International Encyclopedia of the SOCIAL SCIENCES
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International Encyclopedia of the SOCIAL SCIENCES
Associate Editors Heinz Eulau, Political Science Lloyd A. Fallers, Anthropology William H. Kruskal, Statistics Gardner Lindzey, Psychology Albert Rees, Economics Albert J. Reiss, Jr., Sociology Edward Shils, Social Thought
Special Editors Elinor G. Barber, Biographies John G. Darley, Applied Psychology Bert F. Hoselitz, Economic Development Clifford T. Morgan, Experimental Psychology Robert H. Strotz, Econometrics
Editorial Staff Marjorie A. Bassett, Economics P. G. Bock, Political Science Robert M. Coen, Econometrics J. M. B. Edwards, Sociology David S. Gochman, Psychology George Lowy, Bibliographies Judith M. Tanur, Statistics Judith M. Treistman, Anthropology
Alvin Johnson HONORARY EDITOR
W. Allen Wallis CHAIRMAN, EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
International Encyclopedia of the
SOCIAL SCIENCES DAVID L. S I L L S EDITOR
VOLUME
The Macmillan Company & The Free Press
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International Encyclopedia of the SOCIAL SCIENCES
[ C O N T I N U E D ]
PERSONALITY: CONTEMPORARY VIEWPOINTS i. A UNIQUE AND OPEN SYSTEM n. COMPONENTS OF AN EVOLVING PERSONOLOGICAL SYSTEM
Gordon W. Allport Henry A. Murray
A UNIQUE AND OPEN SYSTEM
My approach to personality theory has been called both humanistic and personalistic. It is humanistic in the sense that it demands full recognition of all aspects of man's being, including his potential for becoming more than he is. It is personalistic in the sense that its goal is to understand and predict the development of the concrete, individual person. The approach has. likewise been labeled individual or trait psychology and sometimes a psychology of becoming. I prefer to regard it as an eclecticism based upon the conception of personality as a unique and open system (Allport 1964). An open system is one in which constant intake and output of energy occur, as do homeostatic (tension-reduction) processes. While all theories of personality allow for these two criteria of open system, the present view proposes two additional criteria: progressive internal organization over time and creative transaction with the environment (1960a). [See SYSTEMS ANALYSIS, articles On GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY and PSYCHOLOGICAL SYSTEMS.]
Unlike most major theories, my view is derived not from clinical experience with disordered personalities (as are the views of Freud, Jung, Fromm, Sullivan, etc.) but from the traditions of academic psychology. There is an affinity between my posi-
tion and the theories of Wilhelm Stern, Alfred Adler, Abraham Maslow, Carl R. Rogers, Henry A. Murray, and the contemporary existentialists. Sometimes these views as a group have been labeled the "third force" in psychology (the first two being psychoanalysis and stimulus-response behaviorism). Internationalism. Influenced by historical developments in psychology in continental Europe (especially the schools of act, gestalt, and personalistic psychology), I have tried to relate these movements to Anglo-American empiricism, whose methods I prefer; but I insist that the European view of the person as a self-active (rather than merely reactive) being is sounder than the exaggerated environmentalism and associationism that mark American theories of personality. Some American critics complain that I lean toward German romanticism. Some Europeans, on the other hand, resent my "Americanization" of their thought. Broadly speaking, however, this work is welcomed as a bridge between psychological cultures, and honorary memberships in psychological societies of Great Britain, Germany, France, Austria, and Italy attest to this fact. Presuppositions. While my approach is academic, historical, international, and eclectic, it rests also upon the conviction that science as yet lacks an adequate image of the nature of man. For this reason no doors of method or theory should be closed. It is premature and unseemly for psychologists to present their partial and incomplete theories as if these theories were the final word. Because of this conviction my writing is often polemic in tone, for example in my attacks upon reinforcement theory of learning, projective techniques, animal models, and common actuarial 1
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PERSONALITY: CONTEMPORARY VIEWPOINTS (I)
assumptions—insofar as such particularistic doctrines seem to be overextended in current theorizing. Psychoanalysis, with its heavy emphasis on the unconscious and on ego defenses, contributes much to our understanding of certain human qualities and occasionally provides the best theoretical fit for a given personality; but in general its biologism and reductionism are unsafe guides to follow. Most human conflicts are well configurated in consciousness and for this reason phenomenological report is important. "If you want to know what a person is like, ask him." In place of particularism and reductionism, I advocate a systematic pluralism or systematic eclecticism, which regards human personality as an open system whose potentiality limits are not known. Because any given personality is always in the process of "becoming" (1955), the science of personality should leave doors open for expansion. Since, as a rule, it is purposivists who leave doors open and mechanists who close them, I am aligned with the former, although I do not exclude any valid evidence from any school of thought. I would allow for both the automatic and for the autonomous in human nature. All theories of personality are nothing more than empirically based philosophies of man. Philosophies of materialism, egotism, hedonism, and positivism are too narrow to accommodate all the evidence. More adequate are philosophies of process, growth, and personhood. The unique and the general. This background accounts for the emphasis upon the study of the individual case in preference to the contrived average case. While most writers pay lip service to uniqueness, they do not in fact allow for it in their dimensional methods or in their assertions concerning the laws (or tendencies) of mind in general. Because of the manifest uniqueness of genotype, environment, and experience, the problem is not to justify the study of individual pattern but rather to justify our abstract and approximate nomothesis. We can do so by observing that people have similar (although never identical) physiological needs, comparable learning capacities, and culturally similar environments. Hence they may develop comparable interests and traits. On this basis we are justified in measuring common traits within a population. But while we engage in this familiar practice of differential psychology we should remember that the primary challenge is to invent morphogenic methods for the reliable and valid study of personal dispositions and individual life styles. Just as morphogenic biology lags behind molecular biology, so too does morphogemc psy-
chology lag behind molecular (dimensional) psychology (1961, chapter 1). The morphogenic (sometimes called idiographic) point of view holds that the single life itself should serve as the base line for studies of a person's course of development and also that an individual life is the proper matrix in which to search for the structure and functioning of personal motives and dispositions. I do not deny that the usual dimensional (nomothetic) approaches have their uses, but I argue for increased study of individual patterns of growth. Research. Morphogenic methods are not easy to invent. Some possibilities lie in personal documents, such as diaries, autobiographies, and letters (Airport 1942; Masterson 1946). The widely used Allport-Vernon-Lindzey test (see A Study of Values 1931), is partly morphogenic, partly dimensional. One of my papers (Allport 1962) lists a wide variety of techniques that I consider wholly or partly morphogenic, among them methods such as matching, self-anchoring scales, and personal structure analysis. Eventually such methods should prove to be scientifically more acceptable than the prevalent dimensional (actuarial) methods, since they should enhance powers of prediction, understanding, and control, the three goals of science (1940). As important as such methods are, they are not to be used exclusively. The bulk of my empirical investigations follow the more traditional method of seeking uniformities in such areas as children's imagery, expressive movement, social attitudes, common traits, social perception, rumor, prejudice, and the religious sentiment. These and other research contributions are listed in the extensive bibliography accompanying Personality and Social Encounter (1960b). An early and wholly characteristic field of research is reported in Studies in Expressive Movement (Allport & Vernon 1933), in which quantitative measures are made of handwriting, drawing, gait, gesture, and posture. Correlations of these measures disclose certain common traits of movement, such as expansiveness (versus constrictedness), centrifugality (versus centripetality), and forcefulness (versus light pressure). In general, individuals are consistent in the degree to which their movement manifests such characteristics. But even when an individual does not follow the common statistical trend, one can usually detect a congruence in his personal movement pattern. Thus while most people are consistent in the force they exert in holding a pen in their fingers and in applying it to paper, an artist may grasp the pen firmly but apply it lightly (a reflection of his own pro-
PERSONALITY: CONTEMPORARY VIEWPOINTS (I) fessional style). In this example we note the dual emphasis upon both dimensional and morphogenic interpretations. Social psychology. My investigations bridge the topic of personality with the field of social psychology. I define the latter discipline as "the attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings (1954a, p. 5). In this definition the focus is upon the individual rather than upon societal structures or social processes. The contention that the concept of "role" adequately covers the functioning of personality in the social system is rejected. Nor is there acceptance of a definition of personality stated merely in terms of its effect on other people. For me personality "is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his characteristic behavior and thought" (1961, p. 28). Thus the field of personality study is related to, but not identical with, the field of social psychology. While The Nature of Prejudice (1954b) endeavors to give due weight to societal factors, it is the attitudes, traits, and character structure of persons that receive major attention. Cultural forces are ineffective unless they are embodied in the habits, attitudes, and motives of individual men. Structure of personality My main interest is in the organization of personality. This fact is responsible for the somewhat misleading statement that I advocate a trait psychology. I define a trait as "a neuropsychic structure having the capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent, and to initiate and guide equivalent (meaningfully consistent) forms of adaptive and expressive behavior" (1961, p. 347). An attitude is regarded as a special class of traits, involving an approach or avoidance tendency toward a specifiable object or class of objects. Common traits and attitudes, therefore, are those aspects of personality in respect to which most people within a given culture can be profitably compared. Although I have done a considerable amount of work in this conventional area of differential psychology, this should not obscure my special and more original emphasis on "personal dispositions," or "individual traits" (1937; 1961), conceived as genuine and unique neuropsychic units that guide, direct, and motivate specific acts of adjustment. While common traits are useful as coarse and approximate dimensions for convenient comparison of individuals, the ultimate units we seek are personal dispositions—the actual, organized foci of the individual's life. While objective methods are
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preferable in determining these dispositions, subjective experience and self-report are not to be denied their place. I am inclined to believe that a relatively few (perhaps six to ten) central dispositions can normally account for the congruence and stability found in personal conduct (1960£>, chapter 7). In a few lives one "cardinal" disposition seems to dominate (Hitler's mania for power, the compassion of St. Francis, Albert Schweitzer's reverence for life). Most lives also have "secondary" dispositions, which reflect minor foci of interest or stylistic qualities of behavior (1961, chapter 15). Since even a cardinal disposition never accounts for all of behavior, the full unification of personality is never attained. Somewhat after the manner of Carl G. Jung, I assume that the nearest approach to unity consists in the never realized striving for unity. Proactivity. Most empirical psychology relies on fragmentary and short-run experiments; and clinical psychology and psychiatry rely for their data chiefly on anamnesis and backward tracing of lives. Hence, central motives, thrusting toward the future, are often lost from view. To trace motives into the past (to discover Oedipal conflicts or the history of rewards and punishments) is contrary to the structure of most lives, which strain toward the future. Hence much current theorizing allows only scantily for goals, plans, intentions, ideals, and hopes that mark the course of becoming. Values (defined as "meanings perceived as related to the self") should be considered a chief ingredient in personality structure. Here I am clearly aligned with the third force in psychology. Motivation. Traditional theories of motivation postulate instincts, impulses, and needs, all of which press toward gratification. Equilibrium, tension reduction, or homeostasis, is said to be the goal of all activity. This is the position of most theories of personality, systems which I consider "quasi-closed." Open-system theories insist that men are normally not content with restful equilibrium. Homeostasis, when achieved, merely guarantees, as Walter B. Cannon has said, that man is then free for the "priceless nonessentials" of life. Even the most basic biological drives are individually patterned; food, drink, sex, and sleep involve countless individual tastes. And beyond drives there are innumerable psychogenic interests that defy uniform classification. One should not, therefore, postulate a basic list of motives, as many theories do. Instead I propose that all structural dispositions are in some degree motivational, in that they all "cause" behavior. Those dispositions involving
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PERSONALITY: CONTEMPORARY VIEWPOINTS
greater momentary tension (including drives with their respective canalized tastes) have a prepotent saliency. Dispositions that we call interests, ambitions, and values—all involving long-range intention—are also persistently dynamic but ordinarily nonsalient. In addition there are stylistic dispositions (e.g., the tendency to act politely) that are directive in conduct rather than dynamic or driving. Stylistic dispositions that reflect qualities of temperament are best studied through expressive movements (vide supra*). Functional autonomy. To allow for the continual growth of motives, I have introduced the concept of "functional autonomy." It refers to "any acquired system of motivation in which the tensions involved are not of the same kind as the antecedent tensions from which the acquired system developed" (1961, p. 229). The existence of functional autonomy has been acknowledged by various authors in various ways, e.g., Franz Brentano, Edward C. Tolman, Wilhelm Stern, and Robert S. Woodworth. The principle of functional autonomy comprises the following points: (1) The character of motives alters so radically from infancy to maturity that we may regard adult motives as supplanting the motives of infancy; this view allows for the variety of goals and interests in adult personality better than any doctrine of fixed instinct or conditioned drive. (2) Even biological drives (breathing, hunger, sex) take on an individuality of patterning. (3) The "go" of a motive is always contemporary, and therefore tracing back to Oedipal conflicts, identifications, or childhood conditioning (except in rare neurotic instances) does not provide an explanation for current motivation. (4) Ontogenetic emergence (here postulated) does not contradict continuity in personality development. One should distinguish perseverative from propriate functional autonomy. The former is due to reverberatory (feedback) mechanisms in the nervous system. The latter is based on the dynamic properties of the self-image and on propriate striving. Except in certain neurotic conditions, a person is not tied to earlier motives, whether these are regarded as conditioned, channeled, or sublimated. Rather, the essence of his nature is to master and extract meaning from his environment and to orient himself toward the future. Propriate functional autonomy is possible because the energy potential possessed by an individual is in excess of his survival needs, drives, and the demands of immediate adjustment. In short, functional autonomy is "a way of stat-
(I)
ing that men's motives change and grow in the course of life because it is the nature of man that they should do so. Only theorists wedded to a reactive, homeostatic, quasi-closed model of man find difficulty in agreeing" (1961, pp. 252-253). It should be noted that post-Freudian ego psychology has modified psychoanalytic theory in the direction of functional autonomy (Heinz Hartmann, Erich Fromm, David Rapaport, Karen Horney). Ego psychology no longer looks for motivation exclusively in the unconscious, nor does it regard adult purposes as mere cathexes or sublimations of the instinctive impulses of sex and aggression. Functional autonomy is a declaration of independence for the normal personality. As a model it allows for authentic maturity and growth. Criteria for the mature personality are extension of the sense of self, warm relating of self to others, emotional security, realistic perception, self-objectification (insight and humor), and a unifying philosophy of life (1961, chapter 12). The proprium. The term "proprium" is used to avoid the historic ambiguities of self or ego. Proprium is defined as the self-as-known—that which is experienced as warm and central, as of importance. Ego involved (propriate) states are measurably different from states that are merely task involved, i.e., peripheral to the proprium (1943). Propriate functions include body sense, self-identity, self-esteem, self-extension, rational coping, self-image, and long-range propriate striving. These propriate functions (which must not be attributed to a separate self or agent) develop gradually, beginning at the end of the first year of life. Early sensorimotor behavior is nonpropriate, as is much of the opportunistic functioning of later life. Most of the investigations conducted in general and experimental psychology deal with nonpropriate behavior. For this reason many psychological principles of learning, motivation, and cognitive operation are not fully adequate to a psychology of the propriate aspects of personality. For example, theories of learning place too much emphasis upon the concept of reward and punishment and neglect the effect on learning of the congruence of an act with the self-image. In the normal course of development, external sanctions give way to internal directives. A student who first seeks the teacher's approval may end up by searching for knowledge for its own sake (functional autonomy). To take a further example: childhood conscience is at first a disposition based on prohibition, fear, and parental sanctions. With time, however, this primitive "must" conscience gives way to an adult "ought" conscience, which is
PERSONALITY: CONTEMPORARY VIEWPOINTS (II) based not on fear of sanctions but upon a generic image of one's preferred life style. Thus the mature sense of moral obligation reaches far beyond the childhood superego. And so too with all complex sentiments. They are not mere channelings of early formations but are selective, critical, and often adventurous ways of handling the onrush of existence. The interweaving of the propriate functions performs the task of unifying personality (insofar as it is unified) in much the same way as William McDougall's master sentiment of "self-regard." As an academician and eclectic I respect and utilize contributions from the many particularistic approaches. It is, however, a persistent demand for adequacy of outlook that leads me to emphasize what I regard as neglected hypotheses and interpretations. My historical orientation is reflected in my sympathetic biographical interpretations of the work of William James, John Dewey, Wilhelm Stern, and Kurt Lewin—writers with whom I feel intellectual kinship. While I do not claim to have achieved a final eclecticism, I believe that the opensystem view of personality holds hope for such a development (Allport 1964). An open system, as opposed to a quasi-closed system, allows for an increase of internal organization over time and for transactional commerce with the environment beyond the level of mere reactivity (1960a). GORDON W. ALLPORT
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ALLPORT, GORDON W. 1960a The Open System in Personality Theory. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 61:301-310. ALLPORT, GORDON W. (1960b) 1964 Personality and Social Encounter: Selected Essays. Boston: Beacon. ALLPORT, GORDON W. 1961 Pattern and Growth in Personality. New York: Holt. ALLPORT, GORDON W. 1962 The General and the Unique in Psychological Science. Journal of Personality 30: 405-422. ALLPORT, GORDON W. 1964 The Fruits of Eclecticism: Bitter or Sweet? Pages 27-44 in International Congress of Psychology, 17th, Proceedings. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. ALLPORT, GORDON W.; BRUNER, JEROME S.; and JANDORF, E. M. 1941 Personality Under Social Catastrophe: Ninety Life-histories of the Nazi Revolution. Character and Personality 10:1-22. ALLPORT, GORDON W.; and VERNON, PHILIP E. 1933 Studies in Expressive Movement. New York: Macmillan. ALLPORT, GORDON W.; VERNON, PHILIP E.; and LINDZEY, GARDNER (1931) 1960 A Study of Values. 3d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. -» Allport and Vernon were the authors of the 1931 edition. BERTOCCI, PETER A.; and MILLARD, RICHARD M. 1963 Personality and the Good. New York: McKay. -> See chapter 6. HALL, CALVIN S.; and LINDZEY, GARDNER 1957 Theories of Personality. New York: Wiley. -> See chapter 7. MADDI, SALVATORE R. 1963 Humanistic Psychology: Allport and Murray. Pages 162-205 in J. M. Wepman and R. W. Heine (editors), Concepts of Personality. Chicago: Aldine. MASTERSON, JENNY (Govs) [pseud.] (1946) 1965 Letters From Jenny. Edited and interpreted by Gordon W. Allport. New York: Harcourt. -> First published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. II
[Other relevant material may be found in FIELD THEORY; GESTALT THEORY; PERSONALITY; TRAITS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
The -most general statement of All-port's position is in Allport 1961. A complete bibliography through 1963 is contained in the 1964 edition of Allport 1960b. ALLPORT, GORDON W. 1937 Personality: A Psychological Interpretation. New York: Holt. ALLPORT, GORDON W. 1940 The Psychologist's Frame of Reference. Psychological Bulletin 37:1-28. ALLPORT, GORDON W. 1942 The Use of Personal Documents in Psychological Science. Bulletin No. 49. New York: Social Science Research Council. ALLPORT, GORDON W. 1943 The Ego in Contemporary Psychology. Psychological Review 50:451-478. ALLPORT, GORDON W. 1954 De; during the era of maintenance of character and the fruitful use of powers, Co = De; during the phase of induration and decay, Co < De. These are some of the chief reasons why the concurrent, complementary processes of biological metabolism Co and De have been taken as the main components of this PS's basic paradigm, or model, a model that conforms with a conception of reality that is not expressible in terms of spatial structures of matter as such but in terms of the interdependent, operating properties of matter—that is, in terms of process, time, and energy. It is a fundamental animate model that accounts for the vital, vegetative processes (e.g., maturation, growth, differentiation, repair, etc.) that inanimate models do not fittingly represent. It is also applicable, with suitable modifications, to higher levels of mental activity, especially— when taken in conjunction with the widespread need for novelty (change, exploration, experiment) —to those analytic and synthetic imaginations which lead to cultural (scientific, artistic, ideological, ethical, etc.) innovations of all types [see AESTHETICS and ETHICS]. Finally, this model (with its emphasis on the
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energy-building, antientropic processes of progressive development and creativity) provides the biological ground for what is so conspicuously absent in the purely psychoanalytic system (with its emphasis on energy-reducing, entropic processes, as well as on fixation, repetition compulsion, regression, disintegration) [see CREATIVITY and STIMULATION DRIVES]. Learning and hedonic effects. It is provisionally proposed that among the genetical determinants of the development of personality, none is more influential than the morphology of the primitive brain (subcortex), with its increasing differentiations and integrations of centers (clusters of cellular containers of specialized chemical compounds called micronic structures), each of which will sooner or later constitute an inbuilt readiness to be converted into a more or less distinctive energizing (feeling) state. The most basic centers, related to all others, are those that yield hedonic feelings (pleasure, delight, satisfaction, joy) and those that yield anhedonic feelings (displeasure, distress, dissatisfaction, misery), with expressive movements in each case. From infancy on, hedonic learning, on which so much depends, will consist in the discovery (represented in the brain by more or less enduring spatial structures reconvertible into temporal associations and organizations) of what generates hedonic feelings and what generates anhedonic feelings (of this or that intensity or grade) within the self and then within numerous other selves whose feelings are important to the self. There are many kinds of hedonic and anhedonic determinants (generators), most of which, though analytically distinguishable, operate in relations with a few others, interdependently or consequentially. Some may be experienced together (as compounded sources of joy or misery) or some sequentially, the first being either a necessary forerunner of the second (e.g., tedious rehearsals of a skill before exhibiting it successfully in public) or the "cause" of the second (e.g., the pleasure of bullying a younger sister, followed by a humiliating punishment, a negative social repercussion). Growing up involves, among other things, gradual increases in the prospective time-span; the capacity to foresee the future; the power to postpone the gratification of certain wants, for one reason or another; and the ability to discriminate between pleasures and displeasures which have satisfying or beneficial consequences and those which have dissatisfying or harmful consequences and eventually to regulate one's life so that neither the present nor the future is sacrificed for the other. Of course the operation of a generator, hedonic
or anhedonic, will usually depend on a number of conditions or factors in addition to the past history and developmental age of the subject, factors such as the place, time, duration, and mode of its occurrence, the absence or presence of one or more particular persons, etc. But taking these and other qualifications into account, it might be said that each properly differentiated class of satisfiers (positive reinforcements) and of dissatisfiers (negative reinforcements), taken separately or in combination, deserves some place among the interdependent ends or counterends of individual or collective human living and endeavor. Hedonic and anhedonic generators may be suitably classified in several ways, one being according to their temporal reference: they may be retrospective, involving memories of past experiences which generate present pleasure or displeasure; spective, involving awareness of current delighters or distressors; or prospective, involving anticipations of future experiences which generate present pleasure or displeasure. Current generators may be classified according to their predominant location in space: in the subject, in the environment, or, more often, in subject-environment (especially interpersonal) transactions. Each of these major orders of determinants is divisible into several families, genera, etc. For example, generators in the subject may be located in the body (somatic determinants), in some emotional (e.g., love, hate, fear) center of the subcortex (central determinants), in some type of sensory, imaginal, conceptual, verbal, or motor process (processional determinants), or in the judgments of conscience (superregnant determinants). Environmental determinants. Most of these determinants are dynamically interrelated with environmental determinants. These are dominant in the early months of life when the child's capabilities are pretty much limited to piteous petitioning and to sucking. The hedonic generators in early life consist of whatever provisions (delighters) are gratuitously transmitted by the mother and receptively enjoyed by the child: chiefly bodily provisions (contact, firm support, stimulation, nipple, milk) and affectional provisions (presence, rapt attention, expressions of love, and later of admiration and approval, etc.). The anhedonic generators are constituted either by the absence in the proximal environment of an urgently wanted delighter (e.g., food, mother), whose arrival starts a strip of process pleasure, or by the presence of an unwanted distressor (e.g., pain, loud noise), whose removal restores the status quo. Somewhat later, however, the child may be confronted by an irremovable distressor, in the form of an interloping
PERSONALITY: CONTEMPORARY VIEWPOINTS (II) newborn sibling and/or (for a boy) of a father, who is perceived as a successful contender for the mother's love. Central determinants. This brings us to a discussion of central determinants. It is assumed that, by necessity, the child is wholly egocentric (selfcenteredly oblivious of other selves and selfishly demanding a complete monopoly of his mother's attention when he wants it); thus, he bellows furiously when he is kept waiting, and the sight of a displacing rival is not unlikely to arouse in him a fiendish jealousy coupled with a profound resentment which engenders murderous fantasies directed toward the rival or revengefully toward the mother as betrayer of his trust. It seems that these fantasies and dreams are promoted, in part, by an inbuilt propensity to compose a bewildering procession of extravagant mythological images, many of which are related to the parents or more generally to the "myth of the hero," who, after performing extraordinary, superhuman exploits (e.g., flying, magic, etc.), kills a king and marries his queen. Complexes resulting from the vicissitudes and disastrous outcomes of these imagined heroic deeds and crimes may reside in the lowest strata of the id for a long time. Among other things, growing up calls for an increasing ability to distinguish between imagined events and actual events "out there," as well as a gradual progression from an utterly dependent state ("What will my parents do for me?") toward a relatively self-sufficient state ("What can I do for myself?"). Achievement determinants. An achievement determinant includes references to the (immediate or distant) past, present, and future and has its location in the subject's impression of whether he is moving toward his goal—whatever this may be—and, if so, whether he is moving faster or slower than he expected; with more ease or difficulty, from moment to moment, day to day, or year to year; or, more generally, whether he is getting better, no better, or worse in some respect. One can observe in the child the beginnings of experiences of this nature: the progressive organization of processes—of elementary sensory processes to arrive at the perception and recognition of an object; of sensorimotor processes (with feedback loops) to arrive at the moment when an object can be confidently reached, seized, and variously dealt with; of vocal processes to form words and sentences, etc.—which constitute, in each case, a stepwise gain of volitional power, which is experienced by the child as a pleasure-enhancing minor achievement, and, as such, is often applauded by a parent (a minor recognition). The central determinant
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here is ambition in the child, first to achieve greater and greater control of his own processes by concentration and persistence (i.e., to develop a variety of afferent and efferent skills in dealing with small portions of the encountered environment) and thus to attain a measure of autonomy and independence (which inaugurates the development of the ego, the executive of the regnant system of the personality) and later to use these skills (athletic, social, and intellectual) in competing with his peers for acknowledged superiority (victory or some form of higher order recognition, such as prizes, election to membership or office, or academic marks and honors), as well as to use these skills in satisfying other (material, social, or cultural) wants. The ways-means-end learning cannot begin until a certain amount of functional learning (walking and moving objects) has occurred, and then, what has to be learned year after year to gain positive social feedback (repercussions) from parents, teachers, or peers becomes progressively more difficult. Under competitive conditions, the prizes and, later, the best jobs and much else are reserved for those who have pushed some relevant types of functional learning to a sufficient degree of competence. In short, positive social reinforcements depend on individual differences in ambition (want to achieve), work enjoyment (process pleasure), persistence, innate aptitude, etc. [See ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION and SENSORY AND MOTOR DEVELOPMENT.] Transactional determinants. Transactional determinants are delighters and distressors that come from dealing (successfully or unsuccessfully) with the environment of things, people, or ideas; from enjoyed or not enjoyed dyadic reciprocations with another person—that is, transmissions and receptions of erotic stimulation (mutual orgasm), of affection or disaffection, of interesting or banal information, self-revelations, or opinions, of comic or pointless stories, etc.; from the processes or outcomes of cooperative endeavors; from the repercussions of socialized (ethical, considerate, conventional) or unsocialized (criminal, offensive, obnoxious) forms or styles of behavior, especially the miseries of ostracism, disgrace, imprisonment, etc.; from the processes and effects of transmitting delighters to those who need them or deserve them (a very common, genuine form of enjoyment not covered by current psychological theories), and much else besides [see SYMPATHY AND EMPATHY]. Let these suffice as illustrations of a few elementary varieties of hedonic and anhedonic determinants. In this PS, those that emanate from others (alters) and are directed toward the subject are classified
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PERSONALITY: CONTEMPORARY VIEWPOINTS (II)
as press (plural, press); positive press include acceptance, inclusion, promotion, respect, affection, lust-love, and negative press include rejection, exclusion, demotion, contempt, hate. As a personality develops, associations and organizations will constitute the ground for a large number of general and particular (unique), enduring or unenduring positive and negative interests, evaluations (sentiments and tastes), personal affections, beliefs, wants, modes of behavior, and aims (a negative aim being an orientation toward the riddance in the present or the prevention in the future of the operation of a distressor). Learning. The term "learning" commonly implies that its results are "valuable" (in some sense), regardless of the self-evident fact that a person may learn a good deal that "ain't so" or "ain't good": superstitions, prejudices, repulsive tastes, the craft of forgery, etc.—all of which had better be unlearned. Also, in psychology, the term generally implies that its results determine a young person's subsequent behavior, that he or she very soon becomes a creature of habits, with emotions and aims fixated by experienced distressors or delighters and tactics fixated by experienced successes, etc. This might be pretty nearly the whole truth if the genetical program, with its potentialities for self-actualization, ceased to operate at puberty; if the subject were not easily bored and not eager for new sights and new ventures; if the subject were commonly rewarded for frequent repetitions of the same information (old news), the same jokes, etc.; if the human environment, parents, teachers, and peers were unanimous in their support of the same beliefs, codes, manners, political sentiments, and tastes; if the person were not ambitious to emulate successively the more impressive performances and deeds of others; if for the subject the very meaning of achievement (something to be proud of) did not consist in the accomplishment of something new, extraordinary, more difficult or hazardous; if the person were not enticed by future-oriented imagents (fantasies) of unexperienced delights or of untried ways and means; if no person were ever radically transformed by a "second birth," "great emancipation," or religious conversion; and finally, if no person were ever to discover that the creation of an unprecedented, propitious form of living or of culture (scientific, literary, etc.) could be more profoundly joyous than any experience he had had. If it were not for these and other self-realizing, novelty-seeking, ambitious, proudful, imaginative, and creative dispositions in human beings, all of us would stagnate with learned incapacities and a few enthralling memories of infantile attachments. This
is not to deny the essential truth of one of Freud's greatest discoveries: the lasting underlying influence (either beneficial or harmful) of early terrors, conditionings, loves and hates, erotized fantasies, and much else. What is being stressed at this point is the amount of unlearning (hedonic, cognitive, and tactical), experimentation, courage, endurance, and constructiveness that is required for a full life. [See CREATIVITY; FANTASY; STIMULATION DRIVES.] Variables, assessments, and representations Among the criteria in terms of which the worth of a personological system may be suitably evaluated are: (1) the comprehensiveness (coverage, scope), structure (interr elatedness), adequacy (congruence with reality, significance), and operational definiteness (clarity, precision) of its assemblage of concepts and propositions; (2) the efficiency (in corresponding terms) of its assessment system (data-collecting, data-processing, data-evaluating, and data-integrating processes); and (3) the over-all satisfactoriness (in corresponding terms)—the plausibility and verifiability—of the representations of different personalities (explanatory conceptual biographies) that are composed out of the harvest of facts and interpretations yielded by the assessment process. In this PS, the central set of concepts are classified into abstract elementary orders (e.g., propelling energizers and evaluators; representors; movers; organizers; etc.) and these into families, genera, etc., of decreasing generality. The simplest, recurrent associations of these properties with each other or with the properties of environmental entities (e.g., an interest in Z, a positive evaluation of X, a want to gain Y, images of W, the effectiveness of V processes, etc.) are the kinds of abstracted personality variables which are usually obtained with ratings from questionnaires and tests, and in terms of which an individual is ordinarily described in a social conversation. The aim in this PS, however, is to discover how these structural components, converted into their operating properties, interdependently participate in this or that energized, oriented, organized, temporal unit (organizational variable). This synthetic mode of thought eventually results in the conceptualization of a hierarchy of purposive organizations, the largest and longest of which are systems of concern (of planning, activity, enjoyment, and achievement). It is chiefly of these that a personality-in-progress is composed. Of necessity, large portions of this PS have been omitted; but enough may have been said to indi-
PERSONALITY, POLITICAL: Study cate that it is basically a psychometabolic system, with energy released for drives, emotions, and movements (electrical and muscular) and for the composition of new convertible structures of all sorts. From this it follows that its root concepts are dynamic, genetical, developmental, organismal (systemic, semiholistic), and hierarchical. It stresses the experiential (existential, subjective), hedonistic, and voluntaristic aspects of a person's life (partly because of their contemporary neglect); but heretofore in practice it has done more justice to unconscious psychological processes, as well as to overt behavior with its situational and sociological (membership and role) determinants. HENRY A. MURRAY [Directly related is the entry PERSONALITY. Other relevant material may be found in MOTIVATION, article On HUMAN MOTIVATION; NERVOUS SYSTEM; PSYCHOANALYSIS; SYSTEMS ANALYSIS; and in the biographies of FREUD; HUXLEY; JUNG; LEWIN; MORGAN, C. LLOYD; WHITEHEAD.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BISCHOF, LEDFORD J. 1964 Interpreting Personality Theories. New York: Harper. COHN, ALFRED E.; and MURRAY, HENRY A. 1927 Physiological Ontogeny: I. The Present Status of the Problem. Quarterly Review of Biology 2:469-493. Explorations in Personality: A Clinical and Experimental Study of Fifty Men of College Age, by Henry A. Murray et al. 1938 London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press. HALL, CALVIN S.; and LINDZEY, GARDNER 1957 Theories of Personality. New York: Wiley; London: Chapman. MURRAY, HENRY A. 1940 What Should Psychologists Do About Psychoanalysis? Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 35:150-175. MURRAY, HENRY A. 1951 Toward a Classification of Interactions. Pages 434-464 in Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils (editors), Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. MURRAY, HENRY A. 1958 Drive, Time, Strategy, Measurement, and Our Way of Life. Pages 183-196 in Gardner Lindzey (editor), Assessment of Human Motives. New York: Rinehart. MURRAY, HENRY A. 1959 Preparations for the Scaffold of a Comprehensive System. Volume 3, pages 7-54 in Sigmund Koch (editor), Psychology: A Study of Science. New York: McGraw-Hill. MURRAY, HENRY A. (1963) 1965 Studies of Stressful Interpersonal Disputations. Pages 176-184 in Gardner Lindzey and Calvin S. Hall (editors), Theories of Personality: Primary Sources and Research. New York: Wiley. -» First published in Volume 18 of the American Psychologist. MURRAY, HENRY A.; and MORGAN, CHRISTIANA D. 1945 A Clinical Study of Sentiments. Genetic Psychology Monographs 32:3-149, 153-311. SAHAKIAN, WILLIAM S. (editor) 1965 Psychology of Personality. Chicago: Rand McNally. WEPMAN, JOSEPH M.,- and HEINE, RALPH W. (editors) 1963 Concepts of Personality. Chicago: Aldine.
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PERSONALITY, POLITICAL i. THE STUDY OF POLITICAL PERSONALITY ii. CONSERVATISM AND RADICALISM
THE STUDY OF POLITICAL
Robert E. Lane Daniel J. Levinson
PERSONALITY
Because one cannot write about, or even think about, human affairs without some implicit concept of human nature, the idea of "political personality" is a very old one; indeed, the established classics of political philosophy from Plato through Mill almost always give it explicit attention (Wallas 1908; Lane 1953). Yet at the same time, the development of sophisticated psychology and psychiatry, especially psychoanalysis, is so recent that the modern concept of political personality is qualitatively very different and must here serve as the substance of the discussion. This article will explore the meaning of the concept, examine the ways in which the various psychological schools have left their mark on the idea of a political personality, and then deal more extensively with the ways in which theory and research in this area have helped in our interpretation of political outcomes. The concept of political personality "Political personality" may be defined as the enduring, organized, dynamic response sets habitually aroused by political stimuli. It embraces (a) motivation, often analyzed as a combination of needs and values (the push-pull theory); (fo) cognitions, perceptions, and habitual modes of learning; and (c) behavioral tendencies, that is, the acting out of needs and other aspects of manifest behavior. Each of these has obvious political implications: (a) people who are motivated by needs for power may employ political leverage to satisfy these needs rather than (or in the course of) a pursuit of some explicit policy goal; (£>) cognitively, people who handle information in the defense of their partisanship, rather than as an instrument of broader learning, become dogmatic and obstruct social adaptation to new situations; (c) behaviorally, political life is vitally affected by the tendencies of leaders to act out (externalize) their psychic conflicts, projecting them onto other people and situations or, alternatively, to withdraw into inaction when threatened or, again, to make public demands to assuage their sense of worthlessness. Most simply stated, then, the habitual patterns of feeling, learning and knowing, and behaving in political situations constitute political personality. The definition above states that the elements of
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political personality are "enduring"; this means that they are in some sense central to the personality, not merely the response to somewhat ephemeral situations or the product of a certain occupation or, more generally, a role that a person occupies for the time being. This means that in speaking of political personality, we are dealing with patterns of thought, emotion, and acting out that may be seen in operation in many different situations over a relatively long period of time, perhaps youth, young adulthood, and maturity. Again, this implies that these patterns are laid down relatively early, though their expression and style may reveal differences over time; indeed, there may be fundamental changes in personality at a relatively mature age. Parenthetically, it may be noted that these changes are often the product of a slight change in some set of balancing internal forces (say, strong aggressive impulses held in check by fear of one's own aggression) which may produce a relatively great change in outward personality manifestations (e.g., from ingratiating to domineering behavior). The definition of political personality includes the attribute "organized," implying some interrelationship among the constituent elements such that a change in one, say, a growing need for social approval, would modify other elements, perhaps leading to a decreased willingness to defy authority. Inquiry into this organization implies something like the following paradigm of questions: What patterns of needs, expressed through what need-coping mechanisms (repression, sublimation, ego-striving, etc.), modified by what perceptions of reality and habits of learning, screened through what ideological constellations, produce what behavioral tendencies? The organization of a political personality, then, implies a patterned relationship and interaction among these elements. And, among these elements, the manner of dealing with conflicting needs or motives is probably the most important, followed by the pattern of response to and internalization of authority. There was a third adjective in the definition: "dynamic." Here, this overworked term refers to a capacity to produce change in something else. Operationally this means that if two ideas or emotions are brought into some kind of relationship, the more dynamic element changes the less dynamic element. For instance, the attitude toward authority is generally considered more potent than feelings toward particular leaders. Therefore, when a worshipful attitude toward authority is forced to confront a dislike of a particular political leader, more change will be effected in the attitude toward the
leader than in the posture toward authority in general ("he isn't so bad, after a l l . . . I must have misjudged him . . . at least he looks like a president, etc."). We reserve for the term "political personality" those elements of a person's total psychic pattern which tend to shape attitudes, beliefs, and actions on new issues as they arise. Just as some authorities talk of "reference groups" and "reference persons," so we might here refer to political personality as a constellation of "reference ideas" and "reference emotions"—ideas and emotions to which new problems are referred for guidance and instruction. But, of course, this reference is usually quite unconscious. The concept of political personality borders on other concepts from which it must be distinguished. There is, in the first place, the concept of "attitude," which has been classically defined as a kind of "mental and neural response set." We would distinguish political personality from a single attitude on the obvious ground that the latter is too narrow, and from any conceivable complex of attitudes, however broad, on the ground that such a complex lacks the organization and dynamic potential of a political personality. Personality, as has so often been remarked, is not a bundle of traits. Thus we conceive of a personality as shaping attitudes and not vice versa. [See ATTITUDES.] In the second place, there is the concept of "role," usually defined as a pattern of expected behavior associated with a given position in society. In practice it is not easy to distinguish role-determined behavior from personality-determined behavior when a person is acting out his concept of appropriate role behavior or, worse, when he has accepted the values and beliefs associated with a given role and performs accordingly. Sometimes the only way to distinguish between personality and role is to observe the person in a set of different roles, say, father and bureaucrat. Conceptually, political personality has an earlier genesis, has a different organizational principle, transcends the situation or social position, is more internally motivated or autonomous of the environment, responds to different crises and conflicts, and is more idiosyncratic or individualized than is any (political) role behavior. [See ROLE.] Finally, there is the distinction between personality and culture, a difficult one because personality must be learned somehow from available cultural elements. It is for this reason that personality is sometimes said to be the subjective side of culture. Does individual anxiety reflect an anxietyladen culture? Does the authoritarian personality reflect an authoritarian culture? When we are deal-
PERSONALITY, POLITICAL: Study ing with individuals, the distinction is relatively easy, because no two individuals bring together an identical genetic pattern and an identical sequence of experiences; hence, each is in some way unique. When we deal with "modal personality" or "social character," that is, the features of personality which are commonly shared in a group, we have greater trouble distinguishing between these shared personality elements and the dominant themes of a culture. Obviously the carriers of the culture are people; they exemplify it, as well as conveying its themes to others through their norm-setting and norm-enforcing behavior. Perhaps the best way to distinguish between these concepts of modal political personality and political culture is through the different questions each concept poses, the different theoretical structures employed to answer these questions, and the differential focuses upon people and ideas in each instance. Questions dealing with modal political personality elicit answers employing psychological theories of individual development, learning, imitation, conflict resolution, and the like. They are designed to tell us about people, in this case individuals who happen to be in groups. Questions dealing with political culture employ theories of social change, cultural diffusion, group adaptation to ecological factors, functional requirements of a given social structure, the reinforcement of social patterns, social (rather than individual) pattern maintenance, and so forth. Both concepts contribute to an understanding of political phenomena: modal political personality, through its contribution to an understanding of group psychology; political culture, through its contribution to an understanding of the prevailing myths, beliefs, and adaptive responses of the underlying society. Yet it must be said that often these amount to the same thing. [See POLITICAL CULTURE.] Political personality and environment It is now a truism to say that all social explanations employ some variation of what the learning theorists term a "stimulus (S)-organism(O ^response (R)" model, though sometimes it is referred to as "environment(E)-predisposition(P)-response (R)." Social and political explanations place the emphasis now on one term (S or E), now on the other (O or P). Institutional theories, such as those which claim that a separation of powers is a necessary condition for the rule of law or those which assert that the development of a middle class is necessary for the survival of representative government, emphasize the environmental part of this model. Yet while they are silent on the personalities
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of the actors involved, they always quietly impute to them a set of personal qualities, e.g., the universal love of power, which can be restrained only by others with power, or the reluctance of an economic elite to share power with the masses unless coerced by a balancing middle class and/or the incapacity of the masses to govern themselves. Each environmental theory, then, as mentioned in the first sentence of this article, implies a theory of personal motivation and some distribution of motives, values, and capacities in a relevant population. The study of political personality represents, in the one sense, an effort to fill in these never empty but often unexamined cells in the great macro theories which have guided the study of nations. On the other hand, there is a temptation to employ the new concepts of political personality in an exaggerated way, so as to imply that an individual has a set of motives or needs which are evoked in the same way in all situations or, worse, that a given public, say the German people, chose a certain leader, adopted a certain ideology, became bellicose and domineering or whatever because of some national character constellation, as though this constellation operated quite independently of the history and institutions of that particular public. One has only to glance at the early theories of political motivation to see the temptation at work: politicians choose their careers because they (all of them) love power; the Germans chose Hitler and Nazism because they were authoritarian; Americans offered economic aid to other countries because they were other-directed and wanted the world to love them—and partially turned against aid giving when they found that they could not buy love. The lesson is clear, indeed obvious—but often neglected: it is in a combination of circumstances and attitudes, environment and political personality, that the answers to the important political questions will be found. Theoretical interpretations Since, as was said at the beginning, the modern exploration of political personality is encouraged by and feeds on the developments of personality theory and research among psychologists and psychiatrists, it is not surprising that variations in these more molar fields are reflected in the interpretations of the role of personality in political life. For this reason it is useful to touch briefly upon the way in which various psychological theories affect these interpretations. The first approach is that of Pavlov (1927), Watson (1914), Hull (1943), and others in Russia
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and the United States. Originally called learning theory, it is now more generally called behavior theory. The central doctrine of this school is that an understanding of all behavioral responses may be acquired through a grasp of the concepts of drive, cue, response, and reward and their derivatives; rewarded responses become habits through a process of conditioning, and unrewarded responses tend to be extinguished. Personality, then, is the pattern of learned responses, not all of them adaptive in long-range terms but all of them, at least once, reinforced. It has been argued that the behavior of the Soviet elite has been heavily influenced by this concept of personality, leading them, so it is said, to believe that through a fairly gross manipulation of rewards and punishments they can shape the personalities and behaviors of the populations under their control (Tucker 1963, pp. 91-121). Although it is possible to translate behavior theory into the terms and constructs of other more clinically oriented theories, as Bollard and Miller (1950) have shown, the product is somewhat inelegant. Because of its mechanistic emphasis and insistence upon observable (operationalized) ingredients, the theory leaves out the rich, speculative, and often fruitful concepts of internal dynamics, conflict resolution, fantasy and free-associational styles of thought, dream life, analogical thinking, and the secondary elaborations which these theories produce. A second approach to political personality focuses upon the complex of vectors or forces which influence a person in his "life space." Kurt Lewin (1939-1947) was the originator of this theory whose sources lie in gestalt psychology. His associates and followers have gone on into the field of group dynamics exemplified in their small group experiments (Cartwright & Zander 1953). The central work of this school consists of accounting for the impact of the social world, the world of interaction and group life, upon an individual whose goals are constantly shaped and modified by these influential people—the other members of his group. This approach, reflected in the voting studies produced both by the Lazarsfeld-Berelson group (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944; Berelson et al. 1954) and the Michigan Survey Research Center group headed by Angus Campbell (Campbell et al. 1954; Michigan, University of 1960) has led to some important formulations of the way in which reference groups, interpersonal influence, cross pressures or conflicting identifications, family, school, and work socialization, and group pressures all combine to modify electoral decisions. The findings suggest that in this area of American electoral
decision making, individual differences are not so important as group differences, that is, national modal character is more important than individual personality. Another way to say this is that for any one country, more of the variance is accounted for by environmental factors than by personality factors. The more strictly Freudian approach, now only one of several competing schools of psychoanalysis, focuses, as is well known, upon the channeling and blocking of the libido, the conflict among id and ego and superego (impulse, conscious mind, and conscience), unconscious processes, early determination of central personality characteristics, and the consequent need to return retrospectively to early experience in order to achieve fundamental personality change (Freud 1932). The view of political man which emerges from this perspective on personality and its formation is well symbolized, if not well summarized, by Lasswell's early provocative formulation: The most general formula which expresses the developmental facts about the fully developed political man reads thus: p) d) r = P, where p equals private motives; d equals displacement onto a public object; r equals rationalization in terms of public interest; P equals the political man; and ) equals transformed into. ([1930] 1951, pp. 75-76) This makes of political man the rationalized version of inadmissible private motives and reflects the early emphasis of Freudians and neo-Freudians upon those aspects of personality which could be traced to a wild and assertive id. Anna Freud (1936), Heinz Hartmann (1927-1959), and many others have somewhat restored the balance by giving more weight to ego psychology. But the political personality which emerges from this theoretical framework tends to underemphasize what has been overemphasized by the rest of the world, the plain appeal and obvious influence of economic advantage. More recently, psychoanalytic theory has been re-examined and modified by a group, sometimes called the interpersonal school of psychiatry, which has been led by three important figures: Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, and Karen Horney. The label "interpersonal" comes from the central view of personality expressed by Sullivan in the following terms: "Personality I now define in the particularist sense as the relatively enduring pattern of recurrent interpersonal situations which characterize a human life" ([1940-1945] 1953, p. xi). His work has had less bearing on political
PERSONALITY, POLITICAL: Study problems than has that of his two associates, so we now turn to their formulations. Horney (1937), in emphasizing the reflection of the strains of society in the contemporary neurotic trends of her patients (as a sample of some larger group), reveals what social life is doing to people: making them competitive, decreasing their capacity to give of themselves and thereby reducing their capacity to love; at the same time it is increasing their "neurotic need for affection" and generally, and most importantly, making them more anxious. Unfortunately, because she has no base line, Horney cannot substantiate her claim that modern man has more of these problems than did his predecessors—but she can make a strong case that these facets of personality damage are real and important for our time [see HORNEY]. The importance of these neurotic trends for political personality, that is, the personality faced with political decisions, is substantial, though their expression is uncertain: the anxious man may, depending upon the organization of his personality, withdraw, become assertive, cling desperately to some dogmatic belief, or yield utterly to some tendency toward "other-directedness." What is certain is that his anxiety will impair his rational functioning and prevent him from using politics to his maximum long-term advantage. Erich Fromm, the most politically oriented figure in this group, presents three main themes with special relevance to the study of political personality. The first of these has to do with the idea of "social character," which on the one hand is the "root" of ideology and culture and on the other "is molded by the mode of existence of a given society" (1941, p. 296). For Fromm, "the social character internalizes external necessities and thus harnesses human energy for the task of a given economic and social system" (1941, p. 284). In the same sense, one might think of a modal political personality, in a world where personality and political system are in harmony, as providing the motives, values, and capacities for performing the required political acts. Fromm's second theme has to do with the relationship of man to society and to the government thereof. It was he who in modern times first developed an accounting of the costs of "freedom," that is, autonomy won at the expense of weakened ties of family, neighborhood, community, tradition, occupation, and, in some cases, religion. In developing this accounting and in elaborating on some of the political responses which it facilitated, Fromm portrayed, or at least sketched, the atavistic political personality unable to stand alone, searching for some synthetic ties to replace the ones lost in the
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process of modernization. This theme assumed increased importance with the development of the theory of The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford. Another sprout from the soil of this theory, nurtured by that very original gardener David Riesman (1950), is a theory of modern man as other-directed, that is, decreasingly reliant on his own conscience and increasingly reliant on cues from other people for his ideas and actions. A third theme in Fromm's more recent work deals with the concept of alienation; it is important because it stands for, although it did not originate, an entire school of criticism of modern society. With roots in the work of Feuerbach and Marx (Fromm 1961) but now more leveled at "modernity" than at capitalism, the idea of the alienated man claims that industrialism has alienated man from his work; that commercialism and the long process of change from status to contract have created an alienated "marketing personality" where people and the self are regarded as "things"; that mass society divorces people from meaningful group life; and that mass politics creates automaton-like, meaningless political responses (Fromm 1955). The alienated personality is said to be "available" for charismatic leadership and anomic destructive social movements. Unfortunately for the theory, most available evidence shows that the attitudes characteristic of alienation are more prevalent in rural societies and are especially frequent in village life relatively untouched by industrialism, commercialism, mass media, and mass politics (Banfield & Banfield 1958). While the "interpersonal school" represents one variation of the original Freudian interpretation of political man, another variation is represented by Erik Erikson (1956), whose public hallmark is the concept of identity. Here we have a shift in focus, from instinctual libido and interpersonal relations to the concept of the self, or the self image, but it is a self image in a group context. The term is somewhat elastic: "At one time . . . it will appear to refer to a conscious sense of individual identity; at another, to an unconscious striving for a continuity of personal character; at a third, as a criterion for the silent doings of ego synthesis; and finally, as a maintenance of an inner solidarity with a group's ideals and identity" ([1956] 1960, p. 38). It is important now because of the growing evidence that psychic breakdowns have their origins decreasingly in the repression of impulses, as was the case in the nineteenth century, and more often in "identity-diffusion," that is, the uncertainties and anxieties arising from ill-defined goals, ambiguous
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group identifications, conflicting self images, and vague life patterns. In its political aspects, identitydiffusion leads to low political cathexis and ideological caution (Lane 1962, pp. 381-399). Political personality and political analysis The various concepts and interpretations of political personality are reflected in the applied work of political analysis—but often segmentally, or eclectically, by men seeking personality concepts by means of which they can grapple with the intricate workings of political institutions. The problems of such analysis are many, and the amount of research in this area is small. Legislative behavior. Legislative behavior, the output of which is a set of laws, institutions, and appropriations, is inevitably modified by the personality constellations of the legislators. An early study by McConaughy (1950) suggests that in one American state, South Carolina, a (somewhat unsystematic) sample of legislators were, compared with the average American adult, "less neurotic . . . far less introverted, more self-sufficient and slightly more dominant." McConaughy does not relate these results to legislative behavior. A more comprehensive study of Connecticut legislators by James Barber (1965) finds a large proportion of the legislators lacking in self-esteem and employing their positions in the legislature to compensate for their doubts about themselves; it is the few who are genuinely self-confident who get the legislative business of the legislature done. On a closely related psychological syndrome, the sense of efficacy, evidence from a study of four American state legislatures reveals how important this sense is in affecting the manner in which a legislator sees and handles his role: those with a higher sense of efficacy (ego strength?) look beyond their immediate districts and accept responsibility for the larger unit, in this case the state; more than others, they accept pressure groups and even welcome them as part of the play of forces necessary for developing acceptable policy; and they tend to regard their role as brokers in a cockpit of conflict with equanimity, without becoming personally upset (Wahlke et al. 1962, especially pp. 474-475). But in these four states, as in Connecticut, it appears that more than half of the legislators have grave doubts about their efficacy or even adequacy in the legislative situation. Another theme out of the nosology of personality syndromes is the matter of identity. It seems from Barber's Connecticut study, and from other work on the United States House of Representatives, that the more clearly a legislator perceives his role and
assimilates this role concept to some vigorous and viable sense of identity, the more effective he is—i.e., persuasive, work-oriented, and hard to manipulate. [See LEGISLATION, article on LEGISLATIVE BEHAVIOR.] Although it does not explicitly deal with personality, Nathan Leites' work on "operational codes," first of the Politburo (1951) and then of the French parliament (1959), embodies in different language many of the themes which are normally conceived to be the stuff of personality. Thus, Leites asserts that two themes of the operational code of the Politburo are a fear of dependency, leading to strong measures to avoid any situation where people or nations are mutually interdependent, and particularly any situation where they might be "used" by others (1951, pp. 40-43), and an unusually strong insistence on "the control of feelings," leading to attacks on sentimentality and emotional responses and to an observable "hardness"—at least during the Stalinist period (1951, pp. 20-24). Speaking of the French legislator, Leites (1959) describes a series of behaviors, especially avoidance of responsibility, efforts so to arrange things that others are "to blame" for unpopular or unsuccessful decisions, inability to form permanent coalitions because of distrust of others (following from and causing this pattern of irresponsibility), and a search for a force majeure to get the French parlement or the nation out of its difficulties. Leites would argue that these are French, as well as legislative, characteristics; hence they also fall under the category of "national character," though of course he would also argue that they are traits to some extent widely shared throughout the world. At the bottom of many of these traits, there seems to be a concept of individualism and a tendency to distrust others, a quality which Almond and Verba found central to the working of a successful civic culture (1963). Judicial behavior. Many years ago Jerome Frank (1930) pointed to the very great variation in the treatment given to defendants in similar situations by judges of different dispositions. Although at first this seemed to reflect different "philosophies," it later became evident that this was another name for the motivations, values, punitiveness, and other elements of a personality constellation. Harold Lasswell (1948) illuminated these problems in his discussion of the influence on judicial decisions of narcissistic, paranoid, latent homosexual, and other tendencies in a group of judges whose life histories were made available to him. Pritchett's study of patterns of decisions made by Supreme Court justices (1948) reveals some-
PERSONALITY, POLITICAL: Study thing about the influence of personal characteristics upon judicial decision making, but the personality themes here are only partially developed. [See JUDICIARY, article on JUDICIAL BEHAVIOR.] Electoral behavior. As mentioned earlier, the main themes of the very substantial studies of electoral behavior in the United States, England, France, and Norway deal not with personality features but with group life, media influence, occupational and class differences, electoral laws, and the like. This is for the very good reason that, at least in the United States, and generally elsewhere, modal behavior is situationally determined to such an extent that people with many different personality syndromes tend to behave similarly. The places to look for the influence of personality are in the interstices where social pressures are conflicting or ambiguous. Lane (1959, p. 100) has listed some of these as follows: Selection of the grounds for rationalizing a political act. Selecting topics for political discussion. Selecting types of political behavior over and above voting. Expression of the probable consequences of participation. Holding particular images of other participants. Styles of personal interaction in political groups. In general this means that, at least in the United States, there are no important personality differences between Democrats and Republicans, though radicals of the right and left have been shown to have deviant personality syndromes (Almond 1954; Adorno et al. 1950). On the other hand, there are substantial differences between participants and nonparticipants: the nonparticipants tend to be more neurotic, more anxious, less self-confident, more autistic, less trusting of others, lower in ego strength, and more alienated from themselves and society (Lane 1959, pp. 97-181). In a cross-cultural study by Almond and Verb a (1963), in which personality and cultural differences are, as always, somewhat fused, it appears that those societies in which there is greater interpersonal trust; in which, from the beginning, people have a sense that each person is himself important and influential in the family, school, and place of work; and in which it is possible to work easily and cooperatively with others—such societies develop healthier (more effective and less destructive) patterns of participation and more conciliatory and workable patterns of partisanship. [See POLITICAL PARTICIPATION; VOTING.] Ideology. Electoral participation inevitably leads into a discussion of ideology, but, as Campbell
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and his colleagues (Michigan, University of 1960) make clear, the relationship between voting and ideology is often tenuous. Ideology here means not merely the attitudes and values on topical concerns (foreign aid, civil rights, welfare state) but also the fundamental views which form the ideational counterpart to a constitution: ideas on fair play and due process, rights of others, sharing of power, the proper distribution of the goods of society (equality), uses and abuses of authority, etc. It is in this sense that Adorno and his associates (1950) develop their concept of an authoritarian personality and belief system, and in this sense Lane (1962) explored the ideologies of a group of working-class and lower middle-class men. The problem here is to sort out the conventional beliefs which almost everyone in the society holds, not because these ideas have a special congeniality but because they are, so to speak, "given," from those ideas which are selected from among alternatives because these ideas have a special "resonance." The conventional ideas may be conceived as related to national character, though there can be a lack of congruence here, too; the "resonant" ideas, the more or less individual ones, may more properly be related to and explained by the concept of individual political personality. In the general discussion of ideology, it appears that one central aspect is that of alienation versus allegiance, a rejection of "the system" or some substantial part thereof, compared with a fundamental loyalty to and acceptance of it. Cantril (1958) found this to be a main theme among the French and Italian communists he interviewed; Almond and Verba (1963) suggest that one of the main difficulties of the Italian political system lies in the high incidence of alienation and contrast this with the sense of allegiance and political pride of the Americans and British. Lane found in his Eastport, U.S.A., sample that a failure to support democratic norms and a tendency to see decisions made by conspiratorial groups ("cabalistic thinking") were related generally to just such political alienation but that this did not extend to a more general feeling of social alienation, a rejection of the society and its values (1962, pp. 161-186). On the whole, it seems wise to think of alienation in terms of specific targets of disaffection, a series of topically specific continua, rather than in terms of a dichotomous and total classification, although the tendency of alienation in one area to infect another should be observed. [See IDEOLOGY; LOYALTY.] National character. The study of widespread ideologies or belief systems leads to the study of the broad distribution of political personality types or
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PERSONALITY, POLITICAL: Study
characteristics in a society. At this point we begin to study national or social character—a field which fell into disrepute because of early unsupported generalizations by Le Bon (1894) and others. Following World War n, a series of studies on the German people, sometimes based on interview data and sometimes more speculative (Dicks 1950; Levy 1948; Schaffner 1948), sought to discover what led them down the path to the Nazi revolution. A few comparative studies have indeed suggested that the Germans, more than others, tend to revere both paternal and state authority and have, by a very slight margin, a higher incidence of "authoritarianism" (McGranahan 1946). Subsequent political history has indicated that these elements of political personality are not incompatible with the functioning of certain kinds of republican institutions, and, moreover, they are not fixed in the character of a people forever. Similar studies of the Soviet Union (Dicks 1952; Mead 1951), necessarily more limited because of the inaccessibility of most of the population to such study, have suggested the importance of certain other emotional themes: expressiveness and the felt need for external control (combined, it is true, with a strain between the controlling, overly bureaucratic elite and the mass of people still in transition from traditional to modern behavior and norms); suspicion of "outsiders," implying sharp differentiation between in-groups and out-groups, with some paranoid symptoms; and "identity crisis" posed by the long-term, but recently exacerbated, conflict between Russia and the West—and yet, withal, a lack of "tenderness taboo" (or sadomasochism) which characterized the Nazi mentality. [See NATIONAL CHARACTER.] We are only beginning to study the close interrelationship of personality qualities and political life, particularly the way in which similar institutions function when manned by persons of different personality constellations. This article has not touched upon the important research done on the personality problems of the officials and publics in modernizing nations, as illuminated by Doob (1960), Pye (1962), and Leigh ton (Cornell... 1963), among others, but this is surely an area where further work is needed. Problems of personality and bureaucracy in a world which inevitably is becoming bureaucratized deserve further attention, following the seminal article by Merton (1940). Elite studies have, until now, tended to focus on the more easily accessible data, the external circumstantial forces affecting career choice and selection of the world's elites, but we need to
know more about the internal dynamics and interpersonal characteristics of coopted, appointed, and elected leaders. By now, however, scholars are aware that there is no simple distribution of traits, syndromes, or personality types which is good or necessary (or at least sufficient) for the operation of an efficient and humane political system, and that hence we must direct our research toward discovering relatively subtle patterns of personality characteristics, with varying distributions, meshed into roles and institutions in complementary ways, each "way" modified by the ecology and history of a particular political system. ROBERT E. LANE [Directly related are the entries IDENTITY, PSYCHOSOCIAL; NATIONAL CHARACTER; POLITICAL BEHAVIOR; and the biographies of FREUD; HORNEY; HULL; LEWIN; PAVLOV; WATSON. See also the guide following the next article.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADORNO, THEODOR W. et al. 1950 The Authoritarian Personality. American Jewish Committee, Social Studies Series, No. 3. New York: Harper. ALMOND, GABRIEL A. 1954 The Appeals of Communism. Princeton Univ. Press. ALMOND, GABRIEL A.; and VERBA, SIDNEY 1963 The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton Univ. Press. BANFIELD, EDWARD C.; and BANFIELD, L. F. 1958 The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. BARBER, JAMES D. 1965 The Lawmakers. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. BERELSON, BERNARD; LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; and McPHEE, WILLIAM N. 1954 Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign. Univ. of Chicago Press. CAMPBELL, ANGUS; GURIN, GERALD; and MILLER, WARREN E. 1954 The Voter Decides. Evanston, 111.: Row, Peterson. CANTRIL, HADLEY 1958 The Politics of Despair. New York: Basic Books. CARTWRIGHT, DORWIN; and ZANDER, ALVIN (editors) (1953) 1960 Group Dynamics: Research and Theory. 2d ed. Evanston, 111.: Row, Peterson. CORNELL-ARO MENTAL HEALTH RESEARCH PROJECT IN THE
WESTERN REGION, NIGERIA 1963 Psychiatric Disorder Among the Yoruba: A Report, by Alexander H. Leighton et al. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. DAVIES, JAMES C. 1963 Human Nature in Politics: The Dynamics of Political Behavior. New York: Wiley. DICKS, HENRY V. 1950 Personality Traits and National Socialist Ideology. Human Relations 3:111-154. DICKS, HENRY V. 1952 Observations on Contemporary Russian Behavior. Human Relations 5:111-175. DOLLARD, JOHN; and MILLER, NEAL E. 1950 Personality and Psychotherapy: An Analysis in Terms of Learning, Thinking, and Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill. DOOB, LEONARD W. 1960 Becoming More Civilized: A Psychological Exploration. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
PERSONALITY, POLITICAL: Conservatism and Radicalism ERIKSON, ERIK H. (1956) 1960 The Problem of Ego Identity. Pages 37-87 in Maurice R. Stein, Arthur J. Vidich, and David M. White (editors), Identity and Anxiety. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. FRANK, JEROME (1930) 1949 Law and the Modern Mind. New York: Coward. FREUD, ANNA (1936) 1957 The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. New York: International Universities Press. -» First published as Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen. FREUD, SIGMUND (1932) 1965 New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis. New York: Norton. -» First published as Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einfiihrung in die Psychoanalyse. FROMM, ERICH (1941) 1960 Escape From Freedom. New York: Holt. FROMM, ERICH 1955 The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart. FROMM, ERICH (editor) 1961 Marx's Concept of Man. New York: Ungar. HARTMANN, HEINZ (1927-1959) 1964 Essays on Ego Psychology. New York: International Universities Press. HORNEY, KAREN 1937 The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. New York: Norton. HULL, CLARK L. 1943 Principles of Behavior: An Introduction to Behavior Theory. New York: Appleton. LANE, ROBERT E. 1953 Political Character and Political Analysis. Psychiatry 16:387-398. LANE, ROBERT E. 1959 Political Life: Why People Get Involved in Politics. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1965. LANE, ROBERT E. 1962 Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does. New York: Free Press. LANE, ROBERT E.; and SEARS, DAVID O. 1964 Public Opinion. New York: Prentice-Hall. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. (1930) 1951 Psychopathology and Politics. Pages 1-282 in Harold D. Lasswell, The Political Writings of Harold D. Lasswell. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. 1948 Power and Personality. New York: Norton. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; BERELSON, BERNARD; and GAUDET, HAZEL (1944) 1960 The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. 2d ed. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. LE BON, GUSTAVE (1894) 1898 The Psychology of Peoples. New York: Macmillan. -> First published as Lois psychologiques de devolution des peuples. LEITES, NATHAN 1951 The Operational Code of the Politburo. New York: McGraw-Hill. LEITES, NATHAN 1959 On the Game of Politics in France. Stanford Univ. Press. LEVY, DAVID M. 1948 Anti-Nazis: Criteria of Differentiation. Psychiatry 11:125-167. LEWIN, KURT (1939-1947)1963 Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers. Edited by Dorwin Cartwright. London: Tavistock. MCCONAUGHY, JOHN B. 1950 Certain Personality Factors of State Legislators in South Carolina. American Political Science Review 44:897-903. MCGRANAHAN, DONALD V. 1946 A Comparison of Social Attitudes Among American and German Youth. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 41:245-257. MEAD, MARGARET 1951 Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Problems of Soviet Character. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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MERTON, ROBERT K. (1940) 1957 Bureaucratic Structure and Personality. Pages 195-206 in Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure. Rev. ed. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> First published in Volume 18 of Social Forces. MICHIGAN, UNIVERSITY OF, SURVEY RESEARCH CENTER 1960 The American Voter, by Angus Campbell et al. New York: Wiley. PAVLOV, IVAN P. (1927) 1960 Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex. New York: Dover. -> First published as Lektsii o rabote bol'shikh polusharii golovnogo mozga. PRITCHETT, C. HERMAN (1948) 1963 The Roosevelt Court: A Study in Judicial Politics and Values, 1937— 1947. New York: Octagon Books. PYE, LUCIAN W. 1962 Politics, Personality, and Nationbuilding: Burma's Search for Identity. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. RIESMAN, DAVID 1950 The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -> An abridged paperback edition was published in 1960. SCHAFFNER, BERTRAM H. 1948 Father Land: A Study of Authoritarianism in the German Family. New York: Columbia Univ. Press; Oxford Univ. Press. SULLIVAN, HARRY STACK (1940-1945) 1953 Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry. With a critical appraisal of the theory by Patrick Mullahy. 2d ed. New York: Norton. -> First published in the February 1940 and May 1945 issues of Psychiatry. SULLIVAN, HARRY STACK 1953 The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. Edited by Helen Swick Perry and Mary Ladd Gawel. New York: Norton. TUCKER, ROBERT C. 1963 The Soviet Political Mind. New York: Praeger. WAHLKE, JOHN et al. 1962 The Legislative System: Explorations in Legislative Behavior. New York: Wiley. WALLAS, GRAHAM (1908) 1962 Human Nature in Politics. 4th ed. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. WATSON, JOHN B. 1914 Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. New York: Holt. II
CONSERVATISM AND RADICALISM
The preceding article deals with the concept of political personality and with the relevance of personality in various areas of political life. This article deals with the specific problem of personality and political ideology: the questions of what ways, if any, "conservatives" and "radicals" differ in personality and what part personality plays in influencing the individual's preference for a conservative or a radical political outlook. Some of the major problems involved in answering these questions are found in the questions' terms. Conservatism and radicalism are not discrete entities. These terms are, so to say, genotypes rather than phenotypes, analytic categories rather than concrete doctrines. They refer to basic political tendencies or orientations that may be manifested in a variety of explicit ideological forms. The forms vary widely in different classes, countries, and historical periods. There is considerable disagreement
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PERSONALITY, POLITICAL: Conservatism and Radicalism
regarding the primary defining characteristics of each viewpoint and regarding the validity and usefulness of employing these analytic categories in political analysis. It would be helpful, for purposes of psychological analysis, if the purely political meaning of the terms "conservative" and "radical" were clearly defined and widely agreed upon. This is, unfortunately, not the case. We must therefore begin by considering briefly the alternative usages of these terms and the bearing of this problem on studies of personality and political ideology. [See CONSERVATISM; RADICALISM.] In the broadest sense—a sense implied by their pairing in the title of this article—the terms "conservatism" and "radicalism" may be used to divide the vast array of political ideologies into two gross categories of "right" and "left." Each term then becomes a relatively complex category under which a variety of more concrete viewpoints are subsumed. In general, ideologies of the right support the (present or imagined past) status quo and emphasize the importance of tradition, stability, and hierarchical social order. Ideologies of the left are critical of the prevailing system and seek major institutional change toward increased social and economic equality. The simple right-left dichotomy, while useful for certain purposes, is in need of further differentiation. Within the right, for example, there are various ideological positions that differ markedly in their social and psychological bases and in their political aims. These include the moderate conservatives (who, especially in the more industrialized countries, accept many "liberal" reforms and the political rules of parliamentary democracy), as well as ultraconservative, fascist, and "lunatic fringe" rightist viewpoints. For certain analytic purposes the similarities among these ideologies are of primary interest, while for other purposes the differences require sharper focus. [See CAUDILLISMO; FALANGISM; FASCISM; NATIONAL SOCIALISM.] Within the left, too, are ordinarily included a wide range of ideologies. There are the modern liberals who espouse continual but gradual reform by democratic methods, seeking to increase the scope of governmental welfare functions while maintaining individual freedom from state control. There are also various types of socialist and communist viewpoints, which differ considerably in their programmatic goals and in the methods they advocate for achieving and maintaining political power. [See COMMUNISM; EQUALITY; LIBERALISM; SOCIALISM.] As a first step toward taking these variations
into account, the right-left dichotomy is often divided further into a four-part spectrum: extreme right, moderate conservative (right-of-center), liberal and moderate left, and extreme left. Within this scheme, radicalism has in the past been equated with the extreme left. More recently, however, a new usage has developed: radicalism is sometimes equated with "extremism" and includes both the extreme left and the extreme right. Witness the growing use of the term "radical right" (Bell 1955) in the United States to refer to antidemocratic racist, militarist, and neofascist movements. This usage involves the assumption that the far left and the far right, despite their differences in stated values and ultimate goals, have important similarities in their methods and psychological characteristics. [See MILITARISM.] An example of this approach is Lipset's six-category schema (1960). He distinguishes the right, center, and left (advancing the interests of the upper, middle, and lower classes, respectively) as basic political orientations; and he suggests that within each there are contrasting moderate-democratic and extremist-antidemocratic positions. Thus, in the case of the center, the opposing views are liberalism and fascism. He asserts that one's political orientation is largely a function of class membership, whereas preference for a democratic or an extremist orientation is strongly influenced by personality. Those who hold an antidemocratic political orientation, whether of right, center, or left, will show greater personal authoritarianism than will their democratic counterparts. These categories have been used in a multiplicity of ways as bases for ideological classification and measurement. Some studies deal with welldefined political parties or groupings; others distinguish only between broad categories such as leftright, liberal-conservative, or moderate-extreme. We are still far from an understanding of the degree to which particular ideologies are associated with distinctive personality syndromes. Thus far we have spoken of conservatism, radicalism, and other viewpoints as inclusive, systematic ideologies. A political ideology is an overarching conception of society, a stance that is reflected in numerous sectors of social life (Mannheim 1929-1931). It deals not only with political issues in the narrow sense but also with economic policy, social stratification, methods of social change, civil liberties and civil rights, international relations, religion and the relation of religious institutions to political institutions, the societal functions of government, and so on. Political ideologies in this inclusive sense have been studied primarily as aspects
PERSONALITY, POLITICAL: Conservatism and Radicalism of political parties, movements, or other collective units. We characterize "the" ideology of a given party or group through the analysis of various documents written by its spokesmen, singly or jointly. This characterization is an analytic construction derived from multiple sources. [See Levinson 1964; see also CONTENT ANALYSIS; IDEOLOGY.] The problem is complicated, however, when we seek to study the ideology of the individual citizen. Not everyone has a political ideology in any developed sense. Some persons have fragmentary opinions on a few personally relevant issues. Others have a vaguely defined "leaning" without differentiated views. Still others, more politically involved, have a political outlook that cuts across the established party lines. It is therefore often difficult to identify an individual's political opinions as "conservative" or "radical" in a systematic ideological sense. One way of dealing with this problem in empirical research is to obtain only a general index of the individual's political tendency or leaning, without examining his views in detail. For example, large-scale surveys may simply ask their subjects to categorize themselves politically or to indicate their preference for a party, movement, or political leader. Party affiliation or preference is a relatively useful indicator of ideological orientation in countries having diverse and well-differentiated parties covering a wide range of the political spectrum. Even in this case, however, there are often major ideological variations within a single party; for example, right-wing versus left-wing segments of many European parties, or the French and Italian workers who vote communist without adhering to the general party ideology. In countries such as the United States, where the two major parties are ideologically more amorphous and internally divided, party preference as such tells little about an individual's political orientation. Another way of dealing with the problem is to shift from very general ideological categories to the study of more delimited areas and dimensions of political opinion. Numerous areas and dimensions have been singled out for investigation. For example, in the domain of foreign policy, the dimension of nationalism-internationalism; in religious outlook, the liberalism-conservatism dimension; and similarly in other realms, such as civil liberties, the rights of ethnic and minority groups, the economic and welfare functions of government, and so on. These dimensions are sometimes conceived of as multiple reflections of the more generalized and fundamental ideological vectors noted earlier. To
23
the extent that this conception is a valid one, measures of internationalism, religious liberalism, civil libertarianism, and advocacy of governmental welfare functions will be positively intercorrelated to form a more inclusive syndrome of over-all sociopolitical liberalism. It is beyond the scope of this article to review the empirical evidence bearing upon hypotheses of this kind. In general, there is evidence of moderate consistency in the individual across ideological domains, so that we may speak of relatively generalized liberal, conservative, and other orientations. At the same time, the correlations among measures of the various dimensions vary considerably in magnitude. For example, there is a moderate positive correlation between civil libertarianism and economic liberalism; on the average, advocates of the former viewpoint tend also to support the latter, and opponents of one tend also to oppose the other. However, the consistency is far from perfect. We must have room in our thinking for ideological patterns that cut across the simple liberal-conservative polarity. The complexities in the analysis of individual political ideology have important implications for the study of relationships between ideology and personality. How can we define ideological dimensions or patterns in a way that lends itself to psychological analysis? If we group our subjects only in terms of general ideological leaning, such as over-all liberalism and conservatism, a given category will contain persons with diverse concrete ideologies and personalities. Overly gross ideological categories may subsume very different viewpoints and their associated varieties of personality. On the other hand, there are disadvantages in restricting the focus to a specific issue or narrow domain. Personality is most likely to exert influence on the individual's orientation toward a relatively broad sector of political concern. His stand on any particular issue may be strongly affected by immediate situational factors. There is a "forest and trees" dilemma here. We must find intermediate levels of analysis between the forest of global, undifferentiated ideological categories and the trees of specific, segmented opinions and attitudes. In general, work in the tradition of the sociology of knowledge errs mainly in the former direction, while survey research on public opinion and social attitudes suffers from overspecificity and the neglect of ideological patterning. Work in this field is further complicated by disciplinary conflicts. It would be convenient if there could be a simple division of labor between the relevant disciplines. One might hope, for example, that political scientists and sociologists would estab-
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PERSONALITY, POLITICAL: Conservatism and Radicalism
lish a standard, widely applicable set of ideological categories; psychologists could then determine whether the different categories have distinctive personality correlates. This disciplinary division of labor has not been successful and probably cannot succeed. The study of relationships between personality and political ideology in principle requires some degree of theoretical synthesis across disciplinary lines. The political categories and dimensions must have psychological relevance; the study of personality in this context requires a grasp of political issues and realities. Progress will come through the joint efforts of political analysts who have some sophistication about personality theory and of psychologists who can think in political and sociological terms. This approach was advocated long ago (e.g., Mannheim 1929-1931; Fromm 1936). Within the last few decades some progress has been made in this direction by a number of investigators taking a multidisciplinary point of view. We turn now to a consideration of their work. Authoritarian personality and political ideology The concept of personal authoritarianism has probably received more empirical study, and more critical attention, than any other personality concept that has been utilized in the analysis of sociopolitical ideology. Its history extends over several areas of modern social science and involves several disciplines. Reviewing the development of work on authoritarianism provides an opportunity to clarify some of the theoretical and empirical problems in the general field of personality and ideology. The first major systematic attempts to formulate a conception of authoritarianism as a personality syndrome were made in the 1930s by Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm. The two worked independently but had much in common. Both were clinical psychoanalysts in the generation after Freud, and they took a leading part in the effort to develop a psychoanalytic social psychology. Both had a "democratic Marxist" conception of society, and each attempted his own synthesis of Marxist and Freudian theory. They were primarily clinical and historical in mode of analysis. Reich's major work on this problem was The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933). [See REICH.] Fromm (1936) published a long theoretical essay in the volume Studien uber Autoritdt und Familie. This book epitomizes the newly emerging multidisciplinary spirit of the 1930s—a spirit that originated in Europe and was subsequently carried forward in the United States both by Americans and by European emigres. Soon after, Fromm (1941) published his influential work on authoritarianism and historical change, Escape From Freedom.
Reich and Fromm took as a central problem the ways in which personality is implicated (as cause and as effect) in social ideologies, movements, and structures. They saw the family as a primary agency of social control, not only transmitting explicit values and beliefs but, even more important, inducing types of character structure and modes of authority-subordinate relationships that provide a psychological underpinning for adult sociopolitical functioning. The authoritarian character is hypothesized as the psychological structure most receptive to, and most required by, rigidly hierarchical antidemocratic social structures. The rise of fascism offered a prototypic example for the social-psychological analysis of authoritarianism. [See SOCIALIZATION.] As a parallel development in the 1930s, American social psychologists were beginning the systematic study of political opinion. Their concepts, methods, and approach reflected the then prevailing Zeitgeist of American psychology. Conceptually, their focus was not on broad ideological patterns; it was, rather, on more segmental, quantitatively measured social attitudes. The concept of attitude was systematically formulated by Airport (1935) in a widely influential article. This concept had great appeal, both because of its analytic usefulness and because it readily lent itself to measurement and to statistical analysis. Scale methods of attitude measurement were developed by Thurstone and Chave (1929), Murphy and Likert (1938), and others, and in the ensuing years a tremendous number of scales were developed. In the area of conservatism-liberalism—radicalism, attitude scales were correlated with all manner of other variables, ranging from group membership to school achievement to the readiness to tolerate pain. [An extensive review of the early literature is given in Murphy, Murphy, & Newcomb 1931; see also ATTITUDES; SCALING; and the biography of THURSTONE.] By the early 1940s attitude research had become a major field in academic social psychology. However, the studies typically had a concrete, atheoretical, "shotgun" character. Broader theoretical perspectives were needed. On the one hand, the early investigators failed to regard attitudes as aspects of more inclusive ideological patterns, to consider their meaning for the individual, and to relate them to other, motivational-affective-cognitive components of personality. On the other hand, they had only a rudimentary sociological perspective and were largely unable to place individual ideology within a larger social and cultural context. A seemingly unbridgeable gulf separated the European and the American lines of investigation. Perhaps the first large-scale effort to bridge the
PERSONALITY, POLITICAL: Conservatism and Radicalism gap was the collaborative research of Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford; the study began in 1943 and was published in 1950 under the title The Authoritarian Personality. Sanford (1956) provides a fuller review of the intellectual origins of this work. [See also the biography of FRENKEL-BRUNSWIK.] The research on authoritarianism drew both from the European tradition—with its psychoanalytic-sociological orientation and clinical form of analysis—and from the more measurement-oriented, attitude survey approach of American social psychology (in particular the previous work of Stagner 1936; Murphy & Likert 1938; Newcomb 1943; and more clinical study by Maslow 1943). It used scale methods, but its analytic emphasis was on ideological patterns rather than on single attitudes. In conceiving of ideology as an aspect of personality, it had roots in psychoanalysis and related personality theories, notably that of Murray (see Explorations in Personality 1938). Personality variables were measured by a variety of techniques, including scales, projective tests, semistructured interview, and intensive case analysis (again following Murray in his approach to personality assessment). The research dealt primarily with the relation of ideology to personality—with authoritarianism as an ideology-personality syndrome—and not with the sociology of ideology. Sociological considerations were, however, an intrinsic part of the theoretical approach, and the work has stimulated a good deal of discussion and research along sociological lines (e.g., Christie & Jahoda 1954; Lipset I960; Hagen 1962; McClosky 1958; McClosky & Schaar 1965; Levinson 1964; DiRenzo 1963). The program of research on the authoritarian personality began as a study of anti-Semitism (Frenkel-Brunswik et al. 1947). Its ideological focus gradually broadened to encompass ethnocentric ideology, conceived of broadly as a system of beliefs, attitudes, and values—a way of thinking and feeling—-about "in-groups" and "out-groups" at every level of social organization from the local to the international scene. The overriding concern of the research was the nature of, and the relationship between, ethnocentric ideology and authoritarian personality. To a lesser though still significant degree, attention was given to other ideological domains, notably politics and religion. [See ANTI-SEMITISM.] Political ideology was studied primarily with regard to the liberalism-conservatism dimension. The description of the Politico-Economic Conservatism (PEC) Scale emphasized that the scale yielded only a rough right-of-center versus left-of-center
25
distinction and did not distinguish qualitatively important variations within each of these. The PEC Scale showed statistically significant but moderate correlations, averaging .4 to .5, with the various measures of ethnocentrism and authoritarianism. Two main conclusions were drawn. First, political conservatives are, by and large, more ethnocentric and authoritarian than are political liberals. Second, there are wide variations in authoritarianism within both the right-of-center and the left-ofcenter groupings, and these variations may be related to specific patterns and styles of political orientation. In The Authoritarian Personality a number of specific concepts were put forward in Levinson's chapter on the PEC Scale and in Adorno's chapter on the interview material. For example, Levinson proposed a distinction between the "genuine" conservative and the "pseudo" (authoritarian) conservative, whose ideologies, while alike in many respects, are fundamentally different in others. Adorno, in his discussion of left-of-center viewpoints, posits several syndromes, such as the "ticket liberal," in which authoritarian features play an important part. The Authoritarian Personality thus gave evidence that authoritarianism has diverse modes of political expression. This point merits emphasis, since the book has been alleged to equate authoritarianism with the political right, equalitarianism with the left (Shils 1954). The research must be seen in the context of the times—World War n and its aftermath—during which the most destructive forms of ethnocentrism (mass genocide) and fascism were the paramount issues. The survey measure of authoritarianism was called the F scale, F referring to "potential for acceptance of fascist ideology." It might better have been called the A scale. Authoritarianism is, indeed, a primary psychological source of receptivity to fascist ideology, but it may take other ideological forms as well. Several studies conducted during and after World War n also deal with the relationship of authoritarian personality to fascist ideology. Dicks (1950) conducted intensive clinical interviews with German prisoners of war, investigating personality differences between the strongly pro-Nazi soldiers and those who opposed or seriously questioned the Nazi ideology. He derived an authoritarian syndrome strikingly similar to that of the American study. Erikson's classic analysis, "Hitler's Imagery and German Youth" (1942), is another example of this genre. In the decade following publication of The Authoritarian Personality there were literally hundreds of studies derived from its concepts and measures. Most of them were relatively narrow in
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PERSONALITY, POLITICAL: Conservatism and Radicalism
focus, theoretically limited, and concerned with measurement or technique rather than with substantive issues. The 1950s in the United States were dominated by McCarthyism and a spirit of intellectual retrenchment, and few new directions were established in the social-psychological analysis of authoritarianism and political ideology. There were, however, some significant contributions, of which the following are major examples. Several large-scale surveys of U.S. national samples confirmed the earlier findings that authoritarianism is associated with a nationalistmilitaristic stand in world affairs, with opposition to a civil-libertarian position, with racial and ethnic prejudice, and the like (see, for example, McClosky 1958). Inquiries into authoritarianism and social outlook within the working class were carried out by Kornhauser, Sheppard, and Mayer (1956) in the United States, by Spinley (1953) in England, and by Lipset (1960) in several countries. These studies suggest that the incidence of authoritarianism is relatively high in the working class and is a function of the psychosocial conditions of working-class life: material, cultural, and emotional deprivation; familial disorganization; coercive, stressful, anxiety-inducing pressures. In their political views, the more authoritarian members of the working class tend, more often than the others, either to be highly conservative supporters of the status quo or to hold "extremist" positions. In an extensive analysis of the bases for economic growth in countries at different stages of industrialization, Hagen (1962) attributes a major causal role to the influence of "innovative" (as against authoritarian) personalities. Christie and Jahoda (1954) brought together a series of critical discussions of the theory, methodology, and implications of The Authoritarian Personality. The research literature on authoritarianism until 1956 was reviewed by Christie and Cook (1958). Efforts to relate authoritarianism and political ideology within a broader sociopsychological framework were made by Frenkel-Brunswik (1952) and Levinson (1957; 1958). Emerging from the authoritarian personality tradition, but differing from it in several important respects, is Rokeach's The Open and Closed Mind (1960). His shift in theoretical orientation is implied by the use of the term "mind" rather than "personality" in the title. Rokeach takes a strongly cognitive approach deriving from Kurt Lewin and gestalt psychology, although he also acknowledges a debt to Fromm and to Hoffer (1951). He offers the concept of dogmatism as an alternative to that of authoritarianism. His formulation deals primarily with the structure of belief systems and modes
of cognitive functioning, rather than with motivation, ego defense, and psychodynamics. Correspondingly, his research involves experimental, test, and survey methods rather than clinical and observational ones. Rokeach states the hypothesis that dogmatism (and authoritarianism) is uncorrelated with the right-left dimension of political ideology. He suggests that there are dogmatic and nondogmatic viewpoints within every grouping—left, center, and right—along the political spectrum. He singles out the communists as a major dogmatic subgroup within the grouping on the left. He obtains some support for this hypothesis in an English sample, where a small group of communists exhibited a high mean score on his Dogmatism Scale. However, limitations of sampling and other difficulties raise doubts about the generalizability of this finding. Contrasting results were obtained by DiRenzo (1963) in an extensive study of members of parliament in Italy. He obtained a mean score on Rokeach's Dogmatism Scale for each political party in the Chamber of Deputies. The rank order of these mean scores was almost identical with the order of the parties from right to left on the political spectrum. The neofascists exhibited the highest mean score (most dogmatic); communists, the lowest. Eysenck (1954) interprets the data of his research in England as indicating that communists and fascists have in common a high degree of tough-mindedness (a syndrome closely related to dogmatism and authoritarianism). His work has been strongly criticized by Rokeach and Hanley (1956) and by Christie (e.g., 1956), who point to serious deficiencies in sampling, data analysis, and data interpretation. Eysenck has, however, provided a defense (e.g., 1956). Although a great deal has been written about the psychological bases for Communist party membership and ideology, remarkably little empirical evidence has been gathered. As Almond (1954) has observed, there are wide variations in the "appeals of communism" between countries, between social classes, between transient and long-term members, and the like. More adequate study of the multiple relationships between personality and communist ideology would have to take into consideration the significant variations in societal context and in the character of the ideology. This is true of other political parties and ideologies as well. In general, it would appear that personality is more closely related to concrete political ideology than to party affiliation or preference. There are appreciable variations in individual ideology and personality within all parties. It is therefore necessary to supplement gross surveys of large samples
PERSONALITY, POLITICAL: Conservatism and Radicalism with the more intensive study of individuals, giving equal attention to ideology, personality, and engagement in the societal matrix. What, then, can be concluded regarding the relation of personal authoritarianism to political ideology? On the average, there is significantly greater authoritarianism to the right of center than to the left. The relationship is, however, far from simple. More systematic analysis of qualitatively different patterns of ideology along the rightcenter—left continuum is urgently needed, both for purposes of political analysis and for the study of ideology as an aspect of personality. Authoritarian personality theory calls attention first of all to the democratic—antidemocratic dimension of ideology. One of its central postulates is that authoritarian individuals have a special affinity for antidemocratic viewpoints in all spheres of social life— political, religious, familial, organizational (Levinson 1964). In the case of political ideology, it predicts that authoritarianism will be associated with antidemocratic ideologies, whether of the right, center, or left. The choice of general political direction is related to class membership, as Lipset has shown, and to a variety of other social and psychological variables yet to be elucidated. The ideological relevance of authoritarianism is clearest, and most fully documented, when we shift analytic focus from the broad categories of right, center, and left to more specific ideological dimensions. There is massive evidence that authoritarianism is significantly associated with the following: emphasis upon rigid hierarchy and stratification in political and other structures; rejection of democratic political processes; reliance upon the "great leader" in solving social problems and upon coercive social controls in maintaining social order; chauvinistic nationalism as a stance toward one's own nation and toward international affairs; an ethnocentric view of relationships among various groups within the nation; readiness to place severe restrictions upon civil rights and civil liberties; religious fundamentalism and its extension into political and other spheres; punitiveness as a basic emotional-moral response to deviance (expressed ideologically, for example, in the emphasis upon military solutions to international problems, or upon the use of punishment in the deterrence of legal crime and nonconformity); rejection of innovation, experimentation, and openness in political and other systems. The research to date clearly establishes authoritarianism as a personality constellation having significant implications for political ideology and participation. Much more work remains to be done, however, with regard to the components and vari-
27
ant forms of this syndrome and with regard to its political manifestations under different social conditions. Other ideology-personality constellations Since the late 1950s interest in the social psychology of ideology has expanded beyond concern with authoritarianism, and new personality-ideology constellations are being investigated. Although the primary focus of these studies is not on the right-left dimension as such, they have a bearing on this dimension and, what is perhaps more important, they reflect the emergence of new dimensions in the analysis of political ideology and personality. An extensive review of this work is beyond the scope of the present article; it must suffice to indicate briefly some of the relevant concepts and directions of inquiry. The "conspiratorial" view of politics has been subjected to psychological analysis by Hofstadter (1965). Although he uses the term paranoid style to convey the emotional quality of this view, his interest is not in psychopathology or psychiatric diagnosis but in the fantasies, ego defenses, and modes of thought that give coherence, meaning, and emotional appeal to the conspiratorial interpretation of political affairs. Exploring ideologypersonality relationships through a series of intensive case studies, Lane (1962) uses the term cabalist to identify a similar political orientation. Bittner (1963) takes a historical and phenomenological approach in seeking to delineate a genotypic conception of radicalism. He attributes a number of distinctive psychological properties and themes to the radical orientation. One may then ask whether an orientation having these psychological properties would have special appeal to individuals having corresponding personality characteristics. Although Bittner does not take this last step, his analysis suggests interesting leads for personality study. Similarly, Talmon (1962) describes various psychological properties of rnillenaristic ideology. She is concerned primarily with the social antecedents and consequences of rnillenaristic movements, but her discussion is also richly suggestive of hypotheses regarding their psychological bases. [See MILLENARISM; PARANOID REACTIONS.] The 1961 translation of Scheler's classic essays on ressentiment (1912) brings to wider attention an ideology-personality constellation that merits further study. Scheler conceives of ressentiment as a complex syndrome involving conscious attitudes, feelings, and moral judgments as well as unconscious defenses and wishes. The ressentiment-laden person tends to devaluate authoritative persons and groups, not on the basis of genuine
28
PERSONALITY, POLITICAL: Conservatism and Radicalism
commitment to his espoused values but, rather, on the basis of secret envy, vindictiveness, and impotent rage. As Lewis Coser points out in his Introduction to the volume, Scheler's formulations are important in their own right and as forerunners of more recent analyses of alienation and anomie. [See the biography of SCHELER.] Since the latter concepts have received greater attention in contemporary work, we shall consider them more fully here. The concepts of alienation and anomie have a long history in sociology but have only recently been singled out for extensive theoretical discussion and empirical investigation. The concept of alienation has its modern origins in the psychological writings of Marx (see Fromm 1961), who postulated that the individual in capitalist society is estranged both from his labor and from himself. Without necessarily accepting Marx's assumptions about the societal roots of alienation, many contemporary social scientists have inquired into its nature, its social and psychological bases, and its manifestations in various sectors of social life (e.g., Keniston 1965; Lane 1962). Alienation has been variously defined to include component dimensions such as sense of powerlessness, isolation, and inefficacy; lack of social rootedness; self-estrangement; noncommitment, cynicism, and failure of identity. It may be expressed in apathy, in empty conformity, or in "rebellion without a cause." Politically, it may be found at every point along the right-left spectrum and may be manifested in lack of political participation or in zealous dedication to a party or movement. The analytic usefulness of this concept at present is limited by the multiplicity and ambiguity of its definitions. At the same time, it has been extremely useful in generating new lines of research and new perspectives on the social psychology of politics. [See ALIENATION.] The concept of anomie was initially formulated by Durkheim (1897). He identified the anomie social system as one characterized by a relative failure of normative order, a lack of moral regulation over human strivings and passions. He gave evidence that anomie societies are characterized by relatively high rates of deviant and self-destructive behavior, including suicide. In seeking to explain these phenomena, he postulated that anomie societies produce certain psychological states in many of their individual members: insatiable craving, sense of futility, lack of responsibility and moral purpose, emotional emptiness and despair. He did not, however, deal with the fact that there are wide individual differences in psychological anomie among the members of a given society and that the development of this state of mind may also be
a function of individual personality. [See the biography of DURKHEIM; see also Inkeles 1959.] Recent investigations, given impetus by the work of Srole (e.g., 1956), have extended Durkheim's formulation to include the concept of the anomie personality. McClosky and Schaar (1965) present a systematic review of this theoretical development, as well as a new conceptualization in which anomie is regarded as a function of both personality and social conditions and some research data derived from large-scale surveys. They find significant correlations between anomie and authoritarianism, alienation, ethnocentrism, political extremism, sense of political futility, misanthropy, mistrust, and punitiveness. While this study requires further validation and refinement, it strongly suggests that anomie is a significant concept in the analysis of personality and political ideology. It also indicates the need for further clarification of the concepts of anomie, alienation, and authoritarianism. In conclusion, we note that the study of personality and political ideology is entering a new and more multidisciplinary period. It is being increasingly recognized that work on this problem extends beyond the traditional province of "individual psychology"; the psychologist who would contribute to it must have some appreciation of the political, social, and historical context within which individuals form and act upon their ideologies (Erikson 1958). At the same time, historians and social scientists working in this field must develop a more systematic and profound conception of the individual as an active agent in the historical process—an agent capable of blind conformity, of irrational destructiveness, and of rational, responsible choice in accord with his interests, values, and motives. Our further progress will thus require the conjoint perspectives of personality theory, political theory, and general sociological theory. DANIEL J. LEVINSON [Directly related are the entries CONSERVATISM; LIBERALISM; RADICALISM. Other relevant material may be found in ANTI-SEMITISM; ATTITUDES; CONFORMITY; FREEDOM; IDEOLOGY; INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, article on PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS; POLITICAL BEHAVIOR; POLITICAL PARTICIPATION; PREJUDICE; PUBLIC OPINION; SURVEY ANALYSIS; VALUES; and in the biographies of FRENKEL-BRUNSWIK; MARX.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADORNO, THEODOR W. et al. 1950 The Authoritarian Personality. American Jewish Committee, Social Studies Series, No. 3. New York: Harper.
PERSONALITY, POLITICAL: Conservatism and Radicalism ALLPORT, GORDON W. 1935 Attitudes. Pages 798-844 in Carl Murchison (editor), A Handbook of Social Psychology. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univ. Press. ALMOND, GABRIEL A. 1954 The Appeals of Communism. Princeton Univ. Press. BELL, DANIEL (editor) 1955 The New American Right. New York: Criterion. BITTNER, EGON 1963 Radicalism and the Organization of Radical Movements. American Sociological Review 28:928-940. CHRISTIE, RICHARD 1956 Eysenck's Treatment of the Personality of Communists. Psychological Bulletin 53: 411-430. CHRISTIE, RICHARD; and COOK, PEGGY A. 1958 A Guide to Published Literature Relating to The Authoritarian Personality Through 1956. Journal of Psychology 45: 171-199. CHRISTIE, RICHARD; and JAHODA, MARIE (editors) 1954 Studies in the Scope and Method of The Authoritarian Personality. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. DICKS, HENRY V. 1950 Personality Traits and National Socialist Ideology. Human Relations 3:111-154. DiRENZO, GORDON J. 1963 A Social Psychological Analysis of Personality Structures of Members of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Ph.D. dissertation. Univ. of Notre Dame. DURKHEIM, EMILE (1897) 1951 Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» First published in French. ERIKSON, ERIK H. 1942 Hitler's Imagery and German Youth. Psychiatry 5:475-493. ERIKSON, ERIK H. (1958) 1962 Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. Austen Riggs Monograph No. 4. New York: Norton. Explorations in Personality: A Clinical and Experimental Study of Fifty Men of College Age, by Henry A. Murray et al. 1938 London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press. EYSENCK, HANS J. 1954 The Psychology of Politics. London: Routledge. EYSENCK, HANS J. 1956 The Psychology of Politics: A Reply. Psychological Bulletin 53:177-182. FRENKEL-BRUNSWIK, ELSE 1952 Interaction of Psychological and Sociological Factors in Political Behavior. American Political Science Review 46:44-65. FRENKEL-BRUNSWIK, ELSE; LEVINSON, DANIEL J.; and SANFORD, R. NEVITT (1947) 1965 The Authoritarian Personality. Pages 670-679 in Harold Proshansky and Bernard Seidenberg (editors), Basic Studies in Social Psychology. New York: Holt. -> First published as "The Antidemocratic Personality." FROMM, ERICH 1936 Theoretische Entwiirfe iiber Autoritat und Familie: Sozialpsychologischer Teil. Pages 77-135 in Frankfurt am Main, Institut fur Sozialforschung, Studien iiber Autoritdt und Familie. Edited by Max Horkheimer. Paris: Alcan. -» An English abstract appears on pages 908-911. FROMM, ERICH (1941) 1960 Escape From Freedom. New York: Holt. FROMM, ERICH (editor) 1961 Marx's Concept of Man. New York: Ungar. HAGEN, EVERETT E. 1962 On the Theory of Social Change. Homewood, 111.: Dorsey. HOFFER, ERIC 1951 The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. New York: Harper. -> A paperback edition was published in 1958 by New American Library. HOFSTADTER, RICHARD 1965 The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Knopf.
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INKELES, ALEX 1959 Personality and Social Structure. Pages 249-276 in American Sociological Society, Sociology Today: Problems and Prospects. Edited by Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. New York: Basic Books. KENISTON, KENNETH 1965 The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society. New York: Harcourt. KORNHAUSER, ARTHUR; SHEPPARD, HAROLD I.; and MAYER,
ALBERT J. 1956 When Labor Votes: A Study of Auto Workers. New York: University Books. LANE, ROBERT E. 1962 Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does. New York: Free Press. LEVINSON, DANIEL J. 1957 Authoritarian Personality and Foreign Policy. Journal of Conflict Resolution 1:37-47. LEVINSON, DANIEL J. 1958 The Relevance of Personality for Political Participation. Public Opinion Quarterly 22:3-10. LEVINSON, DANIEL J. 1964 Idea Systems in the Individual and in Society. Pages 297-318 in George K. Zollschan and Walter Hirsch (editors), Explorations in Social Change. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. LIPSET, SEYMOUR M. 1960 Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. MCCLOSKY, HERBERT 1958 Conservatism and Personality. American Political Science Review 52:27-45. MCCLOSKY, HERBERT; and SCHAAR, JOHN H. 1965 Psychological Dimensions of Anomy. American Sociological Review 30:14-40. MANNHEIM, KARL (1929-1931) 1954 Ideology and Utopia: An Introdiiction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Harcourt; London: Routledge. -> A paperback edition was published in 1955 by Harcourt. Parts 2-4 are a translation of Ideologic und Utopie (1929); Part 5 is a translation of the article "Wissenssoziologie" (1931). MASLOW, A. H. 1943 The Authoritarian Character Structure. Journal of Social Psychology 18:401—411. MURPHY, GARDNER; and LIKERT, RENSIS 1938 Public Opinion and the Individual. New York: Harper. MURPHY, GARDNER; MURPHY, L. B.; and NEWCOMB, THEODORE M. (1931) 1937 Experimental Social Psychology: An Interpretation of Research Upon the Socialization of the Individual. Rev. ed. New York: Harper. -> Newcomb was a joint author only of the revised edition. NEWCOMB, THEODORE M. (1943) 1957 Personality and Social Change: Attitude Formation in a Student Community. New York: Dryden. REICH, WILHELM (1933) 1946 The Mass Psychology of Fascism. 3d ed., rev. & enl. New York: Orgone Institute Press. -» First published in German. ROKEACH, MILTON 1960 The Open and Closed Mind: Investigations Into the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems. New York: Basic Books. ROKEACH, MILTON; and HANLEY, CHARLES 1956 Eysenck's Tender-mindedness Dimension: A Critique. Psychological Bulletin 53:169-176. SANFORD, R. NEVITT 1956 The Approach of the Authoritarian Personality. Pages 253-319 in J. L. McCary (editor), Psychology of Personality: Six Modern Approaches. New York: Logos. SCHELER, MAX (1912) 1961 Ressentiment. Edited with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. New York: Free Press. -» First published in German. SHILS, EDWARD 1954 Authoritarianism: "Right" and "Left." Pages 24-49 in Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda (editors), Studies in the Scope and Method
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PERSONALITY MEASUREMENT: Overview
of The Authoritarian Personality. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. SPINLEY, B. M. 1953 The Deprived and the Privileged: Personality Development in English Society. London: Routledge. SROLE, LEO J. 1956 Social Integration and Certain Corollaries: An Exploratory Study. American Sociological Review 21:709-716. STACKER, Ross 1936 Fascist Attitudes: Their Determining Conditions. Journal of Social Psychology 7:438— 454. TALMON, YONINA 1962 Pursuit of the Millennium: The Relation Between Religious and Social Change. Archives europeennes de sociologie 3:125-148. THURSTONE, Louis L.; and CHAVE, E. J. 1929 The Measurement of Attitude. Univ. of Chicago Press.
PERSONALITY MEASUREMENT Jack Block i. OVERVIEW ii. PERSONALITY INVENTORIES Wayne H. Holtzman in. THE MINNESOTA MULTIPHASIC PERSONALITY INVENTORY W. Grant Dahlstrom iv. SITUATIONAL TESTS Sebastiano Santostefano
OVERVIEW
The field of personality measurement, viewed in the perspective of its short but busy history, has progressed in a fumbling, digressive manner. It may now, because of hard-won recognitions, be ready for significant and cumulative advances. The problem and strategy The reason for the disappointing disparity between the energies already expended and the accomplishments which may be certified lies in the uncertainty which has surrounded the concept of personality and the naivete in psychology about the logic and justification of measurement. In the physical sciences and in some subareas of psychology where intuitions are strong and widely held, one need not be acutely concerned with the distinction between a concept and the way in which that concept happens to be measured. By and large, measuring length by a ruler and weight by a scale does not generate controversy; the relation of these concepts to their respective methods of measurement seems obvious and beyond dispute. In the study of personality, however, there is no escaping an immediate, insistent, incessant preoccupation with the problem of linking concepts and empirical operations. Personality measurements, if they discriminate at all, always express, in a pure or impure form, explicitly or implicitly, a personality concept in terms of which the differential behavior may be understood. Personality concepts, if they are not hopelessly vague or inconsistent, always imply
specifiable behavioral differences in people. Ttese differences may be impractical to study or tiey may be judged as trivial, but the concept requres that they exist. The distinction between, yet interdependenceof, concept and measurement in the study of persmality requires a spiraling interplay of these levels of analysis—concepts should suggest approaches to measurement, and measurement should reine conceptual formulations. This reciprocal imprcvement of theory and method has come to be caled the process of "construct validation" (Cronbacl & Meehl 1955). Unhappily, in the adolescent md polyglot field of personality, progress has been rrore often circular than helical. And yet, if a scienct of personality is to be formed, the responsibilities of coupling concept and measure must be met. The domain of personality psychology is sprawling and fuzzily delineated. With so many deinitions of the field and with a plethora of vagiely redundant but not readily integrated concepts, it is difficult to know where to try to begin measuring the nebulous notion of personality and tomrd what ends. [See PERSONALITY.] In order not to be immobilized by the endess conceptual possibilities, two tactics have teen adopted. The first of these requires the courage to be arbitrary—to propose, essentially by fiat, thit a small set of concepts comprehends the important, necessary ways of differentiating people. Tlese concepts need not constitute—and thus far hive never been—a formal model of personality. Ratier, they represent simply a set of dimensions or iceas in terms of which their expounder finds it convenient and congenial to conceptualize his view of "personality." Selection of these concepts ma} be supported by observational, introspectional, clinical, test, or experimental data, of varying degiees of quality and persuasiveness, but often is lot. These concepts serve—or should serve—a heurstic purpose; they provide a way to begin and, su>sequently, a way of indicating and integrating diverse phenomena that may fall under the rubric of ;his conceptual assertion. Presumably, the usefuhess of the concepts will be tested, and they will be reshaped under the impact of the empirical coisequences they entail. The reader may wish to ). Among the personality factors found to be predictive of low resistance to all forms of persuasive influence are (1) low selfesteem; (2) inhibition of overt aggressive behavior; (3) high fantasy imagery and strong empathic responses to symbolic representations; and (4) other-directed rather than inner-directed orientation, that is, a value system stressing adaptation to the social environment rather than inner standards for regulating one's conduct. It is a puzzling fact, however, that these relationships have been found only in samples of men, since no such relationships have been found as yet in samples of women. These findings have been attributed to differences in the social roles prescribed for women and men in our society, which may also account for the repeated finding that women are more persuasible than men on social and political issues (see Hovland & Janis 1959). Current status of research The hypotheses summarized in the foregoing review of social-psychological studies of persuasion do not constitute an exhaustive prepositional inventory of all available findings but, rather, serve to highlight major relationships that have emerged from systematic research. Supporting evidence comes from carefully controlled experiments, but the studies usually have been carried out with small subpopulation samples, most often limited to American high school or college students in a classroom situation. Consequently, the generality of the hypotheses and the limiting conditions under which they hold true have not yet been adequately explored. There is some reason to expect, how-
PERSUASION ever, that the relationships initially observed in the limited experimental situations will have fairly wide applicability because: (a) they appear to be in line with observations from other, less wellcontrolled investigations of social influence (such as panel studies of opinion trends during political campaigns, market research surveys on widely advertised products, and case studies of responsiveness to psychological counseling or psychotherapy); and (b) in a number of instances where replications have been carried out with other subpopulations in other types of communication situations, confirmatory evidence has been obtained (see Janis & Smith 1965). In any case, the development of experimental techniques, attitude scales, and sophisticated methods for analyzing the effects of many different causal factors and their interactions have now reached the point where we can obtain relevant and cumulative knowledge from systematic studies of the conditions under which persuasive communications are effective or ineffective (see Campbell 1963). As new techniques and methods are used in the rapidly expanding field of communications research, we can expect a fuller account of the influence of the variables discussed, as well as new discoveries concerning the ways in which communication stimuli and predispositional factors interact in the processes of persuasion. IRVING L. JANIS [Directly related are the entries ATTITUDES, article on ATTITUDE CHANGE; PROPAGANDA; SUGGESTION. Other
relevant material may be found in BRAINWASHING; COMMUNICATION; COMMUNICATION, MASS; COMMUNICATION, POLITICAL; GROUPS, articles on GROUP REHAVIOR and GROUP FORMATION; HYPNOSIS; NORMS; SAMPLE SURVEYS; SYSTEMS ANALYSIS, article on PSYCHOLOGICAL SYSTEMS; THINKING, article On COGNITIVE ORGANIZATION AND PROCESSES; and in
the biographies of HOVLAND and LEWIN.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABELSON, ROBERT P.; and LESSER, GERALD S. 1959a A Developmental Theory of Persuasibility. Pages 167— 186 in Personality and Persuasibility, by Irving L. Janis et al. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. ABELSON, ROBERT P.; and LESSER, GERALD S. 1959fc The Measurement of Persuasibility in Children. Pages 141— 166 in Personality and Persuasibility, by Irving L. Janis et al. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. ADORNO, T. W. et al. 1950 The Authoritarian Personality. American Jewish Committee, Social Studies Series, No. 3. New York: Harper. ASCH, SOLOMON E. 1946 Forming Impressions of Personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 41:258-290.
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ASCH, SOLOMON E. (1952) 1959 Social Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Attitude Organization and Change, by Milton J. Rosenberg, Carl I. Hovland, William J. McGuire et al. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 3. 1960 New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. BREHM, JACK W.; and COHEN, ARTHUR R. 1962 Explorations in Cognitive Dissonance. New York: Wiley. CAMPBELL, DONALD T. 1963 Social Attitudes and Other Acquired Behavioral Dispositions. Volume 6, pages 94-172 in Sigmund Koch (editor), Psychology: A Study of a Science. New York: McGraw-Hill. CARLSMTTH, JAMES M.; COLLINS, BARRY E.; and HELMREICH, ROBERT L. 1966 Studies in Forced Compliance: I. The Effect of Pressure for Compliance on Attitude Change Produced by Face-to-face Role Playing and Anonymous Essay Writing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4:1—13. CRUTCHFIELD, RICHARD S. 1955 Conformity and Character. American Psychologist 10:191-198. ELMS, ALAN C.; and JANIS, IRVING L. 1965 Counternorm Attitudes Induced by Consonant Versus Dissonant Conditions of Role-playing. Journal of Experimental Research in Personality 1: 50-60. FESTINGER, LEON 1957 A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, 111.: Row, Peterson. FESTINGER, LEON 1964 Conflict, Decision, and Dissonance. Stanford Studies in Psychology, No. 3. Stanford Univ. Press. FESTINGER, LEON; and CARLSMITH, JAMES M. 1959 Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 58:203-210. HEIDER, FRITZ 1958 The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Wiley. HOVLAND, CARL I. 1957 Summary and Implications. Pages 129-157 in Carl I. Hovland et al., The Order of Presentation in Persuasion. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. HOVLAND, CARL L; and JANIS, IRVING L. 1959 Summary and Implications for Future Research. Pages 225— 254 in Personality and Persuasibility, by Irving L. Janis et al. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. HOVLAND, CARL L; JANIS, IRVING L.; and KELLEY, HAROLD H. 1953 Communication and Persuasion: Psychological Studies of Opinion Change. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. HOVLAND, CARL L; LUMSDAINE, ARTHUR A.; and SHEFFIELD, FRANK D. 1949 Experiments on Mass Communication. Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, Vol. 3. Princeton Univ. Press; Oxford Univ. Press. HOVLAND, CARL I. et al. 1957 The Order of Presentation in Persuasion. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. JANIS, IRVING L. 1957 Motivational Effects of Different Sequential Arrangements of Conflicting Arguments: A Theoretical Analysis. Pages 170-186 in Carl I. Hovland et al., The Order of Presentation in Persuasion. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. JANIS, IRVING L. 1959 Motivational Factors in the Resolution of Decisional Conflicts. Volume 7, pages 198— 231 in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Edited by Marshall R. Jones. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press. JANIS, IRVING L. 1962 Psychological Effects of Warnings. Pages 55-92 in George W. Baker and Dwight
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W. Chapman (editors), Man and Society in Disaster. New York: Basic Books. JANIS, IRVING L.; and FEIERABEND, ROSALIND L. 1957 Effects of Alternative Ways of Ordering Pro and Con Arguments in Persuasive Communications. Pages 115-128 in Carl I. Hovland et al., The Order of Presentation in Persuasion. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. JANIS, IRVING L.; and FESHBACH, SEYMOUR 1953 Effects of Fear-arousing Communications. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 48:78-92. JANIS, IRVING L.; and FESHBACH, SEYMOUR 1954 Personality Differences Associated With Responsiveness to Fear-arousing Communications. Journal of Personality 23:154-166. JANIS, IRVING L.; and FIELD, PETER B. 1959a A Behavioral Assessment of Persuasibility: Consistency of Individual. Differences. Pages 29-54 in Personality and Persuasibility, by Irving L. Janis et al. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. JANIS, IRVING L.; and FIELD, PETER B. 1959k Sex Differences and Personality Factors Related to Persuasibility. Pages 55-68 in Personality and Persuasibility, by Irving L. Janis et al. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. JANIS, IRVING L.; and GILMORE, J. B. 1965 The Influence of Incentive Conditions on the Success of Role Playing in Modifying Attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1:17-27. JANIS, IRVING L.; and HOVLAND, CARL I. 1959 An Overview of Persuasibility Research. Pages 1—26 in Personality and Persuasibility, by Irving L. Janis et al. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. JANIS, IRVING L.; and KING, BERT T. 1954 The Influence of Role Playing on Opinion Change. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49:211-218. JANIS, IRVING L.; LUMSDAINE, ARTHUR A.; and GLADSTONE, ARTHUR I. 1951 Effects of Preparatory Communications on Reactions to a Subsequent News Event. Public Opinion Quarterly 15:487-518. JANIS, IRVING L.; and SMITH, M. BREWSTER 1965 Effects of Education and Persuasion on National and International Images. Pages 190-235 in Herbert C. Kelman (editor), International Behavior: A Socialpsychological Analysis. New York: Holt. KATZ, DANIEL 1960 The Functional Approach to the Study of Attitudes. Public Opinion Quarterly 24:163204. KATZ, DANIEL; and STOTLAND, EZRA 1959 A Preliminary Statement to a Theory of Attitude Structure and Change. Volume 3, pages 423-475 in Sigmund Koch (editor), Psychology: A Study of a Science. New York: McGraw-Hill. KATZ, ELIHU; and LAZARSFELD, PAUL F. 1955 Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1964. KELMAN, HERBERT C. 1953 Attitude Change as a Function of Response Restriction. Human Relations 6: 185-214. KELMAN, HERBERT C.; and HOVLAND, CARL I. 1953 "Reinstatement" of the Communicator in Delayed Measurement of Opinion Change. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 48:327-335. KIESLER, CHARLES A.; and CORBIN, LEE H. 1965 Com-
mitment, Attraction, and Conformity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2:890-895. KING, BERT T.; and JANIS, IRVING L. 1956 Comparison of the Effectiveness of Improvised Versus Non-improvised Role-playing in Producing Opinion Changes. Human Relations 9:177-186. KLAPPER, JOSEPH T. 1960 The Effects of Mass Communication. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. (1930-1951) 1951 The Political Writings of Harold D. Lasswell. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. et al. (1949) 1965 Language of Politics: Studies in Quantitative Semantics. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; BERELSON, BERNARD; and GAUDET, HAZEL (1944) 1960 The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. 2d ed. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; and MENZEL, HERBERT 1963 Mass Media and Personal Influence. Pages 94-115 in Wilbur Schramm (editor), The Science of Human Communication: New Directions and New Findings in Communication Research. New York: Basic Books. LEVENTHAL, HOWARD 1965 Fear Communication in the Acceptance of Preventive Health Practices. New York Academy of Medicine, Bulletin 41:1144-1168. LEVENTHAL, HOWARD; SINGER, ROBERT; and JONES, SUSAN 1965 The Effects of Fear and Specificity of Recommendation Upon Attitudes and Behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2:20-29. LEWIN, KURT (1947) 1958 Group Decision and Social Change. Pages 197-211 in Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Readings in Social Psychology. 3d ed. New York: Holt. LUCHINS, ABRAHAM S. 1957a Experimental Attempts to Minimize the Impact of First Impressions. Pages 6275 in Carl I. Hovland et al., The Order of Presentation in Persuasion. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. LUCHINS, ABRAHAM S. 1957£> Primacy-Recency in Impression Formation. Pages 33-61 in Carl I. Hovland et al., The Order of Presentation in Persuasion. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. LUMSDAINE, ARTHUR A.; and JANIS, IRVING L. 1953 Resistance to "Counterpropaganda" Produced by Onesided and Two-sided Propaganda Presentations. Public Opinion Quarterly 17:311-318. McGuiRE, WILLIAM J. 1961 The Effectiveness of Supportive and Refutational Defenses in Immunizing and Restoring Beliefs Against Persuasion. Sociometry 24: 184-197. McGuiRE, WILLIAM J. 1964 Inducing Resistance to Persuasion: Some Contemporary Approaches. Volume 1, pages 191-229 in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. Edited by Leonard Berkowitz. New York: Academic Press. McGuiRE, WILLIAM J.; and PAPAGEORGIS, DEMETRIOS 1962 Effectiveness of Forewarning in Developing Resistance to Persuasion. Public Opinion Quarterly 26: 24-34. Personality and Persuasibility, by Irving L. Janis et al. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 2. 1959 New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. ROSENBERG, MILTON J. 1965 When Dissonance Fails: On Eliminating Evaluation Apprehension From Attitude Measurement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1:28-42.
PETRIE, W. M. FLINDERS ROSENBERG, MILTON J.; and ABELSON, ROBERT P. 1960 An Analysis of Cognitive Balancing. Pages 112-163 in Attitude Organization and Change, by Milton J. Rosenberg et al. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 3. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. SCHRAMM, WILBUR (editor) 1963 The Science of Human Communication: New Directions and New Findings in Communication Research. New York: Basic Books. SHERIF, MUZAFER; and HOVLAND, CARL I. 1961 Social Judgment: Assimilation and Contrast Effects in Communication and Attitude Change. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 4. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. SMITH, M. BREWSTER; BRUNER, JEROME S.; and WHITE, R. W. 1956 Opinions and Personality. New York: Wiley.
PETRIE, W. M. FLINDERS William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) was the founder of Egyptology. An only child, he was born at Charlton, near London. His parents were cultured people, and he inherited an adventurous streak from his grandfather, Matthew Flinders. Considered too delicate for normal schooling, young Petrie followed his mother's interest in numismatics and collected coins for the British Museum. His own reading was extensive, and his education in mathematics, begun by his father, was reinforced by a university extension course, his only contact with orthodox instruction. Long walks in southern England sharpened his eye to the difference between natural contours and traces of man's early constructions, and his first book, Inductive Metrology (1877), presented his idea that the units of measurement used in ancient plans were indicative of date and culture. With his bent for mathematics, Petrie contemplated astronomy as a career, but lack of a degree barred him from it, and he was not pressed to earn a living. Egypt. A casual interest in Charles Piazzi Smyth's theory that Biblical prophecy was enshrined in the measurements of the Great Pyramid grew into a resolve to investigate its truth, and in 1880 Petrie began his survey, which exploded the very theory he had hoped to prove. This work, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh (1883), remained the standard account until 1925, when it was partially superseded by a new survey. The journey to Egypt had far-reaching effects, for Petrie saw the destruction of antiquities going on around him and realized that it was his life's work to salvage all he could. During the next fifty years he published about a hundred books, mostly excavation reports. Funds were provided by friends
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and by the Egypt Exploration Fund (now Society), and later he founded the Egyptian Research Account and the British School of Archaeology in Egypt. After his marriage in 1897, he was ably seconded by his wife in the collection of funds. He became the first Edwards professor of Egyptology at University College, London, in 1892, a chair which he held until 1933. Stratigraphy in excavation. In 1890, under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Petrie made a brief but revolutionary excursion into southern Palestine. Despite Heinrich Schliemann's excavations of mounds at Troy, none of the people working in the Palestinian field had examined a mound, though Schliemann and Wilhelm Dorpfeld had recognized that these common features of the Asian landscape represented an accumulation of occupation. Using pottery as the main guide, Petrie's new system of recording all finds, however small, was put to the test at Tell el Hesy in a six weeks' campaign, and the results were published in a book of that name (1891). Through erosion, layers of the mound were visible in section, and Petrie noted exactly where each potsherd was found. He saw that every layer had its characteristic pottery, and he outlined absolute dates for the main types, which soon proved to be correct. Sequence dates. Petrie's greatest work was accomplished in the last decade of the nineteenth century, based on his excavation of about nine hundred tombs in Egypt. His book, Diospolis Parva (1901), established the sequence of prehistoric periods before the coming of the Dynastic Race to Egypt, estimated by him at that time as occurring in the fifth millennium B.C., although the date is reduced in current literature by a thousand years. His conclusions were reached by stages: first, he prepared a numbered corpus of pottery; then he listed the contents of each grave, arranging them in order to bring pots (represented by corpus numbers) of like shape together in the series. New forms stood out in the arrangement, and each stage was necessarily linked to older and later phases. He assigned a relative date ("Sequence Date"; e.g., SD 30-80) to each phase, representing a fixed order of a given series of burials. Then he checked the sequence against that based on pottery alone by repeating the process on other grave goods such as stone vases and ivories. Petrie's system is still the standard way of placing prehistoric tomb groups in Egyptian history, and it can be adapted for research in every field. With 25 years of experience behind him, Petrie wrote Methods and Aims in Archaeology (1904), the first book of its kind, and although in later
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years he may not always have followed his own precepts, they remain sound in principle. Sinaitic inscriptions. In 1904-1905 Petrie went to Sinai; he discussed the physical and historic relations between Egypt and Palestine in Researches in Sinai (1906). Besides hieroglyphic records of Egyptian mining expeditions, Petrie found sculpture in foreign style, sometimes inscribed in a new script, perhaps an early attempt at alphabetic writing. Excavations in Palestine. After World War I, Petrie decided to devote his remaining years to problems which could best be solved in Palestine. From 1926 onward, he or his staff dug at four sites south of Gaza, of which the most rewarding was Tell el Ajjul. The rich finds were described in a five-volume report, Ancient Gaza (1931-1952). Petrie died in Jerusalem in 1942 at the age of 89. Dedicated to his self-appointed task, he created Egyptology where before there was dilettantism or mere plunder; and his genius imposed discipline upon the previous disorder. His autobiography, Seventy Years in Archaeology (1931), records his triumphs and frustrations on the way, but nothing can detract from his achievements or from his wide view of what archeology should be—the study of how man has attained his present position and powers.
OLGA TUFNELL [See also ARCHEOLOGY.] WORKS BY PETRIE
1877
Inductive Metrology: Or, the Recovery of Ancient Measures From the Monuments. London: Saunders. (1883) 1885 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh. Rev. ed. London: Field & Tuer; New York: Scribner. 1891 Tell el Hesy (Lachish). London: Watt. 1901 Diospolis Parva: The Cemeteries of Abadiyeh and Hu, 1898-1899. London: Egypt Exploration Fund. 1904 Methods and Aims in Archaeology. London and New York: Macmillan. 1906 Researches in Sinai. London: Murray; New York: Button. 1931 Seventy Years in Archaeology. London: Low, Marston. 1931-1952 Ancient Gaza. 5 vols. British School of Archaeology in Egypt, Egyptian Research Account, Publications, Vols. 53-56, 64. London: The School. -> Volumes 1-4: Ancient Gaza: Tell el Ajjul. Volume 5: Ancient Gaza and the City of Shepherd Kings.
PETTY, WILLIAM William Petty (1623-1687), the English economist and first systematic exponent of "the art of political arithmetic," was a self-made man with a
wide range of talents and immense mental energy. He was the son of a clothier, traditionally described by his biographers as "poor," but if, as is likely, Petty's father left him the good house and 8 acres of land that he owned in his birthplace, Romsey, in 1685, the family was comfortably above the poverty line. Certainly, when the young Petty went to sea as a cabin boy at the age of about 14, he was sufficiently literate in Latin and Greek to gain entry to the Jesuits' college at Caen, where he was put ashore on breaking a leg; there he studied Latin, Greek, French, and mathematics. Then, after a short spell in the Royal Navy, he went on to study medicine at the universities of Utrecht, Amsterdam, Paris, and Oxford. By 1651 he had taken his Oxford degree of Doctor of Physic and entered the London College of Physicians. At the age of 28, he became vice-principal of Brasenose College and professor of anatomy at Oxford. Although one of the leading intellectuals of his day and a founding member of the Royal Society, Petty was a man of the world rather than a scholar. He wrote more than he read. He was a persistent inventor: he patented a double-writing device before he got his medical degree, and he pursued his design for a twin-hulled ship through four prototypes. He worked out a scheme for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666. In 1652 he went to Ireland as physician-general to the army, which was no sinecure in a country ravaged by the plague and other lethal epidemic diseases. Within two years of his arrival in Ireland he had taken over the complex task of surveying the forfeited estates of the Irish rebels as a basis for their redistribution among the English conquerors. This task, too, he performed with his usual efficiency and drive and with the determination and pugnacity which earned him many enemies and carried him into countless lawsuits. He spent much of his working life defending his Irish survey and handling his own Irish estates, but he still managed to read a number of communications to the Royal Society on topics varying from dyeing practices in the clothing trade to the testing of mineral waters and to achieve a formidable and serious literary output on economic, demographic, naval, medical, and scientific subjects. A good deal has been written about Petty, and the published opinions of his contemporaries leave no doubt of the respect and esteem with which he was regarded. It is unlikely that he was author, as has been claimed, of the "Natural and Political Observations Upon the Bills of Mortality," which was signed by his friend John Graunt (see Graunt [1662] 1963, vol. 2, pp. 314-435), but he could
PETTY, WILLIAM well have been; and the title page of his own "Observations Upon the Dublin-Bills of Mortality" ([1683] 1963, vol. 2, pp. 479-491) explicitly associates him with the earlier work, which was a pathbreaker in demographic analysis. John Aubrey, his first biographer, the diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, and the economist and statesman, Davenant, all men of distinction in their own right, regarded Petty as one of the outstanding men of their time. Petty's claim to fame as an economist lies not so much in his originality or his theoretical ability as in his analytical skill. His insistence on measurement and his clear schematic view of the economy make him the first econometrician, and he was constantly evolving and using concepts and analytical methods that were in advance of his time. His evaluation of the gain from foreign trade in "Another Essay in Political Arithmetick Concerning the Growth of the City of London" ([1682] 1963, vol. 2, pp. 451-478) is based on a statement of the benefits of the division of labor and specialization and was written a century before Adam Smith's famous account. Petty put so much stress on the role of labor in creating wealth that he has been regarded (for instance, by Marx) as an early exponent of the labor theory of value. But, as is shown by a characteristic and frequently quoted passage from his "Treatise of Taxes and Contributions" ([1662] 1963, vol. 1, pp. 1-97)—"Labour is the Father and active principle of Wealth as Lands are the Mother"—his theory of production and value is based on the two original factors of production of the early economists. He was the author of the first known national income estimates, in "Verbum sapienti" ([1665] 1963, vol. 1, pp. 99120), "Political Arithmetick" ([c. 1676] 1963, vol. 1, pp. 233-313), and "Treatise of Ireland" ([1687] 1963, vol. 2, pp. 545-621), although he did not trouble to define or develop his concepts and was rough, even careless at times, in his use of figures. Some of the calculations in his "Treatise of Taxes and Contributions" and elsewhere are essentially exercises in what is now called "cost-benefit analysis." He was the first writer, so far as we know, to grasp the concept of the velocity of money, again in "Verbum sapienti," although in his "Quantulumcunque Concerning Money" ([1695] 1963, vol. 2, Pp. 437-448) there is no trace of it. He was not above manipulating his data in ways that would justify his polemical arguments, and it would be rash to accept his statistics uncritically. But he was no slave to political prejudice, and his analysis of the economy of his time for England and Ireland —for example, "The Political Anatomy of Ire-
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land" ([1671-1676] 1963, vol. 1, pp. 121-231) — and his various essays on "political arithmetick" are both shrewd and penetrating. PHYLLIS DEANE [Other relevant material may be found in the biography of GRAUNT.] WORKS BY PETTY
(1662) 1963 Treatise of Taxes and Contributions. Volume 1, pages 1-97 in William Petty, The Economic Writings . . . New York: Kelley. (1662-1695) 1963 The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty. 2 vols. Edited by Charles H. Hull. New York: Kelley. -> Contains Petty's main writings and a general bibliography. (1665) 1963 Verbum sapienti. Volume 1, pages 99-120 in William Petty, The Economic Writings . . . New York: Kelley. -* Written in 1665; first published posthumously in 1691. (1671-1676) 1963 The Political Anatomy of Ireland. Volume 1, pages 121-231 in William Petty, The Economic Writings . . . New York: Kelley. -> Written between 1671 and 1676; first published posthumously in 1691. (c. 1676) 1963 Political Arithmetick. Volume 1, pages 233-313 in William Petty, The Economic Writings . . . New York: Kelley. -» First written c. 1676; first published surreptitiously in 1683 as "England's Guide to Industry." The first authorized edition was published posthumously in 1690 by Petty's son. (1682) 1963 Another Essay in Political Arithmetick Concerning the Growth of the City of London, 1682. Volume 2, pages 451-478 in William Petty, The Economic Writings . . . New York: Kelley. (1683) 1963 Observations Upon the Dublin-Bills of Mortality, 1681, and the State of That City. Volume 2, pages 479-491 in William Petty, The Economic Writings . . . New York: Kelley. (1687) 1963 Treatise of Ireland, 1687. Volume 2, pages 545-621 in William Petty, The Economic Writings . . . New York: Kelley. -» Written in 1687; first published posthumously in 1899. (1695) 1963 Sir William Petty's Quantulumcunque Concerning Money, 1682. Volume 2, pages 437-448 in William Petty, The Economic Writings . . . New York: Kelley. -> Published posthumously. The Double Bottom or Twin-hulled Ship of Sir William Petty. Edited by the Marquis of Lansdowne. Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1931. History of the Cromwellian Survey of Ireland: A.D. 1655— 1656. Edited by Thomas A. Larcom. Irish Archaelogical and Celtic Society Publications, Vol. 15. Dublin Univ. Press, 1851. -> Commonly called the "Down Survey." The Petty Papers. 2 vols. Edited by the Marquis of Lansdowne. London: Constable, 1927. The Petty-Southwell Correspondence: 1676-1687. Edited by the Marquis of Lansdowne. London: Constable, 1928. SUPPLEMENTARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
AUBREY, JOHN (1898) 1957 Sir William Petty. Pages 237-241 in John Aubrey, Brief Lives. Edited from the original manuscripts and with a life of John Aubrey by Oliver L. Pick. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
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BEVAN, WILSON L. 1894 Sir William Petty: A Study in English Economic Literature. Volume 9, pages 370472 in American Economic Association, Publications. Baltimore: The Association. FITZMAURICE, EDMOND G. P. 1895 The Life of Sir William Petty: 1623-1687. London: Murray. -» Contains Petty's autobiographical will. GRAUNT, JOHN (1662) 1963 Natural and Political Observatir-^ Upon the Bills of Mortality. Volume 2, pages 314-435 in William Petty, The Economic Writings . . . New York: Kelley. -> The authorship of this work is in doubt. GREENWOOD, MAJOR 1928 Graunt and Petty. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 91:79-85. PASQUIER, MAURICE 1903 Sir William Petty: Ses idees economiques. Paris: Giard & Briere. STRAUSS, EMIL 1954 Sir William Petty: Portrait of a Genius. London: Bodley Head; Glencoe, 111.: Free Press.
PHENOMENOLOGY The word "phenomenology" is derived from the Greek phainein, "to show," from which came phainemenon, meaning "that which appears." Thus, phenomenology in a general sense could be literally the orderly study of phenomena, or appearances, and could as such encompass much of traditional philosophy and science. In its restricted sense, however, it refers to the study of phenomena as phenomena and more specifically to a twentiethcentury movement in German philosophy centered loosely on Edmund Husserl. A good English introduction to Husserl's philosophy has been provided by Marvin Farber (1943), and the whole phenomenological movement has been reviewed by Herbert Spiegelberg (1960). The various forms of existentialism, which have developed particularly in France since World War n, may be regarded as offshoots of the phenomenological movement but should not be identified with it. Phenomenology and existentialism, while primarily philosophical, have had important repercussions in psychology, psychiatry, theology, literature, drama, and the fine arts. The present article will limit itself to a brief sketch of the philosophical background and a somewhat fuller account of psychological phenomenology [see PSYCHOLOGY, article on EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY, and the biography of HUSSERL]. Philosophical phenomenology Philosophical phenomenology is essentially a method of philosophical analysis rather than a school in the traditional sense of the term. The phenomenologist attempts to suspend or "place in brackets" (einklammern} all metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions, to identify and describe the essences of experience as they are in-
tuitively apprehended (Anschauung, Wesensschau), and on this basis to provide a fresh approach to the classic problems of metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, logic, ethics, and aesthetics. Husserl believed that in this way philosophy could be rescued from unproductive speculation and re-established as a rigorously empirical discipline (strenge Wissenschaft'). Phenomenology is thus empirical in its insistence on a continuous and unbiased scrutiny of experience, but not empiricist as the word is commonly used to refer to explanation through past experience. It shares the empirical emphasis of Locke and his successors and of some of the positivists—e.g., Ernst Mach—differing from these primarily on grounds that their analyses of experience were neither rigorous nor complete. Phenomenology is not to be confused with phenomenalism, the doctrine that knowledge is limited to the data of experience and that the knower is consequently incapable of transcending the world of phenomena, nor with psychologism, the contention that all philosophical problems can be reduced to terms of psychology. History of modern phenomenology. Antecedents of modern phenomenology are to be found in the many classic attempts—e.g., that of St. Augustine—to found a philosophy on the data of intuition. The modern movement begins, however, with Descartes, whose "method" involved the suspension of all beliefs and the acceptance as true of only those ideas which are presented "so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt." Although Kant's distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal world rests in part on phenomenological analysis, the post-Kantian (e.g., Hegelian) use of the term "phenomenology" and its loose use in the sciences to denote anything observable are not regarded as relevant. Husserl's phenomenology goes back to Descartes for its inspiration and draws liberally from the psychological analyses of William James (1890) and Husserl's teacher Franz Brentano (1874), particularly from the latter's doctrine of intentionality. Husserl's early interest was in the phenomenological basis of mathematics and logic, from which he moved to epistemology and eventually to a transcendental phenomenology, which is usually regarded as a form of metaphysical idealism. Among his publications the most important for psychology is his Logische Untersuchungen (1900-1901). The Jahrbuch fur Philosophic und phanomenologische Forschung, which he edited from 1913 to 1930, also contains contributions to psychology, and the Husserl archives at Louvain are yielding further material of psychological interest. His more strictly philosophical works, how-
PHENOMENOLOGY ever, have had a profound influence on the existentialist psychologies [see the biographies of JAMES; KANT]. Other influential German philosophers who shared in the phenomenological movement were Alexander Pfander, Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, and Moritz Geiger. Scheler in particular, although not a disciple of Husserl, became widely known for his extension of the phenomenological method into the fields of ethics and value theory. It was Martin Heidegger, however, Husserl's pupil and successor at the University of Freiburg, who perhaps unintentionally popularized the term "existentialism" and who, through his often baffling metaphors and neologisms, has been in some measure responsible for phenomenology's reputation as an obscure and almost esoteric metaphysical system. Since the publication of Sein und Zeit (1927) Heidegger has moved steadily away from a straightforward phenomenology and has concerned himself more and more with the ontological problem—that of the fundamental meaning of being (Sein). In spite of his early enthusiasm for the National Socialist ideology he has been an influential figure in recent continental European philosophy, particularly in French existentialism and in the existentialist movements in theology and psychiatry. Since World War n the phenomenological movement in philosophy has been most active in France under the leadership of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Both men have accepted in principle Husserl's phenomenological method but have pushed further in the direction of a detailed examination of the phenomena of human existence (the human situation) and thus toward a complete existentialist philosophy. Sartre's more strictly phenomenological contributions are to be found in his studies of imagination and emotion; in his novels and plays and in his more systematic philosophical works, e.g., Being and Nothingness (1943), he presents existentialism as a philosophy of life. Merleau-Ponty is also known both as a phenomenologist and as an existentialist. His most important phenomenological contributions have been his analyses of perception (1945) and of language (1952). Psychological phenomenology Psychological phenomenology, too, is essentially a n approach rather than a particular kind of theory or system, and it owes as much to Goethe, Purkinje, and the physiologist Ewald Hering as it does to Husserl. Whereas Husserl's phenomenology is logically prior to all empirical science, concerned w ith essences rather than with "matters of fact,"
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psychological phenomenology is frankly and explicitly descriptive. It represents what David Katz called an attitude of "disciplined naivete," the attempt to suspend all presuppositions (biases, implicit assumptions) and observe and describe the world of phenomena (consciousness, immediate experience, phenomenal world, psychological field) as it is naively apprehended. Husserl regarded this kind of psychology as an important empirical discipline, coordinate with the other empirical sciences but not to be confused with "pure" phenomenology. Psychological phenomenology is in the tradition of all the psychologies since Descartes which have accepted as their task the scientific study of consciousness, and it is thus to be distinguished from the faculty psychologies, the depth psychologies, and the psychologies which limit their subject matter to externally observed or logically inferred behavior. Phenomenology and introspection. Phenomenological description must not be equated, however, with the introspective analysis of the Wundtian school, best represented in the English literature by Edward B. Titchener. For Titchener (1929), "existential" experience consists of the pure, irreducible, conscious content (sensation, feeling, image) which is left after all object reference or meaning context has been deliberately brushed aside. To confuse the sensation itself with the stimulus which arouses it—e.g., the color with the light wave—is to commit the stimulus error. The phenomenologist would accept introspective analysis as a legitimate technique for the establishment of correlations between the variables of physical stimulation and the dimensions of consciousness, as in psychophysics, but he would reject the assertion that the introspectively identified sensations are necessarily the elements of consciousness. He would also agree with the introspectionist that the physical, physiological, or other conditions which give rise to a phenomenon, or which can be correlated with it, should not be confused with the phenomenon itself. Just as color is not an array of light waves, so the person we perceive is not the person who may "really" exist; one is a phenomenal datum, the other an independently definable process, entity, or condition which may or may not be causally related to the phenomenon. The phenomenologist differs radically from the introspectionist in his insistence on the acceptance as legitimate psychological data of the very phenomena which the introspectionist emphatically rejects, namely, such phenomena as organization, directedness, attractiveness, or requiredness—phenomena which for the introspectionist are secondary out-
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comes of association or interpretation. If we suspend our presuppositions, the phenomenologist argues, and refuse to impose on the phenomena any theory as to their origin or their veridicality, we still find ourselves confronted with a meaningful world of things, events, and people, organized and interrelated in vastly complex ways. Elimination of biases and presuppositions. Our first phenomenological task is to observe, describe, and analyze the structures, properties, dimensions, and interrelations of phenomena as they are naively apprehended. This, the phenomenologist contends, is a highly disciplined activity, fully as rigorous as introspection, analogous to but not identical with the phenomenological reduction of Husserl [see the biographies of TITCHENER; WUNDT]. The various biases or presuppositions which must be placed in brackets have been variously classified and need not be detailed here. Some of these stem from the reductive atomism of classical Newtonian physics and can be recognized as implicit in the associationist psychologies developed since the work of John Locke; others stem from the Darwinian emphasis on explanation by reference to origins, evident both in behaviorist learning theory and in Freudian psychoanalysis; and still others reflect the confusion of logical implication with psychological content so frequently encountered in theories of motivation. Without denying the value of reductive analysis or of developmental studies, the phenomenological psychologist would argue that these and other biases involve a prejudgment of the phenomena and the consequent risk that significant phenomena, such as the melodic property of a series of tones or the physiognomic properties of a face, will be dismissed as of no consequence because they disappear in reductive analysis or seem to be the products of past experience. He would argue further that in the recent history of psychology this deliberate bracketing of implicit assumptions and the acceptance of all data of experience, however subtle or evanescent, as intrinsically valid, has led to significant extensions of psychological knowledge and advances in psychological theory. Phenomenology and contemporary psychology The phenomenological method has been applied to many areas of psychology, most systematically perhaps in the experimental study of perception, particularly in connection with the traditional problems of space, time, motion, color, sound, and touch. These are obviously the phenomena most readily accessible to observation under conditions of experimental control. The phenomenal world contains much more, however, than things and
events with their properties and interrelationships. It also contains the phenomenal self and phenomenal "other selves," with their feelings, emotions, and desires; and it contains a whole welter of phenomenal structures, states, and processes which have been traditionally classified as memories, fantasies, choices, beliefs, and the like. These phenomena also invite the interest of the phenomenologist, and even though they are difficult to bring into the laboratory, they are steadily yielding to other techniques of investigation. Some of the most promising of these techniques are being developed by the clinician, whose patient may be incapable of giving a full and free account of his experience and must consequently be induced through indirect devices to reveal what is there for him. The range of phenomenological investigation is thus steadily broadening to include what have been traditionally thought of as noncognitive processes. As facts are being accumulated and techniques refined, more and more attention is being devoted to the reconstruction of the phenomenal world of the "other person," including that of the child, the deviant, the person who has grown up in a culture radically different from one's own, even members of other species. Basic to the investigation is always the attempt to establish the "what" of experience. To explain the "why" one must transcend phenomenology and become a systematic psychologist or even a philosopher. Most of the phenomenologists have gone beyond their phenomenology, but phenomenology has produced no single psychological theory. In the available space only a few of the most significant contributors to psychological phenomenology can be mentioned. Experimental psychology of perception. The pioneer in the experimental phenomenology of perception is undoubtedly David Katz, whose The World of Colour appeared in 1911. Before him, Goethe (1810) and Purkinje (1819-1825) had published detailed descriptive analyses of the world of color, and Hering in Outlines of a Theory of the Light Sense (1872-1875) had countered Helmholtz' empiricist theory of color constancy with a nativist theory based on the acceptance of naively apprehended object color as psychologically valid. Karl Stumpf in his Tonpsychologie (1883-1890) had also made use of the phenomenological method, but Stumpf s interest in phenomenology was as much philosophical as it was psychological. Helmholtz had explained the approximate constancy of object color as the interpretation of primary, physically bound sensation elements by unconscious inference. Katz bracketed Helmholtz' physicalistic assumptions and proceeded to explore the world of color in all its modes of appearance
PHENOMENOLOGY (Erscheinungsweisen'), demonstrating that while film colors (Flachenfarben) vary simply and directly with changes in retinal stimulation, the same does not hold true for surface colors (Oberflachenfarben}, which are phenomenally inherent in the perceived object. Impressions of surface color and of illumination are phenomenally covariant, changes in total retinal stimulation being registered, within very wide limits, as changes in impression of illumination, with the consequence that object color tends to remain phenomenally constant. As a result of Katz's phenomenological studies of color and of his similar studies of the world of touch in Der Aufbau der Tastwelt (1925), the facts of phenomena] constancy have become basic to a reconstructed psychophysics and psychophysiology of perception. [See PERCEPTION, article on PERCEPTUAL CONSTANCY; VISION, article On COLOR
VISION AND COLOR BLINDNESS; and the biographies of HERING; KATZ; STUMPF.] Gestalt theory. Perhaps even more rewarding has been the phenomenological approach to perceptual organization represented by the Berlin group of gestalt psychologists. The reality of gestalt qualities had been recognized by Christian von Erenfels in his article "Uber 'Gestaltqualitaten'" (1890) and by Stumpf, but it was Max Wertheimer's experimental studies of apparent movement (1912) which set the stage for the gestalt movement. The older theories could not admit as psychologically valid an experience of movement when there is no physical movement in the stimuli; phenomenal movement had to be explained away as an illusion. Wertheimer, like Katz, simply accepted the phenomenal fact as valid, insisting that movement as such must have its direct neural correlate; hence the controversial principle of isomorphism. Wertheimer's pioneer experiments led to a long series of studies of gestalt phenomena in perception, memory, thinking, and motivation, many of which have been reviewed by Koffka (1935). While the gestalt theories which emerged, notably the physiological and the psychological field theories, go beyond phenomenology, the basic approach is in each case phenomenological. It should be noted that this approach, although prominently associated with the gestalt group, has been broadly characteristic of experimental psychology in western Europe. Examples of this approach are to be found in the work of Albert Michotte on phenomenal causality, Jean Piaget on developmental psychology, F. J. J. Buytendijk on expressive movement, and Geza Revesz and Albert Wellek on the psychology of music. [See GESTALT THEORY.] Verstehende psychologic. Related to the experimovement but not to be identified with it
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is the "understanding" psychology (verstehende Psychologies of Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Scheler, Eduard Spranger, Karl Jaspers, and Ludwig Binswanger. Distinguishing broadly between the Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) and the Geisteswissenschaften (mental or humanistic sciences), Dilthey (1883) placed in the former category the reductive or "explaining" psychology of the laboratory and in the latter the psychology which seeks an intuitive understanding of man's value orientations as revealed both in individual life and in history. This kind of psychology, systematized by Spranger as a sixfold value typology in his Types of Men (1914), has had considerable influence on the study of personality, both in Germany and elsewhere. Although the verstehende Psychologic is not strictly phenomenological, it represents the attempt at an intuitive, nonanalytic penetration of the inner life of the other person; a somewhat shaky phenomenological basis for it is to be found in Scheler's The Nature of Sympathy (1913). Scheler's descriptive analysis of the various forms of sympathy is part of his attempt to lay the phenomenological groundwork for a broadly inclusive philosophical anthropology. The relevance of the verstehende Psychologic to psychopathology is perhaps best demonstrated in Jaspers' General Psychopathology (1913) and Binswanger's Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins (1942); both authors are to be ranked among the leading existentialists. [See SYMPATHY AND EMPATHY.] The phenomenological movement is still distinctively European. In the United States, leading interpreters of philosophical phenomenology in the Husserl tradition are Marvin Farber and Herbert Spiegelberg. The phenomenological emphasis in experimental, developmental, and social psychology is recognizable in what has come to be known as "cognitive theory," a useful summary and evaluation of which was made by Martin Scheerer (1954). In the psychology of personality and in psychotherapy there is a vigorous and growing existentialist movement, influenced greatly by Binswanger's Daseins analyse. ROBERT B. MACLEOD [Directly related are the entries PSYCHOLOGY, article on EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY; THINKING. Other relevant material may be found in MENTAL DISORDERS, TREATMENT OF, article On CLIENT-CENTERED COUNSELING; PERCEPTION; and in the biographies of HUSSERL; KATZ.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY BINSWANGER, LUDWIG (1942) 1953 Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins. Rev. ed. Zurich: Niehaus.
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BRENTANO, FRANZ C. (1874) 1924-1925 Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. 2 vols., 2d ed. Leipzig: Meiner. DILTHEY, WILHELM (1883) 1951 Gesammelte Schriften. Volume 1: Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Leipzig: Teubner. EHRENFELS, CHRISTIAN VON 1890 Uber "Gestaltqualitaten." Vierteljahresschrift fur wissenschaftliche Philosophic I...J Soziologie 14:249-292. FARBER, MARVIN 1943 The Foundation of Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and the Quest for a Rigorous Science of Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. GOETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG VON (1810) 1840 Theory of Colours. London: Murray. H> First published as Zur Farbenlehre. HEIDEGGER, MARTIN (1927)1962 Being and Time. New York: Harper. -» First published in German as Sein und Zeit. HERING, EWALD (1872-1875) 1964 Outlines of a Theory of the Light Sense. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» First published in German as Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1920 as Grundziige der Lehre vom Lichtsinn. HUSSERL, EDMUND (1900-1901) 1922-1928 Logische Untersuchungen. 2 vols. Halle (Germany): Niemeyer. -» Volume 1: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. Volume 2: Untersuchungen zur Phdnomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. JAMES, WILLIAM (1890) 1962 The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. JASPERS, KARL (1913) 1963 General Psychopathology. Univ. of Chicago Press. -» First published in German. KATZ, DAVID (1911) 1935 The World of Colour. London: Routledge. -> First published in German as Die Erscheinungsweisen der Farben und ihre Beeinflussung durch die individuelle Erfahrung. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1930 as Der Aufbau der Farbwelt. KATZ, DAVID 1925 Der Aufbau der Tastwelt. Leipzig: Earth. KOFFKA, KURT 1935 Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New York: Harcourt. MERLEAU-PONTY, MAURICE (1945) 1962 Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities. -» First published in French. MERLEAU-PONTY, MAURICE 1952 Sur la phenomenologie du langage. Pages 91-109 in Colloque International de Phenomenologie, Bruxelles, 1951, Problemes actuels de la phenomenologie. Paris: Desclee de Brouwer. PURKINJE, JAN E. 1819-1825 Beobachtungen und Versuche zur Physiologic der Sinne. 2 vols. Prague: Calve; Berlin: Reimer. -» Volume 1 was published in Prague and Volume 2 in Berlin. SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL (1943) 1956 Being and Nothingness. New York: Philosophical Library. -> First published in French as L'etre et le neant. SCHEERER, MARTIN 1954 Cognitive Theory. Volume 1, pages 91-142 in Gardner Lindzey (editor), Handbook of Social Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: AddisonWesley. SCHELER, MAX (1913) 1954 The Nature of Sympathy. London: Routledge. -> First published as Zur Phdnomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefiihle. The second revised and enlarged edition—which was later translated into English—was published in 1923 as Wesen und Formen der Sympathie.
SPIEGELBERG, HERBERT (1960) 1965 The Phenomenalogical Movement. 2 vols. 2d ed. The Hague: Nijhoff. SPRANGER, EDUARD (1914) 1928 Types of Men: The Psychology and Ethics of Personality. 5th ed. Halle (Germany): Niemeyer. -> First published as Lebensformen: Geisteswissenschaftliche Psychologie und Ethik der Personlichkeit. STUMPF, KARL 1883-1890 Tonpsychologie. 2 vols. Leipzig: Hirzel. TITCHENER, EDWARD B. 1929 Systematic Psychology: Prolegomena. New York: Macmillan. WERTHEIMER, MAX 1912 Experimentelle Studien iiber das Sehen von Bewegungen. Zeitschrift fur Psychologie und Physiologic der Sinnesorgane 61:161-265. -» Reprinted in Wertheimer's Drei Abhandlungen zur Gestalttheorie published in 1925 by the Philosophische Akademie, Erlangen.
PHILANTHROPY The terms "philanthropy" and "charity" have often been used interchangeably, but changes in attitude to the phenomenon of giving have meant that charity now has a somewhat derogatory connotation, and so it is gradually giving way to the more acceptable concept of philanthropy. The Oxford English Dictionary's definition of philanthropy as being "the disposition or active effort to promote the happiness and well-being of one's fellow men" introduces the modern conception of charitable effort which stresses the total well-being of the individual rather than merely relieving distress. Philanthropy, too, seems a more appropriate term for the highly organized types of giving typical of modern industrialized societies. Participation in philanthropic activity is now more characteristic of the individualistic laissezfaire societies in which the ideology of personal liberty and noninterference by the state is widely held than of those with communist political systems. In some of the individualistic societies it plays such an important role that its organized agencies have become closely integrated with the whole social structure. Every year vast sums of money are collected for an infinite number of philanthropic purposes, and an increasing number of people participate in the work of collecting money through highly organized fund-raising campaigns. So well has this form of activity come to serve certain needs that in many countries it has even been incorporated in government policy in the form of tax exemptions for contributions to charitable agencies. It has become such an accepted form of behavior that few now escape the demands of giving, and many important institutions are partly or wholly dependent on it. On the other hand, in countries in which the
PHILANTHROPY rights of the community take precedence over the rights of the individual, there is less need for voluntary philanthropy because the state takes responsibility for most if not all of the needs of its people. No adequate data have been gathered to tell the history of philanthropy all over the world. Anthropologists have shed light on the practice and attitudes to giving in a number of preliterate societies. Historians have given us accounts, often with much detail, of a few Eastern societies, ancient Greece and Rome, and some of the medieval European countries. These studies show that the scope of charity has undergone many changes with regard to beneficiaries, the type of benefits, and those held responsible and that these have reflected the changing social structures of the societies concerned. But there is very little accurate information on the philanthropic activity of many societies, even in modern times, and there are few scientific studies of the effect of philanthropic activity on the giver and on the recipient. History In early times, charity was usually motivated by religious faith, and so its history in different societies can, in part, be understood by studying their religious ideologies. However, religious zeal is largely the product of a complex of forces; thus, even though the ideal of philanthropy was articulated through the religious functionaries, there were always other underlying reasons that prompted philanthropic giving. It seldom, if ever, occurred either when the giver did not receive some practical or psychological reward, or when there was no punishment for not giving. Active participation in philanthropy has through the ages been much more characteristic of Christian, or Western, than of pagan, or Eastern, societies, and of those belonging to Protestant rather than to Roman Catholic or Orthodox religions (Grubb 1917, p. 837). In preliterate societies, the family, kin, caste, tribe, or clan looked after its own people as a natural duty. The wealthier and those in high positions were expected to bear the larger share of looking after the destitute, and sometimes the village would look after all its members. But almsgiving, in the sense of the duty of everyone to give to those outside their own close circle, was not necessary. For to belong to a large family or clan was to be part °f a system that supplied social and economic security. The continuing strength of the ties of family, kin, tribe, or caste in Africa and Asia is one of the main reasons for the difference in the organization of philanthropy in the East and the
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West. Another is the fact that almost all the new nations have begun their independence with a certain amount of guaranteed social security in their constitutions. Certain current trends in philanthropic thinking and organization go back very far in history. The idea that giving would ensure a reward in heaven was found in Egypt many centuries before the Christian era, and giving was not limited to family or clan. In ancient Rome, the idea was first introduced that citizenship was the basis of the right of relief for every person, no matter whether he was destitute or not; this foreshadowed the principle of universality. Philanthropy in this sense had very little connection with poverty and was not necessarily motivated by pity, nor was it considered an important virtue. The state looked after its citizens, and the wealthy did not give large sums for charity but, rather, aided the state with such gifts as fitting out navies. Some organized charities did eventually develop around the first century A.D. Another philanthropic ideal that is still held by some Christians is the belief that one-tenth of a person's income should go to charity. This idea, called the tithe, goes far back in the history of Hebrew giving and was a religious duty. The system of tithing was fairly common among many ancient peoples and was often collected in the form of a general tax rather than as a gift to God or the poor. Thus our present acceptance of state taxation for charity could be said to be an idea that was also suitable for the charitable needs of earlier societies. The teachings of Jesus with regard to giving, which have had great influence in determining philanthropic attitudes down to the present day in the Western world, can also be traced to earlier religious attitudes toward charity. In particular, Jesus' teaching that the spirit of the giver is more important than the size of the gift, and that it is more blessed to give than to receive, emphasized the virtues of unselfishness and giving as a personal sacrifice. In the East, religion has also usually been the main force to motivate giving. Many verses in the Koran exhort the believer to give alms. This is considered a basic duty, and the destitute and poor can demand alms as a right. The Muslims thus look on almsgiving as a compulsory act, but one that enhances the prestige of the giver. In China, the teachings of Confucius and Mencius were especially important in implanting the ideal of benevolence. The Chinese have always been generous givers, especially in the last two centuries. Up until the communist regime, large amounts of money were donated voluntarily, and
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many local charities were coordinated through organizations like the Hall of United Benevolence, which was established as early as 1805; this foreshadowed the modern trends toward the Community Chest. The idea of state philanthropy, however, did not exist before the communist regime. The Hindu religion also stresses that there will be a reward ior generosity, after death as well as in the present world. But in other respects, the concept of Hindu charity is different from that found in the West. Traditionally almsgiving was not looked on as a matter of bestowing gifts to the poor and needy because of compassion and sympathy, at the whim of the individual giver. Rather, sharing possessions and relieving the wants of others was a habitual activity. This attitude was implanted at such an early age, and was so deeply accepted at all levels of Hindu society, that it explains why ascetics have been able to wander far and wide in India, knowing that they would always be cared for. Manu's teaching, however, did not include the conception of collective, disinterested responsibility, and so it was not until the nineteenth century that the idea of state responsibility and organized philanthropy developed in India. The trends which foreshadowed modern philanthropy can be more easily traced in the Western Christian countries. For since they led the industrial revolution, they were forced to alter their patterns of giving sooner than the less developed countries of Africa and the East. In the early Christian era the religious institutions taught that giving alms was an intrinsic and essential part of a Christian's duty. But there was no over-all control of giving in the sense that all the poor and destitute were equally served. Rather, a giver gave according to his conscience and the amount of social pressure to which he was exposed, directly to the recipient. This meant that the giver usually saw the problems of the recipient at first hand and thus made charity a personal affair. The great changes that took place in the whole conception and organization of charity were due, first of all, to the decline of medieval society in Europe and to the ensuing disorganization which loosed forces that gradually undermined the former, tightly structured feudal way of life. The dissolution of the monasteries, the steady increase in population from 1400 on, the beginning of a serious rural-urban movement, plagues, and wars all aggravated the problem of poverty and destitution. The growing towns, too, gradually provided the possibility of group concern over poverty, for destitution had grown so extensive and evident that it could no longer be ignored. It was soon seen as a
serious, continuing social problem, and this made its relief a social as well as a religious duty. It was soon evident, too, that the church, which had formerly had a near monopoly over charity, could no longer cope with the situation; thus, private and secular charitable institutions began to arise to fill the gap. This movement to secular organizations was nourished by the mounting wealth of the industrial middle classes. Thus historical circumstances, which shifted the power of the former feudal lords and the medieval church, redistributed wealth and power, and brought about the beginning of a new industrial society, also caused a redistribution of responsibility for charity. For the dislocations and maladjustments caused by these momentous changes produced a situation which was too heavy for the church and local piety to handle (Jordan 1959, pp. 55-63). This new approach to philanthropy gradually became defined and supported by law. The earliest and most famous law was that passed by Queen Elizabeth i in 1601 to "create, control and protect the funds that had been allotted or donated to charity." It made the local community responsible for providing for the destitute whose families were unable to look after them. But it went no further than to mark out those responsible for the needy. Laws created to deal with this new social phenomenon, however, necessarily lagged behind the rapidly growing needs. For no one could foresee the extent of the fundamental changes that were taking place or envisage the coming industrial revolution, which would produce new types of destitution and poverty far beyond the capacity of the individual family or voluntary agencies to look after. Part of the gap was filled in by wealthy individuals who gave large gifts of money to relieve the misery of those caught in the new social and economic dislocations. These gifts resembled the grants awarded by the numerous modern American foundations, but differed from them in that they were solely for relief, for in that era prevention was not recognized, nor was the future state of the destitute of much interest (Andrews 1956, p. 38). They did, however, serve the function of enabling people to test out new ways of coping with the situation. In this sense the givers could be looked on as initiators of social change. Social legislation As time went on, the agrarian and industrial revolutions gained momentum, until in the twentieth century the industrialized countries faced a completely new way of life which had brought
PHILANTHROPY about so much economic and social uncertainty that citizens could no longer be protected from the misery of destitution by haphazard relief. Moreover, by that time it was recognized that there were problems to be alleviated in other areas of life. Thinkers, writers, statesmen, and politicians gradually began to accept and then to define a new conception of social welfare. And the public slowly and grudgingly accepted the fact that the state must bear the major share of public relief. This new attitude was gradually incorporated into the state legislation of a number of Western nations. Western countries. The Scandinavian countries, some of the Commonwealth countries, and England, with their relatively stable political systems, were among the first countries to lead the way to the welfare or "social service" state, although part of the Scandinavian experiment was influenced by the first embracing movement to ameliorate the conditions of the workers, which had been introduced in Germany by Bismarck in the 1870s. This statesman had persuaded his government to adopt the most extensive program of social legislation that the world had ever seen, in order to cut the ground from under the feet of his socialistic opponents. The northern European countries and Australia served as the first social laboratories whose experiments could be watched and appraised by the rest of the world. In addition to voluntary or compulsory insurance, introduced in many of the western European countries in the nineteenth century, other social legislation was enacted after World War I and the 1930 depression. Countries such as France and England led the way to further legislation after World War n, inspired in part by the Beveridge Report (Great Britain . . . 1942). This report greatly influenced both public opinion and social legislation, for it was introduced at a time when the destruction and privations of the war had so stirred people that they were ready for a constructive approach to social problems. In England the real change in attitude and practice came about during and after World War n. Rising costs and the heavy taxation of the postwar years caused donations to private charities to decline sharply. This forced many of the former voluntary agencies to depend on the government for at least part of their income in such forms as grants in aid. By the 1960s the social services provided by the welfare state, either directly or through local authorities, impinged on the life of each citizen from birth to death. These services are now regarded as one of the basic rights of all citizens. Thus the principle of universality, the con-
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ception of the desirability of universal coverage for all persons and all needs, gradually emerged. Some of the countries in central Europe, Czechoslovakia in particular, were also early in establishing some governmental measures of social security. The countries of eastern Europe were a little later, and those of Latin America, on the whole, did not bring in state legislation until the 1920s. After that there was a rapid movement toward social assistance in many of these countries, although they were greatly hampered by distances, difficulties of communication, the slow rate of industrial development, and the great number of people living in primitive conditions. Chile, however, has had very advanced social legislation since 1924. In no country did the transition from private giving to state control go through without a struggle, and all countries enacted their social legislation in a piecemeal way and in different sequences of coverages, with no coordinated effort for overall security, until the communists came to power. The advance toward the universal provision of basic support has cut heavily into the former activity of voluntary organizations and private philanthropy, although even in the United Kingdom, with its well-established welfare state, so many voluntary agencies raise money for charitable purposes that it is impossible to estimate their number or the amount of money they raise or spend. Developing countries. As the less advanced countries of Asia and Africa became politically independent in the 1950s and 1960s, they attempted to establish a sound basis of social security for their people. Such attempts were hampered by the conditions of their economies, low standards of living, and overpopulation. Many of them still have to depend on voluntary effort and money to cover all their needs. The history of the extension of philanthropy in India is much like that of the Western countries. In the nineteenth century, changing conditions gradually made it apparent that individual effort alone could not provide for all the contingencies of Hindu life, so voluntary social agencies began to take over some of the burden. In the nineteenth century the Christian missionaries in particular led in setting up social services, and many Hindu reformers, such as Ghandi, were instrumental in furthering this voluntary work. After India had gained its independence in 1947, the government embodied state responsibility for many measures of social security in the constitution of 1950. However, the immensity of the problems faced by the new government, the lack of finances to train personnel to carry out the proposed reforms,
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and the belief that only private volunteers could provide the "human touch" essential to counterbalance the impersonal administrative machinery of a welfare state made the planning commission of the first five-year plan determined to set up the principle that the major responsibility for organizing activities in such schemes as the welfare of women and children, education, and community development should fall to private voluntary agencies. The central Social Welfare Board was established in 1950 to coordinate and administer these agencies. It functions as an autonomous body and enables members to move more rapidly as new problems or social crises arise. A number of foundations have also arisen, and money-raising campaigns on the North American pattern are held in crises such as floods (Kulkarni 1961, p. 68). Most of the less advanced countries are still at the stage when their people are looked after to a large extent by the extended family system of tribal groups. One of their main problems is that sudden and rapid industrialization is making them alter their traditional patterns of duty and responsibility almost overnight. Japan, however, has been an exception. It had a modified pension scheme as early as the 1870s and was the first Far Eastern country to establish a modern social security system (Durand 1953, pp. 85-157). Japan's first Community Chest drive in 1947 showed that the Japanese had accepted the conception of the responsibility of citizenship, which entails impersonal and regular giving. Communist countries. The social legislation and philanthropic outlook of communist countries are difficult to compare with those of capitalist countries, where private initiative and individual ownership of the means of production are dominant. The communist countries have gone further in legislating for the needs of their peoples than have other countries. From the time of the 1917 Revolution in Russia the government has been determined to institute a complete system of social assistance. This ideal was embodied in the first constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which claimed that every citizen had the right to education and to many types of social assistance. Soviet citizens have been trained in this ideology for so long that they now take it for granted that the government will provide them with extensive social welfare benefits and universal education, as well as supply a society in which they will have cultural and even spiritual well-being. In the Soviet Union only religion is not covered by state protection, and must be supported by voluntary effort. Any congregation that is wilting to pay
the salary of its clerics and the costs of maintaining the buildings may hold services in a church, mosque, or synagogue. The Soviet citizen is also able to contribute his time to different voluntary agencies, for the constitution permits Russians to form voluntary organizations to pursue scientific research, experiment in education, encourage sports, etc. There are also occasions when some disaster brings about the need for immediate action. In such cases voluntary contributions are solicited. But there is no formal philanthropic structure for the continued solicitation of funds for long-term projects (Maxwell 1962, pp. 652-655). In the countries with more laissez-faire philosophies and democratic governments the struggle to define the public and private areas of responsibility still continues. In its essence it is an underlying struggle between individualism and collectivism. The individualistic view holds that voluntary charitable agencies must be administered and financed by volunteers because they are one of the important bulwarks against complete state control. Moreover, it is felt that in a period of rapid social change, governments cannot act rapidly enough when new problems arise. So there is still the need for voluntary philanthropists who can experiment on a small scale even in controversial fields, without causing too much general disruption. Many voluntary agencies have gradually been forced to relinquish their control to the state when the financial burden has become too much for them to bear, or when a problem has become so widespread that it cannot be handled by private donations of time or money. North American philanthropy The expansion of philanthropy and its new forms of organization have gone further on the North American continent, particularly in the United States, than in any other part of the world. Indeed, voluntary giving has grown to such an extent in the past seventy years that some people speak of a "philanthropic revolution." North American attitudes to private philanthropy have been very deeply influenced by the tradition of the frontier, with its individualistic philosophy and suspicion of government control. Private initiative is still thought of as the key to American progress and success, for it has led to most of the inventions, medical discoveries, educational experiments, and basic research which have enabled the United States to become the leading industrialized nation. It has also led to the patterns of organization necessary to run a very complex society. This attitude, as well as the businessman's desire to re-
PHILANTHROPY tain control over philanthropic activity, has deeply influenced American business and philanthropic efforts. Indeed, many businessmen feel that corporations should give freely to philanthropy, for in this way they will retain control over areas of life which are still free of government control. This philosophy, combined with the rich resources of the American continent, produced accompanying attitudes that poverty and destitution are mainly the result of a lack of initiative and apathy and that therefore receiving public relief is a shameful thing. As in other countries, however, the twentieth century showed that the social dislocations of rapid industrialization and urbanization were too vast and complex to be relieved by private contributions, even in a rich country. Up to the 1930s, health, welfare, research, and, to some extent, higher education were believed to be mainly the responsibility of private philanthropy. But the great depression of the 1930s forced Americans to accept an enlargement of governmental functions. And so the state began to take over the financing and direction of one voluntary agency after another, assisted by such movements as the New Deal. This movement, however, did not diminish the actual donations to private philanthropy. For they have continued to increase in size, largely because of the affluence of the postwar era and the opening up of new fields for experimentation engendered by the rapidly changing social and economic conditions. Corporate donation. Part of the growth of donations in America is due to the increase in number and size of business enterprises. For as corporations have grown in size, there has been an increasing demand on the part of the public that they take a leading role in financing the social services of the community. Corporations soon recognized that philanthropic activity could become a very important part of their public relations, for it is an excellent medium through which they can demonstrate their interest and participation in community welfare. Today it is one of the most fruitful advertising media for all corporations, big and small. The recognition of the part corporations could play in financing voluntary agencies was first introduced at the end of the nineteenth century by the Y.M.C.A., an organization that had been imported into America in 1851 from England. The Y.M.C.A. had set a new pattern for raising money: intensive drives for money over a short period of time, the use of sophisticated techniques to raise money, and an emphasis on corporation donations. Other voluntary agencies soon copied this pattern, and it is still the typical large North
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American fund-raising practice. Soon definite quotas were set for the contributions of most large corporations. World War i was instrumental in spreading this new philanthropic pattern because it multiplied local problems and brought about many appeals for the relief of sufferers in Europe. At the same time, the patriotic wartime spirit, the large wartime earnings, and the legal right to deduct charitable contributions from the taxable income of individuals and corporations all combined to establish habits of giving on the part of citizens from all income groups. Another trend in philanthropic activity that was established during the war was that of coordination of effort. There was a growing realization that while much of the voluntary work was overlapping, many of the needs were being overlooked. This coordination took the form of Community Chests, which combined a number of charities under one appeal, and United Appeals. By 1929 it was estimated that there were 331 Community Chests in America. These chests had raised $73 million in that one year alone. Again, corporations played a large part in financing this expansion. In 1936 a revenue act was passed which allowed corporations an exemption of up to 5 per cent of their net income for charitable contributions. As the result of this tax and the unprecedented prosperity of the postwar years, corporation giving rose sharply after World War n. This is seen in figures which show that whereas corporation support for 13 Community Chests (for which figures are available) in 1920 was 23.8 per cent of the total amount collected, in 1950 it was 39.5 per cent for 69 Community Chests reporting returns (Andrews 1952, p. 158). The total philanthropic donations of corporations has also risen steeply. The Bureau of Internal Revenue estimates that whereas in 1936 corporations donated $30 million to charitable purposes, in 1951 the figure was over $300 million. Although this figure is large, a breakdown in terms of total giving to philanthropy and type of giver shows that corporation contributions are only 5 per cent of the total annual receipts. The rest is made up of donations from foundations (3 per cent), individual gifts (74 per cent), and other sources (18 per cent) (Andrews 1952, p. 19). The donations do not come only from the corporation budget but also directly from employees. This source was tapped when the growing number of campaigns caused strong competition between fund raisers during World War I and forced them to move further down the economic ladder to achieve their objectives. Employees were a well-
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organized group from which to solicit. This movement was encouraged in so many corporations that by 1950 a large number permitted payroll deductions for the major national and city-wide campaigns in North America (Committee . . . 1953, p. 19). The rise in *he contributions of corporations has enabled them to take over the control of raising and allotting money to many philanthropic agencies. Management can determine the amount that will be given, and since the same men are often found on the boards of a number of the larger corporations, they have come to form an "inner circle" which can control both the gifts that are given and the selection of the top executives in the philanthropic agencies and in the more important and prestigious fund-raising campaigns, such as those for hospitals and universities. Once the modern fund-raising pattern had been established, it did not take the business world long to realize that donating manpower to campaign activity would be as good an advertising device as donating money. Moreover, this was a means by which the organizing and executive ability of promising young men could be tested. In fact, taking part in philanthropic activity, and particularly fund-raising campaigns, has become an essential part of the successful businessman's career. His participation brings him into contact with men who are influential in business, gives him training, and enables him to demonstrate his ability publicly in the highly competitive field of raising money (Ross 1954). Social functions of philanthropy The type of charity has varied from country to country and from one historical period to another, but philanthropy has always been the reflection of a class society because it has depended on a division between rich givers and poor recipients. Even when the poor have themselves been the givers, they have always made up the largest proportion of recipients. The wealthy have not only given because they have more but because, by alleviating distress, they have secured their own positions against those who might displace them and thus have avoided revolt. At the same time, giving has been a means of enhancing their status in the eyes of their fellow men. W. K. Jordan believes that many of our present attitudes toward philanthropy have come down from the early Elizabethan days, in which the maladjustments were so intense that they simply could not be ignored by anyone who was in any way sensitive to suffering (Jordan 1959, p. 146). The Protestant Reformation in England
was partly a product of these conditions and partly in its turn the means of reinforcing the conception of the responsibility of the top classes for the "havenots," even when the structure of the classes changed and the industrialists began to replace the aristocrats. The association of financial responsibility with upper-class position continued to be as strong in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it had been in the seventeenth. The chief charitable offices in Western Protestant countries have traditionally been the prerogative of the top social classes. The well-known term "Lady Bountiful" suggests the part that upper-class women played in philanthropic activity in the nineteenth century. At that time the aristocratic classes in England had leisure and were just becoming conscious of the necessity of justifying their position because of the growing political strength of the lower classes. They also retained from the past the sense of noblesse oblige, a feeling of responsibility for persons of inferior economic and social status. These factors led them to this voluntary work, although the agencies they established were at first so scattered that they either did not cover all needs or else suffered from overlapping. The idea that the top social classes should bear responsibility for the lower continued in the twentieth century, which ushered in new types of problems and necessitated an expansion of philanthropic activity. Today upper- and middle-class men and women hold many executive positions on boards of charitable agencies and fund-raising campaigns in all countries that engage in private philanthropy. In fact, philanthropy is now such an important part of the expected activity of women as well as men that it is very difficult for them to escape working in at least some of the important fund-raising campaigns. For some women fund raising has become such a time-consuming activity that they often regard it as a career. Training for it begins at home, where children are subtly initiated into their future philanthropic roles. This training may be reinforced in such associations as the Junior League, the top social club for young North American women, where actual practical training is given for leading roles in voluntary agencies. One activity that supports the relationship between philanthropy and the upper classes is that of the charity ball, which has become an important adjunct to the life of the social elite in most large North American cities. These balls are organized by committees of society women and are often
PHILANTHROPY spectacular affairs. They combine the display of wealth and position with the worthy purpose of helping a good cause. Many studies have shown this dual relationship between philanthropic activity and social position. Warner's study of Yankee City (Warner & Lunt 1941) was perhaps the first comprehensive study to demonstrate in detail the relationship between social position, wealth, and philanthropy. Although the philanthropic pattern has moved further down the social scale with the tremendous increase in formal organizations, upper-class men and women still hold far more of the most prestigious community positions in the important voluntary agencies than do those of the lower classes. Modern trends Professionalization. Modern philanthropy serves many and varied functions for the givers, the collectors, and the business world, as well as for the recipients. The more obvious functions that philanthropy has played through the centuries, such as relieving the lot of the poor and needy, is easy to see, but the more subtle aspects of its effects have seldom been analyzed. Nor has the way in which it has become integrated into many aspects of the social structure been fully realized. During this process a core of professionally trained administrators and fund raisers has arisen to handle the complex problems that the extension of philanthropy has brought about. And a number of professional organizations have grown up with the specific purpose of directing the larger fundraising campaigns and training volunteer canvassers. These people were at first looked on as "professional beggars," but by now the importance of their role is recognized and they have an accepted professional status. The organization and coordination of philanthropy have eliminated much of the early spontaneity of giving. They have also brought about a more rational assessment of people's ability to give and the introduction of scientific methods of surveying community and national needs and of raising money. Thus philanthropy has entered the field of planning. This trend has meant that the sense of personal involvement with a problem which in the past led to many worthwhile reforms has given way to impersonal donating to a charitable budget. However, emotional appeals are still effective, and certain charities like the Salvation Army and the March of Dimes draw money easily. The ideology of philanthropy. Parallel to the centralization of many former charities under the
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jurisdiction of the state there has arisen the centralization of private giving under the control of businessmen. Business institutions have thus succeeded the religious institutions on which early charity depended for inspiration and control. This change has brought about a change in the ideology of philanthropy. Implicit in the religious ideology of giving was the idea that the giver, as well as the recipient, would receive some benefit from the gift, either in this world or the next. This is illustrated by such well-accepted quotations from the Bible as "Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many days." This implication of future reward is still present in the modern ideology of giving, but the individual reward is no longer thought of as coming in the next world. Rather, it is expected in this one, either in the emotional form of personal satisfaction received from sacrifice and doing one's duty or as a more tangible reward in the form of direct or indirect benefit from better medical services, better homes, playgrounds, and the like. Attitudes of donors. The attitude of the donors, too, has tended to change. Much of the spontaneity and emotional satisfaction that were derived from personal giving to a need that the donor could observe at first hand has disappeared, and people tend to give more from a rational appraisal of the situation or from strong, inescapable pressures exerted by friends and community leaders. These pressures, combined with the multiplicity of demands that most citizens face each year, have made many people apathetic to even the most distressing situations, resentful of canvassers, and resistant to their appeals. Collectors thus face more and more problems in raising money each year. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century there was an almost complete disregard on the part of the public of the donation's effect on the recipient. The recognition that one of the most important rights of the citizen is that of public assistance has changed this attitude and has helped to eliminate much of the humiliation and shame that taking charity had engendered in earlier times. Furthermore, state control has meant a broadening of the base of givers. Not only does a larger proportion of the population give regularly and continuously through taxation but also few people, even in the lowest income brackets, escape the pressures that come through the payroll deductions for charitable gifts that are incorporated in the rules of many large corporations, or the systematic canvassing of people of moderate and low incomes. Even children do not escape, for they can be induced as captive
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audiences in schools to give to as many charitable agencies as the school permits. This is rationalized in terms of training future adult subscribers. The basic problem of philanthropy has changed from that of caring for the physical needs of a relatively few destitute people living in simple societies to attempting to meet the physical, social, and psychological needs of total populations living in highly complex societies. The emphasis is now being placed on securing a "better," "happier," or "healthier" world for all; and the focus has shifted from the relief of immediate want to long-term planning that will prevent future want. This trend toward prevention, whose development has been due to the growth of scientific knowledge, has eliminated the need for charity in some areas. It has also led to a change in the motivation to give; the emotional identification with someone else's problems has been largely replaced by a rational appraisal of present and future needs. AlLEEN D. ROSS
[See also COOPERATION; FOUNDATIONS; POVERTY; TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE; VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS, article OH SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS; WELFARE STATE; Other
relevant material may be found under PLANNING, SOCIAL.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ANDREWS, F. EMERSON 1952 Corporation Giving. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ANDREWS, F. EMERSON 1956 Philanthropic Foundations. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ANGER, CHARLES A. 1963 Donations, Bequests and Grants. Pages 327-328 in Britannica Book of the Year: 1963. Chicago: Benton. BRUCE, MAURICE 1961 The Coining of the Welfare State. London: Batsford. COMMITTEE ON CORPORATE GIVING IN CANADA 1953 Corporate Giving in Canada. Edited by Albert A. Shea. Toronto: Clarke. DURAND, PAUL 1953 La politique contemporaine de securite sociale. Paris: Dalloz. -> See especially pages 85-157. FARNHAM, CARL H. 1957 World Trends in Social Security Benefits: 1955-1957. International Social Security Association, Bulletin 10:407-434. GREAT BRITAIN, INTER-DEPARTMENTAL COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL INSURANCE AND ALLIED SERVICES 1942 Social Insurance and Allied Services. Papers by Command, Cmd. 6404. London: H.M. Stationery Office; New York: Macmillan. -» Known as the Beveridge Report. GRUBB, EDWARD 1917 Philanthropy. Volume 9, pages 837-840 in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. New York: Scribner. JORDAN, WILBUR K. 1959 Philanthropy in England, 1480-1660: A Study of the Changing Pattern of English Social Aspirations. London: Allen & Unwin. KULKARNI, P. D. 1961 The Central Social Welfare Board: A New Experiment in Welfare Administration. New York: Asia Publishing House.
MAXWELL, ROBERT (editor) 1962 Information U.S.S.R.: An Authoritative Encyclopaedia About the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. New York: Pergamon. MENDELSOHN, RONALD 1954 Social Security in the British Commonwealth: Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. London: Athlone. NELSON, GEORGE R. (editor) 1953 Freedom and Welfare: Social Patterns in the Northern Countries of Europe. Sponsored by the Ministries of Social Affairs of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Copenhagen: No publisher. Philanthropy. 1962 Volume 21, pages 735-736 in Encyclopedia Americana. New York: The Encyclopedia. PUMPHREY, RALPH E.; and PUMPHREY, MURIEL W. (editors) 1961 The Heritage of American Social Work: Readings in Its Philosophical and Institutional Development. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. RAMAN RAO, AJJARAPU V. 1966 Industrial Social Services in a Developing Economy. Bombay: Allied Publishers. Ross, AILEEN D. 1952 Organized Philanthropy in an Urban Community. Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 18:474-486. Ross, AILEEN D. 1953 The Social Control of Philanthropy. American Journal of Sociology 58:451-460. Ross, AILEEN D. 1954 Philanthropic Activity and the Business Career. Social Forces 32:274-280. Ross, AILEEN D. 1958 Control and Leadership in Women's Groups: An Analysis of Philanthropic Money-raising Activity. Social Forces 37:124-131. SCHUMAN, FREDERICK L. 1957 Russia Since 1917: Four Decades of Soviet Politics. New York: Knopf. SEELEY, JOHN R. et al. 1957 Community Chest: A Case Study in Philanthropy. Univ. of Toronto Press. SILLS, DAVID L. 1957 The Volunteers: Means and Ends in a National Organization. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. Social Insurance in the U.S.S.R.: 1933-1937. 1938 International Labour Review 38:226-242. WARNER, W. LLOYD; and LUNT, PAUL S. 1941 The Social Life of a Modern Community. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
PHILOSOPHY For discussion of the philosophy of science and its relationship to the social sciences, see SCIENCE, article on THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE; aZso relevant are the articles CAUSATION; POSITIVISM; SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION; and the biographies of BACON; CASSIRER; COHEN; DEWEY; HUSSERL; JAMES; PEIRCE; SCHLICK; SCHUTZ; WHITEHEAD. The philosophy of history is discussed in HISTORY, article on THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY; and in the biographies Of CROCE; DlLTHEY; HEGEL; HUME; MARX; SlMMEL; SOROKIN; SPENGLER; VlCO. Articles that deal with other aspects of philosophy are ETHICS, article on ETHICAL SYSTEMS AND SOCIAL STRUCTURES; POLITICAL THEORY; UTILITARIANISM. The relevance to the social sciences of certain major figures in the history of philosophy is discussed in the biographies, of AQUINAS; ARISTOTLE; AUGUSTINE; BENTHAM; DESCARTES; HEGEL; HOBBES; HUME; KANT; LOCKE; MILL; SPINOZA.
PHOBIAS PHOBIAS A phobia is an irrational, persistent fear of a particular object or place, class of objects or places, etc. Used as a noun or combining form, phobia denotes fear or dread, and in medicine and psychiatry it is joined either with names of objects, situations, etc., or with Greek-derived forms of such names; thus, street phobia, or agoraphobia (from the Greek agora, or "market place"). As a symptom complex the phobia also includes any avoidances and inhibitions employed to forestall impending attacks of anxiety. Thus, an agoraphobic person may be unable to leave his home without incurring anxiety and may therefore remain in it constantly. A person with rat phobia may stop his ears when rats are mentioned in conversation. The phobic person may elaborate and form compromises to keep the dreaded object, or the idea of it or allusion to it, at a distance (e.g., by restricting his activities, putting general or special taboos on certain localities, etc.). Whether a state of mind is to be considered rational or irrational eventually depends on commonsense judgment. This judgment is usually that of the phobic person himself, who knows that the feared object is harmless or in any case should not provoke such intense, unmasterable anxiety. Often ashamed or aware of the absurdity, the phobic patient may nevertheless try to rationalize that there is a possibility of "danger." Accessory circumstances often determine whether a given fear is rational or not, but judging the degree of rationality is still ultimately a matter of common sense. In early childhood the matter of rationality is irrelevant. The fears of small children are rarely rational according to adult standards. Children's insecurity and fear of strangers are neither rational nor irrational. Animal phobias of small children resemble in many ways the fears of certain savages, with whom they share a "totemistic" attitude, the differentiation between man and other animals not being well established. Gradual development of the sense of reality through experience and education leads to such differentiation. History and semantics. Modern interest and ideas about the phobias began with an article by Westphal, "Die Agoraphobic" (1871). The term agoraphobia was invented in this case to denote a morbid fear of open places and is usually extended to mean a fear of streets or the outdoors generally. The German words used were Platzangst and Platzfurcht, which retain the idea of an open square. To one of Westphal's three patients, a certain square in Berlin looked as if it were miles
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wide. The patient complained that any attempt to cross the square or to walk on certain streets brought on a severe attack of anxiety accompanied by trembling, head sensations, palpitation, etc. The presence of a companion prevented or assuaged the anxiety and enabled the patient to skirt the square with somewhat lessened fear. He did not fear traffic; indeed, he felt no anxiety if he could stay near a carriage while crossing. To see houses with windows was also reassuring, but to walk along windowless walls, like those of certain barracks, would bring on an anxiety attack, and he could not go into the Tiergarten, where there were no houses. Absence of human beings or signs of life, an empty street or park, was more dangerous than traffic. Phobeio, the Greek word from which phobia is derived, means "I fear," but in earliest times it meant both "I am afraid" and "I am put to flight"; for Homeric Greeks, emotion and tendency to action were "close together" (Onians 1951, p. 19). Greek words can be readily used in compounds, and phobo- and -phobia were used as combining forms. Hence, -phobia easily became one of a large class of suffixes (including -mania, -philia, -pathy, etc.) that were adopted by medical and psychological writers. Thus we have hydrophobia, fear of water, at one time also called phobodipsia, fear of drinking; photophobia, fear and avoidance of light, a medical but not necessarily a psychiatric term; xenophobia, fear and avoidance of strangers or foreigners. An obsolete term of this sort is panophobia, the night terror of infants. (See Sauvages 1763.) Name inventing has periodically flourished and waned in science and medicine. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, partly in emulation of Linnaeus, imaginative nomenclature was in vogue. Psychiatrists participated heartily in wordbuilding, particularly after Esquirol's adventures with the suffix -mania (1838). They made such wide use of the suffix -phobia that Benjamin Rush (1825) jocularly suggested the name rum phobia for what he opined must be "a very rare distemper." He also facetiously suggested doctor phobia and church phobia (cited in Menninger et al. 1963). Such near-slang usage emphasizes the avoidance aspect and ignores any anxiety. It has been resuscitated in current psychiatric writings in such terms as school phobia, job phobia, and the like, where the anxiety may not be of the conscious phobic type at all. The modern popularity of the word and suffix began with Westphal's coining of agoraphobia. The new term was widely accepted, and many analo-
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gous terms were invented (see Janet & Raymond 1903). For several decades after Westphal many types of phobias were described and named. Some names are still in use, some are obsolete, and others are met with only occasionally. Claustrophobia still refers to the morbid fear of entering or staying in closed spaces, and ereuthophobia is a word generally understood to mean a fear of blushing. Aelurophobia and gephyrophobia are rather rare and are ordinarily superseded by cat phobia and bridge phobia, respectively. Zoophobia, or animal phobia, is inclusive, applying to dogs, cats, birds, etc. Besides the newly described phobias, others were retrieved from earlier literature and given new names. By 1914, G. Stanley Hall could list 136 words ending in -phobia; many of these were never subjects of clinical description but were apparently purely philological virtuoso inventions. The history of this period and pertinent references are to be found in Krafft-Ebing (1895), Janet (see in Janet & Raymond 1903), and Loewenfeld (1904). The study of the phobias and other neuroses went well beyond philology. Obsessions and compulsions were described by Westphal (1877), and many studies dealt with nervousness, neurasthenia, and anxiety states other than phobias, such as hysteria and hypochondria. This work culminated in a general conception of the neuroses, or psychoneuroses, a group of conditions with all sorts of nonpsychotic psychological symptoms not attributable to recognizable pathological changes in the body. [See OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDERS.] Classification. The general tendency was to group phobias along with obsessions and compulsions under one heading, on the grounds that they were "compulsive emotions" (Zwangsaffekte). Even today German textbooks usually put quotation marks around the word phobia or refer to die sogenannten Phobien—-the so-called phobias (Bumke 1924; Bleuler 1916). French writers, following Janet (see in Janet & Raymond 1903), group phobias with other anxiety states, compulsions, and obsessions under the general rubric psychasthenia. Such classification has some point, at least superficially, for many adults troubled by obsessions and compulsions also may have one or more phobias. However, there are certain cases, adult and infantile, in which there are phobias but no obsessional symptoms. Moreover, Stekel (1908), psychoanalyzing phobic patients of the "pure" type, found that they resembled the conversion hysterics he had treated, differing only in that where the phobic patient suffered an anxiety attack, the classical hysterical patient would manifest a conversion
symptom. For this nearly pure type of case Freud suggested to Stekel the designation anxiety hysteria and justified this term in a paper on a childhood phobia (1909). As psychoanalytic conceptions of anxiety developed, and particularly as analysis of phobias in small children progressed, it became evident that phobias might or might not be found in obsessional persons and that they were to be found in patients of all types. Freud's final theory of anxiety (1926), which interpreted phobias in a novel and original way, lessened the interest in classification. Although in a general way earlier authors recognized psychological influences as precipitating and predispositional factors, they did not distinguish the phobia from other neurotic disorders in regard to etiology. From the mid-nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth, all neuroses were supposed to arise from constitutional weakness or deficiency ("degeneration" in some authors' terminology) and essentially from a subtle hereditary or inherent defect of the nervous system. Except for Freud and those who accepted his views phobias were, in short, stigmata of the degeneres superieurs or of psychasthenia. Freud and psychoanalysis Freud's early papers on anxiety and the neuroses contained incidental discussion of certain phobias (1894; 1895a; 1895b), but he first clearly expressed his thoughts on this matter in the case history of "little Hans" (1909; see also Strachey 1962). There he recognized a class of phobias of psychic origin, resembling in many ways the agoraphobia previously described; he gave them the name anxiety hysteria. Phobias were conceived not as illnesses, nor yet precisely as signs of an illness, but as a set of findings: anxiety plus certain special avoidances and inhibitions. In such cases, as time goes on, overt anxiety decreases pari passu as restrictive measures increase. An anxiety state becomes more and more of a phobia. Infantile zoophobias. Freud characteristically looked to the phobias of children for a situation that would furnish a clue, uncomplicated by later elaborations, to their essential meaning, much as he had found simple, direct wish fulfillments in children's dreams that threw light on the complicated and distorted wish-fulfilling dreams of adults. The childhood zoophobias did indeed provide a relatively simple picture of the elements in the formation of phobias and ultimately of psychogenic symptoms in general. The two cases best studied and most cited are the horse phobia of "little Hans" (Freud 1909) and the wolf phobia of the young
PHOBIAS Russian referred to as "the wolf-man" (1918). In later discussions of anxiety, anxiety hysteria, and symptom formation Freud constantly used the material of these cases to illustrate; and develop his theories (see 1915a; 1915£>; 1926). In The Problem of Anxiety (1926) Freud explained Hans's phobia as originating in oedipal wishes. Hans was in love with his mother and was jealous of his father, toward whom he harbored hostile wishes; these wishes came into conflict with his love for his father. The aggression led to a fear of castration, the possibility of which he believed to be a reality. Repressing his love for his mother and his hostility toward his father from consciousness, he displaced his aggression and consequent fear from his father to horses, which he feared would bite off his penis. Thus, to form his phobic symptom, after his repression of the original impulses, Hans used three defense mechanisms: displacement, reversal, for actually his feelings were dangerous to his father rather than the other way round, and regression from the genital idea of castration to the oral idea of being bitten. The wolf-man's phobia arose from a different component of the Oedipus complex, from an inverted oedipal wish. Having observed parental coitus, he identified himself with his apparently castrated mother and feared castration if he permitted himself feminine longings for his father. His fear of castration was displaced to the picture of a wolf in a storybook. The fear that came to consciousness when he ran the risk of seeing the picture was of being devoured—an oral equivalent of the desired passive genital satisfaction. Memories recovered during his analysis established the connection between the wolf and the idea of castration. Avoidance here took the convenient form of not looking at the wolfs picture. From these and other cases of childhood zoophobia Freud asserted that the motive for repression was castration anxiety and that the repressed wishes were the erotic or aggressive components of the Oedipus complex, whether normal or inverted. Repression was then followed by an appropriate displacement, determined by individual experience. Other infantile phobias are based on other types of anxiety, particularly on a fear of losing love, which serve as motives for repression. Because of a child's limited experience, the choice of animals is not large. The Angsttier ("dreaded animal") is apt to be a horse, cow, dog, cat, bird, chicken, beetle, or wasp. Totemism and zoophobia. The study of the zoophobias showed that a child could displace his feelings about his father to an animal and that this
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displacement reflected ambivalence. Hans not only feared horses but admired them, and at one point in his therapy he began to jump around like a horse and even bit his father (Freud 1909). His ambivalent attitude and his identification with the animal gave Freud one argument for interpreting the totem animals of primitive peoples as substitutes for the father, and he spoke of the "return of totemism in childhood" (1913, chapter 4). Mechanisms in the phobia. The defense mechanism of displacement, by which the repressed wishes return to consciousness in disguise, is basic for all phobias, including those of adults. Avoidance behavior or restriction of function follows upon this. In adult phobias, too, the wishes are aggressive or erotic—largely the latter; they are the revived wishes of childhood, usually in new garb. Freud compared the content of the phobia to the manifest fagade of the dream (1916-1917), implying that many defense mechanisms may alter the original content and give a conscious picture different from the unconscious latent fantasy. Thus regression modified the wolf-man's fantasy of being castrated into a conscious fear of being devoured. This further altered the picture, in which the father had already been changed to a wolf by displacement. The displacement mechanism is fundamental, since it is the first and invariable means used by the ego in distorting material that comes back from repression. Other defense mechanisms, such as regression, reversal, and identification, are accessory or secondary in altering the content of the manifest phobic picture. Additional defense mechanisms are described by Sigmund Freud (1926) and some relevant to children by Anna Freud (1936). In the more complicated adult phobias several instinctual wishes may gain expression at the same time through the same content, as a dream may fulfill several wishes at the same time through what is called overdetermination (see Deutsch 1929; Weiss 1935; Fenichel 1944; Lewin 1952). From the study of the simple phobias Freud constructed a paradigm for the formation of neurotic symptoms in general: threatened eruption of an instinct from repression (or from the id); anxiety or threatened anxiety as the signal of such impending danger; subsequent alterations in the ego by means of defense mechanisms that produce symptoms, each type of which (conversion, phobia, obsession, etc.) appears because of the predominance of one (or a few) defense mechanisms. Thus, the meaning of the word symptom is completely altered. No longer an indication of some underlying illness, it is considered a "structure"
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composed of alterations in ego functioning due to the mutual interaction of id, ego, and superego. Some individual phobias Like the dream, the phobia may show much variation in regard to its manifest fagade. However, as certain fr°quent types of dreams have a nearly standard interpretation, so certain phobias, studied through psychoanalysis, show a relative constancy in unconscious meaning. For example, many wellstudied cases of agoraphobia show that the feared streets are unconsciously conceived as places suitable for sexual adventures (see Deutsch 1929; Katan 1937; Miller 1953; Weiss 1935). The companion chosen as protector by some agoraphobes represents a person to whom they are unconsciously hostile and whom they therefore put in the same jeopardy as themselves. Fear of crossing bridges is a feminine fear of childbirth. A fear of falling, on the street or elsewhere, is also feminine, one of its meanings referring to the figurative sexual fall. Claustrophobic anxiety is connected with unconscious ideas of being buried alive and with prenatal life (Lewin 1935). Generally speaking, these unconscious fantasies are either of temptation or punishment. Fear of being alone often indicates a temptation to masturbate under such circumstances. Fears of insanity may include this temptation, as well as a fear of symbolic castration (head equals penis). Fears of dirt refer to sexuality thus conceived. Animal fears have been discussed above. An interesting phobia is the fear of spiders, representing the devouring and dangerous female genitalia. Butterflies may represent beautiful and tempting women; beetles and crawling insects may represent genitalia of small children. This list could be extended greatly; but many other interpretations depend on the individual prephobic history, which determines the relative importance of the fantasy and the suitability of the object chosen for its representation. BERTRAM D. LEWIN [For a conception of phobias that contrasts with the one in this article, see MENTAL DISORDERS, TREATMENT OF, article on BEHAVIOR THERAPY; see also ANXIETY and EMOTION. Other relevant material may be found in DEFENSE MECHANISMS; HYSTERIA; MENTAL DISORDERS, article on CHILDHOOD MENTAL DISORDERS; and in the biography of FREUD.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABRAHAM, KARL (1922) 1953 The Spider as a Dream Symbol. Pages 326-332 in Karl Abraham, Selected Papers. Volume 1: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books. -» First published as "Die Spinne als Traumsymbol."
BENEDEK, THERESE 1925 Notes From the Analysis of a Case of Ereuthophobia. International Journal of Psycho-analysis 6:430-439. BLEULER, EUGEN (1916) 1951 Textbook of Psychiatry. Authorized English edition by A. A. Brill, with a biographical sketch by Jacob Shatsky. New York: Dover. -» First published as Lehrbuch der Psychiatric. BORNSTEIN, BERTA (1931) 1935 Phobia in a Two-anda-half-year-old Child. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 4:93— 119. H> First published in German. BORNSTEIN, BERTA 1949 The Analysis of a Phobic Child: Some Problems of Theory and Technique in Child Analysis. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 3/4:181-226. BUMKE, OSWALD (1924) 1948 Lehrbuch der Geisteskrankheiten. 7th ed. Berlin: Springer. DEUTSCH, HELENE 1929 The Genesis of Agoraphobia. International Journal of Psycho-analysis 10:51-69. DEUTSCH, HELENE (1930) 1932 Psychoanalysis of the Neuroses. London: Hogarth. -» First published in German. See especially Chapter 6, "Anxiety States"; Chapter 7, "A Case of Hen Phobia"; and Chapter 8, "Agoraphobia." ESQUIROL, JEAN E. D. (1838) 1845 Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard. -> First published in French. FENICHEL, OTTO (1932) 1934 Outline of Clinical Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton. -» First published as Spezielle psychoanalytische Neurosenlehre. See especially Chapter 2. FENICHEL, OTTO 1944 Remarks on the Common Phobias. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 13:313-326. FENICHEL, OTTO 1945 The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. New York: Norton. -» See especially "Anxiety as Neurotic Symptom: Anxiety Hysteria," pages 193-215. FERENCZI, SANDOR (1913) 1952 A Little Chanticleer. London: Hogarth. -» First published as "Ein kleiner Hahnemann." FREUD, ANNA (1936) 1957 The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. New York: International Universities Press. -> First published as Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen. FREUD, SIGMUND (1894) 1962 The Neuro-psychoses of Defense. Volume 3, pages 43-61 in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan. -» First published as "Die AbwehrNeuropsychosen." FREUD, SIGMUND (1895a) 1962 On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia Under the Description "Anxiety Neurosis." Volume 3, pages 87-139 in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan. -> First published as "Uber die Berechtigung von der Neurasthenic einen bestimmten Symptomen-Komplex als 'Angstneurose' abzutrennen." FREUD, SIGMUND (1895k) 1962 Obsessions and Phobias: Their Physical Mechanism and Their Aetiology. Volume 3, pages 71-81 in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan. -> First published in French. FREUD, SIGMUND (1909) 1955 Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy. Volume 10, pages 3-149 in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete
PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan. FREUD, SIGMUND (1913) 1955 Totem and Taboo. Volume 13, pages ix-162 in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan. FREUD, SIGMUND (1915a) 1957 Repression. Volume 14, pages 143-158 in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan. FREUD, SIGMUND (1915b) 1957 The Unconscious. Volume 14, pages 161-204 in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan. FREUD, SIGMUND (1916-1917) 1952 A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Authorized English translation of the rev. ed. by Joan Riviere. Garden City, N.Y,: Doubleday. -» First published as Vorlesungen zur Einfiihrung in die Psychoanalyse. FREUD, SIGMUND (1918) 1955 From the History of an Infantile Neurosis. Volume 17, pages 3-122 in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan. FREUD, SIGMUND (1926) 1936 The Problem of Anxiety. New York: Norton. -» First published as Hemmung, Symptom und Angst. A British edition was published by Hogarth in 1936 under the title Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. FRIEDMAN, PAUL 1952 The Bridge: A Study in Symbolism. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 21:49-80. HALL, G. STANLEY 1914 A Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear. American Journal of Psychology 25:149-200, 321-392. JANET, PIERRE; and RAYMOND, FULGENCE (1903) 1919 Les obsessions et la psychasthenie. 3d ed. 2 vols. Paris: Alcan. -> Pierre Janet was the sole author of Volume 1. KATAN, ANNY A. (1937) 1951 The Role of "Displacement" in Agoraphobia. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 32:41-50. KRAEPELIN, EMIL (1883) 1909-1915 Psychiatric. 8th ed., rev. 4 vols. Leipzig: Barth. -» See especially Volume 4, Part 3. KRAFFT-EBING, RICHARD VON 1895 Nervositat und neurasthenische Zustande. Volume 12, part 2 in H. Nothnagel (editor), Specielle Pathologie und Therapie. Vienna: Holder. LEWIN, BERTRAM D. 1935 Claustrophobia. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 4:227-233. LEWIN, BERTRAM D. 1952 Phobic Symptoms and Dream Interpretation. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 21:295-322. LOEWENFELD, LEOPOLD 1904 Die psychischen Zwangserscheinungen. Wiesbaden (Germany): Bergmann. -> See especially pages 330-355. MENNINGER, KARL; MAYMAN, MARTIN; and PRUYSER, PAUL 1963 The Vital Balance: The Life Processes in Mental Health and Illness. New York: Viking. -» See especially page 444. MILLER, MILTON L. 1953 On Street Fear. International Journal of Psycho-analysis 34:232-240. ONIANS, RICHARD B. 1951 The Origins of European Thought. Cambridge Univ. Press. RUSH, BENJAMIN 1825 Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind. Philadelphia: G «gg.
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SAUVAGES DE LA CROIX, FRANCOIS BOISSIER DE (1763) 1768 Nosologia methodica sistens morborum classes juxta sydenhami mentem &- botanicorum ordinem. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Tournes. STEKEL, WILHELM (1908) 1923 Conditions of Nervous Anxiety and Their Treatment. London: Routledge. -> First published in German. See especially Part 2, pages 163-376. STERBA, EDITHA (1933) 1935 Excerpt From the Analysis of a Dog Phobia. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 4:135160. -» First published in German. STRACHEY, JAMES 1962 Appendix [to Freud's "Obsessions and Phobias"]. Volume 3, pages 83-84 in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan. WEISS, EDOARDO 1935 Agoraphobia and Its Relation to Hysterical Attacks. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 16:59-83. WEISS, EDOARDO 1936 Agorafobia: Isterismo d'angoscia. Rome: Cremonese. WESTPHAL, CARL F. O. 1871 Die Agoraphobic: Eine neuropathische Erscheinung. Archiv fur Psychiatric 3:138-161. WESTPHAL, CARL F. O. 1877 Uber Zwangsvorstellungen. Berliner klinische Wochenschrift 46:669; 47:687. WULFF, M. W. 1928 A Phobia in a Child of Eighteen Months. International Journal of Psycho-analysis 2: 354-359.
PHONETICS See LINGUISTICS. PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY The article under this heading provides a broad overview of the field of physical anthropology. Specific areas within the field are reviewed in EVOLUTION, articles on PRIMATE EVOLUTION and HUMAN EVOLUTION; GENETICS, article OU RACE AND GENETICS; RACE; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, ANIMAL, article
on PRIMATE BEHAVIOR. Parallel areas within the field of psychology are reviewed in EUGENICS; INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES; PSYCHOLOGY, article On CONSTITUTIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. Also relevant are the biographies of BOAS; BROCA; DARWIN; HOOTON; HRDLICKA; KRETSCHMER; KROEBER; PEARSON; ROHEIM; WEIDENREICH; WISSLER. Physical anthropology, linked by tradition and by academic usage with the behavioral science of anthropology, is nevertheless a discipline that is basically biological. The long-established connection between two such apparently disparate subjects might suggest a common origin obscured by increasing specialization and ultimate subdivision. This, however, is not the case. Physical anthropology had an origin quite independent of anthropology, or to put it another way, it had roots going back to developments that had little or nothing to
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do with the beginnings of anthropology and its cultural preoccupation. Origins of physical anthropology. One of the classic themes of physical anthropology—the races of mankind—emerged from the zoological and taxonomic studies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ac early as 1684, Bernier published an article in the Journal des s$avans on this subject; this article was one of the first attempts, if not the first, to do for the varieties of mankind what the zoologists and botanists had for some time been seeking to achieve for the bewildering and exciting array of newly discovered flora and fauna that the age of discovery had made known to European students. Following Bernier's pioneer attempt at a classification of man, Linne in 1735 proposed another based on taxonomic principles developed from the experience of several generations of botanists and zoologists attempting to find some kind of order in the enormous variety of nature. By including man in the world of living organisms susceptible to a common systematic treatment, he did much to advance the notion that it was proper to consider man as a biological organism and an object of scientific study. By the end of the eighteenth century, the anatomical and morphological variation of man as a field of serious investigation was well established by the contributions of anatomists, physicians, and representatives of other cognate fields. By the turn of the century the contributions of two anatomists, Blumenbach and Camper, stood out as particularly formative in this area, which had not yet developed into what we would now call a discipline. Both were notable for seeking new methods of analyzing racial differentiation and Camper in particular for introducing quantitative techniques in the search— particularly the measurement of the facial angle. The predominance of anatomy in the formative stages of physical anthropology is also reflected in the contributions made by the studies on man and the primates that were initiated by Tyson's Orangoutang, sive homo sylvestris (1699). The very nature of the inquiry into the racial differentiation of mankind required a comparative methodology, the basis of which was supplied by Tyson. The comparative method has continued to be one of the distinctive features of physical anthropology. The intimate relationship between anatomy and physical anthropology was maintained during the nineteenth century. Some of the outstanding physical anthropologists continued to be men trained in anatomy or medicine. The first names that come to mind are Retzius, Broca, and Virchow, but there are many others. This tradition has continued down
to the present day in Europe, where medical training remains a standard preparation for research in physical anthropology. And, indeed, this tradition is so strong that the association of physical anthropology with cultural and social anthropology is far less intimate there than it is in the United States and in England. Nineteenth-century developments. Despite its early connections with anatomy and other biological subjects, physical anthropology eventually came under the aegis of anthropology. One of the reasons for this association lies in the fact that among the dominant problems to which the emergent anthropology of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries addressed itself were the cultural evolution of mankind and the relationships of various groups within such a frame. Every body of data that appeared to contribute to an eventual solution was appropriated. Thus, anthropologists not only used data on cultural phenomena but also drew evidence from racial and anatomical studies, as well as from linguistics. Later, when archeology became productive of appropriate information it was drawn into the association. Since at this stage of its development physical anthropology had neither a disciplinary identity nor much of an organizational life of its own, it was readily absorbed, at least in the tradition followed in the United States. Indeed, its very name suggests this. The subject matter of physical anthropology remained largely confined to the races of man and whatever comparative anatomical studies were pertinent until the era inaugurated in 1859 by Darwin's publication on the origin of species. Interest in the fossil record of man and its significance for the unraveling of human evolution became evident almost at once. Human fossils such as the Gibraltar and Neanderthal skulls (both discovered just before Darwin's publication and virtually ignored at the time for the lack of an intellectual readiness to see their importance) now took on a new meaning and eventually became recognized as appropriate for physical anthropological techniques which were concerned with comparative human anatomy. Thus, although many of the specialists in the area of human evolution were drawn from older and well-established academic disciplines such as anatomy, medicine, and paleontology, their special interest in the fossil record of man was generally regarded as falling within the category of physical anthropology and served to widen and enrich the subject. Race, comparative human anatomy (with special emphasis on osteology), and human evolution continued to constitute the major concerns of physical anthropology until well into the present
PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY century. This does not mean that expansive tendencies into related areas and problems were absent. But for the most part these tentative explorations were abortive either because the intellectual environment was not favorable or for lack of a fruitful methodology. Broca, for example, examined in an interesting, but ultimately sterile, way the problem of hybridism in man. Without the benefit of modern genetics, this inquiry lacked the foundations for a solid development and now has only historical interest. Methodology. During the nineteenth century, physical anthropology established its classic techniques for measuring the human form; they remained the primary instruments for its research until well into the twentieth century. Data were obtained by a series of standardized observations and measurements. The observations, mainly on qualitative characteristics or those not readily open to measurement, were evaluated by reference to graded scales and charts meant to cover the range of variation. The direct measurements were taken from fixed landmarks wherever these could be established or from areas that could be described with some degree of precision. As variations of technique and measurement proliferated and interfered with comparability of results, it became necessary to establish some uniformity of practice. Several international congresses dealt with this problem, the last one being held at Monaco, in 1911. The techniques along these lines that were designed for osteological material are collectively known as osteometry. Those adapted especially for living subjects are grouped under anthropometry. Physical anthropology was one of the first of the biological disciplines to make extensive use of mathematics, particularly statistics. The problem of dealing with populations, the necessity of using a sampling process, and ultimately the need to devise methods of handling large bodies of data derived from an array of individuals required mathematical evaluation. The suitability of the data of physical anthropology for statistical treatment was especially recognized by Karl Pearson. Almost from the beginning the pages of Biometrika, a journal he established in 1900, were opened to papers that exploited this potentiality, and he himself contributed notably to this development (see Pearson 1920; Wilks 1941). Twentieth-century trends In the present century the field of physical anthropology has grown rapidly to become something closer to a biology of man than it was before. This growth has come about through the development
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of traditional inquiries and the influence of discoveries in other disciplines. Postnatal growth, for example, has become a subject closely linked with physical anthropology, in part because it is a phenomenon that contributes to the understanding of human variation, in part because the technique for studying growth was derived originally from the anthropometric measures devised by physical anthropologists, and perhaps to some extent because it had not been already firmly attached to some established discipline. More recently, physical anthropologists have explored the patterns of over-all growth and have investigated a wide variety of growth problems relating to specific areas of the body, such as the dentition and face. They have established norms. They have examined the factors that affect growth and have sought to discover the dynamics in the growth process that throw light on various anomalies and abnormalities. Discoveries in other areas of science, such as genetics, have also had profound effects upon the recent developments in physical anthropology. In the study of isohemagglutination, the observation of the Hirszfelds in 1916 that various populations exhibited distinct and different frequencies of the ABO blood groups led shortly afterwards to a very active interest of physical anthropologists in exploring this approach as a means of clarifying racial differentiation (see Hirszfeld & Hirszfeld 1919). Field studies in great number were undertaken to determine world-wide variations in these reactions and to seek some basis for their use in identifying racial differences. As other systems of blood groups, such as M-N and Rh, and various hematological characters were discovered, they were added to what has now become an impressive array of hematological variations arising from genetic mutations. And although blood typing and hematology have developed into highly specialized areas with their own problems and goals, they continue to be employed as tools by physical anthropologists, not only in studying racial problems but also in analyzing the dynamics of population genetics. A considerable portion of the physical anthropological literature is still devoted to these applications. It is perhaps worth noting that the earlier expectation that blood groups would provide a genetic and quantitative basis for racial classification replacing older methods has not yet been borne out. The use of blood groups alone has thus far proven to be less than adequate for this purpose, although they retain much value as adjunct criteria. Perhaps even more significant in the recent history of this discipline has been the general impact of genetics upon it. Beginning as early as 1905,
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when Farabee published a study on the inheritance of brachydactyly in man—the first on human heredity based on Mendelian genetics—physical anthropologists have applied genetic principles to their problems and have gained, thereby, considerable insight into processes that would otherwise have been inaccessible. Similarly, Eugen Fischer, a decade after the effective establishment of genetics as a branch of biology, applied this new method to the study of racial hybridism in man with his study of the Rehobother bastards (1913). This was followed by Shapiro's field study (1929) on the English-Tahitian descendants of the mutineers of the Bounty, Rodenwaldt's investigation of the hybrids on Kisar (1927), and Davenport and Steggerda's work on the Negro-white mixtures on Jamaica (1929). At present, population genetics is the aspect of genetics that is being applied most fruitfully to many areas traditionally cultivated by physical anthropology. As in other interdisciplinary contacts, the resulting interactions have created a flow of geneticists into physical anthropology and of physical anthropologists into genetics. Population genetics has been especially valuable in providing insights and leads in the study of the racial differentiation of mankind. The dynamic interaction between mutation and environmental selection and the processes of adaptation that result from this are seen as basic to human racial differentiation, just as they are to animal differentiation. The effects of isolation and genetic drift have become as valid for human groups as they are for Drosophila. Even some of the older concepts of race have been swept away. One can no longer entertain the view, once widely held, that the races of man were originally uniform and that the present heterogeneity of human populations is entirely the product of miscegenation. According to the conclusions drawn from studies based on population genetics, it is more likely that some degree of polymorphism has always been characteristic of human races. Illustrative of the tendency of physical anthropologists to make use of other specialties that promise to throw light on traditional problems is their use of physiological approaches to race. Although not much has as yet been done along this line, some work shows promise. In particular, the adaptative responses of man to various environments is an area of much significance but one which is as yet little known. Enough, however, has been achieved to indicate that this represents an area fruitful of insights into the biological nature of man. Another interesting example of the interaction
between physical anthropology and other disciplines—in this case medicine and psychiatry—is the field of studies of human constitution. The notion that personality types are recognizable from physical stigmata has existed since Greek antiquity. From this ancient concept came the medieval terminology of "humors" of the body, from which the words "phlegmatic" and "sanguine" are derived. About a century ago, this rather naive and certainly primitive idea began to be re-examined in the effort to find, if possible, a more convincing demonstration of a linkage between body build and variations in behavior, disease, and temperament. The pioneering work of MacAuliffe in France and of Pende in Italy culminated in the system proposed by the psychiatrist Kretschmer (1921) in Germany and was later extended into clinical and diagnostic medicine by Draper in the United States (see Draper et al. 1944). This system envisaged a threefold division of body types—asthenic, athletic, and pyknic—with associated and distinctive types of temperament and susceptibility to specific diseases. It was based upon the assumption that body variations in build were correlated with psychological and physiological patterns of behavior. Although much skepticism existed then, as now, on the validity of this thesis, it has continued to engage the attention of a number of researchers. Sheldon, in particular, has evolved a far more sophisticated and useful classification of body build based on three major variables, which he has termed ectomorphy, mesomorphy, and endomorphy (1940). According to this system each individual can be rated for each component, whereas in earlier schemes most individuals could scarcely be fitted into the extreme types. This is the method preferred by most investigators currently working in this field. One of the more recent developments in physical anthropology reflects a growing appreciation of the role that culture and social organization have played in human evolution. One form of this trend is the study of primate behavior. It is notable that after a period of development during which physical anthropology had turned increasingly to strictly biological concerns, in turning to the study of the behavior of primates it is, in a sense, renewing its links with anthropology itself. The pioneer work in this area—beginning with the investigations of Carpenter (1934; 1940) and Zuckerman (1932; 1933)—has recently been carried forward vigorously by a number of students who have not only experimented with the behavior of primates in captivity but have made prolonged and detailed observations of wild animals. Much
PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY of *his work has been inspired both by the insights into human behavior that such studies may be able to furnish and by the belief that social and behavioral characteristics have played a greater role in human evolution than has been previously appreciated or, at least, identified. This development, which certainly in part arises from physical anthropology's continuing interest in human evolution, has, I believe, been stimulated specifically by the great advances made in the last generation in recovering the fossil record of man's emergence. The important discoveries made in China in the late 1920s and 1930s by Black (1930), Weidenreich (1935), and Pei (1934); the enrichment of the record through the work of von Koenigswald in Java in the 1930s (1950); and the opening of totally new geographic areas and systemic groups in south Africa by Dart and Broom in the 1920s and 1930s mark the beginning of a new era in the study of human fossils (see Dart 1925; Broom & Schepers 1946). The south African fossils (the Australopithecines), in particular, forced a revolutionary re-examination of the older concepts, leading to their rigorous modification to fit the new facts, and in general provided a stimulus to the whole field, which has remained in active ferment ever since. More recently, Leakey's discoveries relating to early hominids in the vicinity of Olduvai in east Africa have served to sustain this interest (1951; 1959). From these and other fossils and from the assistance now available from related fields, it is possible to place the appearance of manlike primates at the beginning of the Pleistocene, perhaps as long as 2V2 million years ago. Contrary to the older conception of a hominid evolving both in brain and in his adaptation to erect posture pari passu, it is now clearly evident that it was the latter that came first and, in fact, triggered the former. The anatomical evidence that early hominids had gone a long way toward an accommodation to erect posture before much expansion had occurred in the brain is overwhelming. To many students it seems likely that erect posture, by freeing the hands, with their innate capacity for grasping and manipulating objects, opened the way for the development °f technology. And this, in turn, as it became part °f man's environment, exerted a selective pressure that was reflected in an expansion of the brain. Such an interplay, with its continuation of a selection for intelligence, was reinforced by social developments and particularly by the perfection °f language with its abstract symbolism. HARRY L. SHAPIRO
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BERNIER, FRANCOIS 1684 Nouvelle division de la terre, par les differentes especes, ou races d'hommes qui 1'habitent . . . . Journal des scavans (Amsterdam) 12:148-155. BLACK, DAVIDSON 1930 On an Adolescent Skull of Sinanthropus pekinensis in Comparison With an Adult Skull of the Same Species and With Other Hominid Skulls, Recent and Fossil. Paleontologia Sinica, Series D, Vol. 7, no. 2. Peking: Geological Survey of China. BLUMENBACH, JOHANN F. (1795) 1950 On the Natural Variety of Mankind. Pages 25-39 in Earl W. Count (editor), This Is Race. New York: Schuman. -> An extract from the original De generis humani varietate nativa. BROCA, PAUL 1877 Les races fossiles de VEurope occidentale. Paris: No publisher given. BROOM, ROBERT; and SCHEPERS, G. W. H. 1946 The South African Fossil Ape-men: The Australopithecinae. Transvaal Museum, Pretoria, Memoir No. 2. Pretoria: The Museum. CAMPBELL, BERNARD 1966 Evolution: An Introduction to Man's Adaptations. Chicago: Aldine. CAMPER, PIETER 1791 Dissertation physique sur les differences reelles que presentent les traits du visage chez les hommes. Utrecht (Netherlands): Wild & Altheer. ->• Written in Dutch. Published posthumously. CARPENTER, C. R. 1934 A Field Study of the Behavior and Social Relations of Howling Monkeys (Alouatta palliata). Comparative Psychology Monographs 10, no. 2:1-167. CARPENTER, C. R. 1940 A Field Study in Siam of the Behavior and Social Relations of the Gibbon (Hylobates lar). Comparative Psychology Monographs 16, no. 5:1-212. COMAS Y CAMPS, JUAN 1960 Manual of Physical Anthropology. Springfield, 111.: Thomas. -» First published as Manual de antropologia fisica. COON, CARLETON S. 1962 The Origin of Races. New York: Knopf. DART, RAYMOND A. 1925 Australopithecus africanus, the Man-ape of South Africa. Nature 115:195-199. DARWIN, CHARLES (1859) 1964 On the Origin of Species. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -> A facsimile of the first edition. Numerous editions have been published, including a reprint of the sixth edition in 1927 by Macmillan, and a variorum text edited by Morse Peckham, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1959. DAVENPORT, CHARLES B.; and STEGGERDA, MORRIS 1929 Race Crossing in Jamaica. Washington: Carnegie Institution. DOBZHANSKY, THEODOSius 1964 Heredity and the Nature of Man. New York: Harcourt. DRAPER, GEORGE; DUPERTUIS, C. W.; and CAUGHEY, J. L. JR. 1944 Human Constitution in Clinical Medicine. New York: Harper. FARABEE, WILLIAM C. 1905 Inheritance of Digital Malformations in Man. Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum. FISCHER, EUGEN 1913 Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen. Jena (Germany): Fischer. HARDY, G. H. 1908 Mendelian Proportions in a Mixed Population. Science 28:49-50. HIRSZFELD, L.; and HIRSZFELD, H. 1919 Of Different Blood. Lancet 197, no. 2:675-679.
