa an Africanist and someone who studies Europe or North America a sociologist. But it is impossible today to go on viewing societies as

Historicity 39

more or less developed, situated neatly inside various stages of growth. They are not like horses in a race, running faster or slower, starting before or after each other. They cannot be understood without some consideration of the relations of domination and dependence that unite them, or without consideration of the movements of transformation and liberation that are animating the dominated peoples.

Second, within the dominant and rich societies themselves, progress in the institutionalization of certain conflicts is being accompanied by new rifts, by problems and movements that are still "savage/* "uncivilized." We are seeing the formation of new conflicts even more than the institutional accommodation of old ones.

Rejections and rebellions breed and increase, forcing us to question ourselves about society with respect not to its functioning and integration but to its orientations and conflicts.

Sociology must pay particular attention to the new forms of power and conflict appearing before its very eyes.

As it progressively learns to recognize the new forms of society's action upon itself—the creation of a programmed society, the industrialization of consumption and information, the extension of the field of social conflicts, the programs of accelerated development and revolutionary transformation of huge nations—sociology must begin to question its classical approach, which consisted in placing the observer in front of a society conceived of as a constituted totality, a monument of culture.

Whether we look upon the national "reality" as fundamental, and the nation therefore as a personage, whether we attach more importance to the juridical rules that organize social life and to the moral principles behind them, and lastly, whether we are looking for economic systems behind political or cultural unities, we are inclined tci see society as an entity, because our most usual experience is that neither we ourselves individually, nor the groups of which we are a part, have the capacity to change the rules of the social game, the conditions of economic life, or the cultural conventions.

This type of representation is not favorable to sociology in principle. In order to indicate the distance that separates society from the actors living in it, it tends to resort to a historical, juridical, or economic explanation of social facts./What we might call classical or functionalist sociology has nevertheless helped to maintain this kind of approach while introducing into it the more elementary requirements of sociological analysis. It has claimed the right, with Durkheim, to explain the social by nothing other than the social. But it has also, and as a consequence, presented society as a system organized around its values and its needs for integration, for conflict management, or for adaptation to internal or external changes.

40 Chapter One

It is this image of society as actor, as sovereign, taking advice and meting out justice, uttering the law and making war, educating its children and punishing deviants, that we must eliminate once and for all. We must overthrow the old conception of society, which society itself is unable to make use of, in its practice, other than as an ideological holding operation. I shall indicate here three important aspects of this functionalist representation that I believe must be urgently eliminated from sociologists' thought.

1. The notion to which classical sociology always returns is that of values. But all forms of research into social interactions lead us away from values.

Must 1 recall that political sociology and organizations theory have shown us that decision systems—at least in our type of society—are not the application of principles but the result of transactions, a fact that recognizes a certain heterogeneity of the interests confronting one another? It is of strategies and interests that we ought to speak in this area, not of values. If we consider the functioning of organizations themselves, this observation is even more self-evident; conduct is oriented within them both by technical constraints and by relations of power or, more generally, by social relations. The nearer one approaches concrete social experience, the more the apparent unity of values explodes: on the one hand a society's instrumentality, in other words the internal characteristics of its productive forces, on the other, the social and political relations that orient the system of production and the manage­ment of society.

Which is why we cannot say that authority in the state and in the modern firm is functional, rational-legal, which is to say, in Weber s sense, bureaucratic. We need only consult the observations of the sociology of work to see immediately that rationalization is in no way separable from a social power whose intervention manifests itself in relations of authority that are neither entirely rational nor entirely legal. The notion of bureaucratic authority masks the gap and sometimes the contradiction that exists between a technique and a power. The notion involved is an ideological one. It is not merely isolating a certain order of phenomena within the field of obser­vation, which would be legitimate; it is substituting the unity of a discourse for a set of relations, tensions, and contradictions. Organizational sociology did not achieve any decisive progress until it had rid itself of this type of discourse.

What then is a society's system of values? On the highest level it is the unity of a discourse held by the ruling classes or by the ruling political forces of a society, a discourse whose function is to identify forms of social organization with technical activity, by combining both within the notion of values. Social power presents itself then as the spirit or soul of society, and claims that all social conflicts are played out within a general consensus.

Historicity 41

The system of values is nothing other than a more or less coherent ideology, always bound up with social categories possessing a certain power, which is to say the capability of defining the activities and gratifications of society's members as a whole in terms of their own objectives and representations.

But this ideology does not completely determine the categories of social practice. It exercises a dominion over what may be termed society's discourse; it does not provide an account of all its aspects. For that discourse is also a debate and a discussion; the voice of the popular classes can be heard in them, however faintly, as can that of interest groups with access to the political system, that of the "professionals" who are creating a rhetoric rather than an ideology, and so on.

It is essential to recognize that social practice as a whole—even when isolated from the complexity of a social formation—forms an uncontrolled, unintegrated whole, and thus represents the relations of the classes, struggles for political influence, and all other types of social interactions, despite the effort at unification maintained in the name of values, principles, or traditions, by the ruling class and its ideologists. For a system of values unifying social practice to exist it is necessary that society should be totally dominated, politically and culturally, by a sovereign, whether it be Capital or Central Committee.

2. It is also an ideological operation that makes possible the assertion that a society is governed by a coherent body of values. Are the industrialized societies universalist while the rest are particularist? A totally arbitrary assertion. Nationalisms are indeed broader particularisms than those re­stricted in number and extent by attachment to a community; does this mean they are a form of universalism? The ethnocentrism here is self-evident, leading to an opposition of traditional and modern societies as though the former were "inferior" to the latter. It could be shown, taking each of the pattern-variables Talcott Parson defines (notably in Toward a General Theory of Action, Harvard University Press, 1951, and in Working Papers in the Theory of Action, Free Press, 1953) that every society experiences conduct both affective and affective-neutral, specific and diffuse, particu­larist and universalist, instrumental and consummatory, self-oriented and collectivity-oriented.

These notions enable one to classify conduct, but they cannot be used to define the totality of a society's cultural orientations, and even less to describe the evolution of societies. A society is not a ship steered by a pilot toward a known destination.

3. This double reduction, of society to a central actor, and of actors' orientations to a unified system of values, leads to a third limitation and

42 Chapter One

distortion of sociological analysis: itrefuses to step outside the area illuniined by the institutions. What is not in conformity with the rules of those institutions is termed disorganization, marginality, deviance, anomie. At no point does it occur to this sociology to topple the official image of society and challenge the established order in the name of all that does not conform to it. Social movements are merely manifestations of some kind of malfunction or unfortunate discrepancy in the social organization. And even Robert Merton, who is much more aware than most of the dangers inherent in an excessively rigid functionalism, in his paradigm of social conduct (Social Theory and Social Structure, Free Press, 1957, pp. 131-94), does not go beyond recognition of discrepancies between acceptance of ends and acceptance of means in a given society, which leaves all conduct that rejects both ends and means, or rather power and organization, in an undetermined no-man's-land. This positivist sociology identifies itself with the rules of social life. Just as knowledge of society was long delayed in France by the authority of the state or church, just as it is practically impossible in dictatorships, can it not also be limited, as in the United States particularly, by the authority of norms less linked to a central power, more interiorized, more moral in their nature, so that more often than not sociology is placing itself inside the established order, or even making its own contribution to the building of the wall that, internally as well as externally, protects the "civilized" against the "savages"?

c. Calculation and Mask

This clear conscience enjoyed by classical sociology is now under attack from two different sides: on the one hand by a sociology more responsive to social change and the mechanisms of decision making that orient it; on the other, by a critical sociology that draws attention to the presence in the social order of a construction serving the purposes not of values but of the dominant class. 1 am returning here, having dealt with a sociology of values, to the role played by a sociology of decisions and a sociology of controls. What 1 am trying to do is to follow with greater precision the path leading from classical sociology to actionalist sociology via the two other currents of sociology whose positive contributions and inadequacies must both be pointed out.

1. In his early work, such as the Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim (as A. Pizzorno has pointed out in his "Lecture actuelle de Durkheim" in Archives europe'ennes de sociologie, 1963, pp. 1-36) is at times near to a line of thought, more strongly developed by English radicalism, that has today rediscovered a great vitality. According to this line of thought, social orderjs^ not achieved by integration into a system of values but by the efficient

Historicity 43

functioning of representative institutions: they make it possible to eliminate the 4tpathological forms" of the division of labor. Society is not oriented by values; nor even by the requirements of its own integration; it evolves pragmatically, in terms of negotiations and transactions established between various group interests. Political and social laws, collective c^mtracts and agreements define limited and temporary equilibria, and ensure the best adaptation possible of the society to the constant changes of the environ­ment. It is useless and even dangerous to appeal to values, to principles that manifest both rejection of change and the maintenance of one type or another of absolutism. The idealism of values must be replaced by a pragmatic rationalism. This is a lib era/ vision, whose principal merit is that of being a doctrine of change But which seems to me to confuse two orders of phenomena that ought to be kept distinct.

The fact that in certain modern societies the field of negotiations and representative institutions is widening does not permit us to conclude that a society is a political market, that power is no more than influence, and that no structural limits exist to negotiations and to the pressures exercised by group interests.

The state of a society is not entirely the result of its decisions; all claims are not negotiable; beyond the political processes, and acting as limits to them, there exist both orientations defining a cultural and social field which is qualitatively different from all others, and also relations of domination and power. There is no society that is not like an iceberg; the visible part, that of awareness, of decisions, of transactions, is smaller than the invisible part, that of the impossible, of the forbidden, of repression, of domination. No mechanism of planning, of conscious harmonization, of transaction can integrate all the conflicts into a whole.

Analysis centered on integratipn reduces society to its forms of socia[ organization, of division of labor, and simultaneously transforms differen­tiation, specialization, and hierarchization into an order that can have no meaning other than the determined maintenance of the established order, masking the reality of jpower, of inequality, of repression. A purely "political" sociology on the other hand, centered on the study of negotiations and decisions, dissolves social structure in social change, thus affirming continuity within change and deliberately neglecting the qualitative jumps that must occur, in one form or another, in the course of any long-term change process.

This "political" sociology marks an important advance on functionalist sociology. Because it investigates societies that are in a process of rapid change, which they are attempting to harness, it is no longer directed like the classical school toward research into the conditions of an order that it might still be able to recapture, despite the upheavals of capitalist industriali-

44 Chapter One

zation. It no longer conceives of society as based upon principles and upon agencies that teach those principles and cause them to be respected; it defines it in terms of its operations and thus follows a method of permitting a direct analysis of the mechanisms of society's functioning.

In practice, however, it replaces the appeal to values and social integration with identification with the riders and their representation of society. Already in the nineteenth century the liberal ideologists were wanting all workers to behave like entrepreneurs, seeking their own profits, taking risks and initiatives, conforming with economic rationality, which came to the same thing as denying the relations of domination exercised by the entrepre­neur over the wage earner.

Today, in the same way, by centering attention on decision making, one inevitably sets up an opposition between those capable of making decisions, choices, deliberations, negotiations, and those who are tradition-bound, rigid, encumbered by habits and principles and can appear only as a mass that must have an elite to lead them toward change.

This sociology reduces the functioning of society to the interaction of actors, in much the same way as historical studies have gone on for so long telling us about its kings and captains, its saints and heroes, leaving the vast "inactive" multitude in the shadow.

2. Diametrically, and usefully, opposed to this interactionism we find the critical sociology of social controls, which sees in the categories of social practice not the formal expression of values and norms but the maintenance of inequalities and of power. This sociology, faithful to the Marxist critique of the "fetishism*' of economic categories, recognizes in those domains apparently the furthest removed from social domination and production the stamp of the dominant ideology and its work of legitimizing existing inequalities and privileges. This is an indispensable method of procedure without which presociological notions inevitably creep back: appeals to the "natural" differences between men, to the "natural" criteria of development or payment, to the independence of cultural facts in relation to the social "frameworks" into which they are inserted, and so on.

But can we remain content with seeing society simply as a system of domination without finding ourselves caught once more between two equally deplorable solutions?

The first consists in appealing against all that is institutionalized and organized to a human nature that reveals itself solely in spontaneity and constant transcendence of the established order. This is an idea always ready to surface in a sociology of which it in fact constitutes the negation: social organization, being nothing other than the product of power and ifs

Historicity 45

ideology, can be destroyed by rebellion, thus making it possible to return to or to achieve a society in which exchange would be replaced by use, the instituted by the instituting, the pursuit of the signs of wealth and status by the satisfaction of man's basic needs. No matter what the tone in which these themes are presented, they are never expressing anything but nostalgia for a social philosophy whose splendor cannot conceal the fact that it is the very thing sociology must transcend in order to exist.

The second solution leads back to the functionalism one had supposed defeated. This sociological school, which talks about domination, could more simply use the term stratification. Why accuse a ruling class's ideology, it asks, when all that is needed is to recognize the dominion of values and norms? That differentiation and hierarchization exist in all domains of social organization has never been denied by anyone; why conclude from an observation of their presence that society is ruled by a single class, about which everyone constantly talks without ever defining it in terms of its decisions, its interests, its productive role?

Just as the sociology of decisions dissolves the system in the actors and their relations, the sociology of controls dissolves the actors in the system, which can be acceptable, if it is solely a matter of understanding how a system maintains itself, but which ceases to be so if one is trying to explain its nature and its reason for being, how it is produced and how it operates.

d. Toward an Actionalist Sociology

In conclusion, we must recognize that it is much more difficult to find a way out of functionalist sociology—without leaving sociology altogether—than is supposed by all those who raise such a hue and cry against it. Which leads us to take another look at our outline of the main currents of sociological analysis given earlier in this chapter.

The sociology of decisions and the sociology of controls are less orien- \ ^ tations of sociology comparable with a functionalist or actionalist sociology y) . than islands in the middle of the river that flows between the other two. At every moment sociology has to make a choice between what one might term a sociology of collective consciousness, which is first and foremost a sociology of order and its maintenance, and an actionalist sociology, which is also that of historicity and social relations. f

The sociology of decisions is already a sociology of action, but it is still a sociology of order in that it recognizes the open market as the best of all possible worlds and defines social actors according to their place within the social organization instead of trying to find out how the latter was produced by the relations between the actors.

The sociology of controls seems to break with the clear conscience of

r

46 Chapter One

classical sociology, but is no more than the opposition of His Functionalist Majesty, depriving itself of every possible means of understanding the production of the social order.

However, both these sociologies, by their very opposition, pose an in­soluble problem to functionalist sociology. For the latter, actor and system are inseparable. The actor plays a role defined by the system's norms and values.

The sociology of controls tells us that actors do not play the role they think they are playing, that the actors are masked, the dice loaded, the social order a comedy that always ends in trickery.

The sociology of decisions also shatters the classical image of the system; it replaces the absolute by the relative, the immutable by change, values by transactions.

How are we to provide a simultaneous account of these images of social life: on the one hand, a society that produces itself through its changes and its decisions, empirically, and under the guidance of a ruling elite; on the other, a social order that is the concealing mask of a systematic domination and its accompanying repression?

We are bound to advance, in conjunction, two apparently contradictory propositions: (Da society is a whole defined and delimited by certain social and cultural orientations that are not the property of one category of actors but the field of social relations, and (2) a society is a whole, composed of social relations, and is produced by the actors through their forms of conflict and cooperation.

These two propositions are only compatible if, instead of conceiving of society as an order, we recognize that it is defined by its historicity and hot by its functioning, by its capacity to produce itself and not by its organs of reproduction. For this first step makes it possible to dissociate the orienta­tions of historicity from the values of the social order and to drive class relations and domination between them like a wedge. This is why the sociology of values must be rejected as forcefully as possible. The weakness of the sociology of decisions and the sociology of controls is that they do not question this image of society as a functional system, market or ideology,

' held over from functionalist thought. Historicity is not a set of values, for it defines orientations that are not put

to work and do not become socially functional except via the relations between the classes struggling for control of them.

Society is neither pure class domination nor an order wholly in the service of values. On that doubly negative assertion and the positive propositions it

! implies, the whole of this book is built. Social practice always refers simultaneously to class domination and the orientations of historicity. The sociology of decisions must suppress the system in order to understand the

Historicity 47

actors; the sociology of controls must suppress the actors in order to display the system. But the first reintroduces the system by identifying it with the | interests of the elite, and the second leads us back to functionalist analysis of \ the system by its inability to analyze class relations. Let us end this dilemma: 1 historicity is the stake of class relations; it does not govern social organization ' without being stamped with the dominion of the dominant class; but the dominated are not reduced to mere extras in a performance put on by the ruling class. There are enough exclusions, interdicts, and repressions, but enough rifts also, enough debates and social movements, for us to discern easily enough, behind the established order and its reproduction, the class struggles through which historicity is transformed into social organization.

And immediately we find that the opposition set up between a sociology of order and a sociology of movment has been transcended. The sociology of movement, isolated from that of order, leads back to a sociology of decisions, while the sociology of controls is enclosed within the social order. Historicity is not pure movement; it is not a force of change but a constitution of a field of colfective experience. Likewise, the action of each class is not a simple will toward change but a struggle against a certain order.

The very nature of industrialized societies, as of all societies engaged in a conscious effort of development, purges social analysis of all recourse J o essences, to values.

The error would be to believe that this disappearance of the social order's metasocial warrants must lead to a conception of society as a simple network of decisions, changes, or operations aimed at the maintenance and reproduction of order. Society must indeed be conceived of as a system, but one whose specificity is that of being capable of historicity, of the production of its own condition of functioning on the basis of orientations, creating a model of knowledge, of accumulation, and of prehension of creativity. Such is the central idea of the sociology I term actionalist: society is not reducible to its functioning or to its adaptation to an environment; it produces itself, so that there exists a fundamental tension between a society's historicity and the functioning or reproduction of a collectivity, of a "social formation." which manifests historicity but which is also a particular historical unity and a social organization functioning in accordance with the norms and require­ments of an internal coherence.

I am not certain that my placing a sociology of historical action in relation to other currents of sociological analysis defines it any more clearly. Some may even be irritated by an approach that seems to be putting all the others in their places while presenting itself as an ultimate synthesis.

I hope no one will construe the spirit in which these pages have been written as one of conquest. I am simply trying to define an approach and to show that it corresponds to what is most specific in sociological analysis. But

48 Chapter One

what may constitute its interest certainly constitutes its weakness. Ultimately there would be some justice in answering that this actionalist sociology of mine has no proper content of its own, that by dint of transcending all the others it has reduced itself to existing in those undefined no-man's-lands that serve to separate other particular but well-founded modes of analysis one from another. Without being as pessimistic as that, I do recognize that it is more reasonable to look at how the parts of a society—or the parts of a discourse—fit together than to seek out behind the established order this interdependence of tensions and conflict by which I define the self-pro­duction of society.

And yet, how can one help saying that it is time now, in a day when the present is controlled more by the future than by the past, to give priority to the way in which a society produces itself rather than to the means by which it reproduces itself; and how, at the same time, can one fail to take a position against a sociology of decisions or of "planning" that is not just a set of often remarkable achievements but above all the ideological weapon of the new ruling class?

What I am certainly not trying to do here is to capture the whole of sociology in some imaginary manual, its separate chapters written for the most part by different authors, none of them knowing what the finished work would be, and unintentionally lending their authority to an overall concep­tion to which they do not subscribe. Put much more simply, I am simply saying that when defining a specific procedural approach one must recognize openly that it will conflict with others.

Moreover, I hope that my candor will have the double advantage of provoking argument and providing an antidote to the laziness of all those who call themselves sociologists without ever asking themselves what soci­ology means.

D. The Birth of Sociology

a. The Invisible Hand Withdraws

Sociology could not come into being until the point at which a society was formed with a cultural model that was entirely ''practical" and excluded all recourse, all upward reference to a transcendent order, to what I have termed metasocial warrants for the social order. The European industrial revolution in the nineteenth century marked a first stage in the appearance of sociology. The world of essences was under attack from society's greatly increased capacity to act upon itself and change itself. But industrial society, as formed then, still does not appear as the actor of its own transformation. It stiH refers upward to free enterprise, to the market and its laws, to an invisible

Historicty 49

hand that recalls a God or a sovereign. And those who denounce the capitalist profit lying behind the market are referring themselves in their turn to labor as creative energy, whose progress enters into contradiction with the domination of the bourgeoisie. Capitalist industrial society saw the birth of economic analysis, but sociology could not come into being until growth appeared as a mobilization of social resources, as a set of decisions and no longer as submission to laws, and until, also, society's control over itself was manifested in the politics of economic and social intervention as well as in the possibility of totalitarian regimes, or again in revolutions capable of over­throwing a society completely. In our own century, sociology can at last assert its existence.

Sociology, which begins by constructing the concept of historicity, thereby makes it possible to go beyond historicism. By conceiving the "meaning" of a society as its work on itself, the construction of an experience, actionalist sociology frees itself from all recourse to the meaning of history and continues the great intellectual transformation begun by Marx when he broke with positivism. // refuses to explain the social by the metasocial and refuses also to regard society as a machine defined by the principles of its functioning. Once again, both idealism and naturalism must be avoided. Society cannot be reduced to the interrelation of its elements; but if it acts upon itself by means of knowledge, accumulation, and its cultural model, in a word, by means of its historicity, this is not because it is governed by the designs of providence, by the progress of enlightenment, or by the emergence of the national state, but simply through its own work, its own capacity to construct a "state of nature" and a type of social organization. It is because the industrialized societies today have a theoretically unlimited capacity for transforming themselves, and the possibility of totally destroying themselves, that we can no longer allow priority to a sociology of order. Sociology is no longer organized around values but around social relations; its investigations are concerned less with the laws that control its functioning than with the process of action.

But to reduce the industrialized societies to their historicity would be as false as to reduce primitive societies to their functioning. What makes the acceleration in social changes most apparent is the ever more rapid dissolution of what were once termed "institutions." Jurists and admini­strators must recognize that law is no longer conceived of as the expression of sovereignty and the general interest. Civilizations—and nations too—are discovering that they no longer have a * 'spirit.''

Men are becoming actors, are being wrenched free from the dominion of rules, of imperatives, of customs. What ^disappearing therefore is the image of society as a family house with thick walls, a home where the fire glows in the hearth, lighting up the pictures of ancestors hanging on the walls, in

50 Chapter One

which-a culture and set forms of social relations are handed on from generation unto generation.

In place of all the humanisms, we now see emerging an ever-growing historicity in confrontation with man's natural being.

We are discovering simultaneously that man is part of nature and that he is different from the rest of living beings. We are lowering the barriers that once separated human thought, animal behavior, and machines; but at the same time we are grasping man's sociogenetic capacity.

Nature and antinature. We are both. And rather than throwing our whole weight into one side of the scale or the other it is better to recognize that the essential is the union of these two aspects of the human reality. In this way an image of society is being created different from all those that have gone before, the images that always defined society by its principles, by its essence, or by its place in an evolution seen as a bearer of meaning.

Sociology has no need to demand the whole of the social sciences1 territory for itself. It asserts its right only in its dialogue with that grouping of the natural sciences that fall under the heading of anthropology. One can no more identify the two than separate them.

Nor can one lose sociology in the model of knowledge that created biology. Or isolate it from that model, since that would be to give comfort to its old idealist forms.

Sociology is a science of man, even though it has too often in the past reinforced and justified man's submission to metasocial warrants for the social order. It has looked for the laws to explain social action outside that action; it has subjected human behavior to divine laws, to the laws of princes, to market laws. And in doing so it has jurnejllts back on its principal task: that of refusing to view any social fact as a thing, rejecting the veryjdeajtf social situation, and of revealing, behind practice and behind discourse, the action of society on itself through the creation of a field of historicity and class conflicts.

This transformation of sociological analysis comes into conflict with obstacles that are less intellectual than political. The further the capacity for action of the ruling classes extends, the more strongly they impose their ideology, which presents their action as positive and rational, and which consequently identifies and fuses together the direction of social change, the results of political deliberations, social controls as a whole, and the internal coherence of groupings of means. Society is presented as being an enterprise, an organization that is ensuring its own growth by combining mechanisms of adaptation to a changing environment with the maintenance of its own integration.

The ruling classes always have a rationalizing and integrating vision of society. Actionalist sociology on the contrary, because it refuses to identify

Historicity 51

society with its rulers, because it recognizes the central role of class conflict, is constantly aware of what social order represses and destroys, as well as of the interference of power in the social organization.

Whether they recognize the fact or not, social adversaries are speaking the language of sociology for the first time.

The rulers know that their role is no longer that of mastering nature but that of managing organizations, networks of social relations—that the efficiency of the economy depends upon the capacities for foresight, decision, adaptation, and innovation possessed by complex ensembles. The days are over when an organization—factory, office, regiment, university, hospital— was a tool in the hands of a leader and encountered no other (recognized) problem than the resistance of an adversary or raw material. Wc are no longer in the world of engineers and entrepreneurs but in that of managers and technocratsT

On the other hand, in the mass of dependents a new awareness of truly social problems is appearing: whether it is a matter of worker migration, relations between the sexes or age groups, the conditions of urban life, the forms of authority and, more widely, of the power to orient and direct change, it isjn sociajjerms more directly than in juridical or economici terms that claims and rejections are expressed.

The interest of the ruling class lies in fostering the belief that this change implies an increase in rationality and a growing autonomy of the various problems posed by the difficulties of adapting to a society in a state of rapid change. But it is a poor_answer to this propaganda to imprison oneself in outworn analyses and to believe that social problems are not serious except when they can be reduced to economic interests or to confrontations over the form of institutions.

It is in sociological terms, and therefore in terms of social relations and the action society directs upon itself, that the new forms of social domination, of exclusion and repression, of conflicts and social movements, must be understood. The attempt to do so meets with great resistance, however, especially in a country like France, where the features characteristic of industrial or preindustrial societies remain relatively marked, so that it seems audacious to insist on trends and needs not yet experienced by all. But must sociology wait for a type of society to be already on the wane before daring to examine it?

b. Beyond Historicity?

This representation of sociology and the social conditions of its formation does, however, invite one criticism that must be given due consideration. Is it not, despite all its protestations, an extreme form of nineteenth-century historicism? Is it not culturally bound up with the specific experience of

52 Chapter One

societies involved in an exceptional phase of growth? And is it not in consequence already obsolete, now that we stand at the beginning of a post industrial society in which the search for new equilibria has once more become essential, after the upheavals introduced by a phase of economic development that must now decline, since it is threatening the biological conditions necessary for societies to exist at all? Is it not time to recognize that the most advanced countries economically are about to enter into a posthistorical phase?

I do not dismiss that hypothesis. It is possible to imagine a new type of society, one preoccupied with its equilibria, with its functioning, its inte­gration, and whose investments would be absorbed by the conditions of survival or "happiness" and no longer by those of growth.

Nothing permits us to say that societies will be more and more "his­torical," and perhaps we are indeed witnessing the end of a long period that has been dominated by accumulation, capital, the book, and what American students have called "the dictatorship of the ego."

But this new naturalism, while setting itself up in opposition to the production ethic characteristic of industrial society, remains just as far as that ethic from an acceptable conception of the relations between man and nature. Previous societies have bequeathed to us the image of man domi­nating and "civilizing" nature. All the metasocial warrants of the social order share in this very general representation: man rules woman, the mind the body, technique habit, the intelligence the emotions, and so on. One could continue the list indefinitely. A spiritual principle is being imposed on the material world, which is the world of disorder, the immediate, the variable.

Setting these images in opposition to that of a human society belonging to the natural world, subject to its equilibria and its "laws," means maintaining, indeed reinforcing, the opposition between man and nature. But in this case it is the ecological balance that is good and it is in the human that one must look for the diabolical, for the forces destructive of order.

Our entry into postindustrial society, in an environment dominated by complex organizations and technology, ought not to give new life to the Promethean myth of industrial society, and less still replace it with a naturalizing of man. On the contrary, it ought to impress on us the idea that human society, whatever it may be, constructs its own environment, that any environment is technical and cultural, that man is nature, yes, but with his own special characteristics, chief among which is just this capacity to construct his relation with the environment and his social organization instead of merely receiving them. The opposition between spiritualism and naturalism must be replaced by a sociology that is concerned first and foremost with the work of human societies.

We ought rather to look upon the new naturalism as the counterpart of the

Historicity 53

ruling class's Utopia. The latter reduces society's orientations to its func­tioning. The contrary Utopia counters the dominion of the ruling classes with an appeal to identity, to expression, to pleasure. The very opposition of these two representations invites one to view them as an aspect of the class conflict, of the clash between their respective Utopias in a society that devotes a larger part of its product to investment than any other society in history and which, in this sense, is the very furthest from being a consumer society.

It is because the new conflicts and the new social movements corre­sponding to postindustrial society are still not strongly organized that the "naturalist" Utopias are so conspicuous. Was it not the same in the early ^ days of industrial society, when economic liberalism and Utopian socialism confronted one another before the organization of the labor movement, before recognition was given to the importance of the class struggle and the nature of industrial capitalism, beyond "modernization"?

The great cultural upheaval that became more visible as soon as it reached the ruling classes marks the exhaustion of industrial society and its replace­ment not by a society of equilibrium hut by a postindustrial society in which society's capacity for action upon itself is making a new leap forward, and in" which it is learning to define TtselTas a whole!"imposed 1)7Systems and actions. Sociology must certainly criticize itself in order to move beyond the modes of analysis specific to industrial society, but the most important thing isloshout out loud and clear that the pains sociology is suffering from at the moment are not its death throes but its birth pangs.

This book is intended to be a critical reflection on the practice of sociology, critical first of all in that it attempts to divert sociological work from outworn or secondary paths in order to steer it toward the essential, and secondly in that it is contesting the dominion of the socially dominant and politically hegemonic forces over sociological knowledge. But these criticisms occur within a defense of sociological knowledge, for societies with a strong^ historicity can and must know themselves and know other societies through the use of sociology.

Never has historicity been more the dominant mode of the existence of societies than it is today. Never, in consequence, has a sociology of historical action, of development, of class interaction, been more necessary.

E. From Orientations to Practice

The study of historical action is not all there is to sociology. It is only the first step in the analysis, but one that governs its general direction.

We must at the same time follow the movement that leads from a society's historical experjexice to its system of organization and social control, and also constantly remember the presence of historical action and its problems at the functional level of the various aspects of the social organization. Our analysis

54 Chapter One

must therefore be governed by two principles: the differentiation of several levels of analysis within the social reality and the hierarchization cf those, levels.

a. Institutional Processes

If the study of historical action is not in itself the whole of sociology, this is in the first place because it does not examine concrete social wholes. To speak of baronial society as a social and cultural system does not dispense one from examining France or England as kingdoms and from studying the func­tioning of their institutions within those political units. The second state of sociological analysis, after the study of historical action, is therefore analysis of the institutional system, which may also be called the political system. The new element introduced here is the existence of an organized system of social control. The internal structure of the field of historical action is transformed at this point into a set of social mechanisms by means of which the rules of collective activity are defined.

If one puts the body of values and norms that define a culture and a society at the center of one's analysis, institutions emerge as the formal expression of its norms, and sociology must ask itself questions about the spirit of laws and regulations. Inversely, one can defend a purely contractual conception of institutions, presenting them as limited and temporary contracts made between social groups each seeking to maximize its advantages at the lowest cost.

In contrast to these two conceptions, the institutional system appears to me to transform historical action and the social conflicts that develop within it into a body of decisions and laws, while at the same time possessing a certain autonomy based both on the non-fit between a field of historicity and a political collectivity and also on that collectivitys internal problems of integration and adaptation. One must conceive institutions here, not as organized social life, but as the mechanisms for arriving at legitimate decisions within a political unity. This is why I overlap the terms institutional and political, thereby indicating that the specific role of the institutional system is to combine the unity of political management and the representation of divergent or conflicting social interests.

The institutional or political integration of a society is always limited. First by the domination that sets advance limits on all deliberations and decisions, and second by nonnegotiable protests. The output of the political system is the separation of the legal from the illegal, and thus the maintenance of what is looked upon as order and also the repression of whatever is rejected as outside that order.

b. Social Organization

This definition of the institutional or political system leads to a third level of analysis, that of social organization or, if you prefer, of organizations. This

Historicity 55

deals with groups in which we find, on the one hand, the exercise of an authority that defines rules of conduct and possesses means of ensuring social integration and of sanctioning deviances and, on the other, the application of those orientations of historical action and class relations that characterize the type of society in which the organizations occur.

It is essential here not to identify what is a level of analysis with a concrete reality. An industrial enterprise is certainly^ arT b^phTzatTon-, one "witKin which authority is exercised and roles and statuses, mechanisms of reward and punishment are defined. But it can possess an institutional system in which both board and unions enter into negotiation for the taking of certain decisions. And above all the enterprise is an essential element in the historical action of an industrial society; it is the locus within which the forces of production and class relations are developed. Industrial sociology has devoted the greater part of its efforts to studying the relations between these three levels of analysis. Certain demands made by workers relate to the position of individuals or groups within the organizations, while others challenge the political and institutional system of the enterprise itself, and still others are a manifestation of the conflict between classes whose existence and nature cannot be defined except at the level of the field of historicity. This example shows clearly the hierarchy of the levels of analysis, and at the same time their relative autonomy within a single concrete unit of obser­vation.

The great interest of research into organizations—whether industrial, administrative, scientific, or some other kind—derives precisely from the fact that it permits a study of the interaction between historicity* the political process, and organizational functioning, both as it concerns the social slfuaTion and the actors.

The same type of analysis can be applied to even larger realities than organizations, as for instance to collectivities such as a city or a nation.

This plurality of levels of analysis within a single collectivity has two consequences. The first and most obvious is that the totality of social conduct observable in the functioning of the social organization cannot be analyzed exclusively with the aid of concepts devised purely for the study of social organization.

Sociological terminology uses the concept of role improperly. It must be recognized that only a limited part of social conduct involves roles. There are no set roles except insofar as the interacting actors accept the norms defining their mode of interaction. Such is the case with the technical division of labor. We talk of a team when this distribution of roles within a group is recognized, accepted, and justified by the positive value accepted as per­taining to the performance of a communal task. The images that spring to mind immediately are those of the surgical or medical team, or again that of a ship's or plane's crew. One might equally think of a school, insofar as it appears as an agency of socialization, which presupposes that the knowledge

56 Chapter One

and attitudes transmitted in the teaching process are accepted by both teachers and pupils as something given.

But these examples themselves demonstrate the limitation of this type of reasoning. The roles depend also on some method of assigning them, and on the mode in which authority is exercised. Consequently the type of partici­pation in the decision-making system determines certain attitudes with regard to the roles that cannot themselves be defined in terms of role. The importance of informal organization, which is at the same time marginal to formal organization and against it, shows the reality of this "political" conduct, which is no longer governed by reference to common norms but is in fact an element in the challenging of those norms, by withdrawal, argument and negotiation, or revolt.

Deeper still, the members of an organization may challenge its power system. Such is the nature of the class struggle: it manifests within the social organization conflict whose reason for being resides in the field of historicity, and thus at its most ''abstract" level.

This leads us directly to the second observation. The social control that is exercised within an organization is not the direct expression of cultural values and social norms but the refraction of class interaction through the institutional system.

Power is the crystallization, at the level of organizations, of social interactions whose reason for being resides on previous levels of analysis. It is both an instrument of integration and an instrument of constraint.

In consequence, much behavior that appears dysfunctional if one places oneself at the level of the organization itself, acquires a very different meaning if it is linked to political struggles or to changes in a society's historicity and class relations.

A strike, or more generally a movement of opposition or protests, disorganizes a collectivity, has an adverse effect on its "normal" working, but can be an important element of historical action or within the political system. Nothing could demonstrate more clearly the autonomy of the levels of analysis than these disparities between the meaning that the same behavior can have at each level. These disparities cannot be overcome by any vague appeal to a general rationality or to a fundamental line of social development.

c. Hierarchization and Autonomy of the Levels of Analysis

Thus the study of social organization always has two aspects. On the one hand it bears on systems of means, on techniques. It examines

the interdependence of those means and the mechanisms that regulate equilibria and changes in the working of those systems.

Historicity 57

Consequently it recognizes the existence of social conduct linked to the place the actor occupies within a differentiated and hierarchized organi­zation. Concepts such as anomie, differential receptivity to socialization, relative deprivation, role conflict, latent function, to mention only a few of the most often employed, all belong to this type of analysis and represent the positive aspect of functionalism.

On the other hand it must consider the rules of organization and the mechanisms governing its functioning as the expression of political relations inscribed within a social domination. This complementarity of the two viewpoints is already apparent at the level of the political institutions. The latter are at the same time an instrument for the reinforcement of a social domination—which masks the private character of its interests behind the generality and objectivity of laws and constitu lions—and the locus of negotiations and the management of change. They often possess sufficient autonomy for the political forces not to be purely and simply a translation of social interests and for the political system to institutionalize change. This autonomy can become pathological if the political system is no longer interpreting the great social debates and conflicts; it can on the other hand vanish, if the gap between ruling class and political system is replaced by their fusion into the omnipotence of an absolutist state. France is a curious example of a national society that has experienced, and still experiences, a perpetual see-sawing between these two extreme situations, so that its political institutions ha\e the simultaneous appearance of an absurd and irrelevant game, not only to Ihe revolutionary movements but also to those in power, and of being reduced to the apparatus of a state that is reinforcing and hardening the action of a ruling class either too weak or too entangled in a defense of the past to act for itself.

At the social organization level this duality is much more marked, since it is that between power and techniques, but it can also happen that it leads either to a dissociation or to a fusion. There is dissociation when bureaucrati­zation appears, which is to say when the internal functioning of an organization is no longeroriented by adaptation to the environment or by the problems and conflicts of historicity.

Fusion occurs, on the other hand, when the techniques are merely the mask of ideology and power. This is more likely to happen in organizations responsible for cultural reproduction, and particularly within the educa­tional system.

Both institutions and organizations are thus dependent on the field of historicity, which penetrates in this way right down into the social organi­zation. But again, at both the organizational and the institutional level, actions occur intended to isolate these levels from the dominion of histori­city, to achieve either a pure adaptation of a political society to its changing

58 Chapter One

environment, or a pure reproduction of the social organization. The functioning of any level of the social reality outside the field of historicity is always subjecTto a tension between the intervention of historicity and. in opposition to it, of social reproduction.

d. Conflictive Creation

The sociology of functions and the sociology of controls are thus warring partners. They both share an emphasis on social integration, one being positivist and accepting the discourse of society about itself, the other being critical and seeing the unity of society not in consensus but in domination. The first ought to be contested the more vigorously, since it ignores the problems of historicity and those of the political system, reducing (hem to the existence of a supposedly coherent and accepted code of conduct. But the second is in danger of leading to an excessively schematic and thus, in its turn, ideological analysis by neglecting the autonomy of techniques ancf, above all, by failing to recognize that these techniques are the projection of historicity itself, of the production of society by knowledge and the cultural model, onto the level of organizations. Society is not closed, is not completely integrated either by values or by power. At the level of organizations themselves, the dialectic of historicity and class conflicts is being pursued in the very praxis of social movements. What determines a concrete society is its field of historicity. Social relations cannot be understood other than within an experience, which is not a point or a segment on a line of development but a whole, qualitatively different from others, just as particular models of knowledge, types of accumulation, and cultural models are different from others. But this whole cannot be identified with a social order except, first, insofar as the ruling class identifies itself entirely with its historicity, in other words is not being opposed by the social movement of a popular class; second, insofar as the political system is reduced to the management of the state apparatus by that ruling class; and last, insofar as the society's instrumentality is entirely reduced to the exercise of power. Totalitarian societies are those that come closest to this image, which has been depicted in tragic terms in works of sociological fiction such as those of Orwell.

But it would be just as false to envisage society as an entirely open set of class conflicts, political arguments, and demands, in which social move­ments representing opposing classes are in constant confrontation or almost equal terms like a power and a counter-power. Social relations are limited, on the one hand, by political calculations and the internal coherence of the technical systems and. on the other, by the logic of a mode of domination that is operating simultaneously on the economic, the political and legal, and the cultural level.

This social domination can never be wholly integrating, however. For at

Historicity 59

the same time as it is constructing a social order and trying to insert all the actors into it in a way that will conform to its private interest, it is also excluding, repressing, and, moreover, parleying with rejection or revolt. Society cannot appear open unless, beyond its principles, its rules, and its functions, the sociologist can discover the conduct expressing opposition, defense, and protest that more often manifests itself in an unconscious and nonorganized way than in the form of clearly constituted social movements. The wage earner does not behave solely in accordance with the logic imposed on him by capitalist or technocratic power. He goes slow, he plays truant, he creates an informal organization, he daydreams, he rebels, he forms unions.

The organization of labor in its concrete reality is ultimately no more than the direct and "rationalized" expression of employer power. Even the educational system, which is even more directly linked to the dominant ideology, is never reduced to that ideology completely, because it is the vehicle for knowledge, not just values, because it is dependent on a state in which nondoniinant categories exert an influence, because its professional rhetoric remains distinct from the ideology of the ruling class, because the age groups within it put up a resistance to authority and its norms.

Order never reigns without limits. Society is always shot through with refusals, revolts, conflicts; it is constantly being challenged and contestation is constantly being repressed, which is sufficient to indicate the inadequacy of all conceptions of society either as a machine made up of interdependent parts or as an ideological construction.

Every society is dominated by an order that is that of the ruling class, but the dominion of that order is limited by historicity itself, by political institutions, and by technical necessities. And the dominated class always makes use of these three checks on power to maintain its resistance and organize its opposition.

Actionalist sociology would be dooming itself to destruction if it ceased to recognize the existence both of domination and of its limits and the forms of opposition that those limits make possible. It does not believe that a system of domination cannot be transformed or destroyed except from the outside or by the play of its natural contradictions; nor does it believe that a society's orientations are solely the result of influence, of negotiations, and of a pragmatic adaptation to the changing demands of an environment. It envisages society as a field of conflictive creation. «-—-

By now it may perhaps be possible to perceive the way in which a sociology-of historicity makes theanalysis of change difficult buf at the same time~ provides the means of linking the study of change with that of social A structure. It makes the analysis of change difficult because it situates'itself synchronistically and refuses to start off from a conception of social evolution. But the sociologist would only imprison himself in the whole he is

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constructing if he defined it by its functioning. He would then have no other recourse but to explain change by external causes, which comes down either to not giving any explanation at all—since one cannot establish any relation between a modification of the environment and an internal change—or else to adopting a linear vision of evolution in flat contradiction of the viewpoint adopted at the outset.

Whereas, on the other hand, the distanc_e_andjion-fit that separate a field of historicity from a social organization and, even more, from the life of a concrete and therefore heterogeneous collectivity, make it possible to introduce an analysis of change that remains dependent on the general conception of social structure it employs. But this theme can only be dealt with after an analysis of the various levels of social reality and also of the forms of social action most directly linked with historicity: class relations and social movements.

F. Actors and Systems

a. From Actor to Social Interaction

Actionalist sociology asserts that social conduct must be comprehended in its orientations. It rejects all opposition between the ^ fundamental reality of economic relations and representations derived from those relations artifi­cially appearing to govern them. But equally sharply it refuses to accept the setting of social relations as a whole within a framework of systematized values and norms. Historicity is an action of society on itself, but society is not an actor; it has neither values nor power. Values and norms belong to the actors acting within the field of historicity, to the social classes.

The underlying movement of these analyses must now be more apparent. From historical action to organization, via the political system, our

analysis moves from a society's experience to its internal management, from its practice to its consciousness, from social relations to power, from a society's problems to the solutions it organizes. The analysis does not in any way set out from an absolute principle, from an appeal to liberty and to a subject seeking to transcend its alienations in order to rediscover its unity or to affirm its inexhaustible power of transcendence and negativity. On the contrary, it sets out from work, from the creative activity by means of which a society defines its field by transforming its environment, by constituting a state of nature and a set of cultural and social orientations, in order to arrive eventually at mechanisms of regulation and integration.

This sociological analysis is always threatened by doctrinaire reductions. These confuse society with one of its levels or one of its analytic elements. For some, society is reduced to its operational system, and the dynamism of

Historicity 61

historical action is replaced by the supposed existence of a body of values and norms unifying and controlling the whole of social life; constitutes an ideology of the established order. For others, society is nothing more than a political system, a decision-making mechanism, which simultaneously ex­cludes the internal problems of organizations, linked to the interdependence of their elements, as well as the problems of historical action, of its orientations, and of the class relations that express it.

Last, there are those for whom society is entirely dynamic. Everything is forces of production, social relations and cultural models, as if the political system and the functioning of the organizations had no coherence of their own, as if all social behavior contributed directly to modifying the historical field, as if society had no inertia. - \

But it would be a poor way of opposing such ideological simplifications merely to content oneself with a pluralism of methods and levels of analysis. The essential J_ask ot sociology is to follow the transition from creation to organization and also to seek out, in various forms of resistance to the constraints and limitations of order, the factors of change and innovation.

There exists a hierarchy among the levels of analysis that 1 have distinguished. This does not mean that one is more important than the others or that it isolates determining 4 factors." It is impermissible to say that such and such a category oj social facts—the form of production or the "system of ideas"—determines such and such another caiegory of facts, whether it be religious beliefs or economic activity. It must already be clear that one cannot identify a level of analysis and a category of social facts corre­sponding to a practically defined area of social life. The hierarchy of levels indicates on the contrary that forms of social organization can only be understood by reference to the political decisions of a society, which are limited and oriented by a system of historical action and by a class interaction. — -I

The sociology of historicity, because it is a sociology of action, encounters the difficulty specific to all approaches that analyze the meaning of conduct. Is the meaning for the observer not a prisoner of the actors' consciousness? Is the position of the observer not for this very reason dependent upon the position of the actors themselves?

This difficulty becomes increasingly obvious as one focuses on the more intentional kinds of social conduct and, above all, on social movements. The labor movement or movements of national independence aim at the attain­ment of specific objectives, define their own situation, their own nature and that of their opponents. Is not the sociologist reduced to being nothing more than their memorialist or their mouthpiece?

Sociology has generally replied to this objection byjayinjj thatjts object is not the acTof buT7K~5ocia7 interaction. The meaning it is analyzing cannot

62 Chapter One

be confused with the consciousness of the actor for the simple reason that it must give an account of the conduct of two or more actors involved i n a social interaction. This reply is the only possible one. And, what is more, it needs to be narrowed down even further, since in this general form it does not definitively dispose of the objection.

In practice, the relation between the actors can be conceived of as a reciprocity of consciousnesses. The actors communicate only because they are situated within a set of values and norms that define their respective roles, which is to say the legitimate expectation by each of certain behavior on the part of the other. Interaction presupposes the existence of a higher consciousness, which is no longer that of the particular actors but that of society, a collective consciousness. The sociologist is in that case definitively condemned to be the prisoner of that consciousness. If we add that this collective consciousness can only be the dominant ideology, which is to say that of the dominant class, then the sociologist would be simply expounding and upholding that ideology. He would be no more himself than the ideologist is. And the more he tried to keep aloof from specific interests, the more "objective" he tried to be, the more tied he would be to a defense of established order.

Whether one appeals to a collective consciousness or to a dominant ideology, social relations, far from being an analytical tool, no longer appear as anything but the manifestation of an order that is also a supreme actor.

The concept of historicity, on the other hand, refuses to define the actors by their interaction and their participation in shared values. It conceives of society as a set of cultural tensions and social conflicts.

When one identifies the actor with a role, one is endowing him with a social ego and therefore with rights and duties, with character traits and norms: a good or a bad husband, citizen, or worker. Functionalist sociology, even when it seems at its most abstract, is bourgeois fiction.

We must rid ourselves of this conception, one that literature and painting have long since discarded.

Analysis cannot depict the actor. It can only take him apart, tear him into pieces, so as to make us perceive social interactions first of all. but also, and more profoundly, the permanent confrontation of desire and language, of historicity and natural laws that structure resources, human and nonhuman, that control and make use of the orientations of historical action. An actor never corresponds directly and entirely to a component of historicity or to any one of the social or cultural orientations that leave their mark upon historicity's dominion over social practice.

Even a ruling class is not identifiable with a cultural model or a type of accumulation. The relations between the actors are relations neither of participation in common values nor of pure contradiction of interests; every

Historicity ,- 63

social relation brings together actors who share the same sociocultural experience, who participate in the same historicity, and who are vying for control of it. The actors are constantly see-sawing between that community and that conflict, as they are also between society's functioning and its historicity. The actor is always ambiguous in his relation to the orientation of historical action, and consequently in his conduct at all levels of social reality. The sociologist's analysis is not possible except insofar as the actors interacting with one another are kept apart by misunderstanding, alienation, and conflict, and also insofar as they are unable to make conscious contact, insofar as empathy does not exist. The meaning of a situtation cannot be understood except through the relation of actors in opposition.

It is because society does not coincide with its functioning, because it is in tension wftli itself and in disequilibrium, that sociology must always be critical, for the actor is defined by it solely as mediator between opposing orientations, so that one must stand outside that actor, place oneself directly at the level of the networks of social relations in order to understand the social mechanisms involved, the observed forms of society's intervention in itself.

Because it always explains social conduct by social relations, sociology cannot make any use of the traditional opposition between subjective and objective. The_actor_is_jiot explained by the situation, for the situation is itself social relations and action of society on itself. Historicity is neither a state of the forces of production nor a society's project or system of values. It is society's work on itself, and therefore its "technical" aspect—model of knowledge—is not separable from an economic relation—accumulation—or from a cultural model that some would be tempted to classify under ideology. Can one speak of action while separating situation from the meaning of conduct?

b. The Actor Protests.

To gain acceptance for these general principles is difficult only because they grate on the social actors themselves, centered as they are on their intentions, their objectives, and their ideologies, and therefore bound, to the degree in which they exercise authority, or influence, or power, to oppose an analysis that questions the image they create of themselves. This is why sociqlogyjs inevitably against power, for the simple reason that power is inevitably against it. On the other hand, sociology benefits from struggles for power; it thrives oest away from very strongly organized social actors; it is associated with freedom, perhaps more than any other domain of knowledge in our day, as is dramatically shown by the persecutions it has undergone and is still undergoing under the totalitarian regimes.

The resistance the sociologist encounters is increased by the fact that he is, more often than not, studying his own society: the validation of his analysis

-¥•

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can never be provided by the agreement of the interested actors. The_ meaning he establishes _can_never satisfy the minds of his actors. He would like those actors to say to him: you have understood us. But if he is given this answer, then it is very much to be feared that the sociologist is in error, that he has stepped out of his true role in order to assume that of mediator, or that of ideologist. The sociologist's only justification is that he should arrive at an understandfng of social relations that cannot be grasped by the actors themselves but that make it possible to explain and predict their conduct in defined conditions.

TE SYSTEM OF HSTOROL / O O N

A. The Dominion of Historicity

Historicity is first of all the creation of a model of knowledge and therefore a distancing in relation to the circuit of social exchanges, either between members of the collectivity or between collectivity and environment.

But it is not representation solely. Formed on the basis of a state of activity, it intervenes in that activity; it transforms it into a social system in which conduct is governed by a set of orientations, themselves determined by the societyVTnode of action upon itself. Accumulation provides historicity with means of action, but it is on the basis of the cultural model that social practice's field of orientation is constituted/Society is not reducible to the laws that govern its functioning; nor is it governed by ideas, which is to say by any meaning given as external to social practice, whether it be some divine law or historical determinism. It is constituted by itself—the social is explicable solely by the social—which is to say by its own means and its consciousness of acting on itself.

Is this not handing back a central role to the Idea? Is this cultural model not perhaps an image of the ideal society, against which social conduct is to be measured? Nothing could be further removed from the concept of the cultural model. Ijjsjn no wayseparable from the work that society performs on itself: it is situated by a type of work and accumulation; it manifests the material state of society's apprehension of itself.

The system of historical action, the SHA. is the system of historicity's dominion over social practice. It is not a more or less coherent set of values or principles but the linking together of elements in tension with one another, since through thern society is straddled by its double, as in African religions the believer is straddled by spirits.

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This leads to encounters with three successive orders of problems. First, how is this system based on tensions constructed? Second, how is it to be recognized, for it must be observable and thus possess a concrete autonomy beyond the oppositions that form its nature? Last, what is the relation of this set of orientations, which defines the sociocultural field, with the other face of historicity, that of accumulation, of society's tearing apart of itself, and thus with class relations?

Since the system of historical action defines a field, it delimits types of societies and thus a first level of analysis of historical realities. How are we to construct those types without slipping back into an evolutionist philosophy of history? That will be the theme of the last section of this chapter.

a. Dimensions

Having defined historicity as orientation of social practice and thus as a distancing of society in relation to its own functioning, let us now undertake the reverse operation and define historicity's mode of dominion over social practice. Unless we do this we are running a serious danger of reducing historicity to a reflection of society on itself, to an ideology of social change, two interpretations that have been clearly rejected in previous pages.

Within historicity, its three components do not play the same role in this dominion over social practice, in this constitution of a field of social and cultural orientations.

The model of knowledge is at the same time the most direct and the least socially organized expression of historicity. It governs the forces of pro­duction at the same time as it is forming itself on them as a basis, but without intervening in the social systems that interpose themselves between it and historicity.

Accumulation, on the other hand, is a linking process between economic activity and historicity. It explains the practical division of society from itself; but it does not explain the orientation of social conduct by historicity. This latter role is that of the cultural model. An image of creativity and thus of historical action, in the last analysis it governs the categories of social and cultural practice. It is this set of orientations, this system of historicity's dominion over practice, that I term system of historical action.

Through it, social practice is determined not by its internal laws or the exigencies of social life but by the resources mobilized in the service of a cultural model.

The system links historicity and functioning. It cannot be the formal expression of the cultural model, as though the "idea" of a society were specifying itself in different institutional domains—economic, political, religious, and so on. It associates contraries and thus defines itself by tensions. It is simultaneously an apparatus for transcending social func­tioning and the determination of that functioning.

The System of Historical Action 67

To construct the system of historical action is thus to define the opposi­tional pairs that specify the tension between historicity and functioning. Instead of enumerating the elements which, taken together, would constitute that system, we must start from the system's general nature, which is that of bond and at the same time tension between historicity and the elements of social activity. The elements of the system cannot be defined other than by combining these axes of complementarity and opposition.

We can define a certain number of oppositional pairs that can be seen as dimensions of the system of historical action. I shall indicate only what seem to me the three most essential of these. Certain aspects of the analyses that follow would be made much more complicated if we increased this number, but the nature of the reasoning employed would not be modified.

/. Movement—order. A society's movement is inseparable from its order. Historicity cannot manifest itself except by being transcribed into social

relations. This principle of movement must also be a principle of order, failing which it would be no more than an abstract idea, and the sociological domain as a whole could be analyzed with the help of concepts relating to the functioning of the social system.

That is the first dimension of the system of historical action. It is the process by means of which a movement is transformed into order. This order is inseparable from the movement, but it is also opposed to it, just as distribution or consumption are opposed to production at the same time as being linked to it.

Historical action is in noway a pure movement of continual transcendence of the social order. It constitutes a social order and, therefore, types of society.

The tension between movement and order is thus that of the two faces of historicity—the transcendence of social functioning and the foundation of the categories of social practice.

The present analysis locates itself solely within the field of historicity. It does not present the relalibhs of historicity with institutions or with social organization. However, the slope of the system of historical action termed "order" already leads down toward social organization. This is why 1 employ the more general term: the categories of social practice.

2. Orientations—resources. This opposition is implied in the very con­cept of historicity. Human action is always divided between orientations and resources. The latter can be termed "natural" in the sense that they are the object of study of the natural sciences. The means brought into action by a cultural model constitute sets of variables, systems. The natural sciences make it possible to know the rules in accordance with which those systems function, whereas they do not explain the nature of the orientations that

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make use of them. In parallel to this, man intervenes as a being with needs, which is to say with his biological existence, his personality problems, and also with the roles he plays in the reproduction of society. A religious typejrf cultural model, orienting society toward an extremely abstract image of creativity, is associated with a very strong structuration of the community and the systems of exchange that ensure its continuity and survival: the principle of universal order is above social action but takes responsibility for the social organization of collectivities profoundly entrenched in their repro­duction, as indicated by the very fact that the cultural model indicates a low capacity on the part of society to act upon itself.

Inversely, in industrialized societies it may seem that society's capacity for action on itself no longer has any limits, that its Promethean ambition makes it into its own creator. This is by no means the case. As the elementary structures of social organization break up, so historicity encounters resis­tance from other resources: first from technology itself, but also from those of man's biological conditions of existence, as well as those of other parts of nature, and last those of personality.

We must therefore be wary of two opposing errors. Man is not a demiurge; the more powerful his action, the more, on the other hand, he ceases to recognize himself as spirit and replaces himself in the finite world of which he forms a part. Inversely, man does not simply occupy a niche within an ecosystem.

Society is neither a closed system nor even a system defined by its exchanges with the environment. It possesses the capacity to intervene in itself, in its internal organization, in the same way as in its relations with the external world. Society is part of an ecosystem, but it also constitutes its own environment on the basis of an action that is not reproductive but inventive. It is nature, but it is also a creator of nature.

At a time when society's capacity for action on itself is increasing rapidly and threatening the ecosystem of which man is a part, it is normal that criticism of the ancient separation between nature and culture, of the opposition between body and mind that triumphed with idealism, should lead to a new naturalism derived not from mechanics, as in the seventeenth century, but from biology.

But. just as social thought, after the naturalism of the Enlightenment and under pressure of historical events, rediscovered through the industrial revolution, the French Revolution, and the beginnings of the labor move­ment, the problems of historical action, so the development of a new model of knowledge based on information, communications, and systems analysis must be followed by new thinking on historical action and its present forms.

3. Culture—society. The juxtaposition of these two terms does not imme­diately conjure up an oppositional couple in the same way as order and

The System of Historical Action 69

movement or orientations and resources. And yet the system of historical action cannot be defined without this opposition. For the system is the dominion of historicity oyer society's functioning: it is therefore work and the creation of a relation with the environment on the one hand, and collectivity on the other. A system of historical action is not a political, territorial, and organizational unit, but nor is it an intention on the part of society. It is a model of a society, and thus both a culture and social forms.

The linking of culture and society, of the relation to environment and the relations of the actors among themselves, is nevertheless subordinate to the two others. It cannot be defined except within the intersection of the two previous oppositional pairs. The system of historical action is a set of social forms making it possible to pass from a cultural model, a model of creativity, to a model of consumption situated on the side of order and resources. The social elements are interposed between the cultural elements. A cultural model calls for the employment of social resources and the creation of a principle of order. It is within these social forms that a model of consumption is formed, and it is by means of the model that cultural conduct is subjected to the dominion of the cultural model.

The system of historical action is thus defined by the intersection of oppositional pairs. This sets it in sharp contrast to a social organization defined by norms and by the vertical and horizontal differentiation of statuses and roles. It is not a society's book of rules but the scenario of its drama, the mobilization of its action upon itself on the basis of its work. The dialectic of historical action is made up of oppositions and complementarities between a society's will to be and its being, between its self-production and its practice. Social action is not defined solely by exchanges within a totality or by responses to stimuli; between the material conditions of existence and the forms of social and cultural organization^ it interposes a system of prien-tations, the system of historical action—thejembodiment, oflhistoricity^

b. Elements

It is now possible to sum up our previous analysis by combining the three dimensions just dealt with and using them to construct the system of historical action.

Combining the three dimensions we have established enables us to situate the elements of the system of historical action but not to define their nature and their relations.

We must therefore add that the system of historical action as a whole is the mode of historicity's dominion over social practices and, more precisely, a set j)f sociocultural orientations governing the torms of labor, that is, economjc activity^ The elements are not consiHtlierits~oT ecbfiibmic activity, but their totality must constitute a field of socioeconomic organization. They may be presented by means of a diagram (fig. 2).

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The first element in the system we already know. It is the cultural model. If accumulation introduces class relations directly, the cultural model indicates recognition of a form of creativity that is the driving force of society and utilizes the accumulated resources.

movement order

orientations

T

cultural model

mobilization

hierarchization

needs

Figure 2

The cultural model is movement not order, orientation not resource, culture not society.

Before we name the other elements, it remains for us to define their relations to one another, since we know the dimensions along which they occur and their general nature.

It is the attribute of the SHA to link historicity and the functioning of society and thus to associate elements that are as opposed to one another as possible in order to combine the three oppositional pairs selected.

It is easy to see that the simplest image of the SHA is that which combines the three oppositional pairs to produce four elements of which each has the same position as each of the three others on one of the dimensions and is opposed to them on the two other dimensions.

But the composition of the SHA can be more clearly and directly grasped when it is borne in mind that its elements must form a whole that takes in all the tensions defined by the combination of the three oppositional pairs.

The cultural model must be completed by an element that puts social resources at the service of the cultural model; otherwise that model would be no more than an ideology or a dream. 1 term this element mobilization since it involves giving a content to society's movement, to the transcendence of its functioning.

We must now move over to the side of order, to the transformation of the sub-unit formed by the cultural model and the mobilization of socioeconomic activity into organization. The cultural model must be linked to a corre­sponding mode of hierarchization. If it weren't, then society would be cut in two, a crisis situation worthy of examination but one that only appears as a crisis in relation to the expected correspondence between the cultural model

The System of Historical \ction 71

and a scale of social levels. I am not talking here about social classes, for all that is involved here is a scale, whereas the classes are defined solely by class relations, based in their turn on accumulation. Nor am 1 talking about stratification, even though this second notion is closer to that of hierarchi-zation, simply because the system of historical action is no more than an analytical tool, whereas one cannot talk of stratification except with reference to a more concretely and territorially defined organization.

Last, historicity governs not only this principle of distribution but also, and simultaneously, a mode of consumption, a definition of needs, an element at once cultural and not social, deriving from resources and not orientations and thus complementary to hierarchization within the domain of order.

This construction can be presented most concisely in a diagram (see fig. 2). The diagram presented in figure 2 does not show a division of the economic organization into four specific domains. It does not describe the functioning of a society but the social and cultural orientations by means of which a state of historicity controls and directs soaaT practice.

What is also involved here is a system: the nature of each of the elements is defined by the position it occupies within the whole. Each is linked to the three others by relations of proximity and opposition in the pairs that form the system's basic construction unit. The transition from one element to the other is not a transition from one particular aspect of a general principle to another particular aspect of it. On the contrary, the nature of the SHA forces us to dismiss such a formulation and its attendant lemptations. Is there not a tendency to say that the forms of mobilization or hierarchization must be in harmony with the cultural model? A dangerous phrase if we do not make it clear that this "harmony" is achieved by combining oppositions rather than resemblances, since any two elements are always linked by two relations of opposition and only one of similitude, It is therefore impossible to reduce the system of historical action to a "general idea" of society; the tensions that set its individual elements in opposition are merely the small change of the general tension that simultaneously unites and separates a society's junc­tion big and its historicity. Those who think in terms of values and norms can show how particular norms, adapted to such and such a specific ^institu­tional" domain, are no more than specific forms of more general values. Here, on the contrary, what is being shown in action and specified is the action of society on itself, its distancing with relation to its own functioning. If the elements are in harmony writh each other that is because they are also in opposition to one another, so that the SHA is wholly animated by the tensions inherent in the movement by means of which society constitutes the field of its social and cultural orientations on the basis of its activity, thereby-giving that activity meaning.

The SHA is not an organ of social and cultural integration that will

72 Chapter Two

impose, above and beyondjany differences between its elements, the unity of a body of values. It does not exist outside its internal oppositions; it is the system of those oppositions. This clearly indicates the complete difference that exists between the SHA and a system of social control or a political system. We are used to speaking about societies, that is, about concrete political units possessing laws and a government, mechanisms of exchange, production, education, repression, and soon. The SHA is not a society, even less what is referred to by the rather vague term ''social system," but solely a level within an analysis of society.

The system of historical action is not an actor exercising power or authority; there is no system of social control ensuring its maintenance. It is an abstract system, as against an organization, which is a concrete system in the sense that it is defined by frontiers and by the authority exercised within them.

It is essential to recognize this difference of definition between the units encountered by the various levels of sociological analysis. "Capitalist society" is a type of unit that does not coincide with political collectivities, and even less with concrete historical units. All we are establishing for the moment is the thematics of a general type of society, before going on to see the actors act and mechanisms of decision, organization, or control form within it.

The SHA is a system of oppositions because it is the form taken by historicity, by society's transcendence of itself by itself. The SHA must therefore be conceived of as a totality and not as the result of adding together a certain number of elements, each essential to its functioning.

B. Locating the System of Historical Action

How does the sociologist apprehend the system of action? Is it a construction of the mind, not susceptible of any apprehension by experience and without usefulness other than as a necessary element in an analysis? A necessary hypothesis to explain certain kinds of behavior? Such a mode of approach cannot be sufficient. The system of historical action must be capable of a direct approach since it possesses a certain autonomy of operation.

Then what is the object of a sociology of this system of action? What facts does it take into consideration?

a. A Society's Debates

The analyses just presented enable us to avoid a trap. The elements of the system of action are not experienced as values. They are not affirmed by members of a society as imperatives, like the good, the desirable, or the just.

The System of Historical Action 73

They do not appear as objectives except tor particular social actors, thereby contributing to the formation of their ideology. But this presupposes that we have already brought these actors and their conflicts into play, which is not in fact the case. The elements of the system of action are thus neither recognized as values, nor defended or championed. This does not make them any the less present to the collective consciousness, but they are taken as facts, not as values. In programmed societies—which we shall continue to use as an example for reasons of convenience—although growth has been defined as the cultural model it is in no way asserted as a value. At the very most it js frequently justified by what appears to be its direct consequence: the raising of the standard of living. But that itself is a specific ideology, one to which another can be easily opposed. Growth is equally experienced as constraint, as the pressure of artificially created needs, as an exhausting rat race that makes life hard and robs it of all meaning, or as the destruction of "natural resources." Let an argument begin between these two ideologies, and it becomes very swiftly apparent that growth is in itself a neutral fact that can be judged favorably or unfavorably according to the point of view adopted. Scientific progress means a car and a television for everyone, something that many find desirable. But it also means the threat of thermonuclear annihi­lation, something that fills almost everyone with horror.

The same observation can easily be applied to all the other elements. Judgment with regard to them is always ambivalent and provides food for literally endless argument. A banal but enlightening conclusion. For this ambivalence is nothing other than the apprehension of the relations of complementarity and opposition that link the elements together. Growth is a good thing because it brings with it more "modern" forms of organization and hierarchization or types of needs, which liberate us from the constraints of a previous system; it is a bad thing in that it is opposed to the requirements inherent in the other elements, it is continuous movement, not enjoyment, etc.

What reveals the system of action is the totality of the debates that animate a society, the totality formed by the problems with which the collectivity is faced.

This totality is not immediately apprehensible. It must be isolated from two different orders of problem: on the one hand, the social conflicts that set one category of actors in opposition to another, and which cannot be involved here; on the other hand, the problems that arise from the heterogeneity of a concrete society. French society, for example, can be viewed partly as a programmed society, but it also includes vast areas of the older capitalism and even some preindustrial economic, social, and cultural aspects. Every society in the process of change experiences tensions and hiatuses between

74 Chapter Two

various generations of problems and actors. Social conflicts and tensions linked with change must be kept separate from what I am here terming a society's debates.

The system of action is revealed not by a body of values but by a systemi of debates. Each of its elements is apprehended in its opposition to each of the others, and the unity of the system cannot be perceived other than as the field of those debates within which choices are imposed that are insoluble and constitute a society's permanent problems.

Each of the oppositions perceived is viewed as normal and intolerable. It links two terms of which either can be accepted or rejected, while it is never possible to terminate the debate with a compromise.

It is therefore possible to draw up a map of the problems a society puts to itself, to the degree in which that society corresponds to a system of action. These problems never receive a solution', the historian merely observes that at some given moment they cease to be posed or they become blurred and fade.

Actionalist sociology begins by defining the nature of these debates, which are endless but nevertheless form a limited whole. Schematically we could say that a system of action is experienced as a network of problems at once general and insoluble corresponding to the relations of one of the four elements with each of the three others. But there naturally exist more complex problems that involve more than two elements Above all the expression of these problems is not constant. There exists within any given society, and insofar as it corresponds to a system of action, a realm of discourse that must be reconstituted on the basis of the common consciousness, of good sense. The cerebration of its intellectuals can provide a guide in one's search for the boundaries and themes of this discourse, but nothing can replace a direct study of public opinion. Public opinion is almost always studied in isolation, referred to the facts, to the situation, to which it is a reaction. Opinions of various actors are compared; attempts are made to grasp the differences between what is being thought by the young and the old, by the workers and the leaders of industry, by men and women. This kind of analysis is interesting, albeit limited; it enlarges the Field of historiography; but it has no relation to the analysis we are referring to here. Instead of differentiating between the actors we are looking for the unity of a discourse, not in order to find in it the unity of a system of beliefs and values that doesn't exist but, quite the opposite, in order to define a network of oppositions, of questionings.

Debates in our sense do not bear upon the positive or negative value of a cultural or social feature, but upon the relations between such features. This corresponds to the nature of the system of action, which is not an aggregate of elements but a system of relations by means of which those elements are

The System of Historical Act on 75

defined. Each of the elements is only defined within the system by its oppo­sition along certain axes with each of the others.

The debate must be distinguished from djscussion and from deliberation. I speak of discussion when the field of the exchange is defined by a

decision to be taken that will affect the relative position of the actors. A discussion can always be termed political in the sense that it presupposes an institutional order and, therefore, limits, the most obvious of which is the acceptance of the existence of the actors taking part in the discussion. There is no discussion between a union and a board of directors except insofar as the board recognizes the existence of the union. Not infrequently such recognition is accompanied by mental reservations. The board may think that everything would be so much easier and more pleasant if there were no unions, and the union on its side may be thinking that the ultimate aim of its action is the suppression of employers and their replacement by a workers' cooperative or some other decision-making system. But, if one of the partners estimates at any given moment that it has become possible to change the name of the political game, there the discussion ceases.

A deliberation is even further removed from debate than discussion is. It presupposes the recognition of norms, collective aims, and roles.

If a group meets to examine its activities or the relations between its members, then it is probable that what is involved, at least to begin with, is a deliberation rather than a debate or a discussion, in the sense I am using the terms here. What is presupposed is a community, not just a field of decision. What are we going to do to further the aims of the community? How can we resolve this conflict that has appeared within it? Is authority being properly exercised? Ought we to change the community's functions or recruitment to it? These examples show immediately that problems subjected to delibera­tion are defined as functions of the social system.

When we move on from deliberation to debate, the relations between the actors fade away. Whereas a deliberation highlights roles and, consequently, social relations, while a discussion strives to modify those relations, or the lines of communication, or the forms of authority, in the debate there is no other character than the situation itself, which is no longer a framework but the very stake of the debate.

Adebatejs a drama; the characters involved are not the true actors. A pure debate, one not associated with set elements of discussion, may well be intolerable for actors brought face to face.

We should therefore not limit our investigation_Jo_rc debates. A society's debates may be reconstituted from limited exchanges usually over some distance, employing speech or writing. The actors answer one another without communicating.

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b. The Agencies of Historicity

If we reduce historicity to the stake involved in social conflicts, we are in danger of viewing it as an ideological expression of the dominant class; but if we recognize it as possessing an autonomous social expression, are we not in danger of restoring to the center of our analysis a body of values, of norms, and thus of institutions, in the usual sense of that word?

Historicity is not an ideological construction. It is a set of cultural and social orientations presenting themselves tojhe actorjs societal data and not as paHicularlzed beliefs. In postindustrial society, scientific and techno­logical investment, the cybernetic model of organization, hierarchization by education, consumer orientation are not opinions. Nor are they values that can be directly translated into forms of social organization, since it is not possible to understand social organization by abstracting conflictive class relations and the political mechanisms for formulating the rules that govern that organization.

This objection stated, let us recognize that each element.in.the. system of historical action has a concrete social underpinning that I shall term^an agency of historicity, which is not a historical actor in the way the social classes are. An example will make clear what I mean. No science can exist without laboratories and research centers, just as there can exist no religion without a church, which is to say without a specialized religious function."

It is absurd to claim that science is no more than a stake in a class conflict and that there is a proletarian science as opposed to a bourgeois science or an Aryan science as opposed to a Jewish science. But it is equally false to think that the organization of science is just the direct transcription of a specific social function. One has only to look at the politics of research, at the organization of research centers and, even more so. of the universities, and it immediately becomes impossible to abstract science from class interests and orientations. The social organization of research cannot evade the effects of political and social conflicts, as the confrontations we have seen over research investment make clear. Growing awareness of the political and military effects of many scientific discoveries, and, more particularly, of the social and political determinants behind the choice of research undertaken, makes it no longer possible to look upon laboratories as ivory towers.

Scientists do not exist above and apart from the social and political fray; at the same time their science is not reducible to the ideology of the actors in confrontation. Scientists always find themselves in a false position: they are defending the autonomy of scientific knowledge against ideological pressures and, especially, against established power. But the confrontation between opposing classes or social forces only has to grow fiercer for them to find themselves torn apart. They must defend their independence against power and therefore feel themselves closer to the forces of opposition and protest.

The System of Historical Action 77

But these latter are also seeking, through their struggles, to impose their own ideology- in the scientific domain. So the scientists fear that political confrontation will destroy science's independence, either because it will be forced to conform to an orthodoxy or because a transaction will take place between the adversaries to the detriment of scientific research's "purity."

Scientists, and indeed all the categories of the "priestly" intelligentsia, are neither pure intelligences floating above the melee nor ideologists. They are linked to the ruling class to the degree in which that class dominates the system of historical action and the political system, and thus favor certain areas of research. They are aTso TmkeOo the ruling class to the degree in which they belong to apparatuses that form ajpart^t^^e ruling_class.

Inversely, they are constantly setting up their competence in opposition to the political and administrative power of decision and fighting the limits set to the movement of ideas and persons.

Professionalism is often a way of transcending these contradictory ten­dencies and defining professional organizations and groups outside their links with the holders of power in society.

Thus the intelligentsia occupy three positions simultaneously: neutrality and involvement with one social camp or the other. What defines the members of an agency is not their detachment from the social interests in conflict but the mixture within the group, and more often than not within the individuals themselves, of these three positions.

The same observations apply to the other elements of the system of historical action. The organizers, those who analyze the management of systems, are also experts caught between defense of their rationality and their ambiguous position in class and political relations. Hence the constant mixture of reserve or mistrust they display with regard to the ruling class, as well as to popular movements, and their tendency to develop ideological defenses in the form of technologism or scientism.

A society's mode of hierarchization, which belongs on the side of order, is embodied in aji_agency, ofhistoricity of a different kind. Education is responsible for_ this function. The teachers, who can also sometimes be researchers but in the vast majority of cases have different functions, provide a social hierarchization that in postindustrial society is actually based on education itself, which gives the category of teachers a functional autonomy it did not possess in previous societies, where hierarchization was based, for example, on property or citizenship. It must immediately be added that the role of agency of historicity performed by education is in no way a complete definition of education's functions in society. But it must be stressed immediately that education's role of social selection in accordance with a mode of hierarchization is always associated with another role, that of reproduction or reinforcement of class oppositions. These two functions can

/

78 Chapter Two

no more be identified with one another than they can be dissociated. Education seeks to select those generally most fit to receive higher education, since it must provide the necessary means for scientific development. But it also creates or reinforces class barriers to the mobility of talent, and the way these two functions are mixed up together is shown by the fact that a judgment on fitness for higher education is always also a judgment on social training in the use of a language that is the language of the upper classes.

The ambiguity of the teachers1 situation is apparent in the constant mixture of opposition and conformism that characterizes their behavior. In this they are like all agents of historicity, from priests to scientists, who are all simultaneously watchdogs and protesters. We shall see later how the clash between these two functions leads all agents of historicity to develop an abstract rhetoric that cannot be reduced either to a class ideology or to an element of historicity, and which is more a line of professional defense than the mask for interests foreign to the group itself.

It is probably in the expression of needs that the existence of an autonomous agency is most difficult to recognize. The difficulty seems particularly great in the postindustrial societies, where the orientation of needs can be defined as a search for personal or collective identity and as enjoyment. Nevertheless, in this particular casejTze agents of massive means of communication, that is, the agents of the social processing of needs, do in fact occupy the same ambiguous position as the other agencies of historicity. As in the other cases, the observer is first of all aware of the dominant class's dominion over the expression and social orientation of needs. An abundant and suggestive literature speaks loudly and not unjustifiably about the manipulation of needs. This is an indispensable reaction against the propaganda of the dominant classes which assures society with false in­genuousness that advertising is a response to individual demand and thus acquires a democratic function. But, because criticism of such claims has been voiced for a long time, and with no lack of the necessary energy, we must look further. A more attentive study of business and advertising brings significant conflicts to light. The area of fashion provides one of the most interesting examples today. Whereas fashion properly speaking is a system of social hierarchization and, beyond that, the creation of badges of social level, the apparel trade also finds itself drawn into supporting movements launched by the young and recognized as signs of cultural innovation. So that the trade cannot be wholly assimilated with society's apparatuses of eco­nomic direction, which manipulate demand in the name of the functioning of their power and their profit. Dependent upon technocrats, the traders and advertisers are also, in nontotalitarian societies, dependent upon the forma­tion of cultural trends that are in no way the direct creation of the centers of economic decision. The same remarks apply to the professionals of the mass media.

The System of Historical Action 79

In this case, as in the others, we would be denying the existence of social classes if we ignored the dominant hold of the upper class over the agencies of historicity. But it would also be false to see these latter as merely agents of so­cial domination. Last, it is equally unacceptable to place these agencies above the social fray. Their role is always limited and subordinate within the field of historical action and also, as a consequence, in the political system. But they do have a certain autonomy that is recognizable in the appearance of specific functions at the level of social organization.

This relative and subordinate autonomy of the agencies of historicity is the concrete expression of a society's historicity. The stakes of class conflicts are not abstractions or ideologies but social practices. Class conflicts occur within a certain social and cultural field ot historicity. It is never permissible to say that this field constitutes on its own the principle of society's organization; a factory is not the concrete expression of industrial growth; it cannot be defined independently of the class power exercised within it. But parallel to this, social struggles are determined by the system of historical action, by the nature of the forces of society's production of itself, which those struggles transform in their turn into class relations and consequently into a political system and a system of social organization.

C. The Functioning of the System of Historical Action

a. The Counterelements

The SHA could be defined as a system of imbalances. The cultural model is not situated at its center, like a spider in the middle of its web, organizing and controlling social activities. Jt js^a driving force, but one that must be converted into order and also into mobilization of resources in order to play that role. It is not an ideal model of society but a set of orientations that govern social practice.

It can be presented in a slightly different way from the one 1 used earlier. Figure 3 shows that the alternation of full and empty boxes is that of the orientations of historical action and the actors' objectives.

The system of historical action is a network of oppositions governed by the nature of the cultural model. It is the dominion of orientations over resources, of movement over order, and the interdependence of cultural orientations and social forms.

The tensions between its elements mean that society is not a character being guided by an image of the ideal society. The cultural model is not a social model of movement.

The system of historical action is not an actor but what is at stake in an interplay of actors.

80 Chapter Two

movement order

orientations

resources

cultural model 2

1

i mobilization

i i hierarchization 4

3 needs

Figure 3 culture society society culture

If we introduce actors, with due consideration of their objectives and their values, we see that they cannot act other than by breaking the structure of the system of historical action, by destroying the oppositions separating the elements from one another, and by fusing the elements into their objectives. The objectives are the actors' guides not in an action of society upon itself but in the functioning of a social organization.

These objectives are thus the opposite of the elements of historical action and cannot arise except from its destruction, which is to say from the appropriation by one actor of the system of historical action and from its reduction by that actor to an organization and the functioning of that organization.

This is why they must be termed counterelements. They are representations given value by actors and not orientations of

historical action itself. The counterelements are the values of class actors and no longer the stake of class relations.

Let us take the empty box 2 in figure 3. It designates an orientation toward movement, but a social movement. What is involved, therefore, is a sociocultural model of movement—a definition immediately clear to every reader as actor. It is the image of an ideal society toward which individuals and collectivities are struggling to make headway.

In reality the content of this box is even more extensive and integrative than I have just suggested: this sociocultural model, like any image of an ideal society, is a model of order as much as it is of movement. It is thus apparent that a counterelement can be empirically defined as the locus of overflow and commingling of the elements surrounding it. In more theo­retical terms, each counterelement breaks the oppositions upon which the system of historical action is based; it replaces a tension, which Is a manifestation of historicity, by identity of functioning and so-called rational action. This replacement is not the work of the system of historical action itself; it can only arise from the ideological activity of the actors.

Nothing could demonstrate better that the SHA cannot be defined in terms of social or collective consciousness. Social consciousness posits values or

The System of Historical Action 81

situations of fact, it posits order or movement; it cannot orient conduct toward objectives that vanish whenever it tries to pin them down, since the elements all refer back one to another in an endless play of complemen­tarities and oppositions. ^ejTansition from elements to counterelements is the transition from system to actors. A counterelement can be represented by a self-sufficient image, whereas one can never define an element outside of its relations with the other elements.

Can this general analysis based on one specific case be applied to other cases? Yes. since the various elements of the system occupy equivalent positions within it.

But the content of the various counterelements must still be defined, case by case, for all that. So let us look at case 1 (in fig. 3).

As in case 2. which we have just looked at, this counterelement cannot be understood,„excej)t as the fusion of the three elements surrounding it. The cultural model is reduced to a technique, mobilization becomes a cultural and no longer a social form, and needs are transformed into resources at the service of movement. It is easy to recognize the presence of this counter-element in our own society. It is enough to say, in fact, that our society is powered by a scientific and technical mode of growth, but that it is the organizations that adapt themselves pragmatically to the changing environ­ment, manage their communications better and better, utilize the informa­tion they produce more and more efficiently in order to correct their course and ensure their survival. They thus produce a development that is no longer an orientation but a result of certain practices. There is no longer distance and tension between the cultural model and the social resources mobilized: the two elements are commingled. Needs are no more than the expression of this transformation of social resources into cultural resources. Individuals and groups seek to maximize their advantages and lower their costs; they also seek to extend the field they control, and it is the totality of these self-interests, combining to produce this flexible and dynamic organization, that produces growth as its end result.

One can certainly give other expressions to this fusion of elements into a coulfterelement. We shall see that counterelements. because they belong to the world of actors, take on different colorations according to whether they are acting as guide to one class or another. But one image will suffice to convey the mechanism behind the formation of this counterelement. which is situated on the level of resources and not on that of orientations. I shall term it instrumentalism, in order to emphasize the elimination of any reference to a cultufaT'model of movement.

Case 3 is analogous to the preceding one since it too dispenses with the presence of orientations. But it is doubly cut off from them in that it is situated on the side of order and on the side of society' rather than culture.

8 2 Chapter Two

The social order is no longer anything but a factual organization, lacking any hierarchical principle. The variety of social categories is fused in this case with the mode of mobilization. Society, one might say, is reduced to the technical division of labor, and the nature of needs can no longer be linked with anything other than that social organization.

This gives an image of a society at once diversified and stable, a society in which everyone fulfills a function and lives in a particular way, the different functions organizing themselves together so as to answer to society's needs, without the need of any intervening principle of hierarchy.

It is perhaps easier in this case than in the others to understand both why such a counterelement destroys the system as a whole and corresponds to representations and to an ideal image of society—ideal since it is beyond the tensions that define the system of action and are experienced by the actors. Hierarchization is replaced here by what one may term segmentation.

Case 4, like case 1, is that of a counterelement located on the level of orientations. It is a model of cultural order. But the existence of such a model is not compatible with that of a cultural model. It would only be so if the system of action were presented as an unstable equilibrium between opposing demands, such as activity and contemplation, which would trans­form the SHA into an endless interplay of rhetorical oppositions and entirely contradict all the analysis we have so far made of it.

This model of order cannot therefore be conceived except as the fusion of the elements surrounding it. Cultural practices and social hierarchy fuse in it to give rise to a model of sociocultural integration, and this model is also merged with a model of movement. Here again it is easy to observe an expression of the model in our own society. What else is the notion of a society of mass consumption? A society based on hierarchized needs that possess sufficient impetus to provide the driving force of society's movement. In this view, it is the rush to consume that creates the progress of production. Once again a reassuring image, one that rids us at little cost of the necessities inherent in the model of scientific growth, of the constraints of the great organizations, and the dominion of social hierarchy. This counterelement, like the others, is a means of transcending the tensions of historical action.

Our analysis has up to now introduced the counterelements one by one; but if we look at them all together, do they form a system, just like the elements? Ought we not speak of a countersystem, so that an analysis of historical action should be in the first place an analysis of the relations existing between these two systems that possess the same formal characteristics, the same relations between the elements or counterelements that compose them?

This formal parallelism is very clear and results from the construction of the SHA itself. It is important, for it signifies that the images, which are the

The System of Historical Action 83

counterelements, are simultaneously interdependent and opposed, so that within any given type of SHA we ought to be able to isolate a well-defined set of ide s_ahQ.ujt,_society's historicity, of ideal images of that society.

m o v e / m m

Culture SfXil'/V

order

society culture

orientations

resources

cultural model

E

inslrumentalism CE

sociocultural , . , • soeiocultural nierarcni/.ation

„ integration model CE

mobilization segmentat ion E I C E

CE

needs E

E=element CE-coun te re l emen t

Figure 4

But this docs not lead on to the integration of the elements and counterelements into a much larger unity. The SHA is the.proces_s_ot"_society*s action upon itself on the basis of its experience and its awareness of creativity and accumulation. The countersystem, if we are to call it that, is no more than a set of contradictory representations. Each of the counterelements destroys the system and thus presents itself as a total image, excluding all others.

Let us go back to our example. Our postindustrial society can be thought of as an instrumental society, as a creation of the collective will, as a set of functional segment^ or as a mass society. But these are all conflicting ways of looking at one thing. Transition from one counterelement to another is impossible.-"~

But the counterelements can't be chased out of our field of analysis as easily as all that. If we try to unite them into a whole, then the analysis goes completely astray. Whereas, if we recognize that they break the relation between two or several elements, then their existence appears necessary. No entirely integrated and balanced system of action can exist. The elements oscillate around the axes that define them, penetrating with each oscillation into the area of the counterelements. Equilibrium is maintained only if two opposing counterelements exert opposite and counterbalancing pressures. The counterelements are active; they manifest themselves as wills, as intentions, as principles. Whereas the element is apprehended by the actors only as a problem, a nexus of oppositions, the counterelement asserts itself in its stability as the objective of social conduct.

The oscillation between elements and counterelements is a manifestation of that which joins or separates actors and of the stake of their relation. The social field is defined solely by its tensions and its imbalances, behind which

84 Chapter Two

there can always be glimpsed the distancing of society from itself and historicity's dominion over social practices.

Each counterelement, on the contrary, because it is simultaneously a social and a cultural unit, defines expected types of conduct. The actor's situation is defined within it by the position he occupies in relation to the others and his degree of participation in a model of conduct.

But the counterelement has unity and simplicity^only in appearance. We shall see later that the social classes and social movements interpret them simultaneously in contradictory ways. More directly, each counterelement is torn by oppositions that necessarily refer back to the elements and the relations between them. Let us take an example in our type of society. Its counterelement of sociocultural integration is mass consumption, situated at the meeting point of man's "natural" needs and a social hierarchy based on knowledge and thus on education. Now mass consumption, if we examine it, falls into two opposing principles: on the one hand the social hierarchy of consumption and the importance of status symbols in the objects and modes of consumption; on the other hand the individualization of need and enjoyment. Mass consumption is shot through with two opposing move­ments: the quest for status and the expectation of pleasure. We shall see later that opposing historic actors do not attach themselves simultaneously to the same aspect of a counterelement. The latter's unity is therefore artificial, but it cannot for that reason be neglected by analysis.

The totality of counterelements forms a civilization. This word denotes a set of representations, of images. It introduces a unity into society and culture, the unity of consciousness. A civilization is an ideal that the observer finds at the heart of reality. This is why almost everyone in a society is seeking to define a civilization and no one is embarrassed by the incoherence of the definitions given.

If we take the notion of civilization in this sense, then it turns its back to sociological analysis.

Not only does each counterelement destroy the structure of the SHA, but the counterelements in their turn are kneaded and molded in very diverse ways into all-embracing images of a civilization that each actor, according to his

! social and individual characteristics, contemplates and admires as if he were gazing at some social datum, whereas it is no more than the reflection of his own way of life.

The counterelements contribute nothing to the analysis of society, but they guide us toward the actors. The SHA is lived, it cannot be analyzed directly. It can only be apprehended when broken up and transformed into counter-elements.

This opposition between elements and counterelements opens up one of the principal fields of sociological research. The elements are studied~~as~

The System of Historical Action 85

orientations of social practice; they can be reached by a direct consideration of labor organization, consumption, use of saving, etc. Counterelements, on the other hand, are representations.

Thus we are dealing with two materially distinct kinds of evidence. It is importan: to establish the correspondence between them, to investigate how, in any given society, the combination of the counterelements leads us on to posit the existence of the elements, and how the representation of the elements leads to the formation of the counterelements. Analysis of the latter is thus an important means of verifying the validity of a concrete con­struction of the SHA and. in particular, of the attribution to each of the elements of a certain content of a historical kind.

Anticipating on the analysis of this theme, it is essential to mention that the counterelements cannot receive a general social content; they are inevitable given a particular stamp by the actors striving to control the system of historical action and transform its orientations into values. Each counter-element thus presents itself in the form of an opposition between two images of society, one of which belongs to the ideology of the upper class and the other to that of the popular class, either directly or through the intermediary of professional ideologists. An element has a stable and clear content; its complexity comes from its relations with each of the other elements of the system. A counterelement, on the contrary, is independent of all others, though against this it is itself ambiguous, taking in different contents according to the class that is its bearer. Thus I can now replace the term "counter-elements/' introduced in the course of my analysis, with the term that occupies its place in everyday language: values, ^counterelement is not constitutive of a field of historicity; it is the point of view of an actor, who is always in the last analysis a class actor, looking at the system of historical action. Such is indeed the definition already given of values. The relations between elements and counterelements are the relations between the system of historical action and the class actors. We are here at the very center of sociological analysis, since the field of historicity, bedrock of any concrete social collectivity, is defined by the relation of this system of action to this system of actors. The analysis of social classes will turn entirely upon this fundamenfarquestion.

b. The Crises of Historical Action

The SHA is a system of tensions. The elements are not institutional domains, all more or less coherent with one another, in other words, more or less belonging to the same system of values, but are themselves defined on the basis of the conditions of existence of historical action. If there is no link between order and movement, between orientations and resources, between culture and society^ then no historicity can exist. To speak of system is to

86 Chapter Two

posit the interdependence of its parts and thus the equilibrium of the whole. This equilibrium is not maintained by any controlling or regulating forces.

There is therefore no reason to grant priority in practice to the state of equilibrium as opposed to states of disequilibrium. For the construction of the analysis, it is a matter of indifference whether or not we know that there do in fact exist societies in equilibrium, in other words, societies all of whose elements belong to the same configuration with the same force or the same distinctness. But we must consider the general effects of disequilibrium.

These effects will be called crises. This term is used in opposition to that of conflict, which defines a state of relations between the actors. There exists no inevitable link between a state of crisis and a state of conflict; one can only say that crisis has effects on conflict, in the sense that conflict can be obscured by a state of crisis.

The simplest form of such a crisis is when one of the elements is out of step with the others.

Let us suppose, for example, a mode of hierarchization lagging behind all the other elements of the SHA and thus still belonging to a previous configuration. Let us imagine a society in which hierarchy is based on family origins and property while the other elements belong to an industrial or post-industrial society. This isolated element tends to spread over into the empty spaces surrounding it, in other words to transform itself into several counterelements in accordance with figure 5. The lagging element changes into a set of representations by the actors not corresponding to the dominant state of society. The presence of a single such element creates a quasi-general non-fit between historical existence and the actors* interplay. This explains the importance in such a society of social problems that are largely false problems, even though they play a considerable role in inter-actor relations. In certain European countries the maintenance of the old system of social hierarchization has entailed a whole set of social and political problems that overload and distort the class conflict within those societies.

Figure 5 CE=counterelement H=hierarchization

In the case of France it is possibly the lagging behind of needs, even more than that of hierarchization, that is most noticeable. This has various effects, from the clericalism-anticlericalism struggle to the maintenance of

The System of Historical Action 87

paternalism in the organization of labor, to the falling back onto particu­laristic themes like corporatism—three areas corresponding to the counter-elements surrounding the element needs.

The crisis remains limited however, since only a single element is affected. It becomes central, on the other hand, when one of the system's axes is broken. It follows from the nature of the SHA that it can be affected by three central crises:

rupture of the movement-order axis, which is to say the disjunction CM -r M / / H - N; rupture ot the orientations-resources axis, which is to say the disjunction CM + H // M -f N; rupture ot the culture-society axis, which is to say the disjunction CM 4 N / / M^H.

1. The first of these will be termed crisis of historicity, since it affects the most general dimension of the SHA. In a society of the modern type it expresses itself as disjunction of the social order and the economy. The economy may be more modern, oriented toward freedom of the market or toward technical progress, whereas the social order remains more archaic. But the reverse situation is no less real: the modernization of the social order and cultural practices can be ahead of the production and labor organization model.

The crisis triggered in this way is a social crisis, one that threatens the unity of the society viewed in its historicity. Like any type of crisis, it tends to manifest itself in the importance given to certain categories of actors, which do not coincide with the social classes but are often superimposed upon them. Here these categories are of the old-modern type. One needs only to think of the use of the word "bourgeois" in France: this term is not a simple doublet of capitalist. Whereas the latter is a precise denotation of a dominant class, the word "bourgeois" introduces the idea of archaism, of privilege, of the transformation of the acquired into the transmitted. On the side of the ruling class, as on that of the class being ruled, there exist strong tensions between supporters of the old and supporters of the new that complicate and sometimes blur the class conflict.

Such a crisis is thus very likely to occur in economically heterogeneous societies in which a traditional economic sector is being maintained despite economic growth.

2. The second crisis will be termed crisis ofrationaliry. Orientations and resources, ends and means, are in opposition. The social categories that tend to form are of the high-low or elite-masses type. Two contrasting examples spring naturally to mind. Soviet society has a very advanced cultural model

88 Chapter Two

and hierarchization model. The role played in it by science and technique— such as that of education—is considerable. On the other hand, the use made of social and cultural resources, the forms of labor organization and consumption, are archaic. Hence an awareness of opposition between the ruling elite and the mass of the people. In the United States the situation is the reverse one: the forms of mobilization and the nature of needs have both been very much modernized, whereas the modes of movement and order remain very much stamped by earlier capitalist development. Here too we find a lively awareness of opposition between the mass of the people and the elites, an opposition that according to circumstances can be either progres-sivist or reactionary, but which is never reducible to a class conflict.

The resulting crisis can be termed institutional or political, since it affects society's management ability.

3. The third crisis will be called crisis of integration. It threatens the unity of the SHA very directly since it sets culture in opposition to society. In our type of society it opposes production and consumption on the one hand against organization and distribution on the other. This is a cultural crisis, one might say, and one that subjects the personality to extreme pressures. It tends to set change—both in consumption and production—in opposition to social integration. In these days it occurs above all in societies driven by foreign economic forces, as with Quebec, or national economic forces, as with Japan, when the domination of those forces is insufficiently com­pensated for by mechanisms of political intervention.

In each of these cases the split in the SHA leads to the formation of two opposing subsystems in which elements and counterlements are inter­mixed. These splits may be represented as in figure 6.

The opposition of these subsystems is made all the stronger and more complex in that each of them contains counterelements that are in opposition to one another but reinforce one another in their common opposition to those of the other subsystem.

It is therefore likely that a crisis of the SHA will entail a predominance of the counterelements and, thus, social struggles centered on control of the counterelements, while reference to society's historicity vanishes.

This becomes even more clear-cut in the extreme case of a general crisis of the SHA, a situation in which the three crises already described are superimposed.

The SHA then disappears completely and is replaced by the whole formed by the counterelements, the unity of which is artificial. The historical actors are wholly engaged in struggles that become, one may say, ideological, arfd are detached from the problems of historicity. This is the sociological SeTmTtion of decadence, which is the loss of historicity.

The System of Historical Action 89

crisis of historicity

CM

M

crisis of rationality

H

3

4

N

CM

-> 4.

1

M

H !

4

3 N

1 1

CM

ens \s of m titration

M

Figure 6 CM = cultural model H = hierarch Nation M = mobilization N = needs

Note: The counterelements have been inserted in the subsystems to which two of their three surrounding elements belong. E.g. in the crisis of integration the CE2 has been placed with the elements CM and N, which flank it.

This defines the interest of a study of crises. In a society where there is no crisis, the historical actors struggle around an axis of counterelements but are directly and constantly deflected back to the elements themselves. If the dominant and dominated classes are both defending asociocultural model of development and an instrumental conception of economic progress, the clash between these positions obliges them on the one hand to rediscover a cultural model which is no longer a sociocultural model, since both classes are equally and contradictorily seeking to appropriate it; similarly the class conflict rediscovers the existence of forms of mobilization not reducible to the interests of one class or another, since both can lay claim to them simul­taneously.

Just as the introduction of the actors inevitably entails transition from elements to counterelements, so the struggle between those actors inevitably reintroduces the elements, which are the stake of that struggle.

/ But this oscillation between elements and counterelements, between historical problematic and solutions put forward by social consciousness through class conflict, finds itself halted by ernes of the SHA, which create a_certain opacity between elements and counterelements asTHe~result of their noncoincidence. Social consciousness and its conflicts no longer refer directly to the problems of historicity. Ultimately, in a state of generalized

90 Chapter Two

crisis, the social representations in conflict form a closed world. Ideas, images, objectives are all opposing one another without their opposition recognizing a common field. In which case we must not say that the class struggle is victorious. Quite the contrary is true. For all reference to historicity vanishes, and the actors are no longer defining themselves except by the multiple interplay of their oppositions and their competition. Now whatever the precise conception one has of conflicts, they always imply a will to control and direct an overall process of historical change. In a crisis situation this overall process dissolves into the struggle of the actors. The social conflicts are no more than a shadow play.

More precisely, the conflicts linked with historicity are downgraded into conflicts situated on the institutional and political level; the social classes also break up and subdivide into a multiplicity of social forces.. Let us picture for a moment those societies in a process of development, tiy nature they are societies in crisis whose elements are broadly failing to coincide with one another because several systems of historical action are at work.

The result is that politics acquires a complexity and autonomy unknown in more stable societies, where, on the contrary, the opposition of social classes is much more clearly apparent.

Analysis of crisis is indispensable to that of historical actors. It is rare for social classes to occur in the pure state (without even considering here the intervention of actors formed on other levels of social reality—institutions and organizations). The opposition between supporters of old and new, between elite and mass, between innovators and collectivity, is superimposed on that between the classes. Knowledge of crises makes it possible to unravel this tangle and consequently to isolate the general nature of class conflicts, beyond their particular historical manifestations.

Study of crises is also the necessary complement to analysis which, having defined the SHA and its elements, has laid the groundwork for an examination of the historical actors by introducing the notion of counter-elements, which is to say by passing from historical experience to represen­tations of social consciousness. A crisis is a discordance between the elements and counterelements of historical action.

c. Dominion and Severance

Historicity is the level of analysis governing my procedure as a whole. A society is a particular type of system such that its functioning is governed by its capacity to act upon that functioning, to construct a field of cultural experience on the basis of the capacity to produce work through knowledge, accumulation, and the cultural model.

The system of historical action, on the other hand, is a "regional'" concejpt. It defines one of the social systems, oneTbFthe levels of sociological analysis and. through that analysis, of social reality too. A society, seen in its simplest

The System of Historical Action 91

aspects, abstracted from its historical complexity, is the concatenation of three sub-units: the field of historicity, the institutions, the social organi­zation.

The system of historical action is one of the two elements of the field of historicity; the other being the class relations that form the field of the historical actors.

The system of historical action is organized around the cultural model, a component of historicitv; class relations are more directly linked to accumu­lation. ^

Even before the theme of social classes is dealt with directly, the interdependence of the system of historical action and class relations must be stressed. There are two kinds of analysis that must never be separated: that of the division of society into classes and that of the way in which it is "powered" by the motive force of historicity and, more directly, by the system of historical action.

Everything is social relations, hut everything is also governed by historical action. Conciliation cannot be arrived at between these two orders by dint of compromise, as if the division into classes were never complete and society's orientations never completely integrated one with another.

What links those orientations is so fundamental that we ought to find it at the very heart of any analysis. It is in fact historicity, for historicity must inevitably be simultaneously driving force and severance, the constituting principle of a system of historical action and a breaking away from society's functioning. The cultural model is the means by which historicity becomes orientation of social activity; accumulation, on the contrary, betokens the wrenching away of activity toward historicity, while class relations, in a complementary motion, cause this division of society from itself to move downward again toward social organization.

If one forgets historicity, if one leaves the system of historical action and class relations in confrontation, their unity and duality contradict one another. Whereas they combine when one recognizes that society is definable only by means of the relation of its historicity and its functioning-, of the dominion of the first over the second, which is also the wrenching of the former out of the latter. Analysis does not have to begin from a summit in order to move downward again to the plains of social organization. It is governed by this circular relation: activity — historicity—functioning and therefore by the twin movement of ascent and descent tha t leads to historicity and then comes back down toward social organization once more.

D. The Configurations of the System of Historical Action

The system of historical action is defined by the relations that unite its

92 Chapter Two

elements, but its content depends upon the situation of labor, since the cultural model itself is linked to a type of accumulation and thus toXcertam level of society's action upon itself, to a certain level of developmentjof creative work and knowledge. We could, therefore, without further delay, leave history to get on with the job of applying the general concepts that have been worked out to each individual concrete society. But that would be rushing things somewhat, and neglecting to establish the reasons that enable us to speak of the structure of historical action. We are absolutely not concerned here with reducing historical analysis to the application of a sociological construction, but with bringing out a number of implications in this concept of the SHA. I shall therefore go back over some points made earlier in this chapter.

a. Construction of the Four Societal Types

The elements of the SHA are.sociological in.nature but correspond to the elements of economic activity. The cultural model corresponds to pro­duction, mobilization to the organization of labor, hierarchization to distribution, needs to consumption. This correspondence stems from the very definition of the SHA. which is not a system of ideas but the organization of the movement that drives society to exceed its functioning, in terms of its creative work and in the name of the consciousness of creativity that it is given by that work.

But the system of historical action does not coincide with economic activity exactly, term for term, except when society is entirely molded by its historicity. The further one moves away from this situation, the more the cultural model, like accumulation itself, is attached to order rather than to the movement of economic activity.

All "historical" societies are thus situated between two extreme points that probably do not correspond to any real case: on the one hand a society of pure reproduction, entirely governed by its laws of function and exchange; on the other, a society entirely master of itself, a voluntary association or a totalitarian nightmare.

