Modernization and Its Political Consequences: Weber, Mannheim, and Schumpeter
Modernization and Its Political Consequences: Weber, Mannheim, and Schumpeter
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Overview
The underlying cause of the powerlessness pervading the current political system could be modernization. Taking the work of Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, and Joseph Schumpeter as a point of departure, Hans Blokland here examines this process. The topics covered are, among others, the meaning of modernization, the forces that drive it, and, especially, the consequences of modernization for the political freedom of citizens to influence the course of their society via democratic politics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300134827 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 17 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Modernization and Its Political Consequences
Weber, Mannheim, and SchumpeterBy Hans Blokland
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2006 Yale UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-11081-4
Chapter One
General Introduction
People's capacity jointly to give meaning and direction to social life is an essential dimension of political freedom. Yet many citizens of Western democracies believe that this freedom has become quite restricted. They feel they are at the mercy of anonymous structures and processes over which they have hardly any control, structures and processes that present them with options and realities they might not have chosen if they had had any real choice. In this regard, the present political system seems incapable of resolving any number of today's critical problems: environmental degradation; urban sprawl and the concomitant demise of the inner city; bio industry's barbaric production of unsafe food; the economic and social exclusion of large segments of society; the relentless expansion of the economic realm and, as a direct consequence, the erosion of nonmarketable values and the steady build-up of pressure-especially on time-that the economy places on people. The incapacity to deal effectively with these problems only reinforces the impression that the body politic has lost its grip on events. Thus, a disinterest inpolitics-even to the point of cynicism-appears to be a plausible alternative.
This book considers the extent to which the current sense of powerless-ness-or rather, in the words of CharlesTaylor (1991), the feeling of malaise-was inevitable, in view of the principles underlying the Western political system. It also analyzes the attempts to improve the way this political system operates. Such notions as deregulation, privatization, decentralization, flexibilization, farming out, and marketization have played a key role in these efforts since the 1980s. Here, I argue that many of the measures and proposals will only exacerbate the problems. People involved in these efforts seek to create a social order in which politics will play a much more limited role; the solutions are expected to come from the free play of societal forces. My stance is quite different; I make a case for the rehabilitation of politics. Because of the nature of the problems facing us today, our only hope of finding real solutions is through political action.
1 MODERNIZATION
Under the present model of political decision-making and the model of policy-making associated with it, it would appear that citizens are powerless with respect to the modernization process and are rendered powerless by it. Perhaps these systems of politics and policy are too closely allied with this process for people to cope with the downside of modernity.
It is not easy to give an unambiguous definition of modernization and to pin down its driving force. We can narrow it down, however, by identifying its core processes: rationalization, differentiation, and individualization. The following sections give a brief overview of these three processes and serve as an introduction to the issues that are central to the study.
1.1 Emergence of Instrumental Rationality
According to the Dutch sociologist Jacques van Doorn, rationalization means that "cultural, moral, political, and ideological values and goals" fade into the background and "organizational, bureaucratic, technocratic, and formalistic orientations" come to the fore (1988: 139). The process leaves less and less room for what Max Weber called value rationality, while instrumental rationality gains ground in more and more realms of social life. In other words, people increasingly seek the optimal means to an end-to attain a given value or a particular goal with the least outlay of resources. However, they give less and less thought to that goal, to defining it and understanding why they might be striving for it. Ultimately, this leads to aimless action, devoid of soul and meaning, according to such theorists as Weber, Mannheim, and Habermas.
According to Van Doorn, this is most clearly evident in the areas of technological development and industrialization. In the past, the traditional tool was an extension of the acting individual; nowadays, human beings are operators of the equipment, and their actions are constrained by the rationality of the technology. The undeniably superior performance of this rationality gives it a sacrosanct aura. Thus, it is increasingly held up as a model for order and organization in human relations. The larger and more pervasive these social-technological constructs become, "the more society is driven to deal with all important issues in conformity with the logic of technical effectiveness and efficiency" (Van Doorn 1988: 143). The most prominent manifestation of this tendency is the industrialization process that is currently taking place world-wide. At present, the pace of technological progress, organizational expansion, and concentration is growing explosively; the scale of economic transactions is enlarging, leading to greater competition in global markets. These processes, "each on its own but certainly in concert lead to an accelerated erosion of the specific cultural and institutional influences of the environment" (1988: 144). As Marx had predicted, the world is increasingly becoming an indivisible whole and is everywhere motivated by the same instrumental rationality.