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HULSE, FREDERICK S. 1963 The Human Species. New York: Random House, KOENIGSWALD, GUSTAV H. R. VON 1950 Fossil Hominids From the Lower Pleistocene of Java. Part 9, pages 59-61 in International Geological Congress, Eighteenth, London, 1948, Report. London: Geological Survey and Museum. KRETSCHMER, ERNST (1921) 1936 Physique and Character: A": Investigation of the Nature of Constitution and the Theory of Temperament. London: Routledge. -> First published in German. LEAKEY, L. S. B. 1951 Olduvai Gorge. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. LEAKEY, L. S. B. 1959 A New Fossil Skull From Olduvai. Nature 184:491-493. PEARSON, KARL 1920 The Problems of Anthropology. Scientific Monthly 11:451-458. PEI, WEN-CHUNG 1934 A Preliminary Report on the Late Paleolithic Cave of Chou Kou Tien. Geological Society of China, Bulletin 13, no. 3:327-358. RETZIUS, GUSTAF (1909) 1965 The Development of Race Measurements and Classification. Pages 94-102 in Alfred L. Kroeber and T. T. Waterman (editors), Source Book in Anthropology. Rev. ed. New York: Johnson Reprint. -» First published as "A Review of, and Views on the Development of Some Anthropological Questions." RODENWALDT, ERNST 1927 Die Mestizen auf Kisar. 2 vols. The Hague: Nijhoff. SHAPIRO, HARRY L. (1929) 1962 Heritage of the Bounty: The Story of Pitcairn Through Six Generations. Rev. ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. -> First published as "Descendants of the Mutineers of the Bounty" in Volume 11 of Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Memoirs. SHELDON, WILLIAM H. 1940 The Varieties of Human Physique: An Introduction to Constitutional Psychology. New York: Harper. TYSON, EDWARD (1699) 1751 Orang-outang, sive homo sylvestris: Or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared With That of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man. 2d ed. London.- Osborne. VALLOIS, HENRI V. 1937 L. Mac Auliffe. Anthropologie 47:419 only. VIRCHOW, RUDOLF 1882 Der Kiefer aus der SchipkaHohle und der Kiefer von la Naulette. Zeitschrift fur Ethnologic 14:277-310. WEIDENREICH, FRANZ 1935 The Sinanthropus Population of Chou Kou Tien. Geological Society of China, Bulletin 14, no. 4:427-461. WEINBERG, W. 1908 Uber den Nachweis der Vererbung beim Menschen. Verein fur Vaterlandische Naturkunde in Wiirttemberg, Stuttgart, Jahreshefte 64: 369-382. WILKS, S. S. 1941 Karl Pearson: Founder of the Science of Statistics. Scientific Monthly 53:249-253. WRIGHT, SEWALL 1948 On the Roles of Directed and Random Change in Gene Frequency in the Genetics of Populations. Evolution 2:279-294. ZUCKERMAN, SOLLY 1932 The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes. New York: Harcourt. ZUCKERMAN, SOLLY 1933 Functional Affinities of Man, Monkeys, and Apes. New York: Harcourt.
PHYSIOCRATS See under ECONOMIC THOUGHT.
PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY See under PSYCHOLOGY. PIGOU, ARTHUR CECIL Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877-1959), professor of political economy at Cambridge University from 1908 to 1943, is today best known for his contributions to the theory of economic welfare. He succeeded Alfred Marshall as professor at the age of 31 (a remarkable fact in the mature society of Edwardian Cambridge), to the delight of Marshall but to the chagrin of the older generation, and particularly Foxwell, who had believed their claims superior. He remained a professor at Cambridge until his retirement and indeed continued to live in King's College, of which he had been a fellow from 1902, until his death in 1959. Pigou was born in 1877, the eldest son of Clarence Pigou and his wife, Nora, at Beachlands, Ryde, in the Isle of Wight, the family home of his mother. His father was a retired army officer, descended from a Huguenot line which had long had connections with India and China, first as traders, in later generations as civil servants. His mother's family came from a line which had earlier won distinction and wealth in Irish administration. With such a family background it was rather a matter of course that Pigou should be sent, like his father, to Harrow, but it was his own very considerable abilities that won him an entrance scholarship. At Harrow he was a good enough athlete to win approval in an age in which athletics carried more honor than did scholarship and serious enough scholar to win many of the prizes open to Harrovians. He ended his schooldays as the first boy on the modern side to be head of the school. He went to Cambridge as a history scholar of King's College and spent his first two years reading history as a pupil of that remarkable oddity, Oscar Browning. But to his Cambridge contemporaries Pigou was best known as a leading figure in the Union Debating Society, where from his first term he made his mark and was outstanding as an orator, in a generation of brilliant speakers. It was not until his third year at Cambridge that Pigou began to study economics, and only because the Cambridge syllabus of that time required it as part of the moral sciences tripos. Thus, Pigou's introduction to economics came first by way of history and second by way of philosophy and ethics. Indeed, until he became a fellow of King's College and began to teach economics, Pigou could scarcely be regarded as a specialist in that subject. He had
PIGOU, ARTHUR CECIL submitted, in his first attempt to obtain a fellowship at King's, a thesis entitled Robert Browning as a Religious Teacher, which later became his first book, published in 1901. He had won the chancellor's medal for English verse, as well as the Adam Smith prize for an essay on the principles and methods of industrial peace. He began to lecture on economics in 1901, before his election to the King's fellowship (at a second submission) and was made Girdler's lecturer in the summer of 1904. He was lecturing in 1903, surprisingly, on the history of labor in the nineteenth century. But in 1901/1902 he had already begun to give to the second-year students the course on advanced economics that was the basis of the education of hundreds of Cambridge economists over the next thirty years. In that course Pigou acted as expositor of the theoretical ideas developed by Marshall. Inevitably, as presented by Pigou, those ideas took a form of their own. But it was primarily through Pigou that the Marshallian tradition was handed down and became the Cambridge school of economics. While Marshall's lectures had become less and less systematic as the years went on, Pigou (educated in the more systematic habits that the school of moral sciences had inherited from Sidgwick, whose lectures on ethics and political science he had attended) gave to the exposition of Marshall's theories a clarity and architecture that they had lacked in Marshall's personal teaching. To the end, Pigou remained a devoted and almost uncritical pupil of Marshall's, indeed an almost idolatrous worshiper. It was Pigou, more than any other, who brought up a generation of Cambridge economists in the conviction that (in his often-repeated words) "it's all in Marshall" and the belief that if they were in error, it was because they had misunderstood Marshall or had overlooked some essential passage in the holy writ. It was not until the coming of Piero Sraffa in the middle 1920s and of such younger lecturers as Joan Robinson and John Hicks in the 1930s that Cambridge escaped from an uncritical acceptance of the Marshallian orthodoxy; but then, and even much later, through Robertson, Guillebaud, and others of us, Cambridge retained its essentially Marshallian tradition. In these years it was as a lecturer that Pigou was at his best. The Cambridge economists of the 1920s owed to Keynes their sense of the importance of the economic issues and their sense of urgency to achieve essential reforms; but it was Primarily to Pigou (and also, in later years, to Dennis Robertson and others) that they owed their training in the disciplines of economic reasoning.
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The same qualities that one finds in Pigou's books were paramount in his lectures. Clarity of analysis, division and subdivision where it was appropriate, a willingness to follow an argument through to the end and to refine it as it needed to be refined, all these were the characteristics of his own presentation and of what he demanded in others. Curiously, this eloquence and clarity in teaching did not ordinarily carry over, as it did so abundantly in the case of Keynes, to an enjoyment of personal argument and discussion with his pupils. We admired Pigou; after a lecture we would sometimes shyly ask him a question, and he would answer, either jocularly or even more shyly. But most of us as undergraduates hardly knew him outside a lecture room, while we knew Keynes quite intimately, through his Political Economy Club. Pigou's first book on economics, Principles and Methods of Industrial Peace, an expansion of his Adam Smith prize essay, appeared in 1905. It is interesting to go back to that book, not only for its matter but also for its method, which remained characteristic of Pigou throughout his life and which deeply impressed his pupils. He applied to economic material the method of the philosopher, clarifying the issues, dissecting them and analyzing them, trying to see how different assumptions regarding the material might modify conclusions— the analytical method applied with great precision to an essentially qualitative argument. He used statistics but rarely, and only to establish or to indicate the order of magnitude of some relevant fact. This is very far from the form of argument of the modern, statistically minded economist. While Pigou, as his working life continued, gradually acquired the habits of mathematical economics, he was not by instinct and training a mathematical economist. His thinking remained primarily that of a philosopher trained in analysis. His first book eschews mathematics completely. Welfare economics. It was in 1912 that Pigou published the book which, in retrospect, is the most important of his works—Wealth and Welfare, as it was called in its first edition. It was expanded vastly over the next thirty years and, as The Economics of Welfare (1920a), played a major part in the education of the Cambridge economists of the 1920s and 1930s, and indeed of economists generally. Those who came to it when it had acquired middle-aged embonpoint would do well to restudy it in its slimmer, more youthful, and more rapidly moving form. Its characteristics are those of the 1905 book—beautiful clarity of reasoning and thought; the method of qualitative analysis rather than of statistical argument; the sparing
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introduction of mathematical argument, and only where necessary to a precise formulation. Above all the early version possessed a beauty of architectural design and construction that was lost as new extensions were added over the years. Pigou's ultimate reputation will, one suspects, depend on the judgment by future generations of the work in the field of economic welfare that was principally enshrined in that book. He started from two existing ideas, to be found, in the Cambridge tradition, in the work of Marshall and of Sidgwick. Marshall had discussed (as had Bastiat and others before him) the concept of maximum satisfaction and the conditions under which an economy would achieve it. Sidgwick, in dealing at a less rigorous level with the same problem, had made use of the idea of divergence between utility to the individual and utility to society. Pigou's book was more ambitious. He set out to examine, first, the full conditions of maximum satisfaction; second, the conditions under which private and social product (as he preferred to call them) might be different, so that the maximum would not be achieved under a system of private enterprise; and third, the measures which might be taken to bring the two into equality. In one important respect Pigou's work was fundamentally different from that of his successors in the field of welfare theory. He was primarily concerned (as his first chapter shows) with "fruit" rather than "light": with writing a theory of welfare that was applicable in practice. Pigou's definition of maximum economic welfare made it dependent on the average volume, the distribution, and the variability of the national dividend. Any course, he argued, which without compulsion increased efficiency and the volume of the dividend or which increased the proportion of the dividend which was received by poor persons or which (without diminishing its volume or injuring its distribution) diminished the variability of the dividend would increase economic welfare. The greater part of Wealth and Welfare as originally written, and an ever-increasing part of it as it grew through the various editions of Economics of Welfare, was devoted, in the first place, to the differences between social and private marginal net products arising from imperfect divisibility, to elements of monopoly and similar factors, and to the methods of controlling monopoly and otherwise correcting these divergencies; second, it considered methods of remunerating labor and the practicability and desirability of interference to raise the wages of poorer workers. Wealth and Welfare treated rather scantily the whole question of taxation as it involves transfers from the rela-
tively rich to the relatively poor, which later editions of Economics of Welfare treated more fully and systematically. Much of Pigou's work, as far as it relates to monopoly, to pricing policies of public activities, and to wage bargaining, for example, has been so thoroughly absorbed into the present corpus of economic doctrine that it has long ceased to be identified consciously with his name. Antipathy to his conclusions has been much keener and much more continued with regard to his argument that measures to equalize incomes would increase economic welfare. Pigou himself in 1912 was a liberal —neither an extreme radical nor a socialist. He was almost certainly thinking in terms of minor, marginal changes within the framework of a liberal society. By definition he excluded redistributions which would so affect incentives as to reduce the national dividend. But his conclusions were inherently so radical that they evoked criticism and resistance among economists who would not have felt equally critical of his more familiar and acceptable arguments where they related to monopoly or public utility pricing. Once these criticisms had been voiced, other economists felt bound, from a purely academic standpoint, to examine their validity. In later editions Pigou slightly modified his actual presentation of the argument for increased welfare with less inequality of income, but the essentials remained the same. He began by assuming that individuals are of similar temperament and anticipating the potential criticism that at present rich and poor are temperamentally different, argued that there is evidence that with greater income equality and with time any differences of temperament and taste would disappear. He satisfied himself, by appeal to evidence based on social inquiries, that the assumption he proposed was a plausible one. But in a strict sense, he did not prove it. The subsequent discussions of welfare theory have started with the problem of the meaning and measurability of utility and that of the validity of interpersonal comparisons and have inevitably led to the difficulties of measuring the national income in welfare terms and defining the circumstances in which it can be said to have increased. In particular, ingenious attempts have been made to identify the cases in which, without any interpersonal comparisons and thus without ambiguity, welfare can be said to have been increased. But even with the addition of the compensation principle, these discussions have tended to leave untouched a large number of real cases in which (as in the case of redistributional taxation) the poorer may be sup-
PIGOU, ARTHUR CECIL posed to benefit at the expense of the richer who will suffer some loss; even the compensation principle does not provide a complete and satisfactory solution. Pigou himself took no active part in these discussions, but he was persuaded in 1951 (when he was in his 74th year) to contribute to the American Economic Review a short article which shows his final thinking. In this final summing up of his thinking, Pigou argued, first, that (in Bertrand Russell's words) satisfactions are not in principle incomparable, even if they are not directly measurable. One can thus attach meaning to marginal changes. But he conceded that one cannot hope to establish absolute magnitudes of total utility or to be able to answer the question (which in his Study in Public Finance [1928] he had attempted to answer) whether a tax proportioned to total income will inflict equal sacrifice upon everyone, whatever the size of his income. Second, he turned to interpersonal comparisons and argued that "the utilities enjoyed by different people are not in their nature incomparable. . . . The question whether they are comparable in fact is a more difficult one" (1951, pp. 291-292). His final stand so well states not only his own attitude and that of Robertson (who in this, as in many other respects, remained his pupil and adherent) but also the attitude of many working economists, other than the specialists in this field, that it deserves quotation in full: Now, if we take random groups of people of the same race and brought up in the same country, we find that in many features that are comparable by objective tests they are on the average pretty much alike; and, indeed, for fundamental characters we need not limit ourselves to people of the same race and country. On this basis we are entitled, I submit, to infer by analogy that they are probably pretty much alike in other respects also. In all practical affairs we act on that supposition. We cannot prove that it is true. But we do not need to do so. Nobody can prove that anybody besides himself exists, but, nevertheless, everybody is quite sure of it. We do not, in short, and there is no reason why we should, start from a tabula rasa, binding ourselves to hold every opinion which the natural man entertains to be guilty until it is proved innocent. The burden is the other way. To deny this is to wreck, n ot merely Welfare Economics, but the whole apparatus of practical thought. On the basis of analogy, observation and intercourse, inter-personal comparisons can, as I think, properly be made; and, moreover, unless we have a special reason to believe the contrary, a given amount of stuff may be presumed to yield a similar amount of satisfaction, not indeed as between any one man and any other, but as between representative members of groups of individuals, such as the citizens of Birmingham and the citizens of
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Leeds. This is all that we need to allow this branch of Welfare Economics to function. Of course, in working it out, positive conclusions can only be reached subject to very important qualifications, (ibid., pp. 292293) Pigou, that is to say, remained to the end a believer in the validity of the welfare economics that he had done so much to create. He admitted that certain conclusions rested on assumptions that could not be proved, but he believed that these assumptions accorded best with the available evidence. He believed that the economics of policy making was a serious academic study and not merely a politically loaded exercise. In some repects Pigou, even if imprecise, at least was on the side of the angels: If he believed, rather than proved, that a transfer from richer to poorer was likely to increase welfare, it was, one suspects, partly because he was the sort of person he was. Public involvement and retreat. Throughout his life he was a passionate believer in justice; this was apparent in the way he handled all the problems of running the faculty of economics at Cambridge. If you were working with him, you had to satisfy him that what you proposed was a completely just solution of the problem in hand. To him it was just and proper, whatever could or could not be proved about capacity to absorb satisfactions, that the poor should be treated as if they were equal in value and capacity to the rich. If one could invent exceptions, the exceptions would seem, to anyone of his Victorian uprightness, a case of special pleading. He was always a protector and defender of the underdog. At moments we could visualize him as the severe but just head of the school at Harrow. Pigou's early years, before he was made professor, were the years of the great tariff disputes. Fresh from his triumphs in the Union debates, Pigou threw himself into the conflict and toured the country making free-trade speeches. The probable line of his argument can be deduced from political pamphlets, including The Riddle of the Tariff (1903), and from the much more sophisticated and academic Protective and Preferential Import Duties (1906). But to those who knew him only later in life, what is interesting is that at this stage he was a speaker widely in demand and responsive to those demands, anxious to influence public opinion and policy. With Alfred Marshall he was a signatory in 1903 of the professors' letter to The Times, which gained some notoriety in the tariff disputes of the day. In this phase of his life he was very far from being the recluse he became in later years. His powerful conscience created problems for
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him when war came in 1914, as was the case with many of his Cambridge contemporaries. Although still young (he was then 36), he was not prepared to undertake military service that entailed an obligation to destroy human life. But he devoted all his university vacations to driving an ambulance for a Friends' ambulance unit, and he insisted, no doubt at the instigation of the same conscience, on undertaking jobs of particular danger. Toward the end of the war he was persuaded by Clapham, in peacetime one of his colleagues at King's, to accept a post in the Board of Trade. He achieved, however, no distinction as a civil servant. It could not be claimed for him that he ever possessed the practical administrative abilities that carried Keynes, Walter Lay ton, Hubert Henderson, and others of the Cambridge economists of that generation rapidly into positions of authority and responsibility. He was never, as an economist, quick to see intuitively the order of magnitude and the potential dangers of economic forces, and he was never a person to whom colleagues turned instinctively for advice in the sphere of economic policy making. This limitation betrayed him when, first as a member of the Cunliffe Committee of 19181919 and later as a member of the Chamberlain Committee of 1924-1925 on currency and Bank of England note issues, he was one of those who recommended an early return to the gold standard at the pre-1914 exchange rate—-a. policy that was to be flagellated by Keynes in his Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill (1925). From the early 1920s onward, Pigou withdrew, save for brief exceptions and an occasional letter to The Times, from taking part in national affairs and devoted himself more and more completely to Cambridge. Increasingly, over these years, Pigou retreated into the ordered life of a recluse. He lectured a couple of hours a week in a course which, excellent as it was, remained essentially unchanged for twenty years and cost him little effort. He worked incessantly and regularly at his books. He consumed all that was written in economics, seeking always realistic illustrations for quotation in his own work, and in addition he devoured every detective story available. He would march out on an afternoon walk to Coton or thereabouts. Within this private world were a few privileged friends. They were usually chosen because they shared his love of mountains, and they climbed with him at Buttermere, where he had built a house, or in the Alps. No account of Pigou would be complete without mention of the mountains. These he loved, with these he illustrated problems in his lectures, and to these he hurried away when term ended. He was
a keen and enthusiastic, but not a supremely great, climber; he introduced to climbing many who, like Wilfrid Noyce, became greater climbers. Around Buttermere he invented and pioneered new rock climbs. In the Alps he achieved most of what is possible to the best. Into this private world few women were admitted; the exceptions in later life were the wives of his climbing friends and other women who knew him in that life. His clothes progressively became more and more those of a hermit, and one never knew in what sartorial disarray or in what superannuated castoffs he would next appear. It was through exposure while climbing that he acquired an illness affecting the heart, which from the beginning of the 1930s increasingly curtailed both his climbing and his other activities. This affliction greatly impaired his vigor and energy and left him, through the rest of his life, with intermittent phases of debility. It affected his lecturing: in the 1920s he had been vigorous and immensely stimulating; in the 1930s the liveliness and stimulus somehow slipped out of the lectures; and in his later years, although essentially unchanged, they had lost something of their power to grip an audience. And in the same way, something of the vigor and domination departed from his writing, distinguished as it still remained. Other writings. Over these years he had written much. Unlike the present generation, he tended to write books rather than articles, although on occasion he contributed the latter also. In 1914 appeared Unemployment, a small, popular book in which Pigou, following the thinking of that time, attributed unemployment principally to lack of flexibility of wage rates. In the 1920s there appeared two books reflecting his interest in war finance, A Capital Levy and a Levy on War Wealth (1920Z?) and The Political Economy of War (1921), books which had great influence on current thought. In 1923 a collection of his journal articles was published, entitled Essays in Applied Economics; in this volume was included an important article which had first appeared in 1917 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, "The Value of Money." In a period in which economists at Cambridge were all expectantly waiting for Marshall to publish his formulation of monetary theory (Money, Credit & Commerce appeared only in 1923), this 1917 article had for long been the only printed source other than Marshall's evidence before the Gold and Silver Commission. Industrial Fluctuations (1927), A Study in Public Finance (1928), and The Theory of Unemployment (1933) continued Pigou's stream of output.
PIGOU, ARTHUR CECIL They represent the most distinguished work of the pre-Keynesian epoch and played a significant part in the rapid development of economics during that period. Inevitably these books, in retrospect, have become dated more than his work in other fields. But one wonders whether some of this work, with its emphasis on variations of harvests, on variations of the rates of invention and of consumer stock-building of newly invented durables, and on other nonmacroeconomic factors, may not be overdue for rediscovery and adaption to newer macroeconomic theories. In 1935 there followed The Economics of Stationary States. This book, which appeared shortly after the publication of the ideas developed by Chamberlin and Joan Robinson and makes occasional use of concepts worked out by them, is in another sense very remote from their thinking. Pigou set himself the question of the way in which equilibrium is reached in a stationary state, defined rigorously as one in which the population, its quality and age and sex distribution, its stock of equipment, technology, and tastes, are all fixed. He approached his results through a long series of simplifying assumptions, beginning with Robinson Crusoe economics and progressing only by stages into the problems of specialization and exchange and a monetary economy with markets, many commodities, elements of monopoly, of transport cost, and the rest. He rejected the idea of a progression from perfect competition to monopoly through a chain of closer and less close substitutes. He assumed that "there can only be one single type of (homogeneous) commodity or service. Commodities that are good substitutes for one another are not, as is sometimes suggested, in 'an imperfectly competitive market.' My use does not allow this. In respect of any number of different commodities or services, however good substitutes they may be, there are at least that number of different markets" (1935, pp. 77-78). Pigou was, in fact, not directly concerned in this book with the same problems as Chamberlin and Joan Robinson. As "The Passage to Real Life," its last chapter, makes clear, this work on stationary states presented itself to his mind as a path-clearing operation in a longer progress toward a more dynamic economics. But he conceived of the development of an economy, not as more or less steady, dictated by continuous technical progress and capital accumulation, but rather as a set of steps— stationary states that are disturbed by spasmodic changes in technology, in accumulation, or in other factors. A new set of environmental conditions Would imply a transition (which, he emphasized,
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lay outside the scope of the book) toward a new stationary state. This work represents Pigou's analytical skill at its highest. But it made curiously little impression on contemporary economics, either in Cambridge, elsewhere in England, or in America, and it now seldom receives detailed study. A rereading discloses some of the difficulties of relating Pigou's thinking to that of others. He seldom acknowledged an idea; his acknowledgments are more numerous than a very unworthy index would suggest, but they are, as always, almost entirely acknowledgments of facts or terminology. That he had read and absorbed a great deal is evident. But, like Keynes, he was never a writer who began with a systematic reading of the literature of his predecessors and contemporaries. Throughout this period there were numerous revisions of The Economics of Welfare; there were, in fact, four main editions and six additional reprintings between 1920, when Wealth and Welfare first acquired its new name, and 1952. These occupied most of Pigou's time. There were also a variety of smaller books of essays and lectures; as well as some elementary and pedagogic writings of lesser importance. These latter include Income (1946), The Veil of Money (1949), and Essays in Economics (1952). For a period they had their place in the teaching of economics. Relationship with Keynes. Keynes's General Theory appeared in 1936. It affected Pigou doubly. First, Keynes had dared to attack Marshall, for whom Pigou had more than a pupil's reverence. The contemporary Cambridge belief that "it's all in Marshall" was certainly Pigou's belief. But it was enshrined in the more fundamental belief that if you could not find it in Marshall, it was because Marshall had had to write for the general reader and not because the idea would have been anything new to Marshall. That apart, Keynes had made his chief attack on the classical economics as embodied in Pigou's Theory of Unemployment (1933). Thus, Pigou was on the defensive—principally, I think, because of Marshall; while he had a great sense of authority as professor, he was not a vain man, and as subsequent events showed, he was not unprepared to admit that he had been in the wrong. His defense took the form of a severe review of the General Theory in Economica. He condemned Keynes's "patronage extended to his old master Marshall," and his iconoclastic treatment of classical economists as a group. Thus, indignantly, he imagined Keynes making the following attack: "Professor Pigou, in a book on Unemployment, . . . has committed a variety of sins. Professor Pigou is a classical economist; therefore
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the classical economists have committed these sins!" (Pigou 1936, pp. 115-116). In defense of Marshall, Pigou was prepared, if necessary, to sacrifice himself. Whether Keynes could have achieved a radical rethinking of economics without wounding, as he did, Pigou and Robertson, among others, is a question that will be eternally debated. I have always believed that this was the sad but necessary cost of the revolution of thought. With Robertson, the wounds went so deep that they never could be healed. With Pigou, time brought a healing. And indeed the wounds were never as severe: Keynes and Pigou were both fellows of King's; they dined at the same high table; they immensely respected each other. And Keynes, anxious as he was to see his theories accepted, was almost equally anxious to see Pigou's reputation preserved; he was very conscious that in attacking Pigou, he was attacking ideas which he himself had held only a few years earlier. When Pigou asked for something to be published in the Economic Journal, which at that time Keynes and I edited, Keynes would accept it without demur but would seek to persuade Pigou to agree to minor changes on points where he believed that subsequent discussion might show Pigou to be wrong. When Keynes was ill for a period and I accepted from Pigou, and printed as Pigou wrote it, the article "Real and Money Wage Rates in Relation to Unemployment" (1937), Keynes was greatly distressed lest I should have done something that might discredit Pigou. It was an oddly tolerant and mutually admiring relationship, which never came near to reaching the misery of the cleft between Robertson and Keynes. Pigou continued his work on the problems of the General Theory, publishing in 1941 Employment and Equilibrium, which remains a vigorous defense of the classical position, with new refinements but with essentially the traditional approach. He emphasized the multiplicity of the causes of unemployment and argued that it results from a complicated system of interrelated factors. He brought to the surface the real-balance effect that has since come to be associated with his name. This socalled Pigou effect identifies one of the possible ways in which rising prices may tend to reduce excessive demand and thus restore equilibrium: they decrease the net indebtedness of the public sector to the private sector, and this reduction in the real assets of the private sector may serve to lower aggregate demand. But Pigou's thinking in this field continued to change and develop; he had, indeed, a remarkable fertility of mind until well into his seventies. And in 1949 Pigou, eight years
after retirement, asked some of us who were then running the economics faculty at Cambridge whether he might have a couple of lectures in which to say certain things about the General Theory. In those two lectures, even more moving to hear than to read, he said, in effect, that he had come to feel, with the passage of time, that he had failed to appreciate some of the important things which Keynes had been trying to argue in the General Theory and that he had been oversevere in his Economica review. It was the noble act of a scrupulously honest man, who put truth beyond vanity and another's reputation beyond his own. Assessment. It is not easy to place Pigou in the theogony of economists. In the reactions of the 1960s he has probably been more underrated than any other economist of first distinction. Outside the field of welfare economics, one does not instantaneously associate him with any of the major instruments of economic analysis that one uses daily. He is not, in that sense, to be ranked with Smith, Ricardo, Marshall, or Keynes, if one thinks only of the British school. But modern economics would have been very different without him. MarsJiall was almost certainly right in thinking that Pigou was the proper successor to create a new disciplined and professional school of analytical economics in Cambridge. As teacher and creator of a tradition within Marshall's economics tripos, he set a pattern for a generation of Cambridge economists, and Pigou's pupils, teaching a Pigouvian version of Marshall's economics, are widely distributed around the Anglo-Saxon world. But Pigou's innate and notorious shyness, ever increasing as the years went by, cut him off from all informal discussion of economics, both with Cambridge colleagues and foreign visitors. Pigouvian economics came from the brain of Pigou and from his reading of published material; it was not refined by the cut and thrust of personal argument. Occasionally he would ask privileged pupils and friends (David Champernowne for example) to help him with mathematical or other analysis and accept from them criticism and suggestions. But to the ordinary run of his Cambridge colleagues he could not have been more different from Keynes and Robertson in these respects. Even those of us who were privileged to stay with him in the mountains learned to limit our conversation to the problems of ascents, the merits and demerits of the authors of detective stories, and, occasionally, the flaws in a book on economics, to save the others the labor of reading it. Pigou's isolation from the world inevitably meant
PINEL, PHILIPPE isolation from foreign economists. He read conscientiously, but he was not sufficiently intimate with any non-Marshallians to project himself into their minds and thinking; and he was too loyal an admirer of Marshall to want very much to do so. Pigou's great qualities were those of the classical economists. He was, it might truly be said, the last of the classical school and the last of the great Victorians, who had the misfortune to survive to an age which had lost its reverence for them. He himself showed to the end unflagging interest in the work of the younger generation and no trace of embitterment at its development of economics along lines that he had not foreseen. AUSTIN ROBINSON [See also CONSUMPTION FUNCTION; MONEY, article on QUANTITY THEORY; WELFARE ECONOMICS; and
the
biographies of KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD; MARSHALL; ROBERTSON; SIDGWICK.] WORKS BY PIGOU 1901 Robert Browning as a Religious Teacher: Being the Burney Essay for 1900. London: Clay. 1903 The Riddle of the Tariff. London: Johnson. 1905 Principles and Methods of Industrial Peace. New York: Macmillan. (1906) 1935 Protective and Preferential Import Duties. London School of Economics and Political Science. 1912 Wealth and Welfare. London: Macmillan. 1914 Unemployment. New York: Holt. (1917) 1951 The Value of Money. Pages 162-183 in American Economic Association, Readings in Monetary Theory. Philadelphia: Blakiston. -> First published in Volume 32 of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. It is thought that Pigou's first title for the essay was "The Exchange Value of Legal Tender Money," and it appears under this title in Essays in Applied Economics 1923. (1920a) 1960 The Economics of Welfare. 4th ed. London: Macmillan. 1920fo A Capital Levy and a Levy on War Wealth. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. (1921) 1941 The Political Economy of War. New & rev. ed. New York: Macmillan. 1923 Essays in Applied Economics. London: King. (1927) 1929 Industrial Fluctuations. 2d ed. London: Macmillan. (1928) 1956 A Study in Public Finance. 3d ed., rev. New York: St. Martins. 1933 The Theory of Unemployment. London: Macmillan. 1935 The Economics of Stationary States. London: Macmillan. 1936 [A Book Review of] General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by J. M. Keynes. Economica New Series 3:115-132. 1937 Real and Money Wage Rates in Relation to Unemployment. Economic Journal 47:405-422. (1941) 1949 Employment and Equilibrium: A Theoretical Discussion. 2d rev. ed. London: Macmillan. (1946) 1948 Income: An Introduction to Economics. London: Macmillan. 1949 The Veil of Money. London: Macmillan.
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1950
Keynes's General Theory: A Retrospective View. London: Macmillan. 1951 Some Aspects of Welfare Economics. American Economic Review 41:287-302. -> This article forms Appendix XI of the 1952 and subsequent printings of Economics of Welfare (1920a). 1952 Essays in Economics. London: Macmillan. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BRAHMANANDA, P. R. 1959 A. C. Pigou (1877-1959). Indian Economic Journal 6:466-487. CHAMPERNOWNE, DAVID G. 1959 Arthur Cecil Pigou, 1877-1959. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A 122:263-265. JOHNSON, HARRY G. 1960 Arthur Cecil Pigou, 18771959. Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 26:150-155. KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD 1925 The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill. London: Woolf. KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD 1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. -»• A paperback edition was published in 1965 by Harcourt. KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD 1937 The General Theory of Employment. Quarterly Journal of Economics 51: 209-223. MARSHALL, ALFRED (1923) 1960 Money, Credit &• Commerce. New York: Kelley.
PINEL, PHILIPPE Modern psychiatry was born of the efforts of a few great pioneers. Among them, Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) stands out: his was the first major achievement, at once scientific and humanitarian, in the treatment of insanity. The oldest of seven children, Pinel was born to a pious Roman Catholic family in a small village in the Tarn in southern France. His grandfather and father were physicians; his mother, a very strong character, dominated his youth. Her death, when Pinel was only 15, moved him to take orders. He joined the Oratorians but soon left monastic life, becoming instead deeply imbued with the new philosophical outlook of Locke, Condillac, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Pinel was a brilliant student and a great admirer of the classics, of Hippocrates, and of Plutarch; he read Greek, Latin, and also English, from which he was to translate some of the works of his contemporary, William Cullen. Initially Pinel studied in the Faculty of Letters at Montpellier, but he was above all interested in natural science and mathematics. Personal acquaintance with Paul Joseph Barthez, a renowned physician of the faculty at Montpellier, led him to study medicine. Studious, reserved, and simple in tastes, Pinel had few friends, but those he had were close ones, especially Jean Antoine Chaptal,
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the future scientist. Pinel's erudition made a variety of careers possible, but once he arrived at Paris he decided to devote himself to psychiatry. Pinel's career is inseparable from its political context: The French Revolution made it a duty to protect all individuals, even the insane, against enslavement by others. Pinel first became professor of medical physics, but he was next appointed physician of the hospital of Bicetre, the ancient grange aux gueux ("beggars' farm") at the gates of Paris, where "the insane . . . are treated as criminals, by mercenaries, contrary to either reason or humanity." Pinel denounced this state of affairs, asserting, "I am convinced that the only reason these insane people are so intractable is that they are deprived of air and liberty" (Semelaigne 1888, p. 35). At that time they were, in fact, kept chained. Thanks to his persistent efforts, reason triumphed over prejudice, and soon the insane were no longer regarded as possessed by demons, but as mentally ill. This was certainly Pinel's greatest achievement. However, he refused to accept the excesses of the revolutionary movement: churches were being robbed, and Pinel from within his hospital coolly condemned the raging iconoclasts and the powerful authorities who supported them. During one uprising the mob was about to hang him; he was saved by the vigilance of a recently "unchained" patient whom he had taken into his personal service. Beginning in 1795, Pinel held a position at the Salpetriere hospital in Paris. There too he had to start from the ground up, replacing the orderlies, refurbishing the sordid rooms, and eliminating the use of chains. His psychiatric researches led to two fundamental works, La nosographie philosophiquc (1798), awarded a prize by the Directory, and Le traite medico-philosophique sur I'alienation mentale (1801), his major work. He had a wide audience among medical students; although not eloquent and sometimes absent-minded, Pinel was greatly appreciated in scientific quarters. The fundamental innovations to be found in Pinel's works are of several kinds. First, he insisted on the humanitarian treatment of patients. He had a humane, moral attitude toward the mentally ill, having long talks with them in which he "skillfully gave them a drive that they thought was due to their own initiative" (Semelaigne 1888, p. 118). He substituted understanding and gentleness for violence, strait jackets for chains, and insisted on the temporary nature of even this restraint. Second, he made administrative changes. He
distributed patients in several pavilions according to their condition, thus foreshadowing the dynamic organization of the psychiatric hospital of today. He also urged that asylums be governed by physicians. Finally, he made innovations in therapy. He tried to diversify the treatment of the "raving" patients according to the etiology of their disease. He saw to it that they had games and music to amuse them. "Skill," he said, "consists less in the use of remedies than in the deeply judicious art of using or not using them at the right times" (ibid., p. 102). He completely rejected unnecessary bleedings and sudden cold baths but made good use of warm, sleep-inducing baths. In addition to such physical measures, he had workshops set up for therapeutic purposes, paying the patients wages. He advocated having farms—to be worked and managed by the convalescent patients—attached to asylums. Far in advance of his time, he proposed the establishment of institutions for convalescents in transition between the hospital and the outside world; this innovation was developed further by his students. The doctrine that Pinel had worked out was not universally accepted after his death. Although the basic elements of his approach were applied, they were applied incompletely and without the effort and commitment he had had. We do not know if this failure was due to postrevolutionary political reaction, to a lack of medical men capable of carrying on his work, or to the absence of a sufficiently elaborated theoretical structure. In any case, only today are the foundations laid by Pinel being properly developed. P. SIVADON and P. SABOURIN [For discussion of the subsequent development of Pinel's ideas, see CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY; MENTAL
DISORDERS; MENTAL DISORDERS, TREATMENT OF; PSYCHIATRY.] WORKS BY PINEL (1798) 1818 La nosographie philosophique: Ou, la methode de I'analyse appliquee a la medecine. 6th ed. Paris: Bros son. (1801) 1962 A Treatise of Insanity. New York: Hafner. -» First published as Le traite medico-philosophique sur I'alienation mentale. WORKS ABOUT PINEL
COURBON, P. 1927 Pinel psychiatre. Annales medicopsychologiques 85, part 2:30—52. FOUCAULT, MICHEL (1961) 1965 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Pantheon. -» First published as Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie a I'age classique. LECHLER, WALTHER H. 1960 Neue Ergebnisse in der Forschung iiber Philippe Pinel. Thesis, Univ. of
PIRENNE, HENRI Munich. -» This work is the result of research conducted by Pierre Chabbert and Walther H. Lechler. PINEL, C. 1860 Philippe Pinel. Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology 13:184-205. SEMELAIGNE, RENE 1888 Philippe Pinel et son oeuvre au point de vue de la medecine mentale. Paris: Imprimeries Reunies.
PIRACY See INTERNATIONAL CRIMES.
PIRENNE, HENRI Henri Pirenne (1863-1935) was a Belgian historian. After studying under Godefroid Kurth and Paul Fredericq, he received his doctorate of letters at the University of Liege in 1883. In 1885 he was appointed to a teaching position at that university but the following year moved to the University of Ghent. There he taught until 1930 and between 1919 and 1921 acted as rector of the university. He taught medieval history and from 1893 on held the first chair of economic history in Belgium. Several circumstances contributed to Pirenne's interest in the social aspects of history. He had personal experience with the Walloon woolen industry, since his father managed a factory in the town of Verviers, and he became aware of the acuteness of social distress in Belgian industry at the time that he completed his university studies. His interest in social and economic history was enhanced by postgraduate studies in Germany with Gustav Schmoller and through his acquaintance with Karl Lamprecht; his contact with Arthur Giry in Paris in 1884-1885 strengthened his interest in urban history. Pirenne worked out a synthesis of social, economic, and political factors in the study of the history of his own country (1900-1932), especially of certain mass movements. Thus, he ascribed the process of political unification of the areas on opposite sides of the language frontier to their similar economic and social structure. This does not mean that he was a historical materialist: important individuals play a significant part in his explanation of events, as does chance. Throughout his career, Pirenne studied the history of towns. In his first important contribution to this field (1893-1895), he rejected previous e xplanations of the origin of towns. His own theory w as that towns developed as the result of the revival of commerce in the tenth and eleventh centuries and that their original nuclei were settleof merchants. When he later, in 1927, wrote
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Les villes du moyen age, characteristically subtitled Essai d'histoire economique et sociale, he remained loyal to his original theories but developed certain aspects of the subject more fully. He expanded especially the discussion of Italian and Russian towns. In order to place in proper perspective the effect of the development of the cloth industry on the growth of Flemish towns, Pirenne decided to write a history of that industry. A preliminary step was the collection and publication of the available source materials, and this was accomplished by Pirenne in collaboration with Georges Espinas (1906-1924). Pirenne himself, however, was never to write the history of the industry; others did so, piecemeal, according to his guidelines. Pirenne pioneered in historical demography. His study of the population of Ypres in the fifteenth century set the pattern for such studies in Belgium (1903). Another of his important intellectual contributions was contained in his article "The Stages in the Social History of Capitalism" (1914), which aroused great interest in international historical circles at the beginning of this century; it presented the theory that the evolution of capitalism did not follow a straight line but rather a cyclical pattern, in which each phase of development toward freedom and progress was followed by one characterized by regulation and conservatism, which was in turn succeeded by a phase in which a generation of homines novi reintroduced progressive tendencies. Pirenne's comprehensive interpretation of medieval social and economic history in his Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe (1933) was to influence economic historians for at least a quarter of a century after his death. Two aspects of this work deserve particular mention: the importance of the role ascribed to long-distance trade as the primary stimulus to economic evolution and the characterization of the end of the Middle Ages as a period of contraction. The scope of Pirenne's influence may be inferred from his close connection with the two most important Continental periodicals devoted to social and economic history, the Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte and the Annales d'histoire economique et sociale: both these journals published important articles by Pirenne in their earliest issues. Even after his death, Pirenne attracted considerable attention through his posthumously published book, Mohammed and Charlemagne (1935), in which he suggested that the crucial break between
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antiquity and the Middle Ages did not occur in the fifth century but rather about the year 700, when the Muslims had conquered the southern shores of the Mediterranean. The theory was based chiefly on economic considerations and gave rise to heated controversy. H. VAN WERVEKE [Directly related are the entries CAPITALISM; CITY. Other relevant material may be found in HISTORY, article on ECONOMIC HISTORY.] WORKS BY PIRENNE
(1893-1895) 1939 L'origine des constitutions urbaines au moyen age. Volume 1, pages 1-110 in Henri Pirenne, Les villes et les institutions urbaines. Paris: Alcan; Brussels: Nouvelle Societe d'Editions. 1900-1932 Histoire de Belgique. 7 vols. Brussels: Lamertin. (1903) 1951 Les denombrements de la population d'Ypres au XVe siecle (1412-1506). Pages 458-488 in Henri Pirenne, Histoire economique de I'occident medieval. Bruges (Belgium): Desclee de Brouwer. 1906-1924 ESPINAS, GEORGES; and PIRENNE, HENRI (editors) Recueil de documents relatifs a I'histoire de I'industrie drapiere en Flandre. 4 vols. Brussels: Kiessling. -» Additions to this work were published in Volume 93 of the Academic Roy ale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-arts de Belgique, Brussels, Commission Royale d'Histoire, Bulletin. (1910) 1915 Belgian Democracy: Its Early History. London and New York: Longmans. -» First published as Les anciennes democraties des Pays-Bas. A paperback edition under the title Early Democracies in the Low Countries was published in 1963 by Harper. 1914 The Stages in the Social History of Capitalism. American Historical Review 19:494-515. (1927) 1956 Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. -> First published as Les villes du moyen age: Essai d'histoire economique et sociale. 1932 Guilds, European. Volume 7, pages 208-214 in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan. (1933) 1936 Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. London: Trubner. -> First published in French. A paperback edition was published in 1956 by Harcourt. A new, revised French edition with a critical bibliography by H. van Werveke was published in 1963 by Presses Universitaires de France. (1935) 1958 Mohammed and Charlemagne. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Barnes & Noble. -> First published, posthumously, in French. A paperback edition was published in 1963 by World. (1936) 1956 A History of Europe: From the Invasions to the XVI Century. 8th ed. New York: University Books. -» First published, posthumously, in French. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
GANSHOF, F. L. 1959 Henri Pirenne. Volume 30, columns 671—723 in Academie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-arts de Belgique, Brussels, Biographie nationale. Brussels: Bruylant. Henri Pirenne: Hommages et souvenirs. 2 vols. 1938 Brussels: Nouvelle Societe d'Editions. LYON, BRYCE 1960 L'oeuvre de Henri Pirenne apres vingt-cinq ans. Moyen age 66:437-493.
PITT-RIVERS, A. H. L. F. Augustus Henry Lane Fox (1827-1900), the man who now holds a very high place in the history of archeology and anthropology as General Pitt-Rivers, was born into an ordinary English and Scottish aristocratic family. His father was W. A. Lane Fox of Hope Hall in Yorkshire, and his mother, Lady Caroline, was a daughter of the eighteenth earl of Morton. He changed his name to Pitt-Rivers in 1880, when he unexpectedly inherited the estates of his uncle George Pitt, the second baron Rivers. Owing to his own exceptional endowments, he and his descendants were to enter into a more intellectual aristocracy, for he himself married a daughter of Lord Stanley of Alderley, and one of his daughters became the wife of the well-known archeologist John Lubbock, afterward Lord Avebury. He began his career in the conventional aristocratic tradition, going to Sandhurst Military College and afterward being commissioned in the Grenadier Guards. He was. in fact, a successful soldier, distinguishing himself in the field in the Crimean War and retiring with the rank of lieutenant general. Quite early, however, his originality and gift for research made themselves felt and he was charged with tasks which involved investigating the history of small arms in the British Army and, subsequently, their improvement. His work in this field had important military results, but far more important was the influence it had on his own thinking. This was a time when biological evolution was on everyone's mind, and Pitt-Rivers' study of muskets and rifles made him realize that principles similar to those of biological evolution could be applied to human artifacts. They, too, evolved in a sequence of minute improvements—or, occasionally, followed abortive lines of development which led to their disappearance. While he thought, he also bought—-and gathered in. He had soon amassed large collections of specimens, some ancient, some the handiwork of surviving primitive peoples (or savages, as he usually called them). His house in London became so crowded with weapons, skulls, stone implements, pottery, and other works of primitive art and craft that he decided to found a public museum, arranged according to his evolutionary system. The authorities established the greater part of it in Bethnal Green in east London, and Pitt-Rivers himself wrote the illustrated catalogue in time for the opening in 1874 (South Kensington Museum 1874).
PITT-RIVERS, A. H. L. F. In a paper presented to the Anthropological Institute in that year, he pointed out that, while archeology had imposed classifications on prehistoric artifacts, nothing of the kind had been attempted in ethnology and museums had hitherto been arranged by regions (see Evolution of Culture). His own collections were now exhibited to show the development of forms and their transmission from one people to another. Although he classified the objects of material culture, he insisted on the mental processes behind them, seeing each category as representing an idea —the idea of the spear thrower, of the bow—each original idea subsequently being modified by lesser ideas for improvements. He carried the biological analogy so far as to say that human ideas can be divided into genera, species, and varieties. The collections soon grew too large for the accommodation at Bethnal Green and were transferred to Oxford, where the Pitt-Rivers Museum, still arranged on evolutionary lines, now plays an important part in the teaching of anthropology at the university. Pitt-Rivers had long been interested in ancient cultures, and when he inherited the vast (29,000 acres) Rivers estates around Cranborne Chase in Dorset, the focus of his attention inevitably shifted from ethnology to prehistory. For the Chase lay in the heart of chalk country exceptionally rich in prehistoric remains, and he found himself the possessor of large numbers of monuments dating from the Stone Age down to Roman times. It is a proof of his gifts and of his stamina that, beginning in a new field on retirement from military service, when he was over fifty years old, he was able to make himself one of the world's pioneers in scientific archeology. Almost at once he set to work on the excavation of burial mounds, earthworks, and prehistoric villages. And the precision and thoroughness which he had developed in the army he applied to such effect that his excavating techniques were, from the first, as accurate as those demanded by modern standards. In particular he saw that things still incomprehensible to him would be understood by later workers and that it was therefore a duty to record everything he observed in meticulous detail. This he did, regardless of either time or cost, and as a result it has indeed proved possible for Modern archeologists to utilize his findings. He was an innovator, too, in paying attention especially to the exploration of settlement sites and m excavating them completely. These laborious a nd expensive undertakings were in striking contrast to the hasty opening of burial mounds which
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was then still prevalent. They provided almost the first reliable evidence concerning the living conditions of early man in Britain. He not only recorded every type of find on plans and sectional drawings that were far ahead of their time but also had exact models carved in mahogany of all the principal excavated monuments. Soon he had again accumulated so much material that only a museum could house it. He had one built not far from his house at Rushmore, and it is still maintained, with its fine display of local antiquities, in the midst of the Dorset countryside. He had set altogether new standards in excavation, and he did no less in scientific publication. Between 1887 and 1898 he published his discoveries in four privately and sumptuously produced volumes entitled Excavations in Cranborne Chase. The importance of Pitt-Rivers' work received adequate public recognition even in his own day, although his reputation has certainly increased as archeology has caught up with this extraordinary pioneer. In fact, he became the first inspector of ancient monuments in Britain after the passing of the Ancient Monuments Protection Act in 1882. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society, vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and was a most energetic president of the Anthropological Institute. Although he had made himself a scientist, General Pitt-Rivers remained very much a soldierly aristocrat. He caused his numerous assistants to wear his colors and on occasion to ride to excavations on penny-farthing bicycles, following humbly in the wake of his high dogcart. As a landowner he was, however, somewhat eccentric. He planted his estate at Rushmore with exotic trees and shrubs and stocked it with wild animals, which are said sometimes to have terrified visitors and countryfolk. He also provided a brass band to play for his tenants on Sundays—and expected them to attend. He remained true to his rational and scientific principles to the end. He ordered his body to be cremated after his death and left his head to the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. This museum was destroyed by a bomb during World War n. JACQUETTA HAWKES [For discussion of the subsequent development of PittRivers' work, see ARCHEOLOGY.] WORKS BY PITT-RIVERS
1883
On the Development and Distribution of Primitive Locks and Keys. London: Chatto & Windus.
1 02
PLANNED PARENTHOOD
1887-1898 Excavations in Cranborne Chase, Near Rushmore, on the Borders of Dorset and Wilts: 1800-1896. 4 vols. London: Printed privately. 1890 King John's House, Tollard Royal, Wilts. London: Printed privately. 1900 Antique Works of Art From Benin: Collected by Lieutenant-General Pitt-Rivers. London: Printed privately. The Evolution ~f Culture, and Other Essays. Oxford: Clarendon, 1906. Edited by J. L. Myres. -» Essays first published between 1867 and 1875. See especially pages 1-19, "Principles of Classification." SUPPLEMENTARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GRAY, HAROLD ST. GEORGE 1905 Index to Excavations in Cranborne Chase and King John's House, Tollard Royal. Taunton Castle, Somerset: Printed privately. -» See especially "A Memoir of Lieut.-General PittRivers," pages ix-xxxvi, and a bibliographical list of the works of Pitt-Rivers, pages xxxvii-xliii. SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM, LONDON, BETHNAL GREEN BRANCH (1874) 1877 Catalogue of the Anthropological Collection Lent by Colonel Lane-Fox. London: Science and Art Department of the Museum. TYLOR, EDWARD B. 1901 Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers: 1827-1900. Volume 22, pages 1140-1142 in Dictionary of National Biography, Supplement. London: Smith. WISSLER, CLARK 1934 Pitt-Rivers, Augustus Henry LaneFox. Volume 12, pages 141-142 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.
PLANNED PARENTHOOD See FERTILITY CONTROL.
PLANNING, ECONOMIC i. WESTERN EUROPE ii. EASTERN EUROPE in. DEVELOPMENT PLANNING
J. Tinbergen John Michael Montias W. Arthur Lewis
WESTERN EUROPE
Planning is engaged in by all sorts of institutions; among them, business enterprises and governments. This article mainly deals with government planning. Present-day planning is rooted partly in socialism, partly in modern economic ideas as expressed in national accounts, Keynesian theories, and anticyclical policy generally. The latter expresses the desire to understand and influence the economy—the national economy, to begin with—as a whole. This desire was strengthened by the great depression, when it was clear that something had gone wrong. At the same time, planning, based on market analysis and similar techniques, has been increasingly applied in big business enterprises. Over-all government planning was not applied in western Europe before World War n. Restricting
ourselves to democratically ruled countries, we may say that the first examples of over-all planning were found in the United Kingdom, where the Economic Section of the Cabinet Offices prepared estimates of the national product and some of its components as a basis for the organization of the war effort. Immediately after the war, when a number of democracies started to function again, the Netherlands and Norway followed the British example— each in its own way and for the purpose of postwar reconstruction. France soon followed in 1946. In a sense, some national planning was imposed on all member countries of the Organization of European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), created to administer the European Recovery, or Marshall, Plan, which started operations in 1948. Not long afterward Italy began an exercise in planning, known as the Vanoni Plan, for a balanced development of north and south. This plan was not given official status but served as an important background to Italian policy. In Sweden and Denmark planning developed gradually out of business cycle policy: the annual reports, for instance, of the Swedish Konjunkturinstitut hesitantly progressed in presenting estimates of the next year's inflationary or deflationary gaps, adding suggestions for counteracting them. Several years later, in 1959, Belgium established its Programming Bureau. The remaining countries did not have official agencies in charge of planning, but all OEEC members fully cooperated in the planning exercise of that organization for the period 1955-1960 (OEEC 1957). The planning issue became relevant for Germany when, in its Action Program, the Commission of the European Economic Community stated the necessity for some planning at the community level (European Economic Community 1962). The topic was widely discussed (Albrecht 1964; Plitzko 1964), and these discussions showed the differences in terminology and ideology still prevailing in western Europe, mainly in Germany, though even there they were more seeming than real. This article will discuss the definition of planning which seems to be the most practical one; the theory of planning; the concepts of economic order and economic policy serving as the background of planning; the methods of short-term and long-term planning; the organization and procedure of planning activities; the supervision of plans and their testing; and the impact of planning on society. Definition and theory of planning. Present-day western European countries have "mixed" rather than purely "capitalist" or "free-enterprise" econ-
PLANNING, ECONOMIC: Western Europe omies. They have public sectors of considerable size, and they exert various types of controls over the private sectors. This state of affairs is a product of a pragmatic policy but is consistent with modern economic theory. If the question is asked what economic order—that is, what set of institutions— will maximize welfare under the constraints imposed upon us by nature—that is, the laws of technology and psychology—the answer is a mixed order (Tinbergen 1959; Myrdal 1960). The old idea of Paretian welfare economics, according to which free enterprise would produce the optimum, is tenable only if the laws of technology exclude external effects and indivisibilities [see WELFARE ECONOMICS]. Where external effects and indivisibilities do exist, activities characterized by either of them should not be left to private enterprise. A set of tasks for the community, represented by government, can be derived on the basis of this distinction. They consist of activities showing external effects or indivisible means of production and of a number of otherwise determined policy tasks. Among the former we have public production of energy, transportation services, education, and information. Among the latter we encounter the regulation of unstable markets, the redistribution of income (as required even by the Pareto optimum conditions), the organization of the monetary system, and the determination of the optimum level of savings and of an optimum level of total demand (high and stable employment). Taken together, these tasks constitute such a complicated set of activities that their efficient execution requires preparation. Planning is just that. (Over long periods the most desirable development of an economy should coincide more or less with the theoretical concept of optimal growth [see ECONOMIC GROWTH, article on MATHEMATICAL THEORY].) We will not use the word "planning" in the sense of a particular order or policy, such as a command order with detailed intervention. Depending on the scope of the tasks assumed by the government, planning of these tasks will also be more or less extensive. Independently of the scope of the tasks, however, their preparation requires, in principle, the determination of general goals for the most desirable economic development of the country. The government's activities then must be conducive to that most desirable development. To the extent that such an optimum development requires government activities, it represents a task-setting device for various public institutions. The delineation of private activities is not, as a rule, coercive but, rather, "indicative." It constitutes a background for
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the appraisal—in the future—of the actual accomplishment of the private sector. This does not necessarily mean that all deviations from the plan must be considered "errors" of the private sector. There may have been good reasons to deviate from the plan. Moreover, the difference between the role of the plan for the public sector and for the private sector should not be exaggerated. Only in the abstract can government completely control all its activities. In reality it consists of so many levels and units that its activities cannot all be determined at the top. The lower units, such as the municipalities, can be influenced mainly by indirect means, and there is not so much difference, from this point of view, between municipalities and private enterprises. Moreover, a certain degree of codetermination may be given to the private sector in the formation and the execution of the plan. Planning should be seen as a manifestation of the ever-growing tendency consciously to organize human activity. In this process there is a continuous search for efficiency in its broadest sense. In the particular case of economic planning this means, on the one hand, that social or group needs are increasingly recognized as aims and, on the other hand, that no means, including planning, should be used where not positively contributing to these aims. We observe a gradual expansion of the fields to which planning is being applied; thus, education is now rapidly becoming more planned than some decades ago, and there is a tendency to extend planning to ever larger geographical areas. Finally we observe the integration of hitherto isolated and incoherent pieces of planning into a broader, more coherent frame. Thus, town and country planning are now becoming integrated into national economic planning. Economic order and economic policy. We have already stated that the optimum economic order must be described as a certain set of institutions. Examples of such institutions are private enterprises, public enterprises, markets, social insurance schemes, tax systems, monetary systems, and hierarchies of public authorities. Institutions in turn are characterized by certain rules of conduct or as instruments of the society's economic policy. Examples are tax rates and social insurance benefits. Apart from a static concept of an optimum order, there is a continual process of striving for and managing the optimal order, which we usually call economic policy. In a general way, any economic policy may be described by its aims and its means. Both aims and means may be qualitative or quantitative.
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Most institutions as such must be described in qualitative terms; their rules of conduct or policy instruments can sometimes be described in a quantitative way. Thus, the level of a tax rate, of an import duty, or a public investment has a quantitative aspect. We will use the word "target" for a quantitative aim and the word "instrument" for a quantitative means and reserve the words "aims" and "means" for situations where both qualitative and quantitative aspects are present. There is a causal nexus from means to aims, with intermediary consequences of the use of means which may be called intermediate or derived aims, as distinct from final aims. Thus, the ultimate aim may be higher utility or satisfaction for the citizenry, but higher consumption may be the first derived aim, higher incomes the second, higher employment the third, and higher investments the fourth. Clearly, short-term policies will be characterized more by derived or "nearer-by" aims than long-term policies will be. We will put the dividing line between short-term and long-term policies at somewhat more than a year. The standard example of short-term plans will be an annual plan and that of long-term plans a five-year plan. Often a five-year plan will be classed as a mediumterm plan and the phrase "long-term plan" or "perspective plan" will be used to indicate 15- to 25-year plans. In western Europe the emphasis has been on the shorter range, mainly because of the already developed character of the economies. For less developed economies, perspective plans are more important than for developed economies. For short-term policy in western Europe a wellknown set of targets has been (1) full employment; (2) balance of payments equilibrium; (3) a level of net investment somewhere near 15 or 20 per cent of national income; (4) an increase in the share of lower income groups in national income; and (5) stable prices. It should be noted that full employment has been interpreted variously, but often as a level of unemployment less than 2 or 3 per cent of the labor force. It should also be noted that the fourth aim has seldom been expressed in figures and, finally, that price stability has not been attained. A compilation of the targets or "objectives" of economic policy in Western countries, including the United States, was made by Kirschen and his collaborators (Kirschen et al. 1964, p. 148). They added a listing of instruments, making a two-entry table indicating which instruments are supposed to help attain which objectives. The table contains 16 objectives: (1) full employment; (2) price sta-
bility; (3) improvement in the balance of payments; (4) expansion of production; (5) promotion of internal competition; (6) promotion of coordination; (7) increase in the mobility of labor; (8) increase in the mobility of capital; (9) international division of labor; (10) satisfaction of collective needs; (11) improvement in the distribution of income and wealth; (12) protection and priorities to regions or industries; (13) improvement in the pattern of private consumption; (14) security of supply; (15) improvement in the size or structure of population; and (16) reduction in working hours. The main instruments of economic policy in western European countries have been public finance and social insurance, the regulation of unstable markets, and some quantitative restrictions in foreign trade. A fuller list is given in the table just discussed. It is subdivided into 17 instruments of public finance; 17 instruments of money, credit, and the exchange rate; 16 instruments of direct control; and 11 types of changes in the institutional framework. These numbers probably do not exhaust the number of instruments available. One may enter into much more detail by distinguishing between a number of sectors or industries, and both in wartime and postwar Western economies and in communist-ruled economies, a very large number of instruments consist of investment encouragement or quantitative restrictions for single industries. In many instances there is a choice among several instruments to attain the same target. In principle, both the aims and the means are the subject of autonomous choices of the community: questions of taste, in a way. The restrictions on this autonomy are that the means and the aims should not be mutually inconsistent; this implies that the means should, in the degree used, lead to the aims. In practice the autonomy is of little consequence because of the similarity in tastes among different nations. As a rule the aims are not very different among nations; the autonomy on the side of means usually consists of excluding some extreme means, such as forced labor and detailed intervention. The choice among the some sixty instruments mentioned by Kirschen depends largely on the effects expected from each. The knowledge of these effects is equivalent to knowledge about the operation of the economy. Kirschen's table suggests some qualitative knowledge of this kind in that it indicates, for each objective, the instruments supposed to effect it. What is needed for planning purposes, however, is quan-
PLANNING, ECONOMIC: Western Europe titative knowledge. This has been accumulated for the last half century by an ever-increasing volume of statistical and econometric research. The remainder of this article will discuss the various elements of the planning process, that is, of the preparation of economic policy. The main elements may be defined as the tasks, the methods, the organization, and the procedure of planning. What is meant by the tasks will be clear from what has been said in the present section. They consist primarily of making up plans, either year by year or for longer periods. In addition there are preparatory studies, especially those concerning alternative methods of production in some industries and those concerning the structure of consumer demand. There may also be special studies of the effects of the introduction of new institutions or of particular measures—for instance, to increase productivity or to regulate a given market. Studies about the consequences of European integration represent another example of an element in the planning process. The methods of short-term planning. By the "methods of planning" will be understood the technical methods used to estimate the framework of figures constituting the hard core of any plan. This quantitative job must always be preceded by a qualitative analysis of the changes in the social order deemed desirable and of the significance that should be attached to the economic phenomena that are to be estimated quantitatively. For shortterm plans the changes in the social order cannot be large, since such changes usually take time. The main emphasis will be on the quantitative part of the process, which may be seen as the necessary adjustment of the economy to short-term changes in world markets and to autonomous changes in private behavior, with a view to maintaining full employment and achieving some of the other targets mentioned in the preceding section, including the portion of a long-term plan of development pertaining to the year considered. As already stated, this requires knowledge of many reactions of the economy to autonomous changes and to induced ones. Examples of such reactions are demand and supply elasticities (both with regard to prices and to other determinants) in a number of markets, such as the market for consumer goods, for export goods, and so on. The main problem is to find the values of the instrument variables—taxes, public investments, credit and wage policies, etc.—given the policy targets and the changes in external or exogenous data. We will use the latter term here in the restricted sense of not including changes in
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instrument variables. Sometimes such exogenous variables are indicated as "other data." Essentially there are two methods of solving the main problem: trial and error and the mathematical method. By the latter is meant a systematic use of symbols and equations (or more generally constraints, including inequalities) expressing the reactions mentioned before and a number of technical relationships, which must be satisfied simultaneously by all the figures in the plan. As a rule, combinations of both methods will be used; one may even argue that certain portions of mathematics do not surpass the level of trial and error. Yet the weight given to one or the other of the two extremes differs among countries, and the Netherlands Central Planning Bureau is known for a rather extensive use of simple mathematical models for the framework of planning. The models used (Netherlands . . . 1956; Tinbergen 1956) can be characterized as generalized Keynesian models, since the Keynesian consumption equation is one of the most important. Since the Netherlands is a small country, export and import demand play a considerable role. Supply equations have been given the special shape of price fixation equations. Capital as a factor limiting production does not enter the system: it is assumed that in the short run capital goods are redundant, but labor does enter as a limiting factor. Public finance is described in some detail, distinguishing various types of revenues. Investment is split into private and public, and the private into investment in fixed equipment and in stocks. The models used often consist of some thirty or forty equations. They are adapted to the particular purpose they have to serve. The models used for the general plan differ from those used for special studies (see below). They do not contain financial flows, that is, changes in the main types of financial assets, since so little is known about the propensities to hold various kinds of assets. Financial flows are dealt with separately, using balance equations and a number of less formalized assumptions about the changes in single asset holdings (see below). The formal model refers to the main commodity flows, prices, and current payments of incomes, expenditures, taxes, etc. The application of the model starts with an estimate of the initial position, that is, the situation in the year preceding the plan year. This position, of course, has to be in part estimated and is presented in the form of national accounts and the balance of resources and expenditures. The next step consists of an estimate of the
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probable changes in exogenous data (in the restricted sense defined before, that is, excluding policy instruments). An important part is played by estimates of the changes in exports, taking into account income changes of the country-groups of destination, changes in the price levels of competitors and of Dutch exports, incidental changes in trade policies, etc. Another important datum is the level of private investment to be expected in the coming (plan) year. Investment estimates are based partly on econometric relations but, because of the latter's unreliability, also on a direct survey of a large number of firms. A number of items of public expenditure are also considered data, and figures for these are obtained from the treasury. Agricultural supplies are usually known from crop statistics for the current year and are estimated at the "normal" level for the plan year. Seasonal fluctuations in building and demand for fuel are also assumed to be normal. The coefficients of the equations reflecting reactions, technological or institutional relationships, etc., are taken from econometric and statistical studies and are revised periodically. With these figures given and with given targets, the system of equations can be used to determine the most desirable values of the instrument variables and of the economic variables not representing targets. The results are discussed with various ministries, and as a rule the published plan will be the result of these discussions, avoiding a deviation of policy and plan. The influence the plan exerts is mainly through these discussions. Sometimes alternative figures are added in order to show the possible effect of changes in instrument variables. Thus, the effects of possible changes in wages other than the ones envisaged or of public expenditure for different purposes have been shown in some plans. Once the current money flows have been estimated, financial flows (changes in assets) are estimated so as to produce the most desirable development. The main problems involved in annual planning may be summarized, using the schema of B. Hansen (1955) as follows. From the table of resources and uses we derive the permissible volume of private consumption as the residual between production on the one hand and investment and public expenditure on the other (assuming balance of payments equilibrium on current account). From permissible consumption we derive the necessary tax level. From the financing equation for private investment we derive the necessary increase in banking credit to business. From the balance sheet of the commercial banks we then
derive the necessary change in reserve requirements, which constitutes the main instrument of monetary policy. The methods of long-term planning. France has given attention to long-term planning to a greater extent than has the rest of western Europe. The French example is now being followed by other countries, including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Long-term planning has not been entirely absent in the other countries but has been applied somewhat less systematically. The method of the French Fourth Plan, as set out by Gazes (1962, pp. 33 ff.), was that of successive approximations. In a first approximation, a projection was made for a set of 17 sectors—presumably using input-output coefficients in addition to those already mentioned in "The methods of short-term planning"—employing three alternative assumptions with regard to the general rate of growth: 3, 4.5, and 6 per cent annual growth. In a second approximation, after the government expressed a preference for a rate of 5 to 5.5 per cent, more detailed figures were prepared by "vertical committees" covering 27 main branches and 300 subbranches. The figures were checked by "horizontal committees" dealing with general aspects such as financing of investment, current demand versus supply, manpower and education supply, and so on. The method is not too different from methods several authors have recommended to developing countries; one difference is in the relative scarcities of the factors of production. Capital is less scarce and labor more scarce in developed than in developing countries. This will come up in the concrete appraisal of single projects and in the choice of technologies. For developing countries this appraisal of projects is often added as a third phase. Lately, a geographical subdivision of the nation to be planned for has been added and a corresponding phase in long-term planning methods distinguished. Long-term planning methods have also been developed for special purposes, such as the preparation of institutional reforms or educational planning. In the Netherlands, an extensive study was made of the introduction of unemployment insurance in a new form and of the introduction of profit sharing by workers. In both cases mathematical models were used in which variables appeared characteristic for the particular problem studied; for instance, in the first example the contributions to be made by employers and employees, the benefits to the unemployed, etc. A further example of special models is the model used to study
PLANNING, ECONOMIC: Western Europe the consequences of Benelux integration (Verdoorn 1960). Organization and procedure of planning. The "organization of planning" considers the hierarchic relations within the group of persons and administrative units charged with the tasks of planning. The "procedure of planning" considers the nature and time order of outside contacts made during the execution of planning activities. In the description of the organization, the distinction will be made between the external and the internal organization of the main administrative unit charged with planning. This unit will sometimes be an office, like the Netherlands Central Planning Bureau, within one of the ministries; sometimes it will have a more independent status, as in France, where it is called a commissariat. In a number of developing countries it is a ministry by itself. The level may thus be different, but as a rule it has some interdepartmental character. It may either be organized under the prime minister or, if elsewhere (treasury, ministry of economic affairs), have the right to deal with all ministries
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without special permission of the minister concerned. The ideal situation, in the author's opinion, is for the planning unit to be directly responsible to the prime minister. The preceding remarks refer to the external organization. The internal organization is determined by the number and nature of the divisions and subdivisions and the division of labor among them. It also depends upon the size and the background of its staff. As a rule, different divisions will deal with long-term and short-term planning work, since experience teaches that charging the same persons with these two types of work leads to neglect of the long-term tasks—they are usually considered less pressing than short-term ones. Research in the narrower sense of basic scientific analysis, as distinct from the applied type of planning proper, will be entrusted to a separate division or be the task of the long-term planning division. Current advisory work can best be entrusted to the short-term planning division. Sometimes subdivisions will be established to deal with individual sectors of economic life.
Table 1 — Schedule of the French Fourth Plan
GOVERNMENT
PLANNING COMMISSARIAT AND RESEARCH SERVICE
SOCIAL AND PROFESSIONAL CONSULTATION
Preliminary studies for 1965 and 1975 (1959 and beginning of 1960) - Investment and Planning Section of the Economic and Social Council (spring 1960) Directives of government to Commis--^sariat; appointment of members of Committees of Modernization Elaboration of accounts for 1965 derived from government directives (July 1960) Start of work of 27 Modernization Committees (summer 1960); reply to questionnaire (February 1961) First check of physical and financial consistency of work by committees (March 1961); elaboration of a provisional synthesis for 1965 on the basis of a growth rate of 5 per cent Decision by government on rate of ^~ growth and distribution of public investments (April 1961) -^ Continuation of work on the basis of new growth rate of 5.5 per cent Final synthesis (May 1961); draft plan <EApproval of draft by government ^(September 1961) ~^ Consultation of High Planning Council (October 1961); consultation of Economic and Social Council (November 1961) Parliamentary vote on draft law approving Fourth Plan Source: Adapted from Gazes 1962, p. 34.
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The planning unit may have branches for individual sectors, for instance, in some specialized ministries (agriculture, manufacturing industry, trade, transportation, education) or for individual regions (state planning units in a federation). But the organization may also be different, if the tasks are entrusted f o the corresponding ministries or lower public authorities. In our terminology the contacts with these branches are then no longer internal but external, and form part of the "procedure" of planning. Clearly, the number of persons engaged by the central unit depends on which of these two forms of organization has been chosen. Usually in western European countries this number is not very high. In France the Commissariat employs only about forty persons; the Netherlands Central Planning Bureau is somewhat more centralized and employs some one hundred persons, whereas the Norwegian unit is smaller. In the French system, however, about three thousand persons, distributed over some three hundred working groups, collaborate in the committees dealing with the single sectors (Gazes 1962, p. 35). This number far surpasses the number of committee members in the Netherlands, which amounts to less than one hundred. We now come to the subject of the procedure of planning. In France, as the preceding figures show, outside contacts are highly developed. The time order of the various contacts is well illustrated in Table 1. In the Netherlands, sector plans have occasionally been discussed with representatives of some sectors but not systematically prepared by working groups, as in France. Some steps in this direction have recently been taken. Until now, since the emphasis is on macroeconomic means of economic policy, the usual procedure, once agreement has been reached provisionally with the various government departments, has consisted mainly of consultation with central organizations of employers and employees, and with independent experts, both in the Socio-economic Council and in the Central Planning Commission. Apart from the committee work, which is far more voluminous in France than elsewhere, so far the procedure is not very different from that of the French. Major changes in general government policies in the Netherlands (where wages are, to some extent, under the supervision of the government) have as a rule been preceded by advice given by the Socio-economic Council, based on research and plans made in the Central Planning Bureau.
Supervision and testing of plans. In western Europe, planning agencies are not charged with the supervision of the implementation of plans. There is far less scope for such supervision by a separate agency than there may be in developing or in communist-ruled countries, since in the latter such an important part is played, within economic policy, by the individual public investments envisaged. Such projects may be in need of progress supervision by a special agency, although this is a debatable issue. The general view held in western Europe is that planning units are advisory bodies and that supervision proper is precisely the government's responsibility, that is, the responsibility of the executive agencies. Indirectly, any deviation of actual policies from those recommended by the planners will show up in the next plan, since this always starts out with a survey of the year preceding the plan year. Routine statistics will show any such deviations; but there may be a need for some special statistics on the progress made in big investment projects. Such statistics have been developed in the Netherlands during the last decade. It has become customary also, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, to report not only investment planned for the coming year by private business but also actual investments completed in the year before and estimated investments in the current year, therefore covering three years in all. If supervision proper is not considered a task of the planning unit, testing of previous plans is very much so. By testing is meant an analysis of actual compared with recommended development. In principle, actual development of any variable may be considered the result of three types of factors, each of them also used to get the estimated "most desirable" development of the same variable: (a) the values of the exogenous variables (excluding policy instruments); (b) the values of the instrument variables; and (c) the values of the coefficients of the model used. As a consequence, deviations between planned and actual values may be ascribed to (a) deviations in the values of the exogenous variables, that is, forecasting errors in these variables; (b) deviations in the values of the instrument variables, that is, between actual and recommended policies; and (c) deviations in the values of the coefficients, or errors in the model. If we like, we can combine (a) and (c) and call them forecasting errors in the endogenous variables. It is possible to give a special form to the comparison between predicted and observed values of either exogenous or endogenous variables by count-
PLANNING, ECONOMIC: Western Europe ing the number of cases where, in three successive years, turning points were either (i) correctly predicted, or (ii) wrongly predicted, i.e., predicted where none occurred, or (iii) not predicted, i.e., where they did occur. The reason for choosing this particular test is that with so-called naive forecasting methods, turning points will never be found: it is essential for these methods that they extrapolate the direction of change observed between the first two years. Thus, Theil (1958) found that the Netherlands Central Planning Bureau correctly predicted 13 out of 14 turning points in a number of variables over a number of periods, wrongly predicted another 5 and did not predict the one left of the 14 observed turning points. The record for a number of forecasts made by Scandinavian institutions was that out of 21 turning points, (i) 15 were correctly forecast, (ii) 3 wrongly forecast, and (iii) 6 were not forecast. A similar test consists of scrutinizing whether acceleration or deceleration occurred. Out of 91 Dutch cases, 71 were predicted in the correct way (either acceleration or deceleration); out of 74 Scandinavian cases, 62 were characterized in the correct way. From other studies (by C. van der Panne, in Dutch) it was found that relatively good forecasts between 1949 and 1955 were made of price indexes, indirect taxes, public employment, and the value of exports, whereas relatively poor forecasts were made of invisibles, imports and exports, investments, productivity, and the salaries of civil servants. The impact of planning on society. To conclude, we may ask the general question "What has been the impact of planning of the western European type on society?" Clearly the effects, if any, must be the justification of the efforts and other sacrifices made. For the time being, the answers to this question can only be approximative; and even this phrase may be a euphemism. For well-defined markets with well-defined regulations, the impact of such regulations may sometimes be estimated with a fair degree of accuracy. For the economy as a whole only little can be said. The main point to be made is that planning has succeeded in avoiding the main inconsistency in unplanned economies of the pre-1914 type, namely, the underutilization of productive capacity as a consequence of business cycles and of structural disequilibria. It is highly probable that the disappearance of the business cycle after World War n has been obtained with the aid of macroeconomic planning of the type described in this article. A
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crude estimate of the contribution to national product to be attributed to anticyclical policy can be obtained from the estimates of unused capacity prevailing in pre-1914 economies. Two measures are conceivable: the extent of unused labor and the extent of unused equipment. The figures for unused labor are represented by unemployment percentages. Figures on capacity are very uncertain, as shown by recent studies by Hickman (1965, p. 114). This is due in part to the fact that production at lowest cost is well below capacity production. Therefore our estimate must be seen as only a first crude approach to the problem. But a fair guess of unused capacity may be 10 to 15 per cent, meant as an average for unplanned societies. This guess implies that anticyclical policy may have contributed 10 to 15 per cent to national income. The further question may now be asked, "What degree of detail in planning is optimal?" It is the author's contention that the optimum degree of detail in planning is below the degree of detail applied in the communist-ruled societies. Some support is given to this contention by a recent assessment of the fluctuations in economic activity in various countries over the period 1950-1960 (Staller 1964). These fluctuations appear to be roughly 4 per cent for all communist countries, 1.5 per cent for the Soviet Union, 4 per cent for all Western countries, and 7.5 per cent for the United States. The gain from more detailed planning as applied in the Soviet Union appears to be less than 3 per cent. This points to decreasing returns for the intensification of planning, if one tries to imagine the much higher level of planning effort in the Soviet Union as compared with western Europe. The question is in need of more precise research. J. TlNBERGEN
[See also ECONOMETRIC MODELS, AGGREGATE.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ALBRECHT, KARL 1964 Planifikateure beim Werk: Wirtschaft zwischen Zwang und Freiheit. Dxisseldorf (Germany): Econ-Verlag. BJERVE, FETTER J. 1959 Planning in Norway: 1947— 1956. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. CAZES, BERNARD 1962 La planification francaise: Esprit et methodes. Problemes de I'Europe 18:31-39. EUROPEAN ECONOMIC COMMUNITY, COMMISSION 1962 Memorandum of the Commission on the Action Programme of the Community for the Second Stage. Brussels: The Commission. FOURASTIE, JEAN; and COURTHEOUX, JEAN PAUL 1963 La planification economique en France. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. FRISCH, RAGNAR 1961 Survey of Types of Economic Forecasting and Programming: A Brief Description
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of the Oslo Channel Model. Unpublished manuscript. -> Paper read at the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, 7th Conference, 1961. GEARY, ROBERT C. (editor) 1962 Europe's Future in Figures. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. HANSEN, BENT (1955) 1958 The Economic Theory of Fiscal Policy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -> First published as Finanspolitikens ekonomiska teori. HICKMAN, BERT G. 1965 Investment Demand and U.S. Economic Growth. Washington: Brookings Institution. JOHR, WALTER A.; and SINGER, H. W. 1955 The Role of the Economist as Official Adviser. London: Allen & Unwin. KERVYN DE LETTENHOVE, ALBERT 1962 La progranimation en Belgique. Problemes de I'Europe 18:24-30. KIRSCHEN, ETIENNE S. et al. 1964 Economic Policy in Our Time. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. KLEIN, LAWRENCE R.; and GOLDBERGER, A. S. 1955 An Econometric Model of the United States: 1929-1952. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. KRUSE, HANS H. 1962 L'Allemagne et la planification de 1'economie. Problemes de I'Europe 18:12-23. MASSE, PIERRE (1959) 1964 Le choix des investissements: Criteres et methodes. 2d ed. Paris: Dunod. MEADE, JAMES E. 1955 The Theory of International Economic Policy. Volume 2: Trade and Welfare. Oxford Univ. Press. MYRDAL, GUNNAR (1960) 1963 Beyond the Welfare State: Economic Planning and Its Implications. Yale University School of Law, Storrs Lectures on Jurisprudence, 1958. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. NETHERLANDS, CENTRAAL PLANBUREAU 1956 Scope and Methods of the Central Planning Bureau. The Hague: The Bureau. ORGANIZATION OF EUROPEAN ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION 1957 Europe To-day and in 1960. Volume 2: Europe in 1960. Eighth annual report. Paris: The Organization. PLITZKO, ALFRED (editor) 1964 Planung ohne Planwirtschaft. Basel (Switzerland): Kyklos. SANDEE, J. 1962 La planification economique aux PaysBas. Problemes de I'Europe 18:45-48. SANDEE, J. (editor) 1964 Europe's Future Consumption. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. STALLER, GEORGE J. 1964 Fluctuations in Economic Activity: Planned and Free-market Economies: 19501960. American Economic Review 54:385-395. STAMMATI, GAETANO 1962 La programmation economique en Italic. Problemes de I'Europe 18:40-44. STONE, RICHARD; and BROWN, J. A. C. 1962 A Longterm Growth Model for the British Economy. Pages 287-310 in Robert C. Geary (editor), Europe's Future in Figures. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. THEIL, HENRI (1958) 1961 Economic Forecasts and Policy. 2d ed., rev. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. TINBERGEN, JAN (1956) 1964 Economic Policy: Principles and Design. 2d ed. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. TINBERGEN, JAN 1959 The Theory of the Optimum Regime. Pages 264-304 in Jan Tinbergen, Selected Papers. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. TINBERGEN, JAN 1964 Central Planning. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. VERDOORN, PETRUS J. 1960 The Intra-block Trade of Benelux. Pages 291-329 in International Economic Association, Economic Consequences of the Size of
Nations. Edited by E. A. G. Robinson. New York: St. Martins. WOLFF, PIETER DE 1960 Wirtschaftsprognose als Grundlage der Volkswirtschaftspolitik unter besonderer Beriicksichtigung der niederlandischen Verhaltnisse. Pages 109-124 in Dortmund, Sozialakademie, Internationale Tagung, 1959, Wirtschaftsprognose und Wirtschaftsgestaltung. Edited by Hans Bayer. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. ZWEIG, FERDYNAND 1942 The Planning of Free Societies. London: Seeker & Warburg. II EASTERN EUROPE
The nations of eastern Europe, defined to encompass Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Albania, are ruled by Marxist-Leninist parties exercising dictatorial powers in the name of the proletariat. While the leaders of these parties may differ among themselves in points of doctrine or in their foreign policy, they are all committed to public ownership of the basic means of production and to the pursuit of certain economic goals, including chiefly the promotion of heavy industry by means of state direction and control. The economies of eastern Europe, with the partial exception of Yugoslavia, are centrally managed by a complex apparatus of government and party officials similar in most respects to that prevailing in the USSR. Yugoslavia differs from the other communist states in that its economic organization is substantially more decentralized; in the Yugoslav system, which will be described in the last part of this article, market prices play a significant role in determining the allocation of resources under the over-all guidance and supervision of state policy. Early stages. Nationalization of large-scale industry, banking, and foreign trade in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia proceeded rapidly after liberation from Nazi occupation and was virtually completed by 1946. In the countries allied with the losing side in the war—East Germany, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria—which were burdened with heavy reparations payments, mainly in favor of the Soviet Union, comprehensive nationalization measures were delayed until 1947 and 1948. In the area as a whole the "socialization" of local industry and retail establishments and handicrafts, which were either placed under state management or reorganized as cooperatives, occurred chiefly between 1949 and 1951, after which date a minority of these enterprises were allowed to remain in private hands. Since then the number of private enterprises has varied from time to time as state policy became more or less liberal in the issuance of licenses and in the allocation of raw
PLANNING, ECONOMIC: Eastern Europe materials to the private sector. Agriculture, for a time, represented a notable exception to the policy of rapid socialization. Over three-quarters of existing farms remained in private hands until the late 1950s in all countries but Bulgaria, where a majority of farms were already collectivized in 1951. By 1962, however, collectivization was "virtually completed in every east European country, with the exception of Poland. By 1949-1950 the principal features of the Soviet economic model had been adopted in the management of the socialized sector of the east European states. The resulting economic systems were virtually identical up to 1956. Each Politburo, ostensibly under the guidance of the Central Committee of the Party, formulated the general economic policies of the country. The Secretariat of the Central Committee supervised the execution of these policies by government organs. Responsibility for drafting long-term plans (from four to six years in the several countries) and for elaborating current (one-year) plans was vested in a Planning Commission formally attached to the Council of Ministers. In the late 1940s the economic ministries, which supervised the management of the state-owned industries, were organized according to broad sectors (e.g., industry, light industry, agriculture). In the course of time, these ministries underwent progressive fragmentation. By 1955, for instance, Czechoslovakia's machine-building and equipment industry was managed by three separate ministries. Enterprises were directly subordinated to industrial departments of the ministries, called chief administrations or central boards (e.g., in Poland, the Central Board for Agricultural Fertilizers under the Ministry of the Chemical Industry). In conformance with Soviet practice, enterprises were normally placed on khozraschet: they became autonomous accounting and financial entities which, subject to the directives they received from their superior authorities, were expected to minimize costs, show profits, and pay taxes to the central budget; each had its own account at the national bank, which financed its short-term credit requirements. Up to 1953-1954, the trend was toward ever more comprehensive planning under centralized direction. The bulk of materials consumed by industry were rationed out by the Planning Commission to economic ministries on the basis of balanced estimates. In theory, all state-run enterprises were supposed to take an active part in the process of elaborating the plans: on the basis of the control figures handed down by their ministries, they drew up counterproposals, which usually
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proposed more ambitious output targets than those they had received and which also called for more materials and other resources than the control figures provided for. When the Planning Commission summed up the "counterplans," they frequently turned out to be internally inconsistent. The changes in targets and materials allocations the Planning Commission eventually had to make to harmonize the plans rendered most of the preliminary paper work nugatory. The above system, known as "planning from below" or "counterplanning," was replaced in Czechoslovakia in 1953 and in Poland in 1954 by a new scheme known as "planning from above," where enterprises were formally cut out from the planning process. Henceforth, the option to consult subordinate enterprises was left to the discretion of the ministries. They could do so, if they wished, to obtain information on the consumption of materials or on productive capacities at the plant level; but they could also rely on statistical data obtained through other channels. This more centralized procedure for elaborating the plans was accompanied by a gradual reduction in the workload of the Planning Commission, as an increasing number of balancing and allocation decisions were delegated to the ministries and to lower administrative organs. The new scheme was designed to enable the central authorities to cut the time spent on the mechanics of plan setting and to concentrate their efforts on improving the substance of the plans. To this reform, which took place about the time of Stalin's death, there corresponded certain changes in economic policy which also affected the role of the plans as instruments for governing the pace and pattern of economic growth. Prior to 1953, industrialization proceeded at an extremely rapid pace in every nation of the area, irrespective of its initial level of development. The long-term plans promulgated during the Korean War overtaxed the capacities of the individual economies, which could not simultaneously build up their heavy industries, including armaments manufactures, expand their output of consumer goods, and promote their agriculture. The yearly plans, which were bent toward the achievement of the long-term plans, also overcommitted resources. Hence, priorities had to be established to determine which sectors would suffer the shortfalls. Each year, resources in short supply were deflected from light industry, residential construction, and agriculture and toward metallurgy, machine building, and other branches of heavy industry. Since the yearly plans were often poorly balanced, crucial allocation
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decisions had to be taken in the course of the planyear on an ad hoc priority basis. The rationing of consumer goods, which prevailed in the entire area in the early 1950s, was symptomatic of this abnormal state of affairs. Increased emphasis on consumer goods. In the summer and fall of 1953, however, a New Course was launched by the ruling parties of eastern Europe, in line with developments in the Soviet Union, which significantly raised the priority standing of consumers' goods and services. Consumers' rationing was generally abolished either just before the death of Stalin (as in Poland) or shortly thereafter (as in Czechoslovakia and Rumania). From then on, shortfalls in the output of consumer goods manifested themselves in declining inventories in retail stores, in queues, and in overt or covert price increases; in countries such as Czechoslovakia, which are dependent on food imports to supply their population, agricultural failures gave rise to balance-of-payments crises. Now that the claims on resources of heavy and light industry and of agriculture were more nearly equal, an allocation system based on ad hoc priority decisions was too blunt an instrument to carry out state policy. The current plans had to have sufficient "authority" to guide the economy throughout the year. The need for a priori consistency of the plans compelled the planners to budget their resources more realistically. The trend toward more careful balancing was reinforced after the Poznan riots of June 1956 and the Hungarian revolution in October and November of the same year. Since that time the ruling parties in the region, but especially in the more developed nations, have recognized as a political constraint on the formulation of national economic plans that the total level of consumption and the average level of urban real wages must not be adversely affected by investment efforts or by circumstances of any sort. (It is remarkable, for instance, that private consumption increased slightly in Czechoslovakia in 1963, even though national income declined by 3-4 per cent during that year.) Another factor making for a more systematic attempt to achieve consistency in the current plans after 1953 was the increasing relative scarcity of labor available to industry, not only in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, where the pool of surplus labor from agriculture had been exhausted some time previously, but even in Rumania, where the intake of labor from the countryside was greatly reduced, compared with the first industrialization campaign after 1949. (The area-wide shortage of housing and other urban fa-
cilities contributed to the decision to slow down rural-urban migration.) The increasing scarcity of manpower reduced the planners' ability to correct mistakes in the allocation of materials or investment funds by lavishing surplus labor on the sectors that had not received their share of critical resources. In the years since 1956, the economic reforms carried out in certain of the east European states have broken the previous pattern of institutional uniformity and have given rise to discrepancies from the Soviet model as well as to divergencies among the individual states of the region. Before describing the reforms that eventually caused the systems to diverge, it may be in order to consider the problems the central planners of these economies continued to face in common. Principal planning problems. The principal problem the central planners have to solve consists in preparing an internally coherent set of balanced estimates for materials and equipment. The "material balances" actually worked on by the Planning Commission in each country are those for "funded" materials and equipment, that is, for the crucial items which it rations out with the approval of the Council of Ministers. In Czechoslovakia these items made up less than half of the total consumption of materials in the mid-1950s. In both Czechoslovakia and East Germany, this proportion was higher in heavy than in light industry and in the production of raw materials and semifabricates than in processing sectors. What is also significant is the share of each material's "consumption for productive purposes," calculated according to standard norms based on approved engineering practice. In Poland, according to a special survey conducted in 1959, this share was over 90 per cent for steel semifabricates and for cement, 84 per cent for sulfuric acid, 67 per cent for bituminous coal, between 60 and 65 per cent for tanned leather, salt, soda ash, and pine lumber, and as little as 5 per cent for refined petroleum products. The principal gaps in the availability of information at the planning center are, first, the coefficients relating the inputs of nonfunded materials to the outputs of funded or nonfunded goods and, second, the coefficients corresponding to the consumption of funded products not subject to standard norms. The reliability of the coefficients themselves has often been limited. Allotments of materials were made to economic ministries, which then subdivided them among their central boards. These latter ultimately parceled out their quotas among their subordinate enterprises. At each administra-
PLANNING, ECONOMIC: Eastern Europe tive level—whether functional or regional—lower organs bargained for more generous rations of materials from their immediate superiors. If the central authorities persisted in drafting overambitious plans, then there was pressure from above, at each echelon, to cut back requirements below what enterprises considered a safe minimum. While the range within which this bargaining can affect final allotments has become more narrow with the passage of time, the bargaining process has not been eliminated. Decreasing or increasing returns to scale have also been a source of instability in the technical coefficients. If an industry has surplus capacity that may be utilized during periods of peak demand for its products at a high unit cost—due to the operation of worn or obsolete equipment—its average input coefficient will tend to rise with the level of its output. When the product was homogeneous—electric power, for instance—the coordinating organ on occasion made rough adjustments in the coal- or oil-input coefficients for varying levels of power output; but where the product-mix was complex, this task defied bureaucratic solution. Another factor bearing on the stability of coefficients, about which next to nothing is known at the planning center, is the possibility of reducing the consumption of material inputs by the substitution of other factors. Enterprises were frequently forced to adapt to materials shortages by expending more labor on their products. At best, the central authorities could make a rough adjustment in the allotments of materials to enterprises in anticipation of these economies; but neither input—output nor any of the planning techniques.in use at present are capable of predicting with any degree of precision the enterprise's ability to make these adjustments without running into acute shortages of material inventories, such as may eventually cause production breakdowns. In the absence of electronic computers, which were not available in planning practice in any country of eastern Europe during the period under consideration, the preparation of an internally consistent central plan is a laborious and time-consuming task. Given the limited information on input coefficients and productive capacities available to the Planning Commission, failure to make optimal use of this information in order to relate the total outputs targeted in the various sectors to the quantities of each product available for final demand adds a significant source of potential error. The principal theoretical problem in this regard is the occurrence of "feedbacks" on output levels due to interdependences in the technology matrix. If the
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planners proceed from a known final demand to calculate a mutually consistent set of output levels, they will find that as soon as they have added enough output to an initial level to satisfy materials requirements derived directly from final demand, they will need to make a secondary adjustment to meet the added demand for materials caused by this last increase in output. Theoretically, it may take five or six rounds of adjustment before a satisfactory degree of consistency has been achieved (satisfactory at least in terms of the range of error to which the coefficients are subject). In practice, however, feedbacks were reduced by two factors. It was known in advance that a certain number of sectors—in eastern Europe these were generally the sectors producing raw materials and semifabricates—would be operated at capacity; their output being known in advance, no feedback effects had to be allowed for in these sectors. The only feedbacks were those associated with sectors that were free of capacity restraints in the normal range of their operation, and these feedbacks were likely to be small. Furthermore, the balancing usually started with trial levels of gross output for all sectors. If these output levels were not too far removed from the final, mutually consistent targets, large feedbacks were avoided. Since there was flexibility on the final demand side, insofar as the planning authorities were more or less indifferent between various closely related bills of goods, fewer output adjustments were necessary; this also helped to cut down on the computing workload. While it was possible to prepare a single balanced version of the plan, there was usually no time to draw up alternative versions or to trace the effects of a change in demand for one or more endproducts on the outputs that were not tightly restricted by capacity limits. Another computing task which, while presenting no theoretical difficulty, was still extremely demanding on the limited bureacratic facilities of the central planning organizations is the reconciliation of the material and equipment balances with the "synthetic" plans. These include the costs and profits plans of industry and trade, investment plans, the state budget, and all other macroeconomic plans that may be affected by the material balances (via reductions in material costs, larger sales due to increased outputs, etc.). Repeated references in the economic literature of the area to national economic plans whose component parts were not harmonized testify to the difficulty of elaborating "complex" plans. To construct efficient as well as consistent plans,
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the Planning Commission would have to collect information on alternative production processes open to enterprises and to choose from among these processes the ones most likely to economize on factors in short supply. In practice, the central planners had no systematic procedure either for collecting or for processing this information. (There was no analogue in current practice to linear or nonlinear programming.) This deficiency was especially serious insofar as it affected investment and foreign-trade decisions, which normally involve choice either among domestic processes for producing a given good or between domestic production and imports. (Since exports alone in countries such as Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary represent between 30 and 45 per cent of national income, the correct allocation of resources between industries supplying the national market and industries oriented mainly toward exports is crucial.) Since the mid-1950s, economic calculation, based on comparisons of capital outlays with economies in operating expenses and on comparisons of the domestic costs of exportables with their foreign-currency prices, has become an important alternative to the traditional method of balanced estimates in arriving at suboptimal decisions. These calculations, however, are undermined by defects in domestic prices, to the extent that the latter are used to compute costs and returns. As late as 1965, the price systems of the east European socialist states, with the single exception of Yugoslavia, were still grounded on the principle that the price of each producer good should be set at its average cost of production among the enterprises responsible for the bulk of its output, plus a small profit margin calculated as a percentage of costs. Since price reforms were promulgated only once every three to five years, and relative costs tended to change rapidly, the structure of current costs soon diverged from established price ratios. Even current cost levels did not express opportunity costs, if only because neither interest charges on capital nor rents on the use of land were accounted for. It should also be noted that prices of imported goods, owing in part to the artificiality of exchange rates applied to foreign prices, were improperly related to the domestic prices of home-produced substitutes. 1956-1965: divergencies among states. During 1956 the excessive centralization of the command economies came in for sharp public criticism, particularly in Poland and Hungary. The immediate reforms that were promulgated at the time, however, went no further than the extension of certain
rights and prerogatives to the directors of enterprises, in line with recent Soviet initiatives in this direction. Prior to mid-1957, when the Soviet government abolished most ministries in charge of industrial sectors and subordinated most industrial enterprises to regional economic councils, the organization of the east European economies was still closely patterned after the Soviet. It may fairly be said that the first important divergence stemmed from the failure of the east European states to follow the Soviet example and shift from a functional to a regional hierarchy of economic organs. Bulgaria and East Germany. Only two countries—Bulgaria and East Germany—eventually adopted, in whole or in part, the new Soviet design. Both of these countries abolished their industrial ministries. In East Germany, the supervision of industrial sectors was entrusted to specialized departments of the state Planning Commission, whose role as chief planning organ was reinforced, from 1958 on, by new executive responsibilities. Enterprises of national significance were grouped in associations (Vereinigungen Volkseigener Betriebe) directly subordinated to the Planning Commission. Economic councils were also formed in regions (Bezirke) and districts (Kreise), but, in contrast with the situation of the councils in the Soviet Union, they had direct authority only over enterprises of local importance. In view of this crucial limitation on the power of the councils, the reforms of 1958 and 1959 did not alter the essentially functional character of East Germany's industrial organization. In Bulgaria, however, out of 800 large enterprises formerly attached to ministries, 700 were given over to district national councils. The remaining 100 enterprises were placed under the central control of the Committee for Industry and Technical Progress, the Committee for Construction and Architecture, the Ministry of Transportation and Communication, the Ministry for Education and Culture, and the Central Union of Cooperatives. In conjunction with the reorganization of the economy, 30 districts, corresponding to natural economic regions, were carved out of the 12 existing districts. But even in Bulgaria the regionalization was not complete, inasmuch as the branch committees, in particular the Committee for Industry and Technical Progress, retained exclusive responsibility for issuing methodological instructions to enterprises and continued to exercise certain "directional" functions, described in official language as "the fulfillment of the plan of industrial enterprises for the development of new products, for inter-enterprise cooperation and specialization,
PLANNING, ECONOMIC: Eastern Europe for the introduction of technical progress, for the timely manufacture of essential machines and equipment earmarked for construction projects of national importance, and for the distribution of machines and equipment among districts in cases where the districts concerned have not reached agreement with each other." In Albania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Rumania, the old system of industrial management by specialized ministries has been maintained to the time of writing in 1967. Within this system, however, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and, to a minor extent, Hungary have introduced reforms tending toward the devolution of administrative powers onto lower organs and toward the increased autonomy of socialized enterprises. In 1964 and 1965, Bulgaria and East Germany also took further initiatives in this direction. The only countries that have adhered strictly to the old, tightly centralized system for planning and managing industry are Rumania and, as far as is known, Albania. Czechoslovakia. The most comprehensive of the reforms tending toward decentralization were undertaken in Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1958 and 1959 and again in 1966 and 1967. In 1958, enterprises were consolidated into "productive economic units"—operating as enterprises in their own right or as associations of enterprises —which were directly responsible for the entire production of a sector; in certain cases where production facilities were spread over a large number of plants, the productive economic units were entrusted with the guidance and supervision ("gestion") of the entire output of the sector, including by-products originating in other units. The balancing and distribution of less essential products formerly carried out in the Planning Commission and in the ministries devolved on the productive economic units, which were expected to keep in close touch with their customers and to coordinate their production decisions with each other, without supervision of higher authorities. The old ministries remained in operation, but their activities were oriented less toward routine direction of their subordinate enterprises than toward ensuring the technical progress and the rationalization of production in their sector. Two new types of incentives were created: (1) to recompense the managerial staff and workers, the average wage of the enterprise was linked to labor-productivity increases, and a bonus fund was set up on the basis °f the fulfillment of the enterprise's profit plan; (2) to widen the financial autonomy of the enterprise, it was authorized to keep a significant share of the year-to-year increases in its registered profits,
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which share could be raised by higher authorities if the enterprise agreed to take on more challenging tasks. As a result of the new system of "enterprise stimulation" and of certain changes in financial regulations, the share of decentralized investments, in large part financed from enterprise profits and depreciation allowances, rose to 60 per cent of total investments in 1960 and 1961. While the 1958-1959 reforms enlarged the autonomy of Czechoslovak enterprises in a number of areas, price setting for all important producer and consumer goods remained the exclusive prerogative of the central authorities. No alteration was made in the practice of pegging producers' prices to an initial level of average unit costs and keeping them in force for several years, regardless of changes in supply and demand relations. In 1963, when the reforms were for the most part abandoned and recentralization took place, the failure to adapt the price system to the decentralization was widely criticized. The collapse of the reforms and the eventual abandonment of the five-year plan originally scheduled for 1961 to 1965 were attributed by the partisans of decentralization to the distorting effects of prices on the decisions of enterprises, to the plan's excessive tautness, which made demands on the construction sector and export industries widely in excess of their capabilities, and to a crisis in the balance of payments, due in large part to shortfalls in agriculture. The proponents of tight central controls, including the highest Party authorities, laid the failure to an excessive devolution of powers on lower organs and to a slackening of discipline. In late 1964 and early 1965, after a year and a half of debate, the views of the decentralizers apparently prevailed. The Central Committee of the Communist party called for another round of decentralizing reforms. This was effected in 1966-1967. The newest Czechoslovak reforms, in a significant departure from all previous attempts at remodeling the economic system, now provide for some flexibility in producers' prices. Prices set by free negotiation between suppliers and purchasers will apply to goods representing an estimated 7 per cent of total industrial output. The bulk of these freely priced items are produced in consumer goods industries. In addition, lower and upper limits within which prices are allowed to fluctuate have been imposed on a wide range of goods. Recent experience has shown that prices quickly gravitate to the upper limit, so that the significance of this innovation is rather restricted. These limits and the prices of all other goods will still be set by central organs. In general, the quasi-monopolistic
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position of enterprises, most of which have once again been consolidated and now compass the bulk of the output in their speciality, and the narrow leeway open to buyers to substitute imports for domestic supplies rule out any substantial degree of competition in the newly created "markets." The 1966-1967 economic reforms also call for the imposition of charges on the fixed capital and the inventories of enterprises, at rates of 6 and 2 per cent respectively, to be paid into the state budget. (As early as 1964, Hungary had introduced a similar "capital users' charge," calculated at a rate of 5 per cent of the gross value of fixed assets and of working capital.) The chief incentive to enterprises now consists in the part of "gross income" (equivalent to value added) left to them after deduction of capital charges and of various other obligations to the state. This residue is earmarked for decentralized investments, contingency reserves, housing projects and other social amenities, and wages, salaries, and bonus payments to the staff of the enterprise. In the spirit of the new system, plans are to be implemented via financial pressures and inducements rather than by direct commands. Output targets and limits on the consumption of materials and other inputs, however, may still be issued to enterprises by central planning authorities. Although it is not yet apparent how widely the central organs will avail themselves of their prerogatives, there was considerable apprehension among the proponents of the reforms that this permissive regulation might be used to reimpose the petty tutelage over enterprises that prevailed in former years. Poland. In Poland, wide-ranging discussions took place between 1956 and mid-1958 which became known as the "debate over the Polish economic model." The Economic Council, whose membership included Poland's most influential economists, issued a number of "theses" on the economic model and on price-setting policy which proposed the establishment of a partially decentralized economic system, guided by prices shaped under the influence of supply and demand. However, these theses were not approved by the Party and never received legislative sanction. The decentralizing measures actually promulgated in 1959 did not go as far as the Czechoslovak reforms. Moreover, these measures were eroded by centripetal forces between 1960 and 1963. The associations of enterprises, created in 1959 to replace the old central boards formerly operated as functional departments of the ministries, gradually ceased to represent the interests of their members, as their
mission had initially been conceived. In July 1964, however, new legislation designed to widen the powers of the associations was put into effect, which may tend to reduce the excessive degree of centralization attained in recent years. In Poland, as in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary, a number of enterprises have been assigned a special status. Their managers are for the most part rewarded according to a bonus system based on profits; some of them have also been given a privileged position in choosing their suppliers and in procuring the materials they require to adapt the structure of their output to market demands. A few have been given permission to alter their sales prices. These experiments, if they are successful, may pave the way to comprehensive legislation covering the bulk of industry in the countries mentioned. Yugoslavia. The "Yugoslav model" has exerted considerable influence on the character of the economic reforms at present contemplated in the experimenting countries. It may be observed that the first steps taken toward decentralization in Yugoslavia in 1950 and 1951 were also aimed at relaxing the rigid system of distribution in light industry. Retail trade establishments, formerly bound by the plan to specific sources of supply, were allowed to choose their suppliers among wholesalers and manufacturers. These first reforms, in the case of Yugoslavia, were approximately coeval with the formation, in July 1950, of the workers' councils, which already entailed a more radical departure from Soviet precedent. (In Poland and Hungary, workers' councils were set up in many enterprises in the summer of 1956; they were liquidated in Hungary by the end of the same year and had lost all effective power in Poland by 1959.) The members of the Yugoslav councils, which represent a little over 10 per cent of the total number of employees in the socialized economy, are elected from among the workers and the management staff of each enterprise. The main prerogative of the workers' council is to determine the share of the profits remaining at the disposal of the enterprise to be distributed as bonuses and extra income to the staff and the share to be plowed back as investment. The council also has a voice in appointing and dismissing enterprise directors. In general, it is expected to supervise the over-all orientation of the enterprise, including the composition of its output, technologies employed, and price-setting decisions. Prior to 1952, the influence of Yugoslav workers on output and price policy was hampered by the centralized system, which bound up the enterprise
PLANNING, ECONOMIC: Eastern Europe in minute regulations. At the beginning of that year, a sweeping program of decentralization was undertaken. Operational planning by central authorities was scrapped, along with its panoply of allocation orders and mandatory production targets. The Planning Commission, as well as the interindustrial councils, whicn had inherited many of the operational responsibilities of the economic ministries abolished in early 1950, were deprived of their executive powers. Henceforth, the coordination of production and investment decisions was to be achieved through a flexible price mechanism, while the federal government, using indirect financing controls and centralized investment policy, was to prod the economy toward the goals specified in the long-term plans. Prices were freed in three steps. First, the planners worked out new "economic prices" for raw materials and semifabricates. These prices were roughly on a level with the free prices of nonrationed consumer goods (which far exceeded the former prices of administratively rationed producer goods), while imported materials were priced according to a higher, more realistic exchange rate. Second, after January 1, 1952, all producers, wholesalers, and retailers of manufactured goods were invited to set prices for their products on the basis of market demand and costs, in line with the recently established level of materials prices. In the third phase, which was put off until May 1952 to avoid upsetting the freshly established markets, prices of raw materials and semifabricates were finally allowed to seek their natural level. By taxing enterprises in proportion to their wage bills, however, the federal government retained a decisive influence on cost levels and, indirectly, on prices. Later, as more flexible financial regulations were introduced, the central authorities partially relinquished even this indirect method of price control. In May 1954, the Yugoslav government found it necessary to impose price ceilings on a few raw materials and semifabricates to curb monopolistic tendencies and an incipient inflation. By 1955 the list numbered 40 materials, including steel, gasoline, copper, and lumber, altogether amounting to some 50 per cent of the total value of materials bought by industry. In addition to these outright controls, less stringent regulations were later issued to prevent unjustified price increases in other sectors. The extent to which the government has resorted to these more flexible price regulations has varied with the degree of inflationary pressure to which the economy has been exposed: they were loosened in 1961 and tightened again in 1963 and 1964 to check inflationary tendencies.
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Foreign exchange, except for short-lived experiments in the mid-1950s, has remained subject to centralized allocation. Up to 1961, the foreign exchange proceeds of exports were converted into domestic currency at the official exchange rates, which were then multiplied by coefficients varying according to the type of product exported. The coefficients were calculated to cover the domestic costs of exporters, whether the items exported were high-cost or low-cost. Coefficients were also applied to the payments in domestic currency for imports. They were scaled so as to discourage what were considered to be unnecessary imports and to protect high-cost domestic producers from foreign competition. In 1961 the dinar was devalued and the coefficients were nominally abolished. Nevertheless, exports were still facilitated by subsidies in the form of bonuses amounting to 10 to 32 per cent of the official rate. Quantitative restrictions remained in force for 70 per cent of the total value of imports. Together with the allocation of foreign exchange, the distribution of investments provides the government with significant leverage to conduct its economic policy. The federal government makes available to the Investment Bank and to the Agricultural Bank, via the general fund, fiscal receipts from the socialized sector—including taxes on capital assets, on profits, and on the turnover of retail trade—together with the proceeds of foreign loans. The general fund of the federation, in addition to seven constituent republics' investment funds, which are also managed by the Investment Bank, make up 70 per cent of the resources used for investment lending. The Investment Bank lends these funds to socialized enterprises, in contrast with the situation prevailing in the rest of eastern Europe, where almost all long-term investments are financed by outright budgetary grants. Enterprises are induced to economize on funds not only by the necessity of repaying loans, along with interest charges, but also by having to invest some of their own funds in projects in which the Investment Bank participates. This method of matching funds provides the central authorities with additional control over the volume of investments. The Investment Bank distributes investment funds in accord with Yugoslavia's long-term development plan. While the economic viability of projects and their profitability in terms of dinars are taken into account, these are not overriding considerations. In the mid-1950s, however, some of the bank's funds were auctioned off to enterprises according to the rates of return claimed on investment projects and to the interest rates borrowers
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were willing to pay for borrowed funds; but this system could not be allowed to remain in effect under conditions where prevailing prices provided such an inadequate reflection, in terms of the planners' priority scale, of the relative importance to the national economy of the different sectors. In 1965, the Yugoslav economy, despite the introduction in recent years of various recentralizing measures taken in conjunction with the government's efforts to subdue inflation, remained far more decentralized than any other east European economy. Nevertheless, a number of Yugoslavs concerned with economic affairs, including highplaced officials in Croatia and Slovenia, have voiced their support for further decentralization along market lines and for the elimination of some of the formal and informal controls hemming in the management of socialized enterprises. Opposition to these views emanates from economists and officials concerned with the development of the less industrialized regions of the country, such as Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where socialized enterprises are not yet capable of withstanding competition from abroad or from the more advanced republics to the north and where, in the opinion of these "centralizers," funds ought to be invested on a priority basis even if market criteria cannot be met. As in the rest of eastern Europe, divergent views on the goals of development policy and on the speed at which they might be attained underlie the conflicts among the proponents of different institutional means for integrating the national economy. JOHN MICHAEL MONTIAS [See also COMMUNISM, ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION OF; ECONOMIC DATA, article on THE SOVIET UNION AND EASTERN EUROPE; ECONOMIC THOUGHT, article OU
SOCIALIST THOUGHT.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ACADEMIA REPUBLICII POPULARE ROMINE, INSTITUTUL DE CERCETARI ECONOMICS 1964 Dezvoltarea economicd a Rominiei: 1944-1964 (The Economic Development of Rumania: 1944-1964). Bucharest: The Academy. ALTON, THAD P. 1955 Polish Postwar Economy. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. ARNOLD, HANS; BORCHERT, HANS; and SCHMIDT, J. (1955) 1961 Okonomik der sozialistischen Industrie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. 6th ed. Berlin: Die Wirtschaft Verlag. BALASSA, BELA A. 1959 The Hungarian Experience in Economic Planning: A Theoretical and Empirical Study. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. BRUS, WLODZIMIERZ 1961 Ogolne problemy funkcjonowania gospodarki socjalistycznej (General Problems in the Functioning of a Socialist Economy). Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.
DABCEVIC-KUCAR, SAVKA 1963 Decentralized Socialist Planning: Yugoslavia. Pages 183-216 in Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for International Studies, Planning Economic Development: A Study. Edited by Everett E. Hagan. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. FLEMING, J. MARCUS; and SERTIC, VICTOR R. 1962 The Yugoslav Economic System. International Monetary Fund, Staff Papers 9:202-242. HOFFMAN, GEORGE W.; and NEAL, FRED W. 1962 Yugoslavia and the New Communism. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. KASER, MICHAEL 1965 COMECON: Integration Problems of the Planned Economies. Oxford Univ. Press. KORNAI, JANOS (1957) 1959 Overcentralization in Economic Administration: A Critical Analysis Based on Experience in Hungarian Light Industry. Oxford Univ. Press. -» First published in Hungarian. MARCZEWSKI, JAN 1956 Planification et croissance economiques des democraties populaires. 2 vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. MICHAL, JAN M. 1960 Central Planning in Czechoslovakia: Organization for Growth in a Mature Economy. Stanford Univ. Press. MONTIAS, JOHN M. 1962 Central Planning in Poland. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. PORWIT, KRZYSTOF (1964)1967 Central Planning: Evaluation of Variants. New York and London: Pergamon Press. -» First published in Polish. PRAGUE, VYSOKA SKOLA EKONOMICKA, KATEDRA NARODOHOSPODARSKEHO PLANovANi 1963 Ndrodohospoddfske pldnovdni v CSSR (National Economic Planning in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic). Prague: Nakladelstvi Politicke Literatury. PRYOR, FREDERIC L. 1963 The Communist Foreign Trade System. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. SIROTKOVIC, JAKOV 1961 Problemi privrednog planiranja u Jugoslaviji (Problems of Economic Planning in Yugoslavia). Zagreb (Yugoslavia): Naprjied. SPULBER, NICHOLAS (1955) 1957 The Economics of Communist Eastern Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. UNITED NATIONS, ECONOMIC COMMISSION FOR EUROPE 1961 Economic Development in Rumania. Economic Bulletin for Europe 13, 2:55-107. WARD, BENJAMIN 1957 Workers' Management in Yugoslavia. Journal of Political Economy 65:373-386. WELLISZ, STANISLAW 1964 The Economies of the Soviet Bloc: A Study of Decision Making and Resource Allocation. New York: McGraw-Hill. ZAUBERMAN, ALFRED 1964 Industrial Progress in Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, 1937-1962. Oxford Univ. Press. Ill
DEVELOPMENT
PLANNING
This article confines itself to development planning in economies with substantial private enterprise sectors. In this context, a development plan is a document which sets out the chief measures that the government intends to take in order to raise national output per person. The typical development plan will include most of the following: (1) a survey of current economic conditions, especially national income, productivity, foreign trade,
PLANNING, ECONOMIC: Development Planning and trends in each major industry; (2) a survey of the current social situation, especially population changes, education, health, housing, and social security; (3) an evaluation of progress achieved under the preceding plan; (4) a statement of general objectives of economic and social policy; (5) estimates of growth, or targets, for each major economic or social component during the period covered by the plan; (6) suggested measures designed to raise the rate of economic growth, especially measures to stimulate saving and investment and to increase productivity, and measures to improve the institutional framework of economic activity, such as land reform or reorganization of the markets for commodities, labor, or capital; (7) a program of government expenditures, capital and recurrent. The plan normally looks several years ahead. Typical periods are three, four, five, and six years. Longer plans are sometimes made for 10, 15, or even 20 years ahead; these are sometimes called "perspective" plans. The shorter (three- to five-year) plans include statements of what the government intends to do. A 15- or 20-year plan cannot serve this purpose; its object is partly to try to identify long-term trends, as a guide to planning services which require a longer perspective, such as harbors, hydroelectricity, roads, and education. A fiveyear period is too short for perspectives in such matters but is also too long for specific commitments to some others. Hence, governments normally make a new capital budget every year, and this, rather than the plan, is the final commitment to expenditure. Similarly, statements relating to policy are not final until embodied in legislation. The first documents resembling development plans were published just after World War n. Most countries had established economic controls during the war, including rationing of some consumer goods, raw materials, or foreign exchange, and this experience gave to the idea of planning a degree of respectability which it had not achieved before the war. In Europe the emphasis of these plans was on reconstruction, with equal attention to the private and public sectors, but in the less developed countries the prime concern of the early Plans was to improve government policy making, a nd to establish priorities for government expenditure. There is nothing novel in surveys of current economic or social conditions; many governments nave issued such surveys from time to time and several now do this annually, whether or not there !s a development plan. There is also nothing novel J n announcing measures designed to raise the rate
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of economic growth. What development planning introduced was a comprehensive review of public expenditures looking several years ahead, with publication of a priority list. Before this concept was introduced, it was not usual for governments to review all their likely expenditures for more than a year ahead; reviews stretching five or ten years ahead were a novelty and were an improvement of government procedures. Despite much subsequent elaboration of planning techniques, medium-range projection of expenditures continues to be the main object of a development plan. With time, the emphasis of a development plan has tended to shift away from the review of government expenditures and toward other measures designed to raise the rate of economic growth. The general economic survey aspect and concern for the economy as a whole have increased. Some development plans are now devoted mainly to discussing such subjects as industry, agriculture, mining, investment, saving, and the balance of payments, and a few give only a sketch of proposed government expenditures. The nature of a plan for industry or agriculture or mining depends, in the first place, on whether the sector is under public ownership and operation, as in countries under communist control. Where public ownership and operation are in effect, a plan acts as an authorization to managers of industrial plants, telling them how much capital they may invest, and even perhaps how much of each commodity to produce and how much labor and material to use. Exactly what such a plan must contain is now under active discussion in communist countries. If industry depends on private investment, a development plan can exert negative control but not positive control; i.e., it can prohibit investment in certain fields, but it cannot force persons to invest in other fields if they do not wish to do so. Hence, in the private sector, "plan" is not quite the right word for what a development plan tries to do; it is as much concerned to analyze, inform, persuade, and indicate inducements which the government offers as it is to describe the restrictive controls with which the economy will be managed. How comprehensively the private sector is treated varies from plan to plan. If the government intends to take the initiative in inducing private investors to follow a particular course, or in shaping industrial institutions (e.g., marketing), or in providing finance through credit institutions, the plan may contain an extended discussion of each major industry, indicating what the govern-
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ment hopes will be the outcome. The closer the relations between government and commodity production, the more extensive must be the sections of the plan which deal with individual commodities. Beyond this, a development plan may make a projection, for the whole economy, of output, consumption, saving, investment, imports, and exports in every sector for, say, five years ahead. The primary purpose of such a projection is to provide a consistent background for policy. It ensures that assumptions about investment are consistent with assumptions about domestic savings, foreign borrowing, and the budget surplus; that each of these, in turn, is consistent with assumptions about income, taxes, government expenditure, and demand and supply in each major sector. The use of an input-output matrix is particularly helpful in economies where industries use each others' products as raw materials or equipment, since it is otherwise difficult to assess the full ramifications of an expected change in demand for any particular commodity (e.g., to trace the effects of an expected increase in the demand for bicycles on the steel, iron ore, rubber, coal, oil, chemical, and other industries which produce components or components of components). A projection is not a plan; it is a background exercise which planners do to clarify the interrelationships in their thinking. It is worth doing in complex economies, where interrelationships are not easily held in the head, but is less useful and hardly necessary in small countries with simple economies. A forecast for the whole economy is also the basis of what is now called "indicative planning." The argument here is that it helps investors in any one industry to know what is proposed in all other industries, since these others generate demand for its product. If all investors believe that the economy will grow only at an average annual rate of 3 per cent, they will keep their own investment levels low, and so bring about a low rate of growth. If, on the contrary, they all expect an annual growth rate of 10 per cent, they will all make large investments to cope with this rapidly growing demand, and so the growth rate will be high. Consequently, if, after consultation with all concerned, the government issues a projection based on the highest rate of growth that can be achieved with the resources likely to be available, this "indication" of what is possible in each industry may itself serve to induce a higher level of private investment than would otherwise occur. France is the leading practitioner of indicative planning, which is gaining ground mainly in
western Europe because the sophisticated relationship between government and private enterprise which the exercise requires is more common and the statistics more readily available in the advanced than in the poorer countries. Policy objectives. The elements which go into deciding what to put into a development plan cannot be described in a few words. The following section sketches briefly a few of the principal concerns of development planners. At low levels of development, ignorance is the principal obstacle to development: ignorance of physical resources, ignorance of markets, and ignorance of techniques. The first object of the plan must be to reduce ignorance. Development planners begin with surveys. The land should be mapped and surveyed for minerals, water, and fertile soils. Adequate staff must be provided for the departments of geology, hydrology, meteorology, survey, and soil survey. Equally important is research into the utilization of these natural resources, especially agricultural research, and research into industrial uses of local products. Next comes economic, statistical, and market research. The planner's first task is to see that all these fields of survey and research are covered, since it is these that will yield potential development projects. Development flows from applying skills to natural resources. A policy for improving skills is therefore fundamental to planning. This covers all levels of training and education, including general (primary, secondary, university) as well as vocational (trade schools, farm institutes, specialized institutions) education, institutional as well as onthe-job training, and adult education (especially agricultural extension) as well as schooling for the young. Since a poor country cannot afford all the education which is offered in rich countries, choices have to be made. It is possible by projecting national income to estimate roughly how many jobs there will be for persons with various kinds of special skills, and provision can be made for training them. Projecting the effects of general education is more difficult and not, perhaps, so helpful, since in most poor countries today the demand for places in school exceeds any figure that could be reached by trying to estimate the productivity of general education expenditures. Infrastructure plays an important role in attracting (or its absence in repelling) new investment. Electric power, water, and communications (railways, roads, ports, telephones) often absorb nearly as much capital as industry and agriculture added together. Because of the need to build in advance
PLANNING, ECONOMIC: Development Planning of demand, such investments are especially risky in less developed countries. Thus, the governments of such countries play a larger role in providing infrastructure, or in guaranteeing investment in such undertakings, than is necessary in more developed countries. The planner's objective is to discover the most productive projects, public or private, and to ensure them priority. Productivity cannot be calculated simply in terms of current prices, since current prices do not necessarily reflect the true relative scarcity of resources or the true net benefit to the economy as a whole, and also may not sufficiently reflect future gains. A large part of the literature of development economics discusses the desirable criteria for investment; the substitution of "accounting prices" or "shadow prices" for current prices when calculating costs and benefits to the economy as a whole; and the assessment of benefits and costs deriving from the interdependence of investments. Such calculations show that the set of projects which private investors would choose if seeking to maximize their profits is not necessarily the set which maximizes national income. Hence, if the government seeks to maximize national income, it must offer inducements to invest in some projects and impose restrictions on investment in others. Administering such inducements and restrictions is an important art, in which the poorer countries tend to be relatively unskilled. Investment criteria include capital-intensity, that is, the ratio between the capital invested in a project and the number of persons whom it employs. In countries plagued with unemployment, open or disguised, labor-intensive techniques are preferable to capital-intensive techniques if the difference in cost per unit of output is not very great; for lower productivity per man may yield a larger total output if more men are employed. Another consideration is the distribution of investment among the geographical regions of the country. It is desirable to concentrate investment where the growth potential is greatest, but this may have to be modified in favor of reducing regional disparities in per capita income or of providing work where unemployment is relatively high. Given an adequate infrastructure and adequate knowledge of feasible investments, the planners must persuade or induce entrepreneurs to invest. Persuasion and inducement are seldom needed for investments within the scope of small-scale enterprises; in most underdeveloped countries there is no shortage of small businessmen to invest in commerce or small industrial enterprises, such as grain mills, printeries, trucking, bottling plants,
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cinemas, and the like. What is lacking is experience in building and operating large factories or mines. Most governments are anxious to attract outside entrepreneurship for such undertakings and at the same time to arrange training programs in which their own people may acquire managerial skills. Most countries start developing by exporting agricultural products or minerals. The income thus generated creates demands which are met in the first instance by imports, but which also present an opportunity for domestic production of substitutes for imports. The possibilities of import substitution are limited, however, partly by natural resources and partly by the economies of specialization. When these limits are reached, further development will bring an increase in imports which has to be matched by an increase in exports. Development planners therefore need to watch the effect of development on imports and to keep the import propensity in balance with the export propensity, either by increased efficiency in import substitution or by increased efficiency in exporting. Failure here brings a balance of payments crisis and structural inflation. Failure of agricultural output to expand at an adequate rate is normally one of the main causes of slow economic growth or of structural inflation. Small farmers are quick to take up profitable crops and have produced large supplies of such commercial crops as cocoa, coffee, bananas, rubber, and cotton. Now that population is increasing more rapidly in the less developed than in the more developed countries, the challenge to farmers is, rather, to meet domestic needs by increasing the productivity of existing crops (especially domestic foods), and this seems harder to achieve. Measures to raise agricultural productivity (especially new breeds and varieties, use of fertilizers, disease and insect controls, irrigation, and new methods of processing and storing) are the core of any good development plan, since increases in agricultural output are needed to raise living standards, to provide an expanded market for industrial output, and to serve as a basis for higher savings, taxes, and earnings of foreign exchange. Before World War n, governments of poor countries spent mainly on day-to-day administration of law and order. Planning can easily double the recurrent budget and add as much again in public expenditure on capital account, if the money can be raised. Public expenditure increases partly because an infrastructure of services is required to support an increased output of agriculture or manufactures, but it increases just as much because the public demands some services for their own sake,
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irrespective of their effect on productivity (e.g., curative medicine, general education, social security benefits). How much to spend on public services is a political rather than an economic decision, in the sense that from the economic standpoint the public should have as much service as it is willing to pay for. When development planning began, most poor countries were spending less than 20 per cent of gross national income on gross capital formation and public expenditure together, whereas the rate of growth and standards of public service they now demand would require at least 30 per cent. Foreign investment and foreign aid contribute, but at the beginning of the 1960s the net inflow from these sources averaged only about 4 per cent of the poorer countries' incomes; the main part of the cost must be met from domestic sources. Domestic private saving is low and has to be supplemented by public saving out of taxes and other revenues. Rapidly increasing demands for public expenditure and for public savings have forced equally rapid increases in taxation; in this sense, creating a good tax structure with adequate rates is fundamental to success on both the economic and the political levels. What development planning tries to ensure is that the moneys so raised will be spent intelligently, but this depends even more on political institutions and good sense than it does upon economic techniques. Development plans are full of figures, but policy matters more than figures. The public sector, to which most of the figures relate, is seldom as large as 20 per cent of a poor economy, and development cannot be ensured even by the most intelligent planning of the public sector. In the last analysis, economic growth depends on the willingness of thousands or millions of private citizens to make some change: to change their jobs, acquire new skills, try out new techniques, or invest in new resources. The secret of successful development is to provide a framework which induces people to make the best use of the opportunities which exist in their economy. Effectiveness. Development plans vary widely in the extent to which they are taken seriously. A few are followed faithfully by the governments which have issued them, a few cease to be consulted within six months of publication, and the rest range between these extremes. The hazards of the plan derive from three sources: (1) lack of realism and commitment; (2) differences between those who make the plan and those who make economic decisions; (3) difficulties in forecasting. The original purpose of planning was to select
priorities in government expenditure. However, a five-year plan is not an expenditure authorization; normally authorization occurs only in the annual budget. Hence, what a government actually authorizes in due course is not necessarily tied to what it has put into the plan; and it cannot be assumed that the plan is a true statement of what it intends to do, even at the moment when the plan is issued. If this is true of the public-sector part of the plan, it applies even more to the private sector. Nobody is committed by what the plan says about the private sector. Hence, those who prepare the plan are not constrained by having to put into effect what they are saying. Why does a government issue a plan to which it does not intend to adhere? Such a plan usually predicts a larger achievement than is possible with the available resources. This may be done for one of two reasons, either as a political smoke screen or as a means of attracting larger resources. A development plan has something of the same status as a party's political program. It is not a final commitment (only the annual budget authorizes ), so the government can make promises which it would like to carry out if it had the resources, without stopping to count the actual resources too closely at the moment of publication. Obviously a document published in this frame of mind does not deserve to be called a plan, since the essence of planning is matching needs against resources and determining priorities. The second reason for publishing a plan in excess of available resources is to attract more resources. A large gap between needs and resources may attract either internal or external resources. One problem of poor countries is that people have not learned to pay large sums in taxes. Their governments have in the past taxed only for administration, war, and personal enrichment, so it is axiomatic that paying taxes is a useless burden. The modern welfare state, supplying schools, hospitals, agricultural education, farm-to-market roads, village water supplies, and so on, is a new phenomenon; the public is accustoming itself to demanding these services from the government faster than it is accustoming itself to paying taxes. The strategy of making a plan in excess of resources demonstrates to the public that it can have more of what it wants if it is prepared to pay more taxes. The government of the typical underdeveloped country has substantially increased the share of taxes in the national income over the past 15 years, and this has certainly been aided by the practice of setting high targets for the public sector in development plans.
PLANNING, ECONOMIC: Development Planning The same strategy may work with administrators of foreign aid. These administrators look for gaps in a development plan which they think they can fill. A plan which showed resources equal to desired expenditures would leave no room for foreign aid. This problem can, however, be solved without violating the chief purpose of planning, which is to determine priorities. A good development plan assigns degrees of priority to the projects which it includes. Hence, there is always a list to use for drawing out more taxes or more foreign aid. Implementation. The plan may be well designed in every sense but yet may fail because it is made by people who cannot put it into effect. This is obvious in regard to the private sector; what the planners write may bear no relationship to what investors mean to do. But it applies also to the public sector. A government is not monolithic; power to make decisions is diffused among many ministries and departments. Many a "good" plan fails because it is ignored by the very ministries which are supposed to implement it. Hence, the machinery for implementing the plan is of crucial importance. If the plan is to have a good chance of being implemented, the agency which makes the plan must meet three tests: (1) it must have the support of the head of the government; (2) it must allow all the leading decision makers in the economy to participate in drawing up the plan; and (3) it must control crucial decisions at the stage of implementation. Governments usually establish a special agency for making a development plan. Its size varies according to the size of the country, the complexity of the plan, how the preparatory work is shared with other government agencies and departments, and the extent of the planning agency's responsibility for implementation. Normally ministries and departments prepare their own proposals and have preliminary survey and estimation done by their own engineering and other experts; but if the departments are weak in these techniques, a good deal of preparatory technical work will fall on the agency, which must then have its own architects, engineers, accountants, and other experts. The agency should also be able to rely on the statistical authorities, the government's economic advisory services, and the development corporations for a great deal of the statistical and economic material it needs but may have to supplement this to a greater or lesser extent with its own investigations. There is no formula for dividing the preparatory w ork between the planning agency and other government agencies, other than that the planning
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agency will find itself having to do such necessary work as the others fail to do. Similarly, implementation depends to some extent on the competence of the other agencies. There are cases where the planning agency has become the sole authority for executing all public works, cases where it merely records how implementation is proceeding, and extreme cases where it has nothing whatsoever to do with implementation. Since the plan accords priorities to ministerial proposals, rejecting many outright, the planners must have authority vis-a-vis the ministries. Typically the planning agency is responsible to the prime minister or president, and its chief executive officer is frequently a well-known administrator brought in from outside the civil service and paid above the civil service rates. Unless the agency's head has the confidence and support of the head of the government, the agency will have no effective influence on what goes into the plan. This is not enough, however. The planning agency needs the support not only of the head of the government but also of his strongest ministers. A typical device is to have a special subcommittee of the cabinet for "development plan affairs" which includes the minister of finance and the chief ministers for industry and agriculture. However, the problem is not confined to ministers. Department heads and civil servants are also powerful and can sabotage a plan if they do not agree with it. The only way to have fair certainty that the plan will be effective is to bring into the planning process all the leading persons in the government apparatus, ministerial and administrative, who have the power to make important decisions, and produce a plan which is, as far as practicable, acceptable to them. The same goes for the part of the plan relating to the private sector. A plan for private investment in which the private investors have had no say is not likely to have much effect. Hence, persons knowledgeable and influential in all the industries where substantial change is desired must be consulted in the making of the plan. The machinery for consultation varies in structure and formality. In some small countries all the chief decision makers can sit around the same table, whereas large countries need a network of planning committees including officials and private citizens. Typically, not enough opportunity is given for consultation. The planning agency makes a plan which is unacceptable to important decision makers outside its circle, and they simply ignore it. This is especially apt to happen in countries with a federal structure, where the plan covers many
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functions which are state or provincial responsibilities without adequate assurance that state and provincial authorities are willing to play the role which the plan assigns to them. If the plan is to be effective, the planning agency must have some control over its implementation. In the public sector, implementation is governed by the annual capital budget, which is the authority for expenditure. The planning agency is in the strongest position when the making of the annual capital budget is assigned to it rather than to the authority which makes the annual recurrent budget (the ministry of finance or the budget bureau). This division brings its own problems. Since capital expenditure brings recurrent expenditure, the planning agency must consult the budget bureau when making the capital budget, and the budget bureau must consult the planning agency when making the recurrent budget. If, as is sometimes the case, the planning agency has no control over the annual capital budget, the plan is soon forgotten, and actual expenditure may bear little relation to the plan forecast. The part of the plan relating to the private sector is not so easily controlled by a single agency. Implementation may involve the issue of licenses (for building, imports, or investment), tariffs, subsidies, recommended legislation, and many other kinds of action, vested in half a dozen ministries. The planning agency should be represented on all committees which make decisions involved in implementing the private sector of the plan, though it cannot hope to have a controlling voice. Implementation does not depend entirely on machinery. The most important prerequisite is a realistic plan. If the plan makes assumptions which are far from reality, civil servants and private persons are forced, willy-nilly, to ignore it when making important decisions. However realistic the plan may be at the time it is made, its influence will decline unless it is continually revised. Events turn out differently from what was expected; new physical resources are discovered; the financial situation changes; and so on. With the passage of time the relevance of the published document must inevitably decline. Hence, the plan must be flexible. The private-sector part of the plan is necessarily flexible. If investors turn up with good schemes not previously considered, they will not be turned away; and if other investors decide to abandon proposals which were highly regarded at the time of making the plan, they cannot be forced to continue. Usually the government's concern is only to ensure a high level of private investment; whether this is in one project or an-
other is likely to be of secondary importance, except in industries considered (rightly or wrongly) to be "strategic" in some sense. Not all governments see the situation in this light; some believe that their officials' assessment of investments is better than the private investor's and try to induce or coerce the private investor to keep in line with the published plan; they have only limited success. The public-sector part of the plan is revised every year for the annual budget. Whether conditions have changed or not, the government is continuously besieged by ministers trying to bring forward schemes which are not in the plan, some that were previously rejected, some that are new. As time passes, the published plan must become less relevant. Some countries will openly abandon a plan two or three years before it is due to expire, and issue a new one in its place; others establish new priorities without formally abandoning the plan; still others abandon both the plan and any consistent priorities. A plan must not be considered to have failed merely because things turned out differently. Its value lies in organizing consistent thinking at the time it is made. Constant revision is as important a part of planning as is the process of making the original document. The fact that the economy will not turn out as forecast is not an argument against planning. Decisions cannot all be postponed because we cannot forecast the future correctly; planning helps to clarify what we expect, to reveal its inconsistencies, and therefore to improve the process of making decisions. W. ARTHUR LEWIS [Directly related are the entries CAPITAL, HUMAN; CAPITAL, SOCIAL OVERHEAD; FOREIGN AID, article on ECONOMIC ASPECTS; INPUT-OUTPUT ANALYSIS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
HAQ, MAHBUBUL 1963 The Strategy of Economic Planning: A Case Study of Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford Univ. Press. HIRSCHMAN, ALBERT O. 1958 The Strategy of Economic Development. Yale Studies in Economics, No. 10. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. LEWIS, JOHN P. 1962 Quiet Crisis in India: Economic Development and American Policy. Washington: Brookings Institution. LEWIS, W. ARTHUR 1966 Development Planning. London: Allen & Unwin. MASON, EDWARD S. 1958 Economic Planning in Underdeveloped Areas: Government and Business. New York: Fordham Univ. Press. MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, CENTER FOB INTERNATIONAL STUDIES 1963 Planning Economic Development: A Study. Edited by Everett E. Hagen. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. TINBERGEN, JAN 1958 The Design of Development. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
PLANNING, SOCIAL: Introduction UNITED NATIONS, SECRETARY GENERAL 1963 Planning for Economic Development. New York: United Nations. WALINSKY, Louis J. 1963 The Planning and Execution of Economic Development: A Nontechnical Guide for Policy Makers and Administrators. New York: McGrawHill.
PLANNING, SOCIAL i. ii. in. iv.
INTRODUCTION REGIONAL AND URBAN PLANNING RESOURCE PLANNING WELFARE PLANNING
Charles Madge Herbert J. Cans Richard L. Meier Martin Rein
INTRODUCTION
Social planning involves the drawing up of plans for future action in regard to social institutions and resources. A "social" plan is designed to meet the needs of a society, which means, in many cases, an entire nation. This usage, in which social planning is equivalent to societal planning, is generally accepted by social scientists (see, for example, Myrdal 1959); but social planning is sometimes also used to mean planning by a group as opposed to planning by an individual. Also social planning is sometimes viewed as complementary to, rather than inclusive of, economic planning; in that case, social planning means the planning of a society's noneconomic activities. Recent history. In the present century, and especially since World War n, there has been a rapid growth in the importance of social planning, both as an idea and as an institutional complex. Although the index to the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences does not refer to social planning as such, its article entitled "National Economic Planning" concludes: ". . . the direction of modern society would seem to be toward a planned economy" (Lederer 1933, vol. 11, p. 205). In spite of controversy, often at a high level of intellectual abstraction, on whether so comprehensive a concept of planning is either possible or desirable, the idea of social planning appears to have been institutionalized over the greater part of the modern world and in the programs of international organizations, so that, whatever its logical and philosophical status, it has achieved de facto recognition. In this it may be compared to the ideas of progress, equality, and welfare, stemming from the same broad trend of modern life toward industrialization and technical rationality. During the earlier part of the industrial era the liberal ideology of laissez-faire was in the ascendant. Governments did indeed make social and eco-
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nomic interventions, but on the whole it was only old-fashioned autocrats and certain socialist minorities who thought in more total terms. Military general staffs were, in the pre-1914 period, the bodies most likely to draw up "plans." Since modern warfare depends on industry, military planners could not ignore industrial and civil questions. World War i involved a far more comprehensive mobilization by the major belligerent governments of all their resources, economic and social as well as military, than had ever before been contemplated. National emergency brought home the importance of, for instance, national levels of health and education to a total war effort. In some countries the war was followed by revolution, and in all the major European countries involved there was a recognition, at all political levels, of the need for social and economic reform. The idea of social planning, and especially of national economic planning, emerged into full daylight during the interwar years. The problem of the business cycle, and unemployment, strengthened this tendency and led to increased state intervention and planning even in the United States, where, however, faith in individual private enterprise remained strong. World War n repeated and intensified the effects of World War i. Not only was there total planning for the war itself, but plans for postwar reconstruction began to materialize, in Great Britain and some other countries, almost as soon as the war started. After the war, international organizations multiplied, and social planning became international. Moreover, by the mid-1960s nearly all colonial territories had gained independence, and a large group of new nations had started programs of national development, in which the idea of a "plan" was almost de rigueur. Scope and theory As early as 1841, Friedrich List had written: "It is the task of politics to civilise the barbarous nationalities, to make the small and weak ones great and strong, but, above all, to secure to them existence and continuance. It is the task of national economy to accomplish the economical development of the nation, and to prepare it for admission into the universal society of the future" (1841, p. 142 in 1§04 edition). While his doctrines served the purposes of militaristic nationalism in Germany after Bismarck and in Japan after the Meiji restoration, they also contributed, if indirectly, to Soviet Russian state planning. "Historically, Friedrich List preceded Marx as the father of the theory of planning; Rathenau, who organized the first modern
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planned economy in the Germany of the first world war, preceded Lenin, whose approach to the problem of planning in Soviet Russia was consciously based on the German precedents" (Carr 19511953, vol. 2, p. 363). List also emphasized the distinction between present and future advantage from the national standpoint. He not only justified protective tariffs for young industries but stressed the importance of developing "immaterial" productive forces, such as technical knowledge and skill. Thus even during this early period it was seen that while the core of social planning consists in a plan for balanced capital investment in industry and agriculture, national plans must also allocate resources for education, health, housing, and other kinds of social investment. Planning and social values. Decisions on priorities to be adopted cannot simply be based on economic calculations; essentially they are political decisions based on social values. The decisions embodied in a plan are made for political reasons; they also have long-term political effects (Diesing 1962, p. 231). Although the models of development currently used by national planners are economic and based on quantitative analysis, it can be argued that only when the economic model has been transformed into a general social model can policy conclusions logically be inferred from it (Myrdal 1959, p. 166). It is relatively easy to decide that capital should be invested, for instance, in a steel plant with a given capacity and location. An economic decision, such as the siting of an industry, can to some extent control the direction of social trends, such as urbanization and population movement. But even in societies with comprehensive state planning, it has not been possible to achieve full control over internal migration, let alone over demographic growth. The noneconomic part of social planning must at the present time largely consist in attempting to foresee some of the ways in which economic decisions will affect social behavior and some of the ways in which social behavior will impede or facilitate the implementation of the economic decisions. Thus, social planners must take logical account of nonlogical motivation (Pareto [1916] 1963, vol. 3, chapter 11). "Radical planners have to cope with the paradoxical situation that the success of their intellectual labor, which is an achievement of reason and logic, is best secured if the indispensable consensus rests on a non-logical basis" (Speier 1937, p. 476). How rational can planning be? But these difficulties are not new. They are inherent in govern-
ment and in the framing and execution of policies and programs generally. In what, then, does the added problem of the social planner consist? It would seem to stem from the more ambitious attempt of the planner to arrive at decisions rationally. By comparison with earlier procedures, this attempt involves more systematic fact-finding before the plan is formulated, more systematic coordination of separate decisions and policies, and more explicit formulation and phasing of objectives. Another feature of planned, as against unplanned, national development is the greater stress on evaluation of results achieved and on objective measurements of success or failure. In a nutshell, the problem of social planning is how to insure that it at least approximates to its rational intentions— a problem that falls fairly and squarely in the lap of the social sciences. Social planning as ideology: pro and con. The idea of comprehensive social planning has been criticized as a pseudo-scientific or "scientistic" delusion stemming from Comtean positivism, which in turn is seen as stemming from the Ecole Polytechnique instituted in Paris after the French Revolution. The desire to apply engineering technique to the solution of social problems is seen as a dangerous aberration (Hayek et al. 1935, p. 210; Hayek 1944 passim; 1952, pp. 94, 105). "All such general plans of social reconstruction are merely the rationalization of the will to power. For that reason they are the subjective beginnings of fanaticism and tyranny" (Lippmann 1937, p. 365), Such strictures were a reaction not so much against Bolshevik or Nazi total planning (though these of course were conspicuous features of the interwar political scene) as against the idea that liberal democracies could, and indeed should, seek to avoid maladjustment (socioeconomic and psychological) by democratic planning (Zweig 1942; Mannheim 1935; 1950). Early in the 1930s Karl Mannheim propounded a new stage of "thought at the level of planning," in which the balance of the planned and unplanned activities of society was about to be decisively tipped in the direction of the former. In this view, liberalism appeared "as a transitional phase between two forms of planned order" of which the earlier was that of medieval Christendom, while the new phase was the result of "the growth of a coherent and co-ordinated system of social techniques" within the modern national state (Mannheim [1935] 1940, pp. 160, 362). Although freedom and democracy, in the sense these words have in the liberal West, were undoubt-
PLANNING, SOCIAL: Introduction edly highly valued by Mannheim, his penchant for portentous phraseology laid him open to charges of "historicism" (a belief in inevitable laws of historical development) and "holism" (a belief that social reconstruction should be all-embracing). Karl Popper sharply attacked Mannheim's concept of planning as Utopian and totalitarian; instead, Popper advocated piecemeal social engineering, in which social arrangements are changed "by small adjustments and readjustments" rather than by trying to redesign society as a whole. However, he did not exclude the possibility "that a series of piecemeal reforms might be inspired by one general tendency, for example, a tendency towards a greater equalization of incomes. In this way, piecemeal methods may lead to changes in what is usually called the 'class structure of society'" (Popper 1957, pp. 66, 68). While a Popperian social planner might fail to see the wood for the trees and a Mannheimian might lose his way in the wood, it is doubtful that we really have to choose between these two approaches. The controversy, begun in the 1930s and concluded in the 1950s, seems increasingly unreal. Without wishing to suggest a unilinear trend, one cannot fail to observe the continued increase in the number of plans and planning agencies, both in advanced industrial and in underdeveloped countries. There has, however, been no corresponding development of a general theory of social planning. For hints of such a theory one must look at comparative cross-national studies by economists, historians, political scientists, and sociologists (Shils 1963; see also Duveau 1954; Bettelheim 1959; Ossowski 1959). In the rich countries planning takes on a less comprehensive and programmatic character than in the poor countries, which are compelled to attempt what in the light of the history of the rich countries appears as a short cut (Myrdal 1959, P- 159). In some underdeveloped countries (for example, India) social planning is combined with a democratic political system of free elections based on universal suffrage. In others (for example, China) there is planning along with what has been described as a "mobilization system," in which the goals of development are high and possibly unrealistic and stress is placed on militancy and single-party organization (Apter 1963a). The more ambitious the plan, the more necessary it will seem to promote consensus by fostering a sense of emergency in the face of external and internal danger (Speier 1937). If the plan succeeds, perhaps this a tmosphere of "political religion" can be relaxed
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(Apter 1963£>). It may be surmised that "total" and "piecemeal" theories are the poles between which actual ideologies of social planning vary. Practice and organization Historical priority for comprehensive national planning in peacetime must go to the Soviet Union. After initial hesitations, planning machinery was effectively established by 1925 (Carr 1958-1964, vol. 2, p. 490); the first five-year plan started in 1928. In Germany, the first Nazi four-year plan started in 1933. Fascist Italy launched a plan in the same year, which also saw the start of the Roosevelt administration's scheme for the development of the Tennessee Valley in the United States, while in 1934 the Turkish government adopted a five-year plan for the industrialization of the country (Zweig 1942), and there was published in India, not yet independent, a pioneering first program of planned development (Visvesvaraya 1934). In 1950, soon after independence, the Indian government set up its Planning Commission. India's first five-year plan covered the period 19511956. This was probably the first instance of so influential a planning body being set up within the framework of a parliamentary democracy, and its constitutional status has been criticized (Chanda 1958, p. 92; Jagota 1963). Ghana has had three five-year development plans, the first dating from 1951, when it was still a British colony (Gold Coast); the second and third plans were instituted after the country became independent in 1957. Since 1950 both the number of newly independent nations and the number of national economic plans have been increasing rapidly. In 1964 there were about 125 nations, of which some 93 were currently defined as "developing." Nearly all these had development plans (Moyes & Hayter 1964). Wide variations in political context and in the capacities of nations to provide expert staff for planning bodies must be borne in mind, but the trend toward the institutionalization of social planning is unmistakable. Comparative study by social scientists and historians of this new wave of national plans has barely begun but must surely in coming decades become a leading concern of macrosociology. The example of India. The Indian government's Planning Commission has nine members, drawn from the central political leadership and including the prime minister, the finance minister, the defense minister, and the minister for planning. It is assisted by a National Development Council (which includes the chief ministers of the
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states) and has a secretariat of 369, excluding the 240 attached to the Program Evaluation Organization and the Community Projects Administration (Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi, 1958). The staff includes economists and other social scientists and promotes relevant research proje• See especially Chapter 26 on the Planning Commission. JAGOTA, S. P. 1963 Some Constitutional Aspects of Planning. Pages 173-201 in Ralph J. D. Braibanti and Joseph J. Spengler (editors), Administration and Economic Development in India. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. LEDERER, EMIL 1933 National Economic Planning. Volume 11, pages 197-205 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan. LIPPMANN, WALTER (1937) 1943 Inquiry Into the Principles of the Good Society. Rev. ed. Boston: Little. LIST, FRIEDRICH (1841) 1928 The National System of Political Economy. London: Longmans. -> First published in German. MANNHEIM, KARL (1935) 1940 Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction: Studies in Modern Social Structure. New York: Harcourt. -» First published as Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus. MANNHEIM, KARL 1950 Freedom, Power, and Democratic Planning. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. MOYES, ADRIAN; and HAYTER, TERESA 1964 World III: A Handbook on Developing Countries. Oxford: Pergamon Press; New York: Macmillan. MYRDAL, GUNNAR 1959 The Theoretical Assumptions of Social Planning. Pages 155-167 in World Congress of Sociology, Fourth, Transactions. Volume 2: Sociol-
PLANNING, SOCIAL: Regional and Urban Planning ogy: Applications and Research. London: International Sociological Association. OSSOWSKI, STANISLAW 1959 Social Conditions and Consequences of Social Planning. Pages 199-222 in World Congress of Sociology, Fourth, Transactions. Volume 2: Sociology: Applications and Research. London: International Sociological Association. PARETO, VILFREDO (1916) 1963 The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology. 4 vols. New York: Dover. -> First published as Trattato di sociologia generale. Volume 1: Non-logical Conduct. Volume 2: Theory of Residues. Volume 3: Theory of Derivations. Volume 4: The General Form of Society. POPPER, KARL R. 1957 The Poverty of Historicism. Boston: Beacon. SHILS, EDWARD 1963 On the Comparative Study of the New States. Pages 1-26 in Chicago, University of, Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations, Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa. Edited by Clifford Geertz. New York: Free Press. SPEIER, HANS 1937 Freedom and Social Planning. American Journal of Sociology 42:463-483. VISVESVARAYA, MOKSHAGUNDAM 1934 Planned Economy for India. Bangalore (India) : Bangalore Press. ZWEIG, FERDYNAND 1942 The Planning of Free Societies. London: Seeker & Warburg. II REGIONAL AND URBAN PLANNING
In its generic sense, planning is a method of decision making that proposes or identifies goals or ends, determines the means or programs which achieve or are thought to achieve these ends, and does so by the application of analytical techniques to discover the fit between ends and means and the consequences of implementing alternative ends and means. Urban (or city) and metropolitan planning apply this method to determine public investment and other policies regarding future growth and change by municipalities and metropolitan areas. City planning has existed ever since man began to build towns and to make decisions about their future. In most societies, but particularly in the United States, there has been little consensus about these decisions. The diverse classes, ethnic groups, and interest groups that live in the city have different conceptions of how the city ought to grow a nd change and of who should benefit from the policy and allocation decisions. Consequently, these groups have attempted, directly or indirectly, to influence the ends, means, and techniques of planing, and even the role of the planners. A sociological analysis of American city planning must ask who plans with what ends and means for which interest group. Since the variables in this paradigm are affected by changes in the population and power structure of the American city, the analysis is best carried out historically.
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Planning as civic reform American city planning can be said to have begun with the laying out of the infant country's first cities, usually by engineers who mapped grid schemes of rectangular blocks and lots, largely for the benefit of land sellers and builders (Blumenfeld 1949). Most American cities came into being without prior planning, however, and with only sporadic attempts to regulate their growth. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the provision of utilities and other municipal services could not keep up with the rapid increase in population, and the cities became overcrowded and congested, with vast slums in which epidemics, unchecked crime, and political corruption were commonplace. Shortly before the Civil War, these conditions stimulated the formation of a number of civic reform movements, which were the forebears of contemporary city planning. The reform groups were made up of predominantly Protestant and upper-middle-class civic and religious leaders whose major end was the restoration of order. They sought physical order through slum clearance and the construction of model tenements to improve housing conditions and through the park and playground movement, which tried to preserve the supposedly healthgiving features of the countryside by building parks and other recreational facilities in the crowded areas. They sought social order through the erection of educational and character-building facilities such as schools, libraries, and settlement houses, hoping that these would Americanize the immigrants and make them middle class, and thus eradicate crime, vice, and even the harmless forms of lower-class hedonism. They promoted political order through the "good government" movement, which advocated nonpolitical methods of urban decision making to eliminate the new political machines and the fledgling socialist movement. They were attempting to maintain the cultural and political power they had held before the arrival of the immigrants by imposing on the city the physical and social structure of Protestant, middle-class, preindustrial America. The means by which they proposed to achieve these ends included new legislation to regulate and control city growth; the use of public administration and, later, scientific management procedures to run the city; and the establishment of "facilities," such as parks and settlement houses, which would improve living conditions and alter the behavior of their users. After the reformers had built a few model facilities with private funds in the slums of
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several eastern cities, they realized that they lacked the resources to alter the entire city by this approach, and so they began to use their considerable social status and what remained of their political influence to propose that the cities take over their programs as municipal functions. The reformers' efforts were supported by architects, who had created the City Beautiful movement during the 1890s to develop park, civic center, and other schemes to enhance the city, and by downtown business and property interests, who sought higher land values and also favored efficiency in government to minimize taxes. Others, especially upper-middle-class homeowners, were disturbed by the invasion of commercial and industrial establishments, low-status residents, and slums into previously "good" neighborhoods. These groups called on the city to pass zoning legislation, which would prohibit such invasions by regulating the kinds of buildings and land uses permitted in different zones. Zoning not only encouraged the kind of order, beauty, and efficiency sought by its advocates but also segregated land use and population by class. The rise and fall of the "master plan" By the end of World War I, planning and zoning had become municipal responsibilities. Since their advocates usually opposed the political machines, these functions were incorporated in quasi-independent city planning and zoning commissions, headed by lay boards of civic leaders and businessmen. These commissions were staffed principally by civil engineers and architects, who were called city planners. The new agencies and professionals codified and further operationalized the ends and means they had inherited from the reformers, principally through the "master plan," which proposed both the traditional solutions and some new ones in a single comprehensive scheme. The typical master plan, which has changed relatively little since the first one was drafted in 1914, portrays a future ideal: a city without slums, divided into zones for each major land use, with efficient highway and mass transit systems, vastly increased amounts of open recreational space and other public cultural facilities, and served by a system of neighborhood, district, and downtown retail and civic centers. The proposals for new facilities and rearranged land-use and transportation patterns are synthesized into a master plan map, with proposals for implementing this map through a zoning ordinance to order land use as prescribed by the plan, building codes to discourage slums, subdivision regulations to guide the development
of vacant land, and governmental reorganization schemes to coordinate the proposed changes (Bassett 1938; Dunham 1958; Kent 1964). No master plan has ever become a blueprint for the growth of the city, although individual recommendations have often been implemented. Perhaps the main reason for the failure of the master plan was its assumption of environmental or physical determinism. Like the nineteenth-century reformers, the master planners assumed that people's lives are shaped by their physical surroundings and that the ideal city could be realized by the provision of an ideal physical environment. Since they were architects and engineers, they believed the city was a system of buildings and land uses that could be arranged and rearranged through planning, without taking account of the social, economic, and political structures and processes that determine people's behavior, including their use of land. The ends underlying the planners' physical approach reflected their Protestant middle-class view of city life. As a result, the master plan tried to eliminate as "blighting influences" many of the land uses and institutions of lower-class and ethnic groups. Most of the plans either made no provision for tenements, rooming houses, second-hand stores, and marginal loft industry, or located them in catch-all zones of "nuisance uses," in which all land uses were permitted. Popular facilities that they considered morally or culturally undesirable were also excluded. The plans called for many parks and playgrounds but left out the movie theater, the neighborhood tavern, and the clubroom; they proposed churches and museums but no night clubs or hot dog stands (Wood et al. 1966). The units into which the plan divided the city were determined by transportation routes and other physical criteria, and did not reflect established social groups or ecological conditions of change and growth. Neighborhood boundaries ignored class and ethnic divisions in the population, and the planners made a conscious effort to break up ethnic enclaves in order to achieve nineteenthcentury Americanization goals. The planners' certainty about how people ought to live and how the city ought to look resulted in a nearly static plan, a Platonic vision of the city as an orderly and finished work of art. The only land uses programmed for future growth were those favored by middle-class residents, high-status industrial and commercial establishments, the real estate interests catering to both, and the tax collector. The planners' unwillingness to recognize alternative values also made them unable to see the
PLANNING, SOCIAL: Regional and Urban Planning role of politics in implementing the plan. Believing that their solution was the best blueprint for the future, its formulators thought that they needed only to publish their report, obtain support from the civic leaders and businessmen who sat on the boards of the planning commission, and then persuade elected officials that the plan expressed the public interest. The planners' opposition to partisan political methods of decision making convinced them that the plan was "above politics" and that anyone who rejected it was acting from selfish, and therefore evil, motives. The master planners did not realize that the ends they sought were opposed by many voters, that most city residents place less value on parks and open space than planning ideology dictated, and that most residents do not center their life on the elementary school, as the neighborhood unit plan proposed. Worse yet, the plan advocated a middle-class life style for all, but it did not recommend economic programs to enable low-income people to move out of tenements and buy singlefamily houses. As a result, master plans have rarely generated any widespread enthusiasm among the voters but have always aroused considerable political opposition from the groups who would have to pay economically, socially, and politically for the proposed changes. The master planners were also hampered by conditions not of their making. For one thing, their authority to plan stopped at the city limits, although the growth processes which they sought to control cover a much wider area. Also, the planners were poorly funded, so that their conclusions were often based on whatever data, however inadequate, were already available. Yet their methodology was ultimately also a function of their own ends, means, and techniques. Their belief in physical determinism limited their analysis to the determination of the land-use implications of their demographic and economic projections, and their faith in the solutions they proposed discouraged consideration of the fit between ends and means and of the consequences of these means (Meyerson & Banfield 1955; Altshuler 1965). Yet although master plans had little impact on city development, some of the planners' ideas were adopted. For example, their arguments that excessive land coverage inevitably produced traffic congestion, that off-street parking was necessary, and that zoning too much land for commercial use in the hope of increasing tax income would also leave ^uch land lying needlessly unused were eventually ac cepted in principle by city officials. Being politically weak, however, the planners could not stand
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up to the powerful economic interests who opposed the implementation of these principles, and being apolitical in their approach, they could not develop compromise solutions, which would have salvaged at least some of their proposals. Master planning activity reached a new high after World War n, especially in areas of rapid suburbanization. At the same time, however, planners working in the cities began to lose confidence in the master plan. As cities began to grow and rebuild again, many of the development proposals that came before the planning commission conflicted with the master plan, and the conflict was usually resolved in favor of the new proposals. Some planners argued that, in order to be useful, the master plan had to be constantly revised and updated, but others began to suggest that planning was not only a method but also a process of decision making and that master planning was only one tool among many to be employed in this process. The emergence of rational planning Since 1950 the city has increasingly become the residence of a small number of rich people and a rapidly rising number of poor nonwhites. The latter are forced to live in ghetto slums, and these slums, as well as the pathologies associated with poverty, are reducing the livability of the city for the middle class and creating new problems for city officials. Low-income neighborhoods and residents cannot pay the taxes needed to provide them with municipal services, and the exodus of middleclass residents, stores, and industries to the suburbs is also depriving the city of its most profitable sources of tax income. Some help is now coming from the federal government, which is providing financial support for new city programs. City planning has been funded by federal subsidies as well, particularly for transportation and urban renewal plans. Transport and metropolitan planners. Master planners have concerned themselves with transportation ever since car ownership began to increase urban congestion and suburbanization. After World War n, however, the new spurt in car buying and the growth of suburbia resulted in the building of expressways, subsidized by federal grants, in every American city. These made it more convenient to use cars and thus encouraged the exodus to suburbia even more. As a result, they not only failed to reduce congestion but also took more customers away from the already declining mass transit systems. Consequently, by the late 1950s a number of large cities began to formulate massive transporta-
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tion planning studies, which aimed to determine the location of future expressways and to revitalize mass transit as part of a metropolitan-area transportation system serving the city and its suburbs. Since new transportation facilities stimulate further urban development and thus affect land-use patterns and the economic base of the cities (Mitchell & Rapkin 1954), the transportation planners were in effect formulating a new kind of master plan (Fagin 1963). In this process, they introduced several innovations into planning. Well financed and able to measure the amount and flow of traffic with relative ease, the planners obtained large masses of data and brought in the newly available computer to analyze them. Moreover, since the aim of their plan was limited to serving the transportation needs of the area and the achievement of the economically most productive and most efficient land-use patterns, they were working with a smaller number of ends than were the master planners. This enabled them to formulate a number of alternative schemes, rather than a single one, using the computer and later the simulation model to choose a final plan from among the alternatives ("Land Use . . . " 1959). Because the studies were staffed by transportation experts, economists, and operations researchers rather than by architects and master planners, the ends and means of traditional city planning were of lesser importance. Finally, their plans were metropolitan. Because so much of the traffic flow was generated in the suburbs, transportation planning could not end at the city limits, and regional planning bodies were set up to do the studies. Metropolitan planning had been advocated by city planners and public administrators for more than a generation. The control of growth and the achievement of order and efficiency required a metropolitan government to coordinate municipal services and planning for the city and its suburbs in a single supergovernment, which would do away with the duplication and conflict among the many hundreds of local bodies. The appeal for metropolitanism fell on deaf ears, however. The suburbs rejected any plan which would require them to share their power with, or give up their local authority to, the city. The cities were predominantly Democratic, working class, and Roman Catholic, and the suburbs were predominantly Republican, middle class, and Protestant; thus political, class, and religious conflicts were endemic, and they were magnified when cities became increasingly nonwhite (Banfield & Grodzins 1958). Moreover, the suburbs had no great interest in metropolitan planning or coordination.
Their middle-class homeowners could well afford the duplication of municipal services and were unwilling to accept any infringement on their local autonomy, not to mention the possible arrival of lower-status and nonwhite city residents in exchange for a slight saving in taxes. These considerations may even prevent the implementation of the regional transportation systems now being planned. Urban renewal programs. The second stimulus for change in city planning theory and practice has come out of urban renewal programs. In 1949 the federal government set up the urban renewal program, which funneled considerable amounts of money to the cities, with a view to the elimination of slums (Woodbury 1953; Wilson 1966). Intense political opposition to public housing prevented it from making any significant inroads on the slums, and thus the federal government turned to private enterprise, hoping that it would rebuild on land that had been cleared and reduced in price by federal grants. The program received strong local support from the cities, which expected that new building programs would increase their tax revenues, and from downtown businessmen, who saw urban renewal as a way of replacing the slum dwellers of the inner city with more affluent customers and, later, as a way of modernizing downtown districts with federal aid. The theory behind urban renewal was the traditional nineteenth-century one that if slum dwellers were relocated in decent housing, they would give up their lower-class ways and the social pathologies thought to "breed" in the slums. Since inexpensive housing was in short supply, however, and the private redevelopers of cleared sites were building only luxury housing, the displaced were often forced to move into other slums, where they usually had to pay higher rents (Anderson 1964; Hartman 1964; Greer 1965). In clearing entire neighborhoods, urban renewal also destroyed viable social communities, thus saddling the displaced with emotional costs as well (Gans 1962; Fried 1963). In the larger cities, the unanticipated consequences of slum clearance created so much political opposition that by the start of the 1960s, when the market for luxury housing had been sated, the promiscuous use of the bulldozer was halted. Renewal agencies are now experimenting with rehabilitation, so as to minimize relocation, and are proposing new subsidies for both builders and lowincome residents in order to increase the supply of low-cost housing (Frieden 1964; Abrams 1965). Initially, renewal had been carried out on a project-by-project basis, but once the choice sites desired by private builders had been used up, city
PLANNING, SOCIAL: Regional and Urban Planning planners were asked to develop more comprehensive urban renewal programs. The selection of future renewal sites required the determination of the best re-use of the sites on the basis of city-wide considerations; and the federal government provided planning grants to the cities to create "workable programs," which had to demonstrate how individual projects fitted into a larger, more comprehensive renewal plan before federal renewal funds were made available. Subsequently, the federal government broadened its requirements, for example, by including social considerations in the choice of sites, and set up the "community renewal program" (Grossman 1963). In many cities the community renewal programs resemble the traditional master plan, but in others the failure of urban renewal to help the slum dwellers has called attention to the need for solving the more basic problems of the low-income population. This concern, together with the "War on Poverty," is encouraging planners in a number of cities to develop quite different kinds of plans. Thus there have been innovations in the choice of ends and means as well as in the techniques of planning. Urban renewal is no longer conceived solely as a process of eliminating slums, but as a means of dealing with the problems that force poor and nonwhite people into them. Some community renewal programs are exploring programs of job creation, opening up housing, educational, and other opportunities to nonwhites, and improving social services in the hope that these, together with housing programs, will eliminate the deprivation of the slum dwellers as well as the slums. New ends, such as equality of opportunity and redistribution of public resources to the poor, are complementing those of order and efficiency, particularly since it is being realized that social order can be maintained only through greater economic and political equality. The means are new as well, since, to an increasing extent, programs to help people are being added to those for changing the physical environment. In 1966, the federal government formally integrated social and physical planning for urban renewal by developing the Demonstration Cities program, later retitled the Model Cities program, through which 60 to 70 American cities were to be funded to rebuild and rehabilitate almost completely the physical and social structures of their major slum ghetto neighborhoods (Taylor et al. 1966). Systemic planning. The extension of economic a nd other opportunities bears little resemblance to traditional planning solutions, and the outcome of the planning process is no longer en-
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visaged as a master plan but as a set of incremental or developmental programs that will improve present conditions, formulated so that they can be plugged into the ongoing decision-making processes of city officials (Fagin 1959; Mitchell 1961; Webber 1963a). Physical determinism is thus being replaced by a broader systems approach, which seeks to deal with the causes of the problem. In this conception of the planning process, land-use studies are less relevant, and the community renewal planners are turning to surveys of the present behavior and future wants of the populations for whom they are planning, analyses of the quality of opportunities and social services now available to them, and economic as well as political studies to determine the feasibility and the results of the programs and policies they recommend. This conception of planning also presages a change in the role of the planner. The city planner is no longer a nonpolitical formulator of long-range ideals but is becoming an adviser to elected and appointed officials. Planning commissions are being reorganized into planning departments that take their place in the mayor's cabinet, and consequently the planner's traditional antipathy to politics has decreased. The planner's new role and his rising influence are partly a result of changes in the city and in city hall. The new problems of the city and the gradual replacement of the working-class machine politician by the middle-class, college-educated politician-administrator, supported by professionally trained bureaucrats, have made city governments much more responsive to expert advice, while the reduction of class differences between the planners and the new politicians has improved communication between them. In addition, downtown business and property interests have become more favorable to planning, partly because they, too, face new problems they cannot solve themselves and partly because the planners share their concern with the revitalization of the central business district. Moreover, planners are becoming more sympathetic to the city and are giving up their traditional antiurban ideology. As the suburbs threaten to engulf the city and to endanger the survival of the upper-middle-class cultural and civic institutions that have traditionally been located in the city, the planner has become an advocate of urbanism, supporting schemes to bring the middle class back into the city. Finally, with federal funds rapidly becoming a major source of support for local planning and state planning agencies and metropolitan ones also participating in local planning activities, the
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planner is no longer so closely tied to the small group of local businessmen and civic leaders who have traditionally supported him against his political opponents. This has encouraged him to pay more attention to the needs of other interest groups in the city, and, since the advent of the "War on Poverty," p?rticularly the low-income population. His greater concern with people has also made him more aware of the diversity of values among residents and more in favor of direct citizen participation in the planning process, rather than depending on the traditional appeal for citizen endorsement of the planner's decisions (Wilson 1963). The rational programming approach. The changes in the conditions under which planners work have been complemented, and even preceded, by changes within the planning profession and in the recruitment of planners, especially the entrance of social scientists into city planning. During the 1930s, social scientists helped to conduct national and regional planning studies in various federal agencies. After World War n, the University of Chicago established a planning school which taught national as well as city planning and was the first to stress social science rather than architectural techniques (Perloff 1957). Subsequently, this curriculum spread to other planning schools, and students with social science backgrounds streamed into them, so that today architects and engineers are fast becoming a minority in these schools. The Chicago school approached planning as a method of rational programming. Briefly, it argued that the essence of planning is the deliberate choice of ends and the analytic determination of the most effective means to achieve these ends, these being means which make optimal use of scarce resources and which, when implemented, are not accompanied by undesirable consequences. The Chicago planners argued that ends are not imposed by planning ideology or by a priori determinations of the public interest, but by political and market processes and by other forms of feedback from those affected by planning. According to this view, means and consequences are determined through predominantly empirical analyses, and by other studies that test the fit of means to ends and predict the consequences of these means (Meyerson & Banfield 1955; Meyerson 1956; Davidoff & Reiner 1962; Perloff & Wingo 1962). Rational programming has much in common with concepts of planning and methods of rational decision making being developed in political science, public administration, and management; thus, it is reducing the differences between city planning and planning for other clients and ends.
In turn, this has enabled city planning to use the personnel and approaches of other disciplines, including operations research (Branch 1957; Wheaton 1963), decision theory (Dyckman 1961), costbenefit analysis (Lichfield 1960), input-output studies (Isard et al. I960), information theory (Meier 1962), and simulation models ("Urban Development Models" 1965), as well as sociological and manpower analyses for understanding the behavior, attitudes, and ends of the clients of planning [Willmott & Cooney 1963; Reiner et al. 1963; see also ADMINISTRATION, article on ADMINISTRATIVE BEHAVIOR; REGIONAL SCIENCE]. The social scientists and the rational programmers owe no allegiance either to the master plan or to physical determinism. Aided by research findings, which indicate that the portions of the physical environment with which city planners have traditionally dealt do not have a significant impact on people's behavior (Rosow 1961; Wilner et al. 1962), and by studies of social organization and social change, which demonstrate that economic and social structures are much more important than spatial ones, the rational programmers devote their attention to institutions and institutional change rather than to environmental change (Webber 1963b; 1964). The new conception of planning has also affected general land-use planning, creating a greater concern with the social and economic functions of land use and leading to incremental policy formulations for rearranging it (see, for instance, Wheaton 1964). Even urban design, traditionally based primarily on aesthetic considerations, is now paying attention to the social processes that shape what city planners call the "urban form" (Lynch I960; Wurster 1963). New towns. Nevertheless, traditional master planning and land-use planning have received new support through the revival of another nineteenthcentury concept—the "new town." Originally conceived as a way of moving urban slum dwellers into the countryside and halting the growth of cities (Howard 1898), the new town is a relatively self-sufficient and independent community located beyond the city limits; it provides local employment opportunities for many of its residents, thus reducing their journey to work, the city's traffic congestion, and the alleged defects of the suburbs as so-called "bedroom communities" (Stein 1951)The hope is that if the master plan and related solutions cannot work in established cities, they might be applied on the tabula rasa of a new town. It seems likely, however, that the same political and market forces that prevented the implementa-
PLANNING, SOCIAL: Regional and Urban Planning tion of the master plan will also frustrate portions of the new-town schemes, particularly if they do not meet the wishes of the people who will have to be attracted as home buyers (Eichler & Kaplan 1967). Social versus physical planning In the 1960s rational programming is rapidly achieving dominance at the level of planning theory and is being advocated and used by professors and researchers in the profession. However, it has not yet been accepted by most city planning commissions and departments. Instead, the city planning practitioners have typically reacted to the new theory—and the new urban problems—by adding programs of "social planning" to the traditional land-use approach, now often called "physical planning." "Social planning" is used to describe planning for people or, by implication, for lowincome people, probably because physical plans have catered so largely to building programs for more affluent city residents. The dichotomy between physical and social planning is theoretically unjustifiable, however, because physical plans affect people, rich and poor, as much as do social plans. Even so, planning agencies are now adding social planning divisions to their staffs (Perloff 1963; 1965; Dyckman 1966). The first social planning activities were intended to meet the requirements of the federal community renewal program and to correct the inequities of slum clearance for the slum dwellers, but increasingly they are being carried out to coordinate city planning and renewal with the community action activities and other programs of the "War on Poverty." Frequently, however, this so-called social planning is only a modernized version of previous attempts to impose middle-class ways on the lowincome population, with "human renewal" educational and social work schemes to "rehabilitate" the slum dwellers while—or even in lieu of—improving their living conditions, thus subverting the antipoverty efforts into yet another device for maintaining the present inequality of the lowincome population (Cans 1964). This possibility has led to proposals for bringing planners into closer contact with the low-income population. Davidoff (1965) has suggested that because most planners are employed as technicians to pursue the interests of the so-called Establishment—that is, city hall, the political party, and the business community—other planners ought to become "advocate planners," that is, technical consultants and even spokesmen for the low-income population. In several U.S. cities, planners have begun to work
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with local civil rights groups and with community organizations in poor neighborhoods; they have formed a national professional association, Planners for Equal Opportunity; and they are questioning orthodox planning beliefs about how to plan for the slum ghetto (Piven & Cloward 1966). The politicization of planning. These activities are leading to the politicization of the city planning profession. It appears that the profession is being split into progressive and conservative wings: the former calling for social planning to reduce economic and racial inequality, and the latter defending traditional physical planning and the legitimacy of middle-class values. The rational programmers are a third wing, seeking to develop an approach that makes it possible to plan for all interest groups, but they, too, are split over the issue of working with or against the Establishment. In their day-to-day practice, city planning agencies tend to favor the conservative wing and the traditional land-use approach to planning, although they are both threatened and influenced by the progressives and the rational programmers. Not only are the planning agencies in existence to conduct land-use planning, but most of the directors and senior staff members are trained in this approach, and some of the leading practitioners in the profession still come from architectural and civil engineering backgrounds. Rational programmers and progressives are more often found among the junior staff and have less influence on agency activities. Moreover, since planners are employees of municipal bureaucracies, they are expected to conform to agency policy on the job, and in some cities they are even restrained from off-hours participation in activities and groups that question or oppose agency policy. This naturally reduces the impact of progressive ideas on local planning activities. The future of planning. The future direction of city planning is at present uncertain. As architecturally trained planners become a minority in the profession, city planning will undoubtedly make more use of the concepts and methods of rational programming and will pay more attention to the social and economic problems of the city. Traditional physical planning is still needed to modernize the city, to raise its efficiency in housing and moving workers and residents, and to prevent further physical and aesthetic deterioration. The ends of physical planning may be most relevant to the suburbs and to the newer communities of the western United States, although even they do not always favor the particular kinds of order, efficiency, and attractiveness that physical planners
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seek. In the older American cities, however, poverty, unemployment, racial and class discrimination and their pathological consequences are not only the most crucial problems but also are major causes of the low quality of city living, the middleclass exodus, and the city's financial difficulties (Cans 1965; Wilson 1966). The inequalities and pathologies of the urban low-income population must, therefore, be eliminated, before the attractive, efficient, and slumless city for which physical planners are striving can be realized. When these traditional planners can be persuaded of the validity of this approach, it may be possible to achieve a synthesis of the so-called social and physical planning approaches and thus to create a city planning profession that uses rational programming to bring about real improvements, not only in the lives of city residents but also in the condition of the cities themselves. HERBERT J. CANS [See also CITY; HOUSING; NEIGHBORHOOD; REGION; TRANSPORTATION; and the biography of GEDDES.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABRAMS, CHARLES 1965 The City Is the Frontier. New York: Harper. ALTSHULER, ALAN 1965 The City Planning Process: A Political Analysis. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. ANDERSON, MARTIN 1964 The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949-1962. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. BANFIELD, EDWARD C.; and GRODZINS, MORTON 1958 Government and Housing in Metropolitan Areas. New York: McGraw-Hill. BASSETT, EDWARD M. 1938 The Master Plan. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. BLUMENFELD, HANS 1949 Theory of City Form, Past and Present. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 8:7-16. BRANCH, MELVILLE C. 1957 Planning and Operations Research. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 23:168-175. DAVIDOFF, PAUL 1965 Advocacy and Social Concern in Planning. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 31:331-337. DAVIDOFF, PAUL; and REINER, THOMAS A. 1962 A Choice Theory of Planning. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 28:103-115. DUNHAM, ALLISON 1958 City Planning: An Analysis of the Content of the Master Plan. Journal of Law and Economics 1:170-186. DYCKMAN, JOHN W. 1961 Planning and Decision Theory. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 27:335-345. DYCKMAN, JOHN W. 1966 Social Planning, Social Planners, and Planned Societies. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 32:66-76. EICHLER, EDWARD P.; and KAPLAN, MARSHALL 1967 The Community Builders. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
FAGIN, HENRY 1959 Organizing and Carrying Out Planning Activities Within Urban Governments. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 25:109—114. FAGIN, HENRY 1963 The Penn-Jersey Transportation Study: The Launching of a Permanent Regional Planning Process. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 29:9-18. FISHER, JACK C. (editor) 1966 City and Regional Planning in Poland. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. FRIED, MARC 1963 Grieving for a Lost Home. Pages 151-171 in Leonard J. Duhl (editor), The Urban Condition. New York: Basic Books. FRIEDEN, BERNARD J. 1964 The Future of Old Neighborhoods: Rebuilding for a Changing Population. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. CANS, HERBERT J. (1962) 1964 The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans. New York: Free Press. CANS, HERBERT J. 1964 Social and Physical Planning for the Elimination of Urban Poverty. Pages 629-644 in Bernard Rosenberg, Israel Gerver, and William Howton (editors). Mass Society in Crisis. New York: Macmillan. GANS, HERBERT J. 1965 The Failure of Urban Renewal: A Critique and Some Proposals. Commentary 39, no. 4:29-37. GREER, SCOTT 1965 Urban Renewal and American Cities. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill. GROSSMAN, DAVID A. 1963 The Community Renewal Program. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 29:259-269. HARTMAN, CHESTER 1964 The Housing of Relocated Families. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 30:266-286. HOWARD, EBENEZER (1898) 1951 Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Edited with a Preface by F. J. Osborn. With an introductory essay by Lewis Mumford. London: Faber. -* First published as To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. ISARD, WALTER et al. 1960 Methods of Regional Analysis. New York: Wiley; Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. KENT, T. J. 1964 The Urban General Plan. San Francisco: Chandler. Land Use and Traffic Models. 1959 Journal of the American Institute of Planners 25:59-103. -> A special issue. LICHFIELD, NATHANIEL 1960 Cost-Benefit Analysis in City Planning. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 26:273-279. LYNCH, KEVIN 1960 The Image of the City. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. MEIER, RICHARD L. 1962 A Communication Theory of Urban Growth. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. MEYERSON, MARTIN 1956 Building the Middle-range Bridge for Comprehensive Planning. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 22:58-64. MEYERSON, MARTIN; and BANFIELD, EDWARD C. 1955 Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest: The Case of Public Housing in Chicago. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1965. MITCHELL, ROBERT B. 1961 The New Frontier in Metropolitan Planning. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 27:169-175. MITCHELL, ROBERT B.; and RAPKIN, CHESTER 1954 Urban Traffic: A Function of Land Use. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
PLANNING, SOCIAL: Resource Planning PERLOFF, HARVEY S. 1957 Education for Planning: City, State and Regional. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. PERLOFF, HARVEY S. 1963 Social Planning in the Metropolis. Pages 331-347 in Leonard J. Duhl (editor), The Urban Condition. New York: Basic Books. PERLOFF, HARVEY S. 1965 New Directions in Social Planning. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 31:297-303. PERLOFF, HARVEY S.; and WINGO, LOWDON JR. 1962 Planning and Development in Metropolitan Affairs. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 28: 67-90. PIVEN, FRANCES F.; and CLOWARD, RICHARD A. 1966 Desegregated Housing: Who Pays for the Reformers' Ideal. New Republic 155, no. 25:17-22. REINER, JANET S.; REINER, EVERETT; and REINER, THOMAS A. 1963 Client Analysis and the Planning of Public Programs. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 29:270-282. Rosow, IRVING 1961 The Social Effects of the Physical Environment. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 27:127-133. STEIN, CLARENCE S. (1951) 1957 Toward New Towns for America. Rev. ed. New York: Reinhold. TAYLOR, H. RALPH et al. 1966 Comments on the Demonstration Cities Program. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 32:366-376. Urban Development Models: New Tools for Planning. 1965 Journal of the American Institute of Planners 31:90-184. -» A special issue. WEBBER, MELVIN M. 1963a The Prospects for Policies Planning. Pages 319-330 in Leonard J. Duhl (editor), The Urban Condition. New York: Basic Books. WEBBER, MELVIN M. 1963b Order in Diversity: Community Without Propinquity. Pages 23-54 in Lowdon Wingo, Jr. (editor), Cities and Space: The Future Use of Urban Land. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. WEBBER, MELVIN M. 1964 The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm. Pages 79-153 in Melvin M. Webber et al., Explorations Into Urban Structure. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. WHEATON, WILLIAM L. C. 1963 Operations Research for Metropolitan Planning. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 29:250-258. WHEATON, WILLIAM L. C. 1964 Public and Private Agents of Change. Pages 154-195 in Melvin M. Webber et al., Explorations Into Urban Structure. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. WILLMOTT, PETER; and COONEY, EDMUND 1963 Community Planning and Sociological Research: A Problem of Collaboration. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 29:123-126. WILNER, DANIEL M. et al. 1962 The Housing Environment and Family Life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. WILSON, JAMES Q. 1963 Planning and Politics: Citizen Participation in Urban Renewal. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 29:242-249. WILSON, JAMES Q. (editor) 1966 Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. WOOD, EDWARD W. JR.; BROWER, SIDNEY N.; and LATIMER, MARGARET W. 1966 Planners' People. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 32:228-233. WOODBURY, COLEMAN (editor) 1953 The Future of Cities and Urban Redevelopment. Univ. of Chicago Press.
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WURSTER, CATHERINE B. 1963 The Form and Structure of the Future Urban Complex. Pages 73-102 in Lowdon Wingo, Jr. (editor), Cities and Space: The Future Use of Urban Land. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Ill RESOURCE PLANNING
A plan is a course of action laid out in advance. A resource is an opportunity in the environment that has been identified and appraised by a population of potential users. Resource planning is a general term for the process of laying out better programs for the development of natural resources than are formulated from the opportunistic, short-run expediting of independent resource use projects. Resource planning is an outgrowth of the principles for preserving natural resources and utilizing them economically [see CONSERVATION]. When optimal use cannot be achieved automatically through the workings of the price system, but only through adjusting technologies on a regional, national, or international scale, then some form of centralized, long-range planning must be adopted. Long-range planning is often undertaken for other reasons than the rationalization of resource development, but resource planning almost always becomes a major component of such national and regional plans. Resource planning has not been fully centralized in any society but is distributed among departments and bureaus responsible for agriculture, forestry, fisheries, mining, education, recreation, and regional development. After national plans become explicit, they still contain an assortment of specialized programs initiated and implemented by these functional units, as well as by cooperatives and private corporations, that are only partially controlled and coordinated by the national planning effort. No typical administrative structure exists as yet, but it is evident that to be effective, planners need almost daily contact with agencies collecting relevant, reliable information. In socialist states, and in many others in addition, the hydroelectric potentials and the resources below the ground are state-owned, so that these resources must either be developed by state enterprises or licensed, mainly to large international firms. Although both approaches are amenable to planning, the incentives and controls used are very different. Thus, in Soviet planning an extraordinarily heavy emphasis was placed upon reconnaissance, prospecting, and survey of mineral deposits. A huge centralized, information-gathering operation was
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organized which was able to pinpoint the geographic sources of raw materials to be fed into the expanding industrial complex (Shimkin 1953). In Pakistan, Egypt, Brazil, and elsewhere, future progress hinges upon the development of water resources. Then the natural unit for analysis becomes the basin. Where and when most projects are undertaken depends upon the long-range program for watershed development [Krutilla & Eckstein 1958; Maass et al. 1962; see also WATER RESOURCES]. Workable plans are built up of sequences of projects undertaken by specified agencies working within the public sector, the private sector, or, increasingly, some combination of both. The projects are selected and shaped according to criteria set within the context of a national strategy for survival, welfare, and growth. Additional criteria may be important at the international, regional, or agency level. The initiation of the projects is scheduled to meet anticipated requirements. Experience has shown that resources essential to the functioning of a modern society may also be tapped through the channels of international trade. The technology of extraction, which is transferable to sites throughout the world, is in most cases sufficiently advanced to meet the rigorous specifications for commodity grades and standards established by modern industry and the markets of modern countries. Transport costs have been declining simultaneously. Consequently, the relative richness of the resources found in accessible parts of the world, rather than the political boundaries that separate supply from use, will usually determine the sequence with which the respective opportunities are exploited. Military demands for national self-sufficiency, particularly in case of mobilization for total war, have quite seriously deflected the rational, tradebased program for the use of world resources. Much resource planning in the United States between 1910 and 1950, for example, was intended to meet various projected national emergencies. The reason for this emphasis on disaster planning was the experience with rapid shifts in supply in the international market that occur in response to political crises. Raw materials and manufactured intermediates with a heavy resource component (fuels, refined metals, vegetable oils, paper, sugar, etc.) have a history of reacting to threats of conflict with sharp upward price movements and irregular supplies. It is not surprising that in many countries during World War n elaborate resource planning efforts were made part of the plans for
total mobilization of productive capacity for war. Self-sufficiency for military reasons lost its cogency in the 1950s. The introduction of megatonsize nuclear weapons into international military calculations has rendered meaningless all prior approaches to strategic resource planning, since short-term emergency needs can be met better with inventories and strategic stockpiles of quite manageable magnitudes. Installations to develop submarginal reserves can no longer be justified for reasons of national survival. A transition to the new way of thinking was marked by the U.S. President's Materials Policy Commission report, Resources for Freedom (1952). National boundaries were superseded to an important extent and were replaced by a group of political units subscribing to common procedures for trade and to conciliation of international disputes. Autarchic arguments were retained, but they were moved to a larger arena. The focus of subsequent policy proposals has shifted to the use of resources to improve the levels of living. The reports of the United Nations Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources (United Nations 1953) provided the basis for such planning. Economic and social development. When resource planning leads to economic development, the significance of natural resources will be reduced. This planning will result in a decline in the share of human effort applied to natural resources which support economic growth. The primary occupations (e.g., agriculture, forestry, fisheries, mining) will shrink in over-all importance as the planning becomes effective. Even though the planning thus far conducted in the twentieth century has been uncoordinated, piecemeal, and parochial, the effort devoted to these primary activities has dropped from a share that was greater than 50 per cent of total product to a new level that is considerably less than 10 per cent of the total in the most advanced economies. In addition, economically feasible substitutes for scarce raw materials have been found. The ready availability of a variety of substitutes implies that exhaustion of the major world mineral reserves (as is still an eventual prospect for fossil fuels and phosphates) need not result in a reversal of this progress. Because a large share of the world has averted resource scarcity catastrophes since the days of Mai thus, a strong trust in automatic, almost magical, improvements in technology exists among resource economists. The law of diminishing returns has been repealed at the macro level, in the West
PLANNING, SOCIAL: Resource Planning at least, by the regularly repeated introduction of cost-reducing technical innovations (Boulding 1955). However, planners cannot make extrapolations on the basis of faith in the results of research. They must project the development of known reserves with tested technologies to fill the needs of expanding populations. When this exercise is carried out, as by Landsberg and his colleagues (see Resources for the Future 1963), the future for such resource-rich territories as North America appears secure for at least a generation. Careful matching of supply and demand suggests that no critical shortages should occur during the twentieth century. However, the same exercise addressed to the needs and the accessible reserves in the rest of the world reveals the real challenge facing resource planning. Many parts of the world can project ahead no further than a decade before foreseeable needs will begin to outrun apparent supply. The technology thus far evolved in the West will be unable to cope with the transformation of still lower-grade resources into the manyfold increase in the output of raw materials that will be required. The foreign exchange needs for the equipment, the skilled personnel required for its operation, or the organization involved in distributing the output will reach unprecedented dimensions. Long-range development planning, attempting to plot a course toward adequate levels of living, is therefore forced to resort to new technologies which do not yet exist but could be evolved from the scientific knowledge now available in journals, laboratories, and pilot plants somewhere in the world. The soil and water resources available for the production of food and fiber are a case in point. Land reclamation, fertilizer use, and improved crop varieties are being introduced quite rapidly into the less-developed regions. The foreseeable limits of the combined effects of the known technologies are a doubling, occasionally a trebling, of the output available to a population. But the demand for food often doubles within a generation as a combined result of population growth and urbanization. The anticipated crisis will occur during a bad crop year and will become disastrous if two or more poor years follow each other. The chances are all too great that in the late 1960s °r the 1970s the stresses triggered by uncontrolled famine will overwhelm the government in one or niore of the densely populated territories; Bengal, north central China, and Java are particularly vulnerable because their respective populations will s oon be too large to be supported by the world's
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surpluses. Tens of millions of unfortunates would die in the course of the crisis; the tragedy Mai thus envisaged would be enacted on its most massive scale. In the laboratories, however, a set of principles for the utilization of photosynthesis under optimum yield conditions is unfolding which promises a tenfold increase of output per unit area. These modes of plant culture have not been perfected, primarily because the societies best equipped to work out the details in the technology have been experiencing food surpluses. Nor have the incentives for rapid development, parallel to those granted to weapons technology, been authorized. Solving production problems is not sufficient either, because new foodstuffs will have to be converted into an acceptable diet. Many processing and marketing innovations are needed to accomplish such acceptance. The prospective difficulties of supply are no longer nutritional, but arise primarily from the strongly conservative character of food preferences in most cultures. Heavy investments in public education are required to bring about significant changes in diet. The inadequacy of contemporary Western energy conversion technology is more subtle. The crisis previously anticipated when fossil fuels were depleted will probably be avoided, largely because of the discovery of nuclear energy sources. However, nuclear energy cannot be safely adapted to the operation of independent vehicles, such as small ships, aircraft, trucks, buses, and automobiles, without huge increases in cost. Very likely microbiological processes for the conversion of solar energy will be able to bridge the fuel gap (Golueke & Oswald 1963). Attempts of this sort are held back by the diffuseness of solar energy; eventually much more of the earth's surface may have to be used for the production of fuels than for that of food. Long-range resource planning encounters a few other instances demanding shifts to new, sciencebased technologies (e.g., substitutes for paper and some replacements for nonferrous metals). Doubtless, the expanding investments in scientific work will provide many unexpected opportunities, although they are almost as likely to reveal unsuspected constraints in the application of what is already known and projected to be used. Once the important new findings appear, the affected plans must be adjusted to take them into account. These newest technologies for resource utilization are highly instrumented. As greater depths and more stressful environments are penetrated,
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an increasing need for sophisticated equipment is experienced. These processes are more susceptible to human error than the older technologies are and therefore must be designed in automated or cybernated versions which reduce the risks. Low wage scales do not significantly modify the technical solutions. Therefore, resource-oriented production in the future is expected to become much less labor-intensive. The operation of the instruments and controls, however, does depend heavily on the transmission of large quantities of data through a communications network and the rapid processing of such information at decision centers. Information and organization. Planning quickly becomes routinized in a large bureaucracy. When a new project for producing raw materials (or services) from a natural resource is prepared within a planning context, it undergoes a series of systematic tests of feasibility. One of the first of these hurdles is an estimation of its likelihood of becoming obsolete. The newest scientific findings and their influence on competing producers, on consumers, and on the producers of substitutes are assessed. Also, consultants who have access to bodies of unpublished knowledge are asked to submit appraisals. Similar checks are made concerning whatever factors are scarce in the economy. How much would this proposal worsen the scarcity of foreign exchange, technical skills, transport capacity, etc.? As a result, the revised project design is more closely linked to the characteristics of the market, it is automatically alerted to a wider variety of danger signals emanating from the environment, and a series of monitoring and control systems are incorporated into the design which combine information acquired from the outside with data generated from within the operation. When projects are meshed into national programs and regional plans, a coordinating agency is needed to administer them. The implementation process involves gathering information about progress, interpreting the findings, and instructing the operating units about desirable adjustments in plans. The emphasis in this description is upon the information-processing features of planning because most of the agency effort is expended in this direction. Extra information introduced into resources planning results in a reduction of physical waste and a stabilization of the cost of producing raw materials. It should be noted in passing that the planning agency also has an important political function, since it must resolve conflicts between government units, between individuals, and between the objectives of both groups. That feature of its duties
is not considered here because a high degree of consensus among the involved parties is a prerequisite for the acceptance of plans. Resource planners now encounter situations where the best resource-conserving projects do not deal directly with the scarce resources, or with their recognized substitutes, but with the expansion of "knowledge creation" capabilities and of specialized information transmission systems. For example, the best way of reducing the energy requirements of transportation may involve expanding the telephone system, so that on the average several telephone calls (which expend virtually no energy and very little other scarce natural resources) may save a trip. Similarly, an information service warning based upon knowledge about the effects of changes in weather may reduce spoilage and waste. A different natural resource is being exploited in these instances, one that as yet is rarely recognized in the resource literature. The electromagnetic spectrum is vital to high capacity telecommunications. This resource is still as free as the sea, requiring only international agreement on the allocation of channels. Recently, moves have been made to organize spectrum conservation measures (Ryan 1959), particularly in the vicinity of large industrialized metropolitan areas. Stray radiation acts as a kind of pollutant, causing noise in the channel and errors in the communication process. Fortunately, however, huge capacities remain to be exploited, and the underlying sciences have announced recent findings (e.g., lasers, wave guides) that open up further cost-reducing opportunities. Forecasts of the growth in demand (Litchman 1963) suggest that teledata flows will double every two years; they can increase at this rate until 1980 and still remain within technological capabilities. Human resources. The fact that human resources can substitute for natural resources at the margin has been recognized for at least a century [see CAPITAL, HUMAN; CONSERVATION, article on ECONOMIC ASPECTS], but the principles for developing and conserving this resource have not yet been very precisely formulated ("Needs and Resources for Social Investment" 1960). Nevertheless, resource planning is expanding most rapidly in this direction. Highest priorities are given to formal education systems and public health units. Schools, libraries, and clinics allow a society to draw upon a world-wide fund of knowledge and, with fairly predictable results, distribute parts of that knowledge to individuals (Machlup 1962; Harbison & Myers 1964). Disease prevention programs reduce the frequency of loss of informed individuals be-
PLANNING, SOCIAL: Resource Planning fore they have made their full contribution. Educated persons, working collectively, can extract a better living from a given environment than uneducated persons can. Human capital may be accumulated by expanding the number of persons acquiring education and by making sure that the subjects taught are relevant to future states of the society. The role of human capital is analogous to that of raw materials inventory. Optimal investment in human resources implies quite large-scale experiments in search of formulas for cooperation. An important share of the effort associated with the founding of an organization may therefore also be categorized as human capital formation. Thus, plans will attempt to balance the human investments in health, education, and communications; and the timing of the investments will be phased according to the magnitude of the organizing effort required to launch the specialized agencies desired. Fast-paced organizations of well-informed people will usually make more efficient decisions regarding resource use than will organizations that depend too heavily on computers. Because of these complex substitutabilities, much of the most productive effort expended in resource planning is devoted to organizing the spread of relevant knowledge. The United Nations conference on science and technology (United Nations . . . 1963) was intended to be a benchmark in the development of resources. The resource planning strategy. Thus the overall mandate for planners is outlined: The richest nonrenewable resources should be used first. Organizations are created to implement the projects and arrange for the distribution of output. As lower-grade reserves must be drawn upon, costs rise, and the organizations are forced to seek more efficient technologies. They also pay attention to the salvage of scrap and to fabrication techniques which use less of the resource. As still lower grades are resorted to, the organizations must expend even more effort on reprocessing scrap and manufacturing intermediate products from substitutes in easier supply. Eventually the salvage recycle becomes so efficient that exploitation principles cannot be distinguished from those applying to the various renewable natural resources. The mine works may be abandoned; but the organization, with its skills in the conversion of raw materials, its body of technological knowledge, and its capabilities for meeting the specifications of customers, remains. Higher sustained yields from renewable resources are also obtainable only through improved
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knowledge and organization. Communications systems development makes possible the coordination of utilization over much larger areas. Ultimately, the asset value of the extracted resources must be transformed into self-renewing human and physical capital of even larger value, if the effects of the law of diminishing returns are to be postponed indefinitely. The worth of human resources, however, is also subject to laws. If population continues to grow, the effort to educate, organize, investigate, and communicate must reach saturation at some point, and the marginal value of men will become negative. So far it has not been possible to discern any natural laws which identify these saturation limits for human organization or communication, but the requirements of a healthy human organism do impose constraints. A "minimum adequate standard of living," which provides just enough freedom from environmental stresses to allow social and cultural organization to become as effective as is presently known, can be recalculated as a per capita requirement for resource inputs. The ultimate limit appears to be the energy incident from the sun and its thermodynamic degradation in the course of storage and transport. The earth will probably be able to support indefinitely about ten to twenty times its present population (say, 30,000 million-80,000 million) when employing the stock of scientific knowledge which has yet to be translated into technology (Meier 1956). It will take only three to five generations at present rates of growth for world population to reach these saturation levels. Resource planning has hitherto accepted population as given and not subject to manipulation, but henceforth it must become closely linked with social planning that endeavors to bring births and deaths into balance (Brown 1954). RICHARD L. MEIER BIBLIOGRAPHY
AYRES, EUGENE; and SCARLOTT, CHARLES A. 1952 Energy Sources: The Wealth of the World. New York: McGraw-Hill. BOULDING, KENNETH E. 1955 The Malthusian Model as a General System. Social and Economic Studies 4: 195-205. BROWN, HARRISON S. 1954 The Challenge of Man's Future: An Inquiry Concerning the Condition of Man During the Years That Lie Ahead. New York: Viking. -> A paperback edition was published in 1956. CONFERENCE ON NATURAL RESOURCES AND ECONOMIC GROWTH, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, I960 1961 Natural Resources and Economic Growth: Papers . . . . Edited by Joseph Spengler. Washington: Distributed by Resources for the Future.
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DANIELS, FARRINGTON; and DUFFIE, JOHN A. (editors) 1955 Solar Energy Research. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. GOLUEKE, CLARENCE G.; and OSWALD, WILLIAM J. 1963 Power From Solar Energy via Algae-produced Methane. Solar Energy 7:86-92. HARBISON, FREDERICK; and MYERS, CHARLES A. 1964 Education, Manpower, and Economic Growth: Strategies of H->'..c.an Resource Development. New York: McGraw-Hill. KRUTILLA, JOHN V.; and ECKSTEIN, OTTO 1958 Multiple Purpose River Development. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. LITCHMAN, WILLIAM S. 1963 The Future of Digital Communications. Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Communications Technology Group, I.E.E.E. Transactions on Communications Systems CS-11:149158. MAASS, ARTHUR et al. 1962 Design of Water-resource Systems: New Techniques for Relating Economic Objectives, Engineering Analysis, and Governmental Planning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. MACHLUP, FRITZ 1962 The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. Princeton Univ. Press. MEIER, RICHARD L. 1956 Science and Economic Development: New Patterns of Living. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. Needs and Resources for Social Investment: A Discussion by a Carnegie Endowment Study Group, Geneva, 1959. 1960 International Social Science Journal 12:409-433. RESOURCES FOR THE FUTURE 1963 Resources in America's Future: Patterns of Requirements and Availabilities, 1960-2000, by Hans H. Landsberg et al. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. RYAN, A. H. 1959 Control of Microwave Interference. Institute of Radio Engineers, Transactions on Radio Frequency Interference RFI:1-10. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN 1963 Technology and Economic Development. New York: Knopf. SHIMKIN, DEMITRI B. 1953 Minerals: A Key to Soviet Power. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. UNITED NATIONS 1953 United Nations Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources: Proceedings. Vol. 8. New York: United Nations. UNITED NATIONS, SECRETARY-GENERAL 1963 Science and Technology for Development: Report on the United Nations Conference on the Application of Science and Technology for the Benefit of the Less Developed Areas. Volume 2: Natural Resources. New York: United Nations. U.S. PRESIDENT'S MATERIALS POLICY COMMISSION 1952 Resources for Freedom. 5 vols. Washington: Government Printing Office. IV
WELFARE PLANNING
An inquiry into planning for the social services is handicapped by conceptual ambiguities as to the meaning of the terms "social services" and "social welfare." With refreshing candor, Donnison recently observed that "the distinctive feature of our subject is neither its body of knowledge (for most of this could be incorporated into other disci-
plines), nor its theoretical structure (for it has very little), and we are not interested in methodology for its own sake. We are concerned with an ill-defined but recognizable territory, 'the development of collective action for the advancement of social welfare'" (1962, p. 21). But the global concept of "collective action for the advancement of social welfare" obscures the clashing conceptions of the political purposes of social services. At one extreme is the view that social services "assign claims from one set of people who are said to produce or earn the national produce to another set of people who may merit compassion and charity but not economic rewards for productive service" (Titmuss 1965, p. 14). So defined, social services are regarded as a burden to be carried by the productive institutions of society. Thus they constitute a residual function of government and philanthropy, and social service agencies should, ideally, strive toward self-liquidation. At the other extreme, Titmuss defines social services as "all collective interventions to meet certain needs of the individual and/or to serve the wider interests of society; [these] may now be broadly grouped into three major categories of welfare: social welfare, fiscal welfare, and occupational welfare" ([1958] 1959, p. 42). This discussion of the purposes of the social services has immediate import for planning, because estimates of total expenditures for social welfare clearly depend on the definition we accept. In the U.S. Social Security Administration's annual estimate of total welfare expenditures in the public and private sectors, social welfare is defined as "activities that directly concern the economic and social well-being of individuals and families" (Merriam 1965, p. 3). Consistent with this definition, Ida Merriam includes those agricultural programs that make surplus food available to needy persons (school lunch program, food stamp program, etc.). Lampman, on the other hand, employs a more encompassing definition of welfare in his assessment of the scope of money and nonmoney transfer payments. Public transfers include that portion of earned income (factor income) that is not a payment for current production having any value. Thus, in the agricultural sector he defines public payment for nonproduction as a welfare payment. Moreover, Lampman urges that the Social Security Administration's definition of public programs be expanded to include "subsidies and taxes which alter prices paid by the consumers and taxes that reduce disposable money income" (1966, pp. 3-4). According to this more inclusive definition, the estimate of U.S. expenditure for "social welfare" in
PLANNING, SOCIAL: Welfare Planning 1964 is about $97,000 million in transfer payments and transfer goods and services. By contrast, the more limited definition of the Social Security Administration leads to an estimate of $118,000 million. (No aggregate estimate is available for the conception of welfare favored by Titmuss.) This surprising finding arises because the broader view excludes health and education expenditures that are paid for directly by current users and are thus not regarded as extrafamily transfers. Lampman insists that the concept of welfare be limited to public transfer expenditures. He argues that there is no rationale for including personal expenditure for dental care while excluding personal expenditure for housing, as is done in the Social Security expenditure series. Direct payments by consumers for health services alone amounted to $17,000 million. Not only does the size of the social welfare sector vary according to the conception of welfare we employ, but the pattern of distribution of welfare services is affected even more dramatically. In Lampman's pioneer study of the American welfare system (1966, p, 8), he estimates that almost 40 per cent of the total amount allocated for transfer payments, or $38,000 million, goes to those individuals who would be classified as poor before they received any transfer payment. Assuming that the poor contribute approximately $8,000 million in taxes and private contributions, he thus concludes that they receive a net benefit of $30,000 million. In a more limited analysis of the distribution of housing benefits among various income groups, Alvin Schorr comes to almost the opposite conclusion. He observes that in 1962 the U.S. federal government spent $820 million to subsidize housing for individuals who would be classified as poor; this estimate includes direct subsidies for public housing and additional housing payments for those receiving public assistance, as well as savings from income tax deductions. By contrast, the amount the government refrained from collecting in income taxes by granting tax concessions to home owners (a predominantly middle- and upperincome group) is estimated at $2,900 million. Therefore, in regard to housing subsidies, the federal government spent more than three times as much for those who are not poor than for those who are poor. In this way, Schorr concludes, the government "gives more to those who have more" (1965 First published in French. DURKHEIM, EMILE (1950)1958 Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> First published posthumously as Lecons de sociologie: Physique des moeurs et du droit. ELBOW, MATTHEW H. 1953 French Corporative Theory, 1789-1948: A Chapter in the History of Ideas. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. ELLIOTT, WILLIAM Y. 1928 The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Syndicalism, Fascism, and the Constitutional State. New York: Macmillan. FIGGIS, JOHN NEVILLE (1913) 1914 Churches in the Modern State. 2d ed. London and New York: Longmans. FOLLETT, MARY P. (1918) 1934 The New State: Group Organization, the Solution of Popular Government. New York: Longmans. GIERKE, OTTO VON (1913) 1934 Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500 to 1800. 2 vols. Cambridge Univ. Press. -> A translation of five subsections of Volume 4 of Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, first published 1913. A paperback edition was published in 1957 by Beacon. HAURIOU, MAURICE (1910) 1916 Principes de droit public a I'usage des etudiantes en licence (3e annee) et en doctorat-es-sciences politiques. 2d ed. Paris: Tenin. HOBSON, S. G. 1920 National Guilds and the State. New York: Macmillan. KAISER, JOSEPH H. 1956 Die Reprasentation organisierter Interessen. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. KRABBE, HUGO (1915) 1927 The Modern Idea of the State. New York and London: Appleton. -» First published in Dutch. LASKI, HAROLD J. 1917 Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. LASKI, HAROLD J. 1919 Authority in the Modern State. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. LATHAM, EARL 1952 The Group Basis of Politics: Notes for a Theory. American Political Science Review 46: 376-397. LEISERSON, AVERY 1942 Administrative Regulation: A Study in the Representation of Interests. Univ. of Chicago Press. MAASS, ARTHUR (editor) 1959 Area and Power: A Theory of Local Government. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. MACMAHON, ARTHUR W. (editor) (1955) 1962 Federalism: Mature and Emergent. New York: Russell. MAGID, HENRY M. 1941 English Political Pluralism. Columbia University Studies in Philosophy, No. 2. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. MAITLAND, FREDERIC W. 1900 Introduction. In Otto von Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age. Cambridge Univ. Press. -» Introduction to the English translation of Volume 3 of the four-volume classic
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Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, published 18681913. PAUL-BANCOUR, JOSEPH 1900 Le federalisme economique: Etude sur les rapports de I'individu et des groupements professionals. Paris: Alcan. PENTY, ARTHUR J. 1906 The Restoration of the Gild System. London: Sonnenschein. TAWNEY, R. H. 1920 The Acquisitive Society. New York: Harcourt. -> A paperback edition was published in 1948. ULAM, ADAM B. 1951 Philosophical Foundations of English Socialism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. WEBB, LEICESTER C. (editor) 1958 Legal Personality and Political Pluralism. Australian National University Social Science Monograph, No. 12. Melbourne Univ. Press.; Cambridge Univ. Press.
POISSON, SIMEON DENIS Simeon Denis Poisson (1781-1840) was born at Pithiviers. He entered the Ecole Poly technique in 1798 and did so well there that the school exempted him from his final examinations and immediately appointed him assistant in mathematical analysis in 1800. He became successively an associate professor and a full professor (this in 1806) there, and then was called to the Bureau des Longitudes and to the Institut de France in 1812. After the Bourbon restoration, he was appointed, in 1816, professor of mechanics in the Faculte des Sciences at Paris and was then appointed to the Royal Council of the University, where he took charge of the mathematics curriculum for all the secondary schools of France. In 1837 Poisson was ennobled, and in 1840 he succeeded Thenard as dean of the Faculte des Sciences. Poisson's principal interests were mechanics, mathematical analysis, physics, and the theory of probability. Although we are primarily concerned here with his work on probability and statistics, it is important to mention the fundamental nature of his contributions on such subjects as the invariability of the major axes of planets (1811), the distribution of electricity on the surfaces of bodies, capillary phenomena (1831), and the mathematical theory of heat (1835a). It was toward the end of his life that Poisson's interests focused on probability and statistics. His most important work in this field is Recherches sur la probabilite des jugements en matiere criminelle et en matiere civile, precedees des regies genemies du calcul des probabilites (1837), but slightly earlier he had published several brief papers that were very important for their time, since they contained the bases of a precise statistical method for the social sciences. Poisson, like Laplace before him, sought to establish the probability that a juror may err in arriving
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at a verdict of guilt. Laplace had tried to formulate a hypothesis that does not do violence to common sense; he assumed that the probability that the juror will not be mistaken is governed by a law of equal distribution between -|- and 1. From this law he deduced the probability that the verdict is correct as a function of the majority obtained. Poisson sharply criticized this procedure (1835£>) and laid down the principle that any chain of reasoning in this type of problem should be based on the observation of such facts as demonstrate the existence of a law of large numbers. He attacked the problem by going back to the sources and examining the texts of laws as well as legal statistical documents. Thus, he analyzed the records of the Cours d'Assises. The juries of the Cours d'Assises had 12 members, and although before 1831 the majority required for conviction was 7 to 5, from that date it was 8 to 4. Poisson noted that before 1831 the annual proportion of acquittals was 0.39 in the mean, always remaining between 0.38 and 0.40, and the proportion of convictions by a vote of 7 to 5 was 0.07. He then claimed that even before the required majority was changed in 1831, the effect of the new rules could have been predicted: "The proportion of convictions . . . had to be 0.61 - 0.07 = 0.54. If a vote of 8 to 4 was required, the ratio of acquittals to trials would thus be 0.46. This is in fact what happened during the year 1831" (1836a). This sort of reasoning seems simple and obvious to us today, but at the time it was received with skepticism. Thus, immediately after Poisson read his paper before the Academy of Sciences, Poinsot objected violently to "the idea that a calculus could be applied to the moral sciences . . ." (Poinsot 1836). In Poisson's view, the ordinary law of large numbers (which he evidently knew in the case of Bernoulli's urn) was primarily an experimental fact that should be taken as the foundation of statistics. It is important to remember that at that time the axioms used to construct the calculus of probabilities were different from the axioms used today, probability being defined, after Laplace, as the ratio of favorable cases to the total number of cases, assuming all these cases to be equally probable. Such a definition certainly does not preclude successful work, and Poisson used this definition in discovering his eponymous distribution. But the definition cannot deal with statistical problems, so that it was necessary for Poisson to enunciate what might be called a physical law. The Poisson distribution (or law). The probability of having r successes in the course of n
independent trials for an event whose probability is p is given by the binomial term Pr(r) = (")P r (l ~ pY~r- If> m tms formula, p approaches 0 and n approaches infinity, with np -» X finite and not 0, we find, by using Stirling's formula, that n]
(1)
r-l\ —r rl
We are thus led to consider the discrete distribution
Pr(0) = e-x Pr( 1) = X First published as Le phenomene bureaucratique. DEBRE, MICHEL 1947 La mort de I'etat republicain. Paris: Gallimard. DUTHEILLET DE LAMoxHE, A. 1965 Ministerial Cabinets in France. Public Administration (London) 43:365381. DUVERGER, MAURICE (1955)1965 Institutions politiques et droit constitutionnel. 8th ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. -> First published as Droit constitutionnel et institutions politiques. DUVERGER, MAURICE (1959) 1963 La Cinquieme Republique. 3d ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ECKSTEIN, HARRY 1966 Division and Cohesion in Democracy: A Study of Norway. Princeton Univ. Press. ERZUAH, J. B. 1964 Comparative Study of Constitutional and Administrative Structures in Ghana. Civilizations 14:85-91. FENNO, RICHARD F. 1959 The President's Cabinet: An Analysis in the Period From Wilson to Eisenhower. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. FITZGIBBON, RUSSELL H. 1960 Dictatorship and Democracy in Latin America. International Affairs 36:48-57. FRANKEL, CHARLES 1964 Bureaucracy and Democracy in the New Europe. Dasdalus 93:471-492. FRIEDRICH, CARL J. (1937) 1950 Constitutional Government and Democracy: Theory and Practice in Europe and America. Rev. ed. Boston: Ginn. -» First published as Constitutional Government and Politics: Nature and Development. FRIEDRICH, CARL J. 1949 Rebuilding the German Constitution. American Political Science Review 43:461— 482, 704-720. GOLAY, JOHN F. 1958 The Founding of the Federal Republic of Germany. Univ. of Chicago Press. GOOCH, R. K. 1960 Reflections on the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic. Journal of Politics 22: 193-202. GOULDNER, ALVIN W. (editor) 1950 Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action. New York: Harper. HALLIDAY, W. E. D. 1959 The Executive of the Government of Canada. Canadian Public Administration 2:229-241. HANKEY, MAURICE P. A. 1946 Diplomacy by Conference: Studies in Public Affairs, 1920-1946. London: Benn. HARRISON, M. 1963 The French Experience of Exceptional Powers: 1961. Journal of Politics 25:139-158. HAURIOU, ANDRE 1966 Droit constitutionnel et institutions politiques. Paris: Montchrestien. HEASMAN, D. J. 1962 The Prime Minister and the Cabinet. Parliamentary Affairs 15:461-484. HINTON, R. W. K. 1960 The Prime Minister as an Elected Monarch. Parliamentary Affairs 13:297-303. HIRSCHFIELD, ROBERT S. 1961 The Power of the Contemporary Presidency. Parliamentary Affairs 14:353377. JENNINGS, W. IVOR (1936) 1959 Cabinet Government. 3d ed. Cambridge Univ. Press. KASSOF, ALLEN H. 1964 The Administered Society: Totalitarianism Without Terror. World Politics 16:558575.
POLITICAL FINANCING KEITH, ARTHUR B. (1939) 1952 The British Cabinet System. 2d ed. London: Stevens. KING, J. B. 1960 Ministerial Cabinets of the Fourth Republic. Western Political Quarterly 13:433-444. KOENIG, Louis W. 1964 The Chief Executive. New York: Harcourt. LAPALOMBARA, JOSEPH G. (editor) 1963 Bureaucracy and Political Development. Studies in Political Development, No. 2. Princeton Univ. Press. LASSWELL, HAROLD D.; and LERNER, DANIEL (editors) 1965 World Revolutionary Elites: Studies in Coercive Ideological Movements. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. LOEWENSTEIN, KARL 1957 Political Power and the Governmental Process. Univ. of Chicago Press. MACKINTOSH, JOHN P. 1962 The British Cabinet. Univ. of Toronto Press. MANN, SEYMOUR Z. 1960 Policy Formulation in the Executive Branch: The Taft-Hartley Experience. Western Political Quarterly 13:597-608. MEYNAUD, JEAN (editor) 1958 The Role of the Executive in the Modern State. International Bulletin of Social Sciences 10, no. 2. NEUSTADT, RICHARD E. 1960 Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership. New York: Wiley. -» A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Science Editions. NEUSTADT, RICHARD E. 1963 Approaches to Staffing the Presidency: Notes on FDR and JFK. American Political Science Review 57:855-862. PICKLES, WILLIAM 1959 The French Constitution of October 4th, 1958. Public Law [1959]: 228-276. PROCTOR, J. H. JR. 1964 Constitutional Defects and the Collapse of the West Indian Federation. Public Law [1964] .-125-151. PYE, LUCIAN W. 1958 The Non-Western Political Process. Journal of Politics 20:468-486. ROSSITER, CLINTON L. (1956) 1960 The American Presidency. 2d ed. New York: Harcourt. RUSTOW, DANKWART A. 1955 The Politics of Compromise: A Study of Parties and Cabinet Government in Sweden. Princeton Univ. Press. SIMON, HERBERT A.; SMITHBURG, DONALD W.; and THOMPSON, VICTOR A. 1950 Public Administration. New York: Knopf. VILE, M. J. C. 1962 The Formation and Execution of Policy in the United States. Political Quarterly 33: 162-171. WEBER, MAX (1922) 1957 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Edited by Talcott Parsons. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» First published as Part 1 of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. WILDAVSKY, AARON B. 1964 The Politics of the Budgetary Process. Boston: Little. YOSHIMURA, T. 1961 The Position of the Prime Minister Under the Constitution of Japan. Waseda Political Studies 4:1-25.
POLITICAL FINANCING The acquisition and retention of political power require material resources and human energies. Money is the most important medium for transferring command over material resources. Its command over human energies varies among societies
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at different stages of development but is of great importance in all political systems with competitive popular elections. Political financing, therefore, comprises the processes through which money is used to channel resources and energies for political purposes. Modern studies of political financing have been concentrated in systems where important social decisions are made in competitive elections. They have been little concerned with how money is used as a source of influence in authoritarian regimes. In the democracies, observation and analysis of political financing have focused principally on the activities of candidates, political parties, and other participants in election campaigns, including organized interest groups and parallel-action organizations. Lobbying activities have usually been treated separately. The financial aspects of the political process have been given greatest attention in the United States. In other nations, however, especially in western Europe but not only there, certain phases of political financing have increasingly become objects of study. The study of political financing Characteristics. In systems where political financing has been studied, money flows through many reaches of the political process. Focus upon money per se involves, directly or by implication, all aspects of the political system. Features of the conversion of economic power into political power are revealed, for example, by analysis of the sources of political funds. General questions of voting behavior are encountered by analyses of the uses to which funds are put in election campaigns. Tracing the flow of funds projects the student into analyses of human motivation, political participation, the character of influence, and the structure and operation of political party systems. The widespread attempts to regulate political financing lead to questions of constitutional authority, of the social requisites for enforceable law, and of public understanding and attitudes. Historical topics of political philosophy and complex questions of explanatory theory pervade the scrutiny of political financing. Since money is an agent, standing in place of the goods and services into which it can be converted, arbitrary boundaries on its definition are introduced to make its study feasible. These boundaries can be strategically altered as the data available and the character of the political system being studied permit. In past research, distinctions have been made between contributions of cash and contributions of goods or services. The latter have often been excluded from analysis. Also usually
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separated from analysis have been the general effects of economic power, as felt through many channels in the society—control over credit sources, impact on the mass media of communications, influence emanating from the hierarchical structure of segments of the economic system, and such. Moreover, the personal wealth of candidates is frequently difficult to isolate from the superior development of personal political abilities that those resources may have helped to develop; hence it, too, has often been excluded from the analysis. The quality of available data has profoundly affected the study of political financing. Much more is known in some nations than in others about the grand architecture and operational details of political financing. In all systems, to varying extents, empirical knowledge of desired scope and reliability is lacking. Absence of records and deficiencies in such records as exist partially account for this lack. Inducements to secrecy, because of the character of transactions in political financing and the public suspicion aroused by them, obstruct impressionistic as well as hard, empirical analysis. The complexity of the relevant data, given the implications of political financing for entire political systems, further compounds the difficulties of interpretation. The subject has at times suffered from both sweeping, oversimplified imputations and excessively narrow attempts to assemble dependable data for analysis. The study of political financing has also been shaped by the different incentives of the students. Reform sentiment seeks to alter practices, often in accordance with ideological assumptions about the proper functioning of the political process. Such sentiments have originated both with practitioners and with others. Political interests directly engaged in competitive politics concern themselves with the subject in order to gain or maintain conditions they consider advantageous to themselves. Some study of the subject is politically neutral, directed simply toward better understanding of political behavior. Thus, the study of political financing may serve as a tool of political analysis, a means to political objectives, or a combination of both. Evolution of the study. The broad development of political finance research is revealed by the changes that have occurred over the years in the primary purpose of study, in the scope of concern, in the kinds of data and how they were employed, and in the intensity of comparative analysis. After an almost exclusive concern with public policy, students of political finance have increasingly been examining the subject simply for what could be revealed about the behavior of political systems.
From a narrow focus on formal campaign committees, attention has widened to embrace many of the other aspects of the political process affected by political finance. From a heavy reliance on quantitative data submitted in official reports, analysts have made more and more use of information gathered by depth interview, survey research, direct observation, and other empirical means. After a long period of exclusive concern with political financing in single nations, comparative analysis across the boundaries of political systems has emerged. In the United States, where over the years most political finance research has been produced, this mounting sophistication can be traced through four chronological phases. (1) Until the 1920s data and commentary were largely found in public documents and in the writings of journalists such as the muckrakers of the progressive era. Congressional testimony, state and federal reports, and the discussion they inspired constituted the bulk of inquiry and interpretation. The first effective concern was felt for public employees who were subject to financial assessment by political leaders responsible for their jobs. Some evidence of existing practices was assembled in the move for protective legislation. Attempts were later made to determine total sums spent in certain political campaigns and the amounts and sources of campaign gifts. Interest in the subject increased with the belief that large donations to political parties gave unwarranted influence in government to the individuals and corporations supplying the funds. State and federal legislation was directed not only at age-old abuses, many of them (such as bribery) long contrary to the common law, but also toward limiting the sources of funds and the amounts and kinds of expenditures. It was directed too toward providing publicity to campaign accounts, on the theory that public knowledge of political financing would have a purifying effect on the practices followed and would give voters important information to assist them in deciding which parties and candidates to support. Proposals for public subsidies to help meet campaign costs were generally ignored. In 1926 James K. Pollock published the first scholarly treatment of political financing in book form, Party Campaign Funds. He was concerned with the formulation of wise public policies for the regulation of campaign funds and placed heavy faith in the efficacy of forced publicity. He focused on favoritism in government and emphasized a conception of selfish interests in conflict with public interests. The analysis was confined to practices of party campaign committees and used data drawn
POLITICAL FINANCING chiefly from official party financial statements and the findings of Congressional committees. Pollock cited the shortage of dependable data as a serious obstacle to the creation of effective public policy. The categories of description included the volume of expenditures, the fund-raising methods, the sources of funds, the uses of funds, and the state and federal legal controls. (2) In 1932 a second phase of study opened. Pollock published what long remained the only book on campaign finance outside the United States, Money and Politics Abroad. Practices in Great Britain, Northern Ireland, France, and Germany were examined. Pioneering attention was given to auxiliary and nonparty organizations, and the main sources of data were direct observation and interviews. New categories of analysis were added: e.g., the effect of expenditures on the outcome of elections, the handling of funds within parties, the impact of money on a total political system, the general identification of controlling interests in a state. The main purpose was still to discern effective controls of political finance, but broader understanding of ihs whole party system was sought as a means to that end. Each nation was treated descriptively, separately, and differently, without attempt to develop concepts for comparative analysis. Also in 1932, the first of a series of writings by Louise Overacker appeared, Money in Elections. While essentially policy connected, it professed to formulate a "theory of parties" in order to state, although not necessarily solve, problems posed by political financing practices in the United States. Overacker accepted political pressures as inherent and was chiefly concerned with whether prevailing practices prevented voters from adequately expressing their wants and protecting their interests. She viewed the use of money in elections as a byproduct of popular government and reached the strong conclusion that legislative efforts to limit the volume of election expenditures should be abandoned. Overacker put her faith in publicity of campaign accounts. She included the financing of nomination campaigns in her inquiry, analyzed the sizes of contributions, identified economic and family connections of contributors, set down categories of motivation underlying campaign giving, made certain analyses of trends over time, along with certain comparisons between nations, and otherwise expanded the focus and depth of analysis. Overacker's writings on political finance, culminating in 1946 in Presidential Campaign Funds, especially illuminated the sources of political contributions, including the newly important labor
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movement, and exposed the defects of the Hatch acts, adopted in 1939 and 1940, in their attempts to regulate political finance. She relied mostly on data from official reports and public investigations. (3) The difficulties of obtaining usable empirical data have always limited the number of scholars willing to study political financing. In the United States usually no more than one major worker has been active at a time. In 1953, at the University of North Carolina, a program of research was initiated designed to engage the energies of many persons, expand the range of inquiry, make larger amounts of varied, dependable data available, and use the scrutiny of political finance as an avenue to study of the general political system. The chief resulting publication was The Costs of Democracy (1960), by Alexander Heard. The study viewed solicitation, donation, transmission, and use of political funds as forms of political participation, to be evaluated with other forms of political participation—e.g., campaigning and voting —as parts of the intricate network of relationships that constitute government and politics in the United States. The complex of activities involving political financing was viewed as one set of the evolving mechanisms by which representation of interests in the politics of the United States is achieved. In this framework financial and nonfinancial influences in the outcome of elections were delineated; a typology of motivations for financial participation in politics was presented; and measures of the financial involvement of various types of groups and associations, including the underworld, were offered. The significance of fund solicitors as a type of political activist was evaluated. The flow of funds through and between political organizations was traced and analyzed, with special attention to the character of party cohesion revealed. The significance of political financing in the recruitment and winnowing of candidates for nomination was appraised. Throughout, efforts were made to bring a maximum of qualified data into use, to identify meaningful trends in political practices, to detect causal relationships, and to interpret for its public policy significance the experience and changing context of public regulation of political finance. This work and the studies associated with it were national in focus, although Heard drew on foreign experiences to give perspective to United States practices. In 1958 an organization devoted exclusively to the study of campaign finance was established in Princeton, New Jersey. The Citizens' Research Foundation, with a small staff under the direction
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of Herbert E. Alexander, extended some of Heard's approaches and initiated new ones of their own. Through its publications series, its own research, its assistance to anyone studying the subject, and the accumulation and dissemination of information, the Foundation kept a steady focus of attention on poetical finance in the United States and contributed in many significant ways to the continuity and development of its study. While scholarly concern with political finance was evolving in the United States, western Europe for a long time was the only other major area in which research into the subject was seriously pursued, and much of the work there was isolated and unrelated. Earlier hypotheses, by theorists like Max Weber, were never seriously tested, and research has been focused quite differently in the several countries. In Britain the most extensive investigations of recent years were historically oriented, analyzing changes in the techniques of political finance as related to the widening of the franchise, changes in elite recruitment, and the development of party organizations in the nineteenth century. In Germany a large part of the extensive literature was addressed to legalistic problems of constitutional interpretation and regulations, although numerous monographs and articles also used empirical data to evaluate political finance practices in the German Federal Republic. Some research endeavors were offshoots of interestgroup studies. The greater disclosure of financial data by European trade unions and socialist political parties made possible the analysis of political financing activities of various labor movements. Certain highly controversial political questions, like the relationship of German business to the Nazis in the early 1930s, stimulated other islands of research. Some information, as well as normative evaluation, was also developed by a number of official commissions set up to advise governments on possible regulatory legislation. Such commissions submitted reports in the 1950s in Sweden, Norway, and Germany. (4) In the early 1960s an attempt was made to prepare for more-broadly comparative analyses of political finance. Efforts were begun to develop common frameworks for studies of political financing in the United States, Europe, and non-Western countries. A number of studies were commissioned that for the first time presented system-wide descriptions of the processes of political finance in a number of Asian democracies, particularly the Philippines and India. The range of nations for which minimal information became available was enlarged through article-length studies of political
financing in Italy, Israel, and Australia. These overview studies, constructed within the same basic framework of inquiry, together with similar articles on Great Britain, Japan, and West Germany, were published under the editorship of Richard Rose and Arnold J. Heidenheimer (1963). In his accompanying "Comparative Party Finance: Notes on Practices and Toward a Theory," Heidenheimer (1963) developed concepts that could be used in measuring and explaining differences in political financing between political systems and argued the relationships between levels of expenditures and stages of economic, social, and political development. The emergence of comparative studies made clear the need for more generalized conceptual terms. Moreover, the introduction of nonWestern data and the use of developmental concepts widened the horizons of investigators. The move toward comparative studies spanning continents, and perhaps ultimately spanning centuries also, forced recognition of the need for greater stress on the general theoretical significance of analytical and descriptive studies. Research outside the United States. In 1966 the "research map" of political financing was unevenly charted. Apart from the United States there were three major nations in which the principal dimensions of political financing had been substantially explored. These were West Germany, Great Britain, and Japan, although in the latter two cases analyses were based mainly on information from official reports filed by the participants themselves. In an intermediary group of countries, some Western, some Asian (including Israel, Italy, Australia, Canada, the Philippines, and India), the search for hard data and functional analysis had begun with some promise. In certain groups of countries, like the small democracies of western Europe and the more stable Latin American countries, with only a few exceptions little attempt had yet been made to assay and develop political financing data. The least amount of inquiry had been attempted in the new democracies of Africa and Asia. There the study of political finance, although necessarily focused on different structures and techniques, may eventually prove fruitful. With regard to contemporary practices, more had become known about political financing in West Germany than in any other country except the United States. Research was stimulated not only by scholarly curiosity but also by partisan interests. The political parties had stakes in differing patterns of financial support and in conflicting interpretations of constitutional requirements. Struggles over enactment of disclosure requirements, tax
POLITICAL FINANCING deducibility provisions, and the role of "conveyer" and "sponsor" associations helped to keep the subject timely, throwing up much raw information in the process. The Germans developed a comprehensive system for public financing of political parties, under which in 1964 some 50 million marks were paid annually to the three major parties from the budgets of federal, Land, and local governments. This development not only led scholars to important reinterpretations of the German party system but also provided a new model of political financing practice that itself stimulated further study. In Great Britain following World War n, the conditions of political finance appeared satisfactory to most, except some followers of the Labour party, and were given relatively little study. Many scholars and politicians felt that few improprieties were committed and that few distortions of representative government resulted, a radical change from practices that prevailed in the nineteenth century. British law imposed a rigid limit on expenditures made on behalf of a candidate in his constituency during an election campaign. The effectiveness of the limit bred satisfaction with the system, and most research in political finance was based on official reports of these constituency expenditures. The growth of central-organization campaign activities, however, not limited by these controls and not covered by official reports, led eventually to a mounting desire for more extensive knowledge of British campaign finance. In Great Britain, as in other places, the increased importance of mass communications and the increased role of organized interests in general efforts to shape public opinion brought realization that the British controls over candidate expenditures during the limited campaign period constituted regulation of but a small share of significant political expenditures. The state of knowledge Knowledge of political finance can be viewed at three levels: descriptive, interpretive, and theoretical. After four decades of scholarly study, knowledge of political finance at all three levels had advanced substantially in the United States and was appreciably greater than corresponding knowledge in other nations. The greatest progress had been made in assembling and ordering descriptive data. These led to new interpretive insights into particular segments of political finance, and the broadened range of inquiry during the 1950s and 1960s made possible the development of typologies and of limited, empirically based gen-
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eralizations about some aspects of the subject that had not been offered previously. No comprehensive, abstract theory seeking explicitly to account for all phenomena of the subject appeared, but a number of unifying themes emerged from the diverse inquiries of Heard and his associates, e.g., the ultimate primacy of votes in a society with a free election system, the multiple sources of influence over votes, the limits imposed by a pluralistic political system on any single source of power, and the multiple manifestations of social and economic power. Information about the processes of political financing was detailed and well documented in many particulars, especially the volume and sources of contributions and the volume and purposes of expenditures in certain kinds of elections. Financial relationships between many party and campaign units had been traced and understood. The differential roles of certain significant participants in the processes of campaign finance had been identified. Political giving, as part of the syndrome of political involvement of individuals and groups, had been explored. The roots of effective and ineffective legal controls had been probed, and experimentation with new forms of regulation occurred. Expertise of certain kinds had been developed sufficiently to make possible the evaluation of innovations in soliciting procedures and in other campaign practices. And, over-all, many financial linkages between social structure and political structure had been delineated. Election expenditures. Data and understanding were technically more complete in the United States at national political levels than at state and local levels, an inevitable concomitant of the federal governmental system and the decentralized party structures of the United States. For the presidential election year 1964, for example, over $26 million in expenditures through national-level campaign organizations could be clearly identified, made up of cash outlays plus debts. These expenditures were substantially higher than in previous recent presidential election years. The division of expenditures between the parties has generally favored the Republicans by a ratio of about 60 to 40, although in 1960 the division was about equal. Fluctuations in the purposes for which expenditures were made by national-level organizations could be charted, revealing, for illustration, not only the relatively stable emphasis given to both organizational and communications activities over the decades but also the displacement of the communications medium dominant at a particular time by another, i.e., newspaper advertising by radio,
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radio by television. The relative importance of donations of certain sizes could be traced: usually about two-thirds of the amount received by both parties in individual donations at the national level is in sums of $500 or more. The $26 million accounted for in 1964 by national groups constituted, however, only a small portion of the total cash spent in all nomination and election campaigns that year, probably $200 million in all. In the large states millions of dollars were spent in the presidential race. Where competition was heated, a candidate for governor or United States senator might find over a million dollars spent on his behalf. But below the national campaign level the reliability of data varied greatly from one state and locality to another, so that in only a few specific places could trends be followed from election to election. Generally, at state and local levels the number of reporting and receiving officers, the frequency of reports, and their variable accuracy and completeness made the summary and analysis of data too laborious for regular use. Many funds employed in political finance, moreover, went unreported in official accounts, thus requiring the use of much supplementary information from other sources. Party structures. The effects of political finance practices on internal party structures, and the reverse, had been increasingly studied. For example, the system of special finance committees organized openly and solely for solicitation purposes by the Republican party in the United States for years contrasted sharply with traditional practices in most units of the Democratic party. In the latter, fund raising was a function of regular campaign committees or of special small cadres of individuals, well placed to give or solicit funds, who operated largely out of public view. The Republican finance system consistently displayed greater technical proficiency and less secrecy in its operations than did Democratic practices. In both parties political solicitors became recognized as critically important communications links, representing the views and needs of candidates to donors and reflecting the interests of donors to parties and public officials. Techniques of fund raising changed rapidly in the United States in response to changes in income tax and gift tax laws, in per capita disposable income, in the tools of solicitation, in public attitudes, and in other conditions that affect who gives and how much. Legal limitations. The futility of the legal ceilings imposed on individual political gifts and on expenditures by individual campaign committees had been demonstrated. The federal and state gov-
ernments in the United States had generally pursued repressive and negative approaches in seeking to regulate political financing, prohibiting or limiting various types or amounts of contributions and expenditures. Reliance on public disclosure of campaign accounts as a disciplining influence on candidates and parties had proved disappointing to most of its advocates. Direct and indirect governmental subsidies had increasingly found favor with students and practitioners as a way of helping to meet campaign costs while avoiding some of the pressures of private financing. Four states adopted statutes permitting limited deductions of political contributions in computing personal income taxable under state law. The U.S. President's Commission on Campaign Costs, a bipartisan group appointed by John F. Kennedy in 1961, recommended tax concessions to encourage more-widelydispersed popular financing of presidential campaigns. At all three levels of knowledge postulated above—descriptive, interpretive, theoretical—greatest future progress in understanding political finance lies through systematic comparative study. This progress will require the development of many standard categories of information about political finance in diverse institutional and cultural settings. It will require sophisticated concepts and units of measurement of a type that have not characterized study of the subject in the past. The mere acquisition of certain types of desired data may in many places prove impossible. The type of material that constitutes relevant data varies from one setting to another. Common functions appear in different guises, and seemingly similar phenomena may, in their particular contexts, have quite different significances. The advances already made at a conceptual and theoretical level by students of comparative political systems offer stimulus and promise to students of comparative political finance. The effect of the processes of political finance on the recruitment of political leadership requires special attention. The financial aspects of nomination and prenomination processes have been examined in the United States, for example, yet they remain relatively obscure and their revision seems beyond the purview of most proposals for change. The character of commitments that result from acceptance of financial support requires categorization, and the conditions which prompt financial support instead of other forms of support need delineation. The illumination of these two features of political finance is essential to an understand-
POLITICAL GROUP ANALYSIS
ing of the sources and exercise of political power. Inevitably, the study of political finance will be affected—sometimes encouraged, sometimes obstructed—by its implications for political controversy. ALEXANDER HEARD [See also BUDGETING; CONFLICT OF INTEREST; PARTIES, POLITICAL; POLITICAL PARTICIPATION.]
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Office. -> The most comprehensive report of campaign finances in a presidential election year. U.S. CONGRESS, SENATE, SPECIAL COMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE POLITICAL ACTIVITIES, LOBBYING, AND CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS 1957 Final Report. . . . Washington: Government Printing Office. -> Includes a digest of regulatory recommendations made by Congressional committees from 1905 to 1956. U.S. PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON CAMPAIGN COSTS 1962 Financing Presidential Campaigns: Report. Washington: Government Printing Office.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CITIZENS' RESEARCH FOUNDATION Study. -» Published since 1960. A series of studies of diverse aspects of United States campaign finance, many of them written or edited by Herbert E. Alexander, the director of the Foundation. Congressional Quarterly Almanac. -*• Published since 1945. Publishes annual summaries of certain campaign finance information filed by candidates and political committees with the U.S. Congress. GWYN, WILLIAM B. 1962 Democracy and the Cost of Politics in Britain. London: Athlone. -> An analysis of the evolution of British practices. HEARD, ALEXANDER 1960 The Costs of Democracy. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. HEIDENHEIMER, ARNOLD J. 1963 Comparative Party Finance: Notes on Practices and Toward a Theory. Journal of Politics 25:790-811. OVERACKER, LOUISE 1932 Money in Elections. New York: Macmillan. OVERACKER, LOUISE 1933 Campaign Funds in a Depression Year. American Political Science Review 27:769-783. OVERACKER, LOUISE 1937 Campaign Funds in the Presidential Election of 1936. American Political Science Review 31:473-498. OVERACKER, LOUISE 1941 Campaign Finance in the Presidential Election of 1940. American Political Science Review 35:701-727. OVERACKER, LOUISE 1945 Presidential Campaign Funds, 1944. American Political Science Review 39:899-925. OVERACKER, LOUISE 1946 Presidential Campaign Funds. Boston Univ. Press. POLLOCK, JAMES K. 1926 Party Campaign Funds. New York: Knopf. POLLOCK, JAMES K. 1932 Money and Politics Abroad. New York: Knopf. ROSE, RICHARD; and HEIDENHEIMER, ARNOLD J. (editors) 1963 [Comparative Studies in Political Finance.] Journal of Politics 25:643-811. -» This symposium represents the first major project of the International Study Group on Political Finance. Contains many references to professional literature outside the United States. SHANNON, JASPER 1959 Money and Politics. New York: Random House. -» A brief historical and prescriptive treatment of political finance in the United States, with a chapter on Norwegian practices. SIKES, EARL R. 1928 State and Federal Corrupt-practices Legislation. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. -» The principal early work on legal regulation. Largely historical and descriptive. U.S. CONGRESS, SENATE, COMMITTEE ON RULES AND ADMINISTRATION 1957 1956 General Election Campaigns: Report of the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections. . . . Washington: Government Printing
POLITICAL GROUP ANALYSIS The analysis of political groups covers a wide range of viewpoints, conceptual schemes, and structures of preference. Although the study of nongovernmental groups is currently a widespread academic concern and although some attempts have been made to construct conceptions of the structure of political power in which groups, variously denned, are central elements, no genuine consensus of a theoretical sort has emerged from these investigations. To speak of the group approach to political studies, of the group theory, or of the group model is both inaccurate and misleading. Such terms are at best labels applied to a diverse and frequently conflicting collection of analytical efforts in the study of politics. Despite the absence of a consensus on what group analysis can do for the understanding of politics and power, one can identify two tendencies in the contemporary literature that provide a means of classifying the vast bulk of such writing. The first of these is the position that, especially in relatively developed societies, it is not possible to achieve an adequate understanding of the more visible, constitutionally recognized governmental institutions and their interconnections without taking into account the attributes and activities of nongovernmental or unofficial groups of various sorts. This position has produced a large and growing body of essentially descriptive research on the organization and activities of what are usually called pressure groups or interest groups. This type of investigation developed first in the United States, where the issues of domestic politics and the peculiarities of the constitutional structure combined to make such groups relatively visible and accessible to inquiry. Since shortly after the close of World War n, however, studies of interest groups have been conducted in most of the developed parts of the globe, especially in countries whose systems permit relatively free political inquiry and at least tolerate the formation of extragovernmental associations. The contribution of
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these studies to the description of political systems often has not gone beyond adding another set of institutions to those customarily examined—executives, legislatures, courts, bureaucracies, and political parties. A second tendency, much less common, is represented by a limited set of attempts to develop, directly from research or by synthesis from descriptive studies, something approaching a general theory of politics in which the group, variously conceived, occupies a central position. These efforts show differing degrees of sophistication and complexity. None is satisfactory as a general theory, but collectively they have helped to raise or revive, in the analysis of political systems, questions and problems of a fundamental sort that otherwise were likely to be neglected or to remain unidentified. Among these are questions concerning the nature of political leadership, the processes of electoral choice, the structure of official decision making, the character of linkages between constituents and officials, and the consequences of alternative forms of governmental organization. The convergences among these attempts are far from complete. They differ chiefly in the degree to which they allow for an independent initiative in public policy by elements of the official government, in the extent to which they see influence relations between groups and governmental units as unidirectional or reciprocal, and in the room they allow for short-run consequences of idiosyncratic behavior by those in positions of formal leadership. History The recognition of groups, broadly conceived, as significant actors in politics is scarcely a novelty in Western thought. The essential notion of the group, even as a claimant on the choices of governmental decision makers, is to be found in Plato and Aristotle. It appears and reappears in successive periods, especially when attention is focused on the classic problem of tensions between rulers and the ruled, the problem of the center versus the circumference, as Charles E. Merriam phrased it, whether in the restriction of the claims of the universal church, in the formation of the nation-state, or in the turbulence associated with the commercial and industrial revolutions. In contemporary terms the analysis of political groups has claimed attention as groups have become highly differentiated and numerous under social systems characterized by a complex division of labor, interdependence, a resulting emphasis upon bargaining relations, and efficient means of
communication, almost regardless of whether the political culture supports the open expression of dissent and the legitimacy of nongovernmental associations. In addition, the concept has been taken up by investigators attempting to give some sort of order to the confusing crosscurrents of political influence in semideveloped or underdeveloped countries exhibiting rapid change in various societal sectors. The intellectual paths leading to contemporary concern with the analysis of political groups are, however, diverse. At least four can be discerned. The first path is that of the English and Continental, especially German, pluralists. Essentially a reformist reaction, especially among its later English adherents, against the inclusive claims on behalf of the modern state to a virtual monopoly of legitimate authority, this doctrine's most influential origins are to be found in the historical jurisprudence of Gierke [see GIERKE]. Clearly not hostile to the emergent German nationalism of Bismarck, Gierke saw danger or at least error in the concept of the state as the exclusive source of law. Accordingly, he emphasized the similarities between the state and other social groups and employed his impressive historical scholarship in an attempt to revive the German Genossenschaftsrecht. Gierke's work was introduced to English thought primarily by Maitland, who was skeptical about the implications of Austin's monistic theories of state power and was consequently concerned to emphasize the importance of nongovernmental associations to an understanding of contemporary politics [see AUSTIN; MAITLAND]. Following Maitland and Figgis, who confined his attention largely to the relations between church and state, the later pluralists, G. D. H. Cole and especially Harold Laski, used these insights for an attack on existing state power and on the capitalism with which they saw it inextricably allied [see COLE, G. D. H.; FIGGIS; LASKI]. Paradoxically, their writings implicitly assumed the relative stability of postVictorian British politics in their neglect, at least until the 1930s, of the problem of how the authority of an ultimate power, whether as director or as umpire, is to be maintained. A useful instrument for socialist criticisms in Britain and for the demands of British labor, the doctrines of English pluralism were influential in the United States as a convenient descriptive approximation of some increasingly familiar features of the dispersion of power on the American scene. [See PLURALISM.] A second path to contemporary concerns was opened up by a set of highly influential Continental sociologists, notably Gumplowicz, Simmel, and
POLITICAL GROUP ANALYSIS Ratzenhofer, in the closing years of the last century [see GUMPLOWICZ; RATZENHOFER; SIMMEL]. Differing widely among themselves and pursuing sharply differing goals, they had in common an effort to use notions of the group as a means of comprehending the process of social and political development. They were among the contributors to the stimulating atmosphere of the Continental, especially the German, universities, into which entered a generation of young American scholars who were to be important in the emerging American graduate schools, in the social sciences as well as in other fields. The third path to the contemporary concern with the analysis of political groups is best exemplified by the work of one man, Arthur F. Bentley, although he was not wholly alone in his efforts. His name must be linked with that of John Dewey, who was an influence upon him as early as 1895 and with whom an increasingly intimate association and collaboration developed in the 1930s and 1940s [see DEWEY]. Bentley's classic, The Process of Government (1908), was his only systematic excursion into the explicitly political realm. The book, which was in his words an "attempt to fashion a tool," is in part critical and in part constructive. Bentley participated in "the revolt against formalism" in this period of American thought. He rejected the reification of conventional categories, whether legal, political, or psychological, and repudiated a fixed and simple classification of social groups, whether that of Marx or those of the German sociologists. He insisted that a political science, or any social science, could be based only upon observable human behavior, although he left room for a "potential" stage of activity which he called "tendencies of activity." Group activity, which he saw as a means of stating all the phenomena of government, was to be known and to be stated on this basis. He began to see the process composed of such activity as sets of "transactions," though he did not use the term or elaborate the view until much later. [See BENTLEY.] The Process of Government is thus an inquiry much broader in scope than a study of "pressure groups." For more than thirty years after its publication, however, the broader relevance of the book was almost wholly ignored. Instead, American scholars produced a series of studies of pressure groups and "lobbies" which collectively constitute the fourth discernible path to contemporary concern for the analysis of political groups. Frequently owing their inspiration to materials generated in the course of investigations conducted by committees of the Congress, these studies varied
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in scope and level of sophistication, but they built up a body of comment on a hitherto neglected type of political institution. The best of them focused on a particular arena (Herring 1929; 1936), on a type of policy choice (Schattschneider 1935), on the actions of a single group (Odegard 1928), or on the connections between a group's internal processes and its actions (Garceau 1941). Following World War n, as previously noted, the discovery that such groups were not restricted to the American political scene led to a large number of comparable investigations in a wide variety of countries. "Pressure-group" studies have since become a staple in the research activities of political scientists in almost every corner of the globe. Current trends No genuine convergence of these four paths has occurred, but collectively they have led to a number of uneven attempts to produce some limited theories or at least to alter prevailing modes of exposition. One of the first areas for this sort of effort was the American political party. The works of Herring (1940), Schattschneider (1942), and especially Key (1942) differed in their analytical and prescriptive positions, but each helped to establish the view that the political party, in the United States at least, could not be understood apart from its relations with constellations of nonparty groups [see KEY]. Key took the additional step of examining the party organization itself as one type of interest group, functionally indistinguishable in some of its features from nonparty groupings. Paralleling such attempts have been a number of efforts at theorizing about nonparty groups in relation to the whole spectrum of the political system. Although these efforts cannot yet be properly assessed, it seems likely that those which avoid too narrow a conception of the term "group" will prove most acceptable. To limit the reference of this term to the "pressure group" of popular parlance is dangerous because, on the one hand, there is the risk of oversimplification and, on the other, the likelihood of adding another piece of misleading formalism to those erected by the constitutional structure. Groups thus narrowly conceived are often assigned a monopoly of initiative in the area of public policy, no nongovernmental actors except formally organized groups of this sort are considered, and, consequently, governmental actors are treated as mere referees of group conflict or recorders and ratifiers of the outcomes of intergroup contests. This oversimplification leads to the error of treating a limiting case as if it were the norm. This
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obvious error occurs with great frequency in the literature, despite the fact that even our rough knowledge of the distribution of cases of the relation between interest group and government demonstrates that this oversimplification fails to square with the evidence concerning a vast range of instances. A proper understanding of Bentley's conception would help to avoid the constricting consequences of these oversimplified formulations. Bentley does not use the word "group" altogether unambiguously, but he does use it broadly, so that it becomes almost the equivalent of any pattern of activity. The gap between his own and conventional denotations may have been too wide, but the whole thrust of his theory was away from preassigned weights and roles. Even his distinction between underlying groups and representative groups, a variant of Marx's sub- and super-structure, did not confine the representative groups to being referees and recorders. Those who merely add the nongovernmental group to the collection of formal structures to be explained by analysis may do a different sort of disservice. By concentrating on a single institutional pattern in a descriptive way, they often lose sight of the total political process in all its complexities. In particular, they may ignore the question of variations in power resources, the question of differences in the degree of commitment and of efficient use of such resources, and the matter of the emergence of new groups and the recession of established ones. They may also neglect the functional similarities, as claimants upon legitimate authority, among a wide variety of groupings extending well beyond those conventionally accepted as "pressure groups" or interest groups. If the group notion is to prove useful in a theory of the political system, it is not likely to come about through such a reversion to formalism. Among the more promising recent efforts in the analysis of political groups have been those which have focused on a broad segment of a political system or on the whole of a single system and have attempted to include political groups in the larger analytical enterprise. The best examples of the segmental sort are to be found in recent voting studies based on sample surveys, especially The American Voter (Michigan, University of ... 1960). As part of an extensive examination of the electoral decision in the United States, this study includes an analysis of the influence of group activity and identification on the choices of voters. The immediate significance of this work is its effectiveness in coming to grips with variations in group influence
within and between elections. These the authors trace to a series of factors relating the individual to the group and the group to the political world. They show that some of these factors are relatively stable and some susceptible to considerable shortterm fluctuation through circumstance or design. This work has important implications for a wider range of questions. Exploration of the factors affecting group influence on voters' choices suggests and strengthens hypotheses and intimates lines of inquiry concerning the relations between groups and points of decision within the formal governmental apparatus. In particular, the variability of electoral influence casts further doubt on those conceptions of the relations between group and government which give the group a monopoly of initiative in all circumstances. A second and closely related example that deals with groups in the context of one broad segment of a political system is Key's work on public opinion in the United States (1961). Working primarily from survey data, in this instance data on the structure and properties of mass opinion, Key selects as a basic objective an analysis of the system of "linkages" that may make opinion governmentally relevant, including nongovernmental "pressure groups." His findings are largely inferential, but they serve to undermine simplistic conceptions that categorically assign to groups a coercive monopoly in the formation of policy. He shows that such power is exercised at most in marginal cases of low frequency, and he makes a persuasive case for more sophisticated conceptions involving a greater number of variables. A revived interest in the analysis of political systems as such has been a marked feature of the period following World War n. This revival of a classic concern is traceable in large measure to a high rate of change in numerous political systems, which has compelled analysts to re-examine and in some instances drastically to recast the organizing conceptions with which they previously worked. As a result, the activities and functions of governmentally relevant groups have been placed in context. The work, though not uniform, has produced more general and perhaps more satisfactory conceptions of governmental systems and at the same time has helped to refine views of group activity within the systems. The strongest thrust in this revival has come from the necessity to come to grips with the developing political systems in the newer nations, to which the categories conventionally used in discussing states of the western European type were patently inadequate either for
POLITICAL GROUP ANALYSIS analyzing these less familiar systems or for comparing them with the more familiar types. The most influential example of this kind of effort is the work of Almond and his associates (Almond & Coleman 1960). Building on the accumulated evidence of the multifunctionality of political structures and working on the assumption that conceptions of Western systems have overstated the functional specificity of structure, while those of the primitive and traditional systems have overemphasized diffuseness and lack of differentiation, Almond develops a set of structures and of functions and proposes a comparison of political systems in terms of the probabilities of performance of specified functions by specified structures in specified styles. In discussing the function of interest articulation, he identifies four main types of interest groups, conceived almost as broadly as Bentley's, and suggests a variety of styles in which these may perform this function. Although its success has not been definitely established, the scheme is useful because it places the analysis of political groups in a context which could allow for effective comparison of structures, styles, and systems. A more concrete example of the renewed interest in systems as it bears upon the analysis of political groups is provided by a recent study of the process of governing New York City (Sayre & Kaufman 1960). Examining this system as a contest among individuals and groups, including both governmental and nongovernmental groups, the authors deal comparatively as well as descriptively with variations in the degree of involvement, in the resources, and in the goals of the group contestants. They introduce further and significant probabilistic properties into their scheme by emphasizing the effects of uncertainty, including imperfect information, upon the actions of participants. The resulting conception has considerable analytical power. Although it may not, without considerable modification, be appropriate to a wide range of cases, it bears at least a familial resemblance to other leading efforts to deal with groups in the context of an analysis of systems. In one form or another the analysis of political groups has become fixed as part of the study of governmental systems and processes. Whether this analysis is pursued at the level of the group or at the level of the system, the current trends suggest that it is unlikely to prove fruitful unless it avoids a reversion to formalism and rejects simplistic, single-factor schemes of explanation. The promising revival of interest in the political system and
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the associated tendencies toward probabilistic conceptions point more constructively toward conceiving political groups in context and toward developing multivariate schemes in which such groups are taken into account as factors of varying weight and consequence. DAVID B. TRUMAN [See also INTEREST GROUPS; PLURALISM; PUBLIC POLICY; SYSTEMS ANALYSIS, article on POLITICAL SYSTEMS. Other relevant material may be found in POLITICAL SCIENCE; and in the biographies of BENTLEY; FOLLETT; MERRIAM.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ALMOND, GABRIEL A.; and COLEMAN, JAMES S. (editors) 1960 The Politics of the Developing Areas. Princeton Univ. Press. BENTLEY, ARTHUR F. (1908) 1949 The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures. Introduction by H. T. Davis. Bloomington, Ind.: Principia Press. GARCEAU, OLIVER (1941) 1961 The Political Life of the American Medical Association. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press. HERRING, E. PENDLETON 1929 Group Representation Before Congress. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. HERRING, E. PENDLETON 1936 Public Administration and the Public Interest. New York: McGraw-Hill. HERRING, E. PENDLETON 1940 The Politics of Democracy. New York: Norton. HIRSCHMAN, ALBERT O. 1963 Journeys Toward Progress: Studies of Economic Policy-making in Latin America. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. KEY, VALDIMER O. JR. (1942)1964 Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups. 5th ed. New York: Crowell. KEY, VALDIMER O. JR. 1961 Public Opinion and American Democracy. New York: Knopf. LAPALOMBARA, JOSEPH G. 1964 Interest Groups in Italian Politics. Princeton Univ. Press. LOVEDAY, PETER 1962 Group Theory and Its Critics. Pages 3-44 in Peter Loveday and Ian Campbell, Groups in Theory and Practice. Melbourne: Cheshire. MACRIDIS, ROY C. 1961 Interest Groups in Comparative Analysis. Journal of Politics 23:25-45. MEYNAUD, JEAN 1958 Les groupes de pression en France. Paris: Colin. MICHIGAN, UNIVERSITY OF, SURVEY RESEARCH CENTER 1960 The American Voter, by Angus Campbell et al. New York: Wiley. ODEGARD, PETER H. 1928 Pressure Politics: The Story of the Anti-saloon League. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. SAYRE, WALLACE S.; and KAUFMAN, HERBERT 1960 Governing New York City: Politics in the Metropolis. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. SCHATTSCHNEIDER, ELMER E. 1935 Politics, Pressures, and the Tariff: A Study of Free Private Enterprise in Pressure Politics, As Shown in the 1929-1930 Revision of the Tariff. New York: Prentice-Hall. SCHATTSCHNEIDER, ELMER E. (1942) 1960 Party Government. New York: Holt. TRUMAN, DAVID B. (1951) 1962 The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion. New York; Knopf.
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POLITICAL IDENTIFICATION See IDENTIFICATION, POLITICAL. POLITICAL JUSTICE Political justice refers to the use of the judicial process for the purpose of gaining (or upholding or enlarging) or limiting (or destroying) political power or influence. It may accompany or confirm political or military action, or it may be a substitute for such action. Political justice usually involves the courts, which may be invoked either by public officials or, in those societies which permit open competition for political power, by private individuals. The party invoking the judicial arm must present its demands in a form susceptible of legal determination. This party's allegations in regard to facts must be open to incrimination and proof under the specific legal system involved. These allegations may relate to intrinsically political acts or to common crimes in which the criminal is charged with political motivation, for example, bank robbery to finance revolutionary activity. Those bringing the case may reap propaganda benefits from the political stature of a person implicated in offenses of a nonpolitical and even technical nature, for example, violation of foreign exchange regulations. The classical political offense is that of attempting to obtain or to damage a position of political power by actions incompatible with the rules of the existing political system. The state may define the offense in such all-embracing terms as those defining the early Roman perduellio—"animated by a spirit hostile to the commonweal" (Ulpian, Digest 48, 4, 11). This offense simply consisted in whatever the tribuni plebis were able to put over on the people as perduellio (Brecht 1938). Contemporary equivalents are various forms of the offense of "endangering the security of the state." This type of protective grant may, of course, be refined into any number of ad hoc enactments. The modern concept of uniform citizenship has led toward a more clear-cut definition of civic obligations, although the extension of the individual's political rights has created many possibilities of contest over the boundary between political freedom and political crime, between permissible dissent and punishable disloyalty. Until the beginning of the twentieth century both legislation and judicial practice in Western society showed a general line of development that increasingly excluded peaceful speech and agitation by individuals or
groups from the category of crime against the state or its rulers. The political and intellectual climate deteriorated in the interwar period. The concept of the independent and unified national state was challenged by technological changes, by the increasing intransigence of domestic political deviations, and by external threats to the autonomy of the nationstate. Furthermore, a number of states were reorganized on totalitarian lines far more restrictive than had been the case with old-fashioned autocracies. Consequently, twentieth-century statutes have tended to narrow the perimeters of permitted political activities, facilitating the prevention or detection by the state apparatus of even the most incipient stages of hostile organization or propaganda. Internal and external dangers have given rise to concepts such as "demoralization" of the army or nation and "danger to the existence or independence" of the state. Even in fairly open societies, where traditional categories of political offenses provide fewer means for reproving real or fancied dissent, the state may redefine "perjury" or "contempt of the legislature" so that the area of legal control extends over political attitudes or actions. Individual and group competitors in politics may invoke the concept of "defamation of character" to intimidate their opponents or score propaganda advantages. The utilization of such concepts allows the state or the political contestants to compress the most complex processes and correspondingly complex attitudes into stereotypes of black-or-white, yes-or-no alternatives. The contest between alternatives seems to lend itself to court determination and helps to create public images of defense of, or attack upon, traditional values. In the liberal constitutional framework the value of the political trial depends on the psychological and political pressures of the moment. Because of the meaningfulness of the traditional legal institutions and processes, the trial is marked by a creative element of risk and unpredictability, which distinguishes it from an administrative command performance. Outside the realm of liberal constitutionalism this creative element of uncertainty is reduced, sometimes to the vanishing point. The judiciary is likely not only to be connected with the state authorities of the day by common social premises (as is usual in all societies) but to be directly dependent upon them. The element of uncertainty disappeared altogether in the Stalinist trials of the 1930s and 1940s. They differed not only from liberal usage but from old-style authoritarian trials
POLITICAL JUSTICE by integrating allegations and evidence almost completely with changing political needs. They prefabricated the incriminating facts and tried to fit them tightly into the hypothesis of treasonable development, which the defendant, now publicly cooperating with the prosecution, was assigned to represent. The Stalinist trial formula was the extreme and partly self-defeating culmination of political justice. In political trials, the decision is officially sought in terms of the alleged criminal past behavior of the real or fancied political foe. Yet the judgment frequently rests on a projection of the defendant's alleged past behavior into the future. Criminal responsibility for past action is transformed into responsibility for hypothetical future happenings. The criminal-conspiracy thesis is manipulated so as to converge with the conspiracy thesis of the historical process. Political trials of leaders and prominent members of fallen political regimes are a special, though by no means novel, category of political justice (e.g., Charles i, Louis xvi, Robespierre). Frequent changes of political regime have brought an increasing number of trials by fiat of political successors. Beginning with the abortive Riom trials of the leaders of the French Third Republic and reaching a peak in the Nuremberg and Tokyo warcrimes trials, judicial arraignments of predecessor regimes have become a regular feature of sudden political change. In the late 1950s and early 1960s such trials took place in Turkey, South Korea, Cuba, and elsewhere. They frequently lump together responsibility for unsuccessful political action with charges of violation of constitutional norms, illegal forms of personal enrichment, and inhuman and brutal acts, termed "crimes against humanity" in the war-crimes language. The war-crimes trials were an intensive form of predecessor-regime trial, although in their case the successor regime was a composite of foreign military victors. These trials added a new and, judging by the results, problematic dimension to international political justice: the charge of aggressive warfare. This charge raised legal doubts because it was newly created after the commission of the incriminated acts. Moreover, this charge was somewhat tainted by hypocrisy, coming as it did from states that had either tolerated many of the acts of the now fallen culprits or even become their accomplices. Predecessor-regime trials combine the most problematic features of political trials. They invariably raise the problems of the ad hoc court (judges
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selected for the specific purpose) and the tu quoque rejoinder (discussed above). They also suffer from procedural shortcomings, restrictions on the freedom of defense, and the lack of any appeals jurisdiction. They are largely directed toward the creation of politically useful imagery. Nevertheless, the trials of predecessor regimes carry their own justification to the extent that the procedural irregularities are outbalanced by the weight of the intrinsic evils that they bring before the bar. The frequency and severity of political trials depend on many variables of time and place. Few societies have been entirely free of political justice, but the continuum extends from the halcyon days of Victorian England to the delirium of Stalinist Russia. Acute physical threat to the existing order —social, political, colonial, or racial—is most likely to lead the authorities to invoke the judicial apparatus frequently; sometimes their foes are in a position to invoke it too, and occasionally political prosecutions may result from the local interplay between informal police violence and judicial procedure. Where access to courts is fairly free and where witnesses are protected against the cruder forms of intimidation and violence, courts exercise a dual function. They legitimize official reaction against open challenge to constituted authority. Also, however, by submitting official action to some form of court scrutiny, however mild, they act as brakes upon the spread of official violence. In the absence of acute physical challenge to established authority the likelihood of political prosecution is linked to tactical and propagandistic considerations. It also depends on the strength or weakness of liberal traditions, on ideological judgments, on the prospects of continued erosion of existing authority—as well as on officeholders' calm or fear in the face of events beyond their control. Any court performing an act of political justice rejects the contentions of illegality and prejudice and insists on the strict legality of its bases of action. But whether courts apply an existing norm to appropriately ascertained events or apply a spurious norm to "events" perhaps artificially concocted, they are influenced by the actions of political agencies. Similarly, the actions of the courts can support, mitigate, or check those of the political bodies. The utilization of the apparatus of justice to attain, and at the same time to legitimize, political goals raises questions of appropriateness, necessity, and usefulness. The justification of both goals pursued and methods applied will remain endlessly in
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dispute, in general and in each individual case. Meanwhile, resort to court proceedings for political ends, especially by the state, will be subject to its own inherent limitations. It is one paradox of political justice that repression is most effective when least necessary—that is, when th*3 regime attacks small, unimportant, or transitory minorities—and least likely to be effective when most attractive to the regime, that is, in the face of strong, persistent minority opinion and organization. It is another basic paradox that the value of legal procedure in conveying or enhancing the legitimacy of a regime depends largely on the degree to which that procedure respects the limitations on political prosecution, that is, the degree of insistence upon evidence of concrete past action, the untrammeled introduction and challenge of testimony, the freedom of the defense, and the organizational and intellectual distance between the prosecution and the court. OTTO KIRCHHEIMER [See also INTERNATIONAL CRIMES; JUDICIAL PROCESS; JUSTICE.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ARENDT, HANNAH 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking. BRECHT, CHRISTOPH HEINRICH 1938 Perduello: Eine Studie zur ihrer begrifflichen Abgrenzung im romischen Strafrecht bis zum Ausgang der Republik. Munich: Beck. CASAMAYOR, Louis 1960 Le bras seculier: Justice et police. Paris: Edition du Seuil. DONNEDIEU DE VABRES, HENRI 1947 Le proces de Nuremberg. Paris: Editions Domat Montchrestien. GUDE, MAX 1957 Probleme des politischen Strafrechts. Hamburg: Monatsschrift fur Dt. Recht Verlag-Gesellschaft. HAUSNER, GIDEON 1966 Justice in Jerusalem. New York: Harper. HURST, WILLARD 1944-1945 Treason in the United States. Harvard Law Review 58:226-272, 395-444, 806-857. KIRCHHEIMER, OTTO 1961 Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends. Princeton Univ. Press. LEITES, NATHAN; and BERNAUT, ELSA 1954 Ritual of Liquidation: The Case of the Moscow Trials. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. MERLEAU-PONTY, MAURICE 1947 Humanisme et terreur: Essai sur le probleme communiste. Paris: Gallimard. MOMMSEN, THEODOR 1899 Romisches Strafrecht. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. PAPADATOS, PIERRE A. 1954 Le delit politique: Contribution a I'etude des crimes contre I'etat. Geneva: Droz. RITTER, JOHANNES M. 1942 Verr at und Untreue an Volk, Reich und Staat. Berlin: De Gruyter. WOETZEL, ROBERT K. (1960) 1962 The Nuremberg Trials in International Law: With a Postlude on the Eichmann Case. New York: Praeger; London: Stevens.
POLITICAL MACHINES The term "machine," when used in a social context, describes a hierarchic organization whose members perform different functions, play various roles, and occupy various statuses. It has a leadership which defines and pursues goals and policies with sufficient effectiveness and regularity so that it can be compared to a mechanical device. The term also suggests efficiency, impersonality, and ruthlessness in operation and in the pursuit of goals. The analogy between the human organization and the mechanical organization can be elaborated by pointing to the need of both for fuel, lubricant, and an operator, or headman, or boss. A political machine is a stable, well-functioning party organization headed by a boss or leader or by a small leadership group. It may be rural or urban. It usually operates on a city or county basis, although state-wide machines can also be found. It is a group composed in the main of professional politicians whose principal objective is the acquisition, maintenance, and enlargement of political power. Development of the concept. In the past (see Sait 1933) it was usual to distinguish between the political party, the political organization, and the political club on the one hand, and the machine on the other. The machine was wicked. It sought power secretly and through the use of corrupt and sometimes criminal methods. Its objectives were not the public or party good but private and personal gain. Ostrogorskii (1902) promulgated this view. For him, machines were legitimate party organizations which had been "captured" by mercenaries. He believed that honest machines were not natural. Such views are less common today but are still widely held, especially outside scholarly circles. They emphasize "ruthless efficiency," bribery, patronage, graft, and rigging of elections. In the past and certainly currently, the term has also been applied without such sinister connotations. This was true in such cases as the "La Follette machine" or the "Taft machine." The neutral connotation is more useful, since it makes a greater contribution to an understanding of the phenomenon. Thus, any stable, effective, political organization which has a leadership, a hierarchy, and disciplined members should be considered a political machine. Theodore Roosevelt was correct when he observed that the opposition's organization is habitually called a machine, and its leader a boss or a politician. One's own is a club or party, perhaps even a faction or a caucus, and its head is invari-
POLITICAL MACHINES ably a political leader. Sait insisted that "the boss generally claims the title of leader and the machine, usurping the name as well as the thing, calls itself the party organization" (1933, p. 657). Roosevelt and other commentators recognized that both leaders and machines were necessary as well as inevitable. However, machine and boss are generally considered by press and people as evil both in purpose and in method. Bryce considered "machine" as simply a synonym for "party organization." His chapters entitled "The Machine" dealt with the hierarchy of party committees and conventions (1888, vol. 2, chapters 60-62). Most contemporary scholarship follows this lead. For example, according to V. O. Key, Jr., the party consists of all those who consider themselves members, while the "inner core" of the party is the "party machine or organization"—"the more or less cohesive group held together by the ambition to gain power" (1942, see p. 337 in the 1953 edition). What the machine does with the power if and when it gains it is much less important in Key's approach. The machine may be corrupt and vicious, or clean as a hound's tooth and publicspirited to boot. Avery Leiserson cogently sums up these attempts to distinguish between "political" bosses and machines, without principles or ideology, etc., and the presumably principled, nonpolitical organizations and leaders. With respect to these legitimate as against nonlegitimate forms, he concludes: As a conception of political organization, the picture of party organizations as being necessarily dominated more by the motives of private, personal gain than are so-called non-political organizations suffers from two defects: (1) substitution of a logical or ethical criterion for empirical, functional analysis, and (2) failure to realize that any kind of organization that enters the political process commits the "sin" of mixing ideal with material motives. If there is a distinctive motivation and attitude characteristic of political parties, it is the survival and the power of the organization, but in this the party is no worse than the church, the army, the corporation, or the trade union. (1958, pp. 199-200) The history of machines. Machines and bosses are as old as politics. They have existed in many parts of the world. Pericles was a boss; so were Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus—and the last three constituted the leadership of a "machine." So was Robert Walpole in eighteenth-century England. Today Latin American dictators, General Franco of Spain, Premier Ky of South Vietnam, and the heads of most of the emerging countries could be considered bosses. Michels' "iron law of oligarchy" dis-
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covered bosses in European socialist parties. Everyone is familiar with the description of Nikita Khrushchev as a boss. Hamilton, Jefferson, and Burr were bosses; and their "factions" or "caucuses" were "machines" composed of members of the gentry. Jacksonian democracy ushered in an era which required the ordering and mobilization of large numbers of newly enfranchised frontiersmen. This was a great opportunity for the creators of effective political organization. The "gentlemen" were pushed aside by this new breed, who brought new skills to the political arena. They cared less for niceties and manners than for effectiveness and private pelf. The spoils had been increased by the multiplication of offices and the destruction of the civil service. The Jacksonians succeeded in this enterprise because of widespread antipathy toward the gentry, because their tactics were rationalized by a primitive democratic theory, and because the attention of most of the population was on the conquest of the continent. A division of labor was made between "the people" and the political machine. By mid-nineteenth century, effective, disciplined machines were active in most cities. Because of their near monopoly of nominations, they became in a real sense the governments of the cities. Highly organized local politics became the rule, while national politics remained chaotic. Local machines continued to be characteristic in both urban and rural areas at least until after World War n. Since then there has been a decline. But in the 1950s Philadelphia, which had formerly been a Republican fief, created an old-style Democratic organization. Why were many of these machines so corrupt? Tocqueville noted that Americans believed that politics was disreputable. It was considered suitable only for those who had failed in private business. In those early days the public business was believed to offer fewer challenges than private realms. American party conflict has been unusually nonideological in character as compared with that of parties elsewhere. Issues between parties, especially local parties, have tended to be nonexistent or dull. Gifted or imaginative men have not been attracted to party life, especially if they are genteel. This continued to be the case at least until the time of Theodore Roosevelt, and even then friends tried to cajole him away from dealing with the low fellows in politics. The apathy of the "decent" person, that is, one who shunned politics, was not the only reason for abdication of the responsibilities of republican citi-
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zenship. The machines succeeded to complicate government machinery and the electoral process to such an extent that many amateurs became frustrated. This was even more true of the growing number of poorly educated, sometimes illiterate, usually non-English-speaking voters. The funrtions of machines. Machines developed in part to compensate for the fractionalization of governmental authority decreed by the national and state constitutions. The wide dispersal of power made effective and responsible government difficult, if not impossible. The inability of the national government to act with energy was a serious matter. A similar situation existed at the state and local levels. In state governments, long lists of administrative officials were elected. In cities and counties it was worse. There was confusion, overlapping, and duplication between cities and counties, and also among the myriad school districts and specialpurpose governments. Thus, frequently when important problems occurred and the people or some interests demanded firm, quick action, no one had adequate authority to act. The machine filled this lack. It was the only available means of redressing the rigidities of formal government structure. Structure, in the form of law, was stifling necessary function. The machine volunteered to redress the balance. This process was accelerated by the rapid growth of cities as the industrial revolution transformed an agrarian land into an embryonic urban society. By 1890 the population of urban centers had increased sixfold while the rural population had only doubled. The crazy-quilt system of local government which had already demonstrated its inadequacy could not begin to meet the grave new challenges. Then, as now, the new urbanites were not prepared for their changed life—nor were their governments and their public officials. City life of those days was more harsh and more cruel than it is today. Many immigrants were terrified. Even native-born, rural-reared Americans found adjustment to the impersonal and dangerous city difficult. Both needed and wanted help. Middle-class people, especially businessmen, also had needs: streets, sewers, police and fire protection. Building permits and other licenses were required. Protection was wanted from sometimes debilitatingly rigorous administration of regulatory ordinances. Valuable franchises for public utilities and mass transportation were desired. Many fled to the suburbs in order to escape corruption, boss rule, and high taxes, surrendering the city to the machine and the poor. Criminal and twilight enterprises require per-
mission and protection: bookmaking, gambling, prostitution, horse and dog races. The best available broker for the criminal and the racketeer was the corrupt machine and its captive police force. The quid pro quo was not only money but also votes and manpower on election day. Chicago bosses "Hinky-Dink" Kenna and "Bathhouse" John Coughlin had a horde of pimps, prostitutes, and their cohorts regularly available on election day. Mass immigration was the source of an important part of the population growth. The majority of immigrants settled in the cities, which became ethnically heterogeneous, so that the machines were able to appeal to national pride and prejudice. Often the immigrants received nearly instant citizenship and franchise. Because of their inability to speak English, because of their poverty and illiteracy and lack of experience with voting, their votes were often purchasable. The machines had the manpower, experience, incentive, and effrontery to manipulate the new citizens. The task of the machines was made easier by the legacy of Jacksonian democracy and populism. Aided by the loose national governmental structure, the spoils system had become institutionalized. So had the long ballot. Only a few people had the energy, time, and knowledge to comprehend the complexities of the electoral process and the unreasonable burden of seriously evaluating dozens of candidates in every election. Being unable to do this, many voters were prepared to be assisted by the willing machines. In a society in which there is rapid and dramatic concentration of wealth coupled with a developing tradition of an ever-widening franchise, it is inevitable that the wealthy attempt to control the growing number of enfranchised poor. Ethical restrictions could not stand in the way of furthering this goal. Machines were used because they possessed the skills and resources to control the multitudes. In part, machine politics developed for these reasons. In a deeper sense, however, the growth of machines was inevitable. Organization is required in all complex undertakings, and in any organization there is a tendency for a few to dominate, no matter how many may seem to participate. This tendency is exacerbated by the lack of effective, integrated leadership which can produce coherent policies and viable government and which the people can hold accountable. Because this sort of leadership was absent and unavailable in the formal structure, it had to be supplied from the outside as the only alternative to chaos. Leadership thus went to the party organization, the political machine, and the boss.
POLITICAL MACHINES Corruption and reform. The political, social, economic, and financial costs of corrupt machines are incalculable but enormous, whatever their inevitability or functional utility. The cost in terms of the "degradation of the democratic dogma" cannot be measured. Tens of millions of Americans have developed cynical attitudes toward the myths of our political system, expressed by "You can't fight city hall." The low prestige of politics and politicians is another result, since it has served to keep many potentially able people away from the public arena. The civil service has been degraded. The United States lagged fifty years behind European countries in adopting public welfare and social insurance programs. The physical city and the quality of life therein have deteriorated. Few cities have been specifically planned, and thus lack parks, beaches, and other public amenities. Inadequate schools, inadequate fire protection, inadequate and/or brutal police service, the development of slums, lack of minimum standards for housing, neglect of tenements, rent gouging, lack of consumer protection, wholly inadequate hospital and public health services, an almost total lack of protective labor legislation, and long delays in legislation for the protection of women and children— all have been caused by rapacious machines. From the early days, attempts have been made to bring about structural changes to improve the quality, tone, and probity of government. Most of these have not succeeded. There is evidence that good government can come into being without structural changes and that bad government can continue despite great changes in form. On the one hand, high-quality leadership by the mayor and city council can rectify some systems considered wretched; on the other hand, wily bosses have successfully circumvented reform. The major reforms attempted included the following: the nonpartisan election; the commission form of government; the council-manager form of government; the election for councilmen-at-large; the proliferation of the merit system at all levels; the initiative, referendum, and recall; the Australian secret ballot; the short ballot; centralizing power and responsibility at state and local levels, including the state government reorganization movement and the public administration movement. [See LOCAL POLITICS.] The decline of the machine. In recent years, machine politics has been in decline. Local sources of machine power have been significantly eroded. A study of the 1956 national elections in the United States reported that only 10 per cent of its respondents had been contacted by party workers. If only
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residents of nonsouthern cities of over 100,000 population are considered, this proportion increases to nearly 20 per cent. But even this figure is a modest one for an effective machine (Greenstein 1963, p. 40). The reasons for this decay are in part conjectural. There has been a great reduction in traditional rewards of money, perquisites, and jobs offered by the machine to the poor and the ethnic minorities. Some of this is doubtless due to accretions of various reforms and the loss of patronage. There has also been a vast increase in governmental social welfare programs. And the dramatic increase in the general standard of living has reduced the value of the rewards that the machine is still able to offer. The number of persons so attracted has declined as the poor have decreased. Material security has altered attitudes toward the self, government, and society. "Recognition" and other emoluments no longer seduce blocs of voters as they once did. Boss control was further weakened as the intensity of group identification diminished and as many old ethnic neighborhoods changed. The rise in strength and influence of trade unions, with their strong pension, health, and welfare plans, has further reduced the value of boss rewards to yet another clientele. Moreover, union members receive political directions from union political action committees which may rival political machines in resources and manpower. Generally the electorate is now better educated and the mass media offer much political information, increasing the sophistication of the electorate. In some places machines have been brought down from the outside. In New York, Carmine DiSapio was unseated in this way, and the forces of Eisenhower and Goldwater each defeated the "regular" Republican machines in enough states and localities to win presidential nominations by landslides. An important element in these defeats of the machine was the availability of what the constituents accepted as attractive candidates. In addition, especially in the Goldwater campaign, control of party machinery was wrested from the regulars. Reformers in New York and California have displayed more political insight and greater willingness to "play" organizational politics than their predecessors did. Although the new reformers abhor bosses and machine politics, they have worked within the parties and have challenged the machine at its own game of face-to-face voter persuasion. Machine politics still survives. There remain large
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pockets of poverty amid American affluence where conditions are similar to those which accompanied the rise of the machines. By various estimates 17 per cent or 20 per cent or 25 per cent of the population is poor. Negroes and Puerto Ricans make up a significant portion of the poor, and their problems ?re somewhat similar to those of the earlier waves of immigrants. Both groups have made important, though insufficient, gains in political representation. The power that Congressman Adam Clayton Powell had in New York and the increasing number of Negroes in Congress testify to this. In California and the Southwest, citizens of Mexican origin are similarly increasing their political activities. Machine politics is not yet dead, even in the invidious sense. There have been major transformations; there will be more. But the need for organizations, for leadership, and for political responsibility has increased in the contemporary world. Some promising new organizational forms are developing. They coexist side by side with the remaining weakened and modified older forms and with the still developing structures in the troubled Negro, Puerto Rican, and Mexican-American ghettos. Perhaps we are now wiser than we were fifty years ago. Perhaps we can devise structures that will permit access and integration for those groups which are still dispossessed, without paying the enormous price we have paid for ineffective and often venal local governments.
ALEX GOTTFRIED [Directly related are the entries CITY, especially the article on METROPOLITAN GOVERNMENT; LOCAL POLITICS; POLITICAL CLUBS. Other relevant material may be found in COMMUNITY; LOCAL GOVERNMENT; NONPARTISANSHIP; POLITICAL.]
OFFICE,
MISUSE OF; PARTIES,
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BANFIELD, EDWARD C. (1961) 1965 Political Influence. New York: Free Press. BRYCE, JAMES (1888) 1909 The American Commonwealth. 3d ed. 2 vols. New York and London: Macmillan. -» An abridged edition was published in 1959 by Putnam. FLYNN, EDWARD J. 1947 You're the Boss. New York: Viking. GOSNELL, HAROLD F. (1937) 1939 Machine Politics: Chicago Model. Univ. of Chicago Press. GOTTFRIED, ALEX 1962 Boss Cermak of Chicago: A Study of Political Leadership. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press. GREENSTEIN, FRED I. 1963 The American Party System and the American People. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. GREENSTEIN, FRED I. 1964 The Changing Pattern of Urban Politics. American Academy of Political and Social Science, Annals 353:1-13.
KEY, V. O. JR. (1942) 1964 Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups. 5th ed. New York: Crowell. LEISERSON, AVERY 1958 Parties and Politics: An Institutional and Behavioral Approach. New York: Knopf. McKEAN, DAYTON O. 1949 Party and Pressure Politics. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. MARTIN, RALPH G. 1964 The Bosses. New York: Putnam. MERRIAM, CHARLES E. 1929 Chicago: A More Intimate View of Urban Politics. New York: Macmillan. MERRIAM, CHARLES E.; and GOSNELL, HAROLD F. (1922) 1949 The American Party System: An Introduction to the Study of Political Parties in the United States. 4th ed. New York: Macmillan. MERTON, ROBERT K. (1949) 1964 The Functions of the Political Machine. Pages 215-226 in Frank J. Munger and Douglas Price (editors), Readings in Political Parties and Pressure Groups. New York: Crowell. OSTROGORSKII, MoisEi I. 1902 Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties. 2 vols. London and New York: Macmillan. -» An abridged paperback edition was published in 1964 by Quadrangle. RIORDAN, WILLIAM L. (1905) 1948 Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. New York: Knopf. -» A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Button. ROGOW, ARNOLD A.; and LASSWELL, HAROLD D. (1963) 1964 The Boss and His Past: Game and Gain Politicians. Pages 207-217 in James D. Barber (compiler), Political Leadership in American Government. Boston: Little. SALT, EDWARD MCCHESNEY 1933 Machine, Political. Volume 9. pages 657-661 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan. SALTER, JOHN T. 1935 Boss Rule: Portraits in City Politics. New York: McGraw-Hill. WILSON, JAMES Q. 1960 Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press.
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS See the guide under SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.
POLITICAL ORGANIZATION See under POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
POLITICAL PARTICIPATION In this article the term "political participation" will refer to those voluntary activities by which members of a society share in the selection of rulers and, directly or indirectly, in the formation of public policy. The term "apathy" will refer to a state of withdrawal from, or indifference to, such activities. These activities typically include voting, seeking information, discussing and proselytizing, attending meetings, contributing financially, and communicating with representatives. The more "active" forms of participation include formal enrollment in a party, canvassing and registering voters, speech writing and speechmaking, working in campaigns, and competing for public
POLITICAL PARTICIPATION and party office. We shall exclude from this discussion such involuntary activities as paying taxes, serving in the armed forces, and performing jury duty. Why do social scientists study political participation? To begin with, participation is an ingredent of every polity, large or small. Whether the society is an oligarchy or a democracy, someone must make political decisions and appoint, uphold, and remove leaders. Those who fail to participate, whether out of neglect or exclusion, are likely to enjoy less power than other men. Although not all who participate possess effective power, those who do not participate cannot exercise or share power. As these observations imply, the right to participate is an essential element of democratic government, inseparable from such other attributes of democracy as consent, accountability, majority rule, equality, and popular sovereignty. Indeed, the growth of democratic government is in part measured by the extension of the suffrage and the correlative rights to hold office and to associate for political purposes. Whereas traditional monarchies restrict power and participation largely to the nobility and their agents, democracies have in principle transformed these prerogatives into rights enjoyed by everyone. This expansion of participation was partly stimulated by the desire to give meaning and force to the principles of consent, accountability, and political opposition. Participation is the principal means by which consent is granted or withdrawn in a democracy and rulers are made accountable to the ruled. Since men can be equal and free only if they share in the determination of their own affairs, participation has been viewed as a means for realizing these democratic objectives as well. [See DEMOCRACY.] From Aristotle to John Dewey, political philosophers have extolled popular participation as a source of vitality and creative energy, as a defense against tyranny, and as a means of enacting the collective wisdom. By involving the many in the affairs of the state, participation should promote stability and order; and by giving everyone the opportunity to express his own interests, it should secure the greatest good for the greatest number. The community should gain, furthermore, by drawing upon the talents and skills of the largest possible number of people. Some philosophers have claimed, in addition, that participation benefits the participants as well as the larger community. It ennobles men by giving them a sense of their own dignity and value, alerts both rulers
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and ruled to their duties and responsibilities, and broadens political understanding. Ought participation, however, to be open to all, or restricted to those who know how to use it wisely? On this question, political philosophers and statesmen have often disagreed. Some have maintained that men are not equally worthy of being consulted about their opinions. Some have held that men should be excluded because of caste, race, religion, poverty, or other presumed marks of irresponsibility and moral deficiency. Some have argued that men who lack property or education have no "stake in society," are likely to be swayed by demagogues, and will use the opportunity to participate merely to register their envy and recalcitrance. Arguments like these lay behind the exclusion of slaves and aliens from Athenian democratic processes; of commoners and Jews and other nonCatholics from participation in medieval principalities; and of Catholics from governments formed in the wake of the Reformation. Even the American constitution, as originally framed, implicitly sanctioned prohibitions against voting or holding office for reasons of race, property, religion, or sex. At the present time, the suffrage in some parts of the United States is, in law or in fact, denied to aliens, illiterates, paupers, criminals, Indians, and Negroes. Nevertheless, as democratic institutions have advanced, the trend has been for such barriers to be dropped. Despite their historical association, widespread participation is not peculiar to democracy. Even greater emphasis is placed upon participation by the modern mass dictatorships, both communist and fascist. Their desire to involve every citizen in political affairs is evident not only in their efforts to achieve unanimous voting in elections but also in their organizaton of the masses into an elaborate network of youth groups, mass parties, trade unions, people's councils, cooperatives, recreational and cultural societies, study circles, conferences, rallies, parades, demonstrations, and staged mass demonstrations. Whether these efforts represent participation in the sense in which we have been using that term is open to question. Much of this activity is involuntary, and none of it is designed to allow the masses to wield influence over policy or the selection of rulers. On the contrary, it is manipulated by the self-appointed political elite so as to exploit the democratic mystique, make the masses accessible to the regime's propaganda, harness their energies in the building of the state, and lend the regime an appearance of legitimacy. Thus, the
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attempt to involve the people in the achievement of the state's programs is calculated to strengthen the dictatorship rather than to bring it under popular control. [See DICTATORSHIP.] Nature and frequency of participation Despite its importance to democracy, the right to participate is not exercised by all who possess it. The number of nonparticipants varies with time, place, and circumstance, and also with the type of participation. More people discuss politics than vote, and many more vote than join parties or work in campaigns. Approximately three-fourths of the Americans surveyed during recent national elections reported that they had discussed the campaign with other people. The number of eligible Americans who have actually voted in presidential elections since World War ii has ranged from 51.5 per cent in 1948 to 63.8 per cent in 1960 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1965, p. 384). Turnout in off-year elections to the House of Representatives during the same period has ranged from 37.6 per cent in 1946 to 48.9 per cent in 1962 (U.S. President's Commission . . . 1963, p. 66). Approximately one-fourth of the electorate professes to have proselytized others on behalf of one of the parties or candidates (Michigan . . . 1960, p. 91). Some 15 per cent say they have worn a campaign button or displayed a sticker (Milbrath 1965a, p. 19), and almost the same number claim to have written or wired their congressmen or senators on some occasion (Public Opinion: 1935-1946 1951, p. 703). An even smaller number (roughly 10 per cent) claim to have contributed campaign funds (Alexander 1966, p. 69), while 7 per cent assert that they have attended political meetings, rallies, or dinners (Michigan . . . 1960, p. 91). From 3 to 5 per cent maintain that they participated actively in recent national campaigns (Lane 1959, p. 53), while only 2 or 3 per cent claim membership in political clubs or organizations (Michigan . . . 1960, p. 91). The number who run for political office or hold influential posts in the parties is, of course, even smaller—only a fraction of 1 per cent. Even these figures are probably inflated, for more people tend to report political activity than actually engage in it. The figures cited may also vary, depending upon the time of polling (e.g., whether during or between campaigns) and the type of election: more people vote in national than in local elections, in presidential than in off-year elections, in partisan elections than in primaries, and in elections involving candidates than in referenda involving issues.
Political interest and awareness are related variables that are even more difficult to assess than participation, because their manifestations are less overt. Roughly one-third to one-half of the respondents surveyed during the 1956 election had no opinion or information on 16 well-known political issues (ibid., p. 174). Approximately one-third of the adult public expressed little or no interest in the 1948 and 1952 elections, while another third were only "moderately" or "somewhat" interested (Berelson et al. 1954; Campbell et al. 1954). Even fewer have the interest or capacity to arrive at a coherent set of opinions (Converse 1964). The attentive public, thus, is distinctly a minority. As Bryce observed ([1921] 1931, vol. 2, pp. 157 ff.), only a small group gives constant attention to politics, a slightly larger group is interested but comparatively passive, while the mass of men are largely indifferent. A contemporary writer, Milbrath (1965a, pp. 16-22), employing a similar classification, stratified the electorate into "gladiators" (the small number of party actives and officeholders), "spectators" (who seek information and vote), and "apathetics" (who participate only passively, if at all). Although all such classifications are arbitrary, they point up the tendency for various forms of political involvement and indifference to cluster: people who engage in one of the more "active" forms of participation (say, canvassing) are inclined to be active in other ways as well (say, the collection of money); whereas people who habitually fail to vote will usually avoid such other minimal activities as reading the political news. Milbrath suggests that the various forms of political involvement fall into a hierarchy or continuum according to the cost in time and effort that each demands. But other variables, such as political articulateness, saliency, and interest— which can only partially be reckoned into the "costs"—also affect the frequency of the various forms of participation. These patterns of political activity are also subject to considerable variation. Many people vote habitually, but others vote only intermittently. Although reliable figures are not available, there is considerable fluctuation from one election to another among those who participate actively, as candidates, issues, and political conditions change. A party that is out of power or that has little hope of winning elections is particularly vulnerable to such shifts. Turnover seems to be especially rapid at the lower party levels, among political amateurs and volunteers, who have neither office nor emoluments to sustain them. Variations are also to be found in the rates and
POLITICAL PARTICIPATION patterns of participation from one era to another and from one nation to another. In the United States, participation appears to have declined sharply at the end of the nineteenth century. Although turnout for presidential elections in the decades following the Civil War had averaged more than 75 per cent, the rate fell steadily during the early years of the present century to an average of 51.7 per cent in the 1920s, rose again in the 1930s, and in the 1960s averaged slightly above 60 per cent (Burnham 1965; U.S. Bureau of the Census 1965). Even within the United States, regional variations in participation are great in any given year: in 1960, for example, the turnout ranged from 30.4 per cent in Georgia to 80.7 per cent in Idaho (U.S. President's Commission . . . 1963, p. 67). Equally striking are the differences in the rates of political activity from one country to another. Despite the greater incidence of education, urbanization, affluence, and mass communication, turnout in the United States has generally been lower than in other modern democracies. Turnout in Italy and Belgium in the years since World War n has approximated 90 per cent; in Denmark, West Germany, and Great Britain, 80-85 per cent; and in Canada, Norway, Finland, and Japan, 70-80 per cent. The few cross-national studies conducted so far indicate, however, that despite the low turnout, other indexes of participation—political interest and awareness, expressed party affiliation, sense of political competence, etc.—tend to be higher in the United States than in many other countries, such as France and Italy (U.S. President's Commission . . . 1963; Almond & Verba 1963; Lipset 1960). These findings suggest that the interrelations among the several forms of participation found in the United States are not universal. No one has yet discovered any overarching principle to explain the varying ways in which these phenomena are ordered in different countries. Some of this variation is surely due to the familiar determinants of participation (education, access to information, etc.). But important weight must also be given to factors peculiar to individual countries—traditions, history, access to the governing institutions, the particular forms of political competition, or, as in Italy, special inducements to vote. The systematic investigation and weighting of these factors in various countries remains one of the urgent research tasks. So far we have treated participation as though it were a unidimensional variable. This may be a questionable assumption, however, for although all
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instances of nonvoting are overtly the same, they may spring from different motivations and may represent quite different acts. Thus, in general, two classes of apathetic individuals can be distinguished: those who fail to participate out of political indifference, exclusion, or incapacity; and those who consciously choose not to participate. Although no precise information is available as to their frequency, the first is plainly the larger of the two classes. It includes the habitual nonvoters who have little knowledge of issues or candidates and are mystified by political events. Rarely are they able to connect what happens "out there" with the events of their own lives. Apathy of this type abounds among the uneducated, the inarticulate, the parochial, the isolated, and those who occupy roles in which political passivity is perceived as the norm, e.g., women in political systems heavily dominated by men (Bell et al. 1961; Lipset 1960). As these findings signify, political participation is not "natural," but must be learned; and for learning to occur, one must have capacity, motivation, and opportunity. In some strata of the society, all three preconditions are missing. The second class of apathetics, though small, is far more diverse. It includes those who disdain politics because it seems to them self-serving and corrupt. Some adopt this view as a projection of their own hostility or dissatisfaction with their own lives; others, out of misplaced idealism and the inevitable disappointment with human imperfection; some, out of a generalized cynicism toward mankind and all his arrangements; and some, merely because they are prey to prevailing stereotypes. Still others are disenchanted either because the system serves them badly or because politics does not seem to them sufficiently "meaningful." Some— the "realists"—have concluded that their chances of influencing the gigantic and remote political system are too slight to warrant the investment of time and energy. Others believe that the system offers no genuine alternatives and that all efforts to change the outcomes are idle and self-deluding (Almond & Verba 1963; Campbell in Rokkan 1962(2; Erbe 1964; Rosenberg 1954). Still others, while aware of politics and convinced of its importance, simply find the entire subject dull. Nor are the forces that lead to withdrawal in all respects "negative." In certain subgroups of the society, apathy is positively reinforced. Among those who have attempted to set up their communities outside the prevailing culture—for example, certain "bohemian" subcultures—conventional political activities are frequently regarded as foolish and unbecoming, while political indiffer-
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ence is esteemed. The same holds, though less consciously and articulately, for certain deprived minorities, who perceive participation as useless, dangerous, or as an affectation. For them, the "affirmative" act is to express one's contempt by withdrawing. [See ALIENATION; RADICALISM.] Explaining participation Social scientists aim to develop general theories of human behavior that will account for as many relevant facts as possible with the smallest number of assumptions and explanatory variables. So far no general theory of participation even approaches this ideal. Participation appears to be a complex phenomenon that depends on a great many variables of different relative weights. This does not necessarily mean that no conceptual model can be employed to explain it. For one can at least group the relevant independent variables into those influences which are essentially internal (psychological and cognitive) and those which derive from the individual's external environment, social and political. Any model employing these broad categories is bound to be oversimplified. One may nevertheless reason that (a) individuals are embedded in a matrix of social forces (status, education, religion, etc.) that orients them toward or away from political participation; (fo) in addition, characteristic differences in drives and capacities will cause individuals to vary in their readiness to respond to political stimuli; and (c) the degree to which these social and psychological predispositions find expression as political activity depends partly on the nature of the political environment itself—including the political structure and institutions, the party system, and the pattern of political values and beliefs. The three sets of variables are closely linked and intermingled. A change in any of them can, therefore, increase or decrease participation, and an analysis based on only one of them is bound to be misleading and incomplete. The social environment. The elements that compose the social environment include education, occupation, income, age, race, religion, sex, mobility, and residence. Research in the United States and elsewhere shows that most of these variables correlate to some degree with participation. In general, participation tends to be higher among the better-educated, members of the higher occupational and income groups, the middle-aged, the dominant ethnic and religious groups, men (as opposed to women), settled residents, urban dwellers, and members of voluntary associations.
It should be emphasized, however, that the correlations between participation and some of these variables are low and unstable and that they may vary from one cultural-political context to another. Thus, education and socioeconomic status and participation correlate strongly in the United States but weakly in Norway. Urban-rural differences in participation occur in some elections but not in others. City dwellers, with their increased exposure to mass media, higher education, and greater predisposition to form voluntary associations, characteristically participate more than those who live in rural communities in the United States; yetsome farm states, such as Idaho, Utah, and South Dakota, have significantly higher turnouts than some industrial states, such as California, New York, and New Jersey. Likewise, in some countries that have long traditions of communal leadership or cooperative forms of agricultural organization, participation is greater in rural than in urban areas—e.g., Japan, France, Arab villages in Israel, and parts of Scandinavia (Lipset I960; Milbrath 1965a). Church attendance correlates positively with political participation in the United States, scarcely at all in Great Britain, and negatively in Germany and Italy. Some ethnic minorities in the United States (e.g., Negroes) have very low turnout rates, while others (e.g., Jews) have among the very highest. These deviations suggest several observations about the relation of the social environment to participation. First, the variables in this category are so broad as to be fairly limited in their explanatory power. Often they represent configurations of more exact and dynamic variables, but the configurations are not always identical. Political apathy of Negroes in the United States reflects in large measure not just their position as a minority but also their status as a deprived minority—poor, uneducated, rural, parochial, etc.; this, in turn, has gradually led to the widespread acceptance by both whites and Negroes of the Negro's role as that of nonparticipant. At the other end, the greater participation of high-status groups in most societies is due partly to their superior education and partly to their enhanced opportunities to acquire firsthand knowledge of and to influence politics by greater access to political leaders and to the sources of political decision making. Since the relevant variables are subject to interaction effects, the same demographic factors may have dramatically different consequences in different political-cultural contexts. Social class differences, for example, may signify powerful
POLITICAL PARTICIPATION inequalities in one culture and trivial differences in another. The disparity in the correlations between occupational level and participation in Norway and the United States, for instance, results partly from the greater political and ideological organization of the Norwegian working class than the American working class (Campbell & Valen 1961). The inverse relationship between correlations for church attendance and voting turnout for the United States and Italy reflects primarily the differences in education and economic status of churchgoers in the two countries. Despite these qualifications, categoric variables are not only heuristically useful but sometimes can actually influence participation. Thus, education offers high and reliable correlations with participation, partly because it helps to develop a sense of civic duty, political competence, interest, and responsibility, as well as personality characteristics of self-confidence, dominance, and articulateness. Furthermore, the schools themselves serve as settings in which the skills of participation are acquired: one learns to join organizations, fulfill duties, participate in meetings, discuss broad social questions, and organize to achieve group goals. Finally, the more educated are better able to transmit their political interest and knowledge to their children and, hence, to perpetuate the relationship between education and participation. In the example of education we thus see at work three of the most powerful influences affecting participation: articulateness, sensitivity to one's self-interest, and effective socialization by the political culture. While these influences bear even on differences in voting frequency, they are especially significant in differentiating the politically active from ordinary citizens. These same factors also help to explain the findings on participation yielded by research on other categoric variables. The higher turnout among, say, Congregationalists than Baptists is a function, in part, of their greater articulateness. The greater activity and ideological solidarity of higher-status occupations can be traced in part to their superior capacity for perceiving the relation of their own interests to governmental decisions. The higher frequency of voting among the middle-aged compared with young adults reflects the need for time and experience in order for politicization to take effect; and the same principle applies to the greater turnout and activity of settled residents as against transients. The greater political activity in the cities, compared with rural areas, testifies to a. higher level of articulateness there. The greater political activity of
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members of voluntary associations reflects in some measure the effects of all three influences: articulateness, awareness of self-interest, and greater exposure to the agencies of socialization. Through such variables as these, and through other general constructs of a more dynamic nature (e.g., power, influence, motives, pressures, drives), we may eventually succeed in developing models that refine demographic variables into their appropriate units, equivalent over time and across cultures. When these components are isolated and appropriately weighted, predictions about participation under varying conditions should become much more accurate. [See SOCIALIZATION, article on POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION.] Psychological variables. Participation survives by virtue of its capacity to provide rewards for those who engage in it. Political observers throughout the ages have variously attributed man's political activity to his need for power, competition, achievement, affiliation, aggression, money, prestige, status, recognition, approval, manipulation, sympathy, responsibility—in short, to virtually every need that impels human behavior. Unfortunately, systematic data on the relative frequency and influence of any of these motives are extremely sparse. Nor do we know whether political participation gratifies certain needs that are not satisfied by other kinds of endeavor, or whether the motives that induce active or psychologically costly forms of participation (such as managing a campaign) differ from those which prompt simpler, less arduous activities like voting. In addition to the active versus passive distinction, one may classify participation in terms of its goals: i.e., instrumental as opposed to consummatory or expressive (Davies 1963; Milbrath 1965Z?). Instrumental political activities are primarily oriented toward concrete goals, such as party victory, the passage of a bill, or the enhancement of one's own status, influence, or income. Consummatory or expressive activities are aimed at more immediate satisfaction or release of feeling: thus, voting may be a consummatory rather than an instrumental act for those who care less about the outcome than about the positive feeling they get from casting their ballots; like parading or saluting the flag, it may become a ritualistic form of rewarding behavior. For other people who are mainly concerned with achieving certain goals, the same act of voting would be instrumental. Most behaviors embody both instrumental and consummatory purposes to some degree. In general, psychological variables may be
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thought of as those stemming from individual personality traits (whether primarily constitutionalgenetic or primarily learned) and from cognitive structures, which in this case represent certain characteristic ways of conceptualizing the self and the surrounding sociopolitical world. [See PERSONALITY, POLITICAL.] Available evidence suggests that a number of the more basic or genotypic personality traits— rigidity, guilt neurasthenia, intolerance of ambiguity, manic-depressive tendencies, manifest anxiety—do not correlate highly with political participation. The weakness of these relationships is particularly evident at the more passive end of the participation continuum. Thus, voters scarcely differ from nonvoters on the traits mentioned above. However, apathetic individuals tend to be slightly more aggressive and paranoid than voters. In general, the more active participants exhibit less hostility than the general population, except in the case of activists who belong to extreme or messianic movements. Participants in such movements, which aim at quick and drastic refashioning of the world, are frequently motivated by rage and paranoia and find that participation gives them a legitimized context for discharging their aggression (Almond 1954). Although basic personality dimensions such as guilt and rigidity do not adequately distinguish participants from nonparticipants, they do differentiate somewhat the less active from the more active, the inactives exhibiting these traits in greater measure. The correlations are not high, but one would not expect them to be. Participation is so complex a phenomenon that the connection between any particular activity (e.g., voting) and any source trait (e.g., rigidity) is bound to be extremely tenuous. Then, too, for many people—especially the more passive participants—the psychological investment in politics is so slight that one would be surprised to discover that deep-seated motives were attached to a given activity. Furthermore, the "distance" between a basic personality trait and a specific manifestation of political activity is too great and the route between them too circuitous for the one to be directly engaged by the other. Nevertheless, correlations do turn up between certain personality traits and participation that appear to be due mainly to the impairment of social functioning induced by personality disturbances. An individual who scores high on measures of paranoia, inflexibility, guilt, hostility, and so on will ipso facto function less effectively in many social contexts. He will be less able to perform tasks that
require accurate appraisals of reality and may find threatening such political activities as organizing, deciding, bargaining, interacting, cooperating, debating, and proselytizing. Similarly, research has shown (Gough et al. 1951; Milbrath 1965a) that personality traits which are particularly influenced by social learning—such as dominance, social responsibility, and self-confidence—are positively associated with political participation. It is not so much that these signs of ego strength are sufficient to inspire political participation, but that individuals who lack them are more likely to avoid active involvement. Although the correlations between psychological traits and participation are modest, their direction largely refutes much of the folklore about political practitioners as highly ambitious, exhibitionistic, "folksy," narcissistic, driven, enthusiastic, materialistic, authoritarian, and power-hungry. Research in the United States (very little has been conducted on the subject elsewhere) indicates that politicians and other active participants do not possess these traits in greater measure than do nonparticipants or members of other professions (Hennessy 1959; McClosky & Schaar 1965). American data on social responsibility, authoritarianism, and related measures suggest that participants are more likely than nonparticipants to show social conscience and concern and affirmative attitudes toward mankind. Participants are also distinguished from nonparticipants by such cognitive variables as belief in one's own adequacy and in the amenability of the social order to change. Even the elementary forms of participation, such as voting, may present some people with threatening questions about their ability to understand and affect external institutions that strike them as bewildering or remote. An individual's sense of his own personal competence tends to color his judgment of his political effectiveness, which in turn strengthens his motivation to participate. Confronted with the challenge of trying to change political and social conditions, lower-status groups and the psychologically handicapped are prone to feel bewildered and helpless; they are, in general, more susceptible to feelings of alienation, anomie, and pessimism—both personal and political (McClosky & Schaar 1965). In their view, the social-political system is hostile and inaccessible. They find few of the personal rewards received by the politically active (approval of friends, being "on the inside," the "excitement" of politics, and so on). Accordingly, they not only vote less frequently but also are less interested and personally involved in politics, have fewer and less
POLITICAL PARTICIPATION coherent opinions, and are less concerned with issues and with the outcome of elections (Michigan . . . I960; Eulau & Schneider 1956). While the relations between the cognitive states of low self-esteem and feelings of pessimism and alienation from society are strongly correlated with political apathy, one cannot be certain which way the causal arrow is pointing: i.e., alienation may lead to nonparticipation; nonparticipation may encourage alienation; or both may be correlates of a more basic variable, such as ignorance, which breeds fear, mistrust, and avoidance of situations that might turn out to be threatening. Similarly, the relationship of participation to actual or imagined efficacy can be demonstrated, but here, too, the influence patterns are somewhat circular: one who participates has a greater incentive to learn how the system works and how to function effectively within it; a sense of efficacy, in turn, may predispose one toward further participation. [See POLITICAL EFFICACY.] These psychological variables, and especially the degree to which political participation is felt to be rewarding or nonrewarding, are powerfully mediated by the individual's reference groups. Many of the values and habits of participation are instilled by the family and sustained by peers and other primary groups (Almond & Verba 1963; McClosky & Dahlgren 1959). Any such group for which politics is highly salient will reward its members for participation or punish them for nonparticipation by granting or withholding approval and affection. Intermediate groups as well as primary groups may help prepare their members for citizenship by alerting them to their own interests, developing their social skills, and instructing them in the techniques of public activity. Membership in trade unions, service clubs, and other voluntary associations has repeatedly been found to correlate significantly with political participation. The influences exerted on a given individual by his various reference groups may be aggregative or may cancel each other out, depending on how consonant the groups are. Conflict or cross pressure among one's membership groups may dilute the reinforcement pattern or cause the individual so much pain that he refuses to vote or avoids participating in other ways. Cross pressures, of course, may also result from holding conflicting beliefs, from attempting to serve conflicting interests, or from harboring opinions that are manifestly discrepant with reality. [See CROSS PRESSURE.] The political environment. Much is asserted but little is reliably known about the political cor-
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relates of participation. Political apathy is alleged to be affected by the size, remoteness, and complexity of modern political systems and, more specifically, in the United States by the frequency of elections, the number of offices to be filled, the length of the ballot, and the necessity for observing and making decisions about four levels (municipal, county, state, federal) and three branches (executive, legislative, judicial) of government. Widespread participation is presumably further discouraged when the major parties are large, loosely knit brokerage agencies which lack enrolled memberships, effective discipline, or vital centers for adopting party policy. In the light of these conditions, many observers have suggested that largescale political participation may be an unrealistic goal. A few studies have indicated that such institutional barriers as complicated election codes and nonpartisan forms of the ballot somewhat reduce turnout (Michigan . . . I960; Tingsten 1937). On the other hand, participation is highest among the very individuals who are most articulate and most capable of perceiving the ambiguities and complexities in the system. Would the inactives be less apathetic if government were simpler and more comprehensible? We cannot tell. One difficulty in resolving this question is that those who have little initial interest in politics often rationalize their inactivity by seizing upon any potential obstacle, while the highly motivated have relatively little difficulty in surmounting the informal barriers to participation thrown up by the system (Michigan . . . I960; Almond & Verba 1963). Obstacles to participation may also take more narrow and prescriptive forms: cumbersome registration procedures, literacy tests, poll taxes, residence requirements, inadequate provision for absentee voting, inaccessibility of polling places, and so on. Residence requirements alone may disenfranchise as much as 5 to 10 per cent of the eligible electorate (U.S. President's Commission . . . 1963, chapter 1). Except for a few restrictions designed to disqualify specific groups (e.g., literacy tests and poll taxes in the South), these obstacles chiefly impede those who are least motivated to vote in any case. In the United States, only a modest effort is made by government or the parties to register and instruct potential voters. While voting is widely encouraged, mere exhortation appears to have little effect, except perhaps on professed attitudes toward voting. Thus many more people—nonvoters as well as voters—believe that everyone ought to vote or participate than actually do so. Conversely, the cit-
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izens of some nations with typically higher turnouts than the United States nevertheless admit to a weaker sense of civic duty (Almond & Verba 1963). Like feelings of political efficacy, professed belief in civic duty is significantly influenced by education, status, and general articulateness, as well as by the cultural norms. The situational factors that predispose people toward political activity are no better understood than are the legal and institutional barriers to participation. For example, the commonly held belief that great national or international crises awaken the impulse to participate has not been systematically tested. Scholars favoring this hypothesis can point to the increase in election turnout during the last years of the Weimar Republic, the early days of the New Deal, and similar isolated examples; but one can find as many instances that support a contrary interpretation: Turnout did not increase during the depression of 1932 or the recession of 1958. In wartime, voting tends to decline rather than to rise—partly, however, because many young voters are away from home. Thus, turnout increased slightly in 1940 over 1936, but dropped in 1944. In 1948—a time of momentous decisions and cold war tensions—the proportion of eligible voters who cast their ballots fell to 51.3 per cent, the smallest percentage for any presidential election since 1924. The relative unpopularity of the candidates seems to have had far greater weight than the urgency of international events. In 1956, a comparatively placid year, the presidential vote represented 60.1 per cent of those eligible—a relatively high proportion for the United States. It may even be that unusually grave or ambiguous problems tend to paralyze rather than to activate voters. Such anecdotal data, unfortunately, do not tell us much. What is needed is a series of cross-cultural investigations in which the meaning of such terms as "crisis" and "important" are operationally defined a priori, rather than rationalized in post hoc interpretations by either the respondents or the investigators. In addition to the general variables touched on, the party system, the nature of the campaign, and issues and ideology are three areas that shape participation in modern societies. The party system. Of all political influences on participation, the party is probably the most potent. Its role is partly expressive and partly instrumental. The party resembles the nation or the church both in its symbolic force and in its capacity for arousing affection, devotion, and sacrifice on the part of its loyal members. The vast majority of the party faithful would no more think of switching parties
than of changing their nationality or religion. The party inspires in its members feelings of belonging and, equally, of opposition to those in other parties. While membership in cognate social groups may strengthen party influence on participation, the party is a powerful reference group in its own right. Indeed, it may help to solidify attachments to other social groups. This mystique keeps large numbers of people persistently active even though they have only a slim chance of affecting the outcome of important public events. The parties also perform a number of instrumental functions. Despite their many derelictions, the American parties contact and register voters, select candidates, organize the campaign, and tell supporters what to believe on issues and how to vote. Accordingly, people who affiliate with a party vote more often than those who do not; and those who are strongly attached are more active in discussions, listen to more speeches, and respond more positively to their party's views than do those who are weakly attached. Again, these are correlates, and one cannot always be certain whether party affiliation causes participation or the reverse. Furthermore, even these correlations are far from perfect. Many voters have only a marginal preference for one party over the other, while many nonvoters report strong party loyalties (Michigan , . . 1960, p. 97). In France and some other European countries, party affiliation is less common than in the United States, but electoral turnout is higher (Converse & Dupeux 1962). Many students of politics believe that participation in the United States would be greater if the competition between parties were more intense— that is, if they were more equally matched in the number of their adherents or more sharply divided in ideology. There is some empirical support for the belief that owing to greater incentives, turnout increases as the number of supporters of the competing parties becomes more equal (Milbrath 1965£>). But closeness of competition appears to exercise most of its effect on those with strong party identifications (Michigan . . . 1960, p. 99). More debatable is the claim that greater ideological cleavage between parties increases participation. The argument rests principally on the assumption that those who see the parties as diverging are more likely to find the election important and will therefore be more strongly motivated to work and vote for their party. Support for the hypothesis can be gleaned from several sets of findings: turnout in regular elections is almost invariably greater than turnout in primaries; voters in some countries with typically heavier turnouts than the United
POLITICAL PARTICIPATION States (e.g., Norway) see their parties as more divergent ideologically than do Americans (Campbell & Valen 1961); and within the United States, active party workers are more likely than ordinary citizens to regard the parties as differing sharply on issues (McClosky 1964). But another set of observations can be adduced to support the opposite view: Many voters support their party without reference to the stand it takes on issues (McClosky et al. 1960), and only a minority accurately perceive the degree of intellectual cleavage that already exists between the major American parties. In some countries with high turnout, such as France and Italy, voters do not see the parties as very divergent ideologically. Nor has participation declined in countries that are alleged to have experienced "depoliticization," or a so-called "end of ideology" (Himmelstrand in Rokkan 1962a; Lipset 1960), even though they may have undergone a reduction in the amount of political controversy and agitation among intellectuals. It is also possible that when party positions become polarized, some people will shrink from having to choose between extreme and unpalatable alternatives. [See PARTIES, POLITICAL.]
The campaign. The effort made by the parties to involve the electorate in the political contest is concentrated in the campaign itself. Something has been learned about the effects of campaigns on polarizing party attachments, reinforcing candidate preferences, and switching votes (Berelson et al. 1954). But little is reliably known about the effects of different kinds of campaign techniques on participation. One can assume that even the most listless campaign will succeed in arousing some people who might not otherwise think of attending a political meeting, listening to a political speech, or carrying a banner. Such findings as we do have suggest that the campaign chiefly reaches the faithful, crystallizing partisanship and reinforcing the intention of committed party adherents to vote and to persuade others to vote (ibid.}. When the campaign ends, most of the participants revert to their relatively passive roles. Which campaign techniques are most effective in stimulating citizen participation? All forms of persuasion and publicity probably have some effect, however minuscule. The most dramatic results, however, appear to be achieved through face-toface communication with potential voters. This contact can be made formally, through designated party canvassers, or informally, through politically interested friends and opinion leaders (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944; Cutright & Rossi 1958; Katz & Lazarsfeld 1955). The relative effectiveness of these com-
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municators depends on their ability to command the attention of the people they seek to contact, to represent themselves as trustworthy sources of information, to enforce moral or psychological pressures, and to convey campaign messages in meaningful language (Cohen 1964). The effect of the campaign on participation depends not only on campaign techniques but also on the popularity or charisma of the candidates. Intuitive or anecdotal data suggest that candidates with strong personal appeal can significantly increase the interest of typical nonparticipants and quicken the fervor and activity of party regulars. But in the few elections on which we have data, most voters were unable to discriminate clearly the personality attributes of the candidates (Pool 1959; Davies 1954). Issues and ideology. A sizable body of research has shown that participation is associated with political awareness, that is, actual knowledge of political affairs. (Awareness, of course, is in turn highly correlated with interest.) As we have seen, the number of citizens who can be described as "aware" in any sophisticated sense is extremely small. As many as half or three-fourths of the electorate are unable to define terms common to ordinary political discourse—e.g., "monopoly," "plurality," "left," "right," "balanced budget" (see Key 1961). Many cannot identify the reference groups that speak for their interests, cannot classify themselves accurately as liberal or conservative, and cannot describe the differences between their party and that of the opposition. Striking as these findings are for the United States, they are even clearer for other countries where education and dissemination of public information are less widespread. Awareness affects both the amount and the quality of participation. If the unaware participate at all, they tend to do so in a random, inconsistent way that may actually work against their own stated aims. Data indicate that the politically aware are usually better able to relate their social values to their political opinions; to achieve stable, internally consistent belief systems; and to comprehend and act upon the constitutional "rules of the game" (McClosky 1964; Prothro & Grigg I960; Stouffer 1955). Issues also play a role in participation. Although voters may lack knowledge of the array of issues being contested in a given election, some are strongly motivated by a single issue or class of issues that are for them particularly salient. For some purposes, then, the electorate can be thought of as constituting "issue publics"—e.g., Negroes (civil rights), the elderly (Medicare), trade union-
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ists (the closed shop), young men of draft age (the war in Vietnam), and so on. The activity generated within such publics by the surfacing of the appropriate issue may be critical both for the outcome of the election and for the adoption of government policies. But self-testimony about the important issues can be deceptive: Although some people may actually be moved to vote by the issues they name as decisive—e.g., the Korean conflict in 1952— (Campbell et al. 1954), others may be motivated largely by their preference for a candidate and, when asked, merely name the issues stressed by him. Evidence suggests that the party actives are more likely than ordinary voters to be aware of and motivated by issues. In the United States the active members of the two parties differ sharply on a wide range of issues, while their respective followers tend to agree on all but a few issues (McClosky et al. 1960). These disagreements in the issue outlook of party elites furnish motive force, help to define the parties' images, and determine whom the parties recruit and activate. In principle, any issue can be a powerful stimulus to participation; in practice, some issues are so narrow, technical, or esoteric that they have little chance of capturing the interest of a large public. "Position" issues (the so-called bread-and-butter issues) are generally thought to have a better chance of interesting would-be voters than "style," or symbolic, issues (Berelson et al. 1954). Such position issues as social security, minimum wages, and Medicare are presumably easier to understand, even for the uneducated, and promise more tangible rewards. Style issues, such as civil liberties and many foreign policy questions, are presumably more complex and abstract and, hence, less compelling. Obviously there are important exceptions to these generalizations: for example, civil rights is for most Americans a style rather than a position issue, but during the 1960s it has probably inspired more activity than any other domestic issue. There are severe limitations on the degree to which issues of any type can stimulate interest and participation among large segments of the population. The distance between the individual's behavior and the eventual reward (i.e., effective government action on the issue) is typically very great, and the reinforcement pattern sporadic and uncertain. The wonder, then, is not that people do not participate, but that they do. Political factors, thus, may cause participation rates to vary, but one must keep in mind that the over-all rate of participation for a given country in a given era tends to remain fairly stable and that
changes in the rates of participation from one election to another are usually small. This suggests that the broad social and psychological predispositions earlier discussed set severe limitations on the play of political and situational elements. Participation and democracy What do the findings on participation mean for the theory and practice of democracy? According to the textbook model of democracy, an alert, informed, and wise citizenry rationally assesses the men who offer themselves for election, chooses the best, and removes or reappoints them after carefully weighing their performance. As we have seen, the portrait bears little resemblance to reality. How should this picture be revised in the light of the findings on participation? Does the evidence render traditional notions of democracy untenable, requiring a reformulation of its basic assumptions and claims? These questions have stirred considerable controversy (Dahl 1966; Walker 1966). Much of the argument has centered on what the widespread failure to participate means for democratic government. While some observers have felt that universal participation is neither possible nor especially desirable, none has proposed restricting the practice of universal suffrage. The issue, rather, is the assessment of the consequences of political inactivity among certain sections of the electorate and the amount of participation that reasonably can or should be expected of citizens in a democracy. The answers to these questions, many believe, will shape the nature and quality of the democracy a society enjoys. The arguments of those who are not severely troubled about the dangers of political apathy may be summarized as follows: (1) Little is gained, and something may be lost, by encouraging the involvement of men and women who are politically uninformed and uninterested. Such people are likely to misperceive their own and society's best interests. They are likely to have the poorest understanding of the requirements of a democratic system (civil liberties, tolerance of nonconformity, etc.) and are most susceptible to misleading propaganda and the appeals of popular but inappropriate leaders. Encouraging them to participate may actually cause harm to democratic government. (2) To insist that all must participate because all are affected by politics is to substitute piety for judgment. Little is gained merely by increasing the number of voters. Political activity may be addressed to undesirable as well as to desirable ends. A vote may be used to elect a Hitler as well as a
POLITICAL PARTICIPATION Roosevelt or a Churchill. In a democracy, moreover, a citizen has the right to disdain politics if he chooses. Better apathy than heedless participation. (3) Since even under optimal conditions the great mass of the electorate can never possess the awareness that complex political judgments now demand, the business of politics might better be turned over to those active minorities who, by virtue of their interest, knowledge, and judgment, have shown that they are capable of governing in a democracy. As a safeguard in this kind of government-by-minority, the would-be rulers must, of course, be drawn from all segments of the society, must compete among themselves for office, and must account to the voters for their actions. (4) Widespread political activity, while desirable in some respects, also carries disadvantages. A "too active" electorate may impede those who rule from making the decisions they are best qualified to make. A highly politicized electorate may lead to excessive controversy, fragmentation, and instability. The existence of a large number of "indifferents" among the electorate lends flexibility to the system by permitting power to shift from one administration (or party) to another without generating unusual tension or anger; the decisions of the new officeholders are thus more easily accepted and accommodated. Any sudden upswing of political interest and activity is likely to herald a condition of disturbance or crisis in the system and the emergence of new and profound cleavages. While some observers remain fairly sanguine about the incidence of nonparticipation, others are deeply troubled (Walker 1966; Lane 1959). Typical of their arguments are the following: (1) Those who fail to participate are not properly represented. Government is thereby deprived of its broadest possible assessment and of the benefit of whatever these nonparticipants have learned from their experience. In a democracy, participation is power. Rulers can therefore afford to ignore the needs and interests of nonparticipants. By neglecting to avail themselves of the reinforcements contingent upon participation, the apathetic are further discouraged from bothering to formulate political opinions and demands. Ignorance thus accumulates, and the general level of political vitality and vigilance declines. In practice, it will typically be the poor and the socially deprived who are most likely to be unrepresented—those who most need to be represented. (2) Widespread apathy increases the chances that government will be dominated by men who are unresponsive, self-aggrandizing, and unscrupulous;
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participation, on the other hand, reminds those who govern that they must attend to their duties and serve the electorate. Whenever apathy prevails, it becomes more difficult to organize and maintain a political opposition—an essential ingredient of the defense against tyranny and the abuse of political power. (3) Even if the opinions of the nonparticipants are presently ill-informed, there is no better way to improve the quality of their judgment than by the experience of participation. In the course of participating, one is impelled to acquire the knowledge needed for sound judgment, to become aware of one's best interests, to learn how the system works and what principles and beliefs it values. Voters looking for guidance are prompted to seek out information, to discuss politics with others, and so on. Therefore, participation not only stimulates political learning but also heightens responsibility, deepens awareness, and increases one's sense of political effectiveness. (4) Apathy is a symptom as well as a cause of weakness in the system. It signifies a failure to involve all members of the society in their own governance, a failure to inspire interest and loyalty. Such failures may be dangerous to democracy, for whenever a large number of people exist outside the normal channels of politics and are unable to share in the decisions that shape their lives, the political atmosphere becomes potentially explosive. The cogency of some of the foregoing arguments on both sides of the issue indicates that the relationship of participation to democracy cannot be understood simplistically. To claim that more participation is always preferable is to blind oneself to the possible disadvantages of enlarging participation under certain circumstances. To contend, on the other side, that any increase in participation will invariably serve to enshrine mediocrity and to debase the quality of political life is to ignore the powerful considerations for giving everyone who wants it a role in the collective decision process. Most of the disputants, fortunately, would be unwilling to press their arguments to these extremes. Nothing is to be gained by converting participation into either a fetish or a taboo. It seems plain enough that in itself it is neither good nor bad, but that it takes its character from the social and political contexts in which it occurs, as well as from the motivations of the participants. Both participation and apathy, then, are complex phenomena which resist easy characterization and analysis, not only for the reasons just given but also because many of their correlates are still
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unknown. Although much has been learned in a relatively short time, the relationship between participation and its social, psychological, and political correlates is far from being understood in a systematic way. The explorations that need to be undertaken might be much more useful if both participation and its correlates were broken down into their principal components, so that the influence process—whatever the direction of its flow— might be understood more dynamically. Once identified, these components need to be systematically explored in different social contexts and across cultures to determine their relative explanatory power under varying combinations of forces. HERBERT MCCLOSKY [See also ACCESS TO POLITICS; ELECTIONS; REPRESENTATION, especially the article on REPRESENTATIONAL BEHAVIOR; VOTING. Directly related are the entries DEMOCRACY; ELITES; INTEREST GROUPS; MAJORITY RULE; OLIGARCHY; PARTIES, POLITICAL; POLITICAL CLUBS; POLITICAL EFFICACY; POLITICAL FINANCING; TOTALITARIANISM. Other relevant material may be found in POLITICAL BEHAVIOR; POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY; PUBLIC OPINION; SOCIAL MOVEMENTS; SOCIALIZATION, article on POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION; VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS, article on SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ALEXANDER, HERBERT E. 1966 Financing the 1964 Election. Citizens Research Foundation, Study No. 9. Princeton, N.J.: The Foundation. ALMOND, GABRIEL A. 1954 The Appeals of Communism. Princeton Univ. Press. ALMOND, GABRIEL A.; and VERBA, SIDNEY 1963 The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton Univ. Press. BELL, WENDELL; HILL, RICHARD J.; and WRIGHT, CHARLES R. 1961 Public Leadership: A Critical Review With Special Reference to Adult Education. San Francisco: Chandler. BERELSON, BERNARD; LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; and McPnEE, WILLIAM N. 1954 Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign. Univ. of Chicago Press. BRYCE, JAMES (1921) 1931 Modern Democracies. Vol. 2. New York: Macmillan. BURNHAM, WALTER D. 1965 The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe. American Political Science Review 59:7-28. CAMPBELL, ANGUS; GURIN, GERALD; and MILLER, WARREN E. 1954 The Voter Decides. Evanson, 111.: Row, Peterson. CAMPBELL, ANGUS; and VALEN, HENRY 1961 Party Identification in Norway and the United States. Public Opinion Quarterly 25:505-525. Citizen Participation in Political Life. 1960 International Social Science Journal 12, no. 1. -> The whole issue is devoted to the topic. Contains articles on England, Wales, Finland, France, Norway, and the United States.
COHEN, ARTHUR R. 1964 Attitude Change and Social Influence. New York and London: Basic Books. CONVERSE, PHILIP E. 1964 The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics. Pages 206-261 in David E. Apter (editor), Ideology and Discontent. New York: Free Press. CONVERSE, PHILIP E.; and DUPEUX, GEORGES 1962 Politicization of the Electorate in France and the United States. Public Opinion Quarterly 26:1-23. CUTRIGHT, PHILLIPS; and Rossi, PETER H. 1958 Grass Roots Politicians and the Vote. American Sociological Review 23:171-179. DAHL, ROBERT A. (1961) 1963 Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. DAHL, ROBERT A. 1966 Further Reflections on "The Elitist Theory of Democracy." American Political Science Review 60:296-305. DAVIES, JAMES C. 1954 Charisma in the 1952 Campaign. American Political Science Review 48:10831102. DAVIES, JAMES C. 1963 Human Nature in Politics: The Dynamics of Political Behavior. New York: Wiley. ERBE, WILLIAM 1964 Social Involvement and Political Activity: A Replication and Elaboration. American Sociological Review 29:198-215. EULAU, HEINZ 1962 Class and Party in the Eisenhower Years: Class Roles and Perspectives in the 1952 and 1956 Elections. New York: Free Press. EULAU, HEINZ; and SCHNEIDER, PETER 1956 Dimensions of Political Involvement. Public Opinion Quarterly 20:128-142. GOSNELL, HAROLD F. 1930 Why Europe Votes. University of Chicago, Social Science Studies, No. 19. Univ. of Chicago Press. GOUGH, HARRISON G.; MCCLOSKY, HERBERT; and MEEHL, PAUL E. 1951 A Personality Scale for Dominance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 46:360366. HASTINGS, PHILIP K. 1956 The Voter and the Nonvoter. American Journal of Sociology 62:302-307. HEARD, ALEXANDER (1960) 1962 The Costs of Democracy: Financing American Political Campaigns. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. HENNESSY, BERNARD C. 1959 Politicals and Apoliticals: Some Measurements of Personality Traits. Midwest Journal of Political Science 3:336-355. KATZ, ELIHU; and LAZARSFELD, PAUL F. 1955 Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1964. KEY, V. O. JR. 1961 Public Opinion and American Democracy. New York: Knopf. KEY, V. O. JR. 1966 The Responsible Electorate. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. KNUPFER, GENEVIEVE 1947 Portrait of the Underdog. Public Opinion Quarterly 11:103-114. KORCHIN, SHELDON J. 1946 Psychological Variables in the Behavior of Voters. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard Univ. KORNHAUSER, ARTHUR; SHEPPARD, HAROLD I.; and
MAYER,
ALBERT J. 1956 When Labor Votes: A Study of Auto Workers. New York: University Books. LANE, ROBERT E. 1959 Political Life: Why People Get Involved in Politics. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1965. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; BERELSON, BERNARD; and GAUDET, HAZEL (1944) 1960 The People's Choice: How the
POLITICAL PROCESS Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. 2d ed. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. LIPSET, SEYMOUR M. 1960 Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. LIPSET, SEYMOUR M. et al. (1954) 1959 The Psychology of Voting: An Analysis of Political Behavior. Volume 2, pages 1124-1175 in Gardner Lindzey (editor), Handbook of Social Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. MCCLOSKY, HERBERT 1964 Consensus and Ideology in American Politics. American Political Science Review 58:361-382. MCCLOSKY, HERBERT; and DAHLGREN, HAROLD E. 1959 Primary Group Influence on Party Loyalty. American Political Science Review 53:757-776. MCCLOSKY, HERBERT; HOFFMAN, PAUL J.; and O'HARA, ROSEMARY 1960 Issue Conflict and Consensus Among Party Leaders and Followers. American Political Science Review 54:406-427. MCCLOSKY, HERBERT; and SCHAAR, JOHN H. 1965 Psychological Dimensions of Anomy. American Sociological Review 30:14-40. McDiLL, EDWARD L.; and RIDLEY, JEANNE C. 1962 Status, Anomia, Political Alienation, and Political Participation. American Journal of Sociology 68:205-213. MATTHEWS, DONALD R. 1954 The Social Background of Political Decision-makers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. MATTHEWS, DONALD R.; and PROTHRO, JAMES W. 1966 Negroes and the New Southern Politics. New York: Harcourt. MICHIGAN, UNIVERSITY OF, SURVEY RESEARCH CENTER 1960 The American Voter, by Angus Campbell et al. New York: Wiley. MILBRATH, LESTER W. 1965a Political Participation: How and Why Do People Get Involved in Politics? Chicago: Rand McNally. MILBRATH, LESTER W. 1965£> Political Participation in the States. Pages 25-60 in Herbert Jacob and Kenneth N. Vines (editors), Politics iu iJie American States: A Comparative Analysis. Boston: Little. MUSSEN, PAUL H.; and WYSZYNSKI, ANNE B. 1952 Personality and Political Participation. Human Relations 5:65-82. POOL, ITHIEL DE SOLA 1959 TV: A New Dimension in Politics. Pages 236-261 in Eugene Burdick and Arthur J. Brodbeck (editors), American Voting Behavior. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. PROTHRO, JAMES W.; and GRIGG, C. M. 1960 Fundamental Principles of Democracy: Bases of Agreement and Disagreement. Journal of Politics 22:276-294. Public Opinion: 1935-1946. 1951 Princeton Univ. Press. -» Edited by Hadley Cantril. RANNEY, AUSTIN; and KENDALL, WILLMOORE 1956 Democracy and the American Party System. New York: Harcourt. RIESMAN, DAVID; and GLAZER, NATHAN 1950 Criteria for Political Apathy. Pages 505-559 in Alvin Gouldner (editor), Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action. New York: Harper. ROKKAN, STEIN (editor) 1962a Approaches to the Study of Political Participation. Acia sociologica 6, no. 1/2. -» See especially the articles by Angus Campbell, pages 9-21, and Ulf Himmelstrand, pages 83-110. ROKKAN, STEIN 1962b The Comparative Study of Political Participation: Notes Toward a Perspective on Current Research. Pages 46-90 in Austin Ranney
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(editor), Essays on the Behavioral Study of Politics. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. ROSENBERG, MORRIS 1954 Some Determinants of Political Apathy. Public Opinion Quarterly 18:349-366. Rossi, PETER H.; and CUTRIGHT, PHILLIPS 1961 The Impact of Party Organization in an Industrial Setting. Pages 81-116 in Morris Janowitz (editor), Community Political Systems. New York: Free Press. STOUFFER, SAMUEL A. (1955) 1963 Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties: A Cross-section of the Nation Speaks Its Mind. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. TINGSTEN, HERBERT (1937) 1963 Political Behavior: Studies in Election Statistics. Stockholm Economic Studies, No. 7. Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster Press. U.S. BUREAU OF THE CENSUS 1965 Statistical Abstract of the United States. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON REGISTRATION AND VOTING PARTICIPATION 1963 Registration and Voting Participation. Washington: Government Printing Office. WALKER, JACK L. 1966 A Critique of the Elitist Theory of Democracy. American Political Science Review 60:285-295. WOLFINGER, RAYMOND A. 1963 The Influence of Precinct Work on Voting Behavior. Public Opinion Quarterly 27:387-398.
POLITICAL PARTIES See PARTIES, POLITICAL. POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY See POLITICAL THEORY.
POLITICAL PROCESS "Political process" refers to the activities of people in various groups as they struggle for—and use—power to achieve personal and group purposes. Its most carefully studied forms have been the efforts of conflicting political parties, factions, cliques, and leaders to attain formal positions of legitimate authority in the central organs of public government—unitary and federal, national and local. The process also operates in the endless conflicts between nations and between international blocs. It may be found in the internal governance of corporations, government agencies, trade unions, churches, and universities (Merriam 1944). In all these forms of the political process, actual power may be far different from formal authority. Any power wielder's objectives, whether manifest or or latent, may fall anywhere on the broad spectrum between good and evil. The means may include not only violence, bribery, and character assassination but also persuasion, mutual understanding, reciprocal adjustment, and the slow building of consensus as well. The political process is probably a more difficult
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object of study than most other aspects of human behavior. One difficulty, as with many forms of social action, is the tremendous number of variables that interact simultaneously in many subtle ways. This produces an "organized complexity," something much more difficult to understand than the "disorganized complexity" of random phenomena and random variations, which is susceptible to statistical analysis based on probability theory (Rockefeller Foundation 1959, pp. 7-15). With political events, moreover, the distortion and suppression of important information—whether through ignorance, bluff and maneuver, taboos, or selfcensorship—are inevitable aspects of the process itself. Indeed, participation in the political process is frequently characterized by the vigorous denial of participation. The posture of being nonpolitical, nonpartisan, bipartisan, or "above politics" is a popular style of playing politics. To some extent these difficulties have been counterbalanced by progress in formulating basic concepts, developing currently useful generalizations, and linking concepts and generalizations to observed data, both qualitative and quantitative. Some of the elements in this forward progress may be reviewed in terms of (1) the process approach to politics; (2) the actors in the political process; (3) their purposes; (4) their methods of utilizing power; (5) their development of power; and (6) the art-science relation in the political process. The process approach The process approach is far broader than politics. Indeed, the process concept has been a major unifying influence in modern thought and science. Although its roots go back to Heraclitus and Hegel, among many others, it has been set forth in both general and explicit terms by twentieth-century sociologists, such as Ross (1897-1904) and Cooley (1918), and philosophers, such as Dewey (1925), Whitehead (1929), and Bentley (see Dewey & Bentley 1949). By the process approach, the world or any part of it is seen as an ongoing stream of events in time, as becoming, rather than merely being. "Facts do not remain stationary. . . . The value of every fact depends on its position in the whole world-process, is bound up in its multitudinous relations" (Follett 1924, pp. 9, 12). Facts and process are separated into discrete elements only by human analysis, which is itself a continuing process of interrelating between knowers and the known. Change—whether slow or rapid, hidden or open—is continuous. It is also complex. Single causation is impossible; multiple causation and multiple effects are inevitable. Structures are not
ruled out by this approach; they are included as the more stable aspects of action and interrelationship. "To designate the slower and the regular rhythmic events structure, and more rapid and irregular ones process, is sound practical sense. It expresses the function of one in respect to the other" (Dewey [1925] 1958, p. 62). More concretely, although often less explicitly, the process approach has entered each of the natural and social sciences. In his efforts to understand the ongoing flow of events, man tries to slice up his universe into various specific processes: physical, chemical, physiological, psychological, sociological, political, economic, administrative, and many others. Each of these represents a different aspect of or a different way of thinking about the same ongoing stream of action and becoming. The process approach to politics developed as a reaction against viewing politics in the terms of presumably static and depersonalized structures, such as "the state," individual nations, branches of governments, and political parties. As Easton has pointed out (1953, pp. 160-170), the first steps toward a process approach were taken by those who, like Bagehot (1865-1867), Wilson (1885), and Bryce (1888) examined the genuine loci of power, as distinguished from mere formal authority, in governments and parties. The next step, as illustrated by the work of Bentley (1908) and his many followers, was to look outside government and view the political process "principally as the interaction among governmental institutions and social groups" (Easton 1953, p. 172). This has led to a pluralistic concern with the activities of many kinds of organized groups inside and outside of government, but with much more attention than Bentley was willing to give to individuals, common interests, and normative values. Within any area of inquiry, in turn, theorists and researchers slice up activity into many subprocesses and types. Thus, the political process has been persistently studied in terms of the electoral, legislative, judicial, executive, and international processes, with occasional attention to the more violent processes of revolution and war. The deeper any such study goes, the more it involves attention to still-more-specific processes, such as decision making, planning, budgeting, conflict resolution, socialization, communication and information processing, adaptation and learning, organization and reorganization, growth and decay. The list is endless—particularly since each is, in turn, often subdivided still further. As the theorist or researcher penetrates any of these many aspects of the political process, he soon
POLITICAL PROCESS finds that what he is dealing with is "only the political aspect of the social process in its entirety" (Lasswell & Kaplan 1950, p. xvii). Political decision making involves processes of problem posing and problem solving that are also studied by psychologists, social psychologists, economists, logicians, and mathematicians [see DECISION MAKING]. The process approach has thus led specialists from these fields to apply their skills to political decision making. Similarly, it has led political scientists into one or another of these fields, either to appropriate ideas for quick application to political decision making or, more boldly, to formulate concepts or theories that cannot be obtained prefabricated from those less familiar with political data. Indeed, any political process is closely interrelated with other social processes. An integrated view of these interrelations would require something more than isolated ventures across disciplinary boundaries, namely, a comprehensive view of the "social process in its entirety." This may be done through social systems models dealing with the full range of systems from the nation-state down to formal organizations and small groups (Kuhn 1963; Miller 1965; Gross 1966). Such models provide the analytical tools for describing and explaining the changing structure and performance of concrete systems in specific environments composed of other systems. Unless great care is taken, however, such a view may be so abstract as to lose contact with the major realities of political action (as in Parsons & Shils 1951). This contact may be partially regained by focusing on the "political system" (as suggested in Easton 1953; 1965a; 1965£>; and attempted in Almond & Coleman 1960). Here the risk becomes one of losing contact with the political processes in nongovernment organizations. This contact may be preserved by viewing the political system as a subsystem involved in continuous transactions with other crisscrossing subsystems [see SYSTEMS ANALYSIS]. The actors Although everyone plays some small part in the political process, the majority of people are relatively passive. It is the activist minority of elites, leaders, rulers, or managers who play the major roles, exercise the greater power, receive the greater rewards and recriminations, and become the heroes and villains of history. In many societies these activist roles have been reserved mainly for men who have been born into the proper families, castes, or classes, have been blessed with inherited wealth, or have demonstrated successful
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achievement in battle, business, or trial by competitive test. In all societies many are relegated to subordinate roles by discrimination based on sex, religion, ethnic origin, race, color, or caste. And many others, not barred by such obstacles, may be effectively restricted by poverty, disease, oppression, inadequate education, and an atmosphere of hopelessness. Yet, the passive masses are always part of the act. Their style of "fellowship" affects the pattern of leadership. Their interests and norms, even when unorganized, provide the potentials for future organization (Truman 1951, pp. 34-35, 51-52). They may even determine where and how the leaders end up—as suggested by the age-old description of the ruler as a man riding a tiger. From them may come builders of new organizations, challengers of old regimes, and successors to oldtime leaders. Moreover, there is rarely a sharp and single dividing line between the major and minor actors. Hierarchical relations in societies and large organizations provide finely graded scales of formal authority and crisscrossing spheres of legitimate influence. In industrialized and industrializing societies, with increasing differentiation between and within organizations, the number of such spheres grows apace. All of them may be sources of the indirect and reciprocal influences that lead toward pluralistic dispersions of power (Dahl 1961, pp. 89-103). The identity of all major actors is never readily apparent. Behind the "great man" there often stands the eminence grise and the anonymous assistants; behind the directorate, the "kitchen cabinet"; behind the patriarch, the influential wife, mother, or mistress; behind the "boss," the sprawling bureaucracy, and behind it, a network of alliances with supporting groups and individuals. The illusion of the central omnipotence of a single person or group is often fostered, both by top leaders seeking to expand their power by exaggerating it and by behind-the-scenes operators seeking to protect their power by hiding it. In the electoral process the people most active in picking candidates and supporting their campaigns are seldom as visible as the candidates or the electors. In the daily business of government and nongovernment operations, the major contenders in the power struggle are usually known only to the contestants themselves and a handful of close observers. The social roles of the major actors are always complex. In part they are formally determined by constitutions, laws, charters, regulations, and customs. In part they are, also, the product of informal arrangements and understandings. On the one
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hand, they embody the expectations of others. On the other hand, they are shaped by the personality and capacities of the incumbents themselves. In some respects the role determines the actor's major movements. In some it leaves him free to depart from the script, to extemporize, or to prepare his own lines in advance. In some it saddles him with conflicting and partly irreconcilable requirements. These role conflicts are magnified when people play different roles in different organizations or, as frequently happens at higher levels of authority, "wear many hats" in the same organization. All the actors in the political process are involved in conflicts with opposing groups and individuals. At the lower and middle ranks of single organizations these conflicts may center largely on the "internal politics" of budgets, reorganization, jobs to be filled, and tasks to be grabbed or evaded. At the higher levels they tend to reflect divergent interests in the environment and the divergent pressures of suppliers, and clients, associates and adversaries, controllers and controllees. In "public politics" the executive, legislative, and judicial organizations of government are even more intimately embroiled in structuring or resolving the major conflicts of the community or nation. Purposes of the actors A major objective of all actors in the political process is the use and development of power or influence—that is, the capacity to influence events. The extent of their power distinguishes the major from the minor actors. Because of its importance, the role of power in the political process may easily be exaggerated. It makes sense to regard politics as a "power struggle." But viewing it as a struggle for nothing but power means disregarding other objectives and misunderstanding the nature of power itself. The modern tendency is to view power as one objective within a complex network of purposes. Power's critical importance derives from its essential contribution toward achieving other purposes. Without power no leader or administrator can serve his own interests, the interests of a small minority, or the interests of a great majority. Power, however, is rarely an undifferentiated form of currency. It is usually the more specialized capacity to influence certain events under certain conditions. The extent of power can be appraised only in terms of the achievement—actual or potential—of specific objectives. The sources and forms of power are adapted to and constrained by the objectives sought. An association of doctors, with considerable influence on health matters, will not
exert much influence on foreign policy. The power to install a person in office or remove him from it is not equivalent to the power to control his decisions in office. A president usually finds that the power to do one thing may interfere with the power to do another: "The move that gains him ground on some particular may scar his general Washington reputation" (Neustadt 1960, p. 192). The purposes served by power may be viewed both in terms of group and of individual interests. In organized groups people work together to provide outputs that satisfy various interests of members and outsiders. To do this, they try to obtain certain resources from the environment and—with some degree of economizing on resources perceived as scarce—engage in activities that produce the services or goods needed to satisfy interests. They seek to use some resources to strengthen the capacity of the organization itself. They try to do all these things rationally and in accordance with acceptable codes of behavior (Gross 1964, part 5). Their successes and failures in trying to achieve these various objectives are the best measures of their power. The difficulty in making such measurements derives in part from the great complexity —and in some cases the impossibility—of appraising these various dimensions of performance. The greatest difficulty lies in appraising the satisfaction of human interests. It is easier to identify the parties at interest—the "interesteds"—than to analyze their interests. It is easier to identify their interests than to appraise the fluid and evanescent combinations of satisfaction and frustration. Power is also an instrument for the satisfaction of individual interests. People need power to provide for their basic physiological needs and to help assure their security and survival. They seek power as a means of winning acceptance by others and becoming part of a group or community. Power is needed to satisfy the "desire for a stable, firmly based . . . evaluation of themselves, for self-respect, or self-esteem, and for the esteem of others" (Maslow 1954, p. 90). It is a means toward greater autonomy, creativity, and self-fulfillment. Power may also be used for self-aggrandizement at the expense of others and as a way of venting aggressions upon those too weak to resist. It may be sought as a path to higher status without reference to performance. These are the kinds of things referred to by the idea of power sought "for its own sake." On the other hand, power may also be sought by individuals and groups sincerely interested in serving interests beyond their own. Without the use of power, altruism and idealism become exercises in pathos and futility. Only through the efforts
POLITICAL PROCESS of enough people struggling for more power has it been possible to achieve those dispersions of power that make an organization, a polity, or a society more democratic. Only through the struggle for power may significant steps be taken toward serving the higher interests of human beings and the common interests of humanity. Neustadt (1960) has pointed out that presidents of the United States can provide adequate national leadership only through conscious and expert efforts to build presidential power. A similar comment may be made concerning administrators in any organization and leaders in any nation. Using power Power in use invariably involves a mixture of many different forms—sometimes mutually reinforcing—of persuasion and pressure (Gross 1964, pp. 781-794). Persuasion. Persuasion takes place when A influences B to adopt a course of action without A's promising or threatening any reward or punishment. It may take the form of example, expectation, proposals, information, education, or propaganda. Many actors in the political process influence others by the sheer power of example. Where leaders go, others may follow on the basis of loyalty, devotion, or mere imitativeness. People and groups may also be influenced by mere expectations—particularly when their expectations of the power wielders conform to established customs or codes. Expectations, even when unspoken, tend to communicate themselves in effective ways; when communicated more openly, they become proposals and advice. These, too, may be extremely influential—particularly when there is confidence in the wisdom or disinterestedness of the proposers or advisers. Even without specific proposals or advice, great influence may be exercised merely by providing—or withholding—certain types of information. When the premises on which people act are known, the mere structuring of the information at their disposal may shape their future behavior (March & Simon 1958, pp. 162-169). But education is a long-range and indirect means of influencing behavior, and although it has great potentialities for the development of learning abilities and adaptability, it is often used more vigorously to promote conformity [see SOCIALIZATION]. In some countries it has been "the most powerful means of social control to which individuals must submit" (Crozier [1963] 1964, p. 238). Propaganda is a more immediate form of persuasion, in which powerful symbols are used to appeal to people's
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interests through their emotions and feelings. Propaganda "can strengthen predispositions and, in particular, give them specific direction; and it can contribute to weakening them if this process is supported by direct experience, or by nonpropaganda symbols" (Lasswell & Kaplan 1950, pp. 113— 114). It is particularly powerful when supported by other forms of persuasion and by various forms of pressure—that is, by the "propaganda of the deed." Sustained propaganda and demonstration by the mass media of communication can have profound "characterological effects" on the values and attitudes of many people (Pool 1963). [See PROPAGANDA.] Pressure. Pressure is applied by A upon B whenever A tries to make a course of action more desirable by promising or threatening contingent rewards or punishments. It may take the form of force, commands, manipulation, or bargaining. Force is the most extreme form of power—one that has made the very term "power" obnoxious to many. Its application through imprisonment, torture, or destruction of life and resources will reduce or eliminate the recipient's capacity to act in an undesirable way. Even its threat may serve as an important deterrent. In the international arena nations have traditionally used military power in the pursuit of both offensive and defensive ends. Within nations, governmental monopoly of the legitimate use of organized violence provides the ultimate sanctions behind the enforcement of law and order. Beyond this, physical force is usually used as a method of influence only by revolutionary or separatist groups, criminals, the parents of young children, and in some old-fashioned schools, teachers. Physical force is a blunt instrument which, even when used as a last resort, may have little positive value. It may unleash counterforces capable of undoing what has been done, if not of seriously damaging its users. Besides, more flexible and reliable modes of pressure are available. Rewards, in the form of monetary payments, new positions, higher status, support, favorable votes, cooperation, approval, or the withdrawal of any anticipated punishment, may be bestowed or promised. Punishment, in the form of fines, firing, reduction in status, unfavorable votes, noncooperation, rejection, disapproval, or withdrawal of any anticipated reward, may be given or threatened. It is such incentives and sanctions that provide the backing for command—that is, for the use of power through orders, directions, regulations, or instructions. Command also suffers from many limitations. It can be used only by those whose authority to
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give orders is accepted. It may undermine the initiative and self-respect of those receiving the orders. "Because command is a more ostensible, direct, person-to-person relationship, perhaps it can offend status, self-respect, and dignity of individuals more than does manipulation of operating penalties. Manipulation of the field seems to be more suitable for creating 'permissive' situations, i.e., situations in which a particular response is attained although the individual can choose among a variety of rewards and penalties" (Dahl & Lindblom 1953, p. 121). In manipulation, rewards and punishments are used without an open statement concerning the kinds of action desired. Bargaining is a still more fluid—and far more pervasive—form of using pressure. In bargaining, all sides exercise power upon each other through reciprocal promises or threats. The objectives, the rewards, and the punishments are all subject to negotiation. Indeed, force, command, and manipulation tend to become enveloped in the broader and more subtle processes of bargaining. The great contribution of these cruder methods of power is not in supplanting bargaining but in strengthening the hands of the actors at the bargaining table. [See NEGOTIATION.] Overcoming resistance. No matter what the combination of persuasion and pressure, the users of power always encounter inertia or resistance. "Yet, when the order is given, obedience is reluctant, partial; resistance widens: and as penalties are made heavier, opposition becomes stronger. . . . Naked hands and empty pockets may obstruct and antagonize the action of authority and with means which can scarcely be successfully opposed without destroying the basis of human association itself" (Merriam 1934, pp. 156-157, 183). Other forms of power are met by other forms of resistance. For example, expectation and proposals may be countered by indifference; information by inattention or misinterpretation; propaganda by cynicism. The more effective any form of influence is, the more it may encourage, under certain circumstances, the organizers of countervailing power. In using power, therefore, the actors in the political process develop strategies and tactics for dealing with inertia and resistance. Head-on resistance can often be avoided by the "strategy of the indirect approach," that is, by flexible shifting from points of greater to points of lesser resistance (Liddell Hart 1929). Action campaigns may be carefully timed and designed. This often means taking the initiative, remaining on the offensive, avoiding overdefensive positions, and, where necessary, making sudden changes or retreats. It often
requires a quick response to the challenge of an unexpected crisis or even the purposeful creation of crisis conditions. "Crisis may make it possible to take required actions against powerful groups which are normally well entrenched and invulnerable . . . [and] may stimulate action and hence learning on a problem on which insight has been low and for that very reason has not been tackled as long as it was in a quiescent state" (Hirschman 1963, p. 261). Above all, the various forms of persuasion and pressure must be continuously alternated and intermingled—with bargaining backed up by potential force; propaganda, by example; and manipulation, by information or by the iron fist suitably encased in the velvet glove. No matter how excellent the leadership, the fully successful use of power is extremely rare. Unseen or unpredicted influences usually bear upon a situation. Desired consequences are often accompanied by unforeseen or unforeseeable ones, either immediate or subsequent. On the other hand, what appears to be total failure will usually be counterbalanced by mitigating circumstances and favorable, albeit unforeseen, aftereffects. Many sharp conflicts lead only to deadlock or—when either side fears the outcome—avoidance. Some conflicts may be resolved by an integration of opposing interests, that is, a creative readjustment of interests so that all contenders may gain and none lose (Follett 1926-1930, pp. 31-36). Most power struggles seem to end in mutual concessions. From this point of view the political process may be characterized as a stream of successive compromises punctuated by frequent episodes of deadlock and avoidance and by occasional victories, defeats, and integrations. Under such circumstances, the measurement of actual or potential power is indeed a baffling task. [See POWER.] Developing power The actual use of power requires the development of a "power base," which in turn usually requires the actual use of power. Indeed, any use of power may help strengthen the power base, just as a muscle may be strengthened by exercise. But the constant use of power to achieve substantive objectives will, by itself, usually lead to the depletion of power. The actors in the political process must conserve their power for the occasions on which it is most needed. Over the long run, depletion is inevitable unless some power is diverted from other purposes and invested in the maintenance or strengthening of the power base itself. Formal authority. Formal authority, or the legitimate right to engage in certain actions, is one
POLITICAL PROCESS of the most obvious sources of power. It is conferred upon individuals, groups, or organizations by constitutions, charters, statutes, regulations, delegations, or official decisions. It becomes entrenched and protected by habit, custom, tradition, and the ritual or ceremonial "trappings" of authority (Merriam 1934, pp. 102-132)- It is often derived from a person's lineage, wealth, professional status, knowledge, abilities, or sheer energy. Whether at the level of a nation-state (where it is called sovereignty) or of a single organization, it becomes meaningful only if accepted by those subject to the influence of the authority holders (Michels 1930; Barnard 1938, pp. 161-165). To strengthen their power base, the actors in the political process usually spend considerable time in efforts to win or expand authority. Indeed, the terms "struggle for power" and "seizure of power" often refer specifically to a struggle for or seizure of positions of formal authority. This struggle involves the creation of new positions, the adjustment of old ones, and the installation of people in positions by appointment, election, or military force. It involves the interpretation (or even the change) of customs (Merriam 1945, pp. 74-76) and the use of conspicuous symbolism, in the form of flags, uniforms, buildings, office furnishings, titles, insignias, degrees, or ceremonies (Merriam 1945, pp. 81-93; Barnard [1935-1946] 1956, pp. 207-244). At times it involves "usurping authority" by engaging in unauthorized acts and subsequently seeking legitimation. Wealth. Wealth is another source of power. Almost any form of wealth—natural resources, man-made goods, or monetary claims against resources—may be used as a reward. Some forms of wealth, such as the media of communication, are effective instruments of persuasion. Others, such as armaments, are widely used by nations as instruments of pressure. Money is an all-around instrument for mobilizing other sources of power. Indeed, in many societies the wealthy person or organization acquires a certain aura of authority on the basis of wealth alone. Ownership is not essential. It is control of wealth that is important. This may be exercised by the managers of corporations, as distinguished from stockholders, and by the top officials of government agencies and private associations. Human resources. People—or human resources —are a still more fundamental source of power. It is people who convert physical resources to wealth by developing them and finding them useful. Both authority and organization are rooted in the interrelations of people. The sheer quantity of people
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is an important factor. The huge population of China constitutes a tremendous power potential; the small population of Cyprus, a great constraint. The economic power of producers often depends on the availability of mass markets. The power of political parties and factions is affected by the number of their supporters; that of trade unions and other associations by the number of members. Where democratic values and customs obtain (and particularly where conflicts are settled by voting), the number of people committed to or supporting a given course of action is a significant factor. Yet, in any society or situation the quality of people is also important. In the modern world "quality" refers to much more than the aristocratic birth symbolized by the old phrase "people of quality." It refers to a person's potential for performance, a potential based on education, knowledge, intelligence, skill, interests, age, health, and energy level. Science and technology are of steadily increasing significance in the power base of any nation or organization. Although they are sometimes discussed as if they were abstract, disembodied forces, science and technology are meaningful only insofar as they are embodied in the capacities of specific scientists and technologists, capable of drawing upon or adding to the stock of human knowledge and know-how. Of still greater significance are the qualities of leadership exercised by the major actors in the political process. It is this critical minority of people who exploit or bring to fruition the power potential in larger numbers of people. Organization. Organization is an indispensable source of power. Individuals themselves have only limited influence upon others, but by joining together in some sort of organization, they can develop the power to do things that could not be done at all, or at least not as well, alone. Through the specialization of labor and the cooperation between its component parts, an organization can exploit the special capacities of better-qualified people. It can bring people, resources, and authority positions together in a far-flung and flexible system of power. Accordingly, the major actors in the political process invest considerable time and other resources in maintaining, expanding, and reorganizing existing organizations or in building new ones. Those who free themselves from this task can do so only because others in the organization devote themselves to it. Since no human organization is a closed system, the power developed through internal relationships must usually be sustained—and can invariably be extended—by various coalitions with
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external organizations arid individuals. Supply lines must be protected, clients pacified, controllers mollified, controllees kept in line, associates given assistance and—to the extent feasible— adversaries split or outwitted. This involves the organization of a complex network of support, composed L»oth of active allies and of passive collaborators. This network may include a large variety of shifting and overlapping coalitions, or it may be crystallized into one pattern of alliances. In many situations considerable effort is spent on building unorganized opinions and attitudes into the support network. One of the most important functions of political campaign organizations is to win or maintain the support of unorganized individuals. The art—science relationship The most successful actors in the political process, it has often been said, are those who master the "art of the possible." This phrase emphasizes the fact that the users and developers of power usually must be prepared to compromise on certain principles. Otherwise, the desirable may be impossible. The possible, however, covers a broad spectrum, from the inevitable to the improbable. Some actors in the political process concentrate only upon the most feasible of objectives and the lowest of aspirations. Here the major skill lies in taking credit for events that would probably have happened anyway, as in "epiphenomenal planning" (Wiles 1962, pp. 72-74). Much greater artistry is involved in overcoming inertia and resistance that seem invincible. The masters of the political process are those who from time to time transcend the limits of immediate feasibility and shape sequences of events previously regarded as highly improbable. To satisfy higher aspiration levels, politics must become the "art of the improbable." At any level of aspiration, however, the actors in the political process face indeterminate situations. Except for certain highly routinized behaviors, they can never be sure what will happen if they do not act or what will be the effects of alternative courses of action. They must make their decisions in the face of risk and uncertainty. This calls for considerable artistry in developing a power base, in using power in the form most suitable to their purposes, and in adapting purposes to the exigencies of power development and use. Although ancient, the political art is not static. It changes with and adapts to changing cultures, life styles, forms of organization, and scientific and
technological advances. It has unquestionably been affected in many ways by the slow accumulation of scientific knowledge and theory on the political process. For one thing, under the influence of modern technique it has become highly differentiated. The art of budgetary politics is not the same as the art of using mass media of communication or public opinion polls. It is now appropriate to talk about "the arts," rather than "the art," of the improbable and the possible. Moreover, the expansion of scientific knowledge of the political process places a higher premium on these arts. It is not knowledge by itself but rather its skillful use that replaces hunch with fact, intuition with principle, and fuzziness with an operational definition (Polanyi 1958). Such use requires greater judgment in evaluating and coordinating the contributions of expert advisers. It calls for greater wisdom in selecting those types of knowledge and techniques that are most relevant to any particular problem. It demands more training and sustained learning. Although scientific inquiry, in turn, may even focus upon the acquisition and growth of these arts, it cannot hope to replace them. The most it can do is provide a stronger foundation for the art-science relationship in the political process. BERTRAM M. GROSS [Other relevant material may be found in GOVERNMENT; POLITICAL BEHAVIOR; POLITICAL SCIENCE.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ALMOND, GABRIEL A.; and COLEMAN, JAMES S. (editors) 1960 The Politics of the Developing Areas. Princeton Univ. Press. BAGEHOT, WALTER (1865-1867)1964 The English Constitution. London: Watts. BARNARD, CHESTER I. (1935-1946) 1956 Organization and Management: Selected Papers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. BARNARD, CHESTER I. (1938) 1962 The Functions of the Executive. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. BENTLEY, ARTHUR F. (1908) 1949 The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures. Introduction by H. T. Davis. Bloomington, Ind.: Principia Press. BERTALANFFY, LUDWIG VON (1949) 1960 Problems of Life: An Evaluation of Modern Biological Thought. New York: Harper. -» First published as Das Biologische Weltbild, Volume 1. BRYCE, JAMES (1888) 1909 The American Commonwealth. 3d ed. 2 vols. New York and London: Macmillan. -» An abridged edition was published in 1959 by Putnam. COOLEY, CHARLES H. 1918 Social Process. New York: Scribner. CROZIER, MICHEL (1963) 1964 The Bureaucratic Phenomenon. Univ. of Chicago Press. -> First published as Le phenomena bureaucratique.
POLITICAL RECRUITMENT AND CAREERS DAHL, ROBERT A. (1961) 1963 Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. DAHL, ROBERT A.; and LINDBLOM, CHARLES E. 1953 Politics, Economics, and Welfare: Planning and Politico—Economic Systems Resolved Into Basic Social Processes. New York: Harper. -» A paperback edition was published in 1963. DEWEY, JOHN (1925) 1958 Experience and Nature. 2d ed. La Salle, 111.: Open Court. DEWEY, JOHN; and BENTLEY, ARTHUR 1949 Knowing and the Known. Boston: Beacon. EASTON, DAVID 1953 The Political System: An Inquiry Into the State of Political Science. New York: Knopf. EASTON, DAVID 1965a A Framework for Political Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. EASTON, DAVID 1965Z? A Systems Analysis of Political Life. New York: Wiley. FOLLETT, MAJIY P. (1924) 1951 Creative Experience. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. FOLLETT, MARY P. (1926-1930)1942 Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett. New York: Harper. GROSS, BERTRAM M. 1953 The Legislative Struggle: A Study in Social Combat. New York: McGraw-Hill. GROSS, BERTRAM M. 1964 The Managing of Organizations: The Administrative Struggle. 2 vols. New York: Free Press. GROSS, BERTRAM M. 1966 The State of the Nation: Social System Accounting. Pages 154-271 in Raymond A. Bauer (editor), Social Indicators. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. -> See especially page 181. HIRSCHMAN, ALBERT O. 1963 Journeys Toward Progress: Studies of Economic Policy-making in Latin America. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. KEY, V. O. JR. (1942) 1964 Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups. 5th ed. New York: Crowell. KUHN, ALFRED 1963 The Study of Society: A Unified Approach. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. LASSWELL, HAROLD D.; and KAPLAN, ABRAHAM 1950 Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry. Yale Law School Studies, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1963. LIDDELL HART, BASIL H. (1929) 1954 Strategy: The Indirect Approach. New York: Praeger. -> First published as The Decisive Wars of History. MARCH, JAMES G.; and SIMON, HERBERT A. 1958 Organizations. New York: Wiley. MASLOW, ABRAHAM H. 1954 Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper. MERRIAM, CHARLES E. 1934 Political Power: Its Composition and Incidence. New York: McGraw-Hill. -> A paperback edition was published in 1964 by Collier. MERRIAM, CHARLES E. 1944 Public and Private Government. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. MERRIAM, CHARLES E. (1945) 1962 Systematic Politics. Univ. of Chicago Press. MICHELS, ROBERT 1930 Authority. Volume 2, pages 319-321 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan. MILLER, JAMES G. 1965 Living Systems: Basic Concepts. Behavioral Science 10:193-237. NEUSTADT, RICHARD E. 1960 Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership. New York: Wiley. -> A paperback edition was published in 1962.
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PARSONS, TALCOTT; and SHILS, EDWARD (editors) 1951 Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Harper. POLANYI, MICHAEL 1958 Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy. Univ. of Chicago Press. POOL, ITHIEL DE SOLA 1963 The Mass Media and Politics in the Modernization Process. Pages 234-253 in Conference on Communication and Political Development, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., 1961, Communications and Political Development. Edited by Lucian W. Pye. Princeton Univ. Press. ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION 1959 Annual Report: 1958. New York: The Foundation. Ross, EDWARD A. (1897-1904) 1920 Foundations of Sociology. 5th ed. New York: Macmillan. -> An abridged edition was published by Beacon in 1959 in Social Control and Foundations of Sociology. SIMON, HERBERT A. (1947) 1961 Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization. New York: Macmillan. -> A paperback edition was published in 1965 by the Free Press. TRUMAN, DAVID B. (1951) 1962 The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion. New York: Knopf. WHITEHEAD, ALFRED N. (1929) 1957 Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Humanities. WILES, PETER J. D. 1962 The Political Economy of Communism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. WILSON, WOODROW (1885) 1961 Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics. New York: Meridian.
POLITICAL RECRUITMENT AND CAREERS The social sciences are only now beginning the systematic quantitative study of the social bases for political recruitment and career patterns. By contrast, politicians and their biographers, as well as political philosophers, historians, and legal specialists, have long given attention to the credentials and careers of men in public life—how political recruits used or improved upon their birth chances and what they contributed to political affairs. The range of relevant studies Belatedly but energetically, early lines of scholarly inquiry into political career lines and selection mechanisms are being retraced and extended. In 1919 Max Weber's influential lecture "Politics as a Vocation" was published; in America bench-mark studies such as those of Gosnell (1935; 1937), Salter (1938), and Zink (1930) followed, using vignettes to show how the careers of ethnic-group leaders, legislators, or city bosses could be made or wrecked by turns of luck quite as much as by
POLITICAL RECRUITMENT AND CAREERS either merit or maneuver. In the 1950s and 1960s studies like those of Schlesinger (1957), Eulau and Sprague (1964), and Milbrath (1963) used more rigorous measuring instruments and more extensive samples of evidence in order to identify changing skill patterns, organizational screening devices, ard shifting power bases as aspects of political recruitment. A similar contrast in technique may be seen in work linking psychological needs to the kinds of gratifications, the intensity of commitment, or the style of performance manifested by a public personality. In 1930 Lasswell's clinical case studies of the motivational factors underlying self-recruitment into politics were formulated in terms of how "private motives" could be displaced onto "public objects" and later endowed with "public purposes." Thirty years later in work like that by Gabriel A. Almond, Robert E. Lane, and David C. McClelland, predispositional categories were being differentiated and methods devised for measuring the complex psychological dynamics that underlie political career aspirations. Fundamental social trends of the past half century, as well as advances in technique, have transformed the functional analysis of elite recruitment. In the modern comparative work of scholars like Edward Shils, Lucian Pye, and Morris Janowitz, the changing social origins and activation patterns of plural "elites" in politics are in focus. In the early elite formulations of Mosca, Pareto, and Michels eligibility was presumed to be sharply restricted, and the emphasis tended to be upon the stultifying effects of incumbency. Institutional processes, rather than functions, are the focus of other current studies. Sustained attention is being given to how men are selected and groomed for careers involving community decision making, party activities, legislative work, or the policy-making orbits of officialdom. In contexts where political induction and advancement are increasingly bureaucratized, sample-interviewing techniques have facilitated systematic inquiry. Rigorous marshaling of quantitative empirical evidence, however, is only beginning to characterize studies of political recruitment. The relevant literature is vast only if one includes philosophical speculations about who should rule, plus the work of modern historians concerned with elite transformations, and—in every society featuring a juridical code—the disquisitions by legal specialists on the formalities of investiture, the mechanics of election, the conditions of examination, the prerogatives of office, and the rules of accountability. Of course, source materials linked to unique public
lives and occasions—memoirs and biographies— are also voluminous. From them a diversity of keen impressions and some shrewd aphorisms on how to succeed can be gleaned. But they constitute an unsystematic commentary on political recruitment and career patterns. Modern historians have been somewhat more explicit about patterns, trends, and research methods. They have tried to identify the canalizing and formative structures typical of various regimes. Elites are sometimes treated as vehicles of change; sometimes historical forces are seen creating or destroying elites. There has been recurrent emphasis on the lag between elite habits and preoccupations and the emerging historical challenges to their tenure. Distinctive configurations of rearing and apprenticeship, stamping political elites with inimitable styles, are sketched. Careful work, like that of Namier, has traced the social origins and family connections of those in "constituted bodies" —assemblies, councils, and state bureaucracies. New techniques exploit genealogical records, wills, and tax rolls. Documentary evidence remains unavoidably incomplete, however; historians commonly use it to illustrate, rather than to measure, phenomena. Merit selection and vocational opportunities are shown to have produced effective administrative elites, whose efforts sustained great systems of public order in ancient China, India, the Near East, and pre-Columbian America, as well as in ancient Rome. Under Islamic regimes slaves of the sultan could be groomed and elevated to the imperial administrative elite; the selection criteria were not seriously hampered by considerations of birth or family status. By contrast, nearly everywhere in Europe birthright fixed one's life status and made smaller the talent reservoir. In the Orient the Confucian principles that men were unequal and that merit should determine social status helped to legitimize the competitive examination system, which kept the bureaucratic elite from becoming self-perpetuating. However, many recruits in each generation did come from old official families, whose traditions of service helped give the Chinese bureaucracy its continuity, stability, and assimilative capacities. In the West historians have noted the modern proliferation of nonhereditary elites into every field of endeavor. Those with advantages of birth increasingly must validate their ascriptive credentials with achievements of their own. Nor is elitehood in one domain a warrant for capacity to help shape public policy. The special skills and perspectives needed to negotiate, legitimize, and imple-
POLITICAL RECRUITMENT AND CAREERS ment collective community efforts—the distinctively political skills—increasingly require special grooming. With the development of political vocations careers for poor men were opened in public life, as Weber noted. Success in politics, both as a chosen lifework and as a secondary career linked to success in civilian life, has become possible through a combination of merit, luck, tactics, sponsorship, and perseverance. Perspectives for inquiry and evaluation In the long history of theorizing about politics, "who should govern" is a familiar query. To Plato and Aristotle no real distinction between public service and private lives could be sustained. A political community, by its machinery for inducting men into offices, inevitably allocated rewards and opportunities, integrated resources and perspectives in some degree, and affirmed the ethical "mix" of its political life by the conduct of typical public men as well as stellar figures. Modern formulations like those of Dahl (1961) or Lasswell are preoccupied with pluralism, multiple power centers, semiautonomous localities, intrabureaucratic satrapies. Accordingly, they stress procedural consensus—the rules of the game, for co-optation as well as election—rather than substantive norms. People who would fight over ultimate principles may agree on intermediate objectives. Modern issues pose problem complexes that call for political brokers and administrative expediters. Highly divergent career patterns must be supported. Men may enter politics for reasons only remotely linked to shared ideals or public purposes. The attitude of modern civility expects personal career calculations and concern for the common weal to exist simultaneously in the minds of fellow citizens. Systematic comparative research into political manpower problems has substantially appeared only since World War n. Two major approaches, which differ markedly in the treatment of substantive and procedural norms, exist: the functional systems approach and the conventional organizations approach. The former deals in elites; the latter, in personnel. The systems approach provides both an idiom and an agenda for comparative research. As yet, it has not solved the problems of marshaling empirical evidence to "test" ideas. Functional systems analysis looks at all processes and structures in terms of their instrumental contribution to the vitality of a larger political system. Attention centers on the performance of functions by structures. Success is inferred from the continued viability of
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the political order in question. Put another way, the key structures are elites who collectively perform the functional necessities, elites whose perspectives are undergoing often profound cultural metamorphosis, elites who are in the process of learning how to operate new machinery of political life. In Almond's formulation, that machinery includes not only the essential means of governing but also the means to enlarge the system's developmental capabilities—to integrate perspectives, accommodate interests, sustain a sense of participation, and distribute values equitably. The organizations approach is usually confined to a single sector or segment of the conventional political order—a legislative process, a policymaking sequence of executive meetings, a party organization selecting its legislative candidates. Attention focuses on the performance of tasks by personnel, and success is inferred when actual achievements conform to the idealized patterns aimed at by participants—e.g., democratic selection, representative action, statutory policy, or a constitutional standard. Men are born with certain life chances by virtue of their social circumstances and personal endowments. Modern elite recruitment studies have concentrated on social origins, activation patterns, and the changing kinds of political jobs available as major dimensions for analysis. For example, by studying recruitment patterns during the last stages of colonialism and the early stages of national autonomy, political scientists have plausibly inferred the activation motives and identified the social bases of those involved in periods of accommodation with the alien elite, agitation for selfgovernment and modernity, maneuver for place and protection during the tutelary transition, and consolidation after independence. In virtually all "new states" political recruitment patterns since independence have been shifting substantially, in terms of class and educational levels and in terms of urban-rural and center-hinterland derivations. Always the shifts have been downward and out, that is, in the directions that broaden and diversify the pool of aspirants. What have not been examined carefully in elite studies are the effects of grooming, and career commitments, or the selective screening criteria by which institutions safeguard their key roles from "misfits." These are the very dimensions, on the other hand, that have begun to receive systematic attention in studies of organizational personnel selection in politics. Instituions do not recruit crosssection samples from the social pools of eligible raw material. Even if they did—or where they
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seemed to—the formative influence of career experience may be expected to attenuate the primordial loyalties in some unestablished degree. As Weber has noted: "According to all experience there is no stronger means of breeding traits than through the necessity of holding one's own in the circle of one's associates." To do any firsthand investigation one has to specify the jobs, identify the incumbents, consider both formal and informal screening arrangements used to fill the positions, and then compare the "fit" between what is wanted and what is obtained. Organizations do not regularly get what they want by way of manpower Nor do organizations necessarily seek what they functionally need. The fit between the functional role structures and the organizational position structures in a political system is rarely, if ever, one-to-one. Only with great caution is it possible to treat a job incumbent as a functional role incumbent. Findings about organizational grooming and screening patterns are thus not easily articulated in terms of functional systems theories as presently formulated. Organizational positions and functional roles The study of political recruitment must begin with some consideration of what the jobs in politics are. First come the legally defined positions. Clearly included are legislators, chief executives, high civilian and military officials, judges, and diplomats. Their counterparts in local government are mayors, councilmen, board members, and agency chiefs. How should these jobs be grouped? Classifying them by reference to their legal powers and duties quickly proliferates the categories; grouping them according to statutory terms of eligibility or formal method of selection obfuscates nonlegal comparisons by treating legally recognized criteria such as age, residence, citizenship, literacy, or nominal group affiliation as unambiguous attributes or by suggesting that the same functional considerations should be applied to all elected recruits or to all appointed—or all co-opted —public officials. Legal prescriptions and similar formalized distinctions are useful but inconclusive evidence about political jobs. Second, the inventory of positions includes the institutionalized roles distinguished by participants in the political arena. Terms like lobbyist, propagandist, staff man, reporter, commentator, party cadre, agitator, anchor man, and trouble shooter only begin to suggest the kinds of behavioral patterns—the orbits of action as well as the skills and resources involved—that may be familiar in
a given milieu. Even in studying a conventional political organization, it becomes apparent that ad hoc functional equivalents must be used to subsume the enormous variety of role patterns. Clearly, too, roles may exist but not be filled, either because no qualified candidate can be found or because it is preferred to keep a post vacant. Whatever the institutional boundaries and orbits of politics under investigation, the tasks which apply to a given job are partly shaped—preshaped in binding ways even—by virtue of constitutional and organizational forms. In part they depend upon the expectations of other participants—outsiders as well as insiders, subordinates and peers as well as superiors—and those of the incumbent himself, concerning both the ordinary tasks to be done and the marginal behavior that is acceptable. Circumscriptions on political jobs arise also because of the resources, both technological and human, directed and controlled differentially through organizational processes. A further circumscription is imposed by the political culture. Roles that are equivalent in form, in norms of performance, and in resources may call for a distinctive style in one milieu but not in another. The position structure, both formal and informal, within a legislature, party unit, secretariat, or any other political entity is presumably meant to secure a minimum level of functional output of the organization's product, whether that be statutes, precinct work, briefing materials, or something else. To understand how the organization's modal product is generated, and thereby have a basis for suggesting improvements, it is evidently necessary to undertake a detailed analysis of the intramural role structure both as the participants see it (i.e., conventionally) and in terms of a functional model. For many kinds of research, however, it is not necessary to study the organization's internal dynamics at all. Its membership can be studied in terms of the social origins, skills, and moral qualities demonstrated by modal and deviant types. In this kind of inventory the qualities of key actors are in some degree confounded with those of lesser significance. But it can be argued that the test of an organization's health is the caliber of its average decision maker, not the brilliance of its stellar figures. Moreover, in functional systems terms, what is important is how adequately the structure viewed as a collectivity is equipped and staffed to perform the desired functions. A knowledge of the inputs, in other words, is a reasonably adequate basis for making inferences about the outputs. A
POLITICAL RECRUITMENT AND CAREERS better basis, but not an essential one, would be provided by a full analysis of the organization's functional dynamics. Political socialization and recruitment The induction of manpower into political roles is more specialized and focused than the induction of people into a political culture. Recruitment is concerned with special political role socializations which occur "on top of" general political socialization. However the political system is denned, recruitment to its posts taps people from various subcultures. Presumably, by giving recruits an inside view of a political process, it trains them in appropriate skills and furnishes them with political cognitive maps and perspectives. The prevailing expectation among most scholars is that primordial perspectives and psychic management patterns acquired early in life remain operative in later years and are overlaid by attitudes, values, and conduct patterns more or less acceptable and appropriate to one's career aspirations—i.e., what one wants to make of one's life. Whether these perspectives and patterns govern all basic decisions in later life, including one's official acts, or whether they only color one's political judgment on certain problems or sharpen one's political sensitivities in specific ways are unresolved questions. Hard as it is to draw a line, early political socialization is relevant to the study of political recruitment only insofar as it affects one's chances of being recruited or of desiring to enter into specific roles in political life. Therefore, much current academic work about politicians is formulated in terms of their early socialization. Inferences are often uncritically drawn as though a person's subsequent career experiences had only minor weight in determining his adult perspective on essentials. Yet the individual's life path through the corporate and primary group "infrastructures" of his community provides crucial skills and attitudes as well as sponsors and material resources. Especially in poorly developed countries with weak infrastructures and poor consensus, early political socialization and later experience seem to be of roughly equal importance in determining the viability of the political order. Apart from the development of suitable career perspectives by in-service grooming, it is important to note that selective recruitment from the pool of eligibles may minimize the effects of imperfect early socialization on leadership in a modern civil society. Ordinarily, performing the role of voter or pur-
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suing a citizen's career are not included in discussions of recruitment and career patterns in politics. More specifically, political recruitment refers to institutional processes by which political jobs beyond the citizenship level are filled. Political careers are patterns of incumbency in these political offices and roles. Subjectively, career perspectives are moving vantage points from which men in politics, whether treating public affairs as a calling or as a vocation, appraise their duties and opportunities. Selection devices and screeningo criteria Institutions use a variety of devices to fill all jobs. Through co-optation, equals augment their ranks or sustain their numbers. By mobilization supporters are rallied to perform basic tasks in organized efforts or to "act out" their contributions. Through appointment a key figure designates subordinates to hold office or discharge tasks. Election elevates a man to act as spokesman, leader, or representative for the legally defined electorate that chooses him. Lot and rotation are deliberately arbitrary methods for securing incumbents for specialized roles from among a group of presumed peers. Apprenticeship and examinations, both formal and informal, often precede incumbency in political jobs. Formal recruitment processes in politics are typically extramural or organizational threshold processes, that is, they are designed to secure manpower from an outside pool or public. They give title to political offices and some claim to institutional resources, but they seldom bestow distinctive influence xuithin the organization. Such influence comes, instead, when one can rally a following, claim to be an insider, show special prowess, or otherwise become distinguishable to colleagues. Intramural recruitment mechanisms are basic to most analyses of the organization's performance; these mechanisms select individuals to fill not only the organization's formal offices and recognized positions but also optional informal roles. In the extreme sense of hiring and firing personnel, the formal processes can override the informal ones; extramural controls can prevail over intramural ones. In the ordinary course of political business, however, the intramural screening and reception system for the neophyte legislator, official, or party functionary is a more searching and more unnerving process than any formal, or extramural, hurdle. Moreover, apart from official prerogatives that come with formal induction, the influence wielded inside a political organization is largely
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determined by the intramural rofe patterns that a member finds himself conformhg to, or—more rarely—carving out for himself. Of the formal induction mocbs, special attention has been given to elections. )ublic machinery, including such devices as nominating conventions, primary elections and runoffs, valous proportional representation (PR) formulas, aid such contrivances as nonpartisan elections, is unlikely to be very efficient in picking the caididate with the best credentials of skill and ability for the job; style and native character are perhaps more likely to be discerned -and appreciate! by electorates; personality, one's stand on cuirent issues, and party sponsorship are widely fet to be the most important determinants of popuar support. In the activities of candidate-sponsoring groups prior to elections, the consideratims felt to be most relevant in the search for candidates do not always provide voters with a serious el A cross-national study based on interview materials. ALMOND, GABRIEL A.; and COLEMAN, JAMES S. (editors) 1960 The Politics of the Developing Areas. Princeton Univ. Press. -> Representative functional systems studies stressing socialization and recruitment processes. ALMOND, GABRIEL A.; and VERBA, SIDNEY 1963 The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton Univ. Press. BARBER, JAMES D. 1965 The Lawmakers: Recruitment and Adaptation to Legislation. Yale Studies in Political Science, Vol. 11. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. DAHL, ROBERT A. (1961) 1963 Who Governs? Democracy and Poiver in an American City. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. EULAU, HEINZ; and SPRAGUE, JOHN D. 1964 Lawyers in Politics: A Study in Professional Convergence. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill. FREY, FREDERICK W. 1966 The Turkish Political Elite. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. GOSNELL, HAROLD F. 1935 Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago. Univ. of Chicago Press. GOSNELL, HAROLD F. 1937 Machine Politics: Chicago Model. Univ. of Chicago Press. GOSNELL, HAROLD F. 1948 Democracy: The Threshold of Freedom. New York: Ronald Press. -> A useful summary of "representational" inquiries. JANOWITZ, MORRIS 1954 The Systematic Analysis of Political Biography. World Politics 6:405-412. KELLER, SUZANNE 1963 Beyond the Ruling Class: Strategic Elites in Modern Society. New York: Random House. -> Summarizes a wide range of empirical findings. LANE, ROBERT E. 1959 Political Life: Why People Get Involved in Politics. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1965. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. (1930) 1960 Psychopathology and Politics. New ed., with afterthoughts by the author. New York: Viking Press. -» The classic motivational analysis of political self-recruitment. LEISERSON, AVERY 1958 Parties and Politics: An Institutional and Behavioral Approach. New York: Knopf. -> An analytical review of party recruitment processes. Lowi, THEODORE J. 1964 At the Pleasure of the Mayor. New York: Free Press. MCCLELLAND, DAVID C. 1961 The Achieving Society. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand.
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oretical concepts formed in the other social sciences are applied in the study of political institutions. But this assessment of the theoretical status of political science is largely a result of the failure to perceive the profound revolution that has taken place in the discipline, especially since World War H. In these decades political science has taken some firm and well-articulated steps toward its own reconstruction as a theoretical discipline. During the many centuries from classical antiquity almost to the end of the nineteenth century, the study of political life remained not a discipline in the strict sense but a congeries of inherited interests. Only in retrospect, when modern criteria are imposed upon the thought of past social philosophers, is it possible to identify their intellectual concerns as indeed part of what today we choose to call political science. As a result, by the time political science took shape as an independent academic discipline, it had assumed a thoroughly POLITICAL SCIENCE synthetic character; its subject matter appeared to consist largely of a collection of loosely related This article provides a broad introduction to the topics handed down and modified through the ages. discipline of political science. The major subfields On the surface, all that seemed to draw these inare reviewed in the entries INTERNATIONAL LAW; terests together was their relationship to some INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS; POLITICAL BEHAVIOR; vaguely defined political institutions and practices. POLITICAL THEORY; POLITICS, COMPARATIVE; PUBIf we examine the history of political inquiry in LIC ADMINISTRATION; PUBLIC LAW. For individual the last 2,500 years, we discover that, for the most contributions to the development of the discipline part, the questions which achieved prominence in see the biographies of BAGEHOT; BARNARD; BEARD; the thought of those social philosophers who dealt BENTHAM; BENTLEY; BRECHT; BRYCE; COKER; with political matters not unnaturally reflected the CONDORCET; FOLLETT; GOODNOW; HELLER; KEY; major issues of the day. Over the course of time LINDSAY; LlPPMANN; LOWELL; MAINE; MARX; these topics had accumulated, so that the older MERRIAM; MlCHELS; MlLL; MOSCA; OSTROGORSKII; political science grew as an intellectual pursuit, the PARETO; RICE; RICHARDSON; SCHMITT; TOCQUEgreater was the volume and variety of subjects it VILLE; WALLAS; WEBER, MAX; WILLOUGHBY; WILembraced. By mid-twentieth century the discipline SON. Related material from other disciplines may as a whole threatened to collapse under the strain be found in POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY; POLITICAL of absorbing and imposing a logical and consistent SOCIOLOGY. order on a staggering load of knowledge about Political science in mid-twentieth century is a highly diverse subjects. discipline in search of its identity. Through the By then, however, there also were clear signs efforts to solve this identity crisis it has begun to that the traditional way of selecting problems for show evidence of emerging as an autonomous and research was threatening to change fundamentally. independent discipline with a systematic theoretA nagging question had begun to press in earnest ical structure of its own. The factor that has conupon the members of what by that time had betributed most to this end has been the reception come a highly specialized discipline. Is political and integration of the methods of science into the science indeed only a synthetic discipline, comcore of the discipline. posed of a melange of topics as suggested by hisThe long failure of political science to assert a torical concerns? Is political science little more fundamental coherence of subject matter led some than a historical accident that has brought together scholars to deny that it could ever form an autonall thinking in the general neighborhood of governomous field of research coordinate with other mental or political institutions—and no more presocial sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, cisely or profoundly defined than that? Or is it posand psychology. They would rather assign it to the sible to say that it is in any sense a theoretical category of an applied field, one in which the thediscipline with a definable intellectual unity? MARVICK, DWAINE (editor) 1961 Political Decisionmakers. New York: Free Press. -» Representative studies of recruitment processes. MATTHEWS, DONALD R. 1954 The Social Background of Political Decision-makers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. -> A useful summary of approaches and findings. MILBRATH, LESTER W. 1963 The Washington Lobbyists. Chi^"go: Rand McNally. SALTER, JOHN T. (editor) 1938 The American Politician. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. SCHLESINGER, JOSEPH A. 1957 How They Became Governor: A Study of Comparative State Politics, 1870— 1950. East Lansing: Michigan State Univ., Governmental Research Bureau. WEBER, MAX (1919) 1946 Politics as a Vocation. Pages 77-128 in Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. ZINK, HAROLD 1930 City Bosses in the United States: A Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press.
POLITICAL SCIENCE The basic subject matter Two widely differing sets of criteria have emerged, in the last hundred years or so, for differentiating political life from all other aspects of society and, thereby, for isolating the subject matter of political science. The one has sought to define political life in terms of the institutions through which it is expressed; the other has turned to the activities or behavior of which institutions are the particular historical forms. Under the first set, political science has been described, not very profoundly, as the study either of governmental (or political) institutions or of the state. Under the second set, which did not gain widespread acceptance until well into the twentieth century, it has been characterized as the study either of power or of decision making. Institutional criteria. Two institutional approaches may be distinguished. Governmental institutions. To this day, the most frequent and most popular way of describing the field of political science is as the study of governmental or political institutions (Bentley 1908; Truman 1951). Yet it is the least useful, since it leaves almost entirely to intuition the sorting of political institutions from all other kinds. [See GOVERNMENT.] As the basic conceptualization of the field, it begs the vital question. It does not help us to distinguish governmental or political institutions from other kinds. We are left as much in the dark about the subject matter of political science as ever, that is, at the mercy of our intuitions. This way of orienting oneself to political research virtually abdicates all responsibility for elevating the theoretical level of the discipline. Just what is to be included within it must rest on the emergent but undefined consensus of each generation of political scientists. The state. No conceptualization of the subject matter of political science has had a longer history than that of the "state." Its origins as a way of orienting political inquiry lie buried in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Machiavelli is often cited as one of the first known users of the term, but his invention of it is disputable. However, during these centuries it slowly emerged as a substitute for earlier terms to refer to important political entities, such as kingdom, land, principality, commonwealth, republic, dominion, and empire (MacIver 1926). The state's long tradition as a central political concept testifies more to the persistence of practical political interests in setting research perspectives
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than to the utility of the idea for understanding political life. In fact, its shortcomings for theoretical purposes have become so widely recognized since World War n that its professional use has dwindled to a small fraction of its previous frequency (Easton 1953). For research and analytic purposes, scholars have denuded the term of most of its implication; it has been reduced simply to a neutral and empty conceptual shell for identifying the actors in the international sphere. In its place is appearing "political system," a concept that is burdened with few practical political overtones. [See STATE, article on THE CONCEPT.] Functional criteria. In the face of the theoretical limitations inherent in institutional concepts, it is scarcely surprising that efforts were made to develop alternative first approximations to a gross description of the major variables of political science. Dissatisfaction with an institutional approach has given birth to a variety of interpretations that have at least one quality in common: they all identify the subject matter of political science as a kind of activity, behavior, or, in a loose sense, function. Although some definitions of this kind originated in the nineteenth century, it is only since the middle of the twentieth century that they have finally come to be accepted as an approach superior to an institutional one. The specification of the political function in a society permits political scientists to generalize their subject matter. It is no longer limited in any way by the variable historical structures and institutions through which political activities may express themselves, whether they be in the form of highly centralized "states," undifferentiated tribal systems, or diffusely organized international systems. Power. During the nineteenth century, conceptualization of political science as the study of the state had reached its zenith in the Staatslehre (state theory) school of political inquiry in the German-speaking countries. Its major characteristic was that it reduced political inquiry to an idea of the state interpreted as a body of formal constitutional norms. Ultimately this converted political science to an arid legal formalism that turned away entirely from social reality and at times even seemed to escape contact with legal reality itself. The opponents of this school saw the state not as a body of legal norms but as a set of social groups in eternal competition for power over its instrumentalities. For example, Marx, Treitschke (1897-1898), and the early political sociologists, such as Gumplowicz (1885), Ratzenhofer (1893), and Oppenheimer (1907), saw force and power,
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especially in the struggle and conflict among groups or classes, as an inherent aspect of political relationships. In the United States it took somewhat longer for this change to gain acceptance, if only because it was frequently associated with unacceptable European social philosophies. But by the 1930s Catlin (1930) and Merriam (1934) were arguing for an interpretation of politics as a set of power relationships, and they were joined in short order by many others (Lasswell 1936; Lass well & Kaplan 1950; Key 1942). As a means of approaching the analysis of political phenomena, power has been dramatically successful in breaching the walls of an institutional approach and in blazing a new pathway, one that has led toward a functional conceptualization of political science. An enormous amount of time and energy has gone into describing and defining power relationships, between individuals, groups, and nations and within national political systems, local communities, and organizations. It has commanded the attention of all disciplines. Yet as a central theme, power has one overwhelming drawback. Despite all efforts, the idea of power remains buried under a heavy cloud of ambiguity. It has been suggested that the time may be long overdue for giving serious consideration to the question of whether the social sciences ought not to abandon the idea entirely as a useful concept for the direct purposes of analysis and research (March 1966), But we may wish to adopt a more hopeful attitude. We may assume that the inability to achieve a clear understanding of the referents of power stems from insufficient research or from inadequate but improvable tools of analysis, rather than from the excessively global character of the term itself. In that event we would be left with other equally insurmountable conceptual barriers to the use of power as an orienting concept. Even with a stable, unambiguous meaning, power would still be at one and the same time too narrow and too broad to describe even grossly the boundaries of political research. It is too narrow because political interaction, within any normal use of the term, involves more than the control of one person or group by another or efforts at reciprocal influence. Power, it is true, appears in all political interactions. However, each political relationship may include other aspects as well, and we can neglect these only at the peril of failing to achieve an adequate understanding of the situation. The description of politics as the study of power also casts the definitional net far too broadly. Conflicts over control take place in all areas of life,
not just the political. A parent has power over a child, a priest over his parishioner, a friend over a friend, a corporation over its employees. If we wished, we might choose to designate all of these kinds of power relationships as political. In this event, by fiat we could convert the study of politics into the search for a general theory of power applicable to all social relationships. But if we were to undertake to do this, it would still leave an unresolved question on our hands. Normally many of these kinds of power relationships seem to fall far outside even the broadest conception of the frame of reference of political science. The control of a parent over a child is seldom considered to be political, except in an analogical sense. But if this is granted and it is accepted that there are some power situations that are not political, we would then be left with the task of devising criteria for distinguishing political power from all other types, such as parental or, for that matter, economic, religious, and the like. In this event we would be right back where we started, at the point of searching for a workable criterion for identifying the "political." At the very most, a general theory of social power would be extremely helpful for shedding light on the properties of power relationships in a political setting. In itself this would be no mean accomplishment. But beyond that, it would not help us to attain a conceptualization of political relationships as a whole. [See POWER.] Decision making. Toward the middle of the twentieth century there appeared an important and popular variation on the theme of power as the central subject of political science. In this view, power attains significance because it leads to control over the processes through which public decisions are made and put into effect. This interpretation was quickly absorbed into the discipline. It has led to the direct interpretation of political life as a set of relationships through which public decisions or policies are formulated and put into effect. Power as a component recedes into the background, as just one possible determinant of decisions. The description of political science as the study of the making of public policy has become so widespread, particularly in American political science, and has become so much a part of the normal and even unstated intellectual apparatus of most students of politics, that its elaboration as a major concept can no longer be associated with any single person or group. Its beginnings may be found in the work of Carl Schmitt in Germany, where it arose as a response to the years of indecision fol-
POLITICAL SCIENCE lowing World War i [see SCHMITT]. At that time, however, the idea left little impact on political science as a discipline, and it was only through the efforts of organizational theorists in the United States in the 1940s that its general significance for political analysis and research became apparent. From its beginnings in the study of organizational behavior, the study of policy making has spread into virtually every sector of political research. Indeed, its use by political science reflected the even broader penetration of the idea of decision making into all of the social sciences. Decision making has proved to be one of the truly seminal ideas of the decades following World War n, and few conceptualizations of political science can afford to ignore it entirely. [See DECISION MAKING, article on POLITICAL ASPECTS.] But however transparently relevant a decisional approach is to understanding at least one component of political processes, decisions, like power, are characteristic of all other spheres of life as well. Similar decisional behavior occurs in such organizations as trade unions, corporations, churches, and families, as well as in the political system. Thus the mere definition of political science as the study of decision making provides little guidance in differentiating political decisions from other kinds of decisions. The adoption of decision making as the major focus would, to be sure, provide us with a general theory of social decision making, which would undoubtedly throw some light on our understanding of decision processes in a political context. But we would still need criteria by which to isolate political decisions from other kinds of decisions. The concept in and of itself is insufficient to delineate, even at the grossest level, the range of data that any initial description of political science would have to include. The political system. On the whole, the efforts at describing the broad range of interests of political science have been less than successful in the decades following the turn of the twentieth century. Institutional definitions, such as government and the state, merely serve to define one unknown, political science, by other unknowns. Functional conceptualizations based on power and decision making go well beyond any range of interests that political scientists would at least intuitively seek to embrace within their discipline. Each description of the subject matter of political science has something to commend it, if only because no one way of accounting for the intrinsic cohesion of any field is either the only or the necessarily correct one. Each mode of conceptualization creates its own blind spots and opens its own
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unique windows on political reality. The adequacy of any formal definition will depend on the extent to which it gives a sufficiently general description of the subject matter so that past and current content areas accepted by most scholars are not excluded—or if they are, it is with convincing theoretical justification. No more than for sociologists, economists, anthropologists, or psychologists is it appropriate for political scientists to presume to adopt the total behavior of a society as their special concern. Rather, from all social interactions, political science can abstract only those kinds which its theoretical perspectives dictate to be political in nature. In this sense, politics as a field of study is analytically distinct from the other disciplines. By the same reasoning, since each discipline directs its special attention to only one aspect of the total aggregate of interactions called society, no one discipline is "more basic" than or prior to the others. In its theoretical status each represents an equivalent level of abstraction from the totality of interactions in which the whole biological person engages. \Scc SYSTEMS ANALYSIS.] We may usefully identify the political interactions in a society as its political system, rather than as government, the state, power, or a set of decision-making processes. How are we to distinguish this system from other systems of behavior, such as the religious, economic, psychological, and cultural? In answering this question, we shall simultaneously obtain an initial, gross conceptualization of political science, one that can serve as a point of departure for distinguishing political science as a theoretically separate and autonomous discipline. We may describe the political system as that behavior or set of interactions through which authoritative allocations (or binding decisions) are made and implemented for a society (Easton 1953; 1965a; 1965i>). The implications of this thumbnail definition are enormous, and here we can examine only the most salient ones. The authoritative allocation of values. Scarcity prevails in all societies. This is a fundamental starting point for political analysis. There are not enough of the values (valued things) to meet the wants of the members of a society. This is as vital a political assumption as it is a sociological, anthropological, and economic one. Differences and conflicts over values in scarce supply cannot be avoided. In most controversies, members in all societies are able to negotiate settlements independently, without the intervention of any special agency speaking in the name of the society. Integration of social behavior is in large part a consequence of
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the independent interaction of members as dictated by their personalities, the social structure, and the culture. Through such autonomous behavior they are able to adjust their differences, however acceptable or distasteful any resolution may be to the participants. But in all societies there are always some valued things over which differences cannot be easily negotiated by the members themselves. In these cases, empirically we always find that special institutions or processes have emerged as mechanisms for helping to impose a settlement. Without such special means at the disposal of a society, its integration might be threatened. In addition, collective purposive action would be impaired, if not eliminated. If the society sought to adopt any objectives requiring the combined effort or resources of part or all of its members, some means would have to be found to organize and direct their energies. Differences would have to be reconciled or regulated so that purposive action in the name of the society could become possible. This involves more than just the establishment and maintenance of order, although that may be and typically has been a primary objective. But regardless of the goals, each society has in fact devised some means for regulating differences, so as to be able to coordinate the efforts of its members. One way of achieving this result is by invoking force in the name of the society. Others are through the use of persuasion, manipulation, ad hoc mediation, and the like. The weakness of these methods is that they do not offer stable and regularized procedures through which conflicts over valued things may be negotiated when the members are not able to arrive at an autonomous settlement. Regular and stable means for meeting this situation require two things at the very least: first, structures and procedures for undertaking decisions and related actions—what we may call allocations—that will help reduce or regulate differences, and second, some guarantee that there will be a greater rather than a lesser likelihood that these decisions and actions (allocations) will be accepted as authoritative. That is, the outcomes of efforts to regulate the differences must have a relatively high probability of being accepted as binding. In structurally differentiated societies, the making and implementing of decisions with which the members normally comply are assigned to special institutions that have come to be known as "governmental." But in small, nonliterate societies, where structures are combined and unspecialized, such
tasks will usually be undertaken by persons in social roles that cannot be described as either purely or largely governmental. A lineage head in a tribal society may be chief religious leader, regulator of hunting (economic director), and familial chief, as well as the paramount negotiator of disputes not regulated by the members themselves. In every society, therefore, we can expect to find those kinds of interactions which have to do primarily with influencing and shaping the way in which authoritative allocations of values (decisions and actions) are made for the society. It is these interactions taken collectively which constitute the behavior to which the term "political system" refers; it is the study of these interactions that provides the basic subject matter of political science. We must examine each of the component terms of the phrase "authoritative allocations of values for a society" if we are to appreciate its full implications. Politics revolves around allocations. An allocation distributes valued things among the members of a society. In providing safety, a policeman helps to allocate this value differently from the way it would have been allocated without his presence; in building roads, a government offers a benefit to its users and a deprivation to other taxpayers, for whom it may have no importance at all. An allocation may occur in three significantly different ways: when a decision or action prevents a member from retaining a value that he already possesses; when it prevents him from obtaining one he would like to possess; when it gives him access to a value that he might not otherwise have obtained. Generally an allocation apportions benefits or deprivations in such a way that they are different from what they would have been but for the allocative activities. An allocation of values may be formal. In modernized political systems, allocations take such forms as legislation, laws, judicial decisions, and administrative decrees. They may be informal in these systems, as when administrative action substantially modifies or subverts a law in the process of applying it. They may also be informal, as in nonliterate societies, where a council of elders may meet and achieve an unarticulated consensus on what ought to be done, and the responsible members of the lineage or clan may then feel impelled through custom to undertake the necessary actions. Control over allocations may be diffused throughout a society, as in a direct democracy, or it may be confined to the hands of a few, as in an autocracy. The allocations may benefit all members of
POLITICAL SCIENCE a system or only a powerful few. In each case some redistribution of values has taken place in the sense we are here discussing. But allocations occur in all spheres of life. The distinctive property about an allocation in the political system is that it is usually highly probable that the decisions and actions will be accepted as authoritative. If this is not so, either the system is in the throes of collapse or the members are no better off than they would be without a political system. In that event, there would be no way of fulfilling what we may assume to be a requirement in all societies for political kinds of settlements. To say that an allocation is authoritative does not necessarily .imply that it will be accepted as legitimate. This conclusion is made possible only if we equate authority with legitimacy—a possible, but not a necessary, identity. Thus, a totalitarian usurper may be able to allocate values through the political processes even though a majority of the members in the system consider his power to be illegitimate. Yet out of fear of the consequences they may accept his decisions and actions as binding. As long as there is a greater rather than a lesser probability that most of the members will accept a decision, and its implementing actions, as binding most of the time, it is authoritative. There are numerous reasons why members accept allocations as authoritative. They may do so because of tradition and inertia, love and affection for the rulers, fear of violence for failure to comply, self-interest, or loyalty. But as is often the case, compliance may result from a strong conviction that it is right and proper to obey those who make the decisions and put them into effect, that is, that they are legitimate. In this use of the concept "authoritative," legitimacy is only one ground for the acceptance of an act as having this quality. But regardless of the grounds for considering a decision and related actions as authoritative, what separates political allocations from other kinds is the fact that this compelling quality is associated with it. [See LEGITIMACY.] But political science is not centrally interested in every allocation, even when it is accepted as authoritative. In every organization, aside from the political system, there normally are those who engage in making and implementing decisions that are considered binding by the members of the organization. If we wished, we could so broaden and redefine the scope of political science that it embraced the study of authoritative allocations wherever they are found. In this event, the making of binding decisions in a family, church, trade
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union, fraternal club, or corporation would become phenomena that lie at the heart of political research. But there is a more useful and theoretically more economical way of handling this situation. It will also enable us to obtain the full benefits of research into authoritative allocations wherever they may occur, and yet it will clearly distinguish political allocation as an analytic type different from others. Theoretically we would be adhering more faithfully to the long traditions of political inquiry if we confined the concept "political" to those authoritative allocations which apply to a society rather than only to an organization within that society. That is to say, we would devote our attention to those allocations which are normally accepted as binding by most members of the society, whether or not the members themselves are actually affected by them. This contrasts with the binding decisions and actions effected by organizations within the society. Such allocations need be accepted as authoritative only by the constituent members of the organization; other members of society need not consider themselves bound in any way. Thus, political allocations in the inclusive sense proposed here are societal in their scope and implications. It is because of this and the functions they fulfill for a society that formal and special sanctions, such as the use of force, are often associated with them. But this is only a typical accompaniment, not a necessary one, in political systems (Schapera 1956). This conceptualization of political science need not neglect the obvious fact that in other kinds of organizations, authoritative allocations are also undertaken and that the investigation of the processes surrounding them will aid immeasurably in understanding similar processes within the societal political system. If we wished, we could describe those aspects of voluntary organizations, families, lineage segments, or interest groups which determine the way in which binding decisions are made and implemented for these groups as their political systems. We could then distinguish organizational political systems from the societal political system. To be sure, political scientists have typically been interested in the internal processes of such groups and organizations, for at least two reasons. First, in most societies such groups help to influence the way in which binding decisions are formulated, their content, and their implementation. But this is only a derived interest. It flows from the hypothesis that we cannot understand the authoritative allocations for a society without becoming
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thoroughly familiar with the internal operations of groups that influence these allocations. But a second possible reason is that these organizations and social units look very much like political systems, at least in microcosm. We might even designate them as parapolitical systems, the comparative study of which might help shed light on the political processes of the broader society (Easton 1965a). But recognition of their relevance for political research is entirely different from equating them with the object at the center of attention of a science of politics, i.e., the political system. Resulting areas of research. The areas of research for political science that flow from this description cannot be itemized here. In general, they will encompass all the structures, processes, and activities more or less directly related to the making and implementing of authoritative allocations for a society. But we cannot know in advance what these are under specified historical conditions. They will vary with the kind of political system under scrutiny and the historical period in which it is examined. This conclusion in itself reveals the folly of seeking to describe the subject matter of political science in the specific terms of the kind of institutions that exist at any historical moment. It is instructive, however, to recognize that none of the variable structures and processes of interest to political science in mid-twentieth century need be neglected in the conceptualization of the discipline suggested here. Thus, in nonliterate systems, where little differentiation of political structure prevails, such general social structures as the kinship groups, lineage councils, village headmen, paramount chiefs, friendship cliques, and war parties may be most relevant for revealing the way in which binding decisions are made and put into effect. [See POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY.] In industrialized, structurally differentiated societies the fields of research assume an equally specialized character. Through the examination of such variable differentiated structures as legislatures, executives, administrative organizations, parties, and interest groups, political science has sought to explore those elements of a political system which are influential in determining who makes the allocations, the nature of the ones that are undertaken, and the way in which they are implemented. Through the study of electoral, or voting, behavior, political scientists seek to identify the kinds of issues that become subjects of controversy as possible authoritative allocations and try to explain the recruitment of those responsible for the day-today tasks related to making and effectuating such
allocations [see VOTING]. Public law examines the way in which a system validates binding decisions according to legal criteria, thereby contributing to their acceptability as authoritative in a system [see PUBLIC LAW]. Comparative politics casts its net over similar aspects of political life, but in cultural and social settings alien to the national origin of the research worker himself [see POLITICS, COMPARATIVE]. International relations turns the attention of political science to those institutions and structures through which binding decisions are made and implemented in the relationship among individual political systems. Here it is helpful to conceive of the interaction among political systems as constituting a kind of political system itself, at a higher level of generality. In this view, the participating political systems are just subsystems of the international system, in much the same way that states or provinces may be subsystems of socalled national political systems [see INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS]. The other subject matters standard in political science at mid-twentieth century also fall comfortably into place when we conceptualize political science as the study of those actions more or less directly related to the making of authoritative allocations. Thus, political philosophy represents that area devoted to the assessment of allocations and related structures according to ethical criteria. It also examines and critically evaluates the way in which philosophers have attempted this in the past. Empirical theory, however, seeks to systematize the research processes themselves and to bring conceptual order and consistency to the discipline as a whole or in its various parts. To it belongs the task of developing, in the form of general theories, comprehensive explanations of how authoritative allocations for a society are made and put into effect; and in the form of partial theories, interpretations of the operations of aspects or segments of political systems. [See POLITICAL THEORY.] Brief and formal as this listing of the range of interests for political science is, it does demonstrate that the description of the discipline that has been suggested is consistent with all the research that political scientists characteristically undertake. Not that the subfields just mentioned are fixed in any sense: historically the very opposite is the case. They represent only a convenient and changing way of dividing the whole field for purposes of specialized research. But the point is that the new conceptualization of the key problems with which political science deals does not in itself preclude the continuation of past concerns in political research. It includes them and unites them analyti-
POLITICAL SCIENCE cally, but it leaves the door open to, and indeed invites, their reformulation and extension. Content The content of political science as a discipline also reveals a long-range trend toward greater analytic unity. We can see this best if we trace the various substantive areas into which political science has come to divide itself. In describing the evolving relationships among these subdivisions, we shall find that increasingly they have come to depend less upon practical issues and problems for setting their main areas of interest—although the hold of a problem orientation is still strong—and more upon theoretical criteria. Historically the successive patterns of the subfields that political science has found it useful to adopt fall into four major categories: universalism (moral philosophy), legalism (Staatslehre), realism (political process), and behavioralism. Methodological considerations have some important bearing on the movement toward the latest patterning of the subfields, but we can leave discussion of this aspect for the following section. Although the actual changes from one pattern to the next occurred in a relatively slow and imperceptible way, they brought about major upheavals in the kinds of data to which political science has directed its attention. Universalism. The period of universalism was by far the longest and least homogeneous or distinctive. It encompasses the time from the founding of conscious political reflection in Greek antiquity to somewhere in the nineteenth century. The subject matter of politics was fully integrated with the general study of society, that is, with universal moral philosophy. Each scholar was what we might today call a general or universal social scientist. Without specialization in the study of political matters, there was no reason for special subdivisions of inquiry to arise. The social philosopher was free to follow his own political interests, as dictated by the problems of the day. The subject matter, therefore, was as varied as the history of Western political thought. Legalism. After the centuries in which a political interest was indistinguishable from universal philosophy, the emergence of the legalistic Staatslehre school in the nineteenth century opened up a new era. Imported from Germany into the United States by J. W. Burgess and others, it was reinforced by the positivistic utilitarianism of Bentham and Austin. For a brief time it sounded a note harmonious with scholarly opinion in the United States, in tune as this opinion already was with
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specialism. The Staatslehre school provided a body of knowledge devoted to the study of the state. It is true that the state was narrowly defined as a collection of legal norms and empirically confined to formal legal structures. Nevertheless, concentration on the state, even in this way, did enable those in the United States who later in the nineteenth century began to call themselves political scientists to appropriate, albeit unobtrusively, this body of knowledge as their own. At the turn of the twentieth century, the flow of texts in the United States—from J. W. Burgess, W. W. Willoughby, R. G. Gettell, J. W. Garner, and others—clearly revealed that as a specialized discipline of political science began to take shape for the first time, it absorbed and adapted the formal legalism of the Staatslehre school as the core of its concerns. Thus, political science turned to the investigation of the nature and origin of the legally conceived state, particularly with respect to its sovereign properties and the growth of law. To these were added detailed descriptions of the legal provisions for the forms of governments and for the formal powers of the electorates, the judiciary, the administrative services, and the executive department. This objective formal description was fortified with traditional philosophical inquiry into the ends of government and the state. Realism. Although in Europe political research remained confined to legal forms well into the twentieth century, the American environment could not tolerate such restriction for long. The social problems of a rapidly growing industrial society and the political complexities accompanying the large-scale immigration of varied ethnic groups clearly called for more accurate and increased knowledge about the realities of political life. Behind these social and political needs, in the intellectual sphere, pragmatism as a social philosophy pressed for contact with and interpretation of social experiences. However we may account for the early demise of the Staatslehre approach in the United States, its conscious rejection ultimately led political investigation into entirely new substantive paths. In this third phase, political science began to penetrate beneath the legal forms to the political realities, identified in due course as the underlying political process. To legal form and structure were added nonlegal and informal processes. The shift toward these new kinds of data came about in two distinctive but overlapping stages. In the first, the tendency was to denounce arid legalism in favor of a new realism in political research. Following the approach of Bagehot in The English
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Constitution (1865-1867), Woodrow Wilson in his Congressional Government (1885) condemned the "literary theory" of the constitution and in its place discovered that the true source of legislative control lies in Congressional committees. Other realists followed in his footsteps. James Bryce, in his American Commonwealth (1888), added another dimension to the new reality by stressing the role of parties and unearthing their inner groups—very much like James Fitzjames Stephen's wire pullers —in whom the main power was presumed to rest. Realism quickly opened up a second stage of inquiry. In i': the generalized search for the political realities came to a sharper focus on the basic groups that seemed to be increasing their power on the American scene. In this discovery of groups as the major vehicle through which the political struggle worked itself out, American political science found a new direction for research, the implications of which were not exhausted until after World War n. Politics came to be interpreted as a process through which group activities, outside the formal political structure but acting upon and through it, managed to influence all phases of governmental activity. Charles Beard exposed the impact of extralegal economic groups on the course of historical events. Although Arthur Bentley was not influential until almost a half century later, at the beginning of the twentieth century his insistence upon conceiving of all political activities as group phenomena (and upon the need to abandon the habit of attributing causation to ideas and legal norms) reflected the latent sentiments about political research that others were coming to adopt. A group orientation among European sociologists, imported by sociologist Albion Small, together with philosophic pluralism, reinforced this interest among American political scientists. With the appearance of Herring's Group Representation Before Congress (1929) the basic pattern of group research for the first half of the twentieth century had been set. It was left only to Truman, in The Governmental Process (1951), to formulate systematically the whole conception of political life as conflict among groups. [See POLITICAL GROUP ANALYSIS.] With this penetration to groups as a new kind of data to explain political events, the twentieth century witnessed a great proliferation of subfields in political science. In the 1960s most scholars still functioned more or less with some dependence on the topical delineation of the field as it was laid down during this third stage in the substantive development of the discipline. For the first time political science broke up into
a large number of specialized areas. The distribution of these subfields unmistakably reveals their origins in nineteenth-century legalism. In addition, they testify to the continuation of the historic habit of choosing a research topic by reference to the varied practical problems for which it might offer an immediate and direct solution. Thus, the main divisions of political science as a discipline are defined institutionally, a heritage from political legalism; and the institutions are those peculiar to Western political systems and are linked, intuitively, to the solution of the changing issues of politics, especially in democratic systems. Until World War n, political science consisted of four main fields with names that clearly mirror these legalistic origins and practical interests: political philosophy or theory, national government, comparative government, and international relations. Political philosophy showed the strongest ties with the past (we shall later return to this fully). In the area of national government, the practical criteria of the legalistic phase led political science to open up all institutional aspects of Western democracy for major exploration: the executive, legislature, judiciary, and administration. The basic organization here was regional: at the national, state (provincial, department), and local (municipal, township, county) level. "How to improve them" was the immediate, implicit, and persistent theme. With the inroads made by a concern for the socalled realities of politics, the area of national government was vastly extended to include the underlying and informal social and political group structure. New special fields of research arose to meet these new interests: political parties, interest or pressure groups, and the public or electorate as an influential aggregate and an ethically important element in a democracy. Comparative government added little to the criteria for selecting topics already visible in the area of national government. Research in the comparative field required attention only to the same kinds of institutions, but in political systems other than the one in which the investigator happened to live, a simplistic but nonetheless close-to-accurate description of the differentiating characteristics of this field. Because empirical political research was less advanced in countries other than the United States, however, comparative government in those countries tended to confine its attention to the governmental and party level, with groups and the electorate receiving little attention until after World War n. In the comparative field, strangely enough, sys-
POLITICAL SCIENCE tematic comparison received little serious attention. Research eitter took the form of configurative descriptions of the complex of political institutions in each system cmsidered, or where comparisons were essayed, the) consisted only of taking institutions with the 5ame name from one system, setting them besice those of another, and commenting on the ;pparent similarity and differences. Herman Firer and C. J. Friedrich were virtually alone in bcaking from this pattern and, somewhat ahead o' their time, pointed the way to an analytic appro;ch. Finally, the esta)lishment of the League of Nations virtually gav; birth to the field of international relations. Bu in this area the legal tradition died hard. Internaional law and the formal description of variois international organizations and treaty relationships, joined with the traditional study of foreign poicy as the history of diplomacy, fairly exhausted tite research interests. In all areas, pricr to World War n, some early efforts at reconcepualization had begun to assert themselves. In partcular, the view of political life as a struggle amorg groups for some measure of influence over government helped to draw attention to the fact tha; there might be a single basic kind of activity in the light of which all politics could be explained the struggle for power over policy. This shift in focus away from legal norms, first to groups and then to power (whatever the over-all shortcomings of power as an introduction to the basic subjec, matter of political science), pointed to the arrivil of a fourth phase in the organization of fields, that of behavioralism. In this phase theoretical criteria begin to crop up beside the traditional, practical ones and to play some part in the selectior of the basic areas of inquiry in political science. Behavioralism. °he behavioral movement in political science cane to full bloom after World War n. In common /vith a tendency that pervaded all of the social sciences, political science began to probe in earnest ?or the concrete behavior that goes to make up tie activities broadly described both as legal structures and as informal groups. It turned to the indvidual—his attitudes, motivations, values, and A Systems Analysis of Political Life. New York: Wiley. GUETZKOW, HAROLD et al. 1963 Simulation in International Relations: Developments for Research and Teaching. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. GUMPLOWICZ, LUDWIG (1885) 1963 The Outlines of Sociology. Edited with an introduction and notes by Irving Louis Horowitz. 2d ed. New York: Paine-Whitman. -> First published in German. HERRING, E. PENDLETON 1929 Group Representation Before Congress. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. KAPLAN, MORTON A. 1957 System and Process in International Politics. New York: Wiley. KEY, V. O. JR. (1942) 1964 Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups. 5th ed. New York: Crowell. LANE, ROBERT E. 1962 Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does. New York: Free Press. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. (1930) 1960 Psychopathology and Politics. New ed., with afterthoughts by the author. New York: Viking. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. 1936 Politics: Who Gets What, When, How? New York: McGraw-Hill. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. 1948 Power and Personality. New York: Norton. LASSWELL, HAROLD D.; and KAPLAN, ABRAHAM 1950 Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry. Yale Law School Studies, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1963. LIPPMANN, WALTER (1922) 1944 Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan. -> A paperback edition was published in 1965 by the Free Press. LIPSET, SEYMOUR M. 1960 Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. MACIVER, ROBERT M. (1926) 1955 The Modern State. Oxford Univ. Press.
MARCH, J. G. 1966 The Power of Power. Pages 39-70 in David Easton (editor), Varieties of Political Theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. MERRIAM, CHARLES E. (1925) 1931 New Aspects of Politics. 2d ed. Univ. of Chicago Press. MERRIAM, CHARLES E. 1934 Political Power: Its Composition and Incidence. New York: McGraw-Hill. H> A paperback edition was published in 1964 by Collier. MICHIGAN, UNIVERSITY OF, SURVEY RESEARCH CENTER. 1960 The American Voter, by Angus Campbell et al. New York: Wiley. MORGENTHAU, HANS J. (1948) 1967 Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. 4th ed., rev. New York: Knopf. OPPENHEIMER, FRANZ (1907) 1926 The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically. New York: Vanguard. -> First published in German as Der Staat. RATZENHOFER, GUSTAV 1893 Wesen und Zweck der Politik. 3 vols. Leipzig: Brockhaus. -» Volume 1: Die sociologische Grundlage. Volume 2: Die Staatspolitik nach Aussen. Volume 3: Der Zweck der Politik im Allgemeinen. RIKER, WILLIAM H. 1962 The Theory of Political Coalitions. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. RUNCIMAN, WALTER G. 1963 Social Science and Political Theory. Cambridge Univ. Press. SABINE, GEORGE H. (1937) 1961 History of Political Theory. 3d ed. New York: Holt. SCHAPERA, ISAAC 1956 Government and Politics in Tribal Societies. London: Watts. SIMON, HERBERT A. (1947) 1961 Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization. 2d ed. New York: Macmillan. TREITSCHKE, HEINRICH VON (1897-1898) 1963 Politics. New York: Harcourt. -> First published in German. TRUMAN, DAVID B. (1951) 1962 The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion. New York: Knopf. WALLAS, GRAHAM (1908) 1962 Human Nature in Politics. 4th ed. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. WILSON, WOODROW (1885) 1961 Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics. New York: Meridian.
POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY Two distinct but converging intellectual traditions are to be found in the theoretical and empirical writings of political sociology. Broadly conceived, political sociology is concerned with the social basis of power in all institutional sectors of society. In this tradition, political sociology deals with patterns of social stratification and their consequences in organized politics. It is one particular approach to the study of social organization and societal change. By contrast, in narrower terms, political sociology focuses on the organizational analysis of political groups and political leadership. In this perspective, the core of political sociology involves the study of both formal and informal
POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY party organization, with its linkages to the governmental bureaucracy, the legal system, interest groups, and the electorate at large. This approach is an expression of an institutional or organizational point of view. As societies strive to become modernized and as the role of formally organized political parties becomes more and more dominant, it appears difficult to make a sharp distinction between the social stratification and the institutional approaches to political sociology. Nevertheless, these perspectives assume persistently different conceptions about the political process and are reflections of the basic writings of Karl Marx and Max Weber, respectively, both of whom have deeply influenced the emergence of a sociology of politics. Conceptions of the political process. From the formulations of Karl Marx has come the pervasive view that class conflict and social stratification derive from economic factors or from the social relations generated by the mode of production. But Marx's fundamental contribution is not limited to or even dependent upon the orientation that political behavior is an expression of economic interests. To the contrary, his essential contribution was that he made the study of political sociology equivalent to the study of societal structure, or macrosociology, as it has come to be called. Marx's view that the political system derives from the pattern of social stratification, rather than his specific emphasis on the primacy of economic factors in fashioning social relations, has been a dominant theme in the development of an empirical analysis of politics. Nevertheless, such an orientation has been criticized, both by political scientists and by sociologists, because it reduces political events to a social by-product and fails to consider the consequences of differing types of political institutions on societal change. The social stratification view of politics has been described as a form of sociological reductionism that has inherent limitations because of the institutional and cultural factors which are excluded. The economic determinist view of social stratification is also seen as a barrier to comparative analysis because, by implication, it assumes the universality of a historical pattern of industrialism which holds, at the most, for western Europe and does not apply to the United States. Moreover, it is inappropriate to an understanding of the developing nations, where new forms of political organization are crucial in conditioning economic growth. It is from the writings of Weber that political sociologists received an intellectual impetus for a more autonomous and more institutional view of politics. As a sociologist, Weber adopted a mode of
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reasoning which converged with that of Marx, in that he held a comprehensive view of social structure as a basis for analyzing politics. However, he saw social stratification as encompassing both economic relations and social status—prestige and honor. Furthermore, in his essay "Class, Status, Party" (1921), Weber postulated that the emergence of modern society implied a historical process of separation of political institutions from economic and social structure. Political institutions thereby emerge as worthy of direct sociological inquiry because they are an independent source of societal change. These classic formulations of a social stratification view and an institutional view of politics have persisted despite their reformulation in the light of historical events and intellectual criticism. As the division of labor has become more complex, social stratification theories have been reformulated as "interest group" theories. Politics is still seen as derived from the struggle and conflicts of social strata, but these are viewed as more differentiated and as expressing the demands of specific interest groups—economic, professional, organizational, and even ethnic-religious. Social stratification theories of politics have been broadened to include the view that the governmental bureaucracy and the political party itself have emerged as new strata and thereby as elements in the theory of interest groups. The institutional approach has come to be reformulated as a theory of "societal strain." Political parties are seen as mechanisms for accommodating the strains that exist in modern society. Thus, the identification of elements that condition the effectiveness of political organization in performing this mediating function becomes a central topic of sociological inquiry. Because the political party penetrates all sectors of society and because quasipolitical institutions develop to assist the party in this mediating function, the strain theory of political sociology must extend widely beyond the internal structure of party organization. The political sociologist addresses himself to a range of overlapping empirical problems, whether he begins with a concern for underlying social stratification or with a direct investigation of political party organization. Often differences between these theoretical positions involve differences of social values and conceptions of political philosophy. It is much too crude to label social stratification theories as radical and institutional theories as moderate in their orientations to political change. The most that can be stated is that some theorists who emphasize social stratification in their view of political sociol-
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ogy are also committed to comprehensive and ideological positions of political change. By contrast, the exponents of institutional thinking often tend to be concerned with pragmatic and incrementalist strategies of political change. Social context of political power At the empirical level, the bulk of research in political sociology has been directed toward the investigation of the social basis of political cleavage and consensus. These studies are mainly derived from a social stratification theory of politics and have been characterized by a progressive refinement of categories of analysis, from broad concern with class and occupation to much more refined measures of social status. Through analysis of voting statistics and sample surveys, political party affiliation and voting behavior of the mass electorate have been charted in a voluminous literature. In almost every nation with multiple-party election systems, sample surveys have been introduced. As a result, it is possible to describe voting behavior in considerable detail, in terms of such variables as occupation, income, education, status, ethnicity, and religion. Some surveys have come to include such data as membership in voluntary associations, exposure to the mass media, and contact with political party organization. Experimental work has been done on the relevance of personality and social-psychological variables for understanding voting patterns. These empirical researches have focused mainly on the correlates of national election decisions; they have not probed ongoing mass contact and involvement with administrative agencies of government, even though these contacts are very powerful factors in molding popular perspectives toward the political process. [See VOTING.] While this body of research is an extremely valuable source of descriptive and historical documentation, the findings permit only a limited contribution to the theoretical aspects of political sociology. In part, the difficulties are technical. National surveys based on a limited number of cases produce valid results for the society as a whole, but this approach does not produce sufficient data to isolate the political behavior of specific social and economic subgroups on the basis of a trend analysis. Moreover, comparisons between nations are difficult, if not impossible, to make with precision and clarity, because of the difficulty of developing appropriate standardized indexes. The basic difficulty in empirical studies of consensus and cleavage is the failure to articulate sample surveys with theoretical issues. Most of these findings have been interpreted as supporting
the view that advanced industrialism produces a "middle-majority" politics. "Middle-majority politics" implies the decline of class conflict between the working and middle classes and the emergence of a wider area of consensus among less differentiated social groupings. The gap between elements in the working class and the middle class is described as declining, and the political process is seen as transformed into a process of pragmatic bargaining over specific issues (see Lipset 1960). Middle-majority theories are primarily concerned with changes in occupational structure and do not focus on new sources of social tension and political conflict, such as those based on race, ethnicity, and religion. These stratification theories also underemphasize the impact of foreign affairs on the political orientations of the electorate. While research studies document these trends in the transformation of social cleavage for some industrialized countries, especially the AngloAmerican countries and Scandinavia, the middlemajority theories have been criticized for failing to address themselves to the persistence of workingclass political behavior, especially in the Catholic countries of western Europe. It is also the case that the proliferation of middle-income occupations undoubtedly is transforming political orientations in the one-party systems of industrialized communist societies, such as that of the Soviet Union and those of eastern Europe. However, even in the absence of adequate empirical studies, it is clear that these political changes cannot be understood in terms of changes in social stratification alone. The development of middle-class occupations has very different implications in the developing nations, in that it contributes to discontinuities in the social hierarchy and thereby increases the potentialities for political instability. Public opinion and ideology. Aggregate analysis of the social correlates of political participation and voting has been augmented by extensive research on mass public opinion and political ideology. While these research efforts also rely heavily on the use of the sample survey, they represent a refinement in the intellectual concerns of the social stratification approach, since they seek to explore the extent to which political attitudes not only reflect social structure but are influenced by party organization and the mass media. With the growth of representative institutions and the spread of both literacy and mass media of communication, the processes of government, in varying degree, become responsive to mass opinion. In turn, political parties and the administrative agencies of industrialized societies find it necessary to mobilize
POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY public opinion in order to achieve mass participation in social and economic institutions. Systematic research into political opinion has produced a body of data which has considerable theoretical sophistication and which gives deeper meaning to studies of voting behavior and political participation. The techniques of opinion measurement enable the description of attitude structures toward specific political issues, political candidates, and political institutions. These studies focus on the detailed identification of those parts of the social structure which are characterized either by an absence of political orientations or by political orientations which are extremely weak or, at best, limited to very specific interests and issues. Political apathy has been found to be concentrated in lower-income groups and is a persistent aspect of highly industrialized societies, even with increasing levels of educational attainment. In one sense, the major findings drive home, to those political sociologists who have held an overpoliticalized view of man, a more realistic image that has long been recognized as valid by most political leaders. [See POLITICAL PARTICIPATION.] The concept of alienation has come to figure prominently in empirical research into public opinion. While this concept is fundamentally diffuse, it focuses on understanding the social and psychological processes which produce a withdrawal or disengagement from political interest and political participation. Political apathy appears to be a broader category, which includes both alienation and socially inherited disinterest in politics. Available research does not permit any trend statement about an increase or decrease in political alienation but instead highlights the social groups particularly vulnerable to alienation, such as youth, minorities, and intellectuals. These researches are most relevant when they focus on the process by which a person becomes alienated. They imply that alienation is not a "steady state" but an orientation which can gradually or suddenly be reversed and produce direct intervention, outside the normal channels of political action. The study of mass opinion converges with the analysis of popular ideologies. A sharp distinction must be made beween the developing and the industrialized societies. In the developing nations the concept of ideology is probably not applicable among traditional and peasant groups, if by "ideology" is meant a comprehensive, rigidly held, and explicit political belief system or "world view" (this is not to overlook the obvious and pervasive religious "world views" held by the mass of the population). But the intellectuals in these nations who
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have been trained in Europe or have had prolonged contact with Western political thought are deeply involved in ideological controversy. Moreover, with the rapid expansion of literacy, the mass media, and urbanization, middle-class groups in these nations develop explicit political preferences. In turn, ideological alternatives enter mass political debates. By contrast, in Western industrialized nations this process of ideological diffusion has passed, and there has been a growth of consensus about many domestic, economic, and welfare issues which reflect the changing character of social stratification. At the level of elite or mass opinion, it would be exaggerated to speak of an "end of ideology" (Bell 1960), and more appropriate to refer to a constriction or transformation of ideology. An ideological outlook is still found among elements of the most politically active and involved. However, the bulk of the population, including better-educated groups, do not hold such ideological orientations but, rather, hold generalized party preferences which express, at best, partial ideologies or pragmatic responses to changing political and social circumstances. Specific ideological components also emerge and persist with respect to religious, ethnic, and racial issues and conceptions of foreign affairs, and these can be held with great intensity by small segments of the population. Paradoxically, people whose orientation to politics is limited to specific issues— often issues which seem peripheral to the central questions of political decision making—tend to display ideological orientations. As a result, middlemajority politics in industrialized societies is compatible with the emergence of minority ideological orientations. The formation of public opinion and ideological attitudes involves an interplay between a person's social and psychological background and his participation in organizations and associations, as well as his exposure to the mass media. The term "political socialization" refers specifically to the whole process of internalization of political values, including the impact of the family and educational institutions. Under conditions of rapid social change, the relevance of initial socialization variables in explaining mass political perspectives must be amplified by an understanding of the impact of education and involvement in secondary associations. In fact, the continuing task of systematic empirical research, especially the sample survey, is to help clarify the complex processes involved in the dynamics of public and political opinion. [See SOCIALIZATION.] Empirical studies of election campaigns reveal the limited extent to which shifts in political at-
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titudes and in actual voting behavior take place in a given campaign, although the amount of change is clearly crucial in determining the outcome. It is undoubtedly true and obvious, as the research literature implies, that long-term political socialization has greater impact than the consequences of exposure to mass media in a given political campaign. Nevertheless, the effects of the mass media —both long-term and short-term—and the impact of party organization are key variables in both maintaining and molding political opinions. This is particularly the case for persons who do not hold firm political beliefs or whose style of life is not rooted in memberships in voluntary associations. The influence of the mass media operates either through local activists and opinion leaders or by direct exposure. The notion of "the politics of mass society" (Kornhauser 1959) specifically refers to those processes which weaken community and associational affiliations and expose individuals to the pressures of party organization and the mass media. Paradoxically enough, there is every reason to believe that the impact of the mass media is greater in multiparty, democratic systems than in one-party systems, where distrust of the media is great and where it is recognized that the political regime relies more on organizational controls than on persuasion. Elite analysis Political sociologists who have come to consider politics as more than a reflection of social stratification and mass ideology have increased their concern with the analysis of those institutions and social systems through which the political process operates. The intellectual heritage of those political sociologists who seek to synthesize the stratification and the institutional approaches to political power is diverse. In particular, they have been strongly influenced by the "elite" theorists, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, by the variety of writers who can be called macrosociologists because they have taken total societies as the object of their analysis. Gaetano Mosca (1896) and Robert Mich els (1911) served as central figures in stimulating empirical studies of elites and the sociology of political organization. Their initial formulations were concerned with the bureaucratic features of party organization and had strong ideological evertones. Particularly in the case of Michels, the "iron law of oligarchy" was more a definition than it was an empirical generalization offered as a fundamental barrier to representative institutions. As a result of the subsequent development of a
more objective and detailed theory of organizations, political parties and their auxiliary institutions have been subject to various forms of empirical analysis. Typologies of party organization have been created, using such categories as "patronage," "ideological," "programmatic," and the like, but these typologies were at best transitional to a more detailed study of the specific functions that political organizations and political elites perform. The writings of the University of Chicago empirical school of political research, which included Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell, and Harold Gosnell and which in turn came to be called political behavior research, were crucial in transforming the study of party organizations (see, for example, Gosnell 1927; Lasswell 1936). The effect of this tradition has been to add to elite analysis an interest in the effectiveness of differing types of party organization on the performance of such activities as the recruitment of new leaders, the posing of political alternatives, the maintenance of linkages between the electorate and the government bureaucracy, the mobilization of mass political participation, and the formulation of consent. The literature consists mainly of detailed case studies of political parties and covers a wide range of political systems. Comparative analysis mainly takes the form of paired comparisons (as between, for example, the United States and the Soviet Union) or of more-generalized models for describing the dilemmas facing similar groups of nations, such as the developing nations. The analysis of political party organization obviously involves not only its internal structure but also its relation to the sociopolitical balance of society. First, there is the focal issue concerning the capacity of the economic and industrial sector to influence and control political decisions. There seems to be widespread agreement between political sociologists with differing value assumptions that, with the growth of a complex division of labor, industrial and economic organizations are constricted in their capacity for direct management of the political process. The complexity of economic organization is such, it is argued, that economic leaders do not have the skills or programmatic approach to maintain complete dominance over the political party system, be it a single-party or a multiparty structure. The separation of ownership from property control contributes to this process. Furthermore, the development of trade union organizations often serves as a countervailing force to the political power of economic organization in those societies where labor unions are autonomous organizations. Institutional analysis also implies a modification of economic theories of political
POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY power by calling attention to the growth of professional associations, with their ability to exercise political power in the name of both science and public welfare, and to the political power that adheres to large governmental bureaucracies. Paralleling the politics of economic institutions is the basic balance between the political party and the military. The military have considerable actual and potential power because of the vast resources they command and because of the fundamental importance of national security. Nevertheless, personal military dictatorships are generally absent, since they are incompatible with the political requirements of contemporary social structure. Political sociologists have sought to describe and account for the various forms of political balance which operate between modern political parties and the military. There is hardly a society in which the military do not have some political power. The influence of the military varies from that of a pressure group to that of an active coalition partner in the domestic political structure. In some of the developing states the military may serve as the nucleus of a modernizing oligarchy, although it may be a transitional oligarchy. It is striking to note that one-party states, such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China, have succeeded in reducing or eliminating the military as a major independent power base in domestic affairs. There has been a growth of professional and voluntary associations that tend to accumulate political power, and these organizations have been studied, on a selective case study basis, as examples of pressure groups. The social structure of an industrial society or one in the process of modernization produces a variety of groups, such as old-age, youth, and ethnic, cultural, and religious associations, which generate political demands through their associational representatives. In a multiparty system these pressure groups seek direct access to the parliamentarians and administrative leaders and tend to weaken the party. Even in one-party systems, where the base for independent action by voluntary associations is limited or carefully controlled, the official mass party seeks to make use of such organizations as devices for communication and political support. The analysis of elites supplies a conceptual device for understanding the patterns of integration of institutional power. One important convergence in the field of political sociology is in the progressive increase of research emphasis on elite structures. A paradigm has come to pervade the perspectives of political sociologists: the study of social
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stratification is augmented by concepts of public opinion and ideology; institutional analysis is elaborated by the study of elite structures. Elite analysis has shifted from an exclusive concern with social background as a determinant of elite behavior to a broader concern with the processes of recruitment, career development, and patterns of interaction. Modern elites tend increasingly to be selected by criteria of achievement rather than on the basis of inherited social background, and as a result they tend to be recruited from broader and broader social strata. Furthermore, as Karl Mannheim has pointed out (1935), the sheer increase in the size and complexity of elite structures brings about a growth of heterogeneity, a crisis in defining standards of behavior, and the necessity of developing new devices for achieving agreement and consensus among competing elites. The literature of national power structures tends to focus on the analysis of specific elite groups. In particular, there are available a series of national studies in depth which deal with the recruitment and socialization of the parliamentary elites. In addition, attention has been paid on a comparative basis to the differing patterns of pressure groups, especially economic pressure groups, in influencing the political process. However, systematic research on the differentiation and integration of different elite groups, even for countries such as the United States and the Soviet Union, is far from comprehensive and adequate. The persistence of substantive differences between interest group and social strain theories of political sociology is reflected in differing models of elite behavior. In the analysis of the United States, the residues of economic determinism are to be found in C. Wright Mills's "power elite" concept (1956), in which the societal leadership is seen as an integrated ruling group of a capitalist economic system transformed, in part, by the pressures of international relations and exercising power on an arbitrary basis. The leadership elements are based in the industrial and military sectors operating in conjunction with the professional political elite. The economic elites are dominant and fuse with the military, while the political elites have secondary and circumscribed roles. By contrast, a variety of writers, including Robert Dahl, Talcott Parsons, Daniel Bell, and Morris Janowitz, identify a bargaining model in the United States, characterized by a more pluralistic pattern of political power. The elites are seen as much more differentiated and subject to a system of countervailing checks and balances. In this approach the political elites are crucial to the extent that they
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perform the mediating and adjusting role between the various institutional sectors of society. On the basis of this model, the basic political issue is not so much the arbitrary exercise of power by a small, integrated elite as it is the necessity of creating conditions under which a differentiated elite can make effective decisions. In the United States, according to the analysis of Shils (1956) and others, elite integration presents special problems because the creative role of the politician is not adequately understood and the respect accorded him by the other elite sectors and by the electorate at large is relatively low and unstable. Empirical research into elite structures has distinguished between local—community, metropolitan, and regional—elites and national elite systems. Interestingly enough, for the United States both the power elite concept and the bargaining model highlight the separation of economic power and political elites at the local level. A rich body of historical and analytical material describes the process of "bifurcation" of local elites in the United States. According to the power elite model, this is the result of a shift of political interest to the national arena; for the bargaining model, it is the outgrowth of the process of "democratization," which brings representatives of ethnic, religious, and lower-status groups into political power. Macrosociology and political change The elite perspective in political sociology has been paralleled and broadened by those few but influential sociologists who specialize in the study of total societies and political change at the societal level. These men were stimulated by the holistic approach of social anthropologists and, in return, have had a profound impact on political scientists who deal with comparative politics. In the slow and almost discontinuous development of macrosociology the central issue has been the analysis of the impact of modernization on representative institutions. In turn, studies of the spread of industrial institutions have served to highlight the significance of differing political institutions in accounting for various patterns of national development and the persistence of national cultures. Tocqueville's analysis of prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary France, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, published in 1856, and Thorstein Veblen's Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, which appeared in 1914, stand as landmarks of early contributions to the study of the interplay of political institutions and social and economic development. Both men forecast intel-
lectual trends, in that they did not produce national case studies. Instead they were seeking to explain, by implicit comparative analysis, particular sequences of societal change which were reflected, in the first case, in the outbreak of the French Revolution in contrast to the absence of such violence in England and, in the second case, in the late and authoritarian character of industrialization in Germany. Explicit concern with the theoretical aspects of macrosociology is rooted in the diverse approaches to the common problems of societal integration offered by Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Ferdinand Tonnies, whose works, among others, supplied the basis for the subsequent reformulations of Talcott Parsons, in The Structure of Social Action, published in 1937. At the theoretical-empirical level, the intellectual pioneer was W. I. Thomas, in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, published in 1918-1920. This monumental work set forth the empirical requirements for comparative analysis. His standpoint was both intensive, in that he sought to describe and understand the cultural values of Polish society, and comprehensive, in that he sought to analyze the full range of social institutions, from family and kinship groups to political organization. By juxtaposing the development of a relatively integrated Polish society in Europe with the social disorganization of the Polish immigrants in the United States, he highlighted the differential role of values and of political institutions in the process of modernization and urbanization. The intellectual vitality of macrosociological perspectives, however, derives less from formal theoretical considerations and more from the dramatic impact of contemporary history—particularly, first, the rise and transformation of totalitarianism and, second, the rapid process of decolonization after World War n. Joseph Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), developed a comprehensive and generic analysis of the social and political institutions on which capitalism was based. His ideas about the transformation of entrepreneurial activities into a large-scale organization format, the negative role of intellectuals in the politics of capitalism, and the decline of representative institutions have been seminal formulations. Franz Neumann's Behemoth (1942), an analysis of the social organization of the Nazi party and its transformation of German economic and social structure, and Barrington Moore's Terror and Progress (1954), a similarly comprehensive volume for Russia, are most noteworthy studies in depth.
POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY Comparison of the different elements of totalitarianism and their consequences is dealt with by C. J. Friedrich and Z. K. Brzezinski in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956). While it is not easy to categorize the so-called new nations, they display patterns of similarity which contribute to the comparative analysis. There are those nations, such as Japan and Turkey, which were never under Western colonial rule and which embarked early on the process of modernization. However, an overriding distinction, based mainly on the impact of colonial experience, has become operative. It is possible to differentiate the colonial experience of South America, with its wars of liberation in the nineteenth century, from that of the so-called new nations of Africa and Asia, which, with notable specific exceptions, achieved independence quickly and without extensive violence, after World War n. In turn, these new nations can be categorized by the type of metropolitan rule they experienced—British, French, Dutch, etc. —which could be direct or indirect and which was imposed on differing indigenous cultural-religious systems. The central issue in the study of new nations after independence hinges on the limitations and actual breakdown of multiparty systems in supplying the political leadership necessary for economic and social development. Scholarly writing in this area has passed from a focus on individual case studies to a variety of types of comparative analysis. One approach is that found in Edward Shils's Political Development in the New States (19591960), where he presents a series of generalized governmental types, such as traditional oligarchies and modernizing oligarchies, and analyzes their political dilemmas. Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, in The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960), follow a similar approach, but they make use of statistical indicators to explain these types of political regimes. Alternatively, comparative analysis has been pursued by exploring specific hypotheses related to a particular institution, such as the governmental bureaucracy or economic enterprise. An example of this approach is Morris Janowitz' The Military in the Political Development of New Nations (1964), in which the limitations on the capacity of the military to supply political leadership are in part accounted for in terms of internal organizational and professional factors. A fully comprehensive approach to comparative political sociology must encompass the distinction between industrialized and nonindustrialized nations. Such work has been stimulated partly by the
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desire to make use of the data that are available and to produce quantitative comparisons and findings even though the problems of the validity of international statistical sources and the comparability of survey findings have not been solved. Karl Deutsch and his associates are representative of the efforts to uncover patterns of political behavior through refined statistical analysis of the standard census-type data for all the political divisions of the world. By contrast, more selectively and intensively, Almond and Verba (1963) have employed survey research techniques in countries of Europe and in Mexico to probe both political participation and socialization of fundamental political values. Regardless of subject matter, political sociology has developed a common perspective in its focus on political conflict and political consensus. It is not possible to contend that sociologists have neglected the study of political conflict for an undue emphasis on the study of political consensus. The case is that in crisis situations which result in conflict or produce compromise, it is difficult to gain access to relevant data; thus, the development of the "behavioral persuasion" in the study of politics does in fact encourage a focus on routine and ongoing processes, rather than on crises and decision-making points. Nevertheless, there is a body of monographic literature which describes in "natural history" terms the outbreak of political conflict—when the pursuit of group interest leads to action outside the institutionalized forms of political change. This type of phenomenological research has come to encompass the full range of politics, from community conflict to relations between nations. Social-psychological approaches derived from the study of collective behavior or collective problem solving have been employed to handle these empirical materials. The sources of political conflict and the means by which consensus is created are therefore the central issues for political sociologists, even though the practical difficulties of studying these phenomena are considerable. Political sociology and political theory In the nineteenth century the development of representative institutions meant the extension of suffrage and an increase in the importance of parliament as a device for sharing political power and resolving political conflict. In the twentieth century the complexities of social structure and of the governmental process have produced a rise in the influence of executive leadership and a decline in the impact of the parliamentary process. Theorists of
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the democratic process have therefore had to face the task of making an intellectual contribution to "institution building," both to strengthen parliament and to make possible representation at new points in the political process. At this juncture, political sociology faces political theory. Political sociologists have been men of strong opinions, and they have been concerned with the value implications of their work. But it is only since the end of World War n, particularly under the influence of the newer types of economic analysis, that some political sociologists have become interested in theoretical formulations which explore explicitly the conditions under which political democracy would be maximized. If economic analysis is designed to maximize the use of economic resources, then political sociology has the goal of formulating social, psychological, and economic conditions under which political democracy would be maximized. Some theorists, as represented by Schumpeter, hold that elections are the hallmark of democratic society and that, therefore, the clarification of the election process is a key task of social research. Others, such as Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom, are concerned with the formulation of criteria which encompass the practices of administrative and community agencies. Definitions of political democracy have been drawn by some theorists so as to encompass one-party systems as well. Regardless of the particular definitions, political sociology has come to be linked to the analysis of the economic, social, and psychological preconditions for political democracy. MORRIS JANOWITZ [Directly related are the entries POLITICAL BEHAVIOR and POLITICAL SCIENCE. Other relevant material may be found in ELITES; IDEOLOGY; INTEREST GROUPS; MASS SOCIETY; MILITARY; PARTIES, POLITICAL; PoLITICAL GROUP ANALYSIS; POWER; SOCIAL MOVEMENTS; VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS; and in the biographies of MANNHEIM; MARX; MERRIAM; MICHELs; MILLS; MOSCA; SCHUMPETER; THOMAS; WEBER, MAX.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ALLARDT, ERIK; and LITTUNEN, YRJO (editors) 1964 Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems: Contributions to Comparative Political Sociology. Transactions of the Westermarck Society, Vol. 10. Helsinki: The Society. ALMOND, GABRIEL A.; and COLEMAN, JAMES S. (editors) 1960 The Politics of the Developing Areas. Princeton Univ. Press. ALMOND, GABRIEL A.; and VERSA, SIDNEY 1963 The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton Univ. Press. BELL, DANIEL (1960) 1962 The End of Ideology: On
the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. 2d ed., rev. New York: Collier. CHICAGO, UNIVERSITY OF, COMMITTEE FOR THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE NEW NATIONS 1963 Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa. Edited by Clifford Geertz. New York: Free Press. DAHL, ROBERT A. (1961) 1963 Who Governs1? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. DAHRENDORF, RALF (1957) 1959 Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. Rev. & enl. ed. Stanford Univ. Press. -» First published as Soziale Klassen und Klassen konflikt in der industriellen Gesellschaft. DEUTSCH, KARL W. 1953 Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry Into the Foundations of Nationality. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press; New York: Wiley. DUVERGER, MAURICE (1951) 1962 Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State. 2d English ed., rev. New York: Wiley; London: Methuen. -> First published in French. FORTES, MEYER,- and EVANS-PRITCHARD, E. E. (editors) (1940) 1961 African Political Systems. Oxford Univ. Press. FRIEDRICH, CARL J.; and BRZEZINSKI, ZBIGNIEW K. (1956) 1965 Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. 2d ed., rev. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. GERMANI, GINO 1962 Politica y sociedad en una epoca de transicion de la sociedad tradicional a la sociedad de masas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidos. GOSNELL, HAROLD F. 1927 Getting Out the Vote: An Experiment in the Stimulation of Voting. Univ. of Chicago Press. JANOWITZ, MORRIS 1964 The Military in the Political Development of New Nations: An Essay in Comparative Analysis. Univ. of Chicago Press. KEY, V. O. JR. 1961 Public Opinion and American Democracy. New York: Knopf. KORNHAUSER, WILLIAM 1959 The Politics of Mass Society. Glencoe, 111.; Free Press. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. 1936 Politics: Who Gets What, When, How? New York: McGraw-Hill. LASSWELL, HAROLD D.; and KAPLAN, ABRAHAM 1950 Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry. Yale Law School Studies, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1963. LIPSET, SEYMOUR M. 1960 Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. MANNHEIM, KARL (1935) 1940 Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction: Studies in Modern Social Structure. New York: Harcourt. -» First published as Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus. MARSHALL, THOMAS H. (1934-1949) 1950 Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays. Cambridge Univ. Press. MARX, KARL (1852) 1964 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers. -> First published in German. A paperback edition was published in 1964. MARX, KARL; and ENGELS, FRIEDRICH (1845-1846) 1939 The German Ideology. Parts 1 and 3. With an introduction by R. Pascal. New York: International Publishers. H» The full text was first published in 1932 as Die deutsche Ideologic and republished by Dietz Verlag in 1953.
POLITICAL THEORY: Approaches MICHELS, ROBERT (1911) 1959 Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. New York: Dover. -> First published as Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie. A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Collier. MILLS, C. WRIGHT 1956 The Power Elite. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. MOORE, BARRINGTON JR. 1954 Terror and Progress USSR: Some Sources of Change and Stability in the Soviet Dictatorship. Harvard University Russian Research Center Studies, No. 12. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. MOSCA, GAETANO (1896) 1939 The Ruling Class (Elementi di scienza politico). New York: McGraw-Hill. NEUMANN, FRANZ (1942) 1963 Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944. 2d ed. New York: Octagon Books. ROKKAN, STEIN (editor) 1962 Approaches to the Study of Political Participation. Acta sociologica 6, no. 1/2, RUSSETT, BRUCE et al. 1964 World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. SCHUMPETER, JOSEPH A. (1942) 1950 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. 3d ed. New York: Harper; London: Allen & Unwin. -> A paperback edition was published by Harper in 1962. SHILS, EDWARD 1956 The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. SHILS, EDWARD (1959-1960) 1962 Political Development in the New States. The Hague: Mouton. -> First published in Volume 2 of Comparative Studies in Society and History. STAMMER, OTTO (editor) 1960 Politische Forschung; Beitrage zum zehnjdhrigen Bestehen des Instituts fur Politische Wissenschaft. Cologne (Germany): Westdeutscher Verlag. WEBER, MAX (1919) 1946 Politics as a Vocation. Pages 77-128 in Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. WEBER, MAX (1921) 1946 Class, Status, Party. Pages 180-195 in Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
POLITICAL SYSTEMS See under SYSTEMS ANALYSIS.
POLITICAL THEORY The articles under this heading deal with general problems of political theory and their study. Specific concepts are discussed in AUTHORITY; CHARISMA; CONSENSUS; DEMOCRACY; DUTY; EQUALITY; FREEDOM; GENERAL WILL; IDEOLOGY; JUSTICE; LEGITIMACY; MAJORITY RULE; NATIONAL INTEREST; NATURAL LAW; NATURAL RIGHTS; POWER; RESPONSIBILITY; SOCIAL CONTRACT; SOVEREIGNTY; STATE. The development of political thought, primarily its development in the West, is
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also reviewed in ANARCHISM; CONSERVATISM; CONSTITUTIONS AND CONSTITUTIONALISM; ISOLATIONISM; LIBERALISM; MARXISM; MILITARISM; PACIFISM; PLURALISM; SOCIALISM; TOTALITARIANISM; UTILITARIANISM; UTOPIANISM. For discussions of non-Western political thought, see CHINESE POLITICAL THOUGHT; INDIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT. Other
relevant material can be found in GOVERNMENT; POLITICAL SCIENCE; SCIENCE, articles on THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE and THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE; and in the articles listed in the guides under LAW and RELIGION. i. APPROACHES n. TRENDS AND GOALS
Arnold Brecht Sheldon S. Wolin
APPROACHES
1. What is "theory"? The term "theory" is used in various ways. It always refers to "thought," as distinct from "practice" or "acting." Not every thought is theory, however; reminiscing, for example, is not. The original Greek meaning of theoria was that of a well-focused mental look taken at something in a state of contemplation with the intent to grasp it. In this sense, it covered apprehension of being (ontology) as well as causal explanation, religious and philosophical as well as empirical and logical thought. In current usage, two meanings must be distinguished at the outset. One is as broad as the ancient one, or even broader. It comprises a thinker's entire teaching on a subject (his Lehre), including his description of the facts, his explanations (no matter whether religious, philosophical, or empirical), his conception of history, his value judgments, and his proposals of goals, of policy, and of principles. This broad usage prevails, in particular, in dealing with the history of political theory (see section 5). Theory, in its more technical contemporary use, however, has a far narrower meaning. It denotes "explanatory" thought only or, at least, primarily. A "theory," then, is a proposition or set of propositions designed to explain something with reference to data or interrelations not directly observed or not otherwise manifest. Mere "description" is no theory. Nor are "proposals" of goals, of policy, or of evaluations. Only the explanations, if any, offered for descriptions or proposals may be theoretical; the description or the proposal as such is not. On the other hand, theory does include "prediction," provided that it follows from an explanation. No particular quality is expressed when the term "theory" stands alone; the explanation given
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may be true or false, mature or childish, professional or nonprofessional, religious, philosophical, or scientific—any explanation someone offers for a phenomenon may be called his "theory." If used within a scientific context, however, theory is generally meant to refer to scientific explanations only (see next section). 2. What is "scientific" theory? That explanations may be either "scientific" or "nonscientific" is hardly controversial, but the meaning of this distinction is. A fundamental split runs through the ranks of contemporary political theorists and other social scientists. On one side are those who only regard as "science" work done in line with scientific method in the strict sense of empirical observation and logical reasoning; on the other side are those who use the term in a broader sense, in which it also accommodates other types of (true or putative) knowledge, in particular knowledge supplied by "pure reason," intuition, self-evidence, or even religious revelation. The split shows most in moral valuations. The former group holds that the validity of ultimate moral standards of valuation cannot be established through scientific means; the second, using a broader concept of science, holds that it can. No scientific argument can compel a theorist to agree that the term "science" must be used in only one sense. Rather, like "theory," it is used in various ways. It will here be employed in the narrower sense, as modified below. Not every scholar has to accept this use, nor is it claimed that a scientific explanation is always "better" or "truer" than a religious or philosophical one, but merely that it is something else and that the knowledge it supplies is "transmissible qua knowledge" to a larger degree (see next section). 3. Transmissibility of knowledge Whichever way social theorists may use the term "science," they generally concede that there are degrees in the transmissibility of knowledge. We can, as a rule, communicate our "belief" that we know something to others with no particular difficulty, but we cannot always transmit our (real or putative) knowledge qua knowledge to them. Some knowledge is transmissible qua knowledge to anyone who is able to understand the language used and to carry through the experiments or tests referred to; some is not. This makes it advisable to distinguish between scientia transmissibilis and scientia non transmissibilis, although there are gradual transitions, as we shall see presently. First, there would be no transmissible knowl-
edge at all, and consequently no intersubjective type of science, unless certain minimal assumptions were accepted, all of the common-sense type, especially the following: (a) "consubjectivity" (Hocking 1956), that is, the assumption that human beings obtain similar impressions through their senses; (b) some regularity in nature, without which there could be no explanations in general terms; and (c) some degree of human freedom to form an opinion on truth and falsehood. The validity of these assumptions cannot be scientifically demonstrated; they are "methodologically immanent." As they are universally accepted, however, or at least universally comprehended, they do not block transmissibility of knowledge. Second, while "descriptions" of observations are entirely transmissible in principle, other phases of scientific procedure are not to the same degree, especially not the acceptance of (a) observations as sufficiently exact, (£>) descriptions as sufficiently precise, (c) results of observations as actual facts ("reality"), and (d) hypotheses of causal interrelations as valid. Rather, all decisions to accept are exposed to the possibility of challenge. Important as this limitation of transmissibility is, it does not justify the verdict that on that ground no knowledge at all is transmissible, since the knowledge of documentary descriptions remains fully transmissible and so does purely analytical reasoning, as in formal logic and mathematics. Furthermore, our reasons for accepting or refusing to accept and the reports on additional evidence through further observations are also transmissible. Michael Polanyi, who in his book Personal Knowledge (1958) argues impressively that any type of knowledge, even scientific, is ultimately based on personal "belief" or "commitment," has failed to pay attention to the difference between nontransmissible "decisions to accept" and the transmissible material to which they refer; even so, he does not seem to deny the heuristic advantages of generally recognized standards of science. There is a great qualitative difference between the limitations of intersubjective transmissibility in the area of empirical knowledge and those that block transmissibility of moral valuations in the face of opposing valuations held in good faith by others. Here intersubjective transmissibility fails much earlier or indeed altogether. It should not be overlooked, however, that the factual assumptions on which evaluations are based, as well as the biological and psychological factors accounting for evaluations, and the consequences and risks to which the pursuit of cherished values leads, lend themselves to inter subjectively transmissible ex-
POLITICAL THEORY: Approaches aminations. Full exploitation of these methods can do much to reduce the significance of the cleavage between the two schools (see sections 6 and 9). 4. Some distinctions Theory and practice. Practice may serve to generate, test, or refine theories. We learn by doing, by trial (practice) and error (bad theory). But to go ahead in practice with no previous theoretical thinking may prove very costly and lead to irreparable damage that could have been avoided by forming good theories before acting. If a scientific theory is right and complete, it is self-contradictory to say that something "may be good in theory but is not in practice." Theory and description. Both "description" and "theory" (explanation) are legitimate functions of science. To achieve, if not an explanation, at least a full description of observable phenomena may significantly augment the corpus of human knowledge. Although, as defined above, mere description is not theory, theory may help discover describable phenomena and aid in getting them properly described; it alone can determine their "relevance." Theory and hypothesis. The term "hypothesis" denotes a tentative assumption of facts or of interrelations; it is chiefly used in the latter sense. A "theory," in explaining phenomena, generally refers to some new or old "hypothesis" or law but itself is not a hypothesis; it merely employs one for the purpose of explanation and may even consist solely of that, especially in formulating a new hypothesis. Theory and law. If used in the realm of "is," the term "law" denotes regularity of interrelations. Propositions intended to describe regularities (laws) are, in principle, always subject to challenge in view of conflicting observations. Strictly speaking, therefore, there are no "statements" of laws but only "hypotheses" about laws. If used in the realm of "ought," the term "law" denotes a "norm of conduct" that has been set by someone, man or God. To enumerate "nature" among the potential originators of moral norms is logically objectionable unless nature is conceived of as itself having a moral will or purpose; otherwise the moral norms cannot be logically regarded as "set" by nature. If, however, moral norms are conceived of as set by God, it is not in conflict with logic to look to nature for intimations of the moral intentions of its creator. Theories of this kind, therefore, are not blocked by the demands of logic; but they are "nonscientific" (except in hypothetical terms) because of their reference to premises that can be neither confirmed nor refuted with scientific means.
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Theory and philosophy. A theory tries to explain "something"; a philosophy, in one use of the term, "everything." Philosophical explanations are theories, too, but in their most characteristic efforts, nonscientific ones. They begin where science in the narrower sense of the term leaves off. A few philosophers have attempted to reduce philosophy to strictly scientific work (Edmund Husserl); yet the prevailing use of the term leaves the philosopher free to follow intuition and to speculate about things and interrelations not accessible to science, at least if that is done with full regard to the results of scientific work. Nor is the meaning of philosophy limited to "explanations"; philosophers may, and often do, attempt to "describe" Being as they see it. To that extent philosophy is not "theory," not even nonscientific theory, but rather "ontology." The advantage of philosophy over science is its greater freedom in methods; its disadvantage, the lack of transmissibility qua knowledge. Despite this shortcoming, philosophy performs an irreplaceable function in human society because of the irrepressible human search for the unknown. Theory and reason. Any attempt to explain something is an act of reasoning. "Scientific" theory tends to preclude "loose" reasoning in favor of precisely determined types of reasoning, especially strictly logical deductions from premises whose origin is exactly stated, and logical inductions (generalizations) from observed facts, rendering account of the number and type of observations. When, in deductive reasoning, premises are not won through induction but regarded as religiously revealed, self-evident, grasped by intuition, accepted as traditional, or merely postulated as heuristically useful starting points, this should be clearly stated. Time and again there have been attempts to break through the walls of strictly scientific reasoning by recourse to principles or maxims considered "reasonable" in daily speech, especially humanitarian principles or "the foundations of Western civilization." However, if those principles themselves are questioned, reference to a person's intuition, received revelation, etc. offers no "transmissible" knowledge. What can be transmitted, even then, is thought on the consequences and risks involved in following or failing to follow the principles in question. No limits are set in scientific theory to the heuristic type of reasoning (for example, by analogy, intuition, guessing, etc.) engaged in during the preparatory stage of selecting promising topics for research or working hypotheses. Theory and models. In order not to be bogged down by the great number of variables in theo-
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retical research in political science, it is often helpful to construct a "model" out of assumptions and hypotheses, for example, a specific type of society or of government (see section 12), and then to work within the framework of that model. The model may reflect either conditions actually prevailing at a definite time and place or alternative conditions considered for the purpose of theoretical explorations. In either case, assumptions and working hypotheses should be clearly stated. 5. History of political theory Writing on the history of political theory has rarely if ever been limited to "explanations" and even less so to strictly "scientific" efforts in this direction. Rather; employing the term "theory" in its broadest sense, it has generally included (a) nonscientific types of explanation, especially those of a religious and philosophical character, (b) nonscientific value judgments, especially moral ones, (c) proposals offered for the selection of political goals and for political actions, and (d) mere descriptions of phenomena as seen by political philosophers of the past. It has, therefore, been a blend of philosophy, scientific theory, and description, with far more space and emphasis given to nonscientific philosophical aspects than to strictly scientific ones. Typical issues have included Plato's "ideas" conceived of as essences having some sort of reality, Christian theological dogmas based on revelation and tradition, and philosophical doctrines that claim to constitute superior knowledge, especially those ascribing to pure reason the power to reveal truth independently of experience. They have included, more specifically, the doctrines of natural law in the sense of a code of moral prescriptions allegedly to be found in nature or reason, and its progeny, the doctrines of natural rights. Indeed, natural law constituted the very core of political science and political theory from about 1600 to 1900. The main topics treated under the guidance of the various doctrines and approaches were the state, its nature, origin, and proper ends; the theory of social contract; the proper relationship between church and state; sovereignty; the best form of government; and the implications of natural law for politics. Many of these historical efforts have been important stages in the development of human thought and Western civilization; they have influenced ideals, actions, and the history of institutions. As theories, however, most of them were based on belief rather than science in the narrower sense of the term. This is not meant to say that their results must have been false or that religious or philo-
sophical reasoning ought to be abandoned. The only concern here is with the fact that the history of "scientific" political theory must be culled from its fusion with nonscientific religious or philosophical thought. Ideas and methods of a strictly scientific character have rarely been entirely absent in political thought. The ancient Greek ability of abstraction and of logical and mathematical thinking laid the foundation of modern science. Sophists and their opponents amply referred to empirical observations. The Socratic method of confronting debaters with questions on the meaning and the implications of their propositions and with objections that led them to reconsideration, modification, or selfcontradiction was the early prototype of good scientific method ("clarification of the meaning of propositions and of their implications"). Plato's and Aristotle's works abound in psychological observations that, although not subjected to tests in the modern sense, still offer valuable scientific contributions or cues. Aristotle cultivated the methodical gathering of factual data as the base for theoretical work; he carefully examined the risks and consequences involved in institutional arrangements, actual or imagined ones. There has hardly been a political philosopher who did not take some time off from speculation to examine facts and human motives. The preponderance of religious authority in medieval thought, however, beginning with St. Augustine (354-430), led to a millennium of dearth in strictly scientific work. There was a partial revival when reason and Aristotelian thought were being readmitted into scientific work as supplementary sources of knowledge to the extent that they were not in conflict with revealed religious truth (Thomas Aquinas, 12257-1274). But several centuries were still to pass before the typically modern type of scientific theory emerged in the realistic examination of actual conditions and motivations by Machiavelli (1469-1527), the emphasis on inductive methods by Bacon (15611626), the experimental and mathematical approaches of Galileo (1564-1642), Kepler (15711630), and Newton (1642-1727), and the ensuing ascendancy of empiricism. These new methods stimulated scientific reflection in political theory. No sharp lines, however, were being drawn yet between religion, philosophy, and science. The various approaches were used side by side, often queerly intermingled and, even if scientific in intent, frequently based on erroneous factual assumptions (for example, social contract) or fallacious logical thinking (for example, inferring "ought" from "is," as in natural law, or necessity from
POLITICAL THEORY: Approaches consistency, as in theories of sovereignty [see section 11]). Important further steps toward modern scientific theory include the emphasis on the significance of "doubt" in the works of Descartes (1591-1650) and Hume (1711-1776), and the rejection of "pure reason" as a source of knowledge by Hume and, less radically, by Kant (1724-1804). Kant restricted the reliability of pure reason as a source of theoretical knowledge in the realm of "is" to only a few conditions and steps of thought, such as the "categories" of mental operations; in moral ("practical") questions, however, his doctrine that we have a priori knowledge of the basic moral law still maintained an absolutistic approach. Another great scientific impulse for political theory sprang from the work done by Montesquieu (1689-1755) on the political influence of environment (geography, milieu, etc.) and on methods that are apt to check the abuse of power (separation of powers). The vigor with which, pursuing these approaches, the founding fathers of the United States studied the implications, risks, and consequences of institutions and the methods by which the abuse of power could be checked (separation, federalism, a bill of rights) highlighted the development of scientific political thought. For this reason, the Federalist became a milestone in the evolution of scientific political theory. But the authors blended scientific with religious and philosophical approaches (trust in God, natural law, natural rights). Characteristic of this promiscuity are the celebrated words in the Declaration of Independence that proclaim not that all men are equal but that they are "created" equal, and not that they possess certain inalienable rights but that they are "endowed by their Creator" with them. Indeed, to an extent seldom fully realized, our Western values are based not on science but on religion, history, tradition, and the creative idealism of man intent on forming a world in which he considers life worth living. The separation of philosophical and scientific ways of thinking from religious ones began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England and France. Philosophical and scientific approaches remained interwoven, however, until, in the course of the nineteenth century, they, too, began to part company; indeed, their separation did not grow sharp and consistent until the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. What finally brought it to completion, at least within a broad and influential section of social theorists, was the deliberate elimination of nonscientific elements in what came to be called "scien-
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tific method" and in its offspring, "scientific value relativism" (see next section). 6. Scientific relativity of political values "Philosophical" value relativism is dead today, but "scientific" value relativism is not. There is no need of relativity in speculative philosophical thinking on values. Dogmatic relativity is rather out of place there. Any proposition asserting, as a compelling doctrine, that "there are no absolute values" or that "all values are relative" must indeed be rejected; to claim absolute truth for a proposition that there is no absolute truth is self-contradictory. But an examination of values that keeps within the boundaries of well-defined scientific methods must be as relative in its results as it is in its methods. This is the meaning of "scientific value relativism." It does not teach that all values are relative and that there are no absolute values. Instead, it merely says that the question whether something is "valuable" can be examined scientifically only in relation either to (a) some goal or purpose for the pursuit of which it is or is not useful (valuable), or to (fo) ideas held by someone regarding what is or is not valuable. "Ultimate," "highest," "absolute" values or standards of values are "chosen" by mind or will, or conceivably "grasped" by faith, intuition, or instinct; but they are not "proven" by science, although science can help a great deal in clarifying the meaning of ideas about values and the consequences and risks entailed in their pursuit (Brecht 1959, pp. 117— 118). On these grounds, the relative approach to values is mandatory for "scientific" examinations only; it does not bind religious or philosophical thought. Nonscientific convictions held on the absolute character of certain moral values may well be in line with transcendental truth; they are if there is a God who has set the order of values as we feel it to be, but whether that is so is not for science either to affirm or to deny. The rebuttal that scientific arguments too are in need of "acceptance" (Kaufmann 1944) or in need of "belief" or "commitment" (Polanyi 1958) does not wipe out the qualitative difference in transmissibility that severs evaluative from scientific arguments (see section 3). Historically speaking, scientific value relativism is of rather recent origin. It did not come to be overtly postulated until the turn of the century. Its first formulations—still imperfect in part—were published by German and Austrian scholars who had to vindicate their academic independence from the dominant fashion of political value judgments around them. Among them were philosophers Hein-
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rich Rickert and Georg Simmel, political scientist Georg Jellinek, sociologist Max Weber (who in 1904 wrote the most influential article on it), and the jurists Hermann Kantorowicz, Gustav Radbruch, and Hans Kelsen. The first four did not use the name "relativism"; the last three did. Less outspoken varieties of the same methodological principle ("latent" relativism) had begun to permeate the work of many other social scientists elsewhere— especially American pragmatists and lawyers such as Justice Holmes, French sociologists, and legal positivists everywhere—at about the same time, and have spread ever since. 7. Scientific and legal validity distinguished Scientific validity of moral and legal principles derived from nature (natural law) has frequently been claimed on the ground that otherwise law courts, government officials, and the public at large would have to accept as legally valid any governmental commands, even those of the most cruel character, if given in a formally correct manner. This reasoning is fallacious, however. Rejection of the scientific validity of natural law does not imply acceptance of legal positivism; the latter is not a scientific necessity. Whether commands issued in the form of law (for example, laws declaring attempted suicide, mercy killing, adultery, homosexuality, racially mixed marriages, or violations of "National Socialist principles" to be punishable crimes, or laws ordering mass killings of a certain type of people) should be considered legally valid, that is, binding for courts, government officials, and the public at large, depends on human ideas and designs concerning the legitimate powers of government. These ideas and designs are motivated not only, and not even chiefly, by scientific thought, but more generally by ideas concerning the desirable type of government and the desirable way of life. Whether commands exceed the powers people want to concede to government is a question quite distinct from that of violating scientific truth. He who denies scientific validity to higher law or natural law may yet deny legal (juridical) validity to legislative commands not because they are in conflict with scientific truth, but because they have been issued in excess of the powers conceded to government. 8. Natural law and scientific political theory Many references to natural law as a legitimate source of scientific political theory either are logically defective because they derive inferences in the form of "ought" from observations in the realm
of "is" or are otherwise lacking in intersubjective transmissibility because they presuppose the divine will they want to prove. There are, however, three natural-law categories that can be fruitfully developed in scientific political theory. They constitute a significant meeting ground for the two antagonistic schools. Universal characteristics of human nature. Our knowledge of typical characteristics of human nature is "transmissible" qua knowledge to the extent that the respective traits are actually shared. But which traits are present in all men, or even in all members of a large group, cannot be decided by pure reason, since inductive generalizations are in need of empirical corroboration. Often empirical evidence is so strong as to leave no room for reasonable doubt; this applies to the characteristic phenomena of hunger, thirst, pain, joy, sexual desire, desire for affection, and the ability to think, to remember, to reflect, and to concentrate attention on something that is being thought of as real or as only imaginary. Regarding some other traits, the evidence, while less compelling, may still be strong enough to justify the tentative "hypothesis" that a feature is universal, for example the desire for being respected by others and for selfrespect. Similarly in the area of justice, there is strong evidence that the experience of ideas or feelings of justice and injustice is a universal human phenomenon and that even under the most diverse cultural environments such ideas or feelings always include postulates of (a) truth, or veracity, in discriminatory statements, (£>) generality of the system of values applied, (c) equal treatment of what is equal under the accepted system, (d) respect for freedom insofar as it is not in conflict with that system, and (e) respect for the limits of possibility set by nature. Empirical research on the universal nature of these and other human traits is highly significant for political theory. Tentative hypotheses, formed on the basis of material already available, may anticipate the results of further research. But the ever-present temptation to consider one's own preferences universal must be resisted in strictly scientific work. Furthermore, the theorist must always keep in mind that universality of a human trait alone constitutes no sufficient ground for the inference that it must be universally respected. The principle that all men, in spite of their individual differences, ought to be treated as being essentially equal has its source in religion, history, tradition, and man's creative idealism rather than in science, which can do little more than try to find out in
POLITICAL THEORY: Approaches what respects men are or are not equal. The only scientific conclusion safely to be drawn from the universality of human traits is that ignoring them will lead to resentment, opposition, and possibly revolt or revolution; respecting them will please those concerned, but will possibly antagonize others. These inferences are by no means negligible. They enable us, for example, to expect wide support for shining acts of justice and wide opposition to acts of flagrant injustice even where support or opposition does not immediately show up. Self-avenging laws of human conduct (poena naturalis). Just as our knowledge of the nature of things often enables us to predict undesired consequences of individual behavior (for example, the early waste of physical strength and moral fiber in the dissipated life of a playboy and drunkard), so our knowledge of social interrelations justifies predictions of undesired consequences likely to follow, for example, from selfishness, visionless materialism, corruption, and lack of "virtue," especially from absence of a spirit of service and devotion in public life. Impossibility (limited possibility). The objection raised against a proposed political action that it cannot be executed, or against a proposed goal that it cannot be reached by the means available or by any means, is relevant irrespective of any value judgment regarding the desirability of the goals pursued. The limits set by nature or environment to what can be done or attained are manifold; there are physical, biological, psychological, logical, and legal impossibilities. Most are so obvious that political scientists tend to overlook their theoretical significance. It is impossible to work continuously for 24 hours a day, or to work without food, or to work hard when ill and underfed; or not to think when fully awake, or to enforce a command not to think of something; to equalize the physical and mental conditions of all individuals, their state of health, the length of their lives, their character, the family life in which they grow up, the happiness of their matings, the number, length of life, and behavior of their children and friends, the satisfaction they find in their work, and many other conditions of personal happiness; to establish full economic equality or, if established for a day, to maintain it over any length of time; to supply desired goods to everyone who wants them if there are fewer goods than wanted; to have any two of the following at the same time: equality per capita, equality according to need, equality according to quality of work, equality of opportunity; to make economic conditions more equal than they are
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without interfering in liberty (Brecht 1959, pp. 425 ff.). Also, it is often impossible to reach a desired goal with no undesired side effects. More specifically, it is impossible to guarantee that a person to whom dictatorial power is given, even if he be good and wise today, will be so tomorrow and that his successor will also be good and wise. It is impossible for one man, or a small group, personally to watch over many millions of people or to control the conduct of more than a small number of agents and keep well informed of their doings without the aid of independent institutions (ibid., pp. 437 ff.). The limits set by nature to a man's direct "span of control" illustrate that social scientists can make certain nonmoral statements based on the laws of nature (in this case, biological ones) with the same assuredness as natural scientists. [See NATURAL LAW.] 9. Political goals It has often been said that scientific political theory can deal with means only and must leave the deliberation of ends (goals, goal-values) entirely to politics, philosophy, or religion. This sharp antithesis is incorrect, however. Scientific political theory is able to deal with ends in various significant ways. It can examine (a) the meaning of goals or goal-values and all the implications of that meaning, (&) the possibility or impossibility of reaching them, (c) the cost of pursuing and reaching them, especially the price to be paid through the sacrifice of other goals or values and through other undesired side effects, (d*) all other consequences and risks involved, and (e) implications, consequences, and risks of alternative goals (goalvalues), so as to make an informed choice possible. To engage in these various types of legitimate examination of goals is the proper task of scientific political theory. Far greater efforts of political scientists should be diverted to the critical examination of goals and goal-values than have been in the past several decades; indeed, the examination of goals might well be put back in the center of political theory, where it used to be in former centuries ; however, in scientific work it should now be carried through with strictly scientific means only. 10. Basic units of political theory There has been a growing trend recently toward "conceptualization" in political theory, especially a search for "basic" concepts apt to be useful as building stones for a mature political theory. To be useful they have to be not only clear but realistic in the sense that they or their analytical derivatives
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correspond to carefully observed and politically relevant facts. The following concepts have been suggested as basic: Group (Arthur F. Bentley, Harold D. Lasswell, David Truman, David Easton, Oliver Garceau, Earl Latham, Richard W. Taylor, Phillip Monypenny, Gabriel Almond, et al.). The group is in many contexts regarded as a more realistic basic concept in political theory than the individual [see POLITICAL GROUP ANALYSIS; POLITICAL SCIENCE]. Equilibrium (same authors). Borrowed from physics and economics, this concept is considered particularly useful for political theory as well, although some writers have wondered whether "disequilibrium" would not be more realistic as a focal point in politics since no full equilibrium ever seems to be established. Power, control, influence (George E. G. Catlin, Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell, C. Wright Mills, Bertrand Russell, Hans Morganthau, James G. March, et al.). These have been called the "most basic" concepts for political theory. Action (Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, Hannah Arendt, et al.). This concept, in the sense of a deliberate new start from a given situation directed toward some anticipated goal and engaged in with intelligence and expense of energy, puts emphasis on a distinctly human factor. Elite (Vilfredo Pareto, Harold Lasswell, Milovan Djilas, et al.). The idea of elite emphasizes the basic relevance of the phenomenon that there are leading groups or strata in any system of society [see ELITES]. Choice and decision making (Max Weber, Gustav Radbruch, Chester I. Barnard, Herbert Simon, Talcott Parsons, Arnold Brecht, et al.). These are concepts that have risen sharply in the esteem of political theorists as basic ones for descriptive as well as theoretical work [see DECISION MAKING]. Anticipated reaction (Carl J. Friedrich) and game (John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern, et al.). Both are subconcepts within the general theory of choice and decision making—and they have led to a particularly intensive, highly technical series of studies [see SIMULATION]. Function (Robert K. Merton, Talcott Parsons, et al.). In the sense of a function or dysfunction performed—either purposively or with no purpose —for or against society as a whole or some part of it by any socially relevant factor (including usage, belief, behavior pattern, institution, science), this is primarily a sociological concept apt to serve descriptive purposes, but it also has some explanatory merit [see FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS]. There is, furthermore, a marked tendency to
form concepts that are apt to serve as basic units not for one field alone but for all the social sciences or indeed for all science. Useful as the newly developed concepts are, it would be misleading to expect that they will supplant the continuing relevance of older concepts, such as institution, government, justice, liberty, equality, and—more basic perhaps than all others —cause and effect, consequences, risks, possibility and impossibility (see section 8), and universal human features. No all-comprehensive political theory can be based on only one of the older or newer concepts in isolation, and no single concept is likely to emerge as the most basic, most constructive one. Each deals with a different aspect of the multifaceted phenomena referred to when we say "political." This warning applies, in particular, to overestimating the concept of "power" as the basic unit of political science. This concept, not unlike that of happiness, which previously had long dominated Anglo-American political theory, is too broad and too vague to serve as a well-defined basic unit. It disregards the great variety of both means and purposes of power. Brute force or threat of its use, prestige, authority, persuasion, wealth, personal attraction, beauty, charisma, heroic deeds, prominence in sports or arts, humility, altruism—all give "power." Even ideas have often been called powers. Furthermore, a person may not have sought the power he has and may not use it for political purposes. Although not apt to be treated as the basic unit in political theory, the concept of power, if used with care and qualification, is indispensable for it. We must, in particular, distinguish between that type of power ("p-power") that denotes the constitutional or legal right or authority to do something (for example, the power of a legislature to issue valid laws), and the factual power ('V-power") to influence the use of the legal power or to circumvent it [see POWER]. 11. Changes in theoretical topics The topics that had attracted the most attention up to the beginning of this century, such as the ends of the state and the proper goals and the best form of government (see section 5), have receded to the background under the impact of the distinction between scientific and nonscientific political theory, since scientific theory is unable to say what is "best" or "proper" in absolute terms, that is, with no reference to the questions "for whom" and "for what" it is best or proper. Once that has been specified, scientific theory can offer its services; but it cannot, by itself, answer the
POLITICAL THEORY: Approaches questions "for whom" or "for what" in absolute terms (see section 12). Likewise, the concept of "sovereignty" has lost much of the glamour that held political theorists spellbound for more than three hundred years [see SOVEREIGNTY]. It has not, however, completely lost theoretical significance. It is logically conclusive to argue that (a) as long as people are inclined and able to resort to violence, peace can be secured only by preventing such outbursts, if need be, coercively, and (b) as long as several agencies, whose measures may be in conflict, assume that preventive function, peace is not secured unless one agency or body is given the final decision on quarrels between them. Hence, under the two major assumptions that peace is always more desirable than violent action and that coercive intervention by some higher authority is always more valuable than private violence, the postulate of sovereignty remains theoretically useful, provided it means no more than the logical derivations from those two assumptions. The orthodox theory of sovereignty, however, did involve far more than that. It included a sort of triangular definition of sovereignty, state, and law to the effect that "state" is the unit within which "sovereignty" determines what is or is not "law," and that law is only that, and all that, which the sovereign state determines to be law. This conceptual triangle, persuasive by its logical consistency, cannot claim to be the only logically consistent theory or to be the only desirable one. Even under its own terms it would be more consistent to ascribe sovereign power to a global type of government rather than to isolated state governments. Furthermore, some functions may be either so peaceful or so specific in character as not to need a common sovereign to prevent violence among the agents devoted to their care. Finally, certain norms may be considered legally valid without being laid down by the government (for example, those demanding respect for human dignity) or legally invalid despite being proclaimed by it (for example, cruel commands). Analysis of such problems remains a proper function of political theory. Other topics of strictly scientific political theory include the following: (a) Types of power and influence, with special regard to novel methods and discoveries of psychology, manipulation of opinions, and mass-media and other communication problems. (b) Types of choices and decision making, with special regard to distinctions to be made between them. (c) Types of values or valuations that can be distinguished theoretically as objects of choice (de-
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cision), or types of goals, and the implications, consequences, and risks of their pursuit. (d) Rival forms of government, conceivable alternatives never tried, and the implications, consequences, and risks involved in each. (e~) Details of constitutions, and the implications, consequences, and risks of each. (f) Alternatives in the setup of administrative institutions and in the methods of manning them, and the implications, consequences, and risks of each. (#) Alternatives in the conduct of foreign policy, and the implications, consequences, and risks of each. 12. Scientific political theory of democracy This section will illustrate briefly the manner in which modern scientific theory tackles types of government. Although only democracy will be analyzed here, other types of government are subject to the same method of scientific examination. No scientific argument enables us to compel the use of any particular definition of the terms "democracy," "communism," "socialism," and the like. Neither the etymological origin of the terms nor the meaning that has been actually associated with them at a particular time and place justifies conclusive statements to the effect that they should be used one way and not another, especially since their use has actually changed a great deal in the course of history. Scientific political theory can, however, greatly facilitate an orderly discussion by listing and, through neutral symbols, distinguishing the changing historical and contemporary uses, and the evolving alternative uses. Thus, a theoretical analysis of democracy (D) may list the following contemporary uses: D! = M = Majority rule in the sense that the majority is considered entitled to decide any question in any manner. D2 = hR + 1C + M[l - (hR + iC]) = Human rights and independent courts considered exempt from executive and legislative interference, majority rule limited to other affairs (this is today the prevailing use of the term "democracy" in Western language). D3 = ->• gW + E = Successful promotion of the general welfare and of equality, regarded as both goal and criterion of democracy, its achievement, if necessary, to be taken care of by a specifically trained "vanguard" of the people (this is the current communist use of the term "democracy"). D 4 , D 5 , • • • = Any other meaning of the term; either discovered in actual usage or proposed. From these basic distinctions, political theory can proceed to further specifications by listing, in
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each case, the ends (ideals, goals) whose pursuit is meant to be suggested or postulated by the term democracy, and the means (institutions) by which they are to be pursued. Under alternative D, (current Western use) we may tentatively put down as ends: government for the people, respect of human dignity, development of each to the best of his abilities, general welfare, liberty, equality (at least of opportunity and before the law), and justice; and as means: government by the people, universal adult suffrage, periodic elections of legislatures and of the chief executive or cabinet, independent courts, civil liberties (freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, religion, etc.), and other items. Again, both these lists of ends and means cannot be fixed dogmatically as the only correct ones, but must either refer to definite historical examples, such as the American, British, French, West German, Swiss, or Scandinavian specimens, or be kept open for any proposed modification or addition. All this amounts to building a series of "models" as the base for detailed work (see section 4). Each item on the list of ends is then to be subjected to a thorough cross-examination of its meaning, possible alternatives of its meaning, implications, consequences, risks (see section 9), and of its compatibility with the other goal-items. Whenever goal-items collide, possible modifications and relative priorities must be explored. Each item on the list of means is likewise examined as to its meaning, possible alternatives of meaning, implications, consequences, and risks, and especially regarding the compatibility or incompatibility of consequences to be expected from the use of the respective means with the ends in the previous column. To illustrate: (a) The meansitem "periodic elections" involves the emergence of parties and of uneven influences exercised on the outcome of the elections by party bosses or secretaries, press lords, radio magnates, money interests, etc. (£>) Elections may be carried through in various ways (plurality, absolute majority, proportional representation, etc.). Scientific political theory examines the distinctly different consequences of these methods for the results of elections, for the types of candidates that are likely to be presented and elected, for their behavior before election and after, especially in the legislative bodies (on the assumption that they want to be re-elected), and the influence all this is likely to have on the election of cabinets where that is a function of the assembly (majority or coalition cabinets), on the frequency and character of cabinet crises, on presidential elections, and the like, (c) Majority decisions of legislative assemblies differ according to
the modes of vote taking used, particularly in the event that three or more alternative proposals are put to a vote. Small groups (like the Gauche radicale in France from 1924 to 1932 or the Free Democratic party in West Germany around 1960) may obtain pivotal importance and power quite out of proportion to the number of people represented by them. The internal organization of the legislatures (committees, rules of procedure, etc.) also influences the results, (d) The item "executive branch" involves the problem of public administration. Scientific political theory examines the consequences and risks that must be expected from the establishment of any of various alternative systems of administrative organization, such as the American "departmental" or the European "ministerial" system, and of either a relatively stable body of public employees (civil service) or a relatively floating one (spoils system), and of the various types of education and training of employees, (e) The institutional item "civil liberties" calls for an examination of the extent to which the respective institution is apt to serve the ideal goals or to thwart their realization. Numerous other topics and subtopics can be examined in the same way. The result, almost item for item, is certain to be that some of the consequences of the institutional means inevitably collide with the envisaged ends. These means lead, in part, to nonequality instead of equality, to decisions by minorities instead of majorities, to government not consented to instead of government by consent of the governed, and to bargaining for special interests instead of promotion of the general welfare; in the case of public administration they lead either to favoritism (nonequality) and inefficiency (no general welfare) or to bureaucracy (rule by minorities, nonequality, although possibly efficiency); in the case of civil liberties they lead to criminals going scot-free because of procedural restrictions (nonjustice) and to slander and blackmail facilitated by the institutional liberty of the press (nonliberty, nonjustice), etc. Examination of these and other inconsistencies can be accompanied by the discussion of potential "remedies" (reforms), such as corrupt practices acts or new elections ("turn the rascals out"). Other great problems calling for theoretical investigation include the handicaps that, under the democratic rules of the political game, slow down or entirely prevent long-range planning not only where such planning is clearly undesirable but also where, in the interest of the democratic goals, it is actually desired by the majority of the people. Under the democratic rules, no majority of today
POLITICAL THEORY: Approaches can bind the majorities of tomorrow, except by constitutional amendments (or, to a lesser degree, treaties and contracts). This handicap calls for close theoretical studies of its consequences and risks and of possible remedies, especially the drafting of minimal deviations from the democratic structure that might be considered, for example, when an underdeveloped country is in need of industrialization or other reforms that cannot be achieved under the democratic rules or at least not as quickly as desirable or necessary. It is theoretically of great importance also to examine the conditions of life, communication, education, public spirit, etc., that must be assumed to prevail in a country in order to enable the democratic form of government to operate in line with expectations. Distortions that are likely to follow from the absence of any or all of those conditions must be exposed to adequate attention. Finally, no theory of democracy is complete unless it includes a comparative analysis of the implications, consequences, and risks that pertain to rival forms of government, since the claim to superiority raised for democracy is based, to a considerable extent, not on faultless excellence but on the graver perils that threaten from other forms of government, especially totalitarian ones. [See DEMOCRACY; DICTATORSHIP; TOTALITARIANISM.] This illustration shows not only that there are a great number of topics that need close theoretical examination but that a scientific political "theory of democracy," fully carried through, would fill many volumes. This may serve to explain why no such comprehensive work yet exists. Concentrating on a few items that seem most important to a particular writer is feasible, of course, and may be useful. Also, the painstaking work on individual items that is going on in many countries might be supplemented by periodic surveys of the whole field, which would consolidate the results of the partial studies. Whenever a political leader, a political philosopher, or a scientific theorist produces what he claims to be constructive ideas about a desirable remodeling of democracy through new formulations of goals or new modifications of means, it becomes the task of scientific political theory to examine the implications, consequences, and risks. ARNOLD BRECHT BIBLIOGRAPHY
The history of political thought is reviewed in Dunning 1902; 1905; 1920; Ebenstein 1954; Friedrich 1955; and Sabine 1937. For the history of scientific research see Anderson 1964. Brecht 1966; 1967; Passerin d'Entreves 1951; Rommen 1936; Strauss 1953; Verdross 1958; Wolf 1955 provide historical and analytic discussions of natural
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law. Surveys of contemporary political theory and its study appear in Crick 1959; Hyneman 1959; Robson 1954; UNESCO 1950 (especially the contributions by Raymond Aron, Thomas I. Cook, Harold D. Lasswell, and B. E. Lippincott); and Waldo 1956. The following works contribute to contemporary political theory and its problems: Barker 1951; Brecht 1959; Catlin 1962; Dahl 1956; Duverger 1959; Easton 1953; Flechtheim 1953; Friedrich 1963; Jouvenel 1955; Kaufmann 1944; Kelsen 1945; Lasswell 1948; 1963; Lerner & Lasswell 1951; The Limits of Behavioralism in Political Science 1962 (essays by David Easton, Heinz Eulau, Mulford Q. Sibley, and Richard C. Snyder); Lippincott 1965; Maclver 1947; Merriam 1945; Meynaud 1959; Parsons 1951; Riemer 1962; Truman 1951; Weber 1904-1917 (note particularly the essay on pages 49-112, " 'Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy"); Weldon 1953. ALMOND, GABRRIEL A. 1966 Political Theory and Political Science. American Political Science Review 60:869-879. ANDERSON, WILLIAM 1964 Man's Quest for Political Knowledge: The Study and Teaching of Politics in Ancient Times. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. BARKER, ERNEST 1951 Principles of Social and Political Theory. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. BRECHT, ARNOLD 1959 Political Theory: The Foundations of Twentieth Century Political Thought. Princeton Univ. Press. -> Subsequently published in German, Spanish, and Portuguese. BRECHT, ARNOLD 1966 Aus ndchster Ndhe; Lebenserinnerungen: 1884-1927. Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt. -> See especially the theoretical chapters— 12, 23, 30, and 49. BRECHT, ARNOLD 1967 Mit der Kraft des Geistes; Lebenserinnerungen zweite Hdlfte: 1927-1967. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. -» See especially the theoretical chapters—15, 35, 42, and 50. CATLIN, GEORGE E. G. 1962 Systematic Politics: Elementa politica et sociologica. Univ. of Toronto Press. CRICK, BERNARD 1959 The American Science of Politics. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. DAHL, ROBERT A. 1956 A Preface to Democratic Theory. Univ. of Chicago Press. DUNNING, WILLIAM A. (1902) 1936 A History of Political Theories: Ancient and Mediaeval. New York: Macmillan. DUNNING, WILLIAM A. (1905)1938 A History of Political Theories: From Luther to Montesquieu. New York: McGraw-Hill. DUNNING, WILLIAM A. (1920) 1936 A History of Political Theories: From Rousseau to Spencer. New York: Macmillan. DUVERGER, MAURICE (1959) 1961 Methodes des sciences sociales. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. -> First published as Methodes de la science politique. EASTON, DAVID 1953 The Political System: An Inquiry Into the State of Political Science. New York: Knopf. EBENSTEIN, WILLIAM (1954) 1960 Modern Political Thought: The Great Issues. 2d ed. New York: Holt. ESCHENBURG, THEODOR 1965 Uber Autoritdt. Frankfurt am Main (Germany): Suhrkamp. FLECHTHEIM, OSSIP K. 1953 Politik als Wissenschaft. Berlin: Weiss. FRIEDRICH, CARL J. (1955) 1958 The Philosophy of Law in Historical Perspective. Univ. of Chicago Press. -> First published in German. FRIEDRICH, CARL J. 1963 Man and His Government: An Empirical Theory of Politics. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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POLITICAL THEORY: Trends and Goals
HOCKING, WILLIAM ERNEST 1956 The Coming of World Civilization. New York: Harper. HUSSERL, EDMUND (1913) 1952 Ideas.- General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. New York: Macmillan. -» A translation of Volume 1 of Ideen zu einer reinen Phdnomenologie und phdnomenologischen Philosophic. HYNEMAN, CHARLES S. 1959 The Study of Politics: The F.csent State of American Political Science. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. JOUVENEL, BERTRAND DE (1955) 1957 Sovereignty: An Inquiry Into the Political Good. Univ. of Chicago Press. -> Translated from the French edition and expanded by the author. KAUFMANN, FELIX 1944 Methodology of the Social Sciences New York: Oxford Univ. Press. KELSEN, HANS (1945) 1961 General Theory of Law and State. New York: Russell. KELSEN, HANS 1957 What Is Justice? Justice, Law, and Politics in the Mirror of Science: Collected Essays. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. 1948 Power and Personality. New York: Norton. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. 1963 The Future of Political Science. New York: Atherton. LERNER, DANIEL; and LASSWELL, HAROLD D. (editors) 1951 The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Method. Stanford Univ. Press. The Limits of Behavioralism in Political Science: A Symposium. Edited by James C. Charlesworth. 1962 Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science. LIPPINCOTT, BENJAMIN E. 1965 Democracy's Dilemma: The Totalitarian Party in a Free Society. New York: Ronald. MAC!VER, ROBERT M. 1942 Social Causation. Boston: Ginn. MACIVER, ROBERT M. (1947) 1961 The Web of Government. New York: Macmillan. MERRIAM, CHARLES E. (1945) 1962 Systematic Politics. Univ. of Chicago Press. MEYNAUD, JEAN 1959 Introduction a la science politique. Paris: Colin. PARSONS, TALCOTT 1951 The Social System. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. PASSERIN D'ENTREVES, ALESSANDRO 1951 Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy. New York: Longmans; London: Hutchinson. POLANYI, MICHAEL 1958 Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy. Univ. of Chicago Press. POPPER, KARL R. (1945) 1963 The Open Society and Its Enemies. 4th rev. ed. 2 vols. Princeton Univ. Press. -> Volume 1: The Spell of Plato. Volume 2: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath. RADBRUCH, GUSTAV (1914) 1950 Gustav Radbruch: Legal Philosophy. Pages 43-224 in The Legal Philosophies of Lask, Radbruch, and Dabin. Translated by Kurt Wilk. 20th Century Legal Philosophy Series, Vol. 4. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» First published in German. The 1950 edition was translated from the revised and rewritten edition of 1932. A sixth German edition, edited by Erik Wolf, was published in 1963. RIEMER, NEAL 1962 The Revival of Democratic Theory. New York: Appleton. ROBSON, WILLIAM A. 1954 The University Teaching of Social Sciences: Political Science. Paris: UNESCO.
ROMMEN, HEINRICH A. (1936) 1947 The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy. St. Louis (Mo.) and London: Herder. -> First published in German. SABINE, GEORGE H. (1937) 1961 History of Political Theory. 3d ed. New York: Holt. STRAUSS, LEO 1953 Natural Right and History. Univ. of Chicago Press. TRUMAN, DAVID B. (1951) 1962 The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion. New York: Knopf. UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC AND CULTURAL ORGANIZATION 1950 Contemporary Political Science: A Survey of Methods, Research, and Teaching. Paris: UNESCO. VERDROSS, ALFRED (1958)1963 Abendldndische Rechtsphilosophie: Ihre Grundlagen und Hauptprobleme in geschichtlicher Schau. 2d ed., rev. & enl. Vienna: Springer. WALDO, DWIGHT 1956 Political Science in the United States of America: A Trend Report. Documentation in the Social Sciences. Paris: UNESCO. WEBER, MAX (1904-1917) 1949 Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated and edited by Edward Shils and H. A. Finch. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. WELDON, THOMAS D. 1953 The Vocabulary of Politics: An Enquiry Into the Use and Abuse of Language in the Making of Political Theories. London: Penguin. WOLF, ERIK (1955)1959 Das Problem der Naturrechtslehre: Versuch einer Orientierung. 2d ed. Karlsruhe (Germany): Miiller, II TRENDS AND GOALS
Organized political societies flourished long before men theorized about them. Political beliefs, including notions of authority, obedience, justice, and political explanations, also preceded the appearance of theories and are to be found in the myths, sagas, and folklore of all ancient literate peoples. The idea of theory as a form of systematic knowledge systematically pursued developed out of the intellectual revolution which, beginning in the sixth century B.C. in Greece, resulted in remarkable achievements in drama, science, mathematics, history, and philosophy. One of the radical notions which accompanied this creative outburst and which came to form the basic presupposition of political inquiry was that thought could abstract certain colligated phenomena from their more comprehensive setting and subject them to scrutiny, explanation, and even control. Political life was gradually defined as one form of colligation, or "family," of phenomena. The crucial step in the process was the attempt to understand political life as formed of both the actions between men and those between men and their environment. This understanding was pursued with progres-
POLITICAL THEORY: Trends and Goals sively less reliance upon explanations based on occult forces or the intervention of the gods. Classical political theory The classic form of political theory took shape in fifth-century Athens and was largely the work of Socrates and his circle. This achievement was consolidated by Plato and Aristotle, and it involved primarily an attempt to forge a synthesis of three elements: politics, the idea of a theory, and the practice of philosophy. The success of the endeavor is suggested by the fact that the synthesis survived until the late nineteenth century, when science came to usurp the place of philosophy in the synthesis. The nature of the classical synthesis is best revealed by considering its constitutive words and their meaning. [See the biographies of ARISTOTLE and PLATO.] "Political" derives from a family of Greek words relating to the polls, or city-state—for example, politeia ("constitution"), polites ("citizen"), and politikos ("statesman"), all of which connoted public concerns and, hence, formed a contrast with what was regarded as private or "one's own" (idion}. Thus, the subject matter of political theory consisted of those matters and happenings that were of public concern. The second element of the synthesis, theory (theoria}, also represents a confluence of meanings. Originally, a "theorist" (theoros) was a public emissary dispatched by his city to attend the religious festivals of other Greek cities. Theoria referred at first to a festive occasion, but gradually it acquired the connotation of a long journey undertaken to see (theorem'} different lands and to observe their diverse institutions and values. The way in which these meanings were gathered together and given a political orientation is illustrated in Plato's Laws, Among the institutions of the projected city was one which provided for a few carefully selected theorists (theorei\ who were to be sent abroad for the purpose of observing the educational and legal systems of other cities and conversing with politically wise and learned men there. Upon his return, the theoros was required to present the results of his investigations to the highest political authority in the community. This cluster of notions furnished some of the features which were to become the distinguishing marks of a theory: the observation of practice and the collection of experience; the achievement of perspective upon one's own society by an act of liberation which brought the theorist into contact with a wide range of comparative political experience; and, finally, the process of
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appraising the importance of what had been observed in the light of what was known. As the third element in the synthesis, philosophy provided the conventions which were to govern the systematic pursuit of knowledge. They centered on the task of establishing the grounds for believing some assertions to be true and others erroneous. In addition to signifying the quest for reliable knowledge, philosophia meant the love or passionate pursuit of wisdom—that is, a knowledge which would enable men to become wiser in the conduct of life. When directed to political matters, the aim of philosophy was, as Plato stated it, to make men wiser in the handling of common affairs and, thereby, to benefit all who lived in the political community. Although many ancient writers contributed to the development of political theory, Plato and Aristotle were the most influential in determining its methods and objectives for the next several centuries. The viewpoint of the present discussion is that political theory consists of certain fairly well-defined conventions relating to methods of inquiry, the constitution of the subject matter, and the purposes of inquiry. A new theory represents an attempt to challenge the prevailing conventions in order to substitute new ones. The history of political theory contains a record of these challenges and of the changing conventions which have governed the practice of theorizing. For most of these challenges, the point of departure was the idea of political theory as formulated by Plato and Aristotle. Their formulation represents the truly classical paradigm, and if later alternatives are to be understood, some attempt must be made to state what that paradigm consisted of. (1) Political theory was the practice of systematic inquiry whose aim was to acquire reliable knowledge about matters concerning the public province. Knowledge was valued as the supreme means for improving the quality of human life in the political association. As a philosophical pursuit, theory sought to establish a rational basis for belief; as a politically inspired pursuit, it sought to establish a rational basis for action. (2) Classical theory identified the political with the common involvements which men shared by virtue of membership in the same polis. Romans of the republican period called their political order a res publica, literally, "a public thing"; the same idea was reflected in the sixteenth-century English usage of "commonweal." The core meaning of "political"—a sharing of what is common—was eloquently expressed by Cicero: "Further, those who share Law must also share Justice; and those
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who share these are to be regarded as members of the same commonwealth" (De legibus i, 7.23). Theory was not restricted to the problems of securing and extending the common benefits of political life; it was shaped by the sobering recognition that there were common predicaments and a comrrcn fate issuing from politics and that the ordinary evils besetting human existence tended to be magnified by politics because where power was concentrated, the possibilities of injustice and violence, whether intended or inadvertent, were enhanced. (3) Tie polis was the basic unit of analysis adopted by classical theory. It was, according to Aristotle, the highest and most comprehensive association, which included all lesser associations within it. This belief formed the basis for the classical idea that theory dealt with political wholes or, stated differently, that a theory must be as comprehensive and inclusive as the political association itself. In working out this assumption, classical theory specified what were the significant "parts" of the polis, how they functioned, and what their effect was on the quality of life in the polis. In this way theory came to view the polis as composed of, and dependent upon, various interrelated structures. The structures which received most attention were certain structures of activity (e.g., ruling, warfare, the settling of disputes, education, religious practices, and economic production); certain relationships (e.g., between social classes, between types of superiority and inferiority, between authorities and subjects); and certain structures of belief (e.g., concerning the gods, the meaning of justice and equality). Here, as in so much of classical theory, a moral concern with the quality of political life provided the impetus for developing analytical methods and concepts. In trying to state what a "right" structure looked like, theory was led to inquire into the ways in which a wide range of factors affected the polis. For example, it not only examined the institution of private property and its relationship to inequality and class conflict but tried to specify the different effects which different degrees of inequality and conflict produced. Thus, theory undertook to provide explanations of what caused certain states of affairs and not others and of what might cause other states of affairs. The task of explanation also accomplished one other objective: it provided cues indicating what among the welter of phenomena was significant or relevant, and in this way it suggested what it meant to think in political terms. (4) The notion that a political society constituted a whole served as the basis for the abstract
idea of an order. No idea in the history of theory has exercised greater influence; it is the source of many later conceptions of balance, equilibrium, stability, and harmony. To conceive of a political society as an order was to conceive of it as having a discoverable structure of one kind rather than another, depending on the arrangement of functions, the relationships among various subgroups and associations, and the institutional forms in existence. But, as the classical discussion of political disintegration suggests, every order had an element of the problematic, because every order necessarily tended to the advantage of some and to the disadvantage of others. Consequently, theory was preoccupied with analyzing the sources of conflict and with trying to enunciate the principles of justice which might guide the political association in discharging its distributive function of assigning material and nonmaterial goods in a context of competing claims. There was an obverse side to the concern with order. Like most forms of inquiry, theory was a response to problems, not so much problems of an intellectual kind as ones arising from perceived derangements in the world. The attempt to explain disorder led classical theory to develop the basic political vocabulary of diagnosis: instability, anarchy, anomie, and revolution. Here, too, investigation centered upon the conditions and causes of instability, adhered to a comparative approach, and was moved by the same therapeutic motivation that governed theorizing about order. (5) From the beginning, classical theory insisted upon the significance of comparative studies for supplying a more comprehensive form of explanation and a wider range of alternatives. In order to cope with the many and diverse phenomena introduced by comparative studies, classical theory developed a classification for political forms (e.g., monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, their variants, and their perversions) and a set of concepts which enabled the theorist to place comparable phenomena side by side. Concepts such as law, citizenship, participation, and justice were used to order the relevant phenomena, thus preparing the way for an explanation which would account for differences or similarities. (6) The theoretical imagination of the classical writers felt challenged more by the diversity of political phenomena disclosed by comparison than by the regularities. This response was rooted in a moral outlook which conceived of a constitution as a manifestation of a particular culture. Each constitution represented distinct beliefs about the ordering of society, the treatment of individuals
POLITICAL THEORY: Trends and Goals and classes, the possession and distribution of power, the qualifications for participating in political deliberations, and the promotion of certain collective values. Theory undertook to appraise the various constitutional forms, to determine the form most suitable for a particular set of circumstances, and, above all, to decide whether there was one absolutely best form. (7) The quest for the absolutely best form of polity, which was among the most important preoccupations of classical theory, had a profound bearing on the practice of theory, but it has been greatly underestimated and often dismissed as visionary and Utopian. It reveals, as perhaps nothing else can, the intellectual boldness and radicalism of classical theorizing; it deserves comparison with another achievement recorded by an ancient historian: "Anaximander the Milesian, a disciple of Thales, first dared to draw the inhabited world on a tablet." The creation of ideal states was a way of teaching the fundamental element of theorizing: the reduction of the world to manageable proportions and its simultaneous reassembling in a new way so that others could see the concatenated relationships of the whole. Far from being an idle pastime, the projection of ideal states provided an invaluable means of practicing theory and of acquiring experience in its handling. The preoccupation with the best form of governance was based upon fundamental conviction about the purpose which ought to govern theorizing. Plato's query "Can theory ever be fully realized in practice? Is it not in the nature of things that action should come less close to truth than thought?" (Republic, 473B) implicitly rejected the assumption that a theory ought to be a verbal miniature of an existing state of affairs in which the theoretical statements corresponded to the way things appeared to observation. Instead, classical theorizing hoped to effect an alliance between thought and action, which would lead to the world becoming the embodiment of a theory. This was exactly opposite to what became the main motive of theorizing inspired by modern science, which was to make theory into a miniature of the world. To summarize the main features of the classical paradigm: The quest for political knowledge was an attempt to organize, explain, and, hopefully, master the phenomenal world. A theory embodied an organization of concepts which often were refinements of notions in everyday use, such as justice, equality, and law. By means of logical analysis and observation, these concepts were connected to form a unified construction. In binding together a set of concepts—for example, justice,
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law, authority, and citizen—the "facts" of experience and observation, as well as the constructs of everyday thought, were heightened, refined, and modified, and, ultimately, reaffiliated in a new way by the colligative relations established by the theory. This procedure of reassembling the political world was governed by the conviction that it could be better understood and explained by exposing its interconnections and that successful action must be preceded by a knowledge which simultaneously explained things as they were and stated what they should be. This approach may entail a logical confusion between description, explanation, and prescription or between empirical explanation and normative discourse. Without trying to evaluate this objection, we must try to understand why the Greeks proceeded as they did. In Plato's formulation, reliable knowledge was identified with knowledge of the forms. A form (eidos*) was immaterial, immutable, and universal. It was apprehended by an arduous process of thought (the dialectic) which gradually progressed from reliance upon sense experience and conventional beliefs to the contemplation of pure form. Aristotle retained the eidos but modified it with the assumption that forms revealed themselves dynamically over time and that an intimate connection existed between forms and observable realities. "Observation tells" and "experience shows that" were favorite expressions of Aristotle. He held that for each class of things there was a nature or structure which was seeking realization through the matter composing it; the refractory nature of matter often prevented the perfect fulfillment of the form and, under certain circumstances, it was possible for art to supplement and assist nature. Political theory and political reality The vexed problems surrounding the Platonic and Aristotelian doctrine of forms—whether they are "true" or whether it makes sense to ask whether they are true—cannot be treated here. What is important to the idea of theory is the question which the doctrine of forms tried to answer: What must the world be like to permit a theory to be true? The classical response was that it is a world arranged into a hierarchy of forms. Although later theorists abandoned the classical formulations, they relied on other ideas of what the world or man must be like, in order to render political knowledge a possibility. Thus, Machiavelli assumed that "men have, and always have had, the same passions, whence it necessarily comes about that the same effects are produced" (Discourses
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Upon Livy in, 43). Hobbes postulated "a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death" (Leviathan, chapter 11). Tocqueville found his starting point in the "social condition" of man rather than in certain traits of human nature- "the gradual development of equality," which he traced back to the Middle Ages, is a fundamental "fact" which is "universal, lasting, constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress" ([1835] 1945, vol. 1, p. 6). Marx's well-known concepticn of historical materialism provided a similar example of what the nature of the political and social world was like and of how that nature rendered theoretical knowledge possible. Contemporary theories may use slightly different language, as when they refer to the "regularities of human behavior" or to "the expectation that the universe does in fact contain the essential data and processes that may be necessary for the solution" of political problems (Deutsch 1963, p. 238). Yet the same assumption persists, that the political world must possess certain characteristics for theory to be possible. Although each theory rests on some notion of what the world is like, this knowing in itself is not an automatic response, but a decision. A theory is preceded by, and is a working out of, a decision to study political life in one way rather than another. Whether it is the classical way of dialectical inquiry, the Machiavellian way of juxtaposing contemporary and ancient practices, the Hobbesian procedure of developing axioms about human nature, or the Marxist search for the dynamics of historical development, every theory represents a commitment to a particular way of viewing political realities, a particular method of inquiry, a particular language or way of talking about political subjects, and a particular distribution of emphasis indicative of what the theorist deems important. The paradox that is involved in this enterprise—and it is a paradox common to all forms of theorizing, not just to political theorizing—is that while aiming at a complete understanding of the subject matter of politics, it is deliberately selective, that is, it omits some matters and exaggerates others. By a complete understanding of politics is meant the ancient and persistent attempt to grasp the political society in the round, so to speak, and to explain its workings as a unified whole. To achieve this, the theorist has been compelled to select what is significant and relevant and, above all, to reduce the world to intellectually manageable proportions. An important part of this
procedure involves the establishing of perspective so that phenomena are reduced in scale, some even eliminated altogether, and others enlarged. The perfect expression of this procedure is a metaphor employed by Tocqueville: My present object is to embrace the whole from one point of view: the remarks I shall make will be less detailed, but they will be more sure. I shal perceive each object less distinctly, but I shall descry the principal facts with more certainty. A traveler who has just left a vast city climbs the neighboring hill; as he goes farther off, he loses sight of the men whom he has just quitted: their dwellings are confused in a dense mass; he can no longer distinguish the public squares and can scarcely trace out the great thoroughfares; but his eye has less difficulty in following the boundaries of the city, and for the first time he sees the shape of the whole. . . . The details of the immense picture are lost in the shade, but I conceive a clear idea of the entire subject. (1835, vol. I, chapter 18) This same paradox of wholeness and distortion was present in Hobbes's Leviathan, the civil polity of Locke, and Rousseau's model community and can be found as well in contemporary notions of a political "system" or of an "input-output model." According to our preceding discussion, a theory is a complex way of organizing, seeing, explaining, and altering the world. This view suggests that the difference between one theory and another resides in the handling of these four elements. To these elements one more must be added in order to complete the considerations: each theory presupposes a notion of what is plausible or what is required for the theory to be accepted as true, The briefest glance at the history of political theory reveals an astonishing variety of beliefs concerning what makes for plausibility: Aristotle's reliance upon reasoning and observation, Machiavelli's appeal to the facts of history, Hobbes's abstract and geometrical axioms, Locke's reliance upon natural law and common sense, Marx's "scientific" laws of history, and the contemporary appeal to "empirically verifiable hypotheses." Each of these is not only an appeal to a particular conception of plausibility but is accompanied by a conception of what is considered implausible. For example, Hobbes ridiculed Aristotelian forms of proof, while today's theorist may be equally harsh on "metaphysical explanations." There are many disturbing questions raised by these considerations. Does each theory present us with a different political world? Is political theory a bedlam of subjectivity and relativism? How does one decide whether one theory is truer than another? Is the history of political theory merely a succession of different theories, instead of succes-
POLITICAL THEORY: Trends and Goals sive additions to our knowledge and understanding of politics? These questions cannot be answered here, even assuming that they can be answered satisfactorily at all; what can be done is to suggest some of the relevant considerations by examining aspects of the questions as they have appeared in earlier and more recent theories. A useful case in point is the political theory of the early Christian writer St. Augustine, who, it is sometimes alleged, was not a political theorist at all. The grounds for this allegation, however, usually rest on a different notion of what is plausible; sometimes it is said that Augustine appealed to revelation rather than reason, that he was unsystematic, or that his arguments were neither confirmable nor refutable by logic or fact. Obviously, these criticisms themselves presuppose an agreement about what shall constitute acceptable proof and what makes "sense." They also presuppose a different kind of world in which theory is possible—a world in which God is not the immanent presence that he was for Augustine, a world in which supernatural forces have ceased to be credible. Yet the example of Augustine is important, not for its supernaturalism, but for the way in which it illuminates recurrent characteristics of theorizing. In the first place, Augustine made it clear that he was offering not simply a list of criticisms but a new and comprehensive explanation which deliberately contradicted the prevailing one in fundamental respects. He spent a great many pages criticizing the inadequacies of classical theory as transmitted by Roman authors—especially Cicero —and arguing that it had ceased to provide a satisfactory or plausible explanation of the political world. Second and equally crucial, he was contending that the political world itself had changed. Classical theory could not truly account for the novelty of Christianity or for its implications. The broader bearing of this point cannot be stressed too much. It suggests one of the crucial problems which frequently bedevil the political theorist and render his task quite different from that of the scientific theorist. For the physicist, the world does not change, but his way of perceiving it may, as the contrast between Newton and Einstein shows. For the political theorist, the world itself changes, as is shown by a comparison of the Greek polls with the Hellenistic and Roman empires (or feudalism with the nation-state). Thus, political theory exhibits a twofold complexity: theoretical perspectives change in response to a changing political world and theoretical perspectives can differ even
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when viewing the same world, as is demonstrated by contrasting the views of Paine and Burke regarding the French Revolution [see the biographies of RURKE and PAINE]. Third, as a result of the growth of Christianity in the ancient world, politics came to be viewed from a different perspective and through different categories, such as sin and grace. The shift in perspective, concept, and language resulted in a new way of talking about politics and political orders, one which extended to new notions of space (universal rather than in terms of monarchies or empires) and of time (providential and apocalyptical rather than cyclical). Despite all these differences, Augustine retained the ancient theoretical purpose of trying to organize and account for the world. His De civitate Dei contained an explanation of human behavior, social conflict, imperialism, and war. Above all, it is one of the most sustained analyses of the interconnections of order and the causes of disorder that has ever been formulated in Western thought. Despite its very different notions of plausibility, the theory constituted a mighty effort at accounting for the way things appeared, what caused events to happen in the way that they did and men to behave as they did. Like all theories, it did not purport to discover new facts or provide new information, but rather—by the use of new concepts, such as original sin, predestination, and the symbolism of the "two cities"—to supply a new interpretation of the facts. The classical writers did not need to be told by Augustine that men were wicked, any more than Hobbes's contemporaries needed to be told that political disobedience was a widespread fact. The function of theory is not to amass new facts but to disclose hitherto unsuspected relationships between them. This disclosure is achieved by looking at the facts differently—that is, from a new theoretical perspective. When we examine Augustine's theory it is apparent that we are witnessing a profound departure from the classical paradigm of Plato and Aristotle. The change involves a shift in perspective, language, and a redistribution of emphasis among the concepts in the Augustinian theoretical network. The continuities are not easy to locate, for the change is a radical one, extending to a wholesale redefinition of politics and to what is properly political. For Augustine unredeemed man is incapable of developing a politics which will not be deeply streaked by conflict, aggression, and violence. At the same time, he strips the political order of the proud function assigned to it by the classical writers, the maintenance of an educative
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ethos (paideia} which will assist in the perfection of men. [See the biography of AUGUSTINE.] The re-evaluation of central political concepts has occurred many times in the history of political theory. For example, Plato defined political activity largely in terms of eradicating conflict; Polybius and Machiavelli, on the other hand, perceived a revitalizing force in contending political groups and interests; Madison deplored conflict but figured that the costs of eradication were excessive [see the biography of MADISON]. Or, to take another example, the scope of what is political has also varied enormously. For Plato the political comprised all significant relationships in society; for many liberal writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, what was political was restricted to the narrow functions of enforcing law, maintaining peace, and defending the society from foreign invasion and domestic authority, while others have treated it like some dangerous Gulliver and bound it with innumerable legal restraints. Some writers have, like Rousseau, exalted political participation into the highest form of social activity, while others have described it as of negligible significance, and still others have praised the opposite value of "political apathy." Although this state of affairs, where the same concept is assigned different weight and significance, is often deplored for preventing the cumulative growth of political knowledge, it is important to recall that as long as one of the major functions of a theory is to account for events happening in the world and as long as that world is a changing one, the diversity of meanings is inevitable. It might even be argued that far from being a deficiency, it is one of the achievements of the language of Western political theory that it has been sufficiently elastic and adaptable to be used for a wide variety of circumstances. Although every theory strives to present a rounded picture of the political world in terms set by the theory itself, the danger of an autarchic condition in which each theory presents a surface impenetrable to criticism is minimized by certain practices inherent in theorizing. Most of the major political theories of Western history have disputed ground held by previous theories. Thus, Augustine attacked the classical writers; Machiavelli tried to dismiss the Utopian tradition; Hobbes disputed Aristotle and the Schoolmen; Marx contended with liberal and radical theories; and contemporary writers feel compelled to combat the "ancient myth about the concern of citizens with the life of the democratic polis" (Dahl 1961, p. 281) or, alternatively, the nineteenth-century liberal theory
of rational citizenship (Berelson et al. 1954, pp. 306 ff.). The act of disputation itself necessitates the acceptance of some common matters; otherwise the disputants risk being ignored. Thus, Augustine accepted much of the vocabulary established by his predecessors; his discussion of power, authority, government, and law presupposed an understanding rooted in a pre-existing tradition of political discourse. Like all previous and subsequent theorists, Augustine introduced new meanings, yet much of his thought followed customary significations and, hence, rendered itself susceptible to external criticism. Further, Augustine addressed himself to certain common or public facts —for example, the sack of Rome, the decline of Roman power—and hence it was possible to scrutinize his construction of the facts from a very different theoretical vantage point. What was true of Augustinian theory was true also of later theories: the particular perspective of a theory does not isolate it from criticism and judgment. A tradition of common conceptual language with fairly stable meanings combined with the existence of public facts makes it possible to appraise every theory and assign it worth. It is often said that a theory should be appraised in terms of criteria regarding the consistency and clarity of definitions and the adherence to logical reasoning. Granting the importance of these criteria does not advance us very far. They are too formal to provide anything more than minimal requirements. Far more complicated and interesting problems are raised by the criterion of "adequacy," which may refer either to the sufficiency of evidence, the methods of proof, the range of matters included, or the solutions proposed. Each of these raises different kinds of questions and each remains a continuing source of controversy. What deserves notice, however, is that the purposes and conventions which inform a particular theory may enable it to fulfill some criteria, while preventing it from fulfilling others. For example, Machiavelli may have achieved his purpose of describing the actual behavior of rulers, but his theory is almost wholly useless for the purpose of analyzing the obedience of citizens, a subject which dominated political discussion during the last half of Machiavelli's century. The quest for scientific political theory Since the seventeenth century, there have been repeated expressions of dissatisfaction with the state of political theory. These have been inspired mainly by the example of progress in modern scientific knowledge. The complaint, as voiced by
POLITICAL THEORY: Trends and Goals Hobbes and later by others, has contrasted the steady, incremental advance of scientific knowledge with the seemingly static condition of political knowledge and has located the cause in the failure of political theory to adopt scientific methods of inquiry. It is essential, however, to separate two problems: the adoption of scientific methods— whether mathematical, empirical, or a combination of the two—and the problem of incremental knowledge. It is too easily assumed that the systematic exploitation of scientific inquiry is the only method for steadily adding to our supply of knowledge. Science—particularly its method of organizing inquiry—may be the most efficient and powerful means, but it is not the only means. The history of political theory supplies an important illustration of this. If, as it is sometimes suggested, the progress of science has been the result of the careful and exhaustive working out of a given theory in order to discover how much it can account for and what problems it presents, a roughly analogous situation has occurred over long stretches of the history of political theory. It is no exaggeration to say that the theories of Plato and Aristotle have served longer as models of political inquiry than any comparable pair of theories in the natural sciences. Not only did each of these writers found research institutions which were occupied with amassing new facts and classifying them, but both theories provided the framework whereby writers of later centuries tried to account for new phenomena and to resolve new problems. For example, during the struggles between the papal and secular powers of the Middle Ages, apologists for both sides attempted to apply Aristotle's theory to a state of affairs that he had never anticipated. Although modern textbook writers are inclined to deride this achievement by pointing out that Aristotle's theory had been designed to explain the polis, not the imperium or sacerdotium, it is well to recall that among scientific theories, one of the basic criteria for preferring one theory over another is its capability for being extended to cover phenomena not anticipated by the theory. The history of political theory is full of such examples of viable theories which have been amplified by writers who have followed in the footsteps of the giants: Augustinianism and Thomism have persisted as the basic theoretical outlook for countless Roman Catholic theories; Locke's theory was used to analyze conditions in Revolutionary America and Revolutionary France; Marxism has been extended to cover diverse problems of colonialism, imperialism, and the newly emerging nations.
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The foregoing suggests that in the history of political theory there has been a succession of theories which have been fruitfully used for long periods of time to explain and account for political events. The same history also shows that dissatisfaction with the capabilities of a theory has led to new forms of theory. Dissatisfaction, for the most part, has issued not from intellectual reasons alone; that is, it has not been their lack of logical consistency, their infidelity to fact, or their sterility that has caused theories to be abandoned, but rather changes in the political world, giving rise to problems that seem to be insoluble by means of accepted theories. Moral and political motives, not purely intellectual ones, have been the primary inspiration for new theories. The first great exponent of scientific politics was Hobbes, and yet every one of his theoretical writings originated in his avowed purpose of settling the basis of authority and providing secure grounds for obedience during an age of revolution. Only during the past half century has scientific politics sought to disentangle itself from moral and political concerns, and even now there are sufficient protests among contemporary political scientists to make naive disengagement seem disingenuous. Despite these continuities, however, the quest for a scientific theory of politics has altered the character of theorizing in several significant ways. Before examining these, it is necessary to note the conditions under which such a quest became intellectually compelling. This means asking not only what view of the world was held which made scientific theory possible but also, more crucially, what kind of political world came into being which rendered the application of scientific methods fruitful and its criteria of truth plausible. Prior to the sixteenth century, the political orders of Europe were characteristically decentralized. Uniform legal systems were a rarity, and centralized bureaucracies still in the formative stage. Order itself was not a presupposition of daily life but a precarious achievement. Habits of civility were dictated by local loyalties, and the whole complex of national duties, rights, and codes of deference were only slowly being developed. In brief, political life lacked those qualities of uniformity, regularity, routine, and settled expectations that we now take for granted. Against this background, it is not surprising that political theory had eschewed making regularities in political behavior and processes the basis of theorizing and had, instead, been more intent on establishing them. To the extent that scientific theory presupposes order and regularity
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education and the spread of popular literature, but in phenomena, political societies prior to the esthe point would be the same: the destruction of tablishment of the modern centralized, bureaucralocalism and of discrepancies in wealth, educatized state could not furnish the necessary basis tion, culture, and power and their replacement by for scientific theorizing. To be sure, Machiavelli uniformities have created the conditions for a ridiculed those who denied such regularities—"as science of politics. if the sky, the sun, the elements, men, were In the eighteenth century the popularization of changed in motion, arrangement, and power from Newtonianism gave a strong impetus to the search what they were in antiquity" (Discourses Upon for "laws" governing society and politics, laws Livy i, preface)—and both he and Hobbes conwhich would express the true political and social tended that under specified conditions it was pos"nature of things" rather than the will or prefersible to predict how men would respond, because it was possible to know the mainsprings of human ences of rulers, priests, and aristocrats. One of the motivation [see the biography of MACHIAVELLI]. earliest and most ambitious attempts at a science of politics was made by Montesquieu. Defining Indeed, Hobbes had made the first sustained at"law" as "the necessary relations arising from the tempt to incorporate politics into a scientific exnature of things," he tried to show that various planation which would comprehend matter, man, types of political societies were an embodiment and society. Basing his theory upon the laws of of necessary relationships arising out of the conmotion, which he believed were operative uniditions of that society. His list of conditions was versally, he proposed a deductive science of polibased on geography, economic occupations, retics, which would proceed from simple to more ligion, government, and mores; these operated as complex forms of social motion. The concept of the state of nature provided an imaginary condiforces which determined the kinds of laws, praction in which the laws of human psychology were tices, and institutions which would prevail in a best observable; it was then possible to reason out particular society. Each society exhibited a definite the structure of political society which would best "set," or "spirit," in the way that it fitted its relaaccord with the laws of psychology governing hutionships to its conditions; each society was, in a man behavior. Hobbes's theory was hardly empirisense, a system of interrelationships in which pocal by contemporary standards, yet it remains the litical, social, religious, and economic institutions first systematic effort to assimilate political to sustained and modified each other. When rightly scientific and mathematical reasoning. At the adjusted, the system represented a kind of Newsame time, the Hobbesian political order was in tonian equilibrium. Although Montesquieu favored no sense a replication of what the political world a constitutional monarchy tempered by aristocratic was like, but rather a projection of what it must privileges and corps intermediaries, the comparaor should be. Stated differently, Hobbesian theory tive basis of his theory tended to sanction all powas not a report of regularities but an attempt to litical forms as the natural products of adaptation create them, as was suggested by his wistful reto environment, save only for despotism, which he mark (Leviathan, chapter 31) that "this writing viewed as a monstrous aberration. [See the biogof mine may fall into the hands of a sovereign" raphy of MONTESQUIEU.] who would put the theory into practice. [See the By showing how the complex facts of a society biography of HOBBES.] were informed by a common structure, MontesIn the three centuries that have elapsed since quieu's typology of political systems permitted comHobbes wrote Leviathan, the major Western soparison between political societies. During the last half of the eighteenth century, however, theorists cieties, on the whole, have developed and enforced complex mechanisms for directing and ordering tended to follow a different path toward a science human behavior. Bureaucracies, legal systems, the of politics. They turned to the nature of man police, together with national conceptions of citirather than of things and found psychological laws zenship and of authority, have conjoined to proof human behavior, usually involving some prinduce sustained regularities in political life, far ciples of attraction and aversion or pleasure and greater than in any previous era. At the same time, pain and, on this basis, erected theories which the development of industrialization has added a claimed to be empirical and universal. Yet, in the powerful element to the routinization of life, and case of the major writers in this tradition, such the appearance of the modern city is the symbol as Helvetius and Holbach in France and Bentham of a condition wherein men live lives of remarkin England, the theories remained dominantly a able similarity and uniformity. This list could be priori, with facts serving primarily as illustrations extended to include the growth of standardized [see the biography of BENTHAM]. Above all, there
POLITICAL THEORY: Trends and Goals was nothing scientifically neutral about their formulations. All three writers were critics and reformers who were mainly intent on having the political world reflect their theories rather than having their theories reflect the world. Although many of the major theorists of the nineteenth century—such as Hegel, Tocqueville, and J. S. Mill (excluding the Logic*)—practiced theory in ways dominantly traditional, there was a growing tendency toward making politics a scientific study [see the biographies of HEGEL; MILL; TOCQUEVILLE]. Nevertheless, it is not easy to characterize this tendency, because so many diverse understandings of science were competing. For Comte and his followers, "positive" science was the search for the smallest possible number of "invariable natural laws" which controlled "all phenomena" [see the biography of COMTE]. To the social Darwinists science meant classifying phenomena according to categories of evolution and struggle made famous by Darwin and now adapted to social and political uses [see SOCIAL DARWINISM]. For the Marxists, science meant extending the "necessary" laws of history, which were laws of economic development, to explain the past and present and to predict the future [see MARXISM]. Toward the close of the nineteenth century, however, the social sciences had sufficiently developed to enable men like Durkheim and, somewhat later, Max Weber, to fight clear of most of these earlier disagreements about the nature of science and to lay down some basic ideas about what a theory should be [see the biographies of DURKHEIM and WEBER, MAX]. Twentieth-century concepts of political theory have continued to evolve beyond the point attained by Weber and Durkheim, particularly by borrowing from the fields of social psychology and psychoanalysis and by seeking to utilize mathematics and statistics. The result has been a profound change in the notion of what theory is and what are the appropriate conventions governing its use. Most theoretical efforts now aim at establishing knowledge by methods that are empirical and quantitative; to a considerable degree, they aspire to a form of knowledge that will be precise, rigorous, verifiable, and predictable. Like its predecessors, contemporary theory embodies a decision about what is worth studying, how it shall be studied, and what shall be accepted as knowledge. Contemporary political theory Although it is risky to attempt a characterization of contemporary notions of theory, some of the main features may be indicated. It should be
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mentioned that sharp disagreements exist, not only among those who purport to share the same scientific orientation, but between them and others who remain loyal to traditional methods. What follows is an attempt to designate the main characteristics of what is new—that is, of the scientific conception of theorizing. The alliance with philosophy has been severed, at least temporarily. Although there are some signs of attempts being made to utilize contemporary philosophical techniques of language analysis and its variants, most theorists proceed on the assumption that the adoption of scientific methods obviates the need for elaborate philosophical techniques. This development has been accompanied by the abdication of the traditional attempt to formulate synoptic pictures, or epitomes, of the whole society. Although conceptions of a "political system" are widely utilized, these are avowedly artificial constructions which are not intended to represent actual societies either literally or in the transfiguring way of older theories. They are artifacts whose sole justification is their utility, which remains a moot point. The contemporary conventions reject so-called grand or comprehensive theories and prefer to pursue testable hypotheses. According to one representative viewpoint, "Whether the proposition is true or false depends on the degree to which the proposition and the real world correspond" (Dahl 1963, p. 8). "Analysis" has tended to replace "theory" as the preferred expression; this change is accompanied by a determination to utilize whatever methods appear to have scientific authority: survey data, psychological and sociological findings, decision making, bargaining, communications theories, etc. Those of an empirical and quantitative persuasion frequently express the hope that by patient and systematic investigation it will be possible to establish tested propositions of ever-increasing generality and that, gradually, an interconnected and logically consistent series of propositions will culminate in a general theory of universal validity. As we have previously noted, the scientific impulse in eighteenth-century theory took the form of seeking "laws" which would embody the true "nature of things." Twentieth-century theory has perpetuated the quest but has abandoned the assumption that there is any underlying "nature" to political phenomena. In this respect contemporary theory is in the tradition of Hobbes, who was the first to launch a systematic attack against the classical notion that there was a natural structure appropriate to every political form and that man
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possessed a nature which required a political association for its fulfillment. The divorce of politics from nature and of theory from nature did not become complete until the twentieth century. One effect has been to liberate the theoretical imagination, for instead of seeking to approximate natural structures, it has felt free to experiment with all manner of artificial models and constructs, insisting that such artifacts are to be judged solely by their "pay-off" in explanatory or predictive power. Accordingly, the "real world" is discussed in very different terms, usually as a kind of whirl of phenomena t o which a theory is "plugged in" in an admittedly arbitrary way. Theory no longer seeks to grasp the political world synthetically; rather it seeks to slice into it. The political world is, as one contemporary theorist has described it, "a resource" which is to be exploited on the expectation that the universe does contain "the data and processes" necessary to the solution of theoretical problem (Deutsch 1963, p. 238). Theorizing tends to be sustained by the belief that the political world exhibits sufficiently recurrent regularities and repetition of causal sequences to allow for the testing of generalizations. Theory thus becomes the search for what is "repetitious, ubiquitous, and uniform" (Easton 1965a, p. 15). "It is the task of theory to detect in the welter of the unique facts of experience that which is uniform, similar, and typical" (Morgenthau 1959, p. 18). The concern with regularities forms part of an outlook which contrasts sharply with the traditional preoccupation with the dangers and derangements besetting the political order. Traditional theory had been powerfully influenced by the hope of providing knowledge for action; its language, concepts, and values were primarily those of the actor. Contemporary theory, with its emphasis upon objectivity, scientific detachment, and testable hypotheses, tends to be governed by the values of inquiry rather than of potential action. This appears most strikingly in systems theory, where conceptions such as equilibrium, homeostasis, inputs and outputs are, whatever their value for research, wholly irrelevant to action. For the present, at least, theory appears to have surrendered the critical function, which has been one of its dominant characteristics since Plato. Throughout the first half of the present century, most advocates of a scientific approach to theory accepted a naive distinction between "facts" and "values" and contended that science could not pronounce on questions of preference but only deal with matters of fact. Gradually, this austere posi-
tion has been relaxed into an attitude which insists that scientific knowledge can contribute to the clarification of choices, by indicating that some choices are unfeasible and that others are too costly. It is still insisted, however, that "new theory tends to be analytic, not substantive, explanatory rather than ethical . . ." (Easton 1965a, p. 22). It is fair to say that most scientifically minded theorists today are bored by the factvalue controversy and are trying to negotiate an armistice along the lines of a division of political theory into "empirical" and "normative" theories. The former would represent theorizing based upon scientific methods of collecting and classifying data and of testing hypotheses by statistical or mathematical methods. Its goal would be the empirically verified hypothesis. To normative theory would be assigned an ill-assorted collection of activities whose common element would be a lack of scientific methods. It would include all questions regarding values, all historical studies, and all conceptual inquiries. One would be hard-pressed to concoct a better solution for the sterilization of political theory. Not only does it rest on a profound ignorance, or even arrogance, regarding the nature of traditional theories and their subtle blend of empirical observation and theoretical speculation, but more strikingly, it flies in the face of the kind of experience which the proponents of such a division would be expected to be the first to recognize —namely, the history of theory in the natural sciences. Historians of science are generally agreed that few, if any, of the great scientific theories have been the product of strictly empirical research. Such a belief is a remnant of the Baconian myth concerning the primacy of induction. It has also been argued by philosophers of science, such as Popper, that theories which are shown to be wrong can still be of inestimable value, for examination of them allows us to be quite precise in locating the source of the error. But there are other reasons which are equally telling and should caution against a too easy acceptance of the distinction between empirical and normative theories. The assumption that there can be some kind of purely empirical theory derives from the naive positivist assumption that facts can be known accurately if only we could lay aside our prejudices and biases. Although it is always admitted that facts rest on a principle of selectivity, this admission does not dispose of the issue. The difficulty is that we know facts only by means of the linguistic-conceptual apparatus with which we think and perceive; facts are only interesting when ob-
POLITICAL THEORY: Trends and Goals served through theoretical concepts, and hence, facts present themselves as "theory-laden." The result is that when the empirical theorist employs a procedure in which observations are matched with theory, his enterprise is more circular than he is usually willing to admit, for the observations themselves represent theory-laden facts. It is also important to recognize that the indispensability of concepts in all forms of theorizing— empirical and otherwise—raises special problems which cast doubt upon the desirability of rendering empirical theory autonomous. Although the selection of concepts for use in empirical inquiry will, of necessity, be determined by their empirical relevance and utility, concepts are abstractions, not empirical entities. Moreover, the nature of concepts shares a family resemblance with the concerns of so-called normative theory, not because concepts are "idealized" constructions, like "frictionless bodies" in physics, but because they possess the basic characteristic of all normative constructions—that is, they are discriminatory and selective. Every concept is a distillation achieved by deciding to disregard some features of reality and to emphasize others. Perhaps the most important problem besetting contemporary political theory is not the question of whether theory ought to be firmly wedded to the methods and outlook of the natural sciences, but rather what version of science it will choose: the rigorous, fact-minded, anticonceptual view which believes that cumulative knowledge is the result of patient and dogged application of scientific methods or the view of science as an imaginative undertaking, with its full share of speculation, playfulness, proclivity to error, and its ability to imagine worlds as yet undreamed of—an ability which would maintain the critical, projective quality that has enabled past theories to speak meaningfully to the quandaries of political existence. SHELDON S. WOLIN [See also POLITICAL SCIENCE.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following studies identify the major political theorists, introduce their work, and provide a commentary: Mcllwain 1932; Sabine 1937; Strauss 1953; Voegelin 1956-1957; Wolin 1960. Continuing discussion of problems of political theory can be found in Laslett 1956; Laslett & Runciman 1963; and in the periodicals History and Theory, Nomos, Political Studies, Der Staat. ADKINS, ARTHUR W. H. 1960 Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values. Oxford: Clarendon. ALLEN, JOHN W. (1928) 1957 A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century. 3d ed. London: Methuen,
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ARENDT, HANNAH 1958 The Human Condition. Univ. of Chicago Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1959 by Doubleday. ARENDT, HANNAH 1963 On Revolution. New York: Viking. BARRY, BRIAN M. 1965 Political Argument. New York: Humanities Press. EARTH, HANS (1945) 1961 Wahrheit und Ideologic. 2d ed., enl. Zurich: Rentsch. BERELSON, BERNARD; LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; and McPHEE, WILLIAM N. 1954 Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign. Univ. of Chicago Press. BERLIN, ISAIAH 1954 The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. -» A paperback edition was published in 1957 by New American Library. BRECHT, ARNOLD 1959 Political Theory: The Foundations of Twentieth-century Political Thought. Princeton Univ. Press. CARLYLE, ROBERT W.; and CARLYLE, A. J. (1903-1936) 1950 A History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West. 6 vols. New York: Barnes & Noble. CATLIN, GEORGE E. G. 1962 Systematic Politics: Elementa politica et sociologica. Univ. of Toronto Press. DAHL, ROBERT A. (1956) 1963 A Preface to Democratic Theory. Univ. of Chicago Press. DAHL, ROBERT A. (1961) 1963 Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. DAHL, ROBERT A. 1963 Modern Political Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. DEANE, HERBERT A. 1963 The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. DERATHE, ROBERT 1950 Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. DEUTSCH, KARL W. 1963 The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control. New York: Free Press. DOWNS, ANTHONY 1957 An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper. EASTON, DAVID 1965a A Framework for Political Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. EASTON, DAVID 1965fo A Systems Analysis of Political Life. New York: Wiley. EMMET, DOROTHY M. 1958 Function, Purpose and Powers: Some Concepts in the Study of Individuals and Societies. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martins. FIGGIS, JOHN N. (1896) 1922 The Divine Right of Kings. 2d ed. Cambridge Univ. Press. -» First published as The Theory of the Divine Right of Kings. A paperback edition was published in 1965 by Harper. FRIEDRICH, CARL J. 1957 Constitutional Reason of State: The Survival of the Constitutional Order. Providence, R.I.: Brown Univ. Press. FRIEDRICH, CARL J. 1963 Man and His Government: An Empirical Theory of Politics. New York: McGrawHill. GRIEWANK, KARL 1955 Der neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegriff: Entstehung und Entwicklung. Weimar (Germany) : Bohlaus. HABERMAS, JURGEN 1963 Theorie und Praxis: Sozialphilosophische Aufsatze. Neuwied (Germany): Luchterhand. HALEVY, ELIE (1901-1904) 1952 The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. New ed. London: Faber. -» First published in French.
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HAMPSHIRE, STUART 1959 Thought and Action. London: Chatto & Windus. HARTZ, Louis 1955 The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt. HEMPEL, CARL G. 1952 Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. 2, No. 7. Univ. of Chicago Press. HEXTER, j. H. 1952 More's Utopia: The Biography of an Idea. Princeton Univ. Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1965 by Harper. History and Theory. -> Published since 1960 by Mouton. JAEGER, WERNER W. (1934-1944) 1939-1944 Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. 3 "ols. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. -> A second edition of Volume 1 was published in 1945. JOUVENEL, BERTRAND DE (1955) 1957 Sovereignty: An Inquiry Into the Political Good. Univ. of Chicago Press. -» First published in French as De la souverainete: A la recherche du bien politique. JOUVENEL, BERTRAND DE 1963 The Pure Theory of PoZitics. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. KANTOROWICZ, ERNST H. 1957 The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton Univ. Press. KELSEN, HANS 1957 What is Justice? Justice, Law, and Politics in the Mirror of Science: Collected Essays. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. LASKI, HAROLD J. (1921) 1931 The Foundations of Sovereignty, and Other Essays. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. LASKI, HAROLD J. (1925) 1957 A Grammar of Politics. 4th ed. London: Allen & Unwin. LASLETT, PETER (editor) 1956 Philosophy, Politics and Society: A Collection. New York: Macmillan. LASLETT, PETER; and RUNCIMAN, W. G. (editors) 1963 Philosophy, Politics and Society (Second Series}: A Collection. New York: Barnes & Noble. LASSWELL, HAROLD D.; and KAPLAN, ABRAHAM 1950 Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry. Yale Law School Studies, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1963. LEWIS, EWART (editor) 1954 Medieval Political Ideas. 2 vols. New York: Knopf. -> See especially Volume 1. LICHTHEIM, GEORGE (1961) 1964 Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study. 2d ed., rev. London: Routledge. -> A paperback edition was published by Praeger in 1965. LINDSAY, A. D. (1943) 1959 The Modern Democratic State. Volume 1. Oxford Univ. Press. LIVELY, JACK 1962 The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville. Oxford: Clarendon. MclLWAiN, CHARLES H. (1932) 1959 The Growth of Political Thought in the West, From the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages. New York: Macmillan. MACPHERSON, CRAWFORD B. 1962 The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon. MEINECKE, FRIEDRICH (1924) 1962 Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d'Etat and Its Place in Modern History. New York: Praeger. -» First published as Die Idee der Staatsrdson in der neueren Geschichte. MESNARD, PIERRE (1936) 1951 L'essor de la philosophic politique au XVIe siecle. 2d ed. Paris: Vrin. MORGENTHAU, HANS 1959 The Nature and Limits of a Theory of International Relations. Pages 15-28 in William T. R. Fox (editor), Theoretical Aspects of International Relations. Univ. of Notre Dame Press.
Nomos. -» Published since 1958 by the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, under the editorship of Carl J. Friedrich. Each volume is devoted to one topic. OAKESHOTT, MICHAEL J. (1946) 1960 Introduction. In Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Or, the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastic all and Civil. Edited and with an introduction by Michael Oakeshott. Oxford: Blackwell. OAKESHOTT, MICHAEL J. 1962 Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. New York: Basic Books. PASSERIN D'ENTREVES, ALESSANDRO 1951 Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy. New York: Longmans; London: Hutchinson. POCOCK, JOHN G. A. 1957 The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge Univ. Press. POLIN, RAYMOND 1952 Politique et philosophic chez Thomas Hobbes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. POLIN, RAYMOND 1960 La politique morale de John Locke. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Political Studies. H> Published since 1963 by Oxford University Press. POPPER, KARL R. (1945) 1963 The Open Society and Its Enemies. 4th rev. ed. Princeton Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Harper. POPPER, KARL R. 1957 The Poverty of Historicism. Boston: Beacon. -*• A paperback edition was published in 1964 by Harper. POST, GAINES 1964 Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State, 1100-1322. Princeton Univ. Press. RUNCIMAN, W. G. 1963 Social Science and Political Theory. Cambridge Univ. Press. SABINE, GEORGE H. (1937) 1961 A History of Political Theory. 3d ed. New York: Holt. SHKLAR, JUDITH N. 1957 After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith. Princeton Univ. Press. SIMON, HERBERT A. (1947) 1961 Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization. 2d ed. New York: Macmillan. -> A paperback edition was published in 1965 by the Free Press. SNELL, BRUNO (1946) 1960 The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought. New York: Harper. -» First published in German. Der Staat. -» Published since 1962 by Duncker & Humblot. STRAUSS, LEO (1936) 1961 The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis. Translated by E. M. Sinclair. Univ. of Chicago Press. -» Written in German, but first published in English. STRAUSS, LEO (1953) 1959 Natural Right and History. Univ. of Chicago Press. TALMON, JACOB L. (1952) 1965 The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. 2d ed. New York: Praeger. TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE (1835) 1945 Democracy in America. 2 vols. New York: Knopf. -> First published in French. Paperback editions were published in 1961 by Vintage and by Schocken. The translation of the extract in the text was provided by Sheldon Wolin. TUSSMAN, JOSEPH 1960 Obligation and the Body Politic. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. ULLMANN, WALTER 1961 Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages. New York: Barnes & Noble. VOEGELIN, ERICH 1956-1957 Order and History. 3 vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press.
POLITICS, COMPARATIVE WALZER, MICHAEL 1965 The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. WARRENDER, HOWARD (1957)1966 The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation. Oxford: Clarendon. WETTER, GUSTAVO A. (1948) 1959 Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union. New York: Praeger. -» First published as II materialismo dialettico sovietico. WINCH, PETER 1958 The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. New York: Humanities; London: Routledge. WOLF, ERIK 1950 Griechisches Rechtsdenken. Frankfurt am Main (Germany): Klostermann. WOLIN, SHELDON S. 1960 Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought. Boston: Little.
POLITICAL TRIALS See POLITICAL JUSTICE. POLITICAL WARFARE See PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE. POLITICS See GOVERNMENT; LOCAL POLITICS; POLITICAL SCIENCE; POLITICS, COMPARATIVE.
POLITICS,
COMPARATIVE
The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, published between 1930 and 1935, contained no special article on comparative politics or comparative government. There is an article "Government," followed by articles on individual governments; but no explicit comparative themes are treated, nor do they appear elsewhere under other topics. Much of the great tradition of political theory, in contrast, is essentially comparative, classificatory, typological. Comparison is such an intrinsic methodological assumption that it is not separated out as a specific subfield or approach. This background suggests the thesis of this article: that contemporary comparative politics is a movement rather than a subfield or subdiscipline. The case for comparative politics as a movement is quite persuasive. We start from a tradition in which comparison is an intrinsic aspect of political theory, then move to a situation in which it practically disappears along with the creative political theory of which it is a part, and arrive at the contemporary situation, in which it is a salient and separate part of the political science curriculum. The theory of democratic progress How can we explain this development? Perhaps We may begin by commenting on the fate of the
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Aristotelian classification scheme and theory of political change in the history of political science. On the surface it would appear that this Aristotelian macrotheoretical tradition continues straight on through subsequent millennia, up to and including Dahl's Modern Political Analysis (1963). And yet it would be misleading to say that the Aristotelian approach to comparison continues as a dominant intellectual construct into present-day political science. Enlightenment political theory moved away from the relativistic and cyclical approach of Aristotle to a unilinear approach to political history and political development. This is particularly marked in British, French, and American political theory, where at first democracy was justified as the best form of government on the basis of natural law and social contract, and then, as the democratic revolution spread, as the inevitable direction of human history. Locke and Rousseau are typical of the first approach to democratization, while Tocquevilie is among the first to view it as historically inevitable. His Democracy in America (1835) reflects a growing conviction that democratic politics is the political form of the future. America is the laboratory from which he seeks to derive some sense of the political, social, moral, and cultural consequences of this inevitable democratization. Ostrogorskii (1902) focused on the development of democracy in Britain and the United States, convinced that this was to be the trend of the future but deeply troubled by the growing elitism and bureaucratism of the mass political party in Britain and America. The important point is that Tocquevilie and Ostrogorskii were both concerned with comparisons within the democratic framework and were interested in nondemocratic systems principally as base lines against which democratic systems can be evaluated. The influence of social and political setting on political theory is reflected vividly in the contrasting reactions to democratic development of Woodrow Wilson (1889) and Bryce (1921) and those of Pareto (1916), Michels (1911), and Mosca (1896). Both the Anglo-American theorists and the continental European theorists reject the Aristotelian relativistic typology and cyclical theory of political change. Pareto, Michels, and Mosca argue that all political rule is oligarchical or elitist, regardless of its formal legal or ideological characteristics, while the British and American political theorists see a sweeping historical movement in the direction of constitutional and democratic forms. Woodrow Wilson's The State (1889) is an interesting syncretic product. On the one hand, it shows the great influence of nineteenth-century German political theory, with its massive ethno-
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graphic and historical learning, and the persistence of the Aristotelian categories, but at the same time the work is suffused with an evolutionary, democratic faith. In Bryce's Modern Democracies (1921) faith turns into conviction. He speaks in his introduction of ". . . the universal acceptance of democracy a^ the normal and natural form of government." Thus, on the eve of the development of American political science as a university-based, professional discipline, the theory of democratic progress dominated the field and justified a loss of interest in the classification and comparison of types of political systems or in the general theory of political change. The answers to these questions were viewed as self-evident, and normative speculation about the relative value of different kinds of political systems, and even empirical study of nondemocratic political systems, were pointless, or at best were useful, in the language employed in W. B. Munro's preface to his The Governments of Europe (1925), to make possible the ". . . comprehension of the daily news from abroad." One might say, therefore, that it was the Enlightenment itself, and in particular the parochial American "populistic" and "progressive" version of that faith, which resulted in an attenuation of interest in political comparison and typologies, as well as of the political theory of which that interest was a part. Broadly speaking, this unilinear evolutionary theory of political systems and political development characterized American political science as it began to develop into a substantial universitybased discipline in the first decades of the twentieth century. As separate departments of political science began to appear in these decades, the principal stress in the curriculum was on American politics. Research and teaching proliferated around themes having to do with problems of American democracy. The field of public administration was essentially concerned with the development of a professional public service and with the introduction of rational organizational and management practices in American government. Constitutional law was concerned principally with the conservatism of the Supreme Court and with what some constitutional lawyers thought of as the usurpation by the judiciary of law-making and constitutionmaking functions. The "real" functioning of the Congress and the executive also were fields of teaching and research interest. But the distinctive development during this period was the study of the informal, or the nonlegal, aspects of politics— the role of political parties, the political machine, the lobby and pressure groups, and the popular press. While students in these various fields were
concerned with generalizing about these phenomena, their theories were based essentially on American experience, and practically the whole burden of the research effort in the growing profession of political science was on American political institutions and processes. The older tradition of comparison and political theory survived in the work of such scholars as Carl Friedrich and Herman Finer. Both Finer's Theory and Practice of Modern Government ( 1932) and Friedrich's Constitutional Government and Democracy (1937) are works in the older political science tradition. They are comparative, and they treat varieties of forms of government and of governmental institutions and processes in the context of some of the great themes of political theory. But it is of interest that both of these scholars focus their work predominantly on constitutional, democratic systems. This approach to political science teaching and research was characteristic of American political science in the first four decades of the twentieth century, roughly until the end of World War n. This was the time when the profession was developing its own departments of political science (or government) and when the membership of the American Political Science Association was expanding from around two hundred at the turn of the century to roughly three thousand at the end of World War n. The American profession consisted in the main of students of American public administration, American public law, American political parties and pressure groups, Congress and the executive, and American state and local government. International relations and European governments were essentially minor themes, and students of non-Western political systems were oddities, working in isolation. The breakdown of this pattern was the consequence of the frustration of Enlightenment expectations resulting from the spread of fascism and communism in the 1920s and 1930s and increasing with the emergence of communism in the postWorld War ii period as an unambiguously competing form of modernization. Another factor making for the rejection of the earlier confidence in democratic development was the emergence in the post-World War n period of the many new nations of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, with their confusing variety of cultural and structural patterns and developmental processes. The comparative politics movement Comparative politics as a movement in political science acquired momentum after World War n (Interuniversity Summer Seminar . . . 1953; Her-
POLITICS, COMPARATIVE ring 1953; Kahin, Pauker, & Pye 1955; Macridis 1955; Almond 1956; Heckscher 1957; Neumann 1957; Rustow 1957; Apter 1958; Eckstein & Apter 1963). Among the principal intellectual influences which fed into it are (1) the growing body of data on non-Western political systems; (2) the introduction into foreign political studies of concepts and methods that had emerged in research on American political processes; (3) anthropological, psychological, and psychoanalytic theories of culture and personality; and (4) the concepts and insights of historical sociology and sociological theory. Acquisition of non-Western data. During the 1950s young political scientists streamed into Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and—somewhat later— into Latin America, producing monographic studies often as sophisticated analytically as the best of American and European political studies. The dominance of the political science profession by Americanists and Europeanists began to be challenged by a young generation of political scientists whose field experience was non-Western. The requirements of their research gave them a sensitivity and sophistication in the use of sociological and anthropological methods and theories that their Americanist and Europeanist colleagues often lacked (Apter 1955; 1961; Binder 1962; Pye 1962; Weiner 1962). Parliamentary institutions, bureaucracies, political parties, and interest groups in these new and developing nations often had quite a different significance than they had in Western nations, particularly the United States. Thus, in their search for the effective policy-making and policy-implementing processes in these nations they were led to look for their functional equivalents. "System," "process," and "functional" concepts, anthropological field methods, and anthropological and sociological theory had a natural appeal to these students of non-Western political systems. The behavioral movement. A second significant influence in the development of the comparative politics movement was the behavioral movement, which had its origins in studies of American electoral and political processes. One significant channel in this process of intellectual diffusion was the Committee on Political Behavior of the Social Science Research Council, which stimulated the organization of the Committee on Comparative Politics, which in turn played an important role in diffusing into the field research in non-Western and European areas many of the insights and methodologies that had developed in American political studies. The principal contributions from American political studies adapted to studies of foreign areas were the "process" frame of reference (Herring 1940; Schattschneider 1942; Key
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1942; Truman 1951); the emphasis on the nonformal aspects of political processes—political parties, interest groups, media of communication, and public opinion (Ehrmann 1957; Eckstein 1960; Weiner 1962; LaPalombara 1964)—and the newer and more rigorous methodologies employed in the studies of elections and public opinion (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet 1944; Campbell, Gurin, & Miller 1954). The culture and personality approach. A third influence feeding into the comparative politics movement was the so-called psychocultural approach developing out of the work of Freud and some of his disciples and the psychoanalytically oriented social scientists from the 1920s on, including such figures as Harold D. Lasswell (1930; 1948), Ruth Benedict (1934), Margaret Mead (1928-1935), Abram Kardiner (1939), Ralph Linton (1945), and Nathan Leites (1948). Their work, particularly in response to World War n problems, on the German, Japanese, Russian, and American national characters, created a sensitivity among students in the comparative politics movement to these aspects of politics and public policy. The political culture approach in comparative politics was greatly influenced by this psychoanthropological literature. It sought to relate cognitive and attitudinal patterns in national and subnational populations to the characteristics and functioning of political systems, through the use of cross-section survey methods, studies of particular elite groups, and the like (Almond & Verba 1963; Pye & Verba 1965). Historical sociology and sociological theory. A fourth intellectual current was that of historical sociology and sociological theory. In particular, the work of such sociological theorists as Max Weber (1906-1924; 1922), Ferdinand Tonnies (1887), Talcott Parsons, and Edward Shils (see Parsons & Shils 1951; Shils 1959-1960) influenced the efforts of some of the newer students of comparative politics to develop theoretical frameworks capable of ordering and codifying the research results and the insights produced by this extraordinary empirical research effort. The system concepts of Talcott Parsons and of the information theorists influenced the work of a group of political theorists and students of comparative politics. These included the theoretical contributions of David Easton (1953; 1965), Karl Deutsch (1963), David Apter (1965), Gabriel A. Almond and James Coleman (1960), and Lucian Pye (1962; 1966). Achievements and prospects If one speculates about the future of the comparative politics movement, a number of points
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are suggested. In the first place, the need to codify the growing accumulation of research on political systems from all of the various culture areas of the world and at all levels of structural differentiation and secularization has brought about a return to the classic themes of political theory. The classifications of Almond (1956), Shils (1959-1960), Dahl (1963), Apter (1965), Almond and Coleman (1960), and others reflect a return to the Aristotelian tradition—but now with greater theoretical sophistication and with more, and more reliable, information. Similarly, the concern with theories of political development among these and other authors is again indicative of a return to the classic theoretical problems of political change. The future of this classificatory and developmental interest would appear to lie with political theory rather than with a special subdiscipline of comparative politics. A second development brought about by the comparative politics movement is the breakdown in the parochialism of the theories of various special institutions and processes, such as bureaucracy (LaPalombara 1963; Riggs 1964), political parties (Duverger 1951; Neumann 1956; LaPalombara & Weiner 1966), interest groups, and the like. Here again, one cannot see a future in a comparative politics subdiscipline for these developments but, rather, in the more adequate development of theories of particular processes and institutions in the functioning of political systems. Third, the studies of specific political systems now broadly grouped under the heading of comparative government and politics in most political science curricula are shifting from a configurative approach to one that employs schemes of classification, generic categories of a functional kind, and is illuminated by comparison. It makes no sense to include these studies of individual political systems under the heading of comparative politics, since all political systems will be treated comparatively, whether within the framework of theoretical courses, which will group them into classes and varieties, or in the more intensive analyses of individual cases, which will draw upon general classificatory and developmental theories, and upon specific institutional and process theories. Another and more recent development in comparative politics would again seem to have long-run implications for the development of empirical and normative political theory rather than for the development of a special discipline of comparative politics. As political scientists have become increasingly concerned with the adaptation and transformation of political systems, and particularly with
problems of public policy relating to the new nations, there has been an increasing tendency to focus on the interaction of whole political systems with their domestic and international environments, since it is at this level that it becomes possible to explain political change. This most recent development among students of comparative politics and political development holds out the prospect of bridging the discontinuity between empirical and normative political theories. As methodologies are developed that will make possible precise characterization of the interaction of political systems with their environments, the problem of the ethical evaluation of political systems becomes more of a rigorous, empirically based exercise. This, of course, is not to say that empirical performance is the same thing as ethical evaluation. It can, however, provide the information essential to evaluation and can test hypotheses regarding the ethical properties of varieties of political systems. Finally, the most recent preoccupation in the field of comparative politics—with political development and with the logic of a theory of resource allocation to effect political change—again holds out the prospect for the enrichment of political theory rather than for the future of a particular subdiscipline within the field. Thus, this interest too may be assimilated into a general body of political theory. It is difficult to see, therefore, that comparative politics has a long-run future as a subdiscipline of political science. Rather, it would appear that, like the political behavior movement which preceded it, its promise lies in enriching the discipline of political science as a whole. GABRIEL A. ALMOND [See also MODERNIZATION; POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY; POLITICAL CULTURE. Other relevant material may be found in GOVERNMENT; LEGAL SYSTEMS, article on COMPARATIVE LAW AND LEGAL SYSTEMS; POLITICAL BEHAVIOR; POLITICAL SCIENCE; PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION; PUBLIC LAW, article on COMPARATIVE PUBLIC LAW.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
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KARDINER, ABRAM (1939) 1955 The Individual and His Society: The Psychodynamics of Primitive Social Organization. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. KEY, V. O. JR. (1942) 1964 Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups. 5th ed. New York: Crowell. LAPALOMBARA, JOSEPH G. (editor) 1963 Bureaucracy and Political Development. Studies in Political Development, No. 2. Princeton Univ. Press. LAPALOMBARA, JOSEPH G. 1964 Interest Groups in Italian Politics. Princeton Univ. Press. LAPALOMBARA, JOSEPH G.; and WEINER, MYRON (editors) 1966 Political Parties and Political Development. Studies in Political Development, No. 6. Princeton Univ. Press. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. (1930) 1960 Psychopathology and Politics. New ed., with afterthoughts by the author. New York: Viking. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. (1930-1951) 1951 The Political Writings of Harold D. Lasswell. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. 1948 Power and Personality. New York: Norton. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; BERELSON. BERNARD; and GAUDET, HAZEL (1944) 1960 The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. 2d ed. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. LEITES, NATHAN 1948 Psycho-cultural Hypotheses About Political Acts. World Politics 1:102-119. LINTON, RALPH 1945 The Cultural Background of Personality. New York: Appleton. LOCKE, JOHN (1690) 1964 Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge Univ. Press. -» See especially "Of Civil Government." MACRIDIS, ROY C. 1955 The Study of Comparative Government. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. MEAD, MARGARET (1928-1935) 1939 From the South Seas: Studies of Adolescence and Sex in Primitive Societies. New York: Morrow. MEAD, MARGARET 1951 The Study of National Character. Pages 70-85 in Daniel Lerner and Harold D. Lasswell (editors), The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Method. Stanford Univ. Press. MICHELS, ROBERT (1911) 1959 Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. New York: Dover. -> First published as Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie. A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Collier. MICHIGAN, UNIVERSITY OF, SURVEY RESEARCH CENTER 1960 The American Voter, by Angus Campbell et al. New York: Wiley. MOSCA, GAETANO (1896) 1939 The Ruling Class (Elementi di scienza politica). New York: McGraw-Hill. MUNRO, WILLIAM B. 1925 The Governments of Europe. New York: Macmillan. -» A fourth edition was published in 1954 under the joint authorship of William B. Munro and Morley Ayearst. NEUMANN, SIGMUND (editor) 1956 Modern Political Parties: Approaches to Comparative Politics. Univ. of Chicago Press. NEUMANN, SIGMUND 1957 Comparative Politics: A Halfcentury Appraisal. Journal of Politics 19:369-390. OSTROGORSKII, MOISEI I. 1902 Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties. 2 vols. London and New York: Macmillan. ->• An abridged edition was published in 1964 by Quadrangle Books. PARETO, VILFREDO (1916) 1963 The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology. 4 vols. New York:
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Dover. -» First published as Trattato di sociologia generate. Volume 1: Non-logical Conduct. Volume 2: Theory of Residues. Volume 3: Theory of Derivations. Volume 4: The General Form of Society. PARSONS, TALCOTT; and SHILS, EDWARD (editors) 1951 Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Harper. PYE, LUCIAN W. 1962 Politics, Personality, and Nation Building: Burma's Search for Identity. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. PYE, LUCIAN W. 1966 Aspects of Political Development: An Analytic Study. Boston: Little. PYE, LUCIAN W.; and VERBA, STDNEY (editors) 1965 Political Culture and Political Development. Princeton Univ. Press. RIGGS, FRED W. 1964 Administration in Developing Countries. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ROUSSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES (1762) 1961 The Social Contract. London: Dent. -> First published in French. RUSTOW, DANKWART A. 1957 New Horizons for Comparative Politics. World Politics 9:530-549. SCHATTSCHNEIDER, ELMER E. (1942) 1960 Party Government. New York: Holt. SHILS, EDWARD (1959-1960) 1962 Political Development in the New States. The Hague: Mouton. -» First published in Volume 2 of Comparative Studies in Society and History. TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE (1835) 1945 Democracy in America. 2 vols. New York: Knopf. -» First published in French. Paperback editions were published in 1961 by Vintage and by Schocken. TONNIES, FERDINAND (1887) 1957 Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). Translated and edited by Charles P. Loomis. East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press. -> First published in German. A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Harper. TRUMAN, DAVID B. (1951) 1962 The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion. New York: Knopf. WEBER, MAX (1906-1924) 1946 From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. -> First published in German. WEBER, MAX (1922) 1957 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Edited by Talcott Parsons. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» First published as Part 1 of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. WEINER, MYRON 1962 The Politics of Scarcity: Public Pressure and Political Response in India. Univ. of Chicago Press. WILSON, WOODROW (1889) 1918 The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics. Boston: Heath.
POLLS See ELECTIONS; PUBLIC OPINION; SAMPLE SURVEYS; VOTING.
POLLUTION One of the great puzzles in comparative studies of religion has been the reconciliation of the concept of pollution, or defilement, with that of holiness. In the last half of the nineteenth century,
Robertson Smith asserted that the religion of primitive peoples developed out of the relation between a community and its gods, who were seen as just and benevolent. Dependent on a sociological approach to religion, Robertson Smith continued always to draw a line between religious behavior, concerned with ethics and gods, and nonreligious, magical behavior. He used the term taboo to describe nonreligious rules of conduct, especially those concerned with pollution, in order to distinguish them from the rules of holiness protecting sanctuaries, priests, and everything pertaining to gods. The latter behavior he held to be intelligible and praiseworthy and the former to be primitive, savage, and irrational—"magical superstition based on mere terror." He clearly felt that magic and superstition were not worth a scholar's attention. But Sir James Frazer, who dedicated The Golden Bough to Robertson Smith, tried to classify and understand the nature of magical thinking. He formulated the two principles of sympathetic magic: action by contagion and action by likeness. Frazer followed Robertson Smith in assuming that magic was more primitive than religion, and he worked out an evolutionary scheme in which primitive man's earliest thinking was oriented to mechanical ideas of contagion. Magic gradually gave way to another cosmology, the idea of a universe dominated by supernatural beings similar to man but greatly superior to him. Magic thus came to be accepted as a word for ritual which is not enacted within a cult of divine beings. But obviously there is an overlap between nonreligious ideas of contagion and rules of holiness. Robertson Smith accounted for this by making the distinction between holiness and uncleanness a criterion of the advanced religions: The person under taboo is not regarded as holy, for he is separated from approach to the sanctuary as well as from contact with men, but his act or condition is somehow associated with supernatural dangers, arising, according to the common savage explanation, from the presence of formidable spirits which are shunned like an infectious disease. In most savage societies no sharp line seems to be drawn between the two kinds of taboo . . . and even in more advanced nations the notions of holiness and uncleanness often touch . . . [to] distinguish between the holy and the unclean, marks a real advance above savagery. ([1889] 1927, p. 153) Frazer echoes the notion that confusion between uncleanness and holiness marks primitive thinking. In a long passage in which he considers the Syrian attitude to pigs, he concludes: "Some said this was because the pigs were unclean; others said
POLLUTION it was because the pigs were sacred. This . . . points to a hazy state of religious thought in which the ideas of sanctity and uncleanness are not yet sharply distinguished, both being blent in a sort of vaporous solution to which we give the name of taboo" ([1890] 1955, vol. 2, part 5, p. 23). The work of several modern-day students of comparative religion derives not directly from Frazer but from the earlier work of Durkheim, whose debt to Robertson Smith is obvious in many ways. On the one hand, Durkheim was content to ignore aspects of defilement which are not part of a religious cult. He developed the notion that magical injunctions are the consequence of primitive man's attempt to explain the nature of the universe. Durkheim suggested that experimentation with magical injunctions, having thus arisen, has given way to medical science. But on the other hand, Durkheim tried to show that the contagiousness of the sacred is an inherent, necessary, and peculiar part of its character. His idea of the sacred as the expression of society's awareness of itself draws heavily on Robertson Smith's thesis that man's relation to the gods, his religious behavior, is an aspect of prescribed social behavior. It followed, for Durkheim, that religious ideas are different from other ideas. They are not referable to any ultimate material reality, since religious shrines and emblems are only themselves representations of abstract ideas. Religious experience is an experience of a coercive moral force. Consequently, religious ideas are volatile and fluid; they float in the mind, unattached, and are always likely to shift, or to merge into other contexts at the risk of losing their essential character •. there is always the danger that the sacred will invade the profane and the profane invade the sacred. The sacred must be continually protected from the profane by interdictions. Thus, relations with the sacred are always expressed through rituals of separation and demarcation and are reinforced with beliefs in the danger of crossing forbidden boundaries. [See the biographies of DURKHEIM; FRAZER; SMITH, WILLIAM ROBERTSON.] If contemporary thinkers were not already well prepared to accept the idea that "religious" restrictions were utterly different from primitive superstitions about contagion, this circular distinction between two kinds of contagion could hardly have gone unchallenged. How can it be argued that contagiousness is the peculiar characteristic of ideas about the sacred when another kind of contagiousness has been bracketed away by definition as irrelevant? This criticism of Durkheim's treatment of sacred
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contagion is implicit in Levy-Bruhl's massive work on primitive mentality (1922). Levy-Bruhl documented a special kind of outlook on the universe, one in which the power to act and to be acted upon regardless of restrictions of space and time is widely attributed to symbolical representations of persons and animals. He himself explained the belief in such remote contagion by the dominance of the idea of the supernatural in the primitive view of the world. And since he would expect "supernatural" to be equated with Durkheim's "sacred," he seems to have seen no conflict between his and the master's views. [See the biography of LEVYBRUHL.] We cannot accept Durkheim's argument that there are two kinds of contagion, one the origin of primitive hygiene and the other intrinsic to ideas about the sacred, because it is circular. If we approach the problem of contagion in Levy-Bruhl's terms, then the scope of the answer is broadened: there is not simply a residual area of magical behavior that remains to be explained after primitive religious behavior has been understood but rather a whole mentality, a view of how the universe is constituted. This view of the universe differs essentially from that of civilized man in that sympathetic magic provides the key to its control. Levy-Bruhl is open to criticism; his statement of the problem is oversimple. He bluntly contrasts primitive mentality with scientific thought, not fully appreciating what a rare and specialized activity scientific thinking is and in what well-defined and isolated conditions it takes place. His use of the word "prelogical" in his first formulation of primitive thinking was unfortunate, and he later discarded it. But although his work seems to be discredited at present, the general problem still stands. There is a whole class of cultures, call them what you will, in which great attention is paid to symbolic demarcation and separation of the sacred and the profane and in which dangerous consequences are expected to follow from neglect of the rituals of separation. In these cultures lustrations, fumigations, and purifications of various kinds are applied to avert the dangerous effect of breach of the rules, and symbolic actions based on likeness to real causes are used as instruments for creating positive effects. The cultural definition If we are not to follow Robertson Smith in treating the rules of uncleanness as irrational and beyond analysis, we need to clear away some of the barriers which divide up this whole field of inquiry. While the initial problem is posed by the difference
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between "our" kind of thinking and "theirs," it is a mistake to treat "us" the moderns and "them" the ancients as utterly different. We can only approach primitive mentality through introspection and understanding of our own mentality. The distinction between religious behavior and secular behavior also tends to be misleadingly rigid. To solve the puzzle of sacred contagion we can start with more familiar ideas about secular contagion and defilement. In English-speaking cultures, the key word is the ancient, primitive, and still current "dirt." Lord Chesterfield defined dirt as matter out of place. This implies only two conditions, a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Thus the idea of dirt implies a structure of ideas. For us dirt is a kind of compendium category for all events which blur, smudge, contradict, or otherwise confuse accepted classifications. The underlying feeling is that a system of values which is habitually expressed in a given arrangement of things has been violated. This definition of defilement avoids some historical peculiarities of Western civilization. For example, it says nothing about the relation between dirt and hygiene. We know that the discovery of pathogenic organisms is recent, but the idea of dirt antedates the idea of pathogenicity. It is therefore more likely to have universal application. If we treat all pollution behavior as the reaction to any event likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications, we can bring two new approaches to bear on the problem: the work of psychologists on perception and of anthropologists on the structural analysis of culture. Perception is a process in which the perceiver actively interprets and, in the course of his interpreting, adapts and even supplements his sensory experiences. Hebb has shown that in the process of perception, the perceiver imposes patterns of organization on the masses of sensory stimuli in the environment (1949; 1958). The imposed pattern organizes sequences into units—fills in missing events which would be necessary to justify the recognition of familiar units. The perceiver learns to adjust his response to allow for modification of stimuli according to changes in lighting, angle of regard, distance, and so forth. In this way the learner develops a scheme or structure of assumptions in the light of which new experiences are interpreted. Learning takes place when new experience lends itself to assimilation in the existing structure of assumption or when the scheme of past assumptions is modified in order to accommodate what is unfamiliar. In the normal process of interpretation, the existing scheme of assumptions tends
to be protected from challenge, for the learner recognizes and absorbs cues which harmonize with past experience and usually ignores cues which are discordant. Thus, those assumptions which have worked well before are reinforced. Because the selection and treatment of new experiences validates the principles which have been learned, the structure of established assumptions can be applied quickly and automatically to current problems of interpretation. In animals this stabilizing, selective tendency serves the biological function of survival. In men the same tendency appears to govern learning. If every new experience laid all past interpretations open to doubt, no scheme of established assumptions could be developed and no learning could take place. This approach may be extended to the learning of cultural phenomena. Language, for example, learned and spoken by individuals, is a social phenomenon produced by continuous interaction between individuals. The regular discriminations which constitute linguistic structure are the spontaneous outcome of continual control, exercised on an individual attempting to communicate with others. Expressions which are ambiguous or which deviate from the norm are less effective in communication, and speakers experience a direct feedback encouraging conformity. Language has more loosely and more strictly patterned domains in which ambiguity has either more or less serious repercussions on effective communication. Thus there are certain domains in which ambiguity can be better tolerated than in others (Osgood & Sebeok 1954, p. 129). Similar pressures affect the discrimination of cultural themes. During the process of enculturation the individual is engaged in ordering newly received experiences and bringing them into conformity with those already absorbed. He is also interacting with other members of his community and striving to reduce dissonance between his structure of assumptions and theirs (Festinger 1957). Frenkel-Brunswik's research among schoolchildren who had been variously exposed to racial prejudice illustrates the effects of ambiguity on learning at this level. The children listened to stories which they were afterwards asked to recall. In the stories the good and bad roles were not consistently allocated to white and Negro characters. When there was dissonance between their established pattern of assumptions about racial values and the actual stories they heard, an ambiguous effect was received. They were unable to recall the stories accurately. There are implications here for the extent to which a culture (in the sense of a
POLLUTION consistent structure of themes, postulates, and evaluations) can tolerate ambiguity. It is now common to approach cultural behavior as if it were susceptible to structural analysis on lines similar to those used in linguistics (Levi-Strauss 1958; Leach 1961). For a culture to have any recognizable character, a process of discrimination and evaluation must have taken place very similar to the process of language development—with an important difference. For language the conditions requiring clear verbal communication provide the main control on the pattern which emerges, but for the wider culture in which any language is set, communication with others is not the only or principal function. The culture affords a hierarchy of goals and values which the community can apply as a general guide to action in a wide variety of contexts. Cultural interaction, like linguistic interaction, involves the individual in communication with others. But it also helps the individual to reflect upon and order his own experience. The general processes by which language structure changes and resists change have their analogues at the higher level of cultural structure. The response to ambiguity is generally to encourage clearer discrimination of differences. As in language, there are different degrees of tolerance of ambiguity. Linguistic intolerance is expressed by avoidance of ambiguous utterances and by pressure to use well-discriminated forms where differences are important to interpretation and appropriate responses. Cultural intolerance of ambiguity is expressed by avoidance, by discrimination, and by pressure to conform. The functions of pollution beliefs To return to pollution behavior, we have already seen that the idea of dirt implies system. Dirt avoidance is a process of tidying up, ensuring that the order in external physical events conforms to the structure of ideas. Pollution rules can thus be seen as an extension of the perceptual process: insofar as they impose order on experience, they support clarification of forms and thus reduce dissonance. Much attention has been paid to the sanctions by which pollution rules are enforced (see Steiner 1956, p. 22). Sometimes the breach is punished by political decree, sometimes by attack on the transgressor, and sometimes by grave or trivial sanctions; the sanction used reflects several aspects of the matter. We can assume that the community, insofar as it shares a common culture, is collectively interested in pressing for conformity to its norms. In some areas of organization the community is capable of punishing deviants directly,
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but in others this is not practicable. This may happen, for example, if political organization is not sufficiently developed or if it is developed in such a way as to make certain offenses inaccessible to police action. Homicide is a type of offense which is variously treated according to the relationship between killer and victim. If the offender is himself a member of the victim's group and, if this is the group which is normally entrusted with protection of its members' interests, it may be held contradictory and impossible for the group to inflict punishment. Then the sanction is likely to be couched in terms of a misfortune that falls upon the offender without human intervention. This kind of homicide is treated as a pollution. We would expect to find that the pollution beliefs of a culture are related to its moral values, since these form part of the structure of ideas for which pollution behavior is a protective device. But we would not expect to find any close correspondence between the gravity with which offenses are judged and the danger of pollution connected with them. Some moral failings are likely to be met with prompt and unpleasant social consequences. These self-punishing offenses are less likely to be sanctioned by pollution beliefs than by other moral rules. Pollution beliefs not only reinforce the cultural and social structure, but they can actively reduce ambiguity in the moral sphere. For example, if two moral standards are applied to adultery, so that it is condemned in women and tolerated in men, there will inevitably be some ambiguity in the moral judgment since adultery involves a man and a woman. A pollution belief can reduce the ambiguity. If the man is treated as dangerously contagious, his adulterous condition, while not in itself condemned, endangers the outraged husband or the children; moral support can be mustered against him. Alternatively, if attention is focused on the pollution aspect of the case, a rite of purification can mitigate the force of the moral condemnation. This approach to pollution allows further applications of Durkheimian analysis. If we follow him in assuming that symbolism and ritual, whether strictly religious or not, express society's awareness of its own configuration and necessities, and if we assume that pollution rules indicate the areas of greater systematization of ideas, then we have an additional instrument of sociological analysis. Durkheim held that the dangerous powers imputed to the gods are, in actual fact, powers vested in the social structure for defending itself, as a structure, against the deviant behavior of its members. His approach is strengthened by includ-
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ing all pollution rules and not merely those which form part of the religious cult. Indeed, deriving pollution behavior from processes similar to perception comes close to Durkheim's intention of understanding society by developing a social theory of knowledge. Pollution rules in essence prohibit physical contact. They tend to be applied to products or functions of human physiology; thus they regulate contact with blood, excreta, vomit, hair clippings, nail clippings, cooked food, and so on. But the anthropologist notes that the incidence of beliefs in physiological pollution varies from place to place. In some communities menstrual pollution is gravely feared and in others not at all; in some, pollution by contact with the dead is feared, in others pollution of food or blood. Since our common human condition does not give rise to a common pattern of pollution observances, the differences become interesting as an index of different cultural patterning. It seems that physiological pollutions become important as symbolic expressions of other undesirable contacts which would have repercussions on the structure of social or cosmological ideas. In some societies the social definition of the sexes is more important than in others. In some societies social units are more rigorously defined than in others. Then we find that physical contact between sexes or between social units is restricted even at second or third remove. Not only may social intercourse be restricted, but sitting on the same chair, sharing the same latrine, or using the same cooking utensils, spoons, or combs may be prohibited and negatively sanctioned by pollution beliefs. By such avoidances social definitions are clarified and maintained. Color bars and caste barriers are enforced by these means. As to the ordered relation of social units and the total structure of social life, this must depend on the clear definition of roles and allegiances. We would therefore expect to find pollution concepts guarding threatened disturbances of the social order. On this, nearly everything has been said by van Gennep. His metaphor of society as a kind of house divided into rooms and corridors, the compartments carefully isolated and the passages between them protected by ceremonial, shows insight into the social aspects of pollution. So also does his insistence on the relative character of the sacred: Sacredness as an attribute is not absolute; it is brought into play by the nature of particular situations. . . . Thus the "magic circles" pivot, shifting as a person moves from one place in society to another. The categories and concepts which embody them operate in
such a way that whoever passes through the various positions of a lifetime one day sees the sacred where before he has seen the profane, or vice versa. Such changes of condition do not occur without disturbing the life of society and the individual, and it is the function of rites of passage to reduce their harmful effects. (Gennep [1909] 1960, pp. 12-13) Van Gennep saw that rites of transition treat all marginal or ill-defined social states as dangerous. His treatment of margins is fully compatible with the sociological approach to pollution. But van Gennep's ideas must be vastly expanded. Not only marginal social states, but all margins, the edges of all boundaries which are used in ordering the social experience, are treated as dangerous and polluting. Rites of passage are not purificatory but are prophylactic. They do not redefine and restore a lost former status or purify from the effect of contamination, but they define entrance to a new status. In this way the permanence and value of the classifications embracing all sections of society are emphasized. When we come to consider cosmological pollution, we are again faced with the problem unresolved by Levy-Bruhl. Cosmological pollution is to the Westerner the most elusive, yet the most interesting case. Our own culture has largely given up the attempt to unify, to interpenetrate, and to crossinterpret the various fields of knowledge it encompasses. Or rather, the task has been taken over by natural science. A major part of pollution behavior therefore lies outside the realm of our own experience: this is the violent reaction of condemnation provoked by anything which seems to defy the apparently implicit categories of the universe. Our culture trains us to believe that anomalies are only due to a temporarily inadequate formulation of general natural laws. We have to approach this kind of pollution behavior at second hand. The obvious source of information on the place of cosmic abnormality in the mind of the primitive is again Levy-Bruhl. Earthquakes, typhoons, eclipses, and monstrous births defy the order of the universe. If something is thought to be frightening because it is abnormal or anomalous, this implies a conception of normality or at least of categories into which the monstrous portent does not fit. The more surprising that anomaly is taken to be, the clearer the evidence that the categories which it contradicts are deeply valued. At this point we can take up again the question of how the culture of civilization differs from that which Levy-Bruhl called primitive. Recalling that
POLLUTION dirt implies system and that pollution beliefs indicate the areas of greatest systematization, we can assume that the answer must be along the same lines. The different elements in the primitive world view are closely integrated; the categories of social structure embrace the universe in a single, symbolic whole. In any primitive culture the urge to unify experience to create order and wholeness has been effectively at work. In "scientific culture" the apparent movement is the other way. We are led by our scientists to specialization and compartmentalism of spheres of knowledge. We suffer the continual breakup of established ideas. Levy-Bruhl, looking to define the distinction between the scientific and the primitive outlook, would have been well served if he had followed Kant's famous passage on his own Copernican revolution. Here Kant describes each great advance in thought as a stage in the process of freeing "mind" from the shackles of its own subjective tendencies. In scientific work the thinker tries to be aware of the provisional and artificial character of the categories of thought which he uses. He is ready to reform or reject his concepts in the interests of making a more accurate statement. Any culture which allows its guiding concepts to be continually under review is immune from cosmological pollutions. To the extent that we have no established world view, our ways of thinking are different from those of people living in primitive cultures. For the latter, by long and spontaneous evolution, have adapted their patterns of assumption from one context to another until the whole of experience is embraced. But such a comprehensive structure of ideas is precarious to the extent that it is an arbitrary selection from the range of possible structures in the same environment. Other ways of dividing up and evaluating reality are conceivable. Hence, pollution beliefs protect the most vulnerable domains, where ambiguity would most weaken the fragile structure. Emotional aspects of pollution behavior Pollution beliefs are often discussed in terms of the emotions which they are thought to express. But there is no justification for assuming that terror, or even mild anxiety, inspires them any more than it inspires the housewife's daily tidying up. For pollution beliefs are cultural phenomena. They are institutions that can keep their forms only by bringing pressure to bear on deviant individuals. There is no reason to suppose that the individual in a primitive culture experiences fear, still less unreasoning terror, if his actions threaten to modify
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the form of the culture he shares. His position is exactly comparable to a speaker whose own linguistic deviations cause him to produce responses which vary with his success in communicating. The dangers and punishments attached to pollution act simply as means of enforcing conformity. As to the question of the rational or irrational character of rules of uncleanness, Robertson Smith is shown to have been partly right. Pollution beliefs certainly derive from rational activity, from the process of classifying and ordering experience. They are, however, not produced by strictly rational or even conscious processes but rather as a spontaneous by-product of these processes. MARY DOUGLAS [See also CASTE; COMMUNICATION; MAGIC; MYTH AND SYMBOL; RlTUAL.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
DOUGLAS, MARY 1966 Purity and Danger: A Comparative Study of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. DURKHEIM, EMILE (1912) 1954 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan. -> First published as Les formes elementaires de la vie religieuse, le systeme totemique en Australie. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Collier. ELIADE, MIRCEA (1957) 1959 The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt. -» First published in German. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Harper. FESTINGER, LEON 1957 A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, 111.: Row. FRAZER, JAMES (1890) 1955 The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 3rd ed., rev. & enl. 13 vols. New York: St. Martins; London: Macmillan. -> An abridged edition was published in 1922 and reprinted in 1955. FRENKEL-BRUNSWIK, ELSE 1949 Intolerance of Ambiguity as an Emotional and Perceptual Personality Variable. Journal of Personality 18:108-143. GENNEP, ARNOLD VAN (1909) 1960 The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge; Univ. of Chicago Press. -» First published in French. HEBB, DONALD O. 1949 The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. New York: Wiley. HEBB, DONALD O. 1958 A Textbook of Psychology. Philadelphia: Saunders. LEACH, EDMUND R. 1961 Rethinking Anthropology. London School of Economics and Political Science Monographs on Social Anthropology, No. 22. London: Athlone. LEVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE (1958) 1963 Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. -> First published in French. LEVY-BRUHL, LUCIEN (1910) 1926 How Natives Think. London: Allen & Unwin. -» First published as Les fonctions mentales dans les societes primitives. LEVY-BRUHL, LUCIEN (1922) 1923 Primitive Mentality. Macmillan. -» First published in French.
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OSGOOD, CHARLES E.; and SEBEOK, THOMAS A. (editors) (1954) 1965 Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. SMITH, WILLIAM ROBERTSON (1889) 1927 Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. 3d ed. New York: Macmill an. STEINER, FRANZ 1956 Taboo. New York: Philosophical Library.
POPULATION The articles under this heading provide an overview of the field of population. Specific topics directly within the field of demography are reviewed in FERTILITY; MIGRATION; MORTALITY; NUPTIALITY. Methods used for the study of population are described in CENSUS; LIFE TABLES; SAMPLE SURVEYS; STATISTICS; SURVEY ANALYSIS; VITAL STATISTICS. Other material directly relevant to the study of population will be found in CAPITAL, HUMAN; EPIDEMIOLOGY; FERTILITY CONTROL; FOOD,
article on WORLD PROBLEMS; GENETICS, article on DEMOGRAPHY AND POPULATION GENETICS; LABOR FORCE; LITERACY; PUBLIC HEALTH; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, ANIMAL, article on THE REGULATION OF ANIMAL POPULATIONS. Also relevant are the biographies of BERTILLON; GRAUNT; LOTKA; MALTHUS; PETTY; SUNDT; StJSSMILCH; WlCKSELL; WlLLCOX.
i. ii. in. iv. v. vi. vn.
THE FIELD OF DEMOGRAPHY POPULATION THEORIES OPTIMUM POPULATION THEORY POPULATION COMPOSITION POPULATION DISTRIBUTION POPULATION GROWTH POPULATION POLICIES
Dudley Kirk Alfred Sauvy Joseph J. Spengler Kurt B. Mayer Vincent H. Whitney John V. Grauman Hope T. Eldridge
THE FIELD OF DEMOGRAPHY
Demography is the quantitative study of human populations. Its basic materials are censuses, vital statistics, and, increasingly, sample surveys. Its central concerns are the measurement and discovery of uniformities in the basic processes of human birth, death, population movement, and population growth; these phenomena are treated in both their socioeconomic and their biological contexts. The methods of demography are empirical and statistical and make as much use of advanced mathematics as those of any branch of the social sciences. Like anthropology and psychology, demography bridges the social and biological sciences. The word "demography" was apparently first used by Achille Guillard in his Elements de sta-
tistique humaine, ou demographic comparee in 1855. Its Greek origins are demos (people) and graphein (to draw, describe). Until recently, the word had not attained general usage among English-speaking peoples, and those using it were frequently the victims of typographers and casual audiences who insisted on confusing it with "democracy." The most widely used textbook on population problems in the United States during the period from 1930 to 1960 does not mention the word in the first three editions and refers to it only casually in the fourth and fifth (Thompson & Lewis 1930). However, the word is gaining both wider usage and wider meaning as describing the scientific aspect of population study. Formal demography. A distinction is commonly made between "formal," or "pure," demography and broader population studies. Formal demography is a well-defined, technical subject with a highly developed mathematical methodology. It is concerned primarily with the measurement and analysis of the components of population change, especially births, deaths, and, to a smaller extent, migration. It is concerned with population structure—that is, the age, sex, and marital composition of the population—as it contributes to the understanding of population change. Formal demography has provided some of the most fruitful uses of mathematical models in the social sciences. These include the construction of life tables, which provide the terms within which life insurance and social security systems must operate; intrinsic rates of reproduction and other sophisticated measures of natality, which have contributed much to the understanding of the secular decline of birth rates in the West and their fluctuations after World War ii; stable population analysis, which has provided methods of estimating birth rates and rates of population growth in the absence of reliable vital statistics and often with grossly inaccurate census data; and population projections, based on the analysis of trends in the components of population change. Such projections are in great demand for purposes of economic development, market research, city planning, educational planning, estimating future labor supply, and numerous other approaches to measuring people as producers and consumers. For actuarial purposes, demography is usually defined in the narrow sense of formal demography (Cox 1950). This definition also prevails in certain European countries, notably Italy. Broader usage. A broader and increasingly popular usage of the term "demography" includes studies of demographic variables in their social
POPULATION: The Field of Demography contexts as well as their biological contexts. In this approach, demographic changes are viewed as part of, and as both cause and effect of, their social environment. Demographic analysis has also come to mean "not only the statistical manipulation of population data, but more important, the study of such data as a method of solving empirical problems" (Spengler & Duncan [1956a] 1963, p. xiii). In addition to the components of population change, demographic variables are rather arbitrarily assumed to include those mass measurements of population that are commonly enumerated in population censuses: the size and distribution of the population, its biological composition by age and sex, and certain of its more measurable socioeconomic characteristics. Among these variables, data on population size, geographical distribution (including rural-urban), age-sex composition, and marital status are generally considered to be more specifically the subject matter of demography. Other socioeconomic characteristics, such as race, language, religion, education, occupation, and income, are studied in their own right and often in relation to group differences in birth rates, death rates, and migration. The broader definition of demography inevitably involves interdisciplinary aspects, since demographers and other social scientists may study human populations in relation to other variables. Thus, a study of rural—urban migration may be considered demographic if it is primarily concerned with measurement and quantitative uniformities, economic if it is concerned with economic causes and effects, and sociological if it deals with sociological causes and effects. There is no firm line of demarcation, nor should one be expected. Beyond the specific discipline of formal demography there is no distinguishing criterion of demography as such, other than its involvement in quantitative measures of human populations. Thus, it can be said that the subject matter of demography includes those population theories that are based on quantitative observation and generalization, but not thoss that are formulated a priori at a more abstract and polemical level. The development of demography Censuses in various forms were conducted early in human history. A Roman census was taken under Caesar Augustus the year Christ was born (thus forcing Joseph and Mary to journey to Bethlehem to be enrolled in the place of their ancestry); and a major census was conducted in China in the year 2 A.D., during the Han Dynasty.
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While such scattered censuses are of great interest for historical demography, modern censuses usable for scientific pursuits are essentially of nineteenth-century origin. Regular decennial censuses were initiated in the United States in 1790 and in France and England in 1801. Important exceptions are the population registers in Scandinavia, which date back to 1686 in Sweden and 1769 in Denmark. Origins in vital statistics. Empirical demography began in the context of vital statistics with the work of John Graunt. His Natural and Political Observations Upon the Bills of Mortality, published in 1662, is a study of current reports on burials and christenings for a population of about 500,000 persons in the vicinity of London. The very title of this early work illustrates the fact that demography has roots in both biological and social inquiries. In the 1670s, William Petty built on Graunt's work to write a treatise on what he described as "political arithmetick." Gradually demography was absorbed into the new and more general study of statistics to the point that, in the United States, for example, concern about the accuracy and implications of vital statistics in the city of Boston led to the establishment of the American Statistical Association in 1839. The line of succession in the biostatistical tradition of demography is a notable one ( see Lorimer 1959). Interest in biostatistics led to attempts to explain population change in terms of mathematical processes, particularly logistic curves. Population change was conceived in terms of mechanical models by nineteenth-century researchers such as Adolphe Quetelet and Pierre Francois Verhulst and in biological terms by Pearl and Reed (1920), Alfred J. Lotka (1925), and G. Udny Yule (1925). While mechanical and biologically deterministic models did not ultimately prove convincing, they did lead to major developments in the statistical analysis of the processes of birth and death. Outstanding among these were Lotka's contributions in computing reproduction rates and intrinsic, or true, rates of natural increase, holding constant the age structure of the population. The use of mathematical models, both stochastic and deterministic, has enjoyed a rebirth in demography, perhaps because of the vogue of model-building in social sciences generally, and certainly because of the capabilities of modern computer technology. Malthusian theory. The economic approach to demography is commonly traced to the work of Thomas Malthus, although he readily admitted the contributions of his predecessors. His Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798, is undoubtedly the most discussed work in the field
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of demography. While he modified his position in successive versions of the volume, Malthus held the general view that population tends to increase faster than the means of subsistence and thus to absorb all economic gains, except when checked by moral restraint, vice, and misery. Malthus' influence was enormous, but his view was later challenged in three ways. First, during the nineteenth century economic growth far outdistanced population growth among European peoples, resulting in rising levels of living. Second, despite rises in the level of living, birth rates declined, first in France and Sweden, and by 1880 in western Europe generally. Finally, liberals and Marxists challenged the Malthusian view by asserting that poverty was the result of unjust social institutions rather than of population growth. Regardless of the validity of this argument, it caused population study to be associated with the conservative social philosophy of Malthus, an association which retarded the growth of demography as a scientific discipline. As one author says, The marriage of demography and economics while both were immature—"Parson" Malthus officiating— resulted in a stormy and unfruitful union. Both the dynamics of interactions among economic factors and the dynamics of vital trends in relation to population structure were long neglected in a hasty synthesis that placed undue emphasis on the relation of population to resources and the corollary theory of a hypothetical fixed "optimum." This led to the fallacious assumption that increase of population is necessarily advantageous in a country with low density of population and to an unwarranted pessimism about the possibilities of economic progress in densely populated countries. (Lorimer 1957, p. 21) Dissatisfaction with the Malthusian approach led to the divorce of demography from economics and to a continuing suspicion among some economists that demography overemphasizes the force of population growth and that population control in underdeveloped areas is in some way a diversion from, and even a threat to, the central purpose of economic development. Therefore, the economics of population change in the contemporary world has not received the attention that its importance would seem to merit, although it has not been entirely neglected. Now largely separated from economics, demography in the English-speaking world is commonly taught as a branch of sociology. The birth rate in Western society. In its sociological aspects, population study emerged as a science in the 1920s and 1930s. Up to that time, births, deaths, and natural increase had generally been regarded as biologically given, exogenous both to the economy and to the social system. But by
the interwar period, the general reduction of the birth rate in Western society had become highly visible and was the principal focus of demographic inquiry. Demographic studies demonstrated the social, as opposed to the biological, correlates and determinants of the decline in the birth rate. Thus, empirical studies showed that the decline was not the result of biological sterility but of voluntary restriction of births, predominantly by methods requiring a high level of motivation. It is perhaps not widely known even today that reduction of the birth rate through contraception was initially and predominantly the result of "male" methods, specifically the practice of coitus interruptus and, later, the use of the condom; the principal "female" method of birth control was abortion [see FERTILITY CONTROL]. The feminist birth control movement was noisy, often courageous, and certainly psychologically important, but there is little empirical evidence that the methods it advocated or the services it provided ever played a large part in the reduction of the birth rate in the Western world. In much of the Western world the chief methods of birth control are still coitus interruptus and abortion, although these are being increasingly replaced by new methods that have become generally available only since 1960. Another major concern of demographers was "differential fertility," that is, the general observation that birth control was first adopted by the more urbanized, the better educated, and the upperincome groups, with consequent rural-urban, educational, and class differences in birth rates. Demographers were reluctant to do more than measure these differences, but their observations reinforced concern about population "quality," since class differences in natality clearly seemed to favor the reproduction of the socially and economically unsuccessful, and possibly also the genetically inferior. The obvious role of social environment and voluntary control in the reduction of the birth rate gave rise to a new realization that birth and death rates, like migration, are effects as well as causes of social changes—dependent as well as independent variables with reference to the society in which they occur. Some felt that the existing trends were disturbing and even alarming, threatening "race suicide," on the one hand, and deterioration of "quality," on the other. The reaction to the declining birth rate was strongest in the totalitarian countries that for nationalistic reasons adopted "pronatalist" population policies. These policies included such measures as propaganda for larger families, family allowances,
POPULATION: The Field of Demography suppression of induced abortion, marriage loans with deductions for each child born within the period of repayment, "motherhood medals" for parents of large families, and various privileges in taxation and in the social insurance schemes. Prior to World War n such policies were adopted in fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Some of these measures, without the nationalistic overtones, were also adopted in France and Sweden [see POPULATION, article on POPULATION POLICIES]. In the English-speaking countries reaction to the declining birth rate was slower. In the United States the problem was given intensive study by the National Resources Committee (U.S. National Resources . . . 1938). In Great Britain and Canada family allowances were adopted after World War ii; and in Great Britain a Royal Commission on Population was created and issued a report that is a landmark in British thinking on this point (Great Britain 1949-1954). The effect of these pronatalist policies is controversial. The only clear cases of moderate success are rises in birth rates achieved in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union. In Germany the suppression of abortion and the promotion of earlier marriages and childbirth by marriage loans were contributing factors in the rise in the birth rate from 14.7 in 1933 to 20.3 in 1939 (Kirk 1942; Demographic Yearbook 1948, p. 262). But a substantial part of this increase was almost certainly due to the general improvement in economic conditions, especially the reduction of unemployment. In the Soviet Union the suppression of abortion was especially successful in raising birth rates in the cities, because abortion had formerly been legal and had even been provided as a health service of the state. In the mid-1950s abortion was again legalized and the birth rate in the Soviet Union is now quite low. In the period since World War n, French observers have expressed the view that family allowances have contributed to maintaining a higher birth rate in that country. Theory of the vital revolution. In Western countries there were important regularities in the declines in death rates and birth rates, whether viewed in time or space. The spread of declines, first in death rates and later in birth rates, is a well-documented example of cultural diffusion. From these regularities were derived a number of general propositions concerning the sequence of demographic developments in the modern world. Taken together, these propositions have come to be called the "theory of the vital revolution," or the "theory of the demographic transition."
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According to this theory, in premodern societies both birth and death rates are high; reproduction is inefficient because it is necessary to have high, relatively unrestricted natality in order to match the waste of a high death rate. The initial effect of modernization is a fall in the death rate, apparently owing to higher levels of living and to the introduction of epidemic controls and other elementary public health measures. Without a comparable decline in the birth rate, there is a growing margin of births over deaths and an accelerating rate of population growth. At a later stage of socioeconomic development, with the achievement of general literacy, urbanization, and industrialization (as in the Western countries and in Japan), the size of family is reduced by birth control and the birth rate falls, eventually reducing the rate of population growth. The theory of the demographic transition gave a plausible interpretation of demographic events in Western countries up to World War n. Demographers sought to extrapolate it in time, by projecting the then existing trends, and in space, by assuming that in the process of modernization the rest of the world would follow the same sequence of events as in the West. Population "projections" based on extrapolation of natality and mortality trends gained wide currency and were commonly regarded as estimates rather than as the mechanical extrapolations that they really were. It is ironic that demographers developed the techniques for projecting certain long-standing trends in the components of population growth, especially in natality, just at a time when these trends were about to dissolve. New attitudes favoring earlier marriage and more children appeared in the very societies where the great majority of families had been practicing birth control. The recovery of the birth rate in Western countries just before, during, and especially after World War n violated the projections of previous trends and those formulations of the demographic transition that considered Western countries to be approaching a stationary or declining population. While the prolonged "baby boom" after World War n has receded, all Western countries continue to have modest rates of population growth. The demographic transition has not fully materialized in non-Western cultures, aside from Japan. The transition has largely run its course in countries inhabited by peoples of predominantly European race and heritage, including Europe, the Soviet Union, and the overseas countries of chiefly European background. As yet, very few non-European countries have clearly reached the stage of
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declining birth rates and slower rates of population growth. There has not been a continuum of countries moving through the stages of transition, as Western countries were doing at the time when the theory was developed. Instead, there is now a sharp division between countries that have passed through the "vital revolution" and now have modest birth rates and growth rates, and countries in which the death rates, but not the birth rates, have been going down, so that the rate of population growth has been accelerating. This division separates the developed from the underdeveloped world, and, asi ie from the important exception of Japan, it also separates the peoples of European race and tradition from the peoples of the rest of the world. But there are clear indications that other nonEuropean countries such as Taiwan and Korea may now be entering the later phases of transition, and the development of government policies and especially of better contraceptives may well accelerate the transition. As yet, no country has become "modern"—in the sense of achieving mature socioeconomic development—without also undergoing a decline in its birth rate. Later methodological developments. Two major developments have occurred in demography since World War n as a result of the problems and failures of previous population projections: the development of a complex methodology to analyze trends in natality and the use of field surveys to determine causal factors affecting the number and timing of births. The attempts to obtain better forecasts of future population resulted in successive improvements in the measuring of reproduction. These included the refinement of the crude birth rate to a population standardized by age; Lotka's historic breakthrough in determining the true birth and death rates, given the continuation of existing age-specific natality and mortality rates; the analysis of births by duration of marriage, developed primarily in Europe (since such data were not available in the United States); the analysis of cohort fertility, that is, the number, spacing, and order of births per woman in her total reproductive experience (Whelpton et al. 1965); and stable population analysis, that is, the analysis of mathematical regularities in the interrelations of births, deaths, age structure, and population growth at fixed schedules of natality and mortality (Coale & Demeny 1966). Some of the methods in this area of growing demographic importance involve elaborate computations that are being facilitated by advances in computer technology.
Despite great technical virtuosity and much better understanding of the various ways in which natality may be measured, it is too early to tell whether these efforts have added much to the accuracy of population forecasts, although they have improved understanding of current natality trends. Cohort fertility analysis certainly provides meaningful interpretations of past trends and provides the basis for reasonable estimates of the total number of children a cohort of women will bear well before they have actually reached the end of their reproductive period. In the United States women born during the period 1905-1914 show the smallest average number of births and stand at the end of the long fertility decline that began in the early nineteenth century. It seems certain that later cohorts of women—that is, those born during the period 1915-1935—will show a larger average number of births (U.S. Department of Health . . . 1966, p. 6). After World War n, couples in the United States married earlier, had their children earlier, and had more children than their parents. The result was the higher birth rate in the United States and in some other Western countries during the postwar period. Recent trends suggest that these forces are receding. The official statistics used in the sophisticated methods of analysis referred to above have not given the reasons for the changes that have occurred. These have been sought in the second of the recent major developments in demographic methodology: field studies of attitudes, motivations, and expectations relating to family size. In the United States demographers have conducted a series of national sample surveys of attitudes and practices in relation to family planning. These surveys are documenting the changing aspirations of American families with regard to the size of family desired and the changing practices of marriage, spacing of children, and methods of family limitation (for example, see Whelpton et al. 1965; Westoff etal. 1961; 1963). Demography and the population explosion Since World War n, interest in population problems has re-emerged with great force. This is related to the rapid progress achieved in controlling or postponing deaths throughout the world, which has occurred without a compensating decline in the birth rate in the underdeveloped areas. The result has been the acceleration of population growth, dramatized in a vast and sometimes controversial literature about the "population explosion." The
POPULATION: The Field of Demography rate of world population growth, over 2 per cent per year, is accelerating [see POPULATION, article on POPULATION GROWTH] . World population growth in the present period is historically unique, and there is a general realization that it leads to serious obstacles to the whole range of socioeconomic development, whether in food, health, education, housing, or the general level of living. Population growth is a major block to the satisfaction of rising aspirations in the underdeveloped countries (Coale & Hoover 1958). In both developed and developing countries the rapid growth of metropolitan areas with their wide range of problems has also been classified as a "population problem" on the mistaken assumption that this is primarily due to the birth rate rather than to migration, which has been the principal factor. It is recognized that population growth and concentration have contributed to a wide range of problems involving the quality of education, the urban sprawl, the contamination of the atmosphere, and, according to some, the mediocrity of mass culture and the cacophony of much of modern life. As logical results of these concerns, social scientists have become more interested in the population problem, whether defined as a social problem or as an area of scientific interest. Demography has, of course, provided analysis of the population trends and prospects that underlie this concern. Prior to World War n demographic studies were largely confined to countries with adequate censuses and vital statistics—that is, chiefly countries of the Western world. In recent years there has been growing interest in the demography of the underdeveloped world, where great ingenuity and methodological skill are often needed to make up for the absence of reliable data. This changing emphasis has been reflected, for example, in the much greater attention given the underdeveloped areas in the Second World Population Conference in Belgrade in 1965, as compared with the First World Population Conference in Rome in 1954 (World Population Conference 1966, p. 2). The growth of applied demography. Demography has supplied much of the factual background for the population policies and family planning programs that have been adopted by several of the developing countries. Much of the demographic literature now relates to attitude studies and to action experiments designed to introduce family planning in these areas. On the world scale, the field surveys of knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP studies) con-
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cerning family size and family planning are perhaps the broadest cross-cultural series of studies on any subject in the social sciences. Sample surveys of this type have been done in some twenty countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These surveys have revealed the feasibility of obtaining useful information on such delicate subjects in all societies; the existence of a substantial "market" for contraceptive information and services almost everywhere; and actual contraceptive practice in close relation to the degree of modernization of the country or socioeconomic class concerned [see FERTILITY CONTROL]. Although demography has been described as "observational," as opposed to experimental, at least some demographers have embarked on controlled experiments in relation to efforts to reduce birth rates. In several instances, the KAP studies have included an action component, that is, experimentation in introducing family planning to the population concerned. These studies have met with varying success, depending on the characteristics of the populations and the methods of education and motivation employed. Such attempts have been successful where the population was already in the stream of modernization, had experienced increasing survival of infants, and had achieved some success in avoiding births through postponement of marriage and through contraception and abortion. Projects of this nature have been working in Taiwan, Korea, and Ceylon. However, where the population had not already made serious efforts to reduce family size, as in India and Pakistan, the results of such experiments have been limited (Conference . . . 1962; International Conference . . . 1966; Studies in Family Planning}. A number of countries have adopted national programs for introducing family planning: Communist China, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Ceylon, Pakistan, Turkey, the United Arab Republic, Tunisia, Morocco, Barbados, Jamaica, Honduras, and Chile. The list grows each year. Most of these programs are as yet too new and too small-scale to have achieved measurable success in reducing the birth rate. However, their chances for success may change rapidly with the improvement of contraceptive technology, notably oral contraceptives and plastic intrauterine devices. All contraception involves motivation; the newer methods are effective because they help the less strongly motivated and those living in circumstances where earlier methods were impractical. It seems likely that these and further improvements will revolutionize the whole approach to family
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planning in developing and developed countries alike (International Conference . . . 1966). There is controversy among demographers about the scientific relevance of applied studies in their field. There is less controversy about the role of getting better information on vital statistics and population growth, since these pursuits serve both academic and applied ends. In over half the world, including most of the countries that have adopted population policies, official vital statistics are inadequate for determining either the true levels or year-to-year changes in birth rates, death rates, and populati Dn growth. New approaches that are being undertaken to obtain better estimates include closely supervised registration in sample areas, repetitive surveys, and various combinations that have come to be called "population growth estimation studies." The real measure of the success of a national family planning program is reduction in the birth rate and in the rate of population growth, and demographers are therefore becoming increasingly involved in problems of measuring population growth, as well as in the evaluation of the results of family planning programs. Demography in the social sciences Demography is generally considered an interdisciplinary subject with strong roots in sociology and weaker, but still important, connections with economics, statistics, geography, human ecology, biology, medicine, and human genetics. It is rarely thought of as a completely separate discipline, but rather as an interstitial subject or as a subdivision of one of the major fields. In English-speaking countries persons who describe themselves professionally as "demographers" usually hold positions of broader definition as sociologists, economists, or statisticians, or are in offices and research organizations whose titles include the word "population" but only rarely "demography," a word that is more commonly used in other countries. Interest in demography has led recently to the rapid multiplication of offices and institutes devoted specifically to population research. In the United States there are some ten such institutes associated with universities. There are important centers of demographic study in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan. The United Nations sponsors three regional centers of demographic training (in Santiago, Chile, for Latin America; in Bombay, India, for Asia; and in Cairo, United Arab Republic, for north Africa), and others are under consideration. Some of the most rapid progress in demographic work is occurring at
newly established centers in eastern Europe and in the developing areas. Demography is, in one sense, a general servant of other social sciences. It evaluates and initially digests the vast reservoirs of social data compiled in censuses and vital statistics. It provides substantial raw material for the study of social, political, and economic change. Moreover, in spite of past disappointments over their accuracy, projections and estimates are continually requested from demographers for a multitude of planning purposes. Demography has not had a prominent place in social scientific theory except in that of economics, through the works of Malthus. It is quantitative, empirical, and methodologically rigorous. Its subject matter is statistical categories that only indirectly reflect real social groups. Its quantitative documentation of specific social change is not readily integrated into the structural-functional theories prevailing in sociology, which are commonly speculative and hard to subject to empirical tests. Within its own domain demography has had its greatest successes in the analysis of mortality [see LIFE TABLES; MORTALITY]. Its greatest interest and virtuosity has been in the study of natality [see FERTILITY]. The stepchild of demography is migration, which up to now has defied the application of refined measurements comparable to those developed in the other two fields. Although international migration is no longer of great demographic importance, internal migration in the United States, for example, is the chief cause of variations in rates of population growth between states, cities, and regions. The importance of migration, as well as the advantages of the new computer technology, may bring greater talent and resources into this field [see MIGRATION]. In recent years perhaps the most neglected area in demography has been on the important frontiers between demography and economics, in such areas as population growth in relation to capital formation; application of life table principles to labor force changes; the economics of health, morbidity, and mortality; and the economic implications of different levels of morbidity and mortality. There are also unexplored possibilities for more fruitful cross-disciplinary work between demography and the fields of anthropology, politics, geography, ecology, and genetics [see GENETICS, article on DEMOGRAPHY AND POPULATION GENETICS]. There
are beginnings, but as yet the joint efforts in these related fields are minimal. DUDLEY KIRK
POPULATION: Population Theories BIBLIOGRAPHY
BARCLAY, GEORGE W. 1958 Techniques of Population Analysis. New York: Wiley. -» A nonmathematical presentation. CARR-SAUNDERS, ALEXANDER (1936) 1965 World Population: Past Growth and Future Trends. New York: Barnes & Noble. -> A classic work. COALE, ANSLEY J.; and DEMENY, PAUL 1966 Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations. Princeton Univ. Press. COALE, ANSLEY J.; and HOOVER, EDGAR M. 1958 Population Groivth and Economic Development in Lowincome Countries: A Case Study of India's Prospects. Princeton Univ. Press. -> The most comprehensive work on this subject. CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN FAMILY PLANNING, NEW YORK, 1960 1962 Research in Family Planning: Papers. Edited by Clyde V. Riser. Princeton Univ. Press. Cox, PETER R. (1950) 1959 Demography. 3d ed. Cambridge Univ. Press. -> Emphasizes the needs of actuaries. Demographic Yearbook. -> Issued annually by the United Nations since 1948. The standard international compendium and source book for world demographic information. See especially the 1948 issue. Demography. -> Published irregularly since 1964 by the Population Association of America. FREEDMAN, RONALD (editor) 1964 Population: The Vital Revolution. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. -> A symposium on current world demography. GREAT BRITAIN, ROYAL COMMISSION ON POPULATION 1949-1954 Papers. 6 vols. in 7. London: H.M. Stationery Office. HAUSER, PHILIP M.; and DUNCAN, OTIS DUDLEY (editors) (1959) 1964 The Study of Population: An Inventory and Appraisal. Univ. of Chicago Press. -» A major compendium of scholarly papers on the history, substance, and status of demography. INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON FAMILY PLANNING PROGRAMS, GENEVA, 1965 1966 Family Planning and Population Programs: A Review of World Developments. Edited by Bernard Berelson et al. Univ. of Chicago Press. KIRK, DUDLEY 1942 The Relation of Employment Levels to Births in Germany. Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 20:126-138. LORIMER, FRANK 1957 General Survey. Part 1, pages 11-57 in David V. Glass (editor), The University Teaching of Social Sciences: Demography. Paris: UNESCO. LORIMER, FRANK (1959) 1964 The Development of Demography. Pages 124-179 in Philip M. Hauser and Otis Dudley Duncan (editors), The Study of Population: An Inventory and Appraisal. Univ. of Chicago Press. LOTKA, ALFRED J. (1925)1957 Elements of Mathematical Biology. New York: Dover. -» First published as Elements of Physical Biology. On Population: Three Essays, by Thomas R. Malthus, Julian Huxley, and Frederick Osborn. New York: Mentor, 1960. -» A paperback publication. Contains "A Summary View of the Principle of Population" by Malthus, first published in 1830; "World Population" by Huxley, first published in 1956; and "Population:
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An International Dilemma" by Osborn, first published in 1958. PEARL, RAYMOND; and REED, L. J. 1920 On the Rate of Growth of the Population of the United States Since 1790 and Its Mathematical Representation. National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings 6:275-288. PETERSEN, WILLIAM (1961) 1964 Population. New York: Macmillan. -> An introductory textbook. Population. -» Published since 1946 by the Presses Universitaires de France for the Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques. Population Bulletin of the United Nations 1963 No. 7. -> Discusses conditions and trends of fertility. Population Index. -» An annotated listing of current publications. Published since 1935 by Princeton University, Office of Population Research, and the Population Association of America, Inc. Population Studies. -> Published since 1947. Issued by the London School of Economics and Political Science, Population Investigation Committee. SPENGLER, JOSEPH J.; and DUNCAN, OTIS DUDLEY (editors) (1956a) 1963 Demographic Analysis: Selected Readings. New York: Free Press. SPENGLER, JOSEPH J.; and DUNCAN, OTIS DUDLEY (editors) 1956k Population Theory and Policy: Selected Readings. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. Studies in Family Planning. -> Published irregularly since 1963 by the Population Council. THOMPSON, WARREN S.; and LEWIS, DAVID T. (1930) 1965 Population Problems. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. UNITED NATIONS, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL AFFAIRS, POPULATION DIVISION 1953 The Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends. Population Studies, No. 17. New York: United Nations. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION AND WELFARE, PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE 1966 Natality Statistics Analysis, United States, 1963. National Center for Health Statistics, Series 21, No. 8. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. NATIONAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE, SCIENCE COMMITTEE 1938 The Problems of a Changing Population. Report of the Committee on Population Problems. Washington: Government Printing Office. WESTOFF, CHARLES F.; POTTER, ROBERT G.; and SAGI, PHILIP C. 1963 The Third Child: A Study in the Prediction of Fertility. Princeton Univ. Press. WESTOFF, CHARLES F. et al. 1961 Family Growth in Metropolitan America. Princeton Univ. Press. WHELPTON, PASCAL K. et al. 1965 Fertility and Family Planning in the United States. Princeton Univ. Press. -» Report of a national sample survey conducted in 1960. WORLD POPULATION CONFERENCE, SECOND, BELGRADE, 1965 1966 Proceedings. Volume 1: Summary Report. New York: United Nations. YULE, G. UDNY 1925 The Growth of Population and the Factors Which Control It. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 88:1-58. II POPULATION THEORIES
In this discussion we will leave aside such subjects as population genetics, eugenics, and the geographical distribution of people in a particular
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area. We will concentrate instead upon those theories which relate population size to environment. This relationship is expressed, for instance, by the terms "overpopulation" and "underpopulation" and by the concept of an optimum state which lies in between. It is appropriate to start with a short historical overview. Antiquity. Since overpopulation in China goes back to very ancient times, it is not surprising that Chinese philosophers, especially Confucius, entertained the notion of a numerical balance between populaticn and environment. They also looked for means to check the increase in numbers. The foundations of a theory of optimum population level, fully stated only in the twentieth century, can be found in their writings. In ancient Greece, the earliest thinkers favored the expansion of population. Plato, however, became the foremost exponent of the restrictionist point of view, although he was by no means its first representative. In his Laws, following Hippodamos, he advocated an absolute limit to the number of citizens and suggested means to that end which would frighten today's moralists. In Plato's Laws, however, as well as in his Republic and in Aristotle's Politics, the perspective is rather narrow, and any concern for the whole of mankind is wellnigh missing. Fear of overpopulation finally contributed to the decay of Hellenic civilization. At this point, Polybius analyzed the causes of the low fertility of the Greek population and proposed remedies—but it was too late. Early Rome was characterized by a fertility cult, as was typical of many rising civilizations, including Greece. This ideal found practical support in military and political expansion. From Ennius to Varro, all the writers of the republican period claimed that the primary function of marriage was to provide citizens—if not soldiers—for the state. Later writers denounced the evils of depopulation, and several emperors, notably Augustus, introduced legislation to encourage parenthood. In spite of these efforts, Rome's lack of men finally contributed to its downfall, since it was unable to hold back the barbarian invasions. The Middle Ages. Medieval population theory was not, generally speaking, grounded in economics. Since the concepts of state, race, and nation made little sense to medieval man, political concern for population growth could not crystallize. Gradually, however, the depopulation ensuing from disastrous invasions gave rise to the feeling that population growth in itself was a good thing
and a mark of divine favor. This view was to survive a long time, and to this day it has not completely vanished. The setting up of a social hierarchy could only strengthen this line of reasoning. The leisure classes dreaded any decrease in the numbers of those whose labor they were exploiting (the analogy with a herd was becoming obvious). Thus, the return of the populationist tradition coincided with the reorganization of Western society after the era of feudalism. The Enlightenment. The populationist theory which appeared during the seventeenth century and flourished in the eighteenth century rested on paternalistic premises. According to an early statement by Guillaume Bude: "The king's glory is in the multitude of the people." Similarly, Perriere asked: "Who will carry the weapons, if men are lacking?" Jean Bodin was even more explicit: "There is no wealth nor strength but in men." Mercantilism was a natural extension of populationist theory from the political to the economic field. Mercantilist theory was nationalistic and expansionist in outlook; it aimed at increasing both employment and number of men by processing as much raw material as possible within the national boundaries. In fact, it was less of a scientific theory of population than a political attitude. Political concern with increasing the population as a means of promoting wealth and power for the lord, the king, and later for the state, extended through the centuries, well beyond the period of mercantilism. Most orthodox thinkers in the eighteenth century instinctively took a populationist position. The frankest statement of that position was given by Turmeau de la Morandiere, in one brutal sentence: "Subjects and beasts must be multiplied." We shall see why nationalism, in its early stages, and dictatorships are more prone to populationist arguments than are democratic regimes. In Germany, Hermann Conring also attributed the power of states mainly to population. In England, at the same period, another confirmed populationist was William Petty, who founded the science of "political arithmetic," or demography, and who used his truly brilliant gifts to raise questions so novel that they opened up vast areas to scientific investigation. In France, the physiocrats and their leader, Francois Quesnay, thought that proper regulation of landed property by means of capital investment should take precedence over population increase. Quesnay's Tableau economique (written in 1758 and revised in 1766) contained the first dynamic model of a national economy and was in this re-
POPULATION: Population Theories spect a forerunner of modern national accounting and the matrix developed by Leontief [see INPUTOUTPUT ANALYSIS]. Adam Smith took little interest in the population question, which, as a matter of fact, baffled him slightly. The first to raise it in a formal way was Thomas Mai thus. Malthus and his contemporaries. The autocratic ruler who wields absolute power without avowed obligations always desires a greater number of subjects. The scope of this observation extends beyond the field of demography; it applies to the sovereign as much as to the collector of objets d'art, to the head of a family as much as to the office manager. But when his subjects—or rather, the objects in his possession—have rights or occasion some expense, the ruler's point of view changes, and he grows increasingly cautious with regard to numbers. Such a situation existed in seventeenthcentury England, where the poor laws resulted in an increasing burden for the ruling class at the same time that the poor themselves were ceasing to rely on charity and were becoming conscious of their rights. This new dispensation was the cue for Mai thus. The desire of Malthus and his supporters to see poor families restrict their progeny has been described alternatively as altruistic and egoistic. Indeed, it is both things at the same time: pity for the paupers and dread of having to share with them. Many members of the ruling classes, including a majority of classical economists, agreed with Malthus that it was advisable to keep down the size of the labor force. Reacting to Malthus and his school, the contemporary socialist writers took an opposite stand: Owen, Fourier, Proudhon, and Marx were all unwilling to ascribe pauperism to excessive population and therefore rejected the remedies advocated by Malthus. The egoism demonstrated by Malthus, particularly in his famous statement that a man born into a world already owned by others has no inherent right to a place at nature's feast, elicited violent indignation. This reaction is still partly responsible for several of the misconceptions that surround the population problem. Let us try, then, to clear up these misunderstandings by presenting the problem in the light of the most recent scientific developments, while not forgetting that one's point of view on the subject may vary with one's social status. The concept of optimum population The concept of optimum population corresponds to the idea of a happy medium: it is assumed that
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since we talk about overpopulation and underpopulation, there must be some intermediate stage that avoids either defect. We have already seen that this notion of the proper limit, this concern about avoiding both overpopulation and underpopulation, has a lengthy history. Plato aside, it can be found in rudimentary form in the works of many authors in various countries, from Giovanni Botero to Voltaire to the classic liberal economists. However, it was first stated in scientific terms only at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the word optimum was applied to population by the German economist Julius Wolf. He was soon followed by other economists, such as Knut Wicksell (Sweden), Paul Mombert (Germany), and Edwin Cannan (England). The notion of optimum population was further elaborated during the interwar period by A. B. Wolfe and H. P. Fairchild in the United States and by Lionel Robbins and A. M. Carr-Saunders in England, among others. Meanwhile, it was criticized mostly by writers on the Continent, such as Corrado Gini, Eugene Dupreel, W. E. Rappard, and Adolphe Landry. Determining optimum population Talking of an "optimum population" implies trying to find out how many inhabitants it would be desirable to have if a given end is to be achieved. The end itself remains to be specified, and there are a number of such ends that can be proposed. Among them are the following: Full employment, that is, work for all persons of working age; Power, that is, the full range of means that can be set to work to obtain a collective end, whatever the end may be; Long life and good health; Knowledge and culture; Aggregate welfare, or, put in a slightly different way, the aggregate income of the population; Number of years lived by the population as a whole; Average standard of living. Still other objectives, such as social harmony, family stability, and so on, may be conceived; thus Plato had a political view of optimum population and Eugene Dupreel an aesthetic one. Here we shall only discuss two of these objectives: the economic objective, that is, the average standard of living, and the objective of the collectivity, which is much the same thing as power. The pursuit of either of these objectives leads to a specific optimum population size. Minimum and maximum population. Before proposing a definition of optimum population, we have to specify the extremes on either side of the
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PRODUCTION PER CAPITA
T
POPULATION
Figure 1 — Minimum and maximum population
optimum. In other words, we have to specify the range between minimum and maximum population. Minimum population is determined jointly by economic and biological considerations. Life is very hard to sustain without at least some division of labor. Besides, a minimum number of people is required in order to provide marital partners for all, without too much consanguinity or disparity of ages. On these grounds, it has been estimated that an isolated population cannot safely fall under five hundred or six hundred inhabitants [see GENETICS, article on DEMOGRAPHY AND POPULATION GENETICS]. Maximum population is the highest that could conceivably subsist on the total product, provided it is distributed fairly among all. In both minimum and maximum, the population is drawn toward the bare subsistence level—a very low standard of living indeed. In Figure 1, the horizontal axis measures population size, and the vertical axis measures production per head. The minimum population is equal to p, and the maximum population to T. The subsistence level is ST or mp. Between these two extreme positions, there must be at least one population size that maximizes the standard of living. This is the optimum population, P, with a standard of living equal to MP. The general model. In order to specify the position of the optimum population, P, we cannot avoid using a very simplified model. We shall review its defects at a later point. In Figure 2, population size is still measured on the horizontal axis. Curve AA' denotes marginal productivity, that is, the increase in total production resulting from the addition, one by one, of extra individuals to the population. Initially this curve rises, thanks to the division of labor and the sharing of overhead costs; the latter part of the curve slopes downward, reflecting saturation and diminishing returns. The curve's highest value (/)
is reached at population size K. Curve BB' represents total production; it is the integral of curve AA'. Its point of inflection, I, is for population size K, the same population size that maximizes curve A A'. Point M is touched by a tangent from O, the origin. Production per capita (measured by the tangent of angle MOP) is highest for that point M; Dn the right of M, it decreases. Curve mRS also indicates output per capita, but this time as measured on the vertical axis. It is maximized at population size P, corresponding to curve BB'. Curves AA' and mRS cross at R, since marginal productivity and output per capita are equal at that point. On the production axis, OV, mp, or ST represents subsistence level. The way in which optimum population is derived can now be described as follows: If n is population and f ( n ) is total production, then curve AA' represents f ' ( n } , curve BB' represents f ( n ) , and curve mRS represents f(n)/n. The economically optimum population, rz 0 , is given by f (n 0 ) = f(n 0 )/n ( ) . Furthermore, V being the subsistence level, both nm (the minimum population) and UM (the maximum population) are given by f(nm}/nm = f(n3[)/7i3( = V. A second kind of optimum population, np, is that which maximizes power, in a sense to be described below. This optimum population occurs where curve AA' intersects the horizontal at V, f (n p ) = V. Now we have at our disposal all the elements required to assess the state of a population that is PRODUCTION AND PRODUCTION PER CAPITA
A OT
O
K
np
T
POPULATION
Figure 2 — Optimum population, standard of living, and power
POPULATION: Population Theories subject to environmental pressure. Going from left to right in Figure 2—that is, in the direction of population growth—we find:
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TOTAL PRODUCTION
p = minimum population, K = population with highest increase in production as a function of population size, P = optimum population from an economic point of view, Q = optimum population insofar as power is concerned (see below), T = maximum population. Optimum power. When we speak of optimum power, we have in mind not only military power but also any objective involving the collectivity. Such an objective can even be the wealth of a despotic ruler or sovereign who aims at the highest possible income by exploiting the population. If we ignore the case of minimum population, which has no practical importance here, we see that power, defined in these terms, is whatever exceeds the subsistence level. Power can therefore be described as the area in Figure 2 between curve A A' and straight line VS. Maximum power, N, is attained for a population size Q. Beyond population size Q, power decreases, for when marginal productivity is less than average production, any additional person can be fed only at the expense of the surplus. Since point Q is on the right of P, the population that is optimum for maximizing collective power is always larger than the population that is optimum from the economic point of view. This difference has important social and political implications. It explains why, all other things being equal, totalitarian states have more of a stake in acquiring large populations than have democracies, which tend to be more concerned with the standard of living. Thus it will easily be seen that in any sociopolitical system the effect of any military or other collective burden is to raise the size of a country's optimum population. Let us refer, at this point, to Figure 3, in which the upper total production curve is identical with curve BB' in Figure 2, with the maximum at M, when P is optimum population size. The lower curve in Figure 3 is the result of a constant shift on the vertical axis, so that the tangent through O, the origin, now passes through point M'. On the horizontal axis, M' corresponds to P', which is well to the right of P. The way in which collective burdens increase optimum population can also be demonstrated as follows: Let ftp (the P of Figure 2) be the optimum population
POPULATION
Figure 3 — Collective burdens increase optimum size of population
size when there is no collective burden. Production per capita is f(n)/n, which is maximized (differentiate) when n f ' ( n ) — f(n~) = 0. Thus, as was noted for Figure 2, n p f ' ( n p } — f(n p ) = 0. Now if a collective burden, K, is added, usable production per capita is reduced to [f(n) — K]/n. This function will be maximized when n f ' ( n ' ) — f(n~) + K = 0, or f
n n The only way to achieve this equality is for n to be larger than np, since f'(n) is a decreasing function of n in the region in question. The influence of fixed costs. The important conclusion reached in the preceding section can now be generalized: a country that, for any reason, has to meet fixed costs or, at the very least, costs that are disproportionate to the size of its population will benefit if it succeeds in increasing its population. For instance, if the aged members of a population are to be helped by retirement pensions or other means, the economically active members of that population will benefit from an increase in numbers, so as to spread the burden over a larger number of shoulders. In such a case, optimum population size is increased because of two factors: the number of retired persons, since these are economically inactive, and the number of economically active persons, for reasons already explained. From this we can judge what kinds of problems arise when, for instance, the retirement age is lowered: not only do many of the economically active cease
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contributing to production by becoming economically inactive, but a need also arises for an increase in the economically active population. Let us spell out the same point in figures. Suppose that a population of ten million happens to be of economically optimum size. If one million of its economically active members suddenly become economically inactive, the standard of living is going to drop. In order to raise the standard of living to the highest level possible for that population, it would be necessary to attract a number of immigrants in excess of one million—two or three million, for example. Evolution of optimum population Optimum population has increased considerably since the 1860s in the developed countries. In every case, the increase in optimum population has been faster than the increase in actual population. This trend has resulted from (a) the importance of fixed costs in modern society; (fo) the fact that industrial production is less subject to decreasing returns than is agricultural production; (c) the fact that technological progress, contrary to what is generally thought, does increase the number of jobs. Under an agrarian economy, the populations of European countries traditionally exceeded the optimum. This was demonstrated when, as usually happened, the standard of living improved after the population had been reduced by a severe epidemic, such as the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Today's situation is entirely different. Let us consider the example of Switzerland. In the late eighteenth century the population probably did not exceed 1.7 million inhabitants. Nevertheless, some of them were forced to emigrate, and Swiss men often served in foreign armies. We can assume that the optimum size of the Swiss population at that time was somewhere between one million and 1.5 million people. Today the population is over five million, which must still be below the economic optimum, since it has been necessary to call on 700,000 workers from abroad. The reversal of the secular trend in migration, which instead of flowing out of Europe, as it did for so long, is now flowing in Europe's direction, also shows how much the optimum population must have grown in the course of the twentieth century [see MIGRATION], Review of the optimum population concept Early in this century, when the concept of optimum population was given systematic expression, writers on the subject thought that a definitive
solution had been found for the population problem, at least in theory, and that the only difficulty remaining was to apply the solution in practice. This opinion did not survive long under scrutiny, especially since the facts were against it. The concept of optimum population is indeed too static; it implies that population size can vary without any change occurring in the other factors that could affect the population's standard of living. Besides, even if it were possible, at a given point in time, to calculate a country's optimum population correctly, it would still be difficult to base a population policy on that calculation. For example, if it could be demonstrated that 400 million inhabitants would fare better in present-day India than the actual 500 million, there could be no question of killing 100 million people in order to improve the others' lot. Conversely, if it could be shown that the optimum population of France is 60 million instead of its present 47 million, or that that of Australia is 30 million instead of its present 11 million, there could be no question of suddenly raising the population of these two countries by such large numbers. Even if enough immigrants could be found, there would still be the problems of fitting them all out and providing them with housing, schools, and so on. Thus, there is also a question of time involved. Considerations such as these lead to a less static orientation or, in other words, to the study of population dynamics. But before we turn to that subject, it should be stressed that the concept of optimum population is a usable one provided one is discussing, as we were above, the way in which a specific factor affects the optimum. It is, therefore, a useful tool, and one that, if used correctly, would enable us to explain many historical phenomena and in future to avoid certain dangerous sociological misconceptions. Optimum population growth Technological progress and employment. The problems of development, and therefore the very concept of an optimum rhythm of population growth, hinge on a very important phenomenon which has been too often neglected by economists because the subject breeds superficial prejudice and discourages empirical research. That important phenomenon is the relationship between technological progress and employment. It is commonly believed that technological progress has the effect of reducing employment. Although this opinion, which is very old, has been constantly contradicted by the facts, it nevertheless continues to command belief and regains strength
POPULATION: Population Theories with every technological innovation, as it has with automation. If this opinion were based on fact, if the economy really were headed toward the "pushbutton" economy imagined by Simonde de Sismondi (the king of England, alone on his island, enjoying a very high standard of living through the operation of handles and levers), then population growth would become useless. Furthermore, the economic system would have to be altered drastically. But actual trends have been in the opposite direction. The gainfully employed population is very much larger now in the developed countries than before the industrial revolution, while it is in the underdeveloped countries—that is, in the countries that lack machines—that underemployment is most severe. This is not the place to expound a theory of employment and technological progress. Let us content ourselves with emphasizing the fundamental roles of population growth and of the proliferation of consumer needs. The orientation of consumption toward goods that contain an ever-increasing proportion of value added by manufacture and by services continually raises the number of jobs and at the same time reduces the threat of overpopulation. Of course, other factors may prevent full employment in a specific country. It is even conceivable that there will be a constant increase in the number of available jobs and yet that full employment will never be reached. We are now in a position to approach the question of an optimum rate of population growth. The concept of optimum growth rate. When a population grows very rapidly, it is confronted with a major need for new capital goods. It is therefore compelled to devote a large part of the national income to capital investment, and, as a result, to lower its standard of living. If, on the contrary, the population decreases or remains constant, it suffers various troubles that are difficult to analyze but that have results which are quite obvious. Not one single historical or present-day instance can be cited of a declining or stagnating population that has enjoyed or is now enjoying any real economic expansion. If we follow a chain of reasoning analogous to the one that led to the concept of optimum population size, we come to the conclusion that there niust exist, between the two extremes of rapid growth and decline or stagnation, some intermediate condition of the population that guarantees the highest possible rate of growth in the standard of living. Let us call such a condition the optimum rate of growth, as opposed to the static optimum, defined above, of population size.
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The concept of optimum rate will become clearer if we examine first the costs, and second the advantages, of growth. As previously, we are concerned only with the economic aspects. The cost of growth. Once again, we shall simplify the problem by turning to a model. If, as a result of certain investments, I, national income increases in each of the years following the investments by a quantity r, the ratio r/l is the national rate of interest, T. The reciprocal, I / r , is called the capital-output ratio. For instance, if an investment of 1,000 million increases national income by 300 million a year, the national rate of interest of that investment is 30 per cent. More often than not, the national rate of interest is between 20 and 50 per cent. Let us accept the simplifying assumption that, for all the investments made each year, the capitaloutput ratio remains constant, so that the increase in national income is equal to IT. If the ratio I/r remains constant every year, national income will grow exponentially at a rate (ZT)/r. And if population itself remains constant, the increase in per capita national income, or in average standard of living, will follow the same geometrical progression. Let us now introduce population increase into the model. By demographic investment we mean all outlays or efforts aimed at avoiding a deterioration of living standards as a result of growth. Many authors have used the same capital-output ratio for population increase as for the growth of national income that results from economic investments. For example, if 4 per cent of the national income has to be invested in order to raise national income by 1 per cent in each of the years following the investment, these authors assume that 4 per cent of the national income would also be required in order to accommodate a population growth rate of 1 per cent without a decline in income per capita. This equation of one type of return on investment with another is a mere statistical convenience that may sometimes be very remote from fact. Except when the rates coincide by chance, the assumption is justified only in instances where all persons added to the population are completely unproductive, i.e., contribute nothing to national income. Some idea of the size of the required demographic investment can be obtained by adding to the cost of the technical means of production the cost of educating a man to the level at which he can make use of them—a process that may add up to 10 or 12 years of work. Consequently, a 1 per cent increase in a population would, if we assume that this population is stable, absorb 10 or 12 per cent of its national income. This figure is much
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higher than the one quoted previously for the capital-output ratio. It would be only too easy to infer from this that any growth of population is costly in itself and that, from a strictly economic point of view, it is in a population's interest not to grow, and even to decrease. But this conclusion runs counter to too many empirical findings not to be highly suspect. Moreover, the advantages of population growth should be taken into consideration, and a clear distinction made between advantages of a purely economic nature and the social advantages that have an effect on the economy. Economic advantages of growth. We have already mentioned overhead, or fixed costs, and the fact that in an industrial economy the classic law of diminishing returns is superseded by a more favorable law and sometimes even by a marked increase in returns. Another factor, which has been neglected but which should certainly be mentioned, is the way in which growth facilitates the correction of every mistake, every structural defect or imbalance, in any aspect of population distribution—geographical, occupational, or other. When a faulty proportion, of whatever kind, has to be corrected in any organism whatsoever, this can be done by amputation—that is, by taking something away. But in social matters it is hard to take anything away from what already exists, and strong opposition is likely to be encountered. Population growth, however, makes it possible to improve existing structures without encountering these problems, since faulty proportions can now be corrected by adding what is needed instead of taking away what is not needed. The advantages of growth are still more striking in cases where the proportions that need to be corrected are continually changing. This is especially true of technological progress and economic progress, both of which are continually modifying the occupational distribution of the labor force, not only among the three traditional sectors—primary, secondary, and tertiary—but also among the occupational subdivisions of each sector. In a stationary population with low mortality, the economically active population is replenished by the younger age groups at a rate of only 2.2 per cent a year. Such a rate is not sufficient to ensure the occupational reallocation required by technological change. The result, relatively speaking, is an excess of people in obsolete trades and a consequent slowing down of economic progress. Social advantages of growth. The first advantage of a growing population that should be mentioned here is its age distribution. Since mortality
has declined in most human populations and since, as a result, the absolute number of the aged is bound to increase for years to come, a population that remains about the same size is bound to contain fewer young people and fewer adults of working age. In other words, the average age of the population is going to increase rapidly. When a population ages in this way, there are certain material consequences that have been fairly well investigated and certain moral consequences that so far have hardly been studied. However, it is generally acknowledged that the spirit of enterprise does not flourish in an aging population; nineteenth-century France, and perhaps modern Ireland, are significant instances of this. Nor is an aging electorate the only factor. Not many new businesses are created when the generations hardly replace one another, since the younger generation is content to wait until jobs are vacated by the older. In such a population most positions of power and responsibility are held by elderly people, and thus institutional rigidities set in. It seems that there is a certain analogy in this respect between social and biological organisms. The large proportion of one-child families in a stationary population is another reason why the spirit of enterprise is weakened in both the older and the younger generations. Estimating the optimum growth rate. As far as research on a specific country is concerned, the optimum growth rate has been just as neglected as the optimum population size. There is, of course, no question of proposing a single rate for all economies. In an agrarian economy with an arrested technology, growth is advisable only if the country is underpopulated. Even then the optimum growth rate will be slow, unless underpopulation is very marked, as was the case in the United States and Canada during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus the concept of optimum growth rate is better suited to an industrial economy. Generally, the more abundant or accessible natural resources are through international trade, and the faster technological progress, the higher the rate of population growth should also be. For western Europe during recent years, a growth rate of between 0.5 and I per cent per year seems to have been necessary and by no means excessive. The problems of measurement in this area stem from the fact that it is harder to measure the advantages of population growth—advantages that, as we have seen, are in part social—than the disadvantages. Even if all the elements involved were known, it would still be necessary to choose be-
POPULATION: Population Theories tween maintaining current standards of living and making sacrifices for the sake of future generations. Finally, it should be remembered that demographic trends are slow and far-reaching, so that the consequences of any change that is too sudden may be felt for years afterwards. Social and political aspects of growth. Although it is now possible to outline a theory of the influence of population growth on economic development and standards of living, various elements needed to apply it correctly are still missing. This uncertainty has only exacerbated political and class conflict over population policies. Marxist doctrine, for instance, has never recognized the possibility of a population problem, especially one of overpopulation. This position is out of date; it still shows the effects of the violent reaction against Malthus' egoistic view of society. However, there have been significant departures from this position in such countries as Poland and Yugoslavia, where the birth rate—and thus the growth rate—has been voluntarily reduced in order to make it possible to meet the cost of demographic investments. In Western countries, many Marxists take a more realistic view of population growth than is warranted by orthodox Marxist doctrine. In capitalist countries there is still some fear of the effects of population growth on employment, although recent trends in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, and other countries have demonstrated the weakness of economic theory on this subject. Meanwhile, these same countries dread population increase in the underdeveloped countries of the Third World—an attitude that is reminiscent of Malthus but that, since 1962, is no longer opposed by the Soviet Union. The underdeveloped nations themselves are influenced by two conflicting trends. Tradition, concern for power or prestige, and sometimes the availability of wide-open spaces lead to a favorable view of present rapid growth rates. This attitude is exemplified by the countries of Latin America and tropical Africa. On the other hand, concern about standards of living and fear of overheavy demographic investments are arguments in favor of—or at least not against—the acceptance of birth control. This attitude is encountered mostly in the Far East and the Arab world. All too often in the history of ideas authors have believed themselves to have given the final answer to a problem and to have built a definitive and universally valid theory. Such experiences warn us to be far more cautious. Despite considerable progress made since the
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early 1950s in understanding these phenomena, one cannot suppress a feeling of dissatisfaction. Building a coherent theory of the interrelations of economy and population requires continuous and careful appraisal of actual developments. Because of the practical complexity of such an undertaking, prejudice and facile theories always tend to have the upper hand. As a result, continuous observation of the facts leads to conclusions different from those currently held. These conclusions give food for thought. In particular, they suggest that economic research should focus on the working population and its problems rather than on finance, monetary policy, or materials. These latter are only the results of something else; as economic phenomena, they lie only at the surface, and lead all too often to neglect of the essential factor: men as producers and consumers. Statisticians, demographers, and economists should all work together to establish an all-encompassing, usable theory of population and economic development. ALFRED SAUVY [Directly related is the entry POPULATION, articles on OPTIMUM
POPULATION THEORY
and
POPULATION
POLICIES. Other relevant material may be found in FERTILITY; FERTILITY CONTROL; MORTALITY; PLANNING, ECONOMIC; PLANNING, SOCIAL; and in the biographies of BODIN; CARR-SAUNDERS; FOURIER; GINI; MALTHUS; MARX; OWEN; PETTY; PLATO; PROUDHON; QUESNAY; SIMONDE DE SISMONDI; WICKSELL.] BIBLIOGRAPHY BORRIE, WILFRID D. 1961 The World's Population: Perspective and Prospect. Toronto: Canadian Institute of International Affairs. BOYD, WILLIAM C. (1950) 1958 Genetics and the Races of Man. Boston Univ. Press. CHASTELAND, JEAN C. 1961 Demographie: Bibliographic et analyse d'ouvrages et d'articles en francais. Paris: Editions de llnstitut National d'Etudes Demographiques. DAHLBERG, GUNNAR (1943) 1948 Mathematical Methods for Population Genetics. New York and London: Interscience. -> First published in German. ELDRIDGE, HOPE T. 1959 The Materials of Demography: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography. New York: International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. GARDNER, RICHARD N. 1963 Population Growth; a World Problem: Statement of U.S. Policy. U.S. Department of State, Publication No. 7485. Washington: Government Printing Office. KOSTITSYN, VLADIMIR A. (1938) 1939 Mathematical Biology. London: Harrap. -> First published in French. Li, CHING-CHUN (1948) 1955 Population Genetics. 2d ed. Univ. of Chicago Press. LIVI, LIVIO 1940-1941 Trattato di demografia. 2 vols. Padua (Italy): CEDAM. -> Volume 1: I fattori biodemografici nell'ordinamento sociale. Volume 2: Le leggi naturali della popolazione.
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LOTKA, ALFRED J. 1934-1939 Theorie analytique des associations biologiques. 2 vols. Paris: Hermann. -» Volume 1: Principes. Volume 2: Analyse demographique avec application particuliere a Vespece humaine. MALTHUS, THOMAS R. (1798) 1958 An Essay on Population. 2 vols. New York: Button. -> First published as An Essay on the Principle of Population. A paperback v-Jition was published in 1963 by Irwin. NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, WASHINGTON, B.C., COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY 1963 The Growth of World Population: Analysis of the Problems and Recommendations for Research and Training. Washington: The Academy. PEARL, RAYMOND 1925 The Biology of Population Gro'vth. New York: Knopf. RASMUSON, MARIANNE 1961 Genetics on the Population Level. Stockholm: Svenska Bokforlaget. SAUVY, ALFRED (1952-1954) 1956-1959 Theorie generale de la population. 2d ed. 2 vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. -» Volume 1: Economic et population. Volume 2: Biologie sociale. SAUVY, ALFRED (1958) 1963 Fertility and Survival: Population Problems From Malthus to Mao Tse-tung. New York: Collier. -> First published as De Malthus a Mao Tse-toung. SUTTER, JEAN 1950 L'eugenique: Problemes, methodes, resultats. France, Institut National d'Etudes Bemographiques, Travaux et documents, Cahier no. 11. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. VOLTERRA, VITO 1935 Les associations biologiques au point de vue mathematique. Paris: Hermann. Ill OPTIMUM POPULATION THEORY
The term optimum population denotes a population of such size that, given this population, a specified indicator of "welfare" is maximized. This indicator may be output, or consumption per capita, or some more complicated social welfare function. How large a population must be to be of optimum size thus depends upon the content of the welfare indicator selected; it will be greater, in proportion, as population-oriented elements enter into this content. Optimum size of population also depends, given some welfare index, upon other determinants of the value of this index. Thus, if W denotes this index, W = f(P, x,, x,, x3, • • •, xn}, where P denotes population and the Xi denote other conditions, changes in which affect the value of W and could conceivably affect that value of P with which, under given conditions, the maximum value of W is associated. The population P is therefore of optimum size when, with conditions xl, x2, xs, • • • , xn essentially constant, neither an increase nor a decrease in P can augment W. This optimum may not be invariant; a change in the ceteris paribus assumption may make greater or smaller the P with which a greater or smaller maximum value of W now is as-
sociated. The augmentability of the optimum is limited, however; a point is reached when further improvement in conditions x^ x2, xs, • • •, xn no longer requires further increase in P for W to be maximized with respect to P, and thereafter such improvements increase W, but do not enlarge the optimum. A change in the value of W, dependent as it is on many sorts of change, does not indicate whether population maladjustment (denned below) is changing; it is only change in W, in relation to change in P (with other conditions essentially given), that indicates this. The optimum concept is applicable to sovereign states, regions within states, and metastates. Optimum size and optimum growth rate. The advantages or disadvantages associated with a population's being, or not being, of optimum size must be analytically distinguished from those associated with the process whereby a population changes size; for the former are associated with differences in population size as such, whereas the latter are associated with positive or negative population growth. Population growth, as such, may make for advantage; it also entails costs—costs in the form of the inputs required to train, accommodate, and equip population increments, as well as costs in the form of such unfavorableness in age composition as is associated with population growth. Further population growth is desirable, until an optimum size has been attained. Some of the rates at which this growth might proceed are preferable to others, and some particular rate might even be preferable to all the others. This last rate could then be designated as the optimum rate of growth, and alternative rates could be described as nonoptimal. This article does not, however, deal with this particular optimum or with advantages and disadvantages of population growth as such. Population maladjustment. When the size of a state's population deviates from what is optimum for it, such a state is experiencing population maladjustment. Let M, A, and O, respectively, denote degree of population maladjustment, actual population, and optimum population. Then M = (A — O)/O; and negative maladjustment signifies "underpopulation," while- positive maladjustment signifies "overpopulation." Although some of the circumstances that underlie O also condition A, O is looked upon as normally independent of A. Insofar, however, as changes in A generate changes in conditions underlying 0, it may be said that O is functionally connected with A. Yet, as a rule, changes in A do not produce such novel effects; they merely change the location of preferred positions on existing indifference maps,
POPULATION: Optimum Population Theory transformation curves, etc. To this statement, changes in A attributable to migration are most likely to be exceptions, inasmuch as such changes may produce changes in the technologies or the tastes of the affected countries. Underpopulation is more easily corrected than overpopulation as defined above; its correction merely requires population growth, whereas that of overpopulation depends on suitable autonomous changes (for example, in tastes, technology, external relations), whose occurrence may not be very probable. History of optimum population theory. PreMalthusian writers occasionally complained of population maladjustment, but they did not define a population optimum or measure population maladjustment in relation to it. Presumably, they were not inspired by the attempts of Plato and Aristotle to fix what amounted to an optimum number of citizens for a Greek polls and, in addition, to indicate roughly how many slaves and noncitizens would be required. Malthus and some of his followers suggested the existence of an optimum; but they were concerned primarily with showing that positive population maladjustment is virtually inevitable, and that, consequently, it is essential to favor institutions that tend to retard population growth. J. S. Mill ([1848] 1961, pp. 191-192) defined an optimum population, although he did not so name it: "After a degree of density has been attained, sufficient to allow the principal benefits of combination of labour," he wrote, "all further increase tends in itself to mischief, so far as regards the average condition of the people." Mill thus supposed the optimum would remain constant, although he implied that it had increased in the past. However, it was not until the late nineteenth century and thereafter that considerable attention was given to this concept, usually an optimum defined in terms of per capita income and reflecting a balance between "increasing returns" in manufacturing and related industry and "diminishing returns" in extractive industry. Whether increase in population was accompanied by increase in positive maladjustment, therefore, turned on which of these two forces was the more powerful. On this issue, authors differed. Some expected that improvements in prospect were likely to increase optimums further. Others (for instance, Knut Wicksell) believed that populations in most, if not all, settled countries are of supraoptimum size and unlikely to derive much relief from optimum-increasing forces; they reasoned, therefore (partly on the basis of a generalized marginal productivity theory), that average income would
359
increase most rapidly if growth in numbers was restrained and improvements in methods, together with increases in capital, were concentrated upon increasing output per head. Most discussions of the optimum were policy-oriented; they were designed above all to force proponents of population growth (of whom there were many in military, ecclesiastical, commercial, and other circles) to face the question, Cut bono? In the 1920s, concern with overpopulation, stimulated in part by interpretations of the causes of World War i, intensified interest in optimum population theory. This interest declined somewhat in the 1930s, as the rate of natural increase fell in developed countries, only to be revived after World War n, as adverse effects of population pressure came to be more widely recognized. Formal theory. Theory respecting optimum population must identify this population, given some welfare indicator, and it must account for the tendency of output to grow, under essentially ceteris paribus conditions, at a rate that both varies and differs from that at which population grows. Specification of the optimum can then proceed as follows. Let the chosen indicator be output or consumption per capita; and let it be assumed that (within limits and for reasons examined below) output grows faster than population. This is assumed to be true even though output-governing conditions, other than increase in population, remain constant, with the exception of adjustment of input use to this population change, together with the distribution of activities in space and among occupations. Then, to facilitate identification of the optimum, when population increases while other outputaffecting variables are held constant, let T denote total output; S, total savings or provision for capital formation; C, total consumption (C = T — S); and A, actual population. Let t and c, respectively, denote output and consumption per capita; and m, marginal output per capita (w^AT/AA); then if T increases faster than A, with m increasing initially faster, and then slower, than t, t will be at a maximum when m and t coincide. The population size associated with the coincidence of m and t is sometimes designated the optimum, although this designation is applicable only if there is no need, or incentive, to form capital, that is, when there is a glut of agents of production, complementary to labor, and with zero marginal productivity (as the equality of m and t implies). In all probable situations, however, these agents will be scarce and command a return, and further increments of capital will increase t; should
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POPULATION: Optimum Population Theory
the condition m = t accidentally come into existence, it would be unstable, for dissaving would result, and t, as well as the magnitude of the optimum, would decline. A stable optimum population may coincide with the point of equivalence of m to c, a point at which a return, A(t — m ) , is imputable to the complementary agents and there are corresponding savings, S; this population is necessarily larger than that associated with m = t, since the marginal curve intersects the average consumption curve (which lies below the average output curve) to the right of wher? it intersects the average output curve. Even so, c will be about as high when m = c and S is saved as it would have been at the point m = t, had the state then impounded an amount corresponding to S and thus reduced actual consumption at that point. When c < t, the population optimum associated with m = c, although not unstable because of dissaving (there being saving), might increase in size as a result of the continuing capital formation made possible by savings, S. Given existing technology, this is only a possible outcome, however; for the increase in capital per head may raise t and c and yet not produce changes that increase the optimum. Indeed, many, and probably most, of the changes that increase t and c do not also increase the optimum, O, and do not therefore reduce population maladjustment, M; they merely make it more bearable. The optimum is further increased when actual consumption is reduced not only by savings, S, but also by the more or less unavoidable use of resources for purposes other than the supplying of the domestic population with consumer goods and services and capital. Illustrative of this is the employment of resources for the supplying of security against possible foreign enemies, or for the support of unproductive idlers, or for unilateral payments of tribute and so-called economic aid to foreign states. Let all such outlays be denoted by L; then consumption, C, on the part of the productive population (hitherto supposed to embrace all persons), becomes not T - S but T - S - L. Accordingly, m will coincide with average consumption ( T - S - L ) / A a t a point lying to the right of the point where c approximates (T — S ) / A ; the population of optimum size will be larger, therefore, and t will be smaller when L is positive than when L is zero. In general, threats to a nation's security enlarge its optimum-size population and diminish its average consumption. Values underlying choice of optimum. A nation's population optimum is further enlarged when
it seeks to maximize not, for instance, consumption per capita but some other social welfare function into which populousness enters as a substitute for output or consumption—or, in other words, up to the point where a further increment in populousness does not compensate for the diminution in per capita income and consumption associated with it. The size of the optimum population corresponding to this point depends on how powerful are the tastes favoring populousness; it may occasion problems not associated with smaller optimums. Thus when this optimum is reached and families can therefore average barely more than two children, unsatisfiable tastes for children may occasion discomfort. This optimum also conduces to relatively greater inequality in the distribution of pretax income (although this can be offset by differential taxation) than do smaller optimums. Moreover, it would result in greater positive population maladjustment, should tastes for populousness decline markedly. Of more fundamental concern than these various formulations is the rationale underlying "increasing returns," or the sometime tendency of output to increase faster than population or the labor force (here supposed to constitute a constant fraction of the population), even though other conditions (technology, capital stock, etc.) remain unchanged. One source of this tendency is the indivisibility of some complexes of agents of production with which labor in general is combined, such as the transport system or much of the apparatus of state. Indivisibilities of this sort are most important when over-all population density is low; they become of little or no importance after density has become relatively high, even though quite lumpy increments are sometimes added to a nation's equipment. The second, and principal, source of this tendency is extension of the market, together with facilitation of the extension of various forms of the division of labor. Within limits, enlargement of the labor force permits greater technical subdivision of productive activities in economic and geographical space and, at the same time, by providing an enlarged market, makes much of this subdivision sufficiently profitable to warrant its undertaking. A point is finally reached when numbers are sufficiently great and average income is sufficiently high to provide as large a market as is required to support the best of current and prospective technological possibilities. This point will be approached at a rate proportionate to the speed at which small-scale plants and firms become as efficient as large-scale undertakings, and as inter-
POPULATION: Optimum Population Theory national and interregional trade remains unimpeded and, hence, able to add, for particular products of specialized undertakings, external to internal markets. Some limiting factors. In the past, it was supposed that discovery and invention were positively associated with population density, up to a point, because interpersonal stimulation and communication were facilitated by increase in density. This supposition, while not without limited validity, is now seldom of much import; today, international interchange of technical information, together with improved internal means of communication, supplies most of the stimulus and information essential to discovery and invention. To the limits to "increasing returns" already noted—namely, the overcoming of indivisibilities and the exhaustion of benefits consequent upon extension of division of labor and markets—there must be added a third: the emergence of factors that may become operative even before the other two limits are reached. This third type of limit becomes operative when whatever inputs have been available gratuitously (for example, fresh water) or under conditions of constant supply price either are no longer susceptible to further increase in supply or are susceptible to such increase only under conditions of rising real cost. While the advent of such a limit may be partially counterbalanced by substitution at the technological, as well as the consumer, level, it is never wholly counterbalanced save through technological changes that often, and perhaps usually, are the result in large part of input investment that might otherwise have been used to increase average output. Furthermore, should the limitational factor or its replacement be a wasting resource (for example, fossil fuels), its scarcity would increase more rapidly than otherwise, and so might prove less susceptible to technological alleviation. It is doubtful if the populations of many advanced countries (barring such countries as Australia and South Africa) are of less than optimum size, given that consumption per capita is the indicator to be maximized. It is probable that technological improvements, together with increase in capital per head, have long been almost entirely responsible for increases in output per man-hour and that larger populations have not been essential, or in a free-trade world would not have been essential, to the optimum exploitation of these improvements. It is now quite possible, furthermore, that additional technological improvements, together with increase in capital per head, may re-
361
duce the optimum size of population. Should this come about, both positive population maladjustment and average consumption will increase, as, indeed, they seem to have been doing for many years. Maladjustment will increase further, of course, as physical environmental limitations to growth of output make themselves felt. Tendency to optimum. Although some authors have suggested that populations tend to assume optimum size, this inference is of quite limited validity. Populations are likely to respond significantly to changes in the degree of population maladjustment only if these changes generally modify the ability of men to satisfy their aspirations and only if men can respond thereto by regulating their fertility or otherwise controlling their numbers. This sort of regulation is possible in a country in which control of the apparatus of state is highly centralized and the welfare function to be maximized is one prescribed largely by those in control of this apparatus; powerful incentives, deprivations, and propaganda can then be used to modify fertility and perhaps also mortality. In a modern state in which individual sovereignty is great, however, increase in population maladjustment is likely to make for a decline in fertility only if such an increase slows down the rate of growth of average income more than the rate of growth of the aspirations to be realized through the expenditure of this income; for then, family size, if not the rate of family formation, will be subjected to greater restraint. In underdeveloped and backward states, a contrasting situation may be encountered. In these states, an increase in positive population maladjustment is likely to be accompanied by a diminution in the rate of population growth, when, even under optimum conditions, average income supplies little beyond pressing needs. An increase in population maladjustment then tends to lower average income somewhat, and hence to worsen mortality, as well as to intensify some of the restraints to which fertility is subject. The optimum and policy. Theory relating to the optimum, as such, is not very well adapted to the formulation and execution of population policy, even though population maladjustment is very common and the marginal social benefit of population growth seldom coincides with the marginal social cost of such growth. It is rarely, if ever, possible to determine precisely what population size is optimum for a country, under given conditions; and it cannot be supposed that these given conditions will be static. Nor is it possible to "zero in"
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POPULATION: Population Composition
on the optimum point, after the manner of revealed preference theory. It is possible, however, given some welfare index and working criteria of changes in this index, to narrow the zone within which the defined optimum almost certainly lies. One may choose a tentative optimum point, inquire carefV^y if a larger or a smaller population is desirable, and then move this point in whatever direction reduced maladjustment seems to lie. There will emerge an "optimum" zone, within which the true optimum may be assumed to lie. Even though the precise location of the true optimum is not determirable, it may be assumed that welfare per capita at any point within this zone is not likely to be notably different from that associated with any other such point. Some believe, however, that the smallest of the populations lying within such a zone are the ones to be preferred; then the rate at which depletable resources are used is depressed, and (should technological or other changes make for a reduction in the magnitude of the optimum) positive maladjustment almost certainly will be less than it would have been had the larger of the populations lying within the optimum zone been chosen. This belief rests upon the supposition that whereas a condition of underpopulation is easily remedied, one of overpopulation often is irremediable. If the actual population of a country corresponds to one lying within such an optimum zone, it may be inferred, when there is little uncertainty respecting the boundaries of the zone, that further population growth is not desirable; and this inference becomes all the stronger when the actual population corresponds to one situated in that portion of the zone where the largest populations are found. It is then highly probable, given the welfare function chosen for maximation, that the marginal social cost of a further increment in population would outweigh its marginal social benefit. Under these circumstances, it becomes clearly desirable, should the marginal private benefit of population growth still appear to exceed its marginal private cost, to introduce incentives and deprivations suited to bringing these benefits and costs into balance. It is not likely, however, that such action would be taken in the typical polity where short timehorizons, ideologies, and superstitions play important roles. While modern governments may subsidize family planning, they tend to more than offset this by somewhat easing tax burdens and costs associated with the production and rearing of children. It is to be expected, therefore, that the net effect of government policies will almost in-
variably be to re-enforce the forces making for positive population maladjustment, until it becomes very pronounced. JOSEPH J. SPENGLER [See also LABOR FORCE; MIGRATION; POPULATION, article on POPULATION POLICIES; and the biography of MALTHUS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY BUQUET, LEON 1956 L'optimum de population. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. COHN, SELIG S. 1934 Die Theorie des Bevolkerungsoptimums. Berlin: Michel. DALTON, HUGH 1928 The Theory of Population. Economica New Series 8:28-50. DUBLIN, Louis I. (editor) 1926 Population Problems in the United States and Canada. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. FERENCZI, IMRE 1938 The Synthetic Optimum of Population: An Outline of an International Demographic Policy. Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, League of Nations. GOTTLIEB, MANUEL 1945 The Theory of Optimum Population for a Closed Economy. Journal of Political Economy 53:289-316. GOTTLIEB, MANUEL 1949 Optimum Population, Foreign Trade and World Economy. Population Studies 3:151169. LEIBENSTEIN, HARVEY 1954 A Theory of EconomicDemographic Development. Princeton Univ. Press. MEADE, JAMES EDWARD 1955 The Theory of International Economic Policy. Volume 2: Trade and Welfare. Oxford Univ. Press. MILL, JOHN STUART (1848) 1961 Principles of Political Economy. 7th ed. Edited by W. J. Ashley. New York: Kelley. SAUVY, ALFRED (1952) 1956 Theorie generale de la population. Volume 1: Economic et population. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. SPENGLER, JOSEPH J. 1947-1948 Aspects of the Economics of Population Growth. Southern Economic Journal 14:123-147, 233-265. SPENGLER, JOSEPH J. 1962 Population and Freedom. Population Review 6:74-82. SPENGLER, JOSEPH J.; and DUNCAN, OTIS DUDLEY (editors) 1956 Population Theory and Policy: Selected Readings. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. STONE, RICHARD 1955 Misery and Bliss: A Comparison of the Effect of Certain Forms of Saving Behaviour on the Standard of Living of a Growing Community. Economia internazionale (Genoa, Italy) 8:72-91. WOLFE, A. B. 1934 On the Criterion of Optimum Population. American Journal of Sociology 39:585-599. IV POPULATION COMPOSITION
The term "population composition" refers to the various social and biological categories into which the members of a population may be classed. The composition of a population at any one time is not only a reflection of its social history but also an indicator of the kinds of social problems that it
POPULATION: Population Composition will face in years to come. It is therefore of great interest to governments to obtain, by means of censuses, systems of vital registration, and so forth, the most complete and most accurate information possible concerning population composition. The analysis of population composition forms an integral part of demography, the science of population. Although the number of traits that distinguish one person from another is theoretically unlimited, the number of individual characteristics generally included in the study of population composition is rather small. Only characteristics that are socially and demographically relevant are considered, and even then the technical and financial problems of recognizing and recording individual attributes tend to impose stringent limitations. The characteristics by which populations are usually classified include such basic demographic variables as age, sex, and marital status, and such elementary indicators of social organization as nationality, race or color, language, religion, education, labor-force status, occupation, and industrial classification. This information, as already stated, is generally gathered by means of census enumerations and through the registration of births, deaths, and marriages. Although the "vital statistics" generated by the latter method refer only to people who have experienced a vital event in a given year, they can be used to estimate certain characteristics for the total population and, thus, to maintain a continuous inventory of characteristics. For example, the registration of births and deaths by race permits a fairly accurate estimate of the racial composition of the population in intercensal periods. Another source of information, of growing importance, is the sample enumeration (or microcensus, as it is called in some countries), which provides data needed in intercensal intervals and also permits questioning about characteristics that cannot be included in complete enumerations. The specific population characteristics included in census and other official statistics vary from nation to nation, depending upon their relevance in each case. Thus, questions about race or language are omitted in countries which are ethnically homogeneous; likewise, questions about literacy have been deleted from the censuses of many advanced nations. On the other hand, some governments, for reasons of policy, deliberately omit certain important characteristics from their enumerations. For example, no question has ever been asked about religious affiliation in the United States decennial census, because of a rigorous interpretation of the constitutional separation between
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church and state. In India enumeration of caste membership was dropped after independence, as a matter of social policy. Sex composition Most easily measurable, and of fundamental importance both demographically and socially, is a population's composition by sex. In any given area the distribution of the sexes tends to be unequal, owing to the operation of any or all of three factors. First, a differential sex ratio at birth is universal; more males are born everywhere than females. On the other hand, at all ages the death rates for males are usually higher than those for females. Finally, migration is sex selective; in long-distance migration males tend to outnumber females, but in short-distance movements females usually predominate. The most frequent measure employed in the study of sex composition is the sex ratio: the number of males per 100 females. It is easily computed by dividing the number of males in the population by the number of females and then multiplying by 100 (in European countries the ratio is often exTafa/e I — Sex ratio (males per 100 females) in selected countries Country Ceylon Pakistan Libya Tunisia Israel* Malaya India Argentina Cuba Australia Canada Panama Ireland New Zealand South Korea Thailand Brazil Bulgaria Norway Belgium United States Chile Italy Hungary United Kingdom France West Germany Austria
Census year
1953 1961 1954 1956 1948 1957 1951 1947 1953 1954 1956 1960 1956 1956 1955 1960 1950 1956 1950 1947 1960 1952 1951 1960 1951 1954 1950 1951
Sex ratio 111.2 110.7 107.9 107.2 106.9 106.4 105.6 105.1 105.0 103.2 102.8 102.7 101.9 101.1 100.0 99.5 99.3 99.1 98.3 97.4 97.1 96.4 94.4 93.3 92.4 92.2 88.2 86.6
Jewish population only. Source: Adapted from Demographic Yearbook I960, table 1. Copyright © United Nations 1961. Reproduced by permission.
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POPULATION: Population Composition
pressed as the number of females to a hundred males). Table 1 shows the sex ratio of a number of selected countries throughout the world. It indicates a variation from less than 87 males per 100 females in Austria to 111 males per 100 females in Ceylon and Pakistan. The countries where the sex rr.tio exceeds 100 fall into two distinct groups. First, there are underdeveloped areas, where females in the childbearing ages have higher mortality rates than males. In this category belong such countries as Ceylon, Pakistan, Libya, Tunisia, and India. The second group consists of countries which have experienced large-scale immigration which is predominantly male. This explains the relatively high sex ratios of Israel, Malaya, Argentina, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, for example, and of Cuba and Panama, which have attracted young male laborers from other Caribbean countries. An unusual case is that of Ireland, a country with the relatively high sex ratio of 101.9. The explanation probably lies in the fact that emigration from Ireland is predominantly female; citizens of Ireland may enter the United Kingdom freely, and young Irish women avail themselves in large numbers of the opportunity to obtain positions in the neighboring country. At the other end of the scale are the countries with low sex ratios. The imbalance of the sexes in those countries is the result of a combination of war losses and long-standing emigration. France, Germany, and Austria have been heavily affected by war losses, whereas emigration has played the greater role in accounting for the low sex ratios of the United Kingdom and Italy, for example. In countries where migration plays a minor role, the sex composition is determined almost entirely by the interplay of birth and death rates. In the industrially advanced countries the sex ratio at birth is usually around 105 or 106, but mortality differentials favor females at all ages, so that the sex ratio declines steadily with advancing age and reaches 100 between the ages of 40 and 50. The total populations of these countries tend to have sex ratios between 94 and 97. In the underdeveloped countries maternal mortality is high enough to offset the lower mortality rates of older females; consequently, the sex ratio for the total population in such areas averages around 100. Migration also exerts a powerful influence upon the sex ratio within a given country. Internal migration generally consists of short-distance movements, which in their net effect shift the population from rural to urban areas. Urban migration usually includes more women than men. Occupa-
tional opportunities open to women are greater in urban areas; women are therefore strongly attracted to the cities. As a result, sharp differences may arise between the sex ratios of rural and urban areas. In general, cities have low sex ratios, while rural-farm areas have high ones. There are, however, some exceptions; cities which are steel or mining centers or naval bases have high sex ratios. The ratio of the sexes in a given area has an important bearing upon the incidence of marriages, births, and deaths. The number of possible marriages depends in part upon the proportion of the sexes in the marriageable ages. The surplus of women in the urban areas reduces their chances of finding a marriage partner, whereas their shortage in rural areas may create difficulties for eligible young men. An imbalance of the sexes will delay marriage and reduce the number of legitimate births. Because mortality rates among males tend to be higher than among females, a disproportionate sex ratio also affects the over-all death rate, Age composition Age, as well as sex, is a primary characteristic of the individual. Since it is related to physical capacity and mental maturity, every society uses age as a major building block in its social organization. Social roles and responsibilities are assigned in accordance with an individual's age. The age composition of a society, therefore, determines the number of people available for important social categories. Of special importance here is the size of the labor force and of those groups wholly dependent upon the working force—children and the elderly. In addition to serving as an important basis for the ascription of social status, age is biologically related to fertility and mortality. The obvious connection between age and a wide range of demographic and social phenomena makes the classification of a population by age groups especially important. In conjunction with sex, the age distribution provides the basis for all detailed demographic analyses. Birth and death rates can be meaningfully compared and interpreted only when the age and sex composition of the population is taken into account. It is likewise indispensable for the construction of life tables and for making population projections. Data on age are less reliable than sex data. In nonliterate societies individuals often do not know their age, and census takers have to resort to estimates. Even in literate populations there is a definite tendency for respondents to concentrate on numbers ending with zero or five, and on even
POPULATION: Population Composition numbers. For purposes of refined analysis it is, therefore, necessary to calculate correction factors to offset the effects of age heaping. The current age structure of any population is the product of birth, death, and migration rates which have operated in the past. A comparison of the age composition of various countries, illustrated in Table 2, shows the existence of wide variations between different parts of the world. One can distinguish several major types of age structures. At the one extreme are the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which encompass most of the surface of the earth and include the greater part of the world's population. These countries, characterized by high fertility and high mortality rates, have a very similar age composition. They all have a high proportion of children—approximately two-fifths of their population is in the 0-14-year age group. Over one-half the population is in the 15-64-year age range, which contains most of the economically active people. The proportion of people over 65 years is quite small, generally below 4 per cent. The high proportion of children means a heavy dependency burden on the economically active members of the population. At the other end are the economically advanced countries of northwestern and central Europe, North America, and Oceania, where birth and death rates are both low. In these countries children under 15 years constitute only one-fifth to Table 2 — Percentage distribution of selected populations by three broad age groups AGE GROUP Census year
Country Dominican Republic Paraguay Venezuela Malaya South Korea
Egypt Turkey Japan Yugoslavia Australia United States Denmark West Germany Switzerland Sweden United Kingdom France Belgium
1950 1950 1950 1950 1952 1947 1950 1950 1951 1954 1950 1950 1950 1950 1950 1951 1954 1947
0-T4
15-64
65+
44.5 43.8 41.9 41.3 41.1 38.1 38.0 35.4 30.9 28.5 27.1 26.3 23.6 23.6 23.4 22.5 23.3 20.6
52.6 52.5 55.4
2.9 3.7 2.7 3.2 3.7
55.5 55.2 58.8 58.6 59.6 63.5 63.2 64.7 64.6 67.2 66.8 66.3 66.7 64.6 68.7
3.1 3.4 4.9 5.7 8.3 8.2 9.1 9.3 9.6 10.3 10.8 12.1 10.7
Source: Adapted from Demographic Yearbook I960, table 5. Copyright (P) United Nations 1961. Reproduced by permission.
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one-fourth of the total population; about two-thirds of the population are in the 15-64-year age range; and the proportion over 65 ranges from 8 to 12 per cent. These age structures are the result of major fertility declines, which have had the effect of sharply reducing the proportion of children and increasing, first, the percentage of persons of working age and, in time, that of the aged. The populations of France and Sweden, for example, where the decline of the birth rate began early, were already comparatively aged at the turn of the twentieth century. But in most countries of this group the modifications of the age structure are a relatively recent phenomenon. In the New World substantial immigration has also contributed to enlarging the proportion of adults in the 15-64year age range. The result has been an immediate economic advantage, since this has meant a light burden of dependency on a broad base of economically active age groups. However, the reduction of fertility means that the present extraordinarily broad groups of people in the working ages will not be fully replaced in the near future. Consequently, the proportion of those over 65 will continue to rise. A third group of countries are now in a transitional stage. After drastic reductions in their mortality, these countries have recently begun to experience substantial fertility declines. Analyses which have measured the effects of changes in mortality and fertility separately have shown conclusively that fertility is the main factor that affects the age structure of any given population. Countries with currently declining fertility will therefore experience a progressive aging of their population: Japan and some eastern European countries are cases in point. As economic development progresses, other countries will also enter the transitional phase; but the age structure of the presently underdeveloped countries is not likely to change appreciably in the near future. In the economically developed countries the phenomenon of aging has attracted widespread public attention, since it has created considerable social and economic problems. In an agricultural economy societies have a familistic social organization. There the aged not only are maintained within the family household but occupy a high social status. By contrast, in industrial societies the aged are in a much less enviable position. They tend to maintain separate households and to drop out of the labor force, often involuntarily. They can play fewer socially useful roles, and those who cannot live on their savings become dependent upon their
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children or the state. These changes in status have had not only economic but also major psychological repercussions, which require attention and amelioration. The situation was viewed with considerable alarm in the 1930s, when the birth rate of most Western countries reached a new low and the populations of many of them appeared to be aging very rapidly. The postwar resurgence of the Western birth rate, however, has reversed the trend and resulted in a measure of population rejuvenation in a number of countries—for instance, France and the United States. Nevertheless, the absolute lumber of old people continues to rise, and the concern about their welfare is greater than ever. Age composition and the incidence of aging vary also among subgroups of the population within a given country. Age differentials exist whenever groups exhibit different fertility and mortality levels; their age structure is also affected by migration. Thus, the rural-urban migration of the younger age groups causes rural populations to be older, on the average, than city populations. Considerable differentials are often found, also, between various ethnic and religious groups. For example, the higher fertility of Roman Catholics gives them a younger over-all age structure than that of Protestants or Jews in the same countries. Differential mortality also creates significant age differences between the sexes. In the developed countries females live, on the average, from four to seven years longer than males; consequently, in such societies the proportion of old women is considerably higher than that of old men. Marital status In every human society the family functions as the basic unit, charged with the continual replacement of the generations. This involves not merely procreation but also caring for the children over a long period of time and training them for the performance of socially useful roles. Because of this important part played by the family, information about the marital condition of the population is generally included in official census enumerations, and changes in family formation are carefully studied by demographers, sociologists, and economists. Differences in marital status have a direct bearing on both fertility and mortality. The age at which people get married and the proportion of the population that eventually gets married is an important determinant of fertility, since in general fertility is higher in places where marriages are concluded early and where the proportion married is high. Mortality also varies with marital
status; both married males and married females have lower death rates than do unmarried persons of the same ages. In part these differentials arise from the fact that marriage is selective of individuals in better health. Partly, however, the greater longevity of the married may result from the better personal care and greater regularity which usually characterize married life. International comparisons of marital status require considerable caution because in certain countries a high proportion of couples live in consensual unions and may or may not report themselves to the enumerators as married. This problem exists in all countries, because of those who are legally or de facto separated. As a result, the number of married males is not equal to the number of married females in the census statistics of any country. Despite these difficulties of classification, the percentages of married people in various age groups, as reported by their respective national censuses, show some interesting variations. First of all, there are great differences in the age at marriage, as can be seen from the data presented in Table 3. India and Turkey, for example, show pronounced patterns of early marriage, whereas the tendency to postpone marriage is clearly evident in such countries as Ireland, Spain, and Japan. In addition, there are substantial variations in the frequency of marriage. The proportion married at different ages undoubtedly reflects variations in social organization and in cultural patterns between different societies; but the connections between marital status and social structure are complex and do not permit easy generalizations. The only generalization which applies universally is that the percentage married reaches its maximum for females at an earlier age than for males. As Table 3 shows, women in the 15-24-year age group are much more likely to be married than men. However, after the age of 35 the proportion of married men exceeds that of married women everywhere except in Ireland, where male celibacy is unusually high and the reversal occurs only after age 44. In all countries the disproportion becomes quite pronounced after age 45 because the number of widows increases much more rapidly than the number of widowers. As in the case of age and sex composition, there also exist differences in marital status between subgroups of the population within a given country. Perhaps the most pronounced differentials are the residential ones which are the effects of migration. The cities attract a disproportionate percentage of unmarried women but a relatively low proportion of single men. By contrast, the suburbs and
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Table 3 — Percentage married in selected countries, by age group and sex AGE GROUP
Country India Turkey Egypt Bulgaria United States Yugoslavia Bolivia United Kingdom France Finland Sweden Japan Spain Ireland
Census year
1951 1955 1947 1956 1950 1953 1950 1951 1954 1950 1950 1955 1950 1951
15-24 Male Female 44.2 79.8 61.9 34.0 14.7 52.7 46.9 22.6 21.9 42.4 19.8 33.6 33.2 20.2 12.5 27.2 9.3 23.5 11.3 22.8 8.2 22.7 4.8 17.0 10.9 3.0 2.4
8.6
25-34 Male Female 82.8 89.1 84.9 90.6 87.4 70.8 86.4 90.0 79.1 84.7 80.6 78.7 74.4 74.1 79.8 72.0 79.1 70.0 68.1 71.8 60.9 76.5 80.4 71.1 53.8 62.8 32.2 53.7
35 -44 Male Female 87.7 78.6 92.6 88.3 90.9 80.9 95.9 91.9 87.0 84.3 91.2 78.2 85.2 75.4 86.2 82.0 83.3 81.8 83.6 73.1 78.9 80.2 81.9 95.3 84.6 74.2 58.4 69.1
45+ Male Female 76.9 46.5 89.0 56.4 90.2 44.4 88.9 71.3 78.8 61.2 83.2 56.7 78.8 54.1 80.8 58.2 79.2 54.5 78.0 48.6 56.3 73.0 85.3 56.9 79.9 52.9 59.8 48.1
Source: Adapted from Demographic Yearbook 1960, table 10. Copyright United Nations 1961. Reproduced by permission.
the open country contain a very high proportion of married women. Occupational composition When we turn from the more strictly demographic to the social attributes of a population, it cannot be denied that occupational status assumes a place of paramount importance. Men do not live by bread alone; but the need to make a living requires the sustained effort of a very substantial proportion of the population in all societies. Moreover, the way this living is made largely determines the general social and economic position of the worker and his family. Lastly, the classification of workers by occupation and industry provides a major measure for any comparative analysis of the stage of economic development reached by different societies, as well as an index of regional differences within a given country. Labor-force status. The first step in the analysis of occupational characteristics is the separation of the total population of a country into two groups —those who are economically active, also called the working force or labor force, and those who are economically inactive. Actually, this distinction is hard to make in primitive societies or in grossly underdeveloped areas, where the low level of technology forces virtually the entire population to participate in the production of goods and services. However, with the rise of a market economy, there is an increase in the proportion of people who consume goods and services but do not produce them, and the distinction between economically active and inactive becomes significant. Yet even in highly developed societies it is no easy matter to delineate adequate criteria for distin-
guishing between those who are economically active and those who are not. [See LABOR FORCE, article on DEFINITIONS AND MEASUREMENT.] These difficulties notwithstanding, statistics on the labor force are included in the census tabulations of most countries. Although different countries vary considerably in their definitions and classification procedures, these differences affect mainly the statistics for women, youths, and aged persons because these are the groups in which relatively large proportions of workers are engaged in unpaid family work or work only part time, seasonTable 4 — Percentage of economically active population in selected countries
Country United Kingdom Belgium United States West Germany Australia New Zealand Canada Sweden France Denmark Chile Japan Cuba Greece Ceylon Egypt Hungary Portugal Brazil Bolivia
AGED 20-59 YEARS
Census year
Males
Females
1947 1947 1950 1950 1947 1951 1951 1950 1946 1950 1952 1950 1953 1951 1946 1947 1949 1950 1950 1950
97.6 91.7 90.8 94.8 96.0 96.1 94.9 95.9 94.6 96.7 95.0 94.7 93.8 93.7 94.1 99.2 95.5 92.8 95.5 95.9
38.0 25.8 34.0 41.7 23.5 25.3 25.8 32.7 51.0 44.8 29.1 52.8 15.6 17.5 28.6 99.3 36.7 21.6 13.3 64.3
MALES ENGAGED IH AGRICULTURE
6 14 15 16 19 22 24 25 26 30 37
40 47 50
51 52 52 52 63 68
Source: Adapted from Demographic Yearbook 1956, tables 11 and 12. Copyright © United Nations 1957. Reproduced by permission.
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ally, or intermittently. By contrast, the statistics for men in the working ages are much more comparable, because the overwhelming majority of males in these age groups are economically active. Indeed, the proportion of males between the ages of 20 and 60 years who are in the labor force in various countries is almost uniform. Thus, in the 20 countries listed in Table 4, which represent widely differing social and economic structures on six continents, the proportion of men aged 20-59 years who are economically active ranges from 91 to 99 per cent. By contrast, labor force participation rates for women range all the way from 13.3 per cent for Brazil to 99.3 per cent for Egypt, with 15 of the 19 countries reporting less than half of the females in this age range as economically active. The total size of a country's economically active population depends to a large extent on the size and on the age and sex composition of the total population. Demographic factors establish the maximum limit of the number of people who can participate in economic activities. Such factors are the principal determinants of the size of the male labor force, since in all countries nearly all males pursue some gainful activity from the time they enter adulthood until they reach old age. However, the number of women, young people, and old persons who are economically active is strongly affected by a variety of nondemographic, cultural, and economic factors. The type and organization of economic production, the level of income, and the relative value placed on such noneconomic activities as formal education, retirement, child rearing, and leisure-time pursuits strongly influence the labor-force participation rates of these three groups. In underdeveloped countries, children begin to work at a tender age and few old people can afford the luxury of retirement. In industrially advanced nations, almost all youths are in school until they are 16 or 17 years old and a sizable proportion continue their formal education well into their twenties, while pension plans facilitate and often force the retirement of the elderly. The extent to which women participate in the labor force depends on the type of employment available to them, their marital status and childbearing patterns, and the degree of their social emancipation. Industry and occupations. In addition to separating the total population into the two basic categories of those who are economically active and those who are not, most national censuses further classify the economically active according to the industries in which they are engaged and the types of occupations they follow. The relative distribu-
tion of the labor force by major lines of endeavor, such as agriculture, manufacturing, trade and commerce, transportation, and service, provides one of the most useful indicators of the stage of economic and cultural development a particular society has attained. The same is true of the division by major occupation groups, such as professional and technical workers, managerial and clerical employees, sales workers, farmers and fishermen, craftsmen, industrial operatives, laborers, and service workers. Major shifts have occurred in the occupational composition of all economically advanced countries as the processes of urbanization and industrialization have proceeded. The proportion of the labor force engaged in agricultural activities has declined rapidly, while the percentage engaged in manufacturing, trade, transportation, and services has sharply increased. In the United States, for example, in 1840 nearly 70 per cent of the economically active were in agricultural occupations; a century later the proportion had fallen to less than 20 per cent. Under the impact of technological change, the redistribution of the labor force is a continuing process. Unfortunately, national variation in the definition of the various industry groups and in the content of the occupation categories greatly limits the validity of international comparisons. Nevertheless, a rough measure of the relative degree of industrialization can be readily obtained by comparing the proportion of the male labor force engaged in agriculture. The smaller the percentage of men engaged in agriculture, the more highly developed is a country's economy. The proportion of males in the labor force who are engaged in agriculture is shown in column 3 of Table 4. Although these 20 countries show remarkable uniformity in the percentage of their male population who are economically active, they diverge widely in degree of industrialization. Countries like the United Kingdom, Belgium, the United States, and West Germany all have reached an advanced stage of industrialization, with less than one-sixth of their male labor force engaged in agriculture. In sharp contrast stand underdeveloped areas like Bolivia and Brazil, where two out of every three males are still occupied in agricultural pursuits. Educational status Next to occupation, to which it is closely related, education ranks as an element of major importance in the composition of modern populations. The educational achievements of an individual largely determine his level of living, his cultural opportunities, his social status and prestige.
POPULATION: Population Composition They influence his health and survival chances, his mental attitudes, and his entire outlook on life. By the same token, it is well recognized that the degree of literacy and the total amount of schooling received by the population as a whole plays a major role in its social, cultural, and economic well-being and influences the rate of its development. Educational status therefore serves as a most useful index of the socioeconomic position of individuals and of the class composition of a whole society. Educational data are collected by the censuses of most nations, but until recently the amount of educational information has been quite limited. The simplest and most widely available measure of educational status is the proportion of the population unable to read and write [see LITERACY]. In most advanced countries illiteracy has been almost eliminated, and therefore questions on literacy are no longer included in population censuses. Thus, the data for Sweden stop with 1930, and those for Canada stop with 1931. Illiteracy still constitutes a serious problem, however, in many countries. Because literacy rates are merely crude approximations of educational achievement, an increasing number of national censuses have recently begun to employ more refined measures. They ascertain the number of years of school completed by each respondent and the proportion of the population in specified age groups who are attending school. Unfortunately, the great diversity in the structure of national education systems precludes any valid international comparisons. Within a given society, however, statistics on years of school completed, cross-classified by age, sex, residence, and other characteristics, serve as very useful indexes of cultural achievements and of needed improvements. In the United States, for example, the median level of school years completed by the total population 25 years of age and over rose from 8.6 in 1940 to 10.6 in 1960. Particularly significant is the fact that the proportion of those who have at least some college education rose even more steeply, from 10.1 per cent of the total population 25 years of age and over in 1940 to 16.5 per cent in I960; in the same 20 years, the percentage of college graduates increased from 4.6 to 7.7. The trend of college enrollment has been rising very rapidly since World War n. Of all American students who were graduated from high school in 1959, 42 per cent were enrolled in college in 1960, on either a full-time or part-time basis. In the United States a higher education may soon become the rule, rather than the exception. Although educational gains have been widely
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shared by males and females, rural and urban population, white and nonwhite groups, there still persist sharp differences in the average level of schooling. In 1960 the median number of school years completed by the nonwhite rural farm population was only 5.7 years, or just about half the 11.5 years of the urban white population. This extreme contrast proves that even a country like the United States, where educational progress has been rapid and widespread, still has far to go before all elements of the society are assured a reasonably adequate amount of schooling. Ethnic and religious composition Most of the remaining population divisions that have major demographic and social significance refer to ethnic and religious differences. Cultural diversity generates differentials in fertility, mortality, migration, marriage patterns, educational attainments, and socioeconomic status. In many societies, therefore, classification by ethnic and religious characteristics is essential for any useful analysis of population data. Thus, as the data in the preceding paragraph indicate, a meaningful analysis of the educational status of the United States population should show statistics subdivided not only by age, sex, and residence but also by race. The divisions created between different segments of a population by religious differences have ranged all the way from violence and warfare to segregated school systems. In most Western countries religion now plays a less drastic role than formerly; but there are some exceptions. In the Netherlands, for example, Roman Catholics and Protestants have developed an almost completely dual social structure, from separate schools to separate labor unions and separately organized leisure activities, including sports. In most other nations, the influence of religion has become attenuated and individuals often are not consciously aware of it. But its effects on behavior patterns still persist in many subtle ways; in the United States, for instance, most fertility differentials have declined noticeably in recent years but differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants remain undiminished. The most important characteristics with respect to which ethnic groups are usually compared are race, color, national origin, and language. In immigration countries all of these factors, in various combinations (and often intertwined with religion), give rise to important cultural differences. In such countries, place-of-birth statistics are useful in identifying immigrant minorities, and in
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highlighting problems of acculturation and assimilation. In most areas which have been subjected to conquest and colonization by Europeans, race or color differences divide the population into several segments, which remain sharply differentiated in all demographic and social respects. In all such countries statistical breakdowns by race are indispensable for demographic and sociological analysis. In most of Europe, of course, racial composition is not as important as in areas of European colonization, but nationality and language differences play a prominent part in many countries. The history of Europe abounds with incessant clashes over nat.onality differences, which have resulted in numerous wars and frequent persecution of national minority groups. The outstanding exception to this pattern of conflict is modern Switzerland, where four language groups and the adherents of three major religions have long been integrated into a stable and harmonious unity without losing their distinctive identities. By comparison, the animosity between the Belgian Flemings and Walloons, which shows no signs of abating, appears a curious anachronism in the very center of the rising European Community. It is likely that in the long run the all-pervasive processes of industrialization and urbanization will have the effect of imposing a similar socioeconomic structure upon most, if not all, societies, thereby greatly attenuating the importance of internal ethnic and religious diversity. In the meantime, however, statistics on nationality, language, race or color, and religion remain indispensable in most countries, not only for analytic purposes but also for the making of social policy. KURT B. MAYER [See also AGING; FERTILITY; LABOR FORCE; LITERACY; MIGRATION; MINORITIES; NUPTIALITY.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Demographic Yearbook. -» Issued by the United Nations since 1948. HAWLEY, AMOS H. 1959 Population Composition. Pages 361-382 in Philip M. Hauser and Otis Dudley Duncan (editors), The Study of Population. Univ. of Chicago Press. JAFFE, ABRAM J. 1959 Working Force. Pages 604-620 in Philip M. Hauser and Otis Dudley Duncan (editors), The Study of Population. Univ. of Chicago Press. JAFFE, ABRAM J.; and STEWART, C. D. 1951 Manpower Resources and Utilization: Principles of Working Force Analysis. New York: Wiley. SMITH, THOMAS LYNN 1960 Fundamentals of Population Study. Philadelphia: Lippincott. UNITED NATIONS, DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL AFFAIRS 1956 The Aging Population and Its Eco-
nomic and Social Implications. Population Studies, No. 26. New York: United Nations. UNITED NATIONS, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL AFFAIRS, POPULATION DIVISION 1953 The Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends: A Summary of the Findings of Studies on the Relationship Between Population Changes and Economic and Social Conditions. Population Studies, No. 17. New York: United Nations.
POPULATION DISTRIBUTION
Population is in essence a quantitative concept used to denote aggregates of various kinds. The study of population distribution is concerned with how and why the unit parts of such aggregates are distributed over space in one way rather than another. Particular patterns of population distribution are seen to be closely associated with varying rates of population growth and migration. As applied to human beings, this topic has obvious theoretical and empirical interest, not only for sociology, but also for economics, anthropology, political science, and all those disciplines concerned with the organization and structure of communities, regions, economies, or other groupings that denote relatively stable patterns of human settlement. In the study of any population, emphasis can be placed either on the whole or on its parts. Historically studies of population distribution have shown a strong tendency to involve a restricted area, such as one city or one section of a country, and, at least until recent years, they have been descriptive rather than analytical in scope (Bogue 1959). Many are case studies of the size and composition of the populations of minor divisions within a state or district or of changes in these over time. Quite often, population trends in a local area are contrasted with those in some larger region of which the area is a part. Measuring population distribution The concern of geography with space has been clearly demonstrated for a long time. It is not space itself, however, that is of interest to the geographer, but rather the persons and objects occupying space and their relations to each other and to a habitat. The conventional method which geographers have used to present data on population distribution is mapping. Various cartographic techniques, such as dot maps and linear-distance maps, have been developed (James 1954). Although these have a certain convenience, they lack precision
POPULATION: Population Distribution and are useful only as first approximations to understanding the distributions they depict. However, their utility is enhanced when they are used in conjunction with statistical measures of various kinds. Obviously maps, charts, and tables are dependent on the collection of census data or on data from registration systems or special surveys. They are no more than graphic representations of the basic figures on distributions of populations. It must be emphasized that any measures which summarize the distribution of population are likely to be strongly influenced by the choice of area for the collection of data. [See GRAPHIC PRESENTATION.] Measures of density. All measures of population distribution are concerned with variations in numbers or characteristics of a population over time or by place. The simplest measure is a ratio of numbers to land area. Where information on number of people and amount of land is available, it is a simple matter to use the ratio P/A, population divided by area, to yield a population density. So crude a measure is only slightly improved by substituting population per square mile of arable land. Furthermore, density ratios are averages that give no indication of significant internal variations. Nevertheless, countries, provinces, and other areas are often compared in terms of relative degrees of concentration or dispersion of population by the use of a series of density ratios. Such comparisons may be useful when there is a rather high degree of both geographic and cultural uniformity among regions. Just the opposite, however, is frequently true. In consequence, ratios of population density are often not comparable. In the absence of other information it is not very helpful to know that in 1961 the population density of the United Arab Republic was 27 times that of Australia. Such a figure must be interpreted, and it is of little consequence that large areas of both countries are uninhabited desert. What is significant is that there exist differences in social and economic organization which produce quite diverse patterns of land utilization and dissimilar functional relations with external areas. Both of these result in differences in ability to provide support for the population of each country at particular levels of living and in specific distribution patterns. Around the world the highest densities are found at two extremes. In crowded underdeveloped countries both fertile lands and nearby large commercial-industrial cities support dense populations at low levels of living. In modernized nations the highest densities appear in and around those large cities that are best situated to mediate in the ex-
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change of goods and services on a national and world-wide basis and, by so doing, to support their people at relatively high levels of living. Measures of spacing. In addition to density ratios, various other measures of spacing and concentration are employed to indicate the extent to which numbers are massed or dispersed over a given territory (Duncan 1957). The Lorenz curve has been adapted to measure variation in population distribution, and related indexes of concentration and of dissimilarity have been developed. The fundamental problem remains that when different sets of areas are used as a base, different and even opposing results may be obtained. Consequently any interpretation of an index of this kind must be directly related to the system of subareas adopted. Measures of spacing have evolved both from the community studies of plant ecologists and from the economists' use of models of areas within which an even distribution of population is hypothesized. Various centrographic methods measure central tendency by computing centers of population or of activity. Such measures have been popularized by their use in census volumes, particularly in the United States. The mean center conveniently summarizes the distributions within a particular area at one or more points in time. Simultaneously computing the centers for several different groupings, such as population, urban population, ethnic groups, farm population, and manufacturing, will summarize general trends within a region. However, the choice of the mean point (center of gravity) or some alternative device, such as centilides or quartilides, will depend on the problem under investigation. [See GEOGRAPHY, article on STATISTICAL GEOGRAPHY.] Using an analogy from physics, John Q. Stewart and William Warntz (1958) have described the structure of particular population distributions by the use of population potential models expressed by the coefficient N/d, numbers divided by distance. These are measures of the influence, or "drawing power," of people at specific distances from one another. They are illustrated by the attraction of a major population center for migrants initially located at various distances. Finally, use has been made of several categorical measures that involve the classification of populations by size of community, distance from designated centers, rank-size, function, and so on. Examples are the division of urban centers into metropolitan and nonmetropolitan and of villages into industrial, agricultural, and suburban. The population dis-
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tribution "found" by the categorical approach will depend heavily on the scheme chosen by the investigator. World population distribution The single most striking fact about the distribution of the world's population is its unevenness. Roughly nine-tenths of all people are crowded into no more than a quarter of the land surface. There are three broad areas of heavy massing of population. The most prominent is in Asia, where the most densely populated areas are Japan, South Korea, mainland China and Taiwan, Java (in Indonesia), India, and east Pakistan. Also heavily settled are the greater part of the European peninsula, the northeast coast and Great Lakes rim of the United States, and parts of the Caribbean and of coastal South America. Non-Soviet Asia, which constitutes not quite 20 per cent of the land surface of the globe, is occupied by an estimated 60 per cent of the world's people, and this percentage is increasing. By contrast, South America, with 13 per cent of the land surface, presently accounts for only 6 per cent of the world's people. It too is growing at a rapid rate. Differences among areas in natural or social conditions produce marked variability in the degree of population concentration. The causes are in part geographic. The significance of climate as a determinant of population distribution, a theme familiar since Montesquieu, was enlarged upon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by such geographers as Friedrich Ratzel. Not only do climatic conditions limit the spread of population by maintaining arctic, desert, and tropical areas where settlement of any sizable numbers is difficult or impossible, they also influence the fertility of lands, such as the valley of the Nile or the flood plains of the Ganges, where natural conditions encourage a massing of human beings. Similarly, topographic features may provide favorable or unfavorable conditions for settlement. For instance, only a minute fraction of the world's people live at any great altitude above sea level. In the modern world cultural factors are of greater importance for population distribution than all but the most extreme geographic conditions. The existence of local natural resources may be an immediate cause for the settlement or rapid development of specific areas. Nevertheless, iron ore, coal, and other natural resources have no real significance except in a culture technologically and economically able to exploit them. The growth of large communities on favored coastal and river sites is a function of the development of trade,
particularly of industrial commerce. In both cases the likelihood of concentration of population at a given point will be related to the existence of competing sites and to the requirements of an economy for specific raw materials or finished goods. The size, and even the existence, of particular places will also vary according to such outside conditions as economic costs, transport time, or changing routes and market requirements. Distribution of urban population Marked changes in human organization are reflected in the redistribution of population into an increasing number of larger centers. Between 1900 and 1960 alone the number of cities in the world with more than a million inhabitants increased from 10 to 63. Around 18 per cent of the people of the world now live in cities with populations of 100,000 or more. This urban trend has been accompanied in the modernized nations by a precipitous decline in the proportion of the population living on farms. In the United States, for instance, only some 5 per cent of the population lived in places with 2,500 or more people in 1790, when the first census was taken. By contrast, in 1960, 70 per cent lived in such places or in the built-up fringe of large urban centers. Farm families made up 95 per cent of the population in 1790 and only 9 per cent in 1960. Rapidly spreading urbanization, as well as the concentration of population in an increasing number of growing cities, has had an obvious and profound effect on population patterns, not only in Europe and North America, but increasingly in all the settled portions of the globe. History provides examples of isolated cities with several hundred thousand people, usually commercial centers located in fertile agricultural areas, or administrative capitals supported by the wealth of such favored regions. A network of large cities, on the other hand, is based on the creation of an elaborate technology and involves the interchange of varied goods and services, not only between adjacent cities and their immediate hinterlands, but also among cities, regions, and nations that are widely scattered. Thus, in the 30 years from 1888 to 1918, the population of Japan's six largest cities rose from under 2.5 million persons to over 6 million (Taeuber 1958, p. 47). Between 1947 and 1957, Singapore's population grew by almost a quarter of a million people, representing an annual average growth rate of some 3 per cent. Such growth was supported not by any local natural resources but by the pre-eminence of Singapore as a trade center in its region.
POPULATION: Population Distribution The reasons for urban growth are complex, whether we are dealing with South Africa or northern Europe, Asia or the Americas. In terms of purely demographic variables, cities grow because of natural increase, net in-migration, or a combination of these. In terms of cultural variables, growth is dependent on technological developments in industry, transportation and communication, agriculture, science, and medicine. Such developments have reduced agricultural labor requirements, made possible the exploitation of distant as well as local resources, and established cities as the centers of perceived opportunities for migrants. They have made close living possible for masses of people by controlling epidemics and providing for the necessary transportation of persons, food, and goods. Urban concentration. In the industrialized nations the pattern of population distribution now exhibits a high degree of concentration. Even in those agricultural countries that have not achieved full economic development, cities are claiming a rapidly increasing percentage of the total population. In Malaya, for example, the proportion of the population living in centers of 1,000 or more people increased from 35.1 per cent in 1947 to 50.5 per cent in 1957 (Caldwell 1963, p. 41). Indeed, since World War n, urban growth rates have tended to be highest in the less developed nations. In such countries rates of growth for smaller cities have commonly been higher than for the largest city, although absolute increments have remained highest for the major centers. The increasing concentration of population in urban areas, however these are defined, is a worldwide phenomenon. But in general the more developed nations are also the most urbanized. For instance, in England and Wales fully 80 per cent of the population was defined as urban in 1961. Other countries with over 60 per cent of their populations in the urban category are, in descending order of per cent urban, Australia, Israel, Denmark, Sweden, East and West Germany, Scotland, Canada, the United States, Chile, New Zealand, Japan, Belgium, and Venezuela. By contrast, countries with under 25 per cent of their population in the urban category included, in the early 1960s, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, the Sudan, Tanganyika, Togo, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, and North Vietnam (percentages based on data compiled from official sources by the author; compare Demographic Yearbook 1962, Table 9, pp. 304-315). The definition of urban population varies markedly from country to country and may shift over
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time. Nevertheless, by any definition, industrial growth has been closely tied to urban growth. A concentration of population in urban areas may also be found in countries like Denmark, where commercial agriculture is of prime importance. In addition, there are many developing countries, such as Thailand or Egypt, which have one or more cities growing at a more rapid rate than is commensurate with their increase in employment opportunities (a trend sometimes called "overurbanization"). It has been alleged that heavy net migration to such cities reflects the "push" of excess population off the land, but such a view fails to explain the long history of rural population pressure without migration. Proponents of this type of theory also tend to overlook the fact that marginal urban employment often represents a gain in the migrant's level of living (Sovani 1964, pp. 117-119). Number and size of centers. There is a noticeable difference among countries in the distribution of urban population by size of center. In India, for instance, there were, in 1951, 11 cities with populations over 500,000 and another 59 cities with populations between 100,000 and 500,000. Despite this, slightly less than 7 per cent of the country's total population lived in cities of 100,000 or more, whereas nearly 17 per cent were dwellers in places (many of them agricultural villages) of 2,000 to 5,000 population. By contrast, in Australia there are only 6 centers containing more than 100,000 people, but in 1947 some 51 per cent of the total population could be counted in the large-urban category and only 8 per cent in the small-urban grouping (see Gibbs 1961, p. 405, Table 1). The total population in India's "urban places" (that is, in all those centers of 2,000 or more people) was 24 times greater than that in places of comparable size in Australia. Obviously this is, to a considerable degree, a function of differences in the total numbers of inhabitants of the two countries— 441,631,000 in India in 1961 and 10,508,000 in Australia in the same year. What is significant is that the ratio of urban to rural population and, within the urban category, the ratio of residents in large centers to those in small ones are both totally different in the two countries, reflecting profound differences in the extent to which each is urbanized. This in turn suggests important national differences in economic and social organization. Primate cities. Another way to denote degrees of urban concentration is to compare countries with respect to the percentage of either the total population or the total urban population that is found in the largest city. Great variability will be
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found from country to country. For instance, the more than 14,000,000 people in the New York metropolitan area in 1960 were still only 8 per cent of the total U.S. population of 179,323,175. But in Greece the 1961 population of 1,852,709 for metropolitan Athens constituted 22 per cent of the national population, and in Uruguay in 1963 the 1,173,114 inhabitants of Montevideo made up 46 per cent of the total population. In many countries, particularly those of small or medium size, the urban population shows a pronounced concentration in a single center. Such places, termed "primate cities," tend to mass within their limits not only population but also a variety of economic, social, and political functions. These diverse functions—commerce, government, manufacturing, recreation, and so on—are the basis of support for relatively large local populations. It is sometimes alleged that this concentration at one point in space inhibits the growth of rival cities and thus holds back national development by focusing the means of growth in a single limited area. This argument remains unproved and ignores the stimulus to development which is achieved by a concentration of growth factors. Moreover, primacy may be a temporary phenomenon since, although it is logical to suppose that the primate city bears some fairly stable size relation to the cities beneath it in rank, the assumption is not borne out by any available data. Estimates of the 1955 populations of the metropolitan areas in ten countries show the size of the largest urban area to vary from 1.1 times that of the next largest, in Canada and Italy, to 16.3 times in South Vietnam (California, University of ... 1959). Ecological considerations From the ecological viewpoint, an area constitutes an environment to which a collective adaptation has been made by a population. The pattern of distribution of human beings over an area is thus a generalized indication of their economic organization and life style [see ECOLOGY, article on HUMAN ECOLOGY]. It is also an index of the degree to which there have developed complex, welldifferentiated social orders, in which both activities and populations exhibit high degrees of specialization as interdependent unit parts of areally organized social structures. Such social orders, or communities, show relatively high rates of both migration and social mobility, subjects of considerable prominence in distribution research. A central problem for ecology, then, is to understand the collective adaptation, to a particular environment, of an aggregate with identifiable
characteristics. Among human beings such adaptation varies with the existing technology and results in distinctive and modifiable patterns of social organization. Functionally these human communities are affected by their position in a hierarchy of interdependent communities, ranked in size and distributed over space. The physical and social structure of the community may be viewed as responses to its predominant functions, whether that community be hypothetical or real [see CITY, article on COMPARATIVE URBAN STRUCTURE]. However, the relationships among these factors—specifically those between numbers of people and their distribution in space—have not as yet been systematically explored. Current knowledge depends rather heavily on a combination of logical assumptions, conjecture, and limited, unrelated observations of particular populations that are often unrealistically treated as closed systems. Interdependence of parts is well established in theory, but quantitative proof is largely lacking (see, however, the demonstration of economic interrelations in Duncan et al. 1960). Nevertheless, ecological studies continue to demonstrate how varying distributions are reflected in clearly differentiated patterns of organization. For example, Donald Bogue (1949, part in) has shown how variations in population density, related to distance from metropolitan cities, were associated with variations in the average amounts of trade, services, and manufacturing activities in the metropolitan communities of the United States in 1940. The growth of cities has been shown to be accompanied by an increasing differentiation of specialized parts, with a relative concentration of population and of functions in particular sectors. The location of functional areas and their relations to one another vary in time and space, but the tendency for an uneven distribution of people and activities to exist has led to the development of theories of urban structure based on zones, sectors, multiple nuclei, and functional differentiation (Duncan et al. 1960, chapter 2; Harris & Ullman 1945). Ecological processes. The tendency toward uneven distribution has also led ecologists to emphasize such processes as concentration, centralization, segregation, invasion, and succession in order to describe aspects of the process of population redistribution in local areas. The study of the massing of people (concentration), particularly around points of specialized activity (centralization), or the tendency for people or activities of a similar sort to locate together and to develop areas of relative homogeneity (segregation) seems super-
POPULATION: Population Distribution
375
ficially to present few methodological difficulties. Closer examination, however, shows that these common concepts are difficult both to define and to measure. A major problem is that none of the processes is independent of area. Accordingly, the selection of different areal boundaries will alter the substantive findings. For instance, in calculating the population density of a city, it makes a great deal of difference whether the base for calculation is the central part of a metropolitan area or some larger unit that includes suburban or even agricultural land. Similarly, the various indexes that have been constructed to measure residential segregation have frequently been criticized for failing to measure what their authors thought they were measuring. The difficulty, again, is in the areal base unit selected.
more population in the United States in 1950, O. D. Duncan and A. J. Reiss, Jr. (1956, pp. 26-28) concluded that it did not provide a good fit for the distribution of places by size in that year. Despite this they judged the rule in a generalized form a useful summary of the widely noted inverse relationship between the size of a community and the number of such centers. The same authors went on to demonstrate that there are significant differences in age, marital conditions, income, and other demographic and social factors by size of place. This confirms the importance of studies of the changing distribution of population into metropolitan, urban, and rural categories, supplemented as necessary by finer classifications. VINCENT H. WHITNEY
Rank-size distribution of places The question of distribution of population by rank-size of community has received considerable attention. As early as 1826 the German economist J. H. von Thiinen, in Der isolierte Staaf, suggested that ideally a single city on uniformly flat land devoted to agricultural activity would locate centrally and become surrounded by concentric rings of land use. Over a century later Walter Christaller (1933) argued in a similar vein that a central place, whose function it is to provide services for a surrounding hinterland, can exist only where there is an amount of productive land sufficient to support it. The central-place theory is an idealtype formulation and therefore cannot be expected to provide an accurate description of the distribution of a specific population. Nevertheless, it is useful in identifying a number of factors involved in place distribution and in providing a generalized measure from which deviations are to be expected in reality. The explanations of such variance are not apt to be covered by any single theory. [See CENTRAL PLACE.] A number of attempts have been made to formulate a more precise statement of the distribution pattern of communities as a function of their size (Berry & Garrison 1958). One example is the work of George K. Zipf (1949), who developed a rule of rank-size relations to describe a general tendency toward rank frequency in all human activity. As applied to communities, Zipf's hypothesis attempts to make specific the common observation that in most inhabited regions there are a few large places and an increasing number of smaller ones. The number of inhabitants of a center multiplied by its rank would thus yield a constant. Testing this simple rank-size rule with places of 1,000 or
[See also CENTRAL PLACE; ECOLOGY, article on HUMAN ECOLOGY; GEOGRAPHY; MIGRATION; RANK-SIZE RELATIONS; SOCIAL MOBILITY; and the biographies of RATZEL; THUNEN.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY BERRY, BRIAN J. L.; and GARRISON, WILLIAM L. 1958 Alternate Explanations of Urban Rank-Size Relationships. Association of American Geographers, Annals 48:83-91. BOGUE, DONALD J. 1949 The Structure of the Metropolitan Community: A Study of Dominance and Subdominance. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies. BOGUE, DONALD J. 1959 Population Distribution. Pages 383-399 in Philip M. Hauser and Otis Dudley Duncan (editors), The Study of Population: An Inventory and Appraisal. Univ. of Chicago Press. CALDWELL, J. C. 1963 Urban Growth in Malaya: Trends and Implications. Population Review 7, no. 1:39-50. CALIFORNIA, UNIVERSITY OF, INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES 1959 The World's Metropolitan Areas. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. CHRISTALLER, WALTER 1933 Die zentralen Orte in Siiddeutschland: Eine okonomisch-geographische Untersuchung iiber die Gesetzmassigkeit der Verbreitung und Entwicklung der Siedlungen mit stddtischen Funktionen. Jena (Germany): Fischer. Demographic Yearbook 1962. 14th ed. 1962 New York: United Nations. -» Special topic: Survey and Statistics on Marriage, Divorce, Birth, Death and Life Expectancy. Prepared by the Statistical Office of the United Nations in collaboration with the Department of Social Affairs. DUNCAN, OTIS DUDLEY 1957 The Measurement of Population Distribution. Population Studies 11, no. 1:27-45. DUNCAN, OTIS DUDLEY; and REISS, ALBERT J. JR. 1956 Social Characteristics of Urban and Rural Communities, 1950. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census Monograph Series. New York: Wiley. DUNCAN, OTIS DUDLEY et al. 1960 Metropolis and Region. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. DUNCAN, OTIS DUDLEY; CUZZORT, RAY P.; and DUNCAN, BEVERLY 1961 Statistical Geography: Problems in Analyzing Areal Data. New York: Free Press.
376
POPULATION: Population Growth
GEORGE, PIERRE 1951 Introduction a I'frude geographique de la population du monde. France, Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques, Travaux et Documents, Cahier no. 14. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. GIBBS, JACK P. (editor) 1961 Urban Research Methods. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand. HARRIS, CHAUNCY D.; and ULLMAN, EDWARD L. 1945 The Nature of Cities. American Academy of Political and Social Science, Annals 242:7-17. JAMES, PRESTON E. 1954 The Geographic Study of Population. Pages 106-122 in Preston E. James and Clarence F. Jones (editors), American Geography: Inventory and Prospect. Syracuse Univ. Press. SOVANI, N. V. 1964 The Analysis of "Over-urbanization." Economic Development and Cultural Change 12:113-122. STEWART, JOHN Q.; and WARNTZ, WILLIAM 1958 Physics of Population Distribution. Journal of Regional Science 1:99-123. TAEUBER, CONRAD; and TAEUBER, IRENE B. 1958 The Changing Population of the United States. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census Monograph Series. New York: Wiley. TAEUBER, IRENE B. 1958 The Population of Japan. Princeton Univ. Press. WEBER, ADNA F. (1899) 1963 The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. ZIPF, GEORGE K. 1949 Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. VI POPULATION GROWTH
"Population growth" seems a partial term for a field of study where decline, fluctuations, and sharp changes can also occur, unless it is understood that "growth" is not necessarily positive or monotonic. Population growth is the sum of natural increase (births minus deaths) and net migration (immigrants minus emigrants); but each of these balances can be negative, and so can be their sum. Population growth equals natural increase only where net migration is nil or negligible. Ordinarily, population growth is studied by the comparison of rates in time and space—for example, by comparing annual or average annual rates of growth. This presupposes the absence of compelling events disruptive of orderly time sequences, such as the invasion of a territory, removals or displacements of minorities, and casualties sustained in famine, epidemic, war, or a large natural disaster. Such events are said to cause population "gains" or "losses," and balance sheets can be drawn up after their occurrence. But it is not possible to make a clear separation between population changes caused by disruptive events and all other kinds of population changes. In a long historical perspective, all societies are prone to incur crises;
the victims, constituting "excess deaths" in the short run, are then part of the normal long-run risks of society. Again, war losses are not confined to deaths from deliberate military action but include excess deaths due to deterioration in food, shelter, and medical care, a birth deficit due to the mobilization, captivity, or death of potential fathers, etc. Such losses are, therefore, incalculable. Population growth from 1950 to 1960 Two types of population growth rates are used: exponential rates (per 1,000 per annum), for comparison with other demographic measures, and compound interest rates (per cent per annum), for comparison with growth in nondemographic quantities, e.g., income. There is a slight difference in per-unit value of these rates, since the exponential rate refers to population of midyear, or the mean of the period, while the compound interest rate refers to that at the beginning of each year. Table 1 shows world population counts and population growth rates, as compiled by United Nations demographers, for the period 1950-1960. Many of these figures are unofficial, and some are very rough. The four most populous countries contain half the world's people within one-third of the world's land. The 20 countries which follow have 30 per cent of the world's inhabitants on one-sixth of the world's land. The 205 less populated countries and territories, not separately shown, extend over large land areas, including Canada, Australia, and large portions of Africa and South America. From 1950 to 1960 the world's population increased by an amount (482 million) larger than the 1960 population of India (433 million) or of Europe outside the Soviet Union (425 million). The 1950-1960 gain in China alone approximately equaled the 1950 population of Japan; other comparisons of this sort are no less spectacular. Exceptionally high rates of growth were shown by Indonesia and by Pakistan, which by 1960 had both surpassed Japan in population. Comparisons between the growth rates of European and nonEuropean nations are also instructive; Brazil, for instance, with a growth rate of 3 per cent per annum, not only is growing twice as fast as any of the western European nations except Switzerland but also has, since 1950, drawn far ahead of any of them in absolute numbers. Among gains in average density not shown in the table, it should be noted that during 19501960 some 800 persons were added per square kilometer of land in Hong Kong and about 160 per square kilometer of habitable or cultivable land in
POPULATION: Population Growth
377
Table 1 — Estimated 1950 and 1960 population, land area, population gain 1950-1960, gain per square kilometer, and average annual rate of growth: 24 most populous countries and rest of the world POPULATION Millions 1950 (midyear) 1960
LAND AREA Million square fc;'/omefers
POPULATION GAIN Per square Millions kilometer
AVERAGE ANNUAL GROWTH' Per cent
China 560.0"
650.0"
India
(Chinese People's Republic)
359.2
432.8
Soviet Union
180.0 152.3 82.9 76.7
214.4
United States Japan Indonesia
180.7 93.2 94.2
90.0" 73.6 34.4 28.4 10.3 17.5
5.4 3.0 4.0 12.5" 2.4 9.2 4.7 6.9
27 10 8 14
5 5 16 9
1.1 0.6 0.9 2.9 0.8 3.1 1.7 2.9
4.2
42
1.9"
Pakistan
75.0°
100.0°
Brazil
52.3 50.6
70.5 52.5
France
47.8 46.6 41.7
53.2 49.6 45.7
Nigeria
37.5b
50.0b
Spain
27.9 25.8 25.0 20.9
30.3 35.0 29.7 27.8
0.2 0.3 0.5 0.9 0.5 2.0 0.3 0.8
20.5
24.7
0.1
United Kingdom
9 25 2 3
9.6 3.0 22.4 9.4 0.4 1.5 0.9 8.5 0.2
25.0C
18.2 1.9
26 12 28 2 10
1.5 1.9 1.8 1.7 1.2 2.1 2.9 3.0 0.4
West Germany (German Federal Republic) Italy
Mexico Poland Turkey South Korea (Republic of Korea) Egypt (United Arab Republic) Philippines Thailand Burma
e
20.4 20.3 19.5 18.5
26.0 27.4 26.4 22.3
1.0e 0.3 0.5 0.7
5.6 7.1 6.9 3.8
6 24 14 5
2.5 3.0 3.1 1.9
18.4 17.2 519.0
17.2 21.0 623.4
0.1 2.8 68.9"
-1.2 3.8 104.4
-12 1 2
-0.7 2.0 1.9
2,516.0
2,998.0
135.8"
482.0
East Germany' (German Democratic Republic) Argentina Other countries9 Wor/d total
1.8
a. Compound interest rate. b. copulation Population estimates very rough. c. The 1960 total of 99.95 millions was adjusted for underenumeration of the 1961 census as estimated by the Planning Commission's report. No attempt was made to adjust the 1950 total. This probably accounts for the much higher rate of growth than the officially calculated one of 2.1 per cent per annum for 1950-1960. d. 1955-1960 average: 2.8. e. Habitable and cultivable area: 35,580 square kilometers f.
Includes East Berlin.
g. Consists of 205 countries and territories, h. Antarctic not included. Sources: Adapted from United Nations 1966 (population); Demographic Yearbook 1965 (areas). Population gain and growth rates calculated by the author.
Egypt. In Table 1 the density gain of South Korea stands out as the largest, and average density increased by more than 20 persons also in India, Japan, Pakistan, West Germany, and the Philippines. Some fast-growing countries (e.g., Brazil and Mexico) had smaller density gains than some slow-growing countries of initially high density (e.g., the United Kingdom and Italy). But the measure is summary and can easily deceive. Gains in average density have been slight in the United States and Argentina, while, with rapid metropolitanization, the proportion of those countries' inhabitants living in high-density zones has markedly increased. Also, average density is unrepresenta-
tive of density in those minor portions of China, Indonesia, and Pakistan which contain the majority of those countries' populations. The countries in Table 1 can be grouped by 1950-1960 growth rates as follows: (1) 2.5 per cent or higher—Brazil, Nigeria, Mexico, Turkey, South Korea (based on 1955-1960 data only), Egypt, the Philippines, and Thailand, totaling 288 million inhabitants in I960; (2) 1.5 to 2.4 per cent— China, India, the Soviet Union, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan (based on 1950 and 1960 official estimates), Poland, Burma, and Argentina, totaling 1,745 million inhabitants in I960; (3) 0.5 to 1.4 per cent—Japan, West Germany, Italy,
378
POPULATION: Population Growth
France, and Spain, totaling 272 million inhabitants in I960; and (4) 0.4 per cent or less—the United Kingdom and East Germany, totaling 70 million inhabitants in 1960. The above list excludes the 205 less populated countries and territories, but it is evident that the greaf majority of the world's population was subjected during 1950-1960 to rates of growth between 1.5 and 2.4 per cent per annum and that growth rates greater than 2.5 per cent were not exceptional. In these respects the 1950s have been unlike any earlier phase in mankind's history. Except Adhere there occurred settlement of mostly vacant territory, no sizable population has ever before grown at a rate as high as 2.5 per cent. Sustained growth of a large population at a rate as high as 1.5 per cent was relatively exceptional in the decades before 1950. World population growth up to 1750 If the history of Homo sapiens is counted in hundreds of thousands of years, the present world population could have resulted from an initial small tribe with an annual rate of growth of 0.01 or 0.02 per cent. The notion that any human population would grow so steadily at so minimal a rate is, of course, absurd. Both growth and decline must have occurred at different epochs in different areas, but during some critical epochs growth may have prevailed significantly over decline. Thus, very few million individuals could have subsisted at any time on the earth's surface with a paleolithic culture, whereas a neolithic technology and social organization might have sustained a substantial number of millions. The major early metal-using civilizations (those of the Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Yellow rivers) probably supported several million inhabitants each, all of them dangerously exposed to destructive predatory attack. Establishing large areas of comparative peace and security, the Han empire of China, Asoka's empire in India, and Roman rule around the Mediterranean basin combined larger populations, between 50 and 100 million each (Durand I960; Russell 1958; Boak 1955). The world's population at the beginning of the Christian era has been estimated at 300 million. Undoubtedly there was population decline when these empires crumbled and more still when reliance on military prowess became a substitute for the then irrecoverable social organization that the empires had sustained. Previously sizable populations in Central America, Mesopotamia, and southeast Asia have also vanished at various times, possibly owing to similar cultural changes. But historical demographic research has been focused
mainly upon Europe and China. According to J. C. Russell (1958), Europe's population was 33 million in A.D. 1, had fallen to 18 million by about 600, rose to 70 million after the end of the thirteenth century, and was reduced by the Black Death to possibly little more than 40 million. John Durand (1960) has estimated that China's population was 71 million in A.D. 2, had fallen to 37 million by 705, rose to more than 120 million in the thirteenth century, and was reduced to 60 million in the fourteenth. Inexplicably, these ups and downs in Europe and China were nearly synchronized. Little is known about population changes elsewhere in the world during the same centuries; if we had more knowledge of such changes, it might be guessed how much the world total had shrunk by the seventh century, how much it had risen by the thirteenth, and how much it decreased again in the fourteenth. These guesses cannot justifiably be made without a prior marshaling of large amounts of relevant evidence, most of it very hard to find. As estimated by W. F. Willcox (1931) and revised by Alexander Carr-Saunders (1936), world population may have totaled 545 million by 1650, rising to 728 million by 1750; an average annual rate of world population growth of 0.3 per cent is thereby suggested, not impossible for that period or for times such as the rise of the ancient empires or a few of the centuries between A.D. 700 and 1300. Since growth did not occur in every area and probably met with temporary reversals even in the areas of growth, a long-term world average of 0.3 per cent can be consistent with rates two to five times as high within relatively favored areas in undisturbed times, and such rates would have resulted under premodern peacetime levels of fertility and mortality in organized states. Such a rate might have caused the 300 million population of Roman times to increase to the size of the present world population within one millennium instead of two. Actually, severe cutbacks occurred in the first few centuries A.D. and again in the fourteenth century. Growth in world regions, 1750-1960 Tables 2 and 3 link the world population estimates of Carr-Saunders (1936), used here for 1750-1900, with more-recent estimates, for 19201960 (United Nations 1966). Comparable data for 1910 are lacking, but rough figures can be inserted, since the two series are in substantial agreement. The figures are for the traditional continents; hence, Europe includes the Soviet Union up to the Ural Mountains. It will be seen that, by half centuries, world
POPULATION: Population Growth
379
Table 2 — Estimates of world population (in millions), for selected periods, 1750—1960 Asia'
Europe'
Africa
1750 1800 1850 1900
479 602 749 937
140 187 266 401
95 90 95 120
1910' 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960
1,018 1,044 1,149 1,278 1,417 1,706
450 461 505 541 536 593
135 143 164 191 222 273
North America6
Latin America2 Ocean/ad
2 2 2 6
728 906 1,171 1,608
7.5 8.8 10.4 11.5 13.2 16.3
1,786 1,862 2,069 2,296 2,516 2,998
11.1 18.9 33 63
1.3 5.7 26 81
100 115 134 144 166 198
75 90 107 130 162 212
World total
a. Includes portions of Soviet Union and Turkey, as traditionally assigned to Asia and Europe respectively. b. United States, Canada, Greenland, and minor areas. c. Caribbean, Middle and South America. d. Includes Hawaii. e. Author's rough conjecture (see text). Sources: Adapted from Carr-Saunders 1936 (estimates for 1750-1900); United Nations 1966 (estimates for 1920-1960); figures for 1910 are author's rough conjectures.
population growth accelerated gradually until the late nineteenth century and sharply thereafter. This happened despite a nineteenth-century slowdown in Asia (particularly China) and a twentiethcentury slowdown in Europe. Africa's population probably languished under the slave raids until pacification caused its renewed growth. The small indigenous populations of North America and Oceania were swamped by European settlers, who arrived at a high rate in relation to initially small numbers; but the growth rates of these two continents decreased as the settlement populations themselves attained larger size. In Latin America an initially substantial indigenous population is believed to have declined severely after the Spanish conquest; the partly mixed population eventually
resumed growth, and its present rate of natural increase is of a level unsurpassed by any other population of such size. If we examine the same data by decades, it becomes clear that the world's population was, at the turn of the century, already growing at the rate it almost maintained until 1950—in spite of a number of setbacks: World War I and a worldwide influenza epidemic in the decade from 1910 to 1920; the economic depression of the 1930s; and World War n in the 1940s. Accordingly, an unprecedentedly high rate of growth emerged in the relatively undisturbed 1950s. Europe (including most of the Soviet Union) suffered the heaviest war losses and fell increasingly behind the world average rates of growth, although even here growth
Table 3 — Average annual rates of world population growth (per cent), for selected periods, 1750-1960 Asia'
1750-1800 1800-1850 1850-1900 1900-1950
0.5
1900-1 9 10" 1910-1920° 1 920-1 930 1930-1940 1940-1950 1950-1960
0.8 0.3 1.0 1.1 1.0 1.9
0.4
0.4 0.8
Europe*
0.6 0.7 0.8 0.6 1.2 0.2 0.9 0.7 -0.1
f
1.0
North America1"
Latin America0 1.1
—
1.1
—
0.5 1.2
3.0 3.1 2.3 1.4
1.3 1.9
2.2 1.6
0.4 0.5 0.6 0.9
1.2 0.6 1.4 1.5 1.5 2.1
2.1 1.4 1.5 0.7 1.4 1.8
1.8 1.8 1.8 2.0 2.2 2.7
2.3 1.6 1.7 1.0 1.4 2.1
1.0 0.4 1.1 1.1 0.9 1.8
Africa — —
Ocean/ad
World total
a. Includes portions of Soviet Union and Turkey, as traditionally assigned to Asia and Europe respectively. b. United States, Canada, Greenland, and minor areas. c. Caribbean, Middle and South America. d. Includes Hawaii. e. Author's rough conjecture (see text). f- Net decrease due to heavy war losses. Sources: Adapted from Carr-Saunders 1936 (estimates for 1750-1900); United Nations 1966 (estimates for 1920-1960); figures for 1910 are author's rough conjectures.
380
POPULATION: Population Growth
was faster in the 1950s than in any decade since 1910. The manner in which Africa's population growth has accelerated is guesswork, but there is no doubt that the current rate is high. Immigration has been of decreasing effect in the Americas and in Oceania. A large recovery from the depressed birth vates of the 1930s brought population growth in North America and Oceania back to a high level in the 1950s. Because of decreasing death rates, the rate of natural increase has risen enormously in Latin America, very considerably in Asia, and at least appreciably in Africa. Projections and forecasts Methodological considerations. The dynamics of population growth has come to be recognized as a complex subject and far from self-contained. On the scale of decades, potentials for growth depend on the age composition of the population. But changes in age composition occur also as a result of changes in the components of growth: principally, changes in the birth rate; to a minor extent, relative changes in age-specific death risks and also migration, in those instances where this is large and affects particular age groups. Although the crude birth rates and crude death rates roughly reflect fertility and mortality trends, both they and the consequent natural increase are in part a function of varying age composition and should be interpreted accordingly. A fall (or rise) in mortality affects population growth very directly, especially in high-fertility populations which have age structures such that any considerable change in death risks causes a large change in the crude death rate. The present rapid accelerations of population growth in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are thereby explained. A change in fertility does not attain its full effect on population growth until the passing of several decades. The effect on the birth rate becomes large when the reduced (or increased) numbers of children reach the ages of parenthood. In the still longer run, the proportions of persons of advanced age can become considerably altered, thereby affecting the level of the crude death rate. The higher proportion of aged persons explains why there are higher death rates in European countries with superior health conditions than in some poorer countries elsewhere. These few observations do not exhaust the analytic complexity of the subject. It must be added that the fertility, mortality, and migration changes themselves occur in response to changing economic and social conditions, attitudes, and culture. The future of world population. A population projection (or forecast) is calculated, age group
by age group, by applying data and trends in agespecific fertility and mortality rates to an initial set of data or estimates of the population's age composition. The quality of the basic data is, of course, important and may require detailed analytic appraisal or the construction of estimates corrected for detectable sources of error. Judgment is necessary, furthermore, concerning factors likely to affect levels and trends in fertility, mortality, and migration in the future and concerning the likely nature and extent of those effects. An area of plausible foresight may then become circumscribed that, if sufficiently narrow, can provide a basis for economic and social decision making. Since plausibility of the moment is sensitive to any new item of information, projections intended to have predictive relevance may have to be revised frequently. Tables 4 and 5 show calculations of future world population, as prepared by the United Nations (1966). The distinction here between "projection" and "forecast" lies in the intended greater predictive relevance of the latter. A projection may show the consequences of given trends, whether these are believed likely or not. The consequences of trends or changes judged to be likely constitute a forecast. The "constant fertility, no migration" projection shown in Tables 4 and 5 measures the long-range effect of continuance of world-wide population trends which were typical of the 1950s: a continuing tempo in the decline of mortality, maintenance of current levels of fertility, and no migration. The effects of such trends, calculated separately for each region, are then summarized. On these assumptions, population growth in most regions would accelerate much beyond the 1950-1960 rate and the world's population would total 7,500 million by the century's end. Table 4 — Pro/ecf/ons and forecasts of world population (in millions), 7960-2000
Estimate 1960 South Asia East Asia Europe' Africa Soviet Union Latin America North Americab Oceania0 World total
"Constant fertility, no migration" projection 1980 2000
"Medium" forecast 2000 1980
865
1,446
2,702
1,420
794 425 273 214 212 199
1,143
1,811
1,041
2,171 1,287
496 458 295 387 272
571 860 402 756 388
479 449 278 378 262
527 768 353 638 354
15.7 2,998
22.0 4,519
32.5 7,522
22.6 4,330
31.9 6,130
a. Without European portions of Soviet Union and Turkey. b. Includes Hawaii. c. Excludes Hawaii. Source: Adapted from United Nations 1966.
POPULATION: Population Policies Table 5 — Projections and forecasts of average annual rates of growth (per cent) of world population, 1960-2000
Estimate 7950-7960 South Asia East Asia Europe' Africa Soviet Union Latin America North America" Oceania0 World Mai
2.2 1.5 0.8 2.1 1.7 2.7 1.8 2.1 1.8
"Constant fertility, no migration" projection I960J9807980 2000 2.6 1.8 0.8 2.6 1.6 3.1 1.6 1.7 2.1
3.1 2.3 0.7 3.2 1.6 3.4 1.8 2.0 2.6
"Medium" forecast 796079807980 2000 2.5 1.4 0.6 2.5 1.3 2.9 1.4 1.8 1.9
2.1 1.1 0.5 2.7 1.2 2.7 1.5 1.7 1.8
a. Without European portions of Soviet Union and Turkey. b. Includes Hawaii. c. Excludes Hawaii. Source: Adapted from United Nations 1966.
The forecasts employ varied assumptions, made separately for each region, as to plausible decreases in mortality, some continuance of recent currents of migration, and the possibility that sooner or later substantial decreases in fertility might appear in different parts of the world. Three sets of forecasts were originally calculated: two aiming near the upper and lower margins of probability, and the "medium" set near the center of the range of what present information suggests to be fairly probable. Only the medium forecasts are shown here. The information available at the time the calculations were made suggested as most probable a continuance of world population growth at approximately its recent rate for at least three and possibly several more decades, this being a net outcome of probable acceleration in some regions and slowdown in some others. For the year 2000 the medium forecast leads to a world total of about 6,000 million; the high, to 7,000 million; and the low, to 5,400 million. It is evident that many decades will have to elapse before ordinary processes can reduce the current tempo of world population growth to a moderate rate. The intervening phase of rapid growth adds human numbers so large as to be difficult to imagine. One may justly wonder whether human ingenuity will suffice either for a sufficiently rapid strengthening of social organization to cope with the increasing tasks or for a sufficiently rapid spread of motivation for and confidence in methods of family limitation throughout the world. JOHN V. GRAUMAN [See also FERTILITY; FERTILITY CONTROL; FOOD, article OH WORLD PROBLEMS; MORTALITY; PLANNING, ECONOMIC; and the biography of WILLCOX.]
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
AMERICAN ASSEMBLY 1963 The Population Dilemma. Edited by Philip M. Hauser. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. BOAK, ARTHUR E. 1955 Manpower Shortage and the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. CARR-SAUNDERS, ALEXANDER M. 1936 World Population: Past-Growth and Present Trends. Oxford: Clarendon. Demographic Yearbook 1965. 17th ed. 1965 New York: United Nations. -> Data in Table 1, copyright © United Nations 1966. Adapted by permission. DURAND, JOHN D. 1960 The Population Statistics of China, A.D. 2-1953. Population Studies 13:209-256. ELDRIDGE, HOPE T. 1959 The Materials of Demography: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography. New York: International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. RUSSELL, JOSIAH C. 1958 Late Ancient and Medieval Population. American Philosophical Society, Transactions, New Series, Vol. 48, part 3. Philadelphia: The Society. UNITED NATIONS, DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL AFFAIRS 1958 The Future Growth of World Population. Population Studies, No. 28. New York: United Nations. UNITED NATIONS, DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL AFFAIRS 1966 World Population Prospects as Assessed in 1963. Population Studies, No. 41. New York: United Nations. UNITED NATIONS, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL AFFAIRS, POPULATION DIVISION 1953 The Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends: A Summary of the Findings of Studies on the Relationship Between Population Changes and Economic and Social Conditions. Population Studies, No. 17. New York: United Nations. UNITED NATIONS, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL AFFAIRS, POPULATION DIVISION 1956 Manuals on Methods of Estimating Population: 3. Methods for Population Projections by Sex and Age. Population Studies, No. 25. New York: United Nations. WILLCOX, WALTER F. 1931 Increase in the Population of the Earth and of the Continents Since 1650. Volume 2, pages 33-82 in National Bureau of Economic Research, International Migrations. New York: The Bureau. VII POPULATION POLICIES
Population policies may be defined as legislative measures, administrative programs, and other governmental action intended to alter or modify existing population trends in the interest of national survival and welfare. Many aspects of public policy and of social change in general have an impact upon demographic trends. Population policy embraces those aspects of public policy that are designed to counteract the unwanted demographic effects of over-all policy and of other social forces. Most frequently, attention is focused upon efforts to maintain, increase, or restrain the rate of growth of a population. Thus, the major purpose is to control population size, but consideration may also be
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given to influencing its composition and its geographic distribution. The quantitative aim of population policy is emphasized here, partly because policies now in force are concerned primarily with affecting size and rate of change and partly because the inclusion of nonquanlltative, or qualitative, aims would make population policy virtually synonymous with public policy in general. Biological quality, which is the object of measures designed to control the genetic structure of a population, is sometimes regarded as properly the concern of population policy. Although some countries have enacted legislation that authorizes abortion and sterilization on eugenic grounds, the number of such operations is quite small and their effect upon the biological constitution of the population as a whole is probably negligible. Differential fertility, on the other hand, may have some effect, but existing policies do not attempt to control that aspect of demographic change. Current action in this area is largely confined to those sections of immigration policy that are selective as to racial or ethnic origin. Historical background Government concern over matters of population is not a new phenomenon. State intervention, in the form of laws or decrees encouraging marriage, taxing the unmarried, subsidizing families with children, regulating immigration and emigration, fixing a legal minimum age for marriage, and the like, have existed since ancient times (Glass 1940, chapter 2). In general these measures represented a populationist philosophy that equated power and prosperity with large numbers. The expansionist motivation in population policy reached a climax in Germany, Italy, and Japan during the period between the two world wars. Intensive pronatalist propaganda, cash payments to families with children, the rewarding and honoring of motherhood, the repression of birth control, the regulation of emigration, and the enactment of "eugenic" laws, all reflected the drive for larger native and racially "pure" populations, and they were directly associated with the political and territorial ambitions of the Axis powers. During the same period, policies with a somewhat similar content but a different rationale were taking shape in other countries where very low rates of growth were evoking fears of an impending decline in numbers. Fertility rates were below replacement levels in many of these countries, and although only France and Austria actually recorded an excess of deaths over births, it was considered
but a matter of time until most of western Europe would be experiencing a natural decrease of population. At the same time, sustained economic depression was precipitating a new concept of social justice, and governments were taking steps to protect workers against the risks of unemployment and to guarantee a minimum family wage that would take account of the number of dependents supported by each worker. Although it was not clear to what extent the low birth rates then current were a continuation of the secular trend and to what extent they were a temporary phenomenon, it was thought that low marriage rates and low fertility within marriage had an essentially economic explanation. Consequently, the attempt to sustain or increase the birth rate became linked to the development of social security programs, particularly those aspects of social security that contribute to the economic security of the family. Because of this linkage, it is sometimes difficult to say whether measures favoring the family, maternity, and infancy have a demographic as well as a welfare intent, unless the government concerned specifically so states. Insofar as these programs do have a demographic intent, they are distinguishable from the populationist policies described above, in that they are not expansionist in the imperialist sense but, rather, are animated by a desire to avoid population decline or, at most, to achieve a gently increasing population. Similar programs have developed in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, as an integral part of the plan to build the socialist state. The populationist overtones of these programs stem in part from the old controversy between Malthus and Marx, in which Marx took the position that "overpopulation" was a misnomer for imperfect social organization, and in part from a felt need, in the Soviet Union at least, for a larger population. But in these countries, as elsewhere, the nature of population policy—and even the question of whether a policy exists—is to some extent a matter of the interpretation a government chooses to make of its actions and programs. Thus, a nation's stated policy is not necessarily an exact statement of its purposes of the moment. Indeed, the prevailing pattern of social and political organization is such that much of national policy in any area takes form through a series of compromises between contending pressures and hence has elements of ambiguity, not to say of ambivalence. After World War n, with the emergence of new nations and a growing awareness of the economic problems of underdeveloped countries, population
POPULATION: Population Policies policies that represented a different point of view began to develop. In many of the underdeveloped countries mortality was falling rapidly, as a result of large-scale preventive measures, but fertility remained high and rates of increase as great as 2.5 to 3.0 per cent per annum were either recorded or in prospect. Such rates were without precedent in Western experience. They implied a possible doubling of population within a generation and aroused fears that the effort to raise levels of living would be impeded by the necessity to provide subsistence for the increasing numbers. Policies that favor reducing or stabilizing the rate of population growth have therefore begun to evolve in some of the densely populated underdeveloped countries of the Far East and the Caribbean. Elements of policy Ideally, population policy involves the examination of past and current demographic trends and their causes; an appraisal of the future demographic changes implied by these trends; an evaluation of the social and economic consequences of expected patterns of change, in the perspective of what is regarded as the national interest; and finally, the adoption of measures designed to bring about desired changes or prevent undesired ones. Demographic trends are a function of changing relations between the forces of fertility, mortality, and migration, whether in the population as a whole or differentially in its various segments. Policy makers are therefore logically concerned with understanding the factors of change in these three processes and with ways and means of influencing the direction and amount of change in each of them. However, practical considerations are such that most of population policy, as it exists today, is directed at influencing fertility, although the trends and effects of migration and mortality may also be carefully studied, for changes in them can be the precipitating factors that render population a "problem." Migration. Control of international migration as a means of adjustment between high-density countries and low-density countries holds only limited possibilities, principally because of national feelings, political differences, ethnic preferences, problems of assimilation, and fears of the economic consequences of inundation from abroad. The immigration laws of the so-called countries of immigration (Australia, New Zealand, and most of the countries of western Europe and the Americas) are generally restrictive, setting limitations upon the number and source of immigrants and barring those who, for political, social, or medical reasons,
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are considered undesirable (International Labor Office 1954). Although some migration from highdensity to low-density countries is encouraged, it is carefully controlled, often through bilateral agreements between the governments concerned. In these programs quantitative aims are present, but nonquantitative considerations usually take precedence. From the point of view of the densely populated underdeveloped countries, there are, thus, no available outlets that could possibly siphon off the current and prospective increases in numbers. In effect, the solution of what are regarded as demographic problems is almost strictly a national affair. Adjustments of population to resources or to a program of economic development must be effected principally within national borders. Insofar as the redistribution of population is a demographic process, the regulation of internal migration may be regarded as population policy. This aspect of public policy has not, on the whole, been so regarded, its aims being generally qualitative rather than quantitative; but government action in this area can have great significance and can benefit from demographic analysis and demographic insights. The important internal migrations of the past have, like other demographic processes, been largely unplanned and unguided; chief among them has been the movement from farm to city. Problems of urban congestion and of urban and rural slums exist almost everywhere. Modern programs of resettlement, city planning, urban renewal, relocation of industry, and aid to agriculture are examples of government attempts to cope with such conditions, and some of them utilize a demographic approach and have in mind a partially demographic solution—namely, to influence the redistribution of population. This facet of policy could be increasingly emphasized if social and economic planning should become more prevalent and more sophisticated; it would take on a quantitative character if security considerations were to become a compelling factor. In the underdeveloped countries economic progress will depend in part on the success with which population distribution and redistribution are taken into account and made to contribute to, rather than impede, development. Mortality. Broadly defined, population policy includes measures intended to affect the death rate. But the purpose of such measures is to improve the health of the population, not to control the rate or direction of numerical change. To include the totality of such measures would be equivalent to identifying health policy with population policy. Manipulation of the death rate in order to control the rate
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of growth is not feasible, because there is only one policy in relation to mortality that is socially acceptable—namely, to reduce it. In industrial countries where there is a desire to encourage population growth, death rates are already so low that there is very little to be gained, in the way of growth, from further reductions at most ages. Thus, population policy, as such, does not place a great deal of emphasis on the reduction of mortality, although, of course, other aspects of welfare policy do emphasize it very strongly. Indeed, the concept of public health has been extended in most of these countries, by means of national health insurance schemes or national health service systems, to include individual medical care in the'realm of public responsibility. In the underdeveloped countries where there is a desire to restrict the rate of growth, it might be possible to relax the struggle against mortality and allow death rates to rise. However, such a policy not only is offensive from the humanitarian point of view but would also run the risk of defeating the basic objective of improving the living conditions of the general population. Governments that allowed death rates to rise would soon realize that a competent labor force, essential to economic development, cannot be achieved without some safeguards to health and some positive measures to insure adequate diet and tolerable working conditions. Furthermore, skills require training, practice, and education of some sort. Meeting these requirements would contribute to a fall in the death rate, even if the government, as a matter of population policy, took" no positive steps to reduce mortality. And there is the added circumstance that, because of modern technical knowledge and facilities, the basic preventive measures necessary to control the spread of infectious disease—mass inoculation, spraying, and elementary sanitation— are relatively inexpensive and easy to administer. Control of fertility Under present political, cultural, and technological circumstances, the principal focus of efforts to influence population trends necessarily centers on the control of fertility. It so happens that, in general, countries wishing to stimulate growth are low-fertility countries and countries wishing to restrain growth are high-fertility countries. Only three countries can be said to have coherent, carefully constructed, and frankly stated population policies: France, representing a strong pronatalist view; Sweden, representing a more tempered pronatalist view; and India, representing an antinatalist view. A much larger number of coun- "
tries have taken cognizance of population problems in one way or another: by appointing commissions to study the question and make proposals; by issuing statements of official attitudes; or by enacting legislation which probably has inherent demographic aims, although other objectives may be the only ones acknowledged. A brief description of the policies of France, Sweden, and India, along with some indication of similar or relevant specific measures taken in other countries, should give perspective on how developments in this area are moving in the world in general. France. The essentials of French population policy are set out in the Code de la Famille, which came into force in 1940 ("Decret relatif a la famille . . ." 1939). Its purpose is both to encourage family formation and childbearing in numbers sufficient to maintain a moderate increase in population and to counteract the general aging of the population. Specific provisions to this end include, on the one hand, positive measures for financial aid to marriage and child rearing and, on the other hand, repressive measures restricting the use of induced abortion and contraception. Subsequent legislation has introduced some changes in the program, the general effect of which has been to improve its administration and increase its benefits. The principal economic measure is the system of family allowances. Monthly cash allowances are payable to all families having two or more children under 15 years of age; in special circumstances the age limit is as high as 20 years. Reflecting pronatalist intent, allowances are higher for the third and subsequent children than for the second child. Furthermore, families with only one wage earner receive allowances beginning with the first child, and the allowance per child is higher. In addition, prenatal and maternity allowances are available to all women. The amount of allowances is based on the current minimum wage of metalworkers, and so it tends to vary with the cost of living. As of 1960, three-child single-wage families received allowances equal to at least 133 per cent of the base wage. The prenatal allowance averaged 21 per cent of the base wage, and the maternity allowance, payable after the birth, was equal to 200 per cent of the base wage for the first birth and 133 per cent for subsequent births occurring within three years of a prior birth. Further benefits to married couples include government loans for various purposes, tax reductions, and rebates on the costs of public services. Social services in aid of the family have taken the form of subsidies to school canteens, boarding schools, vacation camps, day nurseries, and kindergartens;
POPULATION: Population Policies the provision of household help; and family counseling. Certain benefits, available to persons covered by the social security scheme and contingent upon attachment to the labor force, are regarded as part of France's program to compensate family expenses and have been regularly included in the computation of the costs of France's population policy. Principal among these benefits are reimbursement for most of the cost of the medical care of the spouse and children of the insured, including maternity care of insured women and spouses of insured men, paid maternity leave for insured women, and leave with pay for the father at the time of the birth of a child. On the repressive side, the Code de la Famille re-embodied earlier legislation which made birth control propaganda, sale or advertisement of contraceptives, and incitement to abortion illegal. The condom, considered a prophylactic, may be freely bought and sold, but other devices are forbidden. [For the laws governing abortion in France and other countries, see FERTILITY CONTROL.] Supplementing the pronatalist policy is the encouragement of immigration of a type that is considered compatible with both manpower and demographic needs. A final aspect of French policy is the existence of the Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques, created in 1945 to conduct research in problems relevant to population, follow studies and developments in other countries, and explore all possible means of increasing the number and improving the quality of the population. Sweden. Demographically, Sweden is similar to France and most of the other countries of western Europe. Like France, Sweden has a closely reasoned, highly developed population policy that is oriented toward sustaining the birth rate. But in Swedish policy, consideration of individual welfare and personal freedom have taken precedence over pronatalist aims wherever the two were in conflict. Also, much more emphasis is placed on payments in kind and on the provision of institutional or social services in behalf of the family. Government action in matters of population began in 1935, with the appointment of a population commission. On the basis of the deliberations and recommendations of that commission and of a second commission, which functioned from 1941 to 1946, Sweden has developed a well-coordinated program, the themes of which are voluntary parenthood and child welfare (Myrdal 1941; Gille 1948). Family allowances are payable in behalf of each child under the age of 16. Reflecting a welfare, rather than a pronatalist, emphasis, this is a flatrate allowance beginning with the first child, and
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the rate per child does not increase with the number of eligible children. The amount relative to the cost of child care is somewhat lower than that paid in France, but the system of supplementary services and allowances in kind is much more exhaustive. The supplementary aids include marriage loans for the purchase of household equipment, a comprehensive system of maternal and child welfare centers, housing and fuel grants for families of moderate means with two or more children, free school meals, home-help services, holiday travel for mothers and children of families in difficult circumstances, and tax relief. The sickness and maternity insurance scheme covers all resident citizens and registered aliens. Maternity leave is compulsory, and the costs of confinement are borne by the state. Women employees may not be dismissed because of pregnancy or childbirth. In keeping with the aim of voluntary parenthood, contraceptive advice is given at hospitals and health centers, contraceptives may be purchased at all pharmacies, the laws against induced abortion have been relaxed, and sex education has been made a regular part of the school curriculum. The object of this part of the program is to improve the quality of the population, as well as influence population growth in the direction desired. Abortion has been legalized to the degree that medical boards may authorize the interruption of pregnancy on rather broadly defined therapeutic or eugenic grounds, taking into account the general social, medical, and psychological circumstances of the woman involved. Sterilization may be authorized for similar reasons. It was hoped that the more lenient attitude toward induced abortion would in the end reduce the number of such abortions; however, it is not yet possible to ascertain whether this program has had the desired effect (Gille 1955). India. In India, population policy is oriented toward restraining the rate of increase, on behalf of economic development and of raising the level of living of the people. This policy was initiated in 1952, with the first five-year plan, and subsequent action has put increasing emphasis upon the need to reduce the widening gap between a lowering death rate and a persistently high birth rate. The third five-year plan, promulgated in 1961, stated, "The objective of stabilising the growth of population over a reasonable period must be at the very centre of planned development" (India 1961, p. 675). The plan calls for a large-scale program of education and motivation for family planning, provision of birth control advice and contraceptive supplies, and government-sponsored research in
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demographic trends, contraceptive methods, and family-planning motivation. Family-planning clinics have been established in a large number of rural areas, and family-planning services are available at urban medical and health centers. [See COMMUNITY, article on COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT.] Theso activities are steadily expanding, with the government subsidizing the manufacture and distribution of contraceptives. The question of how to make the program more effective is under constant study. At the request of the government, the United Nations sent a team of experts to India in 1965, "to assess :he problems involved in accelerating the adoption of family planning by the people and to advise the Government on action that might be taken for this purpose" (United Nations 1965, pp. 9-10). The law against induced abortion has not been relaxed, and pregnancy may be artificially terminated only to save the life of the mother. Voluntary sterilization, however, is regarded as an acceptable means of preventing births, and the practice seems to be spreading. Another facet of Indian policy has to do with the effort to raise the average age at marriage. In this connection, the third five-year plan places special emphasis on the education of women and on the provision of new employment opportunities for women. Programs in other countries. In Europe all the rest of the countries have adopted programs that resemble those of France or Sweden in various ways and to varying degrees, but in none of them has population policy been as fully developed or as clearly stated. These countries have family allowance schemes and social insurance or national health service systems that cover all or part of the costs of maternity and the medical care of workers and their dependents. Measures in the Roman Catholic countries of western and central Europe and in the Netherlands are similar to those in France but less intensive. They may be characterized as favoring natality and as repressing the practices of birth control and abortion. Family allowances are generally of the progressive type; laws regarding birth control propaganda and the sale of contraceptives tend to be restrictive; induced abortion is prohibited. Although pronatalist influences contributed to the enactment of these measures, they do not necessarily have an announced or a sustained pronatalist intent. Two countries—Italy and the Netherlands —have been encouraging emigration. Programs in the Scandinavian countries, the United Kingdom, and Finland are similar to those of Sweden. The general attitude is pronatalist, but
demographic considerations take second place to considerations of immediate welfare. Family allowances tend to be of the flat-rate type; supplementary aids to the family and institutional services are provided; legislation regarding birth control is permissive. Supplementary aids to the family are especially well developed in the United Kingdom, where the population question was studied in depth by a royal commission and where the program has had the benefit of the commission's findings and proposals (Great Britain 1949). In the attempt to combat induced abortion, legal strictures against abortion have been relaxed in Denmark, Finland, and Iceland; abortion and sterilization are permitted on medical, social, or eugenic grounds; and family planning is actively encouraged. In Norway only medical and eugenic grounds for abortion are recognized; in the United Kingdom, only medical grounds. Measures in the overseas Commonwealth countries of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand resemble those of the United Kingdom. In addition, these three countries have, since World War n, instituted policies promoting immigration of a selective type. Policies in the Soviet Union and in eastern Europe since World War n have been pronatalist in tone. Family allowances of the progressive type predominate, and special awards for mothers of large families are a persistent feature. Since 1955, legislation against abortion has been greatly liberalized in most of these countries; in some the operation is obtainable at the woman's request. The change was made on humanitarian and health grounds and was declared a measure intended to combat the dangers and frequency of induced abortion. The use of contraception, rather than abortion, is strongly advocated. The new policy does not necessarily indicate abandonment of the antiMalthusian point of view, but there have been some expressions of the opinion that rapid population increase may interfere with economic development (Mauldin 1960, p. 197; Brackett & Huyck 1962). Outside of Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Commonwealth countries mentioned, nationwide family allowance schemes, inclusive health insurance or health service systems, and related measures in favor of the family have not yet developed very far, but programs of limited scope or of an extragovernmental type have begun to grow up in many countries (U.S. Social Security Administration 1961). The European type of program may be seen as a culture trait that is being diffused to all parts of the world. As such, it has no doubt acquired an aura of Tightness that makes it virtu-
POPULATION: Population Policies ally independent of population policy. Changes of policy from pronatalism to antinatalism or indifference are, therefore, unlikely to dislodge it, although they may bring about some alteration of specific provisions. Policies resembling that of India are emerging in a number of other densely populated underdeveloped countries. Intensive government-sponsored programs to promote family planning have been launched in Pakistan and the Republic of Korea. In Taiwan the government gives informal support to a program that is conducted by private organizations. The first five-year plan of Turkey reversed prior policy and provides for family-planning education. Iran's third plan mentions the need to popularize family planning. In Tunisia a policy favoring birth control is under study and a family-planning campaign has been started. In the United Arab Republic the charter promulgated by the president in 1962 stated that family planning was one way of alleviating the problem of low per capita production. Official interest has also been demonstrated, by government approval or support of planned parenthood programs, in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Barbados, Ceylon, and the Philippines. China has liberalized its laws on abortion and sterilization and, despite strong commitment to anti-Malthusianism, has begun to encourage birth control and advocate late marriage (United Nations 1964; Nortman 1964; Tien 1963; Studies in Family Planning}. Effects of population policy Not much can be said about the effects of population policy. As far as the three countries with well-defined policies—France, Sweden, and India— are concerned, evidence that the desired effects are being produced is inconclusive. In France fertility is above prewar levels, and French analysts believe that French policy accounts for that fact. In Sweden, however, the crude birth rate of 1960 was the lowest in Europe and probably the lowest in the world. Growth rates remain high in India. Elsewhere current levels and recent trends in national birth rates appear to bear no consistent relation to the presence, purpose, or content of national policy. It seems clear that once the majority of a population has recognized at the personal level the desirability of controlling family size, it will act without much regard for the position of the law or official policy. Thus, the secular fall in Western fertility took place over a period when birth control was officially opposed and policy, if any, favored increase. The experience in Japan since World
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War ii is another case in point. Japanese law on abortion and sterilization was liberalized between 1948 and 1954, and at the same time the use of contraception, rather than abortion, was urged upon the population. Recorded abortions increased rapidly and soon were approaching the number of live births. By 1960 the birth rate had fallen to a level comparable with that in Western industrial countries. But the resort to abortion and the fall in the birth rate began before 1948; the practice had undoubtedly existed on a wide scale for some time (Taeuber 1958, p. 278). Legalization may have caused some of the increase in the number of abortions, but the important fact, from the sociological point of view, is that a great many people wanted to limit the size of their families. In other words, when such a conviction has arrived, ways and means of attainment will be found. An antinatalist policy has the problem of instilling that conviction; a pronatalist policy, of dispelling it. The question of whether governments can or will provide incentives strong enough to change behavior in this area is still open. The period of the 1960s was one of rapid development in the area of population policy, especially among underdeveloped countries. Many influences —social, political, economic, religious—were at work, both in and outside of government and at both national and international levels. For instance, the U.S. Congress, in passing the 1966 Food for Freedom bill, specifically authorized the president to use the local currencies acquired in sales of food under the Food for Freedom program to set up birth control clinics in any nation covered by the program, if its government so requested. In January 1967 President Johnson, in his State of the Union message, formally endorsed the "export" of birth control as a continuing policy. The elements of a domestic population policy also began to emerge, with the deepening involvement of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare in birth control activities, and the support of these activities by certain members of the Congress (see U.S. Congress 1966). But the Roman Catholic church, in spite of mounting internal criticism and considerable evidence that many Catholics either were using or wished to use some form of "artificial" contraception, still had not modified its traditional stand by mid-1967. In the meantime, most governments of Latin America—the region with the world's highest rate of population growth—had yet to evolve population policies, although privately sponsored conferences in 1965 and 1967 allowed, for the first time, some public expression of concern. During the same period, other govern-
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merits, such as that of the United Arab Republic, whose natural resources seemed inadequate to support their rates of population growth, were undertaking extensive birth control programs for the first time. But it was impossible to foresee the net impact of these forces upon the content and effectiveness of official policy in matters of population. A contemporary survey of government opinion, covering 53 countries in various stages of economic development, found that while many governments were aware of problems associated with population changes, there were differences between them in the interpretations they gave to such changes and in the policies they considered acceptable for dealing with the problems that are created (United Nations 1964). It must be concluded that knowledge about the interaction between population trends and economic growth is still imperfect and that there is plenty of room for honest disagreement about which population policies will be most effective in securing the general welfare. HOPE T. ELDRIDGE [See also FERTILITY CONTROL; FOOD, article on WORLD PROBLEMS; POPULATION, article on POPULATION THEORIES.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
For the latest information about population policies, the reader should consult the publications of the Population Council and of Planned Parenthood-World Population, both private nonprofit organizations located in New York City. The New York Times Index is also a useful reference source in this field. AMERICAN ASSEMBLY 1963 The Population Dilemma. Edited by Philip M. Hauser. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. BRACKETT, JAMES W.; and HUYCK, EARL 1962 The Objectives of Government Policy on Fertility Control in Eastern Europe. Population Studies 16:134-146. Decret relatif a la famille et a la natalite francaises. 1939 Journal officiel de la Republique Frangaise 71:96079626. DOUBLET, JACQUES 1949 Des lois dans leur rapports avec la population. Population 4:39-56. ELDRIDGE, HOPE T. 1954 Population Policies: A Survey of Recent Developments. Washington: International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. GILLE, HALVOR 1948 Recent Developments in Swedish Population Policy. Parts 1-2. Population Studies 2:370, 129-184. GILLE, HALVOR 1955 Demographic Aspects of Scandinavian Family Welfare Policy. Volume 2, pages 883900 in World Population Conference, 1954, Rome, Proceedings. New York: United Nations. GLASS, DAVID V. 1940 Population Policies and Movements in Europe. Oxford: Clarendon. GREAT BRITAIN, ROYAL COMMISSION ON POPULATION 1949 Report. London: H.M. Stationery Office. INDIA (REPUBLIC), PLANNING COMMISSION 1961 Third Five Year Plan. New Delhi: The Commission.
INTERNATIONAL LABOR OFFICE 1954 Analysis of the Immigration Laws and Regulations of Selected Countries. 2vols. Geneva: The Office. MAULDIN, W. PARKER 1960 Fertility Control in Communist Countries: Policy and Practice. Pages 179-215 in Population Trends in Eastern Europe, the USSR and Mainland China. New York: Milbank Memorial Fund. MYRDAL, ALVA (1941) 1945 Nation and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy. London: Routledge. NORTMAN, DOROTHY 1964 Population Policies in Developing Countries and Related International Attitudes. Eugenics Quarterly 11:11-29. Population. -» Published since 1946 by the Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques. This journal maintains a comprehensive coverage of developments in population policy all over the world. SAUVY, ALFRED (1958) 1963 Fertility and Survival: Population Problems From Malthus to Mao Tse-tung. New York: Collier. -> First published in French. SPENGLER, JOSEPH J. (1955) 1956 Socioeconomic Theory and Population Policy. Pages 456-461 in Joseph J. Spengler and Otis Dudley Duncan (editors), Population Theory and Policy. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» First published in Volume 61 of the American Journal of Sociology. SRB, VLADIMIR 1962 Population Development and Population Policy in Czechoslovakia. Population Studies 16:147-159. Studies in Family Planning. -» Published since 1963 by the Population Council. TAEUBER, IRENE B. 1958 The Population of Japan. Princeton Univ. Press. THAPAR, SAVITRI 1963 Family Planning in India. Population Studies 17:4-19. TIEN, H. YUAN 1963 Birth Control in Mainland China: Ideology and Politics. Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 41:269-290. TIEN, H. YUAN 1965 Sterilization, Oral Contraception, and Population Control in China. Population Studies 18:215-235. UNITED NATIONS, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL 1964 Inquiry Among Governments on Problems Resulting From the Interaction of Economic Development and Population Changes. Report of the Secretary General, E/3895/Rev. 1. New York: United Nations. UNITED NATIONS, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL, POPULATION COMMISSION 1965 Regional Demographic Activities. Report by the Secretary General, E/CN.9/ 192. New York: United Nations. U.S. CONGRESS, SENATE, COMMITTEE ON LABOR AND PUBLIC WELFARE 1966 Family Planning Program. Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty, 89th Congress, 2d Session, on S. 2993. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION, DIVISION OF PROGRAM RESEARCH 1961 Social Security Programs Throughout the World: 1961. Washington: Government Printing Office. WATSON, CICELY 1952a Birth Control and Abortion in France Since 1939. Population Studies 5:261-286. WATSON, CICELY 1952b Recent Developments in French Immigration Policy. Population Studies 6:3-38. WATSON, CICELY 1953 Housing Policy and Population Problems in France. Population Studies 7:14—45. WATSON, CICELY 1954 Population Policy in France: Family Allowances and Other Benefits. Parts 1-2. Population Studies 7:263-286; 8:46-73.
POSITIVISM POSITIVISM There are two positivisms: that of the nineteenth century and that of the twentieth. Common to both is a continuation of the eighteenth-century philosophy of the Enlightenment. Metaphysics and theology are again brought before the bar of reason, with the insistence that the institutions appealing to them for justification be reformed or replaced. Science is claimed to provide the standards applied in this critique. The name "positivism" derives from the emphasis on the positive sciences—that is, on tested and systematized experience rather than on undisciplined speculation. The older positivism of Auguste Comte viewed human history as progressing through three stages: the religious, the metaphysical, and the scientific. His positivism was presented as articulating and systematizing the principles underlying this last (and best) stage. Law, morality, politics, and religion were all to be reconstituted on the new scientific basis. Traditional religion, for instance, was to be replaced by a religion of humanity and reason, with rituals and symbols appropriate to the new doctrine (Simon 1963). Comte's evolutionary and scientistic perspectives were shared by such men as Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley, but contemporary movements of thought have been very little influenced by the older positivism. Twentieth-century positivism came to be known as logical positivism, to distinguish it from the older philosophy. (The movement itself preferred the name logical empiricism.} The adjective points to the importance of the rationalist component in the modern view, which owes as much to Leibniz, inventor of the differential calculus and one of the pioneers of mathematical logic, as to Hume and the later British empiricists, like John Stuart Mill. Twentieth-century positivism. Modern positivism began in the early 1920s with the establishment of the so-called Vienna circle by Moritz Schlick in association with Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Herbert Feigl, and a number of mathematicians and scientists. A few years later Hans Reichenbach and others in Berlin developed closely related ideas. In the late 1930s the center of the movement shifted to Chicago, where Carnap accepted an appointment. There, under the influence of C. W. Morris, the contributions of American pragmatism made themselves felt. The movement came increasingly to be called scientific empiricism, which reflected its broader outlook; an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science was published, as well as a short-lived Journal of Unified Science. Positivism as such lasted into the 1940s,
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but continued to be indirectly influential by way of its impact on British analytic philosophers, especially Gilbert Ryle and A. J. Ayer. Among the movements contributing to the rise of logical positivism, three are especially worthy of notice. First, around the turn of the century, a number of scientists—Karl Pearson in England, Pierre Duhem in France, Ernst Mach in Austria, and others—were directing attention to the logical structure of scientific theory, proposing, and to some extent carrying out, a reconstruction of science on a strictly empiricist and even phenomenalist basis and looking to the replacement of pictorial models by axiomization. This line of thought reached its culmination in Einstein's special theory of relativity, which positivists later widely adduced as illustrating the intimate connection between meaning and verification, apropos of the conception and measurement of space and time. A few years later Bertrand Russell embarked on a program of reducing mathematics to logic, along lines previously followed by Gottlob Frege. In collaboration with A. N. Whitehead he wrote the monumental Principia mathematica (Whitehead & Russell 1910-1913), which provided a comprehensive symbolic logic that was to become the language of the new philosophy. In the early 1920s his pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein published the superlative and important Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921), which laid out the philosophical implications of the new logic in concise and often cryptic form. Finally, the political situation in central Europe after World War i helped to shape logical positivism in the spirit of the Marxist critique of ideology; also, anticlericalism gave particular relevance to a philosophy that denied meaning to even the questions posed by theology. Philosophy and metaphysics The positivist conception of the nature of philosophy marked a radical departure from the prevailing view. Philosophy is not a doctrine embodying "wisdom"—it is an activity; it is neither a theory nor a way of life but rather a way of analyzing what is said in the course of living or in theorizing about life. The business of philosophy is not to arrive at a certain set of propositions embodying a suprascientific truth; its business is to make propositions clear. Schlick looked forward to the day when there would be no more books on philosophy but all books would be philosophically written. As a distinctive activity, philosophy consists in analysis. While the synthetic method, as practiced by mathematics and science, builds up conclusions from initial assumptions or data, analysis,
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as Russell in particular emphasized, digs down to the foundations. It looks to presuppositions rather than to outcomes; it aims at laying bare the "logical atoms" out of which our complex ideas are compounded. (The synthetic aspect of thought was later provided for in the positivist ideal of a "unified science.") The name "logical positivism" calls attention to both the form and the matter of the new philosophy: its method is logical analysis, and its subject matter is the positive sciences. The later, so-called analytic philosophy, especially as it developed in England (in such journals as Analysis and Mmd), differs in both respects from the logical positivism by which it was so deeply influenced: its method is more linguistic than logical, and its subject matter is provided as much by the discourse of law, morality, and everyday life as by what positivism calls "the language of science." Clarity and meaning. The governing ideal of the activity of analysis is clarity. Russell, taking science and mathematics as his exemplar, insisted that it is better to be clearly wrong than vaguely right. Knowledge grows by disproof as well as by confirmation, but intimations and adumbrations of the truth are of no great cognitive value. Opposition to the positivist movement in recent years has crystallized in the slogan "Clarity is not enough"; whether because of the intrinsic nature of philosophic problems or because of the limitations of the resources we bring to bear on their solution, the ideal of clarity is not just unattainable but misguided. According to this view, the great questions of human nature and destiny will not yield to exact treatment. To give up muddleheadedness for simple-mindedness is a worthless exchange. From the outset, however, logical positivism rejected these "great questions" as meaningless. The problems taken to be most characteristically philosophical—those of metaphysics—are in fact pseudoproblems, which are incapable of solution not because of their profundity but because they pose nothing to be solved. The questions asked have the form of questions but are lacking in content. Philosophy need not decide between alternative answers, since all are equally uncalled for. Thus, for instance, agnosticism is as much to be rejected as is theism or atheism, because the agnostic, in maintaining that the answer is unknown, acknowledges the genuineness of the question. To the categories of truth and falsehood, into which statements were previously classified, the positivist added a third category: nonsense. It is indeed this third classification that is the distinctive concern of philosophy; to decide whether statements are true or false is the business of sdence. What phi-
losophy does is to show, by logical analysis, which statements are eligible for scientific consideration and how they are to be considered. To do this work, philosophy needs what Karl Popper has called (while repudiating this use) a "criterion of demarcation"—a way to distinguish meaningful from meaningless statements. Such a criterion positivism found in the so-called veriftability theory of meaning. (Whether it is indeed a theory, or rather a rule or stipulation, was a matter of controversy within the movement, as well as with its critics.) The verifiability principle allows meaning only to statements capable of verification, and it allows only so much meaning as is verifiable (unless they are statements of pure logic or mathematics). A way of testing whether a statement is true or false is necessary to the statement's having meaning, and as the slogan had it, its meaning lies in its method of verification. By this last formulation, positivism is closely linked with operationism (Bridgman 1927). A satisfactory formulation of the criterion occupied much of the attention of the positivist movement (Hempel 1950), but none was universally accepted, even within the movement. If, like Ockham's razor, with which the principle was often compared, it is to free us from "surplus meanings," the problem is how to shave close without cutting into the flesh. The difficulties are twofold. On the one hand, the criterion must be made loose enough to allow entry to the whole of science. Thus, falsification is as acceptable as verification; for Popper (1934) it is the fundamental requirement. Some degree of confirmation or disconfirmation is all that can be asked for (Carnap 1936-1937), and the possibility of verification may be either a technical, physical, or merely logical possibility (Reichenbach 1938). On the other hand, a criterion liberal enough to allow for statements containing theoretical terms, whose verification may be extremely remote and indirect, may readmit ideologies, myths, and ultimately metaphysics. Logic and mathematics A major concern of modern positivism, which is central to both its method and its content, is the nature of language. Philosophy does not analyze things, as science does, but rather our ideas of things—or, more precisely, the language in which our ideas are expressed. The object of any philosophical inquiry is accordingly known as the object language; the language in which the inquiry itself is formulated is the metalanguage. In particular cases the two languages may coincide, in whole or in part; but one must always distinguish between
POSITIVISM using a word and mentioning it—that is, saying something about the word itself. Statements that purport to be about objects but that can be analyzed as (or replaced by) statements about language were called pseudo-object sentences by Carnap; many characteristic statements of metaphysics were taken to be of this kind. Thus, Wittgenstein's assertion "The world is the totality of facts, not of things" (1921) might well be rendered as "Science is the totality of true sentences, not of names or predicates." The notions of a statement's being "about" something and of one statement's being "replaceable" by another later became the focal points of much analysis and discussion, under the rubrics designation and synonymy. Following Charles Peirce, the nineteenth-century American philosopher, later thinkers classified language under sign processes in general; Morris (1938) formulated a widely used theory of signs, which was largely a codification of distinctions rather than a theory in the strict sense. Signs may be analyzed in three "dimensions," or aspects, of their working: in relation to other signs (which is the province of syntactics or logical syntax}; in relation to what they signify (semantics'); and in relation to their users (pragmatics}. In its early years positivism was preoccupied with syntax; later, semantics became the chief concern. Comparatively little was done in pragmatics before the positivist movement as such came to a close [see SEMANTICS AND SEMIOTICS]. Logic and scientific purpose. Logic was identified as the syntax of the language of science and later broadened to comprise its semantics also. Thereby, logic was taken to be definitively freed from both psychology and ontology. The laws of logic are neither principles of reason nor truths of being but are rules of language or the consequences of those rules. These, however, are logical consequences, so that the analysis of any given logic presupposes a logic used in the analysis; but this regression was not regarded as a vicious one. For every language there are rules of formation, by which its signs can be combined into sentences, and rules of transformation, by which, given certain sentences, certain others can be asserted. The rule of modus ponens, for instance, allows us to assert the sentence B, given the sentences A and "If A then B." Because of this rule, the sentence "A, and A implies B, together imply B" is a logical truth, and the second implication is a logical implication. The rules may also allow certain sentences to be asserted regardless of what others are given. These sentences are then known as postulates of
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the system; if they can be so interpreted that their truth, and not merely their assertibility, is guaranteed by the rules of the language, then these sentences, together with their consequences, are logical truths. Which rules are adopted for a language is a matter of convention; it is not the business of philosophy to prohibit certain modes of expression or inference (Carnap's principle of tolerance}. Thus, there are many systems of logic and many languages proposed as "the" language of science. The question is always whether a language of a given structure is adequate for the purposes of science (or for some other special purpose). In particular, positivism promulgated the thesis that everything can be said in an extensional language, that is, one in which the truth of compound sentences is determined solely by the truth of their components and in which predicates designate classes rather than properties. But whether a certain language is judged to be "adequate" for the purposes of science depends on one's convictions as to what there is to be said. On this score, the issues dividing positivism from its critics remained unresolved and, indeed, largely unformulated. Foundations of mathematics. The logic of positivism is not merely a symbolic but a mathematical logic. Symbols have been used in logic since Aristotle, but only as abbreviations or auxiliaries. In the new logic everything hinges on the rules for the use of the notation. It is the focus on the combination and transformation of symbols that makes the logic mathematical. Mathematics, according to the positivist view, is itself a language. It does not tell us anything about the world, but it allows us to transform given statements into others and explores the possibilities of such transformations. By the turn of the century, mathematics had been put into postulational form. Questions then arose as to the nature of the postulates and the justification of the rules associated with them. These questions of the foundations of mathematics occupied much of the attention of the positivist movement. Russell held that mathematics is reducible to logic by defining numbers as certain classes of classes and by defining arithmetical operations on numbers as certain logical operations on classes. Thus, Principia (Whitehead & Russell 1910-1913) begins with purely logical postulates (such as "q implies p or q"}; eventually it presents a proof of "1 + 1 — 2." In opposition to this logicist school, the intuitionists, led by L. E. J. Brouwer, looked at mathematics from the standpoint of pragmatics rather than semantics: mathematics is essentially a human activity; we cannot
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meaningfully speak of the existence of a mathematical entity without being able to construct it. A third school, the formalist, following David Hilbert, was concerned only with syntax—the occurrence of mathematical symbols in certain combinations—without regard to how the symbols are interpi^ted or used. Each of these approaches involved serious difficulties. The logicist view encountered certain paradoxes, especially in relation to class membership (Is the class of all classes that are not members of themselves a member of itself?). The intuitionist must make special provision for the infinite processes that are fundamental to large parts of mathematics—for instance, in connection with limits and continuity. Especially important results were achieved that set absolute limits to the formalist program. Godel (1931) proved that any formalism sufficiently rich to allow for the formulation of arithmetic also allowed for the occurrence of statements which, although true, could not be proved to be true within that formalism. Out of these various endeavors a whole new discipline of metamathematics emerged, in which questions about the nature of various mathematical statements and proofs are themselves treated in a rigorous mathematical way (Tarski 1956). Through the so-called new mathematics in elementary education, the elements of logic (set theory) are now becoming known to every schoolboy. Theory of knowledge Fundamental to any question about the scope and validity of human knowledge is some conception of the nature of truth. The positivist emphasis on the analysis of the language of science was sometimes suggestive of the coherence theory of truth: a statement is accepted as true because of its relation to other statements that provide evidence or arguments for it. In the main, however, the positivist position was that ultimately certain statements (protocol sentences} are accepted on the basis of direct experience that is not itself verbalized. Truth is correspondence with fact, as disclosed by experience. This view, which goes back to Aristotle, was refined by Russell and Wittgenstein, who analyzed the correspondence in logical terms. A proposition is true if it has the same structure as the fact it asserts. However, it is only the logical structure of the proposition that is involved, not the grammatical structure of the sentence formulating the proposition. Thus, "the present king of France" is not a logical constituent of the statement "The present king of France is bald," but only its grammatical subject. Yet, how
exactly to determine logical structure, whether of propositions or of facts, remained to some extent obscure and at any rate controversial (Ryle 1932; Hampshire 1948). Analytic and synthetic truths. Of special interest to positivism was the development by Tarski (1944) and others of the so-called semantic conception of truth. Here, also, truth is a matter of correspondence, but interest is focused on the way in which the truth of complex statements is definable by the truth of other, simpler expressions. The procedure is applicable, however, only to exact languages. Basic to the positivist theory of knowledge is the difference beween logical and factual truth. In positivism this difference reduces to that between analytic and synthetic statements. For Kant, analytic statements were those whose predicates were contained in their subjects ("Every effect has a cause"). Positivists regarded analytic statements as fundamentally either definitions or tautologies: compound statements which remain true for all possible combinations of truth-values of their constituents ("Either it will rain or it will not rain"). However, a satisfactory definition of "analytic" remained elusive, and in later years serious doubts were raised as to whether even the sharp distinction between "logical" and "factual" is tenable (Quine 1953; see, however, Grice & Strawson 1956). A fundamental tenet of positivism is that only analytic truths can be known a priori. Metaphysics is rejected because, as Kant saw, it lays claim to synthetic a priori knowledge. However, "analytic" and "a priori" were often defined, in effect, in terms of one another. If this is not done, some critics held, counterexamples to the positivist position can be provided. The problem of induction. The most important of these putative instances is some form of the so-called principle of induction. As Hume saw, this principle is not analytic and therefore is not knowable a priori, yet it cannot be inductively grounded, a posteriori, without vicious circularity. Some positivists (such as Wittgenstein and Schlick) held that induction is not a matter of a "principle" but only of a rule, so that the question of its truth does not arise. But even a rule calls for justification. In the main, positivists approached the question in terms of a more general concern with the nature and foundations of inductive logic. Inductive logic, it was widely agreed, is fundamentally a matter of probability. But how probability is to be interpreted raised important issues even within the positivist movement. Mathematics provides a probability calculus by which given prob-
POSITIVISM abilities allow for the calculation of others sought for. The question is what exactly we are given and whether this same calculus allows us to attach a determinate probability to, for example, a scientific hypothesis. Reichenbach (1935) defended the view that probabilities are essentially frequencies in the long run and that the frequency interpretation can be applied throughout. Carnap (1950), while acknowledging the importance of the frequency interpretation for certain cases, developed a conception of logical probability to be employed in the logic of confirmation. Each position faces acknowledged difficulties, some of which have in the meantime been bypassed by the development of a third conception—that of "subjective" or "personal" probability (Savage 1954). Operationism and the unity of science. Whatever the logic of induction, positivists agreed that inductive knowledge of extralogical truths can only be empirical. From Hume and Mach, positivism acquired a strong phenomenalistic bent: all knowledge can be cast in the form of statements about immediate experience (Carnap 1928). Alternatively, it can be formulated on a realistic basis (the "thing-language"). Most important is the claim— the thesis of "physicalism"—that everything can be said, in principle, in the language of physics. Closely connected with this thesis is the positivist thesis of the unity of science, which holds that there is no fundamental cleavage between Geisteswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft. Science has but one method; it is unified as to terms, in the sense of physicalism; and there is, again in principle, a unity of scientific laws, all of which can be derived from some single, comprehensive theory. The thesis of the unity of science, however, was of incomparably greater significance as a program than as an established philosophical doctrine. It was with respect to the unity of terms that most progress was made. Operationism, which was positivistic in spirit if not in origin, formulated conditions for the introduction of any term into the language of science: the specification of operations for measurement or verification. It appears, however, that the meaning of a term cannot be identified or even univocally associated with these operations, for it is characteristic of science that there may be several quite different ways of measuring the same magnitude or of verifying the same hypothesis. A greater difficulty is that certain terms are connected with observations, not directly, but only by way of their relation to other terms; symbolic operations are thus called for. But once such operations are admitted, much of the force of the operationist requirement is dissipated.
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In the positivist movement, this difficulty centered on the status of theoretical terms. Theory, according to the positivist view, is significant primarily as an intermediary between observations (or experiments). What is required is a specification of how theoretical terms can be brought into relation with observables. To this end Carnap (1936-1937) developed a theory of reduction sentences, which are partial definitions, as it were; no theoretical term is capable of being completely defined by way of observables. This is not to say, however, that theory posits an ontological domain other than what can be observed. To be sure, theory not only describes observable facts but also explains them. But explanation is essentially a matter of prediction: to explain a fact is to adduce a law from which, together with appropriate initial conditions, the fact can be deduced—that is, predicted (Hempel & Oppenheim 1948). Here, too, problems of detail persisted, and some recent philosophers of science have tended to separate explanation from prediction and to emphasize the part played in explanation by unifying patterns. Positivist ethics As to ethics, some of the logical positivists (e.g., Schlick 1930) espoused a naturalistic hedonism, akin to the liberal utilitarianism of nineteenthcentury thought. But the distinctively positivistic view (Ayer 1936; Reichenbach 1951) applied the criterion of verifiability to moral judgments and concluded that these are strictly devoid of meaning. More accurately, a distinction was introduced between two kinds of meaning, which came to be known as cognitive and emotive. The former is characteristic of scientific discourse, is expressed in declarative sentences, and is capable of being true or false; the latter is characteristic of the discourse of politics, religion, morality, and art, and is expressed in imperatives or exclamations. The first conveys beliefs, whereas the second conveys attitudes (Stevenson 1944). Ethical statements do not embody propositions, but rather constitute commands, exhortations, and the like. Much of the severe criticism directed against this position begged the question of whether it "robs morality of any foundation," although attitudes may be as firmly grounded in character and as effective on action as are beliefs. More philosophic objections were addressed to the workability of the distinction between the two sorts of meaning and to the question of whether the positivist analysis applies to moral judgments rather than only to expressions of moral sentiment. The later development of the positivist view gave rise to various
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"deontic" logics, the precise postulational treatment of ascriptions of rights and duties—and related notions—in ways connected with the tradition of analytic jurisprudence, on the one hand, and with the utility theory of modern economics, on the other, The influence of positivism The persistence of identifiable schools of philosophy, each engaged in continuing polemic with other, opposing schools, seems more characteristic of the European scene than the American. At any rate, the c ispersal of European scholars at the outbreak of World War n marked the beginning of the end of logical positivism as a movement. The increasing diversity of viewpoints within the movement, as well as more widespread misunderstanding of its claims, made for increasing reluctance to identify with it. Moreover, as time passed there v/as a progressive softening of what had been taken to be its distinctive doctrines. The verifiability criterion was broadened; semantics and even pragmatics assumed more importance, as compared with syntax; and principles became programs to be espoused rather than theses to be defended. The revolutionary and even Utopian impulse in some of the early positivists (for instance, Neurath) became dissipated. In philosophy, positivism had a marked impact on analytic philosophy, which is in a way its heir, and positivism is largely responsible for the central position in philosophic training accorded to mathematical logic almost everywhere. But its influence was much greater on science, and on the borders between science and philosophy, than on philosophy itself. On its empirical side, positivism added—especially in psychology and sociology—to the growing emphasis on observation and data, as against the theoretical and even speculative bent of the preceding generation or two. Positivism may also have contributed to the emergence of "behavioral science" as something more than an alternative designation for the more traditional disciplines. It must be noted, however, that the positivists were not, on the whole, inclined toward a strict behaviorism: both Carnap and Reichenbach were quite sympathetic to psychoanalytic ideas, for instance. The positivist interest in the logic of measurement and in the nature of probability at least coincided with, if it did not directly contribute to, the growth of such disciplines as psychometrics and sociometrics. It is on its logical side, however, that positivism exerted its most unmistakable and distinctive influence. The increasing interest during the last sev-
eral decades in the application to empirical materials of various logical and even mathematical systems is clearly indebted to the positivistic philosophy of science. In mathematics itself—especially in foundation studies—a strong claim can be made for the value of postulational and even formal approaches. More dubious is the fruitfulness of their application in the physical and biological sciences (Reichenbach 1944; Woodger 1952). In the social sciences the influence of positivism can be recognized in the concern with "miniature systems" and "model building." It may be too early to assess the value of this tendency. One recognizable danger may be identified as the "semantic myth": that if concepts are introduced by the explicit operational definition of terms and if assumptions are clearly stated as postulates, the scientific significance of the undertaking is assured. In sum, the influence of positivism has been on form rather than substance—on methodology rather than on content. It has given new vigor to the ideals of clarity and precision of thinking, in a perspective in which the emphasis on theory is conjoined with an equal emphasis on the ineluctability of empirical data. But too much self-consciousness as to methodology may have a repressive effect on the conduct of scientific inquiry. Unintentionally, and even contrary to its own purposes, modern positivism may have contributed to a "myth of methodology": that it does not much matter what we do if only we do it right. ABRAHAM KAPLAN [See also ETHICS, article on ETHICAL SYSTEMS AND SOCIAL STRUCTURES; HlSTORY, article On THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY; PROBABILITY; SURVEY ANALYSIS; and the biographies of COMTE; PEARSON; PEIRCE; SCHLICK; WHITEHEAD.] BIBLIOGRAPHY AVER, ALFRED J. 1936 Language, Truth and Logic. London: Gollancz. AVER, ALFRED J. 1956 The Problem of Knowledge. New York: St. Martins. BRIDGMAN, PERCY W. 1927 The Logic of Modern Physics. New York: Macmillan. CARNAP, RUDOLF (1928) 1964 The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in Philosophy. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. -> First published as Der logische Aufbau der Welt. CARNAP, RUDOLF (1936-1937) 1953 Testability and Meaning. Pages 47-92 in Herbert Feigl and May Brodbeck (editors), Readings in the Philosophy of Science. New York: Appleton. -» First published in Volumes 3 and 4 of Philosophy of Science. CARNAP, RUDOLF (1950) 1952 Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology. Pages 208-228 in Leonard Linsky (editor), Semantics and the Philosophy of Language. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.
POUND, ROSCOE FEIGL, HERBERT; and BRODBECK, MAY (editors) 1953 Readings in the Philosophy of Science. New York: Appleton. FEIGL, HERBERT; and SELLARS, WILFRED (editors) 1949 Readings in Philosophical Analysis. New York: Appleton. GODEL, KURT 1931 Uber formal unentscheidbare Satze der Principia mathematica und verwandter Systeme. Part 1. Monatshefte fur Mathematik und Physik 38: 173-198. GRICE, H. P.; and STRAWSON, P. F. 1956 In Defence of a Dogma. Philosophical Review 65:141-158. HAMPSHIRE, STUART 1948 Logical Form. Aristotelian Society, Proceedings New Series 48:37-58. HEMPEL, CARL G. 1945 Studies in the Logic of Confirmation. Mind New Series 54:1-26, 97-121. HEMPEL, CARL G. (1950) 1952 Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning. Pages 163185 in Leonard Linsky (editor), Semantics and the Philosophy of Language. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. HEMPEL, CARL G. 1952 Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science. Volume 2, No. 7, in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Univ. of Chicago Press. HEMPEL, CARL G.; and OPPENHEIM, P. (1948) 1953 The Logic of Explanation. Pages 319-352 in Herbert Feigl and May Brodbeck (editors), Readings in the Philosophy of Science. New York: Appleton. -> First published in Volume 15 of Philosophy of Science as "Studies in the Logic of Explanation." LINSKY, LEONARD (editor) 1952 Semantics and the Philosophy of Language. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. MORRIS, CHARLES W. (1938) 1955 Foundations of the Theory of Signs. Volume 1, No. 2, in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Univ. of Chicago Press. MORRIS, CHARLES W. 1946 Signs, Language and Behavior. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. NAGEL, ERNEST (1944) 1949 Logic Without Ontology. Pages 191-210 in Herbert Feigl and Wilfred Sellars (editors), Readings in Philosophical Analysis. New York: Appleton. NEURATH, OTTO (1944) 1952 Foundations of the Social Sciences. Volume 2, No. 1, in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Univ. of Chicago Press. POPPER, KARL R. (1934) 1959 The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books. -» First published as Logik der Forschung. QUINE, WILLARD VAN O. (1953) 1961 From a Logical Point of View. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» See especially pages 21-46 on "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." REICHENBACH, HANS (1935) 1949 The Theory of Probability: An Inquiry Into the Logical and Mathematical Foundations of the Calculus of Probability. 2d ed. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. -» First published as Wahrscheinlichkeitslehre. REICHENBACH, HANS 1938 Experience and Prediction: An Analysis of the Foundations and the Structure of Knowledge. Univ. of Chicago Press. REICHENBACH, HANS 1944 Philosophic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. REICHENBACH, HANS 1951 The Rise of Scientific Philosophy. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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RUSSELL, BERTRAND 1948 Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. New York: Simon & Schuster. RYLE, GILBERT 1932 Systematically Misleading Expressions. Aristotelian Society, Proceedings New Series 32:139-170. SAVAGE, LEONARD J. 1954 The Foundations of Statistics. New York: Wiley. SCHILPP, PAUL A. (editor) (1944)1952 The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell. 2d ed. New York: Tudor. -» The third edition was published in a two-volume paperback in 1963 by Harper. SCHILPP, PAUL A. (editor) 1963 The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. La Salle, 111.: Open Court. -> A bibliography of the writings of Rudolf Carnap, compiled by Arthur L. Benson, appears on pages 1015-1070. SCHLICK, MORITZ (1930) 1939 Problems of Ethics. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. -> First published as Fragen der Ethik. SIMON, WALTER M. 1963 European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century: An Essay in Intellectual History. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. STEVENSON, CHARLES L. (1944) 1960 Ethics and Language. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. TARSKI, ALFRED (1944) 1952 The Semantic Conception of Truth. Pages 13-47 in Leonard Linsky (editor), Semantics and the Philosophy of Language. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. TARSKI, ALFRED 1956 Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics. Oxford: Clarendon. VON MISES, RICHARD (1939) 1951 Positivism: A Study in Human Understanding. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» First published as Kleines Lehrbuch des Positivismus. WHITEHEAD, ALFRED N.; and RUSSELL, BERTRAND (19101913) 1957 Principia mathematica. 2d ed. Cambridge Univ. Press. WITTGENSTEIN, LUDWIG (1921) 1963 Tractatus logicophilosophicus. New York: Humanities Press. -> First published in the Annalen der Naturphilosophie. The first English edition was published in 1922 by Harcourt. WOODGER, JOSEPH H. 1952 Biology and Language. Cambridge Univ. Press.
POSSIBILISM See ENVIRONMENTALISM.
POUND, ROSCOE Roscoe Pound (1870-1964), an American legal philosopher and law teacher whose published works and public addresses have influenced worldwide juristic thought during this century, was born and reared in Lincoln, Nebraska, a university community near what was then the western frontier. Despite his vast learning, he remained true to his vigorous, kindly, and optimistic Middle Western culture. From his father, a lawyer, he may have derived some of his political conservatism, and from his mother, a college graduate, he received encouragement for his ardent intellectual curiosity. At one time he specialized in botany, earning a PH.D. degree in that field from the University of
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Nebraska and making significant scholarly contributions. His interests had earlier turned to law, and he spent a year as a student in the Harvard Law School. Returning to Nebraska, he was admitted to the bar and practiced law. In 1901 he was appointed a commissioner (auxiliary judge) of the state Supreme Court, where he gained valuable insights into the work of the judiciary. Yet his academic interests prevailed. From 1903 on he was, successively, a member of the law faculties of Nebraska, Northwestern, Chicago, and Harvard universities. At Harvard he was dean of the law school from 1916 to 1936, later becoming a university professor, a high academic honor. Sociological jurisprudence. Pound's philosophy of law was influenced by Hegel's philosophy of historical evolution. Revolting against the German historicism of Savigny, with its reverence for the ancient Volksgeist, and against its American counterpart, the sanctification of English common law, Pound put forth his conception of legal change as experience developed by reason and tested by further reason. From William James, as well as from Hegel, he was led toward an evaluative theory of law based on the selection, reconciliation, and compromise of conflicting claims. From the sociology of Lester F. Ward and Edward A. Ross he obtained some of his enduring ideas. Both had an avowed belief in moderate social meliorism, which Pound came to share. Ward's conception of social forces and of their susceptibility to directive guidance by the human mind is analogous to Pound's theory of social interests, yet Pound did not use the term "social forces"; he avoided Ward's emphasis on biological evolution and adopted none of Ward's whimsical "economic paradoxes." Ward's book The Psychic Factors of Civilization (1893), along with Hegel's Philosophy of History and Jhering's Geist des romischen Rechts ("The Spirit of the Roman Law"), were important precursors of Pound's Interpretations of Legal History (1923). From Ross (1901), Pound seems to have derived his view of law as only one means of social control, but Pound expressly rejected the theory of social instincts, on which Ross relied. Thus, Pound's sociological jurisprudence became an analytical-evaluative discipline, which he later distinguished from the analytic-descriptive discipline that he called "sociology of law" (1943a). In his famous 1906 address to the American Bar Association, which aroused a storm of protest, Pound attacked the complacency of lawyers who mechanically follow outmoded rules of judicial procedure. In 1907 there appeared another influential address, "The Need of a Sociological Juris-
prudence." Then came three of his best-known articles, each of which attacked some aspects of the common law and its American developments. In "Mechanical Jurisprudence' (1908) he acknowledged his homage to James's pragmatism and protested the judicial habit of applying mechanically outmoded rules in various fields, from constitutional law to court procedure. In "Liberty of Contract" (1909) he contrasted the theoretical Hegelian liberty of the industrial employee with his actual liberty and thus lent support to the long struggle for collective bargaining. In "Law in Books and Law in Action" (1910) he showed the disparity between the legal rules as to liability for personal injuries and the verdicts of juries, thus preparing the way for workmen's compensation laws, which abolished the common law defenses of employers (contributory negligence, assumption of risk, and the fellow-servant rule), imposed strict liability for industrial accidents, and dispensed with jury trials. Pound presented a more systematic treatment of these problems in a series of articles on sociological jurisprudence (1911-1912). Then followed a series of short books presenting aspects of his philosophy. He cited law and legal theory from American, from medieval, and from modern English and continental European sources and from Roman law. By 1960 he had published 24 books and 287 major articles and addresses. His five-volume work Jurisprudence (1959) was chiefly a summary of earlier writings. Pound's great contribution to juristic thought was his view of law as an instrument of social engineering and his drive to discover how "to make [human] effort more effective in achieving the purposes of law" (1903, p. 34). Although he acknowledged his indebtedness to Oliver Wendell Holmes for this "functional conception of jurisprudence" (see the letter to Holmes, dated November 10, 1919, in Sayre 1948, p. 276), Pound elaborated the idea and made it his own. The list of legal means is never exhausted. Since law is only one means of social control, the lawmaker needs to study the social effects of legal institutions and legal doctrines in relation to these other controls: a sociology of law. Pound's admiration of Eugen Ehrlich's work in legal sociology gained Ehrlich many American followers. The studies of William U. Moore, Herman Oliphant, William O. Douglas, and other American legal realists were partly inspired by this new philosophy. Pound believed that professional study of the means of making legal precepts effective would lead to better remedies: money damages cannot adequately recompense the badly injured employee;
POUND, ROSCOE rehabilitation training is a better means of restitution. A sociological legal history, by revealing the occasion and the need for old law, aids the present generation to discard more intelligently the traditional doctrines that are no longer needed. From Raymond Saleilles, Pound took the idea of making penal treatment fit the criminal, rather than the crime. In 1920 he became a codirector of the Cleveland survey of criminal justice. The results of that survey led to improvements in criminal law and its administration in crowded urban areas. He remained a steadfast admirer of the legal profession despite its conservatism, and of judicial justice, the only possible "justice according to law." His imaginative mind, viewing legal phenomena with the aid of pragmatism and Midwestern shrewdness, Hegelian and American idealism, produced a downto-earth jurisprudence that could point to practical results. Theory of social interests. Practical results, however, often have a shorter life than do ideas. Pound's chief contribution to systematic legal philosophy is his theory of social interests, on which he began to work as early as 1913 (see the letter to Holmes, dated February 22, 1913, in Sayre 1948, p. 270). From Bentham and Jhering he took the idea of interest as a basic element of legal protection: a right is a legally protected interest. From this idea of individual interests, Pound developed the concept of public interests (the interests of governmental units as property owners) and social interests (the claims and values of society which the legal order strives to maintain). He shared Jhering's view that society is supreme and the state should be subordinated to it. Lawmaking and adjudication are processes in which a balancing of interests or a reconciliation of competing claims takes place; so dominant are the social interests that individual interests are entitled to protection only to the extent that one or more social interests will be furthered or maintained. The factory owner's claim to freedom from official interference in the operation of his machinery is supported by the social interest in the security of acquisitions, yet it may have to give way partly to the social interest in health and safety, as implemented by laws requiring certain safeguards on dangerous machinery. Again, the father's individual interest in the upbringing of his minor children must give way to the social interest in security from juvenile aggression and in the conservation of human resources (the juveniles). This argument was used to support juvenile-court legislation when it was attacked as unconstitutional. Pound's theory sounds like the death knell of
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nineteenth-century individualism until one finds that security and conservation rank high in three of his six classes of social interests, and that social interest in the individual human life—economic, political, cultural—is another value expressed in social legislation. Pound was a patient and optimistic idealist. His theory of social interests is much less radical than it seems at first reading. Five stages of legal history. Pound's concept of the five stages of legal history resulted from his search for the ends of law, as developed in legal rules and doctrines. His first stage, primitive law, presupposes a clan-divided society and a weak central government that seeks chiefly to prevent blood feuds and to maintain the peace by providing a tariff of compensations for injuries, as exemplified in the Anglo-Saxon and other early laws. This stage was later expanded to include some extant primitive societies, as described by anthropologists. In the second stage, strict law, the end sought was certainty and security in the administration of legal remedies, to be attained by rigid enforcement of narrow procedural rules and by formalism in legal transactions. In ancient Rome, in this stage, the head of the family alone had full legal personality, and in the corresponding English stage the wife and minor children were in subjection to the husband-father. In English law the system of writs and of common law pleading, and in Roman law the period of jus strictum, exemplify this stage. In the stage of equity and natural law, the third stage, the unmoral attitude of strict law gave way to an insistence on justice in the ethical sense, and the concept of legal personality was broadened to include dependent members of the family. In Roman law this came about in the classical period, from Augustus to the early part of the third century A.D., and in England and continental Europe the corresponding transition came about in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From this period in England date the married woman's separate estate in equity and the equity of redemption, by which a debtor-mortgagor who had not paid strictly on time could get the chancery court to compel the mortgagee, who by strict law now had legal title to the land, to accept a delayed payment and relinquish the land. In this and many other ways the formal rigors of the earlier period were diminished, and so was the emphasis upon security. A revival of this emphasis brought about the fourth stage, the maturity of law, in which the undue fluidity of law, resulting from the infusion of morals, was gradually corrected and the law became more stable without sacrificing all of the modifications effected in the preceding stage. As
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Pound said, history does not repeat itself in mere cycles but moves upward in spirals. The idea of equality was carried over from the equity stage and led to the concept of equality of opportunity to exercise one's faculties and to use one's substance. In the nineteenth century in England, security and equality were reconciled in the safeguarding of the property and contracts of individuals. A similar stage is said to have been reached in Roman law, and in nineteenth-century Continental law. The socialization of law, the fifth period, brought out the emphasis on social interests rather than on individual interests, the limitations on property and contract, and many types of social legislation (1959, vol. 1, chapter 7). The dependence of law upon sociology and other social sciences was emphasized in Pound's earlier writings and was repeated in a recent essay (American Society for Legal History 1962, p. vii). Yet the social phenomena from which he derived his social interests were chiefly legal phenomena (1943&), and only in his survey of crime did he turn to criminological data. In his best work he found his own fertile insights to be sufficient, without benefit of any conclusions derived from an empirical sociology. The main contribution of sociological jurisprudence is a sustained and systematic demonstration that law is one means of social control and that its merits or demerits are to be judged by its social consequences. EDWIN W. PATTERSON [For the historical context of Pound's work, see JURISPRUDENCE; LAW, article on THE SOCIOLOGY OF LAW; LEGAL SYSTEMS; and the biographies of BENTHAM; EHRLICH; HEGEL; HOLMES; JAMES; KANTOROWICZ; LLEWELLYN; Ross; WARD, LESTER.] WORKS BY POUND
(1903) 1943 Outlines of Lectures on Jurisprudence. 5th ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. (1906) 1963 The Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction With the Administration of Justice. Chicago: American Judicature Society. 1907 The Need of a Sociological Jurisprudence. Green Bag 19:607-615. 1908 Mechanical Jurisprudence. Columbia Law Review 8:605-623. 1909 Liberty of Contract. Yale Law Review 18:454-487. 1910 Law in Books and Law in Action. American Law Review 44:12-36. 1911-1912 The Scope and Purpose of Sociological Jurisprudence. Harvard Law Review 24:591-619; 25:140168, 489-516. 1921 The Spirit of the Common Law. Boston: Marshall Jones. (1922) 1954 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law. Rev. ed. New Haven.- Yale Univ. Press.
(1923) 1946 Interpretations of Legal History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. 1943a Sociology of Law and Sociological Jurisprudence. University of Toronto Law Journal 5:1-20. 1943b A Survey of Social Interests. Harvard Law Review 57:1-39. 1959 Jurisprudence. 5 vols. St. Paul, Minn.: West. -* Volume 1: Jurisprudence. The End of Law. Volume 2: The Nature of Law. Volume 3: The Scope and Subject Matter of Law. Volume 4: Application and Enforcement of Law. Volume 5: The System of Law. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR LEGAL HISTORY 1962 Essays in Jurisprudence in Honor of Roscoe Pound. Edited by Ralph A. Newman. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill. HARVARD UNIVERSITY, LAW SCHOOL, LIBRARY 1960 A Bibliography of the Writings of Roscoe Pound: 19401960, by George A. Strait. Cambridge, Mass.: The Library. Ross, EDWARD A. 1901 Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order. New York and London: Macmill an. SAYRE, PAUL L. 1948 The Life of Roscoe Pound. Iowa City: State Univ. of Iowa, College of Law Committee. SETARO, FRANKLYN C. 1942 A Bibliography of Roscoe Pound. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. WARD, LESTER F. (1893) 1906 The Psychic Factors of Civilization. 2d ed. Boston: Ginn.
POVERTY Poverty has always had several not entirely separable meanings and is always defined according to the conventions of the society in which it occurs. For administrative reasons definition may also take the form of fixing an absolute criterion of poverty (e.g., a "poverty line"). We may distinguish three meanings: (1) social poverty, (2) pauperism, and (3) moral poverty. Social poverty implies not merely economic inequality (of property, income, living standards, etc.) but also social inequality, that is, a relation of inferiority, dependence, or exploitation. In other words, it implies the existence of a social stratum definable by, among other things, lack of wealth. In this sense poverty is relative, implying no particular level of income or amount of property, although in ^industrial and underdeveloped economies the level normally qualifying the individual (but not always the class) as "poor" is one not far removed from subsistence. Pauperism describes a category of people unable to maintain themselves at all, or to maintain themselves at the level conventionally regarded as minimal, without outside assistance. At any given time this implies the fixing of a minimum standard below which men are not supposed to fall and often also implies a model of social relations that indi-
POVERTY cates which paupers have a claim upon public assistance and who is to assist them. Pauperism arose historically beyond the border of the functioning primary social group (e.g., the kinship group) within which the economically dependent can expect assistance or maintenance without special institutional provisions. It therefore reflects the fluctuating fortunes of such primary groups, and in recent periods their secular diminution and functional decline. A man's wife and children are not ipso facto paupers, but widows and orphans are perhaps the earliest clearly defined category of persons with a call upon public assistance. Some societies make a further distinction between types of paupers who "deserve" assistance and the equally indigent who do not. Moral poverty defines the place of poverty in the value system of a society or of its subgroups and institutions; that is, it defines whether poverty is morally acceptable and what status it confers or prevents the poor man from enjoying. It is therefore difficult to separate from (1) and (2), except where it finds expression in specific bodies of men, in the past normally religious bodies, who voluntarily undergo poverty. In stratified societies several values of poverty will normally coexist; for example, it will be a "shame" or a punishment for sin for some, a cause of pride for others, or both at the same time. The origins of poverty. The social category of the poor arises in stratified societies in which the upper and lower strata have direct experience of each other. It may also arise in situations where economically unequal groups coexist spatially, e.g., townsmen and peasants or nomads and agriculturalists. However, with spatial coexistence it is likely that the poorer will distinguish themselves from the richer and vice versa by qualitative rather than quantitative criteria—for example, as (poor) peasants and (rich) townsmen, rather than simply as "the poor" and "the rich." Even elsewhere poverty is rarely the only criterion of stratification as seen from below. It is combined with numbers (Aristotelian democracy); very commonly with labor ("the laboring poor"); or with a complex concept of "the people" or "the community," as perhaps in the phrase "the poor commons" familiar in English usage from the later Middle Ages. Seen from above, however, poverty may adequately define the lower strata, as in medieval legal terminology, where they are simply arme liute (poor people). The poor are normally contrasted with the rich; and a causal relationship is often assumed, as in the German proverbs "Poverty is the rich man's cow" and "Poverty is the hand and
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foot of wealth." However, the contrast is also and at all times with the power and privilege that go with wealth; and consequently poverty always implies weakness and a low position in the social hierarchy, or personal inferiority. That the upper social classes are rich, the lower poor, is generally taken for granted. In the industrial period these broad distinctions are increasingly supplemented or replaced by the familiar distinction between economically defined classes. The "laboring poor" became the "laboring classes" and eventually the "working class." Pauperism. Although poverty was assumed to be normal and, in the ordinary course of events, irremediable for most people, the basic view of pauperism in preindustrial societies was that it was abnormal and called for remedial action. The question was by whom. Intermittent general pauperization, such as that due to famines and other catastrophes, required general public measures of remedy and prevention. The traditional "policy of provision" that imposed on the public authorities the duty of ensuring regular food supplies at reasonable prices, rather than the "poor law," is the ancestor of modern welfare policies. Under normal circumstances it was assumed that the primary communities of men (in practice, determined by kin or locality) should and would be able to make adequate provision for members unable to maintain themselves. This assumption survived the emergence of recognized supralocal pauperism in the late Middle Ages and led to an almost universal tendency to make each local community formally responsible for poor relief within its boundaries. It dominated public policy until the twentieth century. Relief, except in the case of general catastrophes, was the formal and institutionalized supplementation of the voluntary aid for the helpless within primary communities, whether "natural," like the kinship group that remained the tacit model, or "artificial," like the various kinds of "brotherhoods" or corporations. These assumptions, destined to break down with economic and social evolution, were first felt to be inadequate when the pauper was frequently an able-bodied adult not belonging to the community in which he claimed relief, or to any community (as in cities with a large fringe of the socially marginal), but especially when he appeared as the migrant or vagrant "sturdy beggar." Modern European pauper policy began in the mid-fourteenth century with attempts to stem such interstitial pauperism (prohibitions of beggary). The regulation of beggars was then gradually transformed into the regulation of other kinds of paupers. From
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the sixteenth century on, central authority tended to control, supplement, or establish a basically local system of financing and administering poor relief. Central control appeared in the most elaborate form in England, although local autonomy tended to revive there subsequently. In regions that were Protestant or economically advanced or both, the direct intervention of central and local authorities tended to prevail. In Roman Catholic or less developed regions, there was a somewhat greater systematization of private organized charity. Given the circumstances of its emergence, pauper policy set out to provide not only relief but also, and perhaps chiefly, social reorganization, often conceived as the restoration of a lost norm of traditional social and economic stability. However, increasingly it might also aim at assisting the development of a capitalist economy. The two aims were incompatible, although in the short term both tended to rely partly on penal sanctions against the ablebodied unemployed and to make compulsory labor a condition of relief. Before the industrial revolution this incompatibility was more visible in the theory of moral poverty than in the practice of relief. The ideologies of preindustrial societies left a large place for poverty as an ideal, or a comfort for the poor, expressing such values in the comportment of saints, holy men, mendicant orders, etc. The value systems of societies devoted to economic development left room at best for the ideal of nonacquisitiveness (e.g., modestly recompensed public service), but not for one of poverty as such. Conversely, while traditional societies often recognized a category of culpable pauperism, they resisted the view that all poverty reflected personal inadequacy (guilt, sin), a view that became characteristic of early capitalist society, especially in its Protestant versions. Poverty in industrial society. The industrial revolution opened a new era. The social category of the poor divided into the now familiar socioeconomic classes, the urban poor tending to be assimilated conceptually into the "working class" or "proletariat," although the rural poor tended (with some exceptions) to be less readily redefined. On the other hand, with the creation of a single world economy in the nineteenth century, entire national or racial groups increasingly came to be considered, or to consider themselves, as "poor" (and also as exploited, oppressed, or underprivileged) relative to the minority of "rich" peoples. With the mass emergence of new nations from former dependence in the mid-twentieth century, these international contrasts increasingly dominated the discussion of poverty, all the more so
because they served as a measure of economic development. Moreover, the poor country was almost invariably also the one in which the proportion of the poor in the population was higher and the degree of poverty was more acute than in the rich country. The era of industrialization also saw the rise of specific forms of the supralocal social organization of the poor, for both narrow and wide purposes. Among workers employed for wages ("proletarians") the labor union established itself universally as the form of organization for the protection and advancement of the standard of life, insofar as this depended on employment. No equally well-defined or uniform type of organization developed for equivalent purposes among the nonwage-earning poor. Until the increasingly systematic provision of welfare by the state, and of goods and services by economies oriented to the mass market, formal and informal community organizations of the poor developed with a variety of functions, initially often on the basis of preindustrial institutions (kinship, religion, common geographic origin, etc.). Others were later improvised to meet new needs (mutual economic aid, education, public entertainment, and sport), sometimes under the wing of global mass movements of the poor, such as socialist parties. These (but not the labor unions) may be regarded in the main as phenomena of the transition to a fully developed industrial society. However, they contributed to the formation of that complex of attitudes and behavior ("working-class culture," "culture of the poor," and other subcultural phenomena) which reflected and still reflect the economic and social separation of the poor from the rest of society. Together with the labor union, the most characteristic new development in the era of industrialization was the emergence of political mass movements and parties committed to socialism, a theory first elaborated to fit the situation of the industrial proletariat. Socialism also acquired a wider appeal, especially in "poor" countries anxious to overcome economic backwardness. Socialist movements in the broadest sense of the word became the major global form of social organization of the poor, with the object of abolishing poverty. They were often international in scope. Although the early phases of industrialism produced an unusually large and unmanageable problem of pauperism, the actual needs of the poor played only a subordinate part in the formation of public policy until the decline of economic liberalism and the emergence of powerful organizations of the poor or those prepared to utilize the political
POVERTY power of their numbers in elections and otherwise. Before this, no criterion of poverty was usually recognized other than destitution positively asking for relief. Although quantitative inquiries into the "state of the poor" have been made in Britain since the late eighteenth century, and on a firmer statistical base in industrializing countries since the 1830s, no definition of a "poverty line" or survey of the proportion of citizens normally living below it that would be regarded as acceptable today occurred before the late nineteenth century, nor did any comprehensive public collection of unemployment statistics. Public assistance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Liberal capitalism left the solution of pauperism to the spontaneous absorption of the able-bodied into employment by economic expansion, and the rest to self-help, mutual aid, charity, and ad hoc emergency measures (preferably voluntary). It reserved public assistance for the irreducible residuum, or for catastrophic famine, increasingly rare in industrial, but not in underdeveloped, regions. The object of poor laws was primarily to assist the uninhibited working of the free economy, as by facilitating labor mobility, discouraging excessive population growth, etc., and to separate the residuum of involuntary and irremediable pauperism from the rest. The English Poor Law of 1834 was the prime example of such a policy, although mere abstention from ambitious public action was more common. In fact, and in spite of this bias toward abstention, economic conditions made it necessary even in the nineteenth century to establish or extend public systems of relief in the growing areas of relative social disorganization, such as the cities and industrial regions. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a more positive public policy developed, reflecting the abandonment of confidence in an essentially selfregulating capitalist economy, the growing political influence of the poor, and the appearance of planned socialist economies. Pauperism was reabsorbed into the wider problem of providing all citizens with a minimum standard of life at all times. Since neither traditional social organization nor economic growth as such could ensure this, it was increasingly, although sometimes reluctantly, seen as the responsibility, in the main, of national central government. Where special poor laws existed, they disappeared, as in Britain in 1929. In socialist countries, and with the great depression in advanced industrial countries, even such wider welfare policies tended to become part of still more comprehensive policies of economic management, e.g., policies of full employment. Backward regions
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entering upon development in recent decades have therefore, even when adopting the patterns of capitalist enterprise, rarely shown the nineteenth-century confidence in pure market forces. In such countries the adoption of ambitious policies of public welfare, simultaneously with economic development, has normally been a function of the political importance of the poor as voters or as revolutionaries, or of the attempt to forestall their revolutions. Paradoxically, therefore, the most socially conservative regimes have continued to show the greatest attachment to the policies toward pauperism of economic liberalism. Present attitudes toward poverty. The vast increase in wealth offered or achieved by modern technology, the growing role of social planning and management, and the political changes connected with both have led to a sharp devaluation of moral poverty. Poverty is no longer widely accepted as inevitable or desirable, and its abolition is universally advocated. This implies not only the universal elevation of the minimum standard of material life to a level for which the actual standards in richer countries or among wealthier strata provide a guide, but also the abolition of the social inequalities inseparable from the concept of poverty. Governments or bodies of opinion that do not publicly subscribe to these aims are now rare. However, the belief in the desirability of unlimited enrichment is by no means universal, although the belief in the abolition of poverty is. Those who voluntarily abstain from enrichment may continue to enjoy considerable respect, but rarely institutionalized status. Nevertheless, industrialization is marked by a fundamental alteration in the place of poverty in the value systems of societies. The measurement of poverty Increased public interest has since the late nineteenth century led to a notable improvement in the quantitative information about poverty. Various relevant data (e.g., on incomes, cost of living, unemployment, consumer expenditure, housing) are now gathered as a matter of routine by many governments and collated by international organizations, but adequate knowledge still demands periodic ad hoc surveys of the type pioneered by Booth and Rowntree before 1900 (see Booth et al. 1889-1891; see also Rowntree 1901). Measurement, moreover, poses problems both of technique and of definition. Material poverty. At the lowest level, the criterion of material poverty is an inability to achieve a minimum of physiological health and efficiency, and attempts to define a minimum nutritional standard (at present expressed mainly in calories,
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with allowances for other aspects of the diet) have been made since the mid-nineteenth century. Their object, not always achieved, is to eliminate subjective and conventional elements in the assessment of basic poverty. Where the "poverty line" separates the hungry from the properly fed, as it still d^cs in many parts of the world, such minimum standards have some value, although there is no absolute certainty as to what constitutes the physiological minimum. However, in economically developing and richer countries a conventional minimum, tending to rise with time, must and always does determine poverty. Comparisons between richer and poorer countries and between poverty in one country at different times therefore become increasingly difficult. An objective minimum or an unchanging conventional standard measures not what is socially accepted as poverty in the richer country or at the later time, but only the difference between countries or points of time. The periodic "rediscovery" of poverty in countries whose standards of living have markedly improved, as in Britain in the 1880s and in the United States and Britain in the early 1960s, is due largely to the lag in adjusting standards to changing bases of assessment. Nonmaterial poverty. More serious difficulties arise in the measurement of nonmaterial aspects of poverty, that is, of the part played in it by the inferiority of rights, opportunities, and status of the poor and their sense of such inferiorities. Certain of these aspects may be measured separately (for example, access to educational facilities and jobs), but the entire syndrome of frustration, resentment, and underprivilege has so far eluded quantification and comparison. The problem is complicated by the effects of social change or social disintegration on felt poverty. Such difficulties are illustrated by the inability of historians of British industrialization to agree on a generally acceptable weighting of material and nonmaterial factors in the poverty of the period they have studied. Measures of consumption. The most convenient measure of material poverty is through consumption, assessed directly or through income and expenditure. The latter has been found useful for comparisons, since Engel's law, first formulated in 1857, showed that—subject to reservations that are sometimes of major importance—the proportion of total expenditure on food, or more generally on basic needs, tends to vary inversely with income (Engel 1895). Thus, in about 1960 the mean percentage of family expenditure on food ranged from 25 to 30 (Canadian towns, white families in Northern Rhodesia) through 30-35 (northwest
Europe: Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Great Britain), 50-55 (in the poorer countries of eastern Europe), over 60 (urban populations in parts of north Africa, Asia, and Latin America), to 70-80 in rural and poorest urban strata in underdeveloped regions (International Labor Office 1963, tables 22 and 23). Higher percentages occur in abnormally depressed zones, as during and after food shortages; lower percentages are found among the wealthy—for example, 15 per cent among the "rich" in the United States in 1935-1936 (U.S. National Resources Committee . . . 1939). Such juxtapositions allow us to make rough initial comparisons between countries and social strata, but no more. Data on absolute per capita consumption also are often available, although without special inquiries they are commonest in the crude form of "per capita availability" of certain commodities and facilities, which neglects or underestimates qualitative differences and variations between social strata. Such data are therefore of limited value, although they are of some use in discussions of economic backwardness and growth. They show that the mean per capita food supply (in calories) in the poorest countries (south Asia, parts of the Far East and of Latin America) in the late 1950s was more than a third below that in the best-fed (North America, white Australasia, northwestern Europe, Argentina). Considerably wider disparities exist in the mean per capita availability of such elementary consumer goods as textiles. The same data can also be used to demonstrate such changes in consumption levels as the rise in mean per capita food supply in southern Europe during the 1950s (Food and Agriculture Organization . . . 1948; International Labor Office 1963). Income distribution. Data on the distribution of incomes and property provide some guidance to intranational economic inequality, but extreme caution is needed in the use of official statistics on these subjects, especially in areas where incomes remain partly nonmonetary (see Titmuss 1962). Whatever the relevance of such inquiries to the measurement of poverty, they cannot replace specific inquiries into its extent. Since the major improvement in living standards following the recovery from World War n, relatively few such investigations have been made in the industrialized countries. Estimates for the United States suggest that about 20 per cent of the population is below a "poverty line" appropriate to the current standard of living in that country, including a high proportion very much below it (Morgan et al. 1962).
POVERTY British estimates suggest a comparable figure of 8-10 per cent, most (thanks to the more comprehensive welfare provisions usual in western Europe) only a little below the appropriate minimum standard (Townsend 1962). Comparisons of absolute minimum standards are possible with earlier industrial periods but difficult with preindustrial ones, although simple inspection normally reveals considerable improvement in the minimum in the past half-century. It is extremely difficult to make comparisons with periods before the twentieth century of the per cent of the population below changing conventional minimum standards, although in industrialized countries there has probably also been improvement in this percentage. Comparisons of the effects of different types and levels of welfare provision are theoretically feasible, at least for the documented recent period, but the question has not attracted a great deal of attention. While the special problem of pauperism remains, and there is universal hostility toward poverty in most modern social value systems, the general problem of the abolition of poverty has increasingly merged with, and has often become the foundation of, the social and political policy of governments. A separate discussion of the abolition of poverty therefore goes beyond the limits of this article. Broadly speaking, in most countries of the world the solution to poverty is assumed to rest on economic development, although it is no longer generally believed that this will in itself—and without the systematic, planned, and ambitious intervention of governments—eliminate a large residue of pauperism. Nor is it believed that development can be expected automatically to abolish, or perhaps even to diminish, the range of social and economic inequalities (see Paukert 1965). How far these can in fact be reduced or eliminated remains a thorny question. On the other hand there is general agreement that any notable degree of economic development will—although not necessarily in the short run or at all times—notably raise the average standard of material consumption. There is also general agreement that material destitution, or poverty as defined in most preindustrial periods or regions, can be eliminated. E. J. HOBSBAWM [See also CONSUMERS, article on CONSUMPTION LEVELS AND STANDARDS; INCOME DISTRIBUTION, article On
SIZE. Other relevant material may be found in FAMINE; LABOR UNIONS.]
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BOOTH, CHARLES et al. (1889-1891) 1902-1903 Life and Labour of the People in London. 17 vols. London: Macmillan. EDEN, FREDERICK M. 1797 The State of the Poor: Or, an History of the Labouring Classes in England, From the Conquest to the Present Period. . . . 3 vols. London: Davis. EMMINGHAUS, ARWED (editor) 1870 Das Armenwesen und die Armengesetzgebung der europdischen Staaten. Berlin: Herbig. ENGEL, ERNST 1895 Die Lebenskosten belgischer Arbeiter-familien friiher und jetzt. International Statistical Institute, Bulletin 9, no. 1:1—vi, 1-124. ENGELS, FRIEDRICH (1845) 1958 The Condition of the Working Class in England. Oxford: Blackwell. -» First published as Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England. FERMAN, Louis A. et al. (editors) 1965 Poverty in America: A Book of Readings. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS 1948 World Fibers Review. Commodity Series, Bulletin No. 9. Washington: The Organization. FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS Production Yearbook. -> Published annually since 1958. FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS The State of Food and Agriculture. -> Published since 1947. See especially the 1957 volume. FRIEDLANDER, WALTER A. 1955 Introduction to Social Welfare. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. GERANDO, JOSEPH-MARIE DE 1839 De la bienfaisance publique. 4 vols. Paris: Renouard. GILLIN, JOHN L. (1921) 1937 Poverty and Dependency: Their Relief and Prevention. 3d ed. New York: Appleton. INTERNATIONAL LABOR OFFICE 1963 Year-book of Labour Statistics. -> Published since 1936. KOSTANECKI, ANTON VON 1909 Arbeit und Armut. Freiburg (Germany): Herder. KOTY, JOHN 1933 Die Behandlung der Alien und Kranken bei den Naturvolkern. Stuttgart (Germany) : Hirschfeld. LALLEMAND, LEON 1902-1912 L'histoire de la charite. 4 vols. Paris: Picard. LE PLAY, FREDERIC (1855) 1877-1879 Les ouvriers europeens. 2d ed. 6 vols. in 8. Tours (France): Mame et fils. LEYENDECKER, HILARY M. 1955 Problems and Policy in Public Assistance. New York: Harper. MONNIER, ALEXANDRE (1856) 1866 Histoire de Vassistance publique dans les temps anciens et modernes. 3d ed. Paris: Guillaumin. MORGAN, J. N. et al. 1962 Income and Welfare in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill. MUNSTERBERG, SMIL 1900 Bibliographie des Armenwesens; Bibliographie charitable. Berlin: Heymann. -» Supplements were published in 1902 and 1906. PAUKERT, FELIX 1965 The Distribution of Gains From Economic Development. International Labour Review 91:367-392. RATZINGER, GEORG (1868) 1884 Geschichte der kirchlichen Armenpftege. 2d ed. Freiburg (Germany): Herder.
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ROWNTREE, BENJAMIN S. (1901)1922 Poverty: A Study of Town Life. New ed. London and New York: Longmans. -» A study of the poor in York, England. ROWNTREE, BENJAMIN S. (1941) 1942 Poverty and Progress: A Second Social Survey of York. London: Longmans. SCHLESINGER, BENJAMIN 1966 Poverty in Canada and t*": United States: Overview and Annotated Bibliography. Univ. of Toronto Press. TIERNEY, B. 1959 Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and Its Application in England. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. TITMUSS, RICHARD M. 1962 Income Distribution and Social Change: A Study in Criticism. London: Allen & Ur.win. TOWNSEM), P. 1962 The Meaning of Poverty. British Journal of Sociology 13:210-227. UHLHORN, GERHARD 1882-1890 Die christliche Liebestdtigkeit. 3 vols. Stuttgart (Germany): Gundert. UNITED NATIONS 1963 Compendium of Social Statistics. New York: United Nations. UNITED NATIONS, DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL AFFAIRS 1963 Report on the World Social Situation. New York: United Nations. -> Published biennially since 1963. Supersedes an irregular publication of the same title. UNITED NATIONS, STATISTICAL OFFICE Sample Surveys of Current Interest. -+ Published irregularly since 1948. UNITED NATIONS, STATISTICAL OFFICE Statistical Yearbook. ->• Published since 1948. See especially the 1958 volume. U.S. NATIONAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE, INDUSTRIAL COMMITTEE 1939 Consumer Expenditure in the United States, Estimates for 1935-1936. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION, DIVISION OF PROGRAM RESEARCH 1961 Social Security Programs Throughout the World, 1961. Washington: Government Printing Office. WEDDERBURN, D. C. 1962 Poverty in Britain Today: The Evidence. Sociological Review 10:257-280. WILL, ROBERT E.; and VATTER, HAROLD G. (editors) 1965 Poverty in Affluence: The Social, Political and Economic Dimensions of Poverty in the United States. New York: Harcourt. ZIMMERMAN, CARLE C. 1936 Consumption and Standards of Living. New York: Van Nostrand. ZIMMERMAN, CARLE C.; and WILLIAMS, FAITH M. 1935 Studies of Family Living in the United States and Other Countries: Analysis of Material and Method. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Miscellaneous Publication No. 223. Washington: Government Printing Office.
POWELL, JOHN WESLEY John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), American geologist and anthropologist, was born in Mount Morris, New York. The son of a Methodist preacher who moved first to Ohio, then to Wisconsin, and then to Illinois, Powell received a casual education. Although he attended Oberlin and Wheaton colleges, he did not earn a degree. He taught in several common schools until the outbreak of the Civil
War. He joined the Union army, serving more than three years in the artillery, and lost his right arm in the battle of Shiloh. Although promoted to colonel, Powell resigned as major and used this title the remainder of his life. Following the war Powell taught at Illinois State Normal University, and during this period he organized student field trips to Colorado to study geology and biology. He led two expeditions, one in 1869 and one in 1871/1872, down the Colorado River. This spectacular feat of exploration was the turning point in Powell's career. In traversing the plateau country, he recognized the intimate relation between the land, the climate, and the people who occupied the land. His study of the semiarid lands and of the adjustments made by the Indians and Mormons who lived there emphasized the essential character of the region: although the land is potentially irrigable, there is an insufficient supply of water. Powell believed that the aboriginal Indians and the Mormons had developed social institutions and practices to adapt themselves to their environment. Because these lands were part of the public domain, Powell called upon the federal government to start land-utilization projects. His Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (1878) is considered one of the landmarks in conservation. From 1871 to 1879, Powell headed one of the four federal geological and geographical surveys of land in the public domain. These were replaced in 1879 by the U.S. Geological Survey. The Bureau of Ethnology was organized at the same time, and Powell became its first director, a position he held until his death. As an anthropologist, Powell is best known for An Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages (1877), in which he attempted a linguistic classification and set forth an interesting grouping of words by use, emotion, and purpose. Powell's greatest reputation as a scientist resulted from his studies of land forms and erosion. He advanced many original ideas in geology but was content to see them pursued by others. He was strongly influenced by the writings of Darwin but believed that effective evolution does not apply to man, who by his intellect is able to divert or control it. He wrote passionately about the misuse of man's capacity to control his own destiny. In 1881 Powell became director of the Geological Survey, and he remained in this position until 1892. This was an extremely influential post at a time when Congress was moving rapidly into the regulatory field. Powell was successful in establishing, under the Geological Survey, an irrigation survey which was intended to initiate the construction
POWER of extensive irrigation works. Congress curtailed the activities of the Irrigation Survey in 1885, but Powell continued with the mapping of water resources, and he trained specialists who later, in 1902, staffed the Bureau of Reclamation. Powell lobbied diligently for the creation of a federal department of science with Cabinet rank and for concepts remarkably similar to those incorporated eventually in the National Science Foundation. He believed that the federal government should be involved in the scientific and technological interests of the nation and patronize its institutions of research. He also believed in the social function of science and would not divorce it from the development of pure science. This was consistent with his belief that there is an inevitable and gradual process of concentration or centralization of authority and powers in all social institutions. He thought that in modern society there should be a continuing combination of similar institutions ("corporations"), whether they be governmental, industrial, religious, or scientific. Paradoxically, he believed in extreme individualism. Late in life Powell assembled his diversified thoughts into a trilogy, only the first volume of which, Truth and Error (1898), was published. It contained a strange mixture of material and fared badly at the hands of reviewers, although it embodied many of Powell's keen observations on man and evolution. It is difficult to assess Powell's influence. He was a man of action, a skillful organizer and administrator. Many regard him as one of the most successful of the government servants who have determined the role of government in science. His personal influence upon his associates, for example on Lester Ward and especially on those in the Geological Survey, was remarkable. Many academic and professional honors were showered upon Powell, although he cared little for them. He died at his summer home at Haven, Maine, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. WILLIAM C. DARRAH [Other relevant material may be found in CONSERVATION; INDIANS, NORTH AMERICAN; SCIENCE, article On SCIENCE-GOVERNMENT RELATIONS.] WORKS BY POWELL (1875) 1964 Canyons of the Colorado. New York: Argosy Antiquarian. ->• First published as The Exploration of the Colorado River of the West. (1877) 1880 An Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages. 2d ed. Washington: Government Printing Office.
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(1878) 1962 U.S. GEOGRAPHICAL AND GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN REGION Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, by John Wesley Powell. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. 1898 Truth and Error. La Salle, 111.: Open Court. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY DARRAH, WILLIAM C. 1951 Powell of the Colorado. Princeton Univ. Press. STEGNER, WALLACE E. 1954 Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. WARMAN, P. C. 1903 Catalogue of the Published Works of John Wesley Powell. Washington Academy of Science, Proceedings 5:131-187.
POWER In approaching the study of politics through the analysis of power, one assumes, at a minimum, that relations of power are among the significant aspects of a political system. This assumption, and therefore the analysis of power, can be applied to any kind of political system, international, national, or local, to associations and groups of various kinds, such as the family, the hospital, and the business firm, and to historical developments. At one extreme, an analysis of power may simply postulate that power relations are one feature of politics among a number of others—but nonetheless a sufficiently important feature to need emphasis and description. At the other extreme, an analyst may hold that power distinguishes "politics" from other human activity; to analysts of this view "political science, as an empirical discipline, is the study of the shaping and sharing of power" (Lasswell & Kaplan 1950, p. xiv). In either case, the analyst takes it for granted that differences between political systems, or profound changes in the same society, can often be interpreted as differences in the way power is distributed among individuals, groups, or other units. Power may be relatively concentrated or diffused; and the share of power held by different individuals, strata, classes, professional groups, ethnic, racial, or religious groups, etc., may be relatively great or small. The analysis of power is often concerned, therefore, with the identification of elites and leadership, the discovery of the ways in which power is allocated to different strata, relations among leaders and between leaders and nonleaders, and so forth. Although the approach to politics through the study of power relations is sometimes thought to postulate that everyone seeks power as the highest value, analysts of power generally reject this as-
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sumption as psychologically untenable; the analysis of power does not logically imply any particular psychological assumptions. Sometimes critics also regard the analysis of power as implying that the pursuit of power is morally good or at any rate that it should not be condemned. But an analysis of power may be neutral as to values; or the analyst may be concerned with power, not to glorify it, but in order to modify the place it holds in human relations and to increase the opportunities for dignity, respect, freedom, or other values (Jouvenel 1945; Lasswell & Kaplan 1950; Oppenheim 1961, chapters 8, &). Indeed, it would be difficult to explain the extent to which political theorists for the past 25 centuries have been concerned with relations of power and authority were it not for the moral and practical significance of power to any person interested in political life, whether as observer or activist. Some understanding of power is usually thought to be indispensable for moral or ethical appraisals of political systems. From a very early time—certainly since Socrates, and probably before—men have been inclined to judge the relative desirability of different types of political systems by, among other characteristics, the relations of power and authority in these systems. In addition, intelligent action to bring about a result of some kind in a political system, such as a change in a law or a policy, a revolution, or a settlement of an international dispute, requires knowledge of how to produce or "cause" these results. In political action, as in other spheres of life, we try to produce the results we want by acting appropriately on the relevant causes. As we shall see, power relations can be viewed as causal relations of a particular kind. It therefore seems most unlikely that the analysis of power will disappear as an approach to the study of politics. However, the fact that this approach is important and relevant does not shield it from some serious difficulties. These have become particularly manifest as the approach has been more earnestly and systematically employed. Origins The attempt to study and explain politics by analyzing relations of power is, in a loose sense, ancient. To Aristotle, differences in the location of power, authority, or rule among the citizens of a political society served as one criterion for differentiating among actual constitutions, and it entered into his distinction between good constitutions and bad ones [see ARISTOTLE]. With few exceptions (most notably Thomas Hobbes) political theorists did not press their investigations very far into cer-
tain aspects of power that have seemed important to social scientists in the twentieth century [see HOBBES]. For example, most political theorists took it for granted, as did Aristotle, that key terms like power, influence, authority, and rule (let us call them "power terms") needed no great elaboration, presumably because the meaning of these words was clear to men of common sense. Even Machiavelli, who marks a decisive turning point from classical-normative to modern-empirical theory, did not consider political terms in general as particularly technical. Moreover, he strongly preferred the concrete to the abstract. In his treatment of power relations Machiavelli frequently described a specific event as an example of a general principle; but often the general principle was only implied or barely alluded to; and he used a variety of undefined terms such as imperio, forza, potente, and autorita [see MACHIAVELLI]. From Aristotle to Hobbes political theorists were mainly concerned with power relations within a given community. But external relations even more than internal ones force attention to questions of relative power. The rise of the modern nation-state therefore compelled political theorists to recognize the saliency of power in politics, and particularly, of course, in international politics (Meinecke 1924). Thus political "realists" found it useful to define, distinguish, and interpret the state in terms of its power. Max Weber both reflected this tradition of "realism" and opened the way for new developments in the analysis of power [see WEBER, MAX]. " Tower' (Macht) is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests" (Weber [1922] 1957, p. 152). This definition permitted Weber to conclude that "the concept of power is highly comprehensive from the point of view of sociology. All conceivable . . . combinations of circumstances may put him [the actor] in a position to impose his will in a given situation" (p. 153). It follows that the state is not distinguishable from other associations merely because it employs a special and peculiarly important kind of power— force. In a famous and highly influential definition, Weber characterized the state as follows: "A compulsory political association with continuous organization (politischer Anstaltsbetneb~) will be called a 'state' if and in so far as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order" (p. 154). In his well-known typologies and his analyses of political systems, however, Weber was less con-
POWER cerned with power in general than with a special kind that he held to be unusually important— legitimate power, or authority. Later theorists, practically all of whom were directly or indirectly influenced by Weber, expanded their objectives to include a fuller range of power relations. In the United States attempts to suggest or develop systematic and comprehensive theories of politics centering about power relations appeared in books by Catlin (1927; 1930), an important essay by Goldhamer and Shils (1939), and numerous works of the Chicago school—principally Merriam (1934), Lasswell (1936), and, in international politics, Morgenthau (1948). In the decade after World War n the ideas of the Chicago school were rapidly diffused throughout American political science. [See MERRIAM.] Elements in the analysis of power Power terms evidently cover a very broad category of human relations. Considerable effort and ingenuity have gone into schemes for classifying these relations into various types, labeled power, influence, authority, persuasion, dissuasion, inducement, coercion, compulsion, force, and so on, all of which we shall subsume under the collective label power terms. The great variety and heterogeneity of these relations may, in fact, make it impossible—or at any rate not very fruitful—to develop general theories of power intended to cover them all. At the most general level, power terms in modern social science refer to subsets of relations among social units such that the behaviors of one or more units (the responsive units, K) depend in some circumstances on the behavior of other units (the controlling units, C). (In the following discussion, R will always symbolize the responsive or dependent unit, C the controlling unit. These symbols will be used throughout and will be substituted even in direct quotations where the authors themselves have used different letters.) By this broad definition, then, power terms in the social sciences exclude relations with inanimate or even nonhuman objects; the control of a dog by his master or the power of a scientist over "nature" provided by a nuclear reactor would fall, by definition, in a different realm of discourse. On the other hand, the definition could include the power of one nation to affect the actions of another by threatening to use a nuclear reactor as a bomb or by offering to transfer it by gift or sale. If power-terms include all relations of the kind just defined, then they spread very widely over the whole domain of human relations. In practice,
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analysts of power usually confine their attention to smaller subsets. One such subset consists, for example, of relations in which "severe sanctions . . . are expected to be used or are in fact applied to sustain a policy against opposition"—a subset that Lasswell and Kaplan call power (1950, pp. 7475). However, there is no agreement on the common characteristics of the various subsets covered by power terms, nor are different labels applied with the same meaning by different analysts. Despite disagreement on how the general concept is to be defined and limited, the variety of smaller subsets that different writers find interesting or important, and the total lack of a standardized classification scheme and nomenclature, there is nonetheless some underlying unity in the various approaches to the analysis of power. In describing and explaining patterns of power, different writers employ rather similar elements (compare Cartwright 1965). What follows is an attempt to clarify these common elements by ignoring many differences in terminology, treatment, and emphasis. Some descriptive characteristics. For purposes of exposition it is convenient to think of the analysis of power in terms of the familiar distinction between dependent and independent variables. The attempt to understand a political system may then be conceived of as an effort to describe certain characteristics of the system: the dependent variables; and to explain why the system takes on these particular characteristics, by showing the effects on these characteristics of certain other factors: the independent variables. Some of the characteristics of a political system that analysts seek to explain are the magnitude of the power of the C's with respect to the R's, how this power is distributed in the system, and the scope, and domain, of control that different individuals or actors have, exercise, or are subject to. Magnitude. Political systems are often characterized explicitly or implicitly by the differences in the "amounts" of power (over the actions of the government or state) exercised by different individuals, groups, or strata. The magnitude of C's power with respect to R is thought of as measurable, in some sense, by at least an ordinal scale; frequently, indeed, a literal reading would imply that power is subject to measurement by an interval scale. How to compare and measure different magnitudes of power poses a major unsolved problem; we shall return to it briefly later on. Meanwhile, we shall accept the assumption of practically every political theorist for several thousand years, that it is possible to speak meaningfully of differ-
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ent amounts of power. Thus a typical question in the analysis of a political system would be: Is control over government highly concentrated or relatively diffused? Distribution. An ancient and conventional way of distinguishing among political systems is according to the way control over the government or the state is distributed to individuals or groups in the systems. Aristotle, for example, stated: "The proper application of the term 'democracy' is to a constitution in which the free-born and poor control the government—being at the same time a majority; and sirrilarly the term 'oligarchy' is properly applied to a constitution in which the rich and betterborn control the government—being at the same time a minority" (Politics, Barker ed., p. 164). Control over government may be conceived as analogous to income, wealth, or property; and in the same way that income or wealth may be distributed in different patterns, so too the distribution of power over government may vary from one society or historical period to another. One task of analysis, then, is to classify and describe the most common distributions and to account for the different patterns. Typical questions would be: What are the characteristics of the C's and of the R's? How do the C's and R's compare in numbers? Do C's and R's typically come from different classes, strata, regions, or other groups? What historical changes have occurred in the characteristics of C and R? Scope. What if C's are sometimes not C's, or C's sometimes R's, or R's sometimes C's? The possibility cannot be ruled out that individuals or groups who are relatively powerful with respect to one kind of activity may be relatively weak with respect to other activities. Power need not be general; it may be specialized. In fact, in the absence of a. single world ruler, some specialization is inevitable; in any case, it is so commonplace that analysts of power have frequently insisted that a statement about the power of an individual, group, state, or other actor is practically meaningless unless it specifies the power of actor C with respect to some class of R's activities. Such a class of activities is sometimes called the range (Cartwright 1965) or the scope of C's power (Lasswell & Kaplan 1950, p. 73). There is no generally accepted way of defining and classifying different scopes. However, a typical question about a political system would be: Is power generalized over many scopes, or is it specialized? If it is specialized, what are the characteristics of the C's, the elites, in the different scopes? Is power specialized by individuals in the sense that Crt and C,, exercise power over different
scopes, or is it also specialized by classes, social strata, skills, professions, or other categories? Domain. C's power will be limited to certain individuals; the R's over whom C has or exercises control constitute what is sometimes called the "domain," or "extension," of C's power (Lasswell & Kaplan 1950, p. 73; Harsanyi 1962a, p. 67). Typical questions thus might be: Who are the R's over whom C has control? What are their characteristics? How numerous are they? How do they differ in numbers or characteristics from the R's not under C's control? Given the absence of any standard unit of measure for amounts, distributions, scopes, domains, and other aspects of power, and the variety of ways of describing these characteristics, it is not at all surprising that there is an abundance of schemes for classifying political systems according to some characteristic of power. Most such schemes use, implicitly or explicitly, the idea of a distribution of power over the behavior of government. The oldest, most famous, and most enduring of these is the distinction made by the Greeks between rule by one, the few, and the many (see Aristotle, Politics, Barker ed., pp. 110 ff.). Some variant of this scheme frequently reappears in modern analyses of power (e.g., Lasswell & Kaplan 1950, p. 218). Often, as with Aristotle himself, the distribution of power is combined with one or more other dimensions (e.g., Dahl 1963, p. 38). Rough dichotomous schemes are common. One based on "the degree of autonomy and interdependence of the several power holders" distinguishes two polar types, called autocracy and constitutionalism (Loewenstein 1957, p. 29). American community studies have in recent years called attention to differences between "pluralistic" systems and unified or highly stratified "power structures" [see COMMUNITY, article On THE STUDY OF COMMUNITY POWER]. In One study that compares four communities the authors developed a more complex typology of power structures by combining a dimension of "distribution of political power among citizens" with the degree of convergence or divergence in the ideology of leaders; the four types of power structures produced by dichotomizing these two dimensions are in turn distinguished from regimes (Agger et al. 1964, pp. 73 if.)Some explanatory characteristics. Given the different types of political systems, how are the differences among them to be explained? If, for example, control over government is sometimes distributed to the many, often to the few, and occasionally to one dominant leader, how can we account for the differences? Obviously these are
POWER ancient, enduring, and highly complex problems; and there is slight agreement on the answers. However, some factors that are often emphasized in modern analysis can be distinguished. Resources. Differences in patterns or structures of power may be attributed primarily, mainly, or partly to the way in which "resources," or "base values," are distributed among the individuals, strata, classes, and groups in different communities, countries, societies, and historical periods. This is an ancient, distinguished, widespread, and persuasive mode of explanation, used by Aristotle in Greece in the fourth century B.C., by James Harrington in seventeenth-century England, by the fathers of the American constitution in the late eighteenth century, by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century, and by a great many social scientists in the twentieth century. A central hypothesis in most of these theories is that the greater one's resources, the greater one's power. Although explanations of this kind do not always go beyond tautology (by defining power in terms of resources), logical circularity is certainly not inherent in this mode of explanation. However, there is no accepted way of classifying resources or bases. Harold Lasswell has constructed a comprehensive scheme of eight base values which, although not necessarily exhaustive, are certainly inclusive; these are power (which can serve as a base for more power), respect, rectitude or moral standing, affection, well-being, wealth, skill, and enlightenment (Lasswell & Kaplan 1950, p. 87). Other writers choose more familiar categories to classify resources: for example, in trying to account for the patterns of influence in one community, the author described the patterns of social standing; the distribution of cash, credit, and wealth; access to legality, popularity, and control over jobs; and control over sources of information (Dahl 1961, pp. 229 ff.). Skill. Two individuals with access to approximately the same resources may not exercise the same degree of power (over, let us say, government decisions). Indeed, it is a common observation that individuals of approximately equal wealth or social status may differ greatly in power. To be sure, this might be accounted for by differences in access to other resources, such as the greater legality, bureaucratic knowledge, and public affection that fall to any individual who is chosen, say, to be prime minister of Britain or president of the United States. Another factor, however, one given particular prominence by Machiavelli, is political skill. Formally, skill could be treated as another resource. Nonetheless, it is generally thought to be
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of critical importance in explaining differences in the power of different leaders—different presidents, for example, as in Neustadt's comparison of presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower (1960, pp. 152 ff.). However, despite many attempts at analysis, from Machiavelli to the present day, political skill has remained among the more elusive aspects in the analysis of power. Motivations. Two individuals with access to the same resources may exercise different degrees of power (with respect to some scope) because of different motivations: the one may use his resources to increase his power; the other may not. Moreover, since power is a relationship between C's and R's, the motivations not only of the C's but also of the R's are important. One person may worship authority, while another may defy it. A number of writers have explored various aspects of motivations involved in power relations (e.g., Lasswell 1930; Rogow & Lasswell 1963; Cartwright 1959). Costs. Motivations can be related to resources by way of the economists' language of cost—a factor introduced into the analysis of power by a mathematical economist (Harsanyi 1962a; 1962&). In order to control R, C may have to use some of his resources. Thus C's supply of resources is likely to have a bearing on how far he is willing to go in trying to control R. And variations in C's resources are likely to produce variations in C's power. C's opportunity costs in controlling R—that is, what C must forgo or give up in other opportunities as a result of using some of his resources to control R—are less (other things being equal) if he is rich in resources than if he is poor in resources. In concrete terms, to a rich man the sacrifice involved in a campaign contribution of $100 is negligible; to a poor man the sacrifice entailed in a contribution of $100 is heavy. C's willingness to use his resources to control R will also depend on the value to C of R's response; the value of R's response is, in turn, dependent in part on C's motivations. The relationship may also be examined from R's point of view. R's opportunity costs consist of what he is then unable to do if he complies with C. In R's case, as in C's, his supply of resources and his motivations help determine his opportunity costs. Thus a power relation can be interpreted as a sort of transaction between C andR. Problems of research Like all other approaches to an understanding of complex social phenomena, the analysis of power is beset with problems. At a very general
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level, attempts to analyze power share with many —perhaps most—other strategies of inquiry in the social sciences the familiar dilemma of rigor versus relevance, and the dilemma has led to familiar results. Attempts to meet high standards of logical rigor or empirical verification have produced some intriguing experiments and a good deal of effort to clarify concepts and logical relationships but not rounded and well-verified explanations of complex political systems in the real world. Conversely, attempts to arrive at a better understanding of the more concrete phenomena of political life and institutiors often sacrifice a good deal in rigor of logic and verification in order to provide more useful and reliable guides to the real world. There are, however, a number of more specific problems in the analysis of power, many of which have only been identified in the last few decades. Relevant work is quite recent and seeks (1) to clarify the central concepts, partly by expanding on the analogy between power relations and causal relations, (2) to specify particular subsets that are most interesting for social analysis, (3) to develop methods of measurement, and (4) to undertake empirical investigations of concrete political phenomena. Power and cause. The closest equivalent to the power relation is the causal relation. For the assertion "C has power over R," one can substitute the assertion, "C's behavior causes R's behavior." If one can define the causal relation, one can define influence, power, or authority, and vice versa (Simon [1947-1956] 1957, p. 5). Since the language of cause is no longer common in the formal theoretical language of the natural sciences, it might be argued that social scientists should also dispense with that language and that insofar as power is merely a term for a causal relation involving human beings, power-terms should simultaneously be dispensed with. But it seems rather unlikely that social scientists will, in fact, reject causal language. For the language of cause, like the language of power, is used to interpret situations in which there is the possibility that some event will intervene to change the order of other events. In medical research it is natural and meaningful to ask, Does cigarette smoking cause lung cancer and heart disease? In social situations the notion of cause is equally or even more appropriate. What makes causal analysis important to us is our desire to act on causes in the real world in order to bring about effects—reducing death rates from lung cancer, passing a civil-rights bill through Congress, or preventing the outbreak of war. To interpret the terms power, influence, authority,
etc., as instances of causal relations means, however, that the attempt to detect true rather than spurious power relations must run into the same difficulties that have beset efforts to distinguish true from spurious causal relations. Some analysts have confronted the problem; others have noted it only to put it aside; most have ignored it entirely, perhaps on the assumption that if social scientists tried to solve the unsolved problems of philosophy they would never get around to the problems of the social sciences. Yet if power is analogous to cause —or if power relations are logically a subset of causal relations—then recent analyses of causality must have relevance to the analysis of power. In the first place, properties used to distinguish causation also serve to define power relations: covariation, temporal sequence, and asymmetry, for example. The appropriateness of these criteria has in fact been debated, not always conclusively, by various students of power (e.g., Simon [19471956] 1957, pp. 5, 11, 12, 66; Dahl 1957, p. 204; Cartwright 1959, p. 197; Oppenheim 1961, p. 104). Thus, the problem whether A can be said to cause B if A is a necessary condition for B, or a sufficient condition, or both necessary and sufficient, has also plagued the definition of powerterms. Some writers have explicitly stated or at least implied that relations of power mean that some action by C is a necessary condition for R's response (Simon 1953, p. 504; March 1955, p. 435; Dahl 1957, p. 203). Oppenheim has argued, however, that such definitions permit statements that run flatly counter to common sense; he holds that it would be more appropriate to require only that C's action be sufficient to produce R's response (1961, p. 41). Riker has suggested in turn that "the customary definition of power be revised . . . to reflect the necessary-and-sufficient condition theory of causality" (1964, p. 348). However, Blalock in his Causal Inferences in Non-experimental Research has shown that defining cause in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions leads to great practical difficulties in research. "In real-life situations we seldom encounter instances where B is present if and only if A is also present" (1964, p. 30); moreover, specifying necessary and sufficient conditions requires the researcher "to think always in terms of attributes and dichotomies," whereas "there are most certainly a number of variables which are best conceived as continuously distributed, even though we may find it difficult to measure them operationally in terms of a specified unit of some kind" (p. 32). "The use of 'necessary and sufficient' terminology . . . may work well for the logician but not [for] the social scientist" (p. 34). Blalock's criticism, and indeed his whole effort to
POWER explore problems of causal inference in nonexperimental research, are highly relevant to the analysis of power. Aside from these somewhat rarefied philosophical and definitional questions, which many social scientists are prepared to abandon to metaphysicians or philosophers of science, the analogy between power and cause argues that the problem of distinguishing cause from correlation, or true from spurious causation, is bound to carry over into the analysis of power. And indeed it does. The difficulty of distinguishing true from spurious power relations has proved to be quite formidable. The most rigorous method of distinguishing true from spurious causation is, of course, experimentation, and this would be the most rigorous method for distinguishing true from spurious power relations, provided the proper experimental conditions were present. Unfortunately, however, as in many areas of the social sciences, so too in the analysis of power, experimental methods have so far been of limited value, and for similar reasons. In nonexperimental situations the optimal requirements for identifying causal relations seem to be the existence of satisfactory interval measures, a large supply of good data employing these measures, and an exhaustive analysis of alternative ways of accounting for the observations (Blalock 1964). Unfortunately, in the analysis of power, existing methods of measurement are rather inadequate, the data are often inescapably crude and limited, a variety of simple alternative explanations seem to fit the data about equally well, and in any case the complexity of the relations requires extraordinarily complex models. The shortage of relevant models of power may disappear in time. In fact, the causal analogue suggests that the development of a great array of carefully described alternative models to compare with observations is probably a prerequisite for further development in the analysis of power. Again, the analogy between power and cause readily reveals why this would seem to be the case. In trying to determine the cause of a phenomenon it is of course impossible to know whether all the relevant factors in the real world are actually controlled during an investigation. Consequently, it is never possible to demonstrate causality. It is possible to make causal inferences concerning the adequacy of causal models, at least in the sense that we can proceed by eliminating inadequate models that make predictions that are not consistent with the data. • - . [Such] causal models involve (1) a finite set of explicitly defined variables, (2) certain assumptions about how these variables are interrelated causally, and (3) assumptions to the effect that outside varia-
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bles, while operating, do not have confounding influences that disturb the causal patterning among the variables explicitly being considered, (ibid., p. 62) If power relations are a subset of causal relations, these requirements would also be applicable in the analysis of power. In analyzing power, why have analysts so rarely attempted to describe, in rigorous language at any rate, the alternative causal models relevant to their inquiry? There seem to be several reasons. First, students of power have not always been wholly aware that distinguishing true from spurious power relations requires intellectual strategies at a rather high level of sophistication. Second, the crude quality of the observations usually available in studying power may discourage efforts to construct elegant theoretical models. Third, until recent times the whole approach to power analysis was somewhat speculative: there were a good many impressionistic works but few systematic empirical studies of power relations. Of the empirical studies now available most are investigations of power relations in American communities undertaken since 1950. These community studies have provoked a good deal of dispute over what are, in effect, alternative models of causation. So far, however, investigators have usually not described clearly the array of alternative models that might be proposed to explain their data, nor have they clearly specified the criteria they use for rejecting all the alternatives except the one they accept as their preferred explanation. Theories about power relations in various political systems are of course scattered through the writings of a number of analysts (e.g., Pareto 1916, volume 4; Mosca 1896, passim; Lasswell & Kaplan 1950, chapters 9, 10; Mills 1956; Dahl 1961; Rossi I960; Polsby 1963; Parsons 1963a; 1963b). But a straightforward presentation of an empirical theory of power relations in political systems is a rarity. A notable exception is offered by March's formulation of six models of social choice that involve, in some sense, relationships of power. The analogy between cause and power calls attention to one further point: any attempt to develop an empirical theory of power will run headlong into the fact that a causal chain has many links; that the links one specifies depend on what one wishes to explain; and that what one wishes to explain depends, in part, on the theory with which one begins. In causal analysis, it is usually . . . possible to insert a very large number of additional variables between any two supposedly directly related factors. We must stop somewhere and consider the theoretical system closed. Practically, we may choose to stop at the point where the additional variables are
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either difficult or expensive to measure, or where they have not been associated with any operations at all. . . . A relationship that is direct in one theoretical system may he indirect in another, or it may even be taken as spurious. (Blalock 1964, p. 18) Some of the links that a power analyst may take as "ilfects" to be explained by searching for causes are the outcomes of specific decisions; the current values, attitudes, and expectations of decision makers; their earlier or more fundamental attitudes and values; the attitudes and values of other participants—or nonparticipants—whose participation is in SDme way significant; the processes of selection, self-selection, recruitment, or entry by which decision makers arrive at their locations in the political system; the rules of decision making, the structures, the constitutions. No doubt a "complete" explanation of power relations in a political system would try to account for all of these effects, and others. Yet this is an enormously ambitious task. Meanwhile, it is important to specify which effects are at the focus of an explanatory theory and which are not. A good deal of confusion, and no little controversy, are produced when different analysts focus on different links in the chain of power and causation without specifying clearly what effects they wish to explain; and a good deal of criticism of dubious relevance is produced by critics who hold that an investigator has focused on the "wrong" links or did not provide a "complete" explanation. Classifying types of power. Even though the analysis of power has not produced many rigorous causal models, it has spawned a profusion of schemes for classifying types of power relations (e.g., Parsons 1963a; 1963Z?; Oppenheim 1961; French & Raven 1959; Cartwright 1965). Among the characteristics most often singled out for attention are (1) legitimacy: the extent to which R feels normatively obliged to comply with C; (2) the nature of the sanctions: whether C uses rewards or deprivations, positive or negative sanctions; (3) the magnitude of the sanctions: extending from severe coercion to no sanctions at all; (4) the means or channels employed: whether C controls R only by means of information that changes R's intentions or by actually changing R's situation or his environment of rewards and deprivations. These and other characteristics can be combined to yield many different types of power relations. As we have already indicated, no single classification system prevails, and the names for the various categories are so completely unstandardized that what is labeled power in one scheme may
be called coercion or influence in another. Detached from empirical theories, these schemes are of doubtful value. In the abstract it is impossible to say why one classification system should be preferred over another. Nonetheless, there are some subsets of power relations—types of power, as they are often called —that call attention to interesting problems of analysis and research. One of these is the distinction between having and exercising power or influence (Lasswell & Kaplan 1950, p. 71; Oppenheim 1961, chapters 2, 3). This distinction is also involved in the way anticipated reactions function as a basis for influence and power (Friedrich 1963, chapter 11). To illustrate the problem by example, let us suppose that even in the absence of any previous communication from the president to Senator jR, or indeed any previous action of any kind by the president, Senator R regularly votes now in a way he thinks will insure the president's favor later. The senator calculates that if he loses the next election, he may, as a result of the president's favorable attitude, be in line to receive a presidential appointment to a federal court. Thus, while Senator R's voting behavior is oriented toward future rewards, expected or hoped for, his votes are not the result of any specific action by the president. If one holds that C cannot be a cause of R if C follows R in time, then no act of the incumbent president need be a cause of Senator R's favorable vote. Obviously this does not mean that Senator R's actions are "uncaused." The immediate determinant of his vote is his expectations. If we ask what "caused" his expectations, there are many possible answers. For example, he might have concluded that in American society if favors are extended to C, this makes it more likely that C will be indulgent later on. Or he may have acquired from political lore the understanding that the general rule applies specifically to relations of senators and presidents. Thus, the causal chain recedes into the senator's previous learning—but not necessarily to any specific past act of the incumbent president or any other president. This kind of phenomenon is commonplace, important, and obviously relevant to the analysis of power. Yet some studies, critics have said, concentrate on the exercise of power and fail to account for individuals or groups in the community who, though they do not exercise power, nonetheless have power, in the sense that many people try assiduously to anticipate their reactions (Bachrach & Baratz 1962). This failure may be a result of
POWER certain paradoxical aspects of having power that can make it an exceedingly difficult phenomenon to study. For in the limiting case of anticipated reactions, it appears, paradoxically, that it is not the president who controls the senator, but the senator who controls the president—i.e., it is the senator who, by his loyal behavior, induces the president to appoint him to a federal court. Thus, it is not C who controls or even attempts to control R, but R who attempts to control C—and to the extent that R anticipates C's reactions correctly, R does in fact control C. It is, then, not the king who controls the courtier but the courtier who controls the king. Now if we examine this paradox closely we quickly discover that it arises simply because we have tried to describe the relationship between king and courtier, president and senator, C and R by distinguishing only one aspect, namely, the exercise of power. The courtier does indeed exercise power over the king by successfully anticipating the reactions of the monarch and thereby gaining a duchy. But it was not this that we set out to explain. For it is the king who has, holds, or possesses the capacity to confer that dukedom, and even though he does not exercise his power, he gains the willing compliance of the courtier. What is it, then, that distinguishes having power from exercising power? The distinction could hinge upon the presence or absence of a manifest intention. We could define the exercise of power in such a way as to require C to manifest an intention to act in some way in the future, his action to be contingent on R's behavior. By contrast, C might be said to have power when, though he does not manifest an intention, R imputes an intention to him and shapes his behavior to meet the imputed intention. If one were to accept this distinction, then in studying the exercise of power, one would have to examine not only R's perceptions and responses but also C's intentions and actions. In studying relationships in which C is thought to have power, even though he does not exercise it, one would in principle need only to study JR's perceptions, the intentions R imputes to C, and the bearing of these on R's behavior. Carried to the extreme, then, this kind of analysis could lead to the discovery of as many different power structures in a political system as there are individuals who impute different intentions to other individuals, groups, or strata in the system. The distinction between having and exercising power could also turn on the directness involved in the relation between C and R and on the spe-
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cificity of the actions. In the most direct relationship R's response would be tripped off by a signal directly from C. In this case, C is exercising power. But some relationships are highly indirect; for example, C may modify R's environment in a more or less lasting way, so that R continues to respond as C had intended, even though C makes no effort to control R. In these cases, one might say that although C does not exercise control over R, he does have control over R. There are a variety of these indirect, or "roundabout," controls (Dahl & Lindblom 1953, pp. 110 ff.). Measuring power. Even more than with power terms themselves, notions of "more" or "less" power were in classical theory left to the realm of common sense and intuition. Efforts to develop systematic measures of power date almost wholly from the 1950s. Of those, some are stated partly in mathematical formulas, some entirely in nonmathematical language. Since the essential features can be suggested without mathematics, we shall describe these measures in ordinary language. (The reader should consult the sources cited for the precise formulations. Most of the best-known measures are presented and discussed in Riker 1964.) In a rough way, the various criteria for measuring power can be classified into three types: gametheoretical, Newtonian, and economic. Game-theoretical criteria. Shapley, a mathematician, and Shubik, an econometrician, have jointly formulated a "method for evaluating the distribution of power in a committee system" (1954). This is intended to measure the power accruing to a voter where the outcome or decision is determined exclusively by voting. In these cases the rules prescribe what proportion of votes constitutes a winning proportion (e.g., a simple majority of all committee members). Thus each member has a certain abstract probability of casting the last vote that would be needed to complete a winning coalition, in other words to occupy a pivotal position with respect to the outcome. By adding his vote at this crucial juncture, a voter may be conceived of as having made a particularly decisive contribution to the outcome; thus, gaining his vote might have considerable value to the other members of a coalition that would lose without his vote. Shapley and Shubik proposed measuring the power of a voter by the probability that he would be the pivotal voter in a winning coalition. Because their measure is entirely limited to voting situations and excludes all outcomes other than the act of voting itself, the utility of the measure is limited to cases where most of the other familiar elements of political
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life—various forms of persuasion, inducement, and coercion—are lacking. [See COALITIONS.] Newtonian criteria. On the analogy of the measurement of force in classical mechanics, a number of analysts propose to measure power by the amount of change in R attributable to C. The greater the change in R, the greater the power of C; thus Ca is said to exert more power than C6 if Ca induces more change in Ra than Cb induces in Ra (or in some other R). Measures of this kind have been more frequently proposed than any other (Simon 1947-1956; March 1957; Dahl 1957; 1963, chapter 5; Cartwright 1959; Oppenheim 1961, chapter 8 ). "Change in R" is not, however, a single dimension, since many different changes in R may be relevant. Some of the important dimensions of the "change in R" brought about by C that have been suggested for measuring the amount of C's power are (1) the probability that R will comply; (2) the number of persons in R; (3) the number of distinct items, subjects, or values in R; (4) the amount of change in R's position, attitudes, or psychological state; (5) the speed with which R changes; (6) the reduction in the size of the set of outcomes or behaviors available to R; and (7) the degree of R's threatened or expected deprivation. Economic criteria. Where the game-theoretical measure focuses on the pivotal position of C, and Newtonian measures on changes in R, a third proposal would include "costs" to both C and R in measuring C's power. Harsanyi has argued that a complete measure of power should include (1) the opportunity costs to C of attempting to influence R, which Harsanyi calls the costs of C's power, and (2) the opportunity costs to R of refusing to comply with C, which Harsanyi calls the strength of C's power over R (1962a, pp. 68 ff.). The measure Harsanyi proposes is not inherently limited to the kinds of cost most familiar to economists but could be extended—at least in principle—to include psychological costs of all kinds. Designing operational definitions. Empirical studies discussed by Cartwright (1965), March (1965), and others, and particularly community studies, have called attention to the neglected problem of designing acceptable operational definitions. The concepts and measures discussed in this article have not been clothed in operational language. It is not yet clear how many of them can be. Yet the researcher who seeks to observe, report, compare, and analyze power in the real world, in order to test a particular hypothesis or a broader theory, quickly discovers urgent need for opera-
tionally denned terms. Research so far has called attention to three kinds of problems. First, the gap between concept and operational definition is generally very great, so great, indeed, that it is not always possible to see what relation there is between the operations and the abstract definition. Thus a critic is likely to conclude that the studies are, no doubt, reporting something in the real world, but he might question whether they are reporting the phenomena we mean when we speak of power. Second, different operational measures do not seem to correlate with one another (March 1956), which suggests that they may tap different aspects of power relations. Third, almost every measure proposed has engendered controversy over its validity. None of these results should be altogether surprising or even discouraging. For despite the fact that the attempt to understand political systems by analyzing power relations is ancient, the systematic empirical study of power relations is remarkably new. ROBERT A. DAHL [See also COMMUNITY, article on THE STUDY OF COMMUNITY POWER; POLITICAL SCIENCE; POLITICAL THEORY. Directly related are the entries AUTHORITY; BALANCE OF POWER; GOVERNMENT; MILITARY POWER POTENTIAL; POWER TRANSITION. Other relevant material may be found in CAUSATION; COERCION; DECISION MAKING; INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS; MONOPOLY; OLIGOPOLY; POLITICAL PROCESS; SOCIAL CONTROL.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
AGGER, ROBERT E.; GOLDRICH, DANIEL; and SWANSON, BERT 1964 The Rulers and the Ruled: Political Power and Impotence in American Communities. New York: Wiley. ARISTOTLE The Politics of Aristotle. Translated and edited by Ernest Barker. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962. BACHRACH, PETER; and BARATZ, MORTON 1962 Two Faces of Power. American Political Science Review 56:947-952. BLALOCK, HUBERT M. JR. 1964 Causal Inferences in Nonexperimental Research. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. CARTWRIGHT, DORWIN (editor) 1959 Studies in Social Power. Research Center for Group Dynamics, Publication No. 6. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, Institute for Social Research. CARTWRIGHT, DORWIN 1965 Influence, Leadership, Control. Pages 1-47 in James G. March (editor), Handbook of Organizations. Chicago: Rand McNally. CATLIN, GEORGE E. G. 1927 The Science and Method of Politics. New York: Knopf; London: Routledge. CATLIN, GEORGE E. G. 1930 A Study of the Principles of Politics, Being an Essay Towards Political Rationalization. New York: Macmillan. DAHL, ROBERT A. 1957 The Concept of Power. Behavioral Science 2:201-215.
POWER TRANSITION DAHL, ROBERT A. (1961) 1963 Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. DAHL, ROBERT A. 1963 Modern Political Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. DAHL, ROBERT A.; and LINDBLOM, CHARLES E. 1953 Politics, Economics, and Welfare: Planning and Politico-economic Systems Resolved Into Basic Social Processes. New York: Harper. -> A paperback edition was published in 1963. FRENCH, JOHN R. P.; and RAVEN, BERTRAM 1959 The Bases of Social Power. Pages 150-167 in Dorwin Cartwright (editor), Studies in Social Power. Research Center for Group Dynamics, Publication No. 6. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, Institute for Social Research. FRIEDRICH, CARL J. 1963 Man and His Government: An Empirical Theory of Politics. New York: McGraw-Hill. GOLDHAMER, HERBERT; and SniLS, EDWARD 1939 Types of Power and Status. American Journal of Sociology 45:171-182. HARSANYI, JOHN C. 1962a Measurement of Social Power, Opportunity Costs, and the Theory of Two-person Bargaining Games. Behavioral Science 7:67-80. HARSANYI, JOHN C. 1962& Measurement of Social Power in n-Person Reciprocal Power Situations. Behavioral Science 7:81-91. JOUVENEL, BERTRAND DE (1945) 1952 Power: The Natural History of Its Growth. Rev. ed. London: Batchworth. -» First published in French. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. (1930) 1960 Psychopathology and Politics. New ed., with afterthoughts by the author. New York: Viking. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. 1936 Politics: Who Gets What, When, How? New York: McGraw-Hill. LASSWELL, HAROLD D.; and KAPLAN, ABRAHAM 1950 Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry. Yale Law School Studies, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1963. LOEWENSTEIN, KARL 1957 Political Power and the Governmental Process. Univ. of Chicago Press. MARCH, JAMES G. 1955 An Introduction to the Theory and Measurement of Influence. American Political Science Review 49:431-451. MARCH, JAMES G. 1956 Influence Measurement in Experimental and Semiexperimental Groups. Sociometry 19:260-271. MARCH, JAMES G. 1957 Measurement Concepts in the Theory of Influence. Journal of Politics 19:202-226. MARCH, JAMES G. (editor) 1965 Handbook of Organizations. Chicago: Rand McNally. MEINECKE, FRIEDRICH (1924) 1957 Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d'Etat and Its Place in Modern History. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -> First published as Die Idee der Staatsrdson in der neueren Geschichte. MERRIAM, CHARLES E. 1934 Political Power: Its Composition and Incidence. New York: McGraw-Hill. -> A paperback edition was published in 1964 by Collier. MILLS, C. WRIGHT 1956 The Power Elite. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. MORGENTHAU, HANS J. (1948) 1967 Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. 4th ed. New York: Knopf. MOSCA, GAETANO (1896) 1939 The Ruling Class (Elementi di scienza politica). New York: McGraw-Hill.
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NEUSTADT, RICHARD E. 1960 Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership. New York: Wiley. -» A paperback edition was published in 1962. OPPENHEIM, FELIX E. 1961 Dimensions of Freedom: An Analysis. New York: St. Martins; London: Macmillan. PARETO, VILFREDO (1916) 1963 The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology. 4 vols. New York: Dover. H» First published as Trattato di sociologia generale. Volume 1: Non-logical Conduct. Volume 2: Theory of Residues. Volume 3: Theory of Derivations. Volume 4: The General Form of Society. PARSONS, TALCOTT 1963a On the Concept of Influence. Public Opinion Quarterly 27:37-62. -> A comment by J. S. Coleman appears on pages 63-82; a communication by R. A. Bauer, on pages 83-86; and a rejoinder by Talcott Parsons, on pages 87-92. PARSONS, TALCOTT 1963b On the Concept of Political Power. American Philosophical Society, Proceedings 107:232-262. POLSBY, NELSON W. 1963 Community Power and Political Theory. Yale Studies in Political Science, Vol. 7. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. RIKER, WILLIAM H. 1959 A Test of the Adequacy of the Power Index. Behavioral Science 4:120-131. RIKER, WILLIAM H. 1964 Some Ambiguities in the Notion of Power. American Political Science Review 58:341-349. ROGOW, ARNOLD A.; and LASSWELL, HAROLD D. 1963 Power, Corruption and Rectitude. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Rossi, PETER H. 1960 Power and Community Structure. Midwest Journal of Political Science 4:390-401. SHAPLEY, L. S.; and SHUBIK, MARTIN 1954 A Method for Evaluating the Distribution of Power in a Committee System. American Political Science Review 48:787-792. SIMON, HERBERT A. (1947-1956) 1957 Models of Man: Social and Rational; Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting. New York: Wiley. SIMON, HERBERT A. 1953 Notes on the Observation and Measurement of Political Power. Journal of Politics 15:500-516. WEBER, MAX (1922) 1957 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Edited by Talcott Parsons. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> First published as Part 1 of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.
POWER TRANSITION The theory of power transition attempts to account for the shifts of power and the causes of conflict among nations. According to this theory, the spread of industrialization to different nations at different times and at differing rates provides the key to understanding the fundamental patterns of contemporary international relations. Stages of power transition An industrializing nation undergoes a number of changes as it modernizes its economy. Typically, such a nation not only increases its wealth and its industrial strength but also grows in population
4 16
POWER TRANSITION
and improves the efficiency of its political institutions. Since economic development, population size, social mobility, and political mobilization are among the major determinants of national power, an industrializing nation also increases its power, i.e., its ability to influence the behavior of other nations. It goes through a "power transition." This power transition can for convenience be divided into three stages, although in reality the process is continuous. Potential power. First comes the "stage of potential power," a preindustrial stage in which the populat on may be large or small and is often growing rapidly but in which the economy and the government are backward compared to more developed nations. The economy is primarily subsistence agriculture. Productivity and living standards are low, technical skills are few, and capital is extremely scarce. Governmental institutions are inefficient, and national unity is often, though not always, slight. Countries in this stage are often ruled by foreign conquerors or by small aristocracies; the common people participate little in national government except to pay taxes. The human and material resources of such a nation are largely unorganized and only partly used; and the power of such a nation is slight compared to that of any industrial nation, although of course it may be greater than that of some other underdeveloped country. The power of a preindustrial nation is largely potential, to be realized when and if it modernizes its economy and its government. For a nation with a large population, however, the size of its potential power may be great indeed. India, for example, by industrializing fully, would become one of the most powerful nations on earth; and other nations, recognizing this potential, grant India today some of the deference due to the power she may have tomorrow. Transitional growth. The second stage of power transition is the "stage of transitional growth in power." During this stage the nation is in transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, and as it industrializes it grows in power. Fundamental changes take place during this stage. Economic modernization brings higher productivity, increased national income, and higher living standards. Political modernization brings a larger and more efficient government bureaucracy and increases the control of the central government over the nation. The general public is more affected by governmental action and participates more in governmental activities, and nationalistic
sentiment often reaches a high pitch. Population size generally increases rapidly, for modern conditions reduce the death rate sharply. Industrialization, urbanization, secularization, and other related changes alter the whole fabric of national life. Many of these changes have the effect of increasing the nation's power, relative to both that of the other preindustrial nations it leaves behind and that of the already industrial nations it is beginning to catch up with. The speed of this gain in power and the degree to which it upsets the international community depend in large part upon the size of the nation and upon the speed with which it industrializes. The Soviet Union provides a good example of a nation in the stage of transitional growth in power, although it is now at the end of this stage. Its rapid industrialization and concomitant rise in power have changed the whole focus of international relations in the mid-twentieth century. Power maturity. The third stage of power transition is the "stage of power maturity," reached when a nation is highly industrial, as the United States and western Europe are today. Nations in this stage continue to change and to grow in wealth, efficiency, and size, but at a slower rate. At least, this has been the experience of the Western nations that have already reached power maturity. Presumably, the rate of economic advance will also slacken in the Soviet Union and eventually in China and other nations as they reach this point, but only the future can supply proof of this. With power maturity the internal characteristics that give a nation power do not disappear, but in a race where everyone is running forward one may lose simply by slowing down. Power, after all, is relative, not absolute. Nations in the third stage lose relative power as other nations in the stage of transitional growth close the gap between them. The effects of automation may give a further burst of power to nations in the stage of power maturity and allow them to maintain their power superiority longer than would otherwise be the case, but in the end automation will destroy the nation-state and open the way to new and different forms of political organization. Effects on the distribution of power Had the entire world industrialized at the same time and at the same speed, there would have been great changes in international relations but no necessary major shifts in the distribution of power
POWER TRANSITION among nations. However, the industrial revolution, which began in England two hundred years ago and spread slowly through the West, has only recently swept into eastern Europe and Asia and has still to reach the majority of nations in the world. The result has been that first one nation and then another has experienced a sudden spurt in power, as in a race where one runner after another goes into a brief sprint. These sudden sprints keep upsetting the distribution of power in the world, threatening the established international order and disturbing world peace. Increased power is constantly passing into the hands of nations who use it to challenge the existing leaders of the international community. At any given time the nations of the world tend to be organized into an "international order," that is to say, a system of relationships that is fairly stabilized, with recognized leaders, a recognized distribution of power and wealth, and recognized rules of trade, diplomacy, and war. Sometimes, as during most of the nineteenth century, there is only one international order. At other times, as at present, there may be two or more competing international orders. The dominant international order is headed by the most powerful single nation on earth, formerly England, today the United States. In the years since the industrial revolution the rule of the dominant nation has been challenged by one newly industrialized nation after another. Sometimes the challenge has come from within the dominant international order, as when the United States took over world leadership from England. Sometimes it has come from the leader of a competing international order, as in the cases of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. A recurring pattern can be seen in which new nations industrialize and experience an accompanying rapid growth in power only to find themselves dissatisfied with the place granted to them by the world leaders who industrialized ahead of them. When peaceful bids for a redistribution of wealth and power prove inadequate, past challengers have turned to war. In the past one hundred years major wars have been started by challengers as they approached, but before they reached, equal power with those they challenged. Peace, then, is most assured when the dominant nation and its allies enjoy a huge preponderance of power over any possible challenger. War is most likely when the power of a challenger and its allies approaches equality with that of the world leaders who support the status quo.
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Evaluation The major limitation of the concept of power transition is that it refers to a period extending roughly from 1750 to a time in the future (one may guess about 2050) when world-wide industrialization has been achieved. It does not apply to the years before 1750, when no nation was industrial, nor does it apply to a future in which all nations will possess highly developed economies. The theory of the balance of power, on the other hand, may be more applicable to the preindustrial "dynastic" period, when there were many nations of roughly equivalent power, when nations were kings who could and did switch sides freely, and when nations increased their power primarily through clever diplomacy, alliances, and military conquests. Thus, each nation's increase in power could be counterbalanced by similar international action on the part of its rivals. However, it is clear that differential industrialization has created vast differences in the power of nations since the industrial revolution. There no longer exist many nations of roughly equal power, and it is no longer possible to balance power by shifting alliances. In the last two hundred years the usual state of affairs has been a vast preponderance of power in the hands of one leading nation. At most there have occasionally been two leading nations of almost equal power. Modern nations are not free to make and break alliances at will for power considerations (for example, to balance world power), because economic and military interdependence have tied nations together into international orders whose membership they cannot leave without great domestic as well as international changes. Furthermore, balance of power situations, historically, have not aided the maintenance of peace. On the contrary, the greatest wars of modern history have occurred precisely at times when a challenging nation or coalition of nations has most nearly reached equal power with the leaders of the dominant international order. The great century of Pax Britannica from 1815 to 1914 amply illustrates that peace comes with preponderant power, not with a balance of power. The theory of the power transition, unlike the theory of the balance of power, assumes that industrial strength is one of the major determinants of a nation's power and that a nation may therefore increase its power greatly through internal changes in its economy, i.e., through industrialization. By proceeding from this basic assumption
41 8
PREDICTION
the theory of the power transition seems to explain some major developments in contemporary international politics far better than the outdated formulation of balance of power. A. F. K. ORGANSKI [See "Iso BALANCE OF POWER; INTERNATIONAL POLITICS; MILITARY POWER POTENTIAL; MODERNIZATION. Other relevant material may be found under INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS; PEACE; WAR.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
CLAUDE, INIS L. JR. (1962) 1964 Power and International Relations. New York: Random House. ORGANSKI, A. F. K. 1958 World Politics. New York: Knopf. ORGANSKI, A. F. K. 1965 The Stages of Political Development. New York: Knopf.
PREDICTION In sociological writing the term "prediction" means a stated expectation about a given aspect of social behavior that may be verified by subsequent observation. Within this general meaning the term is used in two principal senses: for deductions from known to unknown events within a conceptually static system and for statements about future outcomes based on recurring sequences of events. This article is largely restricted to the latter sense, although the former usage, which covers significant forms of logical reasoning, is widely prevalent. The estimate of a given variable from one or more concurrent variables as in regression analysis is conventionally referred to as a prediction. Similarly, the estimate of a population characteristic may be referred to as a prediction, although the sample from which the inference is drawn is not separated in time from the population that it represents. Still more common, especially in the writing on social systems, is the designation of the term y in the expression "If x, then y," as a prediction, even though the x and y are often regarded as of simultaneous occurrence. Although such usage has been questioned on linguistic grounds, it is well established, and its currency is not likely to be affected by such arguments. In its second principal sense the term "prediction" refers to assertions about future outcomes based on the observed regularities among consecutive events of the past. This category contains its own distinction, depending on whether the statement holds for a single, concrete instance, with due regard for the accidents of time and place, or abstractly holds for any case in a class satisfying
stated conditions. If the statement is concrete and necessarily bound to the calendar, it carries the label "forecast"; otherwise, when it is not so restricted, it carries the more general term "prediction." According to this distinction, the expected volume of crime in the United States in the next calendar year would constitute a forecast, whereas the expected success of the individual on parole under specified conditions would be a prediction. Although this terminology is useful for distinguishing between special and general formulations, it has not been consistently applied, even in technical writing, and many so-called predictions would have to be relabeled as forecasts if the distinction were to be strictly maintained. Prediction as a social process, At least some form of prediction, in the broadest sense of the term, is practiced on all levels of culture (Tylor 1871, chapter 4). The contemporary emphasis in sociology, as described below, is thus consistent with traditional enterprise, answering to the same general purposes but differing in the process by which the foreknowledge is obtained. The social purpose of prediction, whether of physical or social events, is to secure a measure of control over what otherwise would be less manageable circumstances. The effects of such natural calamities as typhoons and floods may be mitigated, if not averted, by forehanded preparation; similarly, by stating the conditions under which a social upheaval can occur, steps may be taken to prevent the occurrence of one. Some of the Biblical prophecies were of this nature, urging the people to righteousness in order to avoid the wrath of God. At times such a statement may be more in the nature of a promise than a threat, setting forth the conditions to be met in order to achieve a desired objective, such as an annuity upon retirement. But however they differ in meaning, practically all predictions are potential instruments of social action, enabling the group either to facilitate a favorable outcome or to impede an unfavorable one. The process of sociological prediction. Although all predictions are alike in broad social purpose, they differ in the process of their formulation, which will be more or less scientific according to the nature of the underlying analysis. The process of sociological prediction has in varying degree those elements common to all scientific prediction; some theory of behavior from which deductions may be drawn and some factual evidence that is relevant to the propositions of the theory. Sociological prediction has arisen naturally from the concerns of sociology itself, both theoretical and empirical, and thus sociologists now take predic-
PREDICTION tion of the forms and processes of social life as one of their principal tasks. This commitment has its roots in the writings of Auguste Comte and has been regularly affirmed by leading representatives of the discipline since that time. Max Weber held that the purpose of sociology is to predict the patterns of social interaction, and Albion Small, one of the founders of American sociology, took very much the same position (1916). Although sociological predictions ideally are to be drawn from theory, for the most part they have been little more than statistical projections based on compilations of empirical data within categories of perhaps little theoretical significance. But such compilations in the form of time series and actuarial tables have had their bearing on theory. For example, the hypothesis of "cultural lag" (Ogburn 1922) was derived in part from the empirical growth curve of inventions, and Edwin H. Sutherland's theory of "differential association" has been refined on the basis of parole prediction studies (see Glaser 1954). In this way the construction of statistical trends and experience tables and their corresponding projections have had some impact on theory, in both extending and recasting it. Nevertheless, it is not the statistical materials and their manipulation that give sociological prediction its special character, for comparable series and their analysis are part of the natural sciences; rather, it is the underlying categories from which sociological predictions are derived. Prediction research. Although many sociological investigations have a bearing on the predictability of social and cultural events, relatively few studies have had prediction as their primary goal. For the purposes of outlining these more specialized studies and citing examples, prediction research will be classified here according to whether its focus is the collective characteristics of the group or the characteristics of its constituent members. In those studies analyzing the collective aspects of the group, the prediction has in some cases extended over several classes of events, whereas in various others the prediction has been restricted to a single outcome. The prediction of a relatively wide range of events is perhaps best represented by the work of William F. Ogburn, a consistent theme of which was the proposition that technological trends of the past provide a useful key to cultural trends of the future. This idea was developed in Ogburn's work during the 1930s, which included reviews of selected social and economic trends in the United States from 1900 to 1930 (President's Research Committee . . . 1933) and a government report on social and economic con-
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ditions affecting the rate of invention and the impact of invention on social life (U.S. National Resources Committee, Science Committee 1937), and it was later restated in The Social Effects of Aviation (Ogburn et al. 1946). Not all studies of trends and cycles have been at the societal level; some have been concerned with the pattern of interaction and the sequence of its development within the small group. The work of Bales and his associates (summarized in Bales 1959) provides an example of this approach, and Bales's writings contain an assessment of its potential for predictive knowledge. The prediction of a single social outcome may be illustrated by the election forecast, since its problems are well defined (Mosteller et al. 1949) and its operating procedures are well standardized. Such a forecast rests on a succession of carefully designed and drawn sample polls taken at regular intervals shortly before the election. Based on the trend of these results, with due allowance for sampling and measurement error, the percentage of the vote for each candidate is predicted, and thus the probable winning candidate can be named. The critical matters bearing on the accuracy of such prediction include the correspondence between the sampled population and the population actually voting on election day as well as the stability of the observed trend, at least through the day of the election. Notwithstanding these and related difficulties, scientific polling agencies have been quite successful in predicting the results of political elections held in the United States since 1952. Students of this process have noted that such predictions may affect the election itself. With minor exceptions, the prediction of individual behavior has been limited to those forms of personal adjustment whose variation is thought to be largely due to differences in social background and circumstance: for example, adjustment in the armed forces (Star 1950), postwar adjustment (Cottrell 1949), adjustment on parole (Burgess 1928), and adjustment in marriage (Burgess & Cottrell 1939). The device by which the prediction of personal adjustment is usually effected is the experience table, which in principle is no different from the actuary's life table that shows probabilities of death by age. Similarly, the table of social experience gives the odds of success for the several subclasses into which the population has been arranged, and it thereby yields a prediction for the individual case; obviously, the more nearly the probabilities approach zero or one, the more accurate is the prediction for each person. This method
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PREDICTION
Table 1 — Frequency distribution of 1,000 poro/ees, by prediction score Number of men Predicfion
in each class
Per cent violators
score*
interval
of parole
16-21 14-15
68 140 91 106
1.5 2.2 8.8
13 12 11 10 7-9 5-6 2-4
no 88 287 85 25
15.1 22.7 34.1 43.9 67.1 76.0
* Score for ( jch parolee is the number of factors for which he scored above the group mean. Source: Adapted from Burgess 1928, p. 248.
can be illustrated by a table from Burgess' early study of factors determining success on parole (see Table 1); this table, an adaptation of the original, shows the percentage of failures (that is, parole violators) for each of the classes into which 1,000 parolees had been grouped according to scores based on 21 factors correlated with outcome on parole. This table, which may be regarded as stating a set of empirical probabilities, is characteristic of practically all studies seeking to predict the behavior of the individual. Recent studies of social adjustment are somewhat distinctive in their employment of refined statistical methods to differentiate between successes and failures. An important innovation consists in their attention to the possible discrepancy between decisions maximizing predictive accuracy and those minimizing social cost. Ohlin (1951) discusses the relevance of prediction tables for parole selection and analyzes their differing purposes, and Cronbach and G^ser (1957) provide a comparable discussion of personnel selection based on psychological test scores. Techniques of social prediction The derivation of a prediction is usually accomplished by general statistical methods, none of which is restricted in its application to social data. Despite their general familiarity, these methods will be briefly reviewed here, primarily to illustrate representative applications in social prediction. Although not all statistical predictions are derived in the same way, all share the requirement that both predictor and criterion variables be subject to reliable measurement. Except for this scant reference, and despite its importance, the problem of measurement will be ignored in the following discussion. Extrapolation. Roughly speaking, extrapolation is the process of predicting a variable from itself—
for example, predicting the future growth of a population from its past growth. By this technique it is possible to obtain a succession of expected values that are arrayed in the future from least to most distant. Such expected values will materialize only if the underlying social process or causal system that the curve expresses is constant for the period over which the prediction extends. Prediction by extrapolation will be in error to the degree that a given process changes; accordingly, prediction by this method will generally be more accurate for shorter rather than longer durations. An example of extrapolation is provided by Hart's prediction of life expectancy on the basis of the trend in life expectancy during the last 75 years (1954). [For other examples of extrapolation see PREDICTION AND FORECASTING, ECONOMIC; POPULATION, article on POPULATION GROWTH.] Correlation methods. Reduced to its lowest terms, prediction by correlation is based on measured linkages between earlier and later events in a given sequence—for example, between scholastic performance in high school and that in college, between adjustment in childhood and that in marriage. It goes without saying that such obtained relationships will have no predictive utility beyond the specific population for which they hold. Thus, if the correlation between type of infant feeding and social maturity (to take a hypothetical example) obtains only in the middle class, the former category will be worthless as a predictor of social maturity in the lower class. In basing our prediction on correlated events, the guiding principle is that the errors of prediction must be minimized in some well-defined sense. To illustrate the application of this principle and also to mark points of entry into the pertinent literature, we will consider in barest detail the most common procedures for predicting a variable from a set of attributes or variables and those for predicting an attribute from a set of attributes or variables. When the criterion consists of more than a single element (Hotelling 1935) and/or when attributes and variates are employed together as predictors (Mannheim & Wilkins 1955), the procedures will be more complicated but no different in principle. In predicting a variable from one or more variables, the practice is to predict so that the sum of the squared errors around the fitted curve is a minimum. When the fitted curve is linear, as is usually the case, the product-moment coefficient of correlation r, or an adaptation of it (partial or multiple), serves to gauge the relative accuracy of comparable predictions. For example, a succession
PREDICTION of similar studies of marriage obtained the following correlations between scores considered to be prognostic of marital adjustment and scores of actual adjustment in marriage: Burgess and Cottrell, .51 (1939); Burgess and Wallin, .50 (1953); Terman, .54 (see Terman et al. 1938). In predicting a quantitative variable from one or more attributes, the rule is to determine the predicted values so as to maximize the sum of squares between groups and correspondingly to minimize the sum of squares within groups, as in the analysis of variance; hence, the coefficient of intraclass correlation, or an equivalent, may be taken as a measure of predictive accuracy. The fact that no instance of such a measure appears in the bibliography to this article is intended to suggest the possibly limited value of attributes for purposes of predicting quantitative variables. Where the prediction is from one or more attributes to a single attribute, the rule is to predict repeatedly whichever attribute has the largest subclass frequency, or conditional probability (Guttman 1941). The accuracy of such prediction will vary according to the difference between the conditional and marginal probabilities. Since measures of association such as C, T, or phi reflect that difference, they have been widely used to gauge the predictive accuracy of attributes. The examples given in Table 2, which are from one of the Gluecks' early studies of recidivism, will serve to illustrate the form and usual magnitude of such coefficients. Finally, where the prediction is from one or more variables to a single attribute the preferred procedure is to derive from the variables a composite variable that will yield the least overlap among the several within-class distributions and hence the least error in prediction. When the composite variable is a linear function of its components, the procedure is termed a discriminant function (Fisher 1936). The experience table for predicting recidivism among Borstal (i.e., reform school) lads (Mannheim & Wilkins 1955) was based on this method and is indicative of both its value and limitations; Kirby (1954) has also used this method, in a parole prediction study. Table 2 — Correlation between recidivism and selected social traits Social trait
Coefficient of contingency (C)
Mental condition Work habits Economic responsibility
.43 .35 .28
Source: Adapted from Glueck & Glueck 1937, p. 135.
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Markov chains. Although the Markov chain, as well as the general class of stochastic processes to which it belongs, is covered in most standard references on probability (Feller 1950-1966), its potentialities for sociological prediction have only recently been explored, and these efforts have been largely, if not exclusively, limited to the fitting of historical data to theoretical chains. Although such materials indicate whether conditions as observed at time tk might have been accurately predicted by Markov methods beginning at time t0, they contain no demonstration that a given process will repeat itself indefinitely and therefore give no indication whether it may be confidently used for predictive purposes. This remark, however, should not be construed as a criticism of the studies cited illustratively below, which purported to be more suggestive than conclusive. The feasibility of predicting political attitudes has been considered by Anderson (1954) in a secondary analysis of panel data. His particular concern was with the probability that a person would hold the same political opinion at the end of a sequence that he held at the start. To determine whether such probabilities might be attained by Markovian methods, a comparison was drawn between distributions based on opinions expressed by a panel of voters in each of the six months immediately preceding the U.S. presidential election of 1940 and those expected on the basis of probability theory. Although the findings of this particular analysis were inconclusive, they do hint at the potentialities of the Markov chain as a device for analyzing the process of attitude change and as a tool for social prediction. The correspondence between actual patterns of labor mobility and those obtained by treating the movement of workers as a Markov process has been examined by Blumen, Kogan, and McCarthy (1955). Although this investigation was concerned primarily with the dynamics of labor mobility, it has considerable relevance for prediction in its emphasis on statements expressing the probability that a worker in a given industrial group will be in that same group after k intervals of time. Apart from its substantive value for industrial sociology, this study is constructively important as a demonstration of the potential utility of Markov theory in the prediction of mobility, both social and geographical. Current problems During the past fifty years of American sociology, the problems, or problematics, of prediction have received at least as much attention as the
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predictions themselves, which, as suggested in the foregoing discussion, have been relatively few in number and circumscribed in content. The range of these problems is reflected in the kinds of issues that have been regularly debated in the sociological journals. Some of these issues are briefly presents J here. Actuarial approach versus case method. The issue of the actuarial approach versus the case method has arisen in the prediction of personal adjustment. This issue has two parts: whether it is possible to frame a prediction solely from case materif is in total disregard of all probabilities, and whether such prediction, when there is no explicit reference to actuarial materials, is more accurate than that based on statistical averages, or rates. Most serious students of prediction would answer "no" to the first question and "possibly under some circumstances" to the second. Prediction that claims to be wholly devoid of probabilities is regarded as logically impossible by some students (Social Science Research Council 1941). Briefly put, their argument is: notwithstanding the claims of the predictor to the contrary, the predicted case will be treated as a class member or located in a risk table although that table may be wholly based on the experience of the forecaster and may exist only in his mind. That the process is subjective and personal does not alter its essential nature as probabilistic; therefore—so runs the argument—all prediction is actuarial and, correspondingly, no prediction is wholly free of uncertainty. The second answer, "possibly under some circumstances," shows a recognition that predictions from extensive case materials may in some instances be more accurate than those based on group averages, by virtue of the analyst's exceptional ability to assign cases to risk categories having probabilities very close to zero or one. However, such idiosyncratic accuracy embodies "procedures" that cannot be readily codified and transmitted to the public, as would be required of scientific methods. Hence, prediction from case materials, no matter how accurate, must be regarded as an expression of clinical insight and judgment rather than as the application of scientific law. Prediction as feedback. Despite the antiquity of the idea that a stated prediction may affect its own fulfillment (Popper 1957) and despite the relevance of this idea to social prediction, few empirical studies have sought to measure the influence of predictions on subsequent events. However, an illustrative literature has emerged, including
references to rumor, stereotyped expectation, the election forecast, and false prophecy (see especially Merton 1948; Simon 1954; Festinger et al. 1956). Students of voting behavior have noted the possible effects of a computer prediction of the election of specific candidates based on national election results in an earlier time zone on the pattern of voting in a later time zone. Such materials lend themselves to systematic classification according to whether the outcome is favorable or unfavorable and according to whether the effect of prediction is positive or negative. Thus, the prognosis that the patient will recover may generate either a confidence that will hasten recovery or an overconfidence that will delay it; on the other hand, an unfavorable prognosis of chronic illness may create either an attitude of resignation or an attitude of defiance, with differing effects. Instances of this kind support the common opinion that by reason of the symbolic nature of human life, social prediction is reflexive and that in consequence the validity of social prediction is subject to greater uncertainty than physical prediction. Efficiency of social prediction. Broadly speaking, the concept of the efficiency of prediction refers to the accuracy of a given method of prediction relative to that of an alternative that is taken as a standard or norm (Reiss 1951). If, for example, the chosen standard produces 20 errors per 100 trials and the alternative in question produces only 10, then the alternative may be said to be twice as efficient as the standard. Usually the predictions compared are that derived from the joint distribution of a criterion and one or more predictors and that derived from the distribution of the criterion alone. Thus, given a male delinquency rate of 20 per cent, the prediction of nondelinquency on repeated trials would carry an error rate of 20 per cent; if, after introducing social class as a predictor, the error rate is reduced to 10 per cent, then the prediction from the two-way classification may be said to be twice as efficient as prediction from the single classification of children as delinquent or nondelinquent. By and large, the measured efficiency of social prediction has been relatively low. For example, in criminological studies, where the identification of the prospective delinquent or recidivist would be of considerable practical importance, the gains resulting from the introduction of information thought to bear on such behavior have been negligible (Schuessler 1954). To achieve substantial gains in efficiency it will be necessary to identify and measure those variables that are closely correlated with the criterion.
PREDICTION Explanation versus prediction. Although explanation and prediction are not irreconcilable or even rival alternatives, there are differences of opinion about which of these should receive the greater emphasis. In general, this disagreement reflects the difference between a preference for theory and an emphasis on factual research. In this disagreement, those placing greater emphasis on explanation usually argue as follows: Predictions (hypotheses) may be deduced from a general explanation (theory), but a collection of statistical predictions, no matter how accurate, does not constitute a theory; hence, explanation should be the first order of business. Moreover, obtained statistical regularities may be an accident of time or place and hence an unstable basis for prediction, whereas a scientific law is universal and therefore an unerring source of prediction. According to this line of reasoning, the poor showing of prediction in sociology is a reflection of crudities in general theory. Thus, the development of a set of valid explanations is considered to be a prerequisite for the improvement of predictions. Those putting greater stress on prediction would probably not disagree with the premise of the foregoing argument, although they would emphasize the interplay between statistical association and theoretical explanation and the steady impact of the former on the latter. Furthermore, they would hold that if they are to frame hypotheses and to test them, they have no choice but to operate pragmatically within existing theory, reforming it as they proceed. Probably the rank and file of American sociologists are "agnostics" with regard to this issue, excepting those whose major interest lies in the philosophy of social science. Limits of prediction. Another issue is the general question whether some classes of social events are inherently unpredictable. Although this question is valid, it necessarily admits of only a speculative answer. The judgment that the "future course of human affairs is unpredictable" (Toynbee 1934-1961, vol. 12) has to do with the broad question of cultural history or evolution and has little to do with prediction as a specialty within sociology. In general, sociologists have been primarily concerned with problems of much smaller compass : land use, migration, suburban growth, fertility rates of human populations, rates of assimilation, patterns of racial violence, and political movements. Nevertheless, the importance of predicting social mutations as well as recurring phenomena has been increasingly emphasized in sociological writings (e.g., Moore 1964), and it is to be anticipated that this problem will be studied
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empirically in the coming decades. Such factual studies will enable sociologists to set provisional limits to the range of social prediction (Bell 1965). In conclusion, it should be noted that prediction and sociology have always been closely linked: sociology grew out of a concern with prediction (Comte's savoir pour prevoir} and has always had the securing of predictive knowledge as one of its express aims. However, relatively few empirical studies have been specifically concerned with producing it. Thus, the importance of recent prediction studies lies as much in the methodological understandings that have grown out of them as in the substantive findings themselves. As these understandings become systematized and gain in currency, a wider variety of factual investigations will probably appear as a sequel to the pioneering work of the last several decades.
KARL F. SCHUESSLER [Directly related are the entries CAUSATION; LIFE TABLES; MARKOV CHAINS; PREDICTION AND FORECASTING, ECONOMIC. Other relevant material may be found in LINEAR HYPOTHESES; MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS; PENOLOGY, article on PROBATION AND PAROLE; VOTING; and in the biographies of COMTE; OGBURN; SMALL; WEBER, MAX.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ANDERSON, T. W. 1954 Probability Models for Analyzing Time Changes in Attitudes. Pages 17-66 in Paul F. Lazarsfeld (editor), Mathematical Thinking in the Social Sciences. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. BALES, ROBERT F. 1959 Small-group Theory Research. Pages 293-305 in American Sociological Society, Sociology Today. Edited by Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell. New York: Basic Books. BELL, DANIEL 1965 Twelve Modes of Prediction. Pages 96-127 in Julius Gould (editor), Penguin Survey of the Social Sciences 1965. Baltimore: Penguin. BLUMEN, ISADORE; KOGAN, MARVIN; and MCCARTHY, PHILIP 1955 The Industrial Mobility of Labor as a Probability Process. Cornell Studies in Industrial and Labor Relations, Vol. 6. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. BORGATTA, EDGAR F.; and WESTOFF, CHARLES F. 1954 The Prediction of Total Fertility. Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 32:383-419. BOWERMAN, CHARLES E. 1964 Prediction Studies. Pages 215-246 in Harold T. Christensen (editor), Handbook of Marriage and the Family. Chicago: Rand McNally. BURGESS, ERNEST W. 1928 Factors Determining Success or Failure on Parole. Pages 203-249 in Illinois, Committee on Indeterminate-sentence Law and Parole, The Workings of the Indeterminate-sentence Law and the Parole System in Illinois. Springfield, 111.: Division of Pardons and Paroles. BURGESS, ERNEST W.; and COTTRELL, LEONARD S. 1939 Predicting Success or Failure in Marriage. New York: Prentice-Hall.
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BURGESS, ERNEST W.; and WALLIN, PAUL 1953 Engagement and Marriage. Philadelphia: Lippincott. CANTRIL, HADLEY 1938 The Prediction of Social Events. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 33:364389. CHAPIN, FRANCIS S. (1947) 1955 Experimental Designs in Sociological Research. Rev. ed. New York: Harper. CLAur1"N, JOHN A. 1950 Studies of the Postwar Plans of Soldiers: A Problem in Prediction. Pages 568-708 in Samuel A. Stouffer et al., Measurement and Prediction. Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, Vol. 4. Princeton Univ. Press. COTTRELL, LEONARD S. 1949 The Aftermath of Hostilities. Pages 549-595 in Samuel A. Stouffer et al., The American Soldier. Studies in Social Psychology in Woixd War II, Vol. 2. Princeton Univ. Press. CRONBACH, LEE J.; and GLESER, GOLDINE C. (1957) 1965 Psychological Tests and Personnel Decisions. 2d ed. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. DOLLARD, JOHN 1948 Under What Conditions Do Opinions Predict Behavior? Public Opinion Quarterly 12: 623-632. DUNCAN, OTIS DUDLEY et al. 1953 Formal Devices for Making Selection Decisions. American Journal of Sociology 58:573-584. FELLER, WILLIAM 1950-1966 An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications. 2 vols. New York: Wiley. -» A second edition of the first volume was published in 1957. FESTINGER, LEON; RIECKEN, H. W.; and SCHACHTER, STANLEY 1956 When Prophecy Fails. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. FISHER, R. A. 1936 The Use of Multiple Measurements in Taxonomic Problems. Annals of Eugenics 7:179188. GLASER, DANIEL 1954 A Reconsideration of Some Parole Prediction Factors. American Sociological Review 19:335-341. GLUECK, SHELDON; and GLUECK, ELEANOR 1937 Later Criminal Careers. New York: Commonwealth Fund. GLUECK, SHELDON; and GLUECK, ELEANOR 1959 Predicting Delinquency and Crime. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. GOODMAN, LEO 1952 Generalizing the Problem of Prediction. American Sociological Review 17:609-612. GUTTMAN, Louis 1941 Mathematical and Tabulation Techniques. Pages 251-364 in Social Science Research Council, Committee on Social Adjustment, The Prediction of Personal Adjustment, by Paul Horst et al. New York: The Council. HART, HORNELL 1954 Expectation of Life: Actual Versus Predicted Trends. Social Forces 33:82-85. HOTELLING, HAROLD 1935 The Most Predictable Criterion. Journal of Educational Psychology 26:139—142. KAPLAN, A.; SKOGSTAD, A. L.; and GIRSHICK, M. A. 1950 The Prediction of Social and Technological Events. Public Opinion Quarterly 14:93-110. KIRBY, BERNARD C. 1954 Parole Prediction Using Multiple Correlation. American Journal of Sociology 59: 539-550. LAVIN, DAVID E. 1965 The Prediction of Academic Performance: A Theoretical Analysis and Review of Research. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; and FRANZEN, RAYMOND H. 1945 Prediction of Political Behavior in America. American Sociological Review 10:261-273.
MCCORMICK, THOMAS C. 1952 Toward Causal Analysis in the Prediction of Attributes. American Sociological Review 17:35-44. MANNHEIM, HERMANN; and WILKINS, LESLIE T. 1955 Prediction Methods in Relation to Borstal Training. London: H.M. Stationery Office. MEEHL, PAUL E. 1954 Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. MERTON, ROBERT K. (1948) 1957 The Self-fulfilling Prophecy. Pages 421-436 in Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure. Rev. & enl. ed. Glencoe, 111.: Free Fress. MOORE, WILBEHT E. 1964 Predicting Discontinuities in Social Change. American Sociological Review 29:331338. MOSTELLER, FREDERICK et al. 1949 The Pre-election Polls of 1948. New York: Social Science Research Council. OGBURN, WILLIAM F. (1922)1950 Social Change, With Respect to Culture and Original Nature. New edition with supplementary chapter. New York: Viking. OGBURN, WILLIAM F. 1934 Studies in Prediction and the Distortion of Reality. Social Forces 13:224-229. OGBURN, WILLIAM F.; ADAMS, JEAN L.; GILFILLAN, S. C. 1946 The Social Effects of Aviation. Boston: Houghton MifHin. -» Includes an extended discussion of the methodology of prediction and a selected bibliography. OHLIN, LLOYD E. 1951 Selection for Parole. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. POPPER, KARL R. 1957 The Poverty of Historicism. Boston: Beacon. PRESIDENT'S RESEARCH COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL TRENDS 1933 Recent Social Trends in the United States. 2 vols. New York; McGraw-Hill. -» Incorporates the results of thirty studies of selected social and economic trends in the United States from 1900 to 1930. REISS, ALBERT J. JR. 1951 The Accuracy, Efficiency, and Validity of a Prediction Instrument. American Journal of Sociology 56:552-561. SAWYER, JACK T. 1966 Measurement and Prediction, Clinical and Statistical. Psychological Bulletin 66: 178-200. SCHUESSLER, KARL F. 1954 Parole Prediction: Its History and Status. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 45:425-431. SIMON, HERBERT A. (1954) 1957 Bandwagon and Underdog Effects of Election Predictions. Pages 79-87 in Herbert A. Simon, Models of Man: Social and Rational; Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting. New York: Wiley. SMALL, ALBION W. 1916 Fifty Years of Sociology in the United States (1865-1915). American Journal of Sociology 21:721-864. SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL, COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT 1941 The Prediction of Personal Adjustment, by Paul Horst et al. New York: The Council. SOROKIN, PITIRIM A. (1941) 1962 Social and Cultural Dynamics. Volume 4: Basic Problems, Principles and Methods. Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster Press. STAR, SHIRLEY A. 1950 The Screening of Psychoneurotics in the Army: Technical Development of Tests. Pages 486-567 in Samuel A. Stouffer et al., Measurement and Prediction. Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, Vol. 4. Princeton Univ. Press. TERMAN, L. M. et al. 1938 Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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ever may be "knowable" about the future. In fact, inferences from the past are the sole basic source for the expectations of events that are beyond the forecaster's control. And the quality of these expectations (forecasts) is clearly a major determinant of the quality of plans and decisions that refer to factors over which the maker or user of the forecast does have substantial control. Economic forecasts refer to the economic aspects of unknown events. Looking into the future, these predictions may be classified into short-run (with spans or distances to the target period of up to one or two years), intermediate (two to five years), and long-term (relating to more persistent developments or distant occurrences). Forecasts in all these categories are made for purposes of business planning, of aiding economic policies of governments, and of testing generalizations of economic theory. It is true that business forecasts deal largely PREDICTION AND FORECASTING, with the near future, because this is both what is ECONOMIC most needed and what stands a better chance of A forecast can be defined generally as a staterelative success in the reduction of avoidable business risks. Nonetheless, in certain areas, such as ment about an unknown and uncertain event— planning new industrial plant construction or most often, but not necessarily, a future event. Such a statement may vary greatly in form and acquisition of new businesses, prediction of rather content: it can be qualitative or quantitative, con- long developments is needed, and lately business forecasters seem to have grown bolder in underditional or unconditional, explicit or silent on the taking to project long trends in the economy. With probabilities involved. A reasonable requirement, the recent emphasis on growth objectives, longhowever, is that the forecast should be verifiable, at range forecasts are also gaining ground as tools of least in principle; trivial predictions that are so governmental planning and decision making. broad or vague that they could never be found inImportant generalizations of economic theory correct merit no consideration, and the same aptypically imply qualitative conditional predictions; plies to predictions that are rendered meaningless for example, the "law of demand" predicts that a by relying on entirely improbable assumptions or decline in the price of a good will lead consumers conditions. As for the "event" that is being predictto purchase more of that good. In the history of ed, it too is to be interpreted very broadly. Thus economic thought one also finds another type of the forecast may refer to one particular or several prediction, in which the author presents as a foreinterrelated situations (single versus multiple precast of things to come what is essentially an emdictions). It may identify a single value or a range pirical hypothesis based on assumptions that may of values likely to be assumed by a certain variable only have been valid at the time or may be ques(point versus interval predictions). Various combitioned altogether. Predictions of secular developnations of these categories are possible, and some ments by the classical economists provide several are interesting; for example, an unconditional inmajor examples, such as the law of historically terval prediction can be viewed as a set of condidiminishing returns and the Malthusian population tional point predictions (that is, the forecaster estiprinciple. (Marx's projections of a falling rate of mates the range of probable outcomes by setting profit and increasing pauperization and crises belimits to the variation in the underlying condilong in the same logical category.) History dealt tions). harshly with some of these prognostications, while In principle, the unknown event that is the tarmany others were left untested by events and get of a prediction could pertain to the past or the must often be viewed as inconclusive or lacking in present, but it is the future that is of primary conpresent interest. In any case, these so-called evocern to the forecaster. Information about the past lutionary laws and other predictions of such a and present is often incomplete and inadequate, general nature are not included in the subject but it is as a rule far richer and firmer than whatTHORNDIKE, EDWARD L. et al. 1934 Prediction of Vocational Success. New York: Commonwealth Fund. TOYNBEE, ARNOLD J. 1934-1961 A Study of History. 12 vols. Oxford Univ. Press. TYLOR, EDWARD B. (1871) 1958 Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom. Volume 1: Origins of Culture. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. U.S. NATIONAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE, SCIENCE COMMITTEE 1937 Technological Trends and National Policy, Including the Social Implications of New Inventions. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. NATIONAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE, SCIENCE COMMITTEE 1938 The Problems of a Changing Population. Report of the Committee on Population Problems. Washington: Government Printing Office. WESTOFF, CHARLES F.; SAGI, PHILIP C.; and KELLY, E. LOWELL 1958 Fertility Through Twenty Years of Marriage: A Study in Predictive Possibilities. American Sociological Review 23:549-556.
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matter of this article, which will concentrate on more limited, specific, and, in particular, quantitative forecasts. Historical background It is clear from the preceding that prediction in the general sense has always been one of the products of economic thought; indeed, the ideal aim of any scientific generalization is to establish regularities or relationships that would hold not only for the past but also for the future observations of the same phenomena. Specific quantitative prediction, however, is of a much more recent origin in economics, having had to await the development of empirically oriented research and its statistical and mathematical tools. Two contributions of enduring influence in this development were Ernst Engel's analysis of cross-section data on workers' household budgets, which appeared in 1883, and Clement Juglar's study of time series data on prices and finance, which appeared in 1862 and introduced the idea of observable "cycles" in business activity. Growing interest in the persistent and disturbing phenomenon of business cycles gave considerable impetus to the collection and analysis of a variety of economic time series. A succession of significant studies of business cycles, with frequent references to historical and statistical materials, appeared between 1898 and 1925: works by Wicksell, Tugan-Baranovskii, Aftalion, Spiethoff, and Schumpeter in Europe, and by Mitchell in the United States. In the course of his later work on business cycles, Mitchell developed a strong (though healthily skeptical) concern about the possibilities of predicting the near-term fortunes of the economy. His 1938 paper on statistical indicators of cyclical revivals, written with Arthur F. Burns, initiated a series of several studies by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which produced tools that have recently been widely used in practical forecasting. [See the biography of MITCHELL.] Another flow of important contributions to the present-day techniques of economic forecasting had its source in the development of new methods of statistical inference, which were first applied in the physical and biological sciences and soon attracted the attention of those interested in social and economic data. Early illustrations of such work are found in Henry L. Moore's studies on economic cycles and forecasting, which appeared in 1914 and 1917. Moore's work stimulated the use of regression methods in forecasting prices and produc-
tion of individual (particularly agricultural) commodities. Irving Fisher's major achievements in monetary economics, index numbers, the study of distributed lags, etc., have long been acknowledged as early models of what came to be known as econometric research. Other pioneers in this approach include Paul H. Douglas (production functions, wages), Henry Schultz (demand functions), Ragnar Frisch (marginal utility measurement), Charles F. Roos (automobile and housing demand), and Jan Tinbergen (statistical tests of business cycle theories). Modern analysts and forecasters who use econometric models clearly owe a major debt to the work of these men. More directly concerned with forecasting of short-term changes in general business conditions were the efforts of Warren M. Persons (1931) and the Harvard University Committee on Economic Research to identify time series that tend to move cyclically and would therefore help to anticipate what was ahead for the economy. The result was the Harvard Index Chart, consisting of three curves: (A) speculation (stock prices); (B) business (wholesale prices, later bank debits); and (C) money market (short-term interest rates). The Harvard chart was first published in 1919 for the last decade before World War i, then extended back to 1875; but the first extensive use of the underlying relationship was made by one of the early commercial business forecasting services, J. H. Brookmire, in 1911. The A-B-C sequence was found to have occurred with substantial regularity in the period before World War I. In the 1920s, the three-curve barometer proved less consistently successful, and it was considerably modified and often used in combination with other statistical devices. The Harvard service did not survive the great depression, although the index was published periodically in the Review of Economic Statistics until 1941. However, a recent unpublished evaluation shows that the sequence underlying the Harvard ABC curves persisted over a long period, not only in the interwar years but also in the post-World War n years. The Brookmire—Harvard method, for all its shortcomings, deserves to be acknowledged as an early forerunner of the present indicator techniques and also as a highly influential factor in the evolution of business cycle forecasting in Europe during the interwar period. For men of affairs, prediction in some (not necessarily explicit) form must have always been unavoidable. Most decisions made in business and many decisions made in government imply or follow some forecasts of economic conditions. Eco-
PREDICTION AND FORECASTING, ECONOMIC nomic and business forecasting as a specialized activity, however, is a relatively recent phenomenon which made its appearance largely in the twentieth century and developed rapidly only after World War i and, particularly, after World War n. In the latter postwar period forecasts have become both more abundant and more ambitious than ever before. Increasingly, forecasts of such comprehensive aggregates as the gross national product (GNP) and its major components, industrial production, and total employment are being made in numerical form not only for the next year but often also over a sequence of short periods, say the next four or six quarters. The spread of such predictions was stimulated by two recent developments: the rise of active interest in the application of macroeconomic theory, and the corresponding accumulation and improvement of aggregative data. The former can be attributed largely to the intensive work done by economists in the last thirty years— since Keynes's General Theory—on problems in the determination of aggregate income, employment, and the price level. The latter goes back to the development of concepts and data on national income accounts by Simon Kuznets and others at the NBER and in the government statistical agencies. Very recently, the rapid growth of electronic computer technology has greatly accelerated the rate at which economic data (the raw materials for the forecaster) are compiled and processed. The same factor also had some more direct effects —without the computer, for example, the largescale econometric models could not have been produced, and hence output of forecasts of the econometric variety would have been severely limited. Types and methods of forecasting It is instructive to classify forecasts by several different criteria. First, one may distinguish between forecasts that are based solely on the past and current values of the variable to be predicted and forecasts that rely on postulated or observed relationships between the variable to be predicted and other variables. The former type of forecast will be referred to as an extrapolation. Second, the degree to which formalized methods are used establishes at least in principle a whole gradation ranging from informal judgment forecasts to predictions based on fully specified and strictly implemented econometric models. And third, one may distinguish between forecasts constructed by a single source, which could be an individual or a team (say, the staff of a business, or government agency), and forecasts derived as weighted or un-
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weighted averages of different predictions made by a few or many individuals or organizations (the latter category includes opinion polls, surveys of businessmen's anticipations, etc.). These various classes of forecasts overlap and can be combined in various ways. For example, a forecast of next year's GNP and its major components by a business economist may consist of any or all of the following ingredients: (1) extrapolation, of some kind, of the past behavior of the given series; (2) relation of the series to be predicted to known or estimated values of some other variables; (3) other external information considered relevant, such as a survey of investment intentions or a government budget estimate; and (4) the judgment of the forecaster. Also, it should be noted that a group forecast, say an opinion poll, will incorporate as many different techniques as are used by the different respondents. Any single classification of forecasting methods that cuts across the different criteria is likely to have only limited application to actual forecasts, which are built much more often on a combination of methods than on one particular technique. Increasingly, starting with the early post-World War ii forecasts, the analysis of factors affecting the course of the economy is being carried on in terms of the major components of GNP. [See NATIONAL INCOME AND PRODUCT ACCOUNTS.] This framework is thought to have the advantages of (a) ensuring that none of the main components of "aggregate effective demand" will be overlooked in the forecast, since they are all represented in the expenditure categories of the GNP accounts; (fc) steering the forecaster to think in terms of the basic determinants of spending decisions by consumers, business, government, and foreign buyers; and (c) providing some safeguards that the various parts of the forecast, being constructed according to the internally consistent GNP system, will not be inconsistent with each other. However, there are also some disadvantages in an exclusive reliance on data such as those for GNP, which are highly aggregative, subject to frequent and often substantial revisions, and available only annually (with a relatively short dependable historical record) and quarterly (for the recent years). A few mechanical forecasting techniques that were once fairly popular can be quickly disposed of as having little scientific basis or empirical soundness. For example, the method that assumes periodic cycles of given duration founders on the fact that cycles in business activity are far from being strictly periodic. The device of equalizing
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the areas below and above trend, or predicting that a business index will turn once it deviates from the "normal" by some critical amount, is unlikely to score well because trends are difficult to determine on a current basis and need not have the connotation of "normal" or "equilibrium" levels even vvhen they are satisfactorily identified. Judgment, in the broad sense of the word, is, of course, a necessary ingredient of all types of prediction: the forecaster must "judge" what information and methods of analysis to use and how to interpret and evaluate the results. Thus, judgment is Dound to enter the forecasting process at various stages, but its proper role is to be a complement to, not a substitute for, a competent economic and statistical analysis. Informed judgment can go far in making forecasts more consistent and dependable, while pure guesswork can only rely on luck for success. It is well to recognize, however, that the ability to reach "good judgments" is not a well-defined, technical, transferable skill but rather a puzzling function of personal talent, experience, and training. Many economic forecasts, particularly from business sources, are not based on formal models and do not disclose the underlying assumptions and methods. Some are likely to be little more than products of intuition, yet most seem presently to take the specific form of numerical point forecasts. However, there is no general presumption that the informal judgmental forecasts are largely hunches; on the contrary, at least the better ones among them originate in the application of various analytical techniques as well as judgment to diverse and substantial bodies of information. Judgmental inferences from data samples and from any other evidence that the forecaster may have and regard as pertinent involve probability distributions. It would be informative and helpful for the appraisal of predictions if forecasters stated the odds they attach to the expected outcomes (the practice is frequent in weather forecasts, for example). The step from interval to distribution forecasting is, in principle, short. However, probabilistic distribution predictions appear to be regrettably rare in practical business and economic forecasting. After eliminating those forecasting procedures that have little relevance currently, the following seem to merit further discussion: (1) extrapolative techniques; (2) surveys of intentions or anticipations; (3) business cycle indicators; and (4) econometric models. Typically, forecasters are using one or another of these approaches, or more likely some combination of them, for the most part
tempering their results with considerable doses of "judgment." Extrapolations. The term "extrapolations" will be used here as a shorthand expression for "extrapolations of the past behavior of the series to be predicted." (The term is often applied in a broader sense to include projections of relationships between different variables, but such forecasts are more conveniently discussed under other headings—"econometric models" and to some extent also "business cycle indicators." To be sure, extrapolative elements can be combined with the others, as in an econometric model in which, say, xt is associated with both xt^ and yt-\ • ) Being restricted to the history of just one variable or process, extrapolations make only minimal or no use of economic theory, which deals largely with relations between different factors. Technically, however, extrapolations can vary a great deal, from very simple to very complicated forms. The simplest "naive models" project the last-known level or the last-known change in the series, that is, they assume that next period's value of the series will equal this period's value or that it will equal this period's value plus the change from the preceding to this period. Few, if any, forecasters would cast their predictions in the form of such crude extrapolations, but the naive models are useful as minimum standards against which to measure the performance of forecasts proper. Since trends are common in many economic time series because of the pervasive influence of growth in the economy, trend extrapolations usually provide more effective predictions and are therefore more demanding as criteria for forecast evaluation. Particularly in application to long-term forecasts, trend fittings and projections are widely used. The trends are usually conceived as smooth (often but not always monotonic) functions of time; the methods of describing them vary greatly, from visual freehand projections and long-period moving averages to diverse (for example, exponential, logistic) curves fitted by mathematical formulas. In the short-run context, the other typical components of economic time series become of primary importance, namely, the cyclical, seasonal, and purely "irregular" or random movements. (However, for some series, trends are substantial even over short periods, and in such cases it is especially rewarding for the forecaster to approximate them well.) [See TIME SERIES.] Strictly periodic, repetitive fluctuations are, like persistent trends, relatively easy to extrapolate: stable seasonal movements would often be more or less of this type. Average ratios of raw (say,
PREDICTION AND FORECASTING, ECONOMIC monthly) data to smoothed values of the series representing mainly the longer-term movements (a centered 12-month moving average is the simplest example) are most commonly employed as a set of "seasonal indexes." Extrapolations of these indexes then serve as forecasts of the seasonal movements. Since such movements are a major source of instability for business firms, their projection is particularly important in industrial and sales forecasting. Complications arise when the seasonal patterns are not very pronounced and not very stable, hence difficult to isolate from other component movements. Forecasters whose interest is mainly in the other movements often try to work around the seasonal effects by predicting changes in the seasonally adjusted series. This leaves the cyclical and irregular components as the major objects of concern for the shortterm forecaster. Looking forward, it is usually anything but easy to distinguish the cyclical from the random element in the movement of an economic time series, although retrospectively it is often possible to do so with fair results (by decomposing the time series and testing the residually obtained estimates of the irregular component for randomness). The forecasting errors that are directly traceable to very short random movements must be accepted as unavoidable. The forecaster can hardly be expected to predict an event generally regarded as unforeseeable, such as an outbreak of a war or a strike started without advance warning. However, although such "shocks" cannot themselves be predicted individually with the tools of economics and statistics, their more significant effects on the economy are, of course, the proper concern of the forecaster. In probabilistic predictions, which aim at the distribution of unknown parameters and outcomes rather than at point forecasts of future events, the effects of shocks and other random errors would be taken into account as an important part of the system to be analyzed. The role of random impulses in propagating business cycles has been given considerable attention in recent simulation studies of aggregative econometric models. [See SIMULATION, article on ECONOMIC PROCESSES.] For sequences of successive point predictions, which are the most common type of economic forecasts, the requirement of a good forecast is, in brief, that it predict well the systematic movements —trends and cycles—not that it predict perfectly the actual values of economic series, which, as a rule, contain random elements. Smoothing techniques can reveal the past patterns of systematic
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changes in the given series, and extrapolations can help the forecaster in his task to the extent that they preserve these patterns and to the extent that the patterns continue to apply. But, in regard to economic and related social events, the future seldom reproduces the past without significant modifications, and the historical "patterns" are often complex enough to elude efficient extrapolation. In particular, extrapolations are by and large incapable of signalizing the turning points in business. The turns in extrapolations will as a rule lag behind those in the actual values; the strength of a good projection lies almost entirely in that it may predict well the longer-term trends. This contributes to the fact that, along with the short random variations, it is the cyclical fluctuations, not the longer trends, that produce the greatest difficulties in short-term forecasting. These fluctuations are recurrent but nonperiodic; they vary greatly in duration and amplitude; and calling them cyclical should convey neither more nor less than that they reflect mainly the participation of the given economic factor in "the business cycle." Important mathematical studies of smoothing and extrapolation of time series (by A. Kolmogoroff and by Norbert Wiener) appeared in the early 1940s. The method of autocorrelation, or the extrapolation of a series by means of a correlation of the series with itself at different points of time, was added and related to the methods of trend projection and harmonic analysis of the residuals from trend. It is an essential feature of dynamic process analysis in economics that variables at different points of time are functionally (usually stochastically) related; this approach may result in difference equations which generate their own solutions, as in the multiplier-accelerator models that yield a dependence of the current value of national income on the past values of national income. Thus, there is a strain of theoretical thought here that suggests the use of autoregressive extrapolation functions in aggregate income forecasting. More recent developments have led to application of such functions in the analysis of how expectations are formed and how lagged adjustments are made. In particular, functions in which the weights decline geometrically as one goes back to progressively earlier past period values have been used in a variety of problems involving either expectation or partial adaptation to change. [See DISTRIBUTED LAGS.] Forecasts derived from such exponentially declining weighted averages were found to have certain desirable properties for a class of autoregressive time series. But these are
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"optimum" predictions only if the structure of the series is known to belong in the given class and only if the past values of the series are all that one has to go on. These conditions are seldom fulfilled or relevant. As one of the pioneers in econometric forecasting methods has observed: "Mathematical processing or analysis can never substitute for sophistication. And until one understands the forces that built a particular structure in an economic time series and how these forces are currently changing, he cannot forecast with confidence even though by chance he scores a preponderance of successes (Roos 1955, pp. 368-369). Surveys of anticipations or intentions. The collection and evaluation of expectational data for the U.S. economy did not develop on a large scale until after World War n, but since then work in this area has proceeded at a rapid pace. The data relate to future consumer expenditures, planned or anticipated capital outlays of business firms, business expectations about "operating variables," and government budget estimates. Reports dealing with purchases of household appliances and automobiles are published periodically by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. They currently include quarterly measures of consumer attitudes and inclinations to buy as well as annual financial data. Since 1959, a quarterly household survey has also been conducted by the Bureau of the Census. The surveys of business plans and anticipations relating to future expenditures on plant and equipment include one that is carried on annually and quarterly as a joint enterprise by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and another that is conducted annually by the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. Since 1955, a quarterly survey of new and unspent capital appropriations has been conducted by the National Industrial Conference Board. The oldest of the current surveys of businessmen's expectations in the United States is the Railroad Shippers' Forecast, which has given quarterly anticipations for carloadings by commodity since 1927. The Fortune magazine program, which started in the 1950s, includes surveys of "business expectations and mood," retail sales, farm spending, homebuilding, inventories, and capital goods production (all of these are now semiannual, except for the annual farm and the quarterly inventory surveys). Data on manufacturers' sales expectations have been gathered since 1948 in the course of the U.S. Department of CommerceSEC survey of investment anticipations; quarterly figures on manufacturers' sales and inventory ex-
pectations are now published regularly by the Department of Commerce in a program initiated in 1957. Two other sources of data on business expectations about operating variables can be grouped together inasmuch as their output takes the special form of "diffusion indexes." Such data indicate, for each successive forecast period, the percentage of respondents in the sample who expect either rises or declines or no change in the given variable. The Dun and Bradstreet surveys of manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers cover employment, inventories, prices, new orders, sales, and profits; they started in the 1950s, are quarterly, and refer in each case to businessmen's expectations for the impending six-month period. The monthly questionnaire of the National Association of Purchasing Agents, first issued in 1947, is addressed to participating members, covers production, new orders, commodity prices, inventories, and employment, and asks how the month ahead is going to compare with the preceding month (whether it will be better, worse, or the same). Surveys of enterprise expectations have also spread in other countries, originating apparently with the IFO-Institute for Economic Research in Munich at the beginning of 1950. This institute sends monthly questionnaires to a large number of companies in West Germany and on the basis of replies from executives compiles diffusion data on the actual and expected directions of change in several important economic variables. By 1959, eight European countries, as well as Japan, South Africa, and Australia, adopted methods of entrepreneurial surveys similar to the IFO procedure. Business expectations have been classified into intentions (plans for action where the firm can make binding decisions), market anticipations (relating to the interplay between the firm's actions and its environment), and outlook (expectations about conditions which the firm cannot significantly influence but which will affect the markets). To illustrate, new capital appropriations or plans regarding next year's outlays for plant and equipment fall into the first category, as does the scheduling over shorter periods of production and employment. The firm's sales forecast, which depends on customers' reaction to the terms offered, advertising efforts, etc., belongs to the second category, as do the expectations concerning financing, inventories, and selling prices (for firms that are not able to set their own prices). Finally, the class labeled "outlook" includes forecasts of the general situation of the economy or industry. Consumer intentions to buy are in principle akin
PREDICTION AND FORECASTING, ECONOMIC to business plans to acquire productive resources, but in practice they are often more vague and attitudinal and usually less firmly budgeted. Government budget estimates also represent intentions: they document what the central administration would undertake to spend for diverse specified purposes, subject to approval by the legislature. In government, as well as in many large business companies, the process of forming "expectations" or forecasts is often highly decentralized and complex, as is indeed the related process of reaching decisions. The distinction between intentions, market anticipations, and outlook is of significance for the question of the predictive value of expectational data. It is plausible that accuracy will tend to be higher the greater the degree of control that those holding the expectation have over the variable concerned. This suggests that intentions should be on the whole more accurate than market anticipations, and the outlook estimates should be the least accurate. There is some evidence consistent with this view, notably the fact that business anticipations of plant and equipment expenditures have a much better forecasting record than business sales anticipations (as shown by the U.S. Department of Commerce-SEC sample surveys). However, there are other relevant factors which can modify such comparisons, such as the variabilities of the predicted series (forecasts of a very stable aggregate, classifiable as outlook, may be better than market anticipations for a variable which is highly volatile and therefore difficult to predict) and span of forecast (surveys looking far enough ahead, even for largely "controllable" variables, will be more in the nature of market anticipations and less of intentions, and they could well be less accurate than outlook surveys for the very near future). Clearly, expectations of all kinds always involve some degree of uncertainty. They are presumably based in part on historical evidence, such as extrapolation of past behavior of the given series and inferences from observed relations with other series; but they are unlikely to incorporate only such evidence. As a result of expert insight or mere hunches, they may well include some additional information not contained in the patterns of the past. Hence, even where expectations are not very efficient when used alone as a direct forecast, they may still have a net predictive value as an ingredient in a forecasting process that combines expectational with other inputs. In long-run forecasting, informed judgment or expectations play a major role along with extrapolative techniques. In large part, these forecasts
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are growth projections, which have been described as tools for exploring economic potentials. They are not intended to provide predictions of actual conditions in a distant year but rather estimates of likely conditions under some specified assumptions regarded as more or less reasonable. Attempts are often made to allow for the uncertainties of the future by constructing alternative projections that assume several different paths of economic developments within the range considered plausible. These forecasts are thus essentially concerned with trends of the economy at full employment. The variables projected are typically population, labor force, hours of work, and productivity on the supply side; expenditures on the major GNP components on the demand side; income, saving, and investment; and price level movements (which are often only implicitly considered, the projections being expressed in constant dollars). Business cycle indicators. Business cycle indicators, which are used in analyzing and forecasting short-term economic developments, are time series selected for the relative consistency of their timing at cyclical revivals and recessions (other criteria being the economic significance of the series in relation to business cycles, their statistical adequacy, historical conformity to general movements of the economy, smoothness, and currency). The series are selected from large collections of quarterly and monthly economic series and then subjected to detailed analysis and repeated examinations of the quality of their performance as cyclical indicators. Such selections, based on studies of 500-800 series and successive reviews of the results, were made at the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1938 (by Mitchell and Burns), in 1950 and 1960 (by Geoffrey H. Moore), and in 1965 (by Moore and Shiskin). The first list included only indicators of cyclical revivals; the later ones covered indicators of both revivals and recessions, classified into those that tend to lead the turns in general business activity, those that tend to coincide roughly with these turns, and those that tend to lag. Further revisions and extensions of the list have been prompted by the appearance of new and improvement of old data, the accumulation of knowledge about the behavior of the series and the processes they represent, and the great increase in efficiency with which time series can be processed and analyzed. These reviews resulted in many significant changes, but the core of the list has not been essentially altered as to its composition in terms of the represented processes. In the most recent list, this core consists of the following: Leading indicators (14 series)—average work
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week in manufacturing, nonagricultural job placements, new building permits for private housing, net business formation, new orders for durable goods, contracts for plant and equipment; change in unfilled orders for durables, change in manufacturers' and trade inventories; industrial materials prices stock prices, corporate profits after taxes, ratio of price to unit labor costs in manufacturing; change in consumer installment debt, liabilities of business failures. Roughly coincident indicators (8 series)—nonagricultural employment, unemployment rate, GNP in constant dollars, industrial production, personal income, retail sales, manufacturing and trade sales, wholesale price index. Lagging indicators (6 series)—long-duration unemployment, book value of manufacturers' and trade inventories, labor cost per unit of output in manufacturing, business expenditures on new plant and equipment, bank rates on short-term business loans, commercial and industrial bank loans outstanding. While the selection is based mainly on historical evidence, it is also broadly supported by general economic considerations and logic. Thus the aggregative series on production, employment, and income measure approximately the general level of business or economic activity whose major fluctuations are defined as the business cycle; hence, these series could hardly fail to be "roughly coincident." The leaders include series that anticipate production and employment, such as hours worked, job vacancies, and new orders and contracts. For example, an increase in demand calling for additional labor input is likely to be met first by lengthening the work week and only later, if still needed, by hiring new workers (the former adjustment is less binding and costly than the latter). New orders precede production and employment by sizable intervals for goods made largely in response to prior offers or commitments to buy. Most durable manufactured goods belong in this category and, particularly, the capital equipment items which are as a rule produced to fill advance orders; construction of industrial and commercial plant is similarly anticipated by building contracts. The execution of these new investment orders and contracts takes time, however, and so the expenditures on plant and equipment is a roughly coincident or slightly lagging series. Another type of sequence arises from the fact that a stock series often undergoes retardation before reversal; hence the corresponding flow series (or rate of change in the stock) tends to turn ahead of the stock. Thus, inventory changes lead at busi-
ness cycle turns, while total inventories lag. Still other sequences are recognized when downturns in some indicators are related to upturns in others. For example, the decline in inventories lags behind, and is a possible consequence of, the downturns in the comprehensive measures of economic activity (such as GNP, industrial production, and retail sales); but the downturn in inventories also leads, and may be contributing to, the later upturns in these and other series (as the need for the stocks to be ultimately replenished will stimulate orders and help to bring about the next business recovery). Such considerations suggest that the coinciders and laggers are not merely of value as confirming indicators; some of them also play an active role as links in the continuous round of business cycle developments. In addition to the 28 series identified above, more than sixty other series are included in the full list of indicators of business expansions and contractions. Up-to-date charts and tabulations and various summary measures for the entire set of indicators have been published since 1961 by the Bureau of the Census in the monthly report Business Cycle Developments. The full list contains several related series for each type of economic process having significance for business cycle analysis and forecasting. Most of the series are monthly (less than 20 per cent are quarterly), and more than half of those classified by timing are leaders. Change in money supply, a series with long leads and rather pronounced irregular component movements, deserves a special reference in view of the hypothesis that this variable is a fundamental factor in initiating business downturns and upturns. The indicators are used mainly to reduce the lag in the recognition of cyclical turning points. The lead time provided by the indicators is, on the whole, short; often, especially when the economy reverses its course in a relatively abrupt manner, the best obtainable result seems to be to recognize the cyclical turning point at about the time it is reached. Even this is not a negligible achievement, however, since revivals and recessions are generally not recognized as such until several months after they have occurred. The greatest difficulty in using indicators for forecasting purposes arises from the need to establish on the current basis the direction in which these series are moving or the dates of their turning points. This is because the trend and cyclical movements in many indicators are typically overlaid and often obscured by other short-period variations, partly of a seasonal but mainly of an erratic nature. Seasonal adjustment and subsequent
PREDICTION AND FORECASTING, ECONOMIC smoothing of the series can help to distinguish its cyclical from its shorter irregular movements, but these are essentially descriptive-historical procedures which are not very efficient and which cause losses in up-to-dateness when applied currently. The leading indicators, in particular, are highly sensitive to all kinds of short-term influences and not only to the forces making for the general cyclical movements. They have anticipated marked retardations in business activity as well as the major recessions and revivals. Skilled (or lucky) judgment of the user could sometimes succeed in distinguishing between these different episodes, but no mechanical, replicable method of applying the indicators has been able to do so. Individual indicators occasionally fail to signalize the approach of a general business reversal, and their leads often vary a great deal in length from one recession or revival to another. The evidence of groups of indicators is considered to be on the whole more reliable than the evidence of any single indicator. Accordingly, the degree of consensus in the behavior of these series attracts considerable attention of business analysts and forecasters. Several measures of the consensus are in use, including diffusion and other composite indexes for groups of the indicator series. Econometric model forecasts. Aggregate econometric models are systems of equations designed to represent the basic quantitative relationships among, and the behavior over time of, such major economic variables as national income and product, consumption, investment, employment, and price level. Such models are used for forecasting and also for other purposes (simulation of the likely effects of alternative fiscal and monetary policies, tests of hypotheses, etc.). In recent years, intensive work in this area has been done in several universities and government agencies in the United States and abroad, notably by Lawrence R. Klein and his associates. The equations in econometric models describe the behavior of consumers, producers, investors, and other groups of economic agents; they also describe the market characteristics, institutional conditions, and technological requirements that guide and constrain economic action. They include variables selected to represent important systematic factors entering each of these functions and relate these variables by means of statistical estimates of their net marginal effects. The estimation of these unknown values (called parameters and taken, as a rule, to be constant) is based on the assumption that all the major factors affecting the relationship have been properly identified, leaving only random
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disturbances with expected values of zero. Ideally, the residual disturbance terms, which entail the net effect of all influences other than those of the specified explanatory variables, should be small, not serially correlated, and not associated with the systematic factors. In practice, the model builder hopes that the disturbances will be at least approximately random and relatively small, that is, that economic theory or other insights will lead him to a sufficiently good specification of a few principal determinants in each of these relationships. In contrast to these "stochastic" equations, which are supposed to hold only approximately, the remaining equations of the model are accounting "identities," which are based on definitions and are therefore supposed to hold exactly. The stochastic equations and the identities together form a description of the structure of the economy. The unknown variables that are to be determined by the model are called the jointly dependent or current endogenous variables; their number equals that of the equations in the complete system. To solve for these variables, each of them is expressed as a function of the estimated structural parameters, the disturbances, and the predetermined variables. The predetermined variables are inputs required by the model and consist of (a) the values of those variables (labeled exogenous) that are viewed as determined by factors outside the model; and (£>) the lagged values of the endogenous variables, which are given by outside estimates or by the past operation of the system. It is the jointly determined estimates of the current endogenous variables, all of which are functions of the predetermined variables with disturbances typically assumed to be zero, that represent the forecasting output or the "reduced form" of the model. If the predetermined variables are taken as given, say at their reported ex post values, forecasts made from the reduced form will be conditional upon these data. "Unconditional" forecasts of the jointly dependent variables will be obtained when the unknown future values of the predetermined variables are themselves predicted (which for the exogenous factors necessarily means prediction outside the model). A closely related distinction is between alternative hypothetical forecasts (for example, of GNP next year, assuming 5 or 7 or 10 per cent increases in government expenditures) and the single preferred forecast (that government expenditures will be up 7 per cent and GNP will be such and such). It follows that unconditional forecasts could have substantial errors because of wrong projections of
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exogenous variables, even if the specification and solution of the model were essentially correct. The accuracy of the conditional forecasts, on the other hand, depends (apart from any effects of errors in the data to which the equations are fitted) only on the errors that occur in the construction and solution of the model. These may arise for several different reasons: (1) incorrect specification of the behavioral or other economic relationships, that is, failure to use the right explanatory variables in their proper form; (2) deficient methods of statistical inference, for example, inability to measure well the separate effects of several closely interrelated exogenous variables; (3) errors in the parameter estimates resulting from sampling fluctuations, that is, from the presence of the disturbance terms which obscure the underlying relationships; and (4) discrepancies between predictions and realizations that result from the assumption that the disturbance terms vanish—in any particular period these terms may differ from zero, even though their expected values are zero. Statistical inferences as to the probabilistic meaning of the parameter estimates, the goodness of fit to the data in the sample period, the presence or absence of autocorrelation in the disturbance terms, etc., can be used to evaluate the severity of the errors resulting from sampling variations and the inefficiency of the estimation methods employed. As far as the appraisal of the model per se is concerned, however, misspecifications are clearly the decisive sources of error, and these are more difficult to detect and evaluate. Theoretical and other a priori considerations can tell us something about the correctness of some of a model's specifications; but the correctness of the specifications for the forecast period and not just the sample period must be judged primarily from the quality of the conditional forecasts made with a model that proved satisfactory on the other statistical tests just mentioned. The unit time period varies from a quarter to a year in different models; for the purpose of analyzing and forecasting near-term developments, short unit periods are desirable, and aggregate econometric models have recently progressed from annual to quarterly units. Models also vary greatly in size and complexity. One view is that simple small-scale models can be sufficient for forecasting the broad course of the economy in the near future and indeed that they may be preferable in this role to large models which present greater opportunities for error by taxing heavily the present inadequate knowledge and data. But, while small models with as few as five equations have recently been pro-
posed, the trend appears to be in the direction of ever larger and more complex systems. It should be noted that conditional forecasts of particular variables are sometimes obtained by econometricians from one-equation systems. If the equation is unlagged, it merely shifts the burden of prediction in that, to get an authentic ex ante forecast of the dependent variable, the independent variable(s) must somehow be predicted outside the model. If the dependent variable is taken with a lag, it can be predicted from the equation inasmuch as the earlier values of the explanatory factors are known or treated as known. The singleequation approach is strictly applicable only to cause—effect relations where one variable, say x, depends on others, yl, y.2, • • • , but the z/'s do not depend on x. If the variables depend on each other, a multiequation model should be applied. An econometric forecasting model can in principle be so constructed and annotated as to be available for production of successive forecasts, replication by users other than the authors of the model, and continuous inspection and testing. This possibility holds out the promise of scientific advance, but it is difficult to achieve in practice for complex models with large requirements in terms of data and methods, especially when the data and methods are themselves subject to frequent and substantial changes. Moreover, some econometric forecasters wish to use their models in a flexible manner, modifying them repeatedly so as to take advantage of additional information. Thus, anticipatory data from surveys, indicators, etc., are introduced into the models as exogenous variables, or judgment about the probable effects of a recent event is used to alter the constant term in an individual equation. Such modifications are often informal and sometimes unrecorded; they may (although they need not) improve any particular forecast, but they certainly increase the difficulty of replicating and evaluating the models. Input-output tables. Input-output analysis, which was developed by Wassily Leontief and first presented in 1941, involves a relatively detailed division of the commodity-producing sector of the economy into individual industries and estimation of the relations between these industries. In a statistical input-output table, each row shows the sales made by a given industry to every other industry, and each column shows what one industry purchased from every other industry. If the quantity of each input per unit of output is treated as a structural constant (which implies constant returns to scale and, a particularly drastic assumption, absence of substitution among inputs when relative
PREDICTION AND FORECASTING, ECONOMIC prices change), then a system of linear equations can be set up describing the interdependence between the outputs of the different industries by means of these "technical coefficients" of production. Such a model can be used to make conditional predictions of the values of industry outputs, given the estimates or projections of the "bill of goods," that is, of purchases by the autonomous sectors— consumers, government, and foreign countries. [See INPUT-OUTPUT ANALYSIS.] Evaluaton of forecasts Despite the widespread and apparently increasing use of economic forecasts in business, government, and research, surprisingly little has been done to test these forecasts in a systematic and comprehensive way. Yet it is clear that forecasts must be properly evaluated if their makers are to learn from past errors and if their users are to be able to discriminate intelligently among the available sources and methods. Without dependable assessments of forecasting accuracy, informed comparisons of costs and returns associated with forecasting are clearly impossible. Conceivably, the effectiveness of forecasts could be such as to complicate seriously their evaluation. Forecasts may influence economic behavior and, in particular, the variables being predicted; to the extent that this happens, the forecasts may validate or invalidate themselves. For example, if almost everyone predicted better economic conditions in the period ahead, this very consensus of optimistic expectations could contribute to the stimulation of the economy. Or, conversely, if the government accepted the forecast that the economy is threatened by recession, it would probably adopt policies designed to avert or at least postpone the undesired outcome initially foreseen. It is easy to exaggerate or misjudge such feedback effects. Of the limited theoretical work on the problem, some is highly abstract and speculative. The best result appears to negate the thesis that public announcements must necessarily invalidate an otherwise accurate prediction. Under some plausible assumptions (notably that the predicted variable has a lower and an upper bound), if unpublished forecasts can be accurate, so can published forecasts, because the reaction to them can conceptually be known and taken into account. Actually, the changes in GNP and other macrovariables that are predicted by different sources for any given period show sufficiently large dispersion to suggest that no single forecast is generally accepted (the evidence comes from a recent NBER study of American forecasts referred to below).
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For groups of forecasters, average forecasts are in the long run typically more accurate than most of the forecasts of the individual members because of compensating errors among the latter. Consistently superior forecasts are evidently hard to find. Some predictions are much more influential than others (and the special significance of official government forecasts is widely recognized), but there is no single authoritative source that enjoys unquestioned leadership. A careful appraisal of American business forecasts presented by Cox (1929) was one of the few early studies in this area. The years following World War u produced a number of particularly unsatisfactory forecasts (reflecting expectations of serious unemployment), which became the subject of some instructive reviews. Christ (see Conference on Business Cycles . . . 1951) published a test of an early econometric model constructed by Klein. Essays concerned with the development and appraisal of different forecasting approaches were collected in several volumes by the National Bureau of Economic Research (Conference on Models of Income Determination 1964; Conference on Research in Income and Wealth 1954; 1955; UniversitiesNational Bureau Committee for Economic Research I960; Moore 1961). In Europe, Henri Theil and his associates (1958) produced a major analysis of the methodology and quality of forecasts, directed to both business surveys and econometric models. A comprehensive study of accuracy and other properties of short-term forecasts of economic activity in the United States has been conducted since 1963 at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and several reports on methods and results of this evaluation have been prepared. Judging from the over-all results of most of these studies, the record of economic forecasters in general leaves a great deal to be desired, although it also includes some significant achievements and may be capable of further improvements. According to the current NBER study, the annual GNP predictions for 1953-1963 made by some three hundred to four hundred forecasters (company staffs and groups of economists from various industries, government, and academic institutions) had errors averaging $10 billion. Although this amounts to only about 2 per cent of the average level of GNP, the errors were big enough to make the difference between a good and a bad business year. The average annual change in GNP in this period was approximately $22 billion. Hence, the errors were, according to absolute averages, not quite one-half the size of those errors that would be produced by assuming that next year's GNP will be the same
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as last year's (since the error in assuming no change is equal to the actual change). Had the forecasters assumed that GNP would advance next year by the average amount it had advanced in the preceding postwar years, the resulting average error would not have been greater than $12 billion. However, while it is true that in terms of the absolute average errors some forecasts of GNP have not been significantly better than simple trend extrapolations, the forecasts were typically superior in terms of correlations with actual changes. In fact, recent forecasts of aggregate economic activity in the coming year, whether measured by GNP or industrial production, have generally been more accurate than both the simple extrapolations of the last level or change and the considerably more effective models of trend projection and autoregression. Forecasters, then, were able to make a net predictive contribution over and above what could be obtained by means of mechanical extrapolations alone. This is a favorable result that is by no means always attained—for example, simple trend projections would have done better than the recorded forecasts that envisaged a serious business depression in 1947-1948. It is not a major achievement, however, since the course of the economy has been relatively smooth in recent years and therefore, on the whole, probably less difficult to predict than the developments in the earlier part of the postwar period. In the decade after 1953, there were fewer and smaller exogenous "shocks" of the type represented, say, by the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Also, the timing of recent business downturns was early enough to make the presence of the recessions rather widely known by the ends of the peak years (1953, 1957, and 1960), and most forecasts are made at the end of the year. This, plus the presumption that the contractions would continue to be short, made predicting the direction of the year-to-year changes in aggregate economic activity relatively easy. By and large, the business economists' forecasts covered by this analysis are informal, eclectic, and framed loosely in terms of the GNP accounts. The econometric model forecasts for GNP in the years since 1953 appear to have been about as accurate as the better business forecasts. It must be noted, however, that very few ex ante econometric forecasts are available for such tests, since most of the models now in use have been constructed only in the last few years and their accuracy beyond the sample periods cannot as yet be evaluated with any confidence. The econometric forecasts that do lend themselves to this appraisal come mainly from a
series of closely related models used in a flexible manner, with many judgmental modifications. Many forecasts show a bias of underrating the growth of the economy; the declines are much less frequently underestimated than the increases. The charge that forecasters tend to be too cautious or conservative seems, in this sense, to be justified. Since such series as GNP or industrial production have strong upward trends, their future levels as well as their changes have been understated most of the time (underestimation of increases typically results in underestimation of the ensuing levels). Forecast errors are also affected by the cyclical characteristics of the forecast period. The levels of GNP and industrial production are underestimated most in the first year of expansion, when the increases in these series tend to be very large. Later in the expansions, when the increases are usually smaller, the levels are underestimated much less. In contractions, the predicted levels are as a rule too high, often because the downturn was missed and sometimes because the decline turned out to be larger than foreseen. The forecasts of total GNP are often substantially better, in the sense of having smaller percentage change errors, than the forecasts of most major GNP expenditure components from the same source. Apparently, the over-all forecasts benefit from a partial cancellation of errors in forecasts of the components. This is definitely preferable to the opposite case of positively correlated and mutually reinforcing errors, but gross inaccuracies in the component forecasts are, of course, disturbing, even if these errors happen to be largely compensating. Errors in predicting percentage changes in personal consumption expenditures are considerably smaller than those in corresponding forecasts of gross private domestic investment, while errors in predicting government spending are of intermediate size. Consumption forecasts have suffered from a pronounced tendency toward underestimation. In contrast, changes in series that fluctuate more and grow less strongly, notably the components of investment, have been as often overestimated as underestimated. Although the errors of consumption forecasts are smaller than those for the other major GNP components when measured in deviations of percentage changes, they are large relative to the errors of some extrapolations. The consumption series, including those for nondurable goods and services, are smoothly growing series that could have been predicted very well in recent years by simple trend projections; and, indeed, the average
PREDICTION AND FORECASTING, ECONOMIC errors of the latter have often been smaller than those of recorded consumption forecasts. Aggregation of short-term expectations or plans of business concerns about their outlays on plant and equipment, as developed in periodic intentions surveys, results in better predictions of total business capital expenditures than those made independently for the entire economy. This can be inferred from comparisons between investment forecasts made before and after the McGraw-Hill investment intentions survey and also from comparisons involving the U.S. Department of Commerce-SEC anticipations data. The average accuracy of short-term forecasts diminishes as they reach further into the future: the various series covered are all predicted better over the next three months than over the next six and better over six months than over nine or twelve. However, the errors increase less than proportionately to the extension of the span. Most extrapolations also tend to worsen with the lengthening of their span, and the simplest among them (the naive models) usually show the fastest deterioration. While forecasts of three to nine months (which includes the annual forecasts whose average spans are little more than six months) are generally superior to all kinds of extrapolations, the longer forecasts, which aim at targets 12 to 18 months ahead, are often worse than some of the relatively efficient types of trend projections and autoregressive extrapolations. Conditional forecasts from formal models appear to produce errors that are similarly related to the time span of prediction. Thus, a recent analysis of input-output tables for the Netherlands during the period 1949-1958 concluded that predictions based on this method were on the whole better than extrapolations when the tables used were less than two or three years older than the extrapolation data. The input-output forecasts of industry output values for three or more years ahead (given the actual final demand schedules) proved inferior to the results of some fairly simple mechanical extrapolations. Forecasts made frequently for sequences of two or more short intervals (for example, quarterly, for four successive quarters each) are more relevant for an appraisal of turning-point errors than are the annual forecasts, and they present a rather unfavorable picture. There are very few indications in the record of an ability to forecast turning dates several months ahead. Not only were actual turns missed, but some turns were predicted that did not occur. Reports by observers of the economic scene in business and financial periodicals are consistent
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with this finding in that they commonly show substantial lags in recognizing revivals and recessions. Business cycle indicators have at times demonstrably reduced these lags for competent users, but they also occasionally gave signals of retardations or minor declines that were misread as forewarning recession. Multiperiod forecasts also provide data that lend themselves to an analysis of forecast revisions, that is, changes in predictions for a given target period made at dates successively closer to that period. These revisions do tend to improve the forecasts in most cases, and they appear to be related to errors in previous forecasts. Positive correlations between forecast revisions and errors of forecast have been interpreted as evidence of "adaptive behavior," or "learning from past errors." Such correlations, however, could also be due to autoregressive elements in some forecasts, since they are implied in fixedweight autoregressive extrapolations. Better statistical data and better utilization of the historical content of the predicted series could lead to significant improvements of the forecasts (as indicated, in particular, by the relative success of some types of extrapolations in predicting consumption and also price levels). Improvements in the record-keeping practices of forecasters are definitely needed. The records should include the estimates of the level of the series at the time the forecast was made, as errors in these base values are as a rule substantial and their measurability is important for the appraisal of forecasts. VICTOR ZARNOWITZ [Directly related are the entries BUSINESS CYCLES; ECONOMETRIC MODELS, AGGREGATE; SURVEY ANALYSIS, article on APPLICATIONS IN ECONOMICS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADELMAN, IRMA; and ADELMAN, FRANK L. 1959 The Dynamic Properties of the Klein—Goldberger Model. Econometrica 27:596-625. ALEXANDER, SIDNEY S. 1958 Rate of Change Approaches to Forecasting: Diffusion Indexes and First Differences. Economic Journal 68:288-301. ALEXANDER, SIDNEY S.; and STEKLER, H. O. 1959 Forecasting Industrial Production: Leading Series Versus Autoregression. Journal of Political Economy 67:402— 409. ALMON, SHIRLEY 1965 The Distributed Lag Between Capital Appropriations and Expenditures. Econometrica 33:178-196. BARGER, HAROLD; and KLEIN, LAWRENCE R. 1954 A Quarterly Model for the United States Economy. Journal of the American Statistical Association 49:413437. BASSIE, V. LEWIS 1958 Economic Forecasting. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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BRATT, ELMER C. (1940) 1961 Business Cycles and Forecasting. 5th ed. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. BUTLER, WILLIAM F.; and KAVESH, ROBERT A. (editors) 1966 How Business Economists Forecast. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. CHRIST, CARL F. 1956 Aggregate Econometric Models: A Review Article. American Economic Review 46: 385-408. CLARK, COLIN 1949 A System of Equations Explaining the United States Trade Cycle, 1921 to 1941. Econometrica 17:93-124. COLM, GERHARD 1955 Economic Barometers and Economic Models. Review of Economics and Statistics 37:55-62. COLM, GERHARD 1958 Economic Projections: Tools of Economic Analysis and Decision Making. American Economic Review 48, no. 2:178-187. CONFERENCE ON BUSINESS CYCLES, NEW YORK, 1949 1951 Conference on Business Cycles. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. -> See especially pages 35—129 for Carl F. Christ's article and comments by Milton Friedman et al.; see pages 339-374 for Ashley Wright's article. CONFERENCE ON MODELS OF INCOME DETERMINATION, CHAPEL HILL, 1962 1964 Models of Income Determination. Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol. 28. Princeton Univ. Press. CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN INCOME AND WEALTH 1954 Long-range Economic Projection. Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol. 16. Princeton Univ. Press. CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN INCOME AND WEALTH 1955 Short-term Economic Forecasting. National Bureau of Economic Research, Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol. 17. Princeton Univ. Press. CORNFIELD, JEROME; EVANS, W. DUANE; and HOFFENBERG, MARVIN 1947 Full Employment Patterns, 1950. Monthly Labor Review 64:163-190, 420-432. Cox, GARFIELD V. (1929) 1930 An Appraisal of American Business Forecasts. Rev. ed. Univ. of Chicago Press. DUESENBERRY, JAMES S.; ECKSTEIN, OTTO; and
FROMM,
GARY 1960 A Simulation of the United States Economy in Recession. Econometrica 28:749-809. DUESENBERRY, JAMES S. et al. (editors) 1965 The Brookings Quarterly Econometric Model of the United States. Chicago: Rand McNally. EISNER, ROBERT 1963 Investment: Fact and Fancy. American Economic Review 53:237-246. PELS, RENDIGS 1963 The Recognition-lag and Semiautomatic Stabilizers. Review of Economics and Statistics 45:280-285. [Forecasting.] 1954 Journal of Business 27, no. 1. Foss, MURRAY F.; and NATRELLA, Vrro 1957 Ten Years' Experience With Business Investment Anticipations. Survey of Current Business 37, no. 1:16-24. GORDON, ROBERT A. 1962 Alternative Approaches to Forecasting: The Recent Work of the National Bureau. Review of Economics and Statistics 44:284— 291. GRUNBERG, EMILE,- and MODIGLIANI, FRANCO 1954 The Predictability of Social Events. Journal of Political Economy 62:465-478. HART, ALBERT G. 1965 Capital Appropriations and the Accelerator. Review of Economics and Statistics 47: 123-136. JORGENSON, DALE W. 1963 Capital Theory and Investment Behavior. American Economic Review 53:247259.
KLEIN, LAWRENCE R.; and GOLDBERGER, A. S. 1955 An Econometric Model of the United States: 1929-1952. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. KLEIN, LAWRENCE R. et al. 1961 An Econometric Model of the United Kingdom. Oxford: Blackwell. LEWIS, JOHN P. 1962 Short-term General Business Conditions Forecasting: Some Comments on Method. Journal of Business 35:343-356. LlEBENBERG, MAURICE; HlRSCH, ALBERT A.; and
POPKIN,
JOEL 1966 A Quarterly Econometric Model of the United States: A Progress Report. Survey of Current Business 46, no. 5:13-39. Liu, TA-CHUNG 1963 An Exploratory Quarterly Econometric Model of Effective Demand in the Postwar U.S. Economy. Econometrica 31:301-348. MAKER, JOHN E. 1957 Forecasting Industrial Production. Journal of Political Economy 65:158-165. MARQUARDT, WILHELM; and STRIGEL, WERNER 1959 Der Konjunkturtest: Eine neue Methode der Wirtschaftsbeobachtung. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. MODIGLIANI, FRANCO; and COHEN, KALMAN J. 1961 The Role of Anticipations and Plans in Economic Behavior and Their Use in Economic Analysis and Forecasting. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois. MODIGLIANI, FRANCO; and WEINGARTNER, H. M. 1958 Forecasting Uses of Anticipatory Data on Investment and Sales. Quarterly Journal of Economics 72:23-54. MOORE, GEOFFREY H. (editor) 1961 Business Cycle Indicators. 2 vols. National Bureau of Economic Research, Studies in Business Cycles, No. 10. Princeton Univ. Press. NATIONAL PLANNING ASSOCIAHON 1959 Long-range Projections for Economic Growth: The American Economy in 1970. Planning Pamphlet No. 107. Washington: The Association. NERLOVE, MARC 1962 A Quarterly Econometric Model for the United Kingdom: A Review Article. American Economic Review 52:154-176. NERLOVE, MARC 1966 A Tabular Survey of Macro-econometric Models. International Economic Review 7:127175. NEWBURY, FRANK D. 1952 Business Forecasting: Principles and Practices. New York: McGraw-Hill. OKUN, ARTHUR M. 1959 A Review of Some Economic Forecasts for 1955-1957. Journal of Business 32:199211. OKUN, ARTHUR M. 1960 On the Appraisal of Cyclical Turning-point Predictions. Journal of Business 33: 101-120. OKUN, ARTHUR M. 1962 The Predictive Value of Surveys of Business Intentions. American Economic Review 52, no. 2:218-225. PASHIGIAN, B. PETER 1964 The Accuracy of the Commerce-S.E.C. Sales Anticipations. Review of Economics and Statistics 46:398-405. PERSONS, WARREN M. 1931 Forecasting Business Cycles. New York: Wiley. PROCHNOW, HERBERT V. (editor) 1954 Determining the Business Outlook. New York: Harper. Roos, CHARLES F. 1955 Survey of Economic Forecasting Techniques. Econometrica 23:363-395. SHISKIN, JULIUS 1961 Signals of Recession and Recovery: An Experiment With Monthly Reporting. National Bureau of Economic Research, Occasional Paper No. 77. New York: The Bureau. SPENCER, MILTON H.; CLARK, C. G.; and HOGUET, P. W. 1961 Business and Economic Forecasting: An Econometric Approach. Homewood, 111.: Irwin.
PREJUDICE: The Concept STEKLER, HERMAN O. 1961a Diffusion Index and First Difference Forecasting. Review of Economics and Statistics 43:201-208. STEKLER, HERMAN O. 1961k Forecasting Industrial Production. Journal of the American Statistical Association 56:869-877. STEKLER, HERMAN O. 1962 A Simulation of the Forecasting Performance of the Diffusion Index. Journal of Business 35:196-200. SUITS, DANIEL B. 1962 Forecasting and Analysis With an Econometric Model. American Economic Review 52:104-132. THEIL, HENRI (1958) 1961 Economic Forecasts and Policy. 2d ed. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. THEIL, HENRI 1966 Applied Economic Forecasting. Chicago: Rand McNally. TINBERGEN, JAN 1938-1939 Statistical Testing of Business-cycle Theories. 2 vols. Geneva: League of Nations, Economic Intelligence Service. -> Volume 1: A Method and Its Application to Investment Activity. Volume 2: Business Cycles in the United States of America: 1919-1932. UNIVERSITIES-NATIONAL BUREAU COMMITTEE FOR ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1960 The Quality and Economic Significance of Anticipations Data: A Conference. Princeton Univ. Press. ZARNOWITZ, VICTOR 1967 An Appraisal of Short-term Economic Forecasts. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research.
PREHISTORY See ARCHEOLOGY; DOMESTICATION; HISTORY, article on CULTURE HISTORY; HUNTING AND GATHERING, articles on OLD WORLD PREHISTORIC SOCIETIES and NEW WORLD PREHISTORIC SOCIETIES; URBAN REVOLUTION; and the biographies of BREUIL and CHILDE. PREJUDICE Otto Klineberg J. Milton Yinger
i. THE CONCEPT 11. SOCIAL DISCRIMINATION I THE CONCEPT
The English term "prejudice" and its equivalents in many other European languages (French prejuge; German Vorurteil; Portuguese preconcetto} refer primarily to a prejudgment or a preconcept reached before the relevant information has been collected or examined and therefore based on inadequate or even imaginary evidence. In contemporary social science this notion has been retained but is usually regarded as constituting only one aspect of the complex phenomenon of prejudice, namely, the conceptual, or cognitive, aspect—the ideas or opinions we have about those individuals or groups who are the objects of such prejudgment. (The term "stereotype" is usually applied to this aspect.) Prejudice also involves an attitude for or
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against, the ascription of a positive or negative value, an affective, or feeling, component. Usually there is in addition a readiness to express in action the judgments and feelings which we experience, to behave in a manner which reflects our acceptance or rejection of others: this is the conative, or behavioral, aspect of prejudice. (The resulting actions are also described as representing varying degrees of discrimination.') Prejudice may therefore be denned as an unsubstantiated prejudgment of an individual or group, favorable or unfavorable in character, tending to action in a consonant direction. Social science research has joined with popular usage in introducing two limitations to this concept. In the first place, favorable prejudices, although they undoubtedly exist, have attracted relatively little attention, perhaps on the principle that they do good rather than harm. It might, however, legitimately be argued that even favorable prejudices should be discouraged, since they too represent unwarranted generalizations, often of an irrational nature. Second, although prejudice may extend far and wide to apply to objects as disparate as trade-union leaders, women, or exotic foods, in practice it has been considered as dealing primarily —if not exclusively—with populations or ethnic groups distinguished by the possession of specific inherited physical characteristics ("race"), or by differences in language, religion, culture, national origin, or any combination of these. This article, therefore, will be primarily concerned with ethnic prejudice. The Italian anthropologist Ten tori takes approximately this position when he defines prejudice as the "negative perception of human groups culturally different from ourselves" (1962, p. 14); but the limitation to perception on the one hand and to cultural differences on the other makes the concept considerably narrower than that which is here proposed. The term "ethnic group" is used in preference to the more popular "race" as the object of prejudice, first because of the difficulty of adequately defining the latter term so that it may safely be applied to human populations, and second because of the even more important fact that the populations against whom prejudice may be directed do not usually satisfy the criteria of "race" proposed by physical anthropologists and geneticists. The phenomenon here being considered can be interpreted in terms of "race" in the case of the apartheid policy of the South African government, although even here the extension of the same attitudes and the same degree of discrimination to Africans, to the mixed "Coloureds," and to Indians (usually
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classed by anthropologists with Caucasians) indicates the lack of consistency in this respect. American attitudes toward the Negro diverge from "race" relations in the true sense to the extent that persons who are genetically almost completely "white" may not be so considered if they have any degree of Negio admixture. Elsewhere other criteria of differentiation may play the dominant role. In Canada, Belgium, and India hostilities appear to follow mainly linguistic lines; in Malaysia the demarcation is due primarily to national origin, and comparable situations are found in many other regions where immigration has been extensive. In Lebanon, Nigeria, and the Sudan, religious differences are also important, as they are in part at least in the case of anti-Semitism; in Brazil and Mexico cultural (and class) factors predominate, so that the word indio is restricted to those who have remained culturally Indian, and there appears to be complete acceptance of those Indians who have become "acculturated." To speak of "race relations" in such contexts is clearly incorrect, and use of the expression "sociological races" to cover these cases —because the groups concerned are treated as if they were "races"—simply perpetuates an unfortunate and misleading terminology. In his valuable treatment of the nature of prejudice, G. W. Allport states that "Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge" (1954, p. 9). This criterion of prejudice appears to go too far. Granted that prejudice is difficult to remove, it surely cannot be assumed that if and when it has been removed by new knowledge it could not really have been prejudice in the first place. The question of the use of information to reduce prejudice will be discussed below as part of the wider problem of determining what methods and techniques are most effective in this connection. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of prejudice as a problem for the social sciences. The hostility which prejudice engenders and the discrimination to which it may lead on the part of the dominant population toward other ethnic groups or minorities have caused so much human damage (the Nazi period represents perhaps the most drastic example) that it is hardly surprising that so many specialists in these disciplines have directed their energies toward understanding and control of this form of social pathology. Particularly but by no means exclusively in the United States, the problem has not only aroused general concern but has also been seen as a research challenge by psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, lawyers, edu-
cators, and others whose professional activities are concerned with human behavior. This has been not only out of humanitarian motives but also out of conviction that the very life of a community may be at stake. The concern has been deepened by the realization that what happens inside a country may also have significant international repercussions. The apartheid policy has implications far outside the confines of South Africa; the American treatment of Negroes affects the image and the leadership of the United States throughout the world. Nor is prejudice a monopoly of the whites. The emergence of new nations has to a certain degree brought with it what has sometimes been called racism in reverse, an antiwhite attitude on the part of darker-skinned peoples. The philosophy of negritude, developed by French-speaking Africans and West Indians, has stressed the values inherent in African culture, but it has by no means always been free of aggressive overtones (Thomas 1963). Prejudice and ethnic hostilities constitute a major danger to peace both within a nation and among nations. The causes of prejudice The fact that prejudice is so widespread has led to a popular belief that it is inevitable and universal. Even among social scientists the view has occasionally been expressed that human nature involves a "dislike of the unlike," although what is "unlike" has never been adequately defined; or it has been suggested that "in-group" feelings are invariably accompanied by dislike of the "out-group," but this, too, has never been demonstrated. A German social psychologist, Hofstatter, has suggested (1954) that one must accept the fact that prejudice against members of other groups represents a "normal" phenomenon of human social life and that no one is free from this attitude. This appears to be an extreme and unjustified conclusion. Individuals and groups vary so tremendously in the extent to which they show prejudice that any attempt to explain it in terms of a universal human nature fails to carry conviction. The full acceptance of Orientals by most whites in Hawaii and their relative rejection in California or British Columbia is difficult to reconcile with such a theory. The further fact that the most intimate degrees of association, including intermarriage or miscegenation, have occurred to such an extent that most anthropologists deny the existence of "pure races" argues that prejudice cannot be universal. Finally, its absence in young children, even though they may acquire it relatively early in life from their social environment, argues that learning rather than na-
PREJUDICE: The Concept ture plays the dominant role in its development (Harding et al. 1954). Derivations from psychoanalysis. One view of the universality of prejudice seems to derive from an erroneous interpretation of psychoanalytic theory. This theory, particularly in its orthodox form, regards hostility or aggression (Freud's Thanatos) as instinctive and universal; prejudice would then be simply one manifestation of this instinct. Not all psychoanalysts would accept this formulation, but even those who do would add that although aggression must manifest itself in some form, there is no one form (for example, prejudice) which must be regarded as inevitable. There is still considerable argument as to whether hostile aggression is universal, but in any case it can be expressed in so many different ways that inference to the universality of prejudice remains exceedingly doubtful. Frustration-aggression theory. A variant of this view is found in the well-known frustrationaggression theory (Dollard et al. 1939), which in its original formulation argued that frustration always leads to aggression and that aggression is always due to frustration. An impressive array of clinical and experimental evidence was marshaled in favor of this position, and there can be no doubt that it has contributed to an understanding of the problem. The fact remains, however, that even if aggression is reactive rather than primary, the same objection holds—namely, that no one manifestation of aggression is necessarily implied and that the specific phenomenon of prejudice requires some further explanation. There is, therefore, circularity in the argument which holds that hostility must be expressed and that when a group like the Negroes is indicated by society as a legitimate object for such hostility, it can then be safely directed by the whites in this accepted fashion. The circularity occurs by taking for granted the very phenomenon that the theory sets out to explain: if society indicates that hostility may with impunity be directed against the Negro, that hostility must have been there to start with. It is not surprising that in later formulations of the theory the role of learning is given a prominent place (Miller & Dollard 1941) in determining the specific nature of the behavior that follows frustration. Prejudice as a learned behavior. Prejudice may certainly be learned; it is through (mainly unconscious) learning that a child acquires and incorporates the prejudices prevalent in his society. Research has shown that in the early years there is a close relation between the ethnic attitudes of parents and children; somewhat later the correspondence is rather between teachers and their pupils.
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The representation of minority groups in the mass media may also play a part in reinforcing, if not in creating, the current attitudes. Most significant, in all probability, is the role of social factors and institutions which emphasize lines of demarcation between ethnic groups—segregation, whether de jure as in South Africa or de facto as in many North American cities, in connection with housing and education; "exclusive" clubs or resorts; churches limited to one ethnic group; restrictions on enrollment in certain colleges or universities; limitations on advancement to executive positions in industry; and discrimination in employment generally. These and similar phenomena serve as constant reminders that they are not like us. It is in this sense that discrimination causes prejudice as well as the other way around. As Myrdal pointed out in connection with the American Negro, the relation is a circular one: "White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in turn, gives support to White prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually 'cause' each other . . ." (1944, p. 75). Unimportance of contact. One form of learning turns out to be less important in causing prejudice or hostile attitudes than is usually believed, namely, that resulting from actual contact with other ethnic groups. It may of course happen that an extremely dramatic or traumatic experience—such as being attacked on a lonely street or being saved from drowning by a member of a particular ethnic group —may result in a generalization regarding the characteristics of the group concerned; it may also happen that repeated experiences of a similar nature may create, and even appear to justify, such a generalized attitude. Research has shown, however, that such experiences are not necessary for prejudices to develop. In one study, students showed a high degree of "social distance" from Turks, even though most of them had never seen a Turk. Other students rejected imaginary groups, such as the Wallonians, Danireans, and Pirenians, even though no one could have had any unpleasant experiences with any representatives of these nonexistent populations (Hartley 1946). Contact and experience may cause prejudice to develop, but they probably play no important role in many cases. Role of language. It has been suggested that prejudices may also be learned through the linguistic habits of a community. The common association in many parts of the world between "white" and purity or honor ("that is white of you") and between "black" and dirt or evil ("he has a black heart") may create attitudes that are difficult to
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overcome. Less clear in their impact are expressions such as "to jew him down"; "nigger in the woodpile"; the Chinese reference to Europeans as "foreign devils"; the French ivre comme un polonais; or the Italian fare il portoghese, said when one enters a streetcar or a theater without paying. Ro^ts of the tradition. All of these aspects of learning are important, but they are limited in their implications to the acquisition of attitudes already current in the community. They help us to understand the development of prejudice in children as they become "socialized" and absorb the prevailing cultural traditions. They leave open the question (as in connection- with the frustration—aggression hypothesis discussed above) as to how the tradition of prejudice arose in the first place. Fear of the stranger. Ethnological accounts of preliterate peoples have indicated with some frequency a fear of the stranger and the development of hostility as a consequence. This is by no means universal, however; Hooton even considered it relatively rare. He wrote: "Primitive people are probably not race conscious to the deplorable or laudable extent which is characteristic of civilized populations. I mean that they are rather naively free from race prejudice until they have learned it from bitter experience. The American Indian was ready to take the European literally to his arms until he found out that a civilized embrace was inevitably throttling" (1937, p. 143). Historical factors. In the form in which prejudice is found in contemporary cultures, many different contributing influences may be recognized, all of which have a relatively long history. From the viewpoint of the whites, the facts of slavery and colonization must at least have reinforced— if they did not create—the notion of a racial hierarchy, with the darker peoples occupying an inferior position. Sometimes this went so far, as in the case of certain Spanish writers during the conquest of America, as to deny to American Indians the same humanity as that of their conquerors; more mildly, but with somewhat the same consequences, the British spoke of the "white man's burden" and the French of their mission civilisatrice, often expressed with the utmost sincerity but clearly implying the superiority of white culture and white people. Historical factors are of great importance in this connection, and the contribution of the historian is needed at various points in this analysis. In some parts of the world relations between ethnic groups have taken a much more favorable turn, and prejudice has played only a minor role. In Hawaii, for example, Adams (1937) indicates that when white
men served as advisers to the king, they were occasionally honored by receiving permission to marry ladies of the court. This set a pattern of ethnic friendliness which was later extended to other groups as well. It became impossible to set up any strict "racial" line because so many members of prominent families had intermarried. In the case of Brazil, where there is some degree of prejudice that tends to follow class lines but only a fraction of that found elsewhere, Freyre (1933) suggests a number of reasons for the relatively more friendly attitude. In the first place, the Portuguese who settled in Brazil had had centuries of contact with darker-skinned conquerors, namely the Moors, which predisposed them to a friendly and even respectful attitude. They developed an attraction for the "enchanting Mooress" which was extended to other women of darker complexion, thus encouraging intermarriage with Indian and later with Negro women. This was facilitated by the fact that Portuguese men migrated to Brazil for the most part without their families, in contrast to the settlers in most of North America. In addition, the fact that Brazil liberated its slaves peaceably and not as a consequence of civil war undoubtedly contributed to an earlier and smoother transition to a new relationship. Clearly, the history of ethnic contacts within a particular country helps to account for the pattern of acceptance or rejection prevalent today. Religious factors. In the case of one variety of prejudice which in recent times has been exhibited in the most virulent and extreme form, namely anti-Semitism, it seems clear that in its origins religious considerations have played a dominant role. (Negro slavery, too, has been justified by an appeal to the Bible.) The story of the New Testament as told to succeeding generations of children has left an imprint of ancient Jewish wickedness which has frequently been extended to the Jewish group as a whole (Clock & Stark 1966). This is true to some extent even in religious teaching today, although many attempts are being made to present a less biased and more objective picture (Olson 1963). [See ANTI-SEMITISM.] Religious identification may be relatively less significant to most people now than it was in the Middle Ages, but the climate of opinion created by past teaching is removed with difficulty even when circumstances have changed. Here, as elsewhere, the strength of "social lag"—the continuance of institutions and traditions even when they are no longer appropriate—is not to be discounted. Nationalism. Another significant factor associated with prejudice is the growth of nationalism
PREJUDICE: The Concept and of feelings of national identity. Huxley and Haddon wrote: "A 'nation' has been cynically but not inaptly defined as a 'society united by a common error as to its origin and a common aversion to its neighbours' " (1936, p. 5). This aversion may be directed to different objects, and as has already been indicated social identity may be attached to a variety of characteristics, including language, religion, or any other symbol of demarcation. National identification is glorified as a means to social solidarity, to participation in a common enterprise, and to "belonging." Unfortunately, however, a "healthy" nationalism easily moves into an exaggerated chauvinism which is not only for "us" but against "them." Considerable research has indicated that this kind of hypernationalism is usually accompanied by ethnocentric prejudice (Adorno et al. 1950). Why it has developed in certain regions and at certain times, and why it has taken one form rather than another, are questions difficult to answer. Economic factors. The analysis of the causes of prejudice has so far stressed the historical process related to ideas of "race," religion, and nationalism and to the manner in which the resulting patterns of prejudice and hostility are "taught" to individuals. Research clearly indicates, however, that learning occurs most readily and most efficiently when it is motivated and when it is accompanied by certain satisfactions which reinforce the learning process. In the case of prejudice, perhaps the most important reinforcement comes from the gains that appear to result, the practical ends to which prejudice and discrimination may lead. Among these ends, it is highly probable that economic gain plays a dominant role; for some theorists (Marxists or economic determinists) it constitutes the single significant factor. Prejudice and discrimination enable the dominant group to maintain others in a state of subservience, to exploit them, to treat them as slaves or serfs, to reduce their power to compete on equal terms for jobs, and to keep them "in their place." Gains and advantages other than economic may also enter, however. There may be a gain in status or prestige, permitting the humblest member of the dominant group to feel superior to the most successful among those who belong to the minority or to rejoice, through identification with his nation, in the subjugation of others through colonization, even when the consequence is economic loss rather than profit. There may be a gain from the point of view of self-image when, in times of misfortune or adversity, the blame can be placed on outsiders who serve as scapegoats; it is they, not we, who are responsible.
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Finally, less important today than in the past, there may be a sexual gain, when men of the dominant group have access to women of the minority, often with severely enforced taboos against the reverse relationship. Rationalization. One of the striking aspects of the use of prejudice and discrimination as means toward these practical goals is that the underlying motive is so rarely recognized. Psychoanalysis has made us all familiar with the mechanism of rationalization, which in this context is characterized by the tendency to persuade ourselves that our actions stem from the loftiest ethical and even religious considerations rather than from anything as base as the desire for gain. This was briefly mentioned above in connection with the "white man's burden" and similar formulations. They, whom we keep in an inferior position, are happier than they would be otherwise; they, whom we persecute because of their beliefs, can be saved only if they accept the true (that is to say, our) religion; they, whom we destroy, are planning to destroy us, and we are simply exercising the right to protect ourselves. It is arguments like these, presented in all sincerity, which so often in the past, and not so rarely in the present, have given to men the conviction that what they are doing is somehow noble and beautiful and that, in Hooton's telling phrase, they "can rape in righteousness and murder in magnanimity" (1937, p. 151). Personality structure. The fact remains that under the same cultural conditions, surrounded by the same institutions and tempted by the same desire for gain, some people show prejudice and others do not. This has suggested that the key to the development of prejudice may be found in personality, and an extensive amount of research has been directed toward this aspect of the problem. The most important single study is undoubtedly The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1950). One major finding was a verification of the results of earlier research indicating that prejudices tend to go together: those individuals who disliked Jews were also likely to dislike Negroes, Mexicans, and "foreigners" in general. The use of a series of scales or questionnaires demonstrated a positive correlation between ethnocentrism and (a) politicoeconomic conservatism, (b) chauvinism (labeled "pseudopatriotism"), and (c) "fascism" as measured by the F-scale. The F-scale has been widely used in subsequent research, and some serious methodological questions have been raised about its application—for example, the failure to take into account the tendency of certain subjects to answer the questions in an "acquiescent" direction,
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the fact that higher education and socioeconomic status are negatively correlated with the scale, and so on. On the whole however, the F-scale is considered to have made a valuable contribution toward the understanding of the prejudiced personality. It has also been applied with interesting results in countries other than the United States (Christie & Cook 1958). The ethnocentric personality. More intensive analysis of prejudiced individuals, conducted as part of the same study, has indicated the following pattern of characteristics: the ethnocentric person is a conformist; he sees the world as menacing and unfriendly; he exalts his own group; he is fundamentally anxious and insecure; he blames others for his own faults and misfortunes; he appears to worship his parents but has strong repressed hostility toward them; he divides the world into the weak and the strong, has a well-developed concern for status, and is willing to obey those above him in the status hierarchy but demands obedience from those below. (Some aspects of this description suggest that the prejudiced person is pathological. This interpretation is justified in some cases but certainly not in all; it is only when authoritarianism is extreme that the inference of psychological maladjustment becomes reasonable.) A major criticism of this important study is its relative neglect of social and cultural factors. Research has shown that groups may be high in ethnocentrism if their culture includes lines of demarcation strictly enforced by custom or by law, as in South Africa or the southern United States, without being particularly "authoritarian" (Pettigrew 1958). The fact remains that personality does exert an important influence, even though it must be seen as acting in conjunction with the historical and sociological factors mentioned above. Prejudice is multidimensional (Klineberg 1964; Williams 1964). Different individuals may develop prejudice for different reasons and frequently for more than one reason. Nor should these various possible causes be considered as independent: they interact, are interrelated, and influence one another. The search for a single, all-embracing origin for prejudice is chimerical. [See PERSONALITY, POLITICAL, article on CONSERVATISM AND RADICALISM.] Varieties of prejudice It follows that prejudice is not a unitary phenomenon and that it will take varying forms in different individuals. Socially and psychologically attitudes differ depending on whether they are the result of deep-seated personality characteristics, sometimes of a pathological nature, or of a trau-
matic experience, or whether they simply represent conformity to an established social norm. No adequate typology of forms of prejudice is yet available, and since there will always be intervening and transitional varieties, perhaps no such typology will ever be fully acceptable. Earlier it was indicated that three aspects of prejudice must be distinguished in the definition: the cognitive or ideational, the affective, and the conative or behavioral. The frequent lack of consistency among these three aspects or components has suggested one typology of attitudes (including prejudice). Katz and Stotland (1959), for example, distinguish between (1) affective associations, (2) intellectualized attitudes, and (3) action-oriented attitudes. In the case of the first two, no accurate prediction regarding behavior is possible; in the third, both the cognitive and affective elements may be absent. In addition there are (4) balanced attitudes, which show consistency among the three components. This is helpful as far as it goes, but it leaves out a number of the dimensions identified above as contributing to the development of prejudice and consequently to the forms which it takes in different individuals. The effects of prejudice In his discussion of the place of the American Negro—or, as he prefers to say, the Negro American—in contemporary society, one social psychologist (Pettigrew 1964) speaks of the role and its burdens. There is much evidence that these burdens are varied and heavy. They are revealed in a pattern of objective life conditions that include considerable poverty and overcrowding, a shorter life expectancy, poorer education, inferior facilities for recreation, more family disorganization, and other related characteristics described in the Dark Ghetto (Clark 1965). On the subjective side, it is difficult to overestimate the effects on personality of belonging to a group which is generally regarded as inferior and so treated. A series of investigations has revealed the frequency with which Negro children show their preference for white over black (as, for example, in the dolls they choose to play with) and the emotional shock which may accompany an experience that requires them to become openly aware of their own skin color. Although this shock may become somewhat attenuated with the years, the damage done to the self-image and self-esteem of such children must be viewed as exceedingly serious (Clark 1955; Pettigrew 1964). It is precisely this damage that was referred to in the unanimous Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954 as one justification for finding that enforced
PREJUDICE: The Concept school segregation violated the rights of Negro children and was therefore contrary to the principles of the American constitution. (A study in Sao Paulo, Brazil, indicated a moderate preference by Negro children for white dolls, but with none of the emotional reactions so frequent among children in the United States; see Ginsberg 1955.) The expression "self-hatred" has occasionally been applied to the reaction of Negroes, Jews, and other minorities who attempt in one form or another to reject their ethnic identity. In its most extreme form, accompanied by a dislike of every reminder of such identity and by hostility which echoes that shown by the dominant group, the term "self-hatred" may possibly be applicable, except that it is the group rather than the self that is hated. There is a whole range of reactions, however, which may result from being identified with a group that is stigmatized as not only different but inferior; it is inappropriate to speak of "hatred" in the case of those who may more legitimately be described as reaching for identification with the larger community. The phenomenon is too complex to be adequately described as "self-hatred," but the underlying psychological processes relating to rejection undoubtedly constitute great hazards to normal personality development. The relative frequency of Negro aggressive crime and the occasional outbursts of group violence are not too difficult to understand against this background of rejection. The effects of prejudice on the dominant group are also clear, although more indirect. If one criterion of mental health is an adequate perception of reality (Jahoda 1958), free from distortions due to needs and wishes and including sensitivity in the understanding of other people, then prejudice obviously interferes with mental health. In any case, the economic and social waste consequent upon prejudice has a harmful effect on the whole community, majority and minority alike. The apparent gains resulting from prejudice and discussed above among its causes are more than offset by its real costs (Rose 1951). The reduction of prejudice The problem of the reduction of prejudice is part of the whole issue of attitude change and therefore involves the techniques of persuasion and propaganda, the effects of the mass media and of education, and other related phenomena. The present discussion will be limited to certain aspects which touch directly on prejudice, even though it must be recognized that in many cases these need to be seen against the background of attitude
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change in general. [See ATTITUDES, article on ATTITUDE CHANGE; PERSUASION.] Effects of information. A great deal of thought and a substantial amount of research have been directed toward the question of whether information about minority groups contributes toward the reduction of prejudice. Since, as was indicated earlier, prejudice contains a cognitive component, it is reasonable to expect that improving the accuracy of that component should have a salutary effect. On the other hand, it is argued that purely informational campaigns will necessarily fail, since the target audience will select, accept, ignore, or even distort the meaning of the available content in order to keep it consonant with preconceptions. This is more likely to occur when the content is presented through the mass media and is somewhat less likely in the case of a "captive audience," although even in the latter case there will by no means be a passive acceptance of what is offered. Research in this area is equivocal in its findings but appears to justify the conclusion that information is indeed useful to a limited degree (Allport 1954; Klineberg 1950). It has been suggested that although cultural differences among ethnic groups should not be neglected in the information presented, particular stress should be laid on cultural similarities and on the common aspects of human experience. Scientific evidence. It has also been urged that special attention be given to the position, held by the overwhelming majority of biological and social scientists, that there is no acceptable proof of the inherent genetic inferiority of any ethnic group. Myrdal (1944) has called for an "educational offensive" to reduce the gap between the scientific and the popular position in this regard. There has in fact been a marked change in this direction in recent years. A trend study of public opinion in the United States analyzed answers to the question "In general, do you think that Negroes are as intelligent as white people—that is, can they learn things just as well if they are given the same education and training?" In 1942, 50 per cent of Northern whites answered "yes"; in 1963, the figure had risen to 80 per cent. In the South, 21 per cent said yes in 1942 and 60 per cent in 1963. This degree of change may well be described as revolutionary (Hyman & Sheatsley 1964). Effects of religious training. A special problem is posed by the relation of religious education to prejudice. The paradoxical situation arises that although in many areas the leaders in the attack on prejudice have a religious motivation or are identified with religion as an institution, in general
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there appears to be slightly more prejudice among those who are "religious" than among those who are not (Allport 1954; Adorno et al. 1950). This probably indicates that religion means different things to different people—in certain cases a true involvement, in others an outward, superficial expression. The problem for religious educators is to instill loyalty to one's faith while also emphasizing the brotherhood of man. It is not surprising that in the light of this difficult task the results of such education have so far been equivocal as far as prejudice is concerned. [See RELIGION, article on PSYCHOI OGICAL ASPECTS.]
Effects of contact and cooperation. Contact between members of different ethnic communities has also had a positive effect under certain conditions. The earlier, rather naive expectation that if only people came to know members of other ethnic groups friendlier relations would automatically result has given way to a more sophisticated understanding of the factors involved. It seems clear, first, that best results are obtained when contact occurs between persons of equal status; no amount of contact between a white boss and Negro workers will alter the prevailing stereotype or prepare the way for better understanding. When status is equal, on the other hand, a salutary effect may usually be expected. This was demonstrated in a series of investigations of attitude change consequent upon integrated housing in a number of Northern communities. A second important condition is that the two groups work together toward the realization of a common goal and that they depend upon each other for its realization. This was the case in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. When the two ethnic groups were mixed in the same military outfits, the attitudes of white soldiers and noncommissioned officers toward Negroes became much more favorable. It is important to note that in these cases the contact was not deliberately chosen or even necessarily welcomed; it was imposed in the one case by housing authorities and in the other by the military command. The participants were presented with a fait accompli. It appears that this procedure works successfully in other situations as well, including school desegration, the hiring of Negro sales personnel in department stores, and so forth (Saenger 1953). It may at first sight seem paradoxical that in a democratic society such techniques should work in spite of the expression of contrary opinion. One could hazard a guess that the fait accompli is effective in those cases in which the attitudes are held with some degree of ambiv-
alence, so that those involved are almost as willing to be pushed in the liberal as in the reactionary direction. The opposition to acceptance of Negroes in these situations is not so strong as to inhibit adaptation to a new status quo when that is introduced by respected authorities. The value of creating opportunities for two hostile groups to work together in a cooperative enterprise has also been demonstrated in a series of important experiments (Oklahoma, University of . . . 1961). An investigation in a boys' camp showed that the introduction of common or "superordinate" goals which could be attained only through joint activity, in which each group depended on the other for success, had a significant effect in reducing hostility. It seems highly probable that similar techniques would work on a wider scale and not only within the microcosm of the experimental situation. What is not entirely clear is what would happen if the superordinate goal could not be reached. Would each group blame the other, with a consequent increase in tension? Or would the sympathy produced as a result of the common enterprise improve relations even in the case of failure? Further research is required in order to answer these questions. Sociometry and psychotherapy. In the case of conflicts between small groups or individuals, certain techniques used in group dynamics and sociometry have frequently been found to be effective. Among these, taking the role of the other—putting oneself in the "enemy's" place and attempting to see the problem from his viewpoint—represents a mechanism which may contribute to better understanding. A number of investigations, some of them specifically related to prejudice, indicate the value of this approach (Krech et al. [1948] 1962, pp. 259-261). Much has also been written about prejudice as a form of pathology and therefore not susceptible to cure except by the methods of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Such methods are probably the only ones that could reach the extreme bigot; but they can hardly be regarded as very practical, since bigots are unlikely to consider themselves ill and in need of treatment by a psychiatrist. It seems highly probable, however, that a system of child care which produces secure and mentally healthy individuals would reduce the frequency of bigots in the population. Institutional change. Earlier it was indicated that prejudice and discrimination are causally related in circular fashion, each contributing to the origin and growth of the other. It would follow that
PREJUDICE: The Concept prejudice can be reduced through an attack on discrimination and that a change in institutions would inevitably mean, in time, a change in attitudes. In the United States, at least, from this point of view the legal approach has constituted the major source of improvement in the position of the Negro, affecting his access to more adequate education, housing, transportation, employment, recreation, and political rights. The frequently heard objection "you can't legislate against prejudice" becomes irrelevant, since one can legislate against discrimination, one of the causes of prejudice; in the case of decisions by the courts, the same effect can be produced not by new legislation but by so interpreting existing laws as to safeguard human rights. Not only in the United States but in many other countries as well, the rights of minorities have been expressly protected in national constitutions, and the full weight of the United Nations and of its specialized agencies, such as UNESCO, has been thrown into the campaign for the reduction of prejudice and discrimination, through both education and the law. Institutions change as the result of many factors not necessarily legal in character. The recent history of the United States has been marked by a rapid transformation through the pressure of "sitins," nonviolent resistance, protest meetings, a march on Washington, the impact of the international scene, and even by outbreaks of violence which, although they must be deplored, may still function as reminders of "the unfinished business of democracy." Not least in its influence has been the development of a new climate of opinion and a reafBrmation of the democratic belief in the rights of all human beings. These occurrences do not mean that the problem of prejudice has been solved. The social lag referred to above will mean a continuation of the prejudiced attitudes of many long after the law and the collective conscience have declared them obsolete. There is, however, some ground for optimism as far as the United States is concerned. To the question "Do you think white students and Negro students should go to the same schools or to separate schools?", a representative sample of American whites in 1942 included fewer than a third who favored school integration; in 1956 approximately one half favored it; in 1963, threefourths. In the South, the proportion was 2 per cent in 1942, 14 per cent in 1956, and 30 per cent in 1963 (Hyman & Sheatsley 1964). The trend is clear. There is reason to hope that it will continue and that it is symbolic of a slow but certain change
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in attitude. There is hope, too, in the fact that "authoritarians" are conformist. If prejudice becomes unfashionable, even the hard core of resistance to change may give way to progress. OTTO KLINEBERG [Directly related is the entry STEREOTYPES. Other relevant material may be found in AGGRESSION; ATTITUDES; CONCEPT FORMATION; ETHNIC GROUPS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ADAMS, ROMANZO 1937 Interracial Marriage in Hawaii. New York: Macmillan. ADORNO, T. W. et al. 1950 The Authoritarian Personality. American Jewish Committee, Social Studies Series, No. 3. New York: Harper. ALLPORT, GORDON W. 1954 The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. -» An abridged paperback edition was published in 1958 by Doubleday. CHRISTIE, RICHARD; and COOK, PEGGY A. 1958 A Guide to Published Literature Relating to The Authoritarian Personality Through 1956. Journal of Psychology 45: 171-199. CLARK, KENNETH B. 1955 Prejudice and Your Child. Boston: Beacon. CLARK, KENNETH B. 1965 Dark Ghetto. New York: Harper. BOLLARD, JOHN et al. 1939 Frustration and Aggression. Yale University, Institute of Human Relations. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1961. FREYRE, GILBERTO (1933) 1956 The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-grande &• senzala): A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. 2d English-language ed., rev. Translated from the 4th, definitive Brazilian edition. New York: Knopf. -» First published in Portuguese. An abridged edition was published in 1964 by Knopf. GINSRERG, ANIELA M. 1955 Pesquisas sobre as atitudes de um grupo de escolares de Sao Paulo em relacao com as criancas de cor. Pages 311-361 in Roger Bastide and Florestan Fernandes (editors), Relacoes raciais entre negros e brancos cm Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo (Brazil): Anhembi. CLOCK, CHARLES; and STARK, RODNEY 1966 Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism. New York: Harper. HARDING, JOHN S. et al. 1954 Prejudice and Ethnic Relations. Volume 2, pages 1021-1061 in Gardner Lindzey (editor), Handbook of Social Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. HARTLEY, EUGENE L. 1946 Problems in Prejudice. New York: King's Crown Press. HOFSTATTER, PETER R. (1954) 1963 Einfiihrung in die Sozialpsychologie. 3d ed., rev. Stuttgart (Germany): Kroner. HOOTON, EARNEST A. 1937 Apes, Men, and Morons. New York: Putnam. HUXLEY, JULIAN; and HADDON, ALFRED CORT 1936 We Europeans: A Survey of "Racial" Problems. New York and London: Harper. HYMAN, HERBERT H.; and SHEATSLEY, PAUL B. 1964 Attitudes Toward Desegregation. Scientific American 211, July: 16-23.
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JAHODA, MARIE 1958 Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health. New York: Basic Books. KATZ, DANIEL; and STOTLAND, EZRA 1959 A Preliminary Statement to a Theory of Attitude Structure and Change. Volume 3, pages 423-475 in Sigmund Koch (editor), Psychology: A Study of a Science. New York: McGraw-Hill. KLINEBERG, OTTO 1950 Tensions Affecting International Understanding: A Survey of Research. Social Science Research Council, Bulletin No. 62. New York: The Council. KLINEBERG, OTTO 1964 The Human Dimension in International Relations. New York: Holt. KRECH, DAVID; CRUTCHFIELD, RICHARD S.; and BELLACHEY, EGERTON L. (1948) 1962 Individual in Society: A Textbook of Social Psychology. New York: McGrawHill. -> A revision of Theory and Problems of Social Psychology, by David Krech and Richard S. Crutchfield. MILLER, NEAL E.; and DOLLARD, JOHN 1941 Social Learning and Imitation. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press; Oxford Univ. Press. MYRDAL, GUNNAR (1944s) 1962 An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper. -» A paperback edition was published in 1964 by McGraw-Hill. OKLAHOMA, UNIVERSITY OF, INSTITUTE OF GROUP RELATIONS 1961 Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment, by Muzafer Sherif et al. Norman, Okla.: University Book Exchange. OLSON, BERNHARD E. 1963 Faith and Prejudice. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. PETTIGREW, THOMAS F. 1958 Personality and Sociocultural Factors in Intergroup Attitudes: A Cross-national Comparison. Journal of Conflict Resolution 2:29-42. PETTIGREW, THOMAS F. 1964 A Profile of the Negro American. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand. ROSE, ARNOLD (1951) 1961 The Roots of Prejudice. Pages 393-421 in United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, The Race Question in Modern Science: Race and Science. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. SAENGER, GERHART 1953 The Social Psychology of Prejudice. New York: Harper. TENTORI, TULLIO 1962 II pregiudizio sociale. Rome: Studium. THOMAS, LOUIS-VICENT 1963 Une ideologic moderne: La negritude; Essai de synthese psycho-sociologique. Revue de psychologic des peuples 18:246-272, 367398. WILLIAMS, ROBIN M. JR. 1964 Strangers Next Door: Ethnic Relations in American Communities. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. II SOCIAL DISCRIMINATION
In a neutral sense "discrimination" means simply "the drawing of a distinction." The criteria on which a distinction is based, however, may range from those widely accepted in a society as valid and legitimate to those generally regarded as invalid and inappropriate. Thus, in purely dictionary meanings, discrimination is "a faculty of nicely distinguishing; acute discernment," and it is also "an unfair or injurious distinction." A given act can
be labeled as one or the other, not by its intrinsic nature, but only by referring to given standards. Types of discrimination. With reference to human interaction we can think of the dictionary meanings of discrimination given above as falling along a continuum. Although no sharp lines can be drawn, it is useful to divide this continuum into three sectors on the basis of the extent to which norms are shared. Thus, at one end of the continuum is the type of differential treatment that is based on generally accepted standards of excellence or appropriateness (e.g., a legal distinction between child and adult, variation in privilege among castes in a stable caste system, or a rule of seniority that gives precedence to those with longer records of service). The second type is discrimination that is deemed invalid—that is, based on unacceptable criteria—by many members of a society because it violates primary customs and laws yet is regarded as acceptable by significant subgroups and supported by secondary norms (e.g., racial segregation in the United States or anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union). It is in this sense that Williams used the term: "Discrimination may be said to exist to the degree that individuals of a given group who are otherwise formally qualified are not treated in conformity with these nominally universal institutionalized codes" (1947, p. 39). Third, there are the distinctions drawn by individuals in violation of the established standards, customs, or laws, without subgroup support and lacking even secondary normative sanction (e.g., favored treatment of one student by a teacher). In this article we shall deal with discrimination only in the second sense. One might call it "social discrimination," in contrast with "normative discrimination" (legal or customary application of standards) on the one hand and "individual discrimination" (unsupported acts of differentiation) on the other. Why should the same word be used to cover what appear to be such diverse facts? Part of the explanation can be found in the study of social change. Because needs and values change, distinctions accepted in law and custom at one time and place may become unacceptable in a different context. Since individuals and areas experience the change at different rates, what has become unacceptable to some remains acceptable to others. This is well illustrated by developments in race relations in the United States. In 1875 few persons believed that differential treatment of Negroes was discriminatory. The legal and constitutional norms were ambiguous, and custom largely supported segregation and other acts of differentiation. In 1896 some of
PREJUDICE: Social Discrimination the ambiguity was removed from the legal norms when the Supreme Court declared that segregation of public accommodations was legal only if facilities were equal. For nearly half a century, however, custom prevailed over law, and in most of the country segregation and inequality of treatment were the rule. During this period the situation was gradually redefined by the passage of civil rights laws in northern states, further court decisions demanding equality, and a growing belief that distinctions drawn on the basis of race were undesirable and immoral. In terms of our classification, racial discrimination began to shift from the normative to the social variety. By the 1960s further Supreme Court decisions, declaring even "separate but equal" facilities unacceptable, federal civil rights laws, and the growth of a substantial national consensus opposed to the use of race as a criterion of choice had established a nominally universal institutionalized norm relative to race relations. Although the process of change continues, racial discrimination in the United States has not yet shifted to the third type: it still has subgroup support and justification from secondary norms; it is not an individual act of differentiation. Critical to the whole idea of social discrimination, it should be emphasized, is the fact that it is embedded in social structures and sustained by group practices even though it violates the dominant standards of the society. When the drawing of "an unfair or injurious distinction" has become a matter of scattered, individual acts unsupported by group memberships and standards, it loses a number of the important qualities of social discrimination: random individual acts of discrimination tend to scatter throughout the population; they do not pile up on particular groups, creating self-perpetuating justifications from the responses of those continually discriminated against. Individual discrimination does not split a society into two or more contending groups that defend different standards of morality and justice, and it is not passed along through normal processes of socialization. In the life of a society, therefore, a move along the range from social toward individual patterns of discrimination is of great significance. Social discrimination (hereafter simply called discrimination) is, then, the persistent application of criteria that are arbitrary, irrelevant, or unfair by dominant standards, with the result that some persons receive an undue advantage and others, although equally qualified, suffer an unjustified penalty. When comparing those who are advantaged with those who are disadvantaged, one can
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speak of discrimination as "the unequal treatment of equals," for example, the application of quotas for university admission on the basis of group membership rather than individual qualification or the determination of eligibility for a job on grounds of race or religion instead of competence. When only those who are being discriminated against are considered, it is also useful to reverse this phrase and to speak of the "equal treatment of unequals": the members of disprivileged groups are treated alike despite variation in their competence, training, or other personal characteristics. Discrimination is an analytic concept, not a moral term. Some manifestations of violence or persecution may be so established in custom that they are best understood as a different kind of phenomenon, despite the moral repugnance with which those who do not accept the custom may view the facts. Or to put the matter differently, discrimination acquires moral relevance when its consequences are measured against stated values. This statement does not mean, however, that there is no basis of choice between those who say that a given discriminatory practice is good and those who say that it is bad. The use of some criteria of discrimination may contradict fundamental values of a society and weaken its unity. For example, a democracy based on equality before the law and other universalistic norms is weakened by discrimination on racial, religious, or ethnic grounds. Thus, one can say that certain practices are morally incongruent with societal well-being in a democracy. The relation of discrimination to prejudice. Among the many questions one might raise in the study of discrimination, four seem of special importance: What is its relationship to prejudice? What criteria are used to determine those to be discriminated against? What forms does the discrimination take? What are its effects on the objects of discrimination? Prejudice can be denned as an inner tendency to respond to persons on the basis of their group membership; it is a rigid, emotional prejudgment that gives an individual confidence that he knows all about a person when he knows his membership in a symbolically important group. This tendency may or may not express itself in discriminatory behavior on the part of a person, depending upon the role he is playing, what others around him are saying and doing, what he believes he will gain or lose by discrimination, and other factors. Each individual has many attitudes, only some of which will be expressed in a given situation. Thus, his prejudice may be inhibited, deflected, or manifest-
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ed, depending upon the context. In contrast, a person lacking in prejudice may nevertheless discriminate if he believes that thereby he may win an advantage or protect himself against loss; he may discriminate as an expression of his solidarity with the group with which he is identified at the mordent. Patterns of discrimination. The criteria used for setting apart those against whom discrimination is directed vary widely. The growth of nations to include persons of diverse origins and the mobility of men in the modern world have brought individuals of many religions, races, national origins, and native languages into close contact. Which of the differences is symbolically important depends to a large degree on the history of the contact and the basic values of dominant groups. Discrimination against Jews in many countries, most disastrously in Germany (see Hilberg 1961), has been based in part on their status as a religious minority but has gained in strength by the convergence of several symbols. Thus, many peasants saw the Jews as city dwellers, ruling groups saw them as threatening radicals, and the middle classes saw them as powerful competitors. In the United States the economic importance of slavery and the violence associated with its elimination were important factors in making race a basis for discrimination. In India the disprivileges resting upon caste status are now legally and constitutionally proscribed, but some religious norms and traditions support continuing patterns of discrimination. In France racial and religious differences are relatively unimportant, but the person unskilled in the French language and poorly assimilated into French culture is seriously handicapped. In some situations cultural differences between groups are sufficiently sharp so that it is not clear whether one is dealing with a case of discrimination within a society or a case of cultural conflict between subsocieties, as in the case of the restrictions imposed on the Tamils by the Singhalese of Ceylon. In addition to discrimination based upon religion, race, national origin, and culture, lines of distinction may be drawn by age (a person is "too young" or "too old," despite qualifications for a position), by sex, by occupation, or by class (see International Labor Office 1962). One may even be discriminated against on grounds of his ancestor's occupation or class, as shown by the segregation of the eta in Japan or by the preference given in many situations to a person from an "old" upperclass family over the nouveau riche. The forms of discrimination are as various as the criteria on which they are based. Perhaps the
three most important types are restriction on social mobility (denial of opportunity), restriction on physical mobility (segregation), and barriers to the acquisition of full self-respect and intrapsychic harmony (such as demands for arbitrary status deference). These often occur together, of course, and are mutually reinforcing, but they may be found separately. One sees them in the extreme form in South Africa, where nonwhites are barred from political participation, educational opportunities, and many jobs; are residentially segregated; and are compelled to carry status-defining passes. Much of this discrimination is "legal" in South Africa, in the strict sense of the term; but since more than three-quarters of the population cannot participate in the definition of legality and protest its validity, the activities there are appropriately described as social discrimination rather than normative discrimination. Discrimination as a system of social relationships is affected by the responses of the individuals and groups experiencing it. In the first instance it "vitiates the power and knowledge of its victim" (Antonovsky 1960), thus creating tendencies by which still further discrimination is justified. Those who are given poor schools, poor jobs, and poor opportunities for advancement may demonstrate low morale, low skill, and high resentment, which then become the "causes" of further discrimination. Such self-fulfilling prophecies or vicious circles (Maclver 1948; Myrdal 1944) help to explain the tenacity of many patterns of social discrimination. Since even the definition of discrimination is still problematic, efforts to scale and measure it and to record precisely the conditions under which various forms occur have been scarce. Fortunately, this situation is beginning to change. Careful studies of the economic consequences of discrimination (e.g., Becker 1957; Krueger 1963), of the exact patterns of segregation (Taeuber & Taeuber 1965; Williams 1964), and of the salience of various forms of discrimination for different groups (Killian & Grigg 1961), as well as more formal conceptualizations of discrimination (Blalock 1960), are indicators of a growing precision in discussions of this topic. The international perspective. In the modern era discrimination has become an international problem. At the very time when many patterns of discrimination are brought under severe challenge within societies, these patterns are affecting relationships between societies. Achievement of a merely national consensus on what is fair and just proves to be inadequate at a time when the fates of nations are bound so closely together. Should women have equal rights in Iraq? Should all reli-
PRESIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT gions be allowed free expression in Spain? Should the advantages of hereditary social classes in South America be reduced? Should Australia modify its all-white immigration laws? Should persons of Mexican descent receive equitable treatment in the United States? Should persons of European descent hold full citizenship in the newly independent African states? Societies are being judged on such questions more and more on the basis of ''outside" criteria; there are the beginnings of an international set of standards in the light of which many practices that carry powerful (if not universal) support within nations have become controversial. Viewed from this international perspective, discrimination is on the increase in the sense that formerly customary practices are being defined as arbitrary and unfair. Stated in terms of the continuum suggested above, many acts are being shifted from normative to social discrimination as international contacts and standards grow in importance. Perhaps the separate societies are going through a necessary and inevitable process out of which will emerge more nearly universal standards in a world abruptly made small. J. MILTON YINGER [See also CASTE; DISCRIMINATION, ECONOMIC; MINORITIES; RACE RELATIONS; SEGREGATION.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ANTONOVSKY, AARON 1960 The Social Meaning of Discrimination. Phylon 21:81-95. BECKER, GARY S. 1957 The Economics of Discrimination. Univ. of Chicago Press. BELTH, NATHAN C. (editor) 1958 Barriers: Patterns of Discrimination Against Jews. New York: Friendly House. BLALOCK, HUBERT M. JR. 1960 A Power Analysis of Racial Discrimination. Social Forces 39:53-59. GRIM SHAW, ALLEN D. 1961 Relationships Among Prejudice, Discrimination, Social Tension and Social Violence. Journal of Intergroup Relations 2:302-310. HILBERG, RAUL 1961 The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. INTERNATIONAL LABOR OFFICE 1962 Discrimination in Employment or Occupation on the Basis of Marital Status. International Labour Review 85:262-283, 368389. KILLIAN, LEWIS; and GRIGG, CHARLES 1961 Rank Orders of Discrimination of Negroes and Whites in a Southern City. Social Forces 39:235-239. KRUEGER, ANNE O. 1963 The Economics of Discrimination. Journal of Political Economy 71:481-486. MAC!VER, ROBERT M. 1948 The More Perfect Union: A Program for the Control of Inter-group Discrimination in the United States. New York: Macmillan. MYRDAL, GUNNAR (1944) 1962 An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper. -> A paperback edition was published in 1964 by McGraw-Hill. SIMPSON, GEORGE E.; and YINGER, J. MILTON (1953) 1965 Racial and Cultural Minorities: An Analysis
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of Prejudice and Discrimination. 3d ed. New York: Harper. TAEUBER, KARL E.; and TAEUBER, ALMA F. 1965 Negroes in Cities: Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Change. Chicago: Aldine. WILLIAMS, ROBIN M. JR. 1947 The Reduction of Intergroup Tensions. New York: Social Science Research Council. WILLIAMS, ROBIN M. JR. 1964 Strangers Next Door: Ethnic Relations in American Communities. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
PRESIDENTIAL
GOVERNMENT
The term "presidential government" came into use in English journalism before the American Civil War as a shorthand expression for the governmental system of the former colonies, the United States. Walter Bagehot so used it in The English Constitution (1865-1867), begun while Lincoln was still president, to draw the contrast with his own term for the British system, "cabinet government." A generation later, in America, Woodrow Wilson assayed Bagehot's "realism" and deliberately rejected Bagehot's term for the United States; Wilson called his own book Congressional Government (1885). Time and American developments, however, have vindicated Bagehot's usage rather than Wilson's. On both sides of the Atlantic the term "presidential government" is commonly employed today to characterize the American system. It is sometimes used loosely, as a generic term applying to all governments with elective chief executives styled "president." This looser usage is of doubtful value analytically, for reasons that will be discussed below. Centrality of the president The government of the United States is "presidential" in the sense that its presidency occupies the vital, central place among public institutions at the national level. This office serves at once as the central source of judgment and initiative and as the only object of national elections in a government legitimated by popular sovereignty. An American president also is the embodiment of sovereignty in external relations. He is, besides, the government's chief spokesman in internal relations with interest groups and citizens at large. A president of the United States both reigns and rules. This key position is the product partly of constitutional provisions, partly of accreted precedents and modern practice. The constitution of 1787 conferred upon the president a number of positions of advantage in the governmental system. First among these is security of tenure for a four-year
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period with removal only by congressional impeachment, a cumbersome procedure which has only been attempted once, in 1867. Second is indirect popular election through the medium of the electoral college. Third is command of the armed forces and the conduct of diplomacy, traditional roynl prerogatives vested in the presidency by former British subjects. Fourth is an assortment of specific rights or duties bearing on the conduct of public administration, most important of which is the right to name department heads and the duty to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Fifth is a limited prerogative in legislation: the qualified veto power and the right to recommend. Building on these constitutional foundations, personalities in office and surrounding circumstances have united to enlarge the presidency, reshaping and increasing its positions of advantage relative to other institutions in the system. The contemporary presidency is the product of a long accretion. In the first century under the constitution the practice of three presidents particularly shaped the character of the presidential office. Washington lent it something of his personal prestige and carefully set precedents to mark it as the highest place in government. His precedents were frequently ignored, but the impact of his tenure was never wholly lost. Jackson dramatized the office's independent popular connection, and his renomination by a national convention of state parties (with electors pledged to the convention's nominee) proved a lasting and important innovation. Thereafter the nominating process made a president's election virtually direct, gave him an independent claim upon the nation, and provided him with an independent power base in politics—the national party. Lincoln, faced by civil war, invented the "war power," juxtaposing his position as commander in chief with his duty under the "take care" clause and his constitutionally prescribed oath of office. This assertion of inherent prerogative was largely sustained by the courts and ever since has made the president something of a "constitutional dictator" in times of declared war. Since the turn of the twentieth century enlargement of the presidency has continued and accelerated. In an age of mass communication Wilson and the two Roosevelts effectively asserted the office's primacy as news source and as national spokesman. In the period when the United States reached a position of world power and then superpower these presidents effectively imparted modern meaning to the office's prerogatives in defense
and diplomacy. During the great depression of the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt played a role in guiding the economy (including labor-management relations), a function that has been associated with the office ever since. He also took the first decisive steps to institutionalize the presidency, equipping it with staff resources of its own, both in the White House proper and in the executive office of the president—a move associated with the report of his Committee on Administrative Management, the so-called Brownlow report (U.S. President's Committee . . . 1937). He and his successor innovated further by developing initiative in legislation to the point where, under Truman, a comprehensive, detailed "program of the president" became an annual feature of the legislative process, setting the congressional agenda. Under Eisenhower a routine role in implementing that agenda was recognized and regularized, with a staff for "legislative liaison" established at the White House to coordinate executive-branch pressure on Congress. Also, in the two decades after World War n— the first decades of the cold war and of nuclear weapons—Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, in turn, developed modern doctrine and procedure for the presidential use of force abroad without resort to declared war or the "war power." Eisenhower and Kennedy, confronting racial conflicts and breakdowns in law enforcement, began the development of modern doctrine and procedure for the presidential use of force at home consistent with a mandate long since given by the courts to preserve internal peace in the United States. Taken together, these positions of advantage make the presidency indispensable to the effective performance of all other governmental institutions. The national parties find their raison d'etre in presidential nominations and campaigns; were there no presidency to unite them, federalism would fragment them, if indeed they existed at all. The national legislature depends upon the presidency for agendas and also for external pressure to enhance the weight of its internal party leadership. The national bureaucracy depends upon the White House for authoritative judgments and political support in struggles between departments or with Congress. The national courts depend upon the White House to sustain and spur executive enforcement. The Washington press corps looks to it for news. The national organizations of assorted private interests use the presidency's aid (or opposition) to magnify their voices and to spur their memberships. State and local governments depend upon the presidency for preservation, ultimately, of local law and order. Apart from insti-
PRESIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT tutions Americans in general look toward their president ("government" personified) whenever private troubles seem to have a public source. Separateness of Congress But the constitution, which established the foundations for this office, also established as a fundamental principle that its positions of advantage should be matched by those of other national institutions, notably Congress. This is the principle of "separated powers"—more accurately, separated institutions sharing powers—a principle intended to insure Americans against the fates that had befallen Englishmen in the colonial period: parliamentary usurpation of the crown, quasi-military dictatorship, and royal manipulation of Parliament. Consciously or not, American constitution makers sought the balance that the English Whigs had precariously achieved in the reign of William and Mary. And even while the English were departing from that model, these constitution makers so successfully pursued it that enlargement of the presidency has produced no loss of "balance" from a still distinctly separated Congress. On the contrary, although history has altered form and terms, congressional positions of advantage continue to confront and check a president's advantages. The constitution granted one or both houses of Congress a share in every aspect of the presidency's powers. The conduct of defense was qualified by making force levels and funds dependent on congressional enactment and by reserving to Congress the right to declare war. The conduct of diplomacy was qualified by reserving to the Senate "advice and consent" on treaties. The conduct of administration was severely limited by making money, authority, and departmental structure subject to specific legislation—with presidential appointees subject to Senate confirmation. In the sphere of legislation Congress was paramount, checked only by the presidential veto, which itself was subject to an overriding two-thirds vote of the two houses. These substantial shares of powers were vested in legislators who were meant to be effectually separated from the president. Senators and members of the House of Representatives were given the advantage of fixed tenure, but with terms different in length from the chief executive's: six years for the upper house, two years for the lower. They were advantaged further by popular election no less direct than his: congressmen were elected by citizens in state-created districts; senators, by state legislatures (a right since transferred to citizens in states). In practical application these elec-
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toral arrangements powerfully reinforce the formal independence of Congress and were responsible, above all, for the achievement of the separation of powers. It is the politics of nomination that has kept Congress effectually separated from the White House. The constitution prescribed differing electorates for senators, representatives, and presidents. But it was silent on the means by which the candidates were to be chosen and presented to electors. And it left the regulation of elections to the states. In consequence, this gap was filled by private organizations, political parties, operating in the legal framework of each state to make the nominations for those offices. Senate and House seats as well as local posts were subject to election inside states, under rules set by state legislators, who themselves had to be nominated. Accordingly, the party organizations and their nominating processes grew up inside the states. For most intents and purposes these have remained distinctly separated by state boundaries. Since Jackson's presidency nominations for the White House have been arranged by confederal conventions of state party organizations, looking toward simultaneous elections in all states of partypledged electors, followed by party votes in the electoral colleges. But nominations for the Senate and the House were differently arranged, at different times, by different men, for differing electoral purposes. Once elected by their different sets of voters, the candidates who had been chosen in these different ways were separated by much more than constitutional prescription. Even when they shared a party label, they were separated by the terms of their employment and survival. So it has remained. In the early 1960s the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the districting of legislative bodies, state and national alike, that failed to meet the test of equal representation for each voter in a state. Revision of state legislative districts and also of the districts for the House of Representatives may have a marked effect on nominating politics inside the states and may make presidential and congressional nominations less disparate. If so, the separation between the presidency and Congress should begin to shrink. But this is speculative. Modern presidential—congressional relations As a separated institution Congress has continued to share powers with the presidency even while the latter's own advantages were growing. In some respects, indeed, congressional advantages
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have also grown. The roles originally envisaged for the two have changed considerably, especially since Franklin Roosevelt's time, but Congress still is able to contend in many spheres with the aggrandized presidency. Since World War n, Congress has been least advantaged in defense and in those aspects of diplomacy related to the use of force. Buttressed by technology, a president's advantages have overshadowed congressional prerogatives: the right to declare war has lost most of its meaning; the right to finance has not produced departures of much moment from White House proposals; the consent to treaties has not curbed White House agreements or initiatives from day to day. In other aspects of diplomacy, however, especially where economic aid comes into play, the need for funds in foreign relations has enlarged the reach of both houses of Congress. By a variety of legislative devices both houses maintain considerable control over details of foreign policy, and by conventions of "bipartisanship" leading legislators have considerable voice in White House deliberations. In spheres of domestic policy Congress has increasingly relied on the White House to frame issues of the day and suggest solutions. The initiative in legislation has passed to the presidency. However, legislative action remains very much a matter of congressional discretion, subject to presidential influence perhaps, but not under White House control. Except in moments of grave national emergency akin to general war Congress has continuously asserted its capacity to alter, block, or disregard proposed bills from the president. White House influence is exercised, for the most part, through legislative leaders whose political dependence on a president is never absolute and rarely controlling. Even his own partisans will owe him almost nothing for their nominations and will often doubt his usefulness in their elections. His influence with them is made of less substantial stuff: popular prestige, access to publicity, party sentiment, personal favors, patronage, and "pork." These frequently cannot suffice in controversial cases. Congress, moreover, is increasingly adept at intervening in details of public administration. While legislative initiative shifts toward the White House, administrative "oversight" shifts toward the Capitol—a curious reversal of the literary theory of the constitution. Congressional prerogatives to authorize and finance the government departments and their programs, coupled with a long-established freedom to investigate, give both the House and Senate rights of supervision over departmental
work. Since the 81930s the enormous growth of a national bureaucracy has spurred both houses to press these rights. They now are exercised unevenly but sometimes in great depth, especially at the margins of a president's concerns, where competition from the White House offers fewest obstacles to congressional intervention. The bureaucracy, in consequence, serves more than one master. A product of the separation between Congress and the presidency has been a separation of officialdom from both. The government departments are dependent upon both, subject in part to both, hence wholly subordinate to neither. Least of all are they subordinate to one another. "Collective responsibility" is not a meaningful concept in the United States, as applied either to department heads or to their civil servants. The presidency's ultimate advantage over Congress is the latter's lack of unity. Congressional advantages in legislation and administration might suffice to tilt the balance toward the Capitol if Congress, as a unit, coordinated and applied them. But it does not. Its powers and advantages vis-a-vis the White House are dispersed among standing committees of the two congressional bodies, the Senate and the House. Powers and advantages repose for the most part in committee work, traditionally dominated by seniority leaders. These seniors become dominant by virtue of repeated nomination and election in home districts, not, except pro forma, by virtue of congressional party colleagues. Seniority is the governing principle precisely because ties of party, being home-centered, cannot sustain alternative arrangements. Committee leaders are but lightly linked by the floor leaders of each house, who owe their places to a party vote. And the two houses have no common leadership whatever (except as party leaders in each house are brought together by their party's president). Congress remains "a broken mirror," as Wilson once described it, and this has proved a fatal flaw in the assertion of "congressional government." Twice in American history Congress has preempted the center of the governmental stage, dominating policy and operations to the virtual exclusion of the White House. This happened in the decades between Jefferson and Jackson and again in the decades after the Civil War. On both occasions institutional disunity kept Congress from consolidating its pre-eminence and paved the way for a resurgent presidency, responsive to new circumstances. The circumstances of this century have not been kind to legislatures anywhere. The United States
PRESIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT is no exception. Pre-eminence has passed beyond the reach of Congress. Disunity now tempers its resistance, but unity could scarcely give it assured domination. The presidency has now evolved too far, in circumstances that permit of no retreat. Even so, and even with continuing fragmentation, Congress still possesses enough independence and advantages to block executive pre-eminence. In this it stands alone among the parliaments of the industrialized world. Congress remains what the constitution made it: a separated institution sharing powers with the presidency. Presidential government in the United States is thus to be distinguished by four features: the centrality of an elective president who serves as chief of state and chief of government; the separateness of an elective legislature that engages in lawmaking and administrative management; the autonomy of a bureaucracy that is at once responsible to both; the absence of a party tie sufficient to unite both. Federalism has contributed enormously to these results; so has a written constitution interpreted by independent courts, which thus become another separated institution sharing legislative powers. Other presidential systems "Presidential government" as a generic term invites confusion and is analytically of little use, for with the possible exception of the Republic of the Philippines the above features have been lastingly combined in the United States alone. It is true that many Latin American republics have comparable constitutional forms, but in some of these nations, notably Mexico, the forms are rendered operable and viable by virtue of a very different feature: the preponderant political party. Elsewhere, the operative feature tends to be oligarchic bargaining, or military "guidance," or personal dictatorship, or some combination of these, which crudely has the same effect of overcoming "separated powers." Similarly, most of the new nations in Africa and Asia that have styled their chiefs of government as "president" rely for the same purpose on a preponderant party, military cadres, personal charisma, or all three of these. In Europe only France under the Fifth Republic has a president as chief of government. The presidential system of de Gaulle resembles the American more nearly than do governments in less developed countries. Under the Gaullist constitution as amended in 1962 a nationally elected president and an elective legislature representing geographic districts are distinct and separate entities that share each other's powers, with no guarantee of
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binding ties through a preponderant or even a majority party. But what the constitution guarantees (at least on paper) is that the president shall have such a preponderance of relative advantage as to minimize the need for party ties, thus assuring his pre-eminence in government regardless of his party's legislative fortunes. The Gaullist president is elected by the nation for a term of seven years. He names the ministry, which has wide powers in administration and lawmaking but serves at his pleasure. There is a premier, but the president presides at will and has his own staff. He confronts an independent legislature, but he can dissolve it, setting new elections, when and as he chooses after its first year. The legislators can do nothing of the sort to him or to his ministers. If the nation is imperiled—and he defines "peril"—he dispenses with legislation and rules by decree. He faces his electorate but once a term. The deputies face theirs when the president decides to part with the legislators. Almost their only countervailing power is the right to refuse places in his ministry—or to reject its bills within the limits of their rather narrow competence— during their year of grace from dissolution. This should carry weight if his assured supporters were returned in the minority. But that situation has yet to arise; the weight is theoretical. So is much else about the Gaullist constitution; no one knows how it would work (or whether it could last) without de Gaulle. While he survives, however, his regime is very different from the presidential system in the United States. Despite the fact that each has an elective president, White House centrality is of a lesser order than de Gaulle's supremacy, which naturally extends to the bureauracy because it encompasses both ministers and deputies. Acknowledging the differences, a number of French analysts use "presidentialist" in lieu of "presidential" to distinguish de Gaulle's system from America's. It is a sensible distinction. Indeed, when English analysts contend, as some now do, that British government is gradually becoming "presidential"—with the cabinet sometimes seeming but a staff to the prime minister— "presidentialist" better describes where such a tendency, if it exists, would lead. For if Churchill and Macmillan should turn out to mark a trend toward concentration of initiative and judgment in the premiership, then Whitehall's hold on Westminster through the mechanism of the parliamentary party would support an outcome far more "presidentialist" than "presidential": de Gaulle's pre-eminence, not merely White House eminence, is surely
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at the end of such a road for Britain. Provided that the government kept a working majority in Parliament, the substitution of prime minister for cabinet would center on him a role beyond the reach of an American president. Much the same can be said of other cabinet systems that may seem to verge on being "presidentialized": none resembles "presidential government" as it is known in the United States up to the present time. RICHARD E. NEUSTADT [See also CONSTITUTIONS AND CONSTITUTIONALISM; FEDERALISM; GOVERNMENT; LEADERSHIP; PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT; POLITICAL EXECUTIVE; PUB-
Lic POLICY. Other relevant material may be found in ADMINISTRATION; CIVIL SERVICE; COMMISSIONS, GOVERNMENT; CONSTITUTIONAL LAW; JUDICIAL PROCESS; LEGISLATION; PARTIES, POLITICAL; REPRESENTATION; WELFARE STATE; and in the biographies of BAGEHOT; BRYCE; HAMILTON, ALEXANDER; JEFFERSON; MADISON; TOCQUEVILLE; WILLOUGHBY; WILSON.] BIBLIOGRAPHY BAGEHOT, WALTER (1865-1867) 1964 The English Constitution. London: Watts. -» First published in the Fortnightly Review. BLUM, JOHN M. 1951 Joe Tumulty and the Wilson Era. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. BLUM, JOHN M. 1954 The Republican Roosevelt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Atheneum. CORWIN, EDWARD S. (1940) 1957 The President: Office and Powers. 4th rev. ed. New York Univ. Press. DUVERGER, MAURICE (1951) 1962 Political Parties. 2d English ed., rev. New York: Wiley; London: Methuen. -> First published in French. FENNO, RICHARD F. 1959 The President's Cabinet: An Analysis in the Period From Wilson to Eisenhower. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. HART, JAMES 1948 The American Presidency in Action, 1789. New York: Macmillan. HENDRICK, BURTON J. 1946 Lincoln's War Cabinet. Boston: Little. HERRING, E. PENDLETON 1940 Presidential Leadership. New York: Farrar. KOENIG, Louis W. 1960 Invisible Presidency: The Behind-the-scenes Story of Seven Presidential Confidants From Hamilton to Sherman Adams. New York: Binehart. KOENIG, Louis W. 1964 The Chief Executive. New York: Harcourt. LASKI, HAROLD J. 1940 The American Presidency: An Interpretation. New York: Harper. -» A paperback edition was published in 1958 by Grosset & Dunlap. McCoy, CHARLES A. 1960 Polk and the Presidency. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. MACKINTOSH, JOHN P. 1962 The British Cabinet. Univ. of Toronto Press. MAY, ERNEST R. 1960 The Ultimate Decision: The President as Commander in Chief. New York: Braziller.
NEUSTADT, RICHARD E. 1960 Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership. New York: Wiley. -» A paperback edition was published (with an afterword) in 1964. PARES, RICHARD 1953 King George III and the Politicians. Oxford: Clarendon. PICKLES, DOROTHY M. (1960) 1962 The Fifth French Republic. 2d ed. New York: Praeger. ROSSITER, CLINTON L. (1948) 1963 Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies. New York: Harcourt. SHERWOOD, ROBERT E. (1948)1950 Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History. Rev. ed. New York: Harper. STEIN, HAROLD (editor) 1963 American Civil-Military Decisions: A Book of Case Studies. Birmingham: Univ. of Alabama Press. TUGWELL, REXFORD G. 1957 The Democratic Roosevelt: A Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. U.S. CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, 1787 1937 The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787. Rev. ed., 4 vols. Edited by Max Farrand. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. ->• First published in 1911. U.S. PRESIDENT'S COMMITTEE ON ADMINISTRATIVE MANAGEMENT 1937 Administrative Management in the Government of the United States. Washington: Government Printing Office. -> Known as the Brownlow Report. WAHL, NICHOLAS 1959 The Fifth French Republic: France's New Political System. New York: Random House. WHITE, LEONARD D. (1948) 1959 The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History. New York: Macmillan. -» An account of Hamilton's contributions to administrative theory and practice. WHITE, LEONARD D. (1951) 1961 The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1801—1829. New York: Macmillan. WHITE, LEONARD D. 1954 The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1829-1861. New York: Macmillan. WHITE, THEODORE H. 1961 The Making of the President, 1960. New York: Atheneum. WILSON, WOODROW (1885) 1961 Congressional Government. New York: Meridian. WILSON, WOODROW (1908)1917 Constitutional Government in the United States. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. H» A paperback edition was published in 1961.
PRESSURE GROUPS See INTEREST GROUPS; LOBBYING;
POLITICAL
GROUP ANALYSIS.
PRESTATION See EXCHANGE AND DISPLAY. PRESTIGE See STATUS, SOCIAL; STRATIFICATION, SOCIAL. PRICE DISCRIMINATION See MONOPOLY. PRICE LEADERSHIP See OLIGOPOLY.
PRICES: Pricing Policies PRICE MAINTENANCE See RESALE PRICE MAINTENANCE.
PRICES For the general considerations underlying the determination of individual prices, see DEMAND AND SUPPLY and UTILITY. The first article presented below discusses problems of price setting in noncompetitive markets. See also MONOPOLY and OLIGOPOLY. For price determination in competitive markets, see COMPETITION. The second article discusses the role of prices in a free market economy and government regulation of prices. For closely related elements of government regulation, see RESALE PRICE MAINTENANCE and REGULATION OF INDUSTRY. The third article discusses historical aspects of the movement of the general level of prices. For analytical treatment of general price level movement, see INFLATION AND DEFLATION; for problems of measurement, see INDEX NUMBERS.
i. PRICING POLICIES n. PRICE CONTROL AND RATIONING in. PRICE HISTORY
William S. Vickrey Ben W. Lewis Earl J. Hamilton
PRICING POLICIES
In the strict theory of perfect competition, price policy has no role. Prices are assumed to be determined by an impersonal and automatic market mechanism that operates to adjust prices so that quantities demanded and supplied at the given price are equal. Price policy is therefore inherently associated with imperfect competition, even though in some cases the competition, though imperfect, is sufficiently active to impose very narrow constraints on the price policies that individual firms can follow without disaster. Where only a single product is involved, with a single price, distinguishable pricing policies include marginal-cost pricing, average-cost or fullcost pricing, uniform monopoly pricing, and stayout pricing. Of these, only marginal-cost pricing corresponds to the full rigor of competition; it is usually considered to be the price that, theoretically at least, is most conducive to efficient allocation of resources. It is generally the most volatile of the pricing methods, resulting in extremely low prices at times of excess capacity, particularly in highly capital-intensive lines, and correspondingly high prices in periods of shortage. This volatility has made marginal-cost pricing quite unpopular, as
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compared with average-cost or full-cost pricing. Average-cost, or full-cost, pricing is, in a sense, the modern equivalent of the medieval just price, in that it gives priority to the goals of stability and equity between buyer and seller rather than to economic efficiency. Monopoly pricing, at the other extreme, represents giving full rein to the cupidity of the seller. While stay-out pricing, i.e., pricing calculated to discourage the entry of potential competitors, is in essence merely a prudential variant of monopoly pricing and thus is in theory subject to similar opprobrium, it usually involves less flagrant exploitation of purchasers and is, in practice, not often referred to by this name. Indeed, much of what is termed "full-cost pricing," but with capital charges and rents often included in costs at fairly generous levels, is in reality a form of stay-out pricing in that the firm's own costs are often a fairly good indicator of the costs that a potential competitor might face. Marginal-cost pricing Where heavy fixed costs are involved in the production of nonstorable goods and services, fluctuation of demand or supply or both gives rise to drastic fluctuations in marginal cost, and one would theoretically expect that competitive pressures or a desire to promote efficiency would produce corresponding variations in price. Actually, inertia, tradition, and administrative constraints have combined to keep such variation to a minimum. In resort areas, seasonal variation in hotel rates is common, particularly where competition is keen, but comparable variation in rates in nonresort areas is rare. Although downward deviation from a "standard" rate in slack seasons seems generally acceptable, upward variation in periods of specially heavy demand (for example, during fairs and festivals) is generally considered to be unethical and in some jurisdictions is unlawful. Nevertheless, even where the nominal rates remain the same, some variation occurs in the effective rates. Price differentials for different accommodations may not vary commensurately with their attractiveness, so that as demand increases, latecomers must pay substantially higher rates for only slightly better accommodations, or, as in the case of Pullman upper berths, must be content with inferior accommodations at a rate differential at which they would ordinarily go begging. Variation of box office prices on short notice has been inhibited by excise tax regulations, and where speculators have stepped in to adjust demand and supply, they have often been subjected to legal penalties. Sometimes price actually varies perversely with
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the intensity of demand, a practice rationalized in some instances by an appeal to the notion of a discount for quantity purchases and in others by average-cost calculations involving inappropriate cost allocations. Thus commutation fares used primarily for the regular rush-hour journey to work are usually priced far below the one-way fares paid by casual riders, who are much less heavily concentrated in the rush-hour periods, and are often priced below even the special reduced excursion fares offered for nonrush-hour trips. Similar concessions are often offered for bridge tolls; in neither case can the size of the concessions be justified by savings in collection costs. Injection of "value of service" concepts, in conjunction with nominal uniformity and historical continuity, sometimes leads to bizarre and costly rate patterns. For example, long-distance telephone rates in the United States are generally based on airline distances, requiring a costly look-up procedure to assess the charge for each call; a toll schedule based largely on direct-dialing code zones would be both more in line with costs and less expensive to apply. Again, evening rates apply according to uniform nominal local time at the point of origin. This sounds like an even-handed procedure, but it results in a Boston caller being able to call a Seattle friend at the reduced rates and reach him at a mutually convenient evening hour, whereas Seattle may not call Boston at the night rates without having to rouse the Boston party out of bed. The staggering mass and complexity of American freight rates is notorious. Even where substantial differentiation between peak and off-peak rates occurs, as in long-distance telephone service, it usually falls far short of the degree of differentiation that would lead to efficient utilization of the facilities. Where the capacity limit is sharp, with no deterioration of quality of service short of capacity and no possibility of supply exceeding capacity in the short run, the efficiency, or marginal-cost, rule is clear: as long as capacity is not fully utilized, price should reflect only operating costs with no contribution to capacity costs; when capacity would be exceeded at this price, the price should be adjusted upward until demand is restrained to the capacity level. Under constant returns to scale, when the capacity charges thus collected just defray capacity costs, capacity is appropriate. When capacity charges determined in this way exceed capacity costs, the installation of additional capacity is indicated, while in the reverse case existing capacity is excessive. Carried to its logical limit, such a price policy
would cause sharp variations in price not only between the peak and off-peak periods of a recurring pattern, but also between one year and the next. This would be particularly true where mistakes are made in the prediction of demand, or where it is necessary or economical to add to capacity in fairly large units. In some cases the results of following such a prescription literally might appear quite inequitable. Thus when a new transit facility is developed in one sector of a city, users of other more crowded facilities in other quarters may feel sufficiently discriminated against because the users of the new facility are (for the time being at least) relatively less crowded without, in addition, their being favored with lower fares. Again, when a large new unit such as a bridge is financed by tolls, these tolls are often imposed immediately upon completion, when traffic is insufficient to cause congestion, and are removed when the cost of the unit has been amortized and when congestion is sometimes beginning to build up. Indeed, it is often felt that variations in shortrun marginal cost are so sharp and erratic as to have no relevance for price policy. In many cases the marginal cost that would be relevant to setting prices so as to guide decisions toward efficient utilization of facilities would reflect not costs imposed on the supplier but costs imposed on fellow users. In the short run a surge of traffic on a transit line, a road, or a telephone system may have no discernible effect on the costs of the operating agency, but will have as its cost a deterioration of the quality of the services rendered through increased crowding of riders, increased delay to motorists, or increased probability that a call cannot be completed promptly because the circuits are all busy. If marginal cost is measured in these terms, the fluctuations may still be great, but they will not be quite so erratic as a strict allocation of capacity costs might indicate. Here again, an appropriate level of capacity will have been reached when the cost of additional capacity would just balance the value of the improvement of service that the added capacity would provide for the actual level of traffic. This cost, in turn, given reasonable continuity of the production function, will equal the charges assessable on a volume of traffic equal to the increment that the added capacity would make it possible to carry at the original level of service quality. However, it is seldom possible to apply this criterion directly, since in most cases prices are not in fact made to vary as widely as even this interpretation of marginal cost would suggest. Aside
PRICES: Pricing Policies from popular prejudice against extreme variations in rates as being unfair or discriminatory, a rational motivation can be attributed to regulated public utilities that would make them reluctant to curb peak use quite this strongly. A utility company is often assured of a "fair" rate of return on its investment, provided only that a case can be made that this investment is needed in providing the service, and some margin is usually allowed between the actual cost of capital to the utility and this fair rate of return. In such cases the interests of the management, both as representatives of the stockholders and in terms of their own prestige and position of control, will be to maximize the amount of investment that is justifiable. This can be done by setting rates so as to maximize the net revenue derived from off-peak service. If peak rates must then be set below cost in order not to exceed the over-all rate of return allowable, a higher peak demand will result and will justify a larger capital investment than would be justified if rates reflected relative marginal costs. One can expect, accordingly, that only rarely will rates vary as widely as costs. Administered and reactive prices Another differentiation among price policies is that between predetermined, or "administered," prices and "reactive," or market-determined, prices. Administered prices tend to be more stable and predictable, thus providing a basis for planning by both buyer and seller that may be felt to lead to more efficient results. If prices are set some time in advance, potential buyers have an opportunity to make plans on the basis of a known price, and at the same time may be protected from certain types of losses that might occur if they made commitments without being assured of the prices that would prevail when they came to carry them out. On the other hand, setting prices in advance may lead to premature commitment by parties who are thus protected against the effects of future developments, and may inhibit taking advantage of opportunities that develop unexpectedly. In principle, a distinction can be made between the amount by which prices fluctuate and the lead time between the establishment of the price and the date of the eventual transaction. It is possible to have an elaborate and sharply changing pattern of price variation settled upon long in advance or to have prices that are set at the last minute fluctuate relatively little. Nevertheless, the tendency is for the preset prices to fluctuate less than the reactive prices. From an efficiency standpoint, whether the price
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should be predetermined or reactive depends to a considerable extent on the point in time at which the affected decision has to be made and on the information upon which it is based. A price may be thought of as a signal from the price setter to an affected decision maker that is intended to convey information and provide incentive in the direction of efficient choice. If, when a commitment is to be made by the decision maker (for example, whether to install gas- or oil-fired heating equipment), the price setter has more relevant information (about the relative future scarcities of oil and gas), it may be conducive to better choices to have a firm price for the future transaction (the purchase of fuel) set at or prior to this time. In other cases the purchaser as decision maker may have more up-to-date and immediate knowledge of the prospects than the price-setting seller has, or there may be substantial costs involved in the pricesetting seller's acquiring a corresponding degree of knowledge, converting this into price information, and transmitting this information to actual and potential buyers (as in the case of variations in demand due to weather conditions or special events). In such cases the determination of prices according to criteria agreed upon in advance but dependent on demand and supply conditions as experienced may be more conducive to efficient allocation of resources. Similar considerations apply, mutatis mutandis, to the relatively rare cases in which the buyer is the effective price setter. The principal objection to ex post pricing is that it subjects the parties to uncertainty as to the price that will eventually be paid. In some cases this is serious enough to be a major consideration. For example, there is a reluctance to offer gas rates reflecting low current costs of incremental gas use for house heating where it is possible that the costs may rise in the future as the capacity of existing mains becomes fully utilized or supplies of natural gas become more difficult to obtain. It would, of course, be possible to offer the current low rate and to avert overinvestment in gas appliances by adequately notifying purchasers of the likelihood of future price increases. However, given the strong promotional orientation of most customer relations, it might be difficult to insure that an unbiased appraisal of future prospects would be conveyed to customers. This difficulty could be met by means of long-term contracts covering the purchase of a given amount of service at a suitably varied sequence of rates. If the customer is eventually allowed to use more or less than the stipulated amount of service, with the difference adjusted on the basis of ex post rates, undesirable
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constraints on actual use would be avoided. In effect, the customer protects himself by a kind of futures contract against the income consequences of adverse price changes without precluding appropriate substitutions; however, the administrative problem of adapting such contracts to the needs of individual consumers in a context of utility regulation appears formidable. Actually, fuel clauses in electric power contracts are a mild form of reactive pricing; these serve, however, more to protect the utility against fuel cost increases than to influence consumption patterns ?ppreciably. In some cages the strength of the commitment in advance to the use of the service at a given time is slight for a substantial part of the demand while the possibilities for effective short-notice reactive pricing are good. For example, it is quite easy to inform telephone users when they place a call what the current rate is. An actual practice approaching this is that of having different rates for different degrees of priority, the caller being able to ascertain from the operator the expected delay for the various categories. Taking an example from electric power, the same load signal used by Electricite de France to switch rates according to time of day could be used to vary rates on a reactive basis, simultaneously encouraging the switching on and off of deferrable demands such as water heaters and refrigerators. One or more "emergency" steps in a reactive price structure can serve as a substitute for arbitrary physical load shedding and can aid in preventing or mitigating the effects of major power failures. But whatever the analytical attractiveness of fluctuating and reactive prices, consumers are often found to have a marked preference for predetermined and even flat rates. Thus, for residential telephone service it is found that customers often seem to prefer a flat monthly rate to a charge varying with use, even in instances where the bill for the amount of service actually used would be lower. That flat rate service saves the expense of recording and billing for local calls is in some cases an adequate justification on the cost side for the flat rate. However, in addition to and independently of this, on the demand side customers appear to be willing to pay extra, on the average, for assurance that they will not be faced with an unexpectedly high bill as a result of a spate of high calling activity. In some cases this attitude may arise from a budgeting situation in which a fixed income is heavily mortgaged for relatively fixed outlays, but it also appears to indicate a more general desire to be free from worry about the
economic consequences of actions. If so, many would regard this as a legitimate preference of consumers to be given appropriate weight in decisions about price structure. In some markets the price to consumers is made reactive through the intervention of speculators. Where the supplier of a service feels constrained to adopt a fairly rigid price policy, whether through custom, excise tax regulations, or a fear that price concessions might be thought to indicate an inferior quality of product, as with theater seats, speculators often find it profitable to pre-empt the units most in demand and resell them at higher prices. To the extent that demand is thus diverted from those less eager to those more eager for the service, as measured by the price they are willing to pay, speculators can be said to enhance the value of the service rendered and, hence, to be productive. However, because of the disorganized and often clandestine nature of their operations, their costs may often exceed the value of the enhancement, so that their net productivity becomes negative. The possibility that a well-coordinated and efficient market in reserved seats for sporting events, theatrical performances, long-distance air travel, and the like might prove highly productive is not to be ignored. Or such reservations might be sold originally on a basis that would simulate the action of such a market: at any given date in advance of the performance, reservations would be sold at prices varying according to the relation between the proportion of the seats of the given category still unsold and the time remaining to the date of the performance. This is, in effect, a form of marginal-cost pricing, marginal cost being in this case the expected value as of the current instant of the seat to the potential purchaser eventually displaced as a result of the current sale (adjusted, possibly, for changes in the identity of other purchasers). While marginal cost in this sense cannot be defined independently of the price policy in the succeeding interval, there will in general exist a price policy such that the price at any given instant corresponds to expected marginal cost computed in terms of the specified price poli cy. Even though this definition is implicit rather than straightforward, it is still capable of being evaluated to an acceptable level of precision. It is, in effect, merely a formal specification of what would be expected to take place in an efficient speculators' market. Another form of speculative pricing occurs in the successive auctioning of highly similar items and in the letting of contracts by sealed tenders, where decisions on how to bid often depend,
PRICES: Pricing Policies under the usual procedures, on speculative evaluations of the bidding strategy of others. The efficiency of such procedures can often be enhanced and the results made more nearly Pareto-optimal by departing from the traditional procedures. For example, similar items can be auctioned simultaneously rather than sequentially, or it can be stipulated that the contract being bid for will be awarded to the lowest bidder but at a price equal to the bid of the second lowest bidder. This latter procedure sounds as though it would result in a needlessly high price. However, when allowance is made for the effect of the change in procedure on the level of the bids that rational bidders would make, it is by no means clear in which direction the price will be affected on the average. What is clear is that the improved procedures enhance the likelihood that the items being sold will be bought by those valuing them most highly and that the contract will be let to the bidder expecting to be able to perform it at the lowest cost. Discriminatory pricing In the absence of economies of scale, marginalcost pricing consistently carried out would yield revenues sufficient to cover total costs, at least where the level of investment has been appropriate. Most of the more difficult problems of price structure occur, however, in a context of substantial economies of scale, in which case, under a strict application of the marginal-cost rule, revenues would fall short of total costs by an "intramarginal residue." Earlier advocates of marginal-cost pricing tended to assume that the appropriate procedure here is to cover this intramarginal residue by subsidies financed out of general tax revenues. But with growing governmental budgets has come increased recognition that substantial increments of tax revenues cannot ordinarily be obtained without incurring additional administrative and compliance costs and interfering with the efficient allocation of resources in other ways. This has led to acceptance of the "principle of the second best," which states that it is desirable, as long as the marginalcost price cannot be maintained in every market, to have prices that generally deviate from marginal cost in complex ways that depend on the complementarity and substitution interrelationships among the various commodities and services. This in turn implies acceptance of discriminatory pricing. In the simplest case, where the market demands for the several output categories are substantially independent, a rough rule is that the ratio of the cost (in terms of misallocation of resources) of curtailing consumption by one unit
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to the net revenue so obtained shall be the same in the various markets. The misallocation can be measured by the difference between the marginal cost of production of the unit and its value to the consumer as measured by the market price he pays. The net revenue is the excess of the marginal cost saved by producing one less unit over the marginal revenue given up, marginal revenue being in turn the price of the last unit being curtailed minus the gain from increasing the price of all preceding units. The implication of this rule is that the proportion by which marginal cost falls short of price is to be made inversely proportional to the elasticity of demand. It is to be noted, however, that while this sounds fine in principle, elasticity of demand is notoriously difficult to determine in practice. This principle reintroduces, in a more restricted form, the discrimination often stigmatized as "charging what the traffic will bear." Where products or services are close substitutes, a different consideration comes into play: the desirability of keeping the price relationship between the two goods or services in line with the relationship of marginal costs, so that a customer making a choice between the two will be faced with a price differential that properly reflects the difference in marginal cost. This poses a special problem where the competing products or services are produced under sharply differing degrees of economy of scale, as when an all-rail route competes with a route making use of coastwise shipping. The allrail route may well be unable to attract the share of the total traffic that can most economically be moved along it unless this route can quote especially favorable rates that will make little or no contribution to covering the intramarginal cost residue, or unless rates for the water movement are kept artificially high by taxes or by high rates for the complementary rail segments of the route. If the water route rates are kept high, this may, on the other hand, unduly inhibit the movement of traffic by water even where an all-rail movement is entirely out of the running. Competition among the varying modes is indeed one factor that has contributed greatly to the complexity of freight tariffs. Where the degree of economy of scale is more nearly the same, as when two rail routes compete, the problem tends to be less one of introducing needed discrimination than one of avoiding discrimination arising from cutthroat competition. In the absence of regulation, in extreme cases rates between competing termini have been brought substantially below rates between intermediate points. Such rate structures obviously interfere with the
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efficient location of industry; and there is, accordingly, a tendency to try to curb this kind of price competition within a single mode of transportation while opening the door a little wider for competition between modes. One result has been the adoption of flat blanket rates for entire areas or zones, in part to simplify rates generally but also as a way of making it easier to recognize and inhibit attempts to undercut competitors by rate concessions. The possibility of competitive improvement in quality remains, and is at times carried to wasteful excess; but improvement in quality is a slower and more difficult process, less likely to result in a major impairment of over-all net revenues. Blanket rates, however, often mask significant differences in marginal cost for transportation to or from different points within the blanketed area, or by different routes to the same point, and thus in their turn lead to inefficient routing of traffic and location of activity. Highway competition has been a strong factor tending to break down discrimination based on commodity classification where rate differentials were based on the supposed elasticity of demand rather than on characteristics of the commodity related to cost of transport, such as density or susceptibility to damage. To avoid losing highly profitable traffic to highway trucks, railroads have been forced to reduce premium rates formerly charged on high-value goods and to place greater emphasis on "all commodity" rates, particularly in the case of shipment in containers and in highway trailers carried on flatcars. The highway competition problem is further complicated by the fact that trucks share the burden of the intramarginal residue of highway costs with other highway users. Aside from the need to stabilize competition, geographical uniformity of rates, even in the face of significant differences in cost, has great appeal to management on grounds of administrative simplicity and to the general public on grounds of equity. Indeed, such uniformity often masks more or less deliberate discrimination. Thus rural electric service or postal service at uniform rates may reflect a more or less conscious desire to redistribute income in favor of agriculture. Another type of discrimination in the guise of uniformity arises when delivered prices are quoted on a uniform basis, with the seller absorbing differences in transportation cost, rather than or a "mill net" basis. In some cases this is merely a matter of ignoring, for the sake of convenience, costs that would make only a minor difference in the total bill. But the practice often goes further than this and constitutes a recognition that sales
to more distant customers are subject to stronger competition from other suppliers than sales to nearby customers. This discrimination has been carried further still in "basing point" schemes, in which the delivered price includes freight, not from the shipping mill but from an established basing point that may approximate the location of a competitor's mill. In international trade, the practice of selling to a more remote market at a lower net realization than is obtained from domestic customers is referred to as "dumping" and is often strongly resisted by the customer country through tariff and other measures. Where the use of a system supplying services involves some form of physical connection or semipermanent relationship between customer and seller, additional opportunity arises for discriminatory pricing through various forms of "multipart tariff." To be sure, where there are costs associated with the connection as such, it is often difficult to distinguish the discriminatory aspects of such schedules from the cost-related aspects. In electricity supply, for example, there is good justification, on strictly marginal-cost principles, for a "customer charge" related to the installed capacity of the connection to the system and covering the cost of this connection plus meter-reading and billing costs. In addition, the user would pay energy charges, which may vary according to time of day and season of the year, and charges for "wattless KVA" drawn by motors and other inductive devices, which may also vary by time of day, but not in the same way as the energy charge. Where time-of-day rates are deemed impractical, because of high metering costs or for other reasons, recourse may be had to step rates, which charge for successive blocks of monthly energy consumption at successively lower rates. Attempts have been made to justify this practice on the ground that customers using only energy in the first blocks draw a relatively large proportion of their energy in the peak periods. A more realistic appraisal seems to be that this represents mainly a discriminatory exploitation of differences in the elasticities of demand for the various blocks of power. Among domestic users, this discrimination operates regressively in favor of the larger customers, who tend to have the higher incomes. It has been suggested, indeed, that the size of the blocks should be varied according to the size of the premises served, but this practice has not proved popular. Not only would it tend to correct the regressive impact of the more usual type of schedule, but it might, properly adjusted, put nearly all customers at a point on the schedule
PRICES: Pricing Policies where they could obtain additional energy at marginal cost, so that the efficiency conditions could be met much more closely. However, if the total charge varies with the size of the premises, this converts the rate schedule into a charge on space at the margin and leads to an uneconomical stinting in the use of space instead of uneconomical stinting in the use of power. On a strictly cost basis, however, there is considerable justification for a charge based on lot area or street frontage, representing the cost of carrying the conduits past the property. Efficiency considerations suggest that such a charge could properly be assessed against any occupant of land within the service area, regardless of whether the specific service is taken, on the ground that occupancy of space in an area in which the service is provided increases the cost of providing the service to those who need it. While charges of this type are sometimes used for water supply, they have not been much used for other utility services, although in some instances developers of new residential areas have been required to provide or pay for a portion of the utility distribution plant. The direct effect of such charges on the allocation of resources is likely to be somewhat independent of the exact method of computing the charge, since any variations from one method to another would probably be capitalized in the value of the affected land. Indeed, the effect of such charges would in the long run not be very different from giving the agency providing the service a general subsidy financed by land taxes (as distinct from taxes on improvements) imposed on the property in the service area. The crucial element is that the amount of the tax or charge be independent of improvements or changes in the nature of the use of the property. In some jurisdictions, indeed, liability for property tax is made conditional on the availability of specified municipal services, such as garbage collection, although in most cases the tax is assessed on improvements as well as on land. There would, in principle, be no need to restrict such charges to cases where the distribution system comprises fixed capital plant: mail and parcel delivery service would be cases in point. Even in the absence of an individual physical connection, or where rate blocks of uniform size would be too arbitrary, a form of multipart pricing is sometimes effected by a variant of the "requirements" contract, in which the shipper, in return for a more favorable set of rates, agrees to ship or receive not less than a given percentage of his total shipments via the specified carrier or
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mode, usually rail. Such bahntreu rates differ in motive from the block rates for electric power, however, in that they usually are aimed at diverting traffic from competing modes rather than at increasing the total volume of traffic moved. Complex as pricing policies already are, modern technology is opening new areas for pricing as a means of enhancing efficiency. Until recently it has been considered impractical to make specific charges, for example, for the use of city streets, and from time immemorial the attractiveness of the city core has resulted in the growth of traffic until the costs of congestion have inhibited further increase. The obvious wastefulness of this congestion has led to recent attempts in England and elsewhere to devise methods of assessing charges on the users of the congested streets that would bring home to them the costs that they impose on others by their presence in the congested area, and thus would restrain use to that which is sufficiently urgent to warrant occupancy of the scarce space. In this way it is hoped that the economic productivity of the core street area will be enhanced much as the enclosure of common agricultural land led to an increase in agricultural productivity. Even when prices are not actually charged, "shadow prices" are being increasingly used as a management tool in large complex organizations as a means of decentralizing the decision-making process. Such uses have been given considerable impetus by the fact that similar "shadow prices" emerge as an integral part of the process of solving linear programming problems. These shadow prices have the property that when the various activities being analyzed are evaluated in terms of them, all activities carried on at positive levels in an optimum solution will show a zero profit, no activity will show a net gain, and in general, activities that cannot be a part of any optimal solution will show a loss. In this and other ways, even socialist and centrally planned economies are finding increasingly that proper pricing policies can play a crucial role in the efficient organization of an economy. WILLIAM S. VICKREY [See also TRANSPORTATION, article on ECONOMIC ASPECTS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bonbright 1961 is an excellent recent summary of pricing as applied to utilities; Davidson 1955 goes into further details which illustrate the tortuous reasoning often resorted to in this area; while Ripley 1912 provides a contrasting statement of the practices typical of an earlier era. Lerner 1944 sets forth in fairly simple form the logic
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of the more general role of prices and pricing policies in the efficient allocation of resources; Hotelling 1938, a somewhat more mathematical presentation, is of special interest as having stimulated a new level of interest in the problem of pricing in cases involving economies of scale. Ruggles 1949; 1950 provide an excellent summary and documentation of the theoretical discussion up to 1949; Beckwith 1955 gives a more elaborate critique of the developwent of the theory and adds some suggestions on how the principles can be applied in a variety of concrete situations. Great Britain . . . 1964 discusses the possibilities and the problems involved in applying pricing methods in a hitherto largely unpriced situation, while Boiteux 1956 illustrates the skillful use of highly theoretical tools by an author having practical experience and responsibility. BECKWITH, BURNHAM P. 1955 Marginal-cost Price-Output Control: A Critical History and Restatement of the Theory. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. BOITEUX, MARCEL 1956 Sur la gestion des monopoles publics astreints a 1'equilibre budgetaire. Econometrica 24:22-40. BONBRIGHT, JAMES C. 1961 Principles of Public Utility Rates. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. DAVIDSON, RALPH K. 1955 Price Discrimination in Selling Gas and Electricity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. GREAT BRITAIN, MINISTRY OF TRANSPORT 1964 Road Pricing: Economic and Technical Possibilities. London: H.M. Stationery Office. -» A report of a panel set up by the Ministry of Transport, with R. J. Smeed as chairman. HOTELLING, HAROLD 1938 The General Welfare in Relation to Problems of Taxation and of Railway and Utility Rates. Econometrica 6:242-269. LERNER, ABBA P. 1944 The Economics of Control: Principles of Welfare Economics. New York: Macmillan. RIPLEY, WILLIAM Z. (1912) 1927 Railroads, Rates and Regulation. New York: Longmans. RUGGLES, NANCY D. 1949 The Welfare Basis of the Marginal Cost Pricing Principle. Review of Economic Studies 17, no. 1:29-46. RUGGLES, NANCY D. 1950 Recent Developments in the Theory of Marginal Cost Pricing. Review of Economic Studies 17, no. 2:107-126. VICKREY, WILLIAM S. 1963 General and Specific Financing of Urban Services. Pages 62-90 in Conference on Public Expenditure Decisions in the Urban Community, Washington, D.C., 1962, Conference on Public Expenditure Decisions in the Urban Community: Papers . . . . Edited by Howard G. Schaller. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. II PRICE CONTROL AND RATIONING
Freedom from personal control by government is deeply imbedded in the ideology of enterprisemarket economies. This freedom as it applies to the individual market decisions which determine prices and purchases in such economies finds strong functional support in the economizing role played by free prices. In the Western democracies, and notably in the United States, government control of industrial and commercial prices and government rationing of goods have traditionally been resorted to only in periods of war or near-war.
The economy of the United States, although characterized by considerable government activity and influence, is essentially an enterprise-market economy, the logic and operation of which call upon prices to play a central economizing role. It is of the very essence of this role that prices be free to respond to, and continually to reflect, the myriad choices and decisions of individual consumers and producers as these are meshed together in the market, and, in turn, continually to guide these choices and decisions. Role of price in enterprise-market economies. Buyers, as they bid in free markets for the consumer-good offerings of sellers, sit in review on the decisions which producer-sellers have made as to the uses of the economy's scarce resources. The prices placed on consumer goods represent market evaluations of these goods and, hence, of resources put to these uses. Producer-sellers in their turn have bid in free markets for these resources (factors of production). The prices (costs of production) which they have paid in hopeful anticipation of later favorable judgments by consumers represent market evaluations of the resources. When the price which emerges in the market for a consumer good is below its cost of production as determined in intermediate and factor markets, it means a pecuniary loss for the producer-seller. More fundamentally it bespeaks the market judgment of consumers that the economy's resources have been misused—resources of given value have been misdirected into uses of lower value. On the other hand, a price above cost of production means a gain for the producer-seller and a market verdict by consumers vindicating the producer's resource decision—resources of given value have been transformed into goods of higher value. The gains, prospectively and as realized, encourage resource decisions in line with society's desires as reflected in free markets; the losses deter and prompt corrections of decisions which misallocate resources. The prices worked out in the markets for the basic factors of production—land, labor, capital, and enterprise—constitute not only the basic costs of production but also the incomes of all who participate in production, the incomes which enable them in their capacities as consumers to bid effectively for goods to satisfy their desires. The constant interplay of prices, as they respond to and influence demands and anticipations within and between the markets for consumer goods, intermediate goods, and basic factors of production, is the enterprise-market economy's mechanism for
PRICES: Price Control and Rationing directing the employment of its scarce, valuable resources and for distributing the fruits of production among those who participate in production. It is the process by which such an economy economizes. It is not surprising, then, that in economies or sectors of economies where prices traditionally are cast in the leading economizing role, doubts are raised by suggestions for government controls designed to limit the free market interplay of prices or to substitute government for prices and the market in the performance of the economizing function. Price control in enterprise-market economies. Principal reliance by enterprise-market economies upon free markets and free prices to perform the economizing function has not meant exclusive reliance upon these forces, even in the absence of war or preparation for war. The classic instance of generally accepted peacetime price control occurs in the case of public utilities, where, because of peculiar economic and physical features of the industry, competition cannot be relied upon to produce socially acceptable results. Almost universally, where public utility services are provided by private companies, monopoly is established by public authority, and service and price are subjected to government regulation [see REGULATION OF INDUSTRY]. Elsewhere in the economy, too, in particular areas at particular times, dissatisfied groups have succeeded in having the economizing results of free market processes altered by the introduction of government controls of output or prices or both: agricultural price supports, petroleum prorating, and resale price maintenance are examples. In transportation a most confused melange of regulated prices and market prices has developed. At the moment the future of price determination in the transportation industries is most uncertain [see AGRICULTURE, article on PRICE AND INCOME POLICIES; RESALE PRICE MAINTENANCE; TRANSPORTATION, article on ECONOMIC ASPECTS]. All enterprise-market economies have substantially altered the patterns of income distribution produced by the free pricing processes of their markets—by tax measures designed to take more from the rich than from the poor and by the free provision of public goods which if available only on the market could not be bought widely by persons of low income. Increasingly, governments have taken responsibility for spurring their lagging economies into fuller use of resources and the production of increased national income—by resort to tax, debt management, and public expenditure programs, all of which are intended to effect
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their results through market prices. Concern over peacetime inflation has stimulated government activity designed to keep the general level of prices in check. This typically takes the form of broad fiscal and monetary (including credit) measures. But more recently informal government pressures, such as admonitions to be "responsible" addressed to industry and labor leaders, have been applied to prices and wages in particular industries. In these instances, control of prices and wages is explicitly disavowed, but, of course, government action here is meaningless unless specific prices and wages are in fact affected. Despite these instances of direct or indirect price control by government, it remains true that in the American peacetime economy prices are largely left free to work themselves out in markets at all levels and so perform, with greater or lesser success and acceptance, their appointed economizing role. There are, indeed, substantial misgivings in the minds of many about the performance of market prices as guides to resource use and as determinants of factor income—growing out of anterior misgivings as to the actual effectiveness of market competition in eliciting responsive prices. Action prompted by these misgivings, however, takes the form of government programs to restore, rehabilitate, and maintain competition rather than to operate directly on the prices themselves. Against this background, we may turn to a consideration of the very special circumstances under which even enterprise-market economies undertake widespread programs of price control and rationing, the nature of the programs on which they embark, and some of the problems which they encounter. Price control in wartime Price control and control of the distribution of consumer goods (rationing) are parts of over-all government programs to bring about widespread mobilization of economic resources in time of war or preparation for war. They are designed both to help in mobilization and to protect the economy from certain adverse effects of mobilization. Price control and rationing rarely make an appearance except in the company of other war-mobilization controls, and they can be understood and appraised realistically only in this context. Total, all-out war demands all-out controls, including the allocation of resources and materials, the control of specific prices, and the rationing of specific goods. Preparation for war ("defense") calls for a program of controls appropriate to the scale of mobilization being undertaken, a program
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which may or may not include full-blown allocation, price control, and rationing. Both the dangers of inflation and the need for direct controls as instruments for mobilizing resources are less in defense periods than in time of war, and the dangers of (and potentially to) these controls are greate^. This is particularly true if it may be anticipated that the defense period will lengthen into an endless era of cold war. Formal direct controls, which are virtually inevitable in wartime, are decidedly optional as measures of long-drawnout preparation for wars which may or may not materialize. Totai war calls for total economic mobilization —a rapid, massive shift of manpower, equipment, and materials from the uses of peacetime to the purposes of war. It demands the utmost in total production despite the transfer of millions of men from fields and factories to military service, and, notably, it demands a cutback in the production of consumer goods in favor of vast new programs for the production of military goods and services. These shifts in resources cannot be made on the scale and at the speed demanded if reliance is had solely upon the ordinary processes of the market. Men will not leave civilian employment by the millions to join the armed services in response to considerations of economic gain. Plants will not be converted en masse and overnight from the production of consumer goods to the production of goods for war (with all that is entailed in new construction, retooling, and the disruption of production and sales contacts and channels) by the precarious directions and questionable lures of early wartime markets. Economic responses would at best be no more certain than the diffused economic calculations on which they were based, and the prosecution of wars cannot wait upon the outcome of speculation, titillation, and gentle persuasion. Sterner and more certain measures are called for. Economic incentives may still be employed, but they must be supplemented by specially designed interventions and by commands. Government limitations on consumer buying and on nonwar uses of resources, and government direction of the use of men, materials, and equipment must take the place of or supplement government bidding in the market in competition with civilian producers and consumers. A declaration of war is a declaration that the individual economic preferences of the citizens of a country are to be subordinated to what is essentially a single national economic purpose—mobilization of the economy to win the war. Tremendous reallocations are necessary, and time is of
the essence. It is of the nature of war that commands which must be obeyed take the place of inducements which individuals are free to accept or ignore and, further, that the operation of commands must not be weakened and diffused by the activities of individual buyers and sellers exercising personal preferences in the market. Markets simply cannot provide the unified direction, speed, and sweep which war demands of an economy. Commands will frequently blunder, and imbalances and unnecessary inconveniences will constantly occur, but the main drive of mobilization cannot safely be entrusted to any mechanism other than centralized command. Feasibility. A major contention of those who look upon wartime price control and rationing with disfavor born of something more than sheer ideology or purely personal irritation is that these direct controls cannot be made to work—that only confusion and breakdowns can result. Experience indicates, however, that for periods running for at least three or four years, under crisis conditions and admittedly in greater degree for some goods in some markets than for other goods, direct controls can, indeed, be made to work. It is clear, of course, that "frozen" prices cannot perform the allocative role prescribed for prices by enterprisemarket economies. But allocation of materials and rationing are present to perform this task in time of war—devices specifically designed to achieve the special allocative ends which wars require both in the military and civilian sectors of the economy. Those responsible for wartime controls are fully conscious of the allocative role of prices in time of peace and the need, if wartime prices are to be fixed, to establish specific measures to provide for allocation. But it is fair to suggest that they are also concerned to establish allocative measures in their own right and on their own merits as necessary under wartime conditions—even if prices were not to be controlled. Materials allocation and rationing are, to be sure, supplements to price control; they also have a wartime raison d'etre of their own. The imposition of price control upon the price structure of a modern industrial economy is in itself not as great a shock as some might anticipate. Peacetime markets as we know them are shot through with conditions, conventions, and customs which make it entirely possible to impose government controls under the circumstances of war without great fear that a highly sensitive, marvelously articulated mechanism will, by the very fact of intervention, be destroyed and without great apprehension that the mechanism simply
PRICES: Price Control and Rationing cannot be made to function under other than its own internal forces and controls. To be sure, some markets are more amenable than others to unusual external controls whether of prices or distribution, and equal success cannot be expected of controls imposed in all markets under all circumstances. Controls need to be tailored to conditions—and in some instances should not be imposed. However, in many industries and markets, sellers consist of (or are led by) a few large firms. What we know of these markets suggests that prices are made more by the personal decisions of the few than by impersonal forces of the market. Such prices can be controlled by government with much greater ease and with much less impairment of any impersonal allocative function they may be thought to perform than would be the case if in peacetime they were the product of more completely competitive processes. We have been reminded by J. K. Galbraith that it "is relatively easy to fix prices that are already fixed" (1952, p. 17). In World War n, the American economy, operating under a network of direct controls calculated to mobilize, redirect, allocate, and distribute resources and goods, changed its course drastically from peace production to war production and consumption, and picked up speed and productive power in the process. Necessity. Inflation is a normal consequence of large-scale mobilization. Total national product and, hence, total national money income may be expected to reach new highs, but much of the product (anywhere from 40 to 60 per cent) must be for military rather than civilian use. Military demands added to the demands of newly enriched consumers for goods and, hence, for the means and materials of production can result only in greatly elevated prices, unless countermeasures are taken. Simply stated: higher than usual personal incomes in pursuit of a lower than usual output of personal goods can be balanced in the market only at new, higher price levels. However, consumer demands can be partially curbed. Much personal income can and will be extracted from civilian pockets by increases in wartime taxes and by vigorously conducted sales of wartime government bonds to individuals and businesses. As an academic matter, enough purchasing power in the aggregate could be transferred by these measures from the civilian population to match the transfer of resources from civilian to government military uses and, hence, to permit the balancing of civilian demand with the lowered output of civilian goods with no increase in the general level of prices. In the actual event, however, this will not be
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done and for good reason. Government borrowing from individuals and businesses is a fruitful source of wartime funds, but at best it will produce far less than the amounts required, and its proceeds are uncertain. If the government is to obtain by taxation the rest of the vast sums it needs, it must levy its taxes where, at the moment, the money is located. Any such tax program, geared to the tremendous demands of an all-out military effort, would necessarily violate all canons of equity in taxation. It would, as well, ruin any plans the government might have to employ economic incentives as part of its mobilization program. Granted that governments could and should undertake to support wars by greater dependence upon taxes than they typically find to be politically feasible, it is generally conceded that they are wise not to go all the way in adopting a payas-you-go program of war finance. It is even more certain that they will not in fact go all the way. Deficit financing, in greater or lesser measure, with its attendant threat of inflation is one of the realities of war [see FISCAL POLICY, article ov WARTIME FISCAL POLICY].
The fact is that if inflation is to be prevented— even if only suppressed or contained—broad indirect measures, such as taxation, public borrowing from individuals and firms, and monetary and credit controls, will have to be supplemented by direct government control of specific prices. This would still be true even if the so-called inflationary gap could be largely wiped out by taxes and bond sales. Panic buying and speculative buying of strategic materials and key commodities could produce skyrocketing prices and profits, which could create bottlenecks and threaten the success of economic mobilization. These increases could lead in turn to spiraling wage demands and further price increases both in the immediately affected and in other commodities. This would be certain to occur in industries where the ineffectiveness of competition leaves much room for discretion in the setting of prices and wages—where increases in both could easily be passed on. Latent savings and credit could feed the fire, and no government concerned with winning a war could avoid further deficit financing. As Donald Wallace put the matter, "In full war, the question is not whether inflation can be stopped without use of direct controls but whether inflation can be checked even with the greatest practicable use of all controls, direct and indirect" (1953, p. 16). Supporters of wartime price control are quite willing to concede that its effect is to suppress inflation and not fully to destroy its underlying
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causes, but they argue that suppressed inflation ment orders that limit consumer use of scarce materials. Experience in World War n demonstrated is to be preferred to open inflation, that the excess the need for rationing for all of these purposes in demand contained by price control itself serves the case of such commodities as rubber, petroleum, a useful wartime function, and finally that supmetals, sugar, and meat and other foods (see pressed inflation can be rendered "noninflationary" Wallace 1953, pp. 215 ff.). Rationing was particuby the use of proper fiscal, credit, and control larly necessary as a support to price control in measures during a reasonable liquidation period those highly competitive markets where price confollowing the war. It is pointed out that the price trol was subjected to great pressures. controls which suppress inflation operate on particular prices so that price-wage spirals will not Policy and administration be touched off and the war economy will thus be The introduction and operation of price control immunized from a particularly virulent and deand rationing involve important policy decisions structive form of inflation. Excess demand, stored as to timing, coverage, and type of control and as up behind the controls guarding the prices of conto administrative machinery and personnel. sumer goods, far from indicating weakness or lack Policy. A price or prices may be "frozen" at the of sophistication in the application of fiscal and level of a given base date or during a given base price controls, should be regarded, if properly adperiod. This is the most dramatic type of price ministered, as a most useful tool for the developaction, and it may be employed for this very reason ment of maximum economic-military potential. in the presence of an immediately threatened inIt is "a practical way of adapting modern capicrease or spiral of prices. It presents many diffitalism [by facilitating the absorption and employculties, both of compliance and enforcement, most ment of great increases in the labor force and in of which grow out of lack of knowledge by sellers the use of labor]—a capitalism characterized by and buyers of actual base prices. It always emoligopoly in product markets and strong unions in bodies inequities that must be corrected over time, factor markets—to the wartime imperative that all and it leaves open the problem of new commodpossible resources be employed and if possible ities and new types or styles. Legal maximum under approximately stable conditions of prices prices may be calculated by formulas, a useful and costs" (Galbraith 1952, p. 34). Restraint in procedure in the case of special commodities and the removal of price controls following the cessaa necessary procedure where new goods or styles tion of hostilities, and the employment of budget are involved. Again, however, buyers are not in surpluses coupled with restrictions on consumer possession of the information necessary for really borrowing and new investment, could thin out and effective enforcement. Margins or markups fall gradually reduce inflationary pressures to the point into this category, and these may or may not be of elimination. effective in holding prices, depending upon the Rationing. Rationing of consumer goods is the character of the calculation of the cost base to natural ally of price control. It will certainly be which they are applied. For compliance and encalled up for wartime service. All-out war is bound forcement, no other type of ceiling can equal pubto bring at least limited rationing, and if price lished or publicly displayed dollar-and-cents prices, controls are widely extended, rationing, too, will and if price control programs are long continued, spread. In peacetime enterprise-market economies, such lists are bound to become more prevalent. rationing (the distribution of goods) is a funcSelection of the goods to which price control is tion of price; in war economies price control and to be applied presents a difficult problem. Certain rationing provide each other with much-needed goods are natural candidates for control because support. The case for both rests on the limits that of spot-price situations (speculative or panic buywar places on the aggregate supply of consumer ing), because price control is needed as an aid goods, while aggregate consumer purchasing power to production control, or because the goods (costcontinues to rise, as well as on the fact of particuof-living or "wage" items) are likely to contribute lar shortages in particular markets. Rationing can to price-wage spirals. As suggested above, it is be made to check consumer demand and thus to easier to control the prices of standard goods proeliminate pressure on prices. It can contribute to duced and sold under conditions of oligopoly, where the equitable distribution of essential goods in sellers are few and peacetime prices are "adminshort supply. (Note that under war conditions our istered," than the prices of goods which are subnotions of equity undergo something of a change.) ject to frequent changes in type and style or which Rationing can direct particular scarce goods where they are most needed for war purposes, and it is are produced and sold by a multitude of small a natural complement to and support for governfirms, which typically "follow the market." The
PRICES: Price Control and Rationing case for control of the prices of luxury ("nonwage") goods rests not so much on concern for their users or because of their direct effect on inflation as on the likelihood that high prices, profits, and wages in these industries will attract resources from, and instigate inflationary demands in, other industries. Considerations relevant to control in particular instances are frequently in direct conflict. The need for control of food prices is great, but so are the difficulties of control. One consideration that is likely to impress price controllers as the control program continues is that all prices are interrelated. While this fact does not dictate an all-ornothing coverage, it points up the need to be on the lookout for unanticipated effects and is a powerful force moving for an extension of controls, once instituted. Woe to the controllers, for example, who fail to keep the price of hogs in mind when setting the price of corn. It is necessary to establish price standards if control is to involve more than a freezing of past prices, and even frozen prices have to be adjusted to reflect individual circumstances and unique conditions. Prices must be set de novo for new goods and goods offered by new sellers. And prices once fixed may need to be changed because of consideration of equity, expediency, or changed conditions. It is fashionable to contend that it is prices not profits that are being controlled; but effect on profits cannot be avoided, and there is much to be said for tying price control directly and openly to, say, percentage return on net worth. It is inevitable as the program grows that particular prices be tailored to particular, identified purposes—the removal of disparities and inequities, the bolstering of physical controls, the meeting of shortages. In some instances involving strategic materials, carefully tailored and differential prices may have to be supplemented by subsidies to insure needed production. The function and effects of prices are nowhere more clearly apparent than in a program of price control once gotten under way. Rationing. Rationing, too, calls for decisions on types and coverage. The intricacies and the sheer physical task of rationing are, if anything, greater than in the case of price control. A strong case can be made on paper for the wide extension of rationing. The realities of the task, however, counsel the restriction of rationing to those instances where great shortages of very important commodities are involved or where the greatest importance attaches to the placing of particular goods in particular hands. Certificate rationing provides a ticket for each allotment, awarded (as in the case of tires in World War n) to persons
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on the basis of their specifically determined need for the commodity in relation to the war effort. Coupon rationing entitles the coupon holder to buy a stated quantity of a given good (for example, sugar) at any time during a given period. Point rationing covers items which are more or less substitutes for each other (for example, different foods), and it entitles the holder of point coupons to distribute his limited purchases as he pleases over a range of goods. This device makes it possible to change point values as supplies and demands change and hence to adjust distribution to changing conditions. Consumers are bound to be disappointed at the limited amounts they are permitted to buy legally, and the temptation is great for rationing officials to overextend their issuance of certificates, coupons, or points. Nothing, of course, could be more damaging to a rationing program, and few things could be more directly damaging to civilian morale and to the war effort. Coupons as a condition of buying are irritating enough; coupons "without honor" compound the irritation. Direct control of specific prices is, quite understandably, not popular with sellers, both because of its effect on revenue and the irritations which are produced inevitably by its imposition and administration. Rationing of consumer goods is, if anything, even more unpopular with sellers and consumers. The latter, almost universally, see its restrictive rather than its "fair share" aspect; it appears to them to be rationing rather than the war that is responsible for their inability to buy all of any good they are willing to pay for. In time, as these controls become more widespread and come to be associated in the public mind with all of the inconveniences of war, the unpopularity fans out generally over the population and deepens in intensity. There can be no doubt that it is easier and more comfortable not to be controlled than to the controlled, just as it is easier and simpler not to control than to control. Paradoxically, if the controls prove to be reasonably successful in containing inflation, with the result that the dangers of inflation fade from public consciousness, the need for controls seems less urgent. Their very efficacy undermines public support for their continuance. Administration. The task of setting up and operating the machinery required to control most prices at all levels and to ration a considerable array of products is staggering. Since these are not regular, continuing functions, the staff must be specially recruited, and the members are bound to be amateurs—learning, it is hoped, as they perform. Some members can be drawn from industry
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and business, and there is a widespread misconception that because industrial and business prices are involved, industrial and business personnel are peculiarly suited to the task. Quite the contrary is true. Industrial and business knowledge and advice are essential, but price fixing in the context of government control is quite different in conception, objective, and practice from the making of prices within a business firm. Businessmen, however conscientious, have much to unlearn before they can qualify as government price controllers. University economists come to the task better prepared than most, but they suffer from the allegation sometimes justified, that they are unrealistic crusaders. The fact is that there is no professional career in an enterprise-market economy for the price controller and rationer, and, hence, there is no standby staff. Other administrative problems, too, are almost overwhelming: control by Washington versus control by the field offices; simple regulations in the interest of understanding and compliance versus detailed regulations in the interest of precise tailoring to fit individual situations; toughness and rigidity versus sympathetic understanding and flexibility. These and a myriad other issues are always present—and, in actual cases that make a difference, not just in a broad philosophical setting. And congressmen, whose constituents "don't like it," are omnipresent and insistent. In due course, controllers as well as those controlled will have had their fill. Increasingly it is borne in on everyone that there is in fact a basic difference between being controlled, commanded, and even abused by the cold, heartless, impersonal forces of the market and by the personal orders (however understanding and "correct") of government officials and that at this stage in history democratic peoples seem to prefer unidentified systems to identified officials as economic arbiters. As price control and rationing proceed, the scales on which the public in democracies weighs the disadvantages of inflation against the irritations of controls are almost certain eventually to swing in favor of "kick out the controls." But it is equally certain that at another time and with the advent of another national emergency requiring sweeping mobilization of the economy and threatening serious inflation, direct controls will be eagerly and confidently adopted again. BEN W. LEWIS BIBLIOGRAPHY
The author of this article has drawn heavily upon two books by economists ^vho were deeply involved in the •planning and execution of the American program of price control and rationing in World War II: Galbraith 1952 and
Wallace 1953. Chandler & Wallace 1951 contains an excellent bibliography of U.S. Government publications relating to wartime controls in World War I and World War II. Particular attention should also be called to the 15 publications of the U.S. Office of Temporary Controls 19471948 covering the work of the Office of Price Administration in World War 11. CAMPBELL, ROBERT F. 1948 The History of Basic Metals Price Control in World War II. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. CHANDLER, LESTER V.; and WALLACE, DONALD H. 1951 Economic Mobilization and Stabilization: Selected Materials on the Economics of War and Defence. New York: Holt. CHICAGO, UNIVERSITY OF, LAW SCHOOL 1952 Defense, Controls, and Inflation: A Conference. Edited by Aaron Director. Univ. of Chicago Press. CLARK, JOHN M. 1944 Demobilization of Wartime Economic Controls. New York: McGraw-Hill. Economic Mobilization Short of War. 1951 American Economic Review 41:51-84. The Economics of Preparedness for War. 1949 American Economic Review 39, no. 3:356-383. -> A Proceedings volume. Economics of War. 1940 American Economic Review 30, no. 1, pt. 2:317-382. H> A Proceedings volume. GALBRAITH, JOHN K. 1947 The Disequilibrium System. American Economic Review 37:287-302. GALBRAITH, JOHN K. 1952 A Theory of Price Control. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. GEORGE, EDWIN B.; and LANDRY, ROBERT J. 1950 The Problem of Controlling Resource Flows in Wartime. American Economic Review 40:323-348. HANCOCK, WILLIAM K.; and COWING, M. M. 1949 British War Economy. London: H.M. Stationery Office. HARDY, CHARLES O. 1940 Wartime Control of Prices. Brookings Institution, Institute of Economics, Publication No. 84. Washington: The Institution. HART, ALBERT G. 1953 Defense and the Dollar: Federal Credit and Monetary Policies. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD 1940 How to Pay for the War: A Radical Plan for the Chancellor of the Exchequer. New York: Harcourt. KLEIN, BURTON 1948 Germany's Preparation for War: A Re-examination. American Economic Review 38: 56-77. LEWIS, BEN W. 1945 Lambs in Bureaucrat's Clothing. Harper's Magazine 191:247-251. MILLS, FREDERICK C. 1943 Prices in a War Economy: Some Aspects of the Present Price Structure of the United States. National Bureau of Economic Research, Occasional Paper No. 12. New York: The Bureau. NOVICK, DAVID; ANSHEN, MELVIN; and TRUPPNER, W. C. 1949 Wartime Production Controls. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. Price Control and Profit Control. 1951 Capital Goods Review No. 7. Price Control and Rationing. 1943 American Economic •Review 33, no. 1, pt. 2:253-278. -» A Proceedings volume. Price Control and Rationing in the War-Peace Transition. 1945 American Economic Review 35, no. 2:150—192-> A Proceedings volume. Problems of an Advanced Defense Economy. 1950 American Economic Review 40, no. 2:191—233. -» A Proceedings volume. The Role of Price Control. 1951 Capital Goods Review No. 8.
PRICES: Price History ROSENBAUM, E. M. 1942 War Economics: A Bibliographical Approach. Economica New Series 9:64-94. TAUSSIG, FRANK W. 1919 Price-fixing as Seen by a Price-fixer. Quarterly Journal of Economics 33:205241. U.S. OFFICE OF TEMPORARY CONTROLS 1947-1948 General Publications. Nos. 1-15. Washington: Government Printing Office. -» No. 1: The Beginnings of O.P.A. No. 2: Ration Banking. No. 3: Apparel Price Control. No. 4: Field Administration of Rationing. No. 5: O.P.A. and Public Utility Commissions. No. 6: Industrial Price Control. Nos. 7-11 [Problems in Price Control]: Standards; Techniques; Changing Production Patterns; Stabilization Subsidies; Legal Phases. No. 12: National Office Organization and Management. No. 13: Studies in Food Rationing. No. 14: O.P.A. Volunteers. No. 15: A Short History of O.P.A. U.S. WAR INDUSTRIES BOARD 1941 American Industry in the War: A Report of the War Industries Board. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. -» The report was submitted in March 1921 by Bernard M. Baruch, chairman. WALLACE, DONALD H. 1953 Economic Controls and Defense. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. WILCOX, WALTER W. 1947 The Farmer in the Second World War. Ames: Iowa State College Press. Ill PRICE HISTORY
Although movements of commodity prices can be measured in earlier periods than can any other phenomenon of general interest to social scientists, we have no satisfactory records of prices in antiquity. Sporadic quotations for a few commodities, such as grain, metals, and livestock, in different places give rough ideas, which are valuable for some purposes, of the relative prices of a few articles and of some violent changes in the price level. (Examples of such violent changes are those which the treasure obtained in Alexander's conquests induced in Greece in the fourth century B.C. and which the debasement of the coinage caused in Rome in the third and fourth centuries.) But there are no series of commodity prices that will permit us to measure changes in their average for any important locality or period in ancient times. Medieval price and wage movements. Although more numerous and reliable than those for antiquity, the medieval price data now available lack the regularity, continuity, homogeneity, and diversity required for the satisfactory measurement of the price level before about 1350. The next oldest continuous quantitative economic data are money wages, or the price of labor. Despite their obvious importance, wage data have been neglected by some price historians and used with less skill than commodity price series by many others. Nevertheless, we can trace the movements of money wages in many leading economic areas since about 1500, and we can gain a fairly accurate impression of
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major changes in money wages from about the time of the Black Death (1348-1349). The wage data for earlier periods are generally fragmentary and sometimes questionable. But when proper use is made of the incomparably rich and virtually untouched account books in Italian archives, particularly the Archivio di Stato in Florence and other depositories in Tuscany, our knowledge of prices and wages in the Middle Ages will be vastly enriched and extended. The preservation of manuscripts that provide the raw material for historical price and wage statistics in one country after another—differing widely in institutions, economic development, and culture—can hardly have been accidental. What was preserved was, and has continued to be, important. Good as they are, however, in comparison with other historical statistics, even the best historical price and wage series are never good enough to satisfy a scholar using them in studying any major problem. Furthermore, the usefulness of the most adequate and reliable price and wage data is usually limited by the lack of other statistical and nonstatistical material that alone can reveal their true meaning. Index numbers for 50-year periods compiled by Sir William Beveridge (1939) from fragmentary quotations for six commodities show that English prices were about a third higher in 1250-1299 than in 1200-1249 and about 15 per cent higher in 1300-1349 than in 1250-1299. Although he believed that the upward movement of prices was violent, Beveridge was commendably skeptical concerning his results. If the scattered prices thrown together by Vicomte d'Avenel (1894-1926) from different areas of France are reliable, the price level was about 14 per cent higher in 1291-1300 and about a third higher in 1301-1350 than in 12011225. Discontinuous quotations (not worth publishing) that I have compiled for a few staple commodities for Aragon and Navarre in 1201-1275 show an upward trend in line with the trend in France. Prices for 12 articles I gathered for Navarre suggest that the price level rose about 25 per cent from 1284-1289 to 1309-1310 but moved horizontally in the next quarter century. Prices for 14 articles I compiled for Aragon indicate that the price level was about 38 per cent lower in 13091310 than in 1276-1277, when money was bad and harvests worse. The index for 1350 was about 6 per cent lower than in 1300. But the underlying data are so scant and questionable that all these estimates of movements of the price level should be regarded as "prehistorical." Index numbers of prices in Navarre for 13511380, based on extraordinarily extensive and com-
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plete series for such an early period, doubled in terms of money of account and rose 30 per cent in terms of fine gold. The quinquennial average of gold prices collapsed in 1381-1385 and had dropped 7 per cent more by 1441-1445, when the series end. Prices in money of account rose 50 per cent from 1381-1385 to 1431-1435 and fell 7 per cent in the next ten years. Inadequate data for Aragon suggest that prices in money of account doubled in 1351-1380, as they did in Navarre, and declined 17 per cent from 1381-1385 to 1396-1400. The price indexes in money of account averaged about 10 po- cent lower in 1426-1450 than in 14011425. The average rose about 3 per cent in 14511475; but although the quinquennial indexes moved horizontally in 1476-1500, the average for the entire period was about 13 per cent lower than in 1451-1475. The trend of prices in the fifteenth century was downward also in Valencia. Apparently prices in silver averaged about 14 per cent higher in France in the third quarter of the fourteenth century than in the second. Prices fell about one-fourth from 1376-1400 to 1401-1425, and the average for the next quarter century declined about 9 per cent (see Hamilton 1936). In the second half of the fifteenth century, French prices averaged about 24 per cent less than in the first half. The trend of prices in France in the fifteenth century did not differ greatly from the trends in Aragon and Valencia, and the decline seems to have been somewhat greater in Alsace. In the third quarter of the fourteenth century, wheat prices in England —a poor gauge of movements of the price level, but the best we have—rose much more than prices in France but a great deal less than prices in Aragon or Navarre. During the next hundred years the trend of English wheat prices seems not to have deviated greatly from the price trends in Aragon, France, and Valencia. The long decline was apparently followed by a horizontal movement in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. But, as in Aragon, there is no clear evidence of a rising trend before 1500. Wage rates have been published for Navarre for 10 grades of labor in the building trades in 13461400 and 11 grades in 1401-1450. Wage indexes in Navarre, where the Black Death was extremely severe and was followed by secondary epidemics, soared nearly 60 per cent in 1349 and continued to rise irregularly, but sharply, for three decades. From 1346-1350 to 1376-1380 the quinquennial average of wage indexes almost trebled. By the end of the century they had almost quintupled, and by the middle of the fifteenth century, when the series end, they had sextupled. If we divide money wage
rates by food prices to obtain a crude index of real wages, we find that the quinquennial average doubled in the half century from 1351-1355 to 14011405. In the next two decades real wages fell about one-fifth, but the net increase in 1351-1445 was more than two-thirds. Crude index numbers of real wages for Aragon suggest that real wages were about one-sixth higher in the last quarter of the fifteenth century than in the first quarter. For Valencia we have a remarkable series of salaries of 22 classes of workers in 1351-1450 and 25 classes in 1451-1500, together with the wages of 11 grades of labor in the building trades in 1392-1450 and 12 grades in 1451-1500. Salaries rose about 25 per cent from 1355 to 1370 and remained stable for 20 years. They dropped 7 per cent in 1399, but rose 20 per cent by 1418, and remained practically unchanged for 70 years. Salaries then dropped 8 per cent in 1489 and held this level through 1500. Wage rates fluctuated more than salaries, but their trends were rather similar. Apparently the wages of most types of labor in England rose sharply in the first two decades or more after the Black Death, in spite of vigorous government opposition to wage increases. The rates for the lowest grades of workers may have risen as much as in Aragon, and possibly even as much as in Navarre. Since food prices did not rise substantially, real wages did. Thorold Rogers tells us that although some of the gain was lost, wages never fell to the old rate and that they were stable at a high level throughout the fifteenth century, when prices were falling. He regarded "the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the sixteenth" as the "golden age of the English labourer, if we interpret the wages [which] he earned by the cost of the necessaries of life" ([1884] 1890, pp. 326, 233 ff.). The fragmentary data available suggest that wages also rose substantially in France after the Black Death. It is often taken for granted that medieval kings robbed their subjects, disturbed economic life, and impeded progress through frequent and unprincipled debasement of the coinage and alteration of its value in money of account. Yet the long-term movement of commodity prices was much more stable in the areas for which we have reliable data in the last two centuries of the Middle Ages than in any country of the Western world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If medieval rulers had not sought to relieve distress and replenish royal treasuries during fifteenth-century depressions by debasing the coinage or marking it up in money of account, prices would have fallen still more. This might have lowered profit margins, deterred savings, and limited progress. For example, in
PRICES: Price History the second half of the fifteenth century Valencian prices fell only about 6 per cent in money of account and a little more than 20 per cent in gold. In the same period prices in Aragon fell less than 10 per cent in money of account and more than 35 per cent in gold (see Hamilton 1936). It would be extremely interesting to know whether the alternation of debasement and markup of the coinage in periods of falling prices and of restoration and markdown in periods of rising prices, which tended to stabilize price trends, did not also intensify short-term instability by causing changes in velocity opposite to the announced or expected changes in the money-of-account rating or the specie content of the coinage. For example, in Spain not only did merchants overstock goods, but women as unbusinesslike as nuns overbought commodities as perishable as eggs in an effort to avoid losses resulting from royal markups of coins (see Hamilton 1934; 1947). The Black Death and succeeding epidemics in the next three decades had substantially reduced the population of western Europe and, consequently, the total production of goods when the revival of gold coinage in England, Flanders, Germany, Castile, and Aragon significantly increased the money supply. Hence the price level moved briskly upward. In the last two decades of the fourteenth century and throughout the fifteenth a considerable growth in population, total production, and the proportion of goods exchanged for money lowered commodity prices. The steady loss of specie to the Far East in exchange for spices and luxury products also exerted downward pressure on the price level. Price and wage history after 1500. Although defective in many respects, price and wage series after 1500 are far more satisfactory than previous series. The data supplied by the archives of Spain are outstanding in quantity and quality. Early in the sixteenth century the trend of prices turned upward in Spain, first and most rapidly in Andalusia, and rose for a hundred years, with practically all troughs and peaks above the preceding ones. Andalusian prices more than doubled in the first half of the sixteenth century and more than quintupled by its close. Prices increased fourfold in New Castile, the region closest to Andalusia, and 3| fold in Old Castile-Leon and in Valencia. On the average, in the four regions prices in silver, then the same as money of account, quadrupled in the sixteenth century. Despite inflation of the vellon coinage (at first copper with a little silver, and then pure copper), which became the money of account after about 1603, the trend of prices in
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Andalusia, New Castile, and Old Castile-Leon was rather horizontal in 1601-1625; Valencian prices in silver declined slightly. Although there were violent increases and declines in vellon prices for the remainder of the century, the trend of silver prices was moderately downward. From statistics collected by Thorold Rogers for England and d'Avenel for France, Wiebe (1895) constructed decennial index numbers of prices and wages for England and 25-year indexes for France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These indexes indicate the direction and approximate magnitude of long-term movements, but are particularly weak in timing changes. Neither Henri Hauser, the latest historian of French prices (1936), nor William Beveridge, the latest and most distinguished historian of English prices (1939), has supplied us with index numbers. Hauser's data are not extensive or complete enough to measure the price level, and trial index numbers based on Beveridge's data for 1500-1700 have not shown trends differing significantly from those derived from Rogers. The decennial price indexes for England were about 6 per cent higher in 1511-1520 than in 1501-1510, more than a third higher by 1551— 1560, and about 150 per cent higher in 1593-1602. According to d'Avenel, French prices began rising during the reign of Louis xn, 1498-1512. The French indexes in silver for each quarter of the sixteenth century were higher than for the preceding one, and the index for the last quarter was 150 per cent higher than for the first. Hence, it seems that silver prices rose more in France than in England during the sixteenth century. The decennial average of English prices continued upward in the first half of the seventeenth century, reaching a level in 1643-1652 about 3-| times as high as in 1501-1510. The trend of English prices was fairly flat in the second half of the seventeenth century, with the lowest average in 1653-1662 and the highest in 1673-1682. If we combine the four Spanish regions for which we have data and make 25-year indexes for comparison with France, we find that in each quarter of the sixteenth century the advance over the preceding one was greater in Spain. Comparing decennial indexes for Spain with those for England shows that while English prices were rising 150 per cent from 1501-1510 to 1593-1602, Spanish prices were rising more than 200 per cent. By 1601-1610, when decennial silver prices for Spain reached their apogee during the Price Revolution, they were 3.4 times higher than a hundred years before. English prices reached their zenith during
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PRICES: Price History
the Price Revolution in 1643-1652, when they were 3.5 times the 1501-1510 level. Spanish prices rose a great deal more than English prices in the sixteenth century, and the Spanish peak came forty years earlier (see Hamilton 1934). While prices in England were rising 150 per cent in the sixteenth century, wages were apparently rising only 30 per cent. While prices in France were rising 150 per cent from the first to the last quarter of the sixteenth century, wages were rising only 25 per cent. In 1676-1700 French prices were twice as high as in 1521-1525, and wagrc were only a third higher. During the seventeenth centuvy the price-wage ratio had become slightly less beneficial to employers and less harmful to workers, but the change was probably too small for any worker or employer to notice during his lifetime. By the end of the seventeenth century English wages were 150 per cent higher than in 1501-1510, while prices were 250 per cent higher. The gap between prices and wages remained wide, although it was far smaller than in 1600. Apparently wages in Alsace lagged farther behind prices during the Price Revolution than in England but less than in France. Wage indexes for Lvov, Poland, on a 1521-1525 base stood lower than price indexes in every decade from 1525 to 1700, but the gap seems to have been great only in 15511560 and in 1651-1700. Charts of raw data presented by Elsas (1936-1949) indicate that wages of two grades of labor lagged behind prices of rye at Augsburg, Munich, and Wiirzburg from about 1540 to 1630. The chief cause of the Price Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the great increase in the money supply. Higher output of silver in Europe, particularly in Germany, beginning in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, arrested the downward trend of prices and, along with imports of gold from the Antilles, caused prices to turn upward early in the sixteenth century. But it was the explosive rise in silver production after the conquests of Mexico and Peru; the discovery of the fabulous mines of Zacatecas. Guanajuato, and Potosi; and the introduction of the mercury amalgamation process of mining in the middle of the sixteenth century that generated the Price Revolution. The sharp rise in prices began earlier and was more violent in Andalusia, where all the bullion legally imported into Europe from the Spanish colonies landed, than in any other area in Europe for which we have satisfactory data. It was in New Castile, the region closest to Andalusia, that the Price Revolution began next and was sec-
ond in magnitude. In fact, it was higher prices in Spain than elsewhere and, to a much lesser extent, royal expenditures for war, diplomacy, and the administration of the European empire, that distributed the precious metals among other countries. Of course, some bullion leaked into other kingdoms directly from the New World. The lag of French and English prices behind Spanish prices and the similar ultimate rise in each country indicates that specie from the New World was the leading factor in the price upheaval in all three countries (see Hamilton 1934). We know approximately how much specie came into Europe legally from the Hispanic colonies in 1503-1660, while the Price Revolution was in progress; but we do not know how much was smuggled into Spain and other kingdoms or what the total money supply was in about 1500. But there are strong reasons to believe that the increase in the money supply during the Price Revolution was much greater percentagewise than the rise in prices. Rather than seeking ancillary causes of the Price Revolution, as most writers (beginning with Jean Bodin and including the present one) have done, one needs to explain the failure of prices to keep pace with the increasing stock of precious metals. Some of the new bullion was neutralized by the increased use of gold and silver for nonmonetary purposes as they became relatively cheaper through rising commodity prices. After the discovery of the Cape route to the East, the age-old flow of bullion from the West to the East was intensified. Once in the East, much of the bullion was hoarded or used ornamentally, so that the continuous inflow of specie did not raise Eastern prices enough to reverse the flow. But these outlets did not prevent unprecedented additions to the European monetary stock. A major counterpoise to the rise in the money supply was the increased flow of goods onto markets, resulting from great technological advances and a large increase in population. Conversion of produce rents into money payments, a shift from wages partially in kind to money wages, and a decline in barter also tended to counteract the effect on prices of the increase in gold and silver money. And with real national incomes and wealth increasing, the velocity of circulation of money presumably declined. During the first third of the eighteenth century, the trend of prices in most countries was moderately downward, and wages moved horizontally. A marked increase in the output of silver in Mexico and (though much less significant) of gold in Brazil arrested the secular decline of prices about
PRICES: Price History 1735. These factors, with assistance from wars and from deposit and note creations by banks, forced prices upward about 35 per cent in London—according to indexes I have computed from data in Beveridge (1939)—and 65 per cent in New Castile and Holland in 1750-1790. In all three areas prices approximately doubled from 1735 to 1800 under the same forces, and prices in Philadelphia rose about 125 per cent. While prices were rising 35 per cent in London, the wages of artisans and unskilled laborers in the building trades, which seem to have been representative for most grades of labor, advanced only 15 per cent, according to wage indexes I have computed from series in Gilboy (1934), since Beveridge supplies no wage data. While prices were doubling, wages rose only 20 per cent. The price series compiled by Labrousse for France (1933) shows a rise of 64 per cent from 1726-1741 to 1784-1789, and his wage series shows a rise of only 22 per cent. Although prices in New Castile rose somewhat more in 1750-1790 than in France from 1726-1741 to 1784-1789, wages rose a little less. The strategic role of changes in the supply of silver money in Spanish price movements is demonstrated by the falling prices during the war with France and England in 1719-1720 as well as during the War of the Austrian Succession and by stable prices during the 13 months Spain was in the Seven Years' War. During these wars specie flowed out and British sea power obstructed imports from the New World. When the suspension of hostilities permitted bullion impounded during these conflicts to flow into Spain, prices rose. Since paper money filled the void in 1779-1783, prices increased; but they rose more in the first two years of peace, when specie pent up in America arrived, than in four years of war and paper-money inflation (see Hamilton 1947). The end of the 18th century brought two hyperinflations caused by the overissue of paper currency. Under the assignats and mandats in the 1790s France had the only hyperinflation she has ever experienced. In Philadelphia prices rose two hundredfold from the outbreak of the Revolution in 1776 to the battle of Yorktown in 1781, and "not worth a Continental" still reminds Americans of their Revolutionary currency. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century price movements. That prices were remarkably stable in England and the United States in the nineteenth century is a myth accepted by many great economists. They were, as compared with the twentieth century, but not as compared with the five cen-
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turies that had gone before. Prices in Philadelphia rose nearly 50 per cent from 1801 to 1814, and from then until 1847-1850 they fell nearly 60 per cent. From 1816, when data begin, to 1847-1850 prices in Cincinnati dropped 58 per cent. From 1818 to 1847-1850 prices in England fell 50 per cent in money of account and nearly as much in gold. During this period money wages declined very little in England and rose slightly in the United States. The chief factors in the severe downward trend of prices were (1) postwar readjustment on an unprecedented scale, including the return to a metallic standard at prewar parity, (2) a decline by half in the output of precious metals in Latin America because of the wars for independence and political instability under the new governments, and (3) a great increase in the production of goods resulting from improved technology, revolutionary changes in transportation, soaring population, and the exploitation of vast new areas with rich natural resources. Serious short-term price declines also occurred. From the fourth quarter of 1836 to the fourth quarter of 1842 British prices fell about 22 per cent. From January 1817 to January 1822 prices fell 24 per cent in Philadelphia and nearly 60 per cent in Cincinnati, where raw materials were a much larger component of the index numbers. From the first quarter of 1837 to the first quarter of 1843 prices dropped 25 per cent in Philadelphia and 58 per cent in Cincinnati. From 1847-1850 to 1873 prices rose nearly 40 per cent in England, France, and Germany, and nearly 60 per cent in the United States. The American Civil War, with its paper money aftermath, and the Franco-Prussian War both exerted upward pressure on price levels. But the chief cause of the upheaval was the great increase in gold production following the discovery of rich gold fields in California in 1848 and in Australia in 1851. Since a proposed shift from the gold standard was hotly debated in England in the 1850s, and actually occurred in Holland in 1851, to combat expected gold inflation, presumably an increased velocity of circulation intensified the effect of a rising money supply. History came as near to repeating itself in 18731896, by duplicating the price movements of 1815-1850, as it ever does. Prices in gold fell 41 per cent in France, 42 per cent in England, and 43 per cent (49 per cent in money of account) in the United States. The annual rate of decline was even greater than in the earlier period, and the causes were strikingly similar. The decline was
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due largely to (1) widespread demonetization of silver in the 1870s, (2) a falling cumulative rate of growth in the gold stock, (3) exploding population, and (4) increased production of goods resulting from remarkable advances in technology and transportation and from the utilization of imnnrtant new natural resources. Alaskan and South African gold discoveries and chemical improvements in the process of extracting gold from ore reversed the steep downward trend of prices. From 1897 to 1914 they rose about one-third in England; four-tenths in France and Germany; and one-half in Canada, Russia, and the Uniied States. World War i sharply accelerated the upswing. Never before in modern times had there been such war expenditures, fiscal deficits, and monetary inflation or such disruption of trade, mobilization, and reduction in the supply of civilian goods. And never before had there been such a violent and universal rise of prices in both belligerent and neutral countries. An acute shortage of goods, the urgent need to reconstruct devastated areas, and low market rates of interest extended the advance of prices in most countries for about two years after the armistice. From the outbreak of war to their peak, prices advanced about 120 per cent in Spain, 130 per cent in the United States (as in the Civil War of 1861-1865), 145 per cent in Canada, 160 per cent in Japan, 205 per cent in Great Britain, 275 per cent in the Netherlands, and 410 per cent in France. Almost everywhere prices collapsed in late 1920 and early 1921, but they were unusually stable in most places in 1922-1929. Hyperinflation in Germany reduced the value of the mark to zero from 1919 to 1923, but prices moved horizontally from the currency reform in 1924 to 1929. From the last quarter of 1929 to 1932 there occurred one of the most severe and widespread falls in commodity prices in history. Apparently no country was spared. India and the Netherlands, with decreases of 36 per cent and 46 per cent respectively, were among those suffering the greatest declines. In France, Italy, Great Britain, the United States, and Canada prices fell from 28 to 32 per cent. As in all cyclical downswings, prices of agricultural products and other raw materials fell much farther than prices of finished consumer goods. Countries and sections of countries that predominantly produced raw materials were critically injured. Laborers suffered massive unemployment. Although the trend of prices was upward after 1933, unemployment and agricultural distress lasted until the outbreak of World War n.
Since much of the literature in money and banking and labor statistics is concerned with the price level and the cost of living in the last 25 years, price history may logically end with the eve of World War 11. EARL J. HAMILTON [See also AGRICULTURE, article on HISTORY; INDEX NUMBERS, article on PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
AVENEL, GEORGES D' 1894-1926 Histoire economique de la propriete, des salaires, des denrees, et de tons les prix en general, depuis I'an 1200 jusqu'en I'an 1800. 7 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale; Leroux. -> Volumes 3-7 were published by Leroux. AVENEL, GEORGES D' 1925 Les enseignements de I'histoire des prix. Paris: Payot. BERRY, THOMAS (1943) 1966 Western Prices Before 1861: A Study of the Cincinnati Market. New York: Johnson. BEVERIDGE, WILLIAM HENRY (1939) 1965 Prices and Wages in England From the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century. 2d ed. New York and London: Longmans. BEZANSON, ANNE 1951 Prices and Inflation During the American Revolution: Pennsylvania, 1770—1790. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. BEZANSON, ANNE 1954 Wholesale Prices in Philadelphia, 1852-1896: Series of Relative Monthly Prices. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. BEZANSON, ANNE; GRAY, ROBERT D.; and HUSSEY, MIRIAM 1935 Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. BEZANSON, ANNE; GRAY, ROBERT D.; and HUSSEY, MIRIAM 1936-1937 Wholesale Prices in Philadelphia, 17841861. Parts 1-2. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. BODIN, JEAN (1568) 1932 La vie chere au XVIe siecle: La response de Jean Bodin a M. de Malestroit. Edited by Henri Hauser. Paris: Colin. -* A new edition of Response aux paradoxes de M. de Malestroit. CIBRARIO, LUIGI (1839) 1861 Delia economia politica del medio evo. 5th ed. 3 vols. Turin (Italy): Botta. COLE, ARTHUR H. 1938 Wholesale Commodity Prices in the United States, 1700-1861. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. DENIS, HECTOR 1892—1895 La depression economique et sociale et I'histoire des prix. Brussels: Imprimerie Generale, Huysmans. -> One volume and atlas. DUPRE DE SAINT-MAUR, NICOLAS-FRANCOIS 1746 Essai sur le monnoies, ou reflexions sur le rapport entre I'argent et les denrees. Paris: Coignard & De Bure. DUPRE DE SAINT-MAUR, NICOLAS-FRANCOIS 1762 Recherches sur la valeur des monnoies, et sur le prix des grains, avant et apres le Concile de Francfort. Paris: Nyon. ELSAS, MORITZ J. 1936-1949 Umriss einer Geschichte der Preise und Lohne in Deutschland vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zum Beginn des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. 2 vols. Leiden (Netherlands): Sijthoff. -> Volume 2 consists of two parts. FRIEDMAN, MILTON; and SCHWARTZ, ANNA J. 1963 A Monetary History of the United States: 1867-1960. National Bureau of Economic Research, Studies in Business Cycles, No. 12. Princeton Univ. Press.
PRIMITIVE ART GILBOY, ELIZABETH W. 1934 Wages in Eighteenth Century England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. GORKIEWICZ, MARIAN 1950 Ceny w Krakowie w latach 1796-1914: Les prix a Cracovie de 1796 a 1914. Poznan (Poland): Nakladem Poznanskiege Towarzystwa Przyjaciol Nauk. HAMILTON, EARL J. (1934) 1965 American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501—1650. New York: Octagon. HAMILTON, EARL J. 1936 Money, Prices, and Wages in Valencia, Aragon, and Navarre, 1351-1500. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. HAMILTON, EARL J. 1947 War and Prices in Spain, 1651-1800. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. HAUSER, HENRI 1936 Recherches et documents sur I'histoire des prix en France de 1500 a 1800. Paris: Presses Modernes. HOSZOWSKI, STANISLAW (1928) 1954 Les prix a Lwow (XVI.-XVII. siecles). Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N. -> First published in Polish. LABROUSSE, CAMILLE-ERNEST 1933 Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France aux XVIIIs siecle. 2 vols. Paris: Dalloz. LEVASSEUR, EMILE 1893 Les prix . . . en France, du commencement du XIIIe siecle a la fin du XVIIIe. . . . Paris: Chamerot & Renouard. LINDSAY, S. M. 1893 Die Preisbewegung der Edelmetalle seit 1850. . . . Jena (Germany): Fischer. MADDALENA, ALDO DE 1949 Prezzi e aspetti di mercato in Milano durante il secolo XVII. Milan (Italy): Malfasi. MILLS, FREDERICK C. 1936 Prices in Recession and Recovery: A Survey of Recent Changes. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. MISKIMIN, HARRY A. 1963 Money, Prices and Foreign Exchange in Fourteenth-century France. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. MITCHELL, WESLEY C. 1903 A History of the Greenbacks, With Special Reference to the Economic Consequences of Their Issue: 1862-1865. Univ. of Chicago Press. PARENTI, GIUSEPPE 1939 Prime ricerche sulla rivoluzione dei prezzi in Firenze. Florence (Italy): Cya. PARENTI, GIUSEPPE 1942 Prezzi e mercato del grano a Siena (1546-1765). Florence (Italy): Cya. POSTHUMUS, NICOLAAS W. (1943) 1946 Inquiry Into the History of Prices in Holland. Volume 1: Wholesale Prices at the Exchange of Amsterdam, 15851914. Leiden (Netherlands): Brill. -> First published in Dutch. PRIBRAM, ALFRED F. 1938 Materialen zur Geschichte der Preise und Lohne in Osterreich. Vienna: Ueberreuter. ROGERS, JAMES E. THOROLD 1866-1902 A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, From the Year After the Oxford Parliament (1259) to the Commencement of the Continental War (1793). 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. ROGERS, JAMES E. THOROLD (1884) 1890 Six Centuries of Work and Wages. 3d ed. London: Sonnenschein. SIMIAND, FRANCOIS 1932 Recherches anciennes et nouvelles sur le mouvement general des prix du XVIs au XIXe siecle. Paris: Domat-Montchrestien. TOOKE, THOMAS; and NEWMARCH, WILLIAM (1838-1857) 1928 A History of Prices and the State of the Circulation From 1792 to 1856. 6 vols. London: King. -> First published as A History of Prices and the State
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of the Circulation, From 1793 to 1837: Preceded by a Brief Sketch of the State of the Corn Trade in the Last Two Centuries. WARREN, GEORGE F.; and PEARSON, FRANK A. 1935 Gold and Prices. New York: Wiley; London: Chapman & Hall. WIEBE, GEORG 1895 Zur Geschichte der Preisrevolution des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.
PRICING POLICIES See under PRICES. PRIMARY GROUPS See GROUPS; SOCIOMETRY. PRIMATES See EVOLUTION, article on PRIMATE EVOLUTION; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, ANIMAL, article on PRIMATE BEHAVIOR.
The concept of "primitive art" is partly a figment of the romantic imagination of the Western art world. A major problem of this field lies in the attempt to move from an ethnocentric preoccupation with primitive art to basic, anthropologically based studies of variations of the art of the world's peoples. Leonhard Adam (1940, p. 30 in the 1949 edition) said that the mere foreignness of form and content of the various primitive arts serve to link them together in our mind for purposes of art criticism but that this linking is extraneous to the works themselves, being more a part of our attitudes toward them. The serious study of primitive art may be said to consist of attempts to delimit, classify, and understand the art of various peoples of the world in such a way that links other than those formed from our Western attitudes may be found between them. The dictionary definition of the word "primitive" stresses the original, first, or root stages of development, and thus use of the term "primitive art" frequently connotes "early" art. However, most of what is generally considered as primitive art originated in the recent past in ethnographically known societies. Most of the primitive art objects in museums and private collections are contemporary with such modern European art movements as impressionism and subsequent developments, but prehistoric art, archeologically recovered and interpreted, is also primitive art. Although still small, the corpus of prehistoric primitive art will probably increase.
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The peculiarity involved in calling recent and still-living peoples "primitive" and in knowing that the word can also have a historical meaning is a major source of discontent with the use of the term "primitive art" (see Haselberger 1961 for arguments on this topic and for consideration of alternate terms). But however controversial the term may be, it does refer to art objects and data centered on the art of various indigenous peoples of Oceania, the Americas, and Africa and on the prehistoric art of precivilized peoples. It has been suggested that "primitive art" be retained as a viable term but that the entity to which it refers be carefully delimited and defined. Primitive art is the art of societies that are typologically, rather than chronologically, primitive. There seems to be no common denominator of form in primitive art. Adam (1940) and Firth (1951, pp. 155-182) make the points that primitive art is not uniform and that it has a great diversity of themes and styles, but that these styles and the differences between them are imposed upon the materials by Western observers. Firth finds that there has been little success in relating style of art to type of society and in relating differences of form and style to geographical or social differences (ibid., p. 170). Nonetheless, there are elements of social structure that are common to all the societies from which the art comes. Primitive society as a type of society from which civilization developed was described by Redfield (1953, pp. 6-15, 22). In Redfield's terms primitive societies are those whose communities are small, isolated, homogeneous, nonliterate, and lacking in full-time specialists. Art in primitive societies is produced by artists who work for an audience or public whose members know each other and share values. The relative isolation of such societies insulates the artists from the influence of foreign styles. The absence of literacy magnifies the importance of art, which in nonliterate societies often carries burdens of communication otherwise the concern of written documents, monument inscriptions, and the like. But most important, the art of primitive societies is the product of artists who are not specialists. They seem to be semispecialists, in that they have learned to carve and paint and to do so better than other members of their society, but they still must participate in everyday economic activities in order to subsist. This contrasts with the situation of artists working in more complex societies, where full specialization occurs. Which are the societies from which the art objects now in museums and private collections corne?
In Oceania, the primitive societies are those indigenous to Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, and Malaysia whose cultures have not been significantly influenced by the extensions of Asian civilization into the Pacific area. In the Americas, they are those Indian societies of North and South America that were not influenced by the Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations. In sub-Saharan Africa, they are various indigenous peoples who were not influenced by extensions of Euro-Asian civilizations or by the several indigenous Negro states and kingdoms of the western Sudan, the Guinea coast, and the Congo region. In Asia (exclusive of the great Chinese and Indian civilizations), the Siberian tribes, the Ainu, central Asian nomads, and some of the marginal aboriginal peoples of south China and mainland southeast Asia may be considered as primitive societies. In Europe, paleolithic cave and portable art may generally be considered primitive art and so may that of neolithic peoples, except that certain neolithic cultures may be considered the beginning stages of European civilization. The points in time at which specific primitive peoples came into contact with civilized European, Asian, and African societies varied, and so the change from the isolation of primitive society to inclusion in the political and economic affairs of large, stratified states occurred at different times in different parts of the world. Utilizing social criteria for the classification of primitive art eliminates much ambiguity. Anthropologists have often been interested, although marginally, in the art of the peoples they study. In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century ethnographic studies, treatment of art went along with general concern with material culture. As more and more energy was diverted from studies of material culture to studies of kinship, social structure, political and economic systems, and value systems, this emphasis declined. Recognition was given to the conservative qualities of primitive art: it looks ever backward to what has come before, to antiquity, and in so doing, it incorporates glimpses of the past. Moreover, art is artifact, conscious and deliberate, so that locked into every art object are consciously determined images and forms, symbolic of ideas, events, and personages. The basic ethnographic collections of material culture and art in the anthropological museums were made during the early and mid-nineteenth century through the first two or three decades of the twentieth. Private collections were also formed primarily during this period, some earlier, but they have been steadily absorbed by the museums. The
PRIMITIVE ART primitive art objects now in the museums originated partly as curiosities brought back by travelers, colonial officials, and missionaries and partly through systematic collections by ethnologists and archeologists. They were displayed and sometimes studied as part of the cultures of the exotic peoples of the world. It was in this period that the European modern art movement, although it had been evolving since the Renaissance, began to change very rapidly. Canons of romanticism and naturalism toppled, and Western art moved through a dizzying succession of styles toward increasing abstraction of form with a corresponding de-emphasis of explicit content. Schools, factions, and cliques arose and contended over the differing styles, each being put forward as the inheritor of the mainstream of European artistic tradition. During the period from 1900 to 1910, as Western artists, art dealers, critics, collectors, and historians sought justification and rationalization of the radical new art forms, they began to make voyages of discovery, not to Oceania and Africa but to the exhibition halls of the anthropological museums where collections from those areas and from the Americas were readily available. The traditional arts of the primitive peoples were hailed as new discoveries, and their stylizations of form were pointed out as support for the radically stylized modern art. Primitive art was hailed as the brother of modern art. Some of the forms of primitive art, notably African sculpture, found their way by this route into the works of Western artists such as Picasso and Braque. Art dealers traded in African, American, and Oceanic primitive art, and collectors purchased (at low prices) these "masterpieces" of primitive art. Interpreters of primitive art arose, not from the ranks of anthropologists but from the art world, and they emphasized form. There was little concern with contextual meaning or the relationship between the art objects and the culture from which they came. Meanings were read into the objects, regardless of historical justice. Unquestionably the Western art world has focused great interest upon primitive art and attracted the attention of scholars. However, these nonanthropologically oriented art commentators have done little to increase understanding of primitive art. At the same time, unfortunately, the anthropologists have moved away from consideration of art, so that although there is some mention of art in ethnological monographs, it is rarely detailed enough to provide for significant analysis. There have been pioneering studies, notably by
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anthropologists with orientations toward art history, but they have not been very penetrating. The usual combination of library and museum research is simply not sufficient; what is needed is art-oriented ethnographic field research. This field research must be carried out in reference to, and with inquiry about, specific objects and classes of objects presently in museums. This, of course, is the oftensounded call to study a living people before their culture changes, but for many parts of the world it is still a valid exhortation and will continue to be for some time to come. However, unlike the kind of study that has been called for in the past, these ethnological studies could build upon the foundation laid by the vast museum collections of the world, most of which are catalogued but not adequately surveyed and cross-referenced. When the collected art of a given people can be dealt with exhaustively, it will then be possible to conduct field research that will help to classify such materials into style areas. Most museum collections contain a large number of specimens that are incompletely catalogued and either are without specific provenience or have erroneously attributed places of origin. A crucial task to be accomplished for previously collected specimens of primitive art is to extend attribution of provenience as accurately as possible. Ethnohistorical research could supplement study of museum collections by concentrating on the historical conditions under which the collections were made and on the sociocultural contexts in which the art itself was made and used. This kind of study would take into account the complex sampling of objects from different time periods and different subareas of the studied regions represented by museum collections. Studies of the sociocultural contexts of specific art objects, forms, and styles should focus carefully upon the art as part of a larger system. In other words, specialized, anthropologically based study of art is needed, which would seek data about art and its contexts from a number of different societies and strive to place such studies in a comparable conceptual framework. A facet of the anthropological study of art in its social context would be that the phenomenon could be dealt with in its own right and as actually found, rather than ethnocentrically, or as primarily in relationship to the art of Western society. Previous ethnocentric studies have warped our view of primitive art, so that its concepts and forms always seem to be exotic variations on our own art. Western concepts of art for art's sake, the marginal position of artists in society, and the emphasis on a conscious,
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verbalized aesthetic criticism are often brought up in considering the art of a primitive society, as though these were universal features of art. Actually these may well turn out to be very special aspects of Western art and perhaps of the art of other civilized societies. General archeological research will obviously increase in areas whose prehistory is now virtually unknown, such as Oceania and sub-Saharan Africa. As the boundaries of ethnographically known primitive art are extended into prehistory, it is possible that presently known styles and areas will take on different significance. Indeed the very notion of primitive art as a field of study may give way to an amalgamation and synthesis of traditional art history and the study of primitive art, so that comparable regional histories of art will be established. Perhaps from such a base, increased knowledge of the common denominators of all art will become possible. PHILLIP H. LEWIS BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADAM, LEONHARD (1940) 1954 Primitive Art. 3d ed., rev. & enl. Baltimore: Penguin. BOAS, FRANZ (1927) 1955 Primitive Art. New ed. New York: Dover. BUHLER, ALFRED; BARROW, TERRY; and MOUNTFORD, CHARLES P. 1962 The Art of the South Sea Islands, Including Australia and New Zealand. New York: Crown. DOUGLAS, FREDERIC H.; and HARNONCOURT, RENE D' 1941 Indian Art of the United States. New York: Museum of Modern Art. ELISOFON, ELIOT; and FAGG, WILLIAM B. 1958 The Sculpture of Africa. New York: Praeger. FIRTH, RAYMOND W. (1951) 1952 Elements of Social Organization. New York: Philosophical Library. -» A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Beacon. See especially Chapter 5, "The Social Framework of Primitive Art." GERBRANDS, ADRIAN A. (1956) 1957 Art as an Element of Culture, Especially in Negro Africa. Leiden (Netherlands): Brill. -» First published as Kunst als cultuur-element, in het bijzonder in Neger-Afrika. GUIART, JEAN 1963 The Arts of the South Pacific. New York: Golden Press. HASELBERGER, HERTA 1961 Method of Studying Ethnological Art. Current Anthropology 2:341-381. -» Includes comments and a rejoinder by Herta Haselberger. A bibliography appears on pages 381-384. LEUZINGER, ELSY (1959) 1960 Africa: The Art of the Negro Peoples. New York: McGraw-Hill. -» First published in German. LINTON, RALPH; and WINGERT, PAUL S. 1946 Arts of the South Seas. New York: Museum of Modern Art. NEWTON, DOUGLAS 1961 Art Styles of the Papuan Gulf. New York: Museum of Primitive Art. NEW YORK, MUSEUM OF PRIMITIVE ART 1960 Bambara Sculpture From the Western Sudan. Edited by Robert Goldwater. New York: The Museum. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1953 The Primitive World and Its Transformations. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press.
SCHMITZ, CARL A. (1960) 1963 Wantoat: Art and Religion of the Northeast New Guinea Papuans. The Hague: Mouton. ->• First published as Eeitrage zur Ethnographic des Wantoat Tales, Nordost Neuguinea. SYMPOSIUM ON THE ARTIST IN TRIBAL SOCIETY, LONDON, 1957 1961 The Artist in Tribal Society. Edited by Marian W. Smith. London: Routledge; New York: Free Press. WILLIAMS, FRANCIS E. 1940 Drama of Orokolo: The Social and Ceremonial Life of the Elema. Oxford: Clarendon. WINGERT, PAUL S. 1949 American Indian Sculpture: A Study of the Northwest Coast. New York: Augustin. WINGERT, PAUL S. 1950 The Sculpture of Negro Africa. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. WINGERT, PAUL S. 1962 Primitive Art: Its Traditions and Styles. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
PRIMITIVE LAW See JUDICIAL PROCESS, article on COMPARATIVE ASPECTS; LAW, article on LAW AND LEGAL INSTITUTIONS; POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY; SANCTIONS; and the biography of MAINE. PRIMITIVE SOCIETY See ANTHROPOLOGY; CULTURE; EVOLUTION; HUNTING AND GATHERING; INDIANS, NORTH AMERICAN; TRIBAL SOCIETY. PRIMITIVE WARFARE See under WAR. PRINCIPAL COMPONENTS See FACTOR ANALYSIS, article on STATISTICAL ASPECTS.
PRISONERS OF WAR See INTERNMENT AND CUSTODY. PRISONS See INTERNMENT AND CUSTODY; PENOLOGY; and the biographies of EEC cARIA and BENTHAM. PRIVACY Privacy is a concept related to solitude, secrecy, and autonomy, but it is not synonymous with these terms; for beyond the purely descriptive aspects of privacy as isolation from the company, the curiosity, and the influence of others, privacy implies a normative element: the right to exclusive control of access to private realms. The philosophical problem of private knowledge, whether and in what sense knowledge and experience may be idiosyncratic and fundamentally incommunicable to others, will not be discussed here (see Ayer 1959). Rather, after some comments on the right to pri-
PRIVACY vacy and the basis for contemporary interest in the subject, this article will consider some of the determinants and indicators of privacy, the elements of a functional analysis of privacy, and finally, the law of privacy. A right to privacy is recognized both in law and in common parlance; but different legal systems emphasize different aspects, and customs related to privacy differ greatly from culture to culture, from social system to social system, and from situation to situation. Many of the claims to the right to privacy are difficult to distinguish from other claims to rights of the personality, from claims to respect for personal integrity, and from claims against interference by government and other external agents. It has been said that a free society is governed by the principle that "there are frontiers not artificially drawn, within which men should be inviolable, these frontiers being defined in terms of rules so long and widely accepted that their observance has entered into the very conception of what it is to be a normal human being" (Berlin 1958, p. 51). The frontiers mentioned are "not artificially drawn" because they are recognized in a given culture as legitimate boundaries of the personality. More generally, they are recognized as identity boundaries that define the culturally recognized entity—be it personality, status, collectivity, or institution—whose "space of free movement" (Lewin [1936] 1948, p. 5), or domain of autonomous activity, or privacy is at issue. Determinants and indicators of privacy Among the material facts and relatively fixed social conditions that strongly affect patterns of privacy must be reckoned population density, rates of interaction, patterns of residence, the division of labor, and the nature of family and other social relationships. Comparative anthropological data do not seem to exist in a form that crystallizes out the aspects relevant to questions of privacy, nor have correlations of these aspects with other social and cultural elements been given any extensive study. The topics mentioned here, accordingly, suggest only the range of matter that appears relevant and deserves further study. Urban society of necessity has privacy standards and privacy problems different from those of rural society. Through the variety of experiences open to the urban dweller and the multiplicity of subgroups to which he may be tied, he becomes more distinctive, more isolated, and more aware of his existence and his rights as a distinct person. In the urban setting, individual honor supersedes family or community honor, and individual privacy gains
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legitimacy. As Maine (1871) pointed out, the legitimacy of group interests historically precedes the claims of individual interests. Thus the nature of privacy has been changing for groups as well as for individuals. Private property may be looked upon as a manifestation of the concept of individuality in a given culture. In Western industrial societies, the concept of property is undergoing fundamental changes as an increasing fraction of the wealth of each nation is distributed by its government. The transition from "privilege" to "right" (e.g., to receive licenses, franchises, grants, or welfare benefits) constitutes a change in the region over which individuals or organizations may expect to have autonomous control, and thus surely changes the region over which privacy may be claimed. For example, if support from a welfare department is seen as a right, much of what is now done in welfare client investigations would surely be considered an invasion of the client's privacy (Reich 1964; 1966). In general, major social changes imply changes in identity boundaries and domains of privacy. Residence patterns and family structure put bounds on patterns of interaction and thus on patterns of privacy (Chombart de Lauwe 1961; 1965). Conversely, privacy norms will dictate some aspects of residence patterns and will exert a strong influence on the process of individual development within the family. But no set of external conditions completely determines patterns of privacy. Even in the most crowded situations one occasionally finds mechanisms that give the individual privacy by institutionalizing places and occasions that grant the individual sanctuary from approaches by others. On the other hand, the relatively isolated city apartment dweller may find that he has very little privacy because of the thinness of walls, the location of doors and windows, the accessibility provided by mail and telephone, and the hordes of service people who collect refuse, read meters, and inspect or "service" the machinery with which the modern apartment is filled, not to mention salesmen, interviewers, and others who have developed the skill of approaching people for one purpose or another. Distance is perhaps the most obvious and external characteristic of social interaction that may be taken as an indicator of exclusiveness or intimacy, of respect or contempt (Simmel [1908] 1958, pp. 320-324). An "undue closeness," that is, one which violates exclusiveness or intimacy norms, clearly represents an invasion of privacy. Hall (1963) has coined the term "proxemics" to denote the study of the distance kept between people of different backgrounds in different situations. The strong feelings
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aroused by cultural differences in regard to habits of intimate contact indicate the social and psychological importance of distance. For example, that men should hold hands when walking together seems very strange to the European but is quite acceptable to the Arab. Similarly strange to the northern European and North American city dweller are customs such as conversing at a distance so short that one feels the warmth of the other's body and the spray from his mouth; the sharing of half-chewed material (e.g., the betel wads of the Tikopia); the sharing of eating utensils; the chewing of the child's food by the mother (Hall 1959). Indeed, some scholars have suggested (e.g., Lee 1959) that the large differences in habits in different cultures regarding the constancy and frequency of body contact between mother and child have a bearing on differences in character development. Concealment, or avoidance of observation, is another action from which privacy norms may be inferred. In anthropological compendia concealed behavior is listed primarily in terms of religion and magic, on the one hand, and modesty patterns, on the other. Recalling Durkheim's definition of the sacred (1912, pp. 56, 236-237 in the 1961 edition), it becomes quite clear how much privacy shares with sacredness. The sacred is set apart, isolated, untouchable except by special people with special dispensations, and it inspires a respect which demands that a distance be kept from it. Without stretching common meanings, it can be said that the right to privacy asserts the sacredness of the person. Modesty is usually discussed in relation to biological events and functions, and anthropologists have found some regularities in the social patterning of these. For bathing and elimination, segregation of the sexes is common; for eating, such segregation is much less common. Sexual intercourse is most commonly hidden in some way, although customs demanding rather little concealment or none at all, especially on ceremonial occasions, have been reported (see, for example, Ford & Beach 1951, as well as Westermarck 1889). Childbirth, illness, death, and religious rites are events at which only individuals in particular statuses or in particular relationships are allowed or expected to be present. The analysis of such patterns in terms of their consequences for social systems—for example, that occasional exclusiveness affirms the solidarity of the exclusive group —appears in many cases to be more successful than the analysis of the motivation of the participants. Yet, what is perhaps the dominant reason for seeking privacy, namely, the desire to be insu-
lated from observation, is intimately related to motives of avoiding criticism, punishment, or the discomfort of feeling inhibited. Social and technological developments have greatly increased the possibility of observing the activities of individuals and groups, of disturbing their equanimity or internal balance, and of influencing or controlling their behavior. Such possibilities of encroachment upon privacy inevitably become realities unless effective social control mechanisms are developed. Law provides one such mechanism; but in a period of rapid social change, the heterogeneity of social norms and beliefs leaves much uncertainty and instability of behavior in those areas of action which law does not seek to control or fails to control. Technology provides the material potential for electronic spying and high-speed record keeping and information retrieval; for psychological testing and psychiatric interviews; for the use of drugs and other physiological agents, as well as methods of physical deprivation, irritation, and coercion which, contrary to the victim's wishes and interests, may unveil the secrets of his mind; and for the manipulation of groups to make people confess or turn informers. The chances that these methods will be used are vastly increased if ideologies are at hand to legitimate such use. When ideologies, political or religious, demand orthodoxy of all citizens, or when confessions of guilt or the punishment of persons, irrespective of proof of guilt, are considered justifiable on administrative or educational grounds, spying and informing, forced confession, and coercive persuasion will flourish. Ideologies of religious or political "purity," of "moraJ community" or of "mental health," can be and have been employed to legitimate the use of psychological techniques for the manipulation of behavior in flagrant disregard of time-honored concepts of personal integrity (Lifton 1961; Schein et al. 1961; Szasz 1963). Thus, in the current crisis in the relations between psychiatry and law one may observe a monumental obfuscation in the notions of personal responsibility and mental health, of therapy and punishment, of personal integrity and the individual's welfare, as these terms are defined by authorities in these fields (Szasz 1963). Functional analysis of privacy The basic social-psychological mechanism that motivates seclusion is expressed by the following proposition: The greater the (perceived) probability that an action will be observed, the greater the probability that the action will be in compliance with the perceived social norms of the observer.
PRIVACY Observation is a crucial part of social control (Merton [1949] 1957, pp. 336-357; Zetterberg 1957; Hopkins 1964); hence, privacy norms put limits upon the degree of social control. Opportunity for privacy facilitates spontaneity. For example, in the therapeutic professional-client relationship confidentiality implies not only that the client will be protected from external sanctions but also that the professional will not exert the usual sanctions for deviance. Thus the client may feel free to tell what the professional may need to know, or what the client may need to tell, if he is to be helped. The experiments in stimulating group creativity that have been called "brainstorming" have, with limited success, attempted to institutionalize the withholding of sanctions (Haefele 1962, pp. 155-156). But the most usual method of attempting to minimize the inhibitions of workers whose creativity is being tapped is to grant them a maximum of privacy. Imperfect consensus and integration of norms and values are found in all but the smallest, simplest, and most homogeneous societies; consequently, in most societies a degree of deviance from legitimate expectations of some role partners is unavoidable. Privacy may therefore be seen as having the function of protecting people against the psychological conflict that would be generated by unremitting observation. In a large-scale, pluralistic society such protection is especially necessary. Privacy insulates the individual from social pressures to compliance and generally reduces the need to act in ways that are likely to gain the approval of others. Gouldner and Peterson (1962, pp. 4445) have made the distinction between "selfesteem"—the positive self-evaluation gained from others' approval, by "consensual validation"—and "self-regard"—the positive self-evaluation attained through recognition of one's distinctness from others, through "conflictual validation." Privacy not only reduces the need for consensual validation but also provides an opportunity for the process of individuation, which depends on conflictual validation. Thus the development of autonomy and personal responsibility in children and adolescents requires opportunities for them to act autonomously, in spite of the possibility that their actions may be contrary to the dominant norms. Privacy and tolerance would seem to be alternative conditions for such opportunities. In general, the less individuals can be relied upon to have internalized norms, the greater will be the external social control. Where both distrust and external controls become particularly severe, various forms of social
483
and psychological pathology may be expected. Severe efforts to interfere with a child's attempts to develop autonomy have been reported to be one component of the etiology of schizophrenia (Lennard et al. 1965). The internalization of norms may be considered a functional alternative to external social control. Hence, the greater the internalization of norms, the greater the privacy granted and, therefore, the greater the development of privacy norms. Other things being equal, the longer the socialization process, the greater the likelihood that relevant norms are internalized and that subsequent supervision is minimal. Physicians and other professionals who have a relatively long educational experience are subsequently given much responsibility with only sporadic supervision. Privacy may also be seen as a reward for responsibility. Studies of industrial workers in the United States have shown rather consistently that close supervision, that is, supervision with short intervals between supervisory contact, and hence with little privacy, results in poor morale and low productivity (Whyte 1961). In a study of industrial work in England, it was found that the normal interval between supervisory contacts was an excellent measure of the responsibility exercised by a worker and could be used as a basis for wage scales (Jaques 1956). This correlation between responsibility and privacy illustrates a more general correlation between social rank and privacy. Certainly, the higher the individual's socioeconomic rank, the more likely it is that his physical amenities and interaction patterns can be arranged so as to maximize privacy; and it is equally true that the higher the socioeconomic rank, the greater the individual's power to defend his rights, including privacy, against both neighbors and agents of the community or state. Furthermore, social distance, exclusiveness, and thus privacy, as expressions of selfregard, are correlated with social rank. This correlation between social rank and privacy is emphasized by the problem of securing privacy for celebrities and public servants whose visibility is especially high. The privacy of collectivities. Many instructive examples of the social structure of privacy situations can be found in the privacy patterns of collectivities. The family is a collectivity that demands respect and privacy; in some societies—for example, contemporary Japan and Greece, as well as in most of the developing societies—the claims of the family or larger group far outbalance the rights of the individual. One may expect to find this to be the case wherever family or group honor is the
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ultimate criterion by which the individual is judged. Aristocracies provide examples, but so do such groups as the Mafia. Family types may be classified by the degree of freedom with which they grant access to nonmembers. "Open" families readily admit members from neighboring families; their doors are not locked, and their members freely mind each other's business, including, for example, the disciplining of children. Little secrecy is possible, and mutual social control is at a maximum. This pattern is likely to occur only if the community has a relatively impermeable privacy boundary: the families are open, but outsiders from beyond the community are kept out. The "closed" family, at the other end of the continuum, protects its privacy by dwellings and other technical arrangements that preserve distance and exclusiveness, but above all by norms that prescribe social distance and formality in social relations. Since there is much less mutual social control, greater variety may be expected to develop among closed families, as well as greater individuality within them. Thus the privacy of the closed family in the open community appears to have the function of generating and preserving the diversity of personalities and values within a given society. The following generalization may tentatively be deduced from this case and other examples to follow: In collectivities with strong privacy boundaries, subcollectivities will tend to be relatively open; in open collectivities, subcollectivities will tend to be closed. The "open society" contains closed social, political, religious, economic, and other organizations. They are closed, at least, to political influence and investigation by the government; and those organizations which are in a competitive relationship (e.g., political parties) are also closed to each other in certain ways. In contrast, closed totalitarian societies either do not permit organizations to develop within them or demand great permeability of all organizational boundaries to governmental observation and influence—to the extent that family members are encouraged to inform on each other. Many situations—familial, therapeutic, conspiratorial, educational—combine strong external privacy boundaries with demands for openness on the part of the individuals who are the subunits. Such openness provides an opportunity for intensive socialization, for the internalization of the norms and values of the collectivity, and, as a special case, for the development of that trustworthy identification with the collectivity which is called loyalty. Loyalty is a prerequisite for privacy in a collec-
tivity that feels itself threatened. Above all, the loyalty of those in leadership and other "sensitive" positions must be assumed, unless it is possible to subject them to constant surveillance by other members of the collectivity, whose loyalty would, in turn, have to be assumed. On a national scale, differences in the social structuring of sentiments can have very important implications for general climates of trust and the concomitant state of privacy. Great Britain and the United States provide an interesting contrast (Shils 1956; Lewin 1936; Hyman 1963). Traditionally, privacy standards for both the individual and the government are much higher in Britain than in the United States. While it would be difficult to say whether, in fact, loyalty is greater in one country than in the other, the common identification with dominant national institutions is made more visible in Britain, for example, by recurring expressions of the generally shared attitude of deference toward the crown, the government, and those higher in the stratification system in general. Thus there is a recurrent expression of consensus invoking the common history of a relatively homogeneous population and focused upon the leadership of the country; and since the leadership group reflects the same consensus in its public utterances, there is a greater continuity of sentiment and trust. Since the American public lacks such recurrent expressions of consensus, it has more easily fallen prey to jingoistic demagogues, and this tendency has resulted, at various times, in widespread suspicion of "treason in high places" and rampant loyalty investigations that have trampled privacy underfoot. [See LOYALTY.] The law of privacy Laws regarding the right of privacy were relatively late in arriving on the scene. While a general law of private personality, rooted in Roman law, found its way into numerous Continental codes, judges have preferred to link the right to privacy with property rights, and its violation with specific torts, such as libel or slander, copyright infringement, breach of contract, trespass, and assault and battery. This has been particularly true of AngloAmerican courts; indeed, common-law jurisprudence regarding the right of privacy dates back no farther than 1890, when Warren and Brandeis (1890) published a famous article on this topic. In England there is still no actionable invasion of privacy unless property rights have been violated or reputation has been injured. In the United States a general right to privacy was first explicitly affirmed by the Supreme Court as recently as 1965, in Griswold et al. v. Connecti-
PRIVACY cut (381 U.S. 530). This decision invalidated a Connecticut law that prohibited the use of contraceptives even by married couples. Yet the dissenting opinion of Justice Potter Stewart questioned the legal basis of the decision: "What provision of the Constitution, then, does make this state law invalid? The Court says it is the right of privacy 'created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees.' With all deference, I can find no such general right of privacy in the Bill of Rights, in any other part of the Constitution, or in any case ever before decided by this Court." In fact, the majority opinion, written by Justice Douglas, relied upon "a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights—older than our political parties, older than our school system." In both the concurring and the dissenting opinions, implied references to natural law were called into question. But it cannot be questioned that fundamental values were invoked when the opinion of the Court mentioned that the marriage relationship is "intimate to the degree of being sacred." It is quite literally Durkheim's idea of the sacred that is involved here. An appeal to such basic and general values would not have been necessary if this decision could have been based on more immediate precedents. Invasions of privacy. Invasions of privacy recognized up to 1965 in the U.S. law courts have been categorized by Prosser (1960, pp. 389 ff.) into "four distinct kinds of invasion of four different interests of the plaintiff, which are tied together by the common name, but otherwise have almost nothing in common except that each represents an interference with the right of the plaintiff . . . 'to be let alone.'" A somewhat different view has been expressed by Bloustein (1964), who has argued brilliantly that this common element is the central issue in the law of privacy. It has been said that the law of privacy developed as a parasite upon laws about specific classes of torts (Harper & James 1956, pp. 677-679). However, Bloustein pointed out that court decisions, judicial opinions, and the most important scholarly sources make clear the principle that, beyond the particular torts to which privacy cases have been tied, any invasion of privacy constitutes an offense against the rights of the personality—against individuality, dignity, and freedom. The following discussion of Prosser's four classes of torts will serve to illustrate the specific wrongs that Anglo-American courts have connected with the concept of privacy. The first category is concerned with intrusion upon the plaintiff's seclusion or solitude or into his private affairs. Exposure of one's private doings to public view, to Peeping
485
Toms, to eavesdropping and wire tapping, to open pursuit, shadowing, trailing, or public surveillance is seen as disturbing one's equanimity. And this fact, rather than any possible harm or loss subsequent to the intrusion, is the basis of the claim that the right to privacy has been invaded. "It appears obvious," wrote Prosser (1960, p. 392), "that the interest protected by this branch of the tort is primarily a mental one. It has been useful chiefly to fill in the gaps left by trespass, nuisance, the intentional infliction of mental distress, and whatever remedies there may be for the invasion of constitutional rights." However, Bloustein pointed out a critical distinction made by Warren and Brandeis when they asserted that mere injury to feelings is without legal remedy. Invasion of privacy is thus "a legal injuria" or an "act wrongful in itself; it is not "mental suffering" that is taken into account in reckoning damages for a legal injury. In common parlance the term "privacy" is very often employed in connection with what legally may come exactly under the categories of trespass, nuisance, or the infliction of mental distress, although under U.S. law the offense in question may not involve any legal question in regard to privacy. The second category of invasions of privacy is concerned with public disclosure of embarrassing private facts about the plaintiff. This was the principal topic of the article by Warren and Brandeis, upon which most of the Anglo-American legal discussions of privacy have been based. Warren and Brandeis pointed out that, in contrast with the law of defamation, which deals only with damage to reputation by lowering a person in the estimation of his fellows, the right to privacy grants protection against actions that would outrage a person's own feeling, irrespective of his reputation. Thus, to publish another's name or picture is an invasion of his right to privacy if it is done without his consent and if it cannot be justified as a matter of public interest, as in the case of the actions of a public figure. The truth of the disclosed matter is no defense, as it may be under the law of defamation. The third category deals with publicity which places a person in a false light in the public eye. The principal cases in this category deal with the publication by the police of information about an individual which may lead the public to infer that he has committed delinquencies of which he has not been convicted. Impersonating someone and forgery of another's signature also belong to this class of privacy invasions, which, in contrast with the other three classes, depends on the falsity of the fiction that is publicized. Finally, Prosser's fourth category concerns ap-
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propriation, for the defendant's advantage, of the plaintiff's name or likeness. In contrast with the three other classes of privacy invasions recognized by the U.S. law, this one involves the use of the advantage gained through the offensive actions. It seems to focus more on the proprietary aspect than the others. What it shares most crucially with the other recognized privacy invasions is that it constitutes an attack upon the individual's identity. Privacy law under civil codes. In countries under civil codes privacy law is often better developed than in common-law countries. In civil codes, laws against many specific privacy invasions can be found under the most diverse chapters of law. Correspondence by letter, telegram, and telephone, as well as personal information given to public officials or professionals, tend to be explicitly protected. And each code has its peculiar prohibitions, for example, against "intrusion by illicit means into another's secrets," or against "injury to personal relationships owing to the willful or negligent act of another." General categories of privacy violation, such as the "injury to personal relationships" just mentioned (which occurs in the Swiss code), are fairly common, although varied in content. On the Continent the recognition and protection of the right of privacy is based, in large part, on the concept of the injuria delict derived from the Roman law. The concept of Personlichkeitsrecht and the idea of a tort contra bonos mores have also done much to strengthen judicial protection of personal privacy (Weeks 1963, p. 501). Finally, it should be noted that the Draft Covenant of Civil and Political Rights as adopted at the fifteenth session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, in 1960, recognizes a right to privacy in article 17: "1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful . . . attacks on his honour and reputation. 2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks" (United Nations . . . 1961). The limits of privacy. The legal protection of privacy has inherent limitations, since legal remedies of privacy invasions may bring with them further exposure of the matter that was to be kept private. It remains to be seen whether the recognition of a general right to privacy by the U.S. Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut will indeed open the gates to a vast amount of litigation about privacy, a fear often expressed in past discussions of possible developments in the law of privacy. A matter closely related to privacy (although not subsumed under the law of privacy) that is likely to be the source of some litigation is the subject
of confessions made by citizens accused of a crime. Supreme Court decisions in regard to confessions (Escobedo v. Illinois [378 U.S. 478]; Miranda v. Arizona [384 U.S. 436]) are clearly based on the fact that certain policemen and other custodians of prisoners have not sufficiently respected the individual's right not to reveal what he does not want to reveal. This issue points to another essential difficulty of enforcing the legal protection of privacy: violations of privacy often are injuries inflicted by relatively large and powerful forces upon the smallest and weakest element in society, the individual, who may be poor, uneducated, and a member of a minority group. Thus the protection of privacy requires not only a degree of consensus in the total population about the rights of the individual, and adequate laws to recognize these rights, but also considerable effort by those who exercise influence and wield power, governmental or otherwise, to enforce the laws and to encourage compliance with the more general social norms of respect for the individual. The emphasis that has been placed here on the right of privacy should not obscure the fact that governments and other collectivities have legitimate concerns with private aspects of their members' lives. Laws establish only guidelines for the competition between the autonomy of the individual and his government; the understanding of that competition requires further study of the functions of privacy for individuals, for collectivities, and for the relationships between the two. ARNOLD SIMMEL [See also CENSORSHIP; ETHICS, article on ETHICAL ISSUES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES; LOYALTY; ORGANIZATIONS, article on ORGANIZATIONAL INTELLIGENCE. Other relevant material may be found in BRAINWASHING; CONSTITUTIONAL LAW; FREEDOM; HUMAN RIGHTS; INTERVIEWING, article on SOCIAL RESEARCH; and in the biographies of LEWIN; SIMMEL.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
AYER, A. J. 1959 Privacy. British Academy, London, Proceedings 45:43-65. BAY, CHRISTIAN 1958 The Structure of Freedom. Stanford Univ. Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1965 by Atheneum. BERLIN, ISAIAH (1958) 1963 Two Concepts of Liberty. Oxford: Clarendon. BLOUSTEIN, EDWARD J. 1964 Privacy as an Aspect of Human Dignity: An Answer to Dean Prosser. New York University Law Review 39:962-1007. CHOMBART DE LAUWE, PAUL H. 1961 The Sociology of Housing Methods and Prospects of Research. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 2:23-41. CHOMBART DE LAUWE, PAUL H. 1965 Des hommes et des villes. Paris: Payot,
PROBABILITY: Formal Probability DOUGLAS, WILLIAM O. 1958 The Right of the People. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. DURKHEIM, EMILE (1912)1954 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan. -> First published as Les formes elementaires de la vie religieuse, le systeme totemique en Australie. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Collier. EVERS, HANS-ULRICH 1960 Privatsphdre und Amter fur Verfassungsschutz. Berlin: Gruyter. FORD, CLELLAN S.; and BEACH, FRANK A. 1951 Patterns of Sexual Behavior. New York: Hoeber. GOULDNER, ALVIN W.; and PETERSON, R. A. 1962 Notes on Technology and the Moral Order. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill. HAEFELE, JOHN W. 1962 Creativity and Innovation. New York: Reinhold. HALL, EDWARD T. 1959 The Silent Language. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. -» A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Fawcett. HALL, EDWARD T. 1963 Proxemics: The Study of Man's Spatial Relations. Pages 422-445 in Arden House Conference on Medicine and Anthropology, 1961, Man's Image in Medicine and Anthropology. Edited by lago Galdston. New York: International Universities Press. HALMOS, PAUL 1952 Solitude and Privacy: A Study of Social Isolation; Its Causes and Therapy. London: Routledge. HARPER, FOWLER V.; and JAMES, FLEMMING JR. 1956 The Law of Torts. Boston: Little. HOFSTADTER, SAMUEL H.; and HOROWITZ, GEORGE
1964
The Right of Privacy. New York: Central Book. HOPKINS, TERENCE K. 1964 The Exercise of Influence in Small Groups. Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster Press. HYMAN, HERBERT 1963 England and America: Climates of Tolerance and Intolerance—1962. Pages 227-257 in Daniel Bell (editor), The Radical Right: The New American Right Expanded and Updated. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. -> A paperback edition was published in 1964. JAQUES, ELLIOTT 1956 Measurement of Responsibility: A Study of Work, Payment and Individual Capacity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. LEE, DOROTHY 1959 Freedom and Culture. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. LENNARD, HENRY L.; BEAULIEU, MAURICE R. and EMBREY, NOLEN G. 1965 Interaction in Families With a Schizophrenic Child. Archives of General Psychiatry 12:166-183. LEWIN, KURT (1936) 1948 Some Social-psychological Differences Between the United States and Germany. Pages 3-33 in Kurt Lewin, Social Conflicts: Selected Papers in Group Dynamics. New York: Harper. LIFTON, ROBERT J. 1961 Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China. New York: Norton. MAINE, HENRY J. S. (1871) 1890 Village-communities in the East and West, to Which Are Added Other Lectures, Addresses, and Essays. New ed. London: Murray. MERTON, ROBERT K. (1949) 1957 Social Theory and Social Structure. Rev. & enl. ed. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. POUND, ROSCOE 1915 Interests of Personality. Harvard Law Reviexv 28:343-365, 445-456. PROSSER, WILLIAM L. 1960 Privacy. California Law Review 48:383-423.
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REICH, CHARLES A. 1964 The New Property. Yale Law Journal 73:733-787. REICH, CHARLES A. 1966 The New Property. Public Interest No. 3:57-89. RUEBHAUSEN, OSCAR M.; and BRIM, ORVILLE G. JR. 1965 Privacy and Behavioral Research. Columbia Law Review 65:1184-1211. SCHEIN, EDGAR H.; SCHNEIER, L; and BARKER, C. H. 1961 Coercive Persuasion: A Socio-psychological Analysis of "Brainwashing" of American Civilian Prisoners by the Chinese Communists. New York: Norton. SHILS, EDWARD 1956 The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. SIMMEL, GEORG (1902-1917) 1950 The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Edited and translated by Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. SIMMEL, GEORG (1908) 1958 Soziologie: Untersuchungen uber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. 4th ed. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. SZASZ, THOMAS S. 1963 Law, Liberty and Psychiatry: An Inquiry Into the Social Uses of Mental Health Practices. New York: Macmillan. UNITED NATIONS, GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1961 Draft International Covenants on Human Rights. U.N. General Assembly, Official Records, Session 15, Annexes, Agenda Item 34. U.S. OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 1967 Privacy and Behavioral Research. Washington: Government Printing Office. WARREN, SAMUEL D.; and BRANDEIS, Louis D. 1890 The Right to Privacy. Harvard Law Review 4:193-220. -» Reprinted in Samuel H. Hofstadter and George Horowitz, The Right of Privacy, 1964. WEEKS, JAMES K. 1963 Comparative Law of Privacy. Cleveland Marshall Law Review 12:484-503. WESTERMARCK, EDWARD A. (1889) 1921 The History of Human Marriage. 5th ed. 3 vols. New York: Macmillan. WESTERMARCK, EDWARD A. (1906-1908) 1924-1926 The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. 2d ed. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. WESTIN, ALAN F. 1967 Privacy and Freedom. New York: Athenaeum. -> A study sponsored by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. WHYTE, WILLIAM F. 1961 Men at Work. Homewood, 111.: Dorsey. ZETTERBERG, HANS L. 1957 Compliant Actions. Acta sociologica 2:179-201.
PRIVATE INTERNATIONAL LAW See CONFLICT OF LAWS.
PROBABILITY i. FORMAL PROBABILITY ii. INTERPRETATIONS
Gottfried E. Naether Bruno de Finetti
FORMAL PROBABILITY
This article deals with the mathematical side of probability, the calculus of probabilities, as it has sometimes been called. While there is sometimes disagreement on the philosophy and interpretation
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of probability, there is rather general agreement on its formal structure. Of course, when using the calculus of probabilities in connection with probabilistic models or statistical investigations, the social scientist must decide what interpretation to associate with his probabilistic statements. The axiomatic approach The sample space. Mathematically the most satisfactory approach to probability is an axiomatic one. Although a rigorous description of such an approach is beyond the scope of this article, the basic ideas are simple. The framework for any probaoilistic investigation is a sample space, a set whose elements, or points, represent the possible outcomes of the "experiment" under consideration. An event, sometimes called a chance event, is represented by a subset of the sample space. For example, in a guessing-sequence experiment, test subjects are instructed to write down sequences of numbers, with each number chosen from among the digits 1, 2, 3. For sequences of length 2, an appropriate sample space is given by the nine number pairs (1,1), (1,2), (2,1), (1,3), (2,2), (3,1), (2,3), (3,2), (3,3). In this sample space the subset consisting of the three pairs (1,1), (2,2), (3,3) stands for the event a run, and the subset consisting of the pairs (1,3), (2,2), (3,1) stands for the event sum equals 4. For convenience of reference, these two events will be denoted more briefly by R and F. The algebra of events. It is helpful to introduce some concepts and notation from the algebra of events. Events (or sets) are denoted by letters A, B, • • • , with or without subscripts. The event consisting of every experimental outcome—-that is, the sample space itself—is denoted by S. The event not A is denoted by A° (alternate notations sometimes used include A, CA, and A'), the event A and B by AB (or A n B or A A B), the event A or B by A + B (or A U B or A V B), with corresponding definitions for more than two events. The or in A or B is to be interpreted in the inclusive sense, implying either A or B alone or both A and B. Two events A and B are said to be disjoint (or mutually exclusive} if AB = , where = Sc is the impossible event, an event consisting of none of the experimental outcomes. The events A + B and AB are often called, respectively, the union and the intersection of A and B, and the event Ac is often called the negation of A. The events A and A° are said 10 be complementary events. Figure 1 is a pictorial representation of two events (sets), A and B, by means of a Venn diagram. The sample space, S,
ACBC Figure 7 — Venn diagram
is represented by a rectangle; events A and B partition S into four disjoint parts labeled according to their description in terms of A, Ac, B, and Bc. Thus, for example, A C B C is the part of the sample space that belongs both to Ac and B r . By definition, A + B = AB C + ACB + AB. The axioms. In an axiomatic treatment, the probability, P(A), of the event A is a number that satisfies certain axioms. The following three axioms are basic. They may be heuristically explained in terms of little weights attached to each point, with the total of all weights one pound and with the probability of an event taken as the sum of the weights attached to the points of that event. (0 (M)
(m)
P(S)=1,
P(A + B) = P(A)
P(B),
if AB =
Thus, no probability should be negative, and the maximum value of any probability should be 1. This second requirement represents an arbitrary though useful normalization. Finally, the probability of the union of two disjoint events should be the sum of the individual probabilities. It turns out that for sample spaces containing only a finite number of sample points no additional assumptions need be made to permit a rigorous development of a probability calculus. In sample spaces with infinitely many sample points the above axiom system is incomplete; in particular, (m) requires extension to denumerably many events. Mathematically more serious is the possibility that there may be events to which no probability can be assigned without violating the axioms; practically, this possibility is unimportant. It should be noted that the axiomatic approach assumes only that some probability P(A) is associated with an event A. The axioms do not say how the probability is to be determined in a given case. Any probability assignment that does not contradict the axioms is acceptable.
PROBABILITY: Formal Probability The problem of assigning probabilities is particularly simple in sample spaces containing a finite number of points, and the weight analogy applies particularly neatly in this case. It is then only necessary to assign probabilities to the individual sample points (the elementary events), making sure that the sum of all such probabilities is one. According to axiom (m) it follows that the probability of an arbitrary event, A, is equal to the sum of the probabilities of the sample points in A. In particular, if there are n points in the sample space and if it is decided to assign the same probability, 1/n, to each one of them, then the probability of an event A is equal to mA( 1/n) = mA/n, where mA is the number of sample points in A. For example, in the guessing-sequence experiment the same probability, £ = .111, may be assigned to each one of the nine sample points if it is assumed that each number written down by a test subject is the result of a mental selection of one of three well-shuffled cards marked 1, 2, and 3, each successive selection being uninfluenced by earlier selections. This model will be called the dice model, since it is also appropriate for the rolling of two unconnected and unbiased "three-sided" dice. An actual guessingsequence experiment in which 200 test subjects participated produced the results given in Table 1. For example, 13 of the 200 subjects produced sequences in which both digits were 1. Table 2 gives the proportion of cases in each category (for example, 13/200 = .065). Inspection reveals important deviations from the theoretical dice model, deviations that are statistically significant [see COUNTED DATA; HYPOTHESIS TESTING]. For illustrative purposes an empirical model can be set up in which the entries in Table 2 serve as basic probabilities. In the dice model P(jR) = P(F) = f = i, while in the empirical model P e (R) = .065 + .065 + .045 = .175 and P e (F) = .130 + .065 + .160 =
SECOND DIGIT
FIRST DIGIT
Table 2 — Proportions of subjects guessing each digit pair SECOND DIGIT 1
1
2
3
Total
13
27
32
72
2
25
13
29
67
3
26
26
Total
64
66
70
200
Source: Private communication from Frederick Mosteller.
2
3
Total
7
.065
.135
.160
.360
2
.125
.065
.145
.335
3
.130
.130
.045
.305
Total
.320
.330
FIRST DIGIT
.350
1.000
Source: Private communication from Frederick Mosteller.
.355. The subscript "e" distinguishes probabilities in the empirical model from those in the dice model. Some basic theorems and definitions Probabilities of complementary events. The probability of the event not A is 1 minus the probability of the event A, P(A C ) = 1 - P(A); in particular, the probability of the impossible event is zero, P() = 0. This result may seem self-evident, but logically it is a consequence of the axioms. Addition theorem. If A and B are any two events, the probability of the event A + B is equal to the sum of the separate probabilities of events A and B minus the probability of the event AB, P(A + B) = P(A) + P(B) - P(AB). For example, P(R + F) = i + A - i = |f = .556, and Pe(R + F) = .175 + .355 - .065 = .465. If A and B are disjoint, P(AB) — 0, so the addition theorem is then just a restatement of axiom (m). Conditional probability. If P(A) is not zero, the conditional probability of the event B given the event A is denned as (1)
Table 1 — Guessed digit pairs
489
P(A) The meaning of this quantity is most easily interpreted in sample spaces with equally likely outcomes. Then P(B|A) = (m A 7 3 /n)/(m A /rz) = mAn/mA, where mAB is the number of sample points in AB. If A is considered a new sample space and new probabilities, l/mA, are assigned to each of the mA sample points in A, the probability of the event B in this new sample space is mAB/mA = P(B|A), since mAR of the mA points in A are in B. The interpretation of P(B|A) as the probability of B in the reduced sample space A is valid generally. Figure 2 shows the two ways of looking at conditional probability. The events AB and A can be
490
PROBABILITY: Formal Probability
Figure 2 — Conditional probability P(B I A)
considered in the sample space S, as in the first part of Figure 2. It is also possible to consider the event B in the sample space A, as in the second part of Figure 2. For example, P e (RjF) = P e (RF)/P e (F) = ,065/.355 = .183. The multiplication theorem. Equation (1) can be rewritten as P(AB) = P(A)P(B|A). This is the multiplication theorem for probabilities: The probability of the event AB is equal to the product of the probability of A and the conditional probability of B given A. The multiplication theorem is easily extended to more than two events. Thus, for three events A, B, C, P(ABC) = P(A)P(B|A)P(C|AB). Independent events. In general, the conditional probability P(B|A) differs from the probability P(B). Thus, in general, knowledge of whether A has occurred will change the evaluation of the probability of B. If the occurrence of A leaves the probability of B unchanged, that is, if P(B|A) = P(B), B is said to be independent of A. It then follows that A is also independent of B, or simply that A and B are independent. A useful way of defining the independence of A and B is (2) P(AB) = P(A)P(B); that is, A and B are independent just when the probability of the joint occurrence of A and B is equal to the product of the individual probabilities. For example, in the dice model P(ftF) = % — P(#)P(F), while in the empirical model Pe(RF) = .065 * P e (fl)P e (F). Thus the events R and F are independent in the dice model but dependent in the empirical model.
The extension of the concept of independence from two to more than two events produces certain complications. For two independent events, equation (2) remains true if either A or B or both are replaced by the corresponding negations Ac and B°. Put differently, if A and B are independent, so are A and Bc, Ac and B, Ac and B°. If the concept of independence of three or more events is to imply a corresponding result—and such a requirement seems desirable—the formal definition of independence becomes cumbersome: The events Al, • • • , An are said to be independent if the probability of the joint occurrence of any number of them equals the product of the corresponding individual probabilities. Thus, for the independence of three events A, B, C, all of the following four conditions must be satisfied: P(ABC) = P(A)P(B)P(C), P(AB) = P(A)P(B), P(AC) = P(A)P(C), P(BC) = P(B)P(C). Bayes' formula. Let A be an event that can occur only in conjunction with one of k mutually exclusive and exhaustive events H l } • • • , H ?c . If A is observed, the probability that it occurs in conjunction with Hi (i ~ 1, • • • ,k) is equal to P(H,A) P(HQP(A|HQ P(H 1 )P(A|H 1 ) + • • • + P(H*)P(A|H*) ' where P(Hj) is the prior probability of the event Hi, the probability of Hi before it is known whether A occurs, and P(A|Hi) is the (conditional) probability of the event A given Hi, so that the denominator of (3) is P(A). The probability (3) is called the posterior probability of H^. It is important to note that application of (3) requires knowledge of prior probabilities. For example, suppose that each of the 200 number pairs of the guessing-sequence experiment has been written on a separate card. In addition, two three-sided dice have been rolled 200 times and the results noted on additional cards. One of the 400 cards is selected at random and found to contain a run. The probability that this card comes from the guessing sequence is (ix.l75)/[(£x.l75) + ( i x $ ) ] = .344. Thus the appearance of a run changes the prior probability .500 to the posterior probability .344, reflecting the much smaller probability of a run in the empirical model than in the dice model. Combinatorial formulas. The task of counting the number of points in the sample space S and in subsets of S can often be carried out more economically with the help of a few formulas from combinatorial analysis. A permutation is an ar-
PROBABILITY: Formal Probability rangement of some of the objects in a set in which order is relevant. A combination is a selection in which order is irrelevant. Given n different objects, m ^ n of them can be selected in
n\ ml (n — m)! _ n(n — 1) ••• (n — ra + 1) m(m — 1) • • • 1
ways, when no attention is paid to the order. The symbol ( ™ ) (called a binomial coefficient and sometimes written C^) is read as "the number of combinations of n things taken m at a time." For a positive integer r, rl (read "r-factorial") stands for the product of the first r positive integers, r! — r(r — 1) • • • 1. By definition, 0! = 1. It is possible to arrange m out of n different objects in (n~)m — ra!(™) = n(n — 1) ••• (n — m + 1) — nl/(n - m~)l ways. The symbol (n~)m is read as "the number of permutations of n things taken m at a time." If the n objects are not all different—in particular, if there are nl of a first kind, n.2 of a second kind, and so on up to nk of a kth kind such that n — nl + • • • + nk—then there are nl/(n^\ • • • n,v!) ways in which all n objects can be permuted. For k = 2 this expression reduces to (^) — (£ 2 ). See Niven (1965) and Riordan (1958) for combinatorial problems. Random variables Definition. In many chance experiments the chief interest relates to numerical information furnished by the experiment. A numerical quantity whose value is determined by the outcome of a chance experiment—mathematically, a singlevalued function defined for every point of the sample space—is called a random variable (abbreviated r.v.). The remainder of this article deals with such variables. For reasons of mathematical simplicity, the discussion will be in terms of r.v.'s that take only a finite number of values. Actually, with suitable modifications the results are valid generally. (Some details are given below.) It is customary to denote r.v.'s by capitals such as X, Y, Z. For example, consider the sample space consisting of the n students in a college, each student having the same probability, 1/n, of being selected for an "experiment." A possible r.v., X, is the IQ score of a student. A second r.v., Y, is a student's weight to the nearest five pounds. A third r.v., Z, may take only the value 1 or 2, depending on whether a student is male or female. The example shows that many r.v.'s can be defined on the same sample space. As a further example, consider the r.v. W, equal
491
Table 3 — Relation between sample points and values of a random variable Values of random variable, W
Sample space
(1,1) (2,1) (3,1)
(1,2) (2,2) (3,2)
(1,3) (2,3) (3,3)
W
to the sum of the two numbers in a guessing sequence of length 2. Table 3 shows the relationship between sample points and values of W. To each point in S there corresponds exactly one value of W. Generally, the reverse is not true. While it is possible to study the calculus of probabilities without specifically defining r.v.'s, formal introduction of such a concept greatly clarifies basic ideas and simplifies notation. If the sample space S in Table 3 actually refers to successive rolls of a three-sided die, possibly with unequal probabilities for the three sides, it is natural to consider only the sum of the two rolls as the event of interest [see SUFFICIENCY]. This can be done by defining separately the five events sum equals 2, sum equals 3, • • • , sum equals 6 or by considering vaguely a "wandering" variable that is able to take the values 2 or 3 or • • • or 6. The r.v. W defined above and illustrated in Table 3 combines both approaches in a simple and unambiguous way. Note that the event F can be expressed as the event W = 4. The advantages of a formal concept are even more pronounced when it is desirable to consider two or more measurements jointly. Thus, in the earlier example an investigator might not be interested in considering weight and sex of students each by itself but as they relate to one another. This is accomplished by considering for every point in the sample space the number pair (Y,Z) where Y and Z are the r.v.'s defined earlier. Perhaps most important, the concept of r.v. permits more concise probability statements than the ones associated with the basic sample space. Frequency function of a random variable. Let X be a random variable with possible values xl} ••• ,XK. Define a function f ( x ) such that for x = xi ( i — 1 , • • • , & ) , f(x;) is the probability of the event that the basic experiment results in an outcome for which the r.v. X takes the value Xi, f(x,) = P(X = *;). Clearly, ffo) + • • • + f(x,c) = 1. The function f(x) defined in this way is called the frequency function of X. For example, in the dice model the frequency function of W is W
2
3
4
5
f(w)
*
i?
I
I
6 i
492
PROBABILITY: Formal Probability
Mean and variance of a random variable. The expected value of the r.v. X, which is denoted by E(X) (or by EX or p.x or simply p if there is no ambiguity), is denned as the weighted average E(X) = 3Cif(#i) + • • • + Xicf(Xk'). E(X) is also called the mean of X. More generally, if H(ac) is a function of x, the expected value of the r.v. H ( X ) is given by (4)
E[H(X)] =
The function H(x~) = (x — /x) 2 is of particular interest and usefulness. Its expected value is called the variance of X and is denoted by varX (or cr2, (xk — /^) 2 f(;x: fc ). The positive square root of the variance is called the standard deviation and is denoted by s.d.X (or crx or cr). If the r.v. Y is a linear function of the r.v. X, Y = a + bX, where a and b are constants, then /iy = a + bfjix, cr\ — bz First published in German. A paperback edition was published in 1959 by Random House. KOHLER, WOLFGANG (1929) 1947 Gestalt Psychology. Rev. ed. New York: Liveright. -» A paperback edition was also published in 1947 by New American Library. MAIER, NORMAN R. F. 1930-1931 Reasoning in Humans. Journal of Comparative Psychology 10:115— 143; 12:181-194. -* Part 1, "On Direction," is in Volume 10; Part 2, "The Solution of a Problem and Its Appearance in Consciousness," is in Volume 12. See especially Part 1. MAIER, NORMAN R. F. 1940 The Behavior Mechanisms Concerned With Problem Solving. Psychological Review 47:43-58. MALTZMAN, IRVING 1955 Thinking From a Behavioristic Point of View. Psychological Review 62:275-286. MILLER, GEORGE A.; GALANTER, E.; and PRIBRAM, K. H. 1960 Plans and the Structure of Behavior. New York: Holt. MORGAN, C. LLOYD (1894) 1906 An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. 2d ed. New York: Scribner; London: Scott. NEWELL, ALLEN; SHAW, J. C.; and SIMON, HERBERT A. 1958a Elements of a Theory of Human Problem Solving. Psychological Review 65:151-166. NEWELL, ALLEN; SHAW, J. C.; and SIMON, HERBERT A. 1958fc> Chess-playing Programs and the Problem of Complexity. IBM Journal of Research and Development 2:320-335. NEWELL, ALLEN; SHAW, J. C.; and SIMON, HERBERT A. 1960 Report on a General Problem-solving Program. Pages 256-264 in International Conference on Information Processing, 1959, Proceedings: Information Processing. Paris: UNESCO. NEWELL, ALLEN; SHAW, J. C.; and SIMON, HERBERT A. 1962 The Processes of Creative Thinking. Pages 63119 in Howard E. Gruber, Glenn Terrell, and Michael Wertheimer (editors), Contemporary Approaches to Creative Thinking. New York: Atherton. OSGOOD, CHARLES E. (1953) 1959 Method and Theory in Experimental Psychology. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. PIAGET, JEAN (1926) 1929 The Child's Conception of the World. New York: Harcourt. -> First published as La representation du monde chez I'enfant. PIAGET, JEAN (1947) 1950 The Psychology of Intelligence. London: Routledge. -> First published as La psychologie de I'intelligence. PIAGET, JEAN 1957 Logic and Psychology. New York: Basic Books. POLYA, GYORGY 1945 How to Solve It. Princeton Univ. Press. POLYA, GYORGY 1954 Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning. 2 vols. Oxford Univ. Press; Princeton Univ. Press. REITMAN, WALTER R. 1965 Cognition and Thought: An Information Processing Approach. New York: Wiley. SELZ, OTTO 1924 Die Gesetze der produktiven und reproduktiven Geistestdtigkeit. Bonn: Cohen.
PRODUCTION SHANNON, CLAUDE E. 1950 Programming a Computer for Playing Chess. Philosophical Magazine 41:256275. TAYLOR, DONALD W. 1960 Thinking and Creativity. Pages 108-127 in New York Academy of Sciences, Fundamentals of Psychology: The Psychology of Thinking, by Ernest Harms et al. Annals, Vol. 91, Art. 1. New York: The Academy. TAYLOR, DONALD W. 1963 Thinking. Pages 475-493 in Melvin H. Marx (editor), Theories in Contemporary Psychology. New York: Macmillan. TAYLOR, DONALD W. 1965 Decision Making and Problem Solving. Pages 48-86 in James G. March (editor), Handbook of Organizations. Chicago: Rand McNally. TAYLOR, DONALD W.; and MCNEMAR, OLGA W. 1955 Problem Solving and Thinking. Annual Review of Psychology 6:455-482. THORNDIKE, EDWARD L. (1890-1901) 1911 Animal Intelligence: Experimental Studies. New York: Macmillan. H> See especially Thorndike's 1898 essay, "Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals." VAN DE GEER, JOHAN P. 1957 A Psychological Study of Problem Solving. Haarlem (Netherlands): De Toorts. WERTHEIMER, MAX (1945) 1961 Productive Thinking. Enl. ed. Edited by Michael Wertheimer. London: Tavistock. WOODWORTH, ROBERT S.; and SCHLOSBERG, HAROLD (1938) 1960 Experimental Psychology. Rev. ed. New York: Holt. -» Woodworth was the sole author of the 1938 edition.
PROCESS, POLITICAL See POLITICAL PROCESS. PROCESS CONTROL See under QUALITY CONTROL, STATISTICAL. PROCESSES, SOCIAL See ACCULTURATION; ASSIMILATION; COHESION, SOCIAL; CONFLICT; COOPERATION; INTEGRATION, article on SOCIAL INTEGRATION; INTERACTION; SOCIALIZATION.
PRODUCT DIFFERENTIATION See MARKETS AND INDUSTRIES; MONOPOLY; OLIGOPOLY.
PRODUCTION The economic theory of production is derived from (a) the behavioral premise that the decisionmaking unit (the firm or the production manager) desires to minimize the total cost of producing any given output or specified combination of outputs, and (Jb) the postulate that normally there exist alternative techniques or processes of production, with different patterns of resource (labor, capital, materials, energy) consumption and, therefore, dif-
521
ferent associated costs. Cost minimization is normally assumed to be a separable but contributing part of the primary objective of maximizing profit. However, this assumption is not necessary, for the decision maker may have other primary objectives, such as maximizing sales or market share, but still be concerned with producing the scheduled level of production at minimum cost. Production theory is often called marginal productivity theory, in reference to the decision rules that represent necessary conditions for the achievement of maximum profit. These classical rules state that for maximum profit (including minimum cost) the quantity of each resource input used in a process must be adjusted until the value of the product resulting from the last increment of the resource (the marginal product) is equal to the cost of the last increment of the resource. Thus, if MPL is the marginal product of labor and P is the price of the product of labor, then P • MPL is the value of the marginal product of labor. If, furthermore, the constant price or wage of labor is W, the decision rule for the employment of labor is to adjust its employment until P • MPL = W. If P • MPL > W, the return from an additional unit of labor would exceed its cost, and profit could be increased by expanding employment. If P • MPL < W, the return from an additional unit of labor would be less than its cost, and profit could be increased by contracting employment. The validity of this argument requires MPL to be a decreasing (downward-sloping) function of employment. Mathematically, this condition is sufficient for a local maximum of profit. The original formulation of production theory is associated most closely with the names of John B. Clark, Philip H. Wicksteed, Francis Y. Edgeworth, and Leon Walras, whose writings on the subject appeared between 1874 and 1896. Walras's 1874, 1877, and 1889 treatments of production were based on the assumption of fixed technical coefficients (see below), with only a brief discussion of the case of variable coefficients. Walras's statement of the marginal productivity theory does not appear until the third edition of his Elements, in 1896 (see 1874-1877). The first clear statements of the marginal productivity theory seem to have been made independently by Clark (1889), Edgeworth (1891-1921), and Wicksteed (1894). Wicksteed's treatment was the most influential, and he is probably the one most often given credit as the originator of the theory. For a fuller discussion of the history of the marginal productivity theory, the reader is referred to Stigler (1941) and to Walras (1874-1877), espe-
512
PRODUCTION
cially the extensive notes by the translator, William Jaffe. [See also the biography of WALRAS.] The production function Traditional production theory postulates an input-output relationship, or production function, showing the quantity of output (or the quantities of various outputs) that can be produced as a function of the quantities of the various inputs consumed. In the case of one output and two inputs, if we let y be the output rate and x± and x2 be the input rates, the production function can be written (1)
y = f(x,,x2).
The output might be kilowatt hours of electricity per year; x^_ might be tons of coal per year; and x2 might be maintenance hours per year. Or again, y might be a chemical product, with xl a raw material reactant and x2 a fuel, a second reactant, or a catalytic material. Equation (1) represents what is called an efficiency frontier in the sense that it provides the largest y that can be produced for given x^ and xz (or the least x± required for given y and x 2 , etc.). There are some production decisions that can be made on purely technical grounds, without knowledge of resource prices. These decisions are usually called engineering decisions, as opposed to economic decisions. Thus, if a modification of the manner in which a process is performed allows the same output while permitting the quantity of at least one input to be reduced without an increase in the quantity of any other input, then a decision in favor of the modification can be made on engineering grounds alone, without any knowledge of prices. An action that saves on one input without altering any other requirement of a process will lower cost, regardless of the price of that input. The production function in (1) presupposes that all such engineering decisions have been made. In constructing this function, all methods, techniques, or processes that require more of one input and no less of any other input are rejected. Once all such engineering decisions have been made, we are left with the best engineering technology. But this technology presents a multiplicity of input possibilities which have the characteristic that output cannot be maintained at a given level, when one input is reduced, unless some other input is increased. The choice among these remaining input combinations is an economic decision, in that the decision requires knowledge of input prices. Briefly stated, economic decisions require knowledge of input prices and best engineering technology. Engineering decisions are concerned with best
engineering technology and require technical knowledge of physical processes. The characteristics of a three-variable production function are readily summarized graphically with an isoproduct map. An isoproduct (constant output) contour is the locus of all inputs (x1} ac2) that are required to produce a specified quantity of output. An isoproduct map is a family of such contours, each corresponding to a different level of output. Such a family of contours is shown in Figure 1 for outputs of 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 units. Substitution. Figure 1 also illustrates the phenomenon of substitution: for any given level of output, say 30, if input 2 is decreased, more of input 1 is required. In addition to having a negative slope, each isoproduct contour is convex to the origin (mathematically, dxjdxi < 0, d2 xz/dx\ > 0). This characteristic is often referred to as the principle of increasing marginal rate of substitution. For a given output, larger increments of x-i are required to substitute for each incremental decrease in x2, and vice versa. There is, of course, great variation in the extent of substitution among different productive processes. At one extreme is the case of perfect substitution, in which the isoproduct contours are downward-sloping straight lines. Thus, for some purposes it might make no difference whatever whether a certain mechanical part is made of aluminum or brass, and we would say that the two materials are perfect substitutes in that use. The production function would be y = a-lxl + a2x2, where a^ and a2 are the number of parts that can be produced from a pound of aluminum and a pound of brass, respectively; xl and x2 are the pounds of input of each metal; and y is the total output of parts, that is, alx1 aluminum units plus a2x2 brass units. At the opposite extreme is the case of limitational inputs or fixed proportions, in which each input requirement is rigidly proportional to the output produced, e.g., xl = b^y, x2 = b2y, where bl and b., are the constants of proportionality. In this case the production function can be written y — min (xl/b1, x2/b2}, where x^/b^ is the largest output producible from the amount of input 1 available, and x-,/b., is the largest output producible from the amount of input 2 available. The smaller of these two outputs determines how much can be produced —output is limited by the resource that is in shortest supply. Some inputs to a process may be perfect or imperfect substitutes, whereas others are limitational. Suppose, for example, that x1 and x2 are perfect
PRODUCTION 10
20
30
513
40
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
figure 1 — /soproducf contours
substitutes, xa and x+ are limitational inputs, and x5 and x6 are continuously substitutable according to the relation y = f ( x 5 , x e ) . Then the production function can be written
y = min
a.2x2, x3/b3
±, f(x5,
Output is limited by the resource or resource combination that is in shortest supply. Diminishing returns. According to the law of diminishing returns, if one of the two inputs is held constant and the other input is increased, the marginal productivity of that input must eventually decline (mathematically, beyond some value of x-i we must have dzf/dx\ < 0, and beyond some value of x, , dzf/dx~ < 0). In Figure 1 it is seen that when x.2 = 12, 10 units of output can be produced with Xi = 3; 20 units of output can be produced with X! = 5; and so on. As output increases in 10-unit increments, the quantity of x^ required increases, first at a decreasing rate and then at an increasing
rate. Since d± > d2 > d3 < d± < d-0, it is seen that the phenomenon of diminishing returns to x^ for x2 = 12 is experienced when output rises above 30 units. Returns to scale. The study of diminishing returns is concerned with how output changes with changes in an input when other inputs are held constant. The study of returns to scale is concerned with how output changes when proportional simultaneous changes are made in all inputs and there is no generally accepted law or principle requiring returns to scale eventually to decline. In Figure 1, returns to scale are represented by reference to the straight line OR through the origin. Observe that if we begin with any input combination, such as that represented by the point P(XI = 4, x, = 2), then a proportional increase in both inputs must be on the line OK. For example, if both inputs are doubled, the new input combination is represented by the point Q. If, beginning at point
51 4
PRODUCTION
P, both inputs are increased % times (to x\ — 6 and x., = 3), it is seen that output increases by a factor of 2 (from 10 to 20). Over this range there are increasing returns to scale. If, beginning at Q. both inputs are increased % times (to x-i — 12 and x., = 6), output increases by a factor of % (from 30 to 40), showing decreasing returns to scale. In general, if D, > D, > D:i > D,, etc., the process shows increasing returns to scale at all output levels. If D, = D2 = D3 = D t , etc., the process shows constant returns to scale at all outputs. If D! < D2 < D3 < D t , etc., the process shows decreasing returns to scale for all outputs. In the example of Figure 1, the process shows increasing returns to scale at first, then constant returns to scale, and finally decreasing returns to scale. The question of returns to scale can be discussed in terms of the mathematical concept of a homogeneous function. The production function y = f(Xi, x2~) is said to be homogeneous of degree 1 if an increase in all inputs by the same proportion, say a, increases output by the proportion a. That is, the production function is homogeneous of degree 1 and therefore exhibits constant returns to scale for all outputs if (2)
ay —
If the production function is not homogeneous of degree 1 and shows either increasing or decreasing returns to scale, then (3)
(3y
a> 0, (3> 0.
If ft > a we have increasing returns to scale, while if (3 < a. we have decreasing returns to scale. Individual processes may show increasing, constant, or decreasing returns to scale. Still other processes may, over different ranges of output, show all three kinds of returns. However, it is usually argued that it is inefficient to operate any process at a size that is in the range of decreasing returns. The output is more efficiently produced by building multiple facilities of a size determined by the output at which returns just begin to decrease. Capital in the production function. For purposes of production theory, the distinguishing feature of capital goods is that their presence, in the form of physical stocks, is required if production is to take place (Smith 1961). Only in special cases, as with machines that rotate or reciprocate and whose speed of operation is variable, can we obtain meaningful measures of service or utilization intensity. Even in these cases, utilization intensity cannot be varied independently of raw material and energy consumption, which represent
current or flow inputs that appear in the production function. For these reasons, it is common to measure capital as a stock, as opposed to a flow, input resource. The significance of capital stock inputs is to be found in the fact that so much pipe, cable, concrete, etc., arranged in a certain way, must be present if output is to be produced. Furthermore, the level of output that can be produced varies directly with the physical quantities of the capital inputs present when production takes place. Such inputs are not consumed in any sense similar to the consuming of raw materials, which may become physically embodied in the object produced, or of energy. This concept of capital as a collection of assets whose presence is required for production applies also to nonphysical capital, such as knowledge, or "human capital," as it is sometimes called. Indeed, knowledge, in terms of durability and relative nonconsumption in production, is the most capital-like of all such assets. In introducing physical capital goods into production function analysis, it is important to recognize another feature of such goods. Capital goods are usually freely variable in size only in the process design stage. In this drawing board stage, one may consider any size plant or individual items of equipment that one pleases, but once the investment is made, the "amount of capital" can only be varied by replacement with smaller or larger units or by installing parallel facilities. Empirical examples. The earliest studies of empirical production functions were made by agricultural economists and agronomists concerned with experimental studies of soil, fertilizer, moisture, and seed productivity. Early studies were also conducted of the weight-gaining characteristics of different feeds and feed supplements for livestock. In these cases there is a firm biological basis for expecting meat and crop outputs to be dependably related to the combinations of feed, fertilizer nutrient, and care expended. One experiment (Heady 1957) in corn fertilization yielded the production function y = -5.68 - 0.32%! - 0.42x2 + 6.35 V^I + 8.52 V#2 + 0.34V x^, , where x^ is pounds of nitrogen applied per acre per year, x2 is pounds of phosphate applied per acre per year, and y is yield of corn in bushels per acre per year. Production functions for many other agricultural products have been determined: the production of alfalfa as a function of the application of potash and phosphate fertilizers; of pork as a function of the amounts of corn and soybean oilmeal; of milk as a function of the forage and grain concentrate used. In engineering design the earliest known use of
PRODUCTION an explicit cost minimization procedure using essentially, if not quite literally, the concept of a production function, was in the determination of economic conductor size by Lord Kelvin. Writing in 1881, before Clark, Edgeworth, or Wicksteed, Kelvin summarized his derivation in a form later known by electrical engineers as Kelvin's law : "The most economical size of the copper conductor for the electric transmission of energy, whether for the electric light or for the performance of mechanical work, would be found by comparing the annual interest of the money value of the copper with the money value of the energy lost annually in the heat generated in it by the electric current" (1882, p. 526). His solution provides the conductor size "which makes the two constituents of the loss equal." In this case, the principle giving rise to substitution between energy and conductor cable is the energy loss mechanism in all forms of energy transmission and transformation. Energy output, y, is input, xl , minus loss, L, in the production of heat, i.e., y = xl — L. Losses vary directly with the square of output but inversely with conductor size, and therefore, for a given length transmission line, inversely with conductor weight (or volume), Xo . Hence, L = fa/2/X2, where k is a constant depending upon a variety of factors, such as the length of the line and the resistivity of the cable. The production function can therefore be written y — x^ — ky2/X.2 , or, in explicit form, y = X.2 ( V 1 + 4k/X.2 The production functions for numerous other engineering processes have been studied: gas transmission (Chenery 1949); heat transmission, steam power production, filtration processes, and batch reactor chemical processes (Smith 1961); and metal cutting (Davidson et al. 1958; Kurz & Manne 1963). These studies have been sufficiently diverse to show that the principle of input substitution has a firm base in a wide variety of scientific and empirical engineering laws. Sometimes the laws generate substitution representing a negligible part of the productive activity of some firms; in other cases the laws generate substitution among the principal inputs of the enterprise. Thus, in steam power production, the basic production function governing the process arises from the law of energy conservation and the empirical laws governing energy loss in boilers, turbines, and generators. At each stage in the transformation of energy — from fuel into steam, steam into mechanical energy, and mechanical into electrical energy — losses occur at a rate which is an increasing function of the output of the stage and a decreasing
515
function of equipment (capital) size in the stage. The production function is y = f ( x 1 } X 2 , X 3 , X4), where y is power output rate, x1 is fuel consumption rate, and X 2 , X ;i , and X4 are size measures of the boiler, turbine, and generator equipment, respectively. Linear programming. An entirely different mechanism of substitution sometimes occurs where a product can be produced by any of several distinct processes, each process being characterized by a fixed coefficient production function. In that case one input substitutes for another when one process is chosen instead of another. Consider a product that can be produced by either of two processes, each of which requires two inputs—fuel and labor. The two processes might simply be two different kinds of equipment. Process 1 requires one man-hour per unit of output and 1.5 gallons of fuel per unit of output. If z/i is output, x1: labor input, and x2l fuel input, then the process is characterized by the equations x^ = yl, X.,-L = l.5yl. If process 2 requires two man-hours of labor and one gallon of fuel for each unit of output, then process 2 is characterized by the conditions X12 = 2l/2 , X22 = 7/2 . Each of these processes taken separately exhibits isoproduct contours like those encountered in any process whose inputs are used in fixed proportions. Figure 2 shows an isoproduct contour (1G1' and JHJ'~) for an output of 300 for each of the two processes. However, if the two processes can be operated in parallel combination at any desired levels of output, then it will be possible to achieve any of the input—output combinations on the line segment GH. To see this, consider the two rays OB and OP (Figure 2), whose slopes represent the ratios at which the two inputs must be combined in each process. The scale laid off along each ray represents the output that would result if the indicated input combinations were employed in that process. For example, 300 units of output can be produced with process 1 when 300 man-hours of labor are expended and 450 gallons of fuel consumed. Similarly, 300 units of output can be produced with process 2 when 600 man-hours of labor and 300 gallons of fuel are used. But 300 units of output can also be produced by employing the two processes in combination. For example, we could produce 100 units of output with process 1 and 200 units of output with process 2. In Figure 2 the length of the "vector" OA represents 100 units of output by process 1, while the projections of this vector on the horizontal and vertical axes give the amounts of the two inputs required, 100 and 150
516
PRODUCTION
Fuel (in gallons)
1,100- OUTPUT BY PROCESS 1 1,000
900 - •
800-*-
700- •
500--
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
900
1,000
1,100
Labor (in man-hours)
Figure 2 — Derivation of isoproduct contours for combinations of two processes
units respectively. Similarly, the vector OD represents 200 units of output by process 2, and its projection on the axes identifies the input requirements of the process at this output. Now, combining or adding the two processes together is geometrically equivalent to adding the vector OA to OD or, since OD equals AC, to adding OA to AC, giving OC—a vector representing a total output of 300 units and whose projections on the axes give the total input requirements of the two processes together. Therefore, the point C represents a point on the isoproduct contour for an output of 300 units which is obtained by operating process 1
at an output level of 100 units and process 2 at an output level of 200 units. Thus, all the points on the line GH are achievable, and the isoproduct contour for 300 units is IGH/'. It is now possible to write a mathematical statement of the efficient production function for this two-process system. Since the individual process outputs are y± and yz, total output is z/x + yz. Process 1 uses Xu = i/i units of labor, and process 2 uses x12 — 2i/2 units of labor. Hence, if Xi is the total labor input, we must have y± + 2y2 ^ x±, since not more than the available labor can be used. Similarly, if x2 is the fuel available for consump-
PRODUCTION tion, we must require 1.5z/i + y2 < x2. Mathtmatically, the production function relating y, Xi , tnd x2 is defined by the condition that y = max^^ (y-+ y2}, subject to y-L + "2y2 ^ x^ and l.'5y^ 4- y2 ^ :2 , or i/i + 2i/2 + Si = #1. and l.Sz/i + y2 + S2 = ^2 , where S^ 0 and S2 ^ 0 are surplus unused quantifies of the inputs. This maximum problem is a linea* programming problem (Dorfman et al. 1958). From Figure 2 it can be seen that if x^ = 500 and x2 - 350, we would have y = 300, with yl = 100 and y2 = 200. It is easily verified that y, = 100, y, = 200 Sl = S2 = 0 is a solution to the above maximum prtblem. Similarly, if xl = 800 and xz = 300, the soluton to the linear programming problem is z/i — 0, z/2 = 300, Sx = 200, S2 = 0. The above reasoning can be extended t) any number of processes and any number of iiputs. For m processes and n inputs, the productionfunction y = f ( x l 5 • • • , ac n ) is obtained by solvirg the following linear programming problem: y=
517
Xi
C=
max (y +y +---+y ), -
subject to almy x.2
dniyi + an2y2 + • •• + anmym< xn , where a^ is the quantity of the ith input recuired per unit of production in the ;th process. [Set PROGRAMMING.] Cost and production theory Given the production function for a process, say y = f ( x 1 , x 2 ) , and the prices of the inputs, e.g., wi,w2, the problem in the theory of cost is :o determine decision rules for minimizing the c«st of producing any given output. That is, for any specified y, we want C — -wjc^ + w2x2 to be a minmum subject to the requirement that y — f ( x i , x 2 ), Necessary conditions for C to be a minimum ar< that w j — \(df/dx^ > 0, where xl = 0 if the ineqiality holds, and that w 2 - \(df/dx2) > 0, where ;2 = 0 if the inequality holds. (Mathematically the problem is to minimize the Lagrangian = T^X! + WoX2 — X[f(x, , x2) — y], where A is the Lag'ange multiplier.) The X in these expressions is interpreted as marginal total cost (X — OC/dy'). Witten in the form wj(df/dx^ > \ < w,/(df/dx,\ these conditions require that no input be employed in an amount such that the marginal cost of an additional unit of that input — the price of the nput divided by its marginal product, Wi/(df/dxj) —is smaller than the marginal total cost for the process. If the marginal cost of any input to the process
exceeds marginal total cost, that input is not used (we have a "boundary" solution). Thus, for two inputs, if w1/(df/dx1') =X = w2/(df/dx2),orWi_/w2 = (df/dx-L}/(df/dx2'), then we have an interior tangency solution, such as point P in Figure 3. If, however, w1/(df/dxl) > X = w2/(df/dxs), or w-L/w2 > (df/dxi')/(0f/dx2), we have x± — 0 and a boundary solution, as illustrated by point Q in Figure 3. The condition w,/w2 = (df/dxl)/(df/dx2^>, in combination with the production function y = f ( x 1 , x 2 ' ) , defines the minimum cost input combination x® , x® , as a function of the parameters y, w] , w., . Hence, total cost, C° = wlx°l+ w 0 ^ , and marginal cost, X°, are determined as functions of output and input prices. Over-all profit, that is, revenue minus minimum cost, R(z/) — C°(T/), is a maximum when dR/dy < OC/dy, where y — 0 if the inequality holds. That is, if marginal total cost, dC/dy, exceeds marginal revenue, dR/dy, at any output, that output should be contracted until either the two are equal or y — 0, whichever occurs first. For example, in the case of two inputs, if it pays to use both inputs and to produce some output, the optimum input-output combination satisfies the conditions (a)
dR _ dC dy ~ dy
= X=
df/dxl
df/dx2
and
If it does not pay to produce, this fact is expressed by the inequality dR/dy < dC/dy.
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PRODUCTION
The above analysis extends readily to the case of n inputs. If all inputs are used and production is positive, the necessary conditions are 0, if it does not pay to introduce a second facility; (2) x1 = 0, %; > 0, X; > 0, if it pays to discard the
original facility when the new one is added (replacement); or (3) x1 > 0, x[ > 0, X'2 > 0, if it pays to add a new facility and operate it parallel to the old. Dynamics and uncertainty. The theory of cost and production has been extended to treat cases in which demand and, therefore, the output requirements of production are assumed to be (1) given functions of time, or (2) random variables with known probability density functions (Arrow et al. 1958; Modigliani & Hohn 1955; Smith 1961). These problems are often discussed under the title "inventory theory," since changes in output requirements over time and demand uncertainty are the two conditions giving rise to the necessity of holding product inventories. Under dynamic production requirements, inventories provide a means of smoothing the production plan. If output requirements are known to rise seasonally, the increased marginal costs associated with high output can be avoided by producing in advance for inventory. Optimal smoothing of the production plan requires a balancing of direct production costs against inventory holding costs. Under uncertain demand requirements, inventories are held as buffer stocks to meet temporary unpredictable increases in demand. Optimal buffer stocks require a balancing of production and salesloss costs (the costs of failing to meet demand) with the costs of storage. [See INVENTORIES, article On INVENTORY CONTROL THEORY.]
Aggregate production functions The production function for particular processes can in principle be, and often is in practice, derived directly from engineering laws and data. Logically, therefore, if the economist has an interest in labor and capital productivity at the industry, regional, or national level, the appropriate aggregate production function could be obtained by aggregating individual process functions. But such a procedure is hopelessly impractical. Instead, economists have postulated the form of the production function and then used aggregative data to estimate its parameters. The analytical forms used have necessarily been restricted by considerations of convenience in estimation. [See PRODUCTION AND COST ANALYSIS.]
VERNON L. SMITH [Directly related are the entries CAPITAL; ECONOMIES OF SCALE; FlRM, THEORY OF THE; INPUT-OUTPUT ANALYSIS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
A comprehensive survey of production theory can be found in Walters 1963, which contains an extensive bibliography.
PRODUCTION AND COST ANALYSIS ARROW, KENNETH J.; KARLIN, SAMUEL; and SCARF, HERBERT 1958 Studies in the Mathematical Theory of Inventory and Production. Stanford Univ. Press. CHENERY, HOLLIS B. 1949 Engineering Production Functions. Quarterly Journal of Economics 63:507531. CLARK, JOHN BATES 1889 The Possibility of a Scientific Law of Wages. Volume 4, pages 37-69 in American Economic Association, Publications. Baltimore: The Association. DAVIDSON, RALPH K.; SMITH, VERNON L.; and WILEY, JAY W. (1958) 1962 Economics: An Analytical Approach. Rev. ed. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. DORFMAN, ROBERT; SAMUELSON, PAUL A.; and SOLOW, ROBERT M. 1958 Linear Programming and Economic Analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill. EDGEWORTH, FRANCIS Y. (1891-1921) 1963 Papers Relating to Political Economy. 3 vols. New York: Franklin. HEADY, EARL O. 1957 An Econometric Investigation of the Technology of Agricultural Production Functions. Econometrica 25:249-268. KELVIN (WILLIAM THOMSON) 1882 On the Economy of Metal in Conductors of Electricity. Report of 51st meeting, held August-September 1881. British Association for the Advancement of Science, Reports 51:526528. KURZ, MORDECAI; and MANNE, ALAN S. 1963 Engineering Estimates of Capital-Labor Substitution in Metal Machining. American Economic Revieiv 53:662-681. MODIGLIANI, FRANCO; and HOHN, FRANZ E. 1955 Production Planning Over Time and the Nature of the Expectation and Planning Horizon. Econometrica 23: 46-66. RESEARCH PROJECT ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE AMERICAN ECONOMY 1953 Studies in the Structure of the American Economy: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations in Input—Output Analysis, by Wassily Leontief et al. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. SMITH, VERNON L. 1961 Investment and Production. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 117. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press; Oxford Univ. Press. SOLOW, ROBERT M. 1957 Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function. Review of Economics and Statistics 39:312-320. STIGLER, GEORGE J. 1941 Production and Distribution Theories. New York: Macmillan. WALRAS, LEON (1874-1877) 1954 Elements of Pure Economics; Or, the Theory of Social Wealth. Translated by William Jaffe. Homewood, 111.: Irwin; London: Allen & Unwin. ->• First published as Elements d'economie politique pure. WALTERS, ALAN A. 1963 Production and Cost Functions: An Econometric Survey. Econometrica 31:1-66. WICKSTEED, PHILIP H. (1894) 1932 An Essay on the Co-ordination of the Laws of Distribution. London School of Economics and Political Science.
51 9
PRODUCTION AND COST ANALYSIS
duction processes display decreasing, constant, or increasing returns to scale; (2) how technological progress affects the parameters of production processes; and (3) at what rate technological progress has occurred. Estimation and interpretation of the estimates is complicated by the fact that observations on inputs, outputs, and costs reflect not only the state of technology but also the economic decisions made by producers and factor suppliers. Assumptions regarding economic behavior and competition in input and output markets often play a crucial role in the statistical analyses, and it is not always easy to determine whether the results reveal the nature of technology or serve instead to test the validity of the economic assumptions. Production functions. The fundamental productive organization is the firm, which enters into contractual arrangements in buying, transforming, and selling goods and services. The production set of a firm describes at a given time the possible relationships between inputs and outputs. For the single-product firm, the production function describes the maximum output that can be produced from given quantities of inputs. Let X denote output in physical homogeneous units, and let L and K denote two inputs—labor and capital—in homogeneous units; then the production function is X max = f(K,L), or simply X = f(K,L). The numbers X, K, and L can take on positive or zero values only, and for a given technology the function is normally specified as univalued. An important practical distinction in statistical studies is between the ex ante (or planning) production or cost function and the ex post (or realized) function. Decisions about the type and scale of plant are made years before the plant is completed. Expectations, formed in previous years, about prices and output levels determine the quantity and character of new capital employed in the current period. The ex post function is the realized relationship and is the one that is normally measured in practice. If all plans and expectations are perfectly realized, the ex ante and ex post functions are equivalent. Functional forms. The most popular form of the production function for statistical testing is the Cobb-Douglas function (Cobb & Douglas 1928), i.e., X = AKttZA A, a, (3 > 0,
Production processes can be studied empirically in terms of either production functions or cost functions. Estimates of the parameters of these functions provide valuable insights into the technology of firms and industries. The central questions relating to technology are (1) whether pro-
where a and (3 are elasticities of output with respect to capital and labor. Assuming perfect competition in the markets for output and for factors of production, with prices P for output, W for labor, and -R for capital, we obtain the marginal productivity conditions (3 = WL/PX and a = RK/PX. In equilib-
520
PRODUCTION AND COST ANALYSIS
rium the elasticities are equal to the ratios of factor rewards to total revenue. The Cobb-Douglas function is a homogeneous function of degree a 4- /3. If a + f3 — I , then increasing both K and L by the same proportion will increase output by that proportion, i.e., constant returns to scale prevails. Decreasing and increasing returns to scale correspond to the cases a + (B < 1 and a + (B > I. The Cobb-Douglas function can easily be extended to cover the case of many inputs and many outputs. Another form of the production function often used for statistical testing is the general constantelasticitv-of-substitution (CES) form, i.e., X = y[6K^ 4- (1 - S)L-"]-"^, where y is a positive constant reflecting the scale in which X is measured, 8 is a "distribution" parameter ( 0 < 8 ^ 1 ) , and v is a nonnegative scale parameter which increases with economies of scale and takes a value of unity when there are constant returns (Arrow et al. 1961). The parameter p is closely related to the elasticity of substitution (cr) between capital and labor: cr
dlog(K/L)
When the elasticity of substitution approaches unity (i.e., when p approaches zero), the CES function simplifies to the Cobb-Douglas form. When the elasticity approaches zero (i.e., when p approaches infinity), the CES function becomes a Leontief-type input-output function. The marginal productivity conditions with v = 1 give WL RK
ficulties of statistical and economic specification, identification, and interpretation (Marschak & Andrews 1944). Thus, for the Cobb-Douglas form (and denoting logarithms by lower-case letters) we have for the production function
x — ak — pi = a + H0 and for the marginal productivity relations x —k — — a + r — P + WI x — l = — p + w — p + uz.
The variables u0 , u^, and u2 may be interpreted as random variables, un affecting "productive efficiency" and ul and u2 affecting "economic efficiency" in choosing the correct factor inputs. Different interpretations are, however, required for crosssection and time series studies. To estimate the parameters, restrictions must be imposed on the joint distribution function of ua, ul , and u2 . If there is no correlation between u0 and ul and between w ( , and w 2 , then a simple extension of the usual method of least squares will provide suitable estimates, but the empirical evidence suggests that there are in fact significant correlations between technical and economic efficiency (Walters 1963). Cost functions. An alternative way of analyzing the production process is to estimate the cost function, which describes cost as determined by the level of output and the prices of inputs when the firm uses the most efficient technique. If the perfectly competitive marginal productivity conditions are substituted into the Cobb-Douglas production function, we obtain the cost function (C = cost),
1 -S
and X L
The CES function can be extended to incorporate many inputs, but it is not so simple an extension as in the case of the Cobb-Douglas function. Specification and estimation. In estimating the parameters, one may fit either the production function itself or the marginal productivity equations. Most Cobb-Douglas function studies have estimated parameters directly from the logarithmically linear production function, thus leaving open an apparent test of the marginal productivity law. Most CES studies have avoided fitting the nonlinear production relation and have instead concentrated on fitting the logarithmically linear marginal productivity equations. Simultaneous estimation of both production and marginal productivity relations is beset with dif-
which is linear in the logarithms of factor prices and output. Most empirical studies of cost have been concerned with measuring the variation of C and X, and not with estimating the effect of factor prices on C. It is clear, however, that if factor prices do change, there is an opportunity to measure the coefficients of the production function by regressing cost on factor prices and output (Nerlove 1963). Cost functions, although apparently more useful than production functions because of the availability of accounting data, are often more intractable, owing to the difficulties of defining and measuring cost. The cost function reflects not only the technological conditions of production but also competitive conditions in factor markets. If, for example, the business is faced with a rising supply curve of labor, the parameters of that supply curve will enter as determinants of the cost function. In
PRODUCTION AND COST ANALYSIS addition, one does not escape the simultaneous equations difficulty referred to above. Time series estimates. The production function or cost function of the firm can be measured by observing the firm as it reacts to different stimuli— such as changes in relative factor and output prices. A time series of observations will produce variations in output, inputs, and cost from which production and cost functions can be traced. These observations will usually generate the short-run production and cost relationships—very short-run for monthly observations—and what may be called an intermediate-run production function for annual observations. The main difficulty with this type of study is that it samples a dynamic adjustment process—a mixture of factor price movements, technological change, and exogenous shocks. One cannot be sure that one has identified the static production function or cost function. Most time series studies of firms have been cast in the form of cost functions. Accounting data are adjusted for changes in factor prices. Usually the cost is measured as "direct" or "production" cost, but sometimes total cost has been used. The difficulties with accounting data are that (a) the unit period (the financial year) is longer than the short period of economic theory, and (fo) the valuation of stocks, capital, and depreciation is usually conventional and based on the requirements of tax law. Studies vary according to their success in dealing with these problems. The general result is, however, reasonably clear: marginal cost is constant or even declining over the range of outputs recorded in the statistical studies. There is no striking evidence of sharply rising marginal cost. Close scrutiny of these results reveals that some can be explained by the fact that output levels were cyclically low relative to the size of the plant. There does remain, however, evidence of excess capacity in certain industries. Cross-section estimates. To avoid the problems of technological and other changes over time, researchers frequently use observations on a number of firms for a particular year—a cross-section sample. Variations in inputs and outputs from one firm to another provide the raw material for crosssection estimates. Differences in the sizes of firms are so large and have normally persisted for so long that the cross-section results are usually interpreted as long-run relationships. The main difficulty with cross-section analysis, however, is that in a competitive market there is no separate and quantitatively different stimulus for each firm. The success of cross-section studies of households in measuring Engel curves is due to the
521
fact that each household has a different income, which generates different expenditure patterns. But this is not the case with businesses in a competitive industry. For firms in a competitive market, prices are the same throughout, so that recorded variations in inputs and outputs must be due to influences other than price—perhaps due to accidental influences or to special nonexchangeable inputs, such as "entrepreneurship." There is no variation in factor price ratios to generate variations in relative factor inputs. Any observed differences in factor inputs are caused by differences in production functions (or accidents), and the observations do not identify a particular production function. Similarly, the cost function in a perfectly competitive cross section shows that average costs, as measured by price, are constant over the sample. If one measured costs by deducting entrepreneurial rewards, one would find only how these rewards per unit of output varied over the population of firms; nothing can be deduced about the variation in cost as a representative firm expands its output. Constant cost curves in cross sections may be evidence of competition rather than of constant returns to scale. This criticism does not apply to studies of firms in isolated factor or goods markets or to instances where there are imperfections in factor markets and output markets or where the level (or price) of output is controlled exogenously by a government agency. In these cases, there is some opportunity for measuring the production and cost functions (Nerlove 1963). When the production relationship is measured directly, i.e., when quantities of inputs and outputs are used, the results should approximate the underlying production function. But in measuring marginal productivity conditions and cost functions, the parameters of the supply curve of factors must be known before one can calculate the production function or cost function parameters. With international or, in some cases, interregional cross sections it is sometimes reasonable to specify both separate factor or goods markets and competitive conditions in each; in these circumstances a cross section may give observations which are suitable for estimating production functions. The general result from cross-section cost studies has been that average cost declines rapidly for small outputs and is more or less constant for large outputs. There is no evidence that large firms incur high costs. For a competitive industry the above interpretation would suggest that small firms probably produce specialized products which command a high price, whereas the large and medium-
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PRODUCTION AND COST ANALYSIS
size firms produce similar commodities which must sell at more or less the same price. For public utilities, certain monopolistic industries, and railways, however, the predominant result—declining cost curves—does indicate economies of scale; but in view of the regulations imposed by governments and ("cmetimes) the noncompetitive nature of factor markets, the result must often be interpreted with caution. For studies of production functions from cross sections of firms (except public utilities), the results tend to be that (a) the order of the homogeneous production function is close to unity and (£>) the share of wages is not very different from the value predicted by the production function (i.e., ft in the competitive markets, Cobb-Douglas case). There are, however, many exceptions to these generalizations. Whether one may interpret these findings as evidence of (a) constant returns to scale of a "representative" production function and (b) the workings of the marginal productivity law is open to question (see Walters 1963, p. 37). Even if one waives the argument that the observations do not trace a "representative" production function, there are still two main problems. First, least squares estimates may give seriously biased results because of the simultaneous equations form of the underlying model. Second, to identify the production coefficients, one must avoid measuring some combination of the marginal productivity conditions or the condition that all revenue is exhausted. In very few studies have simultaneous identification methods been used with suitable safeguards. The development of joint cross-section and time series data has enabled investigators to distinguish "firm effects" from random "time effects," but no general results are yet available. Cross-section, interindustry studies. Some investigators have measured an "aggregate" production function from industrial aggregates of output, labor, and capital. The function so measured describes how production relationships vary not with the size of firms but with the size of industries. Large industries may be composed of small firms, and small industries may consist of one or two giant firms. The function tells us how the net values added of industries vary with their inputs. The results might be expected to reveal whether there are external economies depending on the size of industries. The estimates have not been interpreted in this way; normally they have been thought to shed light on whether economies of scale exist in the firm. Additional difficulties of interpretation arise from the variation in techniques between industries, which are reflected in differences in coef-
ficients for each industry. The heterogeneity of output and capital forces investigators to measure these in money terms. The supply conditions in factor markets and monopolistic power in product markets then affect the estimated coefficients. The general results of interindustry studies are of the familiar pattern, i.e., a + (B — \ and (3 is approximately labor's share of total income. But the fact that the coefficients sum to unity is not evidence of constant returns to scale; it tells us merely that industries with large values added use proportionately more inputs than do industries which have proportionately smaller values added. Thus the productivity of factors is not much affected by classification into industries. This is a result which one would expect in a more or less free competitive market. Similarly, the labor-share result is simply a consequence of measuring the equation: Value added = V = RK + WL, which gives d(V/RK) = Wd(L/RK~). From the Cobb-Douglas function (a +/3 = 1) one derives the same slope, W, between net value added per dollar of capital and labor input per dollar of capital, so that the laborshare result proves merely that the value added is exhausted by the factors. In sum, the cross-section, interindustry studies do not measure the production function and shed no light either on marginal productivity theory or on economies of scale. Time series studies of technical change. The first investigations of production functions were made with aggregate time series data, usually for the manufacturing sector of the economy. Data before the great depression of the early 1930s revealed the two common results, i.e., a + (3 = 1 and ft — labor's share of total income. For periods which include the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s the results deviate considerably from the pre-1930 values. This clearly indicates that the early results were largely the product of a peculiar historical period. One early criticism of aggregate time series studies was that the data simply measured trends in technological progress. In measuring the effects of technical progress with a Cobb-Douglas function, the most common specification is a geometrical or exponential time trend. Progress is then "neutral" in both the Harrod and the Hicks senses. A surprisingly large fraction of the percentage change in output is attributed to neutral technical progress (between 60 per cent and 90 per cent is the common result), and only a correspondingly small fraction is attributed to the increased use of capital in production. This outcome is partly due to labeling as "technical progress" the increase in output which one cannot statistically attribute to other causes. When the basic model has taken into ac-
PRODUCTIVITY count returns to scale, it seems that a substantial fraction of the progress is in fact due to economies of scale. A further development has been to "embody" technical progress in capital equipment at the date at which the plant was built. But with time series data, embodied and neutral technical change are confounded, so the division is not observable. Data on education and other indicators of the quality of the labor force have also been used to examine embodied technical progress. Another main development has been to consider the dynamic adjustment of the economy over time; this involves separate specifications for shortrun and long-run adjustments. The last and most extensive development has been to put the production function into the framework of an economic system specified in the form of a set of simultaneous equations. The production relationships appear as a subset of the equation system. In spite of the effort devoted to research in production and technical progress, our ignorance on this fundamental problem is the Achilles heel of many economic models and policies. The planning models of a. Leontief or linear programming type probably suffer more from incorrect specifications of production functions and progress functions than from any other error. Painstaking, detailed research into processes and innovations is the only answer. A. A. WALTERS [Directly related are the entries AGRICULTURE, article On PRODUCTIVITY AND TECHNOLOGY; ECONOMIES OF SCALE; FIRM, THEORY OF THE; INPUT-OUTPUT ANALYSIS; PRODUCTION.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ALCHIAN, ARMEN 1963 Reliability of Progress Curves in Airframe Production. Econometrica 31:679-693. ARROW, KENNETH et al. 1961 Capital-Labor Substitution and Economic Efficiency. Review of Economics and Statistics 43:225-250. COBB, CHARLES W.; and DOUGLAS, PAUL H. 1928 A Theory of Production. American Economic Review 18 (Supplement): 139-165. CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN INCOME AND WEALTH 1967 The Theory and Empirical Analysis of Production. Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol. 31. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. HlLDEBRAND,
GEORGE
H.;
and
LlU,
TA-CHUNG
1965
Manufacturing Production Functions in the United States, 1957: An Inter-industry and Interstate Comparison of Productivity. Cornell Studies in Industrial and Labor Relations, No. 15. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ., New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations. JOHNSTON, J. 1960 Statistical Cost Analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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MANNE, ALAN S.; and MAKKOWITZ, HARRY M. (editors) 1963 Studies in Process Analysis: Economy-wide Production Capabilities. New York: Wiley. MARSCHAK, JACOB; and ANDREWS, WILLIAM H. JR. 1944 Random Simultaneous Equations and the Theory of Production. Econometrica 12:143-205. NERLOVE, MARC 1963 Returns to Scale in Electricity Supply. Pages 167-198 in Measurement in Economics: Studies in Mathematical Economics and Econometrics . . . , by Carl Christ et al. Stanford Univ. Press. SMITH, VERNON L. 1961 Investment and Production. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 117. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press; Oxford Univ. Press. SOLOW, ROBERT M. 1957 Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function. Review of Economics and Statistics 39:312-320. WALTERS, ALAN A. 1963 Production and Cost Functions: An Econometric Survey. Econometrica 31:1—66.
PRODUCTIVITY Productivity, as discussed here, refers to a class of empirical output-input ratios that is widely used in economic history, economic analysis, and economic policy. In one sense, productivity measures the fruitfulness of human labor under varying circumstances. In another sense, productivity measures the efficiency with which resources as a whole, including capital as well as manpower, are employed in production. In still another sense, productivity measures the forces that underlie the trend of real wages. And in a fourth sense, productivity measures a major factor in the determination of labor or capital requirements. Productivity measurements are addressed to important questions. As we shall see, some of the questions are best answered with one kind of productivity measurement, and other questions with other kinds. For this reason, productivity ratios appear in a variety of forms. In addition, there are some forms that simply reflect the dearth of statistical information. These productivity ratios serve as the best available approximations to the desired measurements. To grasp the subject of productivity, therefore, it is necessary to begin by considering both the concept of productivity and its measurement. Kinds of productivity indexes In each of its forms, productivity appears as a comparison of an output with one or more inputs; that is, as a comparison of an output with the services of one or more of the resources used in producing the output. The comparison is most frequently put in the form of a ratio of the one to the other. Then, because the output-input ratio of a particular time and place has limited significance standing by itself, it is compared with the corresponding ratio of another time or place to estimate
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changes or differences in productivity levels. The comparison is usually expressed in relative form; that is, as an index of productivity. In the output-input ratios with which we are concerned, both numerator and denominator are measured in physical units or (when heterogeneous iterru are combined, which is most frequently the case) in "constant-price" money values. This "physical productivity" is to be distinguished from "value productivity," in which output is measured in current money values while input is measured in physical units or constant-price money values. It should be distinguished also from "cost of production per unit," an input-output ratio in which input is measured in current-price money values and output in physical units. Change in productivity can be measured by change in the relation between output and one or more inputs, either with other inputs kept constant, as in an experiment under controlled conditions, or with other inputs free to vary. We shall deal with the latter case. This means that a change in the relation between output and input, if the input is not the total input, may reflect substitution between the inputs covered by the productivity ratio and those not covered. Finally, productivity in a given period can be measured by the ratio of the output to the input of the period, or it can be measured by the ratio of the increment in output to the increment in input during the period. That is, productivity may be "average productivity" or "marginal productivity." We shall deal with average productivity. It should be noted, however, that under certain conditions (mentioned in the discussion of productivity and wages) indexes of average and marginal productivity are identical. Our discussion is limited, then, to average physical productivity; that is, to the ratio of physical output to one or more physical inputs, other inputs not necessarily being constant. It is this subfamily of output-input ratios to which most productivity indexes relate. Measure of input. While the field has been narrowed, it is still rather wide. To illustrate: (1) Output can be compared with the sum of all the hours of labor—"the manhours"—spent in production (output per manhour). Account is thus taken not only of the number of persons engaged but also of the long or short hours put in by those persons who work more or less than the average work week or year. When comparisons are made over time, allowance is thus made for the declines that have occurred in the length of the usual work week or year. When the comparisons are between na-
tions, allowance is made for international differences in the length of the work period. (2) Output can be compared with the weighted sum of manhours employed (output per unit of labor input). That is, an hour of high-quality labor—a highly paid manhour of work—is counted as proportionately more than an hour of low-quality labor—a lower paid manhour. In this way, account is taken of differences in education, length of experience, and other factors determining the quality of labor. Thus, also, account is taken of the education and other intangible capital invested to improve the quality of labor. Or, (3) output can be compared with the services of the tangible capital employed in production—plant and equipment, tools and rolling stock, land and mines, and inventories of all sorts—as well as the services of the labor resources, each appropriately weighted ("output per unit of total input," or "total productivity," or most specifically, "output per unit of labor and tangible capital input"). Obviously, of the three productivity ratios mentioned, output per manhour requires the least information and is easiest to calculate, and output per unit of labor and capital input requires the most information. It is not surprising, therefore, that the more complex measurements are also of more recent vintage and are less frequently available than the relatively simple output per manhour. However, the productivity measurements that are more complex in terms of data requirements are—from our point of view—less complex in terms of content or meaning. Output per unit of labor input, for example, describes more than does output per unit of labor and capital input. The former is equal to the latter multiplied by another ratio, the weighted combination of labor and capital input per unit of labor input. Output per unit of labor input will rise faster than output per unit of labor and capital input when tangible capital input grows more rapidly than labor input. Similarly, output per manhour will rise faster than output per unit of labor input when education and other investments cause the quality of labor to improve. In short, change in output per manhour may be viewed—and later we will find it useful so to view it—as reflecting the combined effect of change in three things: (1) efficiency, as measured by output per unit of labor and capital input; (2) the relative supply of tangible capital, as measured by labor and capital input per unit of labor input; and (3) average labor quality, as measured by labor input per manhour. This chain of productivity ratios can be readily
PRODUCTIVITY extended to include ratios that are more or less complex (in either of the senses mentioned) than the ratios included in our illustrative series. Thus, when the productivity of an industry or other sector of an economy is considered, and the information is available (which it seldom is), output can be compared not only with the services of the labor and tangible capital employed by the sector but also with these plus materials, components, fuel, supplies, and other commodities and services purchased from other sectors. This productivity ratio, "output per unit of labor, capital, and material input," is another, and somewhat different, measure of output per unit of total input. Change in output per manhour can then be said to combine the effects of change in (1) efficiency, now measured by output per unit of labor, capital, and material input, and (2) total resources per manhour, measured by labor, capital, and material input per manhour. When the data are severely limited (which is often the case), output can be compared simply with the average number of persons engaged in production. The productivity ratio would then be simply "output per man." Change in output per man combines the effects of change in (1) efficiency and (2) total resources per manhour, as just defined, and (3) average hours worked per man. Measures of output. Productivity ratios may differ also with regard to the output included in the numerator. The output of a country may be identified with the goods and services produced within its borders (net domestic product) or with the goods and services available to its normal residents (net national product). National product differs from domestic product by the amount of goods and services (or the equivalent in claims on foreigners) financed by net incomes received from abroad and by net gains from improvements in the terms of foreign trade. One must decide whether or not to define a country's productivity in such a way as to make it depend in part on changes abroad, or at least one must recognize that its productivity has been so defined when it is measured by national product per unit of input. The use of output concepts like gross national product and gross private domestic product reflects not so much a preference for these concepts over net national product or net domestic product as a serious doubt about the accuracy of the measurement of capital consumption in the former case and of the government component of national product in the latter case. This means, of course, that gross national product per manhour, for example,
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is only an approximation to net national product per manhour. The output of an industry can also be assigned different meanings. It can be measured either by the "real value added" by the industry or by its "real value of product," where the former excludes and the latter includes the value of purchased materials, fuel, and energy. To measure an industry's "total productivity," then, one can compare its real value added with its labor and tangible capital input, or its real value of product with its labor, tangible capital, and material input. Less consistent, but usually unavoidable because information is lacking, is the comparison of real value of products with labor and tangible capital input. The three productivity indexes will not necessarily parallel one another. Only the first index is directly comparable with the national index of output per unit of labor and tangible capital. In most discussions of productivity, it is customarily assumed that the differences among the several output concepts are small and can therefore be safely ignored, largely because scarcity of information makes a choice impossible. It is certain, however, that the differences are not always negligible. But we shall have to follow the custom, except for a later comment or two, and concentrate on those differences among productivity indexes that arise from differences in the inputs. Even when there is a choice among alternatives and even when the output and the input indexes can be made fully consistent, productivity indexes are at best crude and somewhat ambiguous measures. As with all index numbers, troublesome questions arise, and rather arbitrary decisions are made, concerning the aggregation of heterogeneous and qualitatively changing inputs or outputs. And there are special difficulties—for example, in the measurement of capital input and of the employment and hours of family workers. Users of productivity indexes must learn not to make fine comparisons. Not every important productivity ratio has been mentioned. However, for the immediate purpose, which is to identify some of the major productivity ratios and to make clear why it is necessary to distinguish carefully among these and other ratios, our list is sufficient. Productivity indexes and production functions The differences among the several productivity indexes can be put more clearly in symbolic terms. The symbols are useful also for showing the relation between the indexes and statistical production functions. Following the usual convention, let the following
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symbols stand for index numbers, on a common base, of the items specified: Y = output, N = manhour input (unweighted manhours), L = labor input (weighted manhours), and K = tangible capital input. To combine labor and capital input it is necessary to express them in comparable units, namely, a dollar's worth of services in the base period or place; or, what is the same, to calculate the index of labor and capital input by taking a weighted arithmetic average of the indexes of labor input and of capital input, with the weights equal, respectively, to the total value of labor's services and of capital's services in the base period. We have, then, aL + bK = labor and tangible capital input, where a is the fraction of total input contributed by labor, b is the fraction of total input contributed by capital, and a + b = 1. The several productivity indexes are Y/N = output per manhour, Y/L = output per unit of labor input, Y/(aL + foK) = output per unit of labor and capital input. In these terms, output per manhour is related to output per unit of labor and capital input as follows: Y/N = [Y/(aL + foK)] [a + bK/L] [L/Nj. When L and K are combined by means of a weighted geometric mean, which is quite rare in the calculation of productivity indexes, this relationship becomes Y/N = [Y/(L«K & )]
[L/N].
Statistical production functions are empirically determined relationships between output (or an index of output) taken as the dependent variable and the two inputs (or the corresponding indexes) taken as the independent variables. The most widely used function assumes a logarithmic-linear relationship between output and input, and a uniform rate of shift over time in this relationship as technology and other determinants change. The function is Y = L a *K 6 *(l +r)*, with a* + b* taken equal to 1. The coefficients a* and b* are, in effect, the weights of L and K, respectively, as determined by fitting the function to the statistics by one of the usual regression methods. Under competition and certain other conditions, to be discussed later, a* tends to be equal to a, and b* tends to be equal to b. The coefficient r measures the average annual rate of shift in the relationship between output and input when t is measured in years. The variable t is used as a proxy for changes in technology, the scale of operations,
and the other factors that change over time and cause this shift, and r is therefore usually (and loosely) called the rate of technological change. In our terminology, r is the average annual rate of change in output per unit of labor and tangible capital input. To illustrate: When input is the same in the given as in the base period, output will be greater in the given period, t years after the base period, by the amount (1 + r ) f . When the comparison is between places rather than periods, t can no longer be used as a proxy for technology and the other factors that determine shifts in the relation between output, Y, and the inputs, L and K. In most cases, N rather than L is used to measure labor input. The production function is then more accurately expressed as Y=N°*K 6 *(1 +ry. In this case, (1 + r)* is equal to (Y/La*K&*)(L/N)a*, not to (Y/L a *K 6 *) alone. That is, r measures the average annual rate of change in output per unit of labor and capital input combined with the change in the quality of labor. An alternative function, which assumes an arithmetic-linear relationship, is Y = (a*L + b*K)(l + ry, with a* + b" = 1. Here (1 + r)* = Y/(a*L + fc*K), which is identical with the index of output per unit of labor and capital input, as usually calculated, except for possible differences between a and a*, and therefore between b and b*. There may also be a difference arising from the fact that r is the trend rate of increase over the whole period covered by the function, and not just the rate of change between the base year and the given year. Obviously, either type of equation can be modified so as to treat separately the input of (unweighted) manhours and the input of intangible capital invested in education, to take account of materials, fuel, and other purchased inputs, to include the terms of foreign trade as an independent variable, and so on. Statistical production functions provide an alternative way of calculating productivity indexes, particularly indexes of output per unit of labor and capital input, and of their rates of change. So viewed, the production function approach has the advantage of requiring no direct information on the weights needed to combine L (or N) and K. The approach also has the advantage of requiring explicit recognition of the assumptions made about the character, or "shape," of the relationship between output and input. At any rate, it provides
PRODUCTIVITY a better way to state these assumptions and a better setting in which to study them, as we shall see. Variation in labor productivity Indexes of output per manhour—commonly called "labor productivity" indexes—state the yield of commodities and services obtained, under varying circumstances, from the expenditure of an hour of human labor. In these terms they report on facts of high economic importance—the relative power of men of different generations or different nations, or of men of the same nation and generation under different conditions, to produce the things men want. Secular trends. A glance at secular trends over the last hundred years or so, which is about as far back as most of the information goes, suggests a remarkably general, perhaps world-wide, development. In all countries for which acceptable estimates are available for at least fifty years—mostly today's developed countries—trends in national output per manhour have been upward. We cannot be sure about the more remote decades of the past century, when the records even of the developed countries are poor. And there is doubt about the trends even over the more recent decades in the rest —the larger part—of the world, which is heavily weighted with countries in which present levels of labor productivity are very low by Western standards. Yet even for the latter, there are grounds— scraps of direct information, and information on the causes and the consequences of higher labor productivity—for supposing that the present low levels are probably no lower, and in most countries are in fact higher, than the levels of a hundred years ago. The exceptions, if any, are likely to be the countries suffering the effects of war or social upheaval. Their current levels of productivity are below the secular trend lines rather than on them. While nearly all countries, if not quite all, have probably raised their labor productivity levels over the past century, the rates of advance have been highly varied. Most of the countries for which direct estimates are available for a sufficiently long period fall in the range between 1.5 and 2.5 per cent per annum. There are none higher than about 2.5, and only a few lower than 1.5, with none much below 1.0. This sample is bound to be biased, however, because it consists largely of the developed countries. Including the other countries, which are probably mostly in the lower portion of the distribution, it is a fair guess that a range of 0.5 to 2.5—almost surely, of 0.0 to 2.5—would embrace virtually all the countries of the world. This range
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is wide indeed. Over a century it means the difference between little or no change and an 11-fold increase. It means, also, that countries have differed greatly in the degree of change of their tangible capital per worker, or the quality of their labor, or the efficiency with which they use capital and labor, or in all three respects. Even if there has been no improvement in some parts of the world, it is clear that for mankind as a whole the average level of labor productivity has risen. Over the century taken as a whole— though not in recent years—it has been pushed up also by a more rapid population growth in countries with high levels of output per manhour. It is hazardous to express these developments in quantitative form, but it seems reasonable to believe that the average rate of increase in the productivity of all human labor during the past century has been something over 1 per cent per annum and perhaps closer to 1.5 than to 1. This much is certain: the rise in labor productivity over the past century has been far greater than the average rate of increase experienced during man's existence on earth. It is also certain that it has been far less than the rate of increase the world now assumes in its plans for the future. Over the century as a whole, the earth's population has risen less than 1 per cent per annum, and manhours worked per capita have probably fallen a bit. It is highly probable, therefore, that the average rate of increase in output per manhour has been higher than the average rate of increase in the aggregate amount of work done. In other words, the present generation of men produces far more than earlier generations because there are more men; but, even more important, also because each man today is able on the average to get more from an hour of his labor than were his ancestors. He has less land to work, it is true, but far more capital of other kinds—largely inherited—to work it with. And on the whole, the use of his time and capital is more efficiently organized. International differences. The disparities in output per capita that appear over the surface of the earth are also to be explained very largely, if not entirely, by differences in output per manhour. In the poorer half of the earth, output per manhour in 1960 was probably at a tenth or less of the western European level, and the latter was half the level of the United States. International differences in manhours per capita are very small compared with those differences in output per manhour and cannot account for much of the variation in per capita output. It may be, in fact, that per
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capita output is greater in the countries working fewer manhours per capita. Some part of the present differences among nations in levels of labor productivity is the result of differences in the long-term rates of growth of labor productivity. But today's large variation cannot be accounted for entirely by differences in trends, over a single century, of the order of magnitude mentioned. A difference even of 2 per cent per annum would make the current productivity level of western Europe, for example, no more than seven times the level of southern Asia, had these areas started from equal levels. The current disparities between the highly productive and the less productive countries must therefore bear a resemblance to those of a century ago but be on the whole much wider. This is not inconsistent with important shifts in the rank of individual nations, which have also occurred. A century ago the labor productivity level of the United Kingdom, for example, was about the same as that of the United States and about double that of Sweden. In 1960, the British level was less than half the U.S. level and somewhat below that of Sweden. Fluctuations. The average rate of growth in labor productivity over the century as a whole is not the whole story. The upward march of labor productivity has often been speeded up and as often slowed down, sometimes to the point of declining absolutely for a time. Among the sources of these fluctuations have been the weather, which has often put a visible mark on national output per manhour in agricultural countries; business cycles, of particular importance in industrialized countries; and the catastrophes of war and political and social upheaval. Not only domestic conditions but also conditions abroad, it should be noted, have caused fluctuations in the yield from an hour of labor as measured by national product. The impress of business cycles on labor productivity is pronounced when output is compared with the manhours that might be supposed to be "available" for work under conditions of full employment. But it is visible also in the more usual comparison of output with the manhours actually worked. Annual figures show a more rapidly rising labor productivity during business expansions than during business contractions. [See BUSINESS CYCLES.] Quarterly figures, confined largely to the commodity-producing industries of the United States, suggest that the rise is slower during the second half than during the first half of expansions, and especially slow during the first half of contractions. This cyclical behavior (which could hardly have been foreseen on the basis of a priori
considerations alone) is evidence of a systematic swing in the balance between the factors that make for rise and those that make for decline in labor productivity—the factors that determine the average quality of labor input, the volume of capital services available per worker, and the efficiency with which labor and capital are utilized. It has interesting implications for the explanation of the cyclical behavior of labor costs, of profit margins, and thus also of decisions to invest. The effects on labor productivity of wars, revolutions, and other serious disturbances have been less frequent but usually more violent and prolonged than those of crop cycles or business cycles. Disorganization, undermaintenance and destruction of plant and equipment, and the loss or diversion of trained personnel have sometimes caused labor productivity to fall drastically. During recovery, labor productivity has often risen for some time at an exceptionally rapid pace, but these high rates have not always continued long enough to erase the effects of the catastrophe from the long-term trend. Apart from these fluctuations, there have also been significant, though less obvious, differences among trends measured over a decade or more. In most countries, for example, the decade beginning about 1952—which is presumably free of most of the immediate effects of World War n—witnessed rates of growth in labor productivity that appear high in comparison with the long-term averages. What is revealed by the fuller record may be illustrated by reference to the United States. Something like five long waves, of irregular length, are discernible in the rate of increase in output per manhour in the United States between 1870 and 1960, excluding the war periods. Rather clearer is a change in the long-term trend at about the time of World War i. During the thirty years before 1919, output per manhour rose at an average annual rate of 2.0 per cent, as measured by real gross private domestic output per manhour; during the forty years after 1919, the rate was 2.6 per cent per annum. These changes, and roughly similar changes in some other countries, have fed speculations about long cycles and about a tendency of labor productivity, and of the technological change that contributes to it, to accelerate. However, the available evidence is too scanty and irregular to be conclusive. Of course, the net balance among the factors that influence trends in labor productivity (among which are changes abroad, as well as domestic factors) may be larger at one time than at another, without necessarily generating systematic patterns of change.
PRODUCTIVITY Whether the fluctuations are more or less systematic, it is clear that growth of labor productivity has been subjected to them. Yet the main impression conveyed by the records of labor productivity in various countries is not so much one of fluctuation as of a persistent and often powerful upward push. This impression is also conveyed by the records of individual industries within countries. Even industries not obviously adapted to mass production methods, such as the service industries, seem to have raised output per manhour, to judge from studies now under way. And this is also true of industries in which natural-resource limitations might be expected to play a considerable role, such as mining and agriculture. Technological changes, and in some cases also the opening of new sources of supply, have prevented the appearance in these industries of the "diminishing returns" that would otherwise be apparent. Sometimes, perhaps because the term "labor productivity" is misunderstood, it is believed that wage earners (or "labor" as a whole) are wholly responsible for these widespread changes in output per manhour. It is true that among the factors that can cause labor productivity to rise (or to be higher in one place than in another) is change in the quality of labor, for labor productivity is measured by output per manhour and not by output per unit of labor input. But also involved are changes in the volume of tangible capital per worker and in the whole host of factors—besides those embodied in labor—that determine the efficiency with which manpower and capital resources are utilized in production. Variation in efficiency When efficiency in the use of resources as a whole is in question, the appropriate index of national productivity is output per unit of labor and tangible capital input. It is hardly the perfect index, for reasons to be mentioned, but it provides the best practical approximation. Yet measurement of efficiency even in this way has hardly begun, except in the United States. It is therefore to the U.S. figures that we turn for a first view of the relevant magnitudes. It is no surprise to learn that the average quality of labor improved—by 0.3 per cent per annum, over the period 1889-1960, according to data on labor input (weighted manhours) per manhour; and that tangible capital per manhour also rose— by 1.5 per cent per annum, over the same period. Efficiency in the use of resources therefore went up less rapidly than labor productivity—by 1.6 per cent per annum, as compared with 2.2 per cent
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per annum. What may be surprising is the difference of only 0.6 percentage points between the two rates of increase. One reason for the small difference is the relatively heavy weight given labor input when it is combined with tangible capital input. The U.S. weights, based on national income data, are currently 8 to 2. There may be a second reason: understatement of the rise in the quality of labor and, therefore, overstatement of the rise in efficiency. The estimate of 0.3 per cent per annum increase in labor quality, based on the use of weighted manhours, assumes all the labor within an industry to be homogeneous. Perhaps more important, it takes no account of the broad advances in education, health, and the like, which improve the quality of labor in industries generally. An estimate based mainly on the amount of schooling received by workers and therefore free of most of the deficiencies mentioned (but suffering from others) suggests a much higher rate of increase in the quality of labor—some 0.8 or even 0.9 per cent per annum. Also involved, although the direction of its effect on the index of efficiency is less certain, is the fact that labor and tangible capital input do not cover investment in the intangible capital of science, technology, and social organization that serves to increase production. It is clear that "research and development," for example, is an alternative to investment in other types of resources. Whatever its origin—whether in activities economically motivated or not—scientific, technological, and other useful knowledge is in some degree a substitute for other resources. But the services of the national stock of knowledge cannot be included in input because the concept of such a stock, or of changes in it, is elusive and not yet within the domain of practical measurement. Only in a few studies of industries or parts of industries—not entire economies—has it been possible to include some investments in technology among the inputs. This omission means that the available index of total input is biased downward if intangible capital in the form of technology has risen more rapidly than the resources that can be included. But no one knows what the difference is between these rates of growth, or can even be sure that that of intangible capital is the higher. This ignorance is also one reason why the index of output per unit of labor and tangible capital input is not a good measure of technological change, as some suppose it to be. An alternative and more widely used estimate of growth in efficiency is available for the United
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States in the form of an index of gross private domestic product per unit of labor and capital input. This index went up by 1.7 per cent per annum, as compared with the 1.6 per cent increase of net national product per unit of labor and capital input. The latter measure is preferable on conceptual ground^ because it covers the large and growing government sector as well as the private sector and because of other reasons already given. But the former index is more reliable because it avoids the conventional, and probably erroneous, assumption that labor productivity in government has not changed. The difference between the two—and between tnese and other alternative indexes—underscores the lack of precision even in the best of available productivity indexes. Two conclusions are suggested by the United States figures, subject to the reservations required by this lack of precision. First, the growth in labor productivity reflects upward trends in all three of its component factors—labor quality, tangible capital per manhour, and efficiency—and not a net difference among positive and negative factors. Second, of the three factors, it is increase in efficiency that appears to have made the largest contribution to the increase in labor productivity. This means, also, that it has made the largest contribution to the growth of output per capita. As for countries other than the United States, there are grounds for supposing that they too have experienced not only the rather general growth of labor productivity already mentioned but also— at least in some degree—improvements in the quality of labor and increases in the volume of tangible capital per manhour. If the first conclusion drawn from U.S. experience holds for them also, we may expect that efficiency has generally risen, although less rapidly than labor productivity; and we may infer that international differences in efficiency will be smaller than the corresponding differences in labor productivity. The measures of efficiency that have been calculated—and they are far fewer than the indexes of labor productivity—seem consistent with these expectations. It must be noted, however, that for countries other than the United States, efficiency is measured (when it is measured at all) by a comparison of output with a combination of unweighted manhours and the services of tangible capital. The use of unweighted rather than weighted manhours means that the measure of changes in efficiency also covers the changes in the quality of labor. In the case of the United States during the period 1889-1960, the index of
efficiency so calculated went up 0.3 per cent per annum more rapidly than output per unit of labor and tangible capital input. Growth in efficiency does seem to have been a rather general phenomenon. Efficiency has risen in each of the dozen or so countries for which trends over a decade or more have been calculated, although always less rapidly than labor productivity. There is evidence for some of these countries that efficiency has also risen in most, if not all, industries, and—again—generally less rapidly than labor productivity. And there is some evidence, as well, that when the average level of efficiency of a country is high relative to other countries, efficiency is generally high also in each of its industries relative to comparable industries in other countries. Further, as with labor productivity, the average rate of increase of efficiency has differed widely among countries, although somewhat less widely than labor productivity. Efficiency has differed also—and to a greater extent—among industries within countries, and it has differed among periods as well. If increase in efficiency has in fact been general, but highly varied, something is suggested about the factors involved. Advances in technology, for example, must consist not only of the major innovations that revolutionize this or that industry but also of a host of smaller innovations that arise over the whole range of economic life. Also, knowledge of innovations, even of those quite specific to particular industries or regions, is sooner or later adapted, to some extent, to the peculiar conditions of other industries and other places. The available figures also support the second conclusion suggested by the U.S. data. Increase in efficiency seems to be important, judged by its contribution to the growth of output, output per capita, and output per manhour; and international differences in the level of efficiency seem to be important in explaining international differences in these quantities. This may be the most striking lesson learned from the measurements, to judge by the surprise expressed by many economists. Between 1928 and 1948, under the influence of empirical work with the production function, Y = Na*Kb* (with a*+ £ > * = ! ) , it was rather widely held that increases in output per worker or manhour, and also differences among countries in this respect, could be accounted for very largely, if not entirely, by the volume of tangible capital per worker or per manhour. Improvements and extensions of the empirical data, and calculations of indexes of output
PRODUCTIVITY per unit of labor and capital or of production functions which allow for changes in efficiency, such as Y = N a *K 6 *(l +?y, have radically revised this opinion. It is now generally recognized that neither tangible capital alone nor even weighted manhours and tangible capital alone are sufficient to explain differences in output per manhour. Indeed, only a third of the average annual increase in the U.S. national output per manhour of 2.2 per cent between 1889 and 1960 is accounted for by the increase in measured input—weighted manhours plus tangible capital input—per manhour. The rest is accounted for by the increase in measured efficiency. Figures available for Norway, Finland, Russia, and West Germany, covering periods of two to five decades, and for these and a few other countries for the postwar decade, tell a similar story. The issue now takes the form: How much would an adequate measure of investment in education and other forms of human capital leave to be explained by efficiency more narrowly defined and measured? It seems questionable, however, to consider as negligible such factors as the growth and diffusion of knowledge (apart from what is covered by investment in human beings); widened markets, which give more scope to the specialization of workers, machines, and business establishments; reductions in hours of work, which enhance labor productivity and may also enhance efficiency; improvements in economic organization; and perhaps also changes in the character of consumption and in the way in which leisure time is used. Something is known about each of these factors, but to improve this knowledge and to determine the relative importance of each factor continues to be a major task in the analysis of economic growth. Productivity and wages The major determinants of the average real hourly earnings of a nation's labor force are the nation's efficiency in using labor and tangible capital, the scarcity of labor in relation to tangible capital, and the quality of the labor force. The productivity index that combines these factors is the index of national output per manhour. It is this index, therefore, that is used in the analysis of trends and of international differences in real wages, enters wage negotiations, and is looked upon as a guidepost in wage policy. Theoretical considerations. National output per manhour is a particular combination of particular measures of efficiency, relative labor-capital scar-
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city, and labor quality. It is the appropriate combination for the purposes mentioned only under certain conditions that need to be made explicit. Even with these conditions satisfied, it is the appropriate combination only in relation to the average hourly earnings of all workers combined. These are workers of changing—usually improving—quality. Most often, however, the earnings in question are those of workers of a substantially fixed quality, in a particular occupation or industry. In this case, the appropriate productivity index —if just one index is to be chosen—is national output per unit of labor input; that is, output per weighted manhour, not output per unweighted manhour. This will be understood if we first note that real labor income includes the earnings from the services of the intangible capital invested in education and other improvements in the quality of labor, as well as from the services of labor of minimum quality—roughly, "unskilled" labor. When this total labor income, per manhour, moves identically with national output per manhour, the fraction of national output that goes to workers in the form of real labor income and the fraction that goes to owners of tangible capital are constant. We can then ask under what conditions these fractions will in fact be constant. Such fractions will be constant when an increase in the quantity of tangible capital's services relative to the quantity of labor's services is accompanied by an exactly proportionate decline in the price of tangible capital's services relative to the price of labor's services. Now, it is clear that a rise in the capital-labor quantity ratio will tend to push up the usefulness of labor relative to that of capital. In more technical language, it will tend to raise the ratio of the marginal product of labor to that of capital. The required conditions are, then: (1) The rise in the capital-labor ratio must be accompanied by an exactly equal and opposite proportionate change in the ratio of the marginal products of labor to capital—which means that the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor must be exactly equal to unity. (2) The ratio of the marginal products must be unaffected by changes in the composition of output and in the technology and other factors that underline efficiency—which means that changes in the product-mix and in efficiency must be "neutral." (3) The ratio of the marginal products must be equal to the ratio of the prices of labor to capital services—which means that competition must prevail in the markets for
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commodities, labor, and capital, so that change in the volume of tangible and intangible capital per manhour and increase in efficiency are free to bring appropriate adjustments in the rates of return to labor and to capital. This reasoning may be put in terms of the logarithmic-linear aggregative production function described earlier, for this function (but not the arithmetic-linear function) assumes unitary elasticity of substitution and neutrality of technological change, among other things. It is the marginal product of labor, not the average product measured by output per unit of labor input, which tends to parallel the real wage rate under competition. But under the conditions described, the index of the marginal product of labor is identical with the index of the average product of labor, Y/L, as can easily be shown. If the relationship between national output, labor input, and tangible capital input is as specified in the logarithmic-linear production function, and if competition prevails, the conditions hold. The index of national output per unit of labor input tends to equal the index of real wages per weighted manhour—that is, the index of real wages per hour of fixed (and average) quality. The index of productivity usually employed in discussions of wages is national output per (unweighted) manhour, however. But national output per manhour is output per manhour of changing quality. It is Y/N, not Y/L: Y/N = (Y/L)(L/N). Under the conditions specified, then, this index of productivity tends to equal the index of average hourly earnings of labor of changing quality, not fixed quality. Given .the same conditions, when the quality of labor improves, the index of productivity generally used (Y/N) will tend to rise more rapidly than an index of average hourly earnings of labor of fixed quality. Statistical evidence. Whether the specified conditions do hold is an empirical question not yet satisfactorily answered by direct tests of the elasticity of substitution, neutrality of change in technology and product-mix, or even competition. A test of a sort is provided for all the conditions combined, however, by historical information on the fraction of national output received as real labor income. The share of national product going to hired workers in the form of wages and salaries (including "fringe" benefits) has generally risen, but the share of national product going to entrepreneurial income (which includes property as well as labor income) has generally fallen. It is difficult to determine the net result, and there is some tendency to overstate its stability—a change from 70
per cent to 80 per cent may appear rather modest. On the whole, however, the fraction going to labor in various countries seems to have fluctuated around a substantially horizontal trend prior to World War I and a somewhat higher but still horizontal trend afterward. [See INCOME DISTRIBUTION, article on FUNCTIONAL SHARE.] In terms of a comparison of long-term changes in productivity and real hourly earnings of production workers in manufacturing industries, available for the United States for 1889-1960, the conditions meet the test moderately well. The real hourly earnings rose at the annual rate of 2.3 per cent. Real national product per unit of labor input rose at the rate of 1.9 per cent per annum, and real private domestic product per unit of labor input rose at the average annual rate of 2.0 per cent. Because the manufacturing earnings are in some degree affected by improvements in labor quality, it is well to compare them also with the corresponding rise in output per manhour: 2.2 per cent per annum in the national economy, 2.4 per cent in the private domestic economy. Larger differences are revealed by comparisons over periods that, although shorter, are long enough to reveal a trend rather than a cyclical or an erratic fluctuation. For example, real hourly earnings in manufacturing in the United States rose less rapidly than national output per manhour in seven such periods between 1889 and 1960, more rapidly in six, and at the same rate in only two. And the absolute difference between the annual rates of change in real wages and in national output per manhour in all 15 periods averaged about 40 per cent of the average annual rate of change in output per manhour. If it is the real hourly income of an occupation of relatively fixed labor quality that is of concern, the appropriate productivity index is Y/L, not Y/N, as we have seen. The difference is not negligible, to judge from the figures just cited. If the wage rate of every occupation were to parallel national output per manhour and if workers benefited not only from these increases but also from the increases in their labor income resulting from training and subsequent upgrading, the share of national product going to labor would rise rather than remain constant; and it would rise at an average annual rate equal to the difference in rates of growth between Y/L and Y/N. It should also be stressed that Y/L is not the appropriate productivity index for every occupation of fixed labor quality but only for those close to the occupation of average quality. It is plausible that the higher the quality of labor in a particular occupation, the more rapid has been its growth in
PRODUCTIVITY numbers employed. If this is so and if the conditions mentioned hold for each class of labor, the appropriate productivity index cannot be the same for every occupation. This conclusion also follows if the human capital resulting from education and other investments is thought of as homogeneous. On either basis, the appropriate index for unskilled labor would be best approximated by Y/N; for occupations of average labor quality, it would be Y/L; and it would be something less than Y/L for occupations of high labor quality. This amounts, of course, to saying that the rate of return to investments in education and the like, and therefore the average hourly earnings of skilled workers, would be expected to decline in relation to the earnings of unskilled labor, when the number of skilled workers increased more than the number of unskilled. Whether or not the rate of return declined absolutely would depend on the other determinants of earnings—the rate of increase in efficiency and the relative growth of tangible capital. When separate categories of labor are distinguished, however, the assumption of neutrality must be questioned. If, for example, technological change has not been neutral but rather has tended to diminish the demand for unskilled labor significantly, the logarithmic-linear production function no longer summarizes fairly the determinants of the wages of unskilled labor, and expectations based on this function are no longer valid. Other qualifications, already mentioned, also need to be remembered: no fully adequate measure of L is yet available; and the quality of the labor force in most occupations in a progressive economy is improved over time, if only by the increase in literacy. Wage policy. The questions raised indicate some of the difficulties in the way of using a relatively simple productivity index as a summary even of the major factors affecting the trend of wages. The difficulties are greater when a productivity index is used as a general guidepost to short-term change in wages in an "incomes" policy—or, as it is sometimes put, as a guide to how wages would change in a competitive industry in a noninflationary economy. Some of these difficulties should be mentioned. First, the trend of national productivity is intended to serve as a guide to the rate of increase in wages from one year to the next, or over the brief period (two or three years) of a wage agreement, and not to the trend rate of increase in wages. There is little ground for supposing that these would parallel one another even in a competitive, noninflationary economy. During the expansion phase of a business cycle, for example, the
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average real wage—in competitive and noncompetitive industries alike—usually rises more rapidly than its trend rate or than the trend rate of increase in productivity. During the contraction phase of a business cycle, the average real wage usually rises less rapidly than these trend rates. To apply the general wage guide only to less than fully competitive industries—letting wages in competitive industries move freely—would mean imposing on the former "competitive criteria" that are competitive only in a very special, if not peculiar, sense. If the application were successful, wages in the industries affected would move differently from wages in the industries that remained free to respond to cyclical as well as other changes in supply and demand. Second, the reason for choosing national output per manhour (or per unit of labor input) even when the wage in a sector of the economy is under consideration is not because the efficiency and the capital per worker of the sector have no effect, or should have no effect, on the sector's wage. They do influence the sector's wage, even though they cannot be counted as a major factor in the long run. They belong among the "qualifications" that must always be attached to any short list of factors affecting wages in order to explain, or justify, a discrepancy between changes in the wages of a sector and changes in national output per manhour. Third, and related to the second point, changes in technology, in tangible capital per worker, in the quality of labor, and even in the cost of living take time to work out their effects in the economy and make their impact on wages. This is true even in a competitive economy and even with such allowance as needs to be made for the influence of expectations on the lags. No industry, nor the economy as a whole, is ever in full equilibrium either in the present or in the base period with which the present is compared. Fourth, with government—and the taxes government levies, the transfers it makes, and the services it renders—economically so much more important now than in earlier periods, changes in the structure and level of taxes and of government expenditures also significantly affect the relation between wages and national output per manhour, at least in the long run. In addition, the difficulties of measuring wages and productivity are aggravated. This explains the custom in the United States of using indexes for the "private economy" to represent national productivity, but the problem is not fully solved by these indexes. Finally, changes in the terms of foreign trade may properly be treated as one of the "qualifica-
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tions" in the few countries in which foreign trade is of relatively minor importance. As a general rule, however, it is better to define productivity to take account of these changes, for it is national output, not domestic output, that is distributed in the form of real wages and other real income. To overcome some of the difficulties posed by the limitations of a general guidepost, recourse may be had to a rule providing for modifications or exceptions. It is seldom clear, however, when an exception is justified or—perhaps more to the point— when an exception is not justified. And there are problems in determining the permissible degree of deviation from the general guidepost. There are other troublesome points that arise when it is asked whether productivity can provide an adequate guidepost for wages. It should be evident by now, however, that many assumptions are involved in applying national output per manhour in wage negotiation and determination and that they do not hold fully in every period and in every situation. Productivity and employment Productivity indexes are frequently used, along with other information, to estimate labor and other resource requirements. For example, future levels of national employment and unemployment have been calculated by (1) estimating the future output implied by certain assumed levels and conditions of demand, (2) extrapolating the past rate of increase in output per manhour, (3) dividing the output by the output per manhour to estimate manhour employment, (4) determining the expected number of persons employed by assuming some level of hours per person, and (5) subtracting the expected employment from the expected labor force to estimate unemployment. If the unemployment so estimated seems likely to be excessive, a policy may be proposed to avoid it— by speeding up the increase in demand, or slowing down the increase in productivity, or reducing hours below what they would otherwise be. Similar calculations have been made of national requirements of land, other tangible capital, water, and power, and of these and other requirements of particular industries. Of the questions raised by these procedures, the two discussed here are put in terms of labor requirements only. The first question concerns the adequacy of the productivity projections. As has been indicated, output per manhour may be viewed as determined by efficiency in the use of resources as a whole, the scarcity of labor relative to tangible capital (or total input), and the quality of labor. The direction
of change of these factors can usually be foreseen with some confidence. As a rule, efficiency and labor quality may be expected to rise, and manhours relative to tangible capital may be expected to decline. However, seldom is enough known about their expected rates of change to make possible a quantitative projection of labor productivity. What is usually done, therefore, is to assume a continuation of past trends and other patterns of change in productivity. The crucial point is whether these are sufficiently stable to yield reliable projections. To estimate future labor requirements, it is usually necessary to take account of cyclical fluctuations. As we have seen, labor productivity generally rises much more rapidly during business expansions than during contractions. The rate of increase in national output per manhour in the United States between 1889 and 1960 averaged 3.4 per cent per annum during years of expansion in output and —0.6 per cent per annum during years of contraction in output. However, there was a good deal of variation around these averages, only part of which can be explained by differences in the degree of rise in output. Use of the average cyclical pattern of labor productivity, or of the average relation of change in productivity to change in output, will help to improve the projection but can hardly eliminate all uncertainty. Even in making long-term projections of output per manhour, cyclical fluctuations must be kept in mind. The calculation may be seriously marred if the business-cycle phase at the beginning of the period used to determine the past trend is different from the phase at the end. Also, the business-cycle phase of the year from which the projection starts must be taken into account. The more important question for long-term projections, however, concerns the past trend. Can it be adequately expressed by a constant rate of growth, or must allowance be made for acceleration or retardation of the rate of growth or for less regular changes in trend rates? At one time it was supposed that output per manhour tended to rise at a declining rate as an industry or economy grew. It does appear to be true of individual industries during their early careers. (This must be judged from the prices of their products, for information on the output per manhour of young industries is usually lacking; but there is good evidence that the two are significantly—and negatively—correlated.) However, any systematic tendency toward retardation seems to disappear once the first period of development has passed. As for trends in national output per manhour, no evidence has been found of a tendency for rates of increase to decline systematically with the pas-
PRODUCTIVITY sage of time. Indeed, speculation has veered in the other direction, and it is now more often asserted that national output per manhour has been accelerating, at least in recent years. But it is not clear whether the current high rates of growth, mentioned earlier, represent acceleration or simply a higher plateau. The rates may rise to still higher levels; or they may continue at present levels; or they may return to earlier levels, as they have often done. Even apart from cyclical fluctuations, then, and even assuming a continuation of past levels of rates of growth, trend extrapolations will be sensitive to the choice of the past period that provides the estimate of the future trend. Allowance must be made for rather wide margins of error. Our second question concerns the nature of the connection between labor productivity and employment. During periods of persistent unemployment, for example, some of the blame for unemployment is often put on mechanization, automation, and the other sources of increase of output per manhour, especially in industries in which output per manhour is rising rapidly. It is often implied that the more rapid the increase in an industry's output per manhour, the less rapid is the increase in the manhours of employment offered by it. It is true that the direct effect of a rise in an industry's output per manhour is to depress its employment. But there are also indirect effects. An exceptionally rapid rise in the output per manhour of an industry has usually caused the price of its product to rise much less, or fall much more, than prices generally; as has been mentioned, there is a fair degree of negative correlation between trends in output per manhour and trends in selling prices. In turn, the relative price decline has served to stimulate the industry's production and thus, indirectly, to maintain or even stimulate a rise in the employment it offers. Indeed, long-term rates of growth of output per manhour in the industries for which British and U.S. data are available—largely the commodity-producing industries—are positively, not inversely, correlated with employment and with output. Other factors enter, of course. The elasticity of demand in response to changes in price varies considerably among industries. The elasticity of demand in response to changes in real national income—which is largely the result of changes in national efficiency—also varies among industries. High income elasticities of demand may help to explain the growth of employment in the service industries despite an apparent lag in output per manhour and a rise in selling prices relative to the commodity-producing industries. For industries
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generally, at this stage of knowledge it seems safe to say only that especially high rates of growth in output per manhour are not necessarily accompanied by absolute or even relative declines in the employment offered. More must be learned about this, as about other aspects of productivity. SOLOMON FABRICANT [See also AGRICULTURE, article on PRODUCTIVITY AND TECHNOLOGY; PRODUCTION; WAGES, article OU THEORY.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BERGSON, ABRAM; and KUZNETS, SIMON (editors) 1963 Economic Trends in the Soviet Union. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. CLARK, COLIN (1940)1957 The Conditions of Economic Progress. 3d ed., rev. London: Macmillan. CONFERENCE ON LABOR PRODUCTIVITY, CADENABBIA, ITALY, 1961 1964 Labor Productivity. Edited by John T. Dunlop and Vasilii P. Diatchenko. New York: McGraw-Hill. CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN INCOME AND WEALTH 1961 Output, Input, and Productivity Measurement. Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol. 25. Princeton Univ. Press. DENISON, EDWARD F. 1962 The Sources of Economic Growth in the United States and the Alternatives Before Us. New York: Committee for Economic Development. DOMAR, EVSEY D. 1961 On the Measurement of Technological Change. Economic Journal 71:709-729. DOMAR, EVSEY D. et al. 1964 Economic Growth and Productivity in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany and Japan in the Post-war Period. Review of Economics and Statistics 46:33-40. DOUGLAS, PAUL H. (1934) 1957 The Theory of Wages. New York: Kelley. FABRICANT, SOLOMON 1942 Employment in Manufacturing, 1899-1939: An Analysis of Its Relation to the Volume of Production. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. FABRICANT, SOLOMON 1959 Basic Facts on Productivity Change. National Bureau of Economic Research, Occasional Paper No. 63. New York: The Bureau. FOURASTIE, JEAN (1952) 1962 La productivite. 5th ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. FUCHS, VICTOR R. 1964 Productivity Trends in the Goods and Service Sectors, 1929-1961: A Preliminary Survey. National Bureau of Economic Research, Occasional Paper No. 89. New York: The Bureau. HULTGREN, THOR 1965 Costs, Prices and Profits: Their Cyclical Relations. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. KENDRICK, JOHN W. 1961 Productivity Trends in the United States. National Bureau of Economic Research, General Series, No. 71. Princeton Univ. Press. MADDISON, ANGUS 1964 Economic Growth in the West: Comparative Experience in Europe and North America. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. MAGDOFF, HARRY; SIEGEL, IRVING H.; and DAVIS, MILTON B. 1939 Production, Employment, and Productivity in 59 Manufacturing Industries, 1919-1936. Works Progress Administration, National Research Project, Report No. S-l. Philadelphia: The Administration.
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PAIGE, DEBORAH; and BOMBACH, GOTTFRIED 1959 A Comparison of National Output and Productivity of the United Kingdom and the United States. Paris: Organization for European Economic Cooperation. Productivity Measurement Review. -» Published since 1955 by the European Productivity Agency, Productivity Measurement Advisory Service of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. REUSS, GERHART E. 1960 Produktivitdtsanalyse: Okonomische Grundlagen und statistische Methodik. Basel (Switzerland): Kyklos. ROSTAS, LASZLO 1948 Comparative Productivity in British and American Industry. National Institute of Economic and Social Research, Occasional Papers, No. 13. Cambridge Univ. Press. SALTER, W. E. G. 1960 Productivity and Technical Change. Cambridge Univ. Press. SOLOW, ROBERT M. 1957 Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function. Review of Economics and Statistics 39:312-320. STIGLER, GEORGE J. 1947 Trends in Output and Employment. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. TINBERGEN, JAN (1942) 1959 On the Theory of Trend Movements. Pages 182-221 in Jan Tinbergen, Selected Papers of Jan Tinbergen. Edited by L. H. Klaasen, L. M. Koyck, and H. J. Witteveen. Amsterdam: NorthHolland Publishing. -> First published in Volume 55 of the Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1966 Productivity: A Bibliography, July, 1966. Bulletin No. 1514. Washington: Government Printing Office.
PROFESSIONS The development and increasing strategic importance of the professions probably constitute the most important change that has occurred in the occupational system of modern societies. The growth of the professions has brought to prominence a set of occupations which never figured prominently in the ideological thinking that, after having crystallized in the late nineteenth century, has tended to dominate public discussion in the twentieth. Professional men are neither "capitalists" nor "workers," nor are they typically governmental administrators or "bureaucrats." They certainly are not independent peasant proprietors or members of the small urban proprietary groups. As for so many categories of social status, the boundaries of the group system we generally call the professions are fluid and indistinct. There are many borderline groups whose professional status is, for one reason or another, equivocal. However, the core criteria within the more general category of occupational role seems to be relatively clear. First among these criteria is the requirement of formal technical training accompanied by some institutionalized mode of validating both the ade-
quacy of the training and the competence of trained individuals. Among other things, the training must lead to some order of mastery of a generalized cultural tradition, and do so in a manner giving prominence to an intellectual component—that is, it must give primacy to the valuation of cognitive rationality as applied to a particular field. The second criterion is that not only must the cultural tradition be mastered, in the sense of being understood, but skills in some form of its use must also be developed. The third and final core criterion is that a fullfledged profession must have some institutional means of making sure that such competence will be pat to socially responsible uses. The most obvious uses are in the sphere of practical affairs, such as the application of medical science to the cure of disease. However, the skills of teaching and of research in the "pure" intellectual disciplines are also cases of such use. Thus the occupational complex we call the professions is organized about that element of the modern cultural system ordinarily called the intellectual disciplines—the humanities, and the sciences, both natural and social—and about their general significance in both modern societies and the cultural systems with which they articulate (Weber 1919a; Shils 1961; Ben-David 1963-1964; Parsons 1965). As this relationship between the intellectual disciplines and society has become institutionalized, it has come to center in the two complexes of universities and research institutions. In the English-speaking world, especially the United States, the tendency has been for both functions to become primarily centered in the universities. In continental Europe, especially the communist countries, the research function has more frequently become institutionalized in separate organizations, usually called academies of science. As the institutional structure of the professional world has crystallized, the university-academy complex has come to be its center. From this center its structure ramifies in two directions. The first direction concerns the professions' involvement with elements of the cultural system other than the intellectual disciplines, as well as with these disciplines themselves. Historically, the most relevant area of the cultural system has been religion, but in the modern world the areas of the arts, and of morality and ethics in their relation to ideology, are also involved. The second field of ramification concerns the application of knowledge—that is, of technical competence in the mastery and use of one or more of the intellectual disciplines or sectors of them—
PROFESSIONS to practical affairs in which the interests involved are social and psychological rather than cultural as such. Two sectors of the professional system In the course of Western social and cultural development, the two fields of ramification described above have gradually become differentiated from each other. Accordingly, the core of the professional system now lies in two areas: the institutionalization of the intellectual disciplines in the societal structure, and the practical application of these disciplines. Hence two primary categories of professions are unequivocally central to the modern system. First is the profession of learning itself. This is organized in terms of two primary functions: contributing further to learning through research and scholarship, and transmitting the learning to others. The others involved may be successors of the current generation of learned men, or "laymen" who value instruction in intellectual matters, or both. Second is the "applied" branch of the professions. Its historic focuses, as represented by the two fields of law and medicine, have been the regulation of order in society and caring for the health of society's individual members. However, the modern list of applied professions includes a much wider range of fields, the boundaries of which are somewhat uncertain. Engineering—the use of professional levels of competence to control physical processes—is the most obvious extension. Various others are reviewed below. Very broadly, we may distinguish these two main branches of the modern professional system in terms of the cultural primacy of the interests served by the academic branch, and of the social primacy of the applied branch. Safeguarding the health of individuals or controlling physical processes may be considered to constitute social interests, since they are activities that are generally carried out through socially organized groups and processes. Each of these spheres of primacy gives rise to a main type of problem in defining the limits of the professional pattern. In the applied sphere, the problem concerns the importance, for the practical interests involved, of competence in culturally defined technical subject matter. However, no social system is only, or even primarily, a field for the implementation of the kind of technically specific goal-interests that can ignore complex interrelations with nontechnical concerns. Hence, the question emerges as to whether the nontechnical con-
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cerns that impinge on the professional function can be more or less neutralized so that the professional expert need not concern himself too seriously with them. Answers to this question vary according to the nature of the functions involved and the degrees to which they have been institutionalized in a differentiated social system. The cultural boundary The modern intellectual disciplines developed through a process of differentiation from a primarily religious matrix. If we go back far enough into the Middle Ages, all "learned men" were in some sense religious specialists. The autonomy of the secular intellectual disciplines crystallized in the Renaissance, yet anything like the full professionalization of competence in them took some time and required the development of a variety of conditions. For the applied fields, the main problem raised by this process of professionalization has been a matter of the penetration of professional competence into fields of noncultural interest which had previously been treated by rule of thumb—that is, treated "empirically," in the older sense of the word. For the primarily cultural fields, the problem has been the differentiation out of the diffuse cultural matrix of fields of special competence capable of attaining autonomy—in religious matters, for example—relative to sources of more generalized prestige and authority. In the Judaeo-Christian world the clergy is clearly the primary historical matrix from which the modern professions have differentiated. The sense in which the clergy continues to be a profession, however, is at least partly equivocal. Certainly, one of the most distinctive features of the Western clerical tradition is that from the great writings of the rabbis and the fathers of the church down to the present it has continued to be a major component in the total body of intellectual disciplines. Hence, intellectual training has to some degree been a prerequisite of clerical status, however, incompletely the ideal has been realized at various points. But in the modern world, the element of intellectual training is central. Only relatively "primitive" fundamentalist groups regard direct inspiration as adequate qualification for clerical functions. Although the clergy includes more specifically professional roles, particularly that of theologian, the central clerical role must be regarded as marginal to the professional system because the "application" of technical competence is only one part of the complex of its role components (Gustafson 1963). In two broad spheres the clergy have not had the
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insulation from other modes of cultural and social involvement or from the responsibility that is requisite to relatively pure types of professional roles. One sphere concerns the social aspect of the role, which in this case is pastoral in the broadest sense. It is widely recognized that the pastoral role incmdPc an important therapeutic component which in some ways overlaps with that of psychological medicine. However, the typical pastor is also the leader and administrator of a congregation with diffuse social responsibilities within the sphere of the parish as a collective system. These responsibilities are not grounded in any specific technical competence. The second sphere is that of authority. Clerical leadership and authority are grounded not so much in competence in specifically intellectual matters as in the diffuse religious and moral authority of the religious tradition as such. It is the charisma of clerical office which is the primary focus of the legitimation of the authority and influence of the clergy rather than the exercise of competence in a sector of the system of intellectual disciplines [see CHARISMA; RELIGIOUS SPECIALISTS]. Nevertheless, it remains of first importance that the clergy share with the more specific professions a basic anchoring in cultural commitments as distinguished from the primary and direct service of some category of social interest, notably economic or political interests. Art and ideology. As the cultural system has become further differentiated in its articulation in society, two further focuses of institutionalization of roles have become prominent in addition to the more strictly professional and the religious ones. These involve (1) primacy of concern for expressive symbolism (especially for "the arts," in the modern sense); (2) primacy of concern for the moral problems of the human condition, and particularly of the society. The latter may perhaps be called the "ideological" focus. I think that both types of concern must be classed with the clerical one as marginal to the central professional complex, sharing certain central features with it but having involvements which, in different respects, are incompatible with full professionalization as defined here. Artists. One critical reference point regarding the degrees of professionalization concerns the extent to which roles can or cannot be fully occupationalized in the sense that the incumbent treats performance of the function as a full-time job— that is, as his primary job or responsibility, on which he can safely depend for income to meet not only his personal needs but very generally also
those of a family. In this sense the committed artist, whether in literature, the visual arts, or music, has tended to oscillate between two main nonprofessional focuses of social organization. One alternative assimilates him to the economic entrepreneur in that he exploits opportunities to live from the sale of his product on some kind of market, and so to operate as an "independent" person. The other typical alternative has been that of patronage, whereby the artist as incumbent is sponsored and supported by some individual or organization so that he can do his own work without directly meeting the exigencies of independent continuance. Of course, individuals have often been their own patrons, being artists as a side line while deriving their main subsistence from personally controlled sources such as independent property income or another job. The performing arts, particularly music, have come to be the most fully occupationalized by and large, the symphony orchestra probably being the most developed example. Here one may truly speak of the "professional musician," but with the probability that the skill component predominates considerably over that of intellectual mastery, important though the latter may be. When one moves from that focus toward the individual performing virtuoso or the creative composer, however, it becomes decreasingly feasible to professionalize the role in our sense. Yet various forms of economic subsidy for such persons, and of validation of their political and prestige positions, are common. Such forms may, for the most part, be treated as derivatives of patronage institutions which have become impersonalized in various ways—for example, through the common European institution of providing publicly for orchestral music, opera, and stage, or through the American use of philanthropic mechanisms to support (in both economic and other senses) those functions [see CREATIVITY, article on SOCIAL ASPECTS]. Intellectuals. In the modern world, concern with the expression of moral commitments and with their application to practical problems, social and otherwise, has to a considerable degree become differentiated in the function of ideology and institutionalized as a primary concern of the groups rather loosely called intellectuals. In part because of the emotional fervor and sense of urgency so characteristic of such groups, this concern is perhaps even more difficult to professionalize than the traditional clerical role. In terms of social organization, the intellectuals have hence been in a position similar to that of artists. They have tended either to find some type of combined economic and
PROFESSIONS influence market for their output, generally as authors of publications, or to depend on patronage. On occasion, this shades over into self-patronage, the ideologist himself becoming the major leader of a movement attempting to implement a moral position. Of course, the function of moral evaluation spreads through a great many types of collectivities and roles. For example, it has always been a major function of the clergy. The modern phenomenon is the emergence of secular moralists who attempt to ground their evaluative judgments in the intellectual disciplines as such. This particular category of ideologists or intellectuals constitutes a major boundary group of the modern academic profession, if by the latter is meant the groups who specialize in different sectors of the intellectual disciplines as such and in their more immediate uses in research and formally organized teaching. This very cursory and schematic review indicates very generally that what we are calling the central professional type of role and collectivity organization must, with respect to the involvement of its cultural component, be limited to the sector of the cultural system where the primacy of the values of cognitive rationality is presumed. Broadly, this is the case for the "profession of learning" in its various branches. The groups anchored predominantly in religious commitments as such, in expressive symbolization through the arts, or in moral evaluation through ideology, approximate to the ideal type of professional organization, but much less closely and only in forms subject to important restrictions. Historic position of the university In view of the central—and in recent decades rapidly increasing—importance of the profession of learning in the total complex of the professions, an outline of the status of the Western university is an appropriate starting point for our discussion of the professional application of disciplined knowledge in the principal socially relevant fields. Both in general structure and in relation to the applied professions, there has long been a striking contrast between the Continental and English systems of higher education, the latter in part determining the subsequent developments in the United States. The Continental system, which crystallized roughly in the sixteenth century, was organized about the four faculties of theology, philosophy, law, and medicine. In England, there were for a long time only the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, both organized into colleges, which were generally nonspecialized. This difference had
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much to do with the fact that in England the center of gravity of professional development, especially in law and medicine, but also in science, lay largely outside the universities, whereas in Continental countries the university has throughout constituted the center of that development. However, the parallelism between the four original faculties of the European university clearly illustrates the sense in which the era of their predominance was one of only partial professional development. The universities, along with the systems of secondary education which developed in that period, had the very important function of building up a formally educated class to underpin the hereditary aristocracy which played such an important role in the transition from medieval to modern society. In Roman Catholic Europe, of course, celibacy precluded the clergy from becoming a hereditary class in any direct sense. At the same time, the character of the Roman Catholic church, with its special seminaries for training the clergy and its monastic orders, tended to minimize the role of university faculties of theology. In Protestant countries, however, the theological faculties assumed particularly important functions both as the main carriers of the religious tradition and as the training ground for the most important elements of the clergy. Nevertheless, the limitations, described above, on the degree to which the clerical role can be predominantly professional apply also to the place of the universities in the training and organization of the clergy. The diffuse cultural character of university traditions with a strong emphasis on religion made the English universities generally into something rather more like theological faculties, and related importantly to the failure of training in the applied professions of law and medicine to find a major place in the universities. In spite of some highly distinguished scientific interludes, such as Newton's period of residence at Cambridge, the English universities came primarily to combine being the focuses of the theological traditions of the Church of England with being finishing schools for the humanistically educated sector of the general social elite. This lasted until the latter part of the nineteenth century, when these universities were caught up in the more general interrelated developments of the intellectual disciplines and of the professional occupations. In a very broad sense, the Continental law faculties were to the early modern state what theological faculties were to the Protestant church: legal education became the primary prerequisite of qualification for positions in the developing higher civil
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services of the state. Hence, on the Continent generally, private legal practice has always been something of a junior branch of the profession relative to the civil service. In England, on the other hand, law faculties in this sense did not develop, nor did law come to have the same relation to public administration. The faculties of philosophy became the trustees of the broad humanistic cultural traditions, which, as a result of the Renaissance, had become institutionalized on a new level. They also became involved in various ways—generally through a pattern that was heavily indebted to the humanistic tradition—in the education of the upper social groups. For all but the highest aristocracy, they gradually took -over the functions that had been ascribed to private tutors, some of whom had reached a very exalted intellectual level (Thomas Hobbes, for instance, served most of his life in such a capacity). The line between universities and secondary schools has been hard to trace. It has varied considerably in different sectors of Western society. But perhaps it is safe to say that for most of the period that is important for the early development of the professions only a minority of the European social and political elites were actually educated in the universities, but that by and large the groups who taught them were located there. Both humanistic scholarship and science remained relatively unprofessionalized, as matters of interest only to talented "amateurs," and were until the important nineteenth-century expansion of the German universities pursued largely outside the university framework. This expansion had certain rather special organizational features which precluded full professionalization, but it was a crucial precursor of the contemporary burgeoning of the university as the center of the whole professional complex. We thus encounter a historical paradox. Three of the four traditional European university faculties have been absolutely central to the institutionalization of the cultural traditions which have underlain the modern professional complex. But, at the same time, these faculties have been involved in a matrix of social organization that has prevented them from developing very far in the professional direction. Only in England did a private legal profession gain a firm foothold—mainly because it developed outside the university system. What, then, of the medical faculty? Its history is far harder to interpret than that of any of the other three faculties. Moreover, it is particularly important in regard to the place of the professions in the social system as such. Perhaps we can approach the problem initially by pointing out that both the theo-
logical and the philosophical faculties are characterized by a clear cultural primacy. To be sure, they are social in that, since their cultural interests and activities are to be pursued in a disciplined manner, they must be socially organized. Further, I do not deny that both religion and secular humanistic culture are socially important. But I do suggest that both are of relatively diffuse orders of significance for the society as a system, especially in comparison with their significance for the cultural system. By contrast, law is specifically social, being concerned with the intellectual grounding and systematization of the normative bases of social order. For the status of law, including its professional concerns, a principal problem is its relation to government. Broadly, we may say that the Continental tradition has been to assimilate law very closely to government, whereas the Anglo-Saxon tradition has tended toward differentiating government from what I have elsewhere called, because of its different basis of order, the societal community. In terms of cultural content, the most important difference between the two traditions involves the status of private legal rights either against the government or in independence from it. In terms of social organization, the difference consists in the much more pronounced development in England of an independent legal profession that, in the course of the repercussions attending its development, has also attained control of access to the judiciary. In this perspective, medicine constitutes the principal historic reference point in Western culture for understanding and controlling the boundary relation between the social system and the concerns of the individual as both biological organism and personality system. The problem of the health of the individual is basically salient to the social system because health is a major condition of normal social participation, and incapacity for such participation is a central criterion of illness. The central position of the body-mind problem in Western philosophical thought is testimony to the critical importance of this area. In this area, too, the Renaissance and the early modern period that followed saw immense cognitive advances, such as the anatomy of Vesalius, Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, the work of Linnaeus, and the invention of the microscope. Along with these cultural advances, however, the institutionalization of medicine as a profession, like that of law, was beset with serious difficulties. A special one was the tradition that "gentlemen" (including practically all learned men, obviously) did not work with their hands, and hence were precluded not only from surgery, which
PROFESSIONS was relegated to the barbers, but even from performing physical examinations. Only gradually did a basis develop upon which scientifically trained physicians could actually become the primary agents for dealing with the illnesses of individuals. On the whole, this basis also developed farther and earlier in England than on the Continent. It was not until well into the nineteenth century, however, that the career of the medical profession could be said really to have been launched [see MEDICAL PERSONNEL]. The discipline-profession complex On the cultural side, the triangle formed by the interrelations of philosophy, law, and medicine provided in an important sense the points of differentiation for the main system of modern intellectual disciplines. In the first place, the differentiation of all three from the religious matrix was crucial. This was particularly the case with the humanities, since they formed the center of the philosophical complex. Law and medicine, then, constituted the framework of the practically applied complex. However, the status of the developing pure disciplines, with their practical implications, long remained highly ambiguous. After the Renaissance the natural sciences, especially physics (and astronomy), had various forms of anchorage in the academic system but were not unequivocally part of it. Thus the Royal Society was for a considerable period a more important center for the sciences than any university complex in England. Teaching or studying the practical applications of physical science knowledge found considerable difficulty in gaining acceptance in the academic system. For example, the German technische Hochschulen (institutes of technology) were long denied the status of universities, including the right to grant doctoral degrees. Indeed, engineering developed at least as much from the "know-how" of the empirical crafts and the contributions of "inventors" as it did from the academically formalized sciences [see ENGINEERING]. Even greater difficulty attended the development of the social and behavioral disciplines, which in one respect are anchored both in medicine and in law (with religion always in the background). In historical perspective, it is perhaps significant that John Locke, a principal father of the British empiricist tradition in philosophy and, hence, of both economics and psychology, was by main occupation a physician. By the mid-nineteenth century, biological science had begun to reach maturity, and around the turn of the last century one could begin to say the same not only for economics and psychology but also for anthropology, political science,
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and sociology. Of course, the discipline of history played a very important role in the development of these social and behavioral disciplines, since it served, among other things, as a bridge between them and the humanities. The circumstances just sketched relate in turn to the fact that the earlier applied professions, predominantly law and medicine, first crystallized in the form of private practice. For law, the most important field of this development was certainly England; the same was at least partly true for medicine. In the United States in the early nineteenth century, law and medicine were organized very much in the English pattern; thus professional training, for instance, was organized almost wholly on the basis of apprenticeship. Relative dissociation from the university system removed the professional practitioner from the type of large-scale organization most closely related to the professions and placed him in the practical position of being a type of independent artisan with particularly high social status. These circumstances help explain why professional groups have traditionally adopted a guildlike status, and why, in particular, two major features have characterized their orientation. One of these features is the ideology of service which long distinguished the professions from the market-oriented business groups during the period when the latter were gaining increasing prominence. The other was the predilection, where complex organization did emerge, for an associational pattern which differed both from the bureaucratic models that were becoming increasingly prominent in business as well as in government and from the types of strict market orientation which for a time seemed to dominate the economy. The American medical profession has been particularly tenacious in its adherence to the pattern of individual fee-for-service practice and has tried, in ways which include diverse forms of regulation of the relations between members of the profession and their patients or clients, to discourage the involvement of physicians in various types of largescale organization. The fully modern phase of the development of the professional system is peculiar to the present century—indeed we cannot foresee how nearly mature it has yet become, or what major developments it may still hold in store. Its two major focuses are the development of the modern university, and the demand for and capacity to use university-level training over a very wide range of practical affairs. Since the organization of most practical interests increasingly involves complex organization, it is becoming less and less practica-
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ble for a majority of professional personnel in any field to practice in the individual fee-for-service pattern. But if the involvement of professionals in complex organizations, both governmental and private, has forced very substantial modifications in the way in which professional services are run, the converse is just as true—and probably even more important. The involvement of high-level professional personnel in most types of modern organization has been the occasion for major changes in the character of the organizations themselves. Most conspicuously, the predominance of the older type of bureaucratic "line authority" is no longer characteristic of any but a small set of large-scale organizations. The basically associational pattern of structuring relations between professional peers—which has had to be extended to the relations between professional and executive personnel operating at similar levels in their respective hierarchies—has come to be of paramount importance in the modern type of formal organization (Parsons 1960a, part 1). The new university system In a way which few social analysts of even a half century ago would have predicted, the United States has become the spearhead of several major new developments in the field of education. First, it has developed, within a century, an essentially new type of university system, the keystone of which is the graduate school of arts and sciences. In part, this system was borrowed from the German philosophical faculty of the nineteenth century. But it was profoundly modified, precisely in the direction of professionalizing the faculty role. In short, the American system has been devoted to the primacy of teaching and research in the secular and pure intellectual disciplines. On the whole, this has freed the faculty members from their previous assimilation to the gentleman-scholar tradition of the educated upper class—a tradition that has not disappeared but has in general come to focus in the surviving undergraduate college. The typical professor now resembles the scientist more than the gentleman-scholar of an earlier time; the academic emphasis is now much more on achievement criteria and on reputation in a national and international cultural forum than on locally defined status. The graduate faculties, above all, have become the center of gravity not only of teaching, and hence of the mechanisms by which the academic profession perpetuates itself, but also of the newly professionalized large-scale research function. Research, then, has become the primary source of a major set of factors operating in the
dynamics of the society as a whole, most conspicuously in the field of technology, but increasingly proliferating far beyond that. Second, professional training in the United States, in sharp contrast with its English background and with most contemporary socialist countries, has been brought overwhelmingly within the university system. This began with the movement in the late nineteenth century to establish university law schools and medical schools on a new level of intellectual sophistication. This pattern has now extended so far that a major credential of a new applied profession is the acceptance of its training program within the university framework. A particularly important consequence of this development has been a complex pattern of interpenetration between the faculties of arts and sciences, on the one hand, and the so-called "professional" faculties, on the other. Thus, a university medical school today has a substantial number of basic scientists on its faculty who are not very different in training and type of competence from their peers in the arts and sciences departments. Furthermore, research has entered the professional school in such an important way that the school is no longer only, or even primarily, a teaching institution. Finally, it is highly important in this broad context that the much fuller acceptance of engineering in the academic complex has been accompanied by the incorporation of engineering education into the more general pattern of the university system. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from an undergraduate engineering school, has become a general university with an over-all scientific and engineering emphasis. Another important feature of the modern university is its insistence on covering, within its arts and science faculties, the whole range of the primary intellectual disciplines, now generally grouped in the three categories of the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The muchdiscussed trend toward specialization has not resulted, except for a scattering of cases, in schools devoted only to one or another of these groups of disciplines, or to specific fields within any one. Thus we have not developed graduate schools of chemistry that have nothing to do with either physics or biology. Moreover, the professionalization of the university complex has not led to an abandonment of the traditional undergraduate college, but rather to its strengthening and to its maintenance as an integral part of the university structure. To an increasing degree, all those destined for the higher occupational levels, whether in an academic specialty, a specialized applied profession, or a
PROFESSIONS nonprofessional role, are expected to undergo the common experience of an undergraduate college program. Relation to the practicing professions. The marriage of the university system to the practicing professions in the United States was spearheaded by medicine and proceeded more slowly and with greater difficulty in both engineering and law. In the medical case, the crucial stimulus was the bringing to bear of European scientific medicine on medical education and, with this, the emergence of new forms of practice. The primary spearhead was the new bacteriology, with its application, stemming from Pasteur and Koch, to the control of infectious disease, and its further extension, stemming from Lister, to asepsis in surgery. From this basis, the upgrading process has branched out into many fields of organic medicine, very prominently into pathology and more gradually into the psychological and, finally, the social realms. The most direct channel of developmental influence operated through the American medical scientists and entrepreneurs who studied in Europe, especially Germany, in the last third of the nineteenth century and brought their new knowledge back to this country. Particularly central was the Johns Hopkins Medical School in its first generation. Engineering, except for the electrical and chemical fields, remained more or less "empirical"—that is, it operated by rule of thumb—considerably longer than medicine. Indeed, the massive breakthrough that founded an entire family of applied professions for the physical sciences came with the spectacular success of the mobilization of science for the war effort of World War n. To be sure, some of these applied professions had predecessors, especially in the applications of physics to electrical technology and of chemistry to dyes and explosives. However, the crucial scientific fields in this case seem to have been not only nuclear physics but, especially, electronics, with its close relation to the development of the information theory-cybernetics complex. This "new engineering," if such a term may be used, has clearly dominated the mid-twentieth-century scene. The professions' opportunities for impressive institutionalization at this juncture have been linked with their involvement in certain levels of social structure. A major factor is clearly the anchoring of the university system in the structure of the society. This anchoring includes the university's financial and other support, as well as the generalization of the belief that it can contribute something special to the public welfare. At the same time, medicine has developed an especially important or-
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ganizational form, one which is critically different from individual private practice, namely, the teaching hospital. This is rooted in a complex variety of modes of social support—religious and philanthropic, private and governmental. But it has provided a sufficiently complex and flexible form of organization for the testing and working out of the highly complicated clinical uses of the new scientific knowledge. The affiliation of such hospitals with university medical schools has ensured that primacy is given to scientifically based standards of competence, while the other affiliations of these hospitals has provided them with a whole series of links with the wider community. It is crucial that, in the course of its development, the teaching hospital has moved from purely clinical concerns for the immediate welfare of its patients, through concomitant emphasis on use of the patients and facilities for the training of physicians, to a steadily increasing involvement with the research function. For engineering, the comparable institutional settings have been industry and certain spheres of government, notably the military. The development of industrial laboratories and, increasingly, those controlled by governmental agencies, such as the three national laboratories for research in atomic physics, have played facilitative roles somewhat similar to the teaching hospitals in medicine. These developments clearly rest on the assumption that applied science has come to have a truly massive practical payoff. It should be realized that this situation is altogether new in the present century. The major new phase in the development of law in relation to society is quite different but exceedingly important. In the latter part of the first half of the nineteenth century, legal thought became increasingly important on the American intellectual scene, somewhat replacing theology as a focus of interest. In its first major phase, it followed the English tradition in centering, above all, about the courts and so about the bases of judicial decision as represented by such figures as Chief Justice Marshall, Chancellor Kent, and Justice Story (Miller 1966). Toward the end of the century, however, the major trends in legal thinking were toward a new affiliation with the university law schools; the social sciences, too, were beginning to exert a more general kind of intellectual influence on law. On the judicial side, certainly justices Holmes, Brandeis, and Cardozo were especially influential; on the academic, perhaps Roscoe Pound was the most important figure. This development has in turn been related to a practical situation in which, since the United States is a relatively pluralistic society, the legal aspect
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of the normative elements of societal integration has been able to take a certain precedence over direct governmental disposal of normative issues. Indeed the American constitutional system, combining federalism with the separation of powers, has favored this strong emphasis on law and on the rrlc of the courts as the first-order agencies of its implementation. Moreover, the services of lawyers have been in very high demand in connection with the complicated affairs of large business organizations and with the complex interrelations of governmental agencies involved with one another and with the private sector. Place of the newer applied professions As the differentiation of American society has proceeded, and problems of inclusion and upgrading have become particularly prominent, the legal definition of rights and obligations has gained in importance. The most conspicuous example in this field is the use, by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other civil rights organizations, of the legal path to the definition of the basic rights of its constituency—a process that, more than any other single factor, has precipitated the new revolution in American race relations. It is perhaps not too much to say that the new legal profession, with the strong involvement of its academic branch, has become the most important professional agency for implementing the moral consensus (incomplete as it is) of American society, in the first instance, but more broadly of modern society in general. The crucial focus, perhaps, is on the concept of right, which controls the area in which moral claims, in one of the most important spheres of interpenetration in all of social structure, fuse with governmental and other social obligations. Law is only partly an intellectual discipline, crucial as its intellectual component may be. Thus, in the present context, it is seen as the crucial link between the cultural system and the practical order of society. Law and medicine, then, have constituted the frame within which a more elaborate system of applied professions has begun to proliferate. On the cultural side, allowing for the complex involvements of the biological and physical sciences with medicine, and for the kinship between medicine and such fields as agronomy and horticulture, the base for this development has been the behavioral and social disciplines, which are barely a century old, and still far from maturity. Three main sectors of concern with the application of these disciplines may be very tentatively distinguished. At one pole stands the sector which focuses on the problems
of the individual as a member of society. Here the intellectual point of departure is the developing discipline of psychology, which interpenetrates in a complex manner with the biological sciences. However, it necessarily ramifies into the more specifically social disciplines, particularly sociology, through the involvement of the individual's personality in various aspects of social structure, especially the kinship nexus. Psychology as an intellectual foundation underlies three main fields of partly developed professionalization. First is the therapeutic complex, of which the more psychological aspects of medicine constitute the core. This complex focuses in the first instance on the individual—the processes by which he is socialized, and his personal adjustment. Second is the educational complex, which is developing as a ramified profession in the areas where the learning process and its organization take precedence over the technical features of cultural content. Third is the social work complex, which fits into this context at a level of application very similar to that of education. All of these fields have practical antecedents, such as early medical practice, educational common sense, and philanthropy, which are comparable to the antecedents of engineering in the traditional expertise of skilled craftsmen. At the other pole, closest to law, stand the attempts to apply the intellectual disciplines that are especially concerned with the processes of largescale social systems. By far the most striking success in this area has been attained in the application of Keynesian and post-Keynesian economics to the management of societal-level economies, with special reference to the field of problems once called "the business cycle." Very fragmentary professionalization has emerged in regard to some aspects of political processes and relationships, particularly in the sphere of international relations, and some problems relating to the social aspects of economic development. Continued concern with these areas may eventuate in fields of professional application comparable to those in economics. However, they are plagued by that functional equivalent of common sense that operates in largescale, fluidly changing circumstances—namely, ideological concern, which can only gradually be brought under the control of a more strictly professional type of intellectual discipline. In the middle sector of this range lies another complex of emerging professions that are broadly concerned with the management of complex organizations. Particularly in the United States, but also in other nations, this complex has crossed the line between private and governmental sectors of social organization—a development that is ex-
PROFESSIONS pressed in the phrase "business and public administration." The cultural base of this complex consists both in findings of the several social science disciplines that can be synthesized to bear upon this field of application, and in a rapidly growing technology of information gathering and processing which has become crucial to most responsible executives. Possible limits of prof essionalization Over the whole range of technical competence, including the early reference points of law and medicine, there are serious limits to, and possibly inherent limitations on, the extension of the process of professionalization, a process which in one aspect is almost synonymous with that of rationalization. These limits have implicitly entered into many of the basic intellectual movements and controversies of this century. Thus law impinges on religious charisma through trie problems of the ultimate legitimation of authority and legal order, not only in general but of specific types of authority under specific auspices. Similarly, the supposed irrationality of man's so-called instinctual drives and interests is often said to be only very partially and precariously amenable to organization into any kind of orderly system. Other considerations arise at all points along the spectrum of areas of professional concern. Perhaps the organizational executive in particular, because he must deal with so many diffuse intangibles (including the basic uncertainties of changing situations in complex environments), must always "play it by ear" instead of submitting to codified rules or definitions of essential technical knowledge (Barnard 1938). In the cultural sphere, it appears to be the special mission of the arts in the modern era to emphasize what is in the present sense the irrational component of the human condition. At any rate, the arts do seem at times to be opposing, in the name of freedom of expression, any attempts to reduce the emphasis that they place on irrationality. Perhaps it is permissible at this point to warn that even such basic distinctions as rational-irrational must be treated with a certain relativity. In current parlance, the relation between them is more likely to be one of dialectical opposition than of insoluble conflict. Moreover, the main historical trend certainly seems to be extending the range of rationally ordered organization. Leadership status of the professions It is my view that the professional complex, though obviously still incomplete in its development, has already become the most important single component in the structure of modern so-
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cieties. It has displaced first the "state," in the relatively early modern sense of that term, and, more recently, the "capitalistic" organization of the economy. The massive emergence of the professional complex, not the special status of capitalistic or socialistic modes of organization, is the crucial structural development in twentieth-century society. Every major innovation in the organization of societies involves a new leadership element—in structural rather than personal terms—which tends to precede that innovation's massive institutionalization. For the modern state, the critical leadership element seems to have been institutionalized aristocracy. Kings and their lineage were the hereditary focuses of what, in terms of our sketch, was basically the extension, by legal means, of rationalized order through the major politically organized units of Western society. Royalty, alone, without backing from a broad aristocratic system, could not have accomplished this. In organizational terms, the capitalistic aspect of the industrial revolution was that it "democratized" the royal-aristocratic system. Careers came to be open to talents; the hereditary basis was no longer legitimized. But the famous capitalistic business firm was a "petty monarchy," with the position of its proprietor being legitimized in terms of his services to his lineage. In turn, the lineage shared in the benefits of the proprietor's success through the legitimacy that it afforded him as its head, and especially through the mechanism of inheriting and bequeathing property. The differentiation of ownership from control, which became evident in the large-scale sector of American "capitalism" in the 1920s (Berle & Means 1932), was comparable to the democratization of the national state, an institution that has undergone many vicissitudes since it first became salient in the Age of Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Since that period, the ultimate support of organizational order and authority has had to rest on some kind of nonhereditary, if not democratic, basis, although legitimation was generalized to more universalistic levels in such conceptions as the "national" or, better, the "public" interest. The old leadership element was clearly the "capitalistic" upper class —or, as I have put it elsewhere, the "decentralized" aristocracy—which could also legitimate its status in achievement terms. The new leadership element is based on cultural criteria of legitimacy rather than criteria of political power or economic success. Given the general secularizing trends of modern society, these criteria could not be religious in the older sense.
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They have had to command both moral and intellectual authority, while being at the same time religiously pluralistic. One possible contender for leadership is the "artist"—of course, as category not individual. His leadership may be characteristic of certain developing societies, but it cannot provide an adequate basis in the organization of technical functions for the modern social world. As a result, whatever may happen in the long run, at least a temporary leadership status seems to have settled on the representatives of the intellectual disciplines. Clearly, the primary organizational locus of these disciplines in the modern world is the university. The fundamental origin of the modern professional system, then, has lain in the marriage between the academic professionals and certain categories of practical men. These latter have taken responsibility, on a basis more of specialized competence than of a diffuse religious or ideological legitimation, for a variety of operative functions in the society. We do not know what lies in store for the next phase of professionalization. I suggest, however, that the professional complex has already not only come into prominence but has even begun to dominate the contemporary scene in such a way as to render obsolescent the primacy of the old issues of political authoritarianism and capitalistic exploitation. Indeed, most of our sensitive contemporary dissidents stress quite other themes, such as alienation. TALCOTT PARSONS [Directly related are the entries CIVIL SERVICE; ENGINEERING; FINE ARTS, article on THE RECRUITMENT AND
SOCIALIZATION OF ARTISTS; INTELLECTUALS;
JOURNALISM; LAW, article on THE LEGAL PROFESSION; MEDICAL PERSONNEL; MILITARY; OCCUPATIONS AND CAREERS; RELIGIOUS SPECIALISTS; SCIENCE, article on SCIENTISTS; SOCIAL WORK; TEACHING. Other relevant material may be found in BUREAUCRACY; EDUCATION; KNOWLEDGE, SOCIOLOGY OF; MEDICAL CARE, article on SOCIAL ASPECTS; STATUS, SOCIAL; UNIVERSITIES; and in the biographies of WEBER, MAX; ZNANIECKL] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BARBER, BERNARD 1952 Science and the Social Order. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. BARBER, BERNARD 1963 Some Problems in the Sociology of the Professions. Dsedalus 92:669-688. BARNARD, CHESTER I. (1938) 1962 The Functions of the Executive. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. BEN-DAVID, JOSEPH 1963-1964 Professions in the Class System of Present Day Societies: A Trend Report and Bibliography. Current Sociology 12:247-330. BEN-DAVID, JOSEPH; and ZLOCZOWER, AWRAVAM 1962 Universities and Academic Systems in Modern Socie-
ties. Archives europeennes de sociologie; European Journal of Sociology 3:45-84. BERLE, ADOLF A.; and MEANS, GARDINER C. (1932) 1933 The Modern Corporation and Private Property. New York: Macmillan. BLAUSTEIN, ALBERT P.; and PORTER, CHARLES O. 1954 The American Lawyer: A Summary of the Survey of the Legal Profession. Univ. of Chicago Press. CARLIN, JEROME E.; and MENDLOWITZ, SAUL H. (1958) 1960 The American Rabbi: A Religious Specialist Responds to Loss of Authority. Pages 377-414 in Marshall Sklare (editor), The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. CARR-SAUNDERS, ALEXANDER; and WILSON, P. A. (1933) 1964 The Professions. London: Cass. CLAUSEN, JOHN A. 1956 Sociology and the Field of Mental Health. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. DONOVAN, JOHN D. 1951 The Catholic Priest: A Study in the Sociology of the Professions. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard Univ. DURKHEIM, EMILE (1893) 1960 The Division of Labor in Society. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> First published as De la division du travail social. DURKHEIM, EMILE (1950)1958 Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> First published posthumously as Lecons de sociologie: Physique des moeurs et du droit. ETZIONI, AMITAI 1961 A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations: On Power, Involvement, and Their Correlates. New York: Free Press. FICHTER, JOSEPH H. 1961 Religion as an Occupation: A Study in the Sociology of Professions. Univ. of Notre Dame Press. GOODE, WILLIAM J. 1957 Community Within a Community: The Professions. American Sociological Review 22:194-200. GOODE, WILLIAM J. 1960 Encroachment, Charlatanism, and the Emerging Profession: Psychology, Sociology, and Medicine. American Sociological Review 25:902913. GUSTAFSON, JAMES M. 1963 The Clergy in the United States. Dsedalus 92:724-744. HUGHES, EVERETT C. 1958 Men and Their Work. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. HUGHES, EVERETT C. 1963 Professions. Dsedalus 92: 655-668. HUNTINGTON, SAMUEL P. 1957 The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. HUNTINGTON, SAMUEL P. 1963 Power, Expertise, and the Military Profession. Dsedalus 92:785-807. JANOWITZ, MORRIS 1960 Tine Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1965. KELSALL, ROGER K. 1955 Higher Civil Servants in Britain, From 1870 to the Present Day. London: Routledge. LIEBERMAN, MYRON (1956) 1958 Education as a Profession. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. MARSHALL, T. H. (1934-1962)1964 Class, Citizenship, and Social Development: Essays. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. -> A paperback edition was published in 1965. MERTON, ROBERT K. 1960 Some Thoughts on the Professions in American Society. Brown University Papers, No. 37. Providence, R.I.: Brown Univ. MERTON, ROBERT K.; READER, GEORGE G,; and KENDALL, PATRICIA L. (editors) 1957 The Student-physician: Introductory Studies in the Sociology of Medical Education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
PROFIT MILLER, PERRY 1966 The Life of the Mind in America. New York: Harcourt. MILLS, JOHN 1946 The Engineer in Society. New York: Van Nostrand. NIEBUHR, H. RICHARD; and WILLIAMS, DANIEL D. (editors) 1956 The Ministry in Historical Perspectives. New York: Harper. PARSONS, TALCOTT (1939) 1958 The Professions and Social Structure. Pages 34-49 in Talcott Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, Pure and Applied. 2d ed., rev. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. PARSONS, TALCOTT 1947 Introduction. Pages 1-86 in Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. PARSONS, TALCOTT (1951) 1959 Social Structure and Dynamic Process: The Case of Modern Medical Practice. Pages 428-479 in Talcott Parsons, The Social System. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. PARSONS, TALCOTT 1960a Structure and Process in Modern Societies. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. PARSONS, TALCOTT (1960b) 1964 Mental Illness and "Spiritual Malaise": The Role of the Psychiatrist and of the Minister of Religion. Pages 292-324 in Talcott Parsons, Social Structure and Personality. New York: Free Press. PARSONS, TALCOTT 1963 Social Change and Medical Organization in the United States: A Sociological Perspective. American Academy of Political and Social Science, Annals 346:21-33. PARSONS, TALCOTT 1965 Unity and Diversity in the Modern Intellectual Disciplines: The Role of the Social Sciences. Daedalus 94:39-65. PARSONS, TALCOTT 1966 The Political Aspect of Social Structure and Process. Pages 7-112 in David Easton (editor), Varieties of Political Theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. POUND, ROSCOE 1953 The Laivyer From Antiquity to Modern Times: With Particular Reference to the Development of Bar Associations in the United States. St. Paul, Minn.: West. PRICE, DON K. 1965 The Scientific Estate. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap. SHILS, EDWARD 1961 The Intellectual Between Tradition and Modernity: The Indian Situation. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Supplement 1. The Hague: Mouton. SUTTON, FRANCIS X. et al. 1956 The American Business Creed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. VEBLEN, THORSTEIN (1891-1913) 1961 The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other Essays. New York: Russell. VEBLEN, THORSTEIN (1919) 1921 The Engineers and the Price System. New York: Huebsch. -> A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Harcourt. WEBER, MAX (1919a) 1946 Science as a Vocation. Pages 129-156 in Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. WEBER, MAX (1919&) 1946 Politics as a Vocation. Pages 77-128 in Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. WEBER, MAX (1921) 1958 The Rational and Social Foundations of Music. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press. WEBER, MAX (1922) 1954 Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society. Edited, with an introduction and annotations by Max Rheinstein. Cambridge, Mass.:
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Harvard Univ. Press. -» First published as Chapter 7 of Max Weber's Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. WEBER, MAX (1922) 1957 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Edited by Talcott Parsons. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> First published as Part 1 of Max Weber's Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. WEBER, MAX (1922) 1963 Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon. -» A paperback edition was published in 1964.
PROFIT Profit is normally held to be the amount by which the total revenues of an enterprise exceed its total costs. There has been much confusion in the literature over terminology, however, and the first task here must be to clear up that confusion. It stems, I think, from the changes which have taken place with the development of the small, owner-managed, competitive firm of the classical period into the great corporation of today. In contemporary corporate enterprises the functions of the plant manager, who works for wages, of the capital supplier, who receives either interest or dividends, and of the entrepreneur, who makes the strategic decisions, must be distinguished. In this article profit will be treated as the return to the corporation determined by entrepreneurial success. History of the concept In the days before the modern corporation, when the typical business concern was managed, owned, and directed by one man, his reward included the wages of management, the return on capital, and the gains of entrepreneurship. If wages and raw materials were the total costs, all the rest was lumped together as profit. Thus, Adam Smith, in the Wealth of Nations (1776), speaks of the "profits on stock." In Part 1, Chapter 9, he says that "high profits will eat up rents" and indicates that the reward to capital is a real cost, which must be paid to elicit or maintain the supply. In the same passage, Smith distinguishes between profits and interest. The former is the reward to "stock," or capital, the latter the price paid for borrowed money, i.e., for loanable funds. Ricardo, in his Principles (see Works and Correspondence, vol. 1), normally treats profit as a real cost, which must be paid to maintain the supply of capital, although sometimes, as Knight (1921) says, it is treated as a residual like rent. Whatever the confusion in the Principles, in his celebrated "Essay on Profits" ("An Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock"; see Works and Correspondence, vol. 4, pp. 9-41) Ricardo clearly defines profit as the return to capital and its organization in production, i.e., its combination with the other factors.
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Alone among the classical writers, Marx (18671879) has an explicit theory of profit. Marx offers a simple, two-sector model with two inputs, labor and capital. Labor receives a subsistence wage, which according to the Marxist definition equals the value of the commodity. The market value, or priz~, exceeds true value, and it is from this "surplus value" that profit is obtained. (The rate of surplus value calculated only on circulating capital differs from the rate of profit calculated on all capital.) Since the only input other than labor is capital, for Marx "profit" is a return on capital. It seems, from his discussion, to include returns to entrepreneurship, but such returns are purely and simply returns to the entrepeneur as the controller of the capital input. Marx's theory of profit has been called an exploitation theory. He believed that the wage earner will receive only a subsistence wage and that all the rest, the residual, is profit and is a return to capital which is earned because of its bargaining power. Because ownership enables the capitalist to employ labor, he is able to drive a very hard bargain and keep the wage earner to a subsistence wage. The ownership of the means of production is the clue to Marx's theory of profit. This theory might equally well be called a bargaining-power theory of profit. However, the theory takes no account of the distinct contributions of the capital supplier and the entrepeneur. In fact, the two functions are considered identical or are comprised in the same input. The theory may bear a superficial resemblance to that of the English classical school, but we should note this difference: for the English classical writers, up to and including Mill, the reward to capital was a real cost, that is to say, a cost which must be paid if the supply of capital was to be maintained. It was a reward variously described as a reward for waiting, for abstinence, or for saving; in any case, it involved a real psychic cost. This was not so for Marx. The total reward is a residual and is the amount of surplus value that could be taken from the worker, by reason of the employer's superior bargaining power, over and above the true value of the product, which is measured by the subsistence of the laboring class. In Marshall (1890) the confusion disappears. In the stationary state, under conditions of competition, the wages of labor, the reward (now called interest) to capital, the wages of management, and the replacement of capital are all costs. "Normal profits" are made up of the payment to the competitive owner—entrepreneur, i.e., interest on capital invested and wages of management. "Abnormal profit," a surplus over total costs, is ephemeral in a competitive economy. Profit is therefore a surplus
attributed to abnormal circumstances, such as lack of competition or dynamic and unanticipated changes. In the stationary competitive system there is no place for the forward-looking, risk-taking entrepreneur and, thus, no place, except by accident, for profit. The Continental school (Pareto, Walras, and Wicksell) similarly make no place in their models of general equilibrium for any profit residual. Each input is paid the value of its marginal product, and the sum of the marginal product shares exhausts the total product. These general equilibrium models are based on severe restrictions: in particular the production function is assumed to be linear and homogeneous of the first degree [see PRODUCTION]. The models are static and competitive. Among more contemporary writers the significance of the Walrasian model is shown in the simplified equation system of Phelps Brown (1936) and in Schumpeter's circular flow equilibrium (1912, chapter 1). Profit could not appear in these models of general equilibrium unless there was a disturbance of the static system or a disturbance of perfect competition. This is made clear when Schumpeter shows that profit within his system can appear only with the emergence of his entrepreneur, that aggressive innovator who introduces improved techniques of production or in other ways alters the production function. Some modern authors (such as Joan Robinson and Kaldor) use simple two-sector, two-factor models and have only labor and capital as their inputs. Like the classicists and Marx, they speak of only two shares of the national income, namely, wages and profit. Profit in these models is, consequently, the return to capital. This may be a convenient usage, but by not permitting the important distinction between the reward to capital and the reward to enterprise, it leaves the models without the dynamic of the expectational entrepreneur. Contemporary views Let us turn now to the question of the source of profit, its nature, and its function in the private enterprise system of contemporary Western society. One is considering here the modern corporation, in which the functions of the plant manager, the owners, and the entrepreneur are distinct. The entrepreneur makes the major policy decisions and must make these decisions in the present although they will bear fruit only in the future. The decisions, therefore, are made under conditions of genuine uncertainty. The writers of the contemporary period were naturally at first under the strong influence of the
PROFIT neoclassical school in England, of the Continental writers to whom we have referred, and of John Bates Clark in the United States. No profit could be earned under the conditions of equilibrium. Whether equilibrium was defined as the equilibrium of the firm and the industry or whether it was defined, in the Continental manner, as the equilibrium of the system as a whole, there was perfect foreknowledge. Because there was perfect competition, there were no surpluses owing to monopoly, apart from Ricardian rents which might be earned by those monopolists who controlled a resource so scarce that its supply curve was perfectly inelastic. Hence, if one was to talk about profit, one had to turn one's attention to conditions within the market which were not those assumed by the neoclassical writers. Schumpeter had to introduce into the circular-flow equilibrium that rude fellow, the innovating entrepreneur, a man who foresaw the possibility of profit (even though, under competitive conditions, it was ephemeral) by altering the production function in one way or another, whether by a technological improvement or by improved techniques in management or improved techniques of selling [see ENTREPRENEURSHIP]. Joan Robinson (1933) and E. H. Chamberlin (1933) showed that profits may be earned and retained by the entrepreneurs who succeed in achieving a privileged monopolistic position in the selling market, or, in the case of Robinson, a monopsonistic position in the factor market. Lerner (1944), Triffin (1940), and Kalecki (1954) also identified the amount of profit with the degree of monopoly. Finally, we may note that Keynes (1930) attributed the incidence of profit to a lack of equilibrium in the system as a whole, that is to say, in his context profit is an accidental windfall occasioned by temporal changes in the price level as a whole. In summary, one may say that all the writers of this period were still strongly under the influence of the equilibrium models of the nineteenth-century writers. They attributed profit to various types of imperfections in the static competitive models of their immediate predecessors. It was Knight (1921) who created an eclectic theory of profit under which all the previous theories could be subsumed. He treated profit as a residual return earned by the entrepreneur as a result of correct decisions taken in the present to bear fruit sometime in the uncertain future. Distinction must be made between risk and uncertainty. Risk exists when there is uncertain knowledge of a future result of a particular action but when there are adequate data to make a probability calculation. For example, if one is building a new factory, one may
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provide against loss through fire before it goes into operation by taking out insurance. A risk can always be insured against because there is a sufficient sample from previous experiments to permit an actuarial calculation. Uncertainty, by contrast, exists when the present decision is made under conditions where no probability calculus is possible —when, therefore, the decision maker has to rely upon his own judgment, his intuition, if you will, as well as on whatever data he may accumulate in order to make his decision. (Some mathematicians maintain that the difference between risk and uncertainty is one not of kind, but of degree, depending only on the amount of data available for a sample for experimental purposes. The point cannot be debated here, but we may accept a difference in the degree of experience as adequate to sustain the argument presented in this discussion.) Knight's entrepreneur will reduce the area of uncertainty as much as he can. He will insure against risk; he will make forward contracts wherever they are possible; he will accumulate all the data he can. There remains, however, an area in which true uncertainty obtains. There may remain some elements of cost about which he can make no certain calculations. More likely, the strategies of his competitors cannot be exactly estimated. Decision is peculiarly the responsibility of the entrepreneur. If he is, on balance, proved by events to be right in his decisions, a profit will result. If, on the contrary, he is repeatedly in error, the concern will experience negative profits, or losses, and under these circumstances the entrepreneur is not likely to continue in his decision-making capacity. Briefly, we may conclude that the entrepreneur is that person—either an individual or a collective—who makes decisions under conditions of genuine uncertainty, the results of which give rise to profits. These profits may come as a result of decisions concerning the state of the market or decisions which result in increasing the degree of monopoly or decisions with respect to the forward holding of liquid stocks that give rise to windfall gains or decisions taken about the introduction of new techniques or innovations that, if successful, will give rise to innovators' profits. Thus, all types of profits, whether their origin be in the market structure, in general movements of the price level, in changes in government, commercial, fiscal, or monetary policy, or in successful innovation, may be subsumed in this general concept of profit as the return to the entrepreneur for successful decision making under conditions of uncertainty. If this is agreed, we have an answer to our question as to the origin of profit. We have now to ask
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how the entrepreneur makes this decision. This question is the subject of current debate among economists. We may distinguish various answers. There is the theory that the entrepreneur does make some kind of probability calculation, the best possible he can make in the absence of adequate dat? about previous like situations. Hart (1940) may be considered representative of this school. Others who may be said to belong to the same school have added to the probability view the calculus drawn from the theory of games (von Neumann & Morgenstern 1944). They have argued that it would be possible for the entrepreneur to decide upon his own strategy after having made a calculus of the possible strategies and responses of his competitors. Still others believe that decision making will be largely determined by the data fed to the entrepreneur by his various chiefs of bureau, that is to say, his various technical advisers, his engineers, his accountants, and those who undertake market surveys. Some, also, have argued that forward contracts enable the entrepreneur to make his crucial decisions with the minimum degree of uncertainty and that profit, in consequence, is a kind of accident which, if one may be controversial, can be attributed only to the ineptitude of the entrepreneur. To the present writer it seems as if all these groups have ignored the true meaning of "uncertainty," which, if we have correctly defined it, rules out these various methods of giving to the entrepreneurial decision a purely rational quality. [See DECISION MAKING, article on ECONOMIC ASPECTS.]
Another school of thought, which is usually connected with the name of G. L. S. Shackle (1949; 1958; 1961), believes that the entrepreneurial decision partakes of an intuitive element. Shackle goes so far, in one context, as to compare the entrepreneur with the artist rather than the scientist. For Shackle, the crucial or strategic decision is necessarily made under conditions of genuine uncertainty. No probability calculus is possible, whether directly or by use of game theory. Forward contracts serve only to narrow the critical area of uncertainty. Within that area the entrepreneur confronts a series of hypotheses about future results of his decision. Some of these hypotheses will be favorable, some unfavorable; some will be highly surprising, some not so surprising. As these hypotheses are ranged in the decision maker's view, two will command his attention. One of these ("focus loss") will appear to him to be the hypothesis with the minimum surprise-loss combination, and the other ("focus gain") the one with minimum surprise-gain combination. Since the hypotheses are
not additive in either the favorable or unfavorable range, choice or decision is made between these two focuses of attention ("attraction" is Shackle's word). A positive decision results only when the focus gain outweighs the focus loss. This view, while it has been criticized or amplified by many contemporary writers, has acquired a considerable following. [See ECONOMIC EXPECTATIONS.] It must not be supposed, however, that it has come to be part of "received theory." We have shown that many contemporary economists, while taking their lead from Knight, have preferred a more rationalistic theory of entrepreneurial decision making. The problem of decision making, whatever may be thought in economics, is a wide question and has been examined in recent years by psychologists, sociologists, military strategists, and others. [See DECISION MAKING.] It is clear that the above approaches imply that the function of profit is to reward the decision maker. A subsidiary function is to provide a source of new investment funds for the widening or deepening of capital. Perroux (1926; 1957), among others, looks on profit partly as the earning of monopolists but principally as a source of savings for new economic growth. Perroux's emphasis is on economic development and the sources of capital supply. His colleague Jean Marchal (1951) has advanced what we might call an institutional theory of profit. For Marchal profit is residual, that is, its amount or, more properly, its rate depends in part on institutional factors, e.g., the social acceptance of profit in public utilities as compared with that of profit in highly speculative enterprises. It is not possible in a brief compass to do justice to Marchal, but it seems that his contribution can be comprised in an uncertainty theory. The position that profit has the function of serving as the reserve fund for capital investment and, thus, as a principal source of funds for economic growth depends crucially upon certain assumptions. We have to consider corporation policy with respect to retained profit as compared with the decisions of shareholders with respect to the disposal of their dividends (one may refer to the works of W. C. Hood [1959] and R. M. Solow [1963]). In this context we have only to note that many modern writers attach a great importance to corporations' retained profits as a source of new investment. This proposition depends, however, on certain assumptions about the use of retained profit. If the corporation uses its surplus funds or its retained profit for further investment, in the proper sense of the word (that is to say, for increasing its capital structure for productive purposes), then
PROFIT the corporation surplus fund is one source for new capital development. If, however, the corporation tends to hedge by holding a portfolio of various stocks and even government bonds, we cannot regard retained corporation profits as a source of new venture capital. The attitude of corporations toward the use of retained profit must be compared with that of shareholders. If dividends exhausted the total profit of a corporation, then dividends would be reinvested through the capital market and would presumably be redirected by the price mechanism into the most remunerative of new employments of capital. Consequently, there is a case in favor of the complete distribution of all profit. It is not maintained that profit distributed to shareholders will necessarily be invested in a manner approximating the optimum allocation of capital more closely than would be done by the corporation's allocation of retained profit. It is simply submitted that, contrary to the opinion of some authors who have written about the capital market, there is a case to be made in favor of the full distribution of profits to the shareholders of the corporations. Measurement of profit We must now consider the problem of the determination of the amount or rate of profit. From what we have already said, it appears that profit may be treated as a residual left over after the other costs of production have been paid. This proposition, however, leaves us with an unsatisfactory theory of income distribution. As Knight (1935) has said, the treatment of profit and rent as residuals leaves us with no rigorous determination of the difference between one residual and the other. It is necessary to distinguish profit from any other income share. We do not believe that this can be done by marginal productivity theory, which depends on the assumption that the input factor is completely divisible and is homogeneous in quality. The entrepreneur by definition is indivisible, and entrepreneurs are not homogeneous as to quality. Thus, marginal productivity theory, in the strict sense, does not apply, although it is perhaps correct to observe that the entrepreneur who earns a profit is apparently more productive in value terms than his less gifted competitors. It has been argued by some that the amount of profit is a measure of degree of monopoly (Kalecki 1954; Lerner 1944; and others). The converse proposition would be that the degree of monopoly could serve as a measure of profit. This proposition, however, is unacceptable. From what has already been said, it would appear that monopolistic conditions reduce the degree of uncertainty, and one
551
would expect that the profit sufficient to attract investment under conditions of monopoly would be less than that needed to attract investment under conditions of dynamic competition. Such indeed appears to be the fact. Empirical studies of profit rates do not show that profits increase with the degree of monopoly. (It is only fair to admit that they do not show, on the other hand, that firms in monopolistic competition earn markedly lower profits than firms under conditions of competition.) It would seem likely that the amount and rate of profit are determined by the degree of uncertainty. If the previous argument is accepted, the more remote the time horizon for the planning period, the higher the degree of uncertainty which must attach to all hypotheses. Thus, we may argue that the degree of uncertainty is a function of the length of the planning period. It would follow that the greater the extension of the time horizon, the higher must be the expected profit if a favorable, that is to say, a positive, decision is to be made. Some economists would like to argue that bargaining power between the entrepreneur and the capital suppliers, on the one hand, and between the corporation and the trade union, on the other hand, is also relevant to the determination of the rate of profit. However, in the eclectic theory put forward above, it would appear that such questions of bargaining power form a part of the entrepreneurial expectations or hypotheses with respect to the future results of present decisions. We may, therefore, conclude that the proper measure of profit is the degree of uncertainty, and if we wish to give a quantitative measurement to such degrees of uncertainty, we may with some confidence do so by the measurement of the extension of the planning period to the time horizon. B. S. KEIRSTEAD [See also the biography of KNIGHT.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BROWN, E. H. PHELPS (1936) 1949 The Framework of the Pricing System. Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas, Student Union Book Store. BROWN, MURRAY 1961 Profit, Output, and Liquidity in the Theory of Fixed Investment. International Economic Review 2:110-121. CANTILLON, RICHARD (1755) 1952 Essai sur la nature du commerce en general. Paris: Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques. CHAMBERLIN, EDWARD H. (1933) 1956 The Theory of Monopolistic Competition: A Re-orientation of the Theory of Value. 7th ed. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 38. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. CLARK, JOHN BATES (1899) 1902 The Distribution of Wealth: A Theory of Wages, Interest and Profits. New York and London: Macmillan.
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FOSSATI, EHALDO 1955 Essays in Dynamics and Econometrics. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina, School of Business Administration. HART, ALBERT G. (1940) 1951 Anticipations, Uncertainty and Dynamic Planning. New York: Kelley. HIRSHLEIFER, JACK 1961 Risk, the Discount Rate and Investment Decisions. American Economic Review 51, no. 2:112-130. -* Contains nine pages of discussion. HOOD, WILLIAM C. 1959 Financing of Economic Activity in Canada, July 30, 1958. Ottawa: Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects. KALDOR, NICHOLAS 1960 Essays on Economic Stability and Growth. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. KALECKI, MICHAEL 1954 Theory of Economic Dynamics: An Essay on Cyclical and Long-run Changes in Capitalist Economy. New York: Rinehart. KEIRSTEAD, B. S. 1953 An Essay in the Theory of Profits and Income Distribution. Oxford: Blackwell. KEIRSTEAD, B. S. 1959 Capital, Interest, and Profits. Oxford: Blackwell. KEIRSTEAD, B. S. 1960 Le profit et ses fonctions. Volume 9, section E, pages 40-42 in Encyclopedic francaise. Paris: Societe Nouvelle de 1'Encyclopedie Frangaise. KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD (1930) 1958-1960 A Treatise on Money. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. -» Volume 1: The Pure Theory of Money. Volume 2; The Applied Theory of Money. KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD 1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. -» A paperback edition was published by Harcourt in 1965. KNIGHT, FRANK H. (1921) 1933 Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. London School of Economics and Political Science Series of Reprints of Scarce Tracts in Economic and Political Science, No. 16. London School of Economics and Political Science. KNIGHT, FRANK H. 1934 Profit. Volume 12, pages 480487 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan. KNIGHT, FRANK H. 1935 The Ricardian Theory of Production and Distribution. Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 1:3-25, 171-196. LERNER, ABBA P. 1944 The Economics of Control: Principles of Welfare Economics. New York: Macmillan. LUNDBERG, ERIK 1959 The Profitability of Investment. Economic Journal 69:653-677. MARCHAL, JEAN 1951 The Construction of a New Theory of Profit. American Economic Review 41:551-565. MARSHALL, ALFRED (1890) 1961 Principles of Economics. 9th ed. 2 vols. New York and London: Macmillan. -> A variorum edition. The 8th edition is preferable for normal use. MARX, KARL (1867-1879) 1925-1926 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. 3 vols. Chicago: Kerr. -» Volume 1: The Process of Capitalist Production. Volume 2: The Process of Circulation of Capital. Volume 3: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Volume 1 was published in 1867. The manuscripts of Volume 2 and Volume 3 were written between 1867 and 1879. They were first published posthumously in German in 1885 and 1894. PARETO, VILFREDO (1896-1897) 1927 Cours d'economie politique professe a I'Universite de Lausanne. 2 vols., 2d ed. Paris: Girard. PERROUX, FRANCOIS 1926 Le probleme du profit. Paris: Girard; Lyon: Bosc. PERROUX, FRANCOIS 1957 Le profit et les progres economiques. Revue de I'action populaire 112:1049-1063.
RICARDO, DAVID Works and Correspondence. Edited by Piero Sraffa. 10 vols. Cambridge Univ. Press, 19511955. -» Volume 1: On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Volume 2: Notes on Malthus's Principles of Political Economy. Volume 3: Pamphlets and Papers, 1809-1811. Volume 4: Pamphlets and Papers, 1815-1823. Volume 5: Speeches and Evidence. Volume 6: Letters, 1810-1815. Volume 7: Letters, 1816-1818. Volume 8: Letters, 1819-June 1821. Volume 9: Letters, July 1821-1823. Volume 10: Biographical Miscellany. ROBINSON, JOAN (1933) 1961 The Economics of Imperfect Competition. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martins. ROBINSON, JOAN 1962 Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martins. SCHUMPETER, JOSEPH A. (1912) 1934 The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry Into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 46. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -> First published as Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung. SHACKLE, G. L. S. (1949) 1952 Expectation in Economics. 2d ed. Cambridge Univ. Press. SHACKLE, G. L. S. 1958 Time in Economics. Amsterdam : North-Holland Publishing. SHACKLE, G. L. S. 1961 Decision, Order and Time in Human Affairs. Cambridge Univ. Press. SMITH, ADAM (1776) 1950 An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 2 vols., 6th ed. Edited, with an introduction, notes, marginal summary, and an enlarged index, by Edwin Cannan. London: Methuen. -» A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Irwin. SOLOW, ROBERT M. 1963 Capital Theory and the Rate of Return. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. TRIFFIN, ROBERT 1940 Monopolistic Competition and General Equilibrium Theory. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 67. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. TURVEY, RALPH 1963 Present Value Versus Internal Rate of Return: An Essay in the Theory of the Third Best. Economic Journal 73:93-98. VON NEUMANN, JOHN; and MORGENSTERN, OSKAR (1944) 1964 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. 3d ed. New York: Wiley. -> A paperback edition was published in 1964. WALRAS, LEON (1874-1877) 1954 Elements of Pure Economics: Or, the Theory of Social Wealth. Translated by William Jaffe. Homewood, 111.: Irwin; London: Allen & Unwin. -> First published in French as Elements d'economie politique pure. WESTON, J. FRED 1954 The Profit Concept and Theory: A Restatement. Journal of Political Economy 62:152170.
PROGRAMMED LEARNING See under LEARNING.
PROGRAMMING "Programming"—more properly, "mathematical programming," to be distinguished from "computer programming"—is a term applied to certain mathematical techniques designed to solve the problem
PROGRAMMING of finding the maximum or minimum of a function subject to several constraints that are usually expressed as inequalities. In itself, mathematical programming has no economic content, but mathematical programming problems arise frequently in the context of economics and operations research, where inequality restrictions are often encountered. A large variety of programming formulations exists, and mathematical programming has been applied in a considerable number of concrete cases. The existence of large electronic computers has made the actual computation of solutions to mathematical programming problems fairly routine. Because of theoretical and computational differences among various programming formulations, it is convenient to classify programming problems according to whether they are linear or nonlinear and according to whether they are discrete or continuous. This article focuses mainly on linear continuous, nonlinear continuous, and linear discrete (integer) programming. Baumol (1958) provides an elementary introduction to these topics, and Dorfman, Samuelson, and Solow (1958) discuss them at an intermediate level. Linear programming Formulation. As an illustration of a linear programming problem, consider the case of an entrepreneur who may produce any or all of n commodities, the produced amounts of which are measured by XT, x2, • • • ,xn. Assume that the profit per unit of the iih commodity is constant and is given by Ci . Assume, further, that the entrepreneur has m resources (land, labor of various kinds, raw materials, machines) available to him, their amounts being measured by Z?j , b2 , • • • , bm . Assume, finally, that the activity of producing one unit of the ith commodity requires (or "uses up") a-n units of resource 1, a2i units of resource 2, and so on. The problem of choosing production levels for each commodity in such a manner that total profit is maximized can then be stated as follows : maximize (1)
z=
4-
subject to r
(2)
+ a.,n xn
a."n xl + a,2 x? i
r dm Xn
"r
T~ a
cn ;
UA 5* 0, u, ^ 0, • • • , um ^ 0. It may be noted that the relationship between a primal problem and its dual is as follows: (a) If the primal problem is a maximization problem, then the dual problem is a minimization problem, and conversely, (b) The coefficients on the righthand side of the inequalities (2) in the primal problem become the coefficients in the objective function in the dual, and conversely, (c) The coefficient on the left-hand side of the constraints (2) in the primal that is associated with the iih constraint and jth variable becomes associated with the ith variable in the jth constraint in the dual. (d) A new set of variables is introduced in the dual, and each dual variable is associated with a primal constraint. If a primal (dual) constraint is an equality, the corresponding dual (primal) variable is unrestricted as to sign; otherwise it is required to be nonnegative. (e) The symmetry of these relations implies that the dual of a dual is the primal. The economic interpretation of the dual variables and the dual program is as follows: Let ut be the imputed price of a unit of the ith resource. The dual program then minimizes the total imputed value of resources subject to the constraints that the imputed cost of producing a unit of any commodity not be less than the profit derived from producing a unit of that commodity. This interpretation becomes meaningful in the light of the following duality theorems : ( 1 ) If both the primal
and the dual problems possess feasible solutions, then z ^ t for any feasible solution; that is, the value of the (primal) objective function to be maximized does not exceed the value of the (dual) objective function to be minimized. (2) If both the primal and the dual problems possess feasible solutions, they both possess optimal solutions, and the maximum value of z is equal to the minimum value of t. (3) If in an optimal solution to the primal and dual problems a constraint in the primal (dual) problem is satisfied as a strict inequality, the corresponding dual (primal) variable has zero value; if a primal (dual) variable in the solution is positive, the corresponding dual (primal) constraint is satisfied as an equality. (4) In an optimal solution to the primal and dual problems, the value of the zth dual variable is equal to the improvement in the primal objective function resulting from an increase of one unit in the availability of the xth resource. In terms of the earlier economic interpretation, the meaning of these theorems is as follows: If a resource is not fully used up (one of the primal constraints is satisfied with strict inequality), the corresponding imputed price of that resource is zero, from which we can also infer that an addition to the entrepreneur's supply of that resource will not contribute to profit. If the jth constraint of the dual program is satisfied as an inequality, diverting resources to production of the jth commodity will reduce profits resulting from production of all other commodities by an amount greater than the profits resulting from production of the jth commodity; hence, that commodity will not be produced. These relationships, expressed in theorem ( 4 ) , are known as complementary slackness. The discovery and development of the theory of linear programming and of the notions of duality can be credited to John von Neumann (see Dantzig 1963, p. 24), D. Gale, H. W. Kuhn, and A. W. Tucker (1951), L. V. Kantorovich (1960), G. B. Dantzig (1951), and others. A notable application of linear programming to the theory of the firm is due toR. Dorfman (1951). Computational methods. Linear programs are normally solved with the aid of the simplex method, which consists of two phases: phase i provides a feasible solution to the linear program, and phase n, taking over at the point at which the task of phase i is completed, leads to the optimal solution (if one exists). In many problems a feasible solution can be found by inspection, and phase i can be bypassed. Phase ii of the simplex method is an iterative procedure by which a basic feasible solution to the linear program is carried into another basic feasible
PROGRAMMING solution in such a manner that if the objective function is to be maximized, the objective function is monotone nondecreasing—that is, the value of the objective function at the new basic feasible solution is greater than or equal to the value of the objective function at the preceding basic feasible solution. It is a finite method (except in the case of degeneracy; see below) in that it terminates in a finite number of steps either with the optimal solution or with the indication that no maximum exists —that is, that the objective function is unbounded. In order to solve the problem given by (1), (2), and (3), we first rewrite it in the form of the condensed simplex tableau:
011
= Z
In this tableau the basic variables are v l f • • • ,vm, and the nonbasic variables are x^^, • • • , xn. The current solution is thus v^—b-^, • • • , vm = bm, x^ = 0, • • • , xn = 0. It is assumed in the current formulation that the lo\ are nonnegative coefficients. An iteration consists of a pivot operation by which the roles of some v, and x} are exchanged. If the variable to enter the current solution is xk and the variable to leave it is vr, the exchange is effected by solving the constraint equation (JY
l*.f\ J\f\
^f/v ^1\
^"rn ^n ~>
UT
for xk and substituting the solution into the other equations. This substitution yields a new tableau that can be interpreted in the same fashion as the old one. The substitution also yields the rules by which the elements of the new tableau can be calculated from the old one. Specifically, denoting the elements of the new tableau by a' i } , b't, c';, z'0, we have a'rk= l/ark; a'rj = arj/ark, b'r~ br/a,.ka'ik = -aik/ark, c'j,~ -ck/ark; a'^ = an — aikarj/ark, c'- = c/ — ckarj/ark, bl = bi - br aik/ark, z'0 = z0 4- brck/ark.
for j ^ k; for i ^ r; for i ^ r, j ^ fe; for j ^ k; for i ^ r;
The element ark is called the pivot of the iteration. It is chosen in the following manner: (a) Its column index can refer to any column k that has
555
ck > 0; this ensures that the objective function is nondecreasing. If there is no such ck, the maximum has been reached, (b) After such a column k is chosen, if all aik ^ 0 in that column, the problem is unbounded. Otherwise we choose the ark > 0 for which bi/aik is smallest. This ensures that the new basic solution is feasible. It is standard procedure to choose for introduction into the solution that xc from among all eligible ones for which ck is largest. Extensive experimental evidence suggests that the number of iterations required to solve linear programs is highly sensitive to the particular pivot choice criterion employed and that many criteria exist which are more efficient than the standard one (Kuhn & Quandt 1963). A characteristic of this form of the simplex method is that it is a primal algorithm—that is, the current solution to the primal problem is feasible throughout the computation. The dual simplex method is completely analogous and differs only in that dual feasibility is preserved throughout the computations. The column vectors in a simplex tableau can be expressed in terms of the inverse (if it exists) of the matrix of coefficients corresponding to the basic variables. This inverse matrix is altered when a basic variable is replaced by a nonbasic variable. The change in the basic inverse can be expressed by multiplying the old inverse by a certain elementary matrix. From the computational point of view we can simplify the solution of a linear program by keeping track of the successive elementary matrices necessary to effect the requisite transformations. Using this procedure is called using the product form of the inverse. If k denotes the pivot column and if aik > 0 and bi = 0 at any stage in the solution of a linear program, the program is said to be degenerate. Degenerate linear programs can cycle—that is, it is possible that a particular sequence of simplex tableaus will repeat indefinitely without any further improvement in the objective function, even though the maximum has not been reached. Although artificial examples exhibiting the property of cycling have been constructed (Hoffmann 1953; Beale 1955), in practice, cycling does not seem to have occurred. Since the appearance of degeneracy in a problem is preceded by a nonunique choice of a pivot in a given column of a tableau, cycling could normally be avoided by making a random choice among potential pivots if more than one is available. Should this procedure fail to avoid degeneracy, there are various methods of perturbing the original problem that guarantee that cycling and degeneracy will be avoided. The development of the simplex method as a whole can be credited
556
PROGRAMMING
largely to G. B. Dantzig (Dantzig, Orden, & Wolfe 1954; Dantzig 1963). Applications and special techniques The diet problem. The diet problem is to find the cheapest diet that satisfies prescribed nutritional requirements. One of the first problems to be formulated as a linear programming problem (Stigler 1945), it is formally analogous to the activity analysis problem. Suppose there are n foods whose prices are p,, • • • ,pn and m nutrients whose minimum requirements are b^, • • • , bm. Let XT , • • • , xn be the amounts of each food included in tht diet, and let ai;- be the amount of the zth nutrient in the jth food. Then the diet problem is to minimize
E Pixj, subject to E a>uXj
Matrix games. Two-person zero-sum games can easily be formulated and solved as linear programs [see GAME THEORY]. Let an, i= 1, • • • ,m, 7 = 1, • • • , n, be the payoff from player n to player i if i employs his ith pure strategy and n his jth. Irrespective of the (pure) strategy employed by player n, player i, utilizing a maximin criterion, would wish to use the strategy that will ensure him an amount at least equal to some number V, called the value of the game. He will play his various pure strategies with probabilities x,, • • • , xm. The requirement that his expected gain not be less than V (irrespective of the strategy employed by player n) can be expressed by
If V ^ 0, we choose a X large enough so that a solution can be found to ^=1a'.fx. > V, j = 1, • • • , n, where a'i} = a^ + X. This transformation leaves the optimal mixed strategy unchanged. For further material on the application of linear programming to matrix games, see Tucker (1960). Transportation and assignment problems. Assume that a commodity is available at m sources in amounts ai7 i = 1, • • • , m, and is required at n destinations in amounts b,•, j = 1, • • • , n. Assuming that the total supply (EL a i) equals the total demand (E^^ ) an^ tnat tne unit cost °^ shipping from source i to destination 7 is the constant ci}, i = 1, • • • , m, 7 = 1, • • • , n, how can demands be satisfied so that no source is required to ship more than is available at that source and so that the total cost of shipping is minimized? The formulation of this problem, known as the transportation problem, is as follows: define x^ as the amount shipped from source i to destination j; then minimize
subject to 7 = 1, • • • , n;
0,
for all i, j.
The equations above express the requirements that all demands be satisfied and that no availabilities be exceeded. One of the m + n equalities above will always be linearly dependent on the others; thus, in the absence of degeneracy, a solution will consist of m m + n — I nonzero shipments. An important propE^*,^V, ;• = ! , • • • , TO; erty of the transportation problem is that if the i=l m ai and bj are integers, the solution of the transpory x -1--i j /._j *A"i tation problem will also consist of integers. Variants of the transportation problem are obtained (a) by assigning capacity limits to the various routes from source to destination, expressed by We transform this statement of the problem into a constraints of the type x^ ^k^, and (b) by perlinear program by defining z, = Xi/V, i= 1, • • • , m. mitting a shipment from i to j to go via some interThen, assuming that V > 0, the problem is to mediate destination(s), resulting in what is called minimize the transshipment problem (Orden 1956). J_ The transportation problem is closely related to V the assignment problem. Consider the problem of subject to assigning n persons to n tasks in such a manner 7 = 1 • • • 77 • that exactly one person is assigned to each task. 1, E CLij J — - , , '*> It is assumed that we can measure the effectiveness z, > 0, of each person in each task on some cardinal scale. i=l, • • • , m. 1
PROGRAMMING If the effectiveness of the iih person in the jth task is given by e-tj, we wish to maximize
557
maximization problem of the corporation may be expressed as the problem of maximizing ^X, + c' 2 X 2 , subject to A,X 2 =
subject to
E xu = i, i=l
n
E /=i xu = i, Xi: > 0.
The solution to the above mathematical problem is the solution to the assignment problem, since its formal analogy with the transportation problem guarantees that the solution values for the x t j will be integers. Hence, each xu will be either 0 or 1; x,i = 0 means that the ith person is not assigned to the jth task, and xi; = 1 means that he is. The equality constraints ensure that one and only one man will be assigned to each task. There are various methods for solving the transportation and the assignment problems. The most common are the simplex method—which is computationally easier in these cases than in a general linear programming problem—and variants of the Hungarian method due to H. W. Kuhn (1955). Some of the variants of the Hungarian method can also be used to solve the so-called network flow problem, the objective of which is to maximize the flow from a single source to a single destination (sink) through a network of intermediate nodes (Ford & Fulkerson 1962). The close relation between these network-oriented problems and the technique of graph theory has resulted in fruitful applications of graph theory to certain types of linear programming problems. The transportation problem was originated by F. L. Hitchcock (1941) andT. C. Koopmans (1951). Decomposition in linear programming. Certain problems are characterized by the fact that they can be represented as two (or more) almost independent problems. A case in point is the productionscheduling problem of a corporation that has two divisions. Assume for argument's sake that each division faces production constraints that are independent of those faced by the other division. Thus, the amounts of labor, raw materials, and other material inputs used by one division in no way depend upon the amounts of these inputs used by the other division. There may, however, exist certain over-all corporate constraints, perhaps of a financial nature. In such circumstances the profit
B,X 2 0, X,,
0.
Here X, and X2 are vectors of activity levels; b 0 , b, , and b, are vectors of resource availabilities; and A,, A2 , B,, and B2 are matrices of input coefficients specifying the amount of the ith resource necessary to sustain one unit of the jf'th activity. The first set of equalities represents the over-all corporate constraints; the second and third sets represent the two divisions' respective constraints. Very large problems (involving tens of thousands of constraints) exhibiting this type of structure can be solved efficiently by the decomposition principle. The decomposition principle rests upon the following basic observations : (a) The solution of a linear program can always be expressed as a convex combination of the extreme points of the convex feasible set of solutions. This representation is called the executive or master program, (b) If the given problem is rewritten in terms of the extreme points, we obtain a new problem with substantially fewer constraints but with many more variables, (c) The solution method is not contingent on our finding all extreme points. On the contrary, columns of coefficients can be generated when needed (for introduction into the simplex tableau ) by the solution of certain small subprograms, each consisting of the independent divisional constraints, (d) The solution process is an iterative one that consists of the following steps: (i~) a feasible solution to the executive program is found; (zi) subprograms are solved to determine what new column is to be introduced into the executive program; (m) the new (restricted) executive program is solved; (TO) the corresponding subprograms are solved again; and so on, until an optimal solution is reached in a finite number of steps. The decomposition principle lends itself to applications of decentralized decision making. From the computational point of view, the decomposition principle extends the power of electronic computers (Dantzig 1963, chapter 23). Nonlinear programming Formulation. Cases of mathematical programming in which either the objective function or the constraints, or both, are nonlinear are referred to
558
PROGRAMMING
as instances of nonlinear programming. Examples of nonlinear programming arise frequently in economic contexts. The activity analysis example discussed in the section "Linear programming" contains two particularly severe restrictions: (a) the profit that can be obtained from producing an extra unit of a commodity is constant and is thus independent of the level of production, and (fo) the amounts of additional inputs needed to produce an additional unit of a commodity are constant and do not depend on the level of production. Thus, the linear programming formulation accounts neither for the possibility of (eventually) declining average r xofit owing to negatively sloped demand functions nor for the possibility of increasing marginal amounts of inputs, which are required for the maintenance of constant unit additions to output because of the well-known phenomenon of diminishing returns. Nonlinear programming is well suited to dealing with the case of such realistic modifications of economic models. The general nonlinear programming problem can be formulated as follows: maximize (4)
/ C^-l 5 ' ' ' 5 Xn),
The so-called saddle value problem is to find nonnegative vectors x° = (x®, • • • , xQn} and ti° = (u\, • • • , w£,) such that (x0, **°) is called the saddle value of 0, and the point (ar°, ti°) is called the saddle point of $.) That is, the saddle value problem is to find x° and ti° such that the Lagrangian function <j> has a maximum with respect to x at x°, a minimum with respect to u at u°, and a saddle point at (x°, u°). The following are the crucial theorems: (1) A necessary and sufficient condition for x° to be a solution to the (primal) maximum problem is that there exist a M° such that x° and u° are a solution to the saddle value problem. (2) Necessary and sufficient conditions for x° and u° to be a solution to the saddle value problem are (7)
= 0;
X°}** 0,
o 3
for all j, and (8)
subject to
dx}
d
= 0;
U\ ^ 0,
3 i
0,
(5) 0; 0.
(6)
Duality and the Kuhn-Tucker conditions. The necessary and sufficient conditions for a solution to the inequalities (5) and (6) to be an optimal solution are called the Kuhn-Tucker conditions (Kuhn & Tucker 1951, pp. 481-492). These conditions represent a powerful generalization of the duality theorems of linear programming. They are based on the assumption that the objective function f and the constraints gr, • • • , gm are differentiable, concave functions. (The function h(x~) is concave if, for any choice of two points x^ and x., and 0 < 0 • First appeared as PrincetonIBM Mathematics Research Project, Technical Report No. 1. GOMORY, RALPH E.; and BAUMOL, WILLIAM J. 1960 Integer Programming and Pricing. Econometrica 28:521-550. HADLEY, GEORGE 1964 Nonlinear and Dynamic Programming. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. HITCHCOCK, FRANK L. 1941 The Distribution of a Product From Several Sources to Numerous Localities. Journal of Mathematics and Physics 20:224-230. HOFFMAN, A. J. 1953 Cycling in the Simplex Algorithm. U.S. National Bureau of Standards, Report No. 2974. Washington: Government Printing Office KANTOROVICH, L. V. 1960 Mathematical Methods of Organizing and Planning Production. Management Science 6:366-422. KOOPMANS, TJALLING C. 1951 Optimum Utilization of the Transportation System. Volume 5, pages 136-145 in International Statistical Conference, Washington, D.C., 1947, Proceedings. Washington: The Conference. KUHN, HAROLD W. 1955 The Hungarian Method for the Assignment Problem. Naval Research Logistics Quarterly 2:83-97. KUHN, HAROLD W.; and QUANDT, RICHARD E. 1963 An Experimental Study of the Simplex Method. Volume 15, pages 107-124 in Symposium in Applied Mathematics, Fifteenth, Chicago and Atlantic City, 1962,
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Experimental Arithmetic, High Speed Computing and Mathematics: Proceedings. Providence: American Mathematical Society. KUHN, HAROLD; and TUCKER, A. W. 1951 Nonlinear Programming. Pages 481-492 in Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability, Second, Proceedings. Edited by Jerzy Neyman. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. ORDEN, ALEX 1956 The Transshipment Problem. Management Science 2:276-285. STIGLER, GEORGE J. 1945 The Cost of Subsistence. Journal of Farm Economics 27:303-314. TUCKER, A. W. 1960 Solving a Matrix Game by Linear Programming. IBM Journal of Research and Development 4:507-517. UZAWA, HIROFUMI 1958 The Kuhn-Tucker Theorem in Concave Programming. Pages 32-37 in Kenneth J. Arrow, Leonid Hurwicz, and Hirofumi Uzawa, Studies in Linear and Non-linear Programming. Stanford Univ. Press. WOLFE, PHILIP 1963 Methods of Nonlinear Programming. Pages 67-86 in Robert L. Graves and Philip Wolfe (editors), Recent Advances in Mathematical Programming. New York: McGraw-Hill.
PROGRAMMING, COMPUTER See COMPUTATION. PROJECTION, PSYCHOLOGICAL See DEFENSE MECHANISMS and PROJECTIVE METHODS.
PROJECTIONS See POPULATION, especially the article on POPULATION GROWTH; PREDICTION AND FORECASTING, ECONOMIC; TlME SERIES.
PROJECTIVE METHODS i. PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES ii. THE RORSCHACH TEST HI. THE THEMATIC APPERCEPTION TEST
Gardner Lindzey and Joseph S. Thorpe Samuel J. Beck William E. Henry
PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES
Projective techniques and their application represent a point of significant intersection for psychoanalytic theory, clinical psychology, social psychology, and cultural anthropology. These instruments include a wide array of materials, instructions, and interpretative rules, but in spite of this diversity, there are certain common qualities that distinguish them from other personality measures, such as inventories, ratings, or situational tests. The most distinctive feature of projective techniques concerns the presentation to the subject of a task that is relatively unstructured. This lack of
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structure involves ambiguous or vaguely defined stimuli and a relatively unrestricted set of response alternatives by means of which the subject may assign meaning to the stimulus material. It is generally assumed that in the process of choosing between the many alternatives for structuring or interpreting the ambiguous stimulus material, the subject reveals significant and fundamental aspects of himself. Ordinarily such devices are considered to be particularly responsive to latent or unconscious components of the person, and consistently there is a minimum of subject awareness concerning the purpose of the test. The response data are typically profuse and often involve fantasy or imaginary creations. The instruments are highly multidimensional; that is, they are intended to provide information concerning a large number of personality dimensions. Historical development. The origins and early development of projective tests are closely intertwined with developments within psychoanalysis. Indeed, Freud's theory of dreams and technique of dream interpretation may be considered the most important single source of the dominant ideas in this area. At about this time Jung's Studies in Wordassociation (1904-1909) appeared, which also has been heavily influential in the development of projective testing. The Rorschach test, best known of all projective tests, was developed by a student of Jung's and was undoubtedly influenced by psychoanalytic theory and practice. The term "projective technique" came to be associated with these instruments primarily as a result of the writings of Henry A. Murray and L. K. Frank during the 1930s; however, the relationship between the concept of projection and these instruments is anything but precise (see Lindzey 1961). Indeed, one can say that "projection," as the term is conventionally used within psychoanalysis today, is seldom directly involved in projective-technique responses. In the two decades following World War i there was a very rapid development and application of aptitude and ability tests as exemplified by the Stanford-Binet and various group tests. Following World War n there were comparable developments in the area of personality testing, with projective techniques receiving the most prominent attention. It was during this period that the Society for Projective Techniques, made up of persons involved in the study and application of these devices, was formed. At the same time the Journal of Projective Techniques, a journal that contains only papers dealing with these instruments, appeared. In addition, an extraordinarily large number of articles and books concerning these techniques have been
published. Even for a single instrument, such as the Rorschach test, a total bibliography would now include more than a thousand items. Moreover, within most modern graduate programs in psychology the inclusion of one or more courses dealing with projective techniques has become standard. The development and application of these instruments have been associated closely with clinical activities. For the most part, individuals drawn to these devices have been working in clinical settings, often with disturbed persons and typically under circumstances where individual subjects could be subjected to a relatively intensive and detailed study. Moreover, the techniques have been considered most attractive and useful by persons who are heavily influenced by psychoanalytic theory or some variety of holistic theory. Seldom has a heavy emphasis upon objectivity, precision, and psychometric elegance been characteristic of work with these devices. Major techniques and their classification Given these general remarks concerning the nature and origins of projective techniques, it may be helpful to provide concrete identification of the instruments by means of representative illustrations. There are many different approaches to classifying these tests (Lindzey 1959), but the most useful approach focuses on the nature of the response evoked from the subject. On this basis projective techniques may be grouped broadly into the following categories: (a) association, (b*) construction, (c) completion, (d) choice or ordering, and (e) expression. Association techniques. Included under association techniques are those instruments that tend to minimize ideation and emphasize immediacy of response. The subject is instructed not to reflect but rather to respond to the stimulus with the first word, image, or percept that occurs to him. Word association. An early and well-known example is the word association technique, which involves the oral presentation of a series of disconnected words, one at a time, to which the subject is instructed to respond with the first word that occurs to him. Typically, both the subject's association and reaction time to each word are recorded. While many lists of words have been used, the most frequently encountered are the early list by Kent and Rosanoff (1910), which was designed as a psychiatric screening device, and the more recent list by Rapaport, Schafer, and Gill (19451946). The latter is similar to Jung's (e.g., 1904-1909), which contains many words of psychoanalytic significance, particularly with regard to psychosexual conflict. Depending upon the par-
PROJECTIVE METHODS: Projective Techniques ticular purpose of the user, scoring and interpretation may involve an analysis of the content of the associations, in terms of their relevance to particular motives or conflict areas such as dominance or aggression, or if a judgment concerning the degree of general adjustment is to be obtained, the subject's responses may be compared with the typical performance of psychiatric and normal groups on the same list of words. In addition to their content, associations are often analyzed in terms of proportion of common responses, temporal deviations, and associative disturbances, such as repeating the stimulus word or giving extremely remote associations. Rorschach and other inkblot techniques. By far the most popular projective technique, in terms of frequency of clinical and research application, is the Rorschach technique (Rorschach 1921), which consists of ten symmetrical inkblots. Typically the cards are presented individually and in a set order, with instructions to the subject that he report what the figures resemble or suggest to him. Responses to each card are recorded verbatim and reaction times are noted, following which an inquiry is conducted wherein the subject identifies the characteristics of the stimuli which determined or contributed to his associations. [See RORSCHACH.] There are a variety of scoring systems in use, the most popular of which are by Beck (Beck et al. 1944) and Klopfer (Klopfer et al. 1954-1956). Those aspects of responses which are usually scored are location, the relative size of the blot area incorporated (including the use of white space); determinants, the use of color and shading in comparison with the form or shape of the blot; and the presence of movement—either human, animal, or inanimate—in the response. Also noted are the accuracy of form perception, the incidence of popular and original responses, and the total number of responses. The content of responses is also classified, at least in terms of human, animal, anatomical, nature, and abstract classes, although some scoring conventions are quite elaborate in this respect. Various scores, representing the number of responses falling into each category, are usually further transformed into ratios of scores which are considered essential for interpretation. Most systems of interpretation of these quantitative scores and ratios prescribe inferences to be drawn regarding the more general organization of personality, rather than specific motives or conflicts. It is usually emphasized that the interpreter must consider the entire profile of scores rather than isolated scores. Modifications of this technique have involved developing new stimuli and more objective scoring
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procedures, as well as alternate forms and group versions of the test. Perhaps the most interesting modification is the Holtzman Inkblot Technique (Holtzman et al. 1961), which introduced desirable psychometric properties to the basic Rorschach approach. Construction techniques. Construction techniques require the subject to go beyond simple association to a stimulus and to create or construct a more elaborate product, which is typically a complete art form, such as a story or picture. Thematic Apperception Test. Next to the Rorschach, the most widely used of all projective techniques is the Thematic Apperception Test (Murray 1943). The TAT consists of cards containing black-and-white pictures of vague scenes, and the instructions request the subject to compose a story to fit each picture, describing what the people are thinking and feeling, what led up to the scene depicted, and what the outcome will be. Analysis of TAT stories, which are usually recorded verbatim, is far from standardized, although a number of general scoring systems have been proposed (e.g., Aron 1949; Bellak 1947; Stein 1948; Tomkins 1947). Most of these systems focus on the content of behavior and experiences described in the story, although they differ considerably in the unit of analysis employed and the degree of inference required. As used clinically, interpretation typically has not rested upon a set of objective scores for specific variables. The basic assumption of most schemes is one of a psychological isomorphy between dispositions attributed to the part of the major character in the story and those that exist in the storyteller. The Blacky Pictures. Closely related to the TAT is the Blacky Pictures test (Blum 1949), which is intended to investigate 11 specific psychoanalytic variables, including oral eroticism, oedipal intensity, and castration anxiety. The test consists of 12 cartoons concerned with experiences in the life of a dog named Blacky, including his relationships with Mama, Papa, and Tippy, a sibling. As its central feature the procedure involves story construction in response to the pictures but adds indications of preference and a series of direct questions for each picture. While administration is highly standardized, scoring and interpretation are not. Completion techniques. Completion techniques present some type of incomplete product, with the requirement that the subject complete it in any manner he wishes and the restriction that the completions meet certain standards of good form or rationality. Best known of these devices are the sentence-completion tests (e.g., Rotter & Wilier-
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PROJECTIVE METHODS: Projective Techniques
man 1947), which are widely used by both clinicians and personality investigators. Typically such a device consists of thirty to one hundred brief sentence stems which the subject is instructed to complete with the first words that come to mind. In some cases the instructions to the subject emphasize that the completions should reveal his own feelings. The type of scoring employed and the customary inferences derived from this technique suggest its close kinship with the TAT. The technique is considered most efficient in assessing the content of personality (attitudes, motives, and conflicts) at a more conscious or manifest level than such instruments as the Rorschach or TAT. Other examples of completion tests are story-completion and argument-completion tests and the Rosenzweig Picture-Frustration Study (Rosenzweig 1949). Choice or ordering techniques. Choice or ordering techniques require the respondent to choose from a number of alternatives the item or arrangement that fits some specified criterion, such as meaningfulness, relevance, or attractiveness. In some cases, such as multiple-choice versions of the Rorschach (Harrower & Steiner 1945) and the TAT (Goodstein 1954), the subject is required to select from a number of hypothetical responses the one that seems most appropriate to him. The Szondi Test. Perhaps best known of these techniques is the Szondi Test. This test was devised in the late 1930s by Szondi, a Hungarian psychiatrist (1947), and made popular in the United States through the efforts of Susan Deri (1949). The test materials consist of 48 photographs of individuals drawn from eight psychiatric diagnostic categories. A rather complex and lengthy administration procedure elicits from the subject expressions of preference for the different photographs. The test is based on the assumption that a person can be described in terms of eight "needsystems" (presumably reflected in the photographs), with the subject's selections and rejections indicating the degree of strength or tension in each. Although the test enjoyed considerable popularity in clinical settings during the 1950s, more recently there has been less evidence of application. Despite some positive features, such as the recommendation of repeated administrations and a highly objective scoring system, the theoretical rationale of the test has appeared to be anything but compelling to most American psychologists. Attempts at empirical verification of the test seem to be overwhelmingly negative (Borstelmann & Klopfer 1953). A recent volume by Szondi, Moser, and Webb (1959) provides a strongly partisan description of the technique and its rationale.
Picture Arrangement Test. A more recent example of an ordering technique is the TomkinsHorn Picture Arrangement Test. This device consists of 25 plates, each of which contains three line drawings that depict the same figure involved in different but related activities. The subject is asked to indicate the order in which these activities took place and to provide a sentence indicating what is going on in the picture. The efforts of the authors (Tomkins & Miner 1957) have been devoted primarily to developing objective methods for dealing with the arrangements selected by the subject, although they provide suggestions for the use of the descriptive statements as well. This test is unique in its consideration for interpretation of only those responses that are relatively rare in occurrence. Rare response patterns from a subject provide a basis for estimating certain tendencies such as hypochondriasis or avoidance of people and for distinguishing normal from abnormal subjects. The existence of a highly objective scoring procedure, coupled with the demonstration of certain distinct differences in the performances of normal and disturbed subjects, identifies this instrument as possessing objective and normative properties that are not encountered anywhere else in the domain of projective techniques. On the other hand, the data collected are sharply delimited, and the process of demonstrating that the test is sensitive or useful has only begun. Expressive techniques. Expressive methods differ from construction techniques in that they place as much emphasis upon the manner and style in which the product is created as upon the product itself. They are often considered to be therapeutic as well as diagnostic devices, since the subject is presumed to relieve his difficulties in the process of revealing them. Play. Most popular among the expressive instruments are play techniques. Originating in play therapy, these methods have been adapted for the diagnosis and measurement of personality, primarily in children. All the approaches present the subject with an array of toys which he is encouraged to use in some manner. Among the objects frequently selected are dolls representing adults and children of both sexes and various age levels. Typically the examiner is responsible for recording as much of the subject's behavior as possible, including his choice and arrangement of toys, accompanying comments, and expressive behavior. Except for the work carried out by Sears and his associates, which has focused on measures of aggression and dependency (Sears et al. 1953), little has been done with this technique in the way
PROJECTIVE METHODS: Projective Techniques of standardization and specification of just how the process of interpretation shall take place. In most instances it is assumed that the examiner will recognize important motives and conflicts when he sees them. Drawing and painting. There is also a variety of drawing and painting techniques that have been used in personality assessment. Attention has centered chiefly on procedures using drawings of the human figure, the most publicized of which have been those of Buck (1948) and Machover (1949). When the test is administered individually, the examiner usually notes the subject's comments, the sequence of parts drawn, and other procedural details. Scoring of human-figure-drawing tests is essentially qualitative, being concerned with such stylistic features as the figure's stance, size, and position on the page, disproportions, shading, and erasures. Interpretation of both drawing and painting techniques is far from, precise, in some cases depending largely upon general clinical wisdom, coupled with a knowledge of some specific rules or generalizations relating certain features of the drawing or painting to personality characteristics. Evaluation and interpretation The preceding survey of the more important examples of different types of projective techniques illustrates the extreme diversity of these instruments. Discussions of projective techniques in a critical context will be found in volumes by Anastasi (1961), Cronbach (1949), and Lindzey (1961). General sources of more detailed information are books by Abt and Bellak (1950), Anderson and Anderson (1951), and Zubin, Eron, and Schumer (1965). The interpretation of projective-technique responses is carried out under conditions that vary from the highly molecular and objective to the most generalized and intuitive. Virtually all the individual tests have interpretative manuals to assist the user in extracting useful psychological information from them, and in the case of the better-known instruments, such as the TAT and Rorschach, there are dozens of books and monographs and hundreds of articles dealing with general and specific problems of interpretation. In spite of the bulk and diversity of this interpretative array, there are certain generalizations that can be made concerning customary interpretative practice. The interpretation of projective techniques in individual assessment is more often qualitative and subjective than it is quantitative and objective. Even in those instances where the responses may
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be subjected to objective scoring that leads to numerical values, the translation of these scores into psychological statements usually involves complex and unspecified processes (Levy 1963). In research use, on the other hand, it is much more common to find the response data subjected to objective scoring, which in turn leads to quantitative scores on specified personality dimensions. If we make the reasonable assumption that the chief interest of the person using projective techniques is in enduring dispositions or in personality characteristics, we find that the customary task of the interpreter is enormously complicated by the sensitivity of these instruments to a wide variety of determinants, only a small proportion of which are relevant to enduring motivational or personality dimensions. Thus, it is well established (Gleser 1963; Lindzey 1961; Masling 1960) that projectivetechnique responses are influenced by temporary or fleeting psychological states, by the nature of the stimuli that are presented, by a number of response sets, by individual differences unrelated to personality factors (for example, differences in intelligence), and by a wide variety of situational factors (for example, examiner—subject interaction, past testing experiences, reason for taking the test). Given these observations, it is clear that the interpreter must make every effort to demonstrate that those aspects of the response data being used in interpretation are not products of variation in nonpersonality factors. In order to be reasonably certain of this, it is almost always necessary that the examiner know a great deal about the circumstances under which the test was administered, as well as a good deal about the subject in addition to his test responses. For this reason, most projective techniques administered in clinical settings form only part of a larger battery of intelligence and personality tests, with interpretation leaning heavily on the consistency of performance among the several tests. Despite this practice, one of the major shortcomings in the customary application of these techniques is the tendency on the part of many users to assume that all test responses are determined solely by personality variables; consequently, they exhibit a readiness to overinterpret. This caution is somewhat less important in research settings, where it is possible to control or randomize some of the factors that might otherwise distort interpretation. As we have indicated, the most extensive use of projective techniques has been in clinical situations. In the hands of clinical psychologists these instruments have played a key role in psychodiagnosis and personality description in a wide variety of psychiatric and psychological settings. These tech-
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niques have also been used extensively in connection with motivation research, or the study of consumer personality or motivation as a means of predicting buying behavior. Not surprisingly, little of the work in this area has achieved very high standards of rigor and control. Cr more scientific interest has been the use of these instruments in personality research. A sizable number of the controlled studies relevant to psychoanalysis that have been conducted have involved the use of projective techniques (Hilgard 1952; Rickers-Ovsiankina 1960). The extensive use of projective measures of achievement and affiliation motivation in a wide variety of social psychological and personality research represents another major area of application (Atkinson 1958; McClelland et al. 1953). Experimental studies of psychopathology have often made use of projective measures. The use by psychologists and cultural anthropologists of projective techniques in crosscultural studies is another area of extensive application (Kaplan 1961; Lindzey 1961; Zubin et al. 1965). Indeed, a large proportion of the studies of modal personality or national character, psychological correlates of acculturation, and personality development in nonliterate settings has involved more or less extensive dependence upon projective techniques. In view of this widespread application and the frequently partisan enthusiasm that has been associated with these techniques, it is not surprising that they have attracted a good deal of critical attention. Criticisms have generally focused upon the psychometric flaws of the instruments, including dubious reliability and validity and the frequent lack of objectivity or specificity in the administration and interpretation of the tests. There is no doubt that much of this criticism is reasonable and based upon relatively convincing data. On the other hand, certain projective instruments under certain conditions have been demonstrated to attain reasonable standards of objectivity and standardization (e.g., Atkinson 1958; Murstein 1963). The matter of validity is always complicated and particularly so when we are dealing with complex motivational concepts, especially when these are presumed to relate to covert or latent aspects of personality. While there are numerous studies (Ainsworth 1954; Lindzey 1959; Murstein 1963) that demonstrate limited predictive and concurrent validity—ability to predict future behavior or performance and to relate to concurrent criterion measures—most findings have not held up well upon cross-validation. Further, such studies do not
ordinarily deal adequately with the covert personality characteristics for which these tests are supposed to be singularly appropriate. At risk of oversimplification, we may state that when we are concerned with the validity of projective techniques, their presumed association with covert variables, complex motivational processes, and psychoanalytic concepts forces the investigator and theorist into the tangled jungle of construct validity, and this guarantees the absence of easy answers. The relation between projective techniques and psychological theory is of key importance in any consideration of the construct validity of these devices. It seems clear on the basis of a number of past examinations (e.g., Holt 1954; Conference on Contemporary Issues . . . 1961; Lindzey 1961) that, while there are some important links between these tests and several varieties of psychological theory, particularly psychoanalytic theory, there is little in the way of firm and formal association between theory and method. Relatively detailed discussion of the validity of these instruments may be found in Ainsworth (1954), Cronbach (1949), Harris (1960), and Lindzey (1961). At the present time, no simple statements can be made concerning the over-all validity of even a single projective test, let alone the entire class of tests. Indeed the question of general validity is meaningless; one must always ask, Valid for what purpose? and, perhaps, Valid when used by whom and under what conditions? All things considered, it is fair to say that these techniques have not lived up to early expectations in regard to their stable sensitivity to covert motivational processes. On the other hand there is little doubt that in the hands of the sophisticated and energetic investigator they have fulfilled satisfactorily a number of important functions. As the previous discussion has indicated, there are some important areas of personality research that have been heavily dependent upon these devices, and there is agreement that some of these areas have involved significant research contributions. It is more difficult to assess the use of the instruments as they have been employed typically in clinical settings, since their function there is highly variable, depending upon the particular setting and the individual clinician. For example, it is difficult to examine Schafer's discussion (1954) of Rorschach interpretation without being convinced that the test can serve important assessment and diagnostic functions when employed in the manner he recommends and by a person of his ability. At the same time, one must admit that few clinical applications are likely to attain these high standards. One may conclude that if projective techniques
PROJECTIVE METHODS: ProjectiveTechniques represent the "royal road to the unconscious," the necessary road maps have yet to become common knowledge. Nevertheless, the instruments seem to have found a useful place within the psychologist's array of assessment tools. GARDNER LINDZEY AND JOSEPH S. THORPE [For discussion of other techniques of personality assessment, see FACTOR ANALYSIS, article on PSYCHOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS; INTERVIEWING, article OU PERSONALITY APPRAISAL; PERSONALITY MEASUREMENT; SOCIOMETRY; TRAITS. Additional relevant material may be found in ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION; FANTASY; PERSONALITY: CONTEMPORARY VIEWPOINTS, article on COMPONENTS OF AN EVOLVING PERSONOLOGICAL SYSTEM; PsYCHOMETRICS; and in the biography of RORSCHACH.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Statistical Evaluation, and Diagnostic Application of a Battery of Tests. 2 vols. Chicago: Year Book Publishers. RICKERS-OVSIANKINA, MARIA A. (editor) 1960 Rorschach Psychology. New York: Wiley. RORSCHACH, HERMANN (1921) 1942 Psychodiagnostics: A Diagnostic Test Based on Perception. 3d ed. Bern: Huber; New York: Grune. -> First published in German. ROSENZWEIG, SAUL 1949 Psycho diagnosis. New York: Grune. ROTTER, JULIAN B.; and WILLERMAN, BENJAMIN 1947 The Incomplete Sentences Test as a Method of Studying Personality. Journal of Consulting Psychology 11:43-48. SCHAFER, ROY 1954 Psychoanalytic Interpretation in Rorschach Testing: Theory and Application. Austin Riggs Foundation, Monograph Series, No. 3. New York: Grune. SEARS, R. R. et al. 1953 Some Child Rearing Antecedents of Aggression and Dependency in Young Children. Genetic Psychology Monographs 47:135-236. STEIN, MORRIS I. (1948) 1955 The Thematic Apperception Test: An Introductory Manual for Its Clinical Use With Adults. 2d ed. Reading, Mass.: AddisonWesley. SWENSON, CLIFFORD H. JR. 1957 Empirical Evaluations of Human Figure Drawings. Psychological Bulletin 54:431-466. SZONDI, LIPOT (1947) 1952 Experimental Diagnostics of Drives. New York: Grune. -» First published as Experimented Triebdiagnostik. SZONDI, LIPOT; MOSER, ULRICH; and WEBR, MARVIN W. 1959 The Szondi Test: In Diagnosis, Prognosis, and Treatment. Philadelphia: Lippincott. TOMKINS, SILVAN S. 1947 The Thematic Apperception Test: The Theory and Technique of Interpretation. New York: Grune. TOMKINS, SILVAN S.; and MINER, JOHN B. (1957) The Tomkins-Horn Picture Arrangement Test. New York: Springer. ZUBIN, JOSEPH; ERON, LEONARD D.; and SCHUMER. FLORENCE 1965 An Experimental Approach to Projective Techniques. New York: Wiley. II THE RORSCHACH TEST
The Rorschach test is one attempt at concurrently examining an individual's functioning intelligence, his emotions, and his unconscious. Aside from theoretical considerations, this has very important practical meaning for at least three disciplines—clinical psychology, psychiatry, and social work. By the time Hermann Rorschach first published his test, in 1921, all three had been forced to grope for multidimensional concepts of personality. While they were ready for objective tests that were sophisticated enough to penetrate to the deeper recesses of human behavior, they were not, to be sure, prepared to have this accomplished by ten inkblots. The Rorschach test's basic data consist of a person's free associations to ten inkblot figures. These
associations are the behaviors from which the examiner can conclude that the person is a hysteric, an obsessive neurotic, a schizophrenic, and so on, or is in sound mental health. These associations are behaviors just as are any other visible activities of an individual by which we judge his character, such as combing his hair or wearing certain kinds of clothes. The term "projective" was originally attached to this kind of test by Frank (1939). It can be justified etymologically but not clinically. The person does put forth, or project, elements of his own personality onto the stimulus. However, the word "project" had already acquired its meaning, specifically with reference to paranoid behavior, in clinical language. So "projection" now has two meanings in the languages of two closely related disciplines. Frank's designation has become affixed to these tests and appears likely to remain so. In order to attain an understanding of the behaviors which constitute the Rorschach test data, the investigator needs to know the grammar and the syntax of the test's language. The present article undertakes to sketch them. Psychological processes lueasured Rorschach found the inkblot data informative regarding three major psychological processes: intellectual control, emotional life, and fantasy life, and his own thinking pivoted around these three areas (1921). Rorschach's initial interpretation of responses to inkblots explicitly follows psychoanalytic theory, and the subsequent evolution of the test as a clinical instrument can readily be traced within the framework of that theory. We are enabled by means of the Rorschach test to describe a person in terms of his ego functioning, his emotional state, and his unconscious ideation, that is, the core areas of Freudian psychology. We are also able to identify that other set of dynamic traits, the defenses. Intellectual controls and good form. Concerning the intellectual controls, the subtitle of Rorschach's monograph (1921) indicates that diagnosis is based on perception. The person looks at inkblot forms and tells what he "sees." These perceptions of forms are the basic behavioral data derived from the test. If now we administer the test to, say, one hundred presumably normal individuals, we infer from the distribution of their responses what a normal population "sees" in the inkblots, that is, what their perceptual behaviors are like in reaction to the test. Administering it to a person about whom we know nothing, we compare his responses with those of the normal popu-
PROJECTIVE METHODS: The Rorschach Test lation. To the extent that this person responds as they do, one can infer that he sees as they do and that he is to that degree normal. This is the foundation on which the test rests. What I have described in the preceding paragraph is Rorschach's concept of good form (F+). The patient's ability to respond with such "good forms" within a certain empirically determined range is an index of his ability to see accurately; the criteria for accurate perceptions are assumed to be set by one's peers. What the test does then is to set up ten situations which establish their own frames of reference for what is accurate and inaccurate, good form or bad, reality or deviation from it. The inkblots are a cosmos in themselves. Not having any conventional meanings or reality, they can start de novo to trace out their own realities. This is the great advantage of the test's using "unstructured" stimuli. With this advantage, there also exists a corresponding responsibility for the dependability of the frame of reference, that is, the normative foundation. "Good forms" (or F+) are the nucleus for ego evaluation. The logic for this rests on the fact that the persons by whom Rorschach established his good-form criterion were assumed to be "normals," who take care of their affairs in life with the usual respect for law, custom, and morals as well as for the social graces. Such living is assumed to be motivated by the wish for the respect of one's fellow citizens. The respect that we want and that we know we derive from others is also considered to be a measure of our self-respect, of ego. Accordingly, an F+ score can be considered as a measure of ego. This deductive reasoning has been borne out inductively by clinical experience. Among persons who are very disturbed neurotically, many are also very erratic in their form perceptions. Neurotics are assumed to be persons in conflict. They have emotional urges which are inconsistent with their standards of good and bad. That is, they are motivated by urges that are ego-alien. In most cases of neurosis, the conflictual stress drains the person of his critical control power, and so his perceptual accuracy breaks down. The further observation is that the milder (clinically) the neurosis, the higher the F+ percentage; the reverse is also true. This relationship is also obtained in the study of development; the lower the age range, the lower the percentage of accurate form perception. Accuracy of form perception progresses with maturation, which is to say, with the ego's growth. A plateau
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is reached at the early adolescent years, and the percentage remains stable thereafter, assuming the relative stability of the personality. [See NEUROSIS; PERCEPTION, article on PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT; SENSORY AND MOTOR DEVELOPMENT.] When an individual's response deviates considerably from expectancy, we look for the explanation in psychological factors, usually emotional, that minimize or enhance the accuracy of perceptual responses. Excitability or agitation may break down perception. Obsessive anxiety may heighten it. Or the person's maturation may have been arrested, perhaps as a result of inadequate or damaged brain tissue, mental deficiency, or a pathological environmental climate—a family setting that has contributed toward halting the personality's growth within a childish or even infantile phase, which often occurs in schizophrenia. In these patients the Rorschach perceptual range is usually below the critical minimum both for the normal and the neurotic ranges. Such are the actual empirical data in clinical groups. To restate: the percentage of good-form perception varies predictably according to what is known clinically of the ego's growth level and of its stamina in the clinical condition. Findings of heightened perceptual accuracy agree with this logic. The responses of depressives and some very severely disturbed neurotics are very close to, and sometimes at, one hundred per cent accuracy. This is due to their crushing anxiety. It makes them incapable of seeing anything except in the most rigidly correct fashion. They overreact to their tensions and pain. They develop a character armor that severely disables them for effective adjustment to life. These conflicts are just as stressful as those of the patients whose conflicts lead to distorted perception. Such is the clinical logic. The empirical fact is that healthy individuals, and this includes those of highest intelligence, never rate at one hundred per cent F+, or form accuracy. They are liberated emotionally, and they do make mistakes. Perceptual accuracy is not the only index of the individual's ego functioning. Ego functioning includes other intellectual attributes. Principally these are attentiveness, the ability to synthesize one's percepts, the intact or pathological quality of the thought processes, and thematic content in thinking as a clue to the personal values which the patient holds. These variables and their numerous nuances are also assessed by the Rorschach test. Emotional life and color responses. Emotional life is tapped by the Rorschach test principally through the person's reactions to the color and to
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the shading tones of the blot figures. Rorschach himself described the variety of the color reactions and their psychological significances. Both his technical observations and his interpretative principles on this point have remained essentially unchanged. He had only begun to glimpse the meanings of the regions to the variations in gray, as a posthumous paper shows (see Rorschach & Oberholzer 1923). Binder (1932) first described these in detail; Oberholzer (1944) has elucidated an especially important response to the grays, that is, the vista percept; and Klopfer (1942) was the first to describe another nuance, the texture response, that is, the person responds as though he feels the stimulus. Wnat any of these variables tell us psychologically would take us far beyond the scope of the present article. Fantasy and the movement response. The most original of Rorschach's discoveries is the "movement" (Bewegung^ response. As he described it, both in his monograph (1921) and in a posthumous paper (see Rorschach & Oberholzer 1923), it is a perception of a human form as if in movement. The patient may see this in the whole blot figure or in any portion of it. While the content in the perceived form may be that of some animal, the movement must nonetheless be one which is anatomically feasible for a human being (e.g., "two bears standing on their hind feet, as if boxing," or even "two birds talking together"). Rorschach was both explicit and definitive in excluding from his fantasy concept any animal movement that is a specific characteristic activity of that animal (e.g., "a dog snapping at a butterfly"). His caution about identifying the movement determinant accurately was dictated by the critical psychological significance of these associations. They are the language by which the test reports fantasy activity in which the person is engaging, fantasy which is a wish or a fear. Fantasy is considered to be introverted emotion, that is, a repressed fear or wish. Nearly all Rorschach fantasy associations also have a significance for the patient's unconscious that is not evident in the overt associational content. The association, like the dream, expresses an idea which the patient cannot entertain in his conscious awareness. It is thus the lead to the unconscious. [See FANTASY.] The importance of such an invention in the field of personality study can hardly be overestimated. The test becomes a depth instrument. Like the dream, it communicates in an idiom seemingly innocent because it is only responses to inkblots. The test thus enables the material to bypass censorship of the ego, enabling the examiner to discern con-
flictual needs in the patient and to relate them to the entire personality structure—schizophrenic, neurotic, or healthy. It can be seen too why Rorschach was so circumspect in defining his fantasy response. The fantasy concept has since his time been extended, principally under Klopfer's influence (Klopfer 1942; Klopfer et al. 1954-1956) to include apparent movement associations that do not conform to Rorschach's definition. They have been identified by the symbol FM, that is, "form tending to movement." Examples of FM provided by one of Klopfer's co-workers (Klopfer 1942, chapter 12) are "spiders crawling up on a leaf"; "a bat turned upside down, a bat flying with his wings spread out"; "a squirrel on a stub, or a nest; just the back, with the tail sticking up." The present writer has not been convinced that these FM responses have the psychological significance of the Rorschach Bewegung, and he follows Rorschach's original technique. Application and evaluation The test currently is being used in almost all parts of the world. Aside from psychology proper, the disciplines that are much interested in it are social work, psychiatry, and anthropology. Social work agencies having recourse to it as an exploratory instrument find it an aid in assessing the severity of a client's disorder and thus are able to arrive more quickly at a treatment plan. In psychiatry the test provides important leads and thus an economical approach to differential diagnosis. To the degree of its validity the Rorschach test does, in comparatively short time, what might otherwise require many exploratory clinical sessions. As a research tool in psychotherapy the test can be administered at various stages in the course of an illness. The progress of the patient (and so the effectiveness of the therapy) can be gauged from changes in the test findings. Developmental growth can be similarly traced by applying the test to children at various ages, something that Ames, Metraux, and Walker have been doing (1959); a similar study was reported by Thetford, Molish, and Beck (1951). Anthropology is still another field in which the test has been useful in research (see Hallowell 1956). It yields information about how psychological structures vary with cultural differences. Research problems stemming from the Rorschach test are grouped broadly into three areas. One is general and experimental psychology, dealing with questions of the relations of color and shading to the affective states of the person, the
PROJECTIVE METHODS: The Rorschach Test rationale for employing the human movement response as an index of unconscious ideation, and the way in which the intellectual variables of the test provide information about the ego's functioning. In the second area are certain theoretical problems that are specifically derived from Rorschach test findings and principles. First among these is Rorschach's Erlebnistypus, or "experience balance," the ratio between the number of movement responses and the number of color responses (1921; Rorschach & Oberholzer 1923), and with it its derivative, the "experience actual" (Beck 1960). These concepts bear on the innermost emotional and individualized needs of each person. Yet these are made accessible through the objective stimuli —the Rorschach inkblot figures. The experience balance and the experience actual are known from the relative amount of externalizing or internalizing of the feelings. This recalls of course Jung's introversion-extraversion hypothesis. But the experience balance data have significance apart from introversion-extraversion. Related, too, are concepts of the psychologic structure of personality as a balance of forces—affective and intellectual, id and ego. Third, in the practical clinical field the research needs are for more and more controlled observations. Here the task is threefold: (1) Statistical data are to be gathered for various diagnostic groups to determine the means and measures of dispersion for each of the Rorschach test variables, for each clinical category. (2) To determine what the entire structure is like in the typical individual of each group, that is, how much F+ per cent, human movement, and color and other test responses occur in the typical individual. Then, assuming the Rorschach test principles are valid psychologically, how does the cofunctioning of the data in any one individual make clinical sense? (3) What are the finer nuances of responses that differentiate individuals in one clinical group from others? The test is sensitive to whether thinking is integrative or pathologic, to whether fantasy is regressive, autistic, or promising of constructive imagination, and to whether emotional life is uninhibited, a painful withdrawing, or controlled release. The goal is to constantly reinforce the test's major foundations and at the same time to discern the ever finer and finer differential diagnostic features. Validity and research value. The big question with regard to the test relates naturally to its validity. The essence of the problem is: What can be the criterion for validity of a psychological tool that undertakes to explore the person in four
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dimensions—the intellectual, the emotional, the unconscious, and the unique personal dynamics (idea content in the test associations)? A single descriptive score that can take account of the myriad features in human behavior has not yet been devised. Statistics are of course essential in this as in any psychological test. Rorschach noted his dependence on them (1921). The present writer and his colleagues have established the statistical bases in adults (Beck et al. 1950) and in children (Thetford et al. 1951). These are means and measures of dispersion for each Rorschach variable as found in the population samples. These statistics enable us to say whether the person under scrutiny deviates, and how far, from the norm. What he is like in his total adjustment is then inferred from the configuration set up by the several variables and the comparison of the configuration with those established for the several clinical groups. The most sophisticated view that can for the present be taken is that which has been summed up for the clinical field generally by the American Psychological Association's Committee on Clinical Tests. According to Cronbach and Meehl, "it is not a question of finding an imperfect criterion but of finding any criterion at all. The psychologist . . . cannot expect to find a clear unitary behavior criterion" ([1955] 1956, p. 180). A correspondence between a response to a Rorschach test picture and some outside, objective measure is not now within this writer's aspirations, or within those of anyone dealing realistically with the test. The clinical information about each patient, and predictability of test results throughout the course of the patient's treatment, must for the present be our validating source. A psychological tool with the objective and promise of the Rorschach test was bound to stimulate new research from a variety of viewpoints. Reports of investigations with the test have increased with the years. The 1965 Mental Measurements Yearbook contains 733 Rorschach references, bringing the total up to 3,030 in the six volumes of this series published to date. As was to be expected, validating studies have been anything but one-sidedly favorable. They range from sharp refutations and rejections to unequivocal acceptance and enthusiasm. A serious difficulty in evaluating the reported publications is that very few replicate others in method, whether of administration or processing results. Almost none publish samples of the raw data, that is, the patients' associations. Variations in basic procedures and in interpretive principles are in fact very wide. In
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part these are consequences of the new perspectives that have brought about alterations both in technique and in interpretation. The most radical innovations have been Klopfer's (1942; Klopfer et al. 1954-1956). He follows the phenomenological orientation in evaluating the test's data. The objective of the phenomenologist—one may say his aspiration—is to know and describe the mental process of the other. This assumes the ability to enter the mind of the other. While the behaviorist sees this as a consummation devoutly to be wished, his orientation is that such entry can never be made; the objective is illusory; all that we cr.ii know of another, including his mental processes, we know from his behavior. The behaviorist can respect the phenomenologist. The school has its very able exponents. But as Mandler and Kessen put it, phenomenology is "unashamedly subjective" (1959). The behaviorist's temperament limits him to objective data. Other investigators who have made important contributions are, in the United States: Piotrowski, on brain pathology (1937); Molish (1958), on Navy, especially submarine, personnel, and also on a South Polar expedition; Schafer, with reference to psychoanalytic concepts (1954); Schachtel (1941; 1943), on theoretical questions; and Ames, Metraux, and Walter (1959), Hertz (1960), and Rabin and Haworth (1960), on childhood and adolescence. The principal American general texts are Klopfer (Klopfer et al. 1954-1956); Piotrowski (1957); Anderson and Anderson (1951); RickersOvsiankina (I960); Beck (I960); and Beck, with others (1944). In Europe, the principal names are those of Loosli-Usteri, whose work deals with disturbed children (1938); Oberholzer, on various clinical or theoretical topics (1931; 1944); and Zulliger, who published (posthumously for BehnEschenburg) an alternate series of test cards (see Zulliger 1941). An important Danish text is that of Bohm (1951). SAMUEL J. BECK [Directly related are the entries PERSONALITY MEASUREMENT; PSYCHOMETRICs; and the biography of RORSCHACH.] BIBLIOGRAPHY AMES, LOUISE B.; METRAUX, RUTH W.; and WALKER, RICHARD N. 1959 Adolescent Rorschach Responses: Developmental Trends From Ten to Sixteen Years. New York: Hoeber. ANDERSON, HAROLD H.; and ANDERSON, GLADYS L. (editors) (1951) 1956 An Introduction to Protective Techniques & Other Devices for Understanding the Dynamics of Human Behavior. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
BECK, SAMUEL J. 1960 The Rorschach Experiment: Ventures in Blind Diagnosis. New York: Grune. BECK, SAMUEL J. 1966 Emotions and Understanding. International Psychiatry Clinics 3, no. 1. BECK, SAMUEL J. et al. (1944) 1966 Rorschach's Test. Volume I: Basic Processes. 3d ed. New York: Grune. BECK, SAMUEL J. et al. 1950 The Normal Personality as Projected in the Rorschach Test. Journal of Psychology 30:241-298. BINDER, HANS 1932 Die Helldunkeldeutungen im psychodiagnostischen Experiment von Rorschach. Zurich: Fiissli. BOHM, EWALD B. (1951) 1958 A Textbook in Rorschach Test Diagnosis for Psychologists, Physicians and Teachers. Translated by Anne G. Beck and Samuel J. Beck. New York: Grune. -» First published as Lehrhuch der Rorschach-Psychodiagnostik, fur Psychologen, Arzte, und Pddagogen. CRONBACH, LEE J. 1949 Statistical Methods Applied to Rorschach Scores: A Review. Psychological Bulletin 46:393-429. CRONBACH, LEE J. ; and MEEHL, P. E. (1955) 1956 Construct Validity in Psychological Tests. Pages 174-204 in Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven (editors), The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. -» First published in Volume 52 of the Psychological Bulletin. FRANK, LAWRENCE K. 1939 Projective Methods for the Study of Personality. Journal of Psychology 8:389413. HALLOWELL, A. IRVING 1956 The Rorschach Technique in Personality and Culture Studies. Volume 2, pages 458-544 in Bruno Klopfer et al., Developments in the Rorschach Technique. New York: World. HERTZ, MARGUERITE R. 1960 The Rorschach in Adolescence. Pages 29-60 in Albert I. Rabin and Mary R. Haworth (editors), Projective Techniques With Children. New York: Grune. KLOPFER, BRUNO (1942) 1946 The Rorschach Technique: A Manual for a Projective Method of Personality Diagnosis. . . . New York: World. -» A supplement of 44 pages is added in the 1946 edition. KLOPFER, BRUNO et al. 1954-1956 Developments in the Rorschach Technique. 2 vols. New York: World. -» Volume 1: Technique and Theory. Volume 2: Fields of Application. LOOSLI-USTERI, MARGUERITE (1938) 1958 Manuel pratique du test de Rorschach. 3d ed. Paris: Hermann. -» First published as Le diagnostic individuel chez I'enfant au moyen du test de Rorschach. MANDLER, GEORGE; and KESSEN, WILLIAM 1959 The Language of Psychology. New York: Wiley. Mental Measurements Yearbook. -» See especially Volume 6, published in 1965. MOLISH, HERMAN B. 1958 Schizophrenic Reactive Types in a Naval Hospital Population as Evaluated by Rorschach Test. Unpublished manuscript. MOLISH, HERMAN B. 1959 Contributions of Projective Tests to Psychological Diagnoses in Organic Brain Damage. Pages 190-230 in Samuel J. Beck and Herman B. Molish (editors), Reflexes to Intelligence: A Reader in Clinical Psychology. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. OBERHOLZER, EMIL 1931 Zur Differentialdiagnose psychischer Folgezustande nach Schadeltraumen mittels des Rorschachschen Formdeuteversuchs. Zentralblatt
PROJECTIVE METHODS: The Thematic Apperception Test fur die gesamte Neurologic und Psychiatric 136:596629. OBERHOLZER, EMIL (1944) 1960 Rorschach's Experiment and the Alorese. Volume 2, pages 588-640 in Cora DuBois, The People of Alor: A Social-psychological Study of an East Indian Island. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Harper. PIOTROWSKI, ZYGMUNT A. L. 1937 The Rorschach Ink Blot Method in Organic Disturbances of the Central Nervous System. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 86:525-537. PIOTROWSKI, ZYGMUNT A. L. 1957 Perceptanalysis: A Fundamentally Reworked, Expanded, and Systematized Rorschach Method. New York: Macmillan. RABIN, ALBERT I.; and HA WORTH, MARY R. (editors) 1960 Protective Techniques With Children. New York: Grune. RiCKERS-OvsiANKiNA, MARIA A. (editor) 1960 Rorschach Psychology. New York: Wiley. RORSCHACH, HERMANN (1921) 1942 Psychodiagnostics: A Diagnostic Test Based on Perception. 3d ed. Bern: Huber; New York: Grune. -> First published in German. RORSCHACH, HERMANN: and OBERHOLZER, E. (1923) 1924 The Application of the Interpretation of Form to Psychoanalysis. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 60:225-248, 359-379. -» Published posthumously. First published as "Zur Auswertung des Formdeutversuches fur die Psychoanalyse." Reprinted in 1942 in Hermann Rorschach's Psychodiagnostics. SCHACHTEL, ERNEST 1941 The Dynamic Perception and the Symbolism of Form. Psychiatry 4:79-96. SCHACHTEL, ERNEST 1943 On Color and Affect: Contributions to the Understanding of Rorschach's Test. Psychiatry 6:393-409. SCHAFER, ROY 1954 Psychoanalytic Interpretation in Rorschach Testing: Theory and Application. Austin Riggs Foundation, Monograph Series, No. 3. New York: Grune. STARK, STANLEY 1966a Role-taking, Empathic Imagination and Rorschach Human Movement Responses: A Review of Two Literatures. Perceptual and Motor Skills 23:243-256. STARK, STANLEY 1966& Toward the Psychology of Knowledge. II: Two Kinds of Foresight and Foresight Theorizing. Perceptual and Motor Skills 23:547-574. THETFORD, WILLIAM N.; MOLISH, HERMAN B.; and BECK, SAMUEL J. 1951 Developmental Aspects of Personality Structure in Normal Children. Journal of Projective Techniques 15:58-78. ZULLIGER, HANS (1941) 1952 Einfilhrung in den EehnRorschach Test. 3d ed. Bern: Huber. Ill THE THEMATIC APPERCEPTION TEST
The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective method for the investigation of personality that consists of a series of 20 pictures about which individuals are instructed to tell stories (Murray 1943). While instructions vary somewhat among users of the test, they all request that the person being tested relate a plot with a beginning, a. middle, and an end. They ask the individual to
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use his imagination freely in order to tell what the people are thinking and feeling. Individuals tell a story for each picture presented to them, with minimal intervention of the tester except mild encouragement and occasional instruction to be sure to include any crucial part (the beginning, the intervening middle events, or the outcome), should it be omitted. The pictures were chosen by Henry A. Murray, Christiana D. Morgan (Morgan & Murray 1935), and the staff of the Harvard Psychological Clinic involved in the research work resulting in the volume Explorations in Personality (1938). These pictures were derived from a wide range of sources according to the judgment of that staff as to which were most consistently revealing of personality trends in subjects in clinical study. As originally presented the pictures consist of a series of 10 pictures used for all subjects and an additional group of 20 that are coded for age (prepubescent and postpubescent) and sex. The examiner draws from these 20 an additional 10 appropriate to the age and sex of the subject being tested. Pictures are numbered and are given in a standard order reflected by this numbering. Underlying assumptions. The underlying logic of the full test, and of the particular pictures which compose the test, rests upon the assumption that when persons are asked to assign meaning to a stimulus which is essentially ambiguous, they will tend to reveal their own basic assumptions about people and human interaction; from these statements, underlying personality trends may be deduced. This assumption leads to the selection of pictures covering a fairly wide range of usual, and some highly unusual, kinds of personal or interpersonal situations. Some pictures are considered more structured—less ambiguous in their apparent meaning—than others; that is, the situations as described are quite clear-cut, and there is little question about the identification of the scenes. The specific actions in which the persons are engaged, however, what brought them about, how they will come out, what the persons are thinking and feeling, do remain ambiguous. The subject is asked to imagine these elements in his story, and his decisions are seen as reflecting his underlying personality traits. Elsewhere in the series are pictures that are more ambiguous in their basic identification. These less-structured pictures are normally seen as calling for greater imagination on the part of the subject. While they provide information on the response of the subject to less definite stimuli, they are not necessarily more revealing of the subject's
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personality. A totally blank white card is also included. Administration. Variations upon administration methods revolve around the questions of the number of cards to be used, whether they are given in one session or two, and the use of various laborsaving procedures. Murray originally proposed that the set be divided into two sets of 10, the second being administered one day after the first and with increased emphasis in the instructions upon full use of the imagination. Some investigators prefer this method (Stein 1948), while others (Henry 1956) utilize a single session and reduce to about 15 the total number of cards administered. Administration in groups, with projected slides, is generally not preferred but has been shown to be a useful method (Murstein 1963, pp. 45-48). Selfadministered forms have been devised and found useful, at least for adult subjects of average to above-average education (Henry & Gardner 1949). Other labor-saving devices have also been used successfully during the preferred individual administration, though in each instance effort is made to maintain good rapport between subject and examiner and to reduce any possible distractive effect of such devices as shorthand or recording equipment. Interpretation Any of a variety of psychodynamic personality theories are appropriate to the analysis of the TAT for its original purpose—the study of unconscious and underlying aspects of personality. Murray, in his manual for testers (1943), suggested a framework based upon his conceptual analysis of personality in need-press terms. This analysis provides a series of categories of motivational states. Needs refer to inner states that can possibly be expressed, for example, N achievement (need for achievement), N affiliation, N sex, N order. Press refers to inner states, but to those involving a perception of some outer event or force acting upon the individual. The analysis of TAT stories in this system involves the translation, using a set of definitions, of story content into the appropriate need or press and the interconnecting of these categories into a ihema descriptive of the entire story. The need-press or the combination of them into a thema is thought to represent motivational trends in the subject. To derive a personality description or a clinical diagnosis from such statements of need, press, and thema still requires that the examiner interpret the material along the lines of some more comprehensive personality theory. This is commonly done in some form of psychoanalyti-
cally based theory. Some workers with the test (e.g., Bellak 1954) see their analyses as dealing with unconscious elements of personality or follow a strongly psychoanalytic form of analysis. Some, still within this essentially clinical framework of individual case analysis, see their analyses as, in addition, reflecting upon preconscious, ego-related aspects of behavior. This latter focus of analysis would include more attention upon the cognitive aspects of personality and social role preferences and would lead more directly to examining underlying motivations in relation to behavioral events. Procedures in analysis and theoretical concepts used depend somewhat upon the conception of the examiner as to the basic nature of TAT data. Most interpreters who have published statements of their methods assume that the TAT data represent interactions between deeper personality trends and current images of interpersonal situations. While the TAT data are clearly prompted in part by underlying dynamic forces, it is apparent that the stories as told are also influenced by various other factors. These include some cognitive abilities of the subject, his understanding of the formal instructions, his assumptions about the nature of a story, the unique properties of the pictures themselves, and the fact that the test-taking act and circumstances are themselves social interactions. Holt (1961) provides an important discussion of this topic. For documentation of specific methods and their logic and conceptual background, see Bellak (1954), Henry (1956), Tomkins (1947), Stein (1948), Holt (1958), Schafer (1958), and Wyatt (1947). An interpretive lexicon is provided by Lindzey and his associates (1959). This lexicon is not a system of analysis but rather a summary of findings from a variety of empirical studies or of differentiating properties of TAT stories proposed by various interpreters. A summary and analysis of common assumptions regarding interpretive logics is to be found in Lindzey (1952). In general these systems of interpretation rest upon the earlier stated assumptions that the story as told is, in large part, the invention of the storyteller and that the properties characteristic of that invention stem from tendencies characteristic of the subject. Interpreters vary in the emphasis which they give to the determining influence of the stimuli pictures themselves, though in principle all acknowledge that influence. The analysis of the properties of the stories thought relevant to the personality analysis and the particular relevance proposed may best be seen in the references given in the preceding paragraph. For illustrative purposes, however, the properties of stories sug-
PROJECTIVE METHODS: The Thematic Apperception Test gested by Henry (1956) will suffice. In broad outline, it is suggested that stories may be analyzed in two basic categories with various subdivisions. These are content and form. Content calls attention to the fact that stories differ in topic, in plot, in characteristics attributed to persons, in actions and emotions reported, in the interrelations of persons, and in the outcome and fate of all of these. Form refers to the manner in which any particular story is told. It would call attention to the length and linguistic facility, to the sophistication or crudeness of language, to the order and organization of plots, and to the utilization of large inclusive concepts or observations of small details. The nature of the sequence of time (references to past, present, future events), the clarity of portrayal of the actual recognizable elements of the stimulus, and the degree of conformity to the instruction as given would also be considered. Having observed such properties as these for all stories told, the interpreter must then attribute meaning to them in personality terms and order those terms into the conceptual framework he finds appropriate. It is at this point that the most skill is called for and from this process that the widest variation in resulting analyses may arise. It is perhaps appropriate here to suggest that the TAT is more a method of investigating personality than a test of it. In this sense, and in this individual personality use, it is a clinical investigatory aid, not an instrument with known absolute properties reflective of definite and circumscribed personality attributes. For this clinical use the TAT provides an order of data on inner processes and on their relation to outer events, which yields its fullest meaning only upon study and analysis by the interpreter already skilled in personality theory and experienced with wide varieties of social and personality groupings. In this sense the TAT response constitutes a social and a personal document as complex and variegated as the subject providing the data, and as tortuous and subtle as most efforts to condense and systematize the life career of any individual. Reliability and validity. Complexity by no means suggests that issues of reliability and validity are to be resolved by estimates of the professional competence of the interpreter. The real issues of reliability or validity for the TAT are complex ones; they involve far more than the usual definition of reliability as reproducibility either of specific elements of stories on the part of a subject or of analytic statements from such data on the part of interpreters—or the definition of validity as a correlation between analytic statements and an external criterion of the same attribute. The
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problems are methodological ones of a nature as yet unresolved. They involve both procedural and statistical matters, as well as decisions regarding the specificity or abstractness of statements from both TAT and criterion data. In general these problems must be resolved for projective data as a type of data before any specific projective instrument can soundly be assayed. To date, the evidence for the reliability and validity of the TAT is extremely ambiguous. Jensen (1959) and Eron (1959), in reviewing the test for the fifth Mental Measurements Yearbook, report many negative or inconclusive findings. Studies reporting validity have varied greatly in method, in kinds of criteria used, and in the kinds of variables from the TAT used. The best summary of the state of affairs regarding these topics is provided by reviewing the general analyses and proposals regarding the problem in the works by Cronbach (1948; 1956) and Murstein (1963). A recent study by Shipman (1964) is of particular interest in that it deals with several kinds of units of analysis from the TAT and provides evidence of differential degrees of congruence with an external criterion. These differences depend in some instances upon the specific versus the global nature of the units dealt with in the TAT and in part upon the personality constructs available from the criterion instrument. The study which most directly parallels the normal clinical use of the TAT and which attempts to reflect directly upon varying types of validity is that of Henry and Farley (1959). This study is based upon the design proposed by Cronbach (1948). It relates blind analysis of TAT tests of 36 adolescents from a homogeneous social environment to a variety of criterion instruments—life history from interviews, the Rorschach test, objective tests, intelligence tests, sociograms—representing data from overt levels of behavior, subjective levels, and projective levels. The authors believe that a crucial element in the substantially significant results obtained is the conscious and exhaustive attention given to the understanding and definition of the system of personality constructs in terms of which all instruments were analyzed and interpreted. [See PSYCHOMETRICS.]
Modifications and applications The Murray TAT was developed for use with subjects from the mainstream of American social life. While the pictures used were intended to refer to personality issues that are not culturebound, the fact that these pictures contain specific objects, clothes, and physical settings has tended to lend them a cultural specificity which restricts
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their use. In some instances, therefore, the TAT principles have been maintained but new pictures designed. There have been instances where it was felt that there was some inappropriateness in the pictures or where a shorter and more focalized set was desired. The Children's Apperception Test (riellak 1954) and the Michigan Picture Test (Andrew et al. 1951) are examples designed for younger age groups on the grounds that the general tone of the Murray is too adult. In the Michigan Picture Test, in addition, the focus was upon elementary school adjustment, and thus the pictures were developed to reflect many school settings. One special set has been developed by Thompson (1949) for use with American Negroes. It duplicates the regular Murray cards, but all figures are Negro. Special sets have also been composed for the study of elderly persons (Lieberman & Larkin 1963) and for the study of personality in work adjustment of business executives (Henry & Moore 1950). The Blacky pictures (Blum 1949) consist of animals in humanlike scenes and are designed for the study of children. Lennep (1948; 1951) has prepared a 4-picture set used in educational and industrial settings. A special set by Phillipson (1955) consists of particularly vague pictures aimed at the study of object relations in the psychoanalytic sense. Cross-cultural, role, and group studies. The principal use of the TAT for cross-cultural purposes has focused upon the study of nonliterate societies. Here it is normally assumed that the modern, middle-class tone of most Murray TAT pictures is inappropriate. For these reasons special sets have been developed for several nonliterate societies. These tend to follow the principle of design as illustrated by the Murray but are modified for special problems of the society and for general cultural appropriateness (Henry 1956, pp. 47-53; Henry 1951). The experience with such sets has varied. Generally they have been felt to make a useful and positive contribution to crosscultural study, though the formal evidence of their validity is mixed. The best presentation and analysis of such use may be found in Lindzey's Projective Techniques and Cross-cultural Research (1961). These special sets are commonly used in connection with problems having anthropological or sociological emphasis, as well as personality concerns. In some instances, particularly the special sets for nonliterate societies, the intention has been to examine personality factors as they relate to cultural differences or as they form the psychic correlates for intracultural variations. Increasingly,
the TAT is also being used in contexts where social roles are at issue, especially where the investigator sees the role behavior as having personality components. This was the focus of Henry's study of business executives, where the aim was to clarify certain personality components of the behavior of executives in large organizations rather than to analyze the personality of the individual adult working in that setting. In some instances, other social role concerns have directed the selection of pictures to be used and indicated the mode of analysis. In a study of adults in Kansas City (Neugarten et al. 1964), four of the regular Murray cards were given, but the fifth was a specially designed card. It contained four persons in a nondescript living-room setting. One was clearly an older male, one an older female, one a younger male, and one a younger female. They could readily be seen as the older parents of a younger couple. In designing this picture and in planning its analysis, Neugarten and Guttman (1958) were interested in age-graded perceptions of male and female figures. Their interest was in the differential perception of these age roles and sex roles by subjects of differing ages. With such pictures the instructions normally remain the same—tell a story— though these may be supplemented by specific directive questions. Similarly modified sets might be used to study supervisor-worker situations in industry, doctor-nurse interactions, teams inspecting new automobiles, interactive small groups, racial conflict situations—in fact, almost any social interaction that lends itself to portrayal in this ambiguous pictorial form. The use of the TAT in the study of groups has had several focuses. One revolves around the study of interactive processes in groups themselves, usually groups of modest size. Another revolves around interest in properties common to various natural social groups, sometimes in cross-cultural contexts and sometimes in cross-class or cross-age contexts within a single society. The Group Projection Sketches (Henry & Guetzkow 1951) is a special set of five cards designed to reflect various concepts for the analyses of small-group interaction. The analysis of TAT data in various racial or social groups has a somewhat different focus. It is best seen as overlapping with cross-cultural studies in which properties of stories common to particular cultures is the issue (see Lindzey 1961). A closely related use involves the social-psychological study of subgroups of our own society. The monograph of Warner and Henry (1948) is one illustration. In the effort to provide data on the functional significance of the daytime radio serial for the normal
PROJECTIVE METHODS: The Thematic Apperception Test listeners of those programs, the authors attempt to identify common psychological concerns and modes of adjustment in their principal group of subjects, middle-class American housewives. A more extensive study utilizing this and other methods is that of Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel (1959) on lower-class American housewives. A special system of analysis has been developed by Schaw and Henry (1956); they illustrated its use by comparing three groups of business executives differing in age. Personality variables. A common use of the TAT has been the study of specific personality variables under a wide range of circumstances. Here the interest is on the TAT as a measuring device of personality variables thought to be of unconscious or "beyond awareness" nature—hostility, anxiety, achievement drives, and other motives such as affiliation and power. The most extensive work has been that of McClelland and his associates (1953) on need-achievement as defined in the Murray need-press system of motivational categories. The general logic of this approach is that if achievement imagery is present in stories elicited by selected TAT cards, then the subject may be said to be motivated to achieve. Efforts to demonstrate that logic have varied considerably: some show that persons with high achievement imagery do indeed attempt to improve their performance or that they are in real life "high achievers," while others clearly disprove these same points. There has also been substantial work on the variable of hostility. Complex relationships tend to be found, which suggests that there is a positive but by no means clear-cut relation between such variables and any particular form of overt behavior. The most exhaustive treatment of studies in this area may be found in Murstein (1963, pp. 84106, 300-322). [See ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION; FIELD THEORY; ROLE.] Special scoring systems which deal with somewhat more complex units have been devised for the study of particular variables. Arnold (1962) has been interested in achievement and has developed a system of analysis focused upon story themes and a scoring method dealing with motivation to achieve. This method shows some interesting differences between high-achievement and lowachievement students in school, among schoolteachers and business executives, and among welladjusted and poorly adjusted men in the Navy. Dana (1959) has devised a system based upon degrees of approximation to various expected story form and content properties and uses it to distinguish normals, neurotics, and psychotics.
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An additional type of variable has been used by Rosen and Neugarten (1960), who have utilized the TAT as a source of data on ego energy. In this instance they proposed that ego energy would be characterized by (1) the ability to integrate wide ranges of stimuli, (2) the readiness to perceive or deal with complicated, challenging, or conflictful situations, (3) the tendency to perceive vigorous and assertive activity, and (4) the tendency to perceive feelings and affects as related to life situations. As measures of these attributes, they chose certain elements of TAT stories commonly used in clinical analysis but here treated only as scorable indicators of these specific ego elements. The central point of relevance about this study, illustrative of others of related type, is that the TAT was used as a source of data for certain properties of ego functioning selected as a test of a theory. Specific TAT response categories were selected as scorable measures of these properties and the behavior of these measures predicted and tested in an appropriate design. In this format, reliability is handled by the common interjudge-agreement method. Validity is thus subsumed under issues of the viability of constructs used in the theoretical formulation, and the usefulness of the TAT estimates of those constructs is determined by discovering relationships to other data. Evaluation The TAT was developed to aid in the "exploration" of personality (Explorations in Personality 1938). It has quite justified its existence in the sense of the access which it provides to personality variables, especially when these are seen as egorelated—as opposed to deep unconscious fantasies —and as they are seen as reflecting the juncture of psychodynamics and social behavioral events. The TAT is best viewed as a source of data on this order of personality event rather than as a test of specific personality attributes of known character. It can, nevertheless, assume testlike properties under certain conditions. These conditions are, generally speaking, outside the instrument itself and reside in the manner in which it is used, the data to which it is related, and the personality constructs in terms of which the basic data are ordered. Its successes and failures, in the usual validity sense, are explained by analysis of these external events. In the usual clinical use, for personality description, considerable variation in stability appears. Such variations may be seen in terms of the specificity—generality of personality units used and in terms of the order of corresponding external criteria. The clarification of the use and misuse of the
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instrument will rest upon continued exploration of these factors—the personality constructs utilized, the logic of translating data into these constructs, the manner of relating these constructs to other data about the individual. Among the sensitivities, as opposed to the stabilities of the instrument, are thc^vi reflecting change and ambiguity in the individual, factors which confound the effort to distinguish error from genuine difference. The future of the instrument will be decided by the study of other conditions of use, by increased sophistication in the manipulation of the basic data, and by increases, from any source, in the user's knowledge of psychodynamics and of social systems. A crucial element in the future use of the TAT may be found in the degree of richness and flexibility of the basic concept and in the fact that constructs from several fields of psychological and social science investigation may be the focus of its use, in the original as well in as modified forms. WILLIAM E. HENRY [See also PERSONALITY MEASUREMENT. Other relevant material may be found in ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION; CONTENT ANALYSIS; FANTASY; MOTIVATION, article on HUMAN MOTIVATION; PSYCHOANALYSIS; PSYCHOMETRICS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ANDREW, GWEN et al. 1951 The Michigan Picture Test: The Stimulus Values of the Cards. Journal of Consulting Psychology 15:51-54. ARNOLD, MAGDA B. 1962 Story Sequence Analysis: A New Method of Measuring Motivation and Predicting Achievement. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. ARON, BETTY R. 1949 A Manual for Analysis of the Thematic Apperception Test: A Method and Technique for Personality Research. Berkeley (Calif.): Berg. BELLAK, LEOPOLD 1954 The Thematic Apperception Test and the Children's Apperception Test in Clinical Use. New York: Grune. BLUM, GERALD S. 1949 A Study of the Psychoanalytic Theory of Psychosexual Development. Genetic Psychology Monographs 39:3—99. CRONBACH, LEE J. 1948 A Validation Design for Qualitative Studies of Personality. Journal of Consulting Psychology 12:365-374. CRONBACH, LEE J. 1956 Assessment of Individual Differences. Annual Review of Psychology 7:173-196. DANA, RICHARD H. 1959 Proposal for Objective Scoring of the TAT. Perceptual and Motor Skills 9:27-43. ERON, LEONARD D. 1959 Thematic Apperception Test. Mental Measurements Yearbook 5:306-310. Explorations in Personality: A Clinical and Experimental Study of Fifty Men of College Age, by Henry A. Murray et al. 1938 New York and London: Oxford Univ. Press. HENRY, WILLIAM E. (1951) 1956 The Thematic Apperception Technique in the Study of Group and Cultural Problems. Pages 230-278 in Harold H. Anderson and Gladys L. Anderson (editors), An Introduction to
Projective Techniques & Other Devices for Understanding the Dynamics of Human Behavior. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. HENRY, WILLIAM E. 1956 The Analysis of Fantasy: The Thematic Apperception Technique in the Study of Personality. New York: Wiley. HENRY, WILLIAM E.; and FARLEY, JANE 1959 The Validity of the Thematic Apperception Test in the Study of Adolescent Personality. Psychological Monographs 73, no. 17. HENRY, WILLIAM E.; and GARDNER, BURLEIGH B. 1949 Personality Evaluation in the Selection of Executive Personnel. Public Personnel Reviezv 10:67-71. HENRY, WILLIAM E.; and GUETZKOW, HAROLD 1951 Group Projection Sketches for the Study of Small Groups. Journal of Social Psychology 33:77-102. HENRY, WILLIAM E.; and MOORE, HARRIETT B. 1950 The Industrial Use of Personality Tests. Advanced Management 15, no. 11:16-20. HOLT, ROBERT R. 1958 Formal Aspects of the TAT: A Neglected Resource. Journal of Projective Techniques 22:163-172. HOLT, ROBERT R. 1961 The Nature of TAT Stories as Cognitive Products: A Psychoanalytic Approach. Pages 3-50 in Conference on Contemporary Issues in Thematic Apperceptive Methods, Pels Research Institute, 1959, Contemporary Issues in Thematic Apperception Methods. Springfield, 111.: Thomas. -> Contains six pages of discussion. JENSEN, A. E. 1959 Thematic Apperception Test. Mental Measurements Yearbook 5:310-313. LENNEP, DAVID J. VAN 1948 Four Picture Tests (1930). The Hague: Nijhoff. LENNEP, DAVID J. VAN (1951) 1956 The Four Picture Test. Pages 149-180 in Harold H. Anderson and Gladys L. Anderson (editors), An Introduction to Projective Techniques & Other Devices for Understanding the Dynamics of Human Behavior. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. LIEBERMAN, MORTON A.; and LARKIN, MARTIN 1963 On Becoming an Institutionalized Aged Person. Volume 1, pages 475-503 in Richard H. Williams, C. Tibbitts, and W. Donahue (editors), Processes of Aging: Social and Psychological Perspectives. New York: Atherton. LIND/EY, GARDNER 1952 Thematic Apperception Test: Interpretative Assumptions and Related Empirical Evidence. Psychological Bulletin 49:1-25. LINDZEY, GARDNER 1961 Projective Techniques and Cross-cultural Research. New York: Appleton. LINDZEY, GARDNER et al. 1959 Thematic Apperception Test: An Interpretive Lexicon for Clinician and Investigator. Journal of Clinical Psychology Monograph Supplement no. 12. MCCLELLAND, DAVID C. et al. 1953 The Achievement Motive. New York: Appleton. MEEHL, PAUL E. 1959 Structured and Projective Tests: Some Common Problems in Validation. Journal of Projective Techniques 23:268-272. MORGAN, CHRISTIANA D.; and MURRAY, HENRY A. 1935 A Method for Investigating Fantasies: The Thematic Apperception Test. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 34:289-306. MURRAY, HENRY A. 1943 Thematic Apperception Test Manual. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. MURSTEIN, BERNARD I. 1963 Theory and Research in Projective Techniques, Emphasizing the TAT. New York: Wiley.
PROPAGANDA NEUGARTEN, BERNICE L.; and GUTTMAN, DAVID L. 1958 Age-Sex Roles and Personality in Middle Age: A Thematic Apperception Study. Psychological Monographs 72, no. 17. NEUGARTEN, BERNICE L. et al. 1964 Personality in Middle and Late Life. New York: Atherton. PHILLIPSON, HERBERT 1955 The Object Relations Technique. London: Tavistock. RAINWATER, LEE; COLEMAN, R. P.; and HANDEL, G. 1959 Workingman's Wife: Her Personality, World, and Life Style. Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana. ROSEN, JACQUELINE L.; and NEUGARTEN, BERNICE L. 1960 Ego Functions in the Middle and Later Years: A Thematic Apperception Study of Normal Adults. Journal of Gerontology 15:62-67. SCHAFER, ROY 1958 How Was This Story Told? Journal of Projective Techniques 22:181-210. SCHAW, Louis C.; and HENRY, WILLIAM E. 1956 A Method for the Comparison of Groups: A Study in Thematic Apperception. Genetic Psychology Monographs 54:207-253. SHIPMAN, WILLIAM G. 1964 TAT Validity: Congruence With an Inventory. Journal of Projective Techniques 28:227-232. STEIN, MORRIS I. (1948) 1955 The Thematic Apperception Test: An Introductory Manual for Its Clinical Use With Adults. 2d ed., rev. Reading, Mass.: AddisonWesley. THOMPSON, CHARLES E. 1949 The Thompson Modification of the Thematic Apperception Test. Rorschach Research Exchange 13:469-478. TOMKINS, SILVAN S. 1947 The Thematic Apperception Test: The Theory and Technique of Interpretation. New York: Grune. WARNER, W. LLOYD; and HENRY, WILLIAM E. 1948 The Radio Day Time Serial: A Symbolic Analysis. Genetic Psychology Monographs 37:3-71. WYATT, FREDERICK 1947 The Scoring and Analysis of the Thematic Apperception Test. Journal of Psychology 24:319-330.
PROPAGANDA Propaganda is the relatively deliberate manipulation, by means of symbols (words, gestures, flags, images, monuments, music, etc.), of other people's thoughts or actions with respect to beliefs, values, and behaviors which these people ("reactors") regard as controversial. The elements of deliberateness and manipulativeness distinguish propaganda from merely casual communication or the "free" exchange of ideas. These elements also distinguish propaganda from education: whereas the propagandist presents a prefabricated argument or a single set of symbols, the educator aims to present "all" sides of an issue and leaves mainly to the audience the decision concerning the truth (if any) of the claims presented and the values (if any) at stake. Inasmuch as some communicators and some audiences regard as controversial what others regard as self-evident
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truth, it follows that under some conditions one man's "propaganda" may be another man's "education." The term "propaganda," in most of its modern usages, apparently derives from the shortened name, "the Propaganda," of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagation of the Faith), a standing committee of cardinals in charge of missionary activities of the Roman Catholic church since 1622. Hence, to many Catholics the word may have, at least when referring to ecclesiastical utterances, a responsible and respectable connotation that it lacks in many other contexts. Something similar is the case, in communist circles, at least, when the term "propaganda" is used with the special definition and meanings given it by Lenin in a collection of writings published in 1929 as Agitation und Propaganda. In that book, which continues to furnish much of the basis for communist reasoning and practice on the subject, Lenin distinguished between (1) "propaganda," which he defined as the reasoned use of arguments from philosophy, history, and science to influence the educated and reasonable few, and (2) "agitation," by which he meant the use of emotional slogans, "Aesopian" parables, and half-truths to influence the uneducated, the semieducated, and the unreasonable. Thus, to the disciplined communist who follows in his Agitprop activities the theory and rules laid down by Lenin, the use of "propaganda" in Lenin's sense is highly commendable and unqualifiedly honest. A related term is "propaganda of the deed." This means the performance of a nonsymbolic (e.g., coercive or economic) act, not primarily for its military or economic effects but primarily for the symbolic effect it presumably will have on some reactor—for instance, staging the public torture of a criminal for its presumable deterrent effect on others or giving economic "foreign aid" with more of an eye to influencing a recipient's opinions than to building his economy. Diplomatic negotiation, legal argument, commercial bargaining, and advertising obviously are likely to include considerable elements of both "propaganda" and "propaganda of the deed" as here defined. History No doubt propaganda has existed ever since primates have been sufficiently articulate to use it. Artifacts from prehistory and from early civilizations give evidence that dazzling raiment, mystic
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insignia, and monuments were used to advertise the purported majesty and supernatural powers of early rulers and priests. In Western civilization, the systematic design of propaganda and of counterpropaganda appears to have begun in the Greek city-states about 500 B.C., with the codification of "rhetoric/' a set of tricks of argumentation deduced in part from the actual practice of successful lawyers, demagogues, and politicians. Such teachers as Plato and Aristotle, and certain of the Stoics, compiled the rules of rhetoric with two aims: not only to make their own arguments more persuasive but also to immunize "good" citizens against the use of logical fallacies and emotional terms by "bad" lawyers and demagogues, and to point out the possible dangers of following irrational leaders. So well did the Greek rhetoricians do these jobs that they have been studied and quoted for over 2,500 years. Aristotle's Rhetoric was emphasized in higher education throughout the Middle Ages and even after the Renaissance, and it is often drawn upon today in classes in public speaking and logic and by many sophisticated propagandists and counterpropagandists. In other civilizations, a number of parallel developments appeared after 400 B.C. Thus, Kautilya, purportedly chief minister to the Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya, counseled in his Arthasdstra ("Principles of Politics") the use by princes of prudent and often deceptive wording in their diplomacy and in their public utterances, especially in times of war and preparation for war. Like modern propagandists, Kautilya was much preoccupied with techniques for sowing fear, dissension, and confusion in the opponent's ranks (psychological warfare) and for showering blandishments on allies without becoming excessively dependent upon them. [See KAUTILYA.] Parallel advice can be found in The Art of War by the early Chinese theorist Sun Tzu. The use of "good" and truthful rhetoric and "proper" forms of speech and writing was urged by Confucius in his Analects as a means of persuading men to live the good life—SL Platonic admonition deliberately echoed as a legitimating device (under the name of "brainwashing") by the present-day rulers of Communist China. The spread of Christianity, like that of all other religions, has of course been due very largely to a mixture of earnest conviction and the deliberate use of propaganda. Recent scholarship points out the striking extent to which the legend of the Jewish messiah has been reshaped in the course of the centuries, beginning with the earliest writers of
the Gospels and Epistles, who apparently made numerous changes and invented details that seemed calculated to engage the attention and influence the actions of non-Jews as well as Jews and that bore only an allegorical relation to historic fact. In other major religions—for instance, in the recasting of the legends of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, of Gautama Buddha, of the ancestral Japanese Sun Goddess, and of the life and relatives of Muhammad—a parallel mixture of faith, conviction, and propaganda can be found. Undoubtedly a similar mixture has been involved in the spreading of every major political doctrine or "ism." Remnants of election propaganda have been found on Roman ruins. Such writers as Quintilian and Quintus Cicero described campaign tactics. In early modern times Machiavelli underscored, like Kautilya and Sun Tzu, the effectiveness of calculated duplicity in politics and war. In Shakespeare, many characters display and discuss the principles of propaganda in concepts and language that a present-day behavioral scientist could hardly improve upon. Mark Antony's funeral oration comes readily to mind; and such English aristocrats as the Duke of Buckingham (see Richard III, Act m) comment knowingly upon such propaganda stratagems as the seizure and monopolization of propaganda initiatives, the displacement of guilt onto others ("scapegoating"), the presentation of oneself as morally superior, and the coordination of propaganda with violence and bribery. After Aristotle, however, only small advances in either the highly organized practice or the systematic theory of propaganda took place until the industrial revolution made mass production possible and thus opened the way for immensely high profits through mass marketing. As part of the modern trend toward well-calculated high-profit distribution, studies began to be made after about 1900 of the wants and habits of many types of consumers and of their susceptibility to alternative kinds of salesmanship, advertising, packaging, and publicity. In the early 1930s, commercial "sample surveys" began to develop rapidly. Almost every conceivable aspect of opinion, attitude, belief, and behavior involved in "consumer motivation" has been investigated with respect to ever more refined subsamples of the populations of most major countries. At present, vast banks of such information are stored and processed in computer centers; they are used as a basis for increasingly precise "pinpointing" of commercial and other propaganda. Nationwide and international advertising campaigns cost billions of dollars annually and occupy a very
PROPAGANDA large percentage of radio and television time and of newspaper, magazine, and billboard space in countries where this is permitted. It is generally believed that this investment also exerts strong influence over some or many of the noncommercial contents of these media. One consequence has been the evolution of efforts to hold the more Machiavellian advertisers in check through such devices as consumers' unions, "truth-in-advertising" laws, and nonprofit publishing, radio, and television alongside (or to the exclusion of) the profit-making media. [See MARKET RESEARCH.] Concurrently with the spread of commercial rationalism and the related outburst of commercial propaganda, the spread of social rationalism, of mass education, and of mass democracy since the eighteenth century has deepened awareness among the educated and some of the semieducated of the roles of fictions and Utopian aspirations in social and political systems. Long ago, Plato pointed out the social functions of "the noble lie." The extension of the suffrage to ever broader and ever more ignorant or ill-educated strata of the population in the past two centuries has brought enriched opportunities to observe the possibilities this offers for both the demagogic and the public-spirited propagandist. One early observer was Jeremy Bentham. His Theory of Fictions, written near the end of the eighteenth century and a forerunner of the modern study of general semantics, emphasized the extent to which a careful choice of symbols can contribute to the respect and awe with which otherwise worthless individuals and institutions can be invested. The immense growth of nonrational forms of nationalism and of plebiscitary despotism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to reconfirm his view. [See BENTHAM.] Many subsequent writers, including Georges Sorel (1908), Vilfredo Pareto (1916), Lenin (1929; and other works), Karl Mannheim (1929-1931), and Harold D. Lasswell (1930; 1935; and other works) have explicitly or implicitly taken the position that men in the mass, and even men on high educational and social levels, often react more favorably to "Utopian myths," "Aesopian language," and "nonrational residues" of earlier experiences than to sober analytic statements. Pavlov's experiments with conditioned reflexes, and the Freudian and Neo-Freudian explorations of the unconscious mind, have tended to give strong support to this view. Both democratic and authoritarian regimes of recent decades have reacted with varying mixtures of warmhearted acceptance and coldhearted cyni-
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cism to such modern elaborations of ancient insights. Military inventions and the spread of particularist nationalism and of attempts at democracy have caused recent wars, social revolutions, and counterrevolutions to reach proportions that called for mobilization of entire national populations. Hence, in World War i, and even more in World War n, each of the major contending governments made massive outlays for propaganda, both domestic and foreign, and much magic was attributed to various "propaganda techniques." Since then, almost every large state has had its ministry of propaganda (or ministry of culture, enlightenment, or international information) or some functional equivalent—at least in wartime or when danger was acutely felt. Likewise it has had its official mechanisms for censorship, "information control," or news management. The use of such agencies became prominent after World War n and during the subsequent cold war. Concurrently, nearly every significant political party, major pressure group, or mass movement has developed its own corps of specialized propagandists (some of them referred to as "lobbyists" or "legislative representatives"). Many are employed full time and have relatively high levels of skill, training, or both. Many such propaganda agencies possess or hire elaborate "research and intelligence" facilities to conduct (overtly and covertly) observations, opinion polls, and information polls among various strata of the elites, the middle classes, and the rank and file. Many kinds of data are tabulated concerning those contents of the press, films, television, and other media that reach the respective strata. "Symbol campaigns" and "image building" are conducted in mathematically calculated ways. The ancient art of rhetoric, practiced by a few skilled leaders, has become the modern quasi science of opinion management, employing armies of governmental, party, and pressure-group employees, including a wide range of real and purported psychoanalytic, psychological, and social scientists. The means of controlling these opinion manipulators and "hidden persuaders" are sought with increasing concern by consumers who are aware of having been duped, and especially by politically conscious persons who fear the spread of regimes in whose operations deceptive propaganda may be combined with tight censorship to produce a nearly unbreakable control. Trends in theory Trends in the theory of persuasion, including the theory of propaganda, have conformed some-
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what to various functions required by the social systems of given times and places, as perceived by the intellectuals concerned. Thus, the rules of rhetoric were devised when Greek urbanism had evolved enough to support a considerable number of rival schools of politics, logic, and philosophy, which sought to settle conflicts by persuasion as well as by violence and commercial deals. Greek thinkers explored many facets of the relations of rhetoric to various forms and functionings of the city-state. In so doing, they defined certain rules of far more general applicability for distinguishing between the discourses— including propaganda—of logical, socially integrative communicators and those of the demagogues of a less respectable stripe. Yet communication theory among the Greeks appears to have remained essentially particularistic, since it focused on the transactions within the social system of the individual city-state. Even after Aristotle collected and compared a great many citystate constitutions—indeed, even after the Roman conquest—the Greek imagination did not reach out far enough to evolve a coherent, empirical theory of intersystem (i.e., intercity-state, or supracitystate, or intercultural, imperial, international, or worldwide) social relations. Hence, it did not develop a corresponding cross-cultural theory of value conflicts or of the possible resolution of such conflicts through propaganda or other types of communication. Even the later Greco-Roman Stoics, who did envisage a universalistic, polycentric system of justice and order under a tolerant system of pluralistic law, did not appear to visualize, much less to formulate explicitly, the intersystem communication processes that would be required to institute such a social order and keep it functioning. They dwelt on a highly abstract plane, among broad moral concepts such as justice, harmony, and "the good life." They did not often descend from man in the abstract to men in specific social systems; hence they did not codify the full range of individual, cultural, and social differences among men that must be considered in order to form any lasting social system above the level of the city-state. Imperial Rome, Byzantium, and early Islam, of course, were hardly hospitable to flights of naturalistic data-collecting or comparative social and psychological theorizing; nor were the Holy Roman emperors, the Christian churches, or the monarchs and barons and caliphs and sultans who dominated the assorted social systems of western Europe and the Middle East between the fall of Rome and the
industrial revolution. Machiavelli, it will be recalled, circulated The Prince in secrecy, like many empirical investigators before and since. For comparable reasons, and perhaps for other reasons as well, the growth of behavioral science was inhibited in the other major civilizations— China and India—during the same two-thousandyear period. It remained for the scientifically oriented investigators enjoying the degree of freedom of inquiry tolerated in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to discover much more than the ancient Greeks had learned about details of the psychology and the sociopolitical applications of propaganda. Present-day theory considers propaganda a special case of the theory of communication in general, which in turn has increasingly been treated as a subdivision of the general theory of social systems. The latter aims to study the full range of possible behaviors of all real and possible social actors, ranging from the individual acting exclusively on his own behalf, through the "dyad" (pair of people) and the small group (several people), to such large collective actors as interest groups (e.g., industrial or farmers' unions or business associations) and territorial groups (towns, provinces, nations, international regions, and the world as a whole). Contemporary analysts of communication (and therefore of propaganda) are aware that the world as a whole has become, to a considerable extent, a single, relatively manipulable social system of which all the surviving previous social systems are now subsystems. Most parts of the globe are now inhabited, highly interdependent economically and militarily, and so richly provided with newsgathering, telecommunications, and travel facilities that symbols of events occurring at any point on earth can be transmitted instantly and in detail to any other point. On the other hand, contemporary social science also recognizes that the world system is not yet a community, if by "community" we mean a set of persons widely accepting a common culture (i.e., habitually receiving a common set of "information bits" and experiencing a common pattern of cognition and values). Hence, modern theory views the current state of the world social system as highly polycentric: the cultural patterns, and hence the economic patterns and political patterns, of its component subsystems are at once highly interdependent and highly diverse and often appear more or less incompatible. Yet the set of subsystems as a whole shows powerful though slow-
PROPAGANDA moving tendencies to evolve, convulsively, toward global community, mainly through increases in population density and through partly planned and partly accidental diffusion of common sets of information bits. Factors in propaganda Confronted by the highly unstable global context in which he must operate, the sophisticated propaganda analyst employing present-day behavioral theory tends to formulate his problem as including at least 11 sets of factors. He asks: (1) To what ends (i.e., to bring about what distributions of values), in (2) the present and expected states of the world social system and of (3) each of its subsystems (nations, lesser territorial groups, interest groups, etc.) with which the propagandist is concerned should (4) the propagandist or some agent of his distribute (5) what symbols through (6) what channels (media, such as press, radio, film, face-to-face contact, mass demonstrations, religious or cultural organizations, etc.) (7) to whom (e.g., elites, opinion leaders, middle classes, masses, customers, friends, opponents, neutrals), and (8) how can the effects of the propaganda be measured (i.e., how can one measure the value reallocations attributable to the propaganda as distinct from other causes)? In the present state of social science, this intricate question can of course be answered with only a moderate degree of confidence. Once the propaganda campaign has begun, the propagandist, and also his opponents or counterpropagandists, will encounter at least three additional sets of factors: With respect to (9) what alternative value allocations and (10) by what means (e.g., counterpropaganda, censorship, coercion, or economic pressure) can the propaganda be neutralized or controlled, and (11) how can effects of such counter-measures be measured1? These 11 sets of factors will now be discussed. Ends (values). When the problem is simply to acquire money for oneself or one's group(s) by inducing others to buy a safe and useful commodity, the stating of ends is easy. When the commodity is of doubtful value or positively injurious (e.g., a dangerous drug or a weapon), the problem grows complicated. Where the problem is to convert multitudes to a new religion or a new social system, it may be extremely hard to specify just what redistributions are desired among large numbers of different sorts of persons, with respect to a large cluster of values such as prestige, income, "ease of soul," military security, etc. Yet the prop-
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agandist can hardly proceed rationally unless he can tell at least himself what reallocations of these and many other values he is trying to bring about and what applecarts he is therefore willing to upset. Changes in the world social system. Each act of propaganda—whether of commission or omission—is very likely to have effects of some sort in at least several parts of the global system. Furthermore, that system itself is inexorably evolving because of such factors as population growth, the invention and diffusion of new cultural sets and technologies, and the consequent emergence of new centers of cultural, military, and economic power. Social evolution, nowadays often very rapid, may decrease the feasibility of many sorts of propaganda—especially of the more simplistic, parochial, and particularistic varieties—and increase the feasibility of the more sophisticated, scientifically formulated, and universalistic. In general, the currents of social change, over the past four thousand years or so, appear to have been drifting, in step with the rising world population and rising educational levels, from smaller to larger social units. Concomitantly, the currents of cultural change apparently have been drifting from less rationality and scieritism toward more, and from primary territorial-group loyalty and interest-group loyalty toward primary loyalty to world social unity. Is the propagandist, for the sake of his shortrun or long-run ends, to swim with or against these mainstreams of history? If against, at what cost? If far ahead of his time, again at what cost? Subsystems of the world system. In the past, there were many times and places when the propagandist could effectively ignore world-system requirements and employ such particularist symbols as "My country (or my family, tribe, race, religion, or business), right or wrong." In the present and future states of the world system, this self-centered type of propaganda may be suicidal. Yet strident particularisms persist. The prudent propagandist has therefore to decide what mix or reconciliation of world-system and subsystem symbolism will best serve his purposes in particular places at given points in time. With the spread of high-capability weapons, the eventual choice, even in the relatively near future, may be between universalist coexistence and particularist nonexistence. The choice may be easy to state in theory, but it is hard to make in practice, in view of the wide variety of particularist subsystems in the world and their frequent incompatibility both with one another and with the requirements of a world system.
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Present-day social science, still much entangled in nationalistic and other small-scale preoccupations, is unclear as to details of the value consequences of promoting, in the present and proximate states of the world social system, adherence to any given set of positions; yet in every utterance tLc practicing propagandist is explicitly or implicitly making such value choices. Use of agents. The use of innocent-looking agents or "front" organizations while the propagandist himself remains behind the scenes can maximize his prospects in two principal ways: (1) The agent(s) may seem to the audience to be mucti more credible or acceptable than the propagandist himself or the group(s) for which the latter speaks. Especially in areas where the propagandist is not very familiar with the language and customs, or where cultural, racial, religious, or nationalist attitudes would deny him a favorable hearing, the use of agents is inescapable. Some four-fifths of the employees of the United States Information Agency abroad, for example, are nonAmericans; and Soviet propaganda abroad relies heavily on local communists as well as on personnel of the Soviet missions. (2) If a given propaganda stratagem fails in a pretest (a "trial balloon") or in execution, the agent can, if necessary, be dismissed or even deliberately "scapegoated" while the principal behind the scenes attempts a new approach. Since modern propaganda in its sophisticated forms requires so high a level of rationality and of familiarity with public affairs and behavioral sciences, the planning of major campaigns probably can best be entrusted to qualified intellectuals whose backgrounds include both knowledge of social science and "hard-nosed" experience with public affairs. However, such personalities may be viewed askance by many reactors. Hence it is important to select "front men" and "contact agents" with whom the intended audience is likely to feel rapport. Choice of symbols. The propagandist aware of the findings of the behavioral sciences no longer has as much confidence as his counterparts from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century had in the ability of rational arguments or even of catchy slogans to influence human behavior. The evolution of psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, and experimental research on communication has made it clear that reactors' responses are affected not only by the immediate input of symbols but also (and often more powerfully) by three other sets of forces: (1) the stored residues of, and associations to, previous inputs of related sym-
bols, which often give the reactor a predisposition and capacity to ignore or to rationalize away the current inflow of symbols; (2) the economic inducements (gifts, bribery, commercial deals, etc.) or threats (job loss, boycotts, etc.) and the physical inducements (caresses, violence, protection from violence, or threats of violence) which the propagandist can apply in conjunction with his symbols; and (3) the coercive structures and processes in the surrounding social systems, which may either facilitate or inhibit the expression of whatever new thoughts or other behavioral impulses the current input of symbols may activate. The sophisticated propagandist, therefore, attempts to take relevant economic and physical action in conjunction with the propagandizing at each stage of his campaign. He also tries to select his symbols in the light of the findings of all the behavioral sciences, from psychoanalytic studies of the stored-up and unconscious reactions of particular sorts of individuals and groups through the psychology, sociology, economics, and politics of international relations and of the emerging world social system. There is substantial agreement today in psychology on what Lasswell has termed the "triple-appeal principle." This principle holds that sets of symbols are likely to be most persuasive if they appeal simultaneously to three components of the individual reactor's personality. That is, the propagandist tries to offset the resistances due to previous information inputs by presenting the thoughts and acts he desires to induce as if they were: (1) rational, advisable, and expedient (psychoanalytically, this is an appeal to the ego*); (2) pleasurable (an appeal to the id); and (3) moral (an appeal to the superego}. Within any collectivity, the "mix" of these components varies from individual to individual; and in large collectivities it varies from subculture to subculture and from stratum to stratum. The propagandist tries to adjust his appeals accordingly. Research from the clinic also suggests the relative effectiveness of choosing vocabularies and symbols and of casting the propagandist (or his agents) in roles, analogous to those associated with parents or parent substitutes (foster parents, uncles, aunts, schoolteachers, priests, witch doctors, political heroes, gods, goddesses, etc.), under whose influence the reactors have undergone many of their most formative, emotion-laden, and strongly sanctioned experiences. It is easy to sense the appeal of such familistic symbolisms as "the fatherland," "the mother country," "the Mother Church," "the Holy Father," "Mother Russia," "Uncle Sam," or "Uncle Ho Chi Minh." The propagandist who can
PROPAGANDA seize the emotional initiative and maintain a virtually parental or divine ascendancy (charisma) can arouse both the animosities and the consciences of his followers and of neutrals by "satanizing" the aims and associates of his opponents while idealizing or deifying his own objectives and allies. Reactors growing up in different social groupings, or in the same groupings at different times, are bound to have at least somewhat differently structured egos and superegos. Hence, the contribution that psychoanalysis and psychology in their generalized forms can make to the propagandist is not sufficient by itself. Furthermore, even those reactors who already have the attitudes the propagandist desires them to have may be prevented from acting upon these by counterpressures from the particular social groupings or social systems affecting them. It would be difficult, for instance, to act openly upon communist leanings in a totalitarian fascist country, or vice versa. Hence, the propagandist must adapt his symbolism not only to the reactors' conscious and unconscious impulses but also to the lines of action that are open to them. Propaganda is likely to be most effective if its contents include encouraging references (direct or implied) to all those actions that are feasible for the reactor and that the propagandist wishes him to perform, and if the contents include deterrent references to acts the propagandist wishes the reactor to inhibit (or, in some cases, no references to the latter, lest "ideas be put into the reactor's head"). The structuring of propaganda contents around such action concepts increases the probability that the propagandist will be realistic in his demands upon the reactor and that the reactor will not be left with the feeling, "I agree with this message, but just what am I supposed to do about it?" Where military or political secrecy or surprise is important to the propagandist, he will be inclined to state his action demands obliquely or deceptively : in some cases opponents can use systematic analysis of the content of propaganda to infer the propagandist's secret or unconscious intentions and probable future actions. [See CONTENT ANALYSIS.] Much more could be said about the selection of symbols. One especially intriguing question for our epoch should be raised: Can behavioral research discover, and will influential propagandists be willing to employ, universalistic symbolisms that can reduce interpersonal and intercollectivity destructiveness to levels that might make possible a viable world social order? Channels of propaganda. A comprehensive list of media that a propagandist might use would be many pages long. It would include newspapers,
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magazines, radio, television, film, handbills, posters, billboards, speechmaking, whispering and rumormongering campaigns, flags, street names, monuments, commemorative coins and postage stamps, Rhodes, Fulbright, and Soviet Friendship scholarships, awards and prizes, the composition of novels, plays, comic strips, poetry, and music "with a message," and all human groupings from the dyad and the family through advertising and public relations firms, churches and temples, pressure groups, parties, and "front organizations" to the propaganda organizations (overt and covert) of nations, international coalitions, and universal international organizations. Since World War n there has been a strong drift, in the practice of propaganda, away from attempts to "saturate" mass audiences with large quantities of simplified slogans. The new trend is toward the far more discriminating choice of those media to whose messages the intended reactors are thought to be especially receptive. This focus upon "placing the shots" instead of indiscriminately bombarding the reactors is due in part to findings of behavioral research. Numerous controlled observations and experiments on the "media habits" and "source preferences" of given reactors have established two views: (1) most persons tend to resist messages that reach them through media they do not especially trust and enjoy; (2) the most effective media, as a rule, for messages other than the simplest of commercial propaganda are not the impersonal mass media but rather those "reference groups" with which the individual feels strongly identified and in which he feels that he is at home and is surrounded with a certain degree of intimate emotional response and personal protection. First and foremost of these is, of course, the family. But many other organizations may perform quasifamilial functions—for instance, the small club of cronies, the church, the trade union, the businessmen's luncheon club, the clique or gang, the communist cell. If the propagandist can influence the leadership of such a reference group, he may establish a "social relay point" that can vastly amplify the meaningfulness and acceptability of his message—-far more effectively than a huge number of broadcasts, leaflets, or billboards, and at much lower cost. Hence, a great deal of research has been devoted in recent years to the identification of such reference groups. One important stratagem is the programming of mass media contents (e.g., newspapers or broadcasts) in such ways that instead of using scattergun techniques on undifferentiated mass audiences they carry material that is
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considered likely to interest specified reference groups (and especially the elites and "opinion leaders" among these) and to be relayed by them, in their own ways and on their own initiative, to other sets of reactors. Audiences. Since propaganda deals by definition with controversial matters, its ultimate audiences, whether reached by direct or indirect media, can be ranged into three groups: (1) those who are initially predisposed to react as the propagandist wishes, (2) those who are neutral or indifferent, and (3) those who are antagonistic. It is advisable in many cases to include symbolism and to select media appropriate to many positions along this continuum. Recent research tends to indicate that the most dependable result of propaganda is likely to be an increase in the resolve or the efforts of those who are already the propagandist's friends. No matter how great the volume or symbolic intensity of propaganda, neutrals and opponents are likely to be little affected unless the propaganda is reinforced by relevant nonpropaganda transactions or other events. For example, propaganda that aims to induce loyalty to a given regime among a landlordridden population that is experiencing the modern "revolution of expectations" may have to be reinforced by delivering as well as promising land and tax reform and bona fide physical protection. Measurement of propaganda effects. The problem of measurement is almost as broad as the field of behavioral research methodology. The modern world is seething with rival propaganda campaigns and counterpropaganda and with countless other symbolic transactions. The problem of disentangling the effects of one's own propaganda from the effects of the other transactions is often insoluble. Yet it is occasionally possible to conduct research whose results can be viewed with moderate confidence. Content analysis. Reasonably dependable quantitative evidence as to the contents of propaganda can be obtained by the method known as "content analysis." The numbers of column inches of printed space or seconds of radio or television time that propaganda occupied can be tabulated. The symbols and themes it contained can be categorized, as already indicated, in terms of expressed or implied demands for actions of various types and in a number of other psychologically or socially significant ways. [See CONTENT ANALYSIS.] Intensive interviews. Fairly objective evidence as to the intensity and semantic significance of propaganda (i.e., the cognitive and affective associations it evokes in given reactors) can be gath-
ered by extended intensive interviews (of a psychoanalytic or psychiatric type) with small, carefully drawn samples of the intended audience. If this audience is in a place where freedom of such inquiry is restricted (i.e., most of the world), the next best method is to interview any presumably informed persons who can be reached—e.g., refugees, expellees, or scholars concerned with the area. [See INTERVIEWING.] Extensive observations. Sometimes participant observers can be sent to the relevant places. Voting statistics, press reports, or the speeches and other actions of affected leaders can also give clues. Evidence on the size and composition of the intermediate (including "relay point") audiences and the ultimate audiences can be obtained from extensive sample surveys, press reports, and leaders' reactions. Where printed or telecommunications media are used, their readership or listenership figures can perhaps be obtained. If public meetings or demonstrations are involved, there may be observers' reports. [See OBSERVATION.] Experiments and panel interviews. Evidence that ensuing behavior of the audience—for instance, its vote for candidate X or its buying of product Y—is due in whole or in part to the propaganda and not to something else remains far from conclusive, however, except in the rare situations where something like an experiment is possible. In some cases, matched groups can be compared— one of them exposed to the propaganda and the other not, or one of them exposed to version A of the propaganda and another to version B, and so on. In some cases, the propaganda reaching one group can be abruptly stopped or intensified and some of the presumably consequent reactions may be observed. However, there is always the possibility that it was not one's own propaganda that brought about the changes, but someone else's, or that the changes were caused by some unknown third factor or set of factors. There is also the problem of "sleeper effects"—long-delayed reactions that may not become visible until the propaganda has worked its way through or around resistances that it may encounter deep down in the reactor's unconscious or until obstacles to expression of reactions (e.g., political policemen or suspected informers) have left the reactor's environment. And there is the possibility that the propaganda may have "boomerang effects"—effects the opposite of those intended—or combinations of boomerang and desired effects. Research design that does not allow for all these possibilities is of doubtful evidential value. [See EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN, article on QUASIEXPERIMENTAL DESIGN.]
PROPAGANDA In view of the extreme difficulty of tracing effects of propaganda upon reactors in their native habitats, a great deal of effort has been spent in recent years on strictly controlled experiments and repeated semi-intensive interviews ("panel interviews") with small matched groups, with a view to establishing general principles of propaganda and persuasion. Among the many factors examined have been the relative credibility and acceptability, to given audiences, of different sources of information, advice, and opinion; the uses of different propaganda contents aimed at the same results; and the effects of different ways of arranging and presenting the same contents. However, reliance on such findings is notably limited by the fact that the behavior of reactors available for such testing may or may not be representative of the behavior of those actual audiences in whom the propagandist is interested. It seems probable that effects of propaganda among actual reactors can in most cases only be estimated, not "measured" scientifically, and that the most valid estimates are likely to be made by persons combining considerable training in the methods of social science with considerable direct experience among the reactors under analysis. [See PANEL STUDIES.] Opposition and social control. Once propaganda produces any effects it tends to evoke opposition. Opponents may try to offset it directly or to invoke community sanctions to bring it under control. Therefore, the propagandist has to estimate his opponents' values and the steps opponents most probably will take. In different sorts of polities along the continuum from the democratic to the authoritarian, a variety of social controls over propaganda may be found. By definition, a healthily functioning democracy is a polity in which opposition to propaganda is habitually expressed primarily through peaceful counterpropaganda. It is assumed that a variety of propagandists will compete vigorously in "the marketplace of ideas," and it is hoped that the ideas best for the society will find the most takers in the long run. Prerequisites for such an outcome presumably include high levels of education, selfcontrol, and civic spirit among the participants, and large amounts of freely available information, disinterestedly gathered and disseminated by relatively autonomous, uncensored newsgathering agencies. In self-protection against secret or "unfair" propaganda by "hidden persuaders," modern democracies sometimes require registration or even licensing of some sorts of propagandists by public authorities, and "plain labeling" of propaganda out-
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put. In the United States, for instance, periodicals using the second-class mails are required to publish frequent statements of their ownership, circulation, and other data. Likewise, all propaganda agents of foreign principals must file registration forms with the U.S. Department of Justice, where the interested public may inspect the data submitted about the agents' and principals' identities, activities, and finances. Such agents are also required to place on each piece of printed matter they circulate a label identifying the principal. This principle of "disclosure," which appears so useful with respect to foreign agents, is not applied, however, to all domestic propagandists, although similar principles are applied to the registration of securities prospectuses and of certain types of political campaign advertisements and contributions. Many nations require similar "plain labeling" of securities prospectuses and paid political advertising, whether foreign or domestic in origin. In many countries, claims made in propaganda (including advertising) about the contents or characteristics of foods and drugs are also subject to registration and labeling. Other efforts made in democracies to provide public control over propaganda include laws concerning libel and slander; laws giving political candidates and legislators exceptional privileges and immunities in the field of free speech; and laws or customs requiring equal space or time in public media for all major contenders in political campaigns. In some cases there may be a legally guaranteed "right of reply," sometimes at the propagandist's expense, for any group or individual held to be seriously injured or exposed to injury by his propaganda. Obviously, however, opponents' reactions to propaganda need not be limited to disclosure or counterpropaganda. All manner of economic or physical inducements or punishments may be tried, even in democracies; and this is much more the case in relatively authoritarian polities. In the extreme case, the authoritarian regime aims to monopolize for itself all opportunities to engage in propaganda and will stop at nothing to prevent any kind of counterpropaganda. How long and thoroughly such a policy can be implemented depends, among other things, on the amount of force the regime can muster, the thoroughness of its internal intelligence and policing activities, and, perhaps most important of all, the level and distribution of secular higher education in the social system of which the regime is the polity. The effects of steps taken to neutralize or suppress propaganda can, of course, be measured by
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the same methods as the effects of the propaganda, and such measurement is subject to the same caveats. BRUCE L. SMITH [See
also ATTITUDES, article on ATTITUDE CHANGE;
^T-AINWASHING; COMMUNICATION, POLITICAL; PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE. Directly related are the entries ADVERTISING; COMMUNICATION, MASS; CONTENT ANALYSIS; PERSUASION; PUBLIC OPINION. Other
relevant material may be found in POLITICAL PARTICIPATION; SOCIALIZATION; and in the biographies of HOVLAND; STOUFFER.] BIBLIOGRAPHY COMPREHENSIVE BIBLIOGRAPHIES
BUREAU OF SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH, WASHINGTON, B.C. 1956 International Communication and Political Opinion: A Guide to the Literature, by Bruce L. Smith and Chitra M. Smith. Princeton Univ. Press. LASS WELL, HAROLD D.; SMITH, BRUCE L.; and CASEY, RALPH D. 1935 Propaganda and Promotional Activities: An Annotated Bibliography. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. SMITH, BRUCE L.; LASSWELL, HAROLD D.; and CASEY, RALPH D. 1946 Propaganda, Communication and Public Opinion: A Comprehensive Reference Guide. Princeton Univ. Press. GENERAL WORKS
BAUER, WILHELM 1929 Die offentliche Meinung in der Weltgeschichte. Potsdam (Germany): Athenaion. DEUTSCH, KARL W. 1963 The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control. New York: Free Press. DOOB, LEONARD W. 1948 Public Opinion and ganda. New York: Holt.
Propa-
DRIENCOURT, JACQUES 1950 La propaganda Nouvelle force politique. Paris: Colin. ELLUL, JACQUES (1962) 1965 Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. New York: Knopf. -» First published in French. FESTINGER, LEON 1957 A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, 111.: Row, Peterson. FREUD, SIGMUND (1921) 1955 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Volume 18, pages 67-143 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth. -> First published in German. FROMM, ERICH (1941) 1960 Escape From Freedom. New York: Holt.
GEORGE, ALEXANDER L. 1959 Propaganda Analysis: A Study of Inferences Made From Nazi Propaganda in World War II. Evanston, 111.: Row, Peterson. HOVLAND, CARL L; JANIS, IRVING L.; and KELLEY, HAROLD H. 1953 Communication and Persuasion: Psychological Studies of Opinion Change. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. KLAPPER, JOSEPH T. 1960 The Effects of Mass Communication. Glencoe, 111,: Free Press. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. (1927) 1938 Propaganda Technique in the World War. New York: Smith. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. (1930) 1960 Psychopathology and Politics. New ed., with afterthoughts by the author. New York: Viking.
LASSWELL, HAROLD D. 1935 World Politics and Personal Insecurity. New York and London: McGraw-Hill. -> A paperback edition was published in 1965 by the Free Press. LASSWELL, HAROLD D.; and BLUMENSTOCK, DOROTHY 1939 World Revolutionary Propaganda: A Chicago Study. New York: Knopf. LASSWELL, HAROLD D.; and LEITES, NATHAN 1949 Language of Politics: Studies in Quantitative Semantics. New York: Stewart. LASSWELL, HAROLD D.; LERNER, DANIEL; and POOL, ITHIEL DE SOLA 1952 The Comparative Study of Symbols. Stanford Univ. Press. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; BERELSON, BERNARD; and GAUDET, HAZEL (1944) 1960 The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. 2d ed. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. LENIN, VLADIMIR I. Agitation und Propaganda. Berlin: Verlag fur Literatur und Politik, 1929. -» A selection from Lenin's writings first published in Russian. LIPPMANN, WALTER (1922) 1944 Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan. -» A paperback edition was published in 1965 by the Free Press. MANNHEIM, KARL (1929-1931) 1954 Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Harcourt; London: Routledge. -» First published in German. A paperback edition was published in 1955 by Harcourt. MUSTE, ABRAHAM J. 1940 Non-violence in an Aggressive World. New York: Harper.
PARETO, VILFREDO (1916) 1963 The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology. 4 vols. New York: Dover. H» First published as Trattato di sociologia generate. Volume 1: Non-logical Conduct. Volume 2: Theory of Residues. Volume 3: Theory of Derivations. Volume 4: The General Form of Society. Personality and Persuasibility, by Irving L. Janis et al. Yale Studies in Attitude and Communication, Vol. 2. 1959 New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
RANULF, SVEND (1938) 1964 Moral Indignation and Middle Class Psychology: A Sociological Study. New York: Schocken. SIEPMANN, CHARLES (1950) 1956 Radio, Television and Society. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. SOREL, GEORGES (1908) 1950 Reflections on Violence. Translated by T. E. Hulme and J. Roth, with an introduction by Edward Shils. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» First published in French as Reflexions sur la violence. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Collier.
SPEIER, HANS (1929-1951) 1952 Social Order and ihe Risks of War: Papers in Political Sociology. New York: Stewart. TONNIES, FERDINAND 1922 Kritik der offentlichen Meinung. Berlin: Springer. UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC AND CULTURAL ORGANIZATION (1950) 1964 World Communications: Press, Radio, Television, Film. 4th ed. New York: UNESCO. PROPAGANDA OF DIFFERENT NATIONS
ALMOND, GABRIEL A.
1954 The Appeals of Communism.
Princeton Univ. Press. AMERICAN ASSEMBLY 1963 Cultural Affairs and Foreign Relations. Edited by Robert Blum. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
PROPERTY BARGHOORN, FREDERICK C. 1960 The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy. Princeton Univ. Press. BARGHOORN, FREDERICK C. 1964 Soviet Foreign Propaganda. Princeton Univ. Press. BARRETT, EDWARD W. 1953 Truth Is Our Weapon. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. CARROLL, WALLACE 1948 Persuade or Perish. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. CONFERENCE ON COMMUNICATION AND POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT, DOBBS FERRY, N.Y., 1961 1963 Communications and Political Development. Edited by Lucian W. Pye. Princeton Univ. Press. DIZARD, WILSON P. 1961 The Strategy of Truth: The Story of the USIS. Washington: Public Affairs Press. GREAT BRITAIN, INDEPENDENT COMMITTEE OF ENQUIRY INTO THE OVERSEAS INFORMATION SERVICES 1954 Summary of the Report. Cmnd. 9138. London: H.M. Stationery Office. HAMMOND, THOMAS T. (editor) 1965 Soviet Foreign Relations and World Communism. Princeton Univ. Press. -> Contains an annotated bibliography of 7,000 books in 30 languages. HOLT, ROBERT T. 1958 Radio Free Europe. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. HOLT, ROBERT T.; and VAN DE VELDE, ROBERT W. 1960 Strategic Psychological Operations and American Foreign Policy. Univ. of Chicago Press. HOUN, FRANKLIN W. 1961 To Change a Nation: Propaganda and Indoctrination in Communist China. New York: Free Press. INKELES, ALEX (1950) 1958 Public Opinion in Soviet Russia: A Study in Mass Persuasion. 3d printing, enl. Russian Research Center Studies, No. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. KIRKPATRICK, EVRON M. (editor) 1956 Target: The World; Communist Propaganda Activities in 1955. New York: Macmillan. KIRKPATRICK, EVRON M. (editor) 1957 Year of Crisis: Communist Propaganda Activities in 1956. New York: Macmillan. KOOP, THEODORE T. 1946 The Weapon of Silence. Univ. of Chicago Press. LERNER, DANIEL 1949 Sykewar: Psychological Warfare Against Germany, D-Day to VE-Day. New York: Stewart. LINEBARGER, PAUL M. (1948) 1954 Psychological Warfare. 2d ed. Washington: Combat Forces Press. MENDELSSOHN, PETER 1944 Japan's Political Warfare. London: Allen & Unwin. SCHRAMM, WILBUR L. 1964 Mass Media and National Development: The Role of Information in the Developing Countries. Stanford Univ. Press. SCOTT, JOHN 1955 Political Warfare: A Guide to Competitive Coexistence. New York: Day. SELZNICK, PHILIP (1952) 1960 The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. STEPHENS, OREN 1955 Facts to a Candid World: America's Overseas Information Program. Stanford Univ. Press. THOMSON, CHARLES A. 1948 Overseas Information Service of the United States Government. Washington: Brookings Institution. WHITTON, JOHN B. (editor) 1963 Propaganda and the Cold War: A Princeton University Symposium. Washington: Public Affairs Press.
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Yu, TE-CHI 1964 Mass Persuasion in Communist China. New York: Praeger. LEGALITY, DIPLOMACY, SOCIAL CONTROL
IKLE, FRED C. 1964 How Nations Negotiate. New York: Harper. LASSWELL, HAROLD D. 1941 Democracy Through Public Opinion. Menasha, Wis.: Banta. MARTIN, LESLIE J. 1958 International Propaganda: Its Legal and Diplomatic Control. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. NICOLSON, HAROLD (1939) 1964 Diplomacy. 3d ed. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. WHITTON, JOHN B.; and LARSON, ARTHUR 1964 Propaganda Toivards Disarmament in the War of Words. Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana. RECENT RESEARCH AND THEORY BERELSON, BERNARD; and JANOWITZ, MORRIS (editors) (1950) 1966 Reader in Public Opinion and Communication. 2d ed. New York: Free Press. DAUGHERTY, WILLIAM E.; and JANOWITZ, MORRIS (compilers) 1958 A Psychological Warfare Casebook. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. DEXTER, LEWIS A.; and WHITE, DAVID M. (editors) 1964 People, Society and Mass Communications. New York: Free Press. LERNER, DANIEL (editor) 1951 Propaganda in War and Crisis: Materials for American Policy. New York: Stewart. SCHRAMM, WILBUR L. (editor) 1954 The Process and Effects of Mass Communication. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. SOCIETY FOR THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF SOCIAL ISSUES (1954) 1960 Public Opinion and Propaganda: A Book of Readings. Edited by Daniel Katz et al. New York: Holt.
PROPERTY Definitions of what constitutes property, as well as attitudes toward the ownership of property, vary with different cultures and different historical epochs. Cross-cultural differences have been studied especially by anthropologists; the article that appears below describes the institution of property in preliterate societies, as do ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY; EXCHANGE AND DISPLAY; TRADE AND MARKETS. Historians of economic theory and historians of social and economic institutions often note changes in concepts of property; see, for example, ECONOMIC THOUGHT, articles on ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL THOUGHT and SOCIALIST THOUGHT,
and such historically oriented articles as FEUDALISM; MANORIAL ECONOMY; SLAVERY. Property can also be considered in its relation to other major social institutions. Thus, implicitly or explicitly, a wide variety of ideas about property emerges in the articles on the major world religions and in MoNASTICISM. Similarly, in the economic sphere, property is directly involved in several of the arti-
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cles under TAXATION, and somewhat less directly in CAPITAL; INCOME DISTRIBUTION; RENT. Moral and legal problems related to property (including intellectual property) are described in PATENTS; PRIVACY. Few thinkers in the social sciences have written xvorks that are primarily devoted to the eluciliilion of the institution of property, but the problem is discussed in the biographies of AQUINAS; HERSKOVITS; HUME; LOCKE; MARX; MAUSS; QUESNAY; POLANYI; SMITH, ADAM; VEBLEN. Property is the name for a concept that refers to the rights and obligations and the privileges and restrictions that govern the behavior of man in any society toward the scarce objects of value in that society. People everywhere desire the possession of things which are valuable by cultural definition and which by this desiring become scarce: sunlight, fresh air, land, food, rituals, medicine bundles, masks, or automobiles. Socially sanctioned customs or police-enforced laws, which define rights and obligations about ownership, control competition for these desired goods. What is owned is property. The history of the English word property indicates something of the way Western man has thought about scarce objects. Both the Middle English word propete and the Old French term propriete are derived from the Latin word proprietas, itself the noun form of the Latin proprius, meaning one's own, which is akin to the French noun propre, meaning what is close or near. Thus, historically, property carries the implication that one has exclusive rights to objects because they are so close or near that they have become part of oneself through familiarity or common usage. Man is not the only animal to show an interest in objects close to him. In an unqualified usage of the term, property appears to be characteristic of many forms of animal life, with the important distinction, however, that one should only talk of property rights when the control of scarce objects can be related to a unique normative system of values; such a system is found only in human groups. Various insects, such as bees, wasps, ants, and termites, will guard their prey and defend their nests from attack. The material they gather is used to feed themselves or their offspring or to build a home. In each case the ultimate aim appears to be the perpetuation of the species, especially in those cases in which the parent never sees the offspring. Control of objects is not for its own sake; it is merely a link in the life cycle. The few birds that accumulate stores or, oc-
casionally, bright colored objects do so as apparent modifications of food-getting or courtship impulses. The occupation and defense of territory are part of feeding, sexual, or parental behavior rather than examples of the control of denned landed property. Rodents hoard food and struggle among themselves for the exclusive possession of territorial rights. These complex behavioral processes are found in rats, squirrels, and beavers. This behavior is not entirely innate (it is the wildest speculation to talk of an "instinct of property"), but it is a complex stereotyped action pattern for which there is much experimental and other evidence to suggest a continuing interaction between nurture and nature (Barnett 1963, pp. 41-43, 81-92; Thorpe 1956, pp. 397-398). Among some primate species there appears to be accumulation of miscellaneous objects used variously for personal adornment, or as playthings, or as instruments for acquiring food. It is characteristic of apes that objects acquire added value when other apes desire them at the same time. Apes, in fact, appear to display a "protosense" of private ownership. Property among animals refers to objects necessary for species survival. The important and relevant distinction between man and other animals, only faintly foreshadowed among some apes, lies in the fact that for man material objects are in essence an extension and definition of personality. Without being strictly necessary for personal or species survival, many material objects are used by man to magnify his sense of self and to extend his influence by giving him power over other men or over the spiritual forces of nature. The objects that thus extend personality are generally scarce and hard to come by. Their acquisition and control result in social conflict. In this conflict the social concept of property is conceived and developed. The study of property among animals shows that exclusive possession of material objects subserves certain basic needs that are common to all animal species. Similarities are analogous rather than identical. Only in man can we postulate the emergence of a sense of selfhood that gives psychological underpinning for the concepts of rights, duties, responsibilities, and obligations. Balancing of individual and group conflicts is a delicate task that is carried out by tribal customs and conventions. As these customs differ from one tribe to another, so will the content of human property rights and duties (Beaglehole 1931; Lowie 1920). An understanding of primitive ownership is best achieved by concentrating upon the property systems of one or two preliterate groups for which
PROPERTY there is reasonable documentation, always keeping in mind the fact that the groups chosen represent a fragmentary range of customs rather than definitive examples of all preliterate societies. Cheyenne Plains Indians. The Cheyenne were an American Indian people inhabiting the Great Plains of what are now the states of Montana, eastern Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Colorado. They lived a nomadic, semipastoral life, dependent on buffalo hunting. They valued horses and engaged in warlike raiding activities. Their property system was in part dependent upon nomadism. Cheyenne inheritance customs were of two kinds. When a married man died, he carried with him to his grave one set of his best equipment: garments, buffalo robes, bows, arrows, gun, war club, knives, pipe, and other personal belongings. His favorite horse was slaughtered. These things were all his and his alone. If the man was a shaman, his medicine bundle also went with the body, unless previously willed to a friend or a son. The rest of the property of a married man who died intestate went to his widow, although an old man could make anticipatory gifts which were binding on his heirs. The parents of an unmarried warrior disposed of his goods by gift. Comparable giving away of property occurred in the case of married and unmarried women. Private property rights were well developed and well recognized among the Cheyenne. Misappropriation of property was not uncommon. Trading in property or giving and taking chattels often validated the exchange of rituals and ceremonials and was used as compensation or restitution in legal disputes, to pay for services in curing illness, to count "coup," or to mark the transfer of incorporeal properties such as supernatural powers. Property was also given to pay for the preparation of new implements and the teaching of such women's arts as quilling, beadworking, or lodge making. Property rights were clearly expressed in regard to killed buffalo, war loot, horses, and other articles of ornament or utility. The owner had full rights of disposal. At times, legal rights became blurred by conflict between custom and personal desires. Application of the principle of "pluralism" suggests that among the Cheyenne, as among most other preliterate peoples, there were various levels and types of prevailing normative systems which at different times could be applied to particular cases of property disposal and ownership (Llewellyn & Hoebel 1941, pp. 20-21, 212-213; Malinowski 1926). Those preliterates who have not invented courts of law to interpret disputed points of ownership have instead a range of property customs
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which vary in definition from boldly accepted delineation to shadowy etchings. Hopi Pueblo Indians. Property rights among the Hopi Indians, a sedentary, agricultural, potteryand basket-making people living in pueblo villages on the tablelands or mesas above the sandy desert of northeastern Arizona in the southwestern part of the United States, provide a neat contrast to the warlike, nomadic Cheyenne pattern (Beaglehole 1935). Among the Hopi, a matrilineal and matrilocal people, a man owns his clothes, his ceremonial costume (mask, kilt, belt, leg bands, rattles), his ornaments of silver, turquoise, and shell, his riding equipment, tools, and implements, occasionally a horse, and perhaps a few sheep or cattle. Today, he keeps the money he earns as his own private property, but if he spends this money on goods for his wife and children, these goods become the property of these members of the matrilineal group, to which the husband does not belong. An unmarried woman similarly owns her own clothes and ornaments. A married woman who is the head of her own household owns, in addition, her house and its contents; her property is customarily inherited by her daughters. The property of a man is usually inherited by his sisters, brothers, and other maternal kinsfolk and not by his wife, sons, or daughters. The borrowing of personal goods is frequent, but prolonged possession or theft is rare. Much Hopi property, whether real or personal, is owned by members of the matrilineal clan. This property includes ceremonial medicine bundles, some masks and fetishes, eagles, and the semisubterranean religious chambers called kivas. Normally, the senior man of a clan is regarded as a trustee for this property, although he may neither use it nor dispose of it, except in customarily approved ways. Land, the basis of Hopi economic life, is severely limited in extent and fertility. It is owned by the village and protected by commonly recognized boundaries. Village land is divided into clanowned land, marked by stone-slab boundary signs. Families within each clan cultivate well-defined family areas. None of these ownerships is absolute, since land for the Hopi is inalienable. Ownership thus means effective trusteeship of the land and of the food and wealth that cultivation produces. In general all trusteeship rights are inherited within the family or lineage connection of the trustee clan. The matrilineal clan also owns access to fresh-water springs. Almost inevitably, a summary description of preliterate property rights gives the misleading im-
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pression of a fixed or static institution. In the illustrations taken from Hopi and Cheyenne cultures, some aspects of ownership are fairly stable, but others are subject to change consequent upon increasing contact with Euro-American culture. The institution of property and the accompanying philosophical or protojuridical justifications have changed and will go on changing to meet the demands of an ever-changing society and its culture. Static models of culture are useful but unrealistic analytic tools. Concepts of property are subject to the endless erosion of time.
ERNEST BEAGLEHOLE BIBLIOGRAPHY
BARNETT, SAMUEL A. 1963 A Study in Behaviour: Principles of Ethology and Behavioural Physiology, Displayed Mainly in the Rat. London: Methuen. BEAGLEHOLE, ERNEST (1931) 1932 Property: A Study in Social Psychology. London School of Economics and Political Science, Studies, No. 1. New York: Macmill an. BEAGLEHOLE, ERNEST 1935 Ownership and Inheritance in an American Indian Tribe. Iowa Law Review 20: 304-316. LLEWELLYN, KARL N.; and HOEBEL, E. ADAMSON 1941 The Cheyenne Way: Conflict and Case Law in Primitive jurisprudence. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press. LOWIE, ROBERT H. (1920) 1947 Primitive Society. New York: Liveright. -> A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Harper. MALINOWSKI, BRONISLAW (1926) 1961 Crime and Custom in Savage Society. London: Routledge. -» A paperback edition was published in 1959 by Littlefield. THORPE, WILLIAM H. (1956) 1963 Learning and Instinct in Animals. 2d ed., rev. & enl. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. VINOGRADOFF, PAUL 1920-1922 Outlines of Historical Jurisprudence. 2 vols. Oxford Univ. Press. -» Volume 1: Introduction; Tribal Law. Volume 2: The Jurisprudence of the Greek City.
PROPERTY TAXES See under TAXATION.
PROSPERITY See BUSINESS CYCLES. PROSTITUTION Prostitution is the granting of sexual access on a relatively indiscriminate basis for payment either in money or in goods, depending on the complexity of the local economic system. Payment is acknowledged to be for a specific sexual performance. Prostitution is a service that may be performed by either males or females and for either males or females, although in practice in nearly all societies
acts of prostitution are commonly performed by females for males or by males for males. The focus of this article is exclusively on female prostitution. Money and sexuality in prostitution. While prostitutes may be selective about the kinds of sexual activities that they will perform for money, it is always clear that some kind of sexual act is available from them. In like manner, prostitutes may be relatively selective about their clientele, choosing not to take those who are dirty or deformed, those who request sexual activities that they think aberrant, or those who violate certain of the norms of conduct between prostitute and customer. However, within the limits set by these idiosyncrasies, the entree to the prostitute is the capacity to pay for the relationship. Payment for the specific act is what distinguishes the prostitute from the mistress or from females who accept a range of gifts while having sexual contact with a male. While these latter cases are marginal, it is important to keep central to the discussion the immediate nexus between money and sexuality as a crucial part of the prostitute-customer relationship. Money is the most public object in the society. In Simmers words, "Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability" ([1902-1917] 1950, p. 414). Money is the universal lubricant and the universal metric; it provides the society with a fluidity and an ease of exchange that is deeply imbedded in the modern consciousness. In an era when marriage is no longer the exchange of goods for a reproductive object, and when there exists a romantic ideology dedicated to the self-selection of the mate, the private experience of sexuality is the polar opposite of the public quality of money. The sexual experience is expected to be individual, affective, and incommensurable, and it is in these attributes that it carries its special salience for society. Social functions of prostitution. It is in the act of prostitution that the most public and the most private values in the society meet without conflicting. Sexual gratification is legitimately expected only within the marital bond, although there are quasi-legitimate forms of sexuality that are proscribed but not punished, either because they are tacitly recognized to promote marriage (premarital coitus between those in love) or because they reduce sexual drives during the absence of a marital partner (masturbation either in adolescence or during marriage). Prostitution had some of these
PROSTITUTION quasi-legitimate functions in American society during the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth. The reason was that, so long as both premarital coitus and masturbation were frowned upon, the function of the "bad" woman could be seen as one of protecting the virtue of those who were "good," and so of maintaining a certain property value. Given the large number of migrant males, many of whom never married, it was to be expected that police officials would conclude that the existence of prostitution was a necessary evil, or even that it was a positive good in that it reduced the number of rapes in the community. From the evidence that is available, it seems that the way in which prostitution is organized, diffused, and evaluated is a function of the significance of marriage in the society and the ways in which society organizes access to legitimate sexual experience. Where there are great restraints on premarital coitus and females are highly valued for their reproductive capacities, prostitution among females will exist as an alternative form of gratification for large numbers of males. Prostitution in the United States A basic shift in the pattern of the use of prostitutes in the United States correlates with a major campaign against prostitution after World War i, but it is more significantly tied to other shifts in the structure of premarital coitus. Figures published in 1948 in Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male chronicle this shift, for while the proportion among males born in 1910 and after who had ever gone to a prostitute is the same as for males born in 1909 and before, the number of times that members of later age cohorts had gone to prostitutes was from two-thirds to one-half less (Kinsey et al. 1948, pp. 595-609). The most substantial changes were among those of lesser education; however, this change was true even of the collegeeducated, whose rate of contact with prostitutes had always been low and might therefore be expected to have remained stable. The differences between the college and noncollege rates in all cohorts are indicative of the impact of social class factors in this area of sexual behavior (ibid., pp. 351-355). It is clear that contact with prostitutes currently accounts for only a small proportion of the sexual experiences of American males in early adulthood and that most sexual experience is centered on peer group activity that results in initiation into heterosexual coitus (Kirkendall 1961, pp. 22-55). It is among males who do not marry or who were divorced or separated in their thirties that the proportion going to prostitutes in-
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creases to about 15 to 20 per cent of all sexual contacts after age 35 (Kinsey et al. 1948, pp. 249-259). At first glance it would appear that these effects might be due to the decreasing visibility of prostitution, resulting from law enforcement and increased legal sanctions. But it is likely, given the intractability of the control of prostitution, that this change was the result of other forces. As a result of these forces, the proportion of nevermarried males in American society decreased; there was a shift in courtship patterns; and sexual contact between unmarried couples increased in saliency. During the same period in which the number of males going to prostitutes was decreasing, there was a concomitant rise in the proportion of respectable females who were having premarital coitus. This was an increase from about one-quarter of all females in the cohorts born before 1900 to about one-half in the cohorts born between 1900 and 1929 (Kinsey et al. 1953, pp. 298-302; Terman 1938; Freedman 1965). This shift occurred at all social levels and is as true of females with grade-school educations as of those with college educations. These changes in rates represent a fundamental shift in the role of coitus before marriage in American society, a shift that indicates a major break with nineteenth-century values and a change in the status of women. Premarital coitus and prostitution While the data from Kinsey and others indicate that the social class factor has substantial effects on the sexual behavior of males, there is no such finding in regard to the sexual behavior of females. Indeed, the premarital coitus rates of males tend to be a great deal higher than those for females, except among the college-educated, where the differences are more moderate (Kinsey et al. 1953, pp. 78-80). It is especially at the very lowest educational level distinguished in the Kinsey reports that the rates of premarital coitus for males are much greater than for females. Part of this may be exaggeration by the males interviewed, given the saliency of such coitus to them. Nevertheless, it is clear that their rates of premarital coitus are far greater than those reported by females in the Kinsey sample at the same educational level. The explanation of these rate differentials lies in the fact that premarital coitus for the majority of females at all social levels, but most significantly among the better educated, takes place primarily with one male—the fiance. Indeed, nearly half of all females who report having experienced premarital coitus state that it was only with the fiance
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(ibid., pp. 291-293), and about 55 per cent of them state that it was with only one male. Another 35 per cent had premarital coitus with two to five males. Of women who had premarital coitus but, as is characteristic of lower-class girls, married before twenty, the proportion reporting that premarital coitus was with five or fewer males is 90 per cent (ibid., table 78, p. 336). These data indicate that patterns of premarital coitus are relatively similar for females across the social-class spectrum but that there exists a minority of females, primarily of lower-class origins, who serve as sexual targets for fairly large numbers of male*: and at fairly high rates of contact. These females, in addition, account for most of the instances of sexual contact between middle-class males and lower-class girls. This suggests that a relatively small number of females are serving the same functions as prostitutes did in the past, but without charging for this sexual activity. However, it is from this small group of females that the largest proportion of women who go into prostitution is drawn. Entry into prostitution The conventional image of the first experience of prostitution has commonly been one of innocence betrayed or, to judge from the biographies of many former prostitutes, a severely traumatic experience. However, for the bulk of girls who enter prostitution from a background of premarital promiscuity, the transition is untraumatic, and for some may even be an entry into a far more leisurely and less pressured way of life (Young 1964; McManus 1960, pp. 81-86). Indeed, even in the nineteenth century the working conditions of the prostitute in England seemed to some observers to be less physically damaging than either work in the factories or the exhaustion of repeated childbearing (Acton 1857, p. 59). The harmful effects of prostitution are far less obvious-, they are attendant upon an increasing involvement in the life of prostitution correlated with decreasing social relationships with others outside that world. To the degree that there is specific trauma upon entering prostitution, it appears more often among females, especially middle-class females, who have not had earlier conditioning from multiple sexual contacts with a variety of males. With the decline of the brothel, or house of prostitution, the apprenticeship experience in prostitution is now dependent upon dyadic relationships between the apprentice and either a more experienced prostitute or a male who operates as a pimp (Bryan 1965). The learning experience involves
more tasks than simply that of getting over the experience of exchanging money for coitus, although this is the informing and central dilemma of the prostitute. It also involves learning ways of approaching males, setting the price, collecting the fee, managing the sexual contact, and letting the customer go. Each of these tasks involves making explicit what has been implicit in all prior sexual contacts, since, no matter how many of these there might have been, there was always the possibility of seeing them as part of a more conventional structure of sexual expectations. Once the commitment to take money has been made, it means that the female has given up even the pretense of an emotionally valued relationship with the male. The situation is no longer one of courting or dating but is limited to the specific exchange of sexual access for money. This means that even if she has refused no one previously, her present lack of discrimination is now a public event. During this apprenticeship period she must learn a specialized argot not only about sexual behavior but also about the naming of others in the environment: customers, steerers, the police, and other prostitutes. The argot is highly value-laden and in and of itself constrains the neophyte into patterns of action and belief (Maurer 1939). The most complex of these tasks, however, involves learning to speak about sexual acts and sexual preferences that in the past have arisen and been performed in gestural and nonverbal contexts, and then learning to tie the new talk to the pricing of the specific activity that is requested. The problem is that while the relationship between money and sexuality is what makes the act possible, the economic portion of the act must not be allowed to intervene in the nature of the sexual performance. The structure of talk, once learned, becomes highly ritualized and predictable, although it varies from one social level of customer to another and from one situation of prostitution to another. Thus the centrality of the cash exchange is high for the lower-class customer, the sexual activities preferred are limited, and the content of the sexual talk is small. On the other hand, in contacts with middle-class males the price is set and not referred to again (although there may be psychic gain for the male as a result of payment), the sexual interest may be wide, and there is a certain expectation of talk that transcends the immediate sexual character of the relationship. The capacity to meet all of these expectations is a relatively uncommon skill, and this fact may account for the mobility problems of girls who enter the profession at various levels.
PROSTITUTION Entering "the life" thus requires learning a new conception of the self, a new relationship to males, and a new way of talking about the self, as well as learning to meet a new world populated by special kinds of others. At the same time there is a decrease in the frequency of interaction with conventional others (except with men in their new role as clients) and consequently a decreasing capacity to return to the conventional world. The life of prostitution, like other forms of deviance, commits a person at the most deeply experienced levels of the self and in the process produces far greater similarities between prostitutes than would be expected on the basis of any set of etiological characteristics. World of the prostitute The culture of prostitution is, like all cultures, composed of significant others who lay claim to the prostitute's time, energy, and affection. Entry into this culture requires the prostitute to make a great many changes in the ways in which she defines other people. These new definitions inescapably cut off many of her older, more conventional definitions. But the older definitions may still have latent claims on her, and in some ways entangle her even when she is most enmeshed in her new experiences. The world of the prostitute is composed of other prostitutes; clients (Johns); steerers and procurers; in some cases, pimps; in others, Lesbian lovers; and, finally, the police and other agents of law enforcement (Bryan 1965; 1966; Jackman et al. 1963). The relationships with other prostitutes are enormously complex, but they seem in all circumstances to carry with them a fair amount of mutual dislike and mutual exploitation. The content of conversations is often limited to the occupational life, for exposure of the self on other levels invites exploitation due to the prostitute's increasing social vulnerability. However, the sharing of a special kind of alienation and social distance from conventional society forces the prostitute back on other prostitutes, for there is no one else with whom she can share the largest part of her daily experience. Relationships with clients are equally difficult. They are most easily handled when they do not impinge on, or have properties of, relationships that might be sought in nondeviant ways. Thus the house girl, who lives in a world of other prostitutes and who services a lower-class clientele, is less likely to develop attachments to clients and more easily sees them as a series of replaceable objects. The call girl, on the other hand, insofar as she must appear in public with her clients in roles that are defined as nondeviant, runs the risk of
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becoming emotionally involved with them. This emotional involvement is expressed in demands that clients pay lawyers' fees, pay for bail bonds, or otherwise help out when she is in trouble, and it typically results in intense anger when they do not. In such cases, because a residue of old relationships is still involved, it is clear that the girl has not fully made a separation between her work life and her personal life. Failure to achieve such a separation may also explain why a call girl often reports more intense feelings of antipathy for the customer than does the street or bar prostitute. The difficulty of the call girl's role here is complicated by the fact that she may well have had middleclass origins and thus may be more committed to the love ethic and more vulnerable to disappointment. Clients and their needs. The clients of prostitutes use them for a variety of reasons (Winick 1962; Gibbens & Silberman I960; Kinsey et al. 1948, pp. 605-609). For many men, especially those in the lower class, the motive is often simply sexual relief or the opportunity to experience a novel sexual contact, in terms of either of a new female or of a tabooed technique (usually mouth—genital contact). However, for many other males, more commonly middle class, the resort to the prostitute is often more complex and is invested with greater ambivalence. Novelty in partner and technique are certainly involved, but an equally potent factor, it seems, is the lack of future responsibility for the consequences of sexual contact. Since many of the organizing constraints on sexual activity are related to maintaining the family and providing for its future, contact with a prostitute is significant to the client because it allows him sexual expression without such controls on behavior. The guilt consequent on the violation of the norms commonly deepens and intensifies the erotic character of the relationship, as does the degraded status of the prostitute, who provides sexual access separated from the entanglements of nurturance and affection. In addition, the prostitute provides a sexual contact that does not involve the male in the timeconsuming conventional buildup to coitus and frees him for other pursuits. The frequency of contacts with prostitutes by males at conventions and in other situations that are separated from the home suggests the loosening of social controls that are necessary for such contacts to take place. There are also those males whose sexual interests are so bizarre that there is no population of conventional women who could understand these desires or provide for them. Indeed, the expression of such desires as sadism or masochism would
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undermine the rest of a nondeviant relationship. The proportion of such men is small, yet there exists a small number of prostitutes who will provide such services. The prostitute has to learn to cope with the various demands of these clients and to sort out those who request things that she will iiOt do even for a price. Prostitutes tell each other about clients, and it is in this interaction that patterns of client management are learned. Supporting relationships. The relationship of the prostitute to the pimp is poorly understood, and the anxiety that the thought of this relationship raises in other men is considerable. This reaction against the pimp has something to do with the asymmetry of a man living off the earnings of women in a society where men must provide for women. In addition, there is envy of the man who gets free that for which all others pay. The strength of the tie of the prostitute to the pimp is best understood in terms of her deprived emotional relationships with other males. In a world of changing faces, in terms of both prostitutes and clients, the pimp remains a stable figure who will speak in the terms of love and affection. Given that this is often a minimal relationship, it still provides a stable anchor for the self in a world where the private sexual experience has been depersonalized and the replaceability of not only the client, but also the self, has been made most apparent. Inadequate as it might seem to others, the tie to the pimp remains for many a prostitute the single human relationship where she may provide both sexuality and love, even if it is contaminated by money. Indeed, the very act of giving money away to the pimp is like divesting the self of filthy lucre. Lesbian relationships have much the same character as the relationship with the pimp, but are probably less demoralizing. They arise from the need for affection and the alienation from men that is implied in the nexus between sex and money. It is not that Lesbians become prostitutes, but that prostitutes, out of their reaction to the emotional poverty of their world, seek loving human relationships and that often the only such relationships available are with women. The world of secondary support for the prostitute is a shadowy one. The bell boy, bartender, or cab driver who directs the customer and the prostitute to each other is an untrustworthy ally, and the prostitute soon learns the cost of accepting help from these individuals, their relative unreliability, and the exploitative nature of their relationship to her. This system of secondary support is a quasidelinquent underworld that verges on the straightforwardly criminal.
Prostitution and law enforcement. Where prostitution is illegal, the prostitute is thrust into a world of police, courts, and correctional institutions. This act of exclusion from the larger society automatically includes her in a set of relationships with the criminal world. Thus her life, already difficult, is further complicated by contacts with narcotics, petty and major crime, and the corruption of the agencies of criminal justice. Since the law is enforced only against the paid participants in the act of prostitution (the customer is rarely arrested), the prostitute is forever confronted with the facts of unequal treatment. Since, in any case, enforcement of prostitution laws is uneven and often tied to changes in the political climate, she is vulnerable to blackmail for money from members of the police force who are free to arrest her or not, as they please. Since her position at the margin of the underworld makes her a listening post, she is pressured to give information to the police. In all of this she is further alienated from the society and forced into a criminal conception of the larger society and of herself. All of the enforcement procedures fail in their intent to reduce prostitution, since they more often confirm persons in the activity than they remove them from it. Psychopathology among prostitutes. All forms of deviance may be seen as at least potentially conducive to the development of major psychopathology. One of the major functions of the culture of the prostitute is to reduce this potential by providing a system of significant others who operate as community and culture. While there is a good deal of evidence for pathology among prostitutes, it is probably reduced by the existence of the culture of prostitution. At the same time, the existence of this culture means that the prostitute's capacity to return to conventional society is thereby reduced. The main potential for pathology is located in the amalgam of sexuality and money at its most obvious level and is complicated by the nature of the cqntrol procedures that society invokes. It should be clear that such pathology as exists is differentially distributed and probably occurs more frequently among middle-class girls who enter the life than among those who come from other kinds of backgrounds. Departure from prostitution. Most prostitutes do not spend their entire lives in the career of prostitution. Looks and physical health are eroded, if not by the life itself, then by the very process of aging. Some prostitutes marry out of the life into relatively stable family systems, while others drop out into service and related occupations, some of which are at the margins of delinquent communi-
PROSTITUTION ties. There is probably some degree of upward mobility for women who enter the life at the callgirl level from backgrounds at a lower social level. Others remain in the system because they have police and prison records, still others because they are drug addicts. The problem of how the exprostitute copes with her past and learns to manage the renewed disjuncture between money and sexuality has not been studied. If she does learn to manage it, part of her capacity to do so may be due to the very alienated relationships that she has had with clients, so that they really do not count as part of her sexual past. It is certain that conditions in the United States make exiting from the life of prostitution more difficult than, say, in Denmark, where there is no statute against the act of taking pay for a sexual contact as long as the female has another occupation. Denmark's policy is based on the hope that through such a mechanism the prostitute will maintain sufficient ties with the conventional community to give her a past other than one of prostitution when she chooses to leave this career (Kemp 1936; Jersild 1958; 1959). Patterns of prostitution The structure and extent of prostitution in any society depend strongly upon the character of premarital sexual practices. It also depends on the numbers of unmarried males in the society at any one time. To the degree that premarital coitus is permissible and becomes part of the courting ritual, there will be a concomitant decrease in the use of prostitutes by young men. Further, the smaller the proportion of unmarried males of any age and the larger the proportion of married females, the less use of prostitutes there will be altogether. In the United States, the structural conditions of premarital coitus have remained relatively stable —-that is, a small proportion of the females provide sexual services for a large number of males. However, they do so through promiscuity rather than through engaging in the same behavior for pay. In other countries, to the degree that a woman's virginity is identified with her marriageability, and to the degree that there are homeless or womanless men, the practice of prostitution is likely to remain much the same as it was in the United States at the beginning of this century. The social organization and the culture of prostitution do vary considerably by nationality. However, since prostitution in nearly all countries is illegal, socially stigmatized, or both, it is usually characterized by secrecy, intense occupational involvement, and difficulties in leaving the profession.
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Its ties with the criminal underworld leave the prostitute open to harassment not only from the police but also from other prostitutes and other members of criminal subgroups. Even without the pressures created by illegality or stigma, the dilemmas of managing an identification of money with sexuality and of establishing an economic yardstick for sexual access would produce strains toward the creation of a prostitute subculture. Thus the prostitute needs to be provided with an occupational milieu that will help her to learn a new concept of self, to manage the complex tasks involved in her role, and to satisfy her normal needs for social relationships. While it has been pointed out that the marriage tie also involves the exchange of sexual access for economic security (Davis 1961), the married woman does not resemble the prostitute in this respect, because the critical component in prostitution is making explicit the nature of this exchange and determining its value in the public medium of money. JOHN H. GAGNON [See also POLICE; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIOLOGY, article On THE EARLY HISTORY OF SOCIAL RESEARCH; and
the biography of KINSEY.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACTON, WILLIAM 1857 Prostitution Considered in Its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects in London