The space between these points is not occupied by a long struggle upward toward liberty and responsibility but by a variety of societal types, configu­rations of the system of historical action. Each of them corresponds to the rooting of historicity in one of the elements of economic activity: con­sumption, distribution, organization, production. This is why they will be referred to here by the name of the economic activity from which they derive and which they transform in meaning and in practice: agrarian, mercantile, industrial, and programmed societies.

We are dealing here not with types of total society but only with configurations of the system of historical action. No territorial collectivity

The System of Historical Action 93

can be identified with one of these types. History begins by apprehending concrete totalities that are at the same time systems of historical action, polhlc^rconectm social organizations, states, and modes of social change^The less strong the dominion of historicity over the society's functioning, the less easily can a societal type be isolated from the particular forms of organization, reproduction, and change of particular collectivities.

/. The programmed society. In the most economically advanced societies, what is accumulated is the capacity to produce production, the very principle of Creative "work, which is to say knowledge. This is made clear by the importance of education and research, by the decisive role played by information and by the use of information systems in economic growth. The cultural model in this case corresponds to the element P (production) of the economic system. It follows from this that the isomorphism of the two systems is expressed by a term for term correspondence of the elements of the SHA and the economic elements. And this is represented in figure 7.

s=social elements c=cultural elements

orientations

movement

cultural model

production c

< mobilization

organization

order

hierarchization

distribution

x-needs

consumption

Figure 7

This type of society, which I term programmed or, more simply, in order to make clear their novelty, post industrial, does not accumulate only consumable goods, instruments of exchange, or capital, but also meansjDf producing work, thanks to technical progress.

For the first time the image of creativity introduces no nietasocial warrant for order, whether derived from religion, from the state, or from economics. Society recognizes that the transcendence of its functioning is its develop­ment, that there is no longer any separation between its transcendence and its immanence. An industrial society is oriented toward "the laws of the market" or toward the creation of an economic framework. A postindustrial society is likewise oriented toward movement and thus very far from returning to a model of equilibrium; but it no longer conceives of movement as opportunity and opportunism, in the terms of the entrepreneur and his

94 Chapter Two

profit; it thinks of it as system management, as ability to program its change. Mobilization corresponds to the organization of labor and production. It

consists in combining forces in order to achieve an objective whose move­ments are perfectly or, more often, imperfectly known. It is a type of mobilization in clear-cut opposition to industrial mobilization, the principle of which is putting labor at the disposition of capital, and even more so to preindustrial mobilization, the type that Weber termed bureaucracy and which is based upon a definition of rights and duties and hierarchical relations between office-holders.

Hierarchization is directly linked with distribution and, therefore, with the level of participation attained in management of the system. The most widespread image of this is the meritocracy.

Lastly, needs are defined in terms of consumption, of enjoyment, and not in terms of conquest, or of maintenance of a level, or of attributes of the position occupied within the social organization.

Analysis of this configuration, as of any other, would require an entire book, which I hope one day to write. Since it is impossible to do any kind of justice to so general a subject in a few lines, I shall limit myself here toone observation: the relations these elements stand in to one another are relations simultaneously of complementarity and of opposition. This investment society is also a consumption society, while being oriented toward science and technique it is also oriented toward expression, toward the rediscovery of mind and body, toward personal and collective identity. It is a society of movement and of organization by objectives, but it is also hierarchized and replaces old-style discriminations with new segregations.

P = production O=organization D = distribution C=consumption

cultural model ' hierarchization

creativity meritocracy P D

O mobilization

objectives

C needs

enjoyment

Figure 8

This postindustrial or programmed society is thus not pure creativity, power without limit, gratuitous invention. It is not just movement as opposed to the pure order of "traditional" societies. Every society is order and movement at the same time; postindustrial society is putting to work resources not freely molded by orientations but imposing their own natural

The System of Historical Action 95

laws. At the same time as society's capacity for autotransformation increases, so it conies"up> more directly against "human nature," defined not morally but scientifically, as a part of nature. The age of the One. of an entirely willed society or of its contrary, a society reincorporated into nature, is an age that is never going to come.

What is termed consumption cannot be reduced to the manipulation of demand by decision centers seeking to maximize their own advantages, their own profits or power. What it brings out is man's resistance, with those natural characteristics being explored by anthropology. The world of lan­guage, of the unconscious, of sexuality, which is never separable from the cultural model nor ever reducible to it.

Man is nature but also action on nature. As in the work of Michelangelo, historicity animates practice. God awakens Adam, he does not invent him; the body predates creation. Is this not an essential aspect of the sensibility of our time? Nature is no longer a raw material from which industry draws energy; man is no longer outside nature; he is nature itself and at the same time the organizer of nature.

The programmed society is no more a new form of industrial society than the latter was an avatar of the mercantile society. It is not the technical product of man liberating and utilizing the forces of nature, but the management_of systems that are simultaneously technical and human, systems of communication rather than of manufacture.

The opposition between productive labor and nonproductive activities no longer has any great meaning in this society; the very boundary between production and nonproductive activities such as education, health, research, and so on is disappearing very swiftly as large organizations continue to enlarge their technocratic domination in all these areas.

Whole forms of industrial society are crumbling ever more quickly before our eyes. First it was youth imposing a new definition of needs. Then it wras the economic leaders themselves discovering the end of the infinite world and the necessity to treat production as a set of interdependent elements interacting within certain limits.

Sociology might be of interest to no more than a few specialists if it did not set itself the immediate aim of understanding the opposition of this new type of society, its specific characteristics, its domination of other societies, its new forms of powrer and conflict.

2. Industrial society. The other types of society are defined by other levels of accumulation. The nearest to the preceding type is that in which accumulations bears on the organization of labor. We term industrial capital that money which is invested in a transformation of the conditions of labor by developing the division of labor. The "works," whether small mill or huge

96 Chapter Two

factory, is a production of the accumulation of capital. It is of small importance here who controls that accumulation, whether it is a private or a public concern. The important thing is that the accumulation, and thus the cultural model, corresponds to the element O (organization) in the economic system. In such cases there is no longer a direct correspondence of each element of the SHA with its counterpart in the economic system. But the nature of that system is not thereby modified. The elements P, O, D, and C must still be situated in relation to one another just as the elements of the SHA are.

Since it is the element O that forms the basis of the cultural model, we must of necessity arrive at the diagram presented in figure 9. The position of each of the elements of the economic system has changed in relation to those of the SHA, but their positions in relation to one another have not altered.

orient at Urns

resources

movement

cultural mtjdel

organization

mobilization

production

order

hierarchization

consumption

needs

distribution

Figure 9

This configuration is that of the industrial society. The cultural model does not yet apprehend society directly as the creator of its own transcendence.

It refers to a principle of movement that cannot be expressed in terms of social action and to which the word "progress" usually lends its half-anthro­pomorphic lace. This is the movement of people or else of goods, wealth, and the combination of the laborers in the workshop that enables society to transform itself and to move toward progress. Society is dominated by the economic order. Explanation of social facts, whether in sophisticated or crude forms, always consists in referring them to economic facts, behind which there soon appears a metasocial principle of a historicist kind: the forces of production, energy in nature and man, "productive" labor.

Mobilization corresponds to production. Whereas in a postindustrial society relations between the elements of society form the organization of the social system of production, here those relations are organized in terms of production.

In labor it is worker concentration that makes possible increased produc­tion. From simple forms of the division of labor, on to Taylorism or Fordism

The System ol Historical Action 97

and largely automated sets of operations, the link between direct organi­zation of labor, increased productivity—and in consequence increased profit for the ruling class too—is close and constant.

Hierarchization is based upon consumption. In this society everything is a sign of wealth. Above all, the social scale is that which goes from immediate consumption to deferred consumption. Hence the importance of saving, which is as central in late nineteenth-century industrial society as is education in the postindustrial society now in formation.

Lastly, needs are expressed in terms of distribution, and thus of level There is the desire to rise, the fear of falling, concern with appearances, while those at the bottom of the scale and, as it were, excluded from social exchanges, like the working class, are imprisoned within their "natural" needs.

3. Mercantile society. In a third situation, accumulation bears upon distribution. The principal means of exchange, money, is accumulated by certain social categories and by the state, but this money is not invested in such a way as to transform the organization of labor. The concentration is mercantile, not industrial. The cultural model is thus linked to the element D (distribution) of the economic system. The same operation as in the previous case produces the diagram shown in figure 11.

P = production O = organization D = distribution C = consumption

orientations

resources

cultural model

progress

O^

P mobilization

rationalization

movement

cultural model

distribution

mobilization

consumption

• -1 h iera rch iz a t inn

saving

C

D needs

level

Figure 10

order

hierarchization

production

needs

organization

Figure 11

98 Chapter Two

The cultural model posits a principle that dominates society and ensures progress by controlling the distribution of wealth. This principle is a political one, the state, as it is formed within mercantile societies and as it has been depicted by Machiavelli and above all by Jean Bodin in L'Occident de la Renaissance.

In a society whose action is still doing little to transform the conditions of production and of the organization of labor but already exerting an influence on exchanges, the cultural model, the image of creativity, takes the form of a principle of order regulating exchanges, creating respect for order, and organizing markets. This model also corresponds to the mode of knowledge formed around mechanics. This state-centered model is not rejected by the social forces of opposition; it is turned against the dominant order and becomes Rousseau's nation, the nation of the French Revolution.

Mobilization brings into relation the components of the social mechanism, which exchange goods and services. Hence the importance of legal categories in the organization of commercial exchanges as well as in that of the administrative services, of the state bureaucracy.

Hierarchization is linked to production roles: peasants, artisans, small merchants, big traders form so many estates inseparable from a trade and even more so from personal ownership of means of production and the capacity for transmitting that ownership. Needs are not defined as con­sumption or as pursuit of status but as demands specific to the place occupied within the social organization. Hence the importance of the way of life, the culture proper to a particular social milieu, also situated in a specific relation with both human and nonhuman environment, whether in the case of land or a trade.

cultural model

State D

c mobilization

exchanges

hierarchization

property

P

o needs

ways of life

P = production O = organization D = distribution C = consumption

Figure 12

4. Agrarian society. Finally, we come to the level at which accumulation is at its lowest, when it bears solely upon consumption in the form of simple saving. One can equally well say that accumulation bears upon the means of reproduction of labor (seed, animals, human energy) and not on the means of creating labor. The cultural model in this case corresponds to the element

The System ol Historical Action 99

C (consumption) in the economic system. Which produces the diagTam shown in figure 13.

What is most obvious in this type of society is the weakness of its historicity and thus the apparent proximity between the elements of the system of historical action and the forms of social and cultural organization. But all we are concerned with here is defining a mode of society's action on itself.

The cultural model is very far removed from being consciousness of a practice of investment and growth. From the order of things it derives a principle of order that is not coincident with observable reality, since it is opposed to a principle of disorder. In terming this model religious I am not

iv 1 in re i model j

consumption

piohihzation

distribution

I hurarchizalkm

organisation

consumption

production

Figure 13

oblivious of the fact that the word carries with it so many intermingled denotations and connotations that there is a danger of ambiguity. It can also be termed cosmological, as long as it is not confused with a system of order defining relative positions, as rediscovered by anthropologists.

Mobilization brings into relation actors defined by their place in distri­bution, and thus by their status, taking this word in the double sense of position and level.

Hierarchization is not separable here from the forms of economic and social organization, and thus from the place occupied in the community by ethnic, sexual, age, or kinship categories.

Lastly, needs are situated in the order of production. They are governed by resources, by the nature of agriculture or herding practices; inversely, the pressure of need stimulates activity. This link defines a subsistence society. No other cases than the four now defined are possible. This does not mean that we have the right to group all societies in which a process of accumulation exists into four groups: we are here considering only the first level of the analysis of society, in other words, that of systems of historical action and not that of concrete societies. Moreover, nothing obliges us to think that there must exist pure historical types, societies corresponding totally to one of the configurations given.

These brief specifications cannot be more than an introduction to com-

100

cultural model

religion

i c

! D mobilization

status

Chapter

! hierarchization

function

O P

needs

subsistence

Two

J

P = production O = organization D = distribution C = consumption

Figure 14

parative studies. They will not be pursued further here because they lose almost all their interest when they are not being used to structure historical research.

Let us simply remember that for each societal type examined the same procedure must be followed: it must be shown that the elements of any system of historical action stand in variable relations of complementarity or opposition. The terms employed to illustrate the various societal types must not leave us with the belief that each of them can be summed up by a general image, by a relatively coherent body of values. The tensions that set the elements in opposition to one another are neither more nor less strong in a programmed society than in the other types of society. In the second place, the presentation of the four elements should in every case be completed by that of the counterelements, an essential step since it links the analysis of the system of historical action with that of the social classes.

Finally, the crises of the system of historical action should be studied within all the configurations in the same way, even when their manifestations differ profoundly from one type of society to another.

Those we call sociologists will naturally tend to begin by comparing industrial and postindustrial societies, but the work of the historians now provides us with such a wealth of information and analysis that more sociologists, one may hope, may study past societies too.

b. Cultural Models and Forms of Production

Why does this analysis rest upon the correspondence between the elements of the system of historical action and those of the economic system?

Because historicity is work and not an idea. It is never possible to separate a certain state of economic organization,..and production, from a state of historicity. The latter is a "reflection" upon economic activity and. at the same time, the meaning of society's practices, which are determined by the system of historical action. For historicity— model of knowledge, accumulation, and cultural model—is not "invented" by

The System of Historical Action 101

great minds; it is not a society's essence. It is determined by society's work and determines that work in turn. The state of production defines society's dominion over itself, its historicity, which In Us turn gives meaning and orientation to social and cultural conduct.

It is the type of accumulation that links the two orders of facts. But at this point it is the relation of cultural model to economic activity that must be illustrated.

The cultural model is not the presentation of a type of economic activity. Although, for convenience, we use the terms ''programmed/* "industrial," "mercantile," and "agrarian" societies for the types we have just con­structed,^ would be wrong to think that the cultural model in each case represents the self-awareness of those societies.

Such a formula would ultimately be acceptable only for the programmed | society, since its cultural model theoretically corresponds to its economic system, to production. But even in this case it is dangerous. The cultural model is not science itself but the direct apprehension of creativity as the work of knowledge, and thus of science.

The further we move away from this type of society, the less "practical'1

the cultural model is, because the society's real creativity is weaker. The image of creativity thus becomes more and more separate from the activity of production, more and more "abstract," and refers to a nonscientific principle of determining order.

A cultural model formed on the basis of consumption is thus further away from being a model of social transformation. It orders and provides a warrant for activities and conduct. But it is not a logic of order; it mobilizes social activity toward a mode of transcending its reproduction that is just as real for such societies as scientific and technological development is for a programmed society. If we are able to speak here of a religious model, it is only by limiting ourselves to one aspect of religion, which is recognition of a principle of movement that embraces the human world. It must not be concluded from this that every society in which religious values are strongly affirmed and firmly founded on a powerful social organization must therefore belong to this type.

In the same way one can point out that a mercantile society, in which the cultural model is linked to distribution, gives that model a political content. It is the organization and power of the city or the state that represents the principle of creativity.

These two cases have in common the fact that they base their cultural model on economic elements which, viewed in themselves, correspond to the order and not to the movement of society. This is not the case with the other two, and this justifies the expression—which economic historians may rightly judge excessive in many cases—industrial revolution. Saint-Simon and

Y

102 Chapter Two

Comte both admirably sensed this great transformation, and the weakness of their analysis derives not from the extreme importance they attributed to it but from their reduction of all social mechanisms to a ''system of ideas" from which the whole social organization could then supposedly be deduced.

In industrial society the cultural model does not yet correspond to the creation of labor but to organization and thus still transcends the domain of production, which finds itself naturally expressed by mobilization in the system of historical action, in conformity with the analyses of the econ­omists, from Smith to Marx. This cultural model could be termed economic, since it is the moment when the laws of economy seem to be governing the movement of society. More generally, historicism is the mode of awareness of the movement of this society.

According to the societal type under consideration, the cultural model and in consequence the field of class conflicts too can be defined as religious, state-oriented, economic, or cultural.

Does this mean that it is one category of social facts or another that occupies the dominant position in various societies? Certainly not. Nothing could be further from my analysis than the idea of a succession of 44ages" inspired by August Comte.

But it does not answer the question to say that in all societies it is economic activity that determines the dominant category of facts. For in what can the determining role of a nondominant factor consist?

In reality, the question of finding out which category of social facts, which "factor," has a dominant role seems to me absolutely foreign to sociology. It introduces the idea that there exist separate domains—the economic, the political, the religious—and that a society is defined by the interaction of such parts. Whereas the action exerted by society upon itself, the action that prevents it from being reduced to its own functioning, is neither economic, nor political, nor religious. It is neither material nor spiritual. Or, if you prefer, it is all of these things together. Social action is a practice and a meaning. Historicity is the work of knowledge, of accumulation, and of the cultural model all at the same time. The state of society's dominion oyer itself is not separable from an image of creativity that takes a religious, state-oriented, political, or scientific form according to the society under consideration. But this content of the cultural model cannot be confused with the greater or lesser importance of a particular level of social reality. To say that a mercantile society's field of historicity is "political" does not mean that the political system occupies a more central place within that society than class relations. Quite the contrary. The hierarchy of levels is the same in all societies: the field of historicity (system of historical action and associated class relations) determines the political system which determines the social organization. The same analytical tools and the same general

The System of Historical Action 103

principles apply to all four societal types, at least insofar as their historicity is concerned.

c. Periodization

This brief account of the systems of historical action necessitates a critical observation, for it is not easy to exorcise the ghost of the philosophy of history. I have been led to present the four societal types in a theoretical succession, the fourth and last corresponding to the economically most advanced societies, which I have called programmed or postindustrial societies. So are we not once more confronted with the image of our society as the end of history'!

This objection is in fact less serious than it first appears. The evident limits of observation, for which the present constitutes an unbreachable barrier, have no more than a secondary importance here. The historical corre­spondences with the various forms of the SHA, correspondences which I have indicated in a deliberately allusive and superficial way. will have to be modified in the future. Although I think it necessary to posit the existence of a type of postindustrial society, it is probable that when we have moved further into it, we shall be more inclined to put back into industrial society many of the changes that today seem to be heralding this postindustrial society^

However, these cautious remarks must not be allowed to deflect attention from the essential point. Jf we define postindustrial society as that society which in principle possesses the greatest possibilities of action upon itself, then it must necessarily mark the end of periodization.

No new system of historical action can henceforth appear. But this does not mean that postindustrial societies in the process of formation will not change. It simply means that those changes will occur within a field of historicity and must therefore be apprehended by analytical tools of a new kind. The stronger the historicity a society possesses, the more its func­tioning and its change can differ from those of another society possessing the same degree of historicity. We shall have to learn to recognize qualitative differences between societies. The idea of placing societies and nations on a scale of modernization and growth has already come to be seen as mere ideology spread by the dominant classes and nations. Postindustrial society is a post historical society.

Evolution will continue to exist within this type of society, but the foreseeable transformations of science will occur within the cultural model I have used to characterize programmed society, a model based upon science itself. It is true that the intervention of science is still almost completely limited to the physical world and that the period now beginning will be characterized above all by a growing capacity for intervention on the part of

104 Chapter Two

the biological sciences, then of all the sciences of man as a whole. But the more profound these interventions become, the more society will be acting upon itself, so that it is possible to say that it is now taking up its place within historical creativity.

To envisage an indefinite series of future phases would be to give way to nineteenth-century historical evolutionism. The more society acts upon itself, the further away it moves from a vision of indefinite progress, because the model of growth becomes more and more internal to the functioning of society itself. It is in this sense that the triumph of historicity is also the end of history.

However, such a way of putting things can be dangerous. It could suggest that we are coming to the end of the era of historical societies, an era lying between those primitive societies regulated by the demands of survival and the laws of their exchanges, and the societies of change, which are linked to the primitive societies at least by the fact that neither type is dominated by the tension between historicity and functioning. In which case, having passed beyond the historical phase, are we returning to societies that are simply functioning systems, a system of reproduction in one case, a system of production in the other? Isn't it time to rid ourselves of all dualist notions and images, of the opposition between order and movement, of the conflict between antagonistic classes, of the tension between transcendence and phenomena, all of which belong to a kind of thought proper to intermediary societies and no longer correspond to the type of society now coming into being before our eyes?

I am utterly opposed to this view. Others, like Serge Moscovici (La societe contre nature, Paris: Union ge*n6rale d'editions, coll. 10/18, 1972), are even critical of the image of a primitive society reduced to self-reproduction, and find historicity, the action of society upon itself, and class conflicts even in such societies. I for my part wish to combat the image of a society reduced to its own change, entirely open and pragmatic. We have seen historicity buried beneath reproduction; now we are seeing it swiftly extending its domain and leading the way from societies with memory to societies with plans. But through all these transformations, not only has the tension between histo­ricity- and functioning remained constant, it has also imposed itself in­creasingly as the central principle of sociological analysis. Postindustrial society is not reducible to the network of decisions taken by the great corporations, financial centers, planning agencies, and states. It is trans­forming action, no longer being exerted upon a social and cultural organi­zation whose laws it is the mission of the natural sciences of man to establish, but, on the contrary, upon a willed social activity, upon conduct looking for expression, innovation, and feeling. Society will always be that natural system whose characteristic it is to turn back upon itself, to divide itself

The System of Historical Action 105

naturally into an opposition between culture and nature and also, as a consequence and in a way that will be gone into fully in the next chapter, into class relations.

Another criticism that springs to mind is that the attention focused on the cultural model entails the risk of introducing the illusion that some kind of "spirit" of society exists. But whatever the societal type and system of action, the general principles of our analysis must be strictly maintained. Neither a cultural model of the religious type nor a model oriented toward scientific knowledge constitutes the envelope of a society; the cultural model is no more than one of the elements oj the SHA. and its relations with the others are those of opposition and complementarity simultaneously. The SUA is a network of oppositions; it cannot be defined in terms of values or in terms of general forms of social organizatioy/Above all one must strongly reject any attempt at overall periodization of social evolution, for it presupposes that the system of historical action possesses the attributes of a sovereign governing institutions, ideologies, and organizations as if they were subjects. Nothing forces us to suppose that the various levels of social reality must evolve in parallel; on the contrary, everything leads us to predict that their changes will be asynchronic, since the units under consideration are not the same: a political society or an organization are historical units that coincide only very partially with a system of historical action. Despite its ambiguities, the notion of the social formation does at least have the merit of being distinct from that of mode of production. This means starting out from a particular dissection of reality for each sub-whole of facts constituted either by social practice or by the analyst, but with the idea of challenging that dissection as soon as possible, of breaking it down in order to reveal the discrepancies or non-fits between the various levels of social reality within that sub-whole. Otherwise we would be encumbering ourselves with all the defects inherent in the history of ideas or institutions, which has been rewritten and reinterpreted periodically by authors who are more reporters than sociologists, ideologists of either greater or lesser independence who are constantly increasing the difficulty of breaking through to a genuine analysis, one not confused with an interpretation of the actors1 consciousness.

Everything constantly leads us back to a rejection of the evolutionist view. Systems ofhistoricalaction are not situated on a line of progress leading from traditional to modern; they each constitute a particular configuration of the same sxstenu They^are thus qualitatively different.

A system of historical action traces a boundary" always a different one, between visible and invisible. Notions, feelings, debates, conflicts appear within it for which no place can be found in any other system. Research into the history of such and such an aspect of cultural or social life thus becomes increasingly futile as its object becomes closer to any of the elements of the

106 Chapter Two

system of historical action. Whereas it becomes increasingly justified, on the other hand, as it bears increasingly on ideas or else on modes of expression. Even so we must recognize that any study of political, legal, or social ideas must occupy a subordinate place simply because their autonomy derives from their link with the mechanisms of social reproduction or merely of institu­tional functioning. We must recognize the discontinuity of the systems of historical action before embarking on the various temporal dissections appropriate to the other levels of social reality.

This discontinuity is not total however. Each societal type, as it vanishes, takes with it certain social and cultural forms, but these live on in the memory and in the imagination of other societies. No society can relive in its organization what was once the common experience of another society, but since no historically defined society ever coincides entirely with a sociological type, all societies, outside their most closely regulated practices, are open to the~experience of others. The acceleration of social change gives a particular importance to this permanence or to these resurgencesof the experiences of past societies in our own type of society.

But the essential point is the discontinuity of the evolution ytt is possible for the history of a collectivity not to be interrupted by rifts: an organization can transform itself until it makes the transition from one type to another, the change mechanism completely concealing the difference between two social systems. The same thing is no longer true on the institutional or political level: this latter is more directly linked to a field of historicity, so that the transition from one state to another is more discontinuous/A system of historical action is a totality whose coherence is not guaranteed by any mechanism of social control; its unity is nothing other than the network of relations that exist between its elements. It is therefore incapable of transformation. The set of change processes that will be analyzed at the end of this book do affect the system of historical action but they cannot emanate from it. This is why no concrete society enables us to observe a system of historical action completely constituted and completely dominating that societ» 6ut this should not lead us to think that the transition from one configuration to another is effected in a series of imperceptible shifts, so that the types we have differentiated are no more than convenient landmarks being used to punctuate what is in fact a continuous development. On the contrary, we must recognize that there are periods oj[ jormaHpn_ar\J. breakdown of systems of historical action. The formation of a system is marked by an awareness of mutation, by acute epistemological interro­gation, by a critical questioning of the elements of the previous system, wrhich are denounced as ideologies. The breakdown of a system, on the other hand, entails the replacement of this questioning of society and culture by either more abstract or more "moral" preoccupations; in such a situation histo-

The System of Historical Action 107

ricity seems on the one hand to be absorbed into the subordinate levels of society, into the institutional system and social organization, and on the other to be "sublimated" into ideas, feelings, and principles. It must surely be one of the principal tasks of applied sociology to see and to make visible in societies entering the postindustrial type the forms of mutation, of break­down in industrial society, and the formation of a new system of historical action.

In our day a culture oriented toward "productive" labor, the austerity of hard work and the thrift that make industrialization possible, is replaced by a culture more management- and organization-oriented than technical. A society that thought of itself as an economicjystem and a historical stage Is replaced by one that thinks of itself as a social system and as an agent for decision making. An organization based on the pursuit of productivity is being overlaid By one that is defined by the objectives it wishes to attain. Social scales based on income are giving way to others placing more emphasis on authority and ability. Lastly, the pursuit of status seems to be replaced by that ofhappiness, self-expression, and communication.

These changes are so profound and so rapid that those of us who are "neither old nor young" find ourselves torn between two societies and two cultures. This is a period of crisis in which the decline of an old world and the rise of a new intertwine or collide, in which it is impossible to situate the actors within a single field of reference, in which the opposition between those supporting the past and those supporting the future cuts across the opposition between right and left, while both must be seen within yet another opposition between those undergoing discontinuity and those imposing continuity.

How can we fail to see in our time and our type of society a mutation as important as that which plunged a section of the world into industriali­zation? How can we avoid analyzing in the same terms the prodigious controlled mutations that are leading entire societies on forced marches from one system of historical action to another?

To recognizejhe transition from one form of historicity to another or to follow the transformations of one element oithe system of historical action does not imply the idea of a general qualitative leap from one society to another.

Social change creates a constant asynchronia between the components of historicity and betweenjthe elements of the system of historical action. The swifter the changes are, the more likely they are to be asynchronic, which in turn diminishes the likelihood of coincidence between a mode of knowledge and a cultural model and thus their dependence in relation to ideologies that refer in the last analysis to class relations.

But whether one is considering this type of society or that, the essential

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point is to recognize that the effort at period ization bears not upon representations but upon categories of historical action. The history of ideas should benefit from these sociological analyses; it may, on its side, occa­sionally indicate paths worth following; it certainly cannot provide a method of analysis, and even less a substitute for research into the societal types and into the characteristics of their system of historical action.

All these historical mutations also make it clear that the rejection of evolutionism and the insistence on the qualitative difference separating systems of historical action cannot conceal the fact that these societaj_typ_es follow one another.

However unsatisfactory the term "postindustrial society" may be, it does at least indicate very clearly that this societal type does not appear until after industrial society. Similarly, no one disputes the fact that the preindustrial societies and the industrial societies are separated by industrialization.

If we refuse to accept any definition of societal types derived from their placement within an evolutionary movement toward a growing differentiation complexity, or secularization, how are we to provide an account of the evolution toward industrialization and then postindustrialization? The answer is that the most "modern" societies are more powerful. They are capable of conquering the others and subordinating them to their own interests. It is natural that the theme of the progress of civilization, including that of *'secularly," should have been celebrated with the greatest energy by the builders of colonial empires. It is indeed conquest that gives meaning to the image of civilization pushing back the frontiers of savagery.

The transition from one type of society to another is the result not of a natural process of differentiation but of that which is furthest removed from historicity, which is to say ittter-social relations, war and conquest, whether territorial or economic.

This is why the work of development, the work of willed and controlled transition from one societal type to another, cannot come from a purely internal evolution. It is impossible for a society to modernize itself to the point where it produces a new society. It can only achieve that by a struggle for or against a domination, by war, the struggle for national independence, military organization against the invader or colonizer. In its passing, evolutionism has taken with it the illusions of a continuous change process by means of which the same could miraculously engender the different.

d. Historical Evolution

The procedure according to which the configurations of the system of historical action have been constructed in recent pages entails a certain number of consequences and implications.

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/. Beyond evolutionism. The first is that this type of analysis is diamet­rically opposed to the evolutionism born out of the philosophy of the Enlightenment and developed in the early nineteenth century. We have not been following the progress of reason gradually liberating itself from the shadows of ignorance and superstition. Nor have we, therefore, been matching and arranging societies along a general line of evolution leading from nondifferentiation to differentiation, from poverty to wealth, from community to society, or from transmission to acquisition.

None of these images is without interest, and we shall meet them again at a different level of our analysis. But the principle upon which the construction of the societal types rests is not that of indicating stages in an evolution; it is that of distinguishing the various configurations that respect the structural law of the system of historical action.

We are therefore not concerned with creating an orderly arrangement of total societies reduced either to values and ideas or to forms of production.

Above all, an evolutionist viewpoint links the problems of[structure and the problems of change so closely as almost to fuse them. I, on the contrary, • am separating them, so that the distinctions made between the various configurations of the SHA do not in themselves contribute any element to a theory of social change. Comparison between industrial and postindustrial societies indicates that a theory of evolution is an attribute of the former, whereas the latter impose a separation between the study of structure and that of change.

2. Convergences and divergences of modern societies. The more practical the cultural model, the more it rests directly upon the creativity of knowledge and labor, and the stronger is the unity of the SHA over and above the particularities of the various societies and cultures.

On the other hand, when the cultural model is remote from scientific practice and introduces metasocial warrants, it is a complex intellectual construction such that, as in myths, the multiplicity of particular combi­nations and expressions becomes very large, which in turn weakens the explicative capacity of the SHA concept and opens the way to anthropology.

It would be hasty to conclude from this that all national societies moving into the postindustrial type are increasingly similar, and that American society and Soviet society, for example, are becoming less and less different. For such a statement implies a confusion of the SHA with the totality of a social and cultural reality.

Returning to an earlier observation, one can contrast this theme of unification with the theme of the growing control of social power over the totality of social organization and the tightening of the socializing network.

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This is also what we find expressed by everyday language, which finds it easier to talk about feudal society than about industrial society and is more aware of the contrasts between the United States and the USSR as institutional and organizational systems than of the differences between twelfth-century England and France on the same levels.

A double contention must be made here: (1) that the most modern societies, the most advanced economically, are increasingly societies of production, less and less societies of reproduction, so that they will tend to occur within an SHA whose forms do not vary from one society to another, and (2) that the SHA in these societies is more overlaid by the effect of extremely various institutional and organizational systems. Modern societies pose their problems in the same way but deal with them in different ways: older societies pose i heir problems in different ways but deal with them in the same way.

3. Changes in function of a social activity: the case of religion. Another implication of the procedure followed is more directly sociological. The actionalist approach and the use of the concept of the SHA forbid any consideration of religion, or the state, or the economy, as sociologically meaningful. Not only must one begin by separating everything in each area of social and cultural organization that belongs to each level of sociological analysis—historicity, institutions, organization—but above all, at the level of historicity itself, one must consider first and foremost the element of the SHA to which the economic, religious, or political conduct under consideration corresponds. We can go further than this, by taking religion as an example.

In societies whose historicity is weakest it is religion that gives its content to the cultural model. The diagram of this system of historical action shows that the cultural model corresponds in the economic order to consumption (see fig. 15). This means that it is a meaning given to an economic activity in which the intermediaries between production and consumption are reduced to a minimum. Labor is already recognized as creative; it is not simply toil or curse, but it is above all recognition of natural forces, an ordering of and respect tor community life. Here the appeal to historicity is intimately linked to the dominion of reproduction, to the nontranscendent religion that Durkheim was one of the first to recognize in illiterate societies.

The history of religions is able to study the variable forms of amalgam between this community-centered religion and the religion of transcendence.

It is of more importance for us here to follow the displacement of religion within the system of historical action from one type of society to another. Starting from the cultural model, it moves through mobilization and hierarchization and finally ends up in the order of needs. When defined by the cultural model corresponding to a subsistence society, it tries to maintain

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itself at the cultural model level; it provides a religious warrant for state power and even to the mechanisms of the market. But his warrant becomes increasingly formal and increasingly employed as a force of order. It is then that one can speak of opium of the people. At the same time religion takes on new functions, which correspond to the place occupied in the SHA by consumption. In postindustrial or programmed society it finds itself linked with the domain of needs. There is a tendency in this case to speak of religious experiences rather than a religious cultural model. Between these twro extremes religion is found more directly linked with the social elements of the SHA. In industrial society it is linked with social hierarchy, in mercantile societies with the forms of mobilization, religious orientations being linked to conduct relating to exchange, as the connection between Protestantism and the rise of mercantile society indicates. This connection leads to the subordination o\' religion to the state. The profound crisis through which the Roman Catholic Church is going today is not solely an institutional crisis, by which I mean the challenging of a rigid and monarchic decision-making system, since that challenge is only one aspect of a crisis affecting the position of religion within the SHA.

It is primarily a question of snapping the bond between religion and the dominant order, its role as warrant for the continuity of the dominant classes, which became dramatic indeed from 1848 onward with the swing back of the bourgeoisie toward religion after the appearance of the prole­tariat on the political scene. Corresponding to this ideological role of religion we find the mobilization of religious attitudes by the social opposition. The greater the weight of the former dominant classes, the more archaic the social order appears in relation to the dominant economic forces, and the more those in contestation organize their defense in terms of community with religious themes as their weapons. This is most conspicuous in dominated societies that are extremely heterogeneous; it is also detectable in already very industrialized countries such as France or Italy,

Moreover, alongside this role as supporter or adversary of the metasocial warrants of the social order in contemporary societies, religion also fills another role, bound up with its positive association with the domain of needs. Whatever in a postindustrial society makes claims in the name of the rights of identity and expression is in opposition to the instrumentalism of the cultural model and can give itself a religious content. From the more or less fanciful return to older religions to religion-based communities, including the quest for a new Christian humanism, religion nourishes the pursuit of direct communication, the defense of the individual personality, resistance to the technological and social dominion of the means of management and direction that govern individual and collective activity.

It is therefore impossible to base analysis on a reflection upon the essence

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of religion or inversely upon a purely organizational analysis of a church, of its dogma and practices^ The meaning of religious activity cannot be defined except by its place within the SHA-

4. Secularization. The closer one approaches postindustrial society, the greater becomes the differentiation between the various domains of historical practice.

When the SHA and the economic system are arranged in the reverse order to one another, as in the diagram (fig. 14) representing agrarian societies (CM-C; M-D; H-O; N-P), the cultural model governs the totality of the elements of the economic organization: it orients consumption; it is the nearest approach to a total ideology of reproduction. In the opposite case to this, when the two systems correspond term for term, as in postindustrial society, there exists a differentiation between the activity of production which carries within it its own legitimation, the mode of economic organization, the hierarchic order which is a political order, one of command, and the domain of consumption and needs within which religious activities may be situated.

In other words, we can generalize the observation made about religion and speak of a movement of secularization that affects first religion, then the state, then the economic organization.

The secularization of the state is one of the best-known aspects of the formation of industrial society. From Bentham to John Stuart Mill and from Saint-Simon to Marx we return continually to the theme of the transcending of the state and its resorption into a civil, self-governing society, whether in the capitalist liberal mode, that of technocratic rationalism, or that of socialism. Marx and Proudhon are not in disagreement on this essential point. The secularization of the economic system is similarly one of the most characteristic aspects of postindustrial society. You rarely find anyone today still relying on the authority of the laws of economic development. Economic calculations are now subordinate both to the progress of scientific knowledge and to the analysis of social relations and of the institutional mechanisms of decision making.

Secularization thus defines the relative distance of any element from the functioning of society—production, organization, etc.—in relation to the cultural model. Which means that one cannot speak of a general movement of societies toward secularization. Such an idea would in fact imply that there is an evolution leading on from societies based on principles or "moral" values to others defined solely by their activities, from societies of order to societies of movement and change. The most modern societies would therefore also be the most pragmatic, and reference to principles and values, like struggles conducted in the name of an overall project, would belong to the past and would be nothing more than forms of resistance to change, to

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the acceptance of change as an end in itself; social evolution would lead from the qualitative to the quantitative, from discourse to arithmetic.

Such images are in total contradiction to my analysis; they destroy the reality of an SHA made of tensions and oppositions in order to replace it with a philosophy of history enabling the observer to identify himself with an industrial or postindustrial society that has been judged to be superior. For every society, as I have said, apprehends the elements of its SHA as facts, and everything that departs from it appears to that society as the product of an ideology.

This optical illusion is inevitable and cannot be eliminated except by recourse to the concept of the SHA, which recognizes the unity of a structure beyond the diversity of the configurations and consequently frees observation from an evolutionist vision organized around one's own society. Industrial and postindustrial societies are no more "positive" than others are.

Corresponding to the growing secularization of one aspect of society there is always the desecularization of another, its movement toward the cultural model. At the same time as religion becomes secularized, so production is desecularized. It is absolutely not possible to speak of a scientific society, as the nineteenth century often thought it was, because science does not only intervene as a form of knowledge but also as a cultural model that imposes its own investments, choices, constraints, and therefore beliefs.

5. The differentiation of systems. The extension of society's capacity for action upon itself is also accompanied by a growing differentiation of the levels of both reality and social analysis. A society with a weak historicity tends to appear as a social system: organizational and institutional systems, class relations, system of historical action—all are intermingled, undiffer­entiated, a state that confers central importance upon a community's unity and culture. Ultimately there is the temptation to abandon the sociological viewpoint when studying such societies and to restrict oneself to a consider­ation of the rules by which they function, the modalities of exchange within a community. Such a point of view is never sufficient, it never dispenses one from searching out the forms of historicity and also, in consequence, the relations of the classes or the process of political decision, even though these different social systems are only slightly differentiated. Hence the importance of the traditional notion of the institution. The religious institution, for example, will cut through the whole society vertically. It carries a cultural model; it is the center of social domination, a political agent, and organi­zation, even though none of these functions may be clearly distinct from the others. Similarly, the plurifunctionality of the family, and also of the school, has been pointed out even more frequently.

At the extreme opposite to this, the postindustrial society can be seen as

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very highly differentiated. The system of historical action is not just what is at stake in class conflicts; it manifests itself in an autonomous way, as is indicated for example by the expression mass culture, for it is not possible to reduce such a culture to the ideology of the dominant class (any more than it is possible to claim that it does not always bear a class stamp). The political system too is more and more clearly differentiated from class relations. Finally, we are all aware of how far organizational problems are now granted their own specificity, which is a new and important fact.

Industrial society too experiences a high degree of differentiation, but though its organizational and political problems possess a great deal of autonomy, the relations of the classes and the system of historical action remain fused together, as in previous types of society. We find few autonomous expressions of the elements of the system of historical action.

We can express the situation as follows, using the symbol to mean 4,not differentiated from" and the symbol / to mean "differentiated from":

agrarian society: organizational system <—^institutional system « • class relations « • system of historical action.

mercantile society: organizational system/institutional system < • class relations « • system of historical action.

industrial society: organizational system/institutional system/class relations « • system of historical action.

post ind it stria I society: organizational system/institutional system/class relations/system of historical action.

It must immediately be added that this idea occupies a place within an analysis of social structure, not in an analysis of change. The more deeply a

; society is engaged in an action of development, which is to say a willed change of the system of historical action, the less strong the differentiation between its systems is, and the more important is the role of the mobilizing power that is aiming at a type of historicity, is a ruling class, has political hegemony, and decides the social and cultural forms of organization.

These observations, taken as a wrhole, pertain to a comparative analysis of the types of SHA. Ought we, in conclusion, to engage in an analysis of the transition from one type to another, to attempt an explanation of social development? The idea is tempting but must be resisted. For a study of change to be possible it would have to be based on other analytical units than the synchronic study of social systems. It is never a system of historical action that changes but always a concrete society, an organization, an area of cultural conduct or social interaction. The analysis of change is not conceivable unless it starts from the constant noncoincidence that exists between a field of historicity and a concrete collectivity. When one places

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oneself on the level of systems of historical action, one cannot help but stress the discontinuity of social evolution; one cannot present a theory of change that will have to find its foundations elsewhere.

In conclusion, the societal types are neither stages in a progressive or regressive evolution, nor totalities entirely separate one from another. They are configurations obtained by rotating the system of historical action upon the economic system, each configuration corresponding to an accumulation situated at the level of one of the elements of the economic system./fhis central role played by accumulation reminds us that the societal types, their operation and tnTtransition from one to another, although they constitute a particular level of sociological analysis, cannot be observed in social practice independently of class relations, whose theoretical status is exactly the same as that of the system of historical action.

Just as every societal type reproduces the structure of the system of historical action, so it possesses class relations whose general nature is the same in all types of society, even though the field, the actors, and what is at stake change completely from one configuration to another.

The observer, like the actor, is imprisoned within the system of historical action and within the class relations that situate him in the most general way. v It is futile and dangerous to extend our image of our society to others in order to arrive at generalities about institutions, forms of organization, methods of socialization. But this does not necessarily mean that we are imprisoned inside our historical experience, since it is always the same simple elements that combine in the same way in all societies.

This is the fact that should dictate our attitude toward analyses handed down to us from the past. One can of course reinterpret them from a fresh point of view in every age. This is a normal procedure, but absolutely contrary is that of social science, since it sees continuity where we must recognize discontinuity, and at the same time disrupts the architecture of a work when it is the architecture, much more than the content, that is transmissible. Past analyses cannot be put to use without the construction of a conceptual apparatus bearing on social systems—the system of historical action, the system of class relations, the political system, the organizational system—and the relations between them. We still depend today on the social thought of industrial society. It is no longer applicable to the type of societies forming before our eyes any more than it is to the forms of conscious, willed development with which preindustrial societies are striving to move on into the industrial stage or even directly into the postindustrial stage. But it is indispensable to us all the same, particularly when, as with Marx, it analyzes class relations and domination, for, living at the beginning of postindustrial society as we do, we are dazzled by the ruling class's Utopia, by its productivist optimism, or sometimes by the opposite Utopia of the return to equilibrium and small communities.

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The important thing is to respect the necessary procedural order: first to analyze our society, then to formulate a body of explanatory propositions, and last, to free ourselves from the biases imposed upon us by our individual and collective situation by recognizing in the thought that comes to us from other societies a problematic at once similar yet made different by its connection with another social and cultural field.

CL4SS RELATIONS

Since society is the uprooting of historicity from social activity and the dominipn of that historicity over society's practices, it is inevitable that this division of society from itself in the order of action also makes itself manifest in the order of the actors. Hence the constant existence of class relations that set a ruling class, serving historicity and also making use of it, against a popular class that resists this domination and contests the private appro­priation of historicity.

It is clearly not the notion of strata that best enables us to define the actors in the field of historicity. But nor is it that of class, which was at one time possible to use in a presociological manner, as the nineteenth-century historians did for instance.

Sociological concepts are able to deal only with social relations. The fundamental contribution of Marx in this domain was to replace an explanation in terms of classes with an analysis in terms of class relations and their determining role in social organization.

To attribute a type of conduct to a class has almost no meaning; to situate it within the relations between classes, on the other hand, is indispensable. This is why this chapter is entitled not "Social Classes*' but "Class Relations.'*

The opposition between classes is based on accumulation, the principle division of society from itself, but at the same time their_conflict is situated in a field whose unity is defined by the cultural model and the system of historical action. Class relations are thus neither relations of competition or superimposition within the social order, nor relations of contradiction, but relations of conflict, which manifest themselves best in the social movements that bring into play the double dialectic of the social classes, a struggle

117

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between two adversaries defending their private interests but also striving for control of the system of historical action. Class relations are simultaneously open and closed; open because they involve conflict, closed because the upper class is imposing its domination and reducing its adversary to alienation.

This general analysis will be filled out later with an investigation of jthe transition from industrial society to programmed society and, more precisely, of the relocation that class relations undergo, both in analysis and in social practice, during the transition from one type of society to another.

A. Historicity and Social Classes

The system of historical action is the cultural and social expression of the capacity human societies possess to produce their own condifiohs ""of existence.

To recognize the existence of the SHA is to recognize that a society is defined not solely by what it is but also by the transcendence that carries it beyond itself and thus sets it in opposition to itself.

a. The Double Dialectic of the Social Classes

This noncoincidence of society with itself necessarily implies a cleavage between the members of society. It is not possible for historicity to be borne by a collectivity defined at the same time by its functioning. In modern societies we witness the recurrent reappearance of the Utopia of stabilized development, a community taking total control of its own transformation. Though important as a Utopia, this idea cannot be accepted by analysis. How can the same engender the different? How can movement be order?

If society acts upon itself it is because it is not an actor, a sovereign, but a system of actors: accumulation and investment are managed by a particular category, which has the power of imposing deductions on the workers and of managing the use of the resources thus accumulated. It is accumulation in the first place that implies the opposition of the classes. But the ruling class is also the class that controls the cultural model and identifies its domination with the dominion of historicity over social practice via the system of historical action.

I term upper cla^s that category which exerts these constraints in the service of the cultural model. This class thus necessarily possesses two opposite and complementary characteristics. On the one hand it is the social expression of the cultural model; on the other, it exerts a constraint on society as a whole. A particular group fulfilling a general function, it is simultaneously the class that realizes the cultural model and the class that

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appropriates it, makes use of it to constitute its own power. It is a ruling class and also a dominant class. In the programmed society the ruling class is the social category that has the power to mobilize social resources for the benefit of scientific and technical development, and that at the same time controls the utilization of those investments and identifies the interests of the cultural model with the interests of the apparatuses which it directs and from which it derives profit and power. The ruling class controls the technical and administrative apparatus of development and imposes constraints on society as a whole—constraints both of development and, at the same time, of the interests of an apparatus (hat is always private, never identifiable with a simple means of managing the general interest. The ruled class, on the other hand, is the class that does not manage to concretize the cultural model while nevertheless participating in it. It too, in consequence, has two aspects. On the one hand it resists the dominion of a domination and adopts a defensive attitude for the protection of its labor and way of life; on the other, it appeals to the cultural model against the private appropriation of which it is the object.

Ruling, dominant class on the one side, dominated and contestuiory class on the other: the whole they form constitutes what I have already called the double dialectic of the social classes.

The popular class, insofar as it is on the defensive, must be defined first by the mode of social domination it is undergoing. The proletarian class is not definable by its professional activity but by the fact that it is wage-earning, by its submission to the imperatives of profit. But the popular class, insofar as it is contestatory, must be defined professionally also, for it is by its professional activity that it participates in society's historicity, thereby rendering its contestation possible. It is arbitrary to represent the working class as totally subjected to capitalist domination, as being defined solely by that domination. This class of wage earners is also a class of workers. The relations of production must never be dissociated from the forces of production and from what those forces carry within them, which is to say the system of historical action itself.

In industrialjjociety, entrepreneurs and workers are in opposition, each side seeking to control the industrial system of historical action. Both sides are very directly historical actors. Dominant and dominated classes, on the contrary, are not directly historical actors. The dominant class takes control of the social order not only as it molds it but also as it receives it as an inheritance. It is protecting the past as much as it is assuring the future, and consequently its action is largely subordinated to that of the agencies of social reproduction through which the dead keep their grasp on the living. In the same way the dominated class defends what it has acquired, its traditions, the advantages it has been able to win, and consequently tends to

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melt away into the defensive coalition of the "little men" against the "big men." Neither dominant nor dominated class can act on its own; hence the importance of the intellectuals who act in their name_. Those who take on the responsibility oT organizing the social order for the profit of the dominant class are usually situated within the administrative and legal apparatus; whereas those who speak in the name of the dominated class are intellectuals in opposition, more or less on the fringes of the decision-making apparatus. These two categories of intellectuals can substitute their conflict for that of the classes if that class conflict is almost completely definable by the opposition between dominants and dominated. But if, on the contrary, the central role is filled by the conflict between ruling class and contestatory class, both of which can act for themselves, then the part played by the intellectuals is small. The class struggle is thus only direct to the degree in which it sets in opposition classes dej'ined by their conflict relation^to historicity, and thus by their labor, which is on the one hand professional activity and participation in the cultural model and other elements of the SHA, and. on the other, exploitation undergone or imposed in order that accumulation may arise from production.

Such an analysis will always clash with the rationalizations produced by the opposing classes. The adversaries do not admit that it is their relation that is the carrier of meaning; they want the meaning to belong to them and their enemy to be cast out into nonmeaning.

The upper classes have always presented history as the story of enlighten­ment making inroads into savagery, bringing order, peace, education, in a word—civilization. Who protects the arts, guarantees exchanges, increases wealth, if not the upper class, which must struggle constantly against the particularism and traditions of the popular groups? The ruling class always has a colonizing vision of the world, and the ideologists of technocracy are in no way different in this respect from courtiers of past ruling classes: is it not domination of the great corporations that guarantees the opening up of the world, the extension of exchanges, the multiplication of choices, the access of greater numbers to influence? The important thing is to rid oneself of barriers, of frontiers, of principles, all instruments of rigidity, isolation, conservatism.

This discourse of the ruling class has always been answered, if not by that of the popular class, at least by that which speaks in the name of the people, even though it may be put forward by a new ruling class in formation. This discourse sets up the positive reality of labor, of activity, of natural need, in opposition to the artifice of a social domination that monopolizes and destroys, that replaces the satisfaction of needs with the creation of symbols of status and office, and submits labor to nonlabor. Has progress not always been the work of those who smashed codes and privileges, who rid themselves

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of the labyrinth of symbols in order to find their way back to creative activity, who replaced discourse by labor?

If sociology is reduced to interpreting the consciousness of the actors, it is impossible to see how it can ever move beyond the endless wrangle of these ° two ideologies.

But it isdifTicult to free oneself from their dominion, not to view society as based on principles, on values, and thus on an action, difficult to recognize it .\s as a set of orientations, a system of historical action^butja system constantly torn Setweenopposing classes both of which identify themselves with historicity and defend a social organization that they control or that protects them. Yet it is in this way that the opposing discourses outlined above can be situated in relation to one another. The discourse of the upper class is that of the ruling class opposing the defensive class; the discourse of the popular class is that of the contestatory class combating the dominant class. Both must thus be viewed as the expression of particular aspects of class relations, as must two other dialogues that are less often and less loudly heard because they are not to the exclusive advantage of one of the classes, that of ruling class and contestatory class and that of dominant class and defensive class. Any analysis of a class system must proceed to the isolation of these four dialogues before recognizing the rules governing their combination.

Everything said so far relates to the relations between classes. Their conflict is not military confrontation or commercial competition; it involves the management of the sociocultural field in which class relations themselves are situated and constituted, which is to say the system of historical action.

But if we consider this type of analysis only, then there is a temptation to enclose class conflicts wholly within the system of historical action and consequently to grant that system a kind of priority—of functionalist inspiration—over class relations. The danger comes from forgetting that the relations between thej:la_sses_are based on accumulation.

The opposition between upper class and popular class cannot be defined in­side the system of historical action. The existence of class relations is posited by that of accumulation, and therefore by the concept of historicity of which accumulation is merely a component.

As soon as one starts to consider society's action upon itself, action made possible by a mode of knowledge and "reflected** by a cultural model, one must recognize the existence of an opposition between classes. What would this noncoincidence of society with its being mean if the collectivity could be apprehended as a being, as a self?

^ccurnulation isjiot only the exploitation of one class bvanother, but it is even less the willed action qfa collectivity demonstrating its unity wrhile at the same time dividing itself from itself in order to invent its gods or any other cultural modef. The division of society intolwo opposing classes—which can

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never be directly identified with concrete groups—is inscribed within histo­ricity just as directly as the existence of a system of historical action. It is thus as false to say that class relations govern the system of historical action— which is thereby reduced to being the ideology of the dominant class—as to say the contrary: that the classes are the agents of the system of historical action. Hence the importance of the concept of field of historicity: the system of historical action and class relations possess the same theoretical status and are interdependent: their relation constitutes the field of historicity.

/ 9 \ mode of knowledge

historicity /

cultural model / • # x accumulation

system of historical j action

7* " I

\ | I '—' 1 1

Hass relations

field of historicity

Figure 15

If one considers historicity alone, one is tempted to say that two kinds of analysis are juxtaposed here: accumulation provides the basis for class relations, the cultural model that for the sociocultural orientations of the system of historical action.

This is inadequate. Historicity is both action on society's functioning and also distancing of its activity.

The reascent toward historicity is achieved by accumulation, which represents the division of society. That division is maintained in the redescent toward social organization. Accumulation becomes class relations, but those relations are not the simple and direct expression of accumulation: as actors, the classes bring the whole of historicity into pla\\ the management of the cultural model as much as accumulation. The cultural model and the whole system of historical action are for their part a principle of unity, of the dominion of historicity over functioning.

If one considers only accumulation, which is to say the formation of class relations, it is possible to say that it is the deduction of a part of the collective

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product and thus of the activity of the producers by a ruling class. Accumulation is a social relation.

But this analysis becomes inadequate and even false when one considers class relations in action, the double dialectic of class relations, for it ignores the fact that accumulation is not separable from the other components of historicity: viewed in isolation it could explain nothing more than a certain overconsumption by the upper classes, the conspicuous consumption de­scribed by Veblen (in The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899) and which is much more an attribute of the upper strata of a ruling class. The Latin-American oligarchies were able to push conspicuous consumption to extremes because they were not true ruling classes; they were merely compradores of English or American capitalism.

Accumulation gives an economic content to historicity, but it is historicity in its entirety that defines the action of the classes.

When one speaks of historicity, the essential thing is to recognize the link between two fundamental statements: first, that historicity is two in one, at the same time the distance and the bond between society's production of itself and its functioning; second, that historicity is both practice and consciousness, work and knowledge, economic accumulation and cultural model, and therefore that the unity of social action must be recognized in order to avoid futile arguments about the causal role of such and such a category of "social facts," arguments that simply refer us on very baldly to some metasocial warrant—religion, the state, economics—for the social order.

We must therefore maintain the most absolute equality between the concept of the system of historical action and that of social classes.

This does not mean, of course, that we cannot make use of one more than the other at any particular stage of our analysis. If jl_is_ necessary io distinguish between the various societal types, then it is to the forms of accumulation that 1 shall assign the central place in the analysis; I shall do likewise when it comes to defining the nature of class relations. But needless to say, once we arrive at the level of institutions and organizations, then the equality of status between the two concepts must be strictly respected^

After defining the principles of this analysis of the social classes, it is essential to specify exactly in what way it is distinct from a description of concrete social groups.

The use made here of the notion of class is not descriptive-, the intention is not to differentiate between social milieux and ways of life. More important still, the classes are defined solely by their opposition, which dichotomizes society. There is certainly no reason to think that in every type of society the actors will be divided into two large categories. Are not such aggregations necessarily arbitrary? When the hierarchic groupings are strongly institu-

124 Chapter Three

tionalized, the difficulty is greater still, since it is rare for the number of "classes" thus constituted to be reduced to two. It would be pointless to go on listing examples and reservations. The dichotomy between ruling class and dominated class cannot in any way be accepted as a representation of social organization as it is to be observed in reality and as it is often codified by institutions.

The social classes in the sense in which 1 employthe term herej^e_not^ defined as real, organized groups. It is not observation of the hierarchical differences within a society that leads to a positing of the existence of two opposing classes. It is the analysis of the system of historical action itself Jthat leads to the positing of this new dimension in our analysis of historical action.

But although the classes must be defined as historical actors and thus as occurring at a certain level of social reality, they also manifest themselves at the political level and at the organizational level and thus tend to become, concrete groups, defined by their social interactions and their way of Jife. Indeed, it is at this level of everyday social and cultural conduct that it seems easiest to recognize the social classes: is there not working-class culture and a bourgeois or aristocratic culture?

Such observations, which are constantly being made, call for two kinds of reservations. First, they usually relate to the reproduction of social inequali­ties and of the distances between classes rather than to class relations themselves. They therefore have more force when the "mobilization" of society is weaker, its rate of change less rapid, the reproduction of a social order more complete. Inversely, the greater the rate of social change, the more difficult it becomes to define a social class by a way of life or education or even by the maintenance of social distances. The closer we come to industrial and postindustrial societies, the more necessary it becomes to give priority to analysis of relations of production over observation of mech­anisms for the reproduction of inequalities.

In the second place, it is not the social class itself that constitutes the group or category whose life style it seems, on the surface, so easy to define. It is a mixture of class fraction and of category, defined on the institutional or on the organizational level.

This procedure ought to be followed even for the study of the middle classes. And yet it would seem simpler to reject that expression altogether and to conclude that the categories thus named ought to be viewed as middle strata. They are so in fact, and for this reason knowledge of their conduct does not necessitate any recourse to class relations. They are also, and more deeply, categories situated at the institutional level. They are "middle" because they are best defined not at the level of social stratifi­cation, or of class relations, but at that of political influence. We usually

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only speak of middle classes when referring to their role in the institutions, in the mechanisms of societal decision.

But once such analyses have been carried out, it remains necessary to find on the middle classes the stamp of their position in class relations. Which leads us to consideration of a distinction, or even an opposition, between two sectors of the middle classes that may nevertheless display analogous behavior at the level of consumption and life style.

On the one hand there aretheexecutive agents of the ruling class, whose authority rests upon a delegation of the bosses' power. The essential points for them, according to the title of Goblots book, are "The barrier and the level" (La barriere et le niveau, Paris: Alcan, 1925). They attach the greatest importance to signs of social distance, to whatever separates them from the working class—way of speaking, dressing, eating—and are increasingly rigid in their attitude toward these things as their participation in the initiatives of the ruling class is smaller. On the other hand there are those directly linked with the agencies of historicity. Let us call them the "professionals." They are society's priest-intellectuals, as it were, and their position in the relations of the classes is not central but secondary; we could say that they lead a bourgeois life, if we wished to describe their life style; we might also stress their political influence. But if we consider the relations of production, then the professionals cannot be defined by the services they render to the ruling class; their professional role is the most important. It is secondarily that they are subjected, to a greater or lesser degree, to the dominion of the ruling class, and in a sufficiently limited way for many of them to become reformist or radical opponents, of that dominion.

This participation in class relations makes it possible to understand the limits of the notion of social stratification. Society is not just a pile of strata, and the principal danger of the expression "middle classes" lies not in the fact that it wrongly encourages the description of society in terms of class but in the fact that it masks the inadequacies of analysis in terms of stratification.

b. Dominant Ideology and System of Historical Action

But if we accept these observations, are we not then exposed to an opposite objection? Are we not tempted to say that it is the o£pojitionjofjjie classes that is the primary fact, the cultural model being no more than the ideology of the dominant class, which it tends to impose, through its very domination, on society as a whole? This conception introduces a severe distortion into the analysis of the SHA and runs into objections that seem to me insurmountable. Let us suppose that that the cultural model is in fact the RleoTogy oTtKe dominant class. Why should the dominated class accept it? Why should I say

126 Chapter Three

that that the nineteenth-century belief in progress was no more than a false consciousness among the popular social categories? And what exactly does the term "ideology of the dominant class" mean? Does it mean that it is a con­scious instrument of domination intended to conceal a social and economic power, or is it on the contrary a real consciousness that is motivating the action of the dominant class? The first interpretation presupposes that one can show that this ideology is nothing more to the dominant class itself than conscious calculation, conscious propaganda. Such a thing is not observed however. All we see is that occasionally a dominant class makes use of former cultural models to help in its struggle against a popular movement. During the second half of the nineteenth century the industrial bourgeoisie was often heard to vaunt the merits of religion as a force for order. But religion is not the cultural model of that capitalist society, and the appeal to religion is no more than one aspect of an alliance between a threatened dominant class and the former dominant classes it is using as a rampart, even though it is perfectly capable of mounting them as soon as its personal interests are directly involved. It is thus arbitrary to conceive of social and cultural life as a conscious conspiracy by a cynical elite.

The system of historical action and, in particular, its cultural model constitute a society's field of historicity and thus the stake for which class conflicts are waged. Neither ruling nor popular class can separate its reference to that stake from its struggle against the adversary.

But the dominant class, precisely because it is dominant, is constantly striving to transform those relations and the stakes they involve into a social order defined by its organization, its norms, and its values. It tends to conceal its interests and its own class ideology behind an ideology of the system. Marx gave us the best example of this when he analyzed classical political economy and the role it assigns to the market as the analytical principle of economic conduct.

The dominant ideology manifests itself, even more than through its ideas or its analysis, by the imposition of organizational categories upon social practice: types of remuneration or working hours, categories of education, divisions between kinds of medical establishment, all these are categories presented as functional differentiations or levels of stratification, and which cause society to appear as an organized but not dominated whole, defined by its functioning, not by its orientations/Sociology, in the name of observation of society "just as it is," has too often been used as a warrant for that ideology. It is being so used when it supposes that social conduct consists of roles defined by relations of exchange, themselves determined by norms and values or even simply by the institutionalized rules of the game.

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But this ideology of the system cannot coincide totally with the ideology of the dominant class unless class conflict is suppressed. And it never can be suppressed completely. Either it manifests itself openly, or else the domi­nated class evades the dominion of the dominator by social and cultural retreat into a hidden world, as Jacques Berque (Depossession du monde, Paris: Seuil, 1964) has shown so well in his observation of the colonized Arab world. The dominant class can never conceal itself entirely behind its laws and the social organization it has set up. It is obliged to struggle, to repress, to debate.

Even in extreme situations, those in which its domination is most completely identified with the social organization, in a totalitarian regime, the ideology of the^system is not entirely J^ictoriousj on the contrary, it falls apart, it is not longer interiqrized. Although open revolt cannot take place, at least the dominion of the dominant class is limited by mistrust, by the cynicism of the double game, or by interior exile.

The system of historical action is the field of action of the opposing classes striving to control it. The opposition or conflict of the classes cannot be understood independently of the stake thai defines them. If one looks at the \ struggle from the viewpoint of one of the classes, it is natural that one should ) identify the SHA with the orientations and interests of that class. In this case the other class appears as simply an obstacle. So we find the technocrat always speaking about the "resistance to change" that his rationalizing action encounters, while a popular class perceives nothing in the action of its rulers but the pursuit of profit or personal power, the irrationality of the arbitrary and private interest.

But if we consider the relations between these classes, then we see that their conflict presupposes a common language. The dominant class does not only 4'enjoy" the advantages of its position. That position also presupposes ! constraints—the constraints experienced by a servant of God or of the state, or by the invester or planner. It is just as arbitrary to see the capitalist as nothing more than a speculator, ignoring the entrepreneur, as it is to see the worker as no more than a defender of his trade and traditions, ignoring his prac:ical and theoretical contribution to rationality and economic progress.

The reason I use the term "double dialectic of the social classes" is to emphasize that we cannot define the classes directly and completely by the opposition of their interests. The classes are the complementary and opposed historical actors that create the dynamic of the SHA by means of their conflict. It is false to say that one class is the agent of progress and the other a force of reaction. For the SHA is not a world of ideas but an action always

128 Chapter Three

bearing the stamp of a mode of appropriation; rulers and ruled are defined both by their relations with each other and by their relation to the SHA.

c. Class Conflict and the System of Historical Action

The classes are always in opposition on an economic terrain, each striving to appropriate society's accumulation. Whatever the society under exami­nation, the class conflict is not separable from labor relations. A society without classes cannot be other than a society without accumulation. This is why the theme of zero growth is acquiring a new strength today in the richest societies, such as the United States, not only in the Utopia of the dominant class but also in that of the movements of opposition. Has the moment not come, it is asked, to replace growth with stability, the creative destruction of industrialization with the preservation of the ecosystem? But what efficacy can there be in such a notion when these societies, economically the most advanced, are the furthest from being societies consuming all their product, are those that devote the largest proportion of their internal product to accumulation and investment?

The class conflict therefore remains with them, and is even extended, since the great apparatuses of economic management dominate not only the fabrication of goods but also communications and consumption.

No class conflict can exist that is solely political or cultural. But it must also be restated, with equal force, that class conflict cannot be

defined independently of what is at stake, which is to say. independently of the system of historical action within which it occurs. In this sense the class con­flict is never essentially economic. If the cultural model is of the religious type, then it will be religious categories tKat define the class actors and their field of conflict. When, as in the period of mercantile economy, the cultural model is "political," expressed in the sovereignty of the state, the social struggles are primarily political and, more concretely, urban, as is shown by the succession of urban struggles waged by so many revolutionary move­ments from the Ciompi or the Blue Nails in Italy and Flanders up to the sans-culottes of the French Revolution and, to some extent, to the Com­munards.

It is industrial capitalism that displays the most complete superimposition of economic struggle and class struggle in its general sense, because the cultural model had by then taken the form of creative labor and progress.

In the postindustrial society, in which creativity is most directly appre­hended as the capacity for technological transformation of the conditions of existence as a whole, social conflicts develop in a cultural field; they take the form of opposition between technocratic management and a will toward the collective reappropriation of overall change.

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It would be equally futile to attempt to define the class actors outside their economic relations as outside their field of historicity. Louis Dumont (in Homo hlerarchicus, Paris: Gallimard, 1966; translation, University of Chicago Press, 1970) has rightly denounced the sociocentrism of observers from industrial societies who try to define class actors in very different societies in the same terms as in capitalist societies, as if religious categories there were merely part of ideology, as if it were possible to separate the definition of the actors from the definition of what is at stake in their conflicts.

And parallel to this, it is just as impossible to apprehend the SHA other than through class relations as it is to define those relations without bringing in the SHA. We must seek for the most direct stamp of historicity not where the social waters are at their calmest but, on the contrary, where the class conflict manifests itself most directly and most visibly overflows resistances to norms and struggles for influence.

The elements of the system of historical action, though possessing relatively autonomous expressions—the agencies of historicity—cannot be wholly revealed other than through the collision of class values in conflict. Each element is being permanently torn apart between the interpretations of opposing classes and, moreover, blended into the ideologv of the ruline class, with the result that one cannot isolate it except by listening—beyond the values of the popular class—to the much less audible voice of refusals and rifts of the countcrutopias and other discourse viewed by the established order as deviant or pathological. The elements of the system of historical action are not presented for our observation, they are the prisoners of class relations, which is to say of conflicts, of domination, and of forbidden desire.

d. The Relation of Domination

I constantly associate classes and conflict. Is this link total and is it fundamental? Classes cannot be defined independently of their conflict, but nor are they reducible to their conflict, for that conflict lies within a field of historical action, which is not an empty field within which the adversaries confront one another but the SHA itself—an oriented and structured mode of historical existence.

If one reduced class relations to a pure conflict between two wholly opposed forms of society and culture, one would find oneself obliged to conduct the analysis no longer in terms of social relations but in terms of intersocial relations, as if one were dealing with a struggle between two states, of whom one would have to assume that they do not belong to a single, general social whole, at least as far as the object of their conflict is concerned. This would mean returning to a wholly antisociological con-

130 Chapter Three

ception, to the image of a purely political and almost territorial confron­tation. It would also, and more concretely, entail the risk of pushing one's analysis of historicity back down to the level of institutions and confron-tations over a decision.

This apparently radical approach therefore simply leads to a very much weakened conception of the social classes, reducing them to no more than buyers or sellers on an abstract market or to opponents on either side of a negotiating table.

Inversely, 1 shall not speak of social classes when the relations between two social groups can be adequately described in terms of difference or competition. Nor shall I speak of social classes if the conflict in question does not involve groups linked by a relation of economic domination, whatever the source and bases of that economic domination.

The opposition between rulers and contesters is essential for the definition of the field of conflict, the adversaries' projects, and the nature of the stakes. But if we were to consider nothing but that opposition, we would be representing the classes as adversaries independent of one another, like two nations engaged in military combat. A misleading image this, for though it seems to give the greatest force to the idea of conflict, it also tends to make us forget that there exist relations of domination between the opposing classes.

The relation of the classes is always a relation of domination; to the degree in which the classes are defined as dominant, dominated, and opposing, their conflict involves power and, therefore, control of the institutional and organizational order.

This is why class relations cover a wider area than "social problems'* and ex­tend beyond the boundaries of the organizations and institutions, jven if the conflict between the classes is not violent, the reference to violence, that is, the struggle against domination, insofar as it is not reducible to institutional and organizational mechanisms, is an indispensable element in the recog^ nition of the social classes.

Violence is not sufficient on its own for a recognition of the classes, but class relations are "anterior" to institutional mechanisms, not reducible to transactions, even though those transactions may make possible temporary equilibria and coexistence between the adversaries.

But what lies beyond the institutions is not only domination and its internal logic; it is also the double dialectic of the social classes, which represents a set of demands that are never entirely negotiable.

We recognize the existence of social classes in a given society to the degree in which we see manifested, over the whole extent of the SHA, the opposition between two antagonistic social movements, each of which unites a reference to the SHA with consciousness of the opposition between classes.

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I do not say that this defines the nature of social classes, but, returning to the method used by Durkheim in his Rules oj sociological method, that it makes it possible to recognize the existence of the classes. If capitalists act in the name of the creative role played by the heads of enterprises and in the name of the necessity to overcome the resistances of habit, of "idleness," or of vested interests, and if workers are waging a complementary struggle against the irrationality of private profit and for economic development—in other words, if these two sides are confronting one another over the management oOfie cultural "model and of each of the elements of the SHA—thelTone can conclude that the capiuilists-workers^relation is a class relation. What is required iiTorder to recognize the existence^f^classes is therefore a conflict that involves the whole of a society's SHA.(anp; which in each of its domains brings face to face historical actors who have the same image of the nature of The conflict and its actors, and who are linked together T)v an economic conflict, by a struggle over the appropriation of accumulated product.

e. Classes and Counterelements

The gap separating the elements of the SHA from class action at the same time brings that action closer to the counterelements of historical action (cf. Chapter 2). These counterelements are not in fact situated on the same level as the elements. They define orientations within the actor, a form of representation and social consciousness, not the warp of a society's historical experience.

The content of the classes and their relations is determined by that of the SHA, but~Their actiotii_majnjfests itself directly in the tprm of counter-elements.One cannot assign such and such a counterelement to either one class or another. That would be in contradiction to the central idea of the double dialectic of the social classes. Each of the two classes is situated both on the level of orientations and on the level of resources, on the level of order and on the level of movement. Each of the counterelements can bear the stamp of one class or another.

The two diagrams in figure 16, taken together, represent the double dialectic of the social classes in an extended manner. Diagram I corresponds to the conquering action of the ruling class. The ruling class identifies itself with the cultural model. This means that it cannot at the same time identify itself with a model of order, since that would be to emerge from the domain of historicity. The fusion of the two modes of orientation—movement and order—cannot occur except on the level of social organization, in the form of a power imposing values, norms, and roles on society as a whole.

The dominated class responds to this appropriation of the cultural model by a defensive instrumentalism. The cultural model, invoked by the domi-

132 Chapter Th/ee

nant class, is thrust aside so that movement is experienced only on the level of means, of resources. If the dominant class talks about progress, about development, about the new society being built by the spirit of enterprise or technical progress, the dominated class replies in terms of wage increases, decrease in working hours, improvements in working conditions, and so on.

order

orientation*

resources

c

cultural model

-

5 s

+ hierarchy

mobility +

c

-

needs

movement order s c

orientations

II

resources

Figure 16

cultural model

+ mobilitv

hierarchy

needs

-r counterelements bearing c culture stamp of dominant class s society

counterelements bearing stamp of dominated class

At the same time, in opposition to the movement model of the dominant class, the dominated class sets up an order model that conflicts with it. We have the image of a leisure society opposed to a society of change; the consumption of values opposed to their production. The dominant class is opposed to this sociocultural model of order. Itself identified with its model of movement, it views social organization solely as a set of means, needs, and particular social groups that should be united only as instruments of development.

For the convenience of the reader I am here using semiconcrete terms that correspond above all to the industrial and postindustrial societies. But it would be necessary to work out precise formulations for each type of SHA.

Diagram II of figure 16 shows an inverse relation between the classes. Here it is the dominated class that is championing the cultural model against the dominant class. This means "progressive" or "contestatory" action, the counterpart of which is a defensive response on the part of the ruling class.

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which presents itself as a "technician" of movement. But against this will to movement on the part of the dominated class it sets its dominion over the social order, to which the dominated class responds in turn with a return to particularism, to autonomy, to the spontaneity of social groups and cultural needs.

Thus each of the counterelements is alternately stamped by one or other _of the social classes, but the action of those classes is organized into two subsystems of actors. Each of these subsystems enables both classes to be historical actors, in other words, to manage the relations between order and movement, between orientations and resources. —

However, a disequilibrium is introduced that could not exist in the system of action. The classes, inside a subsystem of actors, take responsibility either for the social counterelements or else for the cultural counterelements, as figure 16 shows. In one case the dominant class places itself in a social perspective and the dominated class in a cultural perspective; in the other case the reverse is true.

The class conflict does not consist of two adversaries both brandishing their weapons, their interests, their symbols. The conflict is never a face-to-face affair. Each replies to the other on another ground, but the battle is a double one since each class occupies both sides of the battlefield.

Analysis can reconstitute the totality of the conflict, but that unity is never directly experienced in life. Each class is at the same time on the offensive and the defensive. For example, in an industrial society the entrepeneurs who identify themselves with progress clash with the defensive action of a working class attached to its own interests and to the protection of its community from the threat represented by the initiatives and interests of the dominant class; but as a counterpart to this the socialist idea is attacking the instrumentalism of profit and the control exercised by the bourgeoisie over the social order.

It is the intervention of the social classes that transforms the orientations of the~s~ystem of historical action into the values of the social actor and even of the collectivity to the degree in which that collectivity is subjecTlb~TTie domination of a ruling class ancTto tneliegemony of a political force.

The appeal to values also occurs in another situation, that of the crisis that affects social organization at a deep enough level to threaten it with annihilation. In a war, for example, the adversaries each appeal on their own side to national, integrating values common to all categories of citizens. In this case even more than in the previous one the appeal to values has as its function the control or concealment of class relations, and even of the system of historical action. It is a question of providing an upside-down image of the social structure and of placing social organization and its positive regulations at the summit of the analysis.

A cultural model never defines good or bad social conduct. This is always

134 Chapter Three

freely accepted when science is involved; but it must also be recognized in the case of religion. Religion is a cultural model but it is also ideology in the service of the ruling class; it has this second role when it become morality, when it organizes social practices, when it justifies, legitimates, consecrates the social order. And this role is increasingly visible as religion declines as a cultural model, as is the case in so-called modern societies. This opposition between religion and morality is to be found expressed in other terms in all systems of historical action .^Progress, spurred on by soaring production, by the energy of human labor '"and" machines, stimulated by enterprise, the market, and the will to modernization, is a cultural model. But the austerity of industrial morality, the appeal to duty, to hard work, to thrift, is never separable from the ideology of the ruling class, which is using these things to consecrate its social domination.

Cultural model and ideology are never given separately; it is essential to unravel them in order to evade the ruinous and impossible choice between the appeal to a system of values around which consensus is organized and the denunciation of ideological manipulation.

B. Classes as Historical Actors

a. The Field of Historical Actors

The action of a class can never be analyzed as a set of principles, as a "world view/' The action of each class is determined by the double dialectic of the classes; it is at the same time response to the adversary and direct orientation toward the cultural model. According to circumstance, one or other aspect of the action of one class or the other is more or less pronounced, and it is one of the principal tasks of a sociology of the social classes to study the modifications introduced into the system of actors as a whole when one of the elements of that system undergoes certain modifications. Class relations constitute a field of historical actors such that each of its elements and the relations between those elements are affected by any change occurring at any point within the field. The totality of these transformations, whatever their origin or nature, is explained by the structure of the field, which is to say, in its most general form, by the double dialectic of the social classes.

It is thus not possible either to accept or to reject statements such as:_cjass relations are determined or producedl_ b j the Jorces of production. For such statements obscure more than they reveal. What are called forces of production may be seen as a set of means used for the pursuit of certain political objectives. In this sense the state of the forces of production is determined by the forms of decision, by class relations, by the state of knowledge, and so on. It, on the other hand, determines nothing whatever,

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since all it involves is resources mobilized for ends. Thus military aims or aims of international competition can modify the technological resources of a country considerably. The forces of production are_not an extrasocial datum but the result ofeconomic and social choices, of investments and decisions.

So that although one can accept the proposition "that the relations of production determine the forces of production," one can give no clear meaning to the reverse statement, if one reduces the forces of production to the means of economic activity.

It is thus necessary to recognize behind the term 'forces of production" something quite other than technology, and something even more capable than class relations of defining collective orientations. This cannot be anything other than historicJLty. which is eminently action and not situation, and which expresses itself in the system of historical action, in a set of social and cultural orientations.

It is historicity that produces the social classes—in its very principle even, since it is historicity that smashes the mere self-reproducing functioning of social organization; that is the work of society on itself, the distancing without which the dividing line between upper class and popular class is unthinkable. In its historic forms secondly, since the nature of class domination and the field of class relations are determined by the type of accumulation and cultural model.

If we view all this from a historical viewpoint, then it does in fact become clear that class dominatiyiiis dej in ed by the type of cultural model and of - ^ accumulation. The less strong a society's capacity for transforming itself, the more it apprehends its creativity abstractly and not practically, and the more • the relation of domination, being situated by that cultural model, is itself | all-inclusive and not just practice. It is a question of personal dependence, not of manipulation by anonymous market forces or by the propaganda and j advertising of the great apparatuses of management. At the same time • accumulation bears solely upon the direct elements of production, which are \ deducted from consumption: land, manpower, seed. In consequence, the investment linked with the cultural model is very far removed from the labor itself and from the activities of subsistence. Since the productivity of labor is low, it is the combination of elementary deductions from manpower and production that make possible investment in the achievements required by the cultural model.

The world of functioning and that of historical action appear removed from one another and relatively separate. The daily life of the popular class seems to be dominated by the demands of maintaining individual and collective existence. The popular class is at once a class and a community, organized around its kinship system, its forms of economic exchange, its

I

136 Chapter Three

myths and its worship. Whereas, the more one looks at societies with a strong historicity, societies in which the productivity of labor is high, in which the cultural model is practical, the more the class position tends to be identified with the whole of the social experience, until the extreme point reached by totalitarian societies in which class domination by the politico-economic apparatus over the workers-consumers is total.

/"Everything indicates the necessity to transcend a description of the classes and to do so by means of an analysis of class relations and of the field of historicity of which they are part.

A &ubjectivisianalysis, bearing on the action of each class rather than on the relations between classes, very quickly moves away from description and resorts to a kind of philosophy of history in which such and such a social class sees itself entrusted with a mission. Just as some nineteenth-century historians made the nation the central character of history, so one can follow the rise of the industrial proletariat or the peasant, or the entrepreneurs. This is a strictly ideological procedure that imprisons analysis inside a disastrous sociocentrismT"

Those who take the opposition path, who start not from class situation or experience but from class relations, are adopting a procedure that is in principle irreproachable. They keep outside the consciousness of the actors and elucidate a mechanism of accumulation and domination. Hence the decisive superiority of Marxist analysis as compared to that of the French historians of the first half of the nineteenth century, who did indeed put the social classes at the center of their investigation but without ever precisely defining the nature of class relations and the forms of social domination.

But once this general viewpoint has been adopted, it still remains to understand class conduct.

If we reduce class relations to the internal logic of a system of domination, we may be obliged to conclude that the dominated classes cannot have any true action, except when they are in the process of becoming new dominant classes, like the bourgeoisie when it began to take over from the landed aristocracy. Their action is no more than a sign of the crises or the contradictions of the mode of domination, and is only positive to the degree in which it breaches the political and ideological order established by the dominant class.

Such a conception is unacceptable. A dominated class is not merely the bearer of the society of the future, it is an actor in society now; it is only within a certain historical field, indeed, that its action can be understood. This is something that will be more clearly expressed when we analyze social movements, remembering that a class action is always a countermodel of_ society, at the same time defensive and offensive, sharing the general orientations that define the system of historical action with the dominant

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model. Class conflict within a given society can never be confused with the relations between old and new ruling class. As for the idea that a social class, in particular the working class, could be the instrument for the creation of a society freed from all class domination, that is no more than a Utopia, some­thing easily found in all social classes. We have become accustomed enough during the past twenty years to the Utopia of the new ruling class, heralding the end of class conflicts and ideologies thanks to growth and the rationali­zation of social management, to know that the theme of the classless society is nothing morejthan a utorjia, at least_asJong as society is definedJjy.jts accumulation and the transcendence of its forms of production and organi­zation. There is nothing to prevent our envisaging the return of "primitive" societies defined above all by their equilibrium with the environment; but there is everything to prevent our linking the idea of development, of growth, with that of the classless society.

So that although, it js neggssary J.Q analyse glass action withini agiven society, this in no way leads back to the apprehension of class as concrete actor. Very much to the contrary. It is because one defines a class's orientations on the level of historicity that one can examine how that action is diversified in terms of the characteristics of the institutional system and the state of the social organizations. Adominated class is never sufficiently defined by the domination or the exploitation to which it is subjected, because that class participates through conflict in a system of historical action/This is why the analysis oj social movements is a central, indispens­able elenjent of the knowledge of social classes. That these movements are often repressed, forbidden, forced into silence should in no way cast doubt on the existence of a consciousness of class. It is precisely the job of the sociologist to let the world hear the voices of those who are not permitted to speak, who are deprived of education and the means of expression, who do not display themselves on the stage of events, but who are never really silent or invisible.

Just as it is false to represent the classes as concrete social actors, which comesJ:ojthe same thing as confusing the various levels of social reality— field of historici^^oln^n'sysTem,"social organization—to the benefit of the philosophy of history, so it must be forcefully asserted that there is no class without class consciousness. This consciousness can fail to transform itself into collective action, or it can be stifled by the forms of that collective action, but it always exists: mingled witFattifudes that manifest the place of the actors within the social organization and with the strategies worked out on the political level, but always dissociable from them.

This consciousness is for the most part not reflexive; the actors have no consciousness of perceiving their situation in terms of class relations, because their class consciousness is not integrated but divided between a

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Utopia and an ideology. Only the collective action centered on the class conflict can unite these two components of class consciousness: the action that opposes it to its adversary, but in terms that can be analyzed equally well in terms of stratification or in "political" terms, and the action that identifies the actor with historicity.

Returning to the idea already expressed by Maurice Halbwachs (La classe ouvriere et les niveaux de vie, Paris: Alcan, 1913) that sociology cannot define a social position without associating it with a consciousness of that position and conduct that directly manifests it, I intend to draw attention to a level of conduct—that of class relations—that is never immediately given to observation, which at first discerns only organizational claims or political objectives. It is true that this class consciousness is often overlaid by attitudes linked with ascending or descending mobility, with the relative level of income, or with the ethnic group, either regional or national. But I repeat that it is always present, even though it is often hidden or, as we shall see later, alienated. It becomes capable of collective action when class relations press heavily upon the actors, for example when the capitalists depress real wages as hard as they can in order to accumulate the necessary capital for achieving industrialization, and, therefore, when the other social positions of the actor have less bearing on his conduct. It is open cotiflict that is the best animator of class consciousness, as one can observe when a strike breaks out within a group of workers hitherto only slightly unionized and politicized, particularly in a semirural environment or a very young female population. Conflict forces people out of their daily routine and its obligations; it forces them to take risks and thus to become aware of the reasons that justify those risks, to break the habitual relations of dependence on the existing framework of their lives. At the present time, the line of separation between social classes characteristic of postindustrial society has not yet become absolutely clear, but it is periods of struggle and confrontation, such as that of May 1968 in France, that contribute most to demarcating them and to giving an organized and conscious form to hitherto scattered class reactions.

b. The Class Actor

Nothing justifies the assertion that the totality of individuals' social and cultural conduct is no more than the totality of the attributes of their class situation. Not only does such a statement run counter to observation but it also introduces a great confusion. It is given the lie because many combats are situated at the level of organizations and institutions, and if one defines class as an adherence to an environment, it is clear that other adherences exist and that an individual can act as a member of a town, of a family, of a nation, of an age group, of a firm, of a church, just as often as of a class. Studies of electoral behavior, for example, provide no grounds for saying that social

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class is always the principal determinant of the votes cast. And even if collective conduct within a society is examined, it is often in terms of social mobility, upward and downward, of noncongruence of the elements of the social level, that it has to be explained.

I certainly do not conclude from this that the reality of the classes has vanished, since I consider that reality as of the essence. All 1 ask is that sociological analysis should stop proclaiming as established fact the omni­present and always decisive role of class situations and conflicts, since this "established fact" is really no more than a confusion of sociological analysis with a certain phase of historical analysis that corresponds fairly precisely with the first period of European industrialization and that ought not to be endowed with any particular priority in the eyes of the sociologist. It is not historically but sociologically that one must introduce something that invariably presents itself as a tool to be used in the analysis of social conduct.

His class situation defines the actor at the level of the field of historicity. The actor does not always act within the social organization purely as a member of a class. Class conduct is that which, cutting across the levels of social organization and the institutions, poses the problems of historicity. Class conduct rakes the form of social movements; the formation of a social movement imposes an analysis in terms of classes. A social movement cannot be reduced to its organized form, to its political expression. A social movement is a collective action oriented toward the control or the transfor­mation qfTJie'sysiem of historical action. It is not concerned with the place of any individual—or category of individuals—within the social organization, or even his influence over the process of making the decisions that affect him; it is a direct attack on the society's model of development and its power structure. Linking sociaFclasses ancTsocTal movements as closefy as this does not signify that one cannot and should not at the same time define class situations. But no such situation can be identified with the social situation as a totality, even if one can find it in every aspect of social life. Class situation cannot be defined except on the basis of the SHA arid, therefore, on the basis of labor. The dominant class is that class which realizes accumulation and appropriates the management of it, as it does also that of the cultural model and the other elements of the system. The dominated class is that class which, while participating in this system, does not control or direct its management or its appropriation.

One can always define the class situation of any member of society, even though some of them may be in ambiguous situations. In fact, it is important that sociological analysis should be used to smash the categories constituted by social practice, categories that conceal the class situation, as for example the managerial category in Western society.

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Analysis of class is at the same time analysis of situations and analysis of movements; it cannot be reduced to the identification of concrete actors, apprehended in their totality, with a principle of explanation.

The class actor muslthereforebe distinguished from the social actors that correspond to-other levels of social reality.

Atthe_level of soda/ <>ffj^nizationr it is the situation that defines the actors, and those actors must be described by their relative position witfiin a differentiated and stratified whole. Although collective conduct can occur on the basis of thisITpTToTcategory, intervening in the general orientations of the society, it can do so only by replacing the categories of historical action by categories from the social system, for example by rejecting elements foreign to the system, by demanding a return to stability, by condemning social disintegration, or simply by demanding an amelioration of the actor's relative position.

At the level of the institutions^ actors are social forces defined by their participation in a rfecisfon-making system. The stratification is broken up, since the actors form a configuration at the same time more complex yet also limited by the unity of the final decision, which cannot conciliate all the interests and demands in confrontation and therefore appears as a con­straint. The relations between the actors are direct, in the same way as discussions, negotiations, transactions. But the actors are broadly deter­mined by the framework of the discussion itself. For example, according to the mode of political representation the same individuals can be represented by a pressure group within a large party or the only party, or by an autonomous political formation, or by a leader elected on a national scale. Just as in collective labor relations the existence of just one or many unions, of "general" industrial unions or specific trade unions, will transform the nature of the groups represented.

Lastly, at the level of the field of historicity, the classes are defined neither by their relative level nor by their participation in a political decision-making mechanism, but by their direct relation, by their opposition. At the same time the situation is no longer a datum as in the case of the social system, is no longer a field of discussion, as in the case of the institutions; it is thrown back wholly into the melting pot: the actors define themselves as those who are creating the situation but within the limits of historicity, which are the very conditions of their action. The situation is therefore defined both as nonsocial—which is to say as not being a system of relations constituted by the will of men—and as created by historical praxis itself.

This is why thinking on the subject of the social classes always and necessarily moves from recognition of an ''objective" situation that governs the forms for social organization to the voluntarism of the class "for itself1

and of social movements.

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The first task in any study of social conduct is therefore in every case to define the nature of the actors and of the situation as experienced by them in reality. It is on this condition that notions of social class, political power, and social position (status) can become operative. One cannot rest content with simply stating that a collective will possesses in the final analysis a class signification or can be analyzed in terms of stratification and social mobility. One must define, as I have tried to do, the criteria in accordance with which conduct is attributed to a particular level of analysis.

Analogously, it is necessary to define exactly what the criteria of distinc­tion are between conduct that is the manifestation of such and such an element of the SHA and class conduct. And this distinction is easy to make, for class conduct does not separate the conduct of historicity from the relations of domination, whereas conduct of historicity exists that is, to various degrees, undifferentiated from the point of view of the social classes.

If an element of historical action is strongly institutionalized and or­ganized, then that nondifferentiation becomes more probable. For ex­ample, it is difficult to distinguish in the religious conduct of an agararian society between what is specific to the landed aristocracy and what is specif ic to their dependent laborers. But this nondifferentiation can occur in every case. The transformation of needs and cultural practices observable in todays youth does not have the same meaning in the various social strata, but the nondifferentiation is large enough for it to be the clash between innovation and previous cultural practices that dominates the stage.

Above all this cultural innovation is not directly linked to class claims and conflicts.

We must avoid an absolute line of demarcation here. It is not a question of two orders of phenomena but rather of two poles of historical conduct. On the one hand a pure social conflict, on the other a social and cultural change nondifferentiated from the class point of view. But no class action exists other than when these aspects are associated.

c. Actors in Conflict

This analysis, which refuses to view social conduct as the answer to a situation, centers itself on social movements and therefore on class action. And that action cannot be understood unless, instead of taking social domination as our starting point, we take the system of historical action, a set of orientations and not a material reality, a force of production. Dominant class and dominated class are not wholly defined by their relations, for those relations themselves refer to the orientations of the system of historical action, which is the stake in the struggle for domination.

I deny that those orientations are a system of values which, when ,y transformed into norms and forms of organization, define roles and

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position; but 1 also deny that social domination introduces a total contra-diction in society, so that the relation of the dominated class to the "forces of production" cannot appear except on the far side of an overthrow of social domination. The worker is exploited, just as the machinist/consumer of today's technocratic society is exploited, by the very fact of the existence of a dominant class that is seeking to appropriate to itself the direction and the results of economic activity and social organization. But the worker or the machinist'consumer are also actors, participants in the system of historical action. Dominated certainly, but not suppressed or totally reduced by alienation to the logic of the dominant class. We must analyze a system of domination, but, equally important, we must apprehend, in all its forms, resistance that exists to the established order.

From top to bottom of society we find conjlicts that reveal the presence and the action of the dominated.

It is not true that the working-class consciousness, and that of all dominated classes, can be reduced to economism or to a manifestation of crisis in the dominant system. There always exist positive, more or less integrated and organized movements that are defending a countermodel of social development, that are trying to intervene in the political system, that are challenging power in the name of labor. That the dominant class tries to stifle these voices, by repression and by using all the instruments of social control utilized for the legitimation of its privileges, is indeed a self-evident fact, and to ignore it would be to deny the existence of domination and class relations, which would be contrary to one of the fundamental principles of our analysis. But the very existence of repression and violence, beyond a purely ideological dominion, reveals the existence of social movements, which always go beyond economic defensive measures, which advance into the political terrain, and which contest social domination in the very name of the society's historicity.

Centering our analysis on the conflict of class actors struggling for the control of historicity does not in any way lead to reducing the meaning of historical action to the ideology of the actors. The unit of analysis is not the actor, nor even the social movement, but social relations, the field of the historical actors and the stake of their conflict, the system of historical action.

In reality, every view of society that represents it as an organization is identifying itself with the ideology of the actors. It is often no more than an ideological expression of the social control exercised by the dominant class, just as the theme of the infernal logic of domination corresponds to the ideology of the dominated class. Each of the adversaries unites the objec­tivism of his description of the social order with an extreme voluntarism.

The work of the sociologist consists in understanding first the social

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,7i

relations, the real conflicts, the antagonistic social movements that lie beyond and behind these ideologies and, second the nature of the historical field within which those conflicts and those movements take place.

Society must never appear to him as a situation, as a social organization but must be seen above all as an action: the construction of a historical field by knowledge, accumulation, cultural mode, then conflict over the domi nation of that field; a system of political relations permitting the manage ment and organization of a concrete historical formation; and, last, organi zations shot through with the opposition of technology and power. -—

It is within this general viewpoint thai the concept of social classes, as 1 employ it, is situated, and this distinguishes it both from an analysis of stratification and from the reducing of sociology to the analysis of society's fundamental contradictions.

The concept of class is linked with that of conflict and is in opposition to the concepts both of value and of contradiction.

In conclusion, the existence of class relations cannot be demonstrated other than by the intersection of two distinct kinds of analysis.

On the one hand, there is the analysis of a_mode of accumulation and production. It defines the locus and agents of economic domination. On the other hand, there is the analysis of the system of action, which is inseparable from recognition of the class actors or of the collective conflict-actions by means of which actors, always identifiable by their role in production and in relation to accumulation, enter into a struggle for the control of historicity.

d. Ideology and Utopia

How are such actions to be recognized? By the nature of the social relations in which they are involved. Thev constitute social movements. These movements, and thus class conduct, present themselves as a combination of ideology and Utopia. Through a Utopia the actor identifies himself with historicity through an ideology he assimilates hiatoricitv to his interests and hjs .. 9?&M&ijUgn. These terms thus transcribe the double dialectic of the social classes.

Ideology sets the social classes in direct opposition. A ruling class defends itself against the popular class in order to affirm the necessity of an elite in charge of accumulation; the popular class attacks the domination exercised over the social order by the upper class. The ideology of a class is not a circular discourse enclosed within that class. It is always polemical. The only unit of analysis that can be constituted is thus the dialogue of conflict; the class actor, identifying society's orientations with his own values and his interests, combats the adversary, who becomes the enemy of those values, the principle of evil. Ideology is not solely a representation of social interaction from the point of view of one of the actors; it also accompanies a bellicose

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action: it justifies a strategy, works out tactics, seeks alliances, unmasks the adversary where he was least easily recognizable, combats all forms of neutrality. Tjie^battle of ideologiesJs the confrontation of the counter-elements: jreference to the common stake, essential for the definition of a true social movement, disappears here. This is why the battle, even when it seems to exclude all negotiation, easily changes into a struggle of influence, even into the accompaniment to a transaction.

A Utopia, on the other hand, is the identification of the actor with historicity and, in consequence, the reduction of the adversary to an obstacle to historicity. A Utopia is often in opposition to the forces of the past. The ruling class denounces traditions, vested interests, habits, resistances to change. Sometimes it struggles against the privileges of the former ruling class, like the bourgeoisie denouncing the uselessness of "drones." of nonproducers. The popular class similarly denounces inheritance, specu­lation, economic waste. A Utopia is thus rejecting the adversary as an external and destructive force. It appeals to purity, to convictions, to the absolute. It always defines a conception of history, usually one oriented toward the future but sometimes with its face to the past, looking back toward the golden age. If the Utopian dimension is absent, class conflict may lose its reference to historicity and may thus be reduced to a strategic struggle or a material claim. But if ideology is absent, class action is reduced to either a modernizing or an antimodernizing movement.

It is the combination of Utopia and ideology that makes it possible to recognize the field of class relations.

Ideology and Utopia are thus complementary components of class con­sciousness, which is simultaneously consciousness of conflict and conscious­ness of historicity. What ideology and Utopia have in common is to replace the dialectics of historical action with "positivities." Through Utopia the historical actor identifies himself with historicity. At the same time he is transforming that historicity into an ideal order. It is a matter of creating— as Saint-Just wished to do—a virtuous society organized and managed as pure creativity. A Utopia no longer recognizes the autonomy of the institu­tional and organizational levels of social life; everything is absorbed into historicity; hence its terrorist character, since the least organizational deviance or protest becomes a breach of historicity, which is identified with the values of the ideal society. Societal orientations, since they have now-become identified with a historical actor, become values; hence the impor­tance of early training, of moral judgements, of rigor in both laws and morals.

The adversary is rejected as that which constitutes an obstacle to en­lightenment. He is denied the status of adversary, debased to the status of an

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irrational force, something purely traditional—superstition, privilege, or formalism.

Ideology, on the contrary, by assimilating historicity to the actor, renders it indistinguishable from the social organization; God becomes the church, the proletariat becomes the party. The adversary is recognized as such, but he becomes the force of evil—an aggressor if he is external, a traitor if internal. This reduction of historicity to organization forces ideology to explain whatever is not "positive" and does not conform to order by means of a procedure aimed at eliminating all recourse to the dialectics of the historical actor, by accounting in organizational terms for anything that does not seem in conformity with the functioning of the social system. Ideology exorcizes historicity.

To sum up. the positions adopted by a class actor, whatever their apparent complexity, can always be reduced to the combination of three components: a desire to affect the direction of history, which is his Utopia, the claim he lays to a motive role, and a conception of the social order—the latter two components constituting the two poles of his ideology and, therefore, of the double dialectic of the social classes. These three components are not directly associated in the consciousness of each actor. On the contrary, they are in tension with one another, and the tensions leave room for a certain integration only in the form of explicit or implicit polemic with the positions of the adversary. The upper class, for example, thinks of itself as innovative but also as the guardian of the social order, and ultimately as the expression of modern society. Now if society were entirely modern, it would need to recognize the role of modernizers and therefore to accept the domination of a class. More clearly still, the ruling role and the dominating role of the upper class are not easily combined. Finally, the opposition between the ideas of modernity and order, which implies continuity and inheritance, is very clear indeed.

e. Modalities of the Class Conflict

Class relations possess a temporal dimension that an excessively narrow synchronic approach can easily miss. The ruling class, being oriented toward the cultural model, is for that reason reaching out into the future. But as the dominant class, that same upper class is also oriented toward the past, to the degree in which it is creating and maintaining an order and thus a heritage, and to the degree in which—despite ruptures in many cases—it takes over the heritage and privileges of the former dominant class, in particular by establishing family or economic alliances with it or by uniting with it in order to maintain an existing domination of the upper class over the people.

The bourgeoisie has not always elminated the aristocracy. Recent studies

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have shown that in underdeveloped countries the so-called national bour­geoisie has often been in many ways closely linked with the former landed oligarchy. Modern Spain is a good example of the renewal of the dominant classes, in association with a political and social continuity increasing in strength as the risk of popular uprisings appeared greater.

The same observations apply to the popular classes. Insofar as they are cotitestatory, they invent a countermodel of society that appears as a program for or a prediction of the future, but insofar as they are the dominated class, they are defending professional, social, or cultural vested interests that include those of former popular classes; during a period of very rapid industrialization the working class still bears the stamp of its rural origins. And this gives a certain continuity to certain aspects of lower-class representations and action.

These remarks assume a greater importance as one begins to look less at a purely sociological entity—whether it be called system of historical action or mode of production—and more at a concrete historical whole, a social formation. In a country like France, in the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth alike, the themes of its social and political conflicts are stamped just as clearly with the mark of previous societies as with that of the new one.

In any given society, when the resistance of a former system of historical action—and thus of former class relations—is considerable, then the accent in the new class conflicts falls on the dominant/dominated opposition. The locus of the conflicts lies nearest to the superstructures. Hence the im­portance in nineteenth-century France of clericalism and the anticlericalist struggle, on which the historians throw a great deal of light when they reveal that the first half of the nineteenth century was probably the period of the Roman church's deepest penetration into French society.

Hence also, even today, the maintenance of the strong working-class element in social opposition movements in France, a direct response to industry's maintenance of forms of organization and authority that belong to an older form of capitalism rather than to the new forms of social domination. The theme of modernization is never so present as when the weight of the past is heaviest and when class relations are expressed on the political and cultural level more easily than on the level of the system of production itself.

Inversely, when the mode of class conflict is primarily that of riders against a contesiatory class, when it is directed at the future rather than at the past, then it is defined in more operational terms: political economies, modes of management are in opposition, and both resort equally—albeit in opposing terms—to the theme of adaptation to the requirements of the new society. The theme of modernity explodes into prominence, because it is the

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stake around which social struggles are shaping up. In modern societies, at least, the conflict appears more economic, whereas in traditional societies it develops around more cultural themes.

There are two further situations, combining past and future, that ought to be added to the two extreme ones already stated.

If the upper class is above all a ruling class, and if the popular class acts above all as a dominated class, conflicts will be mainly between forces of change and forces defending vested interests. This is the case in many Western societies today, after two decades of rapid economic growth and profound social changes. In such a situation the unions play a more important role in the expression of social conflicts than do the political parties. The conflicts themselves are many in number and are linked together only by a common resistance to charge managed from outside.

Inversely, if the upper class is primarily a dominant class and if the popular class is invoking primarily a contest atory countermodel of develop­ment, then the action of that class, and class relations as a whole, are more "political" than "social/1

In practice the upper class is defending an overall order, relying on institutional and organizational barriers that it has itself raised, whereas the movement of opposition is invoking a total action aimed at a transformation of society that will render it more capable of developing its forces of production. This primacy of the political struggle is frequent in France. It was evident during the Revolution as well as at the time of the Liberation.

These observations are summed up in figure 17. In analyzing these modalities of class conflict, however, one must not forget that they cannot be defined other than within a general model of conflict. This general model cannot be called either cultural or political according to the individual case, cannot be situated either on the social organization level or on that of the institutions. It is always situated on the level of the svstem of historical

upper class popular class

ruling

dominant

economic contestatorv

dominated

modalities of class conflict

Figure 17

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action, since the classes are the actors of historicity. But the conflict can reveal itself more or less directly on the level of historicity. If it is above all setting a dominant class in opposition to a dominated one, then it is via the struggle over the warrants of social order that it will take shape. This means that the distance between a class conflict and a crisis of social organization and power will be small.

When the modality of the conflict is economic, on the other hand, then that distance will be at its maximum.

The more heterogeneous a social formation is, the more its past is indistinguishable from its present, the more important in consequence are its mechanisms of reproduction, the more its upper class is dominant, the more closed or blocked is the institutional system, and the more class conflict manifests itself on the political or even on the organizational level rather than on the level of the field of historicity. The more class relations are overlaid by the crisis of the social organization and the political system, the more class conflicts take an all-embracing form that imposes the primacy of ideologies, which unify in their language the complexity of a historical situation. If class relations are not fused with institutions and with a social organization enabling them to develop, then, on the contrary, the praxis of the conflict rather than the ideologies, the economic struggle rather than doctrinal debates, occupies the center of the stage.

Thus there is overspill from the economic conflict in two opposite ways—on the one hand, through the relation to historicity, on the other, through the gap separating a social formation from a mode of production and thus from a system of historical action. Sociology and history, for opposite but complementary reasons, oblige analysis to go beyond the economic stakes of social conflicts.

This is why conflict alone is never sufficient to define class relations. They contain conflict, certainly, but so do political relations, and even relations within an organization. What characterizes class relations is that they combine the relation of domination that exists between the opposing classes with the classes' common reference to a system of historical action. As a theme, conflict can never lead to anything but an analysis of competing economic strategies. Associating that theme with those of domination and historicity, on the other hand, forces one to recognize the central character of class conflicts in the functioning of society. But just as one cannot reduce the relations between classes to the conflict between them, so one cannot identify them with a situation of domination.

It is true that this domination can in extreme cases be complete, can destroy the dialectic of the classes, create a dichotomy between those who manage society and those who are excluded from it or intervene in it only via

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the exploitation of which they are victims. In which case we have to say that society is wholly violence, constraint, and ideology, and that the dominated classes have no other possible action than to reveal the natural contradictions and the loss of validity of the dominant system. This is a real situation, but in such a case no other class conflict exists than that which opposes an old dominant class to a new one; the only shocks that shake the fabric of history are those that mark the transition from one established order to another. To stop there, however, is to neglect the essential point, which is that class conflicts manifestly exist in all societies. The peasants did not wrest power from the hands of the aristocracy, nor the plebs from those of the urban patricians, and yet their struggles were real, active, dramatic. The class conflict must be studied primarily not as an element of social evolution but as the expression of a society's internal conflict, which is the province of a *r synchronic analysis rather than a diachronic one, for the disappearance of a society also entails the replacement of certain specific class conflicts by others.

Within any society class conflicts exist only because the adversaries are both participants in the same system of historical action, which defines their contest, is the stake for which it is fought, and makes the conflict possible.

No class situation or class system exists that can be defined otherwise than in terms of social relations, which is to say otherwise than in terms of oriented conduct, conduct different in nature from institutional or organi­zational conduct, but social conduct nevertheless, since it participates in the society's historicity, in the creative action exerted by the society upon itself, on the basis of its own work.

C. Types of Class Systems: Industrial Society

Since class relations are not separable from the system of historical action at stake in them or, more particularly, from its cultural model, we ought really to analyze the the field, theactors , and the modalities of the class relations in each societal type.

I shall examine here only the transition from industrial society to postindustrial society. This comparison has no more intrinsic importance than any other, but it can be allowed priority here, simply because the thought of sociologists is much more directly influenced by the experience of those societies in which sociology developed, Just as I did not attempt to provide a historical analysis of the types of SHA, but simply to elucidate the nature of the system itself by standing back to examine one or other of its particular configurations, so I shall seek now to isolate the sociological concept of social class from particular social experience or consciousness.

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a. Historical Conditions of the "European" Representation of Social Classes

Capitalistic industrialization was historically defined by the concurrence of three situations.

At the level of historicity, economic development rests upon the accumu­lation of the capital derived from a direct exploitation of the manpower concentrated in factories and subjected to new forms of organization of labor.

On the institutional level, the principal fact is the prolonged jibsence of social control over economic activities, which were left in the hands of the industrial and financial bourgeoisie. Organization into unions was for a long time forbidden and repressed; the political system continued to exclude the majority of workers and acted as an instrument in the defense of private interests. One is reminded of Tocqueville's judgment on the governments led or oriented by Guizot, a judgment that interestingly enough came from a man profoundly attached to bourgeois society. This situation changed only slowly, with the development of industry itself, with the numerical increase, the concentration, and the organization of the working class, the recognition of unions, the formation of socialist political parties, and the transformation of the role of the state.

On the level of social organization, the main features were the breakdown of rural society, the new forms of division of labor, the urban explosion, and all those aspects that can be subsumed under the term proletarianization.

The combination of these three characteristics shows that at the stage of capitalist industrialization the classes were no longer real groups; that the working class in particular is more easily apprehended in its proletarian condition than in its professional culture, but that on the other hand its political nonparticipation is closely linked with its class position proper. This conjunction of social movement and political action has left its stamp not only on the European labor movement—and the British labor movement above all—but also upon the thought of the social classes and the social movements. Nothing forces us to conclude that political exclusion must always be an attribute of the laboring condition in an industrial capitalist society. But our thought on the industrial societies has been and still is deeply affected by the political conditions of capitalist industrialization in Europe.

The direct conflict between capital and labor, such a central element of this type of industrialization, cannot be identified with particular historical forms of the institutional and organizational system. In the United States, where those forms have been broadly different, where the labor movement has never been dominated by consciousness of a social rift and proletariani­zation, even though labor's struggle in that country has often resulted in great violence, industrialization must be analyzed in terms of capitalist

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property and class conflict, which emphasizes the necessity of never con­fusing a mode of sociological analysis with one's knowledge of a simul­taneously all-embracing and particular historical situation, such as that of nineteenth-century Europe.

In this situation it is tempting to reduce the working class to a proletarian consciousness, a consciousness of uprooting, of exploitation, emptied of all the positivity of self-consciousness as producer because the social control of accumulation has been reduced to the dominion of ruling class over political system.

But the choice must be made between two positions. Either one places oneself on the level of class relations, and there is no reason to deny that the working class can have an action of its own on social and political evolution, or one places oneself in the hypothesis of an absolute power of the bourgeoisie not only at the level of social domination but also at the institutional and organizational levels, and the predictable rift in the system can no longer be attributed solely to the internal logic of the capitalist system but appears as the general crisis of a system, a crisis that can then be defined just as well in functionalist as in Marxist terms.

b. Social Classes in Industrial Society

Having pointed out the consequences of confusing a socioeconomic system with an overall historical situation, we should now examine the level of historicity more closely and define in what way theL cp^nception of the social classes bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century, and by Marxism in particular, corresponds to the SHA that I Jhavedesignated as being that_of industriaf societyyfTrst. however, let us remember the decisive step forward taken by Marx in his analysis of the social classes. He himself stressed that he could not take credit for introducing this notion. He had in fact found it everywhere in the works of historians. Augustin Thierry, Tocqueville, Guizot—all had strongly emphasized the central role of the social classes in historical evolution. Just after the French Revolution there was a very clear awareness of the struggles between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. But the classes were conceived of as actors, defined by their intentions, their values, their interests. Marx, as a consequence of the progress made in economic analysis, dispensed with this conception of classes and centered his analysis instead upon the relations of production, the social mechanism of exploitation, which was a distinct break with the method of the historians.

This new orientation can be expressed directly in the terms ofjthe SHA of industrial society, the general construction of which is, you will remember, as in figure 18. In the industrial society the cultural model is not defined in terms of production: social creativity is conceived of not as the capacity to increase productivity but as the product o\_an organization of production.

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cultural model

mobilization

organization

production

consumption

distribution

hierarchization

needs

Figure 18

The classes put forward opposing images of this creativity. For the indus-trializerW is the spirit of enterprise, competition, the market, and tree trade that are creative. The working class counters this with the idea of associa­tion, whether in the form of productivity cooperatives or of a collectivist management of the economy.

In this society there therefore exists a dissociation between the locus of the classes' economic relations and the cultural model. On the one hand, what is at stake in the class struggles is the organization of society and production; on the other, the opposition between their economic interests is situated at the very locus of production, as the concepts of labor value and surplus value make clear.

The dissociation is not specific to this society. It is even more pronounced in societal types in which the distance between cultural model and produc­tion is greater, which is to say in both agrarian and mercantile society. One can then discern struggles of interests associated with an overall conflict manifesting itself in the field of the cultural model, religious in the one case, state-centered in the other.

Here the dissociation is much less visible, since the cultural model provides an "economic" type of metasocial warrant tor the social order. It is real, nevertheless; the labor movement is after all constantly divided between two principal orientations: on the one hand the Proudhonian tendency, which gives priority to the experience of labor and to the opposition of interests between labor and ownership: on the other hand, the tendency associated with the Luxembourg Commission and Louis Blanc, which is to say, the tendency toward state intervention and organization of the production system.

The experience of labor, the experience of the producer, is heavy with the entire social life of the workers, with the whole autonomy of a working-class culture. This gives considerable power to worker consciousness and lends the support of a community to the workers' struggle, but it can set up the

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barriers of a working-class particularism against recognition of the class struggle and the nature of the economic system.

On the other hand, class consciousness does challenge the economic organization, but it is also intermingled with the effects of the institutional system. In the majority of European cases the class struggle is associated with a response to political exclusion. To the degree in which this exclusion is incomplete, as in France under the Second Republic, the mixture of political action and class action takes other forms.

These two levels are never entirely separated. Worker action, like employer action, passes perpetually from one level to the other. But neither are they ever fused together.

Hence the fact that each of the classes appeals to a foundation of creativity that is outside the practical activity of production itself and that introduces a certain "abstract1' philosophical principle of creativity, which is never fused with social labor. The categories of economic organization are isolated from the practice of creative labor, as are the political or religious categories in previous societal types.

In this sense the "economic*' conception of the classes, whether it derives^ from liberal economy or, on the contrary, from Marxist thought, corre­sponds to the SHA of industrial society and, in particular, to the conditions of the capitalist development of European industrialization. A more com-plefe analysis would need to follow the formation of the class" actors in their relation with the other elements of the SHA.

The hierarchization of industrial society is based upon wealth; but it is not simply a scale of economic stratification. The upper strata are those whose fortune is the instrument for the realization of the cultural model and of the type of accumulation to which that model is linked. It is thus the possession of capital rather than of money that defines the upper class, that makes possible the transition from the principle of hierarchization to the existence of classes. And it is in opposition to this role of capital that labor is conceived of as wealth, as the creation of wealth.

Needs are not defined in this society in terms of enjoyment. The image of enjoyment is linked with that of a future society. In society as it is. in other words, in industrial society, needs are apprehended in terms of distribution, which is to say^rimarTI>;Tn terms of social mobility. But the class conflict superimposes upon this general representation the opposition between a working-class view—to each according to his labor—and a capitalist view based upon thrift, upon the saving that makes investment and access to the capitalist function possible.

The same conclusion emerges from an examination of each of the elements. In every case the opposition of the classes transforms a mode of social or cultural activity into opposing "values." But this opposition can

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never be understood except as a class significance given to elements that cannot be identified with either one class or another.

-L All these observations ought to lead us to this essential point: hi no typeof society does the theme of social class seem to play as central a roleas^it does in industrial society. 1 maintain that class relations and class conflict occupy a central place in all societies, and, moreover, that in all societies the conflict is referable to a system of historical action and that it is not definable by a direct contradiction of interest.

It remains true, nonetheless, that the totality of social experience is apprehended in this type of society on the basis of class relations. This is made clear both by the power of the social and intellectual movement supported by the capitalist class and by the ideological force of the Marxism that has today been taken over by TFose peoples just entering industrial society.

The reason for this has already been given in the previous chapter. It has to do with the progressive differentiation of the levels of social reality.

In an agrarian society the cultural model and the system of historical action as a whole are closely linked with the social organization, in extreme cases reaching the point where historicity and reproduction seem to become identical.

Then, in mercantile society, the cultural model with its state-centered content no longer controls the level of social organization directly; neverthe­less, it remains linked to the institutional and political level, as the term "state-centered" itself would indicate.

Industrial society places its cultural model at the level of economics, hence at the level of class relations and no. longer at that of social organization or institutions.

Lastly, postindustrial society is the most differentiated of all. The cultural model occurs directly on the level of society's transforming action on itself by itself. Hence the eventually very visible autonomy of the agencies of historicity, of the "professionals" in the realms of science and organization, of information, training, and consumption. Hence too the fact that the classes appear as necessarily situated in relation to the stake of their struggle, which cannot be identified with the ideology of any one class but is more exposed than ever to the dominion of those ideologies.

It is therefore without doubt industrial society, and industrial society alone, that lives its historicity in the mode of class relations, just as previous societies had lived it in the religious or the political mode, whereas post-industrial society lives it directly for itself. For industrial society, histo­ricity—society's action on itself—is not conceivable other than in the form of the wrenching out of a class from the social order. For certain members of the society it is the capitalist class, the entrepeneurs, who are wrenching

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society out of its closedness and its reproduction. For others, on the contrary, it is the power of labor, it is the struggle of Caliban alone which can assert the action of society and smash the instruments of social control and reproduction set up by the bourgeoisie. At no other period in history does society appear as this kind of a struggle between metasocial characters. Hence the dramatic richness of Victor Hugo-style visions. The Lord and Lucifer, order and enlightenment, progress and false idols are all perpetually in confrontation.

It is impossible to derive any benefit from any particular work of this historical period—to which we are still so close and which therefore has so much to say to us—without placing it first of all in its historical epoch, in a system of historical action and also in a certain state of interaction between system of historical action, class relations, institutions, and organization. For sociology, to reflect on Marxism is more urgent than ever. I have not offered a reinterpretation or even an analysis of Marxism here for the sufficient reason that this book may be viewed in its entirety as an attempt to undertake, for the society of today, an analysis that might occupy the same position—minus the genius—that Marx did in industrial society. And this means not only that Marxism seems to me absolutely linked with the industrial system of historical action, so that its content cannot be trans­ferred into the present, but also something much more important: that its procedural approach—critique of the ruling class's ideology, investigation into the conditions of existence of social movements, and analysis of the processes of historical change—is exemplary and ought to be one of our guides.

D. Postindustrial Society

The originality of this society is that its cultural model is directly linked with creative labor and that the accumulation playing the principal role within it is that of creativity itself, which is to say the accumulation of the capability of scientific knowledge. Unlike other societies, therefore, this one does not posit metasocial foundations for its creativity outside of its own activity. The difference is clearly visible when one looks at preindustrial societies whose cultural model is linked with religious or economic warrants for the social order, but it exists just as clearly between postindustrial and industrial society. In the latter, the economic realm was still detached from social activity and seemed to possess its own laws, a situation that also entailed recourse to a cause that had to be defined in "natural" rather than purely social terms, whether that cause took the form of a spirit of enterprise or of the power of labor as the creator of value.

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a. Beyond Historicity

In postindustrial society, with scientific progress as its motivating force, ought the disappearance of all metasocial warrants for the social order not lead us to abandon our very starting point? Is the image ofaTsociety divided against itself, imposing on itself a non-"natural" kind of movement and order, not simply a manifestation of the relative weakness of creative labor? Is the opposition of the classes not bound up with scarcity and the perpetuation of inequalities?

Ought the progress of knowledge and investment not to produce, on the contrary, the conception of society as its own operation? The naturalism already present in the nineteenth century and stronger still in our own day conceives of society primarily as an organism, then as a system, more coordinated than integrated, or as an interplay of multiple actors. The competition and the cooperation between these actors combine with each's pragmatism. Ultimately, don't all the notions analyzing the orientations of social action tend to vanish? Is that not the condition of existence of the sciences of man?

What 1 have termed "cultural model" may appear as no more than an attribute of humanity's prehistory. And, indeed, to what can we trace the existence of that cultural model? To the dissociation between cultural orientations and production, to the impotence of labor. Thus, in society defined by creativity, the cultural model and production coincide, the cultural model becomes rational, therefore natural, and at the same time the dichotomy of the classes, which expresses the dissociation of cultural model and production, will also vanish. The evolution of the systems of historical action described earlier leads us back to this naturalism, to this coincidence of society with its own activity of knowledge and labor. Criticism of function-alism ought, in this spirit, be pushed to its furthest extreme, to naturalism, in fact, in obedience to a movement that was already present in early nineteenth-century positivism.

What, then, are the reasons constraining me to retain my general procedure and reject the naturalization of society?

The progress of knowledge does not reduce the cultural model to the_ practice of its operations. It is accompanied by an apprehension of the creativity of science and knowledge, and thus by a valorization of creativity. Caught up in the rapid transformation of its conditions of existence, society does not find production and consumption coinciding in any way within a unified system of functioning. No society has ever consumed a smaller proportion of its product than ours. In consequence, it is divided, more than any other society, into those who manage the apparatuses of knowledge and economic transformation, and those who are caught up in change and are trying to regain control over it.

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We are faced, as I said in the introduction of this book, with two principal representations of the new society, if we leave aside those analyses devoted to the mechanisms of reproduction and control of the social order.

For some, postindustrial society is increasingly a whole made up of organizations adapting themselves to changes in their environment, anxious to maintain or strengthen their advantages, taking decisions in which an increasing number of actors participate. This is a pragmatic, liberal, competitive society in which what I term the cultural model no longer exists, has been swallowed up by the everyday practice of a society orienfed toward change, adaptation, training, in which theLclass conflictjs replaced by the complexity of political processes and networks of influence. Just as liberal thought represented production as a market, so this neo-liberaMhought presents us with the image of an entire society conceived of as a market. ^XbeTTeVe h at "sociology "cannot here avoid a choice that is at once political and intellectual. To give_ "modern'* society the image 1 have just evoked seems to nie to be a political act, a contribution to the ideology of the ruling class. This is a fact that in no way decreases the interest of such an analysis of society. On the contrary. And 1 should like critical sociology to be as attentive to that analysis as Marx was to the thought of Smith and Ricardo. It teaches us better than any other to look upon society as a totality composed of actions and relations, not as an order that can be defined outside the conduct of actors.

But 1 see no reason to reduce all relations and interactions to those characteristic of markets, of^xcTianges between relatively rational actors seeking to maximize their advantages or to work out strategies.

Our society, as much as any other society, is dominated by the power and the secrecy of the great decision-making apparatuses, by the study of rejected, forbidden conduct, by the importance of control, manipulation, and repression.

But even before asserting the permanence of domination and of class relations it is essential to recognize the existence in postindustrial society of a system of historical action shot through with tensions and oppositions, and very different from a market. This society is oriented toward a growing productivity, but it is also a society of consumption and enjoyment. These terms cannot be associated with one another except in opposing systems of values, systems that themselves correspond to opposing social classes.

For the ruling class, it is the strengthening of the large organizations that makes it possible to link technological research with the creation or the satisfaction of "needs." For the popular class, it is the democratic control of the social organization that can mobilize knowledge in the service of the general welfare.

On the threshold of postindustrial society, I maintain that this type of

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society is dominated more completely than any other by its historicity, its capacity to transform itself, and therefore by a system of historical action fraught with oppositions, and by class relations that dominate social practice with a completeness that increases in direct proportion to the completeness of society's capacity for action upon itself

The time is past when an absolute and concentrated social domination was associated with a broad autonomy of function in elementary and local systems of exchanges, when the network of power was very coarse but also rigid. Society's action on itself, the action of man on man, becomes more diffuse and more diversified,theT ordersTless constricting and more num­erous, the manipulation more efficient, more capable of penetrating.througir the economic and social organization to the individual, and even tQ h_is_ biological functioning.

The ruling class no longer relies upon metasocial warrants for the social order, but upon the direct affirmation of its capacity to manipulate. It is thus provoking for the first time a total, cultural resistance, and not just an economic or political one, a resistance that is not the defense put up by particular social groups or interests but the protest of the existant against technocratic domination.

~~~" However, although it is necessary to maintain the existence in postindus-trial society of forms of accumulation, of a cultural model, and of class conflicts, these latter are inevitably different from the conflicts specific to industrial society, just as those were in turn different from the conflicts specific to preindustrial societies.

In industrial society, especially in Marx's analysis of it, class relations already appear more central than the forms of existence and the symbolic attributes of each class. The bourgeoisie revolutionized society, destroyed the old divisions and forms of social organization, in order to ensure its own domination, which was based upon capitalist exploitation and the trans­formation of the modes of organizing labor. Nevertheless, the central role of capital ensured the maintenance of one essential element in the transmission of status: ownership and inheritance. The most visible feature of the most economically advanced societies and the one most frequently pointed out, particularly since the classic work by Adolf A. Berle and G. C. Means (The Modern Corporation and Private Property, 1932), right up to John Kenneth Galbraith's The New Industrial State (1967), is the separation between the ownership and the management of large enterprises in capitalist countries. This separation is even more complete in countries that have eliminated capitalism and in which the ownership of the means of production is collective, whether the owner is a cooperative or the state. It is therefore futile to define the dominant class by the hereditary transmission of advantages, offices, or privileges.

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To define a dominant class can no longer consist in identifying a real group of individuals or families who are transforming an acquired status into a transmitted status. Even more than in industrial society it is the functioning of a system that must be examined, not real, stable groups.

In a word, the classes cease essentially to be sonographic realities that require description before being used as elements In an analysis. The elementary observations just referred to concerning the dominant classes can, at first glance at least, be applied also to the dominated classes. It is pointless here to go back over the customary commentaries on the effects of mass production and consumption, on the gradual decline in traditional life styles, etc.

But all these observations usually lead to the conclusion that we have entered a society in which, even though it is undoubtedly hierarcbized and inegalitarian, we can no longer usefully speak of social classes. Why then do 1 not go along with such conclusions? Is it possible to continue assigning an essential role to the notion of social classes if those classes no longer have any directly observable 'reality"? The answer is that the empirical reality of social classes is inevitably different from what it was in other types of society. It is now linkedTto the management of change. WJiat is important is not to recognize the attributes of a group hut the nature of social relations.

b. The New Class Conflicts

The old image of the class conflict is that of the worker, either agricultural or industrial, dominated by a ruling class that fulfills functions not in them­selves directly productive, that owns the means of production, and that profits from the surplus value taken from the worker.

This image is an obstacle to an .understanding, of ..class, relations in \ postindustrial—and even in industrials-society. The dominant class is defined in both by production, by the decisions and the wrork of organization that directly govern production, that ensure high efficiency and productivity. In consequence one cannot set up the creativity proper to directly productive work in any clear opposition to the dominant order. What had a meaning for someone who scattered seed, worked a loom or a steam forge, scarcely has any these days for someone who adds up figures, makes telephone calls, teaches. The professional autonomy of labor is vanishing, and with it the possibility of setting labor and management in clear opposition. It is not labor as opposed to nonlabor that defines the ruled and dominated man of today.

This is primarily because the ruling class is defined by its management of the apparatuses of production. The technocrats are the rulers of the large organizations that are putting scientific and technical progress to use and being managed in conformity with the laws of complex system control.

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These organizations impose their domination on society as a whole <£yj cornering for their profit or their power the resources that could be used in some area of social life, to fulfill some kind of social demand. And this leads them, by the use of very diverse methods, to control the expression of demand, information, or training. They also impose their domination by achieving within themselves a much more advanced integration than organi­zations of an older type attempted. "~

These apparatuses of decision are usually found associated with the state, which permits them to extend their domination beyond the area specific to the goods or services they produce. They do not come into conflict with the consciousness of the productive worker, as would be the case in an industrial enterprise proper, in which the worker senses the direct link between his physical effort or his work rate and production.

The large modern organization, whose growth and power are bound up with the use of new techniques in production, commercialization, and management, is no longer a locus within which class relations manifest themselves, as was the case with the classic industrial enterprise. It is now the large organization that is a class actor and enters into conflict with a social demand that it controls in accordance with its interests. " Hence the importance of the attacks, still increasing in number and force, against our apparatuses, ancT above all against the educational apparatus, much less because it reproduces inequality than because it produces it. The health service apparatus and the scientific research apparatus are both beginning to undergo analogous attacks, to which the great industrial enterprises are also increasingly exposed in the name of the defense of the environment.

This new kind of domination can no longer be defined in terms of the exploitation of the worker but rather, much more broadly, in terms of the manipulation of demand, deteriorating conditions of life, the monopolizing of resources, and the capacity to affect decisions.

In a strongly integrated organization whose efficiency depends more upon good communication management than upon the direct effort put into manufacture, the nature of contestation changes.

The protest wras once that of the productive, creating worker against the weight and immovability of the established order of power and heredity. Today, confronted with the movement dominated by the apparatuses and the ruling class, it is the protest of the human being, of the autonomy of his experience and expression, his capacity to manage or to control the changes that affect him.

Because we are accustomed to defining the dominated class in terms of a category of workers, we have difficulty in making ourselves see that the extension of domination to the whole of social and cultural life obliges us to

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define the dominated class in more general terms, and to pay attention to different problems and different categories than heretofore. Let us take an example. Each of us is more or less confusedly aware today of the importance of age groups. We talk occasionally, with embarrassment, about "senior citizens"; we talk a great deal, and passionately, about the young, who do in fact intervene collectively more often in political life. What is the origin of this new importance of age groups? One has to go beyond the immediately observable facts: the later entry into working life, longer expectation of life, and so on.

The essential fact is that the young and the old are no longer entirely defined in terms of their participation in labor and live out their identity problems outside the traditional environments of social integration such as the family. The young because they are confronting the system of social domination with their creative claims, the old because they have been abandoned by this society that has used them and now asks of them simply to die with the least possible fuss. It is likely that in the decades ahead the length of the working week will diminish relatively little, whereas the length of the periods before and after the average work life, youth and age, will increase much more quickly. This is a new situation, since life and work life were for a long time almost coincident, the education of children being itself viewed as children's work, as their preparation for the role of adult workers.

Both young and old are resisting the reduction of their social existence to their role as agents of production in the service of the apparatuses. The young, and especially the students, are setting up their requirements in terms of individual education in opposition to mere training for employment defined in terms of the needs of the technobureaucracy; the old are protesting, albeit still silently, against being reduced to the status of retired pensioners, against the way in which the system of social domination refuses to recognize them as "normal" individuals.

To youth and old age must be added the time spent on vacation, which is increasingly given over to participating in a culture and a society defined by opposition to work.

The importance of life outside work is nothing but the counterpart of the penetration of social domination beyond production into information, consumption, and so on.

This does not in any way mean that defensive reactions and protests within the work situation no longer have any importance. Who has ever made such a sweeping judgment? But the ever increasing weight of social integration within organizations, which derives from the fact that the cultural model— and therefore the principal stake of class conflicts—is directly linked to production, leads to life outside work being given ever greater importance, in other words to that life being made the locus where opposition to social

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domination takes on a new importance. It is not a matter of setting work in opposition to leisure but of recognizing the broadening of the field of class conflict. Manipulated both at his work and in his consumption, the postindustrial society man is opposing himself to this domination both at work and outside his work and relying more and more on life outside work to demonstrate the conflict of interests opposing his personal and collective identity to the great apparatuses that are the managers of change.

To these new aspects of the popular class's defensive action we must also add its new forms of contestation if we are to succeed in capturing the concrete reality of this new popular class.

Its contestation, like its defensive action, is directed at the management of change as a whole. It sets up a development oriented toward the progress of collective establishments and personal choices in opposition to the kind of growth governed by the will to power and profit of the large organizations. Previous forms of contestation were aimed in general at fighting back against the power of the ruling class by appealing to the state—to the representative of the "general interest," of "the common good"—in an effort to reverse the role of the metasocial warrants of the social order and transform them into protectors of the weak. Such a procedure ioses all its meaning in a postindustrial society in which the state is so closely associated with the technocratic ruling class, Contestation cannot take any other form than an appeal to self-management. This is not the place to examine this multiple and confused subject in all its concrete and ideological manifestations. It can be conceived of as the expression, recurrent throughout history, of an elementary Utopia, the Utopia that asserts the coincidence of development and community. In which case it falls short of, rather than lying beyond, the class relations and organization problems of a society shot through by ever more complex and shifting exchanges, less and less centered on the permanence of the group. But one can also see in the present diffusion and renewal of this theme the sign of an all-important reversal in relation to the previous society. Contestation in that was above all a centralizing force, setting itself up in opposition to the power of society's notables and to the dominion of a traditional domination. Now, however, we see it becoming a decentralizing force, making a direct demand for the management of society by the users of its machines, of its products, of its communications.

Self-management as a model of society management can hardly get beyond fine sentiments and confused ideas, since it is appealing to stability and community in a society of accumulation, of change, and of class relations. But this theme does certainly define the direction of the new social movements. It is not a program of government, it is a banner unfurled in preparation for new battles, for the struggle against the concentration and extension of the politico-economic power of decision.

Doesn't this evocation of new forms of defense and contestation make it

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difficult to answer the simplest question of all: what is this popular class, who are its members? By constantly insisting on the growing extension of domination in all areas of social life, aren't we in danger of having to define the popular class in extremely vague terms, such as "the little people," those who do not exercise the power of decision? In previous societies the field of class relations was defined both by a cultural model and by a type of accumulation, and consequently of production. We must provide analogous indications for postindustrial society.

So, at the risk of being excessively schematic, let us say that the popular class must be defined as the class of consumers. And the principal field of class relations and conflicts is the area of culture.

The first of these statements is the one most loaded with possible misunderstandings: the consumer only occupies this essential place in postindustrial society because production in that society is increasingly linkedjo mass consumption. Today, manipulation of the consumer plays as essential a role as exploitation of the worker did in industrial society.

This is"wfiy the class war will henceforth take the form of a struggle over whether "needs" are to be detenrnned by technocratic interests—whether this means a strengthened Soviet-type tcchnobureaucratic apparatus or the interests of commercial enterprises of the capitalist type—or by the people themselves, seen as real groups: professional, urban, age or sex groups, and so on.

This does not mean that the problems of workers will lose their impor­tance. In order to avoid misunderstanding, let us begin by leaving aside the fact that the industrialized societies—especially those least completely so among the capitalist countries, such as France or Italy—still to a large extent belong to the industrial type of society, and that we can even see the labor movement in such countries penetrating into categories hitherto paralyzed by repression and paternalism.

In the big postindustrial type of organization, which is to say in those organizations within which rationalization has been extended from the execution of tasks to system management, we are now seeing u reversal of the relative roles played by the claims of producer and consumer. Instead of a social movement embodied by producers and linked with more limited, more "economic" claims made in the name of consumption, we are now seeing the institutionalization of labor conflicts, the development of collective negoti­ation and "participation," and even the adoption of the idea of industrial democracy for their own ends by the large technocratic management. But at the same time, the struggles associated with consumption, with life style, are taking on a new dimension by yoking work and outside-work together in "qualitative" claims. And the new element in these claims is that they are looking at the work situation from an outside-work viewpoint.

We are not saying, therefore, that we are moving out of a society

/

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dominated by the problems of labor into another in which life outside work occupies a larger place, but that we are moving from a domination centered on work to another, more general kind in which the problems that appear within the work framework are bearers of social movements only to the degree in which they are linked with the totality of the problems arising from a domination now extended over a system of production that integrates manufacture, communications, training, and consumption much more closely than before.

The popular class thus defined appears very different from the working class of industrial society; but was that working class not also very different in its turn from the "lower orders" of mercantile capitalism? It is futile to attempt to modernize the image of the working class in an attempt to adapt it to the new realities of labor. For classes are not defined by professional categories but by a conflict relation and by the stake of that conflict. In postindustrial society the stake is the management of change, and therefore the model of development, so that the conflict relation is that which opposes the centers of decision against those social categories that are dominated and exploited by the technocratic apparatuses.

-__ Last, ought we not mention the opposition between the centers of development and the underdeveloped world? It is not by chance that those who speak in the name of those centers and their interests speak about the underdeveloped world as if they were talking about children or "senior citizens." They denounce the archaism of its mentality and its organization just as readily as they do its inability to make long-term decisions and its infantilism. The societies that are dominated, exploited, by the conditions of international trade and by the technological domination exercised by multi­national companies, whether conglomerates or not, are falling further and further behind the leading group of industrialized societies, who sell them products the relative prices of which are ceaselessly rising because of inflation. These societies appeal both to the defense of their own identities and to their determination to control the forms of international division of labor imposed on them. It is therefore natural that the solidarity of dominated nations and dominated classes within the dominant nations should be affirmed more forcefully than hitherto.

L- It is now possible to define with greater precision the relations of the classes by utilizing the diagram representing their double dialectic, (see fig. 19).

On the one hand the dominant class heralds the image of a free and happy society identified with its development (1 + ) and only recognizes particular, specialized groups within society each of which fulfills a function in this admirable machine (4— ). On the other hand it is purely instrumental, managing its organizations (4-f), but ensuring a sociocultural control over the "mass society'* (3+).

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CM

2-

1 +

M

H 1 -3

4 - N

+ counterelement bearing stamp of dominant class

counterelement bearing stamp of dominated class

II.

CM - cultural model H -hierarchi/.atinn M = mobilization N =needs

CM

2+ l

1-

M

H 3+ 1

4- N ;

i . i

Figure 19

Parallel to this, the dominated class falls back on the one hand on a dependent participation (2-), while at the same time putting up in opposition to the dominant class the image of an egalitarian mass society (3-); on the other hand, it takes oyer the cultural model and transforms it into a social image, that of a "communist" society in which progress is at the service of each and all (1-), thereby taking back to itself the whole diversity of groups and individuals (4-). In postindustrial society, as in any other type of society, one can make the hypothesis that these two slopes of the class relations correspond, in theory, to a certain internal differentiation of each of the classes. It is rather unlikely that this differentiation will be complete, and we do not know much about the factors that increase or diminish it. But it is possible to think that in the dominated class those who oppose the dominant class with a sociocultural countermodel (counterelement 1) are those who participate most directly in the society's power of development, which is to say in scientific and technical knowledge, whereas those who are behind counterelements 2 and 3 are those who are most directly the victims of the mode of development and of economic and social change.

Just as in industrial society the labor movement was born of the conjunc­tion of skilled and nonskilled workers, so in postindustrial society the action of the dominated class presupposes the conjunction of an elite of scientific and technical professionals—who can be technicians or design engineers, teachers and students, or specialists in information theory—with a larger mass of individuals reduced to being the tools of development, to being deprived of everything in them not utilizable by the apparatuses of powrer. These are the unskilled and overexploited workers as wrell as the young, the aged, and so on.

They are more inclined to favor a "consumption" countermodel than a "production" countermodel. Similarly, among the rulers one would have to distinguish between businessmen more oriented toward counterelements 2 and 3 and the more "technocratic" administrative and political ruling intellectuals, who are more likely to favor counterelements 1 and 4.

What is certain, however, is that the latest characteristic of the social classes in postindustrial society is that since they are nowr less sustained by the hereditary transmission of social positions, by institutional rules, and by

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symbolic apparatuses, they do not become observable realities except to the degree in which they are effectively functioning as historical actors, which is to say to the degree in which they participate in social movements, even if the movements are incomplete.

In postindustrial society, even more than in industrial society, the existence of the social classes is not completely demonstrable as long as there are no visible social movements, which public opinion always first perceives in the attenuated form of social problems.

Certainly all questionings of the social order are not analyzable entirely in terms of social movements; but when such questioning bears upon society's general orientations and the system of social domination, then it does necesssitate analysis in terms of historical action and makes it possible to reveal class relations, even though those movements may not have reached consciousness of themselves as class actors.

The existence of the classes cannot be established in any purely 4'objective" way, which is to say by considering solely the relations of domination themselves and disregarding collective action.

E. Alienation

Until now the classes have been seen as actors whose interdependence and opposition are defined by the SHA and by the system of actors itself, but who seem to act opposite one another and in opposition to one another with equal liberty. Domination has been recognized as an essential aspect of the relation between the classes, but that domination does not seem to penetrate the consciousness and the action of the dominated class.

Yet it cannot be so. The formation of popular social movements does not only have to contend with the resistance of the adversary and of the institutions he controls, but also with the submission of the workers to their masters and to the categories of social practice defined by those masters.

A class is dominant only because it never presents itself entirely as such, and because it identifies itself with the social organization, which thus appears as a situation, whose functioning—including any dysfunctions or internal tensions—is described. On the other hand, the domination is not purely social; it tends to transform itself into political hegemony in such a way as to set the seal of legitimacy upon itself. The dominated class then tends to participate in the SHA only in ways and forms compatible with the power of dominant class. It has access to a dependent participation only; hence its alienation.

This notion is a difficult one to introduce into the discussion laden as it has been with such a number of meanings and often totally bound up with a whole philosophic approach, as with Hegel, Feuerbach. or the young Marx,

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and which has recently been employed in very vague senses, usually in relation to some respectable humanist intention but one that cannot be employed as the foundation of a sociological analysis.

There is doubtless much to interest the historian of ideas in the reason for the shifts of meaning in the word "alienation." However, 1 shall merely point out that I did not introduce it before 1 had defined class relations, and emphasize that I shall employ it exclusively to designate one of the aspects of class relations.

One has left the domain of sociology the moment one starts setting up social realities in opposition to human nature, to the requirements of liberty or justice, all of these being notions that vary according to the society, the class, the group, the individual using them. 1 shall never say that assembly-line work alienates the worker, that the urban metropolis alienates the city dweller, or that advertising alienates the consumer. Expressions such as these may relate to situations in which the concept of alienation is applicable, but they are in themselves contrary to the use I intend to make of the term. Alienation presupposes the adoption by the dominated class of social and cultural orientations and practices that are determined by the interests of the upper class and mask the relations between the classes Jn positing the existence of a social and cultural situation recognized as the field common to all the actors and definable without recourse to relations of domination. Alienation is in the first place the negation of domination.

But, because of this situation, the popular class has another approach to its situation. Its consciousness is at the same time defensive and contestatory. Consequently its members find themselves divided between a dependent participation and a conflictive participation. Hence a disorganization of conduct and representation, an interiorization of the dependence and of its effects that means the popular class must bear the burden of a contradiction between its own orientations and those imposed upon it. One cannot usefully talk of alienation except insofar as one can observe this fragmentation of conduct. Otherwise one is exposing oneself to all the dangers of a facile interpretative discourse, denouncing alienation at every turn, as moralists used to denounce moral corruption. Alienation defines an action on conduct, and therefore cannot be recognized unless it is observed as a type of conduct.

It replaces the social conflict experienced by members of the popular class between their dependence and their opposition. This conflict is not experi­enced constantly; it presupposes at least that class consciousness has~been activated; it has more likelihood of becoming apparent at the central locus of class relations, for example, where industrial society is concerned, in the work situation. There, the constraints and forms of order must be interiorized; at the same time, class consciousness is being crystallized by the collective situation. Hence the split in popular consciousness producing both a

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self-destructive aggressivity against itself and also flight reactions in the face of an intolerable contradiction.

I shall term instrument of alienation any conduct emanating from the ruling class, or encouraged by it, that is aimed at organizing social rjrajcjdce as a "positive" totality, analyzable and utilizable without reference to class relations. An empiricism that is always based on a rejection of explanation, or on recourse to arbitrary explanations in analyzing the social order, inequality, power.

In particular 1 term instrument of alienation a sociology that transforms the SHA into a system of values and norms, and that analyzes social conduct as the implementation of such a general social code. In other words, I term alienation any sociology that gives a central position to the notion of institutions and that docs not treat power as a social resource, an instrument of exchange.

If 1 mention sociology here it is in order to stress that alienation cannot be regarded as a material situation. Low wages, bad working conditions, deprivation of earned wealth or freedom, these are all expressions of domination, not of alienation.

Nor is alienation to be confused or identified with exploitation. Exploi­tation is the term that denotes the relation of domination in its economic form.

Alienation therefore derives both from an initiative on the part of the dominant class—creation of the illusion of the "given situation"—and from a dependent participation on the part of the dominated class.

One example will suffice to illustrate this definition. The liberal entrepre­neur believes in free enterprise and the mechanisms of the market as instruments of progress. He proposes a system of remuneration to the workers that is calculated to turn them into small "entrepreneurs," either by piecework or, better still, by the subcontracting system so well described by Bernard Mottez in Systemes de salaire et politiques patronales (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1966) and well known because of Zola's account of it at the beginning of Germinal.

These workers are alienated to the degree in which their pursuit of a better wage assumes forms that correspond to the view and the interests of the dominant class, to the degree in which they are playing the boss's game, not recognizing it for what it is but seeing it as a normal element of the 4'given situation," while at the same time defending their conditions of existence against employer dominion.

Alienation is therefore that situation in which the dominated class has no access to the level of orientations and behaves as a resource. This can be represented by the simplified diagram in figure 20.

This diagram makes it easy to understand why alienation conceals the

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class relation and identifies the dominant class with the "given situation." If this latter does in fact control the model of movement and the model of order simultaneously and exclusively, then the SHA as a totality is destroyed and society appears as dominated by an integrated body of values of which the dominant class is no more than the representative or even just the servant. The dominated class is nothing more than a means for the realization of those values; it cannot pursue its own interests except in agreement with the dominant class. Power and class relations no longer have any place in such a representation of society.

4- Counterclement bearing stamp of dominant class.

cultural mcxlel

-

-I- hiera re hi/at ion

mobilization .

Counterclement bearing stamp of dominated class.

+

needs

Figure 20

Alienation is therefore not consciousness of deprivation but deprivation of consciousness. The opinions and attitudes that Melvin Seeman has defined as alienation (in extensive articles to be found [in French] in Sociohgie du Travail, April-June 1967, pp. 113-33, 180-85, 202-9), distinguishing several independent dimensions of this general feeling, the principal ones being consciousness of nonpower and consciousness of nonmeaning, are thus objects of analysis situated on a quite different level from the one I am dealing with here.

It is arbitrary to term "alienated" any conduct that is not one of opposition or revolt, to deplore the alienation of those who would like to buy a car, spend the summer in a vacation club, or see Broadway hits on television.

To study alienation is to recognize the disorganizing effect upon the popular class actor of the contradiction between his contestatory partici­pation and his dependent participation. Alienation destroys the capacity for action. The actor retreats into the refuge of incoherence, withdrawal, mental illness, delinquency—all those types of conduct that the dominant ideology shrugs off without much trouble by calling them deviant or pathological. I don't mean that one can reduce deviancv to alienation. That would be a procedure quite as unjustified as the reverse, since both overlap on all levels of society's functioning. But, given the weight of the dominant order, the most difficult and necessary task is indeed to research the alienation lying

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most difficult and necessary task is indeed to research the alienation lying behind deviancy, since social organization occurs within a field of historicity and in consequence, a field of social domination. The development of psychiatry is today opening up new perspectives in the study of alienation.

F. Concluding Remarks

Class relations are at the same time open and asymmetrical. If they were not open, then one could not talk of class conflicts but only of domination. If they were symmetrical, then the classes would be simply competing groups of interests and one could no longer define class relations.

It is because I am constantly mindful of the fact of domination that I stand in such strenuous opposition to the neoliberal sociologies of influence and strategy.

It is because my central theme is that of conflicts, not that of contra­dictions, that I wish to keep aloof from those sociologies critical of the

\ established order. Lastly, the conjunction of the concepts of the system of historical action and social class sets me totally at odds with the functionalist approach. Actionalist sociology is based on the theme of historicity, of the production of society on the basis of accumulation, knowledge, and the cultural model, which together constitute a field of historical experience and in no way a system of values, which is to say of criteria for choices between good and bad. Society as seen by the functionalists, or by the neoliberals, is an actor or a set of actors making decisions, controlling society's functioning, adapting to an environment. These are sociologies of intention. A sociology of historicity rejects this separation of actor from environment and replaces it with the unitary theme of the construction of a social and cultural field.

The sociologies of intention apprehend society as a diversified but inte­grated whole, as an organization, or as a market. The sociologies of historicity, on the contrary, assert in various forms that the action leading to social transformation is inseparable from class conflicts between those who manage accumulation and the cultural model and those who are opposed to such a private appropriation of historicity.

Moreover, one must never cease to view class relations both as conflicts and as a state of domination. This is precisely what is shown by the central notion of this chapter: the double dialectic of the social classes, ruling and dominant, defensive and contestatory.

Despite the existence of a state of domination, however, what can never exist is the reduction of historicity to a system of domination. A capitalist society is not only the social organization of capitalism; it is at the same time the locus of the labor movement and of its expression on the level of political institutions and enterprises.

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Constant emphasis upon class consciousness and social movements can be adapted both to situations in which the class conflict is largely—never completely— institutionalized and, equally well, to others in which, on the contrary, the breaking of a social domination and its political and organiza­tional instruments imposes itself as the most important fact.

In all cases, actionalist sociology is trying to be a constant reminder of the struggles against the social order, whether that order is thought of as the present order or as a model of a future society. It is searching out, beyond the system, the dynamic of social forces in conflict. It is more attentive than any other sociology to contestations, to the questioning of the established order, to debates, and to society's intervention through its conflicts. But it must always recognize the dominion of the dominant order, and therefore the limitations of social movements.

It is alone in being able to grasp the relations and tensions between transforming action and the weight of the established order.

It is necessary here to give the precise reasons—already presented in part— for which class relations cannot be reduced to the functioning of the domination exercised by the upper class.

The principal reason is the participation of all in the system of historical action, but it is not a sufficient reason, for the system of historical action is not a totality made up of actors, it is no more than the thematic of a society, so that there is nothing to prevent our thinking that the upper class controls historicity entirely, reducing the dominated class to dependent participation and, thus, to alienation. In order for there to be limits to domination it is therefore necessary for there to exist in the first place a certain autonomy of the agencies of historicity, which is to say of the professional categories that ensure the functioning of the system of historical action's elements as agents of development, of organization, of hierarchi/ation, and of consumption. This autonomy can only exist in its turn if it is guarenteed by the institutional system. Finally, it is necessary that instrumentality on the level of the organizations shall not be entirely subordinate to the power that is the manifestation of social domination. Consequently one can define the type of society in which class relations tend to become degraded into a pure social domination. Such societies will be those dominated by conscious and organized action on the part of a ruling class exercising a direct dominion over the political system, leaving no room for a broader social control of society's process of transformation and, in particular, of accumulation; societies, in short, in which labor is reduced to a labor force deprived of professional autonomy. This situation is close, for example, to that found in the early days of capitalist or Soviet industrialization. However, even in cases such as those, the class domination is not total. Only a totalitarian system can impose an absolute domination on a society. And that system is

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itself not absolute unless it is the instrument, not of a ruling class or a social movement that has attained power by transforming itself into a ruling class, but only of a regressive social movement, the expression of a general crisis of society and reducing that society to an organization, especially when it mobilizes it entirely in the name of a military enterprise. Capitalist indus­trialization experienced attempts to form workers' associations from the outset. Soviet industrialization was the achievement of a power that was at the same time a ruling power and one of revolutionary origin. It is only Nazism that has created a society in which the popular classes were unable to act, were totally subject to power, but it is impossible to reduce the Nazi state to the domination of the capitalist class. So that if one considers nothing but class relations themselves, it must be accepted that they cannot be reduced to the exercise of domination. Inversely, one cannot conceive of a society in which class conflict would be totally open, which is to say, totally institu­tionalized. There always exists a logic specific to the dominant system, from the interdependence of the variables of the economic organization to the language of an official ideology. A critical sociology rips away the false objectivity masking the reality of the social and cultural organization. But it exceeds its goal if it comes to deny the action of the popular forces or the political forces, within society and against the dominant order, that are directly and indirectly making their influence manifest.

The opposition of these two currents of thought is untranscendable as long as one continues to see them from a presociological viewpoint. In the same way, in sociological positivism, one can see on the one hand the heroic Saint-Simonian vision of the actor dragging humanity into the positive era, and on the other the image of a social system diversifying itself, becoming more and more organic, in accordance with the ideas of Spencer or of Durkheim.

What ought to be added to any denunciation of order is not only the "moderate" reminder that there are certain limits imposed on domination by institutional give and take or organizational instrumentality, but also the "radical'' reminder that there is constant action on the part of popular contestation and the social movements in which it is revealed. These two modes of limitation of domination are often associated: political liberties favor the formation of social movements, but they cannot become identical; the negotiable and the nonnegotiable are at the same time associated and opposed, as are the two meanings of the word liberty: openness of the institutions and popular contestation. One can never entirely and simply oppose social domination and open class conflict. One ought at least to oppose the ambiguous alliance of liberalism and contestation to the opposite and no less ambiguous alliance of class domination and political dictatorship.

Analysis of the social classes, as soon as it recognizes that those classes and

Class Relations 173

their conflict play a central role in social functioning and change, is faced with an inevitable choice: either it stresses the individual classes, not as groupings or environments but as actors oriented by a project, or else it bases itself on the mechanisms of class domination. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar (in Lire le Capital. Paris: Maspero, 1971; translated as Reading Capital, New York: Pantheon, 1971) have clearly shown the opposition and the complementarity of these two currents in Marxist thought.

The Second International favored the analysis of the mechanisms of capitalist society and its development. Economic realities were seen as the only acting ones, which reduces historical analysis to recognizing the ripening of the system's internal contradictions, without paying any great attention to the problems of political and ideological action.

Inversely, the leftist critique, which achieved its greatest importance directly after the Russian revolution, developed a class voluntarism. The proletariat is the actor of history, which comes back—via a return to Hegel or Croce on the part of Lukacs or Gramsci—to a ^introduction of the idea of a human essence, revealing and realizing itself through the historical action of a working class.

In every case, the procedure is historicist. It recognizes in history a force in motion. That motion is conceived of either as a form of energy driving evolution forward, or as a willed action directed toward the realization, at the end of history, of a human essence.

Inversely, order is conceived of either as obstacle to that motion or on the contrary, as its organization. Those who give most importance to class relations present history as a conflict between a human nature attempting to realize itself through the workers' struggles, and a dominant order, governed for some by power and its legal instruments, for others by profit and its economic law.

As soon as one separates social interaction from the march of history, it ceases to be possible to comprehend social action at its own level: one is endlessly swinging from recourse to metasocial warrants for society to an appeal to economic laws defined without any reference to the interaction of social forces.

The opposition that has been established between class action and the system of class relations is the most disastrous example there is of a mode of thought anterior to sociological analysis. For sociology, analysis can only begin from class relations, not from each individual actor and his particular attributes or intentions. But these relations can never be defined otherwise than as relations between actors all participating in the same system of reference. The classes must be conceived of as adversaries struggling for control of the system of historical action.

To go beyond analysis of the class actors and substitute that of class

174 Chapter Three

relations must therefore lead to our defining those relations as relations between class actors. Those relations are not a simple interaction, are not "human relations"; they occur within historicity itself, which is to say within society's duality, its ability to act upon itself by means of knowledge, accumulation, and the cultural model.

This has to be one of the leitmotivs of this book: the opposition between an analysis of the actors and an analysis of the system has no meaning for sociology.

For sociology, the actor is defined solely by his place within one or another type of social interaction, and the system cannot be defined without recognizing that it is concerned with oriented, meaningful conduct.

This makes it possible to go beyond historicism. Instead of a march of history, hovering above social conduct in just the same way as all the other absolutes that have preceded it, we find historicity, the self-production of society through the class struggle.

The actors are not inside history, inside the evolution of the forces of production and social organization; it is historicity that resides within the work that society applies to its own activity.

The class conflict is therefore an essential and permanent element of the functioning of societies insofar as they possess a certain historicity. The field of historicity is defined by the conjunction of the system of historical action with the relations between historical actors, which is to say the classes. Class relations are interposed between the orientations of the SHA on the one hand and institutional decisions or the forms of social organization on the other. They prevent those orientations from acting directly as values and norms; and this makes it impossible to conceive of society as an organization or as a market.

Beyond economism and voluntarism, twin offspring of the historicist thought linked with the industrial system of historical action, the sociology of class relations becomes possible with the formation of postindustrial society, which recognizes itself for the first time as the product of its historicity.

T E POLITIOILOR INSTITOriON A SYSTEM

A. Institutions

The system of historical action and class relations define a field of historical action and not a society. Whether analysis starts from a system of values or from a mode of production, it always encounters—once the first stage is over—the necessity of reconstructing a concrete social unit, a whole delimited in time and space, regulating its organization and its functioning and therefore establishing social control over its members and its resources.

Political institutions are determined bya field ofjiijstondty^btna^ by J he complexity of a historical situation that never corresponds entirely to a societal type and by the problems specific to a political unity, which is under the obligation to achieve a certain integration, to adapt itself to changes, and to enter into relation with other political units. It is as impossible to reduce the interplay of politics to relations between class actors as it is arbitrary to look upon it as the implementation of cultural values.

The political system, intermediate between the field of historicity and social organization, is dominated by the former and orients the latter, though it may also introduce a certain institutionalization into both class relations on the one hand and the rules of social organization on the othet^/f his makes it essential to separate it clearly from the state* a societal actor, rooted in the political system but acting as much on theHevel of social organization and intersocial relations aTonlTieTeverofthe system of historical action and class relations. The state unifies or.orders by its action the totality of the systems and actors within ^civil society71) that are in interaction yet relatively autonomous and not cohtrollebTby any higher principle of integration/An agent of history, the state is also the opposite of historicity. The conditions of

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176 Chapter Four

its action are in opposition to the analytical approach. This means that the sociologist must never forget the priority of society, of its orientations and its conflicts7"ln relation to the values, the strength, and the mobilization capability of the state.

a. From Field of Historicity to Organizations

This movement from one level of analysis to the other is in reality double. On the one hand it leads in fact from the abstract to the concrete, from a field of historicity to a political society. In this sense a concrete society is not simply the concrete expression of historicity but is equally the mixture of various types of historicity. Whatever the dominion of the dominant mode of production, there still exists a great variety of social forms: archaic rural sectors, mercantile activities, industries producing goods, organizations producing services at a high technical level, all these are to be found in industrial societies such as the United States. France, or the Soviet Union. A journey into the interior of any national society is always a journey through time, even though it is impossible to analyze any archaic or traditional sector without taking into account the domination exercised over it by a more modern mode of production. To speak of the ruling class of any given country is always an ambiguous expression since it may denote either the upper class directing the most advanced mode of production or, on the contrary, the complex unit made up of an association of several ruling classes. Landed capital, industrial capital, financial capital, technostructure, these do not present themselves within the political system as so many actors quite separate from one another or in competition with one another. Research into the national bourgeoisie in dominated societies of the Third World, like that carried out by F. H. Cardoso (Empresdrio industrial e desenvolvimento economico, Sao Paolo Difusao europeia do livro, 1964) has clearly shown that the fusion of landholding, industrial, and banking interests, both national and foreign, was usually a fact, though it was still impossible to speak of a single political actor, integrated, conscious, and organized. Similarly, a popularly based political force must always manage complex relations between very diverse interests and orientations.

The transition from historicity to political unity therefore leads from one collectivity defined by its orientations to another defined by its regulation and therefore by its relations with an environment. A first stage that brings sociologist and historian closer together.

On the other hand, this transition leads from an abstract whole to a concretely bounded unity. Within the field of historicity, the elements of the SHA are in tension with one another, ahlTffie~social classes, whose relations are defined by a double dialectic, are in open conflict. Domination is not the same as poweryOn the contrary, the decisions taken by the political system

Tie Political or Institutional System 177

prepositive and not dialectic. Thejaw/is seen first of all as the crystallization and the warrant of a social domination and of the orientations of a system of historical action. The political system is unifying in action. It legitimates and it excludes, it permits and it condemns.

It is impossible to claim that each of the units isolated by analysis of the field of historicity, whether elements of the system of historical action or antagonistic social classes, has a corresponding political unit, as though the social classes were having their interests defejidedr^political agents, while for_e_ach element of the SHA there was a directly corresponding institutional sector endowed with the broadest autonomy. It is equally impossible to say that The political system is by its nature the transition to the absolute of social domination and the subjection of the entire social organization to a single ruling class.

This double impossibility makes it possible to speak of a political system. Neither formed of the juxtaposition of functions and interests nor reduced to the unity of a central and organized government and will, it is the transcrip­tion, within the limits of a political unity, of the unity and the diversity of a field of historicity.

This is an idea that is equally opposed to that of a term-for-term correspondenceJbetween the two systems and to that of a subjection of the political system to an undivided hegemony, the idea of a sovereign or of a ruling class. —

To define the boundaries of the political system it is not enough to situate it with relation to historicity; it must also be differentiated from what is termed the social organization. The political system produces the decisions and rules that govern society's functioning; it does not manage concrete organizations. In everyday language we distinguish between political institu­tions and their administration. Similarly, the functioning of an enterprise, or more broadly of an organization, is not to be confused with the decision­making processes that govern that functioning. There are decision mecha­nisms that produce the enterprise's objectives, and at the same time there are relations of authority being organized within the enterprise simultaneously with modalities of adaptation to the environment.

These brief observations make it clear that the two processes isolated earlier in the transition from historicity to political system reach their fulfillment on the level of social organization.

On the one hand an organization is a concrete whole that must manage its relations with an environment while pursuing, say, the maximization of its advantages in a situation of competition, or an increased ability to survive, or some other goal. On the other hand, it is constructed around a set of values and norms expressed by a mode of authority and by a definition of statuses and roles.

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The political system is the locus of transformation from field of action into organization.

The distinction just made between political system and organizations leads on to the reexamination of a notion that has generally been used to confuse them, and to which it would be as well to give a new meaning, that of institutions.

It occupies a central position in functionalist analysis. If we posit that a society is oriented by cultural values, and that those values are transformed into social norms, which in their turn define roles and statuses within collec­tivities, then one can term institutions all the role systems regulated by norms and therefore by values.

Religious beliefs, for example, govern religious institutions; and educa­tional model is expressed in institutions that ensure the socialization of individuals.

Nothing escapes the domain of institutions except for social disorganiza­tion, defined as a crisis of values, of norms, of collectivities, or of roles.

The notion of institutions, apparently a confused one since it assigns the same name to the family, the church, the legislative body, the courts, economic organization, also imposes the image of society as legislator, as a personage regulating life in the name of principles, managing its birthright, controlling the tensions that arise from the variety of its roles.

The analysis of the system of historical action and the social classes we have followed up to this point is incompatible with such a representation of institutions. For instead of beginning from the unity of values, instead of conceiving the orientations of action as the responsibility of a society represented in the form of a sovereign actor, our analysis has always concentrated on the internal tensions of the system of historical action and on class relations.

We shall therefore use the term "institutions" here for that set of mechanisms by which the doubly open field of historicity is transformed into a set of rules for sociariife which, in their turn, predetermine the functioning of organizations.

Institutions as they are here defined, therefore, are alyvay_s political, and I shall make no distinction between the terms "institutional system" and 'political system." An organization participates in the system of historical

action, but it does so via the institutional system. This mediating role of institutions imposes a certain inertia upon them,

and also a certain instability- Rules are challenged, new laws are passed, new collective contracts are signed. Societal decisions result from negotiations, and the law itself is constantly being deflected by jurisprudence.

Institutions, because they are mechanisms of discussion, of negotiation, and of transaction, at the same time as being the political expression of a

The Political or Institutional System 179

social domination, are always simultaneously instruments of constraint and of legitimation. They do not codify the totality of the field of historicity; they distort it, exclude certain components from it, limit the action of the social classes, above all that of the dominated classes.

But it is not this sociological meaning that offers the greatest resistance to the meaning I am giving to the concept of institution.

The greatest resistance is offered by the meaning given to that concept by the social experience of past societies, those societies in which the metasocial warrants of the social order took the form of an order and a set of principles upon which the legitimacy of the laws seemed to be based.

Why not recognize that the sociological use I am making of this concept also corresponds to the social use made of it by the type of society in which 1 live, a type of society that recognizes the existence of decisions, even authoritarian ones, or of negotiations, much more easily than that of principles?

A society exercising a very weak transforming action upon itself is led to define itself in three complementary ways: by its subsistence activity, by its intersocial relations—which is to say above all by war—and lastly by its religion, which is in that case both a metasocial order and an ordering of cultural and social experience. These three "functions" are profoundly different from one another, but they all share the fact of being visible as "institutions," not as the result of an action or of social relations.

The notion of institution, intimately linked in social experience with that of reproduction, is therefore the image that offers most resistance to a sociological analysis. This is wrhy the latter has alwrays been associated with a direct attack upon the discourse of institutions and upon the justifications they provide for their own existence. It is in this way that we should understand the attacks on religious and state institutions: struggles against the old metasocial warrants for social order and struggles against the reproduction of the social order. Nowadays, the progress of sociology is closely associated with the struggles against the discourses specific to the army, the educational establishment, the law, and morality: the institutional system is reinforced by the struggle against what are still called the institutions.

b. Construction of the Institutional or Political System

The political—or institutional—system must be understood as a process and not defined by its content, its principles, or its subdivisions. It combines unity and plurality, as we saw earlier; it is mediation between historicity and social organization; last, it combines problems and actors, which could have been studied separately—SHA and social classes—on the field of historicity level.

180 Chapter Four

The\£irspdimension is fundamental. Itjs on the institutional or political level that a territorial collectivity first appears, even though still not conceived of as an organization. And this, by the way, is something that renders the notion of social system as confused as that of institution in the customary language of sociology. So we never know if the term designates a political construct or a total historical reality, in which case it is synonymous with the word "society" when used to denote a national collectivity at some given moment.

Is it a descriptive category or a concept denoting an institutional system? The only way out of this confusion is to distinguish three levels of analysis instead of two: field of historicity, institutions, and social organization. In this way the intermediate position of the political system becomes much clearer.

The second' "dimension is linked with the first, in the sense that in passing from a nonmanaged, noncontrolled system to a governed one, we inevitably find the unity, without which political management cannot exist, combining with the plurality that inheres both in the problems and in the actors. The unity is not solely that of a government, regulating the life of a collectivity. In­stead of conceiving the political system as a single machine for transforming social inputs into governmental outputs, one must avoid anything that sep­arates the political system from the field of historicity. The political system is not a political actor acting upon society and being influenced by it. The field of historicity penetrates inside the political system, it predetermines it, it imposes constraints upon it. The political system's unity cannot come to it from the system of historical action, a totality composed of elements defined by their oppositions and not by their participation in common values. On the contrary, it comes from class domination/Class domination can be extreme,

y ffegemoni^; but even when it is not so it still imposes constraints—frequently in the form of a written constitution—on the political actors.

The element of plurality added to the diversity of the elements of the system of historical action is that aspect of class relations wholly separable from domination, which is to say the existence of social and political forces whose conflict is expressed by a struggle for influence over decision making and by^pFessures of all kinds exerted upon the unifying elements.

Theithirdjdimension reminds us that the separation established between the systerrfof historical action and class relations at the field of historicity level can no longer be maintained on the institutional level. Problems and actors are here gathered together in the unity of a collectivity and its management. Every political system manages interaction between social actors and at the same time manages a system of social organization that is based upon class relations and upon orientations of historical action. To manage a society is to ensure the internal equilibrium of a system, to respect the relations that unite the variables of economic activity, to situate the political unit under consideration in relation to other such units, and so on; it

The Political or lnstitu:ional System 181

is also to debate the sharing out of influence and advantages, and to chal­lenge or to reinforce class relations. — \

It is possible that one could go beyond these analytical principles, and there is no reason to think that these three axes are the only ones that should be taken into consideration. On the other hand it is difficult to see how any one of them could be dispensed with. To reject the idea that the institutional j system is at once one and multiple would mean either returning to the state­ment according to which the institutions reveal a system of values and therefore the "spirit" of a society—an idealist conception that confuses social * * structure with established order—or else ignoring the elementary need for unity of any political society within whose frontiers there exists a set of laws, a government, and mechanisms of social control.

It is possible to conceive of unity carrying the day totally against plurality. In that case the political system will be nothing other than the instrument of ^ an absolute power: historicity and social organization are welded together. In fact, even in despotic, theocratic, or totalitarian regimes there exist substi- I tutes for political pluralism that manifest themselves as struggles between ' factions, court intrigues, personal rivalries.

Inversely, an entirely pluralist political system cannot exist other than in a state of breakdown and incoherence, as an aggregate of lobbies and interest groups with no correspondence from one institutional sector to another. Parliamentary regimes have in practice come close to such a state of decomposition. Perhaps totalitarian regimes too, behind an apparent unity of power, can experience a similar state of decomposition, in which clans and feudal units carry on bitter struggles under cover of a dictatorship, as reliable observers suggest was true in Nazi Germany. - j

It is likewise impossible to separate the political and institutional system from the levels on either side of it, since it is defined by the transition from one to the other. I shall call the slope of the politico-institutional system that^ is governed by the system of historical action and class relations its political slope, and that which directly governs social organization its institutional slope.

If the first of these alone were important, then the politico-institutional system would be abstract, would remain imprisoned within "civil society"; and inversely, if the second had the upper hand absolutely, then it would correspond simply to the governmentyfn fact, the very separation of these two notions is arbitrary. Gass relations cannot be understood without their juridical expressions, and those expressions presuppose the existence of political institutions. Inversely, the government is not a reality that can be isolated from a society's system of historical action and class relations.

Last, it is easy to see that a politico-institutional system is neither a pure interplay of actors and influence nor simply a set of problems.

It is the combination of these three axes that defines the elements of the

182 Chapter Four

politico-institutional system. A more complete study would ask questions about all the forms that this combination can take, but at the moment it would be better to restrict ourselves to the simplest of them, which can be represented by the diagram in figure 21.

And this leads to a definition of four fundamental elements. Each of them stands in opposition to the three others on two of the axes under considera­tion and occurs on the same pole of one of the axes as each of the three others (see figure 22).

Let us simply identify these elements before analyzing them at any length. The actor that brings a principle of unity into the political field, and

reveals the dominion of historicity over that field, is the dominant class. The institutional actors will be called the political force^. These are not

independent of the social classes, but they are defined solely in relation to the political field itself. They are the political expression of interest groups.

The plurality of the problems transmitted to the political system by its system of historical action is the transcription of that system's elements. We shall speak of societal problems. Lastly, the unity of the institutional field is that of political unity, that of government.

c. The Dominant Class

We are not concerned here with isolating a political sector which will exercise a preponderant influence. This element defines the dominion of class domination over the political system. Every political decision is predeter­mined and limited by the nature of cfass domination. If a municipal council, or any other deliberative organism, studies a plan of urban renewal, it cannot do so otherwise than within the framework of the laws of property and taking into account—more concretely still—economic interests upon which it has only limited means of action. Similarly, in a capitalist enterprise, a policy of

i collective negotiation may even go so far as to modify the enterprise's I decisions, but cannot abolish capitalist ownership. All institutional participa-\ tion has limits.

No "revolution within the law" can exist. A modification of social domination can be effected through the use of institutional means, but cannot arise except from social movements and a transformation of the system of historical action.

Usually, codes of law and constitutions.^reveal)the presence of class domination, though this does not prevent the laws from also "beingiproducts^ of the political system, and thus of the influence of various group interests or political forces.

The dominant class therefore intervenes in the political system in two ways: first, as an interest group or as a set of interest groups. It is in this way that such and such an industry may exert an influence in order to obtain

The Political or Institutional System 183

unity plurality

I politics

institutions

politics

institutions

A

B

don

unity

inant class

tvernment

&/c

\ D

Figure 21

plurality

societal problems

political forces

Figure 22

tariff protection, state subsidies, or repressive action against a popular movement. Second, it intervenes as predetermination of the field of possible decisionsVft has often been observed that the dominant class, although possessing a virtually dominant political influence, does not always exert it in practice, that the decisions made by political institutions are not invariably in accord with its interests, that it will sometimes organize its own political interventions badly, and on occasion seems even to lack any acute awareness of its own economic interests. This may be explained in part by the fact that what is involved is a class more dominant than ruling, but the explanation is insufficient. The observed phenomenon underlines the autonomy of the political system" in relation to class domination.^But it would be wrong to conclude from this that the dominant class Ts merely one interest group no different from any other. The more it intervenes indirectly, the less it does so directly, which is to say that the limits it imposes on the field of political decisions are narrower and more constricting.

This analysis of the role of the dominant class demonstrates the weakness of the power elite notion. No direct transformation of social domination into political power exists. It is the political system as a whole that must be viewed as a transformation of class relations. It is rarely possible to show that the

184 Chapter Four

political rulers form a unit, corresponding to that of the ruling class or even to the fusion of old and new ruling classes/In many cases one can cojivxniently approach the analysis of a political system by demonstrating the hegemony)of a fraction of the ruling class, as for example that of the exporting bourgeoisie in strongly integrated countries dependent upon the international capitalist market. But this procedure is rarely sufficient on its own/It is quickly apparent that the political arena possesses a great measure of autonomy, one that perhaps increases in fact as economic power is increasingly in foreign hands./ls this to say that we should take the completely opposite tack and pdy attention only to the Yery open competition of very diverse groups? No, on the contrary, what one must do is comprehend the political system^ as a whole, including its relative autonomy, the impor­tance of a "political class" or of class struggles on the basis of a state of economic dependence, and therefore of class relations and also of the consequences of those relations on social participation and political represen­tation. The ruling class always occugies^^greponderant place in political decisions, but it is not necessarily (.hegemonic...^ ^ y ^,w j r , , , U C k , ^

d. Societal Problems

Their plurality signifies that there is not usually any unified political field, but that hiatuses, or even oppositions, are constantly occurring between the various institutional areas. In the simplest case these latter will correspond to the elements of the system of historical action or, at the level cf social organization, to the elements of the economic system: production, organiza­tion, distribution, and consumption. If, as is preferable, one remains on the plane of sociological analysis, then one finds institutional mechanisms that manage the cultural model; in postindustrial society, tor example, there exists a policy ot' scientific and technical investment; other mechanisms manage the forms of mobilization and organization, others the modes of social ascent, others the expression of needs. But such a classification is so abstract that it is rather unlikely to correspond to the categories of institutional action. The latter deals with organized sectors, educational establishments, the family, hospitals, labor relations, etc. And in the great majority of cases these areas of political action do not correspond to just one element in the system of historical action, so that there is no unified policy with respect to them, even on the part of each individual actor. It does not exist even on the part of each social class considered as such. Hence the complexity of political arguments. which is made all the greater by being governed by the degree of dominion exerted by each of the classes over each of the counterelements of the SHA. The essential work of political science normally consists in breaking down concrete political objects—it centers its argument on a law, a decree, a collective contract, and so on—in order to get

The Political or Institutional System 185

behind the linked effects of the complexity of the problems and the plurality of political actors and then to isolate the elements explaining and deter­mining political choices, in other words the elements of the SHA, class relations, and the class stamp on the counterelements of the SHA.

e. The Political Forces ' " ' ' V f

The distinction between political forces and social classesJis generally easy to make. In parliamentary systems, parties cannot be defined without reference to the institutional system. They are seeking to obtain a majority, either on their own or by means of coalition. They unite members or interests belonging to different social classes^/the French Communist Party, for example, can claim to be the party of the working class, and it is true that its bond with a single social class is stronger and more constant than that of any other party. Yet it remains true^hat only a minority of the working class's votes are normally cast in its favor, and that half of its votes are of non-working-class origin.

This does not in any way signify that its action is not defined by class interests or oriented toward a transformation of class domination. It only means that one must try to find how class relations are being transcribed into political relations rather than merely identify' each political force with the class actor it is supposed to represent.

When one speaks of right and left, one is referring in an explicit way to political representation. What is involved, therefore, is in the first place a purely institutional definition. One could select a certain number of parlia­mentary divisions and allot each member an overall score based on the choices he has made. The average score would be the line separating right from left. However, everyone knows how inadequate such a definition would be and how poorly it would account for actual parliamentary debates. Lines of cleavage exist that do not derive from the political system itself. One can only identify a vote as belonging to the right or to the left by reference to the attitude adopted with regard to the decision in question by class actors, by trades unions and employer federations, for example, or by a consideration of the effects a legislative measure would have upon the interests of such and such a social category.

The distinction between these two aspects of political forces, participation and representation, becomes increasingly visible as the political system under consideration is more partial.

If one studies university councils, for example, one sees in the first place that general lines of cleavage exist between what are called conservatives and liberals, or right and left; then one sees that these lines are variable within that same university, and even more so from one university to another: so and so, who is seen as extreme-left here may be classified elsewhere as belonging

^ H

186 Chapter Four

to the center; last, and most important, this opposition, which may be raised by the actors themselves to the status of a confrontation of principles, manifestly fails to correspond to the opposition of social interests. On the one hand, in fact, since the institution is here linked to an organization, its participants—especially if they share the same administrative situation— have many common interests that are much more closely bound up with their common role as transmitters of a certain culture; on the other hand, these teachers represent, directly or indirectly, models of knowledge and training, and therefore forms of historicity and also social classes, according to whether they act as bureaucrats in the service of the established order or as critical analysts of social discourse. It would be naive to believe that all the so-called forces of the left are always and entirely representative of both modernity and the latest social movements. There always exists a consider­able gap between the participation role and the representation role of political forces.

It is futile to attempt the elimination of one or other of these roles from one's analysis. An autonomous institutional system exists, but it is subor­dinate to class relations just as it is to the elements of the system of historical action. The distance separating the class system from the system of political forces is proportionately greater as social diversity is more extensive and political representation simpler (universal suffrage, election by majority, two-party organization, and so on). The analysis of the political system under the French Third Republic made by S. Hoffman in "Paradoxes of the French political community" in A la recherche de la France stressed further aspects of this autonomy of the political system, which can lead to a genuine divorce^ of political institutions from social structure/A political force possesses a certain influence, which is to say the capacity to make another undergo a modification of his conduct more considerable than that which must be accepted under pressure from that other. The influence of a union is measured by the point on the line between union objectives and employers1

objectives at which the signature on the contract occurs. Influence does not pertain solely to organized political forces. Keynes has pointed out that many politicians are guided in their actions by the teachings of economists, usually of the previous generation, and the example of Keynes himself shows the influence that an individual can exert on the political system. In France, although state and intelligentsia often appear to form antagonistic worlds, and although many intellectuals like to think of Saint-Germain-des-Pres as a new Guernsey, an isle of exile, the intellectuals, and in particular the Christian socialists—both the progressive and the neoconservative variety— have exercised considerable influence on the apparendy closed circles of the higher civil servants and planners.

Influence must not be confused either with power or with domination.

The Political or Institutional System 187 (,0 . u'C*'!

r Power is the capacity to impose an order on a collectivity as a whole. Social dominationjs the dominion of one class over the system of historical action.

Influence is distinct from power in that it is defined on the level of social interaction. An actor may have a great deal of influence and yet not have power, that is, the ability to impose his authority. Influence stands in opposition to domination because it is situated on the level of decisions, and therefore in a concrete political system, whereas domination pertains to the analysis of a "mode of production," not that of a "social system."

The distinction between these three notions should not lead, however, to their being viewed as entirely independent of one another. Influence, because it is exerted at the institutional level, is governed by social domination, as is indicated by the presence of the dominant class element within the political system; power, in its turn, is the foundation of authority on the social organization level, and transmits the effect of social domination via the mechanisms of influence.

The difficulty of defining political forces and their influence comes from the fact that they must always be defined not only by their political participation role but also by their social representation role. When the second of these roles is the more important, a situation defining pressure groups rather than political organizations proper, the influence is fairly directly linked with membership of the ruling class, and consequently to that class's action. Whereas, when one is considering political groupings proper, which is to say groupings defined by their participation in the institutions, then their influence is linked with their centrality in the system or with the strategic position they occupy within it. For example, a deputy in the French parliament occupying a key position within a majority party may be able to obtain advantages for certain private interests, those of his constituency, let us say, that a local pressure group would be unable to obtain.

But the complexity of the possible roster of political influences should never obscure the essential point: the political svsternjs not a changing market on which, according to circumstance, the buyer or seller of such and such a commodity or service may find himself in a favorable or unfavorable situation. Social domination would have no concrete meaning if it were not expressed as a predominant influence. The interests of the ruling groups dominate the political scene as they do the field of class relations. There is no ^compensating power'1; the action of the unions does not balance out that of the employers/ But this statement, which is simply another expression of the idea that the political system is subject to the mode of social domination, in no way signifies that the political system can be considered solely as the agent of the dominant class. First of all, let me repeat, because the dominant class, when examined within any specific political collectivity, is not unified. There are some elements more ruling than dominant, others more dominant than

188 Chapter Four

ruling; there are rising fractions and declining fractions; there are also organizational interests that can lead to opposition between the interests of two industries or two enterprises. But also because the interests of the popular categories can make themselves heard, to the degree in which there is no total confrontation with the interests of the ruling class, and thus to the degree in which political decisions are relatively autonomous within a mode of social domination.

However, I have now placed so much emphasis on the plurality of political forces that 1 must point out, in conclusion, that influence is alwa^jineojja]ly divided among political forces, to the very degree that they are directly or indirectly representative of claw interests.

f. The Government ''"" •" ' ' ^ r *'v

Government is the most visible element of all; it serves of course to denote the autonomy of the institutional system. That system cannot exist apart'from'a territory with frontiers within which an authority is exercised capable of seeing that its decisions are implemented and of repressing what it considers forbidden. An institutional system manages the social organization, distrib­utes resources, guarantees authority, inculcates norms and rules. At the same time it is also acting within an environment that is viewed as exterior to itself and is constituted by other political systems with which it is in more or less direct competition. It is only too tempting to perceive nothing but this autonomy of the political unity, especially if one is studying international relations. But the relations between states are never solely political and must always be related also to class relations, to relations of domination and dependence on the international scale or to relations of competition inherent in an economic system.

Political unity manifests itself therefore in the unity of a centralized or decentralized administrative apparatus that is at once management and repression.

The political system exists only within a well-defined territorial collectivity, a fact that imposes a labor of unification: the parts of the national or local whole are interdependent; a measure in one sector will affect the other sectors of social life. More simply still, the decisions that form the output of the political system must be integrated one with another.

They never are completely, of course, and all legislation will include minority measures, introduced by a political force or a pressure group. But the tendency toward unification is present in even' political system. The government of a society is therefore the totality of its "powers" insofar as they share in the making of legitimate decisions: the legislative, the judiciary, and the executive^ according to where the initiative for decisions occurs/is it not astonishing perhaps, to term "element of unity" a government thus defined

The Political or Institutional System 189

as the action of several powers which, in a certain type of regime at least, are separate? But it is of little consequence whether the powers are fused or separate for the definition of government I have given. The important thing is to recognize that a political society cannot function normally if the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary take noncoordinated decisions on the same subject. There will always remain discrepancies and tensions between various kinds of decisions, but it is impossible to conceive of a political system that does not have a fundamental unity of government. For want of that unity the political system will disaggregate, which presupposes that an absolutely Jiegemonic dominant class or an all-powerful state will take the place of that political system and impose its own principle of unity. Even though the government may not be totally integrated, there always exists an executive representing the unity of central decision and exercising political power. Its role is so important that we must recognize it as being something other than a mere element of the political system.

The executive is an element of the state. Let us anticipate the final section of this chapter here: the state is society's agent of management and from the political system intervenes in social organization and in the field of histori­city. The executive is thus the state's root in the political system. Hence its double aspect: the executive is part of the system of political representation, of the whole made up by the institutions; but at the same time it is the head of the state's apparatus, it commands the administration, and it intervenes in the relations between the classes and in the transformations of the system of historical action.

g. Dependence and Autonomy of the Political System

In taking political form, class relations lead on the one hand to the opening up of relations between the political forces and, on the other, to the closingjrf class domination, which is transformed into legitimate order, protected by the forces of order, reinforced by all the mechanisms of social coritroIT

The government and its executive have force at their disposal, and with that force they maintain^ the boundary they draw between the legal andjthe illegal. Violence^ej^t^^^aTTIevels^of society, in the action of the social classes, and therefore of social movements, as within the framework of organizations. Its particular form on the political level is force, employed in the name of theTnstitutions or against them. On the one hand, therefore, the transition to the political level hardens social domination, closes it by seeking to render its foundations and its continuity intangible. On the other hand, class relations, transformed into interaction between political forces, become institutionalized as they become an essential element in the process of social change/ According to particular situations, which is to say above all

t fc/v'J' 190 (of Chapter Four

according to the relative importance of the ruling or dominant action of the ; upper class, and to a lesser degree according to the relative importance of the

defensive or contestatory action of the popular class, the action of social J control, of integration, and of repression on the part of the political system

/ may be preponderant, and the openness of the institutions no more than a ; safety valve or even a mere illusion. Or else, on the contrary, the institutional

/ dynamic may be the principal fact and one that may lead to a transformation / of the system of social domination. It is always difficult to reduce a historical \ situation to a single one of these two tendencies. The autonomy of the

institutions, and their role in the process of social change, are not conceivable without the existence of social movements whose action always overflows the institutional framework while at the same time making use of it.

Inversely, when the institutions have an integrating and repressive role rather than a negotiating one, any opposition movements that did not strive

I to restore a certain give-and-take within the institutional area could do nothing else but transform themselves into mere violence or be faced with the

\ installation of a new dominant class and new forms of integration and \ repression.

The political system is always the locus of both reform and repression; the ^ action of the social movements is always reformist and revolutionary; at least

to the degree in which they are not driven toward a transformation into a dictatorship.

To what state of class relations do these two modes of functioning correspond? Should we say that a liberal regime, one in which the political system is open, is also the regime in which the system is least dependent on class relations?

No. It is the opposite that must be asserted. An open political system has little autonomy. The more the political forces can enter without constraints into an interplay of influences, the more the political system tends to give a faithful "representation" of social interests and, therefore, in the final analysis, of the social classes/A closed political system on the contrary, tending ultimately to reabsorb itself into the state apparatus, indicates either the domination of a set of new and old groups, more anxious to maintain an established order than to advance economic interests, or else state interven­tion urged by various social categories or substituting itself for them. Because it is closed, it Js fairly autonomous with respect to class relations/

The dependence of the political system with regard to the social classes is increasingly great as the regime involved is more liberal, the upper class more

*• ruling, the agents of the old social order's reproduction weaker, the society relatively more homogeneous as regards its mode of production.

In contrast, one should speak of the autonomy of the political system in relation to the ruling class in a situation in which the dominion of past over

The Political or Institutional System 191

present is strong, in which aging dominant classes need to barricade themselves behind institutional and ideological defenses. Or, on the other hand, in those situations in which social forces of opposition are exerting direct pressure on the political system, or are trying to make use of the state apparatus in order to combat domination.

The autonomy of the political system thus depends on politics being kept aloof from class domination in three ways: (1) by the pull of the system of historical action, (2) by the demands of the state, and (3) by the complexity of the coalitions in what is always sociologically a more or less heterogenous historical whole. The greater this autonomy, the more the political system is defined in relation to the state and not in relation to the dominant class. |

The political forces are at the same time agents of integration and trie political representatives of the class actors. More precisely, to the degree in ^ which class relations are open, so that social movements can confront one another, classes or fractions of classes have their political representatives-, to the degree in which those relations are closed, so that there is domination by one class, the autonomy of the political system is based on its capacity for integration.

A system that is mainly representative presupposes open class relations and, therefore^ Forms of conflict institutionalization that overflow the political area in its narrow sense. This corresponds to the most liberal situation and to the preponderance of the ruling class over the social order's forces of production.

A systemthat js mainly integrating presupposes the existence of an upper -^ class more dominant than ruling or pf strong state intervention—reformist or *• revolutionary—against the hegemony of the dominant class. This situation entails a stronger and more constant tension between political hegemony on the one hand and both the orientations of the system of historical action and the excluded social forces on the other. An integrating system is an autono­mous system.

But whether representative or integrating, it must be remembered that the political system only functions within class relations and the system of historical action.

This means that it rejects and casts into an outer nonlegality not only ; whatever is not compatible with the system of historical action but also * whatever is threatening to the upper class. The task allotted to the mechanisms of social control as a whole is both to reject what is unacceptable and to extend as far as possible the area of the acceptable, of transactions, in order to provide solid protection for the system of historical action and above all for class domination.

Repressive action, like integrating action, is more pronounced when there is a preponderance of dominant class over ruling class, or when the role of the

192 Chapter Four

state is a strong one.^Repression and integration always go togeth erJ just as potency of the ruling class, low emphasis on social control or socialization, and political liberalism form an opposite aggregate.

This world of the excluded has no proper unity of its own; illegal conduct does not constitute a type of conduct whose attributes can be defined. The whole action of the forces of social control is aimed at amalgamating many different kinds of conduct by treating them all as a threat to public order.

It is the sociologist's duty, on the other hand, to unravel that which is tangled. He must isolate what is social movement, which is to say class^action, what is noninstitutionalized political pressure, what is social disorganization. Further still, he must seek for the signs of social movements in conduct that may appear to be politically marginal, or even expressive of social disorgani­zation. This does not mean that any illegal conduct can simply be called a social movement. The return upward to the level of the field of historical actors and the system of historical action is neither always nor completely realized. It can only be recognized when the illegality is being questioned inside the political system itself. A social movement remaining absolutely unrecognized could not develop. Illegal conduct may appear to the analyst as the bearer of an unformed social jmovement, but one_cannot assert the existence of a social movement (except whefi) that illegal conduct creates effects within the political system.

h. Institutional Rhetoric '

The political system's autonomy means that it possesses agents proper to it that strive to invent a determining role for the political system that it does not have: the legislator becomes the origin of all things, the political commands the social.

Every system tends to produce a secondary discourse, which I shall term a rhetoric, which lends a simultaneously factitious yet important unity of content to a practical discourse. At the level of historicity, we have termed this factitious unity that the rhetoricians give to a system of historical action and to class revelations civilization. One can then talk about the spirit of the Renaissance or industrial society, knowing that each individual rhetorician is going to give a different content to these general notions, to these unifying images of society.

At the level of the institutional system, the rhetoricians are the legists, who labor at a never-ending task in attempting to express the unity of the legislative spirit. They talk of prodecure, of natural rights, of equality, of the protection of minorities. And the results of their labor are efficacious, in tHat they tend to lend coherence to the institutional system, and also to lend visibility to certain lines of evolution.

The important thing is to distinguish as clearly as possible three realities

The Political or Institutional System 193

that the very labors of tl^ Jegist^tendjc^contuse: the ideology of the ruling class, which is also the dominant ideology, institutional discourse, and tTTe rhetoric of the legists^ The ideology of the ruling class or, more precisely, the combination of that class's ideology and its Utopia, tends to dominate the institutional system as a whole. It is in this sense that it is possible to speak of a bourgeois society. However, this dominion is subject to two limitations. Firstly, the political discourse does not have an exclusively class content; it reveals the exigencies of the system of historical action, through which the presence of the popular classes is also revealed. In the second place, the ideology in question is entirely dominant only if no political process exists. Now the complexity of any real social formation ensures that any dominant class, whether rising or declining, is never completely unified and never fails to ally itself to other social forces.

There is therefore always a considerable gap between the ideology of the ruling class and a complex institutional discourse, sometimes more archaic than the dominant ideology, sometimes sensitive to the influence of social forces that transcribe the action of the popular classes, an influence that always possesses a certain autonomy and certain internal exigencies.

The rhetoric of the legists is not a simple transposition of the ideology of the ruling class. We shall return to this idea in connection with social organization. The work of the legists is directed less at restating, beyond the historical complexity of institutional discourse, the unity of the ruling class's ideology than at inventing a secondary unity, a set of rationalizations forming a whole that will formalize, ritualize, integrate a number of disparate elements. This is why the legists attach such importance to forms, invent a language constantly failing to coincide with that of social practice, and provide themselves with insignia, with ceremonies, with procedures that are aimed at emphasizing the gap that separates them from social practice. Public opinion is always aware of this autonomy and arbitrariness of juridical forms, and often takes pleasure in viewing them as the instruments of the private interests of the legists themselves.

Here again it would be mistaken to conclude that there exists some radical separation of the elements between which we have just distinguished. The legists* rhetoric is in no way independent of the ideology of the dominant class, and it is also commanded by the content of institutional discourse, which leads it to be in a constant state of self-transformation even wrhile always retaining its identity.

The autonomy of the political system can therefore be defined by the quest for integration, because that word is itself eminently ambiguous. AH participation operates within the framework of a domination, yet^cannot be reduced to an dienation, except in precisely that case in which the political system has no autonomy and is reduced to the hegemony of the dominant

194 Chapter Four

class, a reduction that only operates completely in totalitarian situations, when the majority of the population is deprived of effective political rights.

i. The Political System Acts not on but within Society

The political system is not simply an instrument of the ruling clas/ Even less is it independent of "civil society." The idea that this latter constitutes part of its environment and only emits demands that the political system processes into decisions cannot be accepted.

Class relations and the orientations of the system of historical action are not outside hut inside the politico-institutional system. They constitute its political slope. Political actors are not arbiters or judges; they are in the first place the "parties" to the proceedings.

In the same way, social organization is not solely the environment of the political system; it penetrates that system by means of the elements I have called political forces and government.

Instead of presenting the political system as a decider, as David Easton does in A Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965) or/* Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley, 1965), I shall define it as a transcriber of the field of historicity into social organization terms. It is a definition that goes a little too far, 1 admit, but I am employing it as a means of rejecting as forcefully as possible the idea of separation between the political system and its social environment.

This last term throws all analysis of the field of historicity into chaos. What commands the political system is not a set of social demands fed into it indiscriminately, but a system of class relations and a system of historical action both strongly constituted and determining the general framework of political action.

This is why historians devote so much of their effort, fruitfully, to unearthing the class interests, relations, and movements lying behind political discussions and decisions.

The political system is therefore not self-regulating. Although it is true that it possesses an autonomy of action, takes initiatives, works out compromises and reforms, within a certain state of the field of historicity and social organization, it does not have the power of self-maintenance within certain limits. It can be overthrown or removed by a revolution or a coup d'etat. It seeks to maintain itself and to adapt itself, but it does not depend solely or even principally upon the system itself whether there shall be continuity or discontinuity in the change.

This is why I have not presented the political system as a network of actors, but as the interdependence of elements, of political functions, that combine with and at the same time oppose one another. The political system is autonomous not because it is the power that judges and evaluates as

The Political or Institutional System 195

sovereign but because, in certain conditions, its elements of unity and its elements of pluralism combine and achieve a relative balance.

The political system, if it is open and liberal, refers back directly to the knowledge of the field of historicity. If it is identified with the state, if it is at once closed and more autonomous, then its voluntarism can be explained only by social domination and the rebellion it stirs up. Neither in liberal societies nor in dictatorial societies can it appear as a sovereign judge.

It is dependent, yet at the same time autonomous. In a liberal society, social conflicts and the tensions between the orientations of the system of historical action are in part susceptible of institutionalization, which is to say that transactions arise within the political system. In a dictatorial society, the state is not solely the agent of a ruling class, or that class itself; it is also a political milieu, strongly imprinted with struggles between political groups or even by the complexity of a ruling individual.

This combination of dependence and autonomy that defines the place of the political system with relation to the field of historicity is revealed in the existence of two types of support for political power, and in two meanings of the word democracy.

1. In the first type the citizens support a political system insofar as that system acts in conformity with their demands.

On the one hand, the political system is judged favorably if it implements the central system of historical action. On the other, it is supported if it defends the interests of a class, if it expresses that class's ideology, its "values." Inversely, the political system is experienced as subjection either by the social categories that belong or feel allegiance to another system of historical action, and in particular to another cultural model, or by those categories that consider their interests—in the broadest sense of the term— threatened by institutions acting on behalf of the opposing class. The appeal to democracy is primarily this combined appeal to modernity and to the service of the people. It combats both archaic laws and the hegemony of dominant classes.

2. The political system can in the second place be accepted or rejected as procedure. The Anglo-Saxons have insisted more strongly than anyone else on legal procedures, on "the due process of law." This is something that goes far beyond an acceptance of a mode of internal functioning and implies that the political system is capable of modifying its aims in terms of transforma­tions that have occurred in the political forces and in public opinion. What is being judged here is the capacity or incapacity of the political system to integrate itself by means of feedback into a closed loop system. Political decisions have to modify' demands, which in their turn displace the aims of the political actors.

These two types of support do not always reinforce one another. It is not unusual for a political system to be rejected in the name of democracy of

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content and accepted in the name of democracy of procedure. But there also exist extreme positions that bring together both meanings of democracy. Some denounce "bourgeois liberties" as an instrument of integration in the service of the ruling class; others consider that liberalism, because of the flexibility of its methods, enables the political system to adapt itself best to the 4,general interest," or at least to what is closest to it at any given moment.

In fact, it is just as false to make an absolute separation between the two meanings of the word democracy as it is to fuse them entirely. They should be separate but hierarchized./Democratic procedures do not permit a reversal of class relations or transition from one system of historical action to another. But it is possible for these transformations of the field of historicity to be accomplished without any breakup of the political system/The latter does not have the initiative, but it may keep control. All structural changes are not accomplished by the revolutionary method, but none is the exclusive proluct of the political institutions. Class forces overflow the institutional system, but they do not act outside it unless it is dominated by the hegemony of the dominant class or one of that class's fractions. We have said that political actors have two aspects: they participate in the institutional system and they represent class interests; but they do not accept the first role except insofar as it is compatible with the second, which is to say insofar as the system of historical action is not wholly reduced to the counterelements dominated by the upper class. The autonomy of the agencies of historicity commands the autonomy of the political system, even though it may seem that political decisions ensure the autonomy of the agencies. The state of the political system depends upon the functioning of the system of historical action and class relations, which must be considered in themselves and not reduced to mere inputs of the apparatus of institutional decision.

The illusion that confers upon that apparatus a role as central decider arbitrating an input of demands is based on an unacceptable conception of historical evolution according to which the growing structural differentiation of modern societies creates a political system quite separate from other social subsystems. That the political system is separated from the religious or family system is true, but this is only an indication of the succession of systems of historical action. To conclude from it that the political system possesses a growing autonomy is as false as to deduce its decreasing autonomy from the fact that the bonds between political and economic "rulers" are becoming increasingly close. The political system is always inscribed within a definite framework by the system of historical action, and in particular by its cultural model and by the forms of accumulation.

Nothing today is more dangerous than the idea, or to be more precise the ideology, that presents society as a system of decisions, that recognizes political institutions as possessing the capacity to choose the forms of social organization and change.

The Political or Institutional System 197

Does this mean that I am saying the reverse, that the political system is no more than the belt transmitting the power to drive the system of historical action and class relations? It does not. According to the particular type of society being considered, the political system always possesses one of two kinds of autonomy.

In liberal societies the political forces most fully "represent" classes and fractions of classes. In this sense the political system has a weak autonomy; on the other hand, it is strongly constituted: its elements of unity and plurality are in balance. Although it has a weak autonomy as an agent of society's functioning, it has a very strong autonomy as an agent of social change.

In societies in which the dominant class is strong, on the other hand, societies in which past social formations still weigh heavily on the present, in which the extra-institutional pressure of the popular forces is strong, the political system is not fused at all with the relations of production, since it is more dominated by the agents of reproduction. Against this, however, it has very little autonomy as an agent of change, since it intervenes—generally through the state—only as an agent or substitute for the social classes. In this type of society the political system is blocked and tends to explode, but it imposes on the social movements a true priority of the struggle for political power, which appears as the precondition of any transformation of social domination.

B. Institutionalization

I have termed institutions, not the social activities regulated by specific norms based upon general values, but the mechanisms for arriving at decisions the application of which is sanctioned by a legitimate authority.

It follows that the institutional area is variable and depends above all on the state of the system of historical action and of class relations. It is the province of the sociologists of past societies—most numerous among those we call historians—to define the institutional domains of each society. Here, one can only advance the idea that the more a society is in a state of rapid change—and, in particular, the more it is increasing its capacity for action on itself—the more the institutional system extends itself and overflows its codified forms, while at the same time becoming more centralized. In a society with a weak historicity and a slow rate of evolution, in which the forms of social organization, the kinship systems, the forms of professional activity and ownership, the beliefs, are all relatively stable, the institutional mecha­nisms are codified, as are customs as a whole; but there also exists a large degree of separation between various institutional subsystems, between the subsystems situated in basic units such as the village and that which is found at the center of society, near to the prince or in the ruling organs of the city.

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In economically more advanced societies, on the contrary, the political process becomes diversified, as a result of the simple fact that the processes of change are more diverse; at the same time, since these societies are more strongly "mobilized/* their communication systems being more intricate and swift, the concentration of political discussion is ceaselessly accelerating. Universal suffrage increases participation in general decisions, and then the professional associations introduce political mechanisms into economic organizations; the mass media, first newspapers then television, considerably extend the political field and remove the barrier that separates public opinion from politicians. In advanced industrial societies, the press and television are probably more important political organs than the legislative body itself. This is why revolutionary movements that are trying—outside institutional action—to offer a direct challenge to the social domination within which the political system develops are attacking the press and tele­vision more directly than the legislative body, since this enables them to derive the maximum profit from the mass media, thanks to which their action now has a visibility and a ubiquity it could never have before. To seize political power by force consists first of all in occupying the television transmitters. In a more limited way, the lively discontent of the French with regard to the political news put out by their state television for many years can only be explained if one recognizes that television is, among other things, a political institution.

The weaker the metasocial warrants of social order become, the more the evolution of society appears as the result not of "natural" mechanisms but of a political process manifesting a field of historicity. The political function is less and less the business of certain specific categories, representatives or delegates, and is more and more becoming the business of all, via the multiplication of voluntary associations and pressure groups, and also the creation of new channels of expression. One can in this sense speak of the withering away of the state/on condition one remembers that the state in contemporary industrial societies is finding a new role that is causing U to emerge from the institutional domain. In these societies it is force of social domination and power of management at the same time, an instrument for linking ruling class and social organization. Political institutions, as they become separate from social organization, inevitably tend to clash with the technocratic coalition of ruling class and organizational systems. Institutions clash with apparatuses, direct democratic representation clashes with the concentration of the centers of decision and with the extension of state power, which has been clearly delineated by Bertrand de Jouvenel in Du Pouvoir (Geneva, 1945; translated by J. F. Huntington as On Power, Boston: Beacon Press).

The stronger the large organizations grow, the more numerous the areas of

The Political or Institutional System 199

social life that are directly managed by large apparatuses, and the more diversified the pressures for institutionalization become also.

These pressures occur at the meeting point between organizational power and an opposition to it whose principal objective is selfmanagem e/iZ.yWhen the state or the market is the center of social life, institutionalization is itself concentrated; it takes place via political channels proper or it takes its authority from state intervention in the economic order. These unifying principles of the institutional field are vanishing, and it is less and less possible to think that a society is governed from a central locus. (This judgment applies solely to industrialized societies, and the evidence on which it is based indicates that it cannot be extended to developing countries, which is to say those in willed and accelerated transition to a more advanced system of historical action.)

The domination exercised by the upper class tends to extend to all domains of social life, but this does not suggest that all its aspects are directly commanded by an integrated and organized power elite.

In the same way, efforts toward institutionalization have the same meaning whatever the domain in which they occur, but they develop in an ever more autonomous manner, which diminishes the importance of the legislative body, swamped by the proliferation of "parapolitical" institutions—to use Easton's term—which are institutions just as political as the legislative body itself.

Extension of the political field is therefore always linked with extension of social control. When an area of conduct becomes "public"—when it is no longer concealed by the secrecy of private life or property—it is naive to believe that this indicates progress on the part of liberty, a blow dealt to social domination.

Such a development may in fact indicate a weakening of the forces maintaining a traditional cultural and social order, but to the benefit of a more innovatory intervention by the ruling forces, seeking to extend their influence, and in particular to defuse the protests caused by the maintenance of archaic controls.

Hence the ambiguity of the role often assigned to education: the fact of providing education in a hitherto forbidden area—sex education for ex­ample—removes interdicts but is accompanied by a new strengthening of the mechanisms of social pontrol, by a "moralization" of conduct, by the appearance of norms/l don't wish to push this observation to the point of paradox, but it should at least preserve us against the illusion that all modernization weakens the dominion of the ruling class. I do not say that the contrary is true, but contend that modernization simply brings ever broader sectors of social life into the field of social conflicts, without its being possible to say a priori which social class is going to derive the most advantage from it/

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Both the unity and the pluralism of the political system benefit from this broadening of a society's field of historicity. On the one hand, institutionali­zation and negotiation make progress; on the other, the boundary between legal and illegal, between the legitimate and the excluded, is extended to divide new areas of behavior. The more institutionalization, the more exclusion also.

We live in an era in which the social and cultural glaciers are receding; new lands are being freed from their frozen crust or emerging from the waters. Our social space is widening: the area of choices and conflicts is growing, but so too is that of commands and interdicts. Let us never say that we are moving from the darkness out into the light, as the colonizing, anti-worker, petty-bourgeoisie was fond of saying not too long ago, but rather, more objectively, that the industrialized societies are more and more the result of their own decisions, and therefore that they are at the same time increasingly open and increasingly closed. It is the state of class relations and of the political forces that renders one or the other aspect of their political system more or less visible.

The study of institutions, therefore, is first of all the study of institutionali­zation, which is to say of the formation of political processes on the basis of class conflicts on the one hand and of the functioning of organizations on the other. Here again I should like to curtail the ever increasing use of a word that has risen to amazing fame and fortune in recent years. This success story probably stems from the increasingly widespread feeling that political processes cannot be reduced to the working out of laws and to governmental management. Thus we speak accurately of the institutionalization of labor conflicts, insofar as processes and forms of negotiation at all levels—the level of the shop steward, even of the joint production committee, above all the level of collective negotiations between employers and workers' unions, the legislative body, and, last, of mixed or round-table organisms, whether deliberative or consultative—are organized for reaching contractual or legal decisions by following legitimate procedures, even though pressures or violence are essential elements in the formation of those decisions. But if we extend the use of the word "institutionalization" until it becomes synony­mous with organization, then we are more or less consciously reintroducing the idea that society is the transcription of ideas into facts, of ends into means, which means ignoring the existence of social conflicts and political processes.

a. From Organization to Institution

The first type of institutionalization js^ the tmnstiionjrom^ organization to institution. When a rule, considered hitherto as the manifestation "oFan authority within a given organizational framework, becomes the object of

The Political or Institutional System 201

discussions, of negotiations, and of transactions, when it is recognized as the product of a political process and not of an exercising of authority, then one must speak of institutionalization—the formation and recognition by those concerned of a mechanism of deliberation. The union movement, as we have just commented, has succeeded in institutionalizing a large number of decisions. In the United States, the main manifestations of this success are collective negotiations and mechanisms for dealing with grievances; contrary to a yery widespread belief, workers' unions in socialist countries also participate in very considerable institutional mechanisms that make de­cisions concerning production, organization of labor, or employment. The Yugoslav mode of economic management is one of those that have carried the institutionalization of the organization of labor furthest of all.

France has been experiencing a lively trend toward institutionalization over the past few years in several sectors of her social organization. Not only are collective negotiations—for long curtailed by authoritarian employers— acquiring an ever greater scope, but both churches and schools are seeing political mechanisms being formed within them. The importance of this change is indicated by the passions it provokes.

The Roman Catholic church possesses organs of government and even of representation, but its yery principle, divine revelation and hence the pope's charismatic nature, had led for historical and not dogmatic reasons—espe­cially just after the Counterreformation—to an organizational rigidity mani­festing itself in a deep separation between laymen and clerics, between priests and bishops and the central government. The grievances of almost all these categories tend to create or recreate mechanisms of representation and deliberation. Often, highly placed ecclesiastics who accepted without diffi­culty the need for considering new ideas, and for opening the church up to the world, are now watching with anxiety or even shock as mechanisms that can only be termed political are set up within the church. Those in authority always clamor on behalf of the interests of the organization and the integration of its members when institutionalization begins to take place. The same is true in the educational field, particularly in the universities.

To begin with, in the nineteenth century, one sees teachers in France forcing recognition of their deliberative role, taking advantage of the conflicts between church and state, of the development of teaching, the growing recognition of the role of science. More recently, pressure and protests from students have led to an extension of institutional garticipation and the penetration of "politics'' into the universities. Those who think that the creation of organs for representing members of the university organiza­tion also means the introduction of social conflicts and class ideologies into the universities are only partly wrong. Their error lies in believing that the universities were outside class conflicts and political interests when they were

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merely part of an organization. On the contrary, it was then that it could be shown most easily that the universities,formed a system for the reproduction of inequalities. But they are also right, for the institutional system cannot be isolated from class relations, from the field of historical actors, which means that the political forces forming within the university institutions are bound to be a transcription—with a greater or lesser degree of autonomy—of class relations.

What is really disturbing some people is not the institutionalization of the universities but the action of social movements attacking the institutional system itself, in the name of the struggle against-social^domination.

What are the conditions of existence of an organization^that increase or reduce its possibilites of institutionalization? The answer to such a question must be based on an analysis of organizations, which will be undertaken in the following chapter. Nevertheless, one can advance several general hypoth­eses. Any organization enters into exchanges with an environment, yet possesses an internal system of authority based on power, a projection of social domination via the institutional system. If an organization finds itself in relation with a stable environment, then its system of authority can be maintained more easily than if the environment is a changing one, a situation that inevitably entails modifications in the distribution of tasks, the hierarchy of functions, and so on. This difference must affect the possible degree of institutionalization.

On the other hand, if the distance between power and authority is large, it is more probable that the problems of social domination and those of organizational authority will appear as relatively dissociated, as is the case in a public administration whose officials, if they exercise a delegated authority, are somewhat removed from a power that is of political origin and refers onward, at another remove still, to a social domination.

It is therefore when the origin of power is near to the organizational milieu and when the organization is responding to a changing environment that the chances of institutionalization appear to be great. Inversely, a distant power and a stable environment should make it possible to predict the autonomy of a system of organizational rules.

The first of these cases is usually that of the large modern enterprise. Authority belongs to managers who are more and more the source of power and no longer mere agents of stockholders, banks, or boards of directors. It Is the enterprise itself that is the source of its own power, the technostructure being at the same time organization and force of social domination.

The environment of such enterprises is a changing one, and in order to adapt to it the larger enterprises are replacing an organization based upon rules by an organization oriented toward goals. Under these conditions institutionalization develops in numerous forms: multiplication of commit-

The Political or Institutional System 203

tees, decentralization, and above all collective negotiations to deal with the consequences of change while simultaneously working out long-term pro­grams. The French planning system is placed in a comparable situation. In theory it is close to social and political power, and its task is to predict and organize changes in a context of increasingly open international economic interaction. As a result, it has become oriented toward a growing institution­alization^ of its decisions. Its organizational apparatus has shrunk, and a large part of its activity consists in setting up committees upon which the social partners—which is to say the social and political forces—are repre­sented.

Both cases approach the extreme case in which institutionalization becomes the very definition of the organization, in other words, the legislative assembly.

The opposite case, as we have already seen, is that of the publjc_ administratiqnjn which power is at a remove and which depends relatively little on its environment. Institutionalization in such a case is limited. The rights of civil servants to form unions are severely restricted in many countries, and even when they are not, the scope of collective negotiations is almost always reduced to the obtaining of job security for members rather than intervention in the administration's economic and social function.

The institutionalizing pressure exerted by union confederations in Sweden, Great Britain, or Western Germany, is one of the elements in the formation of a social and economic policy. The employment guarantees that civil service unions obtain, on the other hand, do not seem to affect a government's fiscal, or even its educational policy, at least insofar as those management areas are not undermined by protest movements or by profound modifications in their operating conditions.

Between these two extreme cases more complex situations occur. First, those in which the environment is changing but power is at a remove.

This situation exerts contradictory pressures upon an organization that are more likely to be expressed in the thrust of social movements or by an organizational crisis than by an increase in institutionalization. And then there is the opposite case, that in which the environment is stable and power close. Here, authority is subordinate to power and the resistance to institu­tionalization is extreme. This is the case, as we have already seen, with the church or the university. In the name of the faith, or in the name of knowledge and research, the organizational authority transforms itself into personal, traditional, or charismatic power and opposes the formation of political mechanisms. It is in these intermediate cases that the institutional crisis is most severe, since, in the first of the four cases we have considered, institutionalization is more easily accomplished, and in the second the need for it is less clearly felt.

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These observations may be summed up in figure 23. It is in situation 3 that institutionalization has the greatest chance of being a defense strategy on the part of the organization threatened by social movements. The French university system, after the uprising of May-June 1968, suddenly found itself in this situation after having existed for a long while in situation 4.

b. From Conflict to Institution

The second meaning of institutionalization is the institutional method of dealing with social conflicts. In the majority of cases the institutionalization of an organization is simply a repercussion from the action of social movements, whether that institutionalization was introduced by the managers as a means of rendering the social movements more reformist, or whether, on the contrary, those movements insisted on institutionalization in order to limit the domination of the ruling class. Research into social movements does show that after a first stage of total opposition between competing Utopias there comes a stage of direct confrontation between the social adversaries, then a stage during which the conflict is institutionalized, at least in those cases where a breakdown of social domination and of the institutional system itself has not occurred in the meantime.

This type of institutionalization cannot occur without a transformation of the actors, without the intervention of political forces. A worker movement without political influence could never achieve the institutionalization of industrial conflicts as the result of a long confrontation with the employers. The intervention of the political system as a whole, and in particular of the legislative, executive, or judicial institutions, plays an essential role in institutionalization. It is sufficient in this context to point to the role played by the British Labour Party, by the New Deal, by the Popular Front, as well as by the German Social Democrats.

The institutionalization of a conflict is never complete, just as the institutionalization of an organization is always limited. The result in both cases is residual tensions. Radical or integrative elements resist institutionali­zation and try to maintain either the intensity of the social movement or the organization's internal system of authority. Others, on the contrary, are transformed into institutional actors and become defined more by their participation in political mechanisms than by their membership in a movement or an organization. Between these two, "centrist" elements will as a general rule occupy the functions of command and will concern themselves with reconciling the independence of the movement or organization with its participation in the institutions.

The form taken by the institutionalization of a conflict depends both on the characteristics of the class relations involved and on those of the individual political system itself. All the same, beyond the differences

The Political or Institutional System 205

environment

changing stable

power

distant

institutionalization

3 social movements

organizational crisis

authoritarianism paternalism

4

2 organizational or

bureaucratic norms

Figure 23

between real social situations, it is possible to derive a general analysis of the institutionalization process, and this analysis has made great progress lately, thanks to recent research, especially that of David Easton and his school.

The double dialectic of the social classes leads to the differentiation of various kinds of institutionalization corresponding to the different forms of class relations. Let us examine just the extreme cases. The combination of a dominant class and a defensive class produces a conservative institutionali­zation. Wfiat is involved here is negotiation on both sides in order to maintain acquired or guaranteed advantages. This is something that be­comes increasingly easy as one sacrifices more and more of the opposing elements of class relations and, hence, the forces of social transformation. The French university organization has provided an almost perfect example of this process. The work of maintaining the social order associates easily with a corporative defense.

Leading figures and bureaucrats will oppose one another, negotiate, and above all come to understandings with miraculous facility in order to resist both the demands of a dynamic ruling class and popular contestation. Such a form of institutionalization transcends conflicts by dissociating individual status from organization management. What is involved is more a kind of peaceful coexistence than a genuine negotiation; the confronting interests reveal themselves to be compatible and even complementary within a fixed framework.

Very different from this is the institutionalization of a conflict involving a ruling class and a contestatory class. Here, the reference of the adversaries to the system of historical action is direct; each opposes the other with a set of counterelements and consequently acts directly upon its adversary. Popular pressure modernizes the upper class, and vice versa.

Where the political system itself is concerned, institutionalization presup­poses that the pluralist elements are strong in relation to the unifying

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elements, a state that can correspond to a great variety of situations all in varying degrees of proximity to two elementary cases, that in which the pluralism of the actors is particularly well developed and that in which the unifying principles are relatively weak. The.first case corresponds to a fairly large gap between social classes and political forces. This gap may be created by the intermediate role of the state or by a situation of structural change in which old and new classes are coexisting and overlapping. Here the institutionalization is active, and is^recognizable by the complexity of the transactions involved. In the opposite^case, which occurs when the exigencies of the function of government are weak, when state interventionism is limited, when the ruling class does not need to be hegemonic, institutionali­zation may go hand in hand with direct action by the social classes, which reduces its role as the transcription of class interests into political demands.

That transcription is never wholly absent however. On the levels both of class action and of the political system there must exist agents specializing in such transcription. The leaders of parties are the principal transcribers within the system. Outside the political system there are the propagandists concerned with public opinion; in order to have any influence they must concentrate not so much on social relations as on the political goals acceptable to the greatest possible number.

Where there is a large gap between the political system and a class action, as for example in the case of small revolutionary groups, the role of these external transcribers is considerable. The militant revolutionaries appeal for protection from "democratic" intellectuals supposed to possess a certain political influence, and from whom they ask for limited help in order to halt repression, while remaining free to reject them if the possibilities for direct revolutionary action improve.

It is not possible therefore to conceive of institutionalization without a certain decomposition of the field of class relations and without the reorganization of the stakes of those relations in specifically political terms, within the framework of a strategy defining medium-term goals and seeking alliances.

C. Between Historicity and Organization

The institutional system is neither the simple transposition of the field of historical actors into political terms, nor the locus for the direct differentia­tion of society's values into organizational norms; it possesses an autonomous existence, but it is the locus of historicity's transformation into organization. To study its functioning is thus above ail to define the consequences to its own activity of its position with relation to a society's historicity and organization.

Four principal situations can be distinguished: (a) strong link between

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institutional system and historicity, (b) strong link between social organiza­tion and institutional system, (c) low degree of openness in the institutional system, and (d) high degree of openness in the institutional system. The expression of these situations in terms of the institutional system's function­ing is shown in figure 24.

societal f problems I

government X

la)

dominant class

« )

political forces

Strong link between IS and historicity

SP

X

G

(b)

DC

X

PF

0 Strong link between IS and social organization

(c) High degree of openness of IS

(d) Low degree of openness of IS

Figure 24

a. Strong Link between Field of Historicity and Institutional System

This situation corresponds to the predominance of what we have termed the political elements over what we have termed Hie institutional ones. The political system then appears as the locus in which the broad problems of society are discussed, not as the locus of struggles for influence between political forces. The ruling class draws the boundaries between the permitted and the forbidden.

It is the problems, not the social groups, that are most visible here. Hence the role of speeches, declarations of principles, and programs in such a political system, which somewhat resembles a board of directors appointed

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by the ruling class, of whatever kind that class happens to be/Such a description may sound surprising. Ought one not be saying, on the contrary, that this situation is the most open of all, since it is the most directly dominated by the tensions of the system of historical action and class conflicts? In which case, is not the political system the locus of confrontation between historical actors? But if social movements and, thus, class action dominate the historical scene, they tend to use the political system to turn it into a hustings or a tactical instrument, so as to make it melt away in the heat of social confrontation. This process, in contrast to the one just examined, ought to be termed disinstitutionalization. After 1947, in France, the Confederation General du Travail decided to make use of the joint produc­tion committees, an institution created in 1945, as a platform for class struggles. For years it fought for the most complete possible submission of the committees and their members to the unions, in order to cut short any attempt at collaboration between classes, during a period dominated by the cold war and class against class tactics. As a result, the meetings of the joint production committees became hustings for the clash of incompatible positions. In short, employers and unions were agreeing not to negotiate.

In the same way, the revolutionary students made use of the possibilities of co-management solely in order to make known their will to smash and overthrow a social domination. This disinstitutionalization cannot be con­fused with a type of political system.

To sum up, the alliance of institutional system and historicity can be associated with two situations: either the disinstitutionalization we have just described—which is to say a direct conflict between classes—or, on the contrary, dependence of the political system in relation to ruling class.

Whether one is dealing with a legislative body elected by landowners, with the committee of public safety, or with the ruling organs of party and state in Soviet Russia, the political^^ojminatjon_c)f^the ruling class is sufficiently strong for political action to consist in discussing the broad problems that orient social change: education or the protection of national industries, investment or the distribution of income. Political forces, left in the shadows, either weaken into mere pressure groups or else are absorbed by social movements that have overflowed the institutions. The unity derived from the governmental function also spreads to the second level, since the unity of the political system is primarily dependent upon the ruling class. This unity therefore tends to move down to the organizational level, state apparatus, means of action managed in an administrative fashion and put at the service of the ruling class. In France in particular the bureaucratization of the state is strongly linked with its subordination to the interests of a ruling class, contrary to the all too widely accepted image of a bureaucratic state as an individual force acting in the name of specific principles of its own.

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b. Strong Link between Institutional System and Social Organization

In this case the institutions appear in their role as definition of the rules of social organization. They may even appear as the origin of power, as independent of the forms of social domination and of the system of historical action. Another image too widely accepted: parties or individuals confront one another in the name of principles or interests, and "society" emerges, already perfectly organized, out of their decisions. It is only too tempting to show left and right, centralizers and federalists, clerics and laity, hawks and doves, Girondists and Montagnards, hammering out a society's future in their debates. The thicker the veil drawn over the subjection of the political system to the system of historical action and class relations, the more political life appears as the locus of power.

In reality, this appearance of separation between political system and historicity corresponds to sharp social confrontations rather than to an apparent social consensus. It is because a transformation of the system of historical action is occurring, or because the class conflict is open, only weakly institutionalized, that the political system, forced downward by the movements occurring in society's field of historicity, turns increasingly toward social organization, is defined as institutional rather than political. The actors are defined more as political than as social, and express their social struggles in terms that are directly related to the state or to any other political unity. Thus we find that in a university shaken by student uprisings the political system takes on itself tasks of administrative reorganization, the institutional actors are defined in relation to the university system itself, and thus cease to be labeled as social movements.

Examination of both situations thus reminds us that it is never possible to describe the political system by itself, independently of the field of historicity commanding it, and above all without a direct reference to the class conflict.

c. Low Degree of Openness in the Institutional System

This case, like the following one, does not belong to the same typology as the two previous cases. It is no longer the]politics-institution axis rthat has to be taken into consideration but the\ unity-plurality axis. J

A low degree of openness in the institutional system corresponds to the predominance ofits unifying elements. If it is reduced to the dominion of the dominant class and reference to a political unity, then it is no more than a converter mechanism for transforming social domination into powrer at the social organization level. Such is the definition of a hegemony. A class seizes the state and all the institutions, then imposes its laws on the whole social organization. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the seizure of political

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power by a working class that has become the ruling class and grand planner of the social organization. The political forces not directly controlled by what may be termed the power elite—a fusion of ruling class and high office holders—are eliminated or reduced to spear-carrying status. Similarly the complexity of the system of historical action is replaced, on the political level, by a unified project in which all the institutional sectors are oriented by a common world vision or "civilization project." The political system no longer has any internal autonomy but plays a double role of integration and repression. It commands and permits, it educates and it forbids. Society as a whole is no longer made up of three simultaneously hierarchized and autonomous systems but constitutes a single system; each particular problem becomes a general problem, each activity becomes an ancillary service in the realization of an overall plan. At the organization level, value and instrumen­tality are fused into a general voluntarism; at the historicity level, the system of historical action is replaced by all the counterelements forming an aggregate totally controlled by the upper class. The closing of the institu­tional system thus transforms the social structure as a whole, or rather it de-dialecticizes it in favor of a positivist vision of the world. The producers— industrialists or workers, peasants or technocrats—manage society, which is compared to a machine, a church, or a military order.

This analysis is the counterpart of the one presented earlier dealing with the political system's factors of dependence or autonomy. When the political system is autonomous it is also closed. When it is not directly commanded by the ruling class its pluralist elements are weak in relation to its unifying elements. This situation is that of the hegemony of a dominant class, of the fusion of field of historicity, institutional system, and social organization. A political system cannot be at the same time autonomous and open: the liberal Utopia does not correspond to reality.

But what happens to the pluralist elements in all those cases in which the political system loses its openness? What happens, in other words, to the variety of societal problems and the plurality of political forces, all of which are suddenly repressed? Driven out of the political system, they are displaced into the other levels of society. The plurality of political forces finds its way into the social organization, to which it is adjacent, just as the diversity of societal problems moves upward toward the field of historical action. The downward movement of political forces toward social organization occurs whenever the political system is reduced to a command apparatus. Clans, factions, leagues spring up within an organization and form an informal political network there that modifies the nature of the exchanges inside the organization. When an organization is not institutionalized, whether it be an industrial enterprise, a university, or a church, one finds in particular those who have a certain authority, though without participating in decisions taken by an oligarchy or a distant power, in other words the middle ranks, forming

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into clans and cliques that seek to obtain a certain influence, sometimes by putting themselves at the service of a particular ruler or manager and linking their fate to his, sometimes by pursuing their own interests, sometimes even by supporting a social and popular movement, whether of workers, students, or rebelling laymen. Departmental requests take on a political meaning; apparently purely technical problems are in fact concealing political strate­gies. The transparency of the political system is an illusion: the arguments and struggles for influence that it eliminates interfere with the functioning of the organizations and create a gap, sometimes an enormous one, between formal and informal. The informal organization can have other causes for its existence. On the level of social organization itself, it can be a manifestation of the state of interpersonal relations or of the impact of extraorganizational roles inside the organization; it can also be the sign of a social movement: working-class resistance, when prevented from acting as such, expresses itself in covert going-slow, in worker solidarity in getting around rules laid down by the authorities, and so on. But informal organization can also be a substitute for institutional influence, for political capability.

On the other hand, the diversity of societal problems not recognized by a political system acting in the name of general principles and a coherent plan reappears at the historicity level and more precisely at that of the social classes. More specifically, the professional groups I have termed the agents of historicity become the basis of a class opposition. Instead of being simply the representatives of the stakes of social struggles, they become substitutes for movements of opposition. In the name of the internal exigencies of a sector of social life they set up a resistance to the dominion of the power elite. The most notable instance in our type of society is that of the scientists. They resist the political management of science by the dominant class in the name of the internal exigencies of science and scientific research, but this professional appeal inevitably acquires a political meaning.

The loss of autonomy of the institutional system is therefore inevitably accompanied by a process of "politicization" both of historical action and of the functioning of the organizations. Driven out of its own locus, politics moves out to occupy others, thus creating a confusion between all the levels of social reality. Social organization, institutional mechanism, class conflicts, and orientations of historical action all become mixed up, so that society does present itself as a unity, in conformity with the ruling class's intentions, but this unity is far from corresponding in practice to those intentions, which are nothing more than a system of rationalization incapable of explaining and predicting society's functioning.

d. High Degree of Openness in the Institutional System

In this case, the inverse of the previous one, the diversity of the societal

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problems and the plurality of the political forces achieve greater importance than the political dominion of the ruling class and political unity.

The institutional system appears in this situation as a political market. The institutions are recognized as the very center of social life. The mechanisms of political representation, like the judicial procedures, are highly formal­ized, even ritualized. The complexity of political life derives from the fact that political forces join together in different forms, according to the societal problem under consideration, and according to the degree of intervention of the social classes in the political arena.

The formalization of the institutions goes hand in hand with a large capacity for change in the rules of social life. Laws, contracts, and amend­ments pile up and accompany the transformations of historicity, class relations, and technology.

This image may appear to politicians as the description of an ideal state. Institutionalization reaches its apogee; it limits both social struggles and power within the organization. Society, mistress of herself, constantly discovers her own future through discussions as broad as possible, trans­actions as flexible and temporary as possible, and a generalized participation in influence.

The domain of political decision no longer seems to have limits. Political organs regulate production and distribution, research and education, the functioning of the organizations and the conditions of competition.

This description is not complete however. It does not take into considera­tion either the effects of a quasi independence of the institutional system from the other levels of society or, inversely, the characteristics of the field of historicity and of social organization that will bring about this extreme openness.

Is this dissociation not linked with the tensions between the ruling role and the dominant role of the upper class? The development of the political system may thus appear as the counterpart of the action of a "barbarian" ruling class, particularly one still in the process of taking over, of making its power felt, of transforming society, while the political system, even as it nibbles away at former privileges and vested interests, is really intervening scarcely at all in the process of society's transformation.

One might even go so far as to say that openness of the political system, which imposes no essential constraint on the action of the new ruling class, has the advantage for the latter of defending it against "barbarian" popular movements that are opposed for their part to the autonomy of the political system and have arisen to restore priority to class conflicts.

In a more extreme way, a great openness of the political system may be linked to a state of relative equilibrium between opposing social forces, each of which is strong enough to block the hegemony of another but not to impose its own.

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It would be difficult for those social forces to be the social classes them­selves, for such an equilibrium between the classes would indicate a paralyzing confrontation of the sort that frequently results in caesarism. The openness of the political system may therefore indicate an overrepresentation of the middle classes, who, viewed at this level and no longer in relation to the antagonistic classes, are defined by their very access to political influence. The continued exclusion of popular categories from political participation, added to weakness or divisions in the upper class, may, in conjunction, give the middle classes a very large degree of control over the political system and increase the complexity and autonomy of its discourse.

This large degree of openness in the political system is therefore linked with its dependence with regard to class relations.

The absence of hegemony indicates not the omnipotence of the political system but its development at a subordinate level, above which the ruling class as well as social conflicts are determining society's principal orienta­tions. Just as it is impossible to identify closedness with dependence, so it is false to believe that openness indicates independence. The link between openness and dependence or between closedness and autonomy is merely a reference to the position of the political system in relation to the field of historicity; it is dependent on it, while at the same time possessing a certain openness, a certain internal autonomy.

The political system, isolated from social struggles, can ultimately become artificial. When political forces are most directly defined by their place within the decision-making system, they can become estranged from all social movements, those of the upper classes as well as of the popular classes, whose relations occur outside institutions. The importance of social violence is the counterpart of an excessive autonomy of the institutions. Whenever the institutions are no longer defined by their roles as political expression of the field of historicity, are conceived of solely as a set of rules for a game, the transformation of the system of historical action and social struggles follow their own path, and real participation in institutional mechanisms dimin­ishes. Western legislatures are good examples of this loss of importance sustained by victorious political institutions. Neither the conglomerates, nor the various kinds of multinational enterprises or production apparatuses, nor the most recent popular rebellions pay any great attention to the work of the legislative assembly. Who in the United States believes at this moment that the choice between Republicans and Democrats produces any determining effects upon the broad transformations of society and social movements? The American judicial system, masterpiece of that country's institutions, itself seems ever more powerless to deal with the problems of imperialism, of social inequality, of racism, or of unrest in the universities.

On the other hand, the problems of government, which seem to dissolve in extremely open institutional mechanisms, tend to slip down toward the

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organizational level. The more autonomous the political system, the stronger is organizational power. The link between domination and power bypasses the political system. The organizations become disinstitutionalized, or rather their institutional mechanisms become isolated from their functioning.

In large enterprises, the development of collective negotiations—if the negotiations have no connection with social movements—goes hand in hand with the reinforcement of "company spirit," of organizational power. Institutionalization has no dominion over the organizations except when it is itself subject to the dominion of social movements.

e. No Throne No Mask

Everything always leads back to the same conclusion: the political system is at the same time autonomous and dependent. The loss of its autonomy, and equally any attempt at independence, leads to unexpected consequences, the effects of which are the reverse of what a limited observation of the political system might lead one to expect. It is when it believes itself to be most independent that it is most marginal and exerts least influence on the transformation of social domination into organizational power. There is no essence of politics, only a placing of the political system somewhere in the process of transformation from field of historicity into social organization.

The autonomy of the institutions rests upon two principal aspects of their action. On the one hand they make the transition from an open system, the field of historicity, to a relatively closed whole, a territorial collectivity. They therefore transform the orientations of the system of historical action and those of the social classes into determinants of decisions applying to the collectivity as a whole. The dialectic of the conflict becomes at their level the separation of the legitimate from the illegitimate, the permitted from the forbidden.

On the other hand, this territorial collectivity is not reducible to a field of historicity. It is historically complex. Peasants, artisans, and laborers, great landowners, merchants, and industrial capitalists can all coexist within the same collectivity. This would not matter unduly if these classes were simply juxtaposed, or if their interaction were limited to the making of alliances. But such is not the case: the action of any one class cannot be defined in any complete way independently of the historic whole in which it is placed, independently of whether it occupies a central or merely peripheral place in that whole. The political system cannot, howrever, be identified with a concrete society. Although it is less general and less open than a field of historicity, it is more abstract than a social organization. Many aspects of a concrete society's functioning do not penetrate to the institutional level. This is the case with many of the mechanisms of social reproduction. In the majority of societies the political system intervenes very little in the function-

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ing of the family or even of education, at least when education is directly linked with the family and religious organization. The institutions manage only the problems of historicity or, more concretely, of change. They are not simply a hallway house between the field of historicity and social organiza­tion but rather an instrument for making the transition from the first to the second. This is the source of their autonomy and also of their dependence.

Their dependence in relation to the field of historicity—system of historical action and class relations—is visible as soon as one refuses to view society as the implementation of values, intentions, and principles. Every time the independence of the political, and hence its central role, have been pro­claimed, social domination has been strengthened as a result. It is in this sense that the system's rhetoricians, the legists, can appear as agents for the indirect reinforcement of social domination. The more they assert the independence of the institutions, the more they draw attention away from the dependence of the institutions with regard to class relations.

But the institutional system is more than its rhetoric; its discourse is more complex. There is more to laws and contracts than the ideology of the legists. It is because it represents class conflicts, in the form of struggles for influence between political forces, that the political system is not just a mechanism for the transmission to society in general of a social domination the causes of which are to be found in the foundation of that society.

The political system is a network of actors bounded and constrained by a field of historical action, by the state of class relations, and by the necessity of integrating a variety of elements into a single political collectivity. Its outputs, which is to say societal decisions, therefore express, render operative, the orientations of the system of historical action and the domination of the upper class. But if social conflicts were not institutionalized up to a certain point, then the domination of the upper class would be transformed directly into a political hegemony. Social laws, collective contracts, electoral reforms giving everyone the right to vote—these things cannot put a stop to social domination but they do prevent the existence of a power elite, a fusion of ruling class and political rulers. No political system exists except insofar as social movements exist, and inversely those movements cannot exist without a certain institutionalization of conflicts. A society without institutions can know only crises, or an explosion, which may lead to the replacement of one ruling elite by another but not to the development of social movements.

People are inclined to say either that the political system is the mask of the ruling class or that it is the locus for reforms and for change in society at all levels.

These contradictory statements are both equally muddled, as is the very convenient notion of an opposition between the revolutionary path and the reformist path.

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The movements that do not concern Jhemselves with their political influence are also those that are not revolutionary, that link the crisis of a social system directly to a messianic type of utopTa, or that try to launch a coup d'6tat from a totally unorganized action base. Any true social move­ment is reformist and revolutionary at the same time, recognizes ancTmakes use of the political system's existence, recognizes its limitations too, and constantly keeps the general line of its action outside and above the institutions, at the levels of class conflicts and historicity.

The dominant class for its part also makes use of the political institutions, yet those institutions constitute a limitation to its hegemony. To think that institutions and politics are a vehicle for domination isi'simply to forget that domination manifests itself much more outside the institutional system, in what it rejects or forbids as well as in what it imposes. If sociology claims that what seems to be limiting or contesting hegemony is no more than that hegemony's mask, then it may well, in its turn, be accused of being a mere ruse—though a more subtle one—on the part of the dominant class. An absurd and infinitely receding game, but one that does not exist only in the imagination. The institutional system and its discourse are determined by the system of historical action and by class relations and class domination, but there is never any direct correspondence between the domination of the ruling class and political institutions.

D. The State

I have sought until nowr not to speak of the state. The word has barely occurred other than in a sentence here and there. This is because the state cannot in practice be confused either with the political system or with any one of its elements.

The state is not a concept constructed by sociological analysis but a com­plex social agent, one whose action extends into the field of historicity, into the institutions, and also into social organization.

a. The Integration of Society's Functional Levels

The three broad levels of social reality are not superimposed directly one on top of another inside a collectivity that is the supreme actor, producing its own system of historical action, classes, institutions, and organization. Capitalist industrialization cannot be analyzed within a purely national framework, and the political system itself, though attached to a specific territorial collectivity, cannot be completely identified with that collectivity. Nevertheless, the separation that analysis is forced to introduce between social fields that in fact intersect more than overlay one another also brings oTrflhe"1mportance of the agents that bring them into relation with one another, inside the framework of the territorial unity. The state is the

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principal of these agents. It is through the state that a social organization is defined and managed, limited by frontiers within which a legitimated authority is exercised through the decisions of the political system, and in which the social classes struggle for control of a system of historical action. And yet is not the state, in its turn, less an autonomous agent than the repre­sentative of the historical actors, of the social classes?

In the majority of cases it does in fact appear to be linked to the ruling class, for would that class be ruling and dominant if there existed side by side with it a state in fact more powerful than itself, as it would be if it controlled the combined levels of society's functioning? In other cases the state seems to have been conquered by a popular social movement that succeeds in "taking power/' and its subordination is indicated by that of state dignitaries in relation to the leaders of the party, in countries where a communist party has triumphed. Is the state any more, in either of these cases, than the executive apparatus of those who are exercising social domination?

This interpretation is very superficial. In the case of a popular revolution, the party in power becomes the state. This being so, it is no longer just a social movement but an agent managing a complex society, and at the same time a decider entering into intersocial relations with other states through war and diplomacy.

The debates about the possibility of building socialism in a single country, and even more the acts of the socialist states, have shown clearly enough the gap that inevitably exists between a social movement and a state, especially in a situation of international crisis.

To say that the working class is in power in such and such a country never corresponds to reality but rather pertains to state-produced ideology. This does not mean that socialist societies ought not to be defined primarily by the worker movement or the revolutionary action performed by and for a popular class. But it would be as false to say that the state is no more than the agent of the worker or peasant class as to say that the state exercises a definable power independently of the class movement that made its formation possible. When the state is linked with a ruling class, its autonomy is even more evident. Let it suffice for the moment to say that a ruling class is perpetually trying to establish its domination over society in as direct a way as possible and, therefore, to reduce intervention by the state, the latter's vigor always being greater as the power of the ruling class is less, or as the opposition of the popular classes is more active.

Above all, the state's role is based upon the relative autonomy of the elements of the system of historical action in relation to class actions. Even if it is closely linked to a class or to a social movement, the state intervenes directly in the management of the agencies of historicity—for example, in a postindustrial society, in scientific and technical development

Present within the field of historicity, yet not reducible to a social class,

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the state is also present in the political field. The state bears down upon the political system with all the weight of both the field of historicity and the social organization it represents. Bearing down upon it in its turn is the weight of the political system. State and political system are not two institutional subsystems, but the state is the locus of the institutional system s combination with the other social systems, the system of historical action, the class system, the organizational systems. This is something we sense clearly enough when we recognize that the liberal trilogy—legislative power, execu­tive power, judicial power—is artificial. The state does not merely execute the decisions of the legislative, for it is also an administration on the one hand and an agent of historicity on the other. The state also intervenes, to put it mildly, in judicial power. If it is the political system's task to draw the boundary between the legal and the illegal or delinquency, then the state manages, generally very directly, everything that has been excluded in that process. It is an agent of repression. It ensures the reign of order, and, more than this, it keeps under its direct authority whatever may be deemed by institutional decisions to be a threat to order. Though the apparatus of justice may belong in certain of its aspects to the political system, the prisons and the police are the domain of the state, one into which the political actors venture very little and are always met by a lively resistance on the part of the state apparatus.

These repressive agencies are not organizations; they are situated at the political level; they are the shadows that the light of the institutions keeps at bay, and the state is the master of those shadows.

Lastly, ought we to identify state writh social organization? The state does intervene in that domain, most directly through its administration. More, the state is itself an organization, because it exercises an authority and because it conducts war and diplomacy. In times of war, society even seems to become identical with the state. It is mobilized, and neither class conflicts nor political activities can maintain their usual form within that mobilization.

But even in this case the state is not solely the manager of a collectivity. It is much more the agent of the political system, of class relations, and of the system of historical action at the social organization level. Sometimes it intervenes in order to ensure that the decisions of the political system are respected; sometimes it is above all an instrument of the dominant ideology, which it seeks to transform into a consensus, in particular by acting through its means of socialization. To sum up, the state introduces political and organizational problems into the field of historicity, the problems of historicity and politics into social organization, and, finally, the problems of historicity and of social organization into the political field. It is both go-between and unifier. And this double role rests upon the very definition of its existence: it joins a field of historicity to a social organization via a political system; it joins a general system to a particular territorial collectivity. This is why the

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study of the state has always been situated halfway between history and sociology, in a badly defined no-man's-land, yet one whose autonomy seems to be solidly established—that of the "political sciences,*' which deal in fact with knowledge of the state. For the study of the political system, of its functioning, and of its relations with the social classes on the one hand and with the administration on the other, falls clearly into the province of political sociology, whereas the state, which must always be defined in time and space, in its history and in an international conjuncture, belongs to a different kind of analysis in which the comparative method occupies a central position.

This double role of the state has to be defined more precisely. On the one hand, the state unities society from the top downward, by-

inserting social organization within the framework of the political system and within the field of historicity. It stamps the practices of social life, which on the surface seem relative and changing, with the seal of the absolute, for it is the supreme power and, in Weber's famous phrase, holds the monopoly of legitimate physical violence. The very existence of the state is forever giving the lie to any purely "liberal" vision of society that sees it as a set of strategies, interests, and influences, all in competition but all constantly in a state of negotiation. Its role cannot be understood at the level of social organization itself; the orientations of the system of historical action and class domination become, via the political system, the rules imposed by a power. The state holds that power, which is in principle absolute and which manifests itself most clearly in the work of repression. The state is never more powerful than when it establishes a direct relation between what it calls values and the defense of a territorial collectivity faced with other such collectivities.

On the other hand, the state is not the master but the last resort. It ensures the rise of problems and conflicts back up from social organization toward the political system, class relations, and the system of historical action. It is an instrument of integration and repression, yes, but it is also an agent of change: reformists try to make use of it in order to remedy imbalances and crises produced by a mode of social domination; revolutionaries try to seize it in order to transform society's orientations and class relations.

These two roles do not balance one another and are not situated in the same analytical plane, but they are interdependent.

In a synchronic analysis of society, the state appears as integrating and repressive, but its action does not ultimately result in the embodiment of a field of historicity, since a territorial collectivity is a complex social forma­tion, a historical reality, and not a type or a sociological configuration. In this sense the state is not an instrument of reproduction but is always subject to a fundamental tension: between a historical unity and a sociological field.

In a diachronic analysis, the state is an agent of social change, but one that

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tends to constitute a type of society as homogeneous, as coherent as possible, one that presents itself as bearer of a "model" of society.

These two roles combine in very diverse ways, so diverse in fact that one is constantly tempted to introduce a simplifying principle into one's analysis of them, a temptation one must nevertheless overcome, as this chapter con­stantly tries to show. Is it not possible to say that integration and change are combined at that middle level of society formed by the political system, since it is there that laws are passed to integrate society and there too that the debates are held which can succeed in changing the laws? No, that is nothing but an optical illusion. For although the double movement that descends from historicity to social organization and then rises again from the latter to the former does pass through the political system in both directions, that political system cannot provide an account of it on its own. Moreover it is just as tempting to allow the political system no role at all as it is to allot it every role. Is it not subject to class domination; is it not powerless in the face of really grave decisions such as war, or merely in the face of the power wielded by the head of an enterprise?

Nothing can dispense us from examining the complexity of the mecha­nisms by means of which the state's two great roles are combined—a fact that also shows the vanity of all research in the state's essence. Political philosophies are merely political or doctrinal creations. Study of the state can never either precede or command the study of society's functioning and that of the relations between the hierarchized systems that determine it.

Inversely, the state can never be reduced to the role of agent for one social or political force. It never happens that a field of historicity, an institutional system, and a social organization overlay one another perfectly. Hence the role of the state in the process of change, but hence first its power and its capacity to resort to force and violence. The state is not solely the locus of communication between the various levels of society; it always has an autonomous apparatus and a specific capacity for action of its own.

We shall see that the struggle for state power is the reason for the existence of the collective actions that I term critical actions in order to distinguish them from social movements. The state may even destroy all the social systems by imposing its hegemony upon them directly.

b. State and "Civil Society"

If the place of the state in sociological analysis is indeed as I have just described it, then the principal problem facing that analysis is to define the conditions and effects of the various forms of state intervention of social life. A couple of extreme images should suffice here.

On the one hand we have the image of an integrating state that manages the system of historical action directly by intervening in the refations between

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the classes and by substituting itself for them if needs be, that controls the political system directly and extends its apparatus to the administration of every sector of the social organization. A total state, one might call it, or even a totalitarian one. In the simplest cases—but probably not the ones nearest to reality—one can imagine that this integration might operate at one of the levels of social reality only. Society becomes an organization or a political system, or the form of the ruling class's domination. The all-powerful state would then dissolve into one of its functions. It is more interesting to consider the case of simultaneous integration on all levels of social reality in a state that is substituting itself for those levels. Such a situation signifies a complete dehistoricization, depoliticization, and disorganization of society, and conse­quently the deserialization of a society that has become the instrument of the state.

In this case historicity is amalgamated with what is most removed from it, the "naturality" of the society, as in the case of Nazism, exalting race, the land, the Volk. The political system is no more than a shadow of itself, which is to say an association of mobilization with repression. Social organization is commanded by goals linked to intersocial relations: quest for power, for expression, preparation for war, which becomes the supreme goal of the state and which also leads it on to its ultimate collapse. This destructuration of society at the same time outlaws any process of change. This state has reached an ultimate form and cannot modify itself further except in terms of external pressures and its efforts to adapt to them when unable to dominate them. Such an outcome can only occur in a situation of general crisis within the social organization, of political crisis, and of impotence on the part of the social movements, whether of the ruling or the popular class.

At the opposite extreme we find the image of the state as go-between, reduced to recording the interactions between the various social systems. This is the classic image of the liberal state, agent for the propagation of the system of historical action's elements, agent of the ruling class, striving to decrease the autonomy of the organizations and the weight of its own administration. A state essentially kept within the bounds of the political system. This state's moderation renders it subject to Hfe hisToricaTactors: class relations outweigh state intervention. The role of the state therefore

depends upon the nature of those relations and upon that of the political system. If the latter is very open, then it will be permitted to implement a "welfare" policy directed at jofTsecurity and redistribution of wealth. Ideally, society becomes a political market, pragmatically managed, open to change but with a tendency for historicity to dissolve into strategies and transactions, so that political activity is largely directed to the search for unstable equilibria.

If, on the contrary, the political system is "blocked," or has a low degree of

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openness, then the state's noninterventionism will accompany the hegemony of a more conquering style of ruling class, one that will itself take" oveFthe management both of the system of historical action and of the social organization, extending its ideology into all those areas evacuated by the state. The latter's role will then be to remove any obstacles to the action of the ruling class, to repress opposition to it, to ensure an openness and a mobility that are nothing but the mobilization of social resources for the benefit of the ruling class. The state ensures that there is liberty and equality, which means that it makes sure the well-fed and well-trained horse is able to run in the same race as the ill-fed horse brought in to the racecourse straight from the farmyard, and also that the ritual of the race shall be respected, that any protests aimed at pointing out the real inequality of this situation shall be discounted. More precisely, this state transforms class domination into stratification; it constructs categories of social practice but refrains from intervening—theoretically at least—in the way that men are assigned to the resulting streams and strata. It has only to leave social domination to do its work in order to transform equality into inequality, liberty into impotence.

The role of the state is always situated somewhere between these two extreme positions: the total state that breaks off relations with "civil society," imposes its own interests and ideology upon it, imprisons it in immobility or aggression, and, on the other hand, the state that has been absorbed by civil society—subjected to the interests of the ruling class or, at best, to the conser­vative balance between social domination and social defense.

c. State Interventionism and Class Relations

The importance of the state varies between these two limiting extremes; it presupposes that the state will overflow the political system and penetrate into the field of historicity, but also that it will not destroy the relations between the system of historical action and class relations. Which amounts to saying that this autonomous role of the state depends above all on the nature of class relations.

The state's role is small both when a rising ruling class is imposing itself, seeking to exert its domination directly on society as a whole, and also when the state is absorbed back into the political system, when the institutionali­zation of conflicts between already matured classes gains the upper hand.

These two situations are both variants of the conjunction of a mainly ruling class and a mainly defensive class. In such situations the upper class has no need to shelter behind an autonomous state. At the very most it will make use of it as a means of sweeping away hindrances to its own initiatives.

Now let us consider the other forms that class relations take, then examine in succession the following cases: (1) dominant class-defensive class, (2) ruling class-contestatory class, and (3) dominant class-contestatory class,

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which constitute, together with the case already described (ruling class-defensive class), the simple forms of the double dialectic of the social classes.

1. The conjunction of a mainly dominant upper class with a mainly defen­sive popular class corresponds to a low degree of reference to the system of historical action.

It is possible that in such a case the political system will play a primary role, but since this will involve its subjection to the hegemony of the dominant class it will already be subordinated to the state apparatus which is the expression of that hegemony. More important is the case in which the expression of class domination is direct dominion over social organization, in which social organization is mainly a set of agents for the reproduction of the established order. The state's role then increases in magnitude depending on how far the weakness of both ruling and contestatory classes signifies a crisis of historicity, and consequently the presence of "uncivilized" initiatives on either or both sides. Order cannot simply be reproduced, it must be maintained in the face of constant threats. This means that the state assumes an important repressive role, completed in its turn by a striving toward ideological integration, which becomes increasingly intense as the trends toward explosion become more visible. The state's action is thus displaced downward; it defines and imposes the categories of social practice; it proclaims values and norms, it promulgates rules, sets up authorities, recruits and trains the young and professional groups directly, imposes a religion and an ideology, makes a great show of separating those that have benefited from its training from those—the "bad"—who have not, and whom it excludes or imprisons.

The colonial situation is the one in which this type of state develops most fully, above all when the colonialism involved is of the French type still to be found here and there to this day, specifically in the Antilles, where the capitalist interests are less strong than those of the double domination of an old dominant class and a state-centered administration. The role of the instruments of cultural domination, and especially of the school—though of the church too—is of extreme importance here. It is why rebellion is directed against the state-centered and ideological apparatus more specifically than against the economic domination. Uprisings are undertaken more in the name of the nation than in the name of a class whenever the dominating state is more visible than the ruling class.

2. The exact opposite of situation 1 is that in which a mainly ruling upper class is associated with a mainly contestatory popular class. Here, the confronting classes are relating their action directly to the stake of their struggle, to the system of historical action. They are engaged in a direct and

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open conflict, which leads inevitably to the explosion of the system of historical action, the elements of which are replaced by the sets of counter-elements championed by each of the opposing classes. It might seem, at first glance, that this situation produces the maximum reduction of state inter­vention. Yet that is not the case at all, for such a confrontation presupposes a dynamic, open, very modernizing situation, which means both that the system of historical action is strongly constituted and that the political system is open. The state's action therefore consists in bringing the requirements of the system of historical action and the institutional mechanisms back together, in counterbalancing the class conflicts by an appeal for moderniza­tion and settlement of the conflicts. One can speak here of liberal interven­tion in the sense that there is no direct intervention in the area of class relations. This type of inten'ention also contributes to a maturing process of the class relations by reducing the importance of domination and defense. The state works toward the modernization of the ruling class, but also toward the mobilization of the popular class. The state intervenes with greater force if, because of the pressure of popular contestation, it is obliged to rescue society from a crisis that is the result of the upper class's inability to fill its ruling role. However, the state does not, for example, simply take over from industrialists who have become speculators; it gives a fresh impetus to economic activity and encourages the reorganization and modernization of the ruling class. It does intervene more directly when there is a stalemate equilibrium between an old and a new^ntling class so that neither of the two is actually ruling. This is Antonio Gramsdr's interpretation of caesarism.

In every case, this state extends the "mobilization'* of society, thus providing itself with support in its struggle against the former patricians. The state puts its emphasis above all upon the progress of exchanges, of communications, of education. It therefore appears to be situated beyond class conflicts, for these are still only half-formed.

3. In the last conjunction, popular contestation clashes with an upper class that is more dominant than ruling, incapable of setting the system of historical action to work, more investment- and speculation-minded than productivist, more concerned with maintaining barriers than with orienting change. State intervention in this case is actuated by the efforts of the popu­lar class to control the system of historical action. The most extreme form of this intervention is the conquest of the state by a revolutionary movement. A more limited form corresponds to a state action breaking up the dominant class as a response to popular contestation, assuring itself a role as ruling class, while leaving the original ruling class, renewed by this crisis, the possibility of resuming its ruling role later. Lastly, the state can be even more directly the agent responsible for the formation of a ruling class unable to

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constitute itself without such intervention. Popular contestation is both made use of and repressed; a modernizing and authoritarian state, often capable of activating a paternalist populism, struggles to overcome its economic back­wardness or underdevelopment, but for the benefit of a ruling class formed under its aegis, and one that can more easily be foreign than national.

Many national histories have examples of transition from one type of state intervention to another. In Latin America, the national-popular state, which came into being in very different conditions in both Mexico and Brazil, has been transformed into a modernizing state acting hand in glove with large foreign enterprises and playing a repressive role, especially in the case of Brazil.

It is therefore popular contestation that provokes the intervention of the state in the field of historicity. Inversely, it is the preponderant role of the dominant class that diminishes this state role, either by imprisoning it within the units of the political system or by imposing its hegemony on that system and using the state solely as an apparatus of integration and repression, which also drives it out of the field of historicity and turns it into an instrument of fusion between institutions and social organization, which combine to become the agent of the upper class's ideological domination. j

To sum up, the state may belong to one of three types when it is not totalitarian, when it does not substitute itself for society: (1) It can be almost entirely identified with the political system, (2) it can place itself at the junction of institutions and social organization, or (3) it can emerge from its base in the political system and penetrate the field of historicity.

Each of these types corresponds above all to a modality of social change; they will therefore be examined in more detail at the end of the last chapter of this book. But we can at least name these change processes.

I term liberal societies those in which the ruling class preponderates over the dominant class, societies not excessively weighed down by their pasts, by the dominion of former dominant classes; societies that are open, conquer­ing. Such societies also are under the most direct control of the ruling class. In them, the state has above all an integrating, ideological role. It is the agent of values, that is, of the ideology of the ruling class. It intervenes in the social organization in order to make it submit to the decisions of a political system dominated by the ruling class, but from outside it rather than from inside.

This state action is not carried on in the name of its ruling role or of its links with the ruling class. It is situated at the furthest remove from historicity and is concealed beneath idealist language. At the same time, the agents of the state are more rhetoricians than ideologists: social and cultural integration within the framework of a class domination, adaptation to economic and cultural changes, conduct linked with ascending or descending social mobility, all these are mingled in the discourse and the practices of an

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extremely professionalized state. But this integrating role is not separable from a repressive function which is exercised against "deviants" and against the contestation of the popular class.

This state lends great importance to the work of socialization, of the inculcation of values and norms; it sees itself as exercising a moral, an edifying function.

Contractual societies are those in which the former dominant classes bear down with the greatest weight, in which heterogeneity is greatest, in which the past has not been abolished by the present but in which there nevertheless exists a powerful ruling class. All the elements of the class conflict are mingled in them and tend at the same time to become fused with the debates of the political system, which is a locus for reforms, for transactions or accommodations, and oriented both toward change and toward stability. The state tends to be centered on this political system.

Last, the voluntarist societies are those in which obstacles to change are strongest, in which change is not directly managed by a national ruling class. This means that the state penetrates into the field of historicity under pressure from a contestatory popular class. Sometimes it becomes the agent of that class, sometimes it imposes its power on opposed but composite classes unable to produce social movements, sometimes it turns on the popular class in order to set up a new ruling class under its aegis.

It must be added, however, that this situation, characterized by the dependence of the society under consideration, brings together two opposing roles of the state.

On the one hand the state is in the service of an external domination and plays a repressive role increased by the fact that dependence entails underemployment, serious economic imbalances, and also violent nationalist movements. On the other hand this state, dissociated from economic power, can easily be penetrated by political forces. Such "openness" of the state is one of the most characteristic aspects of many Latin-American situations.

This state exercises a redistributive function, creating a following of "clients," partly among the middle classes, partly among the members of the "marginal" society that depends upon its gifts in order to subsist at all, and is the main basis for right-wing populisms such as the celebrated examples created by Riojas Pinilla in Colombia, Perez Jimenez in Venezuela, or Odria in Peru.

But in both cases it is clear that the state is not simply the expression of a national ruling class, which on the contrary is "civilist" and is seeking to diminish state intervention in order to further its own hegemony over the political system and the social organization.

When the state overflows the political system, then, it can occur in two opposite ways. When it is above all the agent of the upper class, then it acts

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principally within the social organization, and this is what I have termed its ideological role. It integrates and it represses. When its intervention is governed by popular contestation, then it acts within the field of historicity: it is modernizing, "developmental."

Each of these two types of state action can take weakened or degraded forms. When the domination is not imposed by force, it is exercised by social agents that add their own interests and representations to those they have been given the responsibility of transmitting or applying. Ultimately, con­straint can be replaced by ritual, and the remains of old forms of domination fade into mere ceremonies. Inversely, state interventionism breaks down into institutionalization. The state is subject to the pressure of categories largely of the middle strata, who are seeking advantages or security.

These two degraded forms of action can easily combine. The maintenance of the influence of old dominant classes may be associated with a politics distributing what are at least relative advantages to certain social categories. France certainly experienced a period of exhausted republicanism during which the old landowning bourgeoisie was defending the social and cultural order that suited it, while the new middle strata were gradually transforming into a defense of newly acquired vested interests what had originally been an impulse toward wider participation. For the world of education, at a remove from great national decisions and great political and economic interests, it is easier than for most sectors of society to become an area in which this double degradation of state action blossoms and admires its own image with satisfaction. But this decomposition takes more serious forms when the state intervention has been more powerful, when it has transformed the forms of social participation, class relations, and economic policies more profoundly. The nearer one approaches to the revolutionary state, the greater becomes the threat of a state absolutism that may go as far as totalitarianism. The state becomes dominant class and ruling class together. It transforms itself into a bureaucratic apparatus guaranteeing privileges to its own members instead of transforming the social organization. The total state, modernizing and revolutionary at the same time, bears within it the despotic state that imposes extreme constraints upon society for the benefit of a newly formed dominant class closely linked with the state.

d. The State, the Institutions, and Social Organization

Since the state is a liaison agent between the field of historicity, the political system, and the social organization, we ought to work out a set of propositions defining the attributes of the state not only according to the greater or lesser importance of the ruling class or the dominant class, or the defensive class or the contestatory class, but also according to whether the

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political system is more or less dynamic or blocked, and according to whether the social organization is stable or in crisis.

Let us content ourselves here with defining the general effects of the state of the institutions and the social organization.

1. If the political system is dynamic, if institutionalization, in the two forms described earlier in this chapter, is strongly developed, then the state should intervene less in the relations between social actors than in the cultural domain, which is to say in the organization of the relations between society and its field of action. The state then plays an important role in historicity itself and in the "technical" or "professional" organization of social activity. A blocked political system, on the contrary, brings a large part of political relations and class relations back into the state. If the system becomes completely closed, then political life is replaced by rivalries between indi­viduals, clans, cliques, and groups of interests within the state itself. The apparent power of the state, dominating the political system, in fact conceals hidden networks of intrigue and conflict. The most "practical" forms of social organization are dominated by the role they play in the retinues of a group of rulers within the state. The totalitarian state is also deeply fragmented. Goering and Himmler both created empires in certain sectors of the state apparatus and thereby within the social organization too, just as in Stalinian regimes the army or the police can become a state within the state.

2. If the social organization is stable, if it is not affected by serious crises, either in its internal functioning or in the domain of intersocial relations, and international relations in particular, then one can make the hypothesis that the state's role is mainly one of integration and therefore that the state's ideology is being increasingly developed, particularly in the domain of socialization. It is less a question of establishing coherent norms for society's functioning than of inculcating them in the citizens, and especially in the younger generation. The pursuit of consensus, the diffusion of values, these are the essential tasks of this integrating type of state. Serious economic or international crises. on the other hand, force the State into a more organizing role. It is mobilized by the urgent necessity of finding resources, of reestablishing equilibria, of providing security.

But it must be added that this distinction between the integrating state and the organizing state is a "weaker" one than those introduced earlier, since the form this role takes is dependent upon the state of the political system and above all of class relations. A revolutionary state is usually coping with a serious crisis of the social organization, which may go as far as a foreign war, civil war, severe food shortage. Such a state cannot be purely organizing. But it cannot be defined as integrating at the social organization level. It is borne

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by a social movement, which is a very different thing; it intervenes very force­fully in the field of historicity, and this intervention is directly associated with an organizing action, just as Carnot, the "organizer of victory," was associated with Robespierre and with all the social movements combined within the Jacobin action. There is no question here of constructing an ever more complex typology that would only prove to be a bad compromise between the pursuit of principles of sociological analysis and the direct knowledge of historical situations. What we are doing, on the contrary, is putting forward a few simple propositions that together will make it possible to account as succinctly as possible for the diversity of observable situations.

e. From State as Warrant to State as Ruler

Our analyses have been limited to a consideration of the state in its relations with the different social systems.

But is this not to place ourselves in fact in a particular historical situation, and can one maintain this separation of state from "civil society" outside the limited framework of the industrialized capitalist societies that have intro­duced the separation of these two terms? The objection is not unfounded, but its consequences are less far-ranging than may at first appear. It leads rather to the differentiation of several components in the state's action//^ the types of society that precede industrialization the cultural model introduces a metasocial warrant for the social order. Historicity is not lived and thought as praxis, but as order established and maintained by a sovereign, by the state, an order which replaces the religious warrants of social order before itself being replaced by "economic" warrants, which finally yield in their turn to a purely "practical," scientific, and technical view of historicity. The state defines the order in which class relations are placed; at the same time it extends its dominion to the political system and social organization. But this does not mean that society is reduced to being merely the work of the state. The state is all-powerful in the realm of social reproduction, but it is also dominated by class relations and by the forms of social organization that resist its intervention.

Its weakness is the other face of its strength. It does not direct social practice, it only establishes order. Not that this prevents it from intervening in class relations and politics. We must therefore distinguish inside this type of state what belongs to the societal state, the warrant of order, and what to the political statey generally speaking the integrator or go-between.

It is a reversal of this situation that characterizes postindustrial society. Here the state intervenes in the field of historicity as an increasingly important component of the ruling class. This happens not only in so-called socialist countries, but also in societies that have remained capitalist in which the interdependence of state and the large enterprises is increasingly

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evident, as much when planning is mainly private as when it is mainly public. The state controls ever vaster areas of society as the production system

imposes an increasingly integrated management of a technico-human whole. Everywhere, or almost everywhere, education, health services, and housing are the object of growing intervention by the state, while the state is mobilizing the ever vaster resources required by scientific and technical development and the search for power.

Is this to say that the state can be reduced to its membership of the ruling class? Assuredly not, and the variety of types of postindustrial society forming before our eyes is a very convincing proof of this. Here again we must distinguish between two components of state action: the ruling state and the political state.

This is why the growing role of the state in the economic management of society cannot lead us to think that class conflicts have been transcended and that the political system is no more than the instrument of state power. In the industrialized capitalist countries we are seeing rather a dissociation of the state apparatus. On the one hand the technocratic state that manages large organizations and intervenes in the functioning of others; on the other, a state whose role is determined by the situation of class relations and the characteristics of the political system and social organization.

Between these two situations, pre- and postindustrial, the state is no longer a metasocial warrant of the social order but is not yet a manager of large organizations. This is why in industrial societies it is often identified with the political system. Such an identification is never acceptable.

These different roles of the state do not simply succeed one another like the stages in some historical evolution. They combine in an invariably complex manner, so that the apparent unity of the state has to be broken down by sociological analysis. Let us look at the present French state. It retains many aspects of its former role as metasocial warrant. One addresses it as though it were the sovereign, expressing a respect and humility that are the recognition of its sacred nature. It maintains a preindustrial system of historical action whose most visible element is the type of organization that Weber termed bureaucratic. The rule is more important to it than the goal. Its rigidity, its sense of hierarchy, its division into superimposed quasi castes with almost no intercommunication—all these have often been described, sometimes with admiration but usually with irritation, for its archaism in an industrialized society is evident. But it is difficult to persuade the agents of the state that their social function is not reducible to "the general interest," that the great public bodies or the teaching profession are not above society, above its class relations and its political system, that they are not just pure professionals acting in the name of their proficiency and for the good of all, above and beyond private interests.

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This grandiose and long out-of-date image is very far from corresponding to reality, however. This state-warrant has been sapped for some time by the change in society. The state as protector is often no more than a state as patronage, colonized by group interests and political forces that have become deposited in superimposed layers throughout its administration. This disor­ganization of the state is at once the contrary of its abstract rationality and its complement, the consequence of its nonadaptation to the society in which it is placed.

Behind this state-warrant and this "politicized" state there also appears the state-manager, which itself has two different aspects. It is in the first place an interventionist state, developed by popular contestation, especially at the time of the Front populaire and at the Liberation, pressured by the unions, organizer of the joint production committees and Social Security. It is also the instrument of the modernization of the ruling class, first substituting itself for that class in order to reconstruct the country's eco­nomic superstructure, in order to create large production structures, then, as large capitalist production groups formed, associating itself with them in order to aid industrial development. In this managing role it was helped by its old role as warrant. The high stewards of state planning are the descendants of the great royal stewards, so that the technocrats had no trouble in occupying the places of a civil and military aristocracy more concerned with power than money. But this state also ensures the continuity of the ruling classes and of the instruments for the reproduction of social inequality. While modernizing the upper class it also maintains the old social and cultural barriers, without for all that giving up its role as agent for the defense of numerous group interests that are not part of the ruling class. It therefore plays four principal roles:

warrant political

m odernizing dom inciting

Hence the constant ambiguity of the judgments passed upon it, for it is at the same time "Napoleonist" and "social-democratic," and these terms are in their turn confused also, for the Napoleonist state is at the same time the warrant of order and the modernizing agent of the new ruling class, whereas the social-democratic state is at the same time open to political pressures and a relay station for social domination. Those who attack the archaism of the present state are often also those who defend the interests of the new technocratic ruling class, whereas those who defend it find it easy to accept its role of social domination.

Nothing could show more clearly the dangers of analyses that give precedence to the problems of the state, as though the state were the central

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principle of social activity, whereas its unifying role is always sufficiently limited to oblige analysis to give priority to a definition of the system of historical action, of class relations, of the political system, and of the forms of social organization before going on to define the roles and functioning of the state.

f. Conclusion

The state, insofar as it overflows the political system, produces a rhetoric that replaces social dialectics, the tensions between the elements of the various social systems, and the conflicts between actors, with an apparently "posi­tive" discourse, but one that is forced to resort to arbitrary statements in order to reunite opposing or contradictory elements. The autonomy of this state rhetoric is greater as the society is more heterogeneous, as its political system is more bounded or more blocked, as the social organization is more in crisis. But it should also be said that although the state conceals society, it also gives society a unity that is more than merely constrictive. The state masks the tensions of the system of historical action, class conflicts, political interactions, but, because it links together all the levels of social reality, it has an extremely strong capacity for mobilization, it is the creator of community. This other face of the state is what modern societies term the nation. If the homeland is the identification of a field of historicity with a territorial collectivity identified with its values, then the nation, by contrast, is the mass upsurge of social organization to the level of historicity, and it is the state that beats the drums of the soldiers of the Year II, of the Red Army, or of those who fought in Viet Nam. In an age of large enterprises and large empires, of sciences and techniques, of strategies and growth, the nation still is more than ever, in all parts of the globe where essential social changes are being undertaken, the great force of social mobilization. There is no social movement of any scope that does not aim to breathe back life and creativity into the nation, and that is not powered by fhe Utopia of the state's absorption into the nation. But it is also this striving that gives the state more might, and that constantly creates the danger of dissolving the nation into mere subjects and transforming zeal into orthodoxy, into conformism, or into servility.

Beside the state as rhetorician and the state as nation there also exists the state as dominator, placing itself above class conflict and the political system.

It is against this state that protest movements form with the principal objective of "taking power," of seizing the state apparatus.Tt is a Tact tbat such a collective action exists, definable more directly by its relation to the state than in terms of conflict between social classes or the functioning of the political system. It even seems that "political" actors must always be defined by their relation to the state, since the latter is an agent of synthesis in social

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life and represents the concrete unity of a field of historicity, a political system, and a social organization. Political parties are not actors in the politi­cal system only; they represent classes or fractions of classes or coalitions of classes; they also mobilize and defend demands arising in all sectors of the social organization. They therefore act on the state, shelter behind it, or combat it.

This transcendence of political institutions by the political actors them­selves enables us to dismiss the various utilitarianist theories, whether those of Bentham or Destutt de Tracy or those of the "incrementalists" in our own century. Law is based on something other than itself and the process of decision making. But beyond the law and the representation of particular interests, beyond the political system, there are two principles of unification that can intervene.

First, the field of historicity, whether in the form of the system of historical action or the action of a class. The law and the political system as a whole rest upon a metasocial warrant of the social order or upon social development itself. They can also represent the dominion of the ruling class or, on the contrary, a popular movement overturning the institutions and taking power.

The state is the other principle of unification. If we are dealing with the organizing state, the sovereign confronting other sovereignties, then this state domination is limited.

But there is a constant tendency for these two transcendences to become confused. The confusion is purely doctrinal when the field of historicity is referred to as sovereignty of the people. What in fact is a "people"? Is it the consensus that Rousseau hoped would be expressed in referendums? But the confusion is much more serious when the state is identified with a class, with a system of historical action, or, more generally still, with the "march of history." The state is the supreme actor of history, the one at the center of wars, of revolutions, of economic transformations. But it is like a steward destroying the forces that have given him his power and reversing their purposes.

The law can be transcended only by the opening of the field of historicity, by class relations, and by the tensions between the orientations of the system of historical action. When it is transcended by a principle of social organization, then society is standing on its head.

It is probably impossible for the greatest and most admired upheavals to occur otherwise, for progress to have any agent other than absolute power, or any liberty other than despotism.

At least we must remember that when the armies, the police forces, the "organic" intellectuals, and the state bureaucracy impose their will on society, what vanishes into the shadow of state power has only one means of survival and expression: the intelligentsia. It is the intelligentsia alone,

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protected by its ability and its proximity to power, even at the price of great suffering and usually long persecutions, which remembers that above the state, even above the law, there are class relations and historicity.

The extreme visibility of the state apparatus and the political parties may give rise to a belief that the state is the central principle of society's functioning, that society is the work of the state, that conquest of the state means the creation of a new society. This is an illusion constantly present in all societies in which the political parties are more easily defined by their relation to the state than by their action upon the system of historical action, in which the "political0 constantly preponderates over the "social.VLet us therefore sum up what we have been saying. The state is not set above society; nor is it a pure instrument of unification of social practice for the benefit of the dominant class. Locus and agent of communication between the levels of social reality, it is always set within a mode of social domination but is not identified with it. So class conflicts are always more fundamental than struggles for control of the state, and parties are never the simple expression of social movements, and even less the agents of their formation. Reformist action, like revolutionary action, both of which correspond to different processes of social change, must never be confused with the social movements that are manifesting the class conflict in a given field of historicity, and that enter into relations with institutional pressures and organizational demands that are never entirely governed by the action of the parties and the struggle for the state.

It is the priority given to the study of social structure over that of the state, it is the recognition of the system of historical action and class relations as fundamental determinants of social action that are the justification for my insistence on the absence of unity proper in state action, and on the necessity of breaking that action down in order to achieve a genuine sociological analysis and, more particularly, to reveal the nature of social movements.

SOCML ORGANIZATION

Introduction: Where Sociology and History Meet

One is always tempted to represent social organization as the expression of a central principle, such as values or domination. An analysis conducted in terms of historicity, of the system of historical action, of class relations, takes us in a quite opposite direction.

First of all, it recognizes within organizations the meeting of technique and power, concrete forms of the system of historical action and class domina­tion, and distinguishes between different categories of organization accord­ing to their proximity to or distance from the field of historicity, which always imposes tensions and conflicts upon them. This in turn makes it necessary to conceive of organizations as systems of relations between simultaneously complementary and opposing elements, rather than as the work of an omnipotent power or of central values* It then shows how the practice of society, far from possessing a true unity, is nothing but the superimposition onto one and the same surface of all the levels of social reality. And this forces us to recognize that if social practice does have a certain unity, it owes it neither to values nor to the dominant class, but to the state.

We must never look for unity at the level of concrete collectivities: their functioning is not a system. Only analysis enables us to isolate fundamental mechanisms in society. No collectivity is homogeneous, or entirely corre­sponds to a sociological type. We are in that no-man's-land here where sociologist and historian must bring their respective methods as close together as possible.

The greater a society's historicity, the greater too is its heterogeneity. The acceleration of change does not modify all the elements of social and cultural

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life jointly. "Modern" societies present themselves as geographical wholes within which geological analysis will differentiate between formations be­longing to different ages. It is true that these societies have an ever increasing capacity for action upon themselves, and that in consequence they are instituting increasingly profound upheavals in their heritage from the past. They tend to be defined by their present functioning rather than by their bonds with previous social forms; but this characteristic feature of modern societies only serves to reinforce their heterogeneity. Our societies are not content with using merely the coal or oil laid down in distant geological times; they also burrow down into past cultural deposits, where they find forms of authority, of family organization, of religious belief that do not simply vanish beneath the layers of change. And dominated societies, struggling for their independence and their development, depend even more on the support of their past, that is, on the reality of the life of their people, in order to mobilize that life against the dominant power.

Hence the ambiguity of the word to which sociology ought to give the clearest meaning of all: society. We always have a tendency to view a sociopolitical collectivity as a society. We talk for the sake of convenience about French society, or American or Soviet society; and this is confusing and even dangerous if such expressions give rise to a belief in some direct correspondence, to an exact coincidence between a field of historicity, an institutional framework, and a territorial collectivity.

This unity is not to be found at a social level proper; it can only be the work of the state, insofar as the state, as we saw in the previous chapter, acts in such a way as to link the field of historicity, the political system, and the social organization together.

The important thing at the outset is to recognize the heterogeneity of social organization. This is something that can only be displayed by historical rather than sociological excerpting. There is nothing wrong in itself with the old exercise that history books used to be so fond of: a picture of France in 1610, or in the mid-nineteenth century. It can in fact be very useful as a means of showing that the social organization of a collectivity at any given date has no real unity, that a description of it is the opposite of a synchronic analysis. In the same way, the pictures provided by regional geography help to break down the surface unity of observable phenomena, as historical geography has clearly shown.

Nothing could be more foreign to sociology than the search for the spirit of an age or for national psychologies. Such terms confuse real historical experience with sociological analysis. These generalizations, far from having an explanatory capacity, are merely clumsy attempts to keep up with historical change. The "spirit" of French society changes with that society. It is not a searchlight picking out the way ahead; it is at most the flickering glow of the red light on the caboose.

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These remarks should not be taken lightly: they may help in the avoidance of conceptions less naive than those just referred to.

Do we not often read studies of a society's "system of values"? I have already criticized this type of analysis and the use of the concept of values, which leads to the representation of society as the expression—the social organization—of cultural orientations, with class conflicts and political conflicts left out. But this procedure calls for a different type of criticism: it is presupposing in fact that a territorial collectivity, a historically and geo­graphically defined whole, corresponds totally to a societal whole, to a field of historicity. —

The rejection of such a representation leads at the same time to the elimination of another, apparently opposite, idea according to which the social organization as a whole is the concrete expression of a social domination. That a dominant class is exercising dominion over the whole formed by the social organization as well as over the political system is a proposition easily accepted, for it is practically tautological. What would a dominant class be if it did not dominate anything, if it were nothing but a powerful interest group, though acting upon a supposedly completely open market? One cannot speak of domination unless there is power involved, which is to say the capacity to determine the forms of social organization. But it is a long way from that scarcely contestable statement to the idea that a social organization is the concrete expression of the dominating power. And along that way we meet successively the system of historical action, which governs the nature of class domination and of class relations as opposed to being the result of its action, the capacity for action on the part of the popular classes, which are dominated but not entirely alienated, the relative autonomy of the political system, and lastly the even greater autonomy of the social organization as complex historical datum. We must therefore, if we are to avoid all confusion at the outset, accept at least temporarily that a particular social organization is not a system, is not a coherent whole, all of whose parts can be defined by their interrelations, so that any modification introduced at any point of the whole would entail systematic modifications to all the components of that whole.

We began with historicity and the system of historical action, which is to say the action exercised by society on itself, before introducing the theme, quite as fundamental as the first, of class conflicts. On that level one is dealing with systems that are not controlled, ruled, managed. There is no power that keeps them in order, even though the system of historical action, like the system of social classes, naturally tends to react against imbalances and crises. It is not until we reach the institutional or political level of our analysis that a concrete society, and thus a decision system, can be introduced.

One has onlv to continue in the same direction in order to encounter—on

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the level of 4,social organization," of the practice of a historically defined society—particular units that we shall have to call organizations, formed for the pursuit of specific goals, directed by a power that establishes forms of authority and determines the statuses and the roles of the various organiza­tions' members. An enterprise, an administration, a hospital are all organiza­tions, but a national society can also be analyzed with the aid of this concept.

An organization therefore has two faces. It is situated within a societal whole, which is to say within a field of historicity and a political system. It also occurs in a historical situation—and a geographical one—the analysis of which lies to some extent outside sociology.

1. The organization is not a primary datum for analysis. A capitalist industrial enterprise is not the work of an entrepreneur whose action could be explained in socially indeterminate terms, by the spirit of innovation, the will to profit, or as a reaction against poverty. It is nothing more than a concrete and particular manifestation of a system of historical action and class relations. It is also an activity regulated by decisions emanating from the political system.

The power of the manager of an organization does not rest upon his authority within that organization; on the contrary, his authority is founded upon his power, which is the application within the organizational frame­work of his ruling and dominant role as an element of the upper class.

An organization can never be defined solely by its relations with the environment. Such a definition is no more than the ideology of organizational power. Every organization possesses a certain dominion over at least a part of the environment. Just as no school responds exclusively to the demands of its pupils, so no firm responds purely to the demands of the market. Both, in different ways, have the capacity to impose their own objectives on the environment.

2. But an organization is also a decision-making unit set in a historical environment. This means two things.

First, the one already mentioned. An organization does not belong to a field of historicity only. It acts by making use of available resources in a given historical situation. Managers and managed are burdened with behavior and representations inherited from the past. This is something particularly visible in organizations with a socializing role, such as schools.

Secondly, an organization is a decision center that acts in relation to other decision centers. All organizations, not only state organizations, have intersocial relations dominated by war and diplomacy. The more autono­mous the decision center, the more importance problems of war and peace have for it. The objectives of survival, conquest, power, can never be analyzed independently of the field of historicity and the political system in which they

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occur, but nor can they be reduced to the mere functioning of a society. It is illusory to view international relations as social relations within a global society; similarly there always exist intersocial relations to some degree between organizations, relations of competition, of alliance, of aggression, of negotiation.

Nothing could emphasize better than these elementary observations the gap that separates this analysis of organizations from a general conception of social orgahTzafion7The further one moves from the field of historicity, the more the system's unity fragments, the more social relations give way to strategic relations. It is never possible to reduce the behavior of an organization to one of the levels of analysis; it is set in one or several fields of historicity and hence in the same number of cultural models and sets of class relations; it exerts an influence within a political system; it acts upon a market and creates a strategy and intersocial relations for itself. The relations between great powers cannot be reduced to a class struggle at international level; nor can they be fully analyzed without reference to class relations within a system of production.

Finally, it may help to restate clearly the use made in this book of words that are often employed interchangeably in everyday language. I have no right to impose definitions, but 1 owe it to the reader to try to avoid confusions or obscurity. Sociological practice—of mainly functionalist inspir­ation—has led increasingly to the use of the term "institutions" for what I call organizations. Moreover, we are constantly referring in everyday life to associations or even to social movements as "organizations." I have called "institutions" the legally regulated forms of legitimate decision making. I call "organizations" those collective units of action utilizing specific catego­ries of resources, fulfilling a legitimate function, and managed by a specific mode of authority. What I call "associations" are voluntary groupings formed in order to act upon the political system, class relations, or the system of historical action. I shall therefore not speak of economic or academic "institutions" when referring to businesses or schools, but shall use the word "organizations"; I shall not speak of political, or union, or religious "organizations," but of "associations." I shall, however, speak of the organization of enterprises or of political parties or of religious activities, since it seems to me that the distinction to be made is clear enough in any particular context.

A. The Organizational System

An organization is not the result of an arbitrary cross-sectioning of social activity, as would seem to be implied by muddled expressions such as: the

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political, economic, or educational organization of a country, but a set of means governed by an authority with a view to performing a function recognized in a given society as legitimate.

a. Dimensions

A society's field of historicity is formed of a system of historical action and class relations. The orientations of the system of historical action—cultural model, mobilization, hierarchization, needs—can be defined independently of class relations, though it must always be remembered that those relations determine the social control of the system of historical action.

Such a separation is no longer possible at the level of organizations; just as it was not possible even at the level of the political system. Within the framework of an organization, a power is exercised over the management of certain social resources. This power of management is not separable from class domination; those resources and their utilization are not separable from the system of historical action or, more precisely, from its social elements— mobilization and hierarchization.

The power defines an organization's objectives and its norms. These latter are never purely technical, and resist reduction to social utility defined by a form of production. The objective of a capitalist enterprise is certainly to produce consumable goods or services, but it is also and equally to produce a profit. An educational organization produces human beings certified to possess certain knowledge or the capacity to perform certain tasks, but this objective is not separable from the function of recruitment into the social classes or from that of the reproduction of social inequalities. It is impossible to reduce education to professional training, as though it were situated simultaneously above and below class relations without any participation in them.

By power, therefore, I mean the projection onto an organization of a class domination legitimated by the political system. Power is not reducible to authority, a specifically organizational concept, or to influence, a concept that belongs in an analysis of the political system. In a production organiza­tion, shop stewards may win a certain authority, even though that authority is not institutionalized. Union representatives may also acquire a certain influence and affect or even impose decisions. But they generally know that they have not attained power and, more concretely, that their action is always situated in relation to a legitimated domination from which they are excluded.

They must therefore oppose that domination with the force of a social movement, mobilized by consciousness of a conflict of power. An organiza­tion is never solely a system of cooperation. Violence and the relations of force are always present in it and cannot be reduced to pressures exerted on

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the decision system, for power is not the product of the decision system; rather it is what defines that system's limits, as we have already seen in our analysis of the institutions.

The forms of organizations, and the norms that govern their functioning, are manifestations of the orientations of the system of historical action. It is possible to follow the transition from one system of historical action to another as one moves from the rational-legal, state-type of organization on to the pursuit of productivity by the so-called scientific organization of labor, then on again to the goal-oriented organization of the most modern organizations.

Any organization therefore yokes together a power with a resource, a class domination with a form of labor. Any organization that could be wholly defined in terms of the power exercised within it, without encountering any instrumental constraint, whether technical or commercial in nature, would cease to exist as such. This case does exist; it is that of organizations that perform no labor, like a prison or, to a certain degree, a hospital.

I shall return to that case, but it is clear for the moment that it cannot really be counted here as an organization. It is still more difficult to imagine purely technical organizations. And here it must be made clear that the power in an organization is not always exercised directly, as in the case of an enterprise with economic goals inside which that power is embodied in a "boss." A hospital or a university also uses social resources in terms of a mode of social domination, even though those who exercise authority inside them may be unaware of it.

The second oppositional pair that defines the functioning of an organiza­tion has been briefly referred to. An organization has an action simulta­neously inside and outside itself. On the one hand it defines its objectives and organizes exchanges; on the other, it establishes norms and maintains its equilibrium, which is to say the relations between its parts that are compatible with its integration and with the pursuit of its objectives. It is through its^objectiyes that the organization belongs most directly to a society, that it depends, in other words, on a field of historicity and a political system. Inversely, the problems of internal equilibrium are ultimately definable in terms of the ordering of its means and without reference to the higher levels of analysis. The production flow will demand that certain internal equilibria be maintained in order to avoid bottlenecks or the underuse of some part of the production apparatus. Socially, this also reminds us that every organiza­tion must provide a certain congruence of statuses. When the same work is carried out by people whose remuneration differs markedly, a serious organizational crisis will follow and a feeling of injustice or inequality on the part of the disadvantaged which will exacerbate other internal grievances throughout the organization.

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The preceding observations lead us to recognize that an organization is always simultaneously dependent and autonomous. It is dependent upon both technical constraints and social objectives, but it is autonomous in that it is a decision center that can establish exchanges with the outside as well as internal norms of functioning. This autonomy may be very restricted, in particular in the case of administrations with the responsibility for executing political decisions. The image of the enterprise, on the other hand, particu­larly a commercial or financial one, would seem to offer a great independence of decision. But it is impossible to imagine an organization that is either entirely dependent or entirely autonomous.

b. Elements

The combination of these three oppositional pairs leads us to define the elements of the organizational system in the manner presented in figure 25. An organization is the whole formed by the means of management bringing objectives and technical resources into relation. But what figure 25 attempts to clarify is that an organization is not simply the adaptation of means to goals. The elements of the system are linked to one another by two types of relation.

external internal

power objectives

technique exchanges Z>*^ ^ ^ equilibria

Figure 25

1. In the first place, each of the elements stands in opposition to the three others on two of the constituent axes of the system. This situation, the same as that found in the system of historical action or the political system, shows clearly that a social system is not governed by a central principle, by a system of values, a type of interest, or a spirit. It is even more indispensable that we should be reminded of this here than in the other cases, for the system of historical action cannot easily be identified with an actor—even though Society is still much too often talked about as though it were a will—whereas it is tempting to analyze organizations immediately in terms of actors, usually in order to identify them with their managers. An organization should first of all be defined as a system. This system has no center, so that there is no one principle unifying the elements of its functioning. An organization, like a

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political system, cannot function successfully unless it has a way of managing broadly opposing demands. For the pursuit of certain objectives is always in tension with the maintenance of the internal equilibrium, as also with the establishment of norms of functioning and even with the conduct of ex­changes with the outside world.

These tensions can be best displayed by replacing the diagram of the organizational system by its opposite, which is to say by a typology identifying each of the system's elements with a type of organization. In this way one could distinguish between productive, commercial, management, and technical organizations. Organizations of the first type would be governed by their objectives, by their will toward the attainment of certain goals, to increase their production, their profits, or their power. Those of the second type would be guided above all by concern with their exchanges with the outside and therefore with their constant adaptation to an environment, a market in a permanent state of change. Those of the third type would give more importance to administrative management or to what is commonly referred to as organization, which is to say to their internal functioning. Organizations of the fourth type would be concerned above all with their technical and professional coherence, and with the efficient arrangement of their instruments of production.

Such a typology holds little interest, for all our effort has been directed to showing that no organization can exempt itself from responding simulta­neously to all four kinds of exigencies. It does, however, indicate how divergent those exigencies are, and makes it possible to throw light on certain tensions that set different departments or different groups of actors in opposition within the same organization. Technicians, brokers, administrators, and managers all tend to give priority to one of the elements of the organizational system.

2. But the interdependence of the elements and their oppositions should not make us forget their hierarchical relations. No organization exists other than in relation to objectives, to goals. An organization cannot be reduced to a set of means put at the service of objectives defined entirely from the outside. Even a public administration possesses a certain capacity to define its objectives, to work out a ''policy." The unit that does not possess this capacity ought to be termed an establishment, meaning that it cannot be isolated from the larger whole of which it forms part and which does possess a certain autonomy of decision. An enterprise, a firm, is an organization, a factory is no more than an establishment. A secondary school is simply an educational establishment, but the French Ministry of Education is an organization. Adaptation to the environment and internal administration are the means by which objectives are realized and which in consequence determine the nature of the technical means to be employed—means always

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possessing an autonomous reality, imposing specific constraints, which must be taken into account in the fixing of the objectives but which certainly do not form the basis on which the organization is constituted.

This hierarchy of the elements, which may be represented graphically in following way:

objectives

exchanges norms

equilibrium

makes it clear above all that the organizational system can never be isolated from the hierarchy of social systems in which it occupies the lowest place. This subordinate position obviously does not indicate that organizations are in any way lacking in importance, for it is impossible to think of a society without enterprises, without schools, without administrations, and so on, at least in the differentiated societies with which we are dealing. It means that a society is not an aggregate of organizations negotiating their political relations in order to succeed in constituting a certain type of overall society. The whole formed by the organizations puts into practice, beyond the particularities specific to each of them individually, social and cultural orientations, and class relations, governed by a political system.

c. Continuity and Innovation

The system of historical action and the system of class relations have been defined as systems without centers. There is no authority that manages them or controls the boundary between inside and outside, so that several systems of historical action or of class relations can be mixed and combined within a single territorial society. The political system is relatively "open," since it is upstream from the legitimate decisions that are the output of its functioning, but it is also bounded in that it corresponds to a political unit and exercises its sovereignty over a well-defined social whole. An organizational system is closed: it is downstream from those decisions, it possesses precise boundaries within which an authority is exercised and rules are applied. Its leaders therefore have the attributes of power, which is to say the capacity to make peace and war outside and the twin capacity of integration and repression inside. No organization exists that does not possess both formal and informal mechanisms of integration and socialization. Certain types of conduct are expected of members of an organization, and deviants are punished or excluded in accordance with procedures over which the organization has control. These terms are only excessive if one is thinking of social units that are not solely organizations but are also political systems, and in whlcE popular social movements occur that can stand up to and retaliate against

Social Organization 245

the organizational authority/We shall consider in a moment the superimpo-sition of various social systems within one organizational framework. But it has to be recognized that no organization can be entirely institutionalized, in other words, politicized, without disappearing. One can imagine a society in which all the organizations^ have been transformed into voluntary associa­tions, butfn fact one is more likely to find that the voluntary associations also have organizational aspects and thus rules and sanctions of their own. This is why if is difficult to imagine an organization without a mode of remunera­tion. Wages, whatever the name actually used for them, are the principal means of integration and sanction. Whoever can display most of whatever it is that is most favored by the organization, whether it be productivity, seniority, or qualifications, receives a higher remuneration, and whoever is to be punished is deprived of all or part of his wages. An organization has mastery over the definition of its criteria of selection, of promotion or demotion, and of redundancy, even though that power may have limits set to it by law or by a collective contract.

The organization's power is more visible in the state seen as an organiza­tion, but it would be artjficial to establish a difference in kind between private and public organizations, or between organizations with specific aims and societal organizations. Every organization is in some way a state. This power is large and visible because the organization as state is a complex historical unit many of whose elements are not really integrated. Hence the autonomy of the state in relation to a societal type; hence too the autonomy of an organization's managers in relation to a mode of production. An organization does not live solely in a society but also in the midst of events that it produces and experiences. Perhaps this is what enables it to transcend the tensions and the elements that constitute it. The manager of an organization has sometimes been represented as an arbiter who listens, conciliates, negotiates, and is constantly concerned with adaptation and integration. This image had the merit of making it easy to grasp the problems of the organization as a system, and to move beyond the old image of the entrepreneur at the very moment when the central importance of large organizations in the advanced industrial societies first became clear. But it is also an image as inadequate as that of a purely conciliatory government would be. The statesman, the manager of an organization, is in the first place that person who upsets equilibria and rules, who defines a policy, who conceives objectives before considering with a member of his cabinet or his board of directors the best way of reducing the tensions created by the upset.

An organization deprived of innovation is directly menaced with being increasingly absorbed in the resolution of the inevitable tensions between the various elements of its functioning.

On the other hand, it is impossible for an organization to take initiatives if

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it has no way of managing its tensions. I am speaking here not of its con­flicts—those created by grievances, institutional pressures, or social move­ments—but simply of the tensions that occur between the four elements: objectives, norms, exchanges, and internal stability. This interdependence of the capacity for initiative and the management of tensions lies at the heart of the problem of organizations, for it expresses their double nature: they are specific units of action and they belong to a field of historicity and to a political society. They are at the same time system and unit of action.

This is one of the reasons why an organization can never completely transform itself into a political system, never be reduced to the organization of cooperation. It must be a management unit, in order to respond to the constraints of the environment and of its own production apparatus. Knowledge of those constraints, and the handling of them, always imposes a concentration of the capacity for decision, whatever the social mode of determination of the objectives and the nature of the political transactions within the organization.

The other reason is not connected with the effect of techniques but with those of power, which is to say class relations. Sometimes the dominion of the ruling class is direct. The functioning of capitalist enterprises is governed, at a level transcending the particular units of production, by the formation and maintenance of capitalist profit. Sometimes it is more indirect, passing through the intermediary of the state, and therefore of sociologically more heterogeneous coalitions. Urban administrations cannot be understood if one dissociates them from their role of maintaining and reinforcing class distinctions and inequality.

The fact that certain organizational units are also the locus of a particular political system does not in any way permit us to conclude that we are witnessing a "transition from organizations proper to organizational systems" as it is expressed in the terminology of Crozier, who calls organizational systems what I term political systems. "The simple and rigid organiza­tions of the past, based upon a constrictive model imposing defensive gambits," writes Crozier, "are giving way slowly to more flexible and complex organizations based on a model of cooperative play. While these systems are becoming increasingly flexible and regimented, organizations are becoming increasingly flexible and open like political systems" ("Sentiments, organization, et systemes," Revue francaise de sociologies no. 5, 1971, p. 148). Two distinct orders of fact are confused here. First there is the correct observation of the transition from organization by rules to organiza­tion by objectives, and the transcendence by social practice of the type that Weber termed bureaucratic. But this in no way implies that the functioning of modern organizations is drawing closer to that of an open political system. Need I make the point that management by objective has received its most

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spectacular applications in the area of military operations? The amalgama­tion of organization and institution is nothing but the application of a social ^ ideology that wishes to see all social relations as being entirely capable of institutionalization, so that power becomes no more than influence, and ' domination is denied.

The distance between organizations and institutions, and the former's autonomy, is governed both by the existence of technical and commercial constraints and by the projection onto the organization of the domination of the ruling class.

d. Crises of the System

The structural tensions of the organizational system have to be mastered, yet they never can be so entirely. Every organization is always threatened by crisis. And the concept of crisis has the same meaning here as in the earlier analysis of historical action, or of the political system, or even of the system of class relations. A crisis is the breaking of one of the system's axes.

The one most often described is the rupture between outside and inside, between objectives and norms, exchanges and technical equilibria. In a producer organization it can take the form of a dissociation between com­mercial and financial policy on the one hand and administrative and technical management on the other. In today's universities there is likewise a great difficulty in reconciling certain social functions—defined both by the educational demands of those accepted and the training requirements of the world they will be entering—with internal exigencies involving both the creation of new knowledge and the organization's functional norms.

If crisis leads to explosion, then the organization breaks down. On the one hand it closes itself off inside its internal problems, thereby isolating itself from its environment; on the other, it engages in initiatives that are no longer sanctioned by the capacity to engage the entire organization: the administra­tion no longer follows.

The nature of this crisis, as of the others, can be more exactly defined if we present the organizational system as in figure 26. The separation of outside and inside brings with it to begin with a confusion between objectives and exchanges. The objectives become autonomous, since they are no longer imposing themselves upon the functioning of an organization. They are reduced to a will to conquest. In the opposite direction, the exchanges are unbalanced by this crisis and are no longer anything but submission to exter­nal constraints. The action turned toward the outside thus becomes a mix­ture of arbitrary initiatives inspired by the spirit of conquest and a very dependent and very arduous adaptation to external constraints. The picture here is of a power detached from an organization, for example, a state power no longer restrained by norms and equilibria, or of an economic power en-

248 Chapter Five

Outside Inside

dependence autonomy autonomy dependence

power objectives

technique exchanges equilibria

Figure 26

gaging in speculation rather than the orientation of a production organiza­tion. Parallel to this, the norms, detached from the objectives, can no longer be based on anything but the pursuit of the organization's survival, while the equilibrium of the apparatus governing the organization's functioning ex­plodes and is replaced by the internal exigencies of each of the whole's com­ponents, by the predominance of specialization.

Figure 27 shows what one might term the counter-elements of the organi­zational system. All forms of crisis end up by replacing elements of the organizational system with counterelements. These counterelements, instead of combining into a system of their own, instead of being simultaneously opposing and complementary, are contradictory of each other. Conquest is in contradiction to constraints, as concern for survival is to specialization.

power

technique

Figure 27

dependence

objectives

constraints

Outside autonomy

conquest

exchanges

Inside autonomy

norms

specialization

dependence

survival

equilibria

The break between inside and outside brings with it the dissociation of the elements belonging to each of the two halves thus torn apart.

The other types of crisis have the same effects. The rupture between power and technique, between ends and means, gives greatest importance to the contradictions between conquest and survival on the one hand and between constraints and specialization on the other. The instrumental components of the organization are at once forced back upon themselves and subjected to a passive adaptation to the changes of the environment, while power no longer

Social Organization 249

has any reason for being except its own reproduction. The striving for conquest is motivated not by objectives but by the ever greater difficulties involved in ensuring its survival, a flight headlong into disaster accentuated by the disorganization of the instrumental means. The further an organiza­tion's center of power is from its executive departments, the more likely this crisis is to occur. It is a constant theme in descriptions of military campaigns. The technical problems and the relation to the enemy impose themselves with obvious force, while objectives and norms are fixed on a very different level. The particular sensitivity of the army to these problems explains why the army was one of the first large organizations to do its utmost to shorten its chains of command and adopt management by objectives.

Lastly, the dissociation of dependence and autonomy brings with it the dissociation of constraints and survival on the one hand and of conquest and specialization on the other. This crisis is perhaps the most profound, since an organization, before being defined at its own level, must first be defined by the place it occupies in the hierarchy of social systems. Being a particular decision center and the locus of implementation of the field of historicity and the political system, it can hardly survive the dissociation of these two aspects of its nature. This crisis occurs particularly within an organization that is at the same time inserted in an administrative system and given the responsi­bility of production tasks that render it analogous to a private enterprise. It cannot combine two such opposite logics—its dependence and its autonomy.

As a response to all these crises, an organization cannot simply resort to a stronger integration of its elements, since the crisis arose from their disintegration. It is therefore faced with three solutions: either it moves closer to the levels above itf transforming itself into a simple agent of social control, thus being absorbed into the political system, which might be termed the administrative solution; or it strives to win the right to fix its objectives and norms at the lowest possible levels, by decentralizing decision making and broadening the scope of initiatives permitted at the bottom; or, last, it transforms itself into a veritable state within the state, into a sovereign power, into a "body" concerned with asserting its privileges, outlawing external pressures, and having its own disorder recognized as order.

B. Administrations, Enterprises, and Agencies

The organizational system as it has just been described defines a level of sociological analysis and not a set of directly_observable_social units.

But if, instead of moving downward from field of historicity to organiza­tions, one follows the opposite path, then it is no longer possible to encapsulate all organizations within the same formula. For certain of them are directly attached to the political system and do not participate in class

250 Chapter Five

relations or the system of historical action except via the intermediary of the political system, in other words, indirectly. These I term administrations. Others, on the contrary, are directly linked to class relations, while being political units. These are enterprises. Still others participate directly in the system of historical action, while also passing through class relations and the political system. For them 1 have employed the term agencies. An adminis­tration cannot possess a political system or class relations of its own. It is purely an agent for the execution of institutional decisions. An enter­prise, on the contrary, because it is directly linked to class relations, itself becomes a political locus; it is at the same time an organization and an institutional system. In the same way an agency is at once an organization, an institutional system, and an actor in class relations.

administrations * institutional system

enterprises •* institutional system - class relations

agencies - institutional system • class relations

system of historical action -"~~~

Figure 2&

In every case analysis in terms of organizational system is applied in the same way, but as one moves from administration to agency, so this analysis ceases to describe the whole functioning of the entity under consideration and concerns itself with one of its levels only.

a. Administrations

An administration is created by the sovereign, by the political system. Administrations form a whole that constitutes not the state—which is much more than a societal organization since it reaches across the whole of society and provides a more or less solid link between field of historicity, political system, and organizations—but the state's apparatus of execution.

If the state is reduced to its administrative apparatus, it is often said that jt is bureaucratized, which is to say that it is no longer anything but the implementation of the decisions of a political system, itself more or less completely subject to a class domination and the orientations of the system of historical action.

Administrations correspond to what Amitai Etzioni terms coercive organi­zations in his Modern Organizations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964). They are the apparatus of social control. This term points up the central problem of any administration. An administration has a tendency to cease being a true organization, to become reduced to a means for the

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application of political decisions and of the juridical texts that express them, and therefore to lose its technical dimension, that is, the two elements— exchanges and equilibrium—that are just as much constitutive of the organi­zational system as are objectives and norms. It is even questionable that we ought still to speak of objectives. In certain cases an administration is reduced to the application of internal norms. This is the case with repressive administrations and a great majority of total institutions. This term, used by Erving Goffman {Asylums, New York: Anchor Books, 1961), denotes organizations that totally enclose a population that leads its social life wholly within them and is thus entirely subjected to an authority that regulates all its activities. A hospital, an asylum, a prison, a boarding school, a hostel or home, a military camp, a ship at sea, and even a company town are among the best known examples of total institutions.

This type of organization experiences a permanent crisis arising from the dissociation of power and instrumentality. And this is further aggravated when the norms become isolated from its objectives, action directed in toward the interior of action directed toward the exterior. Such administra­tions are therefore criticized for being inefficient, incapable of adapting themselves to their environment, and finally for not really being managed at all. The French are quite accustomed to this type of experience; they think they are dealing with a public administration, and when they penetrate it, as one of its "patients" as it were, they are amazed to encounter nothing but a tangle of obligations, to find that the elements of the administrative whole have no communication among themselves, that a decision is made in the name of the rules and without any consideration of the effects on the management of the administration itself. Such an administration shuts itself away in secrecy because its objectives are defined above it and because its exchanges with the environment are all one way. Its internal equilibrium no longer has any meaning in the absence of all technical autonomy//All administrations are not of this type. Many make use of the techniques imposed by the manipulation of complex ensembles, have a certain capacity to define their objectives, at least on the operational level, and even direct their relations with a material and social environment. This is the case with the army, for example, and more generally with other administrations more directly linked to the state as I have defined it. The domination of norms tends therefore to become weaker, as one finds when the army is active, that is, in wartime, and the organization tends to assign itself wider and wider objec­tives, until it begins to stretch the bonds that keep it in subordination to the institutional system and the field of historicity./TJltimately this leads to the creation of total organizations, which are the complete opposite of total institutions and tend to behave as societies, or at least to assign themselves values of their own, a "spirit," and a high degree of technicality.

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But then the administration tends to become an agency, or at least to feel itself, like an agency, to be the depositary of a society's cultural model. An ill-founded pretension, since it is "forgetting" all that lies between and separates the system of historical action and the organizational system, in other words class relations and the political system. Such total organiza­tions are in practice identifying values and instrumental action, requiring from their members a moral integration and a consensus that are incompat­ible with recognition of the fundamental conflicts of orientation and with the organization of a system of negotiations and influence.

What is not recognized becomes deviant or clandestine. The political system finds its way back in the form of clans and cliques, at the top of the organization at least, and conflicts of interest are expressed in unofficial going slow, absenteeism, high turnover of personnel, theft or sabotage, and, more generally, by the formation of defensive informal organization that ends up by being tacitly recognizee^/

Every administration can be situated between these two extreme limits: the total institution and the total organization, extreme dependence of institu­tional decisions and the illusion of complete independence with relation to the political system and class relations.

In the total institution, disorganization is extreme, since a single one of the elements of the organizational system—norms—is invading the territory of all the others. In the total organization, on the contrary, what appears is a superorganization with compensating resistance mechanisms.

Superficially these two types have common attributes, and this is what leads us to speak in both cases of bureaucracy: resistance to change, incapacity to deal with demands coming from either inside or outside. But this resemblance is no more than superficial. It is better not to speak of bureaucracy except in the case of total organizations, and to term the functioning of the total institutions disorganization.

The total organization strives to sever the bonds of dependence that keep it in subordination to the political system and the field of historicity, and its aspirations to becoming an agency can only reinforce this isolation. The result is that such an administration can experience only a process of involution as it changes. Class relations and political relations are no longer experienced as anything but organizational problems, as forms of dysfunc­tion, which authority strives to eliminate by the imposition of new rules, further constraints, which in turn provoke a stepping up of withdrawal conduct, of evasion tactics, or of passive resistance. Increasingly, organiza­tion devotes the essential part of its activities to digging itself deeper and deeper into this vicious circle of constraint and resistance. What renders the situation intractable is the stubborn insistence on treating problems as organizational that in fact are not so. Bureaucratization is the breaking down

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of class relations, of the orientations of the system of historical action, and of political relations into nonmanageable elements of organizational function­ing. Any individual problem becomes confused and impossible to deal with because it presents itself in an undifferentiated way: officially what is involved is a purely organizational, concrete, limited problem that would seem to be just a matter of interpreting regulations or sorting out some technical point; but as soon as it is tackled, it turns out to involve inadmissible conflicts of interest and procedural methods not recognized by the system of decision. To deal with this new set of problems it would be necessary to go outside the organizational system, to go up at least to the institutional level. But this the total organization refuses to do, since it is so deeply entrenched in its inordinate pretensions to independence and self-sufficiency. Such an organization can simply be fragmented by its own internal difficulties, but that is not the most usual outcome. Or the contrary, it tends to respond by redoubling the emphasis on its integrating elements, which is to say on the affirmation of its values and the renewal of its technical constraints and rationality. This is something often seen in educational establishments to the degree in which they are also administrations. A grandiose form of discourse centered on the values and function of the teaching process, associated with invocations of the so-called demands of learning, tries to elbow out all questions about teaching's social functions or the mechanisms of adaptation to social demands.

The total institution is very different. Its principal function is to carry out the execution of political decisions. It is therefore disorganized in the sense that it has the minimum of autonomy. It represses more than it integrates, it does not seek to assert its autonomy, but attempts, on the contrary, to shelter behind decisions made outside of itself. Its members are enclosed in a ghetto, settled into a deviant adaptation, as Goffman has stressed. A bureaucratized administration has pretensions to moral integration and technical efficiency. Total institutions are above all given the task of eliminating deviant actors from the social scene so that they will be deprived of their political rights. What is expected of them is to guard the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden, the normal and the pathological so as to keep away the threats that "the barbarians" may hold over the heads of "civilization." Their reason for existence is not inside themselves; their function does not reside in what they do but in what they prevent. They are therefore very little concerned with defining objectives and the interiorization of norms by their members. They will even accept quite readily that their functioning and their results shall be completely contrary to the objectives fixed for them. This is why, if one succeeds in getting through the barriers set up by authority and examines that functioning directly, it is easy in these total institutions to see relations of domination and power in the pure state.

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The arbitrary reigns within them absolutely; violence is what governs their social relations, to such an extent that one can no longer speak of a social system. Prisoners and warders, the sick and the disabled with the staff who keep watch over them and "treat" them, none of these belong to an organization. The former are shut away and governed by the others, who act as delegates of the social order. Relations are dominated by force and blackmail, arbitrary decisions and corruption. One cannot speak here of the involution of a system as was the case with bureacratic administrations. No internal dynamic exists, merely a permanent reproduction of exclusion.

This description of total institutions only reveals one of the aspects of the process of disorganization, however. In practice, the absorption of the organizational system by the political system can occur just as well in the direction of a direct dominion of the pluralism of the political forces as in the direction of an imposition of the legitimate order. Which leads us to add to the two extreme types already mentioned—total organization and total institution—a third that might be termed the pseudo-political institution. Instead of the organization's being subject to a political system, and without its succeeding in combining within itself an organization system and a political system, it experiences a contamination and a disorganization of both levels of its functioning. Interest groups transform all the elements of the organizational system into objects of transactions, objectives and norms as well as exchanges with the environment or technical management. But at the same time these groups are not defined except by their role and their place within the organization, and are thus incapable of transforming themselves into genuine political forces, in particular because they are not situated at the level of general decisions and because they remain situated inside a heteronomous unity. What we hare is a caricature of self management. These pseudo-political forces do not therefore refer back to class relations and are consequently not actors of a system of historical action. They are organizational pressure groups, seeking to maximize their relative advan­tages inside the organization, and thus to obtain the greatest possible control over their own conditions of existence and activity, rather than to manage and orient the organization as a whole.

Sectional demands are what preponderate, and the definition of objectives and norms is obtained solely in a residual way, as the acceptance of what is compatible with particular interests, within the framework too of the minimum of remaining requirements imposed by institutional decisions.

Here again, to speak of bureaucratization creates more confusion than it sheds light. The administration is not imprisoned inside its involution; it is dislocated by the relations of influence between groups that are not defined by their role in an organization. This situation is often to be observed in educational administrations. The teachers defend their professional status

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and their freedom to devote their time to other activities such as research, writing for publication, or consultation. The students wish to minimize the constraints associated with the obtaining of degrees and think more about a professional future they see as insufficiently linked to the content of their academic activity or to the social and cultural activities they take part in with their friends. The administrative staff negotiates its conditions of work in accordance with norms and by the use of means that are not specific to the organization concerned. It is possible to imagine an ultimate vision of a university in which there is no longer any real interdependence between teachers, students, and nonteaching staff, and which would no longer be definable except as the totality of past transactions between categories coexisting within the same framework defined by the political institutions. An extreme case certainly, but one we come dangerously near when political institutions are not capable o\^ determining objectives and unload their responsibilities upon members of the organization without at the same time giving them the responsibilities that would make self-management a possi­bility.

Disorganization is characterized in particular by the explosion of author­ity, permanent confusion between authority and influence, and the dissolu­tion of technical equilibria in favor of transactions between interest groups. This administrative disorganization is accompanied by a political disorgani­zation. In such a situation there is no longer either organization or politics but a confused mixture of both levels, which provokes a double reaction. On the one hand, that of the "organizers," who oppose the pseudo-political institution by means of the integration and concern for efficiency of the total organization; on the other, that of the political forces, which seek to disen­gage themselves from this excessively limited organizational framework in order to act on the level of the political system or on that of class relations. It has been possible to observe these two tendencies at work in French univer­sities in recent years, but his example also shows the tremendous power of resistance of pseudo-political institutions when the problems that give rise to these tendencies are not dealt with at their normal level, which is to say at the level of the political system, of class relations, and of the system of historical action. The organization is crushed by the weight of social relations and cultural choices far too heavy for it. —

These analyses demonstrate the usefulness of complementing the study of the organizational system and its crises with that of the relations between the organizational level and the upper levels of social reality within a particular organism. Administrations provide a particularly apt case in this respect. They are by definition the organizations most directly subordinated to the political system. They are on the lowest rung of the social systems ladder. They therefore tend either to isolate themselves from all that governs them, to

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bureaucratize themselves, or else to incorporate themselves in the institu­tional system. This second tendency can take two opposite forms: on the one hand reduction to the role of application of the law and defense of the social order; on the other, confusion with a system of political relations. These various forms of the pathology of administrations: total organization, total institution, and pseudo-political institution, show that the functioning of an administration is governed by its capacity to be at the same time subjected to its objectives and master when it comes to managing its technical constraints: an administration cannot be other than dependent. This dependence presup­poses before all else a clear-cut separation between society's functional levels; recognition of the system of historical action, the independence of class relations, and the openness of the political system—these govern an adminis­tration's capacity to carry out its tasks, which are at once subordinate, socially and politically, and specific, insofar as they have a technical dimension. In other words, the weaker the state, which is the unifying prin­ciple of field of historicity, political system, and social organization, the better an administration functions in its own domain.

The dependence of an administration is the condition of its autonomy, as a set of means of management relating objectives defined at a higher level and technical operations imposing their own constraints. This is why the most stable administrations are those furthest from the possibility of transforming themselves into agencies or enterprises, in particular those that manage fiscal resources and expenditure, without any function other than that of a form of management subordinate to political decisions.

b. Enterprises

The objectives of an administration are set at the level of the political system. The same is not true of the enterprise, which is an autonomous decision center directly controlling an organization with economic goals. This defini­tion differentiates between the two levels of the enterprise: it is an organiza­tion, a set of means in the service of goals, but it is also a decision center, an economic actor. The enterprise is always more or less controlled by the general political system; its activity must always be carried on within the framework of laws, decrees, and regulations, but one cannot speak of enterprise if the organization's objectives are actually determined by the political institutions. That is the boundary that separates the enterprise from the administration, and it is just as valid for public enterprises as for private ones. State planning, or the setting up of state monopolies within a liberal capitalist society, can result in the creation of vast public services, but these are still enterprises, extremely concentrated but nevertheless autonomous. In contrast, in all those cases in which the state apparatus swallows up the political system we observe a relative lack of differentiation between adminis-

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tration and enterprise. This case, however, is one of those that demonstrate most clearly the necessity for distinguishing between these two types of or­ganization. Their modes of functioning are so different that the tension be­tween administrative management and the enterprise's capacity for decision is at the heart of planned societies' economic functioning.

What does this autonomy of economic decision signify? It can be interpreted as an autonomy in relation to the institutional system.

The enterprise then appears as an actor in a market, defining its objectives and its norms, managing its exchanges with the environment and its internal equilibria, in particular the coherence of its technical means. In short, it appears as an organization_in_the jmre state, whereas the administration is not the master of its own objectives, tends to be no more than an appendage of the system of institutionalized decisions, and ultimately to have no autonomy of conduct.

This image corresponds to the one that enterprises are apt to offer of them­selves. Is their activity not governed by pragmatic goals, by the conquest of markets, by the increase of wealth or by expansion, by the capacity to respond to the modifications of the environment?

But it can be objected that if the enterprise is a system of decision and therefore a political unit, it must be recognized that like all political systems it comprises both elements of unity and elements of plurality, that it is at the same time dependent upon a field of historicity and directed toward organiza­tional implementation. Figure 29 shows the nature of the political system again. The enterprise implements the orientations of the system of historical

plurality unity

political slope societal problems class domination

institutional political forces government slope (interest groups)

Figure 29

action and manages their tensions; it is inscribed within class relations and, whatever the nature of those relations, it is the locus where the power of the ruling class is exercised, backed up by juridical formulations. It is also the locus of relations between a number of interest groups; these overlie class relations, in part at least, but replace class conflicts in the decision-making framework, over which the various forces exert a greater or lesser degree of influence.

An enterprise as such—which is to say the conjunction of an organization and a decision center—is not where class relations are formed. Those relation? occur at a higher level, the field of historicity. An enterprise is a political unit ,

- /

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whose functioning presupposes class relations and therefore the existence of class power. Certainly its political system can be weakly constituted, only slightly institutionalized; its political participation can be very restricted, limited for example to the internal functioning of a board, or to relations between managers. But it can also extend far more widely, through the development of contractual relations, of participation in consultative organs, or others endowed with certain powers of co-management. Interest groups are not solely the organizational expression of the social classes; we are familiar enough with the lengthy arguments over the relations between linear and functional organization, "staff and line"; enough has been written describing the tensions and negotiations between procedural and production departments, between technical and sales departments, or again between the enterprise, its bankers, and its customers, for it to be pointless to insist here on the multiplicity of the actors intervening in the decision-making process.

But, however open the political system of the enterprise may be, it cannot be complete. The "boss" of the enterprise is neither an arbiter nor the representative of a majority, nor the leader of those interest groups posess-ing most influence. He is the actor responsible for the interests of the ruling class.

An enterprise can therefore be redefined as the political system that ensures the transmission of a class domination into the functioning of an organization.

This definition will seem unclear, for the reader senses of course that the use of "enterprise" here does not correspond to the everyday use of that term. This everyday use derives from capitalist industrial society.

The ruling class in that society establishes its power at the level of the organization of labor and not at that of technical progress. This means that the system of historical action, and in particular the cultural model, remains above the level of economic organizations. The essential elements of that society are the market, capital, the entrepreneur's risk and profit. The nineteenth century created many more images of businessmen than of industrialists.

But this situation also implies that the industrial enterprise as an economic unit, as basis for profit, is directly engaged in the sphere of progress and capital. The differentiation between field of historicity and institutional system is weak. In industrial society, establishments with economic ends are agencies and enterprises at the same time.

In postindustrial society, the separation of these two types of organization is much more clear-cut, for two reasons. First, a great number of agencies cannot be called enterprises in the usual meaning of the term: this is the case with hospitals, research centers, military or paramilitary establishments. Second, a clear distinction must be made between those economic organiza-

Social Organization 259

tions that are part of the new cultural model in that they contribute to technical progress, function as systems, and answer to a new type of needs, and those—still dominated by the market and the direct dominion of capital over a "productive" labor—that are industrial enterprises in the classical sense and are therefore classified below the level they occupied in industrial society, no longer have any part in the world of the agencies, and have become pure enterprises. The world of economic organizations, even of the very largest, is breaking up more and more clearly into several categories, for we must not forget that side by side with the industrial and the post industrial types there still remains the mercantile type, of which the colonial companies, as well as the oil companies, are the most familiar example.

In order to distinguish clearly between the first two of these types, I am imposing on the reader the effort required to replace the social language that speaks of "enterprise" with a sociological language that classes certain economic organizations as agencies and a large number of others as "enterprises/* The importance of these last in the advanced capitalist societies derives from the fact that they occupy an area of changeover from industrial capitalism to a postindustrial society of which they do not represent the technocratic nucleus, and in which they are still striving to maintain capitalist class relations and a capitalist ideology.

Agencies are the very seat of class domination, not in the sense of a classical capitalist enterprise with class conflict inside it, but in the new sense that the agency is itself ruling class and imposes its domination on the whole of that sector of society in which it intervenes as accumulation of power.

These transformations of economic organizations, which mark the transi­tion from industrial society to postindustrial society, are difficult to analyze. First, because the Western industrialized societies have experienced no break in the transition from one societal type to the other. Capitalism and technocracy are combined within them, and morphological description of the economy does not enable us to separate them from one another. Economic analysis can succeed in this respect and has indeed contributed the principal new ideas in this domain; sociology is playing a part too, specifically in seeking to understand the new social relations and the new fields of negotiation and decision making opening up within economic organizations.

Beyond the complexity of certain historical situations, however, it is of course the transformation of economic organizations from one societal type to the other that must be analyzed. In industrial society the domain of organizations, of practical activities, was still dominated by that of the metasocial warrants of social order. The factory was subject to the market just as agricultural life was subject to a simultaneously religious and community-centered cultural model. An organization as such did not extend as high as the field of historicity. There did not exist what in my Sociologie de

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Faction I termed "a rationalizing model," the successor to and destroyer of the metasocial warrants. Such a model does not appear until postindustrial society. r 1

In consequence it is in this society, for the first time, that organizations become the locus of social domination. Postindustrial society is dominated by large organizations just as mercantile society was dominated by merchants and princes. Personal, autocratic, or charismatic power is replaced by the impersonal power of the apparatus, of the technostructure. But by the same token, those economic organizations that have no direct participation in the new system of historical action, even though they may possess great wealth and great political influence, are no longer anything but "enterprises" situated below the level of the agencies. If a society allows them a central role, then it is closing the door into postindustrial society in its own face, which is perhaps the case with Europe, in capitalist and socialist countries alike, since it is undoubtedly having great difficulty in emerging from industrial society.

In industrial society, on the contrary, and in earlier societies, the ruling class controls the organizational domain directly, to such an extent that it is difficult to talk about organizations at all in, say, medieval society. Economic organizations in industrial society are more dependent upon capitalist power and the market, but this very fact means that they are part of the world of agencies, simply because they are more the instruments of capitalist profit than they are organizations.

It is in postindustrial society that the economicjyganizations take up the whole stage, and by the same token become increasingly differentiated, so that among what are usually called enterprises we must make distinctions between administrations, agencies, and enterprises in the sense given to the word here. ~

As a result, if we examine these latter—that is, the organizations that are the locus of decisions and strategies but are not bearers of the cultural model—their internal conflicts of interest, though they may be overlying more fundamental class conflicts, are not direct class conflicts themselves. The agencies alone are the locus of the formation of class conflicts and the stake of them. Industrial enterprises, in industrial society, are the stake of class conflicts because they are agencies at least in part. The growing role of technical progress means that the majority of industrial enterprises today are no longer agencies but what, sociologically, I term enterprises. As for the economic units that play the role of agencies at the same time as that of enterprises, we have to recognize a fundamental tension within them between two opposing modes of action and functioning.

The intermediate position occupied by enterprises between administra­tions and agencies leads to a division into three principal types of enterprise: a central type, a type nearer to administration, and a type nearer to agency.

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The first gives priority to the objectives-exchanges duo. Its logic of action, to use Lucien Karpik's term (in "Les politiques et les logiques d'action de la grande entreprise industrielle," Sociohgie du travail, January-March 1972, pp. 82-105), is economic. It leaves internal problems in a subordinate position. This type corresponds above all to enterprises placed within a changing environment. The second type is defined by the dominant role of the objectives-norms axis. It presupposes a stable environment, or one whose modifications are controlled. The proximity of this type to the administration is clearly indicated by the fact that it corresponds to many public services. A public transport enterprise closely resembles an administration. Its rules are precise and stable, its authority is of the rational-legal type. Commercial and technical preoccupations are present, but they seem to constitute particular departments within the enterprise rather than elements completely inte­grated into its management.

The third type of enterprise gives central importance to the objectives-equilibria axis. Like an agency, it has moved a long way away from the rational-legal type of authority and closer to management by objectives. The fine control of a technical and human communications system is its principal tas^/These three types of enterprise can be distinguished from one another above all by their degree of internal differentiation. The administrative enterprise is that which functions most completely like an organization. Its institutional system is weaker or more dependent upon the general political

exchanges^

administrative enterprise

development enterprise

commercial enterprise

Figure 30

system. It is even more weakly linked to the field of historicity. Class conflict is only manifested in it indirectly, and it bears very little of the burden of the cultural model.

The commercial enterprise, on the contrary, is more clearly divided, as we saw at the outset, between an organizational level and an institutional level. One finds a discontinuity appearing within it between grades of personnel with authority and managers. And this creates two acutely sensitive areas within

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the enterprise: first, at the foreman level, situated at the point where labor force and management meet and possessing contradictory tendencies that have been emphasized often enough; second, at the level of the management staff, who are forced into forming cliques in order to get beyond staff level and exert any influence on the decisions that they will subsequently be responsible for applying.

The development enterprise is already an agency, so that above the level of the organization's managers we find the level of the agents of historicity, which in postindustrial society is that of the more or less technocratic professionals, and in a society of capital industrialization that of the businessmen, the financiers who manage the interests of capital and control the cultural model of "progress."

It is desirable to recognize the central position occupied by the commercial enterprise, the most clearly different both from administrations and agencies, a unit of political decisions, locus of conflicts and negotiations, an association of an organization and a center of economic initiative. Enterprises are never, in any type of society, the organizational units of the highest level. That position always belongs to the agencies.

c. Agencies

Certain organizations are agencies of historicity, which is to say that they are directly in the service of the cultural model of the society under considera­tion. Their members share in this sacred character of the organization, which manifests itself materially in the monumental aspect of its premises. Churches, state palaces, mock Roman temples or medieval castles of finance and industry,! university campuses or research centers, they all seek to dominate their environment and stand out from all other buildings by their size, their materials, their style.

The members of the agencies are not defined by an administrativejitatus or by a role in some form of production, even though those two modes of definition occur also, but first and foremost by the fact that they have interiorized certain orientations and transformed them into values for their organization, something they like to express by talking of their vocation or their spirit of "service." More simply, one can speak of their professionaliza-tion, meaning that they belong to a "corps'' that controls its recruitment, defines its norms of conduct, and exercises a certain jurisdiction over its members.

Values and norms depend upon the nature of the cultural model; they are religiousTVtate-centered, economic, or scientific.

The professionals in the agencies are the agents of historicity, the representatives of social creativity, of whatever transcends the functioning of the society while at the same time being embodied in it.

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In the type of society being formed before our eyes, new categories of professional, new types of agency are appearing. Production enterprises are being transformed into agencies; medicine is being organized into hospitals that are centers for treatment, teaching, and research all at the same time; technical progress, civil as well as military, presupposes the creation of further research centers. And then there are the universities; retaining their dual role as transmitters of a cultural heritage and social inequality on the one hand, and as purveyors of specialists to society according to its needs on the other, they are now becoming more and more the centers for the creation of new knowledge. So that something is being constituted that may only partly correspond to what Fritz Machlup in The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1962) has called the knowledge industries, but which is certainly growing very rapidly.

In all types of society the agency that corresponds to the cultural model becomes clericalized; no society has ever known self-management of its cultural model. The result is the formation of a barrier between "cleric" and layman. This is indicated by external signs and is maintained by sanctions against those who cross it, the profaners, in other words, any profane persons who seek to take over these sacred activities. This separation invariably gives rise to the formation of barbarian agencies, to anticlerical activities that can be denoted by the general term of magic: those wrho are not clerics seek to seize the cultural model, to manipulate it, but without respecting its organi­zation and its language. The magician stood opposed to the priest just as the new magicians of astrology, for example, stand in opposition to today's scientists. The Utopian sects played an analogous role in relation to progress, which was the cultural model of the industrial societies. And indeed the cultural model in agrarian and in programmed societies corresponds to "cultural" elements of the economic organization: consumption and produc­tion; consequently agencies and magic compete with and oppose one another in cultural areas. When the cultural model draws its strength from "social" elements, on the contrary, that is. from organization and distribution, then the agencies are social forces and the magic will take the form of social groupings striving to wrest the cultural model—state order or progress— from the clerical apparatuses.

The pTofessijpnaHzation of the agencies is merely one of their aspects, the one that corresponds most directly to the image they have of themselves. A second aspect concerns their relations with the social classes. If an enterprise is a polkical unit acting within the framework of a class domination, an agency is directly a class actor acting within the framework of the system of historical action. If I have spoken of an agency's values and norms, that is because the agency identifies itself with the cultural model and the system of historical action as a whole. And this identification reveals the class nature of

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the agency. For the agency is a part of the ruling apparatus of society. It controls a type of accumulation through its organization. It concentrates in its hands one type of society's resources.

Today, the hospital complex is the central element of the public health service; but it also concentrates within itself the whole of the nation's medical resources, a fact that could turn out to be very disadvantageous to the sanitary side of the health service and preventive medicine generally, since as services they are more dispersed and have a less direct relation to the development of knowledge and new biological and medical techniques. Reliable observers of the organization of health care in the United States have consequently been able to point to the fact that although large American hospitals are probably the best in the world, the health of the United States' population as a whole does not rate nearly as high in a worldwide comparison. It was with such things in mind that doctors and medical students in France, in 1968, felt compelled to protest against a narrowly professional medical training that seemed to them quite indifferent to the psychological and social problems that are to a very large degree what in practical terms determine the need for treatment. Finally, is it necessary to recall the central importance given by the student movement, whether in the United States or in France, to protests against the university's technocratic role, against its indifference to the students' education in the wider sense and to social problems, against its links with other elements of the power elite, civil and military?^ would be erroneous to believe that class conflicts set rulers and ruled against each other within agencies. Agencies are what Galbraith has called technostruc-tures, and though it is true that the conflicts that form within them are in consonance with class conflicts, the latter set the agency as center of power and accumulation more directly in opposition to the consumers of the services the agencies control and dominate. The conflict, as I have said many times, is always simultaneously economic and sociocultural, linked to the forms of control over accumulation and over the cultural model.

The third principal aspect of the agencies is that their objectives are not subordinated to any higher instance, so that in consequence their organiza­tional system is more strongly integrated than that of the enterprises or of the administrations. This integration is so great, the relating of objectives to techniques so complete, that an agency can be described both as an organization and as a voluntary association. This extreme integration goes hand in hand with an extreme internal differentiation between the organiza­tional system, the institutional system, and the implementation of the system of historical action.

The integration signifies that both norms and exchanges are no more than mediations between objectives and techniques, between creativity and equi­librium. This situation is the reverse of that in an administration, where the

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norms tend to assume the main role. The technical role thus becomes participation in the objectives, as the very theme of professionalization suggests. Managing an agency means simply managing its functioning and no longer involves the pursuit of aims external to the organization.

Differentiation does not necessarily take the form of hierarchized subsys­tems. But in every agency there exists a higher decision level that is "professional"—which is to say regulated in accordance with its higher principles—then a political level, and last an organizational level proper. This makes it possible to situate an agency in relation to two extreme and opposite types: that in which each level becomes independent of the others and that in which they become indistinguishable.

In the first case the organization breaks up into an agency, an enterprise, and an administration. In the second, the fusing of the levels brings about a general ritualization, a mixing of technical operations and service of the cultural model.

The idea can be put forward that the differentiation, which is to say the autonomy of the hierarchized subsystems, depends above all on the ruling class role played by the agency.

It is to the degree in which the functioning of the agency is not of an absolutist type, in which the dominated social forces succeed in questioning the agency's domination, that the separation and hierarchization of func­tional levels is realized in the most satisfactory manner. This action does in fact tend to separate the political level from the professional level on the one hand and from the technical functioning on the other; nevertheless, absence of contestation, by reinforcing the direct link between objectives and techniques, tends to eliminate the importance of the institutional level.

These three aspects are combined in all agencies, which, more than enterprises and administrations, are complete organizations; they are profes­sionalized; they are a society's ruling apparatus. But their relative impor­tance can vary greatly from one case to another. This leads us to distinguish three elementary types of agency: the professional, the managerial, and the technical

Agencies of the first type are the nearest to the general picture of agencies just given. They develop when the agency hasn't the right to influence its environment directly and, consequently, when it is placed under public control, the complete form of which is the self-management of a set of resources. The managerial agencies are, on the contrary, those that have the capacity to mold social demand to fit in with their interests, and are consequently those that have the greatest economic independence. The technical agencies are those subjected to the strongest technical constraints and having the most indirect relation with the cultural model.

The relative importance of these three types depends above all on the role

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of the state in society, since the state is the organ that links the various levels of society's functioning: field of historicity, political system, and organiza­tion. The stronger these links are, the more the state intervenes in the field of historicity and the more it tends to subordinate itself to or incorporate itself into the agencies, thus transforming the professional agencies into manager­ial agencies or reducing them to the state of technical agencies,/This proposition is a counterpart of the one put forward a little earlier according to which the combination of an open class conflict with a direct reference to the stake of that conflict, which is to say the system of historical action, is the most favorable situation for the formation of agencies at the highest, that is the professional, level. An all-powerful state will have nothing surrounding it but administrations; if it is merely interventionist, then it will allow private political systems and enterprises; if it is reduced to an apparatus for the execution of political decisions, then its place in the field of historicity is occupied by agencies—on condition, at least, that that place is not entirely occupied by the domination of the ruling class, which refuses to allow the activity of any agency not directly subject to its interests. The universities know from experience how narrow the path is that permits them to protect themselves at the same time from state domination and from that of the ruling class. 1 don't think they are sufficiently aware that this independence presupposes that they themselves are struggling against their ruling role, whether they are actually the agent of their contestation, or whether they are the allies of popular forces.

Administrations, enterprises, and agencies are all organizations. But in the case of administration the higher levels of society's functioning are not projected onto the organizational system, whereas at the opposite extreme the agency belongs directly to the system of historical action, to class relations, to society's political and organizational levels. Enterprises, lastly, are subordinate to the field of historicity and in particular to class relations, but still possess a political system as well as an organizational system.

What emerges from the preceding observations is that the integration of the organizational system is ensured best, not in the administrations, which is to say when the organizational system is most isolated from the higher systems, but in the agencies. Differentiation and integration go hand in hand. The administration is subjected to contradictory forces, one set pushing it toward the loss of its autonomy, the other set toward bureaucrati­zation. It maintains its integration only with difficulty and often tends to become reduced to a single one of its elements, its norms. There is, on the other hand, a close association between principles and practices in the agencies, in which action directed outward and action directed inward tend to fuse, just as orientations do with techniques or dependence does with autonomy.

Social Orcanization 267

But this superior integration of the agency is also more constantly threat­ened by its role in class relations. Every agency is a center of power and therefore a constituent part of the ruling class. The stronger its class role is, and therefore—in our society, at least—the more technocratic it is, the more its professional role, its political system, and its organizational system are threatened with disaggregation. Inversely, the more an administration is the agent of class domination, the more easily it achieves integration, without losing an independence that it cannot in any case possess.

This comes to the same thing as saying that the stronger class domination is, the more likelihood there is of organizations taking the form of adminis­trations and the less chance they have of being agencies. This explains the ambiguity of the social situation of the professionals in the agencies: they are at the same time linked with the ruling class as managers of the apparatuses and in opposition to it in order to maintain their direct relation with the orientations of the system of historical action.

An administration, in the main, is turned in upon itself, concerned with accomplishing the tasks assigned to it. It applies norms and the sanctions that maintain those norms. An agency, on the other hand, has all the characteristics of the system of historical action. It is a network of tensions. It is never solidly based within society's functioning; it wavers between heaven and hell. To speak of it as one speaks of an administration or an enterprise, whose objectives are defined in a much more specific, not to say institutional, manner, is always inadequate.

An agency does not fulfill a function, it produces society. Does the distinction made between administrations, enterprises, and

agencies cover organizations in their entirety? Don't all the chosen examples correspond either to production organizations or management organiza­tions? Is it possible to deal in an analogous way with organisms of socialization, say the school, or, in certain societies, churches, not to mention the family, which cannot be defined as an organization? One is at first tempted to answer in the negative, and to view the school or the church as a locus for the transmission of a culture or an ideology, not as an organization in which both the orientations of the system of historical action and class conflicts are manifested. However, the reasons for replying in the positive have already been given and had better be repeated. Class relations are indeed present in the school, both because the school is a preserver of social inequality and because it modifies it, either by increasing it or by reducing it. On the other hand, the school—including the secondary school—partakes of all the levels of social analysis: as organization it carries out technical functions while at the same time inculcating norms of authority, in other words reproducing power; as an agent of adaptation to professional and social change it belongs to the institutional system; and, last, as a locus for

268 Chapter Five

the production and diffusion of a mode of knowledge and a cultural model, it belongs to historicity. In other words it is at the same time an administration, an enterprise, and an agency. If one goes back to preindustrial societies, then the church, which was responsible in those days for schooling, can be described in the same way.

One must avoid opposing "practical" organizations to others that are supposedly '4ideological.'' They are all built around techniques and around a power; they are all the locus of domination and conflict at one and the same time.

d. Secularization

Creativity is increasingly apprehended as practice, as a whole set of operations transforming culture, man's relations with his environment. The cultural model changes, but without ceasing to define a transcendence of the social order: postindustrial society is oriented toward scientific progress as firmly as the old agrarian societies were toward divine power.

This evolution is accompanied by a downgrading of what was an agency in a certain society into an enterprise, then into an administration, until it finally disappears completely as an organization. So that although there may never be any secularization of society, we can observe a secularization of certain organizations. This downgrading has now reached its final stage in the case of religious organizations. The agency was first of all transformed into an enterprise, which is to say into a political force, then into an administration, before finally exploding, as we see happening today in the case of the Christian churches of the West. This downgrading appears less brutal in practice because there are always fragments of earlier societies subsisting within the postindustrial societies in a state of formation. However, it is more important to note that the downgrading, interrupted by attempts to regain an earlier importance, is accompanied by an increase of anti-organiza­tional conduct, by a transformation of the organization into a voluntary association that strives to revive the spirit or essence of the downgraded agency, as is shown by the proliferation of sects, basic communities, or social movements deeply imbued with religious inspiration that have grown up on the ruins of the religious agencies.

These processes are less advanced in the case of state organizations. The downgrading of these agencies must not be confused with the withering away of the state in a general sense, an expected development contradicted by observation of the industrialized societies.

The majesty of the state agencies is replaced in industrial society by the growing importance of state services as enterprises, as political agents. This is why capitalist industrialization has experienced such a strong tendency to confuse the state with the political system. In postindustrial society, state organizations are increasingly administrations, and this creates a very large

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gap between a state power, intervening in economic and social life, financing and controlling new agencies, managing the progress of knowledge, and the state administrations executing the decisions of a political system in which enterprises play a considerable role. France is finding the downgrading of its state agencies into administrations difficult to cope with. These new adminis­trations persist in trying to preserve the image of their former function, that of serving the general interest; they persist in demanding the respect of those subject to them; and they refuse to recognize that they function within the framework of a class domination and in accordance with the relations of influence operating in the political system. In the domain of the state too, the downgrading of the agencies is accompanied both by attempts at restoration and, more important, by counterorganizational endeavors demanding com­munity self-management.

The evolution of economic organizations is shorter: from being agencies in industrial society they are downgraded in postindustrial society to being enterprises, decision centers, at least insofar as they do not manage to transform themselves back into agencies by linking their growth to technical progress.

Lastly, the knowledge organizations are today experiencing, ever increas­ingly, the splendor of the agencies. The isolation of the researcher is replaced by the creation of laboratories, hospitals, research centers, university insti­tutes.

These transformations are summed up in figure 31. The table gives concrete expression to the frequent definition of postindustrial society as a society of organizations. It is in fact in this type of society that the domain of organizations reaches its broadest extent, at least within society's practical activity.

religious

organizations

state economic knowledge

agrarian society

mercantile society

industrial society

postindustrial society

agency

enterprise

administration

*

*

agency

enterprise

administration

*

*

agency

enterprise

*

•

•

agency |

Figure 31

The ruling class has to be increasingly defined in industrialized societies by the organizations it controls, as the management elite, as the technocracy. It

270 Chapter Five

is less and less in the service of metasocial warrants of the social order. This is a transformation that is far from complete, above all in countries where industrialization has encountered, and is encountering, the resistance of previous social forms. There the rulers still like to situate themselves above the organizations as custodians of an absolute power, able to serve as an ultimate recourse for subjects who have fallen victim to abuses of authority committed by lower ranks and sometimes feeling themselves bound by the duties of noblesse oblige. Crozier (in La society bloquee, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970) has given a very good description of this resistance on the part of the former French ruling class to their organizational role.

C. The Categories of Social Practice

a. Organizations between Historicity and History

Organizations implement a system of historical action and class relations within the framework of a political system, but these levels of society's functioning also overflow any particular organization. Organizational con­duct and relations are determined by the categories of social practice, the concrete expression of the field of historicity and the political system. The organization is a decision center, it acts in terms of objectives and establishes norms, it defines roles. But it is not sufficiently its own master to choose them freely; its functioning is not determined by its intentions. It would be a serious illusion to believe that an organization, whether factory or school, hospital or army, controls, is able by its decisions to transform, its own social function, its forms of authority, its human relations, its forms of socializa­tion. A concrete unit of action, it is at the same time capable of enacting and changing its rules of existence yet immersed in a society that determines it at the higher levels of the field of historicity and the political system. The necessary counterpart to a study of organizations is therefore that of the categories of social practice* which are not created by individual organiza­tions but depend most immediately on institutional decisions and, beyond that, on class relations and the orientations of the system of historical action. Hence the fact that organizations fulfilling very different functions yet belonging to the same society have a gTeat many features in common, what one might call a common spirit, which is evident equally in their relations of authority, their definition of roles, and their forms of stratification and communication.

Does this statement perhaps take us back to a question referred to at the beginning of this chapter? Does there exist a unity of the categories of social practice to be sought for either in a central body of values or in the dominion of an agent of social domination?

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These apparently antithetical forms of the same statement are equally unacceptable.

They correspond to two theoretical extremes only. It is possible to imagine a society organized around values and a consensus and such that conflicts and tensions develop within those values, within the norms that specify them, the means of social control that maintain them, and the agencies of socialization that transmit them. But no differentiated society actually corresponds to this image of the Gemeinschaft. Historians are constantly reminding us that values, even when manifested in the ceremonial form of a written constitution, always correspond to particular social groups and that it is arbitrary to say that the Declaration of the Rights of Man was a formulation of the values held by peasants in Picardy or artisans in the Faubourg St-Antoine.

It is more tempting to say that the categories of social practice taken as a whole possess a unity that is in fact the unity of the ideology of the dominant class. For one would not speak of dominant class if it was in fact not capable of imposing rules and forms of social and cultural organization on a collectivity as a whole. However, there is no reason to believe that the domination in question is in practice complete.

It is so only when the dominant class completely reduces historicity to the dimensions of its own interests, replaces the elements of the system of historical action with the counterelements that make up its ideology, its values; when its hegemony over the political system is a total dominion; when it reduces the functioning of the social organization to the reproduction of its own power. In a word, when the society loses all historicity, is reduced to slavery. This in fact corresponds to the extreme forms of the colonial situation, when the imposition of an assimilative ideology and a repressive order is stronger than the effort to promote dependent economic develop­ment.

The further one moves away from such a situation, which cannot be described solely in terms of class but rather in terms of total domination, the less the image of social practice as integrated ideological discourse is acceptable. On the one hand the agencies of historicity retain a certain autonomy; second, the domination is repressive and not solely integrating; it rejects, it does not completely assimilate. In the third place, there therefore exists, in various forms, a defensive reaction or counteroffensive on the part of the dominated classes. Last, there exists a certain autonomy of technology and of the forms of social activity that cannot be reduced to ideologies.

No social practice can ever be understood by eliminating class domination, or by reducing that practice to an ideology of the dominant class. Class conflict and reference to the system of historical action always remain the two fundamental and inseparable principles of sociological analysis.

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Before continuing with this analysis we must consider a second way in which social practice can overflow organizations. Since organizations are individual, concrete agents, they are not situated merely in a field of historicity and a political system. They also act within a historical situation constituted by the superimposition and combination of different sociological subgroups.

The labor relations within an organization are not determined simply by the form of the organizational system: they do not even depend solely on class relations and political interactions; they are also stamped by past forms not only of working-class conduct but of employer conduct. And this becomes even truer, the more heterogeneous, the more "dualist," the more dependent the society in question is, and also the more it is committed to a voluntarist effort to construct a new society with "old" men. The state of an organization at any given moment is a historical fact, a decision is an event, not just a case for applying a system's operational principles.

Social organization depends upon a field of historicity yet at the same time escapes from it; or, rather, what is in everyday parlance called a society— denoting a collectivity situated in time and space—overflows social organiza­tion, since the latter is grouping together fragments from several societal wholes into the unity of a political whole, which is transmitting the dominion of a system of historical action and a ruling class. Here the sociologist plays second fiddle to the historian, but he can still be of use to him. Social life is made up not only of forms of social organization lagging behind or in advance of the main form, but also, attached to those fragments, of tattered remains from secondary political systems, from class relations now withering away or else just taking shape, from elements of systems of historical action now falling apart or in the process of formation. We live not only in a system of sociocultural orientations and classes but also in the midst of ghosts, of shades to which life still clings, dreams still or already real, and by means of which we communicate with the past and the future, rather than belonging solely to the present. Our words are addressed not only to those before us now, they are uttered also on a stage on which the past is being replayed, and the future is being rehearsed. Everything that exists at the same time is not synchronic, does not belong to the same system, is not coherent. Is this experience not more vivid today than in the past? The rapidity of structural changes means that we live more today in the very midst of our dead, still here with us, as indeed in the midst of our descendants, who infiltrate us by means of the changes that drive us out of our present.

The more we live in a society of simultaneity and ubiquity, the more we are others at the same times as ourselves, and the more we wrap ourselves around in the dream and in the art that give form and movement to the shadow of other forms of historicity. Real experience is always out of synchronization

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with social systems. A society reduced simply to the concatenation of a field of historicity, institutions, and social organization would be so oppressive that the individual would be unable to bear it; for he would then be nothing but what he did, and would no longer be capable of imagination and change. He would no longer have to decipher the worn inscriptions of the past and the signs heralding his future, could no longer be a personal agent of change. Those we call great men are surely those who succeed, by dint of their deep attachment to the past and future, in escaping from the illusions of the established order and discovering, behind the false unity of social organiza­tion, the central structures of society, into which they make their way in order to become agents of historicity.

It must also be said that no organization, no concrete society, is ever reducible to a collection of fragments of historicity. Always, mingled in with all the facts that belong to the realm of socio logy, one finds those that pertain to anthropology. No social organization ever wholly escapes from the exigencies of its survival; in all of them it is possible to discern the profound imprint of cultural constructions expressing questions foreign to historicity and bearing upon life and death, upon sex, upon the relation to the other, and so on. Every organization employs techniques and languages that are made use of by social action but are not the product of social interactions. Human societies are also part of nature. The specific characteristics of the human system are superimposed upon those of various kinds of nonhuman systems that are therefore also present in the social life of men.

It is certainly true that the more the historicity of societies grows, the greater their capability of acting upon themselves, the more too does the area of cultural and social "structures" seem to shrink, in the same way as kinship systems break down in urbanized societies. But there is no proof that historical actioj^entirely fills the void thus created. For what disappears in the way of established order constantly reappears as play, as voluntary activities, and more broadly still as new forms of community in social life.

Those societies with the most abundant and complex economic resources at their disposal cannot be reduced to their labor any more than the others can, just as the progress of science does not eliminate our questioning of the human condition.

Every social organization is a moving frontier between human nature and social action, between the realm of anthropology and that of sociology. At every moment we run up against the limits of our territory, and we have no assurance that they are still expanding.

b. The Practice of Historicity

Returning to the determination of the categories of social practice within the framework of a field of historicitv one encounters first of all the orientations

274 Chapter Five

of the system of historical action. They manifest themselves most directly in agencies, and with most difficulty in those enterprises and administrations that remain stamped with the role of agency that they may have played in previous societies while being at the same time less closely linked to the new system of historical action. They are not imprisoned in the agencies however, and spread through the whole of society in the form of expectations, demands. In the most industrialized societies, value is assigned to participa­tion in scientific and technical progress, to professional proficiency, to organization by objectives, to enjoyment, without our being able for all that to speak of a body of values, since these different orientations are in tension one with another and, moreover, can never be separated from the positions occupied by the actors in class relations. But these orientations do constitute a whole that can be presented in cultural expressions. A society recognizes itself in works of art that are not declarations of principle or ideological works but the transcription of that societal thematic in terms of an individual experience of it. The work of art moves through all the levels of social reality, from system of historical action to individual life story via class relations, the state of the institutions, and the role of the state. But its degree of universal-ism depends upon its capacity to raise itself to the level of historicity, of a mode of knowledge, a cultural model, and a type of accumulation.

On the other hand, its importance decreases proportionately as it is more ''idealistic" or, on the contrary, more "realistic,*' which is to say, as it tries on the one hand to express the spirit of a civilization more and on the other to describe the functioning of society and its various activities more directly. The most poverty-stricken art of all is that type which identifies realism with idealism, as in the case of "socialist realism."

If I have brought art into this discussion, it is because the practice of historicity cannot be isolated in one step. It can only be reached and expressed by starting out from what is furthest removed from it—personal experience, the lived event. If one tries to grasp it "objectively," one can only end up confusing it with the forms of social organization, political relations, and class relations.

This also explains how it is that the practice of historicity can be best discerned, outside art, in social movements, which themselves have profound exchanges with art. It is through organizational demands, institutional pressure, and contestation of class power that the path up towrard the system of historical action lies. It is in this sense that a Utopia is not on the fringe of society but at its center, although only on condition that it does not take the system of historical action apart in order to pick out and retain only one element, in other words only on condition that it overflows class conflict.

The practice of historicity is therefore never the mere functioning of

Social Organization 275

organizational forms. It constantly transcends them and appears as a force of protest rather than of conformity.

But although it is true that the reascent toward the system of historical action is effected from a starting point in social practice by the agency of art and social movements, the common experience of the actors cannot be reduced to these creative forms of conduct.

The orientations of the system of historical action affect each one of us via class domination, political decisions, organizational authority, and state power, which is to say via historical aggregates that would only be transpar­ent to social systems if they were sociologically homogeneous, something that is never the case. The actor is separated from the system of historical action by the whole interwoven opacity of the forms of domination, of hegemony, and of power, and by the whole weight of social reproduction and the transmission of statuses. He therefore constantly tends to hive himself off from this social and historical framework, to confront the laws, the rule, the traditions with an appeal to creativity centered upon himself as an individual or upon willed social interactions. He confronts the crushing pyramid of instituted social forms with the force of his spontaneity, the instituting, absolute force of desire.

But this reaction is necessarily ambiguous. As transcendence of the dominated, institutionalized, organized, inherited order it is the most con­crete means of return to the production of society, to its historicity. But such a return can only be void of content, pure distancing rather than counteraf-firmation. Social action, individual or collective, that took this rebellion as its principle of orientation would be led in the first place to a total dehistoriciza-tion, to a recourse to the fundamental needs of man that can never be anything, behind an idealist form, but the shadow of the order being fought and usually the mythical image of a golden age in some undefined past or future. It would then become even more the prisoner of what it is fighting than before, since it would become indistinguishable from marginality, especially from the crisis reactions of the various social systems, and hence from the conduct of anomie.

The appeal to spontaneity, to personal creativity, always runs the risk of combining very easily with a reinforcement of the social order, just as the ghetto reinforces the dominant interests that are excluding it.

For the sociologist no human needs exist that can be opposed to the social order as a nature can be opposed to cultural constraints. Fundamental needs, imperative demands, exist in every society, but they are nothing other than the orientations of the system of historical action and therefore cannot be lived outside social relations of domination, of decision, and of organization. And this fact brings the other slope of the actor's relations with the system of

276 Chapter Five

historical action into view. As against revolt there is also participation. The forms of social interaction then appear as agents for the realization~of the system of historical action. Participation in that system is not separable from participation in the social order, and the dominant forces at all levels of society actively exploit this confusion of cultural orientations with the social order. This in fact defines the creation of values and norms, the concrete expression of the dominant class's ideology acting through its institutional hegemony and its organizational power. Social participation does not succeed in bringing the actor into relation with the system of historical action, for it binds him both to the interests of domination and power and also to a historically formed and bequeathed order. So that the man who makes his way up toward God by way of his church becomes the prisoner of that church, of its dominant role and its traditions.

The actor cannot reach the system of historical action directly within the social organization; he can do no more than manage, with greater or lesser success, the dialectic of engagement and disengagement. He can only escape from this by moving up from the social organization level to the upper levels, first by becoming a political actor and, even better, by transforming himself into a producer of society, through social movements and through art.

And, even then, social movements are directed at the transformation of social organization and tend to impose a new identification of the system of historical action with another social order, while art for its part is unable to separate personal creation from means of expression that are also, in their turn, part of the social order and therefore determined by the relations of domination and power.

Every society tends to construct a societal Utopia, a paradise in which a direct relation is established, beyond all social interaction, between the individual and cultural orientations that have in course become values. But the realization of such a societal Utopia could only be the construction of a totalitarian society, the reduction of society to the state, the identification of all with the commandments of a charismatic power.

The relation of actor to historicity cannot exist outside the dialectic of revolt and participation.

c. Class Relations and Social Practice

It would be futile to talk about class domination if it did not have a visible effect on social practice. In fact the political system too operates within the limits that domination permits. It manifests itself through inequality. But this notion, like that of stratification, to which it is very close, tends to look much simpler than it really is and can introduce confusion. Beginning from the same descriptions, it can equally well lead to a functionalist analysis as to the revealing of class relations. It speaks of social organization in terms of

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historical actors, and vice versa. It is not difficult to see that men do not come into the world and live in it as equals in fact, that social mobility is limited, that the opportunity of access to education, to income, to the highest qualifications are dependent on social origin. One can also add with equal facility that inequalities at the outset are both institutionalized and interior-ized, so that the man setting out from a low level has a lower level of aspirations and expectations, while at the same time he has already been directed into channels that diminish his chances of ascent. But the study of social stratification has no need to make use of the concept of class.

The more one defines society as an integrated whole, possessing both values or a common ideology and mechanisms for the creation and reproduc­tion of inequality, the nearer one stays to a functionalist analysis, which can have either a left- or right-wing tone without its basic approach being affected in any way. It is only necessary to introduce the concept of class if the analysis has to explain breaks in the social organization and even, to be much more precise, rejections. This is something that goes much further than the idea of selection, since no collectivity exists that does not have more or less well developed mechanisms for selection and for the reproduction of inequalities.

But inversely, if the society is completely cut in two. it is impossible to see how the upper class can maintain its domination other than by force alone, since it is by definition numerically smaller. The use of force, of constraint, of repression is constant; but here one can follow the Gramsci of the Quaderni del Carcere and, in particular, of // materialismo storico e la filosofia de Benedetto Croce(Turin: Einaudi, 1966) in saying that class domination must necessarily resort both to coercion—which is the role of political society, that is, the state apparatus—and to integration, which is the definition of the role of what Gramsci calls civil society, using that phrase in a rather different sense than is usual. This integrating role cannot be reduced to action in the form of propaganda. Its importance stems from the fact that the upper class identifies itself with the system of historical action and with historicity itself. And this, I repeat, has two meanings: on the one hand it produces the Utopia presenting the upper class as the servants of historicity; on the other, it identifies historicity with the upper class's own interests, in an ideological manner, thus laying a foundation for its domination and rejecting those who do not conform to it.

The dominion of the ruling class over social practice cannot therefore be reduced either to a work of unification, to the spinning of a web of social and cultural categories within which the collectivity as a whole functions, or to an action of separation and rejection. These two aspects are equally important and inseparable. If one looks at the school system in France and, more generally, at the transmission of knowledge, one can say with Pierre Bourdieu

27B Chapter Five

and Jean Claude Passeron (Les heritiers, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964, and La reproduction, Editions de Minuit, 1970) that its function is to reproduce inequality, to keep everyone in the place assigned to him in the social hierarchy. But Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet (Uecole capi-taliste en France, Paris: Maspero, 1971) are right in setting against this ideo­logical integration the efficiency of the mechanisms of separation and repression. However, their observations too are only partial, for the school system must also permit and organize a certain mobility, diffuse the values of the ruling class, manage social practice as a whole.

To sum up, the upper class does not exert a unified action but rather multiple actions that form a system of dominion over social practice. As ruling class it acts differently from the way it acts as dominant class; second, it exerts both an opening and a closing action. Closing because it is a specific group that manages and controls accumulation, that is, defending its own interests and maintaining its privileges; opening because it wishes to rule and dominate society as a whole. The elements of this system of dominion are de­fined in figure 32. The whole formed by these four elements belongs to the ideology of the upper class. The term ideology has the advantage of indicating the continuity between the level of class relations and that of social organiza­tion. But in order to avoid confusion, and also to stress that it is not a discourse that is involved here but a practical activity—the constitution of the categories of social practice—it seems to me that the term dominion is clearer.

ruling class

dominant class

Figure 32

openness closedness

mobility

integration

concentration

repression

The forms of the division of labor or the occupation of space, the distribution of authority, recruitment and promotion channels, the form and content of sanctions, the symbols of social status are not just ideas or conceptions but the very shape of daily life translated into regulations, into decisions, and even into institutional mechanisms, for the dominion of the dominant class is not the product of a system of influences and negotiations. It can be modified by decisions of the political system, but it is more deeply rooted than that system, for it is class domination in action. Power is the manifestation of domination in an organization; dominion is the form it takes in the whole field of social practice.

Concentration means that in every social organization the dominion of the ruling class makes itself visible by an opposition between center and

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periphery, rulers and ruled, or some such analogous dichotomy. Hierarchy is discontinuous, and that discontinuity must be amalgamated with the appar­ent continuity of a stratification. This is a classic theme of sociological investigations, which usually collect opinions that amalgamate the two types of representation, in other words that recognize, beyond the hierarchy of functions and continuity of an organization chart, a line of rupture and qualitative change.

Mobility here does not only signify the ideology according to which life is a race or a process of natural selection in which the best is supposed to win.

Social organization does in fact provide channels of social ascent, and a ruling class—in the United States or the Soviet Union more so than in Europe —likes to draw attention to the cases of those of its members who rose from rags to riches. This mobility does not only have the function of renewing and therefore strengthening the ruling class; it also manifests the identification of the ruling class with the system of historical action: those who rise are the most "modern," the most enterprising, and by that very fact form the ruling class.

Integration is linked with the action of the dominant class. It therefore cannot be reduced to the incorporation of the greatest possible number into a social practice defined by the ruling class. It entails the formation of a dominant bloc in which new and old ruling classes and their allies, whether social categories or state forces, are all at least partially fused. What is involved therefore is an integration into a mode of domination involving the past as much as the present and future. It is more directly ideological than mobility or concentration but less instrumental. Hence its importance in the school system, which is integrating children and teenagers less into the practice of the ruling class than into a complex whole, in which the reproduction of former forms of social domination plays an essential role. So-called arts subjects, particularly history, literature, and philosophy, are deeply imprinted with this ideological function of integration, laying great stress on the continuity of the great works. An extreme form of this integration is to be found in Harvard's Redbook of 1945, which lays down that university's principal task as being the handing on of the Western cultural heritage, formed in Greece, then in Rome, developed by Christian civilization and extended by modern humanism and liberalism. The de­fenders of classical education in France have often had recourse to analogous terms in their eulogies of humanism, of disinterested culture, the product of a succession of social and intellectual elites.

But this integration is never complete. Its counterpart, and by the same token the complement to the work of concentration, is repression. The social organization must eliminate, exclude, encyst, and reduce to silence all those who are not integratable and who have been constituted as deviants by the

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mechanisms of concentration and integration. Repression's aim is not solely the defense of order against disorder but also the defense of values against the forces that reject them. Taylor offers workers the opportunity to share in the behavior of the capitalist entrepreneur. They can enrich themselves by their labor if they put their reason and self-interest to the correct use. But if the carrot and the interiorization of capitalist values won't do the trick, then the whip has to be used. More crudely still, the colonizer deplores the idleness of the natives who stop working as soon as they have managed to earn the handful of dates that will enable them to subsist. They must therefore be constrained to provide their labor and excluded from a participation that they themselves refuse and of which they are incapable.

The relative importance of each of the elements of this system of dominion of the upper class over social practice depends upon the nature of the class domination. The more heterogeneous a society is, the more closely old and new dominant classes are associated, the more integration and repression prepon­derate. The more the ruling class possesses a political hegemony, the more concentration and repression acquire importance. These two situations are found most strongly combined in the colonial situation. But even in the case of a fairly strongly homogenized and liberal industrialized society, that is, one in which the political system is largely autonomous with relation to class domination, the dominion of the ruling class is not reduced to the ideology of mobility, even though that element does have a greater visibility here than in other cases. For the nearer a society approaches the postindustrial type, the more profoundly it intervenes in itself and also the higher the degree of integration it demands from its members, while at the same time imposing an intense concentration, with the result, in a society already possessing greater mobility than others, of increasing the field of repression and at the same time transforming it.

The reproduction of a class domination cannot therefore be reduced to the concealment of that domination behind a set of categories and mechanisms deriving their authority only from rationality, good sense, principles, or traditions, and never from class interests.

Such an explanation in fact comes to the same thing as talking in needlessly dramatic terms about the permanence of a social system organized around values, norms, and instruments for controlling the social order and the socialization of new members of a society.

From the moment one introduces class conflict, one can no longer explain the maintenance of domination by the masks behind which it conceals itself, for the class adversary can tear off the masks at any given moment. Therefore repression must be exerted, a barrier must be raised between the acceptable and the forbidden, deviance must be named and penalized, darkness must surround the central light.

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It is not only class domination that imposes rejections and repressions. Society's historicity itself defines the field of the possible, renders certain forms of conduct, certain feelings, or certain ideas inconceivable, incongru-ent. No culture can respect all the past and leave the way completely free into the future; it would lose its identity in the uninterrupted flow of change.

This is why the reproduction of the system of historical action and of class relations cannot be confused with the social control that is situated at the institutional level, and even less with the rules that govern the functioning of a community, of a concrete whole defined in its human and nonhuman environment and submitting itself to laws indispensable for its survival, for its integration, for its defense against external threats, for the maintenance of its internal and external equilibria. Societies with a strong historicity almost cease to experience such laws, for they are dominated by decisions and plans for change and no longer by homeostatic mechanisms; consequently, while less imperative in their norms, while more diversified and tolerant, they are also more repressive, for the changing of historicity and hence of class move­ments and conflicts is constantly on the increase.

Faced with this dominion of the upper class over the categories of social practice, the popular class is to a great extent deprived of means of action and subjected to alienation, to that contradiction that so many films, books, and sociological researchers have so often described, especially in the case of the workers, between dependent participation in a practice defined and man­aged by the upper class and reference to a counterorganization constituted by the popular class. This counterdominion is by its nature less visible, but its importance is considerable. The sociology of the informal organization has thrown a great deal of light on it, especially since the famous "Hawthorne studies" carried out at the Western Electric plant in the late 1920s (see F. J. Roethlisberger and W. J. Dickson in Management and the Worker, Harvard University Press, 1939).

This counterdominion acts in accordance with the logic of popular action in the double dialectic of the social classes. To the openness managed by the ruling class it responds with a defensive closing. To the closedness estab­lished by its adversary it opposes a contestatory opening-up.

One could therefore define this system of counterdominion as done in figure 33. Equalityis the response to concentration. It is aimed at the removal not of hierarchies but of barriers and the dichotomization of society.

In a more elementary way it is a matter of eliminating within the group those forms of hierarchy that are based on participation in the dominant sphere.

Resistance stands against mobility. This is the traditional theme of the go-slow and the establishing of group norms in opposition to the attraction exerted and organized by the ruling class.

resistance

counters ociety

equality

liberty

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ciosedness openness

defensive class

contestatory class

Figure 33

The theme of the countersociety is more directly ideological than the previous ones, just as integration is more so than mobility or concentration. The best analyses in this field have been produced by those who have studied resistance to colonial domination. The rejection of integration or of its extreme form, assimilation, draws its strength from the mobilization of a threatened culture, a culture defended not because it is traditional but because it acts as a breakwater to aid resistance against the inflow of domination and corruption.

In the same way, at the moment of the labor movement's greatest develop­ment there appeared the theme of proletarian culture, and even today, as at other moments in history, there is still the attempt to organize a counter­culture.

Last, the theme of liberty fights back against repression, not by organizing ghettos, which merely reinforces the work of integration and repression, but by challenging the boundary that social order establishes between the per­mitted and the forbidden, the normal and the pathological, the integrated and the deviant.

The antipsychiatry movement and the struggle against the various forms of imprisonment in prisons, asylums, or homes, is the most contemporary expression of this attempt at counterdominion.

However, it is difficult to see how counterdominion could be the exclusive work of the popular class itself, simply because of the weight on it of both constraints and alienation. The role of the count erelites, drawn mostly from the intelligentsia, is therefore almost always important in this attempt to challenge the values and norms established by the ruling class, and also in generating a practice to combat them. But their intervention is only sufficient if the conflict remains on the ideological level proper. It is important on the social organization level only if it draws its strength solely from a popular practice of counterdominion, only if it is revealing that practice and helping to rip apart the pseudo-positivity of the social order.

This analysis of the dominion of the ruling class over social organization and of the attempts made by the popular class to establish a counter-dominion requires for its completion an observation of the effects exerted by class relations at the level of consumption, which is to say of the transmission and reception of cultural goods as opposed to forms of social interaction.

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Consumable objects and conducts are hierarchized in such a way as to reproduce the distinctions between the social classes. This mechanism operates in accordance with the two methods already indicated. On the one hand a break is created between the upper and the lower modes of consumption. Above, one finds invention, genius, pure wit, elegance, taste, all of which are both the product of individual gifts and the result of prolonged membership of an elite freed from lowly material cares: below, we find practical, repetitive activity permitting immediate gratifications. On the other hand a continuity is established from top to bottom, an unbroken down­ward gradation. The work of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron has thrown remarkable light upon this organized stratification. "High culture," vulgarized until it reaches the stage of radio and television games and quizzes, is downgraded from production to reproduction, from modern historical analysis to the crudest of narrative and chronological history, but always in such a way as to create a feeling of dependent participation in a higher social and cultural world, revered, imitated, and unchallenged. The popularization of culture must at the same time attract and repel the people. Attract it so that there is no risk of its challenging the class nature of the dominant culture; repel it so that it shall not feel capable of participating in anything but a mode of objects or at the most of techniques, without being able to rise further to the level of ideas and orientations.

Claude Grignon, in L'ordre des choses (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1971), has made a very acute examination of technical education in French state schools from this point of view. Such education must be inferior, but it must not be different. The technician and the nurse must have some notions of general culture so that they can belong in the world dominated by the economic or medical rulers: but they must also be limited to technical operations, so that they never ask themselves questions about the functioning of production complexes, in order that the gap between elite and technicians be maintained—a gap that the latter find it easier to accept because another gap, just as large, is created at the same time between them and the mass, whether this consist of workers, patients, or students.

But this class stratification does not lead solely to responses of pure conformity. Apart from dependent participation, two very different types of conduct are observable that also refer to the double dialectic of the social classes. On the one hand there is the reappropriation of cultural objects for the defensive maintenance of a popular culture based on both professional activity and on the preservation of old cultural values, and centered on the primary gToups, the family or the neighborhood. On the other hand, there is the use of objects of consumption in a "desocializing" way in an effort to reach the orientations of the system of historical action by leaping over the social order. This one might term the pursuit of opportunity, manifested by

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the cult of real or mythical heroes who have attained success without going through authority, influence, or membership of the upper class. This rage to live, stronger among the young, is fed both by participation and revolt and enables mass culture to overflow the popularization of high culture, while at the same time never being able to liberate itself from the dominion of the ruling class, which perpetually gathers it back "into the fold."

This dominion is stronger in proportion as cultural consumption is more directly linked to the reproduction of a social domination and forms of social organization. It is less strong in the domain of the consumption of symbolic products when such consumption is not linked to professional roles. Here again, as in the previous analyses, one must not either be snared by the functionalist illusion of stratified participation in values or forget that the dominion of the dominant class does not entirely account for popular conduct, which always remains oriented—albeit often in degraded form—by the double effort of resistance and contestation.

d. Social Practice and the State

The categories of social practice are also determined by the political system, although we can limit ourselves here to two observations.

First, the political system only appears to lend a unity to social practice. It does not have that role if it has no openness, if it is entirely subject to a hegemonic class, in other words, if it does not itself intervene as such. When it intervenes, it does so to the degree in which its elements of plurality resist the forces of unification, and also to the degree in which its own unity is weak, in which contractual mechanisms are added to the elaboration of laws, and in which it does not outlaw the action of social movements, organiza­tional demands, and pressures exerted upon itself. Second, the political system, acting within a historically and geographically determined territorial whole, combines rules that are not sociologically interdependent, constitutes and defends a political order that is socially composite. The greater the intervention of the political system is the less deep-seated the unity it possesses.

We must therefore conclude that social practice and what one might term a society's discourse has no unity, does not form a coherent whole that could be identified either with a body of societal values or with the domination of a ruling class.

Sociology has used the notions of values, norms, and roles in a way that cannot be accepted. Social practice is not made up of role reciprocity and role expectations brought into harmony by a common reference to norms and thereby to values. This image may correspond to communities ultimately defined by the rules of their functioning alone, or inversely to voluntary

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associations; it is not applicable to a society in which class relations and political relations have the greatest importance. The actors communicate within the framework of a system of historical action, of laws, of rules, but their interests do not chime together in any harmony. They are all seeking, at the political level, to increase their influence, to conduct their strategy, and also, at the class relations level, to defend themselves against an adversary while at the same time identifying themselves with societal orientations.

In consequence, actors rarely play their roles, rarely conduct themselves, in accordance with what others expect of them. They cannot dissociate their organizational behavior from their strategic conduct and their class conduct. This overlapping and this noncoincidence are more accentuated in the agencies than in the administrations, are reduced to the minimum in total organizations, and are most evident of all in social exchanges outside the organization.

If we consider the opposite hypothesis, that of a unity of social practice as an ideological whole, then we see that its realization presupposes a complete overlaying of the system of historical action and the political system by a class domination. This is not possible unless the dominant class is extremely dissociated from the ruling class, and consequently if the society is domi­nated by a hegemonic bloc of old and new dominant classes and thus deprived of all capability of managing its historicity. But this situation is that in which the categories of social practice are the least homogeneous, exactly like displays in a museum combining works from different societies and epochs. It is in just such a way that the religious culture of a traditionally Catholic region can combine into a constantly remodeled syncretism heri­tages as dissimilar as the buildings and art works of the Vatican. On the other hand, this social and cultural domination, even if it succeeds in imposing practices, is overflowed on every side by a historicity, by class relations, by political conduct that it can never succeed in stifling completely.

We have just encountered once more the general idea or theme of ideology. It has already played a part in our analysis of the social classes, and we shall meet it again when dealing with social movements and social change. The moment has come to put some order into the very diverse uses to which this word is put.

First let us set to one side the simplest and only clear meaning. Actors have an ideology. They represent a situation to themselves—a situation thaTIs always a whole composed of social interactions seen from their point of view—and reinterpret as the environment of their intentions what is in fact a relation of which they are one of the terms. It is in this sense that I have used the word ideology when associating it with the concept of Utopia.

All systems of social interactions, whether it is a matter of class relations and their stake, of political relations, or of organizational relations, produce

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two types of representation in the actors: either they identify themselves with the social field in question and perceive their partners or adversaries as obstacles—which corresponds to a Utopia—or else they identify the social stake with themselves, as they perceive themselves in relation to their partners or adversaries.

There exist ideologies and Utopias linked with organizational roles, with group interests, or with classes. Every observable ideology or Utopia on the organizational level also participates in a class ideology or class Utopia.

But the ideology of the dominant class is also the dominant ideology. Thus we come back to the problem of an ideology of the system, of the social organization. And consequently we find introduced the idea of three levels of social reality: the economic, the political, and the ideological. This theme appears in many ways.

In the first place, this trichotomy can be employed in order to distinguish the domains of social production, that of society's adaptation to change and that of reproduction—the first being defined in economic terms, the second in political terms, the third as that of ideology.

Second, distinction can be made between societies in which social domina­tion manifests itself in a directly economic form and those in which that domination presents itself in a form that is either primarily political or primarily ideological.

Third, social action can be conducted by groupings defined by an economic situation or by the intermediary of political forces, or by that of ideological groups.

To the first of these ideas it must be replied that the levels of analysis and of social reality cannot be identified with categories of social facts. The level of social production, which I term the level of historicity, is not that of economic facts, for it is the level of the cultural and social orientations of the system of historical action as well as that of class conflicts and ideologies. What sociology is dealing with, on this level as on all others, is not facts— economic, political, or cultural—but social interactions.

The upper class always tends to be both ruling, which means it controls the production of society, and dominant, which means it ensures the reproduc­tion of the established order and its own domination. These two orientations manifest themselves on all levels of social reality. Although 1 distinguish between three levels—the field of historicity, the political system, and the social organization—this representation must not be confused with a hierarch-ization of categories of social facts.

The second formulation is on the surface acceptable. In fact, it fits in very well with a great many schemata representing the transition from "tradi­tional" societies to "modern" societies, from societies of transmission to societies of acquisition. These are acceptable ideas insofar as they indicate

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the decline of metasocial warrants of the social order, but totally unaccept­able if they go so far as to impose an image of evolution leading from irrationality to rationality, from a religious state to a positive state. Every mode of social domination is at the same time economic and ideological. The masters of bygone societies were not only god-kings or priests, they were first and foremost owners of the earth and men. The technocrats of the postindustrial era are not scientists but masters imposing their ideology. When shall we free ourselves completely from this tenacious sociocentrism that makes us see our own society as the last stage before the final entry into "nature/* into "reason," into "freedom/' into "the end of history?"

If there is going to be an end to history, then it can only take the form of an event, whether of human or nonhuman origin, and not that of a return to a stable state free from all the agonies and aspirations of historicity.

The third formulation reminds us quite rightly that the more a society is subjected to domination, the more too are social relations distorted, the more the class conflict is replaced by the clash of the constituted order and forces of contestation that attack it from outside, by what I shall term, in my last chapter, critical action as opposed to social movements.

The trichotomy "economic, political, ideological" thus introduces the worst kinds of confusion. It suggests that there is a category of social facts corresponding to each of the levels I have distinguished: the field of historicity, the political system, and the social organization, whereas each of these levels must he defined as a system of social interactions.

Class relations are situated on a level that is the same as that of economic relations and of ideologies, which is also a political locus insofar as the action of the state penetrates from the political system into the field of historicity. The political system also deals with economic interests and is animated by political ideologies that refer more or less directly to the class ideologies, while at the same time also pertaining in part to the internal rhetoric of the political system itself. Last, the social organization is the locus of an eco­nomic practice, while at the same time the organizations are dependent on the political system or also possess—in the case of enterprises and agencies— a political system of their owrn. It is equally the locus where the ideology of the dominant class tends to become an ideology of the system, the spirit of the categories of social practice, but in a way that is not absolutely constraining except in the domain of pure reproduction, in the graveyard of dead historicities.

One cannot superimpose an ideological superstructure on top of an economic infrastructure without taking up a historicist viewpoint. In that case one can conceive of forces of production powering society as a whole. But one can just as well say that it is the ideas and values that power the social practices. In every case this evolutionism rests upon a philosophy of

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history, last avatar of the metasocial warrants of social order. Sociology cannot exist until after that moment when it has totally expelled the vitalism of material forces or of values, when it has begun conceiving of the whole of society in terms of social action and hence in terms of both practice and orientation, economy and ideology, indissolubly linked. The social organiza­tion can never be viewed as the simple concrete expression of a domination; it is linked to the field of historicity and therefore to the double dialectic of the social classes. Closed as a concrete organizational whole, it is open as the practice of historicity.

Social organization alwrays presents two complementary aspects. On the one hand it represents the field of historicity, which is to say both

the orientations of the system of historical action and class conflicts. On the other hand it is the expression of a domination.

It is in this respect that it is the dominant ideology. But it can no more be reduced to that ideology than it can be to cultural orientations or, by contrast, to open class conflict.

This is the meaning of the opposition between technique and power introduced at the beginning of this chapter as one of the fundamental dimensions of social organization. An organizational system or a political system has no more "positive" unity of content than the system of historical action has. All the social systems are modes of historicity's dominion over functioning and are dominated by the tensions between the two aspects of class relations: conflict and domination. This is why in all the organizations one can and must seek out the tensions between the elements of the system and the conflicts between the actors.

Does there then exist no unifying agent of the categories of social practice? YesT there is such an agent: the state.

The state is what links field of historicity, political system, and social organization together. A powerful state dominates the political system, intervenes in the field of historicity by substituting itself to a greater or lesser degree for the social classes, regulates social practice through the inter­mediary of its apparatus, which can include agencies and enterprises as well as administrations.

If the state is not simply the disguise of a dominant and hegemonic coalition, then it is capable of planning a society, of regulating its relations of authority, the forms of its division of labor, its educational programs, its mode of occupying space, in a systematic manner. But this powerfulness on the part of the state does not make it possible to say that the whole formed by the categories of social practice is thereby made homogeneous. On the contrary, the interventionist or planning state incorporates within it a variety of practical demands; it acts in the name of the popular classes, even though its action is pursued more in the interest of the ruling classes. It imposes its

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own interests and representations, which are linked with the intersocial relations in which it is engaged; in particular, it mobilizes a national consciousness reinforced by foreign relations, and this is the most hetero­geneous aggregate of all, taking its inspiration without distinction as it does from Joan of Arc and Robespierre, from Peter the Great and Lenin, from Washington and Lincoln.

A totalitarian state does not create the society most integrated around a body of values. It imposes conformity, but a conformity with principles and rules that are at the same time heterogeneous and changeable. State absolutism reigns in such a society over a social and cultural junkshop.

The greatest integrating capacity is found in a state that is able to combine its role as leader of development and its capacity to mobilize the popular classes with all their cultural baggage. What one has then is a state-social movement, a revolutionary state, the state of the year II, of the Soviets, or of the Cuban or Chinese revolutions.

And in that case we are a long way away from ^Gramsci*s idea of civil society, When the state, in Italy or in France, integrates the interests and ideologies of the ruling classes, or of the upper layers of the underdeveloped regions, with those of the modernizing centers of the economy and society, giving much more importance in both countries to the "Southern intellec­tuals, " it succeeds in unifying the social organization to a certain degree, but its success can never be more than partial, tending to be limited to the creation of a state ideology, while the heterogeneity of society and social practices remains untouched.

We are still further away from the situation characterized by the omnipo­tence of a ruling class.

It is always necessary to search out the dominion of the ruling class and to demonstrate its presence beyond the socially abstract language of society's regulations and administration. In fact it is one of sociology's most useful activities to unmask the false objectivity or the false technicality of the social organization, but this effort must not be confined to only one of its aspects, however important. What must also be sought out and made visible is the system of historical action and the dominion of the ruling class, as well as the counterdominion of the popular class and the composite action of the political system.

This will make clear the gap that separates the social organization from its reproduction. Analysis of the first refers onward to the system of historical action and toward the social classes, via the forms of economic activity and of organizational power. Reproduction, on the contrary, can only be a con­certed action directed at the maintenance of the social order, which is to say of a concrete historical whole, in which class domination, political power and authority are intermingled. Reproduction can therefore never be the work oj"

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a dominant class alone. It can only be realized by the state, when it is in the service of a hegemony and of the conservation of privilege. The dominant class always seeks to reproduce its domination. But it is prevented from doing so efficaciously to the degree in which it is also a ruling class. It is the state that can separate rulers and dominants by the fusing of dominant classes or class fractions and by organizing a technical and ideological apparatus of reproduction.

Obviously the principal instruments of social reproduction are the organs of socialization. In industrialized societies the ruling class, while making use of the school system to its advantage, is at the same time mistrustful of it because it is linked with the state and because, in consequence, it is sen'ing middle classes possessing a political influence as much as it does the old dominant classes and their cultural heritage.

Reproduction is therefore a program of political and ideological action effected under the direction of the state, one of whose functions it is. The more societies are capable of rapid changes, the further reproduction is removed from being a simple conservation of an established state. It is reaction, struggle against social change. The upper class, therefore, and the popular class too, have an increasing difficulty in this type of society in managing the relations between their offensive, ruling, or contestatory conduct on the one hand and their defensive conduct on the other, this latter being that of reproducing the social order in the case of the dominant class and reproducing a class culture, and more broadly still a dominated culture, in the case of the popular class.

In a society with strong social warrants it is not the power of the dominant class only that is reproduced but the whole of the field of historicity, the transformation of which is very slow. In industrialized societies, on the contrary, there is a dissociation between the transforming action of the ruling class and a process of reproduction that maintains the privileges of the dominant class but is more directly linked to the action of the state.

In neither of these cases can the social order be intensified with the domination of the upper class. It is never possible to break the interdepen­dence of the orientations of the system of historical action and class relations.

e. Discourse, Ideology, and Rhetoric

The whole made up by the practices and the representations within an organization or within the social organization has no unity of its own. Such discourse can and must always be broken down in such a way as to reveal all the levels of society's functioning—historicity, politics, organizations—and all the levels of actors—class, political, organizational. The unity introduced by the state is more that of container than of content. But it is impossible for an organization—or for an institution—not to seek to establish its own unity.

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not to define its ''spirit/' It therefore produces a specific rhetoric. And this rhetoric reverses the order that I have followed in my analysis. Instead of stressing the organization's dependence in relation to the higher levels of society, it presents it as an independent actor acting in the name of its principles, of its cohesion, and of its survival. This rhetoric always has two aspects, one justificatory, the other polemical. The first is necessary because an organization, torn between its history and its historicity, must assert its autonomy, justify its existence, provide itself with a vocation and a mission. The polemical aspect stems from the fact that any organization is in competition with others, which are either threatening it directly or seeking to improve their own relative position in relation to its own. This rhetoric increases in strength proportionately with the organizations autonomy. It develops more easily in an enterprise than in an administration and more easily still in an agency than in an enterprise. The rhetoric of the organiza­tions is thus the opposite of a state ideology or of the ideologies of the social classes. It evolves within socioprofessional groups that are not clearly linked either to the main social classes or to the state's economic action. The most conspicuous case is that of school or university rhetoric, which I discussed as it occurs in the United States in my book Universite et socie'tt aux Etats-Unis (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1972).

It tends as a general rule to assert the primacy oifa professional role, seen as being in the service of the general interest, independent of social conflicts and political struggles, champion of both order and movement, past and present, the individual and the collectivity, and basis of an esprit de corps. Talcott Parsons and G. M. Piatt, in "Considerations on the American Academic System" (Minerva 4 [1968], pp. 497-523), have provided a very-detailed analysis of the professionalism of American universities, which is also attachment to the autonomy of the university organization. But an analyst identifying himself less with the actor cannot be satisfied with such a description.

Rhetoric plays an ambiguous role. On the one hand it conceals the dependence of an organization in relation to the higher levels of society and especially in relation to the dominant class. Professionalism is a convenient way of not posing the problem of power and of not asking oneself questions about the nature of the social and political choices that govern professional activity, its financing as well as its forms of organization. This is why the student movement fought against professionalism, which has often felt itself more threatened by such contestation than by its links with the power elite. Nevertheless, professionalism also carries within it a will to defend itself against power. Theleachers are suspicious of the state, of big business, of the armed forces. They howl with protest at the slightest subordination of the educational organization to external objectives.

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The situation is scarcely any different in France, where the link between teachers and state is more direct, but where one finds the same determination to be seen as occupying a place in the center of society, halfway between powerholders and people, and the same sheltering behind principles, regula­tions, and an extreme degree of professionalization.

It is just as impossible to accept this rhetoric at its face value, forgetting the dependence of the organizations, as it is to treat it as merely a comple­ment to the ideology of the ruling class, as if teachers—to take a specific case—were in fact serving the interests of the ruling class increasingly well by asserting themselves to be independent, and as if they were fulfilling the social function of maintaining the social order with ever greater efficiency the more they shelter behind abstract notions such as liberalism, humanism, and professionalism. Rhetoric is the specific characteristic of the "middle strata," whose links with class relations are sufficiently indirect for them to be able simultaneously to serve the ruling class, feel sympathy with the popular class, and above all defend their own professional and organizational independence. Hence the growing importance today of the rhetoric of the management staff in large enterprises, especially in those that are closest to being agencies. Cut off from top management, at a remove from the workers, they tend to identify themselves with the enterprise and with their professional interests. It is rare for them to side with the workers, less and less usual for them to feel themselves to be in collaboration with the employers. They produce a rhetoric that speaks both of growth and of participation in order to give more autonomy to the enterprises of which they feel themselves the best qualified champions. The discourse of an organization is therefore never reduced to a rhetoric: it is fashioned even more by the ideology of the dominant class and also includes the discordant voice of popular ideology.

This separation between ideologies and rhetoric is connected with the twofold nature of the organizations: they implement the orientations and social relations of a field of historicity and the decisions of the political system; they are also autonomous units reinforced by their historical and geographical particularisms. It is futile trying to reduce the superimposition of all these components to a unity, and consequently to endow the categories of

\ social practice with an integration they cannot possess. Is it possible to detect a cultural rhetoric, analogous to the social rhetoric

that evolves within the organizations? Such an attempt seems reasonable, since cultural practices, especially in our type of society, are more and more the product of large organizations. The educational system, the organs of the press, radio, or television, all put out programs that are indeed the output of organizations more or less akin, according to the individual case, to an agency, an enterprise, or an administration, and that often belong to all three of those types at once. But this parallelism is in part artificial.

The rhetoricians of an organization act upon it from within; they have the

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capacity partly to determine a production unit's mode of functioning. Here, on the contrary, if their action exists then it must be in direct delation with a public that has the power to either receive or not receive the cultural product being put out, and that public is not organized. We do not use the term t4mass media" to denote Firm's own newsletters, school textbooks, or radio programs put out by an organization purely for its members.

We must therefore take a different path to reach cultural rhetoric, while still maintaining the general definition of rhetoric as a whole. It is formed, it seems to me, by the conjuncture of two constituents.

On the one hand it occurs, like all rhetoric, within social "reality" as it appears, which is to say within the social order. It is seeking what it likes to call a mass audience, by which it means the domain of opinions viewed as responses to a set of stimuli of which the social nature and significance are not questioned. On the other hand, it is constantly talking in the name of "needs" and demands. The social and cultural field is constantly being transformed, giving rise to the appearance of new demands, but public opinion always remains just as conditioned as ever by all the organs of social and cuhural reproduction, with the result that rhetoric is constantly stressing freedom, spontaneity, what people "really want," something that market research is increasingly able to reveal. Public opinion is to a large extent determined by the dominant ideology, but the more it is, the less place there is for rhetoric. Reading the Soviet press is an excellent way of finding out the views of that society's rulers, but a very bad way of trying to isolate the autonomous contribution made by Russian journalists. Similarly, the mes­sages being transmitted through advertising, in capitalist countries, are essentially the ideological propaganda of private enterprise.

An autonomous contribution by rhetoric can exist only when one places oneself in the position of the consumer and his choices, asking no questions about the system of historical action, class domination, or the political decisions that govern the forms of consumption, but simply concentrating on the initiative and satisfaction of the consumer. This is why the language of the rhetoricians constantly mingles references to a world of objects, of cultural data, with references to human nature, to good will, to abstract rights, to what is acceptable or unacceptable to the consumers. What it excludes totally is the definition of social relations, the search for causes, for events, or for mechanisms of decision.

Here again rhetoric is at the same time a means of concealing the determinants of social and cultural practice and a means of creating a gap between consumer and the dominion of ideology. Cultural transmissions cannot be reduced to rhetoric. They have no more unity of content than organizational practice, except in the case when a totalitarian state is linking the various levels of society together completely. The dominant ideology exerts its dominion over them, in accordance with the forms just analyzed.

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The ideology of the popular classes can make its voice heard in them too, more weakly it is true, but increasingly as the political system is more open. Rhetoric has its place in them too, which makes the formers of opinion into a "middle" category not reducible to that of the agencies transmitting the dominant ideology.

I am laying so much stress on this low degree of integration to be observed in social and cultural practices, because, if one represents them as being entirely unified, either by values or by dominant interests, as both right- and left-wing functionalism would have it, it is no longer possible to understand how social movements can form and manifest themselves. If the universities are purely bourgeois and simply responsible for maintaining a class inheri­tance, then I don't understand how a student movement can have come into being. If public opinion is wholly molded by propaganda, then I don't see how movements can arise within it. Social practice is the plane upon which, simultaneously, we find projected the orientations of the system of historical action, class relations, the unity and plurality of the political system, and the complexity of a historical situation. It is this diversity in the origins of the rules and messages that lends a certain autonomy to rhetorics, an autonomy that it would be absurd to think of as limitless. It cannot be separated from its subordination to all the forms of the ruling class's power and dominion. It is an indirect agent of integration and exclusion; but it exists only because social practice is not entirely integrated and dominated. The rhetoricians are on the fringe of the great social conflicts without ever being completely neutral, but their existence shows that such conflicts are not impossible.

f. Social Systems >

This study of organizations, and of what overflows them in the social organization—that is, the direct determination of social practice by the orientations of the system of historical action, class relations, and the political system—completes the body of material formed by the first five chapters of this book. Our analysis began with historicity, followed its transformation into a system of historical action and into the stake of class relations, then moved down to the level of concrete collectivities, first of all that of the political system whose existence is linked with that of a territorial society, then that of the organizations, autonomous units of decision, bounded by precise frontiers, possessing a scale of authority of their own and characterized by their own particularities in time and space.

The autonomy of the political system and the organizations derives pri­marily from the fact that their content is never reduced to a field of historicity, that they combine within themselves agents, rules, and conduct that belong to various systems of historical action and various systems of class relations. It derives also, within a synchronic analysis, from the fact that the

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systems whose concatenation constitutes the field of historicity possess neither unity of orientations and values nor an instrument of social control. The elements of the system of historical action are defined by their oppositions and their complementarities at the same time. What is called the spirit of a civilization is not the unifying principle of a system of historical action but an ideological creation, the sole function of which is to paper over the disintegration of the system or to mask its true nature by identifying it more or less retrospectively with the interests and the representations of the ruling class.

The system of class relations is characterized both by the domination of the ruling class and by the resistance or the contestation produced by the popular class. It can never be reduced to an absolute power, as though society were no more than a vast organization being manipulated in the dark by a wicked genie.

From all this two general ideas emerge.

1. My analysis refuses to view society as a simple system, since it defines what is usually referred to as the social structure as a system of systems. Society is not an organization, is not the whole formed by means correspond­ing either to a body of values or to the action of a social power. What constitutes a unified whole is the state, not society. The state can be seen as capable of weighing its objectives, organizing the making of decisions and negotiation between political forces, of organizing its activities. This is why sociology has had such great difficulty in freeing itself from the idea that its object is the study of the state, its laws, its institutions, its doctrine, and in freeing itself also of the dominion of the state itself which tends to demand of the sociologist that he shall be a modern Royal Historiographer. One of the most obvious aspects of this book is its determined attempt to shift analysis away from this state-centeredness, by starting out from the system of historical action and the social classes and then by asserting the priority of a study of the political system over that of the state. This orientation is a continuation of the constant effort of social thought and sociology since Saint-Simon, Tocqueville, and Marx.

The role of the state is essential, but it cannot be understood other than as a striving toward the practical integration of the different social systems, which are of different natures. The organizational system is the management of a set of means, of internal and external relations, in terms of objectives. Those objectives must be taken to have been established at the moment one begins one's study of the organization. " Piloting" an organization consists in maintaining an instant-by-instant comparison of the required values of all the components on the one hand and the observed values on the other, then switching in feedback mechanisms that will keep the second set matched to

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the first. An organization is situated in an environment that it does not entirely control and whose variations it must take into account in defining its objectives.

The political system is not a "piloted" system but a field of goal or objective formation. One cannot distinguish completely between its ends and its means. Political means are instruments for the determination of the ends that are imposed on organizations. This system is not governed by norms, for it produces them, or at least it produces laws and regulations. It does not rest upon authority but upon influence, upon strategies, and proceeds by means of transactions and negotiations, insofar, at least, as these are compatible with the domination exerted by the ruling class. The functioning of the political system is defined by its adaptation not to an environment but to the changing relations between the political forces and the more individualized interest groups that act through the political forces as intermediaries.

The system of historical action constitutes, produces the field of social experience. It has no internal organization that enables it to arrive at decisions. The importance acquired by the sociology of decisions must not make us forget that they are almost never the prime determinant of social organization. The deciders are determined by the system of historical action and by class relations; they do not simply decide in the manner of a sovereign. Has it not been rightly said that politics is the art of the possible? At the level of the system of historical action it is impossible to speak of environment, for environment is defined by the action a society exerts upon itself, by its historicity, by its capacity to transcend its functioning and to define its own type of development, not arbitrarily, but on the basis of its cultural model, its accumulation, and its mode of knowledge.

Class relations cannot be separated from the system of historical action. The classes are not the actors in social organization and are even less defined by their relation to the state. They are the actors of historicity, locked in a struggle for the control of the system of historical action and of historicity, which sets an upper class against a popular class.

System of functioning, system of adaptation, system of creation—the three levels of society are all systems different from one another in nature, and their concatenation is not regulated by a sovereign authority but simply managed by the state within the framework of a concrete and therefore heterogeneous societal unit.

2. This analysis views society as a system of systems of social action. It asserts the hierarchy of social systems and the determination of social organization and the political system by the field of historicity, but it sees this latter not as a situation but as a set of orientations of action and of relations between actors. Sociology does not discover its true object until it rids itself of two oppositions that can have no meaning for it: that of situation and actor.

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and that of objective and subjective. To these two false oppositions I add another, one that translates the first two into the terms of sociological analysis itself: the opposition of explanation and comprehension.

Social organization is not determined in the last instance by a body of values or by a state of forces of production. The cultural model is not an idea but the consciousness of a creativity that one cannot define other than as work upon work, the product of knowledge and accumulation. Neither cultural models, nor the other elements of the historical system, nor class relations, are forms of social organization; they are forms of society's action upon itself. They can never be defined outside an economic activity and economic relations, any more than they can be reduced, in the positivist tradition, to a material state of society.

As it moves down from the system of historical action until it reaches social organization, analysis is not making a transition from an objective situation into the domain of social consciousness and ideology. The system of historical action is a system of orientations, of culturally and socially orientecT conducts, and it is at the level of class relations that ideologies are formed. Inversely, social organization is a set of practices, of forms and techniques of labor. At the summit of the analysis we find the production of labor, oriented by the system of historical action and put into effect by class relations; at the very-bottom we find the organization of labor and the values or norms that organizational power seeks to impose. The system capable of producing its finalities governs that which adapts them to demands and in its turn governs the organizational system that imposes ends upon means.

This is why sociological analysis cannot separate the explanation of the systems from the comprehension of the actors; for the systems bring orienta­tions into relation, while the actors are nothing other than the agents of the system.

90CUL /I/O/EVENTS

A. Four Kinds of Collective Conduct

Society must not be taken for what it is, for its forms of organization and its rules of functioning. What appears as the framework for social behavior is in reality the always limited, fragile, badly integrated result of the conflicts and the transactions that occur between the classes and the social forces derived from them and that are the actors of a society's historicity, actors that animate and interpret a society's system of historical action, which is to say its social and cultural field of development.

If one means by social conduct nothing but the interplay of the actors within a given institutional and organizational framework, then the notion of the social movement becomes incomprehensible, for social movements belong to the processes by which a society produces its organization on the basis of its system of historical action and via class conflicts and political transactions.

By social movements 1 understand, in essence, the conflict action of agents of the social classes struggling for control of the system of historical action. But it is difficult to abstract this type of collective conduct from the observ­able reality with which all the levels of analysis are intermixed. Can one speak of a working-class movement, defined by its struggle against capitalism for the control of industrial development, without taking into consideration research into the institutional system, which is to say specifically the degree and form of institutional methods of dealing with labor conflicts, or without considering the effects of economic crises, professional mobility, or the organization of enterprises?

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But before studying the interaction of various types of collective conduct it is first necessary to make a clear distinction between class conflict, resistance to authority, and pressure on the institutional system. And this comes to the same thing as distinguishing between the kinds of collective conduct that correspond to the system of historical action, the institutional system, and the organizational system. The essential part of my analysis will then be devoted to a study of social movements, which are the collective conduct of historicity. Lastly, it will be necessary to consider the projection of the social movements onto the level of the institutional system and, above all, onto that of social organization, and therefore the transformation of the social conflict into struggle against established power.

The most urgent task is to learn to recognize the various kinds of collective conduct in practice. Too often we in fact find opposing general interpreta­tions: for some, the student movement is to be explained by the crisis in the universities, which are organized in a manner no longer in harmony with society as a whole, while society is asking them to produce new "officer material"; for others, it is above all the bureaucratic rigidity of a decision­making system that must be challenged, and that is denounced in terms of accusations against ministerial bureaucracy and the corporatism of the teachers; for others still, the student movement reveals and gives life to a new class conflict. Such discussions, however suggestive, cannot lead to any result unless one defines at the outset the characteristics of the types of collective conduct that reveal either a class conflict, an institutional blockage, or an organizational crisis. At the point we have reached in our analysis it is now possible to effect such distinctions.

a. Conduct Characteristic of Organizational Crisis

Actors are situated first of all within a social organization. Any collective action presupposes the existence of an actor, of other actors who are bearers of interests differing from his, and of a social field in which their interactions occur. How can we define the elements at the organizational level more precisely?

1. The members of an organization who put forward claims are defining themselves in two ways, from the inside and from the outside of the organi­zation.

On the one hand they fill a certain position and they consider that since they make a certain contribution, they ought to receive a just remuneration, which is to say one in accordance with the relative level of their contribution.

On the other hand, the organization is only one particular social milieu,

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one in which the actor is only partially engaged. He therefore acts within it in terms of his other roles and his personal interests as a whole. The rise in prices is not the responsibility of the individual enterprise or organization, but it provokes claims and conflicts within them. Social or professional mobility creates situations in which the actor's professional role is more directly engaged, but which cannot be reduced to it, which is another important form of the influence of external factors upon organizational conduct. This duality of the actor's position, setting him both inside the organization and outside facing it, is in opposition to the unity of a class position, which defines the identity of the actor in a social movement.

2. The claim is addressed to a clearly defined interlocutor, the person who holds authority and, beyond that, power. But if we limit the analysis to the specifically organizational level, then the "chief appears at the same time omnipotent and almost totally lacking control over his decisions, since he is only the person who brings objectives and means into relation in the name of norms, and also in that of a certain strategy with regard to an environment that is in fact a set of constraints upon the organization. With the result that any claim must first place itself within limits defined both by those constraints and by the nature of the power itself. Hence the discontinuity of claims, their "nibbling" aspect, and a constant see-sawing between a very limiting "realism'* and an overflowing of the organizational framework that can even lead to the formation of a social movement.

3. The field of the conflict is the organization itself; the claim is in this sense always oriented toward disorganization and toward reorganization. It disorganizes since it modifies the previous scheme of things; but it is aimed at a reorganization, for it has no true force except when it is protesting against disorganization and crisis. The person threatened with unemployment, underemployment, or redundancy, who protests against arbitrary treatment or bad working conditions and wages, while at the same time accusing management, wants to protect the organization in which he works and thus guarantee his own future. The miner subjected to a life of back-breaking toil still fights against the closedown of his pit for fear of being out of a job.

Thus the organizational claim is the prisoner of the organization, and even appeals to the interests of the organization against those of the power that manages it or those of the external forces that act upon it.

It is difficult in this case for a collective action to come into being oriented toward a transformation of the social order. Such an action can only come into being if, beyond the crisis of the organization, power is being challenged. On the other hand it frequently happens that a social movement gives rise to crisis behavior, or draws strength from it. An economic crisis, the threat or

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the reality of unemployment, unleash collective behavior that is not always associated with a challenging of power and that is different froln a social movement, which is to say from a class conflict challenging the control of the system of historical action. The student movement in France during recent years was strongly associated with crisis conduct. It was in the arts faculties, with very uncertain job opportunities ahead, with a teaching curriculum inherited from the liberal society and even from older societies still, that the movement developed most easily.

If it comes into being in isolation, this type of collective conduct can only be oriented toward the reconstitution of the social system affected by the cnsis._Jt is t o s u c n conduct—and not to social movements—that one must apply the definition given by Neil Smelser in his Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1963): "A noninstitutionalized mobiliza­tion for an action whose aim is to modify one or several types of tension on the basis of the generalized reconstitution of one component of the action/' The movement increases in importance, according to this author, as the crisis affects a more fundamental component of the action, which is to say, in order of decreasing importance: values, norms, participation in organizations, and use of technical resources. In response to the crisis there occurs the effort to reconstruct society, to restore its principles and its functioning. There is an endeavor to find the way back to a "normal" situation, to recover lost positions, the integration of the collectivity, the rules of the social game, the principles animating culture. Sometimes the collective conduct is not aimed at a return to a previous equilibrium: it can display confidence in the future. It is only a crisis, some people will say, and as soon as reason returns a new equilibrium wrill be found, preserving the essential values and answering better to the requirements of the present time than the old system, which was worn out or has been distorted by external pressures that must bear the responsibility for the crisis.

In every case, viewed in itself, the crisis manifests itself by fragmentation, by anomic behavior, by demoralization, by withdrawal, by apathy, or—in contrast—by rebellion against an obsolete, over-rigid organization, incapable of answering the needs of modern society.

In all three types of conduct—restoration, anornie, modernization—the actor faces the social system directly, without the intervention of conflicts between actors who are defined by their opposition.

The actor is defined within an organization; he refers himself to its rules, its customs, its needs. He challenges injustice, incompetence, irrationality. The actor himself is not very clearly defined, since each individual can act in terms of several membership groups and several roles. The crisis is experi­enced as non-meaning, not as the result of an adverse action. Positions are arrived a: as "obvious" responses to the crisis, and, like light projected onto a

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broken mirror and reflected in all directions, the image of the order to be reestablished is often incoherent and leads to the simultaneous presentations of contradictory assertions or objectives. The action that occurs is more a sharp break, either forward or backward, than a transformation. It is therefore difficult to organize, and the specific characteristic of crisis conduct is its discontinuity, the swift succession of excitement and depression, of far-ranging programs and apathetic indifference.

Every popular class carries on an action that is defensive at the same time as it is contestatory. But it can happen that the link between these two slopes of its movement snaps or is absent, and that a purely defensive action results that then becomes a conduct of organizational crisis. But many collective actions are too hurriedly placed in this category. A rural collectivity affected by the penetration of mercantile capitalism is often subject to a messianic movement or some other form of uprising. It is insufficient to see this as a defense reaction on the part of a community struggling against its own disintegration. Very often, on the contrary, one can see it as an effort directed both at reappropriating the process of modernization and at struggling against a still distant and ill-defined adversary. The messiah is not merely the person imposing the return to a former more or less idealized situation, but rather the person who is attempting to transform those undergoing the change into actors. In which case what is taking place is a social movement and not just a simple reaction to social disorganization, a confused form of class struggle and not a tradition-bound integrating mechanism. What distinguishes the two types of collective conduct is the fact that the social movement alone has the capacity to mobilize a group or collectivity for a struggle against an adversary and for the control of change, whereas reaction to an organizational crisis can only be directed toward the inside of a collectivity. It becomes, on this account, wholly heteronomous in its political action, or else, on the contrary, dominated by a will to 4,recapture lost ground," an impulse toward increased social participation, which is also heteronomous.

This dissociation of inside and outside, substituting itself for the theme of conflict, is the sign by which one can recognize an organizational crisis and the absence of a social movement.

b. Institutional Tensions

The output of the institutional system consists of decisions defining the framework within which the organizations act. The actors are social forces attempting to exert a certain influence on the decisions that will be imposed on a collectivity.

The action of a social force is therefore defined by four fundamental components.

In the first place, recognition of the limits of the field of decision. A union

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negotiating with employers cannot have the suppression of capitalism as its objective. That suppression may be the orientation of the labor movement, but no industrialization of labor conflicts exists except insofar as the labor movement and union action are not wholly identical. The union does not renounce the orientations of the labor movement when it enters into negotiation, but it only possesses any influence on decisions because its socially transforming action is indirect and limited.

In the second place, a social force—an interest group or a pressure group—aims at improving its relative position in relation to other social forces within the influence system.

In the third place, each social force works out a complex strategy since its interests are at least as differentiated as the societal problems with which the political system is coping. A pressure group is only a weak social force because it has only a single function and arrives at a complex strategy in a different way. It can only act by sheer vociferousness and aggressive activity.

If the actors of the institutional system were all pressure groups, then that system would disintegrate.

In the last place, the action of a social force is always directed toward a decision to be taken. The role of members of a legislature is to pass or not to pass laws, that of a municipal council—which is also an executive organ—is to decide on the use to be made of local resources.

A collective negotiation within an enterprise is aimed at altering the use being made of resources and the exercise of authority.

This description of institutional action is too limited, however; it does not take into consideration anything outside the area in which the institutions are effective. Yet every institutional system is limited, every claim is not negotiated, all social interests are not represented. Certain kinds of collective conduct are responses to the blockage or closedness of the institutional system. In France, the state has almost always refused to negotiate with the unions over wages. In the universities, the most advanced countries econom­ically had until very recently almost no system for the representation of students. In the Roman church there is still almost no recognized institu­tional system. In all these cases decision and authority are identified, and opposition tends to pass without transition from organizational claims to a direct contestation of social domination. But there also exist protest move­ments opposing the blockage itself and directed at opening the political system up: it is the imposition of values and norms, the refusal of authoritarian or bureaucratic rulers or managers to negotiate that are attacked. Such an action is reforming in nature; it is calling for a necessary modernization and often stresses the positive effects of conflict on social integration wrhen recognized and dealt with; at the same time it challenges the heritage of the past and vested rights.

What are the distinctive features of pressure on the institutional system?

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One is bound here to find the attributes of a social force. A pressure movement accepts certain limits, demands participation in decision making, is defined by the real capacity of influence; its action is therefore directed toward and against the institution. Workers strike in order to obtain recognition of the reality of the union and to impose the opening of negotiations. The beginning of the student movement at Nanterre in 1967 was marked by a strike aimed at obtaining student participation in the application of the Fouchet reforms, specifically in order to rescue certain categories of students from what were believed to be the harmful and unjust effects of that reform.

Such pressure can be aimed at obtaining institutional treatment of certain claims. It can also be a reaction against the blockage or the fragmentation of the institutional system and thus produce and lend strength to an anti-institutional uprising. These two types of conduct must be clearly distin­guished. The internal problems of the social organization and its functioning are associated with the problems—different by nature—of power, which is to say, of the projection onto the social organization of the relations of domination. But the problems of the institutional system's functioning, expressed by such words as rigidity, blockage, and so on, cannot be identified with those of hegemony, which reveal the dominion of social domination over the institutional system.

Institutional pressure often has as actor the lower strata or elements threatened by the upper class. They demand equality, oppose themselves to the monopolizing of wealth and political power by the great landowners. Their action is much more political than social, since they do not constitute the popular class of the society under consideration. Such was the case with the small landowners in Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries, those of Athens in particular, who rose against the power of the owners of the large estates who were a threat to them: they demanded more equality and supported the tyrants in their anti-aristocratic action. At a remove of many centuries, the petty bourgeoisie, in England and France, likewise demanded that measures be taken against wealth and for public education so as to equalize opportunities. In the first case, these small landowners cannot be identified with slaves, since they were citizens; in the second, the petty bourgeoisie cannot be identified with the working class, whose social move­ment was then being organized. Such movements can be extreme in the methods of government they advocate or support; they are nonetheless "moderate" as far as their action on class relations is concerned.

There is no lack of ideologists, nowadays particularly, who deny the existence of class conflicts and social movements and see nothing in them but the effect of institutional blockages. Let the state and the enterprises only become good strategists, capable of rational calculation, knowing at every

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moment how to negotiate the optimum conditions of adaptation to a changing environment, and pragmatic transactions will replace dogmatic confrontations.

I am not setting one ideology up against another. I am simply asserting that the collective conduct that is a response to the dysfunctioning of the institutional system is not of the same nature, does not have the same attributes, as social movements challenging the domination of the system of historical action.

Nothing could be more arbitrary than to assert the meaning of a historical event or a voluntary association. Comparative analysis must be our shield against such simpleminded attempts. The rigidity of the French institutional system is certainly an important element in the situation that led to* the explosion in May 1968. But what about the American universities? They were not suffering from a similar rigidity and centralism, yet they produced a student movement not unrelated to that which occurred in France or in Italy. Before recomposing the event and the connections between diverse problems and forms of collective conduct, we must first unravel them analytically.

This is a task made all the more difficult and all the more necessary by the fact that the sociologist tends to place himself inside a social whole, usually his own society, and like all social actors is more easily able to represent to himself the "concrete" problems of that social whole's functioning than its reference to cultural orientations or a class domination that cannot be recognized except by an effort of abstraction.

1. Thus, starting from the legitimate isolation of organizational conduct, one passes easily to the claim that social actors are defined solely by their position in the social organization and, more concretely, their position within social stratification and mobility.

The lowest strata then appear as both conservative and dependent, ultimately as passive. They participate only very slightly in the creation of values andsocialexchanges; they are not innovative, their behavior is rigid. The upper strata, on the contrary, display more "elective" conduct, devote a larger proportion of their resources to things other than subsistence, are more capable of welcoming innovations, which are more easily incorporated into their more diversified and more flexible type of conduct. On the other hand, the lowest categories are more heterogeneous, less capable of collective action and also more responsive to a desire for individual ascent.

This type of analysis does, however, encounter types of conduct that I think belong to other levels of society's functioning: the political system and class relations. It then invents notions whose purpose is to get around this change of viewpoint. If it observes protests, it says either that they are aimed at the reestablishment of the previous social order and that they are resisting the

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effort of the upper strata to conduct the necessary changes rationally and in stages, or else it says that they are anomic reactions to crisis, simple forms of social disintegration.

The sociological attitude I have just briefly described is not a neutral one. It is conservative, for it takes the established order as its starting point: "things being as they are"; differences are "empirically" observed between strata or between categories defined by their mobility, which comes to the same thing as proving that those who are at the top or who want to get there are effectively * Superior" to those below. Everything that departs from this schema is merely disorder, resistance to change, or a return to the past.

The extreme form of this conservative sociology is that which takes upon itself the viewpoint of the state. The holders of power have the initiative; the people is merely an inorganic, fickle, authoritarian mass which is divided between marginality, escape into Utopian countersocieties, and intolerant conformism.

2. Those who look at things from the viewpoint of the political system do not construct the same picture of social conduct. They are more responsive to the "limited rationality7' of interests and strategies, to transactions and negotia­tions. But they assert, like conservative sociology, that the higher one moves in the social hierarchy, the greater the capacity for political action grows, and the greater the complexity of the strategies and alliances, with the result that change is the work of the most influential, whereas the people are more rigid. If it is observed that transformations are provoked by the action of the popular classes, then this liberal sociology answers that in the first place nothing could be less certain. The people does intervene, true, but for one thing it is not the cause of the change, since that was produced solely by a conflict taking place in the heart of the ruling elite, and for another it cannot orient it, merely contenting itself with temporarily occupying the power vacuum and increasing either the disorder or the rigidity of the political system, provoking reactions that render change more difficult and more costly.

3. Sociology can take up its stance on the level of historicity and in par­ticular on that of class relations. But it always runs the risk of presenting the historical actors it deals with as real collectivities. Hence the image of a progressivist peasant or worker class, exclusively animated by a will to liberty and equality, that becomes a permanent cultural feature rather than the expression of a social movement against domination and privilege. To the observations of conservative and liberal sociology, this progressivist sociology answers that if progress is not always identifiable with liberty, that is because it is taken over by traitors, bad shepherds or bad councillors, defenders of former privileges or monopolizers of the general interest. Which leads to an

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ever more powerful appeal to virtue, to social integration, and thus reinforces the weight of the state and the dominant ideology.

These distortions of an analysis that identifies one of the levels of society with society's functioning as a whole invariably lead sociology into becoming an auxiliary either of an order based on principles or traditions, or of an elitist control of change, or else of the setting up of a new social organization and new class relations. And this leads us to two conclusions.

The first is that sociological analysis can never identify itself with the management of society and even less with the state. This is why power, whatever its form, is mistrustful of sociology, because it criticizes instead of justifying, distinguishes instead of integrating. However, power is only too glad to call upon sociology to help it combat deviancy, reinforce socialization, eliminate archaisms. And power will tolerate it more easily when it is itself not very integrated, subject to crises of change or adaptation. Sociology receives better treatment in pluralist political systems than in "monopolistic*' ones; it is defended more strongly by social movements when they are still forming or when they are contestatory than when they are near to gaining power; it is listened to more by categories whose statuses lack congruence or are unstable than by the extremes of the social scale.

The second conclusion is that one must choose between the fragmentation of sociological analysis and its independence. Fragmentation signifies that sociologies of the right, left, and center carry on a ceaseless polemic battle, which may teach them to limit themselves to the type of social phenomena that best corresponds to each, but is more likely to sharpen the swords of competing ideologies. Independence, on the other hand, is indistinguishable from an attempt to integrate sociological analysis, which in turn presupposes both a principle of unity, in other words of hierarchization. of the various levels of analysis, and also a principle of dissociation, in other words of separation of society as a system of systems from society as a collectivity historically and geographically defined and ruled by a state.

So instead of simply separating the problems of the field of historicity, those of the political system, and those of social organization, what must be recognized in the first place is that the first set commands the second, and through them the third. Behind the categories of social practice, behind order, stratification, and power, one must always seek out, in the last analysis, the orientations of the system of historical action and class relations. From the consumption of society one must move back up to the production of society via its adaptation to changes.

But this operation has no meaning unless one recognizes that the whole constituted in this way cannot be identified with a territorial and political collectivity directly observable as the field of action of a state. There can and must also exist, as opposed to sociology, a political science that begins from the state, from its power, its role in international relations, that then

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the state, from its power, its role in international relations, that then considers social organization, represented as a set of resources hierarchized and distributed by power, before studying political exchanges and finally, as its ultimate remainder, collective feelings and collective conditions of exis­tence. At the moment of embarkation upon a study of social movements, nothing could be more indispensable than to remind ourselves that this topic is entirely the province of sociological analysis proper and must not be confused with other topics such as the functioning of the state, political crises, or even the struggle for "power."

c. Modernizing Protests

To organizational claims, to institutional tensions, and to social movements, we must also add modernizing protests. It is in relation to social change that the notion of modernization needs to be introduced and discussed, but it is also bound to occur inside a societal type too, for. although movements tend to move from present into future in the name of modernization, others are defined by their struggle in the name of the present against the past. Such a protest arises in reality against the absence of historicity. If the dominant class and the dominated class preponderate over the ruling class and the contestatory class, if the maintenance of the past and its reproduction preponderate over commitment to a beyond in society's functioning, then a society is "disoriented." It is weighed down by the dead works of past systems of historical action, while new domains, latent with historicity, are kept outside the field of social action. The dead is strangling the living, which provokes a simultaneously elementary and ambiguous reaction. Elementary because it is a call for a return to what is most fundamental, a protest against decadence, against the loss of historicity. Ambiguous because it is unaffected by class relations and because its opposition to past forms of domination can be conducted just as well by a new ruling class as by a force of opposition.

There can come a moment when forms of social and cultural control lose their meaning. The administrative apparatus in France, for example, remains dominated by the state-centered cultural model. The slightest bureaucratic application takes on the air of a plea to the prince; the citizens are kept well away from everything touching the state. Protests against the arrogance of the state are not separable from those denouncing its ineffi­ciency, its incapacity to provide the services of which it has the monopoly. Such protests are liberal, which means they wish to slough off the old forms of authority, but for the benefit of a new power and a new ruling class just as much as for that of the popular class.

This type of protest is more frequent in the cultural sphere than the social sphere. Is Europe, western and eastern alike, not entirely made up of culturally archaic societies? The archaism is more visible in eastern Europe,

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which often has the air of a museum for nineteenth-century forms of expression, relation, and communication. But the archaism is just as great, though often less of a nuisance, in the west. Hence the importance of attacks against the forms of control operating in the private sector: family, church, school. The principal locuses of socialization are the object of attacks that are directed above all at their loss of meaning.

I don't think that the condition of women and the discriminations they undergo can be explained by the needs of class domination in our type of society, whether industrial or postindustrial. The dependence of women clearly stems from much further back. But whatever its origin, upon which Serge Moscovici has recently shed a great deal of light (La soci&e contre nature)* the condition of women appears nowadays above all as a vacuum of meaning: our society is incapable of explaining the definition it gives of masculine and feminine roles, or of saying why it resists the control of birth when it accepts the control of disease and hence, to a considerable extent, the control of death.

The movement forming against the subjection of women speaks rightly of a struggle for liberation or equality. Is that not the definition of a modernizing action that still remains indeterminate as to its meaning within present society? The success of such a movement, by bringing vast new areas into "public life," by extending the scope of organized control, can be of benefit to the new ruling class, for example by opening up new markets or giving rise to a new "morality" capable of effective use against the subversive elements introduced into the liberating struggle, but can also help in the formation of new popular social movements rising in opposition to this advance of modernized conservative forces.

Such protests are important above all at a time when a new type of society is being introduced. The new ruling class is often busier struggling against the past than against its new adversary. It is easier to identify these movements of cultural modernization than those that appeal to historicity against the excessive weight of institutionalization or of organizational problems.

Often, in fact, such movements are forced to appeal to a more or less mythical past in order to protest the reduction of society to its functioning. A new right, a new left: these terms refer less to a socially undetermined modernization than to a "fundamentalism" so ambiguous that it can sometimes lead their most ardent representatives into alliances with those apparently furthest away from them. How can one forget in France the role of a nonliberal Catholicism such as that of Bernanos and Mauriac nevertheless engaging in the fight against Spanish fascism?

The constant weakness and the frequent greatness of these movements stems from the fact that they are socially very indeterminate. Consequently

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those who refuse to see social movements as anything but confrontations of interests, even struggles for the management of the state apparatus, are the first to denounce the "infantilism" and muddle of such manifestations. But they also have an exceptional reverberation, for although they are not social movements animating a conflict, they do at least reach those who are rejecting dead traditions and trying to give a meaning to something that has lost or not yet acquired meaning.

B. The Nature of Social Movements

a. Identity, Opposition, and Totality

One is at first tempted to say that a social movement is to be distinguished from other types of collective conduct by the fact that it is oriented toward values, toward a conception of society and man. Whether its content be religious, political, or economic, does it not always appeal to principles: equality, justice, liberty, happiness?

Smelser's analysis enables us to avoid this error of judgment. The appeal to values corresponds to a crisis of the value system of social organization and in no way imposes the introduction of the concept of the social movement as I employ it here. On the contrary, the specific characteristic of a social movement is that of not being oriented toward consciously expressed values. Because it is situated on the level of the system of historical action, it is defined by the confrontation of opposing interests over the control of a society's forces of development and field of historical experience. A social movement is not the expression of an intention or of a conception of the world. It is not possible to speak of a social movement if one cannot at the same time define the countermovement to which it is in opposition. The labor movement is not a social movement unless, beyond all protests against the crises of social organization, beyond any pressures for negotiation, it is challenging the domination of the ruling class.

It does not matter whether that challenge is reformist or revolutionary, whether or not it is accompanied by confidence in the capacity of the institutional system to deal with the conflict. What is important is that the actor should no longer define himself in relation to functional norms or procedures of discussion and decision, but in relation to a general social conflict. This conflict does not consist of direct opposition between concrete social groups; it is challenging the control of social development as that development is defined by a cultural model and by the other elements of the system of historical action.

The conflict has a stake, occurs within a field. The adversaries always speak the same language; otherwise there could be no debate and no combat.

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In a society defined by the role of scientific and technological innovation, by organizations managing change, by a social hierarchy based upon knowledge, and by the pursuit of privatization in the realm of consumption, no social movement can exist oriented toward another type of historicity. Similarly, in the nineteenth century, the liberal movement representing the capitalists and the labor movement were in no sense opposing two entirely different types of society. They were opposing two conflicting versions of progress. People often talk today about the hostility of youth—and particu­larly of the student movement—to the consumer society. Nothing could be more false. The conflict is between the world of objects and the world of enjoyment, of expression and imagination, between two opposing versions of consumption. Both technocrats and members of the contestatory movement speak in equal measure about creativity, about change, about the central role of knowledge; but each considers that the adversary is appropriating and destroying the fundamental orientations of the system of historical action.

This is why 1 define a social movement as the combination of a principle of identity, a principle of opposition, and a principle of totality, and also, seen in a broader context, as an actor in a field of historical action.

1. The principle of identity is the definition the actor gives of himself. A social movement cannot be organized unless this definition is conscious; but the formation of the movement largely precedes that consciousness. It is conflict that constitutes and organizes the actor. It is usual for the actor to define himself in the first place in organizational and institutional terms. It is easier to speak of the poor—in other words of a socioeconomic status—or of the underprivileged—in other words those without access to the institutional and political system, who are not represented—than of the working class.

It is the practice of social relations that situates and defines the historical actor, that is the social movement, just as it is the field of decision that defines the political actor. The actor of the social movement is therefore never given in any direct observation. The working class does not simply consist of all workers added up to make a whole. Nor does it consist of workers as they are placed beneath the domination of the capitalists, for that definition would also do for the identification of a political or organizational actor. The working class is the actor of a social movement solely because it is aiming, through its conflict with the capitalist class, at control of the industrial system of historical action. Consciousness of identity is part of the definition of a class or of a class social force, for the classes cannot be defined other than in terms of social relations, and therefore of the orientations of each of the social adversaries.

In the practice of social interactions, the principle of identity presents itself as a transcendence of the group or category that is its bearer. The workers in

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a factory, a workshop, or a town, view themselves, in certain circumstances, as engaged in a struggle that overflows the framework in which it appears, that mobilizes demands that cannot be entirely satisfied within an organiza­tional or political framework. They have an awareness of being more than themselves, both because they are in conflict with an adversary drawing on more than his own forces and because they have objectives that are not just theirs. Observers of strikes often distinguish between instrumental strikes, defined by their precise aims, and expressive strikes, through which the group asserts or constructs its solidarity. It is self-expression that causes the principle of identity to appear. I employ this term not in order to create the impression that a social movement begins in the first place from a conscious­ness of itself, of its interests and its aims, before entering into a struggle with the adversary on a battlefield determined by circumstances. The identity of the actor cannot be defined independently of the real conflict with the adversary and of recognition of the stake of the struggle.

2. The principle of opposition must be defined in the same way. A movement cannot be organized without being able to name its adversary, but its action does not presuppose that identification. The conflict causes the adversary to appear, as it shapes the consciousness of the actors confronting one another.

Even if the conflict is limited by its immediate stake and the forces it brings into play, one cannot speak of principles of opposition unless the actor feels himself confronted by a general social force in a combat that is challeng­ing the general orientations of social life.

The dimension of the conflict is fundamental in any social movement. This conflict may be worked out partly on the institutional level, but never completely. Appeal may be made to an arbiter, a mediator, a tribunal, a court. But this is always a tactic, justified by the resolve to make use of legal means as well as force in order to defend oneself against the adversary or attack him, and does not spring from the conviction that a change in the distribution of influence can make the cause of the conflict disappear. Whatever its particular locus of occurrence, therefore, this conflict is always experienced by the social movement as a class conflict—which does not mean that every social movement is struggling for economic interests.

If such interests are in fact involved, a social movement only exists when the conflict is placed on the level of the cultural model central to the society in question.

In any type of society—agrarian, mercantile, industrial or postindustrial— only one pair of social movements exists, that which sets the social classes involved in opposition.

But concrete social movements are not always ' 'total," especially in periods when a societal type is being formed or is in decline.

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The agent of the social movement may thus not be directly definable in class terms. The recent student movements, I am convinced, revealed the social conflicts of a postindustrial society, but no one defends the idea that students are a social class. A movement of townspeople, of consumers, a regional or cultural movement can all be manifestations of a social move­ment. But their agents are not class actors, insofar as the social movement is intermixed with organizational claims, political pressures, or a modernizing protest.

3. Finally, no social movement can exist that defines itself solely by conflict. All possess what I term a principle of totality. The labor movement only existed because it did not consider industrialization solely as an instrument of capitalist profit but had the will to construct a noncapitalist, an anticapi-talist, industrial society, freed from private ownership of the means of production and capable of a higher development.

The principle of totality is nothing but the system of historical action of which the adversaries, situated within the double dialectic of the social classes, are disputing the domination.

The social movement is therefore not necessarily all-embracing. The conflict may be engaged over a single one of the elements of the SHA. It has a different character according to whether its locus is order, movement, orien­tations, or resources, the social or the cultural. But even if it is localized, the social movement is still expressing a principle of totality. And this is demonstrated by its efforts to gain control of and orient the social agencies whose function it is to watch over one of the elements of the SHA.

The most important social movements are also, however, the most all-inclusive, and it is difficult to see how a movement could remain circum­scribed in any lasting way by one of the elements of historicity, since it would then be in danger of becoming fused with analyzable collective conduct on the institutional or the organizational level. Important social movements challenge the general orientation of the system of historical action, which is to say the action of their adversary in its totality.

It constantly happens that there are "ultras" who deny any principle of totality. This behavior corresponds to phases of rupture, when a social movement still in formation clashes, not with an adversary, but with the adversary's identification with social development.

Then the worker smashes the machines and sabotages production, the student rejects all teaching. If one isolates such behavior, it can be explained without any recourse to the concept of the social movement. The university or industrial crisis can be pushed into non-meaning. The worker or the student reduced to real or virtual unemployment can reject "society." But they belong to social movements insofar as they are merely extreme expressions of them, in very particular situations. Social movements themselves struggle

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against tendencies that destroy them by reducing them to the expression of a crisis of social organization. To destroy the industry or the university is also to destroy the social movement forming within it. Sabotage or criminal actions are undifferentiated forms of opposition conduct; they can therefore be analyzed at the most elementary level, that of the crisis of social organization.

A social movement cannot be analyzed outside the Field of historicity in which it forms. One may say in general that it brings into opposition classes, or social forces that are in the last analysis class forces, whose struggle is for control of a system of historical action. But it is the knowledge of this latter that makes it possible to define the nature of the class actor, the field of the conflict, and its stake. Hence the danger of anachronism: in looking back into the preindustrial past for the equivalent of the labor movement one may fail to recognize the social movements characteristic of preindustrial socie­ties, whose actors, stakes, and forms of action are all different from those of the labor movement. In the same way, reference to the labor movement may prevent a comprehension of the social movements forming in postindustrial societies, which are challenging the consumer society in the name of the most diverse forms of cultural self-management. Are these once again just Utopias or resistances to change? Certainly not, for the new system of historical action imposes a new definition of social movements' principle of totality.

The labor movement itself cannot be reduced to a conflict of economic interests or to a reaction against proletarianization. It is animated by an image of industrial "civilization/* by the idea of a progress achieved through forces of production used for the good of all—a very different thing from the ordinary egalitarian Utopia, which is fairly unconcerned with conditions of growth.

Must we conclude from this that a social movement necessarily proposes a "counterplan," an alternative model of society? Not at all. Such a statement in effect confuses two levels of analysis, for a plan or a model of decision cannot be defined except on the level of the institutional system, or even that of social organization. One does not speak of a counterplan unless one is aiming at some sort of negotiation or political pressure, unless one believes that there is a possibility of modifying society's management by opening up a political discussion, by institutionalizing the societal debate. This corres­ponds to the situation of some social movements, but not of all. A social movement can be reformist, reformist-revolutionary, or revolutionary. Which it is depends upon the relations established between the problems of social organization, of the institutional system, and class relations. But these differences cannot affect the definition of what a social movement is.

The essential thing is to recognize that a social movement is not the expression of a contradiction; it causes a conflict to explode. It is a form of

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collective conduct oriented, not toward the values of the social organization or toward participation in a system of decision, but toward the stake of the class conflicts that are the system of historical action.

In order to recognize a social movement it is not enough to ask the actor three questions: for whom are you acting? against whom are you acting? what result do you expect from your action? Any actor, in any situation, can answer those questions. No social movement exists unless the system of historical action, including each of its elements, is the object of opposing visions held by class actors who are antagonists. The relation of the popular class to T (totality) passes through its contestation of the domination exerted by the upper class. / (identity), O (opposition), and T cannot be given as components that could be isolated by the actor himself: the principle of identity is the instrument of separation between O and 7\ which present themselves as linked by the fact of the upper class's dominion over historicity. O cannot be apprehended other than as a filter along the link between / and 7; the principle of totality, the stake, only appears as such through a mis­understanding of the conflict between actor and adversary, otherwise it would be no more than an objective, which is to say either the projection of/ or else, on the contrary, simply a meeting ground, neutral as a football field.

It is the specific characteristic of a social movement that each of its elements refers on to the relations between the two others. Consequently it is never in a state of affective neutrality or pure analysis of its situation. It is never at rest; it is ceaselessly sent on from one of its components to another, from one of its slopes to the other. Its consciousness cannot have any other content than that of endless movement, of unquiet, and of the passion that sets it in the most total opposition to the actor in an organization who is defined by his place within a whole and receives his identity from the social system.

The actors of a movement do not form a social milieu that one can define by common choices, a personal and collective social identity. On the contrary, a social movement is constantly occupied with challenging the social definition of roles, the functioning of the political arena, and the social order. Its unity can never be that of an organization, for it is what unites hope and rejection, negation and affirmation. It is at the level of the system of historical action that the social movement is situated.

It is false to make a distinction between the social movement as an elemen­tary, limited protest, imprisoned within the lower ranks of society, and a political action that will give it a broader scope and enable it to challenge the domination of class and state. A social movement cannot be reduced to economics and pay claims. The workers' labor situation gives them a class consciousness that may be disarticulated, overlaid, diluted, but never reducible to immediate demands or dissatisfaction. We shall look at the

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inadequacies of a "spontaneist" representation later on; it is much more important to reject the notion according to which class consciousness can only be brought in from outside. We must not confuse consciousness with action, society with the state.

Such confusions lead to the identification of a social movement with its organization or its leaders. This danger, the most serious threatening the practice of social movements, must also be combated at the level of analysis. The origin of Stalinism lies in the total hostility displayed toward the Proudhonians and the populists, and in the confidence put in the party as bearer of scientific truth. It was in this way that the labor movement engendered its opposite, a totalitarian state. The labor movement is defined first of all by worker consciousness, which is to say consciousness of the conflict between capitalists and wage earners for the orientation of industrial society.

And 1 do mean consciousness. If it is necessary not to reduce that con­sciousness to opinion, it is more important still not to dissociate action from consciousness. If the soldier at Waterloo cannot perceive what is at stake in the battle, that is because what is involved is an event and a struggle that is more intersocial than social. But the colonized native who rebels, or the militant worker—even though he may come forward only to demand more bread, or because he is reacting to an insult—has a representation of the conflict in which he is engaged and a project of society. These historical actors, combatants in social movements, have a double will toward creation and control or, what comes to the same thing, a Utopia and an ideology. They want to manage their own society and to combat the adversary who is preventing them from doing so. Taking the viewpoint of the established order, one can study forms of social conduct "from the outside/* as responses to a crisis of the organization, without asking any questions about the consciousness of the actors. If, on the other hand, one seeks out, behind what gives itself out as order, both the orientations of a system of historical action and class conflicts, if one reveals the social relations lying behind roles and statuses, then it is impossible not to find social and cultural orientations in the actors of the field of historicity. But this consciousness is not the discourse of the actor; it is inseparable from the action carried out within social relations and for a historical stake. This is why it transcends individual opinions and manifests itself in a collective consciousness that provides itself with ideological and Utopian expressions, whose existence one recognizes from the great energy they channel into the mobilization of a certain type of collective action.

This is not to say that man wishes by his nature to create and control the product of his creation, for such an assertion is as empty of meaning as all those that seek to define a human nature. But it is an assertion that the

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conduct linked to class relations and to participation in the system of historical action cannot be understood other than as oriented, as having a meaning for the actor himself, insofar as he is acting at that level of social reality. The actor is not a puppet controlled by a social structure, any more than that structure is the result of the actor's intentions. Structure and action cannot be dissociated, for it is in terms of social relations that both must be expressed.

This general idea fits in well with analysis of the social movement in itself: class relations and social movements are not dissociable. But we must not apply it too brutally to the study of real conduct. A social movement is never "pure." On the one hand it is intermingled with organizational and institutional conduct; on the other, it is also an organization and sometimes almost a state within the state. Membership of a class movement is not entirely described by class consciousness. When one considers a complex and organized protest movement, one becomes aware of a discrepancy between consciousness and action; usually the observer will find that the movement is made up of leaders on the one hand—who manage its organization, define its strategy and tactics, while also sharing in its orientations—and a "base" made up of members much more directly subject to organizational con­straints who want to obtain limited advantages, such as an increase in their wages, a food allowance, or the rescinding of some sanction, who are also seeking to increase their influence, to hold discussions with representatives of authority, and who fall prey to all the problems that arise from their own heterogeneity as a group and that create tensions or conflicts within it.

There is a great temptation at this point to renounce any analysis at all in terms of the social movement, which suddenly seems "idealist," and simply to analyze the policy of the leaders and the discontent of the "base." It is not enough simply to resist that temptation. One must show that the hypothesis of social movement is indispensable to a comprehension of the link between these two faces of protest. And first one must listen in very hard to that "base," which can never be reduced to its pragmatic, immediate objectives, which is the bearer of consciousness of social conflict and its stake, but a consciousness intermingled with attitudes that evoke other aspects of each individual's social situation. It is the action of the leaders that isolates this consciousness and draws it up from where it lies embedded, and often frag­mented, in the midst of other elements. But it is this consciousness that makes it possible to separate what is strategy in the action of the leaders from what is social movement. And this also defines the importance of militants. Not that they are the pure expression of the social movement, liberated both from the confusion of the "inorganic masses" and from the excessively strategic objectives of the leaders; but they are indeed the mediators between consciousness and action, sometimes nearer to the base, sometimes already

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leaders, but almost always subject to acute tensions and thereby driven on toward a sociological analysis of the problems of the social movement.

b. The Field of Historical Action

A social movement cannot constitute an autonomous unit of analysis. No party, or union, or voluntary association of whatever kind can ever be identified with a social movement, since they can all just as easily be manifesting reactions to an organizational crisis or to tensions in the institutional system.

The social movement is identifiable only as an element of a field of historical action, which is to say of the interactions between the collective actor under consideration, his adversary, and the relatively autonomous expressions of the system of historical action, particularly the cultural model.

The labor movement is not only definition of itself, of the employers, and of the stake of class relations; it is also a response to employer action, to employer social movement, the aim of which does not necessarily correspond term for term to that of the labor movement.

The relation between the two social movements can take the most diverse forms; but all of them are more or less directly connected with one of the following three cases presented in figure 34. In the first case, the two social movements do correspond term for term. The capitalist and the proletarian are defining themselves and defining their adversary in the same way, while at the same time situating their conflict in the same field.

1 2 3

Of <

Figure 34

In the second case, the definition of the field is still shared—for example "progress" linked with industrialization—but the adversaries no longer see one another from a reciprocal viewpoint. The theme of the double dialectic of the classes is easily applied here. The worker defines himself as producer and attacks the dominant class; the capitalist defines himself as an entrepreneur and sees the worker as the defender of vested interest, of a trade, of a job, of a professional and social group.

In the third case, the two adversaries are no longer relating themselves to the same definition of the field. It seems doubtful that true social movements

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can form in such a situation. Would the result not be more a simple conflict between two actors totally opposed to one another like two societies trying to split apart? To be more precise, one of the actors is breaking itself off from the dominant social order entirely, which means one can no longer speak of a relation between two social movements. When the Black Muslims or, more generally, the black nationalist movements in the United States express their wish for a complete break with white America, then one can no longer speak of a relation between a black movement and a white movement, only of a secession. White integrationism and the radicalism of the Black Panthers, on the contrary, are opposing one another, at least in part, within the same field, so that their conflict is roughly that of type 2.

The closer one approaches to type 1, the more an institutionalization of the conflict appears probable. The closer one approaches type 3, on the other hand, the more violent the conflict is, in other words the more likely it is to explode the institutional mechanisms.

It is also probable that the "purer" social movements are, which is to say the more independent they are of reactions to organizational or institutional crises, the more easily they can be drawn toward type 1 and therefore the more easily institutionalized they are.

A social movement can certainly not exist unless a certain integration of the elements /, O, and T is apparent, as well as a certain integration of the field of historical action, but it will not mairtain itself in being as a force of conflict, as an agent of social transformation, unless that integration is limited. If a movement is wholly conscious and organized, then negotiation and accommodation occur more easily than when there is not a complete reciprocity of viewpoint between the actors. The vigor of a movement depends upon the noncorrespondence between its actions and its reactions, between its aim and that of the adversary, an absence of correspondence that weakens the organizations and the ' 'consciousness" of the movement but reinforces its dynamisms and enables the conflicts to correspond more directly to the double dialectic of the social classes.

This chapter as a whole refers constantly to popular social movements. Is it possible, in order to define a historical field of action, to set popular class social movements and upper class social movements face to face, or is such a parallelism artificial?

To a large extent it is, since the upper class manages society as a whole directly enough for its orientations to be manifested through the categories of social practice, through social and cultural organization as well as through political and legal decisions. This class deliberately conceals itself behind the established order, thereby enabling it to repel any attacks upon it while waxing indignant against abettors of disorder who are attacking production, the laws, the social customs.

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But this presupposes a complete domination, the extreme case to which all observable real situations obviously cannot be reduced.

The upper class is more likely to produce a social movement, the less unified it is, especially when a rising ruling class is opposing the domination of declining upper classes. This movement will present itself above all as doctrinal. The ruling elite opposes itself to whatever restricts its action: popular class, former dominant class, political system, cultural traditions, state organization. It is constantly dissociating its own modernism from the class relations it dominates. It is as mute on the subject of its own power as it is vociferous when it comes to criticizing archaism. But that silence is not indifference, and the upper class acts with great persistence and perspicuity to defend its control over accumulation and to replace the system of historical action with the set of counterelements that correspond to its class interests. The difficulty one encounters in defining such a movement is the opposite of that which makes a knowledge of popular movements elusive. The latter appear above all as "practical" and one is tempted to see nothing more in them than a form of economic defense, forgetting the orientations of the popular consciousness. Upper class movements present themselves as mod­ernizing, and seem to be more ideologies and Utopias than a practice of social relations. But in both cases it is indispensable to link practice and ideology together and to recognize that the classes involved, at least to the degree in which the political system possesses a certain autonomy, form antagonistic social movements, each possessing a principle of identity, a principle of opposition, and a principle of totality.

The field of historical action is not solely defined by its adversaries. The totality, which is to say the system of historical action, possesses a greater or lesser autonomy.

In the type of society in which science defines the cultural model, it always finds itself placed between a situation in which it appears as an autonomous actor and another, opposing situation in which the orientation of knowledge appears to be determined by the state of class relations.

If one held absolutely to one or the other of these two extreme positions, then the very notion of a field of historical action—and thus of the social movement—would disappear. In the first case the class actors would no longer be anything but interest groups, situated within a social organization defined by scientific rationality; in the second case there would no longer be anything but two societies facing one another, and the existence of science would vanish as it did at the time of Zhdanovism. There always exists a certain autonomy of the actors who represent the elements of the system of historical action. In our own society the scientists, the organizers, the teachers, insofar as they make the meritocratic mode of hierarchization work, and the advertising men who reveal and manipulate society's "needs''

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are none of them in any way independent with regard to the dominant class; yet they do for all that possess a certain autonomy of action as well as relations among themselves that express the relations between the elements of the system of historical action.

They intervene in the field of historical action, without identifying themselves with either of the two social movements. So that the complete picture of that field should be as in figure 35. I have termed / " the social movements as they appear to the agents of the system of historical action who maintain a certain autonomy of that system in the face of the pressures exerted by the social movements. These latter tend simultaneously to reject

/ !

0 < \ / / 1 J

—r i

\ !

> r

Figure 35

the autonomy of the agents by viewing them as dependents of their adversaries and to look to them for help in limiting the pressure of the adversary. The technocrat complains of the scientist who is behaving like a worker and not complying sufficiently with the demands of the big organiza­tions, while at the same time using science and its investment needs as an argument against the demands of the workers. These latter on their side also make use of the name of science against the interests and pressures of the technocrats who are limiting the development of science, but at the same time they are mistrustful of it, viewing it as a tool in the hands of those with power. No field of historical action can exist unless the conflict of the actors stops short of totally dismembering the system of historical action; at the same time, that system cannot be directly identified with an institutional and organizational whole, since that would eliminate the central role of class conflict.

In conclusion, the object of sociological analysis can never be the social movement itself; it must be the field of historical action in which the social movement is one of the actors. The labor movement can never be isolated

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from capitalist domination and industrialization. We must go further still. The analysis of social movements presupposes the conjuncture of two separate kinds of observations. On the one hand those that bear upon social conducts and therefore on the orientations, actions, and claims of the actors; on the other hand, those that bear upon the system of social and economic relations, on the nature of accumulation and economic domination. One cannot establish the existence of a system of historical action and of class relations solely on the basis of social conduct and social movements; nor is it any more possible to conceive that a type of historicity and of class relations will not express itself in a certain class consciousness and, therefore, in social movements.

The essential point is that the two procedures should be kept clearly separate throughout in such a way as to validate one another. It is the recognition of the new social movements whose actors, locuses, and themes are new too, which validates the analysis of postindustrial society as a system of historical action different from the one we have called industrial society and which corresponded to the first stage in the great movement of economic and social transformation of the modern world.

But it is imperative to study the new nature of the factors of growth, the role of the large organizations, of the meritocracy, of the new orientations of consumption, of the new centers of social domination, of the new social barriers and sources of inequality. Sociology will continue to stumble over internal contradictions and incoherences as long as the two kinds of analysis have not been overhauled in a parallel manner. And it is difficult for it to achieve a total success as long as social movements themselves are still not strongly constituted.

The interdependence of these two procedures, the internal analysis of a type of collective conduct and the sociohistorical analysis of relations of production and domination, ought to lead to a rediscovery of the unity of sociological explanation. For it is impossible to conceive of there being two distinct kinds of social facts, one kind objective the other subjective, with the economists studying the former and sociology being left with the specific task of describing opinions, attitudes, and ideologies.

We saw earlier that class relations are always at the same time economic relations and a social opposition the content of which is not separable from that of the system of historical action, for the latter can no more be defined without direct reference to a type of accumulation, of work on work, than without reference to the cultural model.

The nature of the actors, of the stakes and forms of their conflicts, the ideologies and the Utopias of the movements cannot be expressed either in purely economic terms or in terms of systems of values. A conflict of economic interests is more likely to be primarily the expression of an organi-

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zational crisis and is not necessarily a sign of the presence of a social movement. Social movements challenge the historicity of a society, but though that historicity is not separable from a type of economic action it still cannot be reduced to a form of economic organization. The interests that social movements defend are those of a class engaged in the struggle for domination of a historicity, and therefore for a cultural model, for a form of mobilization, for a type of hierarchization, for a form of needs. The struggle extends not to the whole of the functioning of an economic system but to the whole of the system of society's action upon itself.

Confusion may occur in a particular type of society, industrial society, of which the cultural model, the metasocial warrant, is economic and therefore seems to coincide with the field of economic relations. The labor movement is the popular movement par excellence of this system of historical action. But even in this case the struggle is not purely economic and involves the whole of society's orientations. If one considers previous systems of historical action, the definition of the actors is provided by the elements of those systems themselves: thus a social movement can have as its bearer a community rather than an economic category, and give itself moral or religious orienta­tions, or on the contrary situate itself directly on a political plane. Inversely, in postindustrial society, social movements form around what is called con­sumption, in the name of personal or collective identity, yet at the heart of the great apparatuses of production and management—not in relation to the system of ownership. The diversity of historical contents must be transcended not by the pursuit of a general and specifically economic content but by analysis of the general social mechanisms that one finds in all the systems of historical action and in all class relations. Far from separating the objective foundations of the movements from their ideology, what we must do is conceive of them as forms of social action within which practices and orientations are never separable.

Reducing the social movements to a conflict of interests is made all the less feasible by the fact that the relations between the adversaries cannot be entirely defined in the present. The field of historical action is indeed defined by a synchronic analysis, but it is experienced by actors who, on account of the double dialectic of the classes itself stretch both back toward the past and forward to the future.

A popular class takes up a defensive position. It draws support from whatever it has that can resist the domination of the upper class—from its traditions, its vested interests—while those who have been colonized resist through their language, their family organization, their customs. The worker is protected by a "popular culture" or "working-class culture." Contestation on the other hand is a struggle against the appropriation of historicity by a dominant class also bearing a heritage and above all associated with former

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dominant classes, a struggle toward a future that is to make possible the full realization of the system of historical action truncated and paralyzed by the upper class. There is no social movement that does not link these two apparently opposed movements within itself. While the ruling class is inviting the popular class to "modernize itself," to adapt itself to the present, to abandon all its forms of resistance to change, the popular class, through its social movement, is drawing strength from its past in order to hurl itself toward a future that is to abolish the present dependence.

The ruling class acts no differently. It too wishes to construct a future in the name of the past from which it derives its present eminence and for which it hopes to provide a succession. At any moment this oscillation from past to future may break down. The popular class may become solely defensive or solely contestatory, and the upper class solely dominant or solely ruling. But then the social movements vanish and the analysis of the actors can and must be conducted in terms that do not entail the intervention of either the SHA or class relations.

A social movement can be recognized by the fact that it speaks both in the name of the past and in the name of the future, never solely within the categories of the present social organization. This is why each such move­ment gives back life to the systems of historical action and to the social classes of the past, even as it is heralding those of the future. The disappearance of the religious or state-centered metasocial warrants of the social order does not prevent religious and political themes from fueling the action of the social movements in industrial or postindustrial societies. We must not see this as the preservation of archaic elements in modern behavior, and even less as a sign of the permanence of the orientations of human conduct, but as an essential aspect of the very nature of the class relations and their double dialectic.

Sprung like a bow between conflict and a project of society, between the two orientations of the class of which it is the agent, torn apart by alienation, alloyed with claims and pressures, the social movement does not dominate the tide of events with its principles, its organization, and its discourse. Yet its role is central in history, and its study is at the heart of actionalist sociology.

It is furthest of all from the work of those that Roland Barthes has called (in Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971) the logothetes, the inventors of languages. These logothetes separate, order, combine within a closed space inside which they are themselves inprisoned. A social movement on the contrary cries aloud to the four winds, and its tongue is never smooth. It argues with itself and with its adversaries, calls the past to arms and prophesies the future. Even when it is at its most Utopian it is immersed in duration. The more closely it is examined, the less the functioning of a society

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appears to be dominated by principles or rules. Society is enmeshed in its historicity, in the production of itself, and that work is never carried out by a center of decision, even though the state may seem all-powerful or the hegemony of the dominant class total. The meaning of historical action is not heard except through the sound and the fury, through the conflicts of classes, themselves muffled by repression, propaganda, and the good faith of the ruling class.

What is called a social movement is simply the appearance in the realm of events of certain social forces, some of which have hitherto lain latent among the categories of social practice, while others have more often than not been imprisoned in silence and illegality. It is not easy for history and the sociologist to give back their voices to those who were never allowed to speak, who have left us no carved inscriptions, no tablets, no scrolls, whose heralds died on gibbets, on crosses, or as victims of starvation without any memorial­ist to record their words. Hence the interest of the descents that can today be made into the history of the colonized, of their refusals, their rebellions, and their dreams.

Society does not appear as a piece of machinery managed and controlled by a pilot except to those who see it only from the pilot's seat and who accept a priori the definition that the pilot gives of his situation. I see it on the contrary as both unified by (he orientations of historicity—which are never identifiable with a power—and torn by conflicts and contradictions; its changes and its events cannot be separated from the vast no-man's-land of darkness in which the life of the majority is spent, and from which they only emerge, like Goya figures, to shriek in terror, in anger, or in hope.

c. Alienation

The image just given of the field of historical action is not yet complete. The social movements facing one another—that of the upper class and that of the popular class, or of certain of their elements—do not stand in a relation of equality, are not in the situation of two knights about to tilt at one another in a tourney. The conflict situation in this case is also and first of all a relation of domination. The relation of the actors is asymmetrical. The result is that the popular class, subjected to the domination of the upper class, is alienated, subjected to a dependent participation. Its members are driven to act in conformity with the interests and the logic of action of the upper class.

In consequence, a popular movement can never present itself in the form shown in figure 36. It is always characterized by the tension between the alienated consciousness that reproduces the aim of the upper class and a will to break away, which identifies the popular interests with the system of historical action while rejecting the adversary whose link with the SHA is rejected.

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Figure 36

Alienation is the fragmentation of the individual or collective conscious­ness subjected to the contradictory pulls of dependent participation and class consciousness. The first renders it impossible to view society as a set of social relations and imposes the image of a moral order, to which one must adapt in order to avoid guilt. The second forbids that adaptation and produces rejection in default of actual conflict. With the result that the alienated consciousness is imprisoned in a withdrawal that can only be broken by aggression against the established order.

The popular consciousness can be dominated by alienation; it is so when no social movement forms. Any social movement has to struggle not only against the adversary but also, and primarily, against the apathy or, on the other hand, the excitement of its own adherents. But the existence of a social movement is just as "normal" as that of alienation, and it is extremely dangerous to believe that a popular class is incapable of acting on its own other than in an alienated way.

If one accepts that the popular class is wholly alienated and that its action cannot be oriented other than from outside, if one adds to this that such an action rests upon the noncorrespondence of the upper class with the system of historical action and hence, to put it simply, with the forces of production, it is as if the intelligentsia, when giving meaning to the revolt of the "masses" from outside, were nothing but a new ruling class, seeking to displace the old one and identifying itself, like any ruling class, with historicity. The existence of social movements is denied in theory and opposed in practice. Those who speak in the name of the people's interests set up their power structure on the ruins of that of the former dominant class, as, for example, when the bourgeoisie replaced the aristocracy; as with technocracy, in the East as in the West, substituting itself for the capitalist bourgeoisie, sometimes in the name of the interests of the people. The result is opposition from "leftist" movements, which is to say the reaction of the social movement taken over by the new agents of social and economic domination.

The analysis upon which the action of these new dominators rests is not acceptable, for it passes without reason from the indisputable fact of

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alienation to the unfounded assertion that the popular consciousness is reduced to alienation.

One could point out to begin with that alienation is no more likely to affect the "masses" than the intelligentsia. Those who are subjected most directly to alienation are not incorporated any more easily into the aims of the adversary than are the intellectuals, whose training and forms of social conduct are often nearer to those of the upper class.

But above all, to identify the popular consciousness with alienation is to forget that the worker is not wholly defined by his position within the social relations of domination, but also participates directly in the forces of production and in all the elements of the system of historical action, which enables him to combat the appropriation of the SHA by the dominant class.

Class consciousness and the social movement are never entirely induced in the popular classes. It is possible that the state of the institutions and social control prevents the organization of the social movement and the expression of conflict. It is never true that this powerlessness conceals total renunciation and total integration into the project of the ruling class. Such an integration cannot appear except in the case of workers who no longer constitute—or do not yet constitute—the dominated class corresponding to the upper class effectively in power. It is illusory to seek to localize a social movement within a professional category that has corresponded to a class in another type of society. The workers are the working class in the society of industrialization; they are not the center of the popular class in all types of society, and specifically not in a postindustrial society. But at the very moment when a certain type of social movement and conflict is weakening, others form, so that the idea of "the end of ideologies" and, by the same token, the disappearance of social movement, is never acceptable.

Inversely, the spontaneist theses do not correspond any better to reality. A social movement is not to be identified with a lived experience. It is at the same time struggle against alienation and transcendence of reactions to organizational crisis or institutional blockage. This double striving presup­poses an effort of abstraction, of analysis, of organization, and therefore a noncoincidence between the social movement and experience.

If the weight of dependence and alienation,of dispersion or ignorance, does not prevent a movement from coming into being, it may still dismember it This dismemberment is a reminder, first of all, that a movement is not a thought and a consciousness, since it must be reconstituted on the basis of characters and isolated or opposing groups. A peasant movement succeeds in creating an uprising of the class of landless peasants against the oligarchs or masters of the land, but it often has nothing more than a vague image of national unity or economic progress toward which it orients itself. It is other categories—the intelligentsia, the civil servants, the poorer strata in the

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towns—who complete this half-fledged movement, who are most responsive to the national theme and also to the struggle against the oligarchs, but they often lack the thrust of the exploited peasants' class defense. Sometimes these categories are no more than an avant-garde that transforms its political action into an agrarian revolution, as was the case in Cuba; sometimes, on the contrary, they incline more toward a new bourgeoisie; sometimes again a populist alliance forms between the two separate move­ments. It can happen that the revolutionary tide will become violently split, as in the Mexican case, with the new ruling elite, produced by the revolution, achieving lasting power after having rid themselves of the peasant revolu­tionary leaders.

The unit of analysis is therefore not generally an organization or the action led by a man or a group. The movement is more often a broken mirror than a conscious and organized will. But the contradictions and the internal struggles cannot be understood except with reference to the movement itself, defined more abstractly not as a collective or personal subjectivity but as an actor in the historic drama, an actor defined by a social force, by the struggle against an adversary, and by the striving toward control of social devel­opment.

This leads us back once again to the double dialectic of the social classes. The upper class is at the same time ruling and dominant, it manages the cultural model and society's organization; it also subjects the whole of society to its private interests. The popular class is both defensive, in that it participates in a dependent manner in economic activity, and progressivist, in that it contests the identification of the system of historical action with the interests and the ideology of the dominant class. Without this progressivism no social movement can exist. But such a movement can only develop by triumphing over alienation, over interiorized dependence. In a colonial country, or one dominated by a foreign economy, there is a strong "demon­stration effect" at work, which is a source of alienation, but this is opposed by the will to development and national independence, which is the very principle of nationalist social movements. Parallel to this, such a movement may see the dominant class or nation exclusively in the role of exploiter. If this happens, then the movement begins to founder, falls back upon a more or less artificial call for national authenticity, and becomes regressive. The movement does not form fully unless it can escape the opposition between a traditional authenticity and a modern destructiveness, unless it is aiming at a national reappropriation of the forces of development, and specifically of the instruments of production and of the social and cultural change introduced by the dominator. The opposition between Slavophiles and supporters of the West was an intellectual debate. No social movement formed until it was transcended, as it was with the arrival of the populist movement, and even more so with the socialist movement.

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d. Breakdown of Social Movements into Various Forms

A social movement may be transformed either into values conduct or into contradiction conduct.

If the duo l-O preponderates over T, one can no longer speak of a social movement. The actors in opposition may be defined in many ways, either by their relative position within the social system—rich against poor—or by their influence within the decision system—rulers against ruled. If one wishes to go beyond the organizational or the institutional levels of analysis, then the conflict must be defined not as the opposition between two groups, between two orientations of action, but as the contradiction present in the social system and, more concretely, in the mode of production.

One cannot in fact analyze the orientations of the action other than with reference to a system that is itself a bearer of meaning. If one wishes to escape from the meaning of the organizational system and the institutional system, and if one does not wish to introduce the meaning of what I term the system of historical action, then the conflict cannot be defined other than outside all reference to the actors, that is in terms of the structure of production.

The notion of social movement then becomes useless and dangerous. It is an appropriate mode of analysis in studying the fragmentation of a system of contradiction, but one that cannot, as far as I can see, succeed in introducing the notion of class consciousness. It can lead only to a transformation of social relations into military relations and of sociological analysis into politics.

Inversely, ifT preponderates over the oppositional pairl-O, then the action is referred to a system of norms and values, or at least to a field of decision, and defines the actor and his adversary by their positions relative to the interior of this system or this field. This is the case, for example, with the majority of immigrants to the United States, insofar as they seek to integrate themselves into the social system, encounter resistance from higher ethnic strata, but are unaware of the existence of a central conflict.

We must therefore distinguish now between social movements and certain forms of collective conduct that are not social movements yet are close to them in that they cannot be reduced to reactions to either an organizational crisis or institutional pressures.

1. A social movement is often associated with conduct pertaining to social and cultural innovation.

The theme of innovation does not properly belong to a social movement. It can only be an expression of an organizational crisis, but, more important, it can also be dissociated from a social conflict on the level of the field of historicity itself. Scientism and positivism certainly accompanied social movements in the nineteenth century, but they never became fused with them. Such social and cultural orientations are not the ideology of a

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particular social movement. They rather indicate a new mode of organiza­tion, of construction of the cultural and social field.

That field is not linked to one class; it defines the area in which the classes fight. The social and cultural innovations that are manifestations of the constitution of that field may come from all the "modern" actors, whatever side they are on. Innovation plays a more important role in a social movement the more that movement is deprived of practical modes of conflict action. It becomes reflexive and develops in the imaginative rather than the political sphere, so that innovation and ideology become intimately inter­twined within it. It participates in the construction of a new social and cultural field. This is the explanation of why the student movement in the Anglo-Saxon countries, much more than in France or Japan, though politically weak is more inventive and more culturally innovative.

This cultural innovation is not truly linked to a social movement unless it is polemical, in which case it comes into conflict with mechanisms of cultural reproduction maintained by the dominant class. Then it defies the family, the school, the laws. It shocks. Its role is even more central if it provokes a crisis of the system of historical action, behind which there appears more or less directly a conflict of classes. In postindustrial society the call for self-fulfill­ment enters into opposition with the orientation toward science, and since the latter is controlled by the ruling class the former is nearer to a popular movement. But such a link is always partial and fragile. The popular class remains on the defensive, and the more conduct can be expressed in terms of modernization, the less it is the bearer of such conduct, since it participates less directly in the choice of social change.

The innovation of protest is thus led to make up for the social backing it lacks by an appeal to principles that may have a great strength as social criticism but that are at the same time socially indeterminate. The appeal to spontaneity, desire, expression, fundamental needs, does not constitute the field of a conflict; it is rather seeking to attack the established order from without, in the name of a social actor to whom no name can be given. This is pure Utopian conduct, the bearers of which are agents whose class position is ambiguous or indefinite, conduct that corresponds both to a cultural crisis and to the establishing of a new system of historical action, these two levels of analysis coming together directly over the absence of reference to class relations and political interaction.

It is usual for this critical innovation to develop in a prerevolutionary situation, or one of social and cultural crisis, then to come into conflict with a popular social movement, and even more with the action of the parties transforming that movement into action at state level. Thus isolated it occupies a doubly marginal position. It is on the one hand made use of, "recycled/' by the ruling class managing social change, while on the other it

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can only reappear as "leftism" in those sections of the social movement opposed to its institutionalization or identity with the state.

These links and this separation of social movement and innovation, especially cultural innovation, are often expressed by the ambiguous situa­tion of the intellectuals and of those, particularly in France, who are called left-wing intellectuals and who have important means of expression at their disposal. This situation is ambiguous because it is linked both with the modernizing tendencies of the ruling class and with the cultural claims and protests of opposition movements. Should a social crisis break out, this category is in great danger of being torn apart and fragmented, for, however politically militant it believes itself to be, it is situated much more on the level of innovation than on that of conflict.

How can the sociologist today not be acutely aware of this ambiguity, since it governs his professional situation? He is constantly under attack from social movements, by the technocrats on the one side, by revolutionary groups on the other. And yet both sides use his analyses increasingly for their own ends, and he himself knows that his principal role is to make possible the appearance of social conflicts by defining the field and revealing what is concealed beneath the Utopias and ideologies of the dominant class.

2. Let us now move over to the opposite frontier of the social movement, to the place where conflict preponderates over reference to the field of conflict. The weakening of the principle of totality brings with it the fragmentation of conflicts. Here we no longer have classes meeting in a societal conflict but particular social categories that are conducting a battle, heavy with class significance but also with reaction to crisis and institutional pressure.

Analysis of the social movements would be excessively restricted if it did not take special, limited, muddled, but nevertheless important movements into consideration.

In the United States, at the present moment, no social movement exists comparable to the labor movement of the early twentieth century. However, the black movement, the movements of students, of American Mexicans or Indians, or of women are none of them either reactions to a crisis or pressure groups (as was, for example, the N AACP, which appealed to the principles of the constitution to obtain equal rights for black people).

Perhaps these individual movements will unite into a general movement, directly challenging the ruling class and its instruments of domination and not simply the role of whites, of males, of the "new mandarins," and so on.

But now they are separate social movements limited only by lack of recognition of the general stake of the conflict in which they are engaged. Self-affirmation and opposition to the established order are paradoxically giving these movements a "consciousness" of themselves that is much more

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acute than the consciousness attained by general social movements more directly engaged in the dialectic of the social classes.

Whereas the innovatory elements are not socially conscious, the individual social movements are organized around the affirmation of a collective identity, around a common will and an organization.

But this visibility more often than not conceals the breakdown of a social movement. Reduced to its conflict dimension alone it becomes transformed into an institutional pressure, or into a manifestation of a crisis of the system of historical action.

The force of a protest action is very often no more than a means of applying pressure to obtain more influence and the modification of political decisions. Inversely, an all-embracing challenging of society may indicate a defense reaction against the incoherence of the system of historical action. Direct confrontation in both cases may lead to belief in the presence of a very deep-rooted social movement, whereas confrontation simply conceals collec­tive conduct of a very different type, a fact that is infallibly proved by the collapse or sudden transformation of the protest movement.

Such are the opposite slopes of social movements, but we would do much better to link them than to set them in opposition, for no social movement exists that is not at the same time self-consciousness and instrument of the "nature of things."

Before going further into our analysis of social movements, it would be as well to stress once more everything that separates a social movement from crisis conduct. Important political movements exist, some of which have seized political power, and which seem to be nearer to social movements as we have described them than to the forms of crisis conduct referred to earlier in the chapter.

The fascist movements, for example: do they not speak in the name of the people, do they not set themselves up in opposition to an oligarchy or plutocracy, do they not aim at national development, in short, do they not contain, as any social movement must, the elements /, O, and 77

Formally, yes, but the analogy disappears as soon as one remembers the definition that we gave of those elements and their relations.

The principle of totality was defined as the movement's reference to the system of historical action, and therefore to the field of historicity, to the "natural" constraints of a society. Now, a fascist movement has as its principle of totality the inverse of this, that is to say the rights and the values of a national or ethnic collectivity. It exalts the Volk, integration, ascription (see J. P. Faye, Langages totalitaires, Paris: Hermann, 1972). As a conse­quence of this it does not define itself as one term of a conflict but as the expression of those who are "in" and the force that must drive out or suppress the "out." This comes to the same thing as defining the actor's

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identity not as a particular social force but as a totality. It therefore sets out from the consciousness of a crisis affecting the social organization; it denounces culprits whom it defines not by analysis of their economic or social role but by their natural wickedness and foreignness, in order to restore purity and unity to the social body. A fascist movement is not a right-wing social movement in opposition to movements on the left. On the contrary, what it involves is the absorption of social contestation and institutional pressure into crisis conduct. Consequently one can easily pick out "popular" ideas in fascist movements, wrhether in National Socialism or in less important ones such as Phalangism or Poujadism. A crisis provokes defense reactions which take the form—especially in the middle strata whose class situation is most confused—of a rejection of minorities, whether privileged or not, but who are in fact denounced only by the use of irrational mechanisms powered by prejudice, the desire for a scapegoat, the integrationist search for a unity which, since it has no real content, is necessarily reduced to adhesion to the movement itself and to its leader.

I do not wish here to underestimate the importance of such crisis movements, which have dramatically affected modern Europe, but simply to eliminate them from our analysis. They are not a particular kind of social movement; they are of a different nature, and the tools of analysis suggested for a study of social movements do not apply to them. We must resist the temptation to view them as essentially an instrument of the ruling class. That they develop in a class society and that the ruling classes may support them against the threat to them represented by popular movements is a fact known from experience, but one that in no way justifies our forgetting the essential, which is that we are dealing with a convulsion of society in crisis and not with the expression of a conflict for the control of social development.

e. Birth of a Sociology of Social Movements

The concept of social movement cannot be separated from the concepts of system of historical action and social classes and hence from the historical situation that makes possible the formation of a specifically sociological analysis. Such an analysis presupposes that social conducts are explained in themselves and not by recourse to some other order of facts. Such is indeed the originality—which must be accepted or rejected—of the concept of the social movement.

At the furthest possible remove from our analysis lies the kind of analysis that sees in such movements the expression of human passions, virtues and vices, embodied in a hero or in a demon. Such an explanation is in accordance with a system of historical action, but the subject of history is defined beyond a social practice, in an anthropomorphic way. Social conduct is then apprehended solely as moral conduct.

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Then comes a specifically political type of analysis. Movements are defined in relation to the institutions they attack or defend. They are struggling for legitimacy; they are aiming at power, which they reduce to the state.

What links these two modes of analysis is that they both define the social movement with reference to an order and not to social relations.

When we come to industrial societies, the viewpoint changes, because the cultural model takes the form of an instrument for the transformation of social practice. Whether it is called progress or development, it is no longer separate from economic action. In consequence, class relations are no longer the opposition between labor and non-labor but the opposition between economic actors.

However, the concept of the social movement is not born with industriali­zation. It cannot make its appearance until later. The society of capitalist industrialization still recognizes metasocial warrants for the social order. Those warrants are economic—the market—and no longer religious or political; but they are opposed to social reality being directly analyzed as the product of social relations. The ideologists of the ruling class now speak of nothing but free enterprise regulated and sanctioned by the laws of the market alone, an enterprise that must triumph over the habit-bound power of vested interest or "superstitions." The ideologists of the popular class reverse this viewpoint and find the reason for being of economic laws and social organization in the law of profit, defined as the expression of social relations, but reduced to an economic mechanism.

At the moment when economic growth is essentially determined by the accumulation of capital and the quantity of labor at the disposal of the capitalist market, there appears the idea that the economic system has its own logic, and can be analyzed both synchronically and diachronically. What then are popular social movements if not the expression of the contradictions and the crises of the economic system, while also being an appeal both for a rational management of production and for a satisfaction of human needs? These appeals still refer to something beyond the social regime, a reality that science can reach, as it can also achieve recognition of the desire and the needs of individuals or groups. Which comes to the same thing in the practice of the majority of Marxists as explaining the form and content of a social movement by the state of the system of economic domination it is confront­ing. It is imperialism and the general crisis of capitalism that situate and define social movements. And the meaning of those movements cannot be apparent except to someone who possesses the tools for a scientific analysis of capitalism. Consequently a social movement cannot acquire its true meaning except by transforming itself into a properly political force. A social movement is the midwife of a newr society freed from the contradictions of the society that preceded it.

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These two elements of analysis are linked: the explanation is provided by an analysis of the economic system, not an analysis of the social movement itself, and the movement is an instrument for the creation of the future society, for transcending the society in which it is formed and which is defined by its mode of economic domination. Hence the alternation and combination of a voluntarism oriented toward a humane and rational classless society, and of a determinism that leads to the analysis of social movements as signs of the contradictions of the economic system.

The conception of social movements that I presented is very different. It is expressed not in terms of contradictions but in terms of conflicts. It does not oppose future society and present society. It does not isolate class relations from a society's historicity. The classes involved are engaged in a struggle for the control of a system of historical action. A popular movement is thus not analyzed as the agent of a future society but as the champion of a countermodel of society, placed in the same field of historicity as the dominant model.

Every social movement, whether it be that of a ruling class or that of a dominated class, carries within it the Utopia of the transparent and rational society, the classless society, subject of course to tensions and oppositions, but tensions and oppositions that always remain enclosed within a rational and human model of social organization. The analysis should not take these representations into account. It is possible to imagine a classless society, a society without concentrated accumulation, a society whose transformation and functioning are fused. It would be a society based on a search for equilib­ria rather than a striving for development. But such a conception, important though it may be, certainly cannot be of use in the analysis of social movements formed in industrial or postindustrial societies as we know them, which are of all known societies those which set aside the largest proportion of their product to be devoted not to consumption but to investment, some­thing that presupposes a concentrated economic and social power, planned and organized by apparatuses that control and manipulate ever larger areas of social life.

If the social movements are defined within a type of society, then the dissociation between the state of domination and the objections of liberation vanish; society is no longer represented as moved solely by the logic of a mode of domination. This is what is underlined by the central concept of the double dialectic of the social classes.

The worker, in industrial society, is both proletarian and producer. He participates in historicity, even though the dominant class is imposing its dominion on society. This leads on to the statement that social movements, as they have been defined, cannot exist except insofar as the political institu­tions possess a certain autonomy, are not simply reduced to drive belts

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transmitting a social domination, and unless, on the level of social organiza­tion, the dominion of the dominant class's values and ideology is not limited by the resistance and the autonomy of technical activity and by the opposition of the workers themselves.

No social movements can exist in a totalitarian society, and the transfor­mations of such a society cannot originate anywhere but in its own internal contradictions or from its conflict with other societies. That of course is an extreme situation, a real one alas, but not definable on the level of social domination and class relations alone, so that it is possible and necessary to study social movements in societies with classes, as all known industrial and postindustrial societies are, but in which there exists a certain autonomy of the political system and of the organizational systems. Once again, this type of analysis is not trying to say that class conflict is limited and that an area of common interests coexists with grounds for conflict. It is asserting, and this is quite different, that there can be no conflict without a common stake or without participation of all the elements of the system of historical action. This participation may be entirely confined to conflict, which means that the classes involved oppose one another in defense of opposing social forms of each one of the elements of the system of historical action.

It is only from this viewpoint that the analysis of social movements no longer has to seek for any explanation on another plane, whether it be moral, political or economic, each of those traditional recourses being merely transcriptions of the nature of the cultural model—the existence of meta-social warrants for the social structure in societies in which the capacity of a society to transform itself by investment is too limited for its creativity to be apprehended as the direct stake of class relations.

The constant presence of popular social movements leads one to reject the idea that their historical meaning can only be given to them from outside. It is certainly impossible, I agree, to defend a spontaneist thesis that would ignore the dominant character of the upper class and the fact of alienation; but it is just as impossible to assert that only a political instrument, supported by a scientific theory of history, is capable of leading the social movement beyond mere reformist protests and a striving toward a better social integration.

Beyond the Utopian and ideological arguments about spontaneity and the directive role of the party, there emerges quite clearly the double situation of every popular movement: it is subject to a domination as well as being an essential element in an open conflict far the control of historicity.

C. The Natural History of Social Movements

The orientations of a social movement do not depend solely on the state of the political system or of the social organization. They also take different forms

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according to the stage of evolution of class relations. Social conflicts have a natural history.

a. Utopias and Counterutopias

A new type of society and, especially, of production is usually ushered in by a rising ruling class. This class, while combating the former ruling class that it is pushing aside—though often by making deals with it—identifies itself strongly with "the forward march of civilization." It proclaims very loudly that it has no other concern but the general interest, and likes to display dazzling proofs of its modernism and of the general improvement that its action is bringing to the collectivity. A Saint-Simonian hymn of praise to industry, general enough to fit in with a great variety of social and political orientations. In our century too we have seen modernist economic leaders push their determination to cut themselves free from the old forms of capitalism or the state so far that they almost seem to be standing behind the opposition. Popular movements in this situation are in a much less favorable position and are subject to very great tensions. On the one hand, they have still not learned how to describe their own existence and the nature of their adversaries; they are cornered into responding to the ruling class's Utopia with a counterutopia rejecting en bloc the society in formation and offering in opposition to it a countersociety that takes no account whatever of the real state of economic activity and the new set of SHA elements in formation. On the other hand, these movements have the language of previous social movements at their disposal. Just as the French labor movement has for a long while drawn on the vocabulary of the French Revolution, so today we are seeing an intensive use of the vocabulary and modes of analysis that have characterized the labor movement for the past century. These reminiscences have a positive function: that of resisting the dominant Utopia. When the dominant themes are growth, affluence, rationality, consumption, leisure, is it not essential to go back to the language of the labor movement denouncing poverty and exploitation in the factories? Not so much because it is still appropriate—all languages of protest have common elements and none is ever entirely obsolete—as because it is a summons back to conflict, to contradiction, and to rupture in a society where one hears of nothing but opportunity, flexibility, modernization.

In this first phase the social movement of opposition is divided between total rejection of a society seen as identical with a system of domination and the search for an integrated and spontaneous society. On the one hand, O is fused with T\ on the other, / is identified with 7. The student movements that have formed in the universities of most advanced capitalist countries recently, and that are opposing the settling-in of postindustrial society and its new system of domination, technocracy, are constantly divided between rejection of the social order and the quest for an immediate social solution.

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One is tempted sometimes, reflecting on such movements, to see in them the heralds of a real schism in society. On one side the domain of rational calculation, of arguments from probability, of pragmatic strategies and utilitarian compromises, on the other that of forms of social and cultural organizations quite alien to the world of commercial production and consumption. But that is to reduce analysis to the subjectivity of the actors and to confuse the formation of movements and social conflicts with the appearance of Utopias with no forms of communication between them. In reality, observation shows that a social movement does not form, that action is not possible, except when the rejection and the affirmation combine, when the struggle is begun, when contestation shatters the apparent unidimension-ality of the dominant society and causes conflicts and contradictions to explode in its womb.

But even then, in this first phase, the constituent elements of social move­ments are only weakly linked, there is little homogeneity. Such movements can produce historical events of great importance, as the May 1968 move­ment did in France; but it is difficult for them to conduct a continuous and organized action. The First struggles of the labor proletariat had the same characteristics of violence, confusion, and discontinuity that we find today, during the birth pangs of postindustrial society.

b. Confrontation

It is usually the consolidation of the new ruling class, of its political dominion and its organizational power, that brings with it the transition from the era of Utopias to the era of confrontations. Little by little the actors define themselves, the nature of the new situation becomes clearer, new analyses, new languages appear. It is at the heart of a society—not on its fringes—that the great social movements form. The attacks made by revolutionaries upon the labor aristocracy should not make us forget that it is skilled workers from the most modern enterprises who have most often been the most active militants in the labor movement, and the strikes of May-June 1968 were yet another reminder of this important fact.

In the Utopian phase, intellectuals speak in the name of the people, of the underprivileged, of the peasants driven from the land and sucked into the urban labor market, of the immigrant proletariat, and their action is as important as it is limited. It becomes less visible when the historical actors succeed in acting without mediation, and when the new stakes have been imposed on all.

This confrontation increases the internal homogeneity of the social movement, since what is identity for one becomes opposition for the other. And this homogeneity favors organization. It is then that the social move­ment comes closest to a voluntary association. Its members undertake

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commitments with regard to the association, constitute a community; mechanisms of leadership and representation appear, which combine parti­cipation in common values and efficiency in the collective struggle. The leadership of a social movement in its central phase is always both instrumental and expressive, charismatic and Machiavellian.

It is necessary here to speak of values. In the Utopian phase the movement wavers perpetually between denunciation of "objective" contradictions and an appeal to a "natural" model of society. The opposition of cultural and social values reveals the fact that the movement is appealing to the historical orientations of society but claiming them for and by a concrete collectivity, the voluntary association, against the adversary conceived of as the anticom-munity, as an external pressure, that of personal interest for some, that of disorder or destruction for others.

These voluntary associations can take the form of parties, but what are involved here are not social forces defined by their participation in the political system and its interplay of influence but, to a far greater extent, movements defined by a project of transforming society and that always resist defining themselves within an institutional interplay, since the latter occurs only within a form of social domination.

Of course, a social movement is not always revolutionary; it does not always exclude institutionalization of the conflict, but it is never reduced to being merely an agent of such a process.

c. Institutionalization

This observation still holds good for the third stage a movement goes through, that of institutionalization. The confrontation of the orientations of society gives way to the struggle over the division of the profits. The social movement in opposition, by claiming a larger share for those it is defending, also gives the society's capacity for growth a new boost. In this way the labor movement, exerting an ever greater pressure for a rise in real wages, boosts economic progress, both by augmenting internal demand and by forcing the economic rulers to raise productivity, and thus to accelerate technological progress. From now on the conflict occurs within the economic system, whether it is concerned with higher wages, structural reforms, or democratic social planning.

But beside this positive aspect of Institutionalization—its task of eroding old dominations and vested interests—we must also recognize a negative side: the more the historical actors turn into group interests, the more historicity is in danger of being lost, no longer because it is being torn between two adversaries but because those adversaries are compromising with one another without concern for social development.

The aging ruling class becomes a dominant class while the popular class,

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the thrust of its social movement now blunted, becomes a defensive class, especially in its peripheral sectors, which are at a considerable remove from the center of the class struggles and are seeking to harness the social movement's ideas and mobilizing capacity in the service of corporate interests. Very often in the industrialized capitalist countries one finds unions, especially those of office workers or civil servants, using the banner of social democracy, and even of self-management, as a cover for hagglings over vested interests and petty privileges. They are indifferent both to the problems of production and to the real social conflicts.

This stage of evolution is always accompanied by undertows. The Utopias and confrontations do not disappear entirely but undergo a lateral shift into the radical, aggressive, disenchanted wings of social movements that are losing their contestatory forces. Schisms then occur. While certain sections want to sacrifice "outdated ideologies" to the efficacy of institutional action, others oppose this notion and want to go back to the purity of the original movement and cling to a historical practice that they keep alive in the ideological mode.

The institutionalization of a social movement does not in itself lead to the disappearance of that movement. This disappearance only occurs if the system of historical action in which the movement developed is replaced by another. The development of industrial capitalism destroyed the capacity for historical action of movements formed under mercantile capitalism. The plebeian town movements underwent an increasingly rapid decadence during the nineteenth century, while the labor movement, the contemporary and adversary of capitalist industrialization, experienced a corresponding rise. Today the labor movement is undergoing the same erosion in its turn as a new type of society comes into being, a technocratic society and a consumer society at the same time, whose development is in turn bringing into being new social movements now experiencing their Utopian phase. This mode of succession throws light on the historically important coincidence of the anti-institutionalist wings of an old social movement and the Utopian movements that are the first forms of a new social movement.

It is a coincidence that is expressed by both the conjunction of their struggles and the discordance of their themes. Every movement in formation brings with it a new practice and seems to make use of an old discourse. The May 1968 rising in France was a dramatic example of this situation: the laborite discourse is constantly united with and yet opposed to the appear­ance of the "cultural revolution" of which the students and the young generally have been the bearers.

These stages do not follow one another unless, by definition, no break in the social order occurs. And that break is neither accidental nor inevitable. It depends, as we have seen, not on the orientations of the social movement but

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on the historical conjuncture. Crisis of the social organization, blockage of the institutional system, weight of the dominant role of the upper class— these make up a revolutionary situation. A social movement is not defined by that situation but by a field of historicity. As a result there are frequent discrepancies, the main consequence of which is the appearance of autono­mous actors, agents of political action though also linked to a social movement.

It is in the middle phase, that of confrontation, that the gap is narrowest. The social movement at this point can be a party and thus a political agent for the transformation of society. It is absorbed into political action. The same is not true either in the Utopian phase or the institutionalization phase.

In the former, the still poorly integrated, not very homogeneous social movement may deploy itself in a revolutionary crisis, but it is not capable on its own of conducting a political action, of taking over the management of society. If it is to make itself felt, it can only be through terror, which is to say by denying all autonomy to the institutional system and the internal problems of the social organization, which leads to an inevitable dissociation of the movement from the exercise of power. An entirely contestatory movement cannot at the same time be entirely managerial.

This is an internal crisis dominating the life of revolutionary movements that overturn the established order at the very birth of a new system of historical action.

Inversely, a revolutionary crisis breaking out when the social movement is in the process of institutionalization exceeds the movement's capacity for political action in another way. In this situation it is the political system itself that becomes an autonomous actor and that gives the crisis a political outcome alien to the social movement. This is a situation experienced by the European labor movements at the time of the Great Depression. They were engaged on a program of democratization of the economy or of structural reforms. They were swamped by political movements, sometimes of a fascist kind, sometimes, on the other hand, of the popular-front type. But in the latter case the autonomy of the political action was very marked, which resulted in its also being weak and, thus, in its ultimate defeat by reactionary social and political forces.

These discrepancies between social movement and political action re­sponding to a general crisis of society underline the necessity of never confusing a social movement with political conduct as a whole.

d. Peripheral Social Movements

The direct link established between social movements and social class led naturally to a consideration of the former within a given field of historicity and not within a complex social formation. But one cannot ignore the fact

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that there are always noncentral class relations in existence. We must therefore go beyond the observations that have just been made concerning the stages of class relations within a field of historicity, and ask some questions about the forms taken by social movements linked with peripheral class relations, for example with mercantile relations in an industrial society, or with land-centered relations in a mercantile society. The simplest idea is that various class relations and social movements enter into interaction within a political field or even combine at their own level. But studying these historical situations is not sufficient, for modern sectors and archaic sectors are not simply juxtaposed; the former dominate the latter, so that a peripheral social movement tends to be dissociated: on the one hand, in its own field, it tends to decay, to lose its reference to a system of historical action, to become mere institutional pressure or organizational claim; on the other, it intervenes in the central social relations in such a way as to modify them without transforming them completely.

The decay process occurs more directly as the society's dualism is more apparent. An ''underdeveloped" region is driven into defensive conduct, one form of which is attachment to regional leaders or submission to substitute elites (this is how Eric J. Hobsbawm has analyzed the Sicilian Mafia in Primitive Rebels, Manchester University Press, 1959), and the extreme manifestation of this is a community uprising that may go as far as collective suicide or a chiliastic explosion. The heteronomy of such movements is generally very strong, and the most "expressive" leaders are often also engaged in a political game in which they are more the manipulated than the controllers.

The role in the central social conflicts will fall, according to the particular situation, into one of three principal categories.

1. The marginalization of an economic sector leads, if its ruling class is involved in modernization, to a reinforcement of the role of the state, which is acting as agent of the dominant class and contributing to the formation of a new ruling class. The policy of this state can range from redistributionist demagogy to an integrationist, authoritarian nationalism, a ground upon which fascist movements may later be able to develop (Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, New York: Beacon, 1966).

2. The peripheral popular class can be absorbed by the central popular class and radicalize it by supplementing its defense of economic interests with a new community resistance, as happened in Italy after both world wars. This radicalization always remains distinct from revolutionary movements centered on the old popular class.

3. There may be a dissolution of the old popular class into political pressures of the populist type, into simple organizational demands, or even into conduct of ascending mobility.

It is the nature of the ruling class that determines the appearance of one of

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these three types of conduct. The more the old ruling class moves in the direction of economic change, the more likelihood there is of seeing the first type appear, while the third one corresponds to a replacement of old ruling class by new.

These historical situations can only be dealt with here very briefly; they would have to be analyzed in much more detail if one wished to provide an account of the historical forms of many social movements made up of heterogeneous elements and in societies undergoing structural change. In particular, the degree of heterogeneity of the society being examined explains, to some extent at least, the principal mode of expression of the social movement. The greater the importance of peripheral popular classes in a central social movement, the more the latter manifests itself ideologically, which is the counterpart of the dissociation of the peripheral social move­ment. In the opposite situation, the practice of social relations and the integration of the social movement are given priority over its ideological expression. Between these two extreme cases occur those in which the social movement presents itself above all as a political force but overflows the limits of the institutional arena.

Corresponding to a strong social heterogeneity there will be a combination of violence, direct demands, and ideology. Corresponding to an average heterogeneity there will be an association of institutional pressure and recourse to force in political relations. A low degree of heterogeneity favors the integration of the social movement, which is to say its capacity to manage its own relations with its institutional and organizational action, and therefore makes possible the formation of what I am about to define as a high-level project.

D. Levels of Project

a. Project and Social Movement

The meaning of a social movement cannot be reduced to the consciousness its members have of it, to their intentions, to the values to which they refer themselves. That consciousness is in no way the central nucleus of the movement; it is at the same time composite and ever-changing. It inter­mingles intentions, values, and rationalizations; it varies according to the state of relations with the adversary, the organizational forms of the movement itself, its alliances, and so on. It is the specific characteristic of an ideology always to appear very definite about its determination to include or reject but to vary constantly as to the nature of what it is including or rejecting, and even as to where exactly the boundary between good and bad lies.

Too often reference is made to a movement's "project" when all that is

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really meant is its ideology. We must reject that kind of confusion and stress that "project" should never be used to introduce an analysis of a movement's meaning as experienced subjectively, an analysis reducible to a necessarily artificial reconstruction of its principles and values.

Perhaps in certain cases it is useful to start from ideology in order to understand social relations, but one is certainly not going to be able to explain the meaning of an actor's actions by imprisoning oneself inside his consciousness. Instead of grasping a social interaction, one would be juxtaposing two projects, hearing the conflicting speeches of the heralds from both camps, without being able to do anything more than record their irreducible differences. It is therefore not in that sense that the notion of project is employed here.

The entire analysis starts from social relations, not from the actors. Those relations are defined both by the dominant-dominated couple and by the reference of the coupled actors in the same action system.

The higher the level of project, the less reflexive it is, the more it defines a field of action and not a subjectivity. The worker in an enterprise apprehends himself both as a specialist in a trade, a member of a work group, and as a member of an age category, a family, a neighborhood, a nation, a union, etc. He defines himself by difference, not by opposition in relation to other individuals or groups that are more or less qualified, rich, educated and so on than he is. He also has personal intentions: to keep his job, to find a better one, to earn more, to wear himself out less, to have a nice long vacation. On this level the notion of project has no place. It should not be introduced except insofar as relations of opposition are created within a given system of action or, more concretely, when a struggle for power is appearing. The higher the project level, the less the actor is defined by his intentions and the more he assumes the tensions imposed on him by his position in the double dialectic of the social classes.

It is therefore impossible to define the level of project by examining the subjective coherence of a discourse or of conduct. The level of project cannot be defined by the actor himself; it must be constructed by the sociologist from an examination of the whole field of action, the social relations that constitute it. What characterizes a high-level project is that each of the actor's orientations refers on to the others. Working-class defense of jobs and job security can refer on to the attack against the employment system, which refers on to the theme of progress, thus constituting a network of interdepen­dent orientations.

If it is necessary to speak of project this is in the first place in order to indicate the distinction between the social movement and other types of collective conduct. Organizational or institutional conduct is defined in relation to a certain concrete social whole. A social category reacts to a type

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of authority, to a system of remuneration, to the noncongruence of its status; or else a social force is seeking to increase its influence over decision making. In each of these cases the actor is defined by his situation in an already controlled whole. If the workers with a certain skill or being paid a certain wage demand a change in their situation, then they are acting first of all within the framework of the social organization that defines them, and thus within an established order. This, as we have seen, is also true of institutional conduct, which is not formed otherwise than in a doubly limited and unified field, on the one hand by a territory and a government—whether those of a nation, a city, an enterprise, or a voluntary association—and on the other by a mode of social domination, which is to say of class relations. There is an attempt to modify the game in one case, the rules of the game in the other; in both cases there is a certain social definition of the situation accepted from the outset. Things are quite different with social movements. They are situated at the highest, yet the most fundamental level of the social definition of a historical situation. A system of historical action is not a "society/' it is only the instrument for producing society.

Class conflict gives social form to that system. This field is not institution­alized, organized, of itself. It is defined only by a stake and the double dialectic of the social classes. A social movement is defined by a project in that it challenges all forms of social control, whether institutional or organizational. A social movement, by definition, does not refer itself to the relative situation of the actor within a whole defined independently of the position of the actors; for him, the situation is constituted by the relation of the actors, by their conflict, whether or not that conflict is viewed as capable of institutionalization. If workers demand a reorganization of the wage scale, if they claim the right to negotiate real wages at the level of the enterprise or of the branch, this conduct may be overlying a social movement, but the conduct in itself provides no indication of whether this is so or not. If, on the other hand, those workers are opposing a society based on profit with a society based on labor, if they wish to destroy or diminish the control exercised by the holders of capital or the rulers of the apparatus over investments, or the distribution of the product of economic activity, then, with a greater or lesser degree of violence, greater or lesser comprehensive­ness, they are challenging class relations. They are no longer defined by their relative position on a scale or in a decision-making process; they are seeking to define a state of social relations that will transform the nature of the institutional system or the social organization. And this brings us back to the first definition of a social movement: a conflict action over control of a field of historicity. The actors are defined by their opposition, while at the same time each actor is apprehended by the domination he exerts or seeks to exert over the svstem of historical action.

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These relations cannot be defined in other terms than those of the double dialectic of the social classes. The actors are not defined by their position in a system of economic relations but by their aim in relation to the system of historical action. To define the actor by the state of a system, that is to say by his status and his role, is to place oneself solely on the level of social organization. In that case one cannot define anything other than crisis conduct, ascending or descending mobility conduct, role conflict, anomic conduct, and so on and so on.

On the other hand, since the system of historical action is the stake of class relations, a social movement cannot be defined by a situation; it is an actor in a set of orientations and conflicts. The concept of project expresses the nature of a general procedure, that of actionalist sociology. One must reject the choice between an objectivitst and a subjectivist definition of social movements. The meaning of the action is not reducible either to the actor s consciousness or to mechanisms definable without any reference to the orientations of the actors. Those orientations must be isolated within the consciousness of the actors and linked with the engagement in a social conflict, in class relations.

Projects do not relate to society's functioning but to its historicity, to the forms and orientations of the action it exerts upon itself by means of knowledge, accumulation, and the cultural model.

Although it is necessary to retain certain connotations of the word "pro­ject," it is of fundamental importance to recognize the place occupied by the concept in the construction of actionalist analysis. A social movement is never the response to a situation or the sign of a social mechanism: it is the work of a class actor engaged in conflict over control of the orientations of the system of historical action.

b. The Three Levels

The notion of project only becomes useful when one distinguishes three levels of project, thus permitting a more precise characterization of social move­ments. The level of project is not a measure of intensity. It is defined by the relations between the constituent elements of the social movement.

The first level of project is that on which the elements 7, O, and T are not linked together; this means a fragmented movement is involved. The second level is that on which the elements are grouped in twos: I-O + I-T + 0-T. The third level is that on which the three elements are integrated into the whole, I-O-T.

A low level of project can be observed for example when the actor and the adversary are not clearly defined by the nature of their opposition and when the stake of the conflict is not linked to the actors' conflict.

If students are attacking 'Monopolies" and aiming at a society of self-management, spontaneity, and individual and collective creativity, then only

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a very low degree of interdependence is to be found between the elements of the social movement.

This does not in any way signify that such a movement is any less important than one with a higher degree of integration. All judgments of that kind must be avoided. For the moment, all that concerns us is to define the characteristics of a level of project.

A low-level movement usually compensates for the lacking integration of its elements in a social practice with the force of an ideology, or rather of a doctrine, that imposes a nonpractical unity on the divergent orientations of its action.

It thus overflows the theoretical model of the social movement at top and bottom at the same time. On the one hand it is bringing categories into play that fall into the province of organizational or institutional analysis; on the other hand it is Utopian. A social group that could be analyzed as marginal or anomic also invents countermodels of society. It is therefore obliged to devote a large part of its activity to managing its internal tensions; it is constantly shaken by rupture and schisms, it is ceaselessly seeking to strengthen its doctrinal integration while at the same time being rent by internal dis­sensions.

At the opposite extreme, a high-level project is defined by a strong integration of the elements I, O, and T.

A high-level project presupposes a certain coherence of the field of histor­ical action of the society concerned. A social movement depends not only on its own integration but on the state and on the action of its adversary, as well as on the situation of the system of historical action. This second point is the easiest to gTasp. If the forms of production and of distribution are not coherent, if, for example, a highly industrialized society is also a society of inheritance, then social struggles cannot be coherent in their orientations. On the other hand, the discrepancies between the formation and the achieve­ment of consciousness of the social adversaries tend to disorganize social movements, either because they end up replacing one of the actors with a disparate coalition or because they lead one of the adversaries to identify himself with social development and thus fail to recognize the existence of social conflicts.

One must be careful to avoid oversimplified pictures, however. There is a temptation to define a high-level project in such a way that it appears to correspond more to a state of strong ideological and political integration. A political party often addresses itself very clearly to a specific social group, designates its adversary in terms of the conflict that sets them in confronta­tion, and proposes a new society. This does not justify the claim that it is the expression of a high-level social movement. First, because the sociologist must go beyond ideologies and consider the effective social mobilization. This means that a high-level social movement cannot be defined other than

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by its capacity for integration and transcendence of the lower levels. The labor movement gives the best known example of this. It only exists because it integrates and transcends both the workers' organizational claims and their institutional pressures. The only reason a level may be called high is that it manages the relations between the various levels of project.

If it were to establish itself solely and directly on the highest level, then there would no longer be any tension between the elements /, O, and T, and it would still be possible to interpret such collective conduct on the organiza­tion or institutional level just as much as on the level of historicity.

The movement that achieves the unification of these elements or of the lower levels of collective conduct, and which, moreover, succeeds in elimi­nating its adversary and thus in identifying itself with social development, becomes the exact opposite of a social movement, a kind of state.

It then becomes fused with social organization and power. It escapes from the dialectic of the social classes as well as from those of the system of historical action. It is no longer movement, but order.

A social movement is not alive unless it is a process integrating elements or forms of collective action, and not the strategy and tactics deduced from a doctrine or a political force.

c. Management of Internal Problems

Deep within the movement, therefore, there always exist tensions between claims, formed on the social-organization level, pressure exerted within the institutional system, and the social movement defined by the interdepen­dence of the principles of identity, opposition, and totality.

The institutional pressure exerted, for example, by a union or political party acting within a parliamentary framework is constantly led to repress certain claims and on the other hand to develop others, to transform them into a social force of opposition and pressure, to politicize claims. Similarly, one cannot conceive of a social movement with a high level of project situated solely on the level of contestation; it controls the institutional pressures, limits them in certain cases, develops them in others. A social movement's forms of action, organization, and evolution depend largely on the relations established within it between contestation, pressure, and claims.

Sometimes the integration of these levels is too weak, and the movement tends to split between reactions to the crisis of social organization and a contestation that has become more ideological than practical and can be dissociated from the movement's practice. Sometimes, on the contrary, the autonomy of the various levels of collective action is too weak, and the movement that believes itself to be engaged in the most all-embracing contestation may no longer be anything but the ideological response to a crisis situation.

A concrete social movement is therefore not solely the organized expres-

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sion of class consciousness. It is defined by the capacity a class action possesses of governing an institutional pressure and organizational claims. It is when this dominion is strong that a mass sociopolitical movement appears, but one within which a set of decision mechanisms must be organized as a means of managing the relations between the different levels of collective conduct. A high level project is not the most "pure" but the most integrating.

Thus project must not be confused with the representation a movement creates of itself and of the meaning of its action.

The consciousness of social movements does not appear until the reality of those social movements becomes blurred. Movements can never be com­pletely conscious and organized. They are defined by their consciousness in two cases. First, the end of their existence, when they become peripheral, when they leave the field of historicity, while their power of action and organization is accompanied by representations contrary to the nature of social movements. The social relations are in that case "naturalized." Or, second, at the very beginning of their existence, when they are manifestations of crisis reactions, a political pressure, and a class consciousness all at the same time. Being unable to base themselves on a class consciousness already expressed and shaped, they struggle to make it visible by means of conduct that the keepers of the established order view as simply deviant. They refuse to distinguish between proletariat and subproletariat, they contest the definition of the marginal, the insane, the criminal, the truant, in order to unmask the power that lurks behind the rationality of society's norms. Such movements are not mass movements but advance actions, like those of the anarchists in the early days of the great tide of industrialization, or that of the leftists today. They are necessarily led into being no more than ephemeral explosions against which established power mobilizes all its conformisms, or to operating a certain filtering process within themselves, a certain hierarchi-zation of problems, and therefore a differentiation between class action, political thrust, and reactions to social disorganization.

Every social movement is thus torn between a powerful but confused all-embracingness and an internal differentiation that can go as far as fragmen­tation.

The level of project measures above all the capacity to manage this tension, to reconcile differentiation and unity, which is to say the autonomy of the various levels of collective conduct and the dominion of historical action over institutional and organizational conduct.

The sociology seeking to define the project level of a social movement cannot therefore rely on the doctrinal capacity of the movement itself. Because society is first of all a system of historical action, whose elements are in tension with one another and with class relations defined by a double dialectic, a social movement is a historical actor of central importance only insofar as it lives its tensions and oppositions within itself, rather than

350 Chapter Six

"transcending" them into a body of values, objectives, and tactics. This is why the most important movements are also those in which the relations between "base" and leaders, between claims and revolutionary aims, be­tween modernization and the defense of class interests, have been debated in the most open and the most constant manner.

Where such debates do not exist, the social movement breaks down into organizational claims or institutional pressures on the one hand and an action directed toward the state, either from outside or from inside, on the other. It is wrong to make a distinction between primitive movements on the one hand, Utopian and disorganized, violent and ephemeral, and mature movements on the other, responsible, strongly organized, and capable of a durable action beyond variations in the historical conjuncture. But it is equally wrong to exalt the spontaneity of the masses and deplore the cooling of the original volcanic eruption into hardened bureaucratic flows or authoritarian pyramids. The greatest figures in social movements have been those that most clearly expressed the necessity for such movements to be both mass movement and organized political force. It is in this sense that one should understand the exemplary importance of Rosa Luxemburg in the socialist movement. The founders and leaders of states doubtless leave a more conspicuous stamp upon history, but that does not always signify that their action can be identified with a social movement, since nothing in the life of societies, it seems to me, could be more opposed than the state and social movements.

d. The Maximum Possible Action

Certain historical situations normally call for a certain level of project. We shall speak here of the maximum possible action. The simplest expression of this idea is arrived at by relating project levels to the stages in the natural history of social movements. The Utopian stage is that in which the ruling class identifies itself with social development, while the popular classes, still in the process of transformation, only achieve consciousness of themselves and of their conflict by rejecting society en bloc and by setting up an all-embracing countermodel in opposition to it. One is therefore justified in thinking that the maximum possible action is to be found in this stage at level / , that which combines organizational crisis with Utopia. In an analogous manner, the working-class categories in the process of joining urban and industrial society are at once dominated by an adaptation crisis, by a situation of marginality or underprivilege, and by the image of a community-based society, so that it would be very difficult for any high degree of integration to occur in a social movement. On the contrary, it is in the central phase, that of confrontation, that the movement can attain the highest level of project. The actors are strongly constituted and have shaken free of previous social formations. A face-to-face conflict develops, the stake

topia

+ 2

+ 1

x -^^

confrontation

^ X -—.___

^ ^ - 1

- 2

institu tionalization

- 1

^ ^ ^ ^ X

- 1

Social Movements 351

appears more clearly as the system of historical action becomes more coherent. Finally, in the last phase, that of institutionalization, the maximum possible action is to be found at the intermediate level. Relative isolation of the opposition /-O, separated from a thrust toward social participation corresponding to the pair / - T and maintenance of a criticism of the adversary viewed as obstacle to social development 0-r(see figure 37).

level 3

level 2

level 1

maximum possible action ' Figure 37

This leads us on to consider two opposite types of situation: that in which the movement is beyond the maximum possible action and that in which it falls short of it.

In the Utopian phase, movements beyond the maximum possible action do not attain a high level of integration other than ideologically. It is frequent in such a case for a new movement to be drawn upward by recourse to the strongly constituted ideology of previous social movements. This is a customary situation in France, where the beginnings of the labor movement were associated with a revival of the language of the French Revolution, and where even today the movement born in the universities can be observed making use of the Marxist-Leninist language developed in a profoundly different social situation.

In the situation furthest away from this one, the period of institutionaliza­tion, we find the previous confrontation model maintaining itself but deprived to a large extent of its practice and transformed into a movement of ideas rather than a social movement.

The action of revolutionary groups still appealing to today's working class within the traditional framework of the enterprise probably belongs to this category of movements of ideas that have gone beyond the maximum possible action. Such situations are not without their own particular efficacy. Often they are anticipating a later phase of evolution and thus preparing for a transformation of a social movement, or else for its replacement by another.

The failure of movements to reach the maximum possible action presents a simpler case. The most often quoted example is that of the economism of production-line workers in mass production industries. Workers of this category, as I have observed in France, generally have a markedly lower degree of class consciousness than do skilled workers. They attempt to compensate for the constraints of their work mainly by exacting higher remuneration, and their hostility' with regard to the enterprise is not usually

352 Chapter Six

integrated into any representation of class conflict. In an institutionalization phase one also finds outbreaks of pure economic claims. The complexity and importance of wildcat strikes in this period derive from the fact that they combine conduct below the maximum possible action, conduct involving simple economic claims increasing in intensity as the situation is more favorable (as in periods of expansion and inflation), and conduct beyond that maximum, fanning the embers of direct confrontation afresh and overflow­ing the unions' attempts toward an institutionalization of the conflicts both ideologically and in terms of political consciousness.

Collective actions falling below the maximum possible action play a much less important role in social change, but their importance is often the sign of a change of phase, and more precisely of the weakening of a model of open confrontation characteristic of the central period. The economism of the unskilled workers leads to a transformation of the labor movement into an actor in a system of industrial relations.

e. The Penumbra of Social Movements

Whatever their level of project, social movements are not identifiable unless they reveal themselves by means of a durable collective action, one that cannot be reduced to "reaction" to a crisis or to specific social tensions, and by means of an ideological or Utopian production that puts forward, even if only in a fragmentary way, a vision of society.

A strike, a riot, a campaign for support may indicate the presence of a social movement but cannot be identified with it. It is prudent not to recognize the presence of a social movement until one sees that movement intervening in several different organizational and institutional situations.

But once these fairly narrow limits have been drawn, one must also recognize the necessity for an analysis in terms of social movements in a much larger number of situations.

A simple claim, even though it cannot be recognized as a sufficient proof of the existence of a social movement, often does not fit into the framework of a functionalist analysis. The clearest sign of this failure of containment is violence, an appeal to the absent social movement by an actor refusing in this way to keep his claim within ''reasonable" bounds, which is to say inside an organizational system, and therefore a power relation system. Violence is restrained by a social movement. On the other hand, if the formation of the movement is hampered by repression, alienation, or the heterogeneity of the group, then violence is not kept in check. Terrorism is organized violence intended to provoke repression and thus to bring conflict out into the open, to tear apart the integrating, ideological fabric of power, to force people to take sides and become aware. But violence and terrorism can be calling for an absent or an impossible social movement. They may be doctrinaire attempts to render visible a conflict and a stake not really central to those

Social Movements 353

involved, either because they are anachronistic or because they are pre­mature.

Social movements would present a very small field of study if restricted to movements of the highest level. More often than not it is necessary to posit the existence of a social movement in order to explain certain forms of collective conduct that at first, considered in themselves, seem to belong to other categories of social analysis, yet whose meaning is not wholly captured by those categories and can only be explained when such forms of conduct are linked to others, with which they often have no recognized kinship.

One ought to go further, and recognize a reference to a social movement even outside organized forms of collective conduct, in conduct that another analytical orientation terms marginal or deviant. It is arbitrary to term all abnormal conduct, whether that of the delinquent or that of the mentally ill, social protest and potential participation in a social movement. But it is also just as arbitrary to view such conduct as no more than a response to social disorganization. Anomie leads to desocialization, to withdrawal, to suicide. But aggression or, on the other hand, an obsession with purity can be decollectivised forms of ideology and Utopia and thus belong to the same order of social phenomena as social movements. This occurs only when one can find in them the structure I-O-T, in the form, for example, of a loss of identity, personality damage due to deprivation of full parental relations, an opposition to society perceived as a machine of exclusion, and the quest for an individual or community Utopia described in terms more or less transposed from the system of historical action and in particular from its cultural model.

It is not easy for the sociologist to explore this penumbra of the social movements, for he is encountering personality problems that are not within his competence. But at least he can launch an appeal to the psychoanalysts, calling upon them to help find a common language, or at least a system of translation from one language into the other. If there are forms of conduct that can have light thrown on them by a knowledge of the socialization process, how can we avoid accepting the possibility that they may be understood even more fully by being examined from the point of view of the social structure for which socialization is merely the agent of reproduction?

The dominant ideology can be relied upon without fail to reinterpret social movements in terms of crisis, of disorganization, of anomie. The sociologist is merely doing his job by attempting to do the opposite, by refusing to speak the language of order and by seeking out, behind social order and its sanctions, the relations, the conflicts, and the social movements being concealed.

It is in this spirit that he should recognize social problems as indirect and weakened forms of social movements. These problems can be divided into three categories.

1. Questioning the social order and its self-justification. A social problem

354 Chapter Six

occurs not when there are insane people, for all societies construct that category, but when questions are asked about what causes an individual to be treated as insane. It is mainly the total institutions that become social problems of this type, and in a more general way all of society's repressive organization. Are prisoners guilty? Are those shut away really insane? Are those the police arrest more "unfortunates" than delinquents? All such questions have fueled a great deal of sociologists' activity for a long while, at least insofar as they have not benignly acquiesced in the action of the forces of social control. Such social problems do not betray any social conflict, but they check the smooth flow of domination's discourse, shake its good conscience, and undermine its ideological attempts to mask the nature and meaning of its acts.

2. A second type of social problem involves an adversary much more visibly but without yet speaking the name of any specific actor. The urban crisis and the even more general topics of pollution and the destruction of the environment are the most important examples of this type of social problem today, and typify its ambiguity very well. We hear denunciations of the omnipotence of money, accusations hurled against the big enterprises for unloading responsibility for their external diseconomies onto the collectivity, or against political or administrative organisms for giving way to the pressures of economic forces. But these protests are often associated with a "naturalization" of the social problems that robs them of their violence, to the point where they become just an appeal to the vague image of a "natural" society that will stay permanently ensconced in its own little niche within an ecological whole, an image in total contradiction of the most general characteristics of human societies, since those societies are constantly modifying their relations with the environment by their labor, rather than inserting themselves into "nature." A social problem thus becomes a cultural problem, which avoids the necessity of finding social mechanisms responsible for its gravity.

3. A third type of social problem corresponds to the maintenance within a given society of social and cultural forms stemming from former societal types and therefore characterized by an anterior form of class relations.

The modernizing protest movements mentioned earlier in this chapter also include an indirect appeal to a social movement, especially insofar as a present class domination is drawing support from the remains of former class dominations. Thus denunciation of archaism is also an attack against class domination.

Sociology finds one of its most fertile fields in the study of social problems, for though these weakened forms of social movements seem less interesting than the more self-evident and stronger forms, it is often more interesting to distinguish among various types of collective conduct by observing them within the vaguely defined whole constituted by a social problem. And the

Social Movements 355

sociologist of today's industrialized countries, living at the birth of postindus-trial society, in confused, transitional societies, in which new confrontations analogous to that of industrial capitalism and the labor movement do not yet exist, ought especially to be seeking for the signs of social movements in formation in the complexity of our new social problems.

E. Formation of Social Movements

Distinguishing the various levels of project is indispensable to a knowledge of the functioning of social movements. The role of ideology, of violence, or of schisms is illuminated by the use of this general analytical tool. Which brings us to the question: for what reasons does a movement raise itself to this level? And, more generally: what are the social conditions that permit or prevent the formation of a social movement? The posing of that question leads to an extension of our field of analysis. From the outset of this chapter we have constantly sought to distinguish various types of collective conduct, our aim being to isolate the specific features of a social movement and not to content ourselves with affixing that label to any collective effort toward the restora­tion or transformation of an element of social organization.

We must now take an opposite path and try to find out how a social movement comes to be produced out of the totality of a social situation.

a. From Consciousness to Action

It is important to understand the transition from class consciousness to an organized social movement. In a given system of historical action there always exists a class consciousness. The sociologist cannot conceive the existence of classes without class consciousness, just as one cannot define a status without roles.

But this proposition must immediately be completed. Therejs_a danger here of introducing an absolutely unacceptable spontaneist conception, since that entails a cTass~consciousness^vemvTiere and always present and active.

The error here is to confuse class consciousness with a simultaneously simple and all-embracing representation, with a vision of society. Tn reality, class consciousness is formed, like a social movement, by the

combination oT a consciousness of conflict and a consciousness of historicity. These two elements are~n6t"alwrays associated with one aUother: utopia^and ideology can be separate, which causes class consciousness to fragnTentTn order for class consciousness to exist it is therefore necessary that the dimensions / - T and 1-0 should be strongly linked one to another, which supposes the existence of a direct link between O and T (see figure 38). This clearly eliminates any spontaneist thesis: the formation of class cpnsiUQUs.rie § depends upon the presence for the actor represented by / of a link between O

356 Chapter Six

identity

Figure 38

totality

opposition

and r, which is to say consciousness of the domination exerted by his adversary not upon him (/), but upon society as a whole. It is in facT the condition of contestation: the actor must liberate historicity from the domination of the ruling class.

Now one cannot speak of domination without introducing social organiza­tion, so that class consciousness therefore cannot exist unless it speaks in the name of a community, thereby appealing to a collectivity identified with its historicity and liberated from the domination of the upper class. And this leads to the recognition that / and O are also better integrated within a class consciousness as they themselves and their relation are more "concrete."

A social movement forms and is organized to the degree in which its elements /, O, and T have a concrete expression, which is to say one visible to the actors themselves. Workers organize themselves more easily the more they form a real group, concentrated in one place, isolated from other social categories, and perhaps more homogeneous too. The struggle againstthe adversary presupposes that the latter is more visible: one is fighting not capitalism but the bosses, not technocracy but decision centers, and so on. Finally, the system of historical action is not a real stake unless it appears as an organization, and therefore as the scaffolding of a national society, as the action of a state.

This brings us to the central paradox of social movements: the definition of historical action and the appearance of historical actors are responses to opposing conditions.

On the one hand there is no social movement unless it is the level of historicity that is being aimed at; on the other, there is no organization of that movement unless the actor and his field of action are defined all-em-bracingly and concretely. Every social movement is caught in this dilemma. It must choose between the purity of objectives that reduces action to pure Utopian or ideological formulation, and the efficacy of action accompanied by nondifferentiation of objectives, making the social movement into a mere witness to the strong or weak capacity of a given social organization for change.

Social Movements 357

b. Modulation of Social Movements

These principles of analysis can now be transcribed in terms of historical situations.

1. When there is a high degree of separation of the various levels of society —historicity, institutions, organizations—a situation corresponding to what we may term liberal societies, it is easy for historical action to be defined as such: the problems of the system of historical action and class conflicts are isolated from the institutional mechanisms, which have a certain autonomy and process a particular kind of problem; in the same way, they are also not intermingled with those of the social organization: conflicts and crises are separate. But this situation, though favorable to the visibility of social movements, is unfavorable for their organization. In social practice, the social movement is swallowed up by institutional pressures and organiza­tional claims, often to the point when it no longer appears except as a negative impression, that is, as we have seen, by violence. Such a type of society is favorable to the formation of ideologies and Utopias on the one hand and to violent ruptures on the other, while between the two the essential part of social practice is dominated by reformism at the institutional and organizational levels.

2. At the opposite extreme are situations in which crisis and conflict are indissociable, societies in economic or military crisis whose institutional system is blocked. The social movements cannot break free from claims and pressures. This produces two principal consequences. Collective action tends to be more a generalized uprising guided or utilized by a ruling counterelite, by a specifically political action directed against the state rather than against class domination in isolation. On the other hand, the capacity for action is considerable; the class becomes a real group aiming at the creation of a new social order that will be an integrated community.

These are the two faces of a revolutionary action, which is always both the instrument of formation of a new society—and thus of a new ruling class—and also the complete reappropriation of society by a popular social movement. Every revolutionary society is dominated by the complementarity and the opposition of this dependence of the social movement in relation to a political elite and this extreme form of populism.

3. Between these two extreme situations two intermediate cases occur. The first is that of societies in which there is no institutional blockage or organizational crisis but no autonomous dynamism of class relations either. These are societies that have a low capacity for growth but a high capacity far negotiation and gradual improvement. In this case there is no great degree of definition of objectives or mobilization of actors in a social movement. The problems of historicity melt into a multiplicity of accommodations; the class movement fragments into the pressures and claims of a variety of interest groups.

358 Chapter Six

4. In contrast, there are societies that are powered by a dynamic ruling class in a state of renewal but that encounter institutional blockages and organizational crises. It is in such cases, as for example when industrial capitalism is developing in countries where it is resisted by archaic political and cultural formations, that one finds combined all the conditions favorable to the formation of both the objectives and the actors of a specific social movement, which is neither absorbed by institutionalization nor incorpor­ated into an all-embracing political action. But naturally such social movements are not strong except as movements of opposition and lack the capacity for overall transformation possessed by revolutionary political movements.

No discontinuity exists between these four types, which can also inter­mingle within the same national reality. The French situation, for example, comes close, according to the moment in time and the social sector selected, to almost all of the types. One can discern a liberal model at work—economic dynamism, progress of institutionalization, and mixture of class ideology and violence—which makes it akin to the first type, which one might very schematically call the American model. Inversely, the first model exper­iences, to a greater or lesser degree according to period, a generalized crisis, linked with the archaism of the ruling class—more bourgeois than entre­preneur—with institutional blockage, with the effects of the rapid break­down of archaic sectors in agriculture or commerce or of forms of cultural organization in education or religious life. Hence the strength of the type that favors revolutionary political action and the struggle against the state. One can even describe sectors of French life in which absence of dynamism is associated with a high degree of institutionalization of conflicts and in which a growing action of the social-democratic type occurs: the civil service being the principal example.

But, taken as a whole, it is the last type that is nearest to the French situation during recent decades. Economic dynamism and transformation of the ruling class, institutional blockages with organizational and cultural crisis.

Ought we to say that one of these situations produces social movements whereas the others would cause other types of collective conduct to appear? Assuredly not. It is much more a question here of studying what Daniel Vidal, in Essai sur Vidfologie (Paris: Anthropos, 1971), called the modula­tions of a social movement. The state of the social organization and the institutions cannot determine the formation of a social movement, which is defined on another level, but it does determine the attributes of that movement.

This can be seen better by going back in more detail over our typology of social movements. We need to consider at least four variables (without taking

Social Movements 359

any account here of the difficult problems of constructing those variables from indicators that are not always convergent).

1. In the first place, we need to know if a society has a strong or weak reference to its historicity, whether its agencies of historicity are merely a ground for a struggle between opposing social forces or whether they possess a real autonomy. In an industrialized society one can speak of the strong or weak "dynamism" of a society. This dynamism is not completely separable from the state of class relations, but nevertheless can never be reduced to it.

2. The second variable to consider is the nature of the class adversary. If one is examining a popular movement, is the upper class primarily ruling or primarily dominant, concerned mainly with production, or with reproduc­tion?

3. Third, we need to introduce the state of the political system. Is it open or blocked? Does it have a high or a low capacity for institutionalization of both social conflicts and organizational problems?

4. Last, social movements are affected by the situation of the social organi­zation. Is it in crisis or is it integrated? Discordance between different sectors of the social organization and, to an even greater extent, the existence of a profound economic, political, or military crisis will affect social movements.

One cannot tabulate the modulations of social movements in anything but a provisional way (see figure 39), simply in order to indicate the nature of propositions that then remain to be proved empirically.

A brief glance over the table could lead to the belief that it relates to a type of reasoning very different from the one pursued until now. May one not interpret it, in fact, as the expression of the general idea: a social movement is nothing but the expression of political blockages and crisis of the social organization? If one adopts that idea, a social movement is no more than an infrapolitical remainder, manifesting itself in anomie and withdrawal, completed by heteronomous participation in political initiatives taken within the system. The agitation of the plebs, the lack of participation of the most disadvantaged sectors, the sudden appearance of demagogues would all then be evidence of those actions on the fringe of the political system, of a social marginality that can never be wholly eliminated in those societies most skilled in managing their change in a flexible and continuous way.

My analysis is wholly opposed to the one just described. It rests upon the assertion that social movements exist everywhere. When the organizational system and the political system have the greatest capacity for integration and the regulation of change, social movements are not weaker, more moderate, more like simple pressure groups. They are probably more dismembered, but then contestation is expressed more directly in the form of violence. The important thing is that the forms of conduct in question can never be reduced to withdrawal or to marginality.

POLITICAL SYSTEM

4- integrated

1 OPEN social / organization

/ - in crisis

AL

\ + integrated

- CLOSED social organization

\ - in crisis

HISTORICITY +

ruling class 4

4 + 4 4

strong institutionalization

4 4 4 -

basic militantism

+ 4 - 4

political protest

4 4 - -

revolutionary reformism

dominant class -

4 - 4 4

" progress iv ism"

4 - 4 -

structural reforms

4 - - 4

political and ideological offensive

4

social prophetism

HISTORICITY -

ruling class 4

- 4 4 4

segmentation

- 4 4 -

conflictive political participation

- 4 - 4

political breakdown

- 4 - -

direct confrontation

dominant class -

- - 4 4

pressure groups

- - 4 -

strategy

4

claims

general crisis

1 Figure 39

Social Movements 361

The analysis of concrete protest movements should combine this typology of the modulations with the much more general classification presented earlier in this chapter, which situates social movements in relation to organizational claims, institutional pressures, and modernizing protests.

Such a combination consists in finding out in each case which is the dominant form of protest. It may happen that a social movement is only vaguely constituted, is no more than a backdrop to a claim, to a reaction to an organizational crisis. Inversely, the crisis may be only a secondary aspect of the situation and be modulating a protest that is primarily a social movement.

Between these two extreme cases, observation finds protest movements that are only partly social movements, because the conflict for domination is present but occupies a subordinate place. Often, for example, protests against inequalities. This term is vague enough to cover a great variety of realities; but it often indicates the presence of an attenuated social movement overlaid either by a cultural innovation movement or by an institutional pressure or organizational claim. This is particularly the case when the mode of domination being opposed is itself archaic or more symbolic than practical. In such cases the protest against inequality may be absorbed into a social movement stronger than itself, adding to it new aspects in its struggle against the dominant class; but it may also make use of the language or the tools of action of a social movement solely in order to obtain institutional or organizational reforms. The struggles for the ''democratization'* of educa­tion are an excellent example of such a confusion. It is then essential to apply the principles of analysis we have defined in order to winnow the essential from the accessory and to define the principal nature of such a protest movement. A nature that may be very different from the image of it formed by the actors themselves.

Another aspect of the variations in popular movements stems from the fact that they are always, because of alienation, split into two. The form of this split depends upon the state of the social organization, of the political system, and of the upper class, but in every case there is a certain separation between the main body and the avant-garde.

If that separation is complete, if the main body—the mass or base—is defined solely by privation, if the meaning of its possible action is wholly external to it, then there is no longer any social movement.

Such a situation can only correspond to absolute domination, and the opposition to this takes the form not of social movements but of critical actions, which will be analyzed in the next chapter. But, although one must maintain the existence of a working-class consciousness in the industrial proletariat, one must not fall into the positivist illusion of a class conscious­ness that is in fact a set of opinions. Any class consciousness, any social movement holds together elements that are being torn apart from one

362 Chapter Six

another, the disjecta membra of a popular class subjected to alienation, to categories of social practice controlled by the ruling class, to repression, to the tyranny of their immediate and pressing needs.

Where there is a highly dominant upper class, a certain organizational rigidity, and a certain political closedness, then the two parts of the popular social movement tend to be of the base + leaders type, with the leaders defined by their organization and their political doctrine. In a liberal type of society, on the other hand, the separation within popular movements will occur between associations that engage in politics and movements formed outside of politics—movements that oppose the political arena or strive to transform it. Many variants exist between these two extremes. In Chile, for example, a mass movement with a preponderantly worker membership, and oriented by revolutionary parties, is at the same time an element of the political system and because of this is constantly being overflowed by movements of rebellion and violence. The role of the political intelligentsia is small in liberal situations, whereas that of the politicians on the one hand and of rebels on the other is considerable.

In "closed" situations, on the contrary, social movements are managed by militants on the one hand and by theoreticians and political strategists on the other.

In all these cases the important thing is that either the forces acting within the political system or the rebel forces, and likewise either the political intelligentsia or the organized mass movements, cannot be defined either by their inclusion in politics or by their exclusion, but are components of social movements, which is to say of a contestation of the domination being exerted over the system of historical action. A movement can never be defined by political participation; it is always an action aimed at giving a social content to a historical problematic.

This analysis of the formation of social movements, above all in relation to the state of the institutions and the social organization, makes it possible to throw light on an often used classification that distinguishes movements according to the nature of their action: economic, political, or ideological

This is a clumsy typology, since no social movement of a high project level exists that does not unite all three of these kinds of action, but it is useful too in that it reminds us that the agent of a social movement can be either a social category acting directly as a class, or a political force representing class interests more or less directly, or a movement of ideas challenging class relations. We must return here to an analysis analogous to that involving the concept of the maximum possible action. When the maximum is low, when it does not exceed a first-level project, then the movement seems to be the same thing as an organizational crisis, being distinguished from it only by its violence; at the same time there appears a movement of ideas, very much above the maximum possible action.

Social Movements 363

If the classes have a low modernizing content, if the political system is blocked and the social organization in crisis—a situation that can exist even in dominant societies but that is much more frequent in dominated societies —then the social movement splits between violence and doctrine.

The more heterogeneous a society is, the less the mode of production dominating it develops in conjunction with the disaggregation of former modes, and the more also this form of social movement is likely to occur. In a situation of lesser heterogeneity, but one in which the class relation is above all one between dominants and dominated, and in which the social organiza­tion is in crisis, a social movement tends to manifest itself above all as a political force, bearing down upon the institutions, reinforcing state inter­vention.

On the other hand, the social movements that appear most directly as class movements involving economic struggle are those that correspond not only to a great clarity in the central class relations but also to a relative openness of the political system and to the absence of a serious crisis in the social organization, particularly in a phase of growth and "modernization." But they are constantly in danger of decaying into "economism" or into a purely defensive movement. Lastly, one must consider the very particular problem of those social movements that appear in societies where power has been taken over by forces representing a popular movement. Almost all the analyses in this chapter presuppose the existence of a ruling class in power and are therefore dealing with popular movements of opposition. The following chapter, dealing with the problems of social change, will examine social movements linked with development, but still within societies in which there is an upper class in power, whether the power is that of a national bourgeoisie or of foreign capital.

The situation of countries ruled by communist parties is quite different. The communist apparatus holds power and therefore occupies the position of a ruling class. But it would be absurd to view it as a simple equivalent of a ruling capitalist class. It is a ruling class formed from a social movement. The gap between class relations, political system, and social organization is here reduced almost to nothing. The new rulers identify themselves with the state, are at once ruling class, hegemonic power, and direct management agents of the social organization. Popular social movements tend to be transformed, according to their degree of closeness to power, into their opposite: an instrument of social integration. If power has been won by revolutionary methods, then the integration tends to be ideological rather than political and political rather than social. In a social-democratic situation, such as that of the Scandinavian countries and Norway especially, the integration is moral and community-based; the spirit of protest does not disappear, but it is increasingly associated with a process of equalization and protection that tends to diminish social gaps but also to give social movements more and

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more of a defensive aspect. When they possess an absolute power, these movements turned state eliminate any possibility of opposition movements, since they are the representatives of the popular class and those who manage society in the general interest. The social movements that inevitably form— for this image of a classless society is derisory, especially in a situation involving a high accumulation—therefore have to face a socio-politico-cultural bloc that consigns them to a situation comparable to the first of the three situations I described; the alliance of violence and ideas occupies the principal place in it.

But such movements also have specific characteristics. On the one hand they appeal to the original social movement against the new ruling appara­tus. On the other they defend community, defined as all-embracingly and as concretely as possible, the "people" against those with power.

Each of these two tendencies is ambiguous. The fundamentalists are authoritarian; they tend to speak in the name of terror and its purity against those who are growing rich on their abuse of power; they are also the nearest to an appeal to a class movement. On the other hand the community seekers are egalitarian, but they are also defensive and may concentrate their efforts mainly on opposing the ruling class with a defense of traditions, of vested interests, of the solidarity of a primary group very far from being a class movement. Each of these two tendencies thus forms both an opposition of the right and an opposition of the left. The first is worker-based and terrorist; the second is egalitarianist and traditionalist. The greater the distance between the original social movement and the present power apparatus, the greater the strength of the second tendency, while the first preponderates when the association of the movement with power is closer.

All these movements are subject to extreme constraints, often to the most direct pressure. But it frequently happens that they manifest themselves in the form of ruptures, riots, uprisings. Sometimes even, as in China, they are able to deploy themselves openly for a while by becoming involved in a political struggle at the top. The more they are repressed, the more they tend to fragment: a nucleus of intellectuals maintains its opposition, but almost completely cut off from a community-based defense that is increasingly defensive and less and less ideological as the regime itself seeks to strengthen its absolute power with an action of depoliticization and disideologization.

F. Social Movements and the State

a. Movement and Party

If it is to become really important, does a social movement not need to become a political movement, a political force claiming the management of the state for itself instead of limiting itself to mere intervention in the

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institutional arena? Here we are meeting a very familiar idea: only its relation To the state can constitute a social movement, since if reduced to the level of class relations it can be no more than a claim-making or reforming force, always acting within class domination, its wings clipped by alienation, constrained to seek accommodations, and finally subject to a repression from which it cannot liberate itself other than by taking over the state appa­ratus. If a social movement does not challenge the domination of the system of historical action other than by making organizational claims and applying institutional pressures, then is its unity not the same in nature as that of the state, is it not situating itself directly at the level of the societal whole, which is at once field of historicity and territorial collectivity, sociological whole and historical unity? If a social movement is defined by the formula I-O-T, is this orientation toward totality not introduced through a relation to the state, with the social movement aiming at a management of society? Whether it is a ruling class movement or a popular movement, is the social movement not always a parastate or a counterstate?

Against this conception I have constantly said that social movements are not wholes made up by the practice of collective actors, but the expression of class relations. They are situated at a specific level of social reality, the highest, that which overflows a nation's political and organizational system. At this level the ruling class can never reign supreme, even though it may be hegemonic and all-powerful, because the opposition of the popular class is always present, however repressed, concealed, fragmented it may be.

It is therefore useless to look for a social movement's sole means of aiming at totality in its relation to the state. That totality is not a concrete societal whole but the system of historical action.

The fact nevertheless remains that a social movement does also relate jq^ the state, since, like the state, it unfolds its action on all levels of social reality.

This leads us to the following proposition: a direct parallelism exists between the relations of field of historicity with state on the one hand and social movement with "party" on the other.

Class relations, the stake of which is control of the system of historical action, are penetrated by the state. On the one hand it is an agent of social control in the service of a primarily dominant upper class, while on the other it is an agent for the intervention of social forces aspiring to become ruling.

In the same way a social movement, especially a popular one, is linked and even subordinated to a party to the degree in which it clashes with a system of control and reproduction of the social order. It is also linked to a party, but one subordinate to it, when it acts more directly on the level of the field of historicity, when it is more con testator)- than defensive. AH of this being more clearly expressed in terms of the double dialectic of the social classes: if the dominant class-defensive class couple preponderates, then the party also

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preponderates over the social movement; if the ruling class-contestatory class preponderates, then the social movement governs the party. Let us look at two extreme examples.

The development of capitalist heavy industry in France at the end of the nineteenth century was accompanied by strong working-class contestation, in the Labor Exchanges (Bourses du Travail), then in the General Confedera­tion of Labor (Confederation Generate du Travail). The worker movement, in the Charter of Amiens, rejected the use of the institutional arena, asserted the central role of the revolutionary movement, demanded priority for direct confrontation of workers and capitalists. The movement had the upper hand over the party.

At the opposite extreme, in Russian society—more heterogeneous, with a "blocked" political system, shaken by international crises and military disasters—the role of the party was strongly asserted by Lenin, and it was the conquest of the state, not the growing force of a social movement, that overthrew the dominant order.

Between these two extreme cases we find the two other juxtapositions of class relations.

The combination of a ruling class and a defensive class leads less to the formation of a party of the same type as that just suggested than to the creation of a political force that participates in the institutional arena and strives to provoke an intervention of the state in the field of historicity.

Lastly, the combination of a dominant class and a contestatory class brings movement and party into their closest form of association. It is the other slope of Leninist thought and action; it is also the situation experienced by France at the time of both the Popular Front and the Liberation. The movement governs the party, but associates itself with an action conducted against the political and organizational hegemony of a state controlled by the dominant classes.

The state is never simply the agent of the ruling class; either it is primarily defending the interests and power of a partly archaic dominant class, or it is drawing support from the thrust of new social forces. In the same way, a party is never the direct agent of a social movement, and even less the condition of its existence. Its importance stems from the fact that the social movement must act within a historically complex social formation and not solely within a field of historicity. No social movement could exist without a party other than in an entirely homogeneous society governed by an exclusively ruling upper class. Inversely, the social movement effaces itself behind the party in heterogeneous societies controlled by old dominant classes and also in a state of institutional and organizational crisis. In such a case the party is both the representative of a social movement and also the agent of a new ruling class. The Jacobin party did battle with the aristocracy

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and royal power; it was also the organ of the electoral divisions, but it was primarily the agent of the bourgeoisie in its rise to power. Similarly with the Bolshevik party. And any government "of public safety," master of the state, is powerless, in combining these two roles, to do otherwise than reject social conflicts and sacrifice the independence of the social movement to the building of a new society, inseparable from the defense of nation and state, which are threatened by foes from without and within. —

The cases in which a social movement takes the form of a political party should be granted no priority. The political party does not bring conscious­ness, does not raise limited claims and alienated workers to the level of totality. It rather combines, collective conduct into a whole within the framework of institutional system and state action, either in order to exert a certain influence within them or else to transform them wholly. When a party imposes itself as the agent of a social movement, then the movement is on the brink of disappearing, either through the institutionalization of conflicts or by the setting up of a dictatorship.

A social movement is not the raw material of political action; it is both the reason for that action's existing and its opposite, for political action is always aiming at the management of society and is therefore opposed to the recognition of conflicts, which are what a social movement is always defined by.

The relations between social movement and political action depend before all else on the conditions of the formation and organization of the social movement itself.

A strongly constituted movement may give itself political expression. The political actor is then usually no more than the transformation of the social movement into a social force within the framework of the political system. The political agent is then reformist, while the social movement has reached a high level of project, only to grow progressively weaker as the intitutionali-zation of the conflict progresses. It is difficult to conceive of a social movement both strongly constituted and also associated with a revolutionary political force, because, as we shall see in chapter 7, such a force exploits the contradictions of a social formation, which themselves contribute to the dismemberment of the social movement. Whereas if the social movement is weak and not particularly integrated then it can be made use of by a political force. The latter can either be reformist, if the political system is relatively open, or revolutionary.

Jn no case is the social movement absorbed by the political action. The transition to political action always leaves "remainders" of opposition thai can be more or less strong, more or less organized—"leftist" tendencies, explosions of violence. It is never possible, for example, to talk of a working-class party taking over the labor movement totally, even if such and such i

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party is effectively the principal political agent of the working class. This observation holds good for revolutionary parties as well as for reformist parties. The importance of such "remainders" is considerable, for they are indicators of the autonomy of social movements. We said earlier, when describing the natural history of social movements, that there are situations, in the first stage of that history, when it is in fact the very essence of the social movement that evades political organization. Situations of this kind occurred in June 1848, with the Paris Commune, and in 1968, with the May movement.

Social movements are the direct or indirect expression of class conflict. Their form depends on the state of the political system and the social organization. But in studying the variations of these forms, one must not forget that social movements have their reason for being and constitute themselves at the level of class relations and not at that of the stae.

b. Total Social Movement and Revolutionary Crisis

We must now recognize the particular importance of what one might term a total social movement, which integrates the various levels of collective conduct. A social movement is capable of acting upon the whole of society— and thus of posing the problems both of social domination and of power —only when it simultaneously mobilizes a class consciousness, a general institutional pressure, and a claim bearing upon the whole of the social organization. This institutional pressure never exists more completely than when the historical actor is also defined by a clearcut situation within a process of collective social mobility, and more precisely when he is a rising force, a new political force attempting to acquire influence, to exercise control over social change. It is true that rising forces can only be defined as such on the institutional level, and must therefore limit their action to that level, especially if the political system is open. The class is then no more than an interest group acting within the political arena, either directly or, more often, through the intermediary of external political leaders. The very thing that permits the extension of the social movement is thus also something that can cause it to decay. This observation was predictable. Institutionalization can weaken the social movement and provoke a radicalizing reaction in groups that wish to restore the purity of the class confrontation; but it is also the condition of a social movement's development, for the absence of institutional influence can signify nothing other than the force of the repression exerted by the political system, and the purity of the sect can never acquire the muscle of the church.

If we consider social organization, the force of the social movement at this level derives from the fact that it also acts in the name of the largest possible concrete collectivity. In industrial societies this collectivity is usually the

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nation or at least a territorial unit such as a region, a town, or even a neighborhood. Should a crisis affect the whole of a territory, then the social movement may derive new strength from it. We know the strength of movements in regions dominated by a single activity, vine-growing areas, coalfields, cities dominated by a single industry. Above all, a social move­ment acquires exceptional strength when it becomes linked to national defense. In the case of France one need only mention the Paris Commune, the Resistance and Liberation, to understand the importance of the bond between labor movement and national movement. But defense of the social organization, even more than at the previous level, is a force that can weaken the social movement. The labor movement of Western Europe has never forgotten the experience of summer 1914. As soon as a social movement breaks out of the bounds of the field of historicity, and therefore of class relations, as soon as it starts to be fueled by mobility conduct and national conduct, then it can break down, either collapsing into a muddled and ephemeral whole that soon fragments under the pressure of internal contra­dictions, or else acquiring from that multidimensionality the necessary strength to go on and take power.

The most important social movements, those that succeed in destroying the social domination to which they are opposed, are not those that refuse to intervene on the institutional and organizational levels but, on the contrary, those that link themselves to the social forces formed on those levels and succeed in taking them over, controlling them.

A social movement is always situated between two extreme types. On the one hand, there is the type I termed the total social movement, in which organizational claim and political pressure are taken over bylTcTass action that is thus enabled to lead an attack against the state itself, while still remaining above all a force of contestation.

On the other hand, there is the revolutionary crisis, which cannot be defined on the basis of the social movement itself, but rather on that of the situation of state and political system. The revolutionary crisis is most likely to occur when the state as manager of the collectivity and as actor in international relations is affected by a crisis. Defeat and invasion create a situation in which the rupture of the state can most easily occur.

This rupture is also more likely when the ruling class is divided and when a popular force has the form of a real community.

The combination of these three conditions defines a certain situation of the state rather than the nature of a social movement. This is why the social movement is in great danger of being no more than a secondary actor in the crisis, which may turn to the advantage of state forces proper, such as the army, or a fraction of the ruling class acquiring a political hegemony.

Social movement and revolutionary crisis cannot be either completely

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separated or, even less, identified. It is impossible to analyze revolutionary movements in purely "political" terms (as Jean Baechler has done, for example, in Les Phenomenes rtvolutionnaires, Paris: P.U.F., 1970) ignoring the class conflicts that mobilize social movements. It is no less impossible to identify social movements with rupture of the state and political system. A total social movement can overthrow the state, it cannot "seize" it.

A revolutionary crisis brings the social movement into its field of action, but indirectly, since it is then rather a community force in opposition to a state crisis, a crisis of political system and social organization at the same time.

This crisis is linked with a predominance of dominant class over ruling class, which gives the upper class's political and ideological dominion a greater visibility than its role as economic manager.

A total social movement, on the contrary, does not form unless the upper class is also a ruling class, which implies that the political system and the social organization are relatively open and not reduced to a pure apparatus for maintaining the hegemony and ideological control of the dominant class. But in this situation the social movement is inspiring a conflict that is at least partially capable of institutionalization. To sum up, a social movement cannot occur pure and simple. Either it tends to be incorporated into the political system as a force applying institutional pressure, and into the state whose intervention it determines, or else it is linked with a revolutionary crisis through which the political hegemony of a new state is set up.

A popular social movement is a fundamental agent of social life; it can never take power by itself and identify itself with society. It is an agent of contestation, not of management. And this is why the historiographer so constantly ignores it. For it is itself linked, more or less directly according to the individual society, with the ideology of the dominant class and the state. The state does everything it can to present the popular social movement, of whatever kind, as an infrapolitical force, formed by reaction to an economic or political crisis, but a force incapable of raising itself to the level of a creative action and that if left to itself can only remain primitive, only dissolve into disorder or seek to reconstitute a previous state of society. A convenient interpretation that makes it possible to draw a veil over the role of the class in power and to analyze society by simply distinguishing between central and marginal forces, active and passive forces, forces of change and forces that resist those changes.

Whenever analysis begins from the state and not from the system of historical action and class relations, it rids itself, intellectually—and mater­ially—of the social movements and of the fact, which is nevertheless fundamental, that any social order and any state is eliminating even as it integrates, is bringing class choices into operation, and rejecting the excluded possibilities into outer darkness.

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E. Concluding Remarks

Historical action, action that situates itself on the level of historicity, is that which hives itself of f from the functioning of the social system, as well as from strategies and negotiations, in order to impose a requestioning of the rules of the game, in order to stir social organization and institutions up into a mixture of creativity and violence.

But this image becomes blurred as soon as one comes closer to it, for the mistake would be to confuse historical actors with real actors, as though the heat of historical action, especially in periods of rapid social change, somehow drew up the ethics of conviction, the true stature of the hero and the revolutionary, out of the usual morass of habit and petty hagglings. In reality, the various levels of sociological analysis do not corresond to different and directly observable objects. The revolutionary movement is also crisis conduct and struggle of influence. The formation of a high-level project does not possess the simplicity of the position of values and principles, but on the contrary the difficulty and the complexity of an effort to articulate the sundered elements of historical action.

The actor certainly introduces a unity into his forms of conduct at every turn, the unity of an ideology. A deceptive unity that does not reveal the meaning of social relations intersecting at many levels. A unity increasingly unstable and changeable as it claims with greater arrogance to be stable and everlasting.

History never presents the actual combat of the saint and the dragon. It is after the combat, when a new dominant class has established itself in power, when it has set up its system of legitimation, of social control, of sanctions and reproduction, that it invents the legend of its birth and its consciousness.

It is never the consciousness of the actor that makes it possible to understand the social relation in which he is involved. It is the reconstruction of those social relations by analysis, in all their complexity, that makes it possible to understand first the unfurling of social transformations and second the multiple rationalizations of the actors.

It can now clearly be seen what a gap lies between this conception of social movements and those usually put forward, conceptions that almost always adopt the viewpoint of an actor or of a decision center.

Those who identify themselves with a social movement itself speak in the name of principles when the movement is weak, in the name of management when it is on the verge of power. In both cases the movement is presented as an agent of social integration and *'realization." It embodies values, it is the agent of progress, it must become the state. Protest carries its own opposite— consensus—within it, and the more violent the protest, the more it overlies the image of a strongly integrated society, at once creative and virtuous. Anti-power is opening up a path to absolute power; the revolution devours

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its own children. The highest principles can also become political strategies and institutional accommodations. The movement's ideology, replacing social relations with the actor's assertion of his principles, can only be the opposite of a social movement; it replaces the dialectic of conflict with the positivity of power.

Those who do not adopt the viewpoint of the actor tend to view a social movement from the point of view of order, and more precisely from that of the state. The social movement then appears exclusively as a crisis, a rupture, made up of withdrawal, of marginality, of Utopia. To this blaze of disorder and fancy they oppose the movement's impotence, for it is never the social movement that has the management of power, and everything can be brought down to struggles between ruling classes or, better still, between political elites. The social movement apparently has no importance other than during periods of power vacuum or of stalemate between competing elites.

This second type of analysis rests upon an error of perspective. It begins from what is most visible, most constituted—the state—without asking itself about the social forces, the class relations, and the orientations of the system of historical action that govern the state's form and action. The importance accorded to social movements is not separable from the idea that a society, before being a decider, is a field of historicity, a system of orientations and class relations.

This also leads to a criticism of the first type of conception of social movements mentioned above. For underlying their greatness and their weakness lies the fact that they can never be identified with deciders, never be absorbed into the state. Their existence reminds us that society is not a piloted system, but the realization in conflict of a system of historical action, characterized by domination, protest, conflict, the contrast of light and darkness. Social movements remind us by their action that order and the consensus are merely the limited expression of domination, that social life consists of its forbidden and repressed possibles as much as it does of its legitimated decisions and practices.

The more rapidly societies change, the more social movements seem to appear totally visible and even to become incorporated into politics. Al­though it is indeed true that, in certain types of society at least, the political system does become more extensive and diverse, every society engaged in its own transformation represses demands and imposes a power. The more societies are marked by their historicity, the more in consequence the oppression that ensures the reproduction of the established order is contested by movements opposed to the new forms of the ruling class. To follow the procedure of functionalist sociology is to go back through the diversity of conducts to the unity of norms and values, to the unity of the social system. The procedure we are following is the opposite one, since it begins from the

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imposed values and ideologies in order to work back to the dialectic of historical action.

Actors do not act in conformity with values: their action can be explained only on the basis of the system of historical action—which is the very opposite of a body of values—and on the basis of class relations.

But is there not a risk, if one constantly emphasizes the central role of social relations and systems in analysis, of losing sight of what defines social movements concretely: the collective engagement in a general conflict, the stake of which is control of the action directed by a society at its own transformation?

Assuredly not, for the action of a social movement consists in transform­ing the given into product. The force of a project is its capacity to overthrow the social order, to unmask the power concealed by values and the exercise of authority, to discover behind the "natural order" the cultural model and class interests.

In this movement of wrenching away from the social order, the historical actor is constantly opposing the counterweight of his ideology to the role that the social system is imposing on him. To the unity of the social order he opposes the unity of his vision of the world, which destroys the dialectic of historical action in an equally radical manner. So that a social movement is always the bearer of a new social order, new values, and a new power. The higher its level of project, the more it is able to become "Constantinian." If it is victorious over its adversary, then it replaces the dialectic of the social classes with the assertion of a model of society, its strength of opposition with its power of integration.

We term the movement terror when the revolutionary force, becoming power, devours itself as it sets up its dictatorship, which is at once realization of a social transformation and rejection of social conflicts.

It is between these two positivities, that of the order controlled by the dominant class and that of terror, that the social movement is situated, not withdrawn into consciousness of itself but engaged both in innovations and in conflict, managing the tensions always present between social conflict and historicity. The project of a social movement is defined not by the horizon toward which it is advancing but by its capacity to reject all social order and to be the instrument of the dialectics of historical action.

SOCIA CHANGE

Introduction: Historicity, Conflict, Change

System of historical action, class relations, social movements: these are the concepts we have used to construct our analysis of the social structure, but it is not to them that we must turn for an explanation of change.

Must we then move away from the field of historicity and reveal change as the result of political negotiations, and more directly still as an effect of the continual adaptation of the actors to changes occurring in their environment? If this solution were sufficient, we would have to renounce everything that has been said about social structure, forget that the field of historicity controls the political system of social organization, and that the dominant order has means of social control and socialization at its disposal for its own reproduction.

So we are boxed in: even if one recognizes the importance of exogenous change factors, it is impossible to give them a central role without contradicting the whole of a procedure that was based on historicity and therefore on the action exerted upon society by itself.

But we would be prisoners of our previous analyses only if real societies were no more than agencies of historicity, direct expressions of a system of historical action and class relations. This is why Utopias are also uchronias. They cannot have any history since they are nothing but an expression of values. They conjure up communities purged of all sociological heterogeneity, without domination, without accumulation, without classes.

Real societies are not only the institutional and organizational expression of cultural orientations and social conflicts. They are also both the jocus^of domination and the mingling of present and past.

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Because dominant classes impose an order instead of only being in conflict with the popular classes, every society is in disequilibrium: it is expressing a historicity but it is also imprisoning it and transforming movement into order.

This domination is not exercised over a sociological unit but over a historical whole. It is heavier as that whole is more heterogeneous, as the old maintains itself better beside the new, or even as the modern sector has greater interest in strengthening the society's archaism.

One cannot explain the change of a social system, but one must understand the change of a historical unit on the basis of the disequilibria created between the levels of social reality. It is because an organization is not only the embodiment of a field of historicity, because it is laden with historicity, that social actors create the future by living their field of historicity instead of simply reproducing the present.

And this makes it possible to analyze the social conduct and social relations that produce changes, and especially the most important change of all, the transition from one field of historicity to another, in other words, development.

a. From Historicism to Historicity

Sociology cannot constitute itself as positive knowledge until the moment it breaks with historicism.

Historicism can only be ideological, in other words, can only indentify itself with the actor and reinterpret the social field and its transformations from his point of view. Sometimes this ideology is expressed directly: history is a long march toward the actor himself, whether it is a nation that is involved, or a class, or any other collectivity. Sometimes it is more abstract. For instance, many sociologists have described the transition from closed societies to open societies, from transmission to acquisition, from particu­larism to universalism, without shrinking from the most extreme form of sociocentrism, even to the point of identifying themselves with the conquering, colonial work of the capitalist societies to which the majority of sociologists have belonged and still do belong.

It was the industrial revolution and the French Revolution that brought with them the full flowering of historicism, which belongs to the cultural model of societies in the process of industrialization. These societies no longer represent creativity to themselves as an order, as a logos, and have not yet begun to represent it as a practice, as development. They conceive of it as the liberation of energies—both natural forces and cultural orientations— that are able to act to the degree in which one removes the barriers behind which they have hitherto been imprisoned. Suppress inheritance, religion, the school or the family, seen as agencies for the reproduction of the social

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and cultural order; outlaw corporations and regulations; dispense with tariffs, duties, concessions; encourage initiative and competition, thrift and opportunity to get on in the world: and you will see society prosper, you will see the potential of individuals and collectivities become a reality, the complex replace the simple, and universalism succeed particularism. Beyond specific and limiting social frameworks, human nature will be realized, defined by its plasticity, its capacity for learning and acquisition. Historicism in all its forms leads to the end of history, as the river leads down to the sea. It always presupposes opposition between human nature and what is imprisoning it, an opposition that takes over from that of the divine universe and the world of the fall.

The absolute that is no longer an original order reappears as ideal order, as Cournot's posthistoric, as the end of humanity's prehistory, or as liberty and progress.

But, it may be objected, hasn't this book been putting forward the most historicist conception of all, placing its systems of historical action in a line of succession leading eventually to a system that seems, in much the same way, to be not just postindustrial but posthistorical—a society defined by its unlimited capacity for action upon itself, for development, for practical creativity? And isn't there something artificial about presenting the theme of historicity as antihistoricist when the very words themselves seem to indicate a close kinship between the two ideas?

The objection will not really stand up, even leaving aside the essential fact that each system of historical action constitutes a qualitatively defined whole, thereby depriving actionalist analysis of the apparent advantages of historicism. The essential point, though, is that the society we have for the time being termed postindustrial is in no way, in our description, a "positive" society; it is neither defined by values nor reduced to permanent

and empirical change. Like any other society it is dominated by the internal tensions of a system of historical action and by the dialectic of the classes. It is not more "natural" than another, or more stable. It is probable that, in a few decades from now, the distinctions between the four systems of historical action will have to be adapted as to content and that a greater importance will be given to the transition from capacity for action on the environment to capacity for action on man's biological, psychological, or social being.

The content given to the social types is determined historically; it is therefore provisional. But the evocation of those types does not involve any historicist presupposition, since it does not involve any march toward an apotheosis, toward a final and natural type of society. This is why, as a preliminary to my analysis of postindustrial society, I presented a critique of all the Utopias of equilibrium and the sort of integration they would lead to: replacement of Promethean effort by concern for the ecological system in

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which human society is placed, the classless society, abundance, the rationalism of a society reduced to its operational arithmetic. Instead of saying that this new society represents the triumph of progress, one can show that it gives rise to new confrontations between orientations and resources, to new social movements, new forms of transformation.

Each type of society is a particular configuration of the elements whose relations are defined by a structure, that of historical action. It is therefore never sufficient to situate societies in relation to one another along an evolutionary line, indicating the progressive appearance or disappearance of some overall characteristic of society, of the sort contained in the Parsonsian pattern variables (universalism-particularism, affectivity-affective neu­trality, achievement-ascription, and so on). Constructing the structural problems of the system of historical action on the basis of the notion of historicity is the only way of eliminating all recourse to the philosophy of history.

b. Modification, Adaptation, Mutation

A sociology of historicity is not in opposition to historic ism alone. It also parts company with the analysis of change in other types of system.

1. If one is considering a system defined by its code or rule book and the reproduction of the rules in it, then change cannot be conceived of as other than external. Chance stands in opposition to necessity. A society defined by its order, one that changes slowly, is more certain to be modified by war and conquest, which may displace trade flows, lead to colonization movements, ruin or stimulate urban activities.

Events or changes coming from outside provoke the search for new equilibria. At the same time, the concrete actors do not necessarily conform to the rules of the social and cultural organization. The conditions in which their personality forms inevitably leads to the production of deviants, rebels, or innovators.

These change factors are not very different from the first kind; in both cases they stand outside social interactions, in their environment, of which the personality of the actors is just as much part as the climate, epidemics, or invasions. The less strong a society's historicity, the more its reproduction preponderates over its production, and the more important this kind of change is. These mechanisms of change correspond not just to one type of society but to the organizational level of any society. On this level, but on this level alone, one can reinsert the notion of evolution, which is no longer acceptable on any general plane.

It is legitimate to speak of the spread of exchanges and the growth of forces of production. We have seen that on the level of an organization the

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interdependence of the field of historical action and class relations is replaced by the distinction between power and technique. This latter taken in itself—and it is the limited meaning I allot to the commonly used term "forces of production"—can be defined quantitatively. Such a definition would be seriously damaging if applied at the level of historicity, but it is acceptable at the organizational level, as for example, if one is measuring productivity, the quantity of available energy per employee, the proportion of skilled workers on the labor force, and so on. The transition from one system of historical action to another can always be described—even though it is a very partial description—as an increase in productivity or even in a certain type of skill.

On the other hand, a type of society can also be defined by the volume of its internal and external exchanges. The volume of communications will increase with the development of a society's capacity to act upon itself. There cannot be an industrial society in which the volume of communications is lower than in preindustrial societies, and we often hear the most economically advanced societies being characterized by the importance attaching within them to the mass media and all forms of communication. That their nature and the use they are put to differ according to political regime, forms of organization, or the state of class relations is obvious. The fact nevertheless remains that communications increase and spread in the most developed countries everywhere, and also in those most oriented toward development.

This idea of social evolution, of the progressive reinforcement of the most efficient forms of organization, is not sufficient to describe organizational change. It is applicable to the instrumental aspect of organization, however, and thus completes the exogenous form of change already referred to which explains the modification of norms and objectives. An organization can only reproduce its code, so that change can only stem from accidents, from internal or external events—such as wars or the intervention of certain individuals—against which the apparatuses of social control and reproduc­tion are put into action.

The apparently simple idea of technical development, of modernization, therefore fuses all the levels of social reality into one and "flattens" them. In terms of social organization and quantity it expresses transformations that cannot be understood other than at the level of the field of historicity and its mutations, and whose implementation depends upon the political system and the state.

2. At the level of the political system, change is more progressive than on the level of historicity, while at the same time occurring less gradually than on the social organization level. This intermediate situation is connected with the very nature of the political system. Its boundaries are defined not by itself but by the field of historicity. It functions within a class domination,

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manifested in particular by the general principles of the law, and within societal problems defined by the system of historical action. These boundaries cannot be displaced in a continuous way by a reforming action. On the other hand, the political system is autonomous and therefore susceptible to changes emanating from itself, insofar as it combines the actions of very diverse social forces and takes decisions that are responses to exigencies of integration or of tension reduction. The more the political forces are directly reproducing social classes, the less important changes of political origin are. A pluralism of actors and fields of decision, on the contrary, permits partial adaptations, imperfectly coherent amongst themselves, and that may as a whole constitute a profound transformation of the political system, of its functioning and of its decisions.

Changes of a political type are more important in societies where the state is supported by metasocial warrants and seems to command social relations. The search for both integration and strength may lead to the belief that society is a negotiating and lawgiving, rewarding and punishing sovereign. Change seems to be the result of decisions that stem both from deliberations and from an arbitrary power. It is no longer a question of restoring the equilibrium threatened by changes external to the social system, and not yet one of inventing a new mode of action of society on itself. Political change is a learning process aimed at giving the decider the greatest possible control over the field of intra- and intersocial interactions. This pursuit of strength is very little concerned with the restoration or modification of a code, and its pragmatic methods do not shrink from overturning traditions, transforming social elites, economic activity, or urban organization.

3. The greater a society's historicity, the greater its capacity to act upon itself, tKe "more change appears as~an internal process. This idea imposes itself in the early stage of industrialization: investments and technical progress bring more wealth than war and conquest do. It is not legitimate to deduce from this that industrial societies no longer have any reason for recourse to war, and it has already been pointed out that in today's societies the investments devoted to new techniques are often associated with the pursuit of force, hence with the international strategy of nations and empires. But these obvious remarks are not objections to the idea that change in the economic and social organization is increasingly determined by the capacity for investment and the nature of class relations and social and political interactions within the society in question.

These internal transformations cannot be reduced to organizational changes. They are linked both with the effects of social conflicts and with those of revolts against domination. In both cases they are linked with the dynamic of social relations.

At this level, changes are necessarily discontinuous. New forms of

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accumulation, new models of knowledge, new cultural models appear. These appearances are not necessarily sudden or simultaneous, and do not always entail the elimination of previous forms. The modalities of one field of historicity's succession to another do not depend upon the content of historicity itself, but upon the institutional and organizational characteristics of the society in question. Nevertheless, the discontinuity between one type and another is in all cases fundamental. It is a manifestation of the interdependence of the components of historicity, and even more so that of the elements of the system of historical action (cultural model, mobilization, hierarchization, needs).

Even if the mutation from one field of historicity to another is not accompanied by a political rupture, societies still have a certain consciousness of the qualitative transformations they undergo. A change that may appear locally as part of a continuum, or even as quantitative, turns out to be not so upon really close examination. It can only be defined exactly by situating it within the whole constituted by an entire set of transformations.

The meaning it then acquires will reveal the rupture with a previous state. For a while, the representatives of the past will talk loudly about the decline in morals, the loss of authority, the lowering of standards. This is part of a desperate attempt to hang on to the notion of continuity when the mutation has already occurred. Are we not ourselves living through one of these eras of transition from one societal type to another, a time when everything on the surface seems confusion, disorganization, non-meaning, or else appease­ment and negotiation? A twin error staving off the consciousness we must acquire of the new forms of historicity and class relations.

Let us sum up the observations made so far: On the organizational level, events produce modifications and reinforce them. On the political level, the change in position of one actor leads to a reorganization of the whole political field, which maintains its continuity while adapting itself in accordance with trial-and-error learning mechanisms. The state intervenes in order to maintain or develop its strength. On the level of the field of historicity, change is governed by the changes that have occurred in class relations and by a society's capacity for innovation. It operates a mutation from one societal type to another.

The higher one moves up toward historicity, the more change is the product of action and social relations; the further one moves down from it, the more change is the result of exogenous interventions affecting an organization and the code governing its functioning.

There therefore always exist two fundamental processes of social change. The transformations of the political system, of social organization, and of

the system of historical action are the result of a discrepancy, a non

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coincidence, between the capacity and forms of society's action on itself on the one hand, and the forms of decision, of social conflicts, or of domination, on the other. This is change through crisis.

The philosophies of history fuse all these levels of analysis together within an all-embracing view of the evolution of societies, which may favor social organization—by talking about transition from simple to complex—or the political level—by stressing the transition from rules to objectives, from law to contract—or the level of historicity—by allotting a central role to the transformation of the cultural model, which is then presented as a linear evolution.

If I have stressed the differences between kinds of change according to the level of social reality on which they occur, that is because a process of change, no less than a society's functioning, must be viewed as the interaction of those three simultaneously autonomous and hierarchized levels. If society were no more than an organization, then it could onlv reproduce itself by seeking to reestablish its equilibria whenever they were threatened by events. If it were nothing but a political system, then history would be nothing but war and diplomacy, and economic and cultural development would remain incomprehensible. A society reduced to a field of historicity is not conceivable, for it would have no frontiers, no government, and no laws. But a society whose organization and political system were entirely and directly controlled by its field of historicity would be identified with the values of the state and therefore imprisoned in the immobility of principles.

Social change cannot be conceived of other than on the basis of the tensions and discrepancies that always exist between the field of historicity, the political system, and the social organization.

c. Conflicts and Change

The procedure outlined in this book accords a place to social conflicts so central that it must also, it would seem, establish a close link between any explanation of change and any explanation of conflicts. And change cannot be separated from social action or, therefore, from social relations and conflicts. This fact has already led us to reject the far too widely accepted idea of resistance to change, according to which actors often resist the novelty that necessitates a modification of attitudes, a difficult reformula­tion of contributions and rewards, a questioning of values, of social interactions, of traditions and habits.

This conception usually occurs as part of the ideology of the dominant class. Workers' resistance to the introduction of a new work process is spoken of much more readily than the resistance of bosses to the extension of

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union rights or raises in wages. The ruling class identifies itself with progress, with rationality, with efficiency. In the same way, colonizers denounce the habit-bound attitude of the colonized.

The forms of conduct of change are, on the other hand, never separable from social relations, from the significance of a technique or behavior in the relations of authority, influence, or power. Change is not a thing, but an initiative that modifies social relations.

Nevertheless, this assertion does not lead to a direct link between conflict and change, at least if one is examining the central problem of change in the field of historicity. For social conflicts are linked with class relations, and are therefore situated within a field of historicity. """

It is true that they trigger mechanisms of change. But they are situated inside a field of historicity, and their actors are not directly agents of change. It is of the nature of industrial capitalism that conflicts exist within it between capitalists and wage earners. Nothing enables us to say that the conflict is directly a process of transcendence of that type of society and its class relations. A class conflict is born and dies with the system of historical action in which it is situated. What prevents the recognition of this fact is that the social movements whose image dominates industrial societies share in the historicist cultural model of those societies. Bourgeoisie and industrial proletariat alike have defined their action by their preparation for the great tomorrow, by the march of progress, and their opposition to the adversary has always been expressed by the vision of a society of the future, toward which the tide of history is supposedly carrying us. There is a promised land in which national independence, the affluent society, the classless society will succeed dependence, traditions, the tyranny of the paycheck. But why identify the meaning of the action with the consciousness of the actors^

Many social movements exist that do not define their objectives historically, in an evolutionist vision. In our own century they are much more inclined to arise in opposition to technocratic management of change in the name of the present and individual identity than to oppose attachment to the past and its heritage in the name of the future. In the same way, peasant movements that are aimed at recovering land seized by national or foreign owners do not necessarily link their opposition with faith in a movement aimed at creating a new society; a movement directed against the ruling class must be distinguished from an action based on the idea of succeeding to that ruling class.

To define social movements as agents of progress reintroduces historicism and all the philosophies of history. It is essential to realize, as one embarks on the study of social change, that one can no longer make use in this field of the concepts evolved for the analysis of social systems.

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A. The Temporality of Social Systems

a. The Temporality of the Field of Historicity

Each of the systems that has been analyzed—system of historical action, system of class relations, political system, organizational system—presents itself as the interdependence of elements defined by their place in relation to intersecting oppositional couples. All these systems belong in the province of synchronic analysis. For example, the double dialectic of the social classes, which defines the relations between an upper class that is both ruling and dominant and a popular class that is both defensive and contestatory, constitutes a system of social relations. It therefore forms the basis of social movements, which are always inseparable from a particular system of historical action and thus cannot explain, directly at least, the transition from one system of historical action to another.

But it would be wrong to believe that the descriptive analysis of these systems can eliminate all temporality, that the elements placed in relation to one another are wholly definable in and by the present.

An upper class is at once ruling and dominant. Insofar as it is ruling, it takes charge of historicity, which is to say that it produces or encourages a type of accumulation, a model of knowledge, and a cultural model, and that it controls the functioning of the system of historical action: cultural model, mobilization, hierarchization, and needs. It is therefore the chartered agent of society's action upon itself; the stronger a society's historicity, the more closely that action approaches development and hence to an orientation toward the future. The capitalist bourgeoisie revolutionized society, mod­ernized it by destroying the previous modes of production and systems of historical action.

Insofar as the upper class is dominant, it identifies the system of historical action with its own interests, with its domination. It establishes and maintains an order. Partly in order to protect itself against the attacks of the contestatory class, it transforms the acquired into the transmitted, it creates a line of inheritance, the reproduction of the social order.

On the one hand, therefore, the upper class is ensuring the domination of the future over the present; on the other, it is ensuring the domination of the present over the past. On the one hand it may find itself allied with a new popular class against an old ruling class; on the other, it is allied to the old ruling class against the popular class.

These two aspects of the upper class, symbolized in industrial capitalism by the opposing images of the entrepreneur and the bourgeois, are never separable, but never quite coincident.

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In the same way, when the state is the principal agent of industrialization, as in France in recent decades, it is at once the agent of a state capitalism or a technocracy oriented toward the transformation of society—while being also capable of an offensive action against the old bourgeoisie—and also a bureaucratic apparatus linked by an unbroken continuity with the monar­chic, Napoleonic, and Jacobin states and thus with an archaic type of control over social order.

The same temporality is to be found in the action of the popular class. As dominated class it resists the domination exerted by the upper class by drawing support from its traditional means of defense. The peasant defends his land, the worker his trade, the teacher his rhetoric. To the technocratic class that is proclaiming the necessity for change, for mobility, for com­munications, it replies by demanding security, continuity, the defense of its particular interests. When the domination is strong and the popular class has only limited political means of countering it, then it experiences any growth it is subjected to as a loss of ground. Several research studies carried out in France over the past decades have shown that the working class has experienced social evolution as a continuous erosion of its conditions of existence, only interrupted—and then very briefly—by political ruptures of which the Popular Front was the most important, but whose gains were swiftly canceled out by the dominant class. Even though examination of the facts shows that during the past twenty years the real standard of living of workers has risen, the campaign of the Communist Party and the General Confederation of Labor based on the pauperization of the working class has undoubtedly corresponded to majority opinion in that class.

But the popular class is also a contestatory class. It appeals to_a society's historicity against the order established and maintained by the ruling class. The working class appeals to progress against the capitalist bourgeoisie. The most recent social movements appeal to creativity against manipulation, waste, and ossifying authoritarianism.

The same kind of observation can easily be applied to the system of historical action itsejf. Order and movement, orientations and resources are not in opposition solely as poles of the axes of historical action; they are also always out of synchronization with one another. The tensions between the elements of the system are also oppositions between past and future, throwing light on the ambiguity of a present that cannot be isolated either from orientations toward change or from the weight of tradition.

This temporality is not external to the field of historicity. It is the direct expression of historicity itself. The system of historical action is historicity's mechanism for the control of society's organization, for the dominion of the production of society over its functioning. Social movements themselves, although they belong to a field of historicity, are nonetheless laden with

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temporality. Popular movements clash with the domination of the upper class; they protest against poverty and dependence, against injustice and inequality. In order to resist the ruling class, which is exhorting the popular classes to participate in the work of modernization, they teach back into their past for strength to carry on the present struggle to construct a future. It is not enough to say that they are defensive on the one hand and contestatory on the other, for the appeal to the past is not defensive alone: it is itself contestation insofar as it is defending what has been destroyed and dominated by the upper class or by the colonizer. The Utopia of every social movement is the reconciliation of identity with change; it is control over social transformations retained by an actor defined at the point where they begin. An impossible dream, but one that can fuel collective action and combat the appeal to the present, the appeal for modernization, launched by the ruling class. When has a popular movement not appeared heavy with archaism in the face of an innovatory, liberal, even wildly free-thinking ruling class? Do such movements not always impose a group solidarity that often sets itself up in brutish opposition to invention, to individualism, to any renewal of modes of expression? And, indeed, the regimes born of popular movements are often conservative, not to say reactionary, in many areas of social and cultural organization. But social movements themselves are at the opposite extreme. They exist only through the sense of history that animates them, that enables them to mobilize themselves in the name of the past and on behalf of the future.

The ruling class on its side, insofar as it also is the bearer of a social movement, is likewise appealing to deep-lying values and old traditions in order to launch itself into an action of social transformation.

Nothing could be further removed from a social movement than the calculation of strategies, than painstaking attention to intersocial relations, to concatenations of circumstances, to balances of power, to political intricacies. A social movement, however slight, however diluted, is on the same level as historicity. It is not an instrument of adaptation or reproduc­tion. It invents history; it gives a new meaning to the past by constructing the future.

b. The Temporality of Institutions and Organizations

The same analysis may be applied to the other levels of social reality, political system and organizations alike, since the latter are not systems independent of society's field of historicity but are, on the contrary, defined by that field's embodiment in concrete social units. It must be remembered, however, that neither a political society nor an organization is generally a homogeneous whole from the viewpoint of historicity. French society in 1972 is a mixture of

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mercantile society and industrial society, still containing precapitalist elements and already possessing certain aspects of a postindustrial society. History is inscribed within geography. The same observation usually holds good for organizations. Although particular enterprises may exist that can be considered typically industrial or mercantile, a more detailed examination nearly always reveals, at the very least, historical discrepancies between the elements that contribute to their functioning.

1. A political system makes decisions within a complex collectivity, but one in which a field of historicity occupies a more or less dominant position. The temporality specific to the field of historicity and that of a concrete historical and geographical unit do not correspond.

Every political system establishes and maintains an order. That order is assured of possessing a certain inertia, largely due to the law and its application by courts or other organisms. It is linked to the action of the dominant class, albeit indirectly. On the one hand the interplay of political forces leads to changing alliances between dominant classes or fractions of a dominant class; on the other, the popular classes can obtain the institu­tionalization of certain conflicts; lastly, there are social categories or groupings of interests that intervene in the political system without one being able to assign them a clear class situation. What are called the middle classes are usually neither a set of classes or fractions of classes, nor a set of strata defined by their position on a social scale, but a non-coherent grouping of interests defined by their political influence.

The more a dominant class is politically hegemonic, the more it establishes a coherent institutional order, often expressed in constitutional texts and legal codes. The political system is then a crystallization of class domination. Its principal functions are integration, particularly by means of socialization, and repression, especially in forms directed against popular contestation. This domination transformed into hegemony incorporates in a variable manner the defense of the interests of former ruling classes, of their clients, and of the clients of the new ruling class.

The more a political system is open, on the contrary, the more it is autonomous, the more it plays the role of a political market, seeking to obtain the greatest possible consensus at any given moment. The laws it incorporates form a less coherent system, jurisprudence has a greater importance, the diversification of institutions is greater, allowing greater importance to contracts and compromises. The political system is then an agent of change, since political interplay is complex, majorities shifting, the possibility of limited initiatives greater.

These two aspects of the political system, conformism and reformism, usually overlap and provoke tensions that in their turn produce internal changes. The dialectic of unity and plurality within the political system is

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not static; it transforms society more, the more complex that society is and the less the upper class of the dominant mode of production is hegemonic, for it is in this situation that the ''middle classes" have the greatest political influence. France has long been a good example of a very heterogeneous society in which the progress of industrialization was associated with the preservation of large agricultural and mercantile sectors, and with a strong state playing both the role of maintainer of old social and cultural forms and that of agent of the middle classes, to the point of making the public sector into a fairly autonomous whole, albeit subordinated to the class domination characteristic of a capitalist-industrialist society.

2. In an organization, the dissociation between order and change is even greater. Every organization is an apparatus of power. The latter is seeking to ensure its reproduction, to control its heritage.

This is clear above all in the case of those organizations we have termed "agencies," because they ensure the realization of certain elements of historicity, even beyond class domination, as is the case in the school system today, or as was the case in the ecclesiastical organization or the state bureaucracy in other types of society.

But an organization is also a unit of production and a commercial agent. In these respects it possesses a capacity of movement opposed not only to the reproduction of power but also to bureaucratization, or in other words to the pathological autonomization of the organization's internal functioning. This bureaucratization may or may not be associated with absolute power on the part of the ruling class. It constitutes in any case an essential factor in the immobility of the organization. The opposition of these various factors in the functioning of organizations leads to discrepancies. The most commonly discussed discrepancy of this kind occurs when forms of production and exchange develop more quickly than either the absolutism of power or bureaucracy. But the contrary case is also important: a private or public, capitalist or socialist entrepreneur can be one step ahead of the technical and commercial conditions of production.

3. Moving from system of historical action to organizational system, as one makes the transition from an abstract whole like industrial society or industrial capitalism to concrete wholes, such as political societies or, to an even greater extent, organizations, one finds tXizdiscrepancies between order andmoyernentwidenm elements cease to be terms of a dialectic and can become two orders of facts, separate from one another and capable of opposing one another sufficiently to provoke, beyond an artifical equilibrium, either a transformation of the unit in question or its decomposi­tion.

At the level of organizations, viewed not as independent of historicity but

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as the embodiment of a field of historicity—system of historical action and class relations—the two sources of internal temporality provide reciprocal reinforcement.

On the one hand there is the temporal gap that separates order from movement within the system of historical action and the two aspects of each of the social classes; on the other there is that opposing the movement of historicity to the hegemony that imposes laws, or the power that is the determinant of authority within an organization.

We are now a very long way from the picture of social systems as stable wholes, or wholes possessing sovereign mechanisms of equilibration. Social systems are not based on a body of values and principles that a central authority, some consciousness within society, is obliged to make people respect. The organizations that seem to be close to this image are those that perform a function of control and repression. But either they are sub­ordinated to political institutions that have the capacity to modify their rules and their functioning, or else they are sooner or later destroyed by their own fragmentation, whether due to internal explosion or to external pressures. Every concrete social unit is at once closed and open. Insofar as it is closed, it excludes, rejects, imprisons in special places without historicity, without political system, those forces that do not act in accordance with the values of those who hold political hegemony or organizational power. What is the action of these forces, and do they not, in certain conditions at least, become agents of mutation, in revolt against the order that excludes them?

Insofar as it is open, will the unit's dynamic not have the effect of modifying the upper levels of society, of provoking reforms that may, when they reach the level of historicity itself, lead to a transformation of the system of historical action and class relations?

Society is thus shot through both by forces of rupture and forces of reform. Both may be agents of change or, on the contrary, of crisis.

Society is not a system organized around functional requirements, mechanisms of social control and socialization. It is neither a biological system ensuring its own homeostasis, nor a lawgiving, educated sovereign. It is the noncoincidence between the systems that constitute society as well as the nature of historical action that make an analysis of change possible. Class conflict, when it gives priority to the ruling class/contestatory class opposi­tion, weakens the hegemony of the dominant bloc, attacks the mechanisms of reproduction, and encourages both modernization of the social organiza­tion and the appearance of new forms of historicity. Change then occurs via reforms and innovations. When, on the other hand, class conflict opposes proletarianized masses, subjected to repression and strict social control, shaken by crisis, to a hegemonic bloc more concerned with reproducing its privileges than managing historicity, then change is linked with rupture, with

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the alliance of class action and the will toward development. This type of movement may in its turn take two principal forms: either that of a social movement oriented by a positive project of societal change, development, and liberation—in which case I shall speak of a developmental movement— or else that of a revolt, linked with a general crisis of society, that cannot be projected toward the future otherwise than by the intervention of a revolu­tionary political agent—in which case I shall speak of a critical action. It is this type of collective action that we must consider first, because it is furthest removed from the social movements as defined in the previous chapter, which are situated within a societal type.

B. Rupture Conduct

a. Openness and Closedness

The analysis of social movements occurs in a relatively open society, one in which the ruling class does not have a total control over the system of historical action and is obliged to face conflicts. A strong historicity in a society, leading to swifter economic and social changes, a high degree of mobility, and a high level of participation in change, favors the formation of social movements.

All that is involved here is an "openness^ of the Jield of historicity^ something that must not be confused with the dynamism of organizations or the flexibility of institutions. These latter determine the degree of institu­tionalization of conflicts. We have already noted that the most favorable circumstances for the formation of social movements are the combination of a high organizational and institutional capacity for deal]ng with claims and \ r pressures at their level and of an open conflict at the level of class relations. It is false to say that social movements acquire their greatest strength in a situation of organizational crisis and institutional blockage.

But social movements cannot be further understood if the openness of the field of historicity is taken to be total. In that case there is no longer a gap /H between class relations and political system; society appears as a political market, a network of influences whose final product is a set of decisions organizing social life.

Such a situation is never real, and the image is merely a manifestation of the ruling class's Utopia. This Utopia is one that was vigorously defended by liberal capitalism. It occurs today in new forms. Those who insist that societies must organize their future in the name of their values and by integrating the greatest possible number of social demands into their calculations, thus giving new life to the idea of the philosopher king—who has now become the big enterprise compiling its prospectus—are necessarily

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placing themselves at the viewpoint of a dominant class capable of speaking in the name of all, serving as depository of the values around which the consensus is organized through discussion and negotiation. Class relations are not entirely open relations. The opposition in them implies the existence of a relation of domination. The dominant class has the capacity to define the form of social interactions, of the political process, and more generally of the categories of social practice. Social classes, social movements, and domination are all inseparable from one another.

But if the system of domination is considered in isolation, if society is described as the implementation of that domination, as an ideological construction at once guaranteeing and masking class domination, if, in consequence, historicity—in itself and within the system of historical action—is identified with the domination of the ruling class, then the existence of social movements becomes incomprehensible. The popular class has no means of opposing the ruling class, it has no autonomy of action, no direct relation to historicity; it can only reflect the internal contradictions of the dominant system. Only an external agent, an intelligentsia inspiring a political action based on a scientific analysis of the contradictions of the system of domination, can transform claims or rebellions into a social movement capable of challenging the dominant class.

But why choose between two conceptions that are just the two one must not separate, since they correspond to the two aspects of class relations and social movements?

The popular class is subjected to a class domination; it is also the class of labor and production. Class relations are defined both by conflict and by domination. A social movement seeks to control the system of historical action while at the same time combating its adversary. Only conceptions very far removed from social reality and satisfying themselves with notions more vague than general can define a class situation either by the simple fact of belonging to a technological environment, to a technical mode of production, or solely by the relation of dependence or wage earning. No analysis is possible as long as one does not recognize the interdependence of these two aspects of a class situation: its relation to the adversary and its aim to control the common stake, in other words its participation in a system of historical action.

Social movements challenge class domination because the popular class does participate in the system of historical action and can therefore struggle for the control of historicity.

The action of the popular classes is not solely the sign of objective contradictions; it is before all else conflict action revealing the opposition between the classes and their struggle for control of historicity, of the action directed by society onto society. Our analysis of social movements took this

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dialectic of the social classes into consideration. But what it considered above all was the conflictive forms of conduct within a societal type. Now we must consider the movements that clash with domination. They are distinct from social movements proper, above all because the reign of domination identifies the field of historicity with a political hegemony and instruments for the reproduction of social power. Social movements occur specifically on the level of the field of historicity. Responses to domination cannot oppose themselves other than to the whole of a social order, to all its levels fused in one. It is therefore much more the state than the action of the ruling class that they are attacking.

Let us term historical movements all these collective forms of conduct contesting the class order and aimed directly or indirectly at historicity. They can be divided into two categories: social movements occur within afield of historicity and set in opposition primarily a ruling class and a contestatory class. Critical actions attack a domination, a crystallization of class domina­tion into social order and political hegemony. These two types of historical movement are never entirely separate from one another in social practice, or rather a social movement occurring in an entirely open society would no longer be anything hut an institutional pressure; inversely, a collective action defined entirely by its struggle against the internal contradictions of a system of domination cannot be anything but the conquest of power by a new ruling class capable of developing and managing forces of production blocked by the power of the old dominant class.

But since we have up till now paid most attention to class conflicts within a system of historical action, we must now analyze the collective conduct linked with dependence and exclusion. Whereas social movements occujr within a field of historicity, so that their conflict cannot by itself explain the transition from one system of historical action to another, movements based on rejection of dependence are different in that they can be agents of societal change. Class relations cannot be closed of themselves. Their closedness can only be that of an organization or of an institution. The power of the capitalist class is its capacity to impose forms of labor, relations of authority, economic decisions, laws, a distribution of the social classes within the urban space, or within the educational organization. Domination manifests itself first of all by the separation of the integrated from the rejected, of the permitted from the forbidden. These dichotomies take different forms according to the field of historicity in question, an opposition between gods and demons, order and disorder, the civilized and the barbarian, the normal and the pathological. The political system draws the boundary between legal and illegal; an organization excludes the deviant.

Those who are rejected or shut away are not naturally agents of change. They are more likely to become merely desocialized or to construct patho-

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logical societies that simply reinforce their exclusion and thus shore up the strength of a social order that need do no more than exercise a repressive action against them.

But exclusion, marginality, deviancy, or withdrawal can only appear as such insofar as the social organization is accepted as an instrument in the service of a field of historicity, which is to say both of certain cultural orientations and of the values of a class actor.

Society, not questioning its norms, explains deviancy either by the individual characteristics of those led into it, or by the tensions inherent in social change and in the disorganization it brings with it.

This good conscience is not always present. The social order may appear absurd or arbitrary, archaic or inefficient. The political system likewise may be recognized as too restricted or too weak, corrupt or repressive. Such attitudes in no way define a social movement, but they do transform the meaning of marginal forms of conduct. If the social organization or political system is in crisis, marginality can become rejection and revolt. It is not a psychological difference that must be sought between the two states, however, but a social difference: order is no longer recognized as instru­mental, it is contested; it no longer seems legitimate, or is simply no longer interiorized. Through organizational crisis and institutional blockage, social conflict is finding an indirect expression.

Organizational crisis and institutional blockage thus transform marginality or deviancy into a social problem and hence into a latent protest. In the area of the excluded, a principle of totality reappears (to return to the term employed in our analysis of social movements). The blockage and the crisis always have two complementary aspects. On the one hand there is the closedness of a set of rules and rites that manifests the dominion of a social and political power. In the political system the rules create exclusion, impose the arbitrary; in an organization they draw their strength from values, from principles that transform authority into power, that reject claims and negotiation.

On the other hand this rigidity is accompanied by disorganization. The demands that the system cannot or will not process insinuate themselves into it, gnaw at it, and sometimes tear it to pieces.

It is in this way that a society passes from conflict to contradiction. One cannot speak of contradiction between the social classes, since they have the stake of their conflicts in common. Whereas, on the contrary, the closedness established by domination, hegemony, and power, reinforced by both blockage and crisis, completely separates the included from the excluded. The excluded forms of conduct are contradictory of norms and values, laws and regulations. Between the two camps a common language is no longer spoken. Ultimately, social relations are replaced by intersocial relations, dominated by violence and by force.

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b. Blockage and Crisis

The organizational crisis and the institutional blockage can characterize a type of society and thus the conflict that corresponds to it. But they indicate more directly still the presence of a very heterogeneous social formation, one in which change does not come about by progressive incorporation of old social categories into new ones, but by permitting or by reinforcing the maintenance of class relations that are archaic in relation to the new ruling class in formation. The colonial situation is an extreme form of this. Mercantile or industrial capitalism develops within it, while at the same time an agrarian sector, often still in the majority, continues to subsist. Does a social movement form then in this old popular class? In particular, does one find a peasant movement arising in countries penetrated by enclaves of mercantile capitalism? Before defining the forms of collective action that can appear in this situation, it is essential to recognize that such forms cannot include social movements, as I have defined them. And it is in this sense that the old popular classes can be termed marginal. Their action can only be more or less fragmented between reaction to a social crisis and a disposition to violence, a negative impression of the social movement that is impossible for them. Reaction to crisis brings a will to reconstitute the community threatened by exogenous change, and this will can be associated with violence in the action of messianic impulses eager for a purifying confrontation. Defense of the past and a desperate effort to control change mingle in a mobilizing Utopia or in more elementary, more fragmented forms of collective action. There exists no peasant revolution overthrowing capitalist penetration, but there does exist a whole range of protest movements in which defense of community and struggle against change experienced as aggression are constantly mingled in not so much primitive as ambiguous forms of social movement. This ambiguity prevents such movements from having a national importance except insofar as they are heteronomous, insofar as they are made use of by a section of the dominant classes or by political forces that are themselves often unstable coalitions. It is in this way that peasant movements born of a complete rupture with the dominant order can easily reintroduce themselves into it through the intermediary of the political arena or serve as a tool in the hands of a new ruling class, which nevertheless has interests opposed to those of the peasantry in question.

The fusion of these two types of conduct becomes increasingly possible with proximity to the central class relations, but crisis and blockage lead to other types of protest than those considered in the previous chapter.

c. Revolutionary Critical Action

Can the conjunction of an apparatus of domination, of hegemonyjmd power oftfie upper class, of an institutional blockage and an organizational crisis,

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give rise to a movement defined by the interdependence of a principle of identity, a principle of opposition, and a principle of totality? It can, but the protest movements that form in such a case are profoundly different from social movements proper.

1. The actor can no longer be defined by his place within social relations. The dialectic of the social classes is replaced by the opposition established between participants and excluded. The identity of the social actor fragments and is replaced on the one hand by consciousness of exclusion, on the other by a community consciousness. The actor is replaced on the one hand by the nonactor, deprived of action, on the other by the collective social being defined by social and cultural values and no longer by social relations, and therefore as a community. Let unemployment brutally invade an industrial center, or let that center be condemned to economic nonentity, and you will see a protest form among the workers threatened by poverty and social disorganization; at the same time a community defense forms in which other social categories, and even local notables, also participate. According to the individual situation, these two aspects combine in various ways. The important point is to recognize the split in the principle of identity and the separation between two different definitions of the actor involved.

2. The adversary can no longer be recognized as such. The adversary is no longer an actor-antagonist but is the social order, since domination is not an action conducted by an actor but the whole made up by the categories of social practice itself. It is industrial development, the low productivity or unfortunate localization of certain activities, the competition from other products or other producers, the fall in consumption that lead to unemploy­ment and the decline of a town or a region. The popular actor does not think that what are involved here are technical reasons and ultimately the necessities of what has been termed destructive creation, which imposes the liquidation of the past for the sake of the progress of modernization. Nor can the adversary be conceived of as the actor who is being opposed within a certain situation. Situation and adversary are one. It is this concrete whole that threatens the group and excludes the actor.

3. Nor can the principle of totality be the stake of social relations. Driven out of the present by domination, blockage, and crisis, the stake is displaced either toward the past or toward the future. Toward the past when a popular movement seeks to recreate its community, to restore its previous activities and organization. This occurs especially in situations where the domination appears most foreign, external to the community in question. A large majority of messianic or community movements arising in response either to

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a colonial domination or to the introduction of capitalism into precapitalist societies are directed in this way toward the myth of the restoration of the destroyed collectivity.

Toward the future, on the other hand, when the crisis is more internal to a mode of production and thus to a field of historicity. The protest movement then makes its appeal to the forces of production, to human creativity against the domination of the crisis. But this transcendence of the present cannot be entirely achieved by the popular actor, torn between his exclusion and his community-based resistance. The movement is heteronomous in part at least. It is necessary for an external revolutionary agent to intervene in order to transform the negation of negation into affirmation. The reference to totality splits, just as the principle of identity did. On the one hand the actor identifies himself with historicity experienced as the development of the forces of production; on the other, he is disorganized even more than alienated, excluded not just dominated, and he must therefore be mobilized by a voluntarist action, by the initiative of a revolutionary agent.

Frantz Fanon, particularly in his Les damn'es de la terre, (Paris: Maspero, 1968), is one of those who have tried most successfully to understand the conditions determining the transition from alienation to revolutionary critical action in the case of a blocked, dependent society in crisis, as colonial society is. He is correct when he asserts that the specific characteristic of the colonial situation is that of being closed, of presenting itself not as a conflict relation but as an order that rests upon the contradiction between colonizer and colonized, civilized and savage, white and black. The alienated popula­tion resists by drawing strength from its traditional culture, but it cannot be pushed into motion, politicized, except by the intervention of "evolved" elements that have a part in the dominant order, through their pro­fessional level and way of life, but who encounter discrimination. It is true that this category gives rise to a contradictory nationalism, at once dependent and chauvinistic, imitative and reactionary; but it is also from it that the political leaders emerge, leaving the city and its semiprivileges in order to reimmerse themselves in the peasant masses, as happened in Kenya and in Algeria. There is still room for doubt about the limits of this synthesis of the community with a modernized yet rejected elite seen as stealing the colonizer's fire in order to light the way for the colonized. But such an analysis does at least make clear the central role of this dialectic of defense and counteroffensive.

The difference between a social movement and this type of action—which 1 am terming a revolutionary critical action in order to indicate that it is challenging a situation as a whole and that it speaks from outside, in the name of the excluded—is clearly apparent from a juxtaposition of the diagrams representing the two kinds of historical movement (see figure 40).

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social movement revolutionary critical action

totality community | voluntarism

/

/ \ identity i \ opposition exclusion

Figure 40

modernization O

The social movement is an element of society's internal dynamic, since that dynamic rests upon the class conflict over the control of historicity. The revolutionary critical action, on the contrary, is an agent of change. It transforms what appears to the dominant ideology as illegality, deviancy, or marginality, into a force opposing domination. This force, being no longer able to contest that domination in the present, projects its will to control historicity into the future, and at the same time opposes an overall model of society to the model it is fighting. The conflict no longer has the form of an alternative but the form of a transcendence.

This action is not reforming in nature. It does happen that in failing to overthrow the established order it can fulfill a reforming role in practice, but that is not its orientation.

We need to stress the duality of this revolutionary- critical action. Exclusion and crisis are associated with rupture conduct and with the role

of a political and ideological elite that takes over the modernizing process blocked by the crisis. On the other hand, the defense of the community opposes the "established disorder'* and mobilizes creativity, the moral forces that are going to construct a new community.

But no revolutionary action exists other than through the union of these two types of intervention, through the union of the people and the avant-garde, of the spontaneity of the masses and the revolutionary leaders, of voluntarism and naturalism. A naturalism that appeals to the contradic­tion between forces of production and class domination, to the necessary transcendence of the general crisis of a regime condemned by history; a voluntarism of the militant "base," uniting the search for their identity, their role as citizens or workers, with the elimination of the old order and the creation of a new society. Every revolutionary movement transcends and unites tendencies that, if separated from one another, lead on the one hand to populism and on the other to Blanquism. But however closely they are united within the revolutionary movement, these two tendencies are always distinct, and their relations are analogous to those that at once unite and oppose social movements proper and reforming action. Reforms are imposed

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by the action of the social movement, but the institutionalization of conflicts dissolves the social movement and also, by moving the line separating legal from illegal, results in one section of the social movement being thrust out into illegality.

The gap between the critical and modernizing orientation of the revolu­tionary leaders and community mobilization can be wider still. For the creation of a new society is also the management of dfevelopment, of accumulation, of change, and more simply an effort of organization aimed at overcoming the effects of the previous system's crisis, aggravated generally by the circumstances of the revolutionary rupture. A new ruling class forms, which usually enters into conflict with the community-centered voluntarism. The rulers denounce the collusion between a right-wing opposition and a left-wing opposition, the first being more concerned with community, with maintaining or reestablishing a broad popular consensus, the second being more voluntarist, maintaining or reestablishing a class action. The victory of the new ruling class seems more probable as the gap between revolutionary critical action and social movement is smaller. In fact, such proximity means that the society in question was already engaged in a process of societal change.

The revolutionary leaders then take up the management of a socialist accumulation, different from capitalist accumulation but bringing the same division into classes in its train, above all when external threats—such as those to which the Soviet Union was constantly exposed during its first decades of existence—seem to render high-speed industrialization and national disci­pline obligator)'.

On the other hand, in a situation of underdevelopment, and perhaps of relative geopolitical isolation too, the postrevolutionary model of devel­opment cannot be determined by competition with the capitalist societies. This is why the Chinese People's Republic has not followed the Soviet path of industrialization.

This does not mean that "leftist" voluntarism can then carry the day at the expense of the formation of a new ruling class, for it cannot have the necessary capacity for integration and management. What carries the day is the force unifying the two tendencies: the revolutionary party, which is at once ideological mobilization stimulating collective creativity^and also will to national development. The Chinese Cultural Revolution did not mark the victory of left over right but that of the political ideology of the Thoughts of Mao Tse-tung and of mass political and ideological mobilization over the formation of a new ruling class.

A social movement is a collective action cojidjicted against domination. Tne more strongly constitule^itlsTiKe lessTTwill dissolve into organizationaT claims and institutional pressure, the better it can develop its conflict on the

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basis of the collective action of the workers and within a political situation in which it can also exercise a certain influence, whether direct or indirect_A revolutionary critical action is not a movement against power but on behalf of a new power. It is aimed at creating a new society. Consequently the postrevolutionary Utopia construes society in the same way as the Utopia of a ruling class and in the opposite sense to the representation characteristic of a social movement. For the latter, class conflict is at the top of society and is embodied in the political system and the organizations. Revolutionary power, on the contrary, gives society a doctrinal, ideological unity. Society is experienced by it as an organization, animated by values, integrated around a consensus, and handling politcal action and economic action as resources to be harnessed for the benefit of a model of society. Revolutionary power, like all absolute power, armed with the dominant ideology, refuses to recognize the autonomy of historicity and the class conflict within the society it controls. The adversary, in its view, can be only the foreigner or the foreigner's agent. This is particularly true in the situation in which a new-ruling class has just established itself in a position of power, but there can be no complete distinction here between two types of postrevolutionary society. The French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions alike denounced those they were fighting as agents of monarchs, of capitalism, or of imperialism.

If we go back to the movements themselves, the revolutionary critical action is stronger the less open the political system is and the more the various sectors of the social organization are in crisis. France is one of the countries in which the mixture of the labor movement and a Leninist revolutionary party has long been an intimate one, while at the same time another fraction of the labor movement is linked with reforming socialism. And it is tempting to take the view that the existence of a large communist fraction in the working class is an essential political and social fact. If we are concerned simply with describing the French political situation, then it is an evident fact. But the analyses we have just been pursuing lead to a very different view. The evolution and forms of the working-class consciousness relate to class relations. The existence of a revolutionary critical action depends upon other factors: the degree of hegemony of the ruling class or class bloc, the state of the organization, which is to say, not only the economic situation but also the forms of authority or the composition of the labor force. There is no reason to think that these two orders of variables are closely linkeoyThe political process of social change and social conflicts are in constant interaction; but they do not constitute a single phenomenon, even if they are both partially the province of the same political associations.

The gap and the distinctions between the two kinds of historical movement are much more visible in situations of rupture than in those in which the social movement and the revolutionary critical action are both part of a

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mixed opposition. During the French Revolution, the Terror established by the Jacobin bourgeoisie was identifiable neither with the peasant movement against the landed aristocracy, especially in 1789, nor with the sans-culottes movement of the urban lower orders.

The same observation holds good for Bolshevik power, which was quite distinct from the contemporary peasant populism and its consequences, as also from the labor movement as a whole.

A revolutionary critical action may have less generality than a revolu­tionary movement capable of overthrowing a political regime. For the social crisis may be much less disruptive than an economic or military rupture and reduce itself to the strong tensions imposed on a society undergoing rapid changes under the management of a ruling class subject to few social controls. The institutional blockage may similarly reduce itself to the nonrepresentation of important elements of political life without indicating any particular inefficiency of the decision mechanisms. One may then see revolutionary minorities being constituted, sometimes on a very small scale, but capable of attacking the established order with a great deal of violence. The Black Panther movement in the United States or the extreme sectors of the Japanese student movement are of this type.

The action of the social movement and that of the revolutionary critical action are both complementary and opposite. This is because the first relates to the analysis of a social structure and the second to that of change. The seizure of power is the objective of any social movement, but this term is used so widely only because it is ambiguous. The popular social movement exists only because it is a force of opposition in a given society. It is also revolutionary because it is contesting the very foundations of social domi­nation. The revolutionary critical action is not the political extension of the social movement; it is extending and organizing the reverse of any social movement; it is drawing its strength from what I have termed the proletarian consciousness, not from the working-class consciousness, and it is preparing to manage development, not social conflicts.

The ruling class dreams of being both the agent of historical transfor­mation and a dominant power. In the same way. the popular class dreams of being both the builder of a new society and the agent of opposition to established power. But sociology cannot identify itself with a social actor, especially if he is a holder of power. It is erroneous to think that a social movement ever seizes power; it is a political agent alone that can do that. It is even more erroneous to think that an agent of political change is the expression and the instrument of a social class. Although one can never separate them, one can even less identify them. Whatever the process of social change, it can never entirely absorb social conflict The social movement is born, lives, and dies with the society of which it is a part.

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Political action can be based on it, serve it, reinforce it; it cannot be identified with it, even when it has the means to impose the idea that it is the realization and the truth of such a movement.

d. Institutional Critical Action

There exist many intermediate situations between that in which the power and hegemony of the dominant class transform both organizations and institutions into pure instruments of reproduction of the dominant order, and that in which the autonomy and adaptive capacity of organizations and institutions isolate the social movement from rupture conduct and may even ultimately institutionalize social conflict completely. The majority of these intermediate situations can be grouped into the picture of a society that is not undergoing a general organizational crisis, but of which the political system is largely closed, which is to say subject to the hegemony of a dominant class or class bloc.

Critical action will then no longer occur on all levels but essentially on the institutional level, in other words, on the political level proper. (Not to term a revolutionary action "political" makes things difficult; the term "critical action" seems preferable, however, in order to avoid using the same word in two different senses.)

Every political system establishes a boundary—a changing one—between the legal and the illegal. It excludes and it represses. What is rejected does not always allow itself to be shut away or snared into the consequences usually entailed by rejection. "Barbarian" political forces form "beyond the pale," forces with no direct participation in the institutional system. By exerting pressure on the political arena from outside, they can of course force their way in and become political actors defined by a certain influence.

However, it is the reverse mechanism that interests us here. Let us term it the "institutional critical action." It is not an element in the political arena but a response to the hegemony of the dominant classes and to the blockage of the political system. The contestation forming in organizations rises toward the institutional level, where it is confronted with a closed door. Let us take an example. The French university system has been experiencing a very rapid expansion over the past sixty years. Although it is true that the teaching in it is not well adapted to the demands of its students or to their probable job opportunities, and that the dropout rate is very high, the government is nevertheless able to point out that it has been able to build new campuses almost everywhere and that the enrollment rate has not merely not fallen but has even risen slightly. This expansion and these changes have created new expectations and made the expression of contestation easier. But that contestation is confronted with a blocked political system: a ministry locked away inside its own bureaucratization and a positive caricature of

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centralization, timid faculty councils incapable of working out what's wrong, a government more concerned with la France than with the French. Contestation clashes with the institutions, with the bloc of bureaucrats and high-ups secure in their backing by the hegemony of the ruling classes, by the alliance of old capitalism and young technocracy. Thus a critical political action appears, which proves itself capable of inventing new institutions. This action extends into the enterprises, which are experiencing a situation rather analogous to that of the universities: here too it is expansion, not crisis, that is being experienced, but above all a long authoritarian tradition, refusal by bosses or managements to negotiate, weakness of union influence. Beginning in 1968, worker action has led to a high degree of institutionaliza­tion of conflicts, which, although limited, has nonetheless profoundly changed collective labor relations. But these new worker-management relations are far from absorbing all the demands presented by contestation to the decision-making system. Hence the occurrence of anti-institutional violence, but, even more important, a political force of imagination that is breaking away from institutional norms. In recent years (1969-72) the most visible aspect of French political life has been the general questioning of decision-making systems and of forms of exclusion and repression. The law is being challenged, and with it the running of the prisons; the authority and traditional decision-making system of the Roman Catholic church are being violently criticized; the functioning of the educational system as an instrument of social selection has been exposed. What is involved here is less a general social crisis than a political crisis, but one that is overflowing the bounds of reformist actions and giving rise to "barbarian" political criticism.

This institutional criticism has less generality than a revolutionary critical action. It cannot really challenge society in its entirety. It therefore entertains ambiguous relations with reforming action, as is demonstrated in France today by the role of the Confederation franchise democratique du travail, oriented simultaneously toward self-management and the institutionalization of conflicts.

e. Anticipatory Critical Action

Set back from this institutional critical action, and even further back from the revolutionary critical action, we finally come to the ant icipatory critical action < This is the response to a situation in which there is neither a general organizational crisis nor institutional blockage. Domination is no longer hegemony and absolute power.

But society can be deprived of historicity if the dominant class-defensive class pair is more important that the ruling class-contestatory class pair. Here again, let us look at the French situtation.

The dominant class in France is an alliance of old and new, of industrialists

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and the mercantile and financial bourgeoisie or of technocrats and the old capitalism.

The state—and not the political system now—has as its principal role the task of ensuring the formation and the persistence of this dominant bloc. Hence the importance of the "ideological superstructures" in class domina­tion. Hence too the formation of a critical action that challenges this mode of domination in the very name of the tension that sets historicity in opposition to the forces controlling it.

It is because class domination in France is always heavily laden with a past content, even when the political system is relatively open and the economy expanding, that the role of the intelligentsia is important. Its adversary is not the political system and it is not organized into a revolutionary political and ideological nucleus. It is fighting the state and, through the state, a dominant ideology, still charged with the heritage of a past aristocratic or clerical society, or with an archaic capitalism.

For this intelligentsia it is much more a matter of ^eraser I'infame than of changing political relations or of overturning the economy. Quite often the intelligentsia is very well placed in the social organization and not without political influence. Its struggle is conducted above all on the cultural level. It can produce a counterideology, and the political and social forces of opposition like inviting famous intellectuals onto their platforms. But that role is a secondary and often absurd one. Much more important is the intelligentsia's prophetic role, its capability of conceiving the historicity that is to come, through its criticism of the archaism of present social domination. It the upper class is more ruling than dominant, then the work of anticipation can be associated with the action of that upper class; the renewal of the ruling class, thanks to industrial growth and Gaullism, has led in France to the appearance of a new category, that of the intellectual innovators linked with the new ruling class, whose principal meeting place was the Jean Moulin club.

Intellectual critical action, on the otheT hand, acts from the outside; it is more Utopian than ideological and contributes to the recognition as well as to the formation of a new model of knowledge, a new cultural model, and even a new type of accumulation.

Its principal base is found in the agencies of historicity, in the organizations that have the most direct relation with the system of historical action and that, while being placed within a class domination, cannot be reduced to expressions of the dominant ideology. That is why the role of researchers of all kinds is so important in this prophetic intelligentsia.

This action at the top seems isolated at first. It has no contact with organizational claims or even with institutional pressures. It is in fact stronger as the society in which it occurs is more capable of internal modifications, thanks to its capacity for organizational and institutional adaptation, and

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therefore experiences a greater degree of institutionalization of the conflicts pertaining to the system of historical action that is beginning to sink toward the horizon. This action develops at the moment when quantitative changes are beginning to turn into social and cultural mutations. Its break with the established order is not separable from the expression of a new social experience, already present and not yet recognized. Its role is neither innovation within the system nor revolutionary disruption; it is critical anticipation.

f. The Levels of Project of Critical Action

One can distinguish various levels of project in critical action as in social movements.

The level of project in both cases is not a degree of intensity of action but a level of integration of the elements of a collective conduct, which is to say of the principles of indentity, opposition, and totality.

The first level is that of disjunction of these elements. Not of the reduction of the collective action to a single one of them, but of their simultaneous but nonintegrated presence. Reaction against exclusion, the struggle aganist the established order, the will to modernization can occur together without being linked. And all the more easily if exclusion leads either to community defensiveness or to absolute rupture, thus producing isolated reactions rather than the organization of a complex project.

There exist several forms of second-level project, since it is defined by the integration of two of the elements while the third remains disconnected.

Community defense and rupture can be associated, as is the case with many forms of labor movement at the very outset, especially when the working-class population undergoes a swift cultural change and comes into contact with an urban world strictly dominated either by industrial capitalism or by a more archaic dominant bloc. The theme of modernization is not absent from its action, but it is more a dream than an axis of conflicts. In other situations it is modernization that is associated with the rupture, and community defensive­ness becomes the dream of a reintegrated society. Lastly, community defense and modernization can be allied and preponderate over consciousness of rupture, as in movements nearest to populism.

The highest level of project is that in which all three elements are integrated. Its analysis is the one already presented.

On the basis of these observations, which are bound, by definition, to reproduce those presented in relation to social movements, three new questions occur.

1. In the first place, does there exist a correspondence between levels of project and types of critical action?

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Does revolutionary critical action occur more easily on the highest level, while anticipatonr critical action, that of the intelligentsia, being more difficult to integrate, occurs most often on a low level of project? Or is it rather the reverse, an intellectual protest being more easily integrated than a mass action? The first hypothesis seems the more likely, for the situation in which an anticipatory critical action forms is much more open and consequently rupture conduct will not encounter a coherent and controlled domination. Even if groups of intellectuals have the capacity to present their opposition in the form of a continuous and extremely integrated discourse, analysis of that discourse will still reveal that opposition's low degree of coherence, especially since the intellectuals themselves occupy a very complicated social position. They usually belong to the middle classes, living both in symbiosis with and in opposition to the dominant class or the state's apparatus. They have importance only insofar as they can express themselves with a fairly broad degree of freedom. And although they may speak in the name of those who are gagged, they are not gagged themselves.

The revolutionary critical action, on the other hand, is constrained by the repression to which it is subjected when it attacks the whole social order, gathering all its themes together into a general mobilization of the forces of opposition. But although it may attain a high level of project more easily, it is also more constantly threatened with internal rifts, since its principle of identity, like its principle of totality, is double.

A revolutionary movement is at the same time integrating and split.

2. Second, does the interaction of the elements of the critical action occur within and through the experience of social relations, or is it the work of a political or ideological agent?

It is here that the distincition between social movement and critical action is clearest.

In La conscience ouvrie're (Paris: Editionsdu Seuil, 1966), I showed how the comparison of work situations makes it possible to identify the favored loci of class consciousness. This consciousness is not built up by political action; it is constituted at the level of class relations themselves, which is to say, in the case of an industrial capitalist society, at work. Political associations and, particularly, political parties transform this class consciousness into political action, but it is wrong to say that they constitute a social movement that without them would never get beyond the stage of economic claims or institutional pressure. On the contrary, critical action cannot be constituted at the level of the experience of social relations, since it is a response to the contradictions of order, not to the conflicts of movement. It can only be integrated at the top, at the level of political action and, even more so, at the level of ideology. But this latter term cannot be employed here without risk of

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misunderstanding, since I have constantly associated it with the class situation and class action. This is why I have used the word doctrine. Hence the essential role of the doctrinal intelligentsia, which is an essential agent, it seems, in the integration of a revolutionary action. This intelligentsia keeps up variable relations with the representatives of the anticipatory critical action, with those we term in France the "left-wing intellectuals.'' These relations are close and may go as far as partial fusion in the case of a low degree of integration of the revolutionary critical action. This was a well-known situation in Western Europe in the twenties and thirties, strengthened by a common opposition to fascism. But this mixture of left-wing intelligentsia and revolutionary intelligentsia should never lead us to forget the fundamental differences between them. The left-wing intelligentsia tends to split apart as the organization of the revolutionary action proceeds, one part of it rallying to the revolutionary party, another continuing as far as a leftist radicalism, a third finding itself pushed back into a more limited form of protest, on the margins or in the interstices of the political system, a fourth and last protecting itself and shutting itself away in an acute consciousness of the limits of political action.

3. The last question bears upon the relations between social movements and critical action on the lowest level, which is to say, when the two types of protest manifest themselves not through orientations but by negative resistances to a domination. I have termed this indirect manifestation of the social movements violence. The most elementary level of critical action is also violence. Does this mean there are two different types of violence, or does it mean that the most indirect form of expression of the social movements is simply the starting point of the critical action? Violence is in itself an undifferentiated locus where social movement and critical action mingle: response to conflict and response to contradiction. But this is only a theoretical situation. In practice, violence is oriented either toward the social movement to some extent or toward critical action. In order to distinguish between these two types of violence, wre can speak in the second case of terrorism, in the first of uprising.

Terrorism is always directed by a political and doctrinal elite. It is an elementary form of revolutionary action, the main aim of which is to cause a rupture and thus to mobilize any masses subjected to domination and alienation.

An uprising, on the other hand, has as its actor a social movement that is not very integrated, subjected to repression, placed in a situation in which class conflicts are not strongly constituted but directly linked to one social category. An uprising is never spontaneous; it is the work of militants immersed in the mass, whereas terrorism is more the wrork of organized revolutionary nuclei. It often happens that the failure and repression of an uprising leads to the

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appearance of a terrorist action; inversely, the success of terrorism may unleash an uprising. Many internal tensions of revolutionary movements stem from the relations of complementarity and opposition between these two forms of violence.

At this level, as at all others, one can neither separate nor identify social movement and critical action. They are the two faces of a protest that challenges social domination, the relations of the system of historical action and of the social classes.

A critical action separated from a social movement is reduced to nondifferentiated rupture conduct, to the putsch, or to isolatedprophetism. A social movement without critical action degenerates either into political pressure for the institutionalization of conflicts or into mere claims with violence, or into a modernizing current in which class conflict no longer occupies a central role. It would therefore be futile to seek to distinguish between them as though they were two independent orders of fact. Leninism inclines toward being revolutionary action, but it is nonetheless inseparable from the labor movement. The latter exists and goes beyond simple reformism only insofar as it draws strength from the consciousness of exclusion and from a response to repression.

But recognition of these relations of interdependence must be accompanied by two reservations.

In the first place, this interdependence is charged with tensions. This is best shown by the fact that social movement and critical action constantly struggle against each other and each seeks to subordinate the other to its own orientations. The critical action accuses the social movement of being merely defensive, of being incapable of moving outside the field of class relations in which it acts. It proclaims itself the indispensable agent for the formation of a genuine social movement. The Party must control the union. On its side, the social movement mistrusts the critical action. Above all when it is institu­tional or anticipatory. A class movement always wishes to overflow the bounds of a political or ideological action. But it also resists a revolutionary critical action inseparable from the creation of a new powrer. It maintains the priority of opposition and conflict; it mistrusts all ruling elites that take charge of society's management and thus create new instruments of social control.

In the second place, one cannot maintain a complete parallelism between social movement and critical action.

The critical action occupies a central place in the study of social change, whereas the social movement belongs in the realm of synchronic analysis. This indicates the more central importance of the study of social movements. For the critical action, like the domination to which it is a response, fuses all levels of social reality within itself, whereas social movements are situated specifically on the level of class relations. The critical action also tends to

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place state problems above those of society and to identify itself with an actor, with his intentions and his will. If it does not recognize the primacy of the concepts of class relations and social movement, then the study of social change is drawn inevitably toward the philosophy of history, toward the appeal to a meaning of evolution and history. Indeed, it is for this reason that social movements encourage the progress of sociological analysis and make it possible, whereas critical action, although it stimulates it. often contradicts it in the name of its doctrinal necessities.

g. Critical Action of Rulers

These analyses of the critical action, like those of social movements in the previous chapter, have concentrated on popular conduct, not on that of the rulers. The reason is that the response to power, to the established order, to exclusion, and to repression must clearly be looked for on the side of the popular classes. Similarly, as we saw earlier, ruling class action is also less clearly visible when it takes the form of social movement, since it consists very largely in controlling the categories of social practice. Nevertheless, we ought to consider the role of the ruling class in rupture with the social order, and examine how a new ruling class seeks to impose itself. It is legitimate to speak of the critical action of a new ruling class and to distinguish between the forms it takes: revolutionary, institutional, or anticipatory.

Against whom is its criticism directed? From what is it breaking away? Economic actors create new activities if they cross the boundary that separates value-assigned activities from nonvalued activities—thus putting themselves in a marginal position—and also if they draw support from community beliefs which, in contradistinction to the dominant system, do assign a value to innovatory conduct. These two conditions correspond to the two aspects of the principle of identity in a popular critical action: consciousness of exclusion, of nonidentity, and community defense. The innovator situates himself in a field of exclusion, because he is undertaking activities the dominant class cannot undertake without derogation, activities that are assigned a low value by the educational system or that meet with resistance from a dominant class anxious to maintain its protective barriers.

But the excluded or the marginal must also draw support, not from a preexisting community, such as a popular class, but from a community built around the fundamental principles of the dominant order, therefore around an old cultural model. This elite, in constituting itself a class, is placing itself outside the dominant system both by marginalization and by its funda­mentalism. It is this combination that gives this deviant group a dominant class vocation. It too falls back on the past as onto a trampoline that will launch it into the future. The tradition stemming from Weber has linked the

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development of capitalism with a Protestant ethic seen as according with the austerity required for capitalist accumulation. But instead of stressing the interdependence between an ethic and an economic practice, one can on the contrary stress the tension between economic initiatives marginal to the most highly valued practices, and a taking over of metasocial warrants of the social order leading to consciousness of a societal mission. Marginal initiative and cultural fundamentalism are the budding forms of the management-domination duo of the new upper class in formation.

The objective of this new class is divided into two orientations, as in the case of the popular class's critical action. The latter is aiming at a modernized society, but this general progressivism is always accompanied by the motive role of a political and doctrinal elite that wrenches the critical action free from immobilism or repression.

The same hold good here. The new ruling class acts in the name of the modernization and opening up of society: barriers must be removed, creativity freed, markets and exchanges opened up. At the same time it is powered by a doctrinal and state-centered elite capable both of managing the breakaway action and of avoiding the slide back into the past that may result from the element of cultural fundamentalism.

The diagram presented in figure 41 sums up this analysis of the critical action of a ruling class in formation.

popular critical action

social marginality openness

/

cultural fundamentalism I state-centered and

rupture doctrinal elite

/ 0 T

Figure 41

The analogy with that representing the popular critical action is clear. In this way one avoids the difficulty noted by Baechler in Les origines du

capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). There is no need here to explain the formation of capitalism by social or cultural conducts that presuppose the existence of capitalism.

Social transformation appears linked, on the contrary, to a double movement away from a closed social and cultural organization. On the one hand the advance toward the margins of society, on the other the return to a cultural model that is a purged version of an old one and therefore sought in the past.

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Just as a colonized nation goes back to the wellspring of its culture in quest of the strength that will enable it to oppose domination and reappropriate the economic forces that have already transformed it, so a new ruling class escapes from the present by legitimating its new economic action in the name of values that have been sought out deep in its society's traditions. Hence the role of religion in the formation of mercantile society, of the chic model in the formation of industrial capitalism, of historicism and evolutionism in the formation of postindustrial society. It is not modernity that can explain modernization; it is the association of deviancy with the return to origins.

It would be pointless here to go back over the analysis of institutional or anticipatory critical action. The action of the ruling class in formation may find its origin on the political level alone, when it is not faced with a strict control of the social organization by the dominant bloc but only with an institutional blockage. It will then draw its strength from the forces excluded from the political system that are threatening it from outside, not in order to take over its management but in order to blow up the institutional barriers opposing its influence or its hegemony.

Lastly, if there is a "left-wing" intelligentsia, championing the excluded and repressed popular masses, there also exists a "right-wing" intelligentsia that justifies the formation of a new ruling class with its protests against the contradictions of present society. The technocratic movement formed at the time of the great depression is an often studied example of this, and one whose prolongations were important after the war.

These reflections, albeit brief, are intended to indicate that change through rupture is not the province of the popular classes alone. The revolutionary event is after all the conjunction of old class struggles with the critical action of both a new popular class and a new ruling class. It did not require the alliance but simply the conjunction of peasants, lower urban orders, and bourgeoisie to make up the French Revolution. The action of all those classes could not be simultaneous, could not be openly integrated in a political arena.

It is as a general rule the old class conflict that is transcended first of all with the overthrow of the old dominant class; then the two critical actions at once unite and vie with one another until a new ruling class is established, either directly or in succession to a ruling revolutionary elite.

h. From Exclusion to Rupture

All these forms of rupture conduct are agents of social transformation. Rejected by the dominant order, they link contestation with modernization. Opposed to power is a historicity which, being no longer a stake in social relations, becomes transcendence, change.

This is sometimes expressed by saying that the closedness of relations of production sets them in opposition to the movement of the forces of

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production and therefore enables popular contestation to ally itself with modernization: Lenin's "power of the Soviets plus electrification/'

Such is the first great mechanism of social change. It is always present, for no completely open society exists, and increases in importance the more the social organization is in crisis, the political system blocked, the dominant class conservative.

Synchronic analysis defines the various systems and their general relations. It also explains in particular the nature of class relations and social movements.

Diachronic analysis, having recognized the internal temporality of each of the systems, their oscillation between past and future, throws light on the effects of the dissociation of power from instrumentality, of hegemony from the political market, of management from class domination. Any dedialec-ticization of a social system replaces a relation of opposition with the separation of included and excluded, normal and deviant. It is these excluded forces that become agents of change, at least to the degree in which they avoid disorganization by their alliance with a historicity itself excluded from the present by the immobility of power, and thanks to the anticipatory, prophetic, and revolutionary role of the critical elites.

This process of change is distinct from the internal transformations of society as they are now about to be analyzed. Yet this does not mean that it is a process of change coming from the outside. It is not a modification of the environment that obliges a system to readapt itself; it is not a crisis that destroys the established order. For these external factors may explain the disorganization of a society, or even its succumbing to a general crisis, or to a collapse into barbarianism, but, if one places history at the heart of social reality, the change of historicity cannot be anything other than the work of actors taking over historicity itself, the work of society upon itself. Such is the principal meaning of revolutionary thought or of analogous types of critical thought: crisis can be transcended by popular creativity; blockage and disorganization also liberate from alienation and make possible a transformation of present negation into future affirmation, on condition at least that opposition elites are managing society's dialectical change.

But how are these elements of critical action linked one to another; how does the strength drawn from the past become construction of a future? We have said that it is exclusion and rupture that unite the principles of identity and totality, defense of the past and invention of the future. But may they not separate them rather than uniting them, or at least lead to a confused and provisional coalition? There are peasants who want to get their land back; a revolutionary elite organizes the struggle against the colonizer and then takes over management of a national development or turns into a new bourgeoisie: in this case the critical action disintegrates.

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These questions and these doubts oblige us to mark out the limits of critical action. And above all to be more precise about its relations with social movements. Critical action is not constituted unless it is linked to a social movement belonging to the system of historical action in which the domina­tion occurs. In cases where the domination involved is being exerted by industrial capitalism, for example, the conjunction of peasants robbed of their land and revolutionary elite does not give rise to a development movement unless the labor movement is recognized as having an essential role.

The Communist revolutions occurred in societies where poor peasants were in the vast majority; they were led by a revolutionary intelligentsia stemming from the middle classes, but in the name of the working class nevertheless, even when, as in the Chinese case, there was discontinuity between the worker uprising and the organization of a revolutionary action occurring in the midst of the peasant masses.

In the absence of a direct link, a link both practical and ideological, with a more "advanced" social movement, fundamental social and political transformations can occur, but the critical action falls apart. The themes of national independence, creation of a socialist society, and economic develop­ment intersect without joining. Nationalist rulers mobilize the people against the foreigner and the privileged category associated with him, but this is not enough to produce the politicization Fanon speaks of, the creation of a popular movement.

As far as the critical action of ruling classes is concerned, the role of social movements cannot be exactly the same. But is the new ruling class not also bound to be linked to a social movement, which is to say engaged in a struggle against a popular movement that is threatening it, so that this new class must also be participating directly in the relations of the central classes?

Critical action can never be independent; it is not dynamic unless it is connected to social conflicts and movements.

Social movements are not the actors of change, but they are the catalytic agent of the forces of change. And this observation, which governs the study of critical actions, is equally justified when one considers the changes that are the product of reforms.

C. Conduct of Internal Transformation

A society capable of being entirely analyzed as an organization would tend toward immobility, toward the stability of norms, or toward bureaucratiza­tion. On t)ie other hand, the stronger the dominion of the field of historicity over institutions and organizations, the more a society is engaged in

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innovations and dynamic conflicts. The principal problem to be considered is, therefore, What is the state of class relations that makes possible the transformation of a system of historical action? In other words, how do class relations produce social development? """

a. Strength

Our analysis of the social classes set out from the idea that the opposition between ruling class and popular class is the translation into terms of historical actors of historicity itself, which is to say of society's capacity for transcending itself by its own action. The ruling class is the actor that takes charge of historicity. This being so, it speaks and acts in the name of society as a whole. Yet is also remains a particular actor and consequently identifies historicity with its own interests and with its own ideology, an ideology that defines its dominant role and provokes the contestation of the popular class, which then appeals to historicity against the domination of the ruling class.

The result is that the force of historicity, the capacity society has for self-transformation, is determined first of all by the strength of the ruling class. It must transcend its dominant role and overcome the defensive or contestatory actions of the popular class.

Development presupposes a "potential difference" in society, a concentra­tion of the power of decision. It is never society that develops of itself. It is developed by a ruling class or by popular leaders combining their power of management with their mobilizing role. One of the recurrent features of history is the popular Utopia of self-development, of harmonized develop­ment, of reconciliation, of continuity and change. Such Utopias are justified as the dreams of those under domination; they cannot realize a social transformation. The new man cannot be produced directly by the old man. The transition from one to the other can be operated only by a ruling class or by the leaders of a revolutionary critical action.

The supremacy of the ruling class over the dominant class depends first of all upon the functioning of the political system. No active ruling class can exist unless the poliiical system is open, so as to prevent the transformation of the ruling class into a dominant class.

The upper class is increasingly ruling as the political system is more strongly constituted, and as the dialectic of its unity and plurality functions more concretely. In the same way the most favorable situation on the level of the organizations is that in which power and instrumentality are in closer relations, relations of both complementarity and opposition.

On the political level, this signifies that the more popular contestation is institutionalized, the more the ruling class becomes separate from the dominant class and, more particularly, from its alliance with the fractions of the old dominant class. An industrial capitalist class, for example, is at once

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a category of entrepreneurs and a category of the bourgeoisie, which tends to reinforce the continuity of its domination by allying itself to fractions of the mercantile bourgeoisie or even fractions of the landowning class. Working-class pressure relayed by the unions, by political parties, by movements of opinion tends to weaken the mechanisms of reproduction of the social order and to develop the role of production of social order filled by the ruling class.

The rise in real wages in industry during the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, can be seen as an essential factor in the technical progress by means of which industrialists sought to maintain their profits by diminishing the proportion of the product price represented by wages.

The relation of popular pressure and ruling action of upper class is not a one-way thing. The ruling class produces economic transformations that also augment the capacity of wage-earners to exert pressure.

The important thing to recognize is that the double dialectic of the social classes functions as a unit. Ruling action weakenes defensive action; contestatory action weakens the dominant class.

b. Mobilization

Return to the double dialectic of the social classes leads to the conclusion that the ruling class's capacity for action can throw light on only one of the faces of development. An all-powerful ruling class can only identify historicity completely with its own existence and consequently transform itself into a dominant class.

Development does not only presuppose the accumulation of resources and the capacity for investment; it also presupposes the widening of the home market, the spread of internal communications and often of external exchanges too, the participation of the greatest number in the forms of social organization. All of which defines the term mobilization taken in all its aspects: it measures the value of communications in a society, its "moral density."

But the level of mobilization cannot be reduced to a set of indicators of the internal communications within a society.

The important thing is to know whether a society provides its members with a communication capability superior or equal to the needs of its reproduction alone.

A high degree of mobilization may reach only to a first level, that of an offer of symbols in excess of the needs of organizational functioning. For example, buying on time or advertising are spurs to increased consumption. The offer of education can itself be of this type. Corresponding to a second level we find the indicators of political mobilization, first among which is political news. On the thrid level is communication directly linked on the one hand to personal and collective creativity—participation in the orientations

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of the system of historical action—and on the other to the capacity to recognize class actors and their conflicts.

The highest level of mobilization is therefore that which, instead of permitting "participation*' in the objects and practices of society, establishes the most direct relation with historicity and therefore analyzes society, differentiates the system of historical action from class relations, from institutional mechanisms, and from organizational functioning.

The level of mobilization depends on the functioning of concrete class relations, that is, on their institutional and organizational conditions. An organizational crisis limits communications, reduces expectations, limits the extent of social interactions. A closed political system puts out very little information, engenders attitudes of passivity, of withdrawal, or of narrow conformism. A more dominant than ruling upper class imposes a cultural and social order that fixes everyone's place and legitimate expectations.

Nineteenth-century European capitalism usually gave rise to a ruling class of entrepreneurs who occupied a sufficiently hegemonic position to dispose of resources and of a power more than sufficient to ensure that it enjoyed considerable profits and to give it a motive role in growth. As opposed to this, it neither experienced nor tolerated anything more than a limited mobiliza­tion. Contestation was repressed, the relative openness of the political system was very slow in coming, since for the larger part of the century the vast majority of British workers did not have the right to vote, and mobilization via consumption itself appeared on the scene rather late in the day. Richard Hoggart (in The Uses of Literacy* London: Chatto & Windus, 1957) has depicted the lasting social and cultural isolation of the British working class. Although it is false, economically, to say that the working class was a sort of gypsy encampment outside the life of the nation, since it was in fact the source of capitalist profit and therefore at the center rather than the periphery of the production system, this description is accurate insofar as it evokes their low level of mobilization. Maurice Halbwachs, in the early twentieth century (La classe ouvriere et les niveaux de vie, Paris: Alcan, 1913), was still able to viewr this isolation as a fundamental social fact. His explanation, however disputable it may be, is at least worth remembering as a sign of that isolation. For does that isolation not explain the relative slowness of European industrialization, and the role of the apparatuses of social domination?

When mobilization is slight, defensive conduct preponderates in the popular class oyer contestation, and the latter, being difficult to organize, only surfaces in the form of violence, the consequence of which was usually increased repression rather than reform.

Mobilization does not attain higher levels among the popular elements

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unless the social organization is not in crisis, the political system open, and the upper class more ruling than dominant, in particular because it is a rising class still in opposition to the old dominant class and its hegemony.

Popular mobilization, like the action of the ruling class, is an effort to achieve direct control over the system of historical action.

The interdependence of the strength of the ruling class and popular mobilization reveals the dynamic side of the double dialectic of the social classes: the superiority of the ruling action-contestory action pair over the dominant action-defensive action pair. A society in a state of development cannot be dominanted by the repression-violence pair; it calls for initiative and contestation.

Thus an open class conflict is associated with strong historicity in a society, with its having the capacity to act upon itself. But, one must object, does this explain the changing of historicity, the transition from one system of historical action to another?

It is at this point that we must recall our first observations about the temporality of the field of historicity. The class conflict acts agains the immobilism of domination and defensiveness. It does not reinforce a system of norms and beliefs, but rather the society's capacity for action upon itself. This means that it unbalances the society, tilting it toward the future and no longer toward the past. It provokes a progress of social activity, a growth that enters into an ever increasing state of tension with the social order.

The dymanic of class relations reduces the forces of immobility, shakes the foundation of power and its values, the hegemony, the role of the dominant class, and therefore in a general way all the mechanisms of social control. Change is thus introduced at the top and at the bottom of the social edifice at the same time. For the weakening of order and traditions simultaneously with the progress of the forces of production transform social experience, and make possible the appearance of a new state of historicity, which gives meaning to a situation that is itself new.

Openness of class relations prevents the fusion of a power with historicity. At the same time, the opposing actors by their very conflict are strengthening social activity, the forces of production. Certainly this conflict has limits, those of the system of historical action within which it is occurring, but the more open it is, the less the field of historicity overlaps with social organization and the more the practical and theoretical conditions are created for the transition to a new field of historicity. On the one hand, the growth of the forces of production, on the other, the invention of new forms of historicity. The link between the two is provided by the innovations that transform the organizations, the institutions, and the system of historical action itself.

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c. Innovation

1. At the organizational level the conflict between managers and executants can lead to two opposite processes. On the one hand what Alvin W. Gouldner, in Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1954), sees as repressive bureaucratization. This is a vicious circle in which defensive opposition to the established order leads to a reinforcement of the rules and repression, which in its turn gives rise to further defensive reactions and a widening gap between formal and informal organization. This mechanism is particularly common in administrations, which is to say when the organization is linked only distantly to the field of historicity. Defensive claims are made seeking to obtain guarantees by means of new regulations. The system of regulations that results leads by its very rigidity to maladjust­ments and provokes further defensive reactions, as Crozier has shown in his work. The opposite case is when the confrontation of managers and managed leads to the institutionalization of organizational conflicts. The functioning of the organization breaks out of its proper boundaries and penetrates into the political area. This politicization works both ways. It indicates the penetration of political forces into the organizations, but also the constitution of an autonomous political system within the organization. It is the mixture of these two processes that gives its ambiguity to the subject of political strikes.

This term is used to indicate that a labor conflict is determined by objectives that are those of political forces, and thus that the strike's reason for being must not be searched for where it actually breaks out but in the political arena itself. Not that this means that such a strike is artificial and that there is no relation between the claims made and political pressure. But it does signify that the aim of the strike is to modify the decision-making system within the enterprise, to obtain certain rights for the unions, for example, to force a management to negotiate, to modify the work rate, the mode of remuneration, or the conditions of recruitment, promotion, or laying-off. The frequent discussion, especially in Britain, of industrial democracy—a term that links a political term with an organizational one—indicates the formation of a new political field. The gap between the two levels of social reality is partially abolished, and this communication makes it possible for changes arising within the organization to modify the political system as a whole.

2. Analogous mechanisms are observable on the institutional level. Here too the political hegemony of the dominant class and the pluralism of political forces can combine to produce a veritable political bureaucratization and lend a growing autonomy to political rhetoric. Many political forces may increase their influence and obtain advantages while at the same time the

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hegemony is being consolidated on its side. Political integration is then nothing more than an instrument for the consolidation of social domination.

But opposed to this political bureaucratization there is state development and, more precisely, state interventionism.

Just as organizational relations can penetrate into the political field, so institutional relations can penetrate into the field of historicity. The state is an agent of communication between the various levels of social reality, especially between historicity and the institutions. This communication is two-way. The dominant class establishes its hegemony over the political system through the intermediary of the state. If that hegemony is total, the state apparatus substitutes itself for the political system destroyed by the disappearance of the pluralism of political forces.

State interventionism, on the contrary, is the penetration of political decisions into the field of class relations, and even beyond that into the system of historical action.

It cannot be the normal result of the functioning of the political system itself, since that system is situated within a Field of historicity. It is produced by the conflict between the hegemony and "barbarian" political forces, particularly an institutional critical action, but it is necessary that the conflict be taken over by the political system, which seeks to resolve it in order to preserve its own autonomy and even its own existence. This is why state interventionism is always both institutionalization and also disinstitu-tionalization. It disorganizes the political system even as it reinforces it. These terms, which may seem somewhat abstract, are simply descriptive of, for example, the functioning of parliamentary institutions.

Such institutions not only have to manage the confrontation of political forces and the institutionalization of their conflicts, they are also subjected to the pressure exerted by the dominant class and by the forces of social contestation, which are both, in their very principle, extra-institutional. The representative, the deputy, always talks the language of politics and that of the social forces at the same time. This situation is easily caricatured by showing two members of opposing parties progressing in the course of a few seconds from discussion to invective, from negotiation to dramatic denuncia­tions. The state intervenes in class relations when the autonomy of the institutional system within the framework of a class domination is threatened.

The action of the state cannot then be identified with the interests of the dominant class. It is intervening both on the level of class relations and on the level of the crisis.

Nothing, it must be stressed yet again, is responsible for the maintenance, for the internal social control, of the system of historical action, of the dialectic of its elements. Never does a society produce a system of historical action in equilibrium, even though institutions and organizations tend to lend it a certain coherence and a certain inertia. State interventionism

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therefore acts to reduce the asynchrony of the elements, to "modernize" some of them or to recognize their transformation. The conflict of the historical actors splits the system of historical action apart. Only the intervention of a new actor, rising from the political system up toward the field of historicity, can recompose its unity and consequently cause it to advance toward a new form. Just as the state as agent of a hegemony tends to maintain the system of historical action in its present form, so the interven­tionist state pushes it toward a new coherence.

3. We ought probably to envisage a final stage in this ascent, that which leads up from field of historicity to the components of historicity.

Let us consider the case of a system of historical action that is the stake of real class conflicts. Class ideologies and Utopias are in direct confrontation, leaving no autonomy to the agencies of historicity. These agencies cannot disengage themselves from the opposing pressures in order to maintain or reestablish their autonomy except by escaping forward and upward, which is to say by inventing a mutation of the components of historicity. If the capitalist class and the working class are fighting for the ownership of historicism, if knowledge is taking the shape of opposing ideologies, then a study of systems arises all the more naturally because it is an attempt to understand what lies outside the clash of those opposing wills. In the same way the conflict of labor and capital causes the themes of management and development to appear.

It is in expanding societies, and those in which social conflicts are most open, that the components of a new historicity are invented.

d. Domination and Innovation

Let us summarize this analysis of innovation. It rests upon the dynamic role of class conflicts. In a closed society it is the opposition between domination and class defense that commands the synchronic analysis of social relations. It does not lead to change but to immobility. And this immobility provokes the appearance of critical actions. Insofar as the society is open, on the contrary, it is the opposition between ruling class and contestatory class that occupies the central place. This opposition in its turn 'opens" society up even further, renders it dynamic by shaking the dominion of values and absolute power within the social organization, and that of the hegemony of the dominant bloc in the political system.

How does it happen, then, that the ruling class gains the upper hand over the dominant class, instead of transforming itself into an oligarchy? And how is it that the popular class attacks class domination rather than withdrawing into defensiveness? How does the political system come to be open? Why doesn't organizational power stifle the progress of technique? Since we are concerned with explaining the state of relations between the

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various levels of society, and of class relations too. no analysis of social structure can provide answers to such questions. It is at the furthest remove of all from the field of historicity that the answer is to be found, in the state's relations with other states, in its situation within a specific economic and political conjuncture.

No entirely internal explanation of change can exist. For all structural change meets the resistance of a social structure. Hence the importance of the state's role, of its conquests, of its might, of its dominion over the environment, of its capacity to impose its interests and its decisions on others.

A society is not open unless it is conquering, dominant, and exploiting weaker societies. An open society is first of all a dominant society that establishes an unequal exchange with other societies, or that can resist competition or foreign dominion. And it is the state that here plays the principal role by maintaining the conditions of accumulation by its force. It is this external disequilibrium that gives the advantage to the conflict of rulers against contesters over that of dominants and the defensive popular class.

External domination and competition open up class relations and work toward dissociation of a social order being challenged from innovations and forms of economic activity undergoing modernization. The conjunction of modernization and innovation produces development from within.

Thus the mutation of society is always linked with the central role of domination. Either it arises from revolt against an internal domination and it is critical action that provokes the mutation, or else it arises from a domination exercised externally to itself by the society in question.

The two processes of development are therefore not separable. It is because certain societies transform themselves by innovation that others are transformed by rupture, for the first dominate the second and hold them in dependence to them. The dominant society is less heterogeneous, less dualist, and therefore liberates itself partly from the weight of an obsolescent domination and power by exporting them, while at the same time importing resources and possiblities for growth. The development of the dominant societies produces underdevelopment, which is to say obstacles to develop­ment, in the societies they hold in dependence. This domination is not important only on account of the economic advantages it brings to the dominants; it also opens up class relations and encourages innovation and modernization.

e. Development

The dynamism of class relations, the rise of innovations, and conquest do not suffice to explain a structural change. The invention of a new field of historicity cannot be the product of actions defined within a system of

420 Chapter Seven

historical action, of class relations, or of political institutions, and the intervention of conquest, although it explains the leap forward, cannot account for the appearance of a new "direction." Historicity is not a will but a direction given to activities, thus becoming the "design" of social practices.

The translation to a new field of historicity therefore presupposes the appearance of new forms of activity, new technological situations trans­forming the human environment and "nature."

The opening up of class relations makes possible the appearance of new situations that have not been either willed or thought, and that are the object of a reflection that always takes the triple form of historicity: the quest for a new model of knowledge, new forms of accumulation, a new cultural model. A dominated and blocked society cannot achieve development unless a willed action oriented toward seizure of state power decides to catch up lost time, abolish dependency, achieve the collective reappropriation of the instruments of growth. A "central" society, on the contrary, situated on the highest level—at a given moment—of historicity, cannot perform its mutation unless its institutional and ideological controls are weak and its capacity not only for innovation but also for invention, for the discovery of new forms of historicity, is great. It is at this point that synchronic analysis directly commands that of change. Because society is a system, class relations and the functioning of institutions and organizations can produce new forms of activity, which can in their turn produce a new historicity, which will then extend its dominion over social practice by way of a new system of historical action and new class relations.

In order for this spiral of change to work, the tendencies toward reproduction must be constantly weakened, and society must be kept open by its own conquests; but an entirely open society, apart from being very hard to conceive of, would be in danger of self-immobilization, of absorbing its historicity into its institutions, and even its institutions into its organization. It is the presence of domination, of the hegemony of the dominant bloc, and of the critical actions these give rise to, that thrusts society forward. So that the two processes of change just analyzed are never entirely separable one from the other.

Class relations are both open and closed. If they are completely closed, society is no longer capable of anything but reproducing an apparatus of domination; it cannot produce its own transformation. If they are completely open, then those class relations are completely institutionalized and bureaucratization is triumphant in political system and organizations alike. The reign of ideology is replaced by that of rhetoric. Development is the bringing of rupture and innovation, of change from within and change from without—"without" meaning that which is excluded and repressed—into dialectic relation.

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Development is also, and more fundamentally, social interpretation of growth. Rupture and innovation cannot be combined unless they are supported by growth and, more precisely, by the quantitative evolution of social activity7, that is, of social exchanges. The action of qualitative transformation, whether it be cultural innovation or revolutionary critical action, must be linked to this growth in order to transcend the closedness of society or its fragmentation. The material evolution of social activity, detached from social conflicts, is apprehended as creativity and thus as pure historicity. This is why all movements linked to development have a consciousness of going in the direction of history or. more modestly, of being agents of modernization.

If society is dominated by the power of a hegemonic class, development rests upon the combination of growth with critical action. If on the contrary, class relations are relatively open, then it is based on the association of innovation—reforms—and social movements (see figure 42). And to the table in figure 42 we must add another, showing the agents of nondevelop-ment (see figure 43).

ruling action coniesiatory action

closed society

open society

hegemony critical action

social movement

Figure 42

ruling action contestu tor\' uc tion

closed society

open society

reproduction

political equilibrium

withdrawal into community

defensive

Figure 43

I term closed society one in which the upper class controls the system of historical action almost absolutely and replaces it with its own ideology, the sum of the counterelements it produces. It is likewise one in which this domination is expressed in a hegemony and in absolute power, a situation not separable from an organizational crisis and an institutional blockage. An open society, on the contrary, is one in which the class conflict—of which the system of historical action is the stake—is openly expressed, and in which institutions and organizations function as subordinate but autonomous systems.

In a closed society the mechanisms of internal change have only slight importance. The social organization is modified only by mechanisms that

422 Chapter Seven

can be termed, on various counts, external. It can be competition, the extension of exchanges, or an advance of the forces of production stimulated by the needs of a belligerent or expansion policy. This type of society also sees the appearance of initiatives stemming from revolts within the manage­ment apparatus. The absence of flexibility leads those adversely affected by the blockage to act by hiving themselves off from the central organization. In this way, the French university system, placed in a situation in which the progress of research was becoming more and more of a priority, found para-university organizations developing, work conditions being better the further one moved from the center, and the creation of a "marginal" activity being the best way of protecting oneself against the bureaucratization at the center. These initiatives may be forced to emigrate if the closedness of the society or organization in question is too complete. In this type of society it is difficult for contestation to find its way up from organization to historicity, so that organizational claims become ruptures and give rise to the various types of critical action analyzed earlier. These factors of development encounter the resistance of a power occupied above all else with its own reproduction, and clash with the fragmenting effects of exclusion, whether in the form of social disorganization or the formation of ghettoes interiorizing their exclusion. An open society, on the other hand, gives more importance to internal processes of change. The transcending of conflicts on one level leads to an intervention on the level above. Organizational conflict leads to a new institutionalization, political conflict to state interventionism. The tearing apart of the system of historical action between the conflicting classes leads to cultural innovation culminating in the invention of new forms of components of historicity.

These innovations coexist with social movements, which provide fuel for institutionalization or interventionism but do not become identical with them since they are directly or indirectly expressing the class conflict. The linking of these two ideas shows that development is always the combination of a factor pertaining to synchronic analysis and another directly oriented toward change.

A social movement is not oriented toward change. It inspires a class conflict that belongs to a field of historicity and cannot go outside it. The same is true of growth, which is situated inside a system of historical action and class relations.

Innovation on the one hand, critical action on the other, are both, on the contrary, agents of change.

A process of development, defined as the whole made up of the elements composing the two opposing systems presented in the tables above, therefore always combines the movement specific to historicity, the efficiency of society's action upon itself with the reactions to the forces of immobility

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present in any concrete society, bounded by frontiers, organized around a power and its values, or fragmented by debates impossible of resolution.

At the most general level of analysis, therefore, one must go beyond the opposition between endogenous and exogenous factors of change, since any collectivity in a state of change is a social organization at the same time as belonging to a field of historicity.

When one considers a society, an assembly of the different levels of analysis within a political and territorial unity, one must seek for the explanation of change at the greatest possible distance from the mechanisms of the various social systems' functioning: an organization tends to maintain its equilibria and its norms; a system of historical action or one of class relations does not have the capacity to transform itself on its own.

This is why change can never be entirely understood without recourse to the role of violence and force, exerted above all by the state: conquest of external territories and markets, power struggle within the context of international rivalry, economic decisions imposed in an authoritarian manner in the name of the national interests. Whether the state is dominant or dominated, it still intervenes in a decisive manner. The study of classes and social movements orients us toward knowledge of society; the study of social change and critical actions toward knowledge of the state. The two approaches are complementary and opposed, just as social movements and critical actions are.

The mistake would be to isolate the role of struggle, as if change were the work of a personage, public or private, engaged in competition or merciless conquest.

The role of struggle is central only because it links the social conditions of change together. Whatever the situation under consideration, those condi­tions can become separated from one another unless an actor gathers them together into a will for change.

In a dominated, blocked, disorganized society, defensive reactions on the one side, and reactions of assimilation and parasitism on the other, tend to prevent change. Only violence, and particularly revolutionary war, but also repression exerted by state power, can link attachment to the past with the will to construct a future. Are certain newly independent nations not hampered in their development by the fact that they have not won their independence by military means, by the fact that they have not therefore constituted a ruling elite associated with a high degree of popular mobiliza­tion, and have not eliminated the dominion of peripheral capitalism?

In a dominant and more open society, modernization and innovation do not naturally couple to produce a mutation. Conquest, the search for new frontiers and new empires, is always present

Every structural change rests upon the tension and the discrepancy

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between historicity and organization. And even then it is essential that this gap shall not become a sundering and a contradiction. There must be an actor or a set of actors giving unity and dynamism to the situation, either by creating a voluntarist organization struggling for the reconquest of historicity, or by reforming social organization and the institutions in order to adapt them to the demands of economic activity and the new orientations of historicity.

Having analyzed the principal modes of social change—by rupture and by reform—we must now step back and take a more general look at the types of development, the various ways in which an organized political collectivity embarks upon the transition from one societal type to another.

D. Forms of Development

a. Negative and Positive Conditions of Development

The form development takes depends upon the relation between the resistance put up by the past and the impulse toward the future, between the state of the field of historicity and that of the institutions and the organizations.

It is never class domination alone that resists change. It is domination converted into hegemony and power, and consequently the union of both present and past dominant forces. Blockage of institutions occurs when the decision mechanisms are dominated by social forces, principles, and modes of action inherited from the past and no longer contemporary with the field of historicity. This institutional time lag may be due to the hegemony of an old dominant class, to an archaic role on the part of the state, or to a political bureaucratization artificially maintaining outdated and inefficient forms of institutional conflict processing. In all these cases the political system lags behind the field of historicity.

The same observation holds good for organizations. They are in crisis if power is lagging behind instrumentality, if the norms established by power are not contemporary with the internal and external demands presented to the organization.

Development becomes difficult when the dead has a stranglehold on the living. The weakening of old unifying principles and, therefore, of the social order's metasocial warrants is one condition of development. The other negative condition is the development of exchanges, the weakening of barriers, the extension of trade.

The positive conditions, on the contrary, are situated mainly on the level of class relations. We have already defined these conditions as being on the one hand the capacity for initiative on the part of the ruling class, and on the other the level of mobilization of the popular class. They may appear as separate phenomena or be partly mingled with state interventionism.

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If one stresses the negative conditions only, as Jean Baechler does, for example (in Lesorigines du capitalisme, Paris: Gallimard, 1971), then one is led to hang one's explanation on an assertion foreign to sociology—the assertion that there is a natural tendency to change, a will to become richer, to improve one's status, to invent, that will spontaneously realize itself as soon as the barriers impeding it are removed.

Inversely, if one emphasizes the positive conditions only, one traps oneself in an artificial society, a society without inertia, in other words without institutions and without organization, and one is in danger of confusing development with discourses about the necessity for it or the promises it holds.

It is preferable to examine the permutations between positive and negative conditions, and the consequences they entail for the mode of development.

If the negative conditions are favorable, development can be achieved by the action of the ruling class. The latter will make use of popular mobilization only to the degree compatible with its own Utopia. It will identify itself with totality, which enables it to adopt a humanitarian language, and even a number of humanitarian measures, while at the same time limiting popular participation in accordance with its own needs as ruling class. The capitalist class, when it proclaimed the freedom of labor and abolished the guilds and slavery, was simply serving its own interests and repressing those who interpreted freedom of labor as the right to negotiate the conditions of labor collectively and thus to unite. And this, as we have seen, has the consequence of producing a critical action. //, on the other hand, the social order is less open, the political system not flexible, the social organization in crisis, and if the dominant bloc is therefore weighing more heavily upon the rulers' initiatives, then development presupposes a greater degree of popular mobilization, whether in the form of social movements, state interventionism, or the institutionalization of organizational conflicts. Lastly, if the institutional blockage and the organiza­tional crisis stem from causes that lie outside the society in question, if the dominant class is itself the dependent of an external domination, the popular mobilization will have to substitute itself for the ineffectual ruling class, seize the state apparatus, and make it into the instrument of a total and voluntarist transformation of society. The society then becomes more closed, in order to limit the consequences of unequal exchanges, and draws support not from the old metasocial warrants of the social order but from an integration that welds historicity, institutions, and organizations together as strongly as possible into a general mobilization.

Societies belonging to the first type I term liberal, those coming into the second category contractual and those corresponding to the third voluntarist

Analysis of the positive and negative conditions of development seems to be more directly applicable to liberal situations. Is this a result of the fact that I am observing the various modes of development from a base within a society that can be diagnosed at a glance as liberal, or at any rate as being very far

426 Chapter Seven

removed from a China or a Cuba? What limitations and distortions does this situation impose on me?

The answer to that question has to be in two parts. 1. It is indeed in liberal societies that analysis of situations is easiest,

because it is in them that the dominion of voluntarism and its doctrine is weakest. Since the intellectual is required to participate relatively little in political action, he finds himself in a position to analyze society, at least to the degree in which the class conflict is open, and insofar as he himself makes an unremitting effort to keep outside the dominion of the dominant class. To say that the observer in such a society is tied to the dominant ideology would come to the same thing as rejecting sociology itself, it would be introducing a Zhdanovian type of opposition between bourgeois science and proletarian science, thus sacrificing all striving after knowledge to the ideology of a totalitarian dominant class.

2. But such an attitude would be contradicting itself if it led to a naturalization of society's functioning and change processes. Such an intellectual attitude would in fact be identifying itself with the ideology of the ruling class, which always tends to view the state of society defined by its power as natural.

The liberal mode of development is no more natural than any other, can no more be understood than any other without a consideration of the roles that domination, hegemony, repression, and violence play in it. The removal of past barriers does not set free the forces of production, natural energies, latent needs. Development is an action and the result of social relations. Behind the "natural" mechanisms of the market one must always seek out the domination of a class, its control of accumulation, the dominion of its ideology, its recourse to force in order to establish and maintain its power.

It is here that the situations furthest removed from liberalism regain the advantage. It is on the basis of those situations that criticism of the dominant ideology and its naturalism is most easily developed. It is always tempting when speaking of nineteenth-century Europe or twentieth-century America to place nations on scales of development or underdevelopment and to preach to the underdeveloped a spirit of patience and initiative that will enable them to haul themselves up the rungs of growth and modernization. This is to forget the existence of the relations of domination and interdependence that unite developed and underdeveloped, colonialism, imperialism, the unequal exchange, the conquest of internal markets, and the destruction of local and national cultures. Only the contestation of the dominated, inside and outside liberal societies, which are societies of domination, can keep alive the necessity and the possibility of an analysis of social situations in terms of social relations, hence in sociological terms.

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The liberal societies are an observatory from which one can best conduct any analysis of the elements of a social process. But in order to understand the way in which they are combined by the action of historical actors, one must give precedence to the study of the most voluntarist societies. The use of such terms as liberal, voluntarist, contractual must not make us forget that the liberal societies are also dominant, that voluntarism is a response to dependence, and that interventionism is linked with an intermediate situation of strong internal heterogeneity.

b. Voluntarist Societies

The situations to which this development process corresponds vary according to the proportions in which an external domination is combined with an institutional blockage or an organizational crisis.

In dependent societies, several societal types are found closely associated, and the social movements belong both to a certain economic system and to another, more archaic one, not on account of a dualism juxtaposing the modern and the traditional, but on account of dependence itself, which imposes the maintenance or ever the aggravation of underdevelopment in the interests of the dominion exerted by the dominant power over a part of the economy, precious metals, raw materials, or, more recently, manufactured goods.

It is tempting to avoid using the concept of social movement in such a case and to refer the situation directly to an analysis of critical action against the dependence and underdevelopment that are blocking social change. No doubt in this situation the role of the critical action is a determining one, the action of the political parties, of armies, of geopolitical conjunctures, extremely important. But one must also define social movements in societies where class relations cannot be isolated from relations of dependence. Against this, one need hardly point out that it is mistaken to look in such situations for the direct equivalent of the social movements in a nondualist and therefore nondependent society. It is absurd, for example, to reduce a Latin-American situation to the confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat, as though dependence were no more than a secondary circumstance. Social movements and critical actions are inevitably mingled.

1. Such movements must bring together three orientations of action. In the first place, there is a class orientation. There can be no dialectic of

initiative and mobilization if there are no real class relations in the society in question, if there is no national ruling class, if there are nothing but agents of the external domination.

In the second place, there is a reaction against dependence. Here it is not a class but a territorial collectivity, whether regional or tiational, that is

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defending itself against an external domination. This dimension may separate itself off from the others in order to give birth to a very vague, very easily manipulated nationalism or populism, but it is necessarily present in a dependent social movement. It is fairly directly linked to the existence of "marginality" which is to say, the powerlessness of a dependent society to bring a large section of the population into participation in economic growth. The concentration of income, the exploration of capital, the political weight of the categories associated with the external domination, throw a large section of the labor force both out of work and out of the urban organiza­tion, after having been pushed into the cities by the penetration of capitalism into rural life and by the attractions of a monetary economy, of a more diversified labor market, or of public subsidies. These "marginals" may serve as an unskilled labor pool for the agents of the foreign domination; they are also—and this applies more to middle-class marginals than lower-class ones—the "base" of the anticapitalist and nationalist movements.

In the third place, the dependent society is part of a type of economy and society managed by the dominant force. It is therefore directed toward modernization. This may be in a passive way, by the "demonstration effect" that reinforces the dependence; it can also be in an active way, through the action of a force tearing society loose from traditional dominations, a force of national integration, of development and communicates communications of all sorts. This gives a captial importance to the national state, which, even when it is associated with the forces of foreign domination, often wishes to be a rationalizing, integrating, modernizing entity and frequently succeeds in controlling a considerable proportion of investments. As regards the foreign domination, the national state enjoys an autonomy that is relatively greater— at least in the most modern forms of dependence— since economic power is not essentially in its own hands. Apart from the agricultural or industrial workers subjected to one or other type of exploitation, and also from the marginals, there is a third social category important in a dependent society: the clients of the state.

That state may be brought into the service of the domination and used to repress popular pressures, as in Brazil and Iran and also, less dramatically, in Mexico. It can also be the main agent of national integration and of the struggle against foreign domination, as in the Arab socialist states, Nasser's Egypt particularly, and Peru.

The tridimensionality of these social movements—class, nation (anti-dependence), modernization—is therefore not separable from the fragmenta­tion of the movement among several social actors who may be allies but may also be competitors. This is what defines the intermediate position these movements occupy between the simple form of social movement, cor­responding to a homogeneous society, and critical actions. We are dealing

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here with what are undoubtedly social movements, but torn, dismembered social movements, penetrated on every side by reactions to social crisis, by politics, by critical actions.

The relations between their three dimensions depend on many determi­nants but first and foremost on the nature of the dependence. The distinction commonly made between the three stages of external domination has to be applied here.

When the domination is wholly external, exerted by the international market, the principle of identity rests upon class consciousness. The master is linked with the capitalist market and the peasant, whether day laborer, seasonal worker, retainer, or small peasant owner threatened with eviction and subject to the trading system controlled by the big landowners, is wholly subjected to an all-embracing domination.

The formation of an internal market, particularly during the period of changeover of imports associated with crisis in the world market, is accompanied by the swift collapse of an agrarian economy maintained in an archaic state and also of an excessive urbanization that is to be explained by the very conditions of a dependent industrialization. This situation defines in terms of modernization a social base that is made up of migrants, of the new urban masses driven off the land and drawn toward the cities' pseudo-tertiary sectors even more than toward their industries.

Lastly, in the case of a developing internal market of plant and equipment, dominated by foreign enterprises more or less in association with a state that favors the formation of a bourgeoisie, drives back the "barbarians," and ensures capitalist accumulation by a lowering of the real working wage, then the base of the movement is national, which is to say that it defends the nation, in the Jaures sense, against the concentration of resources in the upper class.

These observations define the transformation of the principle of identity in accordance with the stage of development, hence in accordance with the forms of dependence. But they do not make it possible to distinguish between the two formulas that correspond in each stage to the social movement whose principle of identity is determined. For example, in the first stage C N M would be just as good as C M N to express /, O and T.

It is therefore necessary to introduce a new hypothesis. The nature of the movement depends upon the openness or closedness of the political system. If it is open, if an area of political interplay exists, then the popular movement is more oriented toward an internal social struggle. If it is closed, on the other hand, this means that there is a hegemonic state directly or indirectly bound by a foreign dependence, and the movement will oppose itself to that dependence. In the first two stages a closed political system, a hegemonic state, will produce a national principle of opposition. In the third

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stage this national opposition becomes a class opposition if the state is linked with a foreign domination interiorized by the passing of the internal market under foreign control. This leads to the table presented in figure 44.

We cannot enter into a sufficient analysis of these development movements here. That will be the subject of another book, now in preparation. But I must at least put forward two kinds of observations bearing upon the relations between social movement and critical action on the one hand, and upon the type of development corresponding to such movements on the other.

hegemonic state open politico/system

I O T I 0 T

phase I C N M C M N

phase II M M C M C Ar

phase III N C M N M C

C — class iV = nation / = identity O = opposition M = modernization T = totality

Figure 44

2. Each of these elements has a double nature: it pertains both to the social movement and to the critical action.

The class involved is both that of the workers and of the excluded, that of the producers and of those without work or land. What I have referred to, in the case of an industrial society, as "working-class consciousness" and "proletarian consciousness" are more closely associated here than elsewhere. It is their conjunction that is expressed in the central role given by the Chinese revolution to the "poor peasants," at once laborers and out of work, the exploited and underemployed. The appeal to class consciousness cannot be an appeal solely to a class spontaneity, but an appeal to both a class community and a class doctrine; to the union of a peasant, urban, or worker mass with a revolutionary force that is the bearer of a doctrine of class struggle.

The same duality marks the national dimension of the movement. A struggle against national dependence and its accompanying alienation, a consequent will to national construction and mobilization, but also an affirmation of cultural and social identity, as it is found in populisms.

Modernization likewise is at once evolution and rupture. This theme powers conjointly the will to industrialization and a will to popular participa­tion that implies in particular an absence of rupture between agriculture and industry.

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If we group these complementary and opposed tendencies that have been presented within each of the elements of the movement, then voluntarist development is seen to be dominated by the dialectic of a creative action and a mass mobilization.

3. This is already defining the mode of combination of the elements of development. The most obvious fact is their close interdependence: breaking of the institutional and organizational barriers and hence of hegemonic power, liberation of the forces of production, initiatives of growth leaders, popular mobilization. The heterogeneity of the movement's elements, and the duality of orientation of each of them, leads to tendencies to disaggrega­tion or to fragmentation that cannot be counterbalanced otherwise than by powerful integrating forces. These are of two kinds. First, they exist within the development movement itself, which is not opposing present domination and crisis solely in the name of modernization. It is mobilizing the past on behalf of its creative action on the future. The domination is always also modernization, and colonizers have constantly proclaimed the meaning of their intervention; they are smashing traditions, increasing the volume of exchanges, imposing a general language over the local languages, a central government over chiefdoms and patrimonial power. The popular develop­ment movement sets itself in opposition to this sort of modernization, mobilizes beliefs, forms of social organization, customs, traditional leaders, to mount a defense against social and cultural alienation. It is a question not of defending traditions and the power of former masters, but of mobilizing a sense of community while also attacking the symbiotic relation between oligarchy and external domination. Construction of the future is achieved through first defending the past. This is true of any social movement, but in the case of development movements, which are responsible for the transition from one system of historical action to another, this feature is more fundamental. The structure of the village, the kinship system, traditional solidarities, religious beliefs, language, customs—all are mobilized as a force of resistance against a modernization associated with dependence. The Jews resisted Roman modernization just as the people of Algeria did French modernization and the people of Quebec are resisting Anglo-American modernization.

In the same way, the unblocking of institutions or the resolution of organizational crises could signify an increase in dependence.

The measures making possible the institutionalization of conflicts, the representation of interests, the improvement of means of production, are ambiguous in a dependence situation and can appear as attempted assimila­tion by the dominant society.

This bond between past and future within the popular movement itself is solid only if there is a central agent of development and integration, which is

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at the same time an agent of the struggle against domination, hegemony, and power, and also a manager of society within the framework of a doctrine and a political organization: voluntary association and state at the same time.

This agglomeration of functions presents itself as integrating in its effect. The popular leaders inspire a mass mobilization oriented toward the liberation of the nation, of the workers, and of the forces of production. Hence the importance of doctrinal unification. But the development's voluntarism does not suppress the plurality of the conditions of that development and their relations.

Destruction of the old metasocial warrants, progress of exchanges, capacity for economic initiative, popular mobilization—these are lines of action that cannot be fused without problems into one general line. In particular there exists an always latent and already indicated opposition between the stimulation of the productive forces and the reinforcement of the leaders' decision capability on the one hand, and an ideological critique associated with popular mobilization on the other. This opposition can eventually result in a new class conflict.

One can also see opposition between those who accord greater importance to the negative conditions of development, who wish to "open up" their society, and those who on the contrary wish to give the greatest possible importance to a combination of initiative and mobilization.

Societal power is inevitably shaken by internal crises that reveal the strength of a dialectic of development, whatever the unifying force of the doctrine and apparatus of that power.

This analysis corresponds to the most extreme forms of voluntarist development, those which presuppose the creation of a revolutionary power uniting as closely as possible the struggle against underdevelopment, the creation of an authentic national independence, and the overthrow of the dominant classes. But there exist a very great number of voluntarist regimes that integrate the components of the development process much less completely. These differences may derive from the nature of the unifying doctrinal, state agent, itself too closely linked to the particularities of a history, of a social situation, and also to the accidents of conflicts between leaders and attempts at repression to be considered as falling within the province of the analytical tools being used here.

But they also derive primarily from the composition and the integration of the development movements themselves. Since there are variations in the relative importance of the three elements—class, nation, modernization— within such movements, as well as in the degree to which they are either closely or only loosely linked, so there must also be corresponding variations in the management of development. We will limit ourselves here to putting forward a few elementary hypotheses on the determinants of the composition of development movements.

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The nationalist orientation of the movements seems to be determined by the clash of an established national culture with a direct foreign domination. The military conquest of one country by another produces a stronger nationalist reaction as the domination thus established is more complete— political and cultural as well as economic—and as the national culture being breached is stronger.

The orientations toward modernization—if we extend certain observations made earlier—must depend upon the development of exchanges within the society in question. An isolated community is more moved to defensive reactions, attempts to maintain or reconstitute its organization and culture. This is a much less frequent situation, however, than was supposed by those who laid such emphasis on the social and cultural isolation of the huge rural estates of Latin America, for example. A higher level of economic, political, and cultural exchanges, particularly when there is also a high degree of urbanization, favors on the other hand an orientation toward development, which is lacking in sectors kept in isolation.

Lastly, the class orientation is more directly present in the central sectors of an economic whole, in those activities most directly linked to the dominant economic system. Analysis in class terms is the form of analysis least linked to the development situation and most linked to the synchronic analysis of a mode of production. If the domination is being exercised by industrial capitalism, then it is the industrial workers that will become involved most in conducting a class action; if the domination is exercised by a mercantile capitalism, then the class action forms among the urban lower orders; finally, in the case of a colonial occupation commandeering land in order to settle a population or masters brought in from the colonizing center, then it is among the peasants that class action will form.

These hypotheses may be summed up in figure 45. Starting from this set of propositions, it is possible to explain the combinative modes of the actions directed toward the four conditions of development. But systematic examination of those configurations cannot be carried out usefully outside of a complete comparative analysis, which presupposes an in-depth examina­tion of a variety of historical situations.

One can at least say that in a situation in which the development movement includes the elements C, M and N, and in which that movement is formed on the basis of a general crisis of the institutions and the social organizations, all the conditions are present to make the development action the most integrated and therefore the most highly organized around a doctrine and a political apparatus, around a party-state.

At the opposite extreme, a weak presence of all the elements of the popular movement (though weak presence can never extend to total absence) associated with a restricted limited crisis of institutions and organizations has the greatest likelihood of leading to what one might term a liberal

434 Chapter Seven

national confrontation

economic sector

Figure 45

1

central —

marginal -

C

+ exchanges

+

M N C N

M N

C = M= N =

JV

class orientation modernizing orientation nationalism

exchanges

+

C M

M

! C

dictatorship: a state, which is not a party, plays a unifying role, conducts a struggle against the old oligarchy that is wholly unrevolutionary in tone and that ensures its absolutism by "opening up" the country, by taking economic initiatives and by drawing strength from a more or less artifically whipped-up popular support subsequently reinforced by fear of repression.

All the forms of voluntarist development occur between these two extremes: the party-state and the state-tyrant.

It is therefore in this type of society that the distance between the categories of synchronic analysis and those of diachronic analysis is greatest. Change is not managed by a ruling class imposing its domination on a popular class; it is conducted by an elite establishing its power over the masses. Sometimes this elite plays no more than a transitory role, simply preparing the way for the entry onto the scene of a new ruling class. Sometimes it is the elite itself that becomes the ruling class, which goes on to manage a new type of industrial society, for example. Ruling elite and ruling class can never be entirely separated, yet must never be identified with one another either. The Soviet rulers are undoubtedly a ruling class, since they make the decisions on investments and the distribution of wealth, and since they act as bearers of the interests of the large politico-economic apparatuses; they are nonetheless the successors of a revolutionary elite, and the nature of their power cannot be understood unless one defines it as a combination of a class domination and of the power of an elite formed to operate a social transformation.

These observations on voluntarist societies may be applied as a whole to very diverse types of society. But, even though in the space of this book we cannot go into more detailed analyses, closer to social history, it must at least be stressed, as certain previous remarks will have indicated, that voluntarist societies have been defined by the distance that separates them from liberal

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societies, which is to say by their heterogeneity. But they diverge from the British type in two very different ways. On the one hand we find national societies in which it is the political and ideological dominion of the archaic dominant classes acting through the state that is preponderant; on the other we have those that are penetrated by foreign domination, are poorly integrated, and do not possess a powerful state apparatus.

The nearer one moves toward the extreme forms of the first type, the more the agent of development is a revolutionary party, whereas in the intermediate forms, as Barrington Moore showed in his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (New York: Beacon, 1966), it is fractions of the old ruling classes supported by the state apparatus that play the principal role.

The further one moves in the opposite direction, however, until one reaches the extreme form of dependence exemplified in the colonial situa­tion, the more the orientations of any social movement—class, nationalism, modernization—can only be linked together by a specifically political and even state-linked agent. The dream of spontaneous uprisings by the people evaporates only too quickly in the face of state apparatuses, whether in the service of neocolonialism and a new dependence or whether they are the artisans of a state socialism or a national integrationism.

The further one moves away from the liberal situation, the more the class actors are replaced in the center of the stage by the foreign master and by the state, which sometimes serves them and is sometimes the agent of a national development.

c. Contractual Societies

Because they encounter obstacles to their development, yet possess social forces capable of initiatives and mobilization, contractual societies have customarily been defined by the noncontemporaneity of their contents. In fact, this general type includes two rather different situations.

In one case the ruling class is dynamic and strong. The economy is in the process of modernization or transformation, but is clashing with an archaic political system and which cultural traditionalism, both supported by the maintenance of considerable archaic sectors in the economy. In the other case it is rather that there is an organizational crisis combined with an institutional disorganization. Obviously these are not wholly mutually exclusive situations, but, according to which of the two is more in evidence, the development process takes differing forms.

In both cases it is on the level of the intermediate system, that of the political system, that the mechanisms of development occur, whereas in the dependence situations produced by a voluntarist development it is in the field of historicity and above all in the field of class relations that the principal interventions occur.

Now on this political level we have learned to distinguish between the

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institutional critical action and state interventionism. In the first case, organizational claims rise toward the political system but fail to penetrate it because it is blocked. They are then deflected toward a political rupture, a critical action that proposes a radical transformation of the systems of decision and, for that very reason, has an anticipatory strength, thus becoming an agent of social transformation. This type of action is thus the response not to a crisis but to a hegemony. I have already referred in this context to the action directed against the Gaullist regime in France. Critical action can be partly reabsorbed by an institutionalization of the conflicts, but it is in fact the limitations of that institutionalization that account for its existence in the first place.

In the other case it is a process of internal change that is involved. The process in not merely the institutionalization of conflicts, which by itself is not an agent of change. Political pressure leads to state intervention in the field of historicity, which is different from an extension of political negotiations. Interventionism, the transcending of the political system, occurs in a situation of crisis and disorganization rather than in one of blockage, in particular when there is a crisis of hegemony and a strong challenge to old values and forms of social organization.

What these two situations have in common is that the principal actor in development is not a power elite, at once economic, political and ideological, as in the situation of voluntarism and dependence. Nor is it the ruling class, as in the case of liberal societies. The development action can only be shared by social and political actors at once opposed to one another and complementary.

In the case of the institutional critical action, the development action is shared between that action and a hegemonic state. Their relations are not those of a ruling class social movement with a popular social movement. They are not in a dialectic opposition; they clash, rather, in such a way that they can produce a splitting up of society, which becomes divided between its past and its future and incapable of managing change. But they can also produce a gradual sort of development, interrupted by sudden breaks. For the external threat represented by the critical action can lead the hegemonic state to emphasize its ruling role at the expense of its dominant role and pursue forms of national mobilization capable of taking over from the forms of popular opposition. Hence an authoritarian progressivism that one could perhaps call Bonapartism or Bismarckism, to borrow the terms suggested by Helio Jaguaribe in his Desenvolvimento economico e desenvolvimento politico (Rio: Fundo de Cultura, 1962).

In the case of state interventionism, the state is less an agent of progress on behalf of the ruling class than an interpreter of a popular pressure and an instrument for the resolution of a crisis. This laborite state places much more

Social Change 437

importance on its mobilizing role, it is more exposed to the action of a social movement than to that of an institutional critical action. It also tends to give more importance, among the negative conditions of development, to the overthrowing of old barriers, whereas the Bonapartist state lends more importance, on account of its closer link with the ruling class, to the progress of the forces of production and of exchanges.

As will be seen, each of the two types gives priority to action involving one of the negative conditions and one of the positive conditions of development.

The type that brings together an institutional critical action and a Bonapartist state puts the emphasis on exchanges and initiative; the type that brings together a laborite state and social movements is more concerned with the destruction of old principles of order and with mobilization. The one constitutes the right wing, the other the left wing of the area of contractual societies. If this general type can be justified, it is because in both cases there can be no development unless the opposition between the two forces of change is limited. It is not a true institutionalization of conflicts that is involved but rather a kind of limited belligerence. The institutional critical action attacks the systems of social decision and the state, but it does not have the capacity for total opposition that defines the revolutionary critical action. The Bonapartist state, on its side, though it rejects and represses this political action, strives to compete with it socially, to isolate it from the popular masses.

Similarly, laborite state interventionism recognizes the existence and the initiatives of the ruling class, and the latter does not reject an intervention that draws its strength from a popular mobilization in order to destroy the positions of a domination that is only partly identical with it. This limited belligerence gives a larger place to force than to violence. The state is more inclined to exclude than to destroy. Its interventionism is aroused by a show of force through organizational claims, through strikes, for example; it does not draw support from the violence that breaks out. since that is on the organizational level. Finally, the ruling class makes use of force to maintain its position, but it does not resort to violence against an interventionism that does not threaten it with annihilation.

d. Liberal Societies

If in voluntarist regimes the actions of the various conditions—positive and negative—of development are closely linked to one another, in contractual societies those links are more partial and each of their two types is defined by the association of one positive condition and one negative condition. In the case of the liberal societies there is no social and political force linking these factors of development together.

1. Liberal societies are those in which the previous social and cultural

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order is weakest. This is particularly the case with new societies, those that have come into being by extending their frontiers further and further, whose population consists to a large degree of recent immigrants. Such societies, therefore, do not need to transform a previously established social order. They have generally not encountered any but the sparsest original popula­tions whose technical capabilities were very inferior. They have destroyed them, shut them away, or assimilated them. They have not set up the new society within that original population's social and cultural order or even over it.

More generally, this is also the case of societies whose economic evolution has reached a relatively high degree of hornogenization and social integration without any revolutionary rupture.

2. These societies are situated at the center of intense exchanges. Exchanges have another meaning for another part of the world, since they are not solely competitive in nature but ensure the domination of certain countries over a large part of the world, through colonization, imperialism, and other forms of domination. But the role of these exchanges cannot in fact be reduced to domination.

Wherever one looks, the progress of exchanges results in the progress of forces of production, as the Manchester School stoutly maintained in the last century and as the Common Market shows in practice more recently.

3. Liberal societies are governed by an upper class that is more ruling than dominant, less concerned with its political hegemony and the defense of its values than with its economic activity and strength.

4. It is in liberal societies that social movements have the greatest force and critical action the least. Insofar as no fundamental crisis of the social organization or institutional blockage exists, the system of historical action is the stake of class struggles that lead to the institutionalization of conflicts and organizational change.

This schematic account does not, however, provide an answer to the prob­lem of development. It describes a "modern" society in which the weight of the past and of asynchronia is slight, in which dependence is replaced by domina­tion, and in which social relations are identical with the conflict of the social classes, or in other words fall into the province of synchronic analysis. Must we then accept liberal ideology, reduce change to evolution, development to growth, and accept that the progress of these flourishing societies leads them to make the transition from one type of society to another without the aid of any specific mechanisms, mercantile societies becoming industrial societies, industrial societies in turn gradually moving into a postindustrial system of historical action?

But one can follow the opposite line of reasoning. The logic of these liberal

Social Change 439

societies is then that their progress weighs them down, that the weight of the dominant class gets greater and greater in relation to that of the ruling class, that their institutional system either becomes gradually more closed or disorganized, that their organizations become bureaucratized and encyst themselves more and more inside the reproduction of the social order. They are subject to a progressive loss of their historicity, for the descent of the historical actors to the level of the political forces ends up by disintegrating the system of historical action. The system's internal oppositions become blunted like society's conflicts, and it becomes the opposite of itself, a set of ideas, of values, that has no other function than its own reproduction, a function performed by rhetoricians who deliver speeches or write books about the French spirit or the British tradition. The political system itself, deprived of hegemony, becomes ritualized or bureaucratic.

But the society is dynamic enough and open enough for its material activity and its functional problems to continue evolving. Hence the appearance of new demands, new actors, and at the same time, at the other extremity of society, the invention by intellectuals of new components of historicity. Society fufictions on two planes. On the one hand there are the institutions absorbing class conflicts and organizational claims; on the other there is a material change that brings into being "barbarian" claims closely associated with the search for a new historicity, the need for which has been made apparent by the decline of the old. This counterculture cannot remain isolated from society, under pain of becoming a marginal culture, shut away in new ghettoes. It is contestatory, it draws attention to the limits of institutionaliza­tion, triggers a process of disinstitutionalization associated with cultural innovation. By numerous diverse channels, society as a whole evades the dominion of the institutional system and its social control: institutional or revolutionary critical action and state intervention reappear until, in a final stage, new class conflicts and new social movements define themselves.

The open society thus leads to an excess of institutionalization associated with a new conservatism. This then gives rise to both an organizational crisis and to cultural innovation, which penetrate society from opposite ends until they have reconstituted a new field of historicity.

The evolution here is therefore not linear; and its discontinuity directly affects the social movements, whose action occurs within the field of historicity.

It is impermissible to say that the whole of history is shot through with the laments and claims of the popular classes, gradually succeeding in making themselves heard as labor became more concentrated and more educated, as the metasocial warrants of social order were undermined, as the conflicts formed within our societies were replaced by conflicts between them and the societies they exploit and dominate. Such a view of history, like any

440 Chapter Seven

philosophy of history, can gallop through the centuries snatching up dazzling and telling facts, persuasive images here and there. But it explains nothing, and above all not the transition from one actor to another, from one field of struggle to another, from one objective to another. Although it may be true to say that all history is shot through with class struggle, it would be going back to before Marx not to recognize that struggle must always be linked with a mode of production, that it is an essential element in a field of historicity. What one must start from, on the contrary, is the discontinuity of social struggles. And we therefore need to know how to make the transition from one social movement to another.

A social movement, if it is not swept up into the triumph of a revolutionary critical action, will become institutionalized. It does not, for all that, disappear, and the consciousness of the popular class will in fact defend itself against this institutionalization by producing a fundamentalist counter-current. Even while the political role of the bourgeoisie was being extended, and the urban lower orders were achieving a certain degree of institutional participation, one could already see the spirit of the French Revolution being revived, being transformed throughout the nineteenth century in France. In the Commune, the members of the Internationale were no more than a small minority swelling a tide that drew its main strength from that old political tradition. And on the level of social struggle it was the landowners the Communards were attacking much more than the industrial bosses. The budding labor movement, repressed or just barely tolerated, was still undifferentiated: organizational claims, institutional pressures, and social movement were all still intermingled with no clear hierarchy as yet. Crisis and conflict were indissolubly linked. It was the fundamentalism of the old movement that was providing a necessary language, an ideology, an active revolutionary capability. The union of old and new movements can only occur within a context of misunderstanding. The force of the old revolu­tionary ideology deflected attention from recognition of the new conflicts and from the very nature of the new society being born. The new social movement needed to put new wine into old bottles. But it needed even more to develop its own action, to demonstrate that the factory was more important in its struggle than the neighborhood. It is in such contexts that movements of transition between past and future are formed, dominated by the contradiction of recourse to old themes and a prophetic apprehension of new problems. Such movements are emotional, violent, short-lived, incapable of any lasting and widespread action, but their reverberation is immense, first because they occur at a moment when they alone are offering any absolute opposition to the ruling classes as a whole, and also because they explode at the junction point between two societies. The great flare-up of anarchism, for instance, occurred at the changeover point between the

Social Change 441

mercantilist, artisan world and the world of industrial capitalism. And is not the situation we have been living through since the late sixties a similar one?

The labor movement is becoming institutionalized. Claims and pressures are increasing in number all the time, all the more bitterly pressed as the industrialization phase is more recent and less advanced toward completion, and also as the political strength of the labor movement is weaker. But these claims and pressures are less and less bearers of a social movement. This situation is leading to the appearance of a labor fundamentalism. It draws its support from militants in the "base" of the movement, militants who are mistrustful of associations, parties, unions, all solidly embedded in their carefully worked out, studiously formulated class consciousness. These militants are at the same time close and yet a long way away from the new popular class, whose outlines are still indistinct. The action of this new class combines reactions to organizational crisis, or to the failure to process new conflicts, with the first signs of a "cultural revolution" directed against technocracy and the capacity to manipulate not only labor but also consump­tion, education, and information. The new opposition makes use of the language and the analysis proper to the labor movement, even while its action is developing in other social areas not yet recognized as forming a social class.

At the heart of these contradictions there is an ultraleft that unites a consciousness of belonging to the labor movement with a prophetic action that is bringing new conflicts, new actors in the social struggle, into visibility.

One can forsee that in a few decades from now this revolutionary spasm will be seen as an episode that almost everyone is trying to forget, to condemn, or to treat as a kind of childhood illness. Its brief blaze will nevertheless have marked the transition from industrial to postindustrial society, from the reign of industrial capitalism to that of technocracy. Its impotence indicates its importance, for the transition from one society to another always occurs within a contradiction as well as through growth.

Reference to the transition into postindustrial society leads me to end this analysis of social change and of its agents with a question: will the postindustrial society now information not profoundly modify the relations between social movements and critical action, between field of historicity, institution, and organization in the mechanisms of social change?

This society must be defined first of all by its cultural model: development, which is to say system efficiency. The dissolution of metasocial warrants of the social order makes change into both a principle of the social order's functioning and also a principle of the transcendence of that order. Society enters a state of permanent change, as is loudly proclaimed by both the ideologists of the ruling class and those of the popular class. The former talk about the limitless prospects opened up by scientific and technological

442 Chapter Seven

discoveries, and about the general rise in the standard of living; the latter contest technocratic domination in the name of personal creativity and self-management. The growing awareness of the limits of natural resources, as of the catastrophes that could shortly be visited upon us by the destruction or modification of old natural balances, is not leading to a superficial Utopia, to the abandonment of development and the quest for new equilibria. Rather, it marks the inevitable withering away of the destructive creativeness that brought forth the cultural model of industrialization and also the appearance of a new model of development.

But in this type of society, which seems to be defined by change, should we not expect to witness the withering away of both social movements and critical actions? This is an idea often put forward. It is toward a very different conclusion, however, that our analysis must lead us.

Ultimately, this new type of society must lead to the fusion of social movements and critical actions, as it also leads, in a complementary way, to the fusion of the types of conduct occurring at the various levels: historicity, institutions, organizations.

The initiatives of the ruling class—either directly or through the inter­mediary of the state—extend that class's dominion over all aspects of social activity. This being so, a movement of opposition is at the same time a defensive and contestatory social movement and also a critical action springing out of exclusion, repression, imprisonment, and directed not toward a future but toward a counterpresent. These societies no longer have any future, they do not define themselves by their place in an evolution. The triumph of historicity is the end of history. Social movement and the critical action, like the social sciences themselves, no longer apprehend society by means of the categories of time and space but rather those of its functioning and development, which are also the categories of the increasingly closely linked disciplines of economics and sociology. The critical action, oriented toward antidomination rather than postdomination objectives, now comes within the definition of the social movement, which on its side becomes charged with all the force of rupture and rejection of an all-embracing dominion that characterizes the critical action. This is why, although it is true that organizational and institutional problems may achieve a growing autonomy, at least insofar as one draws closer to homogeneous societies, it is even more true that, in these societies dominated by large and very integrating organizations, claims and contestation turn out to be closely associated, just as contestation and rupture do. We are witnessing an integration of the areas of opposition as well as of the forms of domination. Hence the "heating up" of social conflicts and the fact that the conflicts bound up with society's functioning on the one hand and those connected with social change on the other are beginning to fuse together. Critical action, emerging

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from the social field, is turning in toward the interior of that field. There even exists a strong tendency for a direct confrontation between an upper class for which domination is merely the other face of management and that is seeking to impose an authoritarian growth, and a popular class whose social movement would thereby be absorbed by the critical action. We would then have a sort of unstable coexistence of integration and rejection, between the silent majority and the ghettoes. But beside this opposition, which is more a contradiction than a conflict, there constantly reappears the struggle between a contestatory popular movement and a dominant class more concerned with reproduction of the social order than with the production of change, which shifts the dynamism back onto the popular side. Hence the role of violence, especially during the period when the new society is establishing itself and in which the Utopia of the ruling classes is being imposed, while at the same time the new conflicts have not reached a stage when they can be institu­tionalized.

Once again we are a long way from the evolutionist illusions of the fifties, of the era when many observers were announcing the end of ideologies, the institutionalization of all conflicts, the withering away of all social movements and doctrines. Was it even possible to suggest an analysis of social change in a period when the principal sociology-producing countries were under the influence of that ruling Utopia and had lost sight of the discontinuity of evolution, of the importance of the contradictions and the conflicts through which the change from one field of historicity to another is effected?

E. Concluding Remarks

The sociology of change always seems to be trapped in a contradiction. On the one hand it can take change, in other words evolution, as its

starting point. It is of little consequence whether we define that evolution as the design of providence, as the development of a political order moving up from cities to empires and even on to world government, or as the extension of markets and exchanges, or the intensification of the forces of production. What is involved, in every case, is the bestowing of a universal existence on the cultural model—religious, state-centered, economic, or scientifico-technical—of the particular society in which the observer is situated. This means that one is rendering incomprehensible what one is trying to explain, and one is forced to resort to arbitrary interpretations in order to provide any analysis of the past: one is reconstituting the hard but ultimately triumphant progress, despite all irrational obstacles, of a natural and therefore terminal society. There are no sociologies of change left, only philosophies of history.

On the other hand, one can start out from social organization, from the functioning of a society maintained in a state of unstable equilibrium by the

444 Chapter Seven

interdependence of its parts and also, even more efficiently, by a system of values applied by institutions concerned with social control, with the maintenance of order, with the reduction of tensions, and with socialization. In order to explain change, this sociology must resort to the action of external forces. But even supposing that these external forces do not belong to systems themselves incapable of maintaining their equilibrium, how can they provoke more than disorganization, and what Peter Heintz has called a policy of shreds and patches (politica de parches)?

This contradiction is in itself untranscendable. If one sets order against movement as two distinct domains, one cannot understand how movement can be anything other than a rationalization of order, and how order can change without falling into anomie. But every society is order and movement at the same time.

This leads to the isolation of two major mechanisms of change. On the one hand, historicity is transformed into order. The dialectics of

the" field of historicity are transformed into boundariesTseparating the legal from the illegal, conformity from deviance. What is excluded or repressed, and therefore cast out into the outer darkness beyond the frontiers of society, can become "barbarian," disorganized, or withdrawn into the ghettoes of exclusion, but it can also break off with the established order and seek freedom in the past or, increasingly, in the future.

On the other hand, the dynamism of historical action produces tensions with the established order and leads to modifications that rise from social organization toward the institutions, from there on upward to the field of historicity, and from there further upward still to the very principles of historicity.

These two mechanisms are inseparable from one another. Change by innovation can lead to the strengthening of social movements,

but having reached that point it can only move down again toward political negotiation, without being able to exceed the bounds of the field of historicity in which it is situated. Lacking the force of critical action, a social movement cannot achieve a rupture, it can only institutionalize itself or stagnate in permanent protest.

Parallel to this, the various forms of rupture conduct cannot provoke a change unless they can appeal to historicity, as capacity for transcendence and as evolution of the forces of production, against the closed order of power and repression.

These mechanisms combine differently according to the degree of homogeneity of the society in question. The more old social forms have been destroyed by new forms, the more change by innovation occupies a central position. The stronger dualism is, on the other hand, as it is above all in dependent societies, the more change by rupture plays the essential role.

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In every case conflicts and social movements remain central to the analysis. Not because they are themselves the agents of change. The opposite is true. But because they are the locus of both innovation and rupture. They lead to institutionalization and modernization, and their, struggle against domination also leads to critical action and to mutation.

The analysis of social change is not possible unless it starts not from the level of the field of historicity, as the synchronic analysis of the social systems must do, but from the level of social organization, where the closedness of the social order governed by a power and its values transforms the confrontation of the classes into actions of transformation, into pursuit of a future. Certain societies experience ruptures first and foremost, and social movements may ultimately be absorbed into and destroyed by critical actions. Others seem to avoid critical actions and pursue a movement of modernization. But these are simply two opposite forms of nondevelopment. In the first case the society is imprisoning itself inside the integrationism of values and, more concretely, in the maintenance of an established power: in the second, modernization leads either to suffocation by the dissolution of power or, more probably, to fragmentation due to a growing incapacity to recognize the existence of new demands and the necessity for qualitative changes.

All change is at once continuity and discontinuity; all social movement is at once modernizing and critical.

Broad social change affecting an entire society cannot be understood excepTonthe basis of historicity, but it is the opposite of its implementation. It is born from the meeting of historicity and functioning, from their tensions and their contradictions. It is neither the meeting of the system and the external event, nor the march of history imposing its natural law on actors and social forms despite their resistance. It is at once project and rejection. The central problem is always to understand how the new is born from the old, how old men produce new societies.

CONCLUSION

A. The Sociologist and His Society

Ought one to be thinking, as one closes this book, that it has woven a web of concepts so fine and so complete that every sort of sociological research will recognize itself in it, or find its contribution to sociological theory clearly defined? Certainly not. The aim of this book is, on the contrary, to define an approach and to present it in as direct and coherent a manner as possible. This approach, this procedure, aims at revealing, behind the surface "functionality" of social organization, behind the mechanisms of adaptation to change, the production of a field of historicity and its management by the conflicting classes.

The account it gives of itself is of necessity systematic in nature, and may give the impression of a procedure imprisoned inside its own construction; but it would be wrong to be swayed by that impression: in gathering all the forces at its command, the purpose of this book was to provide weapons for the sociologist, who, in his striving toward knowledge, encounters a much more powerful system, that of the forces of social control, of the regulations and classifications, the propaganda and constraints of everyday life.

Rather than sum up in a few sentences the principal stages of my line of reasoning, it would be of more use by way of conclusion to clarify the position of the sociologist, as it has been gradually defined during the course of these pages along with a certain picture of society.

The sociologist's disadvantage in relation to the historian or the ethnologist is that he is looking at his own society. He is not subjected to the discipline of confronting a culture and a society different from his own, capable of resisting his ethnocentrism, his tendency to transpose his own representa­tions and feelings onto the population he is studying.

446

Conclusion 447

Those who think they can resolve this difficulty by simply casting off all social ties, by becoming "free-floating" intellectuals, defined solely by their professional norms, lack any credibility, and it is usually a very short time indeed after their declaration of independence that someone else is performing an ideological autopsy upon their reasoning and their descrip­tions.

The way out must be sought in another direction. It is impossible to give a general picture of a society's functioning without favoring certain categories of facts and evidence, which is of course arbitrary. What one must therefore do is to establish the greatest possible gap between the observable whole selected and an analytical construction. This gap between the society being studied and the analytical model must be maintained by following a critical procedure that breaks open the closedness of social organization, searches out the tensions, the conflicts, and the teeming possibles beneath social integration, and hears the muffled cries drowned by official discourse.

To infiltrate the networks of social practice, to resist the dominion exerted by the mechanisms of social control and the image a society presents of itself, one must first of all step back, take up one's stance at a remove, within an analytical apparatus, not to become its prisoner but in order to go on and attack a reality that always resists analysis by confronting it with its false concrcteness.

The sociologist acts no differently from the social movements he studies. He is systematic because he must resist social and cultural domination in order to make knowledge of society possible. That is why one can neither separate nor completely identify the vocations of the sociologist and the politician. There is no question here of siding with those adversaries of Weber who won their false victory over him during the famous session of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik on that fifth of January, 1914. Sociology cannot achieve its true form unless it renounces all value judgments and frees itself, in all essential matters at least, from the limits imposed by intervention, by application. But how is one to construct a system of knowledge without throwing all one's weight against everything that dominates the social organization and conceals social relations beneath the appearance of positivity? Class relations must be pointed out where the guardian of order sees only jobs, privileges where he perceives only rules, opposition where he observes merely habit and acceptance, innovation or contestation where he denounces deviance. But the sociologist alone cannot take on so heavy a task, even when the social organization is such that the intelligentsia appears as a force of opposition to power. For the sociologist to be able to work, it is necessary that the practical action of social movements and political argument shall ceaselessly attack the reproduction of the established order, smash open the social order, disclose social relations to the view behind principles, values, and techniques.

448 Conclusion

^Yetthe^ojnoloj^^ with any social movement, for the actor, whoever he may be, is_objjged to define the situation on the basis ofthe position he himself occupies, and therefore to reconstitute the mixture of the levels of analysis within the unity of lived experience, wtiereasl:he sociologist must unravel them, separate them. The "organic" intellectuals, because they are linked with class interests, with political forces, or with the action of a state, reveal initiatives, objectives, conflicts. But how could they both speak from the point of view of an actor and at the same time explain the social interaction in which the actor is engaged? Is it not inevitable, sooner or later, voluntarily or involuntarily, that they will become either watchdogs or pariahs?

The sociologist is not in the service of the politician, but he cannot work where there are no political debates or fights. He cannot be either a partisan or a neutral. Political action on his part cannot reach the level of a social movement unless it is fueled with the analyses that sociology alone can contribute.

One could reread all the chapters of this book searching, through the study of the production of society, for that of the production of sociology. For it is impossible to separate the birth of sociology from the formation of programmed societies or societies aiming at such a societal type in their Yoluntarist development action.

The sociologist is an agent of historicity, and because of that he is inclined, like all "priest-intellectuals," toward rhetoric. He is also a stake of class conflicts, even though he pretends not to notice it, and perhaps an agenTbf the ideological domination of the ruling class, or of the state's power apparatus. He is someone who can participate in a social movement, in a critical action, or in reformist innovations. He must therefore know that no sociologist has the monopoly of sociology'. Although sociology must believe in the unity that actionaHst sociology gives it, that unity can never be achieved in practice. It will always tend to break up into three main fragments corresponding first to the integration and adaptation of the social order, second to social conflicts, and third to all that is rejected by social control. There must inevitably be tensions, tug-o-wars, between a sociology_of reform, a sociology of conflict, and a sociology of rupture. The sociology of controls reminds the sociology' of action of the existence of domination and its instruments of social control: opposing that domination, action must also be rupture, countersociety, Utopia. Inversely, the sociology of functions reminds the sociology of action that a social system is one that is managing its tensions and is therefore susceptible of reform. We have noted on several occasions the ambiguity of the notion of conflict, which has a place in the sociology of social movements but also in a sociology of the political field. Each one of us can combine these three tendencies in his own

Conclusion 449

way, depending on our varying responses to negotiation, confrontation, or revolt; but one must know how to listen to all the languages of social action, however widely they may differ from one another.

No individual, however, can take up his position at some point of stable equilibrium equidistant from all these tendencies. No sociologist can integrate the whole field of analysis; it is sociology that produces itself through sociologists, through their conflicts and debates.

B. Analysis and Action

The gaze that sociology turns upon society is not an indifferent one. It has no other aim but knowledge, yet that objective engages the sociologist in society's organization and in its change. He cannot be above the melee. He is either working on behalf of power or on behalf of liberty. Not necessarily by espousing some particular ideology, but by either accepting the categories of social practice or by shattering them in order to search behind them for social relations and the dominion of historical action over society's functioning. He is an agent of liberation when he shows that no actor ever holds the complete meaning of the social interactions in which he is involved. The order that the employer imposes within his enterprise does not provide the meaning of the social relations of labor. The state's discourse gives neither the meaning of its power over the citizens nor the meaning of its international relations.

It is in the analysis of the social classes that this principle has been applied first, since it is dealing with the social relation most directly linked to the system of historical action. The class relation does not simply set the spirit of enterprise in opposition to habit, or profit in opposition to labor.

If one were to accept one of those two formulas, one would be forced to say that the meaning of the relation between the classes does in fact belong to one of those classes, the ruling class in one case, the workers in the other. And this seems to me to imply, inevitably, that one is ultimately appealing to something that is not socially definable, not definable in terms of social interactions, to explain social facts. To speak of the creative spirit, of purity of motive, or of public service in relation to the ruling class is simply to refer to the cultural model of the society in question while assimilating it in an absolutely arbitrary way to the rulers. Inversely, to set productive labor and parasitism or profit in opposition is to introduce a reference, quite alien to sociology, to the creative role of directly productive activity.

To assert that the meaning of the actor resides in the social interaction is therefore not as banal as it might appear at first sight. It is an assertion that refers onward to the central theme of historicity, of the distancing of society from itself, and of the oppositional pairs that combine to form the system of

450 Conclusion

historical action. And at the same time it refers to the double dialectic of the social classes, each concentered upon its own particular interests but also reaching out to seize control of the system of historical action.

In order to avoid being trapped inside the consciousness of the actors and to free oneself from the dominant ideology, one must recognize that society cannot be reduced to the rules of its functioning, and that its historicity governs its organization. At the field of historicity level, the relations between the actors are neither ones of complementarity nor of competition but of solidarity or of conflict, for the social relation is not a particular functional aspect of a regulated, governed, controlled system but the double tearing apart by means of which society produces itself, the tearing apart of the conflicting classes, the tearing apart of society's historicity and its functioning.

Nothing could be further removed from sociology than the notions and the categories that describe and justify the power of the state. In France, the resistance to sociology has always drawn its strength from the central role of the state in the practice and theory of society.

In France it seems very hard to talk about society at all. Yet everyone talks endlessly about the state, and very often it is seen as the one and only concrete expression of society.

The state is the superactor, the principle of unity: it is order and change, entrepreneur and negotiator; anthropomorphically speaking, it is the head and arms of society. At the very most it is criticized for lacking a heart. Hence the particular effort that sociology needs to make here in France to dethrone the state, to cast doubt on its view of things, on its order and its discourse, to dissolve the false unity it lends to society and reveal the movements that lie behind it. This critical approach should also be extended to the whole field of what are in everyday language called the institutions, to the instruments of social control. Every society possesses an apparatus of legalization and socialization, and therefore of repression and exclusion too. How can sociology do its work as it should if it permits itself to be imprisoned inside that apparatus's discourse?

Once again, it is not fighting the apparatus and its discourse that is important, for that can be a way of recognizing it, or even of becoming incorporated into it. The important thing is to find a way through it, in order to reveal society's own production of itself behind that smooth surface of social and cultural integration.

This book favors the study of social movements. Yet is it possible in the Europe of today to forget that the greatest social movement of the industrial societies, the labor movement, was used as a tool in the construction of an absolute power, in a task of social and cultural repression that cannot be reduced to Stalin as an individual?

And beyond even that darkness, there was the Nazi hell displaying to us

Conclusion 451

the almost perfected image of antihistoricity, of the destruction of all social relations and movements.

Because I grew up in the shadow of those horrors, I have sought to find a way through the opening up of conflicts and debates to the truth of social relations and the possibility of social movements that will never be reduced to their organization, and even less to the power for which they are fighting.

Social movements are not characters nonchalantly walking on the waters of history. The sociologist who is content to be taken in by images and speeches, by associations and outward manifestations, is in some danger of contributing to the destruction of what he has been unable to see.

The social movement, like the Zadkin statue in Rotterdam, is emotional, rent, a witness to pain and hope, and never the watchdog of orthodoxy and a new order. It is not to be found basking in public places but is always at least partly concealed by repression and alienation.

That which constitutes the condition of existence of sociological analysis is constantly in contradiction with the process of social action. One can dream of a philosopher-king, but it is impossible to conceive of a sociologist-king. Hence perhaps the fascinated interest displayed by analysts for men of action, and the mixture of attraction and mistrust inspired in them by centers of decision. For history is made only by those who shatter all the systems that analysis strives to reveal, those who identify themselves with concretely defined forces, and who are ready to read society the wrong way round, according greatest importance to the strategies of intersocial relations, then to organizational problems, then to institutional mechanisms, and inten'ening least directly or least consciously in the field of historicity. The work of the sociologist can no more provide a model for social action than ideology ought to govern the progress of sociological knowledge.

The sociologist accords most importance to those forms of collective conduct most resistant to his procedure. He criticizes the notion of values, but he concentrates his attention on those social movements and conflicts in which the actors proclaim their values loudest; he analyzes the double dialectic of the social classes, but observes confrontations and ruptures.

What sociologist is not himself torn between his involvement in social relations, which is indispensable if he is to penetrate beneath sham appearances, and his detachment from them, also an indispensable precondition of grasping social relations, which never coincide with the consciousness the actors have of them?

Let me take that observation further. The sociologist must recognize the complex relations, combining subordination with autonomy, that link institutions and organizations to the field of historicity. Social movements, far from corresponding to some stable intention and doctrine, must be apprehended in the unstable tension that places them between the institu­tionalization of conflicts and the rupture represented by a critical action. It

452 Conclusion

would be absurd to sing the praises of a society reduced to pure self-production, to its system of historical action and its class relations, without any autonomy whatever of its institutions and organizations, without rhetoric and without reproduction. This wholly "open" society would promptly revert to a closed society; without the inertia provided by institutions and organizations, the tensions between the elements of the system of historical action and the conflicts between the classes would lead to total fragmenta­tion, since the field of historicity is not an actor and has no government or mechanism of social control. The whole state would soon be occupied by what is furthest from historicity, from the oppositional pairs of the system of historical action and the double dialectic of the social classes: namely, the state.

Inversely, a society that tried to reduce itself to an organization could only end up as its opposite: a theocracy. It would be wholly at the service of historicity and of a ruling class with the most absolute control over that historicity.

What this book has tried systematically to explore is the impossibility of reducing society to one level, to principles, to an order or to a movement. It exists only in a fourfold state of tension and rending: the tension between historicity and functioning; class conflict; tensions between field of his­toricity, institutions, and organization: tensions between social movements, critical actions, and reforms.

Faced with a character—whether individual or collective, real or imaginary—the sociologist, like the theater director, must not seek to reduce him to a single situation, to a single meaning, in order to make him the object of a controlled experiment. Like Peter Brook in the theater, he ought rather to reveal the plurality of the possible readings, and the discrepancies between them. He ought to show that one cannot reduce an actor to social roles, however numerous and varied they may be, for every actor participates in historicity, is the bearer of that transcendence of the social organization in which the categories of practice and all social interactions have their foundation. But let us not forget that the levels of analysis are hierarchized: historicity governs functioning, class relations dominate political exchanges, the upper class imposes its order on society as a whole, and what is called socialization is also and principally training to accept domination. The sociologist must consciously react against the ideological role he is constantly being required to play, even in a situation where he is able to keep outside the hegemonic apparatus. He must learn to doubt the categories of social practice and ideologies, to live and work in the space that lies between the agent of social integration and the doctrine bearer of counterpower, not simply as a halfway mark between them but fighting the first and retaining his independence from the second.

Conclusion 453

C. Decline or Birth of Sociology?

Having situated the sociologist in society, we must also place him in history or, at least, and less ambitiously, define the present state of sociology.

For it is not enough to say that the appearance of a new type of society is making the development of sociology necessary. We must also recognize the obstacles it faces and the way in which the circumstances of its growth situate it in society.

The social mutation represented by our entry into programmed society has produced two types of effect upon the sciences of man in industrialized societies.

On the one hand, the ruling class has imposed its Utopia and its ideology on them. It has called up and given its support to an anti-crisis sociology, one oriented toward integration or toward society's adaptation. It is in the United States that this kind of sociology has developed most fully; though more recently it has been winning a wide hearing in the people's democracies and in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, societies more torn between past and future, or more capable of analyzing this inner tension, seem not to apprehend the changes taking place intellectually and, like many societies undergoing the crisis of transition from one state of historicity to another, turn away from investigation into the meaning of that transition and withdraw into analyses far removed from the social problems of the present and oriented toward the progress of formalization.

In either case, whether escaping from the present or accepting it uncritically, sociology has paradoxically played a rather restricted role in the sciences of man during recent decades.

One might go further: sociology has in fact represented a conservative element, a backward-looking element even, in the domain of knowledge.

The takeover by a new model of knowledge has been expressed in the vast growth experienced in the natural sciences of man, from biology to linguistics and anthropology by way of genetic psychology. The social sciences were unable to integrate themselves wholly into this great bound forward, for they deal with social interactions and social systems, which cannot be reduced to the models of organisms or machines. Indeed, instead of profiting from the general growth, they seem actually to have been thrown into reverse by it? led into becoming "moral and political" sciences once again, concentrating on the integration of the social order rather than on the production of a new universe of knowledge.

The taking over of power by a new ruling class of social planners, whether private or public, has admittedly lent importance to lines of research lying very close to sociology, vast areas of which have in fact been renewed in the process: the analysis of decision making and organizations. But this progress

454 Conclusion

has in its turn thrust the remainder of sociology either toward an ideology of opposition, at once anticipatory and backward-looking, or else toward a reaction analogous to that which influenced Durkheim so strongly: the concern to reestablish a new social order after such profound upheavals.

This relative backwardness on the part of sociology has not prevented it from growing, from penetrating into the universities (except for the most recalcitrant), from attracting students, from arousing the interest of the general public, from introducing a number of new words into our everyday language. But the backwardness and the advances have to be balanced against each other, and it seems to me that the former weighs more heavily.

What is now reversing the situation, what is rendering a new development of sociology both necessary and possible, is the appearance of new social conflicts. The sciences of man can no longer limit themselves to the creation of the new systems-theory model of knowledge; they can no longer content themselves with merely providing tools to help decision makers; they must and can reoccupy their own territory, the study of social relations, of the classes, of power, of political systems and organization, of social movements and the mechanisms of change. There is a vast but not yet quite crystallized expectation surrounding sociology today. It is often repressed or stifled. It is also weakened by an attachment to old forms of social analysis that subordinate social facts to other kinds of facts, whether juridico-political or economic, that are judged to be more fundamental. But who does not feel that for the first time it is now right to analyze social facts in social terms, a notion that is no mere truism and arouses much greater resistance than such a modest formula might lead one to expect? Social claims are now beginning to be expressed directly in social terms. Has the novelty of this fact been appreciated? Urban disorganization, rejection of old forms of authority, the challenge to relations between age groups, between the sexes, or between ethnic groups, protests against forms of inculcating social norms, all these are movements that make the headlines and that also cry out directly for sociological analysis.

The ripping aside of the technocratic Utopia and the more or less rapid institutionalization of the social movements specific to the industrial era provide imperative indications of where its work lies to a sociology still uncertain of its own procedures but now benefiting from long years of critical retreat, of methodical doubt applied to its operations and the implications of its conceptual and technical tools. I hope to share in this attempt to redefine the content and conditions of sociological analysis.

D. The Internationalization of Sociology

This attempt cannot bear fruit unless sociology is the field of the most important social interactions of our time. In practice, sociology had long

Conclusion 455

taken root solely in the capitalist and liberal countries, not only because they have a university system and better equipped research centers at their disposal but above all because, being less engaged than other countries in voluntarist development, they are less given to imposing the unifying view of the state, of its apparatus and its ideology, upon their societies. But this situation has very often led sociology to forget or even consciously to conceal the international relations of domination that play so fundamental a role in our era. From an ethnography openly stamped with the colonial relation, down to the sociocentrism of the modernization theories that condescendingly inform the underdeveloped and dominated countries what their chances are, in twenty or a hundred years, of being like us—not to mention the more direct and much more serious compromising associations with counter­espionage, as in the case of the Camelot plan in Latin America—sociology has certainly deserved serious criticisms. Many of these, happily, have come from the ranks of American, British, or French sociological workers themselves.

Sociology can only live on the debate between its agents in the dominant countries, committed to their society but not particularly subjected to the state, supported by research organizations possessing a real autonomy and considerable resources, and the sociologists of the dominated countries, who are usually poorly equipped, sometimes incorporated into the state apparatus and on occasion persecuted by it, but who stress the bonds of dependence and the concealment of the class conflicts, the national conflicts, and the problems bound up with a voluntarist transformation of society. The university researcher in the industrial countries, even when he believes himself at his most independent, is in danger of being bound by the blindest of solidarities to the domination exerted by his own society over others. He must be called to awareness by the social and intellectual protests of all those being dominated, both inside and outside his national frontiers; even though that protest cannot become knowledge except when transmuted by a sociological labor that undeniably is carried on largely in the dominant countries. Here again, no one actor holds the meaning of his action. The duty of every sociologist is to get as near as he can to the meeting place of opposites: an intransigent attachment to the demands of knowledge and a refusal to subordinate that knowledge to ideology, on the one hand; a commitment with regard to dominated social and national collectivities and attention to the intellectuals denouncing the relation of domination, on the other.

The image of the programmed, postindustrial society has been evoked many times throughout this book. It would be an error to think that it involves only the most industrialized countries. It must be at the center of the analysis of all forms of development. For not only are certain dominant countries entering this new type of society; it is also defining new relations of

456 Conclusion

domination. Finally, and less often appreciated, movements of liberation and voluntarist development, when they actually take over a whole society, as in China, cannot be understood other than as agents for the construction— on the foundation of an agrarian, dependent, mutilated society—of a particular type of postindustrial society, one in which it is not difficult to recognize, behind very different change and management processes, the same system of historical action as in the most industrial countries, the same extention of social and cultural participation, the same priority accorded to the management of social wholes, the same forward-looking attitude. Sociology cannot be other than global, for no society can be analyzed solely from the inside. No class, no state, no collectivity can be reduced to its management and its consciousness. This book has been worked on in Chile, in Brazil, in Quebec, and in the United States almost as much as in France, and I should like it to be read as an attempt to get away from representations of a particular society in order to present a type of analysis in which sociologists in Latin America, in Africa, and in Asia can recognize some of their own intellectual aspirations in the same way as researchers in Europe, North America, or Japan. My book is not trying to synthesize their points of view but to make possible an understanding of the relations, the oppositions, and the interdependence of situations and points of view.

E. The Author Quits His Book

This book does not end on its last page, it begins. It sends it readers out to invent a sociology whose guiding attitude alone has been defined. What must be done?

The sociological field will always be divided into two parts: first, the study of social wholes, organizations, collectivities, societies, and—more con­cretely—nations, towns or villages, factories, schools, and so on; and second, the study of social actors: individuals, groups, social movements, pressure groups. But sociologists are unanimous in thinking that situations and actors are indissociable, that the notions used to describe both must be congruent, and that the concepts of analysis tend to unify the two orders of phenomena.

What type of situation, what type of actor, should that person who has not thrown this book aside or piously consigned it to the graveyard of dead ideas be asked to study? And what is the unity that must bind these two fields of work together?

1. The most natural impulse here is toward a new definition of situations. One must learn to read a situation not as a set of facts and "data" but as a network of social relations. Society produces itself through its political and social struggles, its inventions and its conquests. Today the field of

Conclusion 457

historical study has been considerably extended. It is no longer limited to examining the functioning of particular areas of social life, political institutions, economic organization, forms of cultural expression. Should it not be extended also in the direction of an actionalist sociology, a sociology set upon destroying the very idea of situation and searching ceaselessly beyond the surface of things, whether durable or fleeting, for the action of social groups, the creation of a state of historicity and a system of historical action, combats and debates, pressures and negotiations? We still hear far too often those old words of advice: put the actor back into his "frame," the event back into the whole background, the present back into the past. When such advice is followed, what is the final goal being aimed at? It is the moment when a professorial finger points to a lighted diorama screen on which everything is in its rightful place, clear, neatly outlined, at exactly the intended scale, immobile, incomprehensible, dead.

We must turn our back on that grand official style, which is in fact simply enabling the author to voice his prejudices and his desires most improperly in the form of universal history.

This book should be consulted in the first place on the subject of social change and social movements, then on organizations and the state, then on the political system and social class, and finally on the field of historicity and the content given to it by each of the societal types.

Does not a procedure of that kind best define the work of sociology today, a work powered by the resurgence of social movements and the renewed vigor with which, both intellectually and practically, we are exploding those "facts" known as the "spirit" of a school, the "needs" of production, the "nature" of the family, the "demands" of the consumer, the "opinions" of the citizens, the "logic" of the institutions, and all the other statues that clutter up and dominate our public places.

2. It is much more difficult to open up a new path to the study of actors. The collective actor who intervenes in the field of historicity cannot be a character, analogous to the actors of the organizations only more heroic or more brutal. Such an image, used in works of propaganda, identifies the field of historicity with the state and therefore contributes directly to the destruction of social movements or their manipulation by the ruling apparatuses. The actor in social movements is not a character: his project is a never-completed effort to bind together the consciousness he has of himself, of his adversary, and of the stake of the struggle, and also to bring together social movement, political strategy, and organizational claims. Here, once again, we inevitably encounter one of the central themes of this book: a social movement is not a collective ego, any more than society is reducible to the values or to the central authority that organize its functioning.

458 Conclusion

The most important thing, beyond a historiographic apprehension of social movements, is to study the historical actor, the fragmented anti-character torn between a latent consciousness and an ideological avant-garde, to search him out in his withdrawals, his flights, or his ruptures, and to explain his forms of collective action and organization. These are topics present in political writings but hardly ever to be found in the sociological field: the relations between top and bottom, or between a class's culture, its social consciousness, and political action; the formation of solidarity; the birth or decline of a social movement.

If one wishes to know how society is consumed, how values and norms are either respected and interiorized or rejected, one can observe the concrete actor, his most visible forms of behavior, his choices between objects clearly circumscribed and defined by the social organization, such as toothpastes, singers, or candidates in an election—though no adequate explanation of social conduct can ever be found on that level.

If one's interest is directed at political interactions and decision mecha­nisms, then one must give up that type of approach and analyze strategies, influences, negotiations, clashes.

Lastly, if one wishes to reach and grasp class conduct and social movements, one must not study either individuals in a market or partners in a decision-making process. One must go beyond the categories of social practice, and against them, beyond the negotiable and political too, in order to reach conflicts that are at once deep-lying and fragmented, active and suppressed. The sociologist owes it to himself to go out in quest of his object of study, to intervene, to venture into the zones of dark and silence instead of merely standing out among the bright city lights and listening to the jingles and the slogans.

It is also time to go beyond accounts or interpretations that remain external to the process of a social movement's formation, or that resort—and this is even worse—to some sort of providence to explain social conduct: a class at last recognizes its true interests, the national consciousness stirs from its slumber, believers are aroused by the true faith, and so on.

There is no more difficult task, for no task puts the conception of the sociologist's role more directly in question: observer or participant? How is he to penetrate and grasp the formation—or the breakdown—of a social movement without being inside it? Yet how, once inside, is he to avoid submitting to the demands of its action, which are not those of his analysis?

The sociologist must never confuse a movement with a power or a doctrine. But even less must he permit himself to be stopped by the walls that enclose social movements, walls of stone, of fire, or of silence. This book is addressed to all those for whom sociology is an act of knowledge in the service of that liberty without which sociology itself cannot exist.

GLOSSARY

The words listed here—about fifty in number—arc those used by this book in the context of the general analytic schema presented.

These definitions can be usefully consulted only during the reading of the text or atter having read it. Their sole aim is to spare the reader a tiresome search when he is hesitating over the meaning the author has assigned to a term he cither has invented or does not employ in its most usual sense.

Accumulation

Action

Administration Agency

Alienation

Apparatus

The deduction of part of the product of labor by the ruling class for investments in conformity with the cultural model of the society in question and with the interests of that ruling class. Conduct occurring within a social interaction and oriented toward the maintenance, transformation, or overthrow of one or more of the constituent elements of a social system.

Historical action is that which occurs within class relations and is oriented toward one or more of the elements of the system of historical action. See also Critical action. An organization directly dependent on the executive. An organization directly implementing one or more elements of the system of historical action and therefore intervening directly in the relations of social domination. Crisis of the popular class actor trapped in the contradiction between the dependent participation imposed on him by the dominant class and his class consciousness.

The organization of a collective actor intervening in the field of historicity (classes, agencies, state, social movements, critical actions).

459

460 Glossary

Authority Components of historicity

Conflict

Contractual (societies)

Counterelements

Crisis

Critical action

Cultural model

Debates

Development

Domination

Double dialectic of the social classes

Delegation of power within an organization. Model of knowledge, accumulation, and cultural model. See also Historicity. Relation of opposition between social actors partici­pating in the same social whole, whether system of historical action, institutions, or organization. Societies in which development is managed by political institutions. Result of the ideological appropriation of the elements of the system of historical action by the opposing class. The counterelements are the values of class actors. Breakdown of one of the axes of a system. For example, in relation to the system of historical action I speak of a crisis of historicity, of rationality, or of representativity. The transformation of a social movement into a force of structural change in a situation of organizational crisis, institutional blockage, and hegemony of the ruling class. Depending on whether the rupture effected is more or less total, I speak of an anticipatory, an institutional, or a revolutionary critical action.

Apprehension by a society of the gap between historicity and functioning, and image of creativity. Component of historicity directly governing the formation of the system of historical action.

Public expression of the tensions between the elements of a system, particularly between the elements of the system of historical action. The process of a society's transition from one field of historicity to another. Dominion of the upper class over the institutional system and social organization. The ruling class identifies itself with the system of historical action, but also identifies that system with its

particularism relation to historicity

upper class

popular class

dominant

defensive

ruling

contestatory

Glossary 461

Enterprise

Field of historicitv

Hegemony Hierarchization

Historicitv

Ideology

Influence

Innovation

Institutionalization

Institutional svstem

own particular interests, thus establishing its domina­tion over society- The popular class opposes this action with a defensive attitude and also contests the private appropriation of historicity. Organization managed directly by the ruling class and possibly possessing an autonomous institutional system. Whole formed by the system of historical action and class relations, and by means of which historicity is transformed into orientations of social activity, thus establishing dominion over that activity. See also Historicity.

Domination of the political system by a class actor. An element of the system of historical action. Mode of transformation of a cultural model into a principle of social order. Studied within an organization it becomes stratification.

Action exerted by society, on the basis of its own activity, on its cultural and social practices, through the combination of three components: the model of knowl­edge, which constitutes an image of society and nature; accumulation, which sets aside part of society's available product; and the cultural model, which apprehends and interprets society's capacity for action upon itself. See also Components of historicity; Field of historicity. Any definition of a social interaction from the viewpoint of one of the actors. In a more limited sense, the apprehension by a class actor of the class relation, but without reference to the stake of that relation, which is to say the system of historical action. Content of political or institutional interactions. Rela­tion between the possibility of modifying the other's behavior and the possibility of being modified by that behavior.

Modification induced in a social system by the effects of social interactions in a lower-level system. Transition from the field of historicity or from social organization to the politico-institutional system. In the first case this is primarily the institutions' processing of class conflicts; in the second, it is the institutions' processing of social interactions and social claims arising within an organization.

Mode of legitimate decision making within a political collectivity. Synonymous with political system. In a

462 Glossary

more limited sense, the institutional dimension of this system is that which corresponds to the appearance of a territorial collectivity, whereas the political dimension indicates the penetration into the system of class relations and the system of historical action.

field actors

politics societal problems

government

dominant class

political forces

Legitimacy

Liberal societies

Metasocial warrants

Mobilization

Needs

Organizational system

Attribute of decisions taken by the political or institu­tional system. Societies whose development is oriented by social movements and by innovations. Cultural models characteristic of societies with a limited historicity, in other words of all societies preceding the programmed society. They subordinate social action and analysis to laws that transcend them. The meta­social warrant of agrarian society is religious, that of mercantile society state-centered, that of industrial society economic. Metasocial warrants are always transformed by the ruling classes into an ideology of the system, but as cultural models they are not reducible to an ideology.

An element of the system of historical action. Mode of combination of social resources in the service of a cultural model. In a diachronic analysis, mobilization signifies the raising of the general level of social exchanges above the limits acceptable by the mecha­nisms of reproduction. An element of the system of historical action. Cultural resources utilized by a mode of social hierarchization and corresponding to a cultural model. An organization is a set of instruments at the service of a power within the framework of a field of historicity' and a political system. Thus the organizational system is formed by the intersection of a power/technique axis and an internal /external axis.

Glossary 463

external internal

power

techniques

objectives

exchanges

norms

equilibria

Political system Power

Project

Reproduction

Revolution

Rhetoric

Social interactions

Social movement

Social relations

Social system

See Institutional system. Manifestation of social domination within an organiza­tion or within the state. Level of integration of the principles of identity, opposition, and totality within a social movement. Action of agents of social control aimed at maintaining a mode of social domination within institutional or organizational units. Change in the field of historicity, and more specifically in the ruling class, resulting from a critical action formed within a situation of institutional blockage and organizational crisis, and associated with a social movement. The language of a system of historical action, an institutional system, or an organizational system, seen as an actor. Rhetoric unifies the elements of such systems by destroying their relations and replacing them with an essence, an idea, or a principle.

All interactions occurring within a socially defined field. More precisely, this term is used to distinguish institu­tional, organizational, or intersocial relations, from class relations. Aim at control over the system of historical action by means of class conflict. Social movements, critical actions, and development movements are the three principal types of historical movements. Social relations situated within the field of historicity and thus bringing into play, whether directly or indirectly, the social classes. Generic term denoting the system of historical action, the system of class relations, the political system, or the organizational system.

464 Glossary

Societal types

State

System of historical action

Wholes defined by a state of historicity, in other words by the correspondence of a mode of knowledge, a type of accumulation, and a cultural model. And also, as a consequence, by a system of historical action. There exist four simple societal types generally referred to as: agrarian, mercantile, industrial, and programmed (or postindustrial).

Apparatus of social management defined by a certain degree of integration of the political system, social organization, and field of historicity. Intervenes in intersocietal relations.

Mode of historicity's dominion over social and cultural practices, the elements of which are defined by the combination of the oppositional pairs movement/order, orientations/resources, culture/society in accordance with the following diagram:

movement order

orientations cultural model

1 ^ mobilization

hierarchtzation

needs 1

System of historical actors Utopia

Values Violence

Voluntarist societies

Synonymous with class relations. Identification of a class actor with the system of historical action without any direct consideration of class relations. See Counterelements.

Manifestation of a social movement reduced to making its appearance within a crisis of the social organization. Societies whose development is oriented by critical actions by either the upper or popular class and making use of the state.

INDEX

accumulation. 4, 16, 18-19, 21.121-23. 128, 135

adaptation. 3 administration, 202-3, 250-

56 agency, 76-79, 129,171,211,

217,259, 262-68,274.387, 402. 418

aggression, 326 agrarian society. 98-99 alienation. 35, 166-70. 325-

28. 362 anthropology. 50. 95. 109. 273 apparatus, 157, 260 armv. 249, 251 art. 272, 274 association. 239, 264-65, 338 asynchrony, 107 authority. 300 autonomy, professional, 159

blockage, 197. 228, 303, 357. 359, 400, 409, 424

bureaucratization, 57, 208, 250, 252-53

capitalism, 95-%. 259 change. 2, 7, 43, 51,59, 109.

159. 161-62, 219,374-445 church, the, 201, 203, 267-68 civilization, 84, 192 class consciousness, 137.

315-17,327,355.361.404, 430, 432

classses. social, 5-6. 20-21,

46-47, 117-74. 258.260, 306, 318, 328,365-66, 414-15. 427; middle class. 124-25.213. 292,386; ruling class, 20. 34. 36, 40. 50-51, 119-20. 146-49. 157-59, 182-85.212.217, 222-24. 263. 285. 323-24. 336,383.397,407-9.412-13. 438; working class, 119-21. 137, 146-49, 150-53, 162-64,222-24,281. 311,315.323-24.335-36, 384, 398

classless society, 335, 363-64 colonization, 127, 223.271,

280.282.393.395.409.435 communism, 363-64 community, 63, 113, 135,

232. 356, 363-64, 394-95. 431

concentration, 278-79 conflict. 10, 58-60, 63. 86,

128-29, 133, 138. 142. 145-49, 159-66. 170,204-6,314,324-25,331,381-82

conquest, 108,247-48,419 consensus, 271 consumption, 84. 94, 163,

282-83. 293 contestation, 59, 160-62,

223-25,281. 323,385 contractual society, 226.425,

435-37 contradiction, 169-70, 314,

325. 329, 335, 392

counterelements, 79-85, 131-34. 248

countersociety. 282 crisis. 85-90. 133. 172.215,

228. 247-49, 299-302.313, 332-33, 357-59, 369-70, 372. 392-93

critical action. 389-411, 422, 430-31.442-43

cultural model, 4, 16, 19, 65-70. 95.96. 100-103, 133-34. 151-54. 156,312,375

culture. 68-69, 107, 124, 163

debates, 72-75 decadence, 88 decisions, 9. 33-34, 43, 45,

1%. 2%. 302-3 deliberation, 75 demands, 160, 163. 300. 348 democracy, 195-% dependence. 29, 426-28, 436.

444 development. 29, 389, 412,

419-33 deviance, 42. 169-70, 353 differentiation, 113-16. 154,

265 discourse, 284, 290-91 discussion. 75 disorganization, 178, 252,

254-55 doctrine, 320. 347, 363, 405.

432 domination, 10. 54, 58, 129-

31. 148-49. 159-62. 164,

465

466 Index

166, 170, 180, 187,237, 247, 260, 277, 280, 325, 390,418-19.427

dominion, 278, 281

education. 77-78, 199, 22" elite, 87, 90. 183-84.210,

215.283,371,434 enterprise, 202. 256-62 equality, 281, 364 equilibrium, 86, 241 evolution, evolutionism. 5,

106, 108-16.377,410.442, 443

exchanges, 241, 247-49, 419, 424,438

exclusion, 191, 254. 392, 401. 410

executive. 189 exploitation, 142, 168

factors, 102 fascism. 221, 332-33 force. 189. 423, 437; political

forces, 185-88 functionalism, 26, 28, 32, 37-

42,45, 170, 178.277 fundamentalism, 309, 364,

407,440-41

government. 188-89

hegemony. 166,184, 209, 285. 304, 386, 392-93. 400

heterogeneity, 226. 235, 280, 343. 363, 393

hierarchization, 70. 94, 97, 98,99, 153

historical action, system of, 65-116. 125-29,273-74, 313,322, 346

historical subject, 27-29 historicism, 22,31,49, 102,

173,287,375-77 historicity, 4. 15-64, 65. 76,

87.90-91. 102. 13S, 170, 288, 375-77, 379; field of. 91, 129, 174,232,240

history, end of, 103-4. 287

identity, principle of, 311-12, 394"

ideology, 19-20. 44. 50, 62, 125-28, 129, 143-45, 193. 227,271,285

industrial society, 49, 101-2, 128,133.149-55,230. 258-59,323

inequality. 276. 361. See also equality

influence, 9, 34, 186-87. 302-3

innovation, 245, 329-31, 407, 416-19

institution, 49, 54. 57, 113. 140.168, 175-234.239, 302-8. 400; total institu­tion. 250-51. 253

institutionalization, 197-206. 212.227.319.339-41,416

integration, 38. 88, 160. 191-92, 193,220-21.223.244, 264,279

intellectuals, 120, 233-34, 282,327.331.362.364, 402-5.409.447-48

intelligentsia. See intellectuals interest groups, 231, 254.

257-58. 303 intersocial relations. 9. 108,

129, 238-39 intervcntionism. 417. 436-37

knowledge, mode of, 4, 18

labor. 16, 19. 100,128.159, 163-64

law, 98. 192-93.215 leftism. 326. 331,349. 367,

441 legitimacy, legitimation. 179,

199.240 liberal society. 197, 225. 357,

425-26.437-43 liberty, 26, 172. 282 logos. 19

marginality. 42, 353, 392, 407, 428

market. 157. 212 mass media, ^8-79, 198 mercantile society, 97-98 meritocracy, 94 messianism, 302, 393 metasocial warrant, 2, 16, 25,

31,48.50,93.%, 152. 155, 179.229.424

middle class. See classes, social

militants. 317

mobility, 279 mobilization: indiachronic

analysis. 413-15; in syn­chronic analysis. 70. 94, 96. 98, 99

modernization, 29, 199. 227, 301.308-10,378,408,428, 430-33

modification, 377 movement, 32, 47. 67 movement, social, 26, 137.

139,165-66,197,234, 274-75, 298-373, 384-85, 390-91,406-7.422,427-35. 438, 440-41

nation, 232-33, 369, 428-30, 433

nature. 16, 17-18,24.49-50, 52, 67. 95

needs, 71,94, 97,98, 99, 111, 153

negotiation, 43, 172, 203 norms, 34, 71.240-42, 284

objectives, 240-42, 247-49 opposition, principle of, 312-

13,394 order. 32-33, 37. 45. 47, 59,

67,444-45 organizations, 51, 54-55, 160,

200-204.210-11.235-97, 299-300. 387; informal, 56,59,210-11,251-52,281

organization, social, 9, 54-56, 140, 270-90. 368-69; total, 251-53

orientation, 67-68

participation, 185. 196, 276 party, political, 206, 233,

234,316,336.364-68,397, 408, 433-34

peri odizat ion, 103-8 politics, 15, 54, 175-216, 284,

306, 378-79. 386-87, 429, 435-36

postindustrial society, 36, 51-53.83,93-95, 103, 108-14. 128,155-66,229,258-60, 269,322.376.441-43,455

power,40,56,57,63.187,197, 240-41,253,372,398,432

practice, categories of, 67, 126, 166,270-97,319,449

Index 467

pressure, 187, 304, 348. 368 professionalism, profes-

sionalization. 77, 262-65. 291-92

production, forces of, 135, 377

professionals, 77. 125. 262-63 programmed society. See

postindustrial society progress, 96, 134 project, levels of, 343-55.

403-7 proletariat. 150, 335. 399. 430 psuedo-political institution,

254-55

rationality. 87-88 rebellion. 59. 223, 276 reforms, 190.304.386,388 religion, 99. 101, 110-12, 134,

409. Sec also church, the representation, 185. 190-191,

197 repression. 54, 190-91, 218,

223. 226. 279-80. 401 reproduction, 3. 58, 77. 179,

202, 214. 280, 289-90 resistance, 281-82 resources, 67-68 revolution, revolutionary, 224,

341.357,369-70, 393-400. 409.432

rhetoric. 78. 192-94, 215, 232, 290-94

role. 26-27, 34. 55. 284 ruling class. See classes, social rupture. 302. 313. 325-26.

388.389-411

science. 19-20. 76, 211. 320-21

secularization, 112-13 self-management, 162, 199.

254 social controls. 33-36, 44-45,

54, 191-92. 199.250-51 social formation, 105, 180 social problems, 353-54, 392 socialization, 290 societal problems. 184-85 societal types. 92-100, 115.

Sec also individual listings spontaneity, 327. 355-56 state, the. 98, 101,175.198.

216-34, 266, 268, 288. 295. 307, 357. 364-70. 378-79. 402,406.417,419.428.433

strategy, 303 stratification, 9 strength, 412-13 system. 17,31,67-68.242,

294-97. See also force: power

technique, technology. 17. 57. 242, 271

technocracy. 230-31. 259, 321.326'

tensions. 85, 302-8 terror. 341. 373 terrorism, 352, 405-6 totalitarianism. 58, 127, 136,

171-72, 181.227-28.289 totality, principle of, 313-15,

320! 394-95 transactions. 43. 254, 357

university, 201-2, 203, 255, 263. 264.291-92.301,305. 337.400,421-22

uprising. 405-6 Utopia. 53, 137. 143-45.216,

274. 276. 330. 335. 337-38. 347. 398

values. 5. 19-20,40-41,46, 72-73.80.85, 133, 170, 225. 237. 271,284,329, 339. 371

violence. 130, 189,213,254, 319.352,357,405-6,423, 443

voluntarist society. 114, 226, 425-26.427-35

war. 108. 172.218.238. 423

withdrawal. 326 women. 309 working class. See classes,

social; proletariat