Yet it is precisely the substantial values that give meaning, purpose, and coherence to life and diversity and dynamism to culture. The mindless pursuit of arbitrary ends-something a machine can do, or workers on an assembly line-deprives the act of its meaning and the actors of their dignity. Even though instrumental rationality is limited, current social structures and processes seem to compel people to think and act in this frame of mind in more and more domains of life. It often seems that people are trapped in what Weber has called an iron cage. For instance, managers might feel coerced by the market to apply efficiency measures more strictly than they themselves deem morally acceptable. Under pressure from economic competition from abroad, the citizens comprising the body politic might feel compelled to spend more time in gainful employment than they would if they were free to choose otherwise. In the same vein, individuals are being taken captive by a proliferation of monsters of their own making-organizations that owe their "total" character to an inexorable process of bureaucratization, functionalization, and professionalization. A civil servant, for instance, may feel that his or her freedom is constrained by bureaucratic rules that force him or her to apply standard decisions-prescriptions that do not reflect the concrete and value-laden context in which one operates.
Weber was terrified of the consequences of this process, which he saw as irreversible and unstoppable. He saw us heading toward a cold and impersonal society, one in which instrumental rationality would overwhelm value rationality. Thus, he too had wrestled with the question of how to gain control of the rationalization process.
The ascendancy of instrumental rationality, of which economic thinking is both an expression and a catalyst, could not really get under way until substantial rationalities, particularly those embodied in religion, tradition, and culture, had begun to decline. Thus, in order to halt its progress, one would have to create new substantial rationalities. On that basis, one would then have to intervene in the current flow of blind processes. At the level of society at large, thinkers like Mannheim considered political action to be the best means to do so. However, Western liberal societies now define politics primarily in instrumental terms. Political democracy is an institutional order in which social conflicts of interest are resolved by peaceful means. As Harold Lasswell (1936) once summed it up, politics answers the question of who gets what, when, how. Our political system offers citizens less and less scope for collective efforts to give their community meaning and direction through a substantive program. Yet only that notion of politics would seem to offer any chance of developing a substantial rational program; only such a notion could engender the power and legitimacy that are needed to rein in the process of rationalization.
1.2 Differentiation and Individualization: Deterrents to Political Action
The chances for citizens to organize themselves politically and thereby jointly determine their future are shrinking because of two processes that go hand in hand with rationalization: differentiation and individualization. By differentiation we mean that more and more human activities are organized within an ever-growing number of increasingly specialized institutions. Consequently, social complexity increases; while mutual functional dependencies expand, so does the sovereignty within the specialized institutions. Individualization is related to this process. It means that people see themselves-and are seen by others-less and less as members of a single social group, as exponents of a specific pattern of values, norms, customs, and expectations. While the number of groups to which a person belongs keeps rising, membership in those groups becomes less and less meaningful; the extent to which they confer an identity upon their members is declining. As people's repertory of roles grows in range and complexity, their identity is no longer constant, clear cut, coherent, or secure (cf. Blokland 2003). Moreover, one might say that there is an expanding domain in which the individual, unhindered by others, can do or be what he or she is able to do or be (cf. Berlin 1958). This does not, however, imply that the individual is more capable of taking charge of his or her life. A growing negative freedom does not necessarily mean that people are able to make informed choices and justify those choices in terms of values and goals they have set for themselves (Blokland 1997a).
Robert Lane adds another dimension to the preceding analysis of present-day individualism. In a book entitled The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (2000), he presents evidence from a large number of empirical studies affirming the body of criticism of modern societies-particularly by such authors as Tönnies, Simmel, Fromm, Mumford, and Wirth-that modern social relations are typically superficial, impersonal, and instrumental. That is why people tend to say they often feel lonely and long for intimacy. A "Machiavellian syndrome" is spreading through the market economies of the West; to an increasing extent, people are adopting a manipulative stance toward their fellow men. It seems as if they can no longer separate the way they treat others on the job from how they behave away from work. They are continually calculating the costs and benefits of a relationship; they end it when it no longer "pays off." Consequently, modern people often have many casual acquaintances but rarely any good friends (2000: 96). According to Lane, modern individualism-defined as the pursuit of personal aims instead of collective goals-explains why we are lonely and indifferent. Although people long for human warmth, they continuously seek greater self-sufficiency, which they see as crucial to a sense of well-being. An unbounded striving for independence or freedom from bonds makes relationships noncommittal and superficial; moreover, it undermines the social conditions for self-determination (cf. Blokland 1997a: chap. 4). Intimate and meaningful relations are the most important building blocks of human well-being. Therefore, as the ultimate consequence of contemporary individualism, the well-being of Americans has by their own report been on the decline for about three decades. Europe is lagging, as usual, but the trend is in the same direction. Lane observes "a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations, of easy-to-reach neighbors, of encircling, inclusive memberships, and of solidary family life" (2000: 9). Due to this lack of social support, people have become much more vulnerable to the misfortunes of life: illnesses, stress, unemployment, disappointing relationships, frustrated ambitions, failed expectations, and the like. The end result is a widespread but quiet desperation.
Differentiation and individualization have major political consequences. These processes, along with the expansion of economic, social, and political domains as a result of rationalization, make it increasingly difficult for individuals to identify themselves with others and with a public cause. For this reason, they are less and less willing and able to engage in a common political project. Instead, citizens focus their political energies on the promotion of particularistic interests. Meanwhile, the noncommittal Greenpeace model of political participation is gaining in popularity; people commit themselves in an abstract fashion to a fairly abstract cause. Politics as the expression of a collective will, as the mobilization of electoral majorities on the grounds of a substantive political program, disappears from the picture. Consequently, as Charles Taylor writes, there is a growing sense that the electorate is powerless against the state and the market, and that it would be rather naïve and utopian to think they could control their own future through politics (1991: 113). Thus, they no longer even try. They become alienated from politics, and complaints about the "gap between citizenry and politics" become a common topic for discussion. Because of political disinterest and apathy, citizens do not have a shared experience of political action. This reinforces their sense of helplessness and prevents notions of public interest from taking root. It is thus increasingly difficult to combat social fragmentation and to counter the primacy of instrumental rationality. To lose the capacity to forge effective political majorities is, in Taylor's apt metaphor, "to lose the paddle in mid-river" (1991: 118).
Thus, modernization leads to political powerlessness in various ways. The first problem is the advance of instrumental rationality, which leads to the creation of "iron cages," the virtually uncontrollable structures and processes of bureaucratization and economization. The second problem is that individualization, differentiation, and the blurring of substantial rationalities in more and more domains of life are making it increasingly difficult for citizens to identify with each other and with any public interest. The erosion of shared values and goals reduces the chance of citizens engaging in political action to shape their society. They lack the shared conceptions of the Good Life and the Good Society that are necessary to take that step. The third problem is that individualization and differentiation also lead to greater social pluriformity, complexity, and opacity. Problems and solutions in one area of policy are increasingly intertwined with issues in other areas. Increasingly, problems, aims, and interests are being defined in widely divergent terms. Furthermore, the calculating, individualized citizens take collectivities less and less into account. Society is breaking down into so many autonomous domains that it is no longer under control.
This brings us to the issue of pluralism.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface....................xiChapter One. General Introduction....................1
1 Modernization....................2
2 Pluralism, Polyarchy, and Incrementalism....................7
3 Doubts about Incrementalism and Polyarchy in Political Science....................9
4 Political Endorsement of Polyarchy and Incrementalism....................12
5 Questions....................15
Chapter Two. Max Weber....................17
1 Personal and Intellectual Background....................18
2 Weber's Philosophy of Science....................21
3 Capitalism and the Rationalization of Occidental Culture....................28
4 Bureaucracy and Bureaucratization....................38
5 Democracy in Modern Society....................45
6 Preliminary Assessment....................55
Chapter Three. Karl Mannheim....................61
1 Personal and Intellectual Background....................61
2 The Reception of Mannheim....................64
3 Science and Society....................66
4 Some Fundamental Assumptions and Concepts of the Sociology of Planning....................78
5 Planning for Freedom....................88
6 Mannheim's Diagnosis of Our Ethical Situation....................102
7 Preliminary Assessment....................109
Chapter Four. Joseph Schumpeter....................114
1 Personal Background....................116
2 Standpoints on Science, Economics, and History....................119
3 The Decline of Capitalism....................125
4 The Socialist Economic System Works....................141
5 Socialism and Democracy....................154
6 Making Up theBalance....................170
Chapter Five. Synthesis: The Modernization of Politics and Society....................183
1 The Rationalization Perspective....................184
2 Rationalization and Politics....................193
3 Democracy and the Entry of the Masses into the Political Arena....................197
4 What to Do?....................205
Notes....................211
Bibliography....................241
Index....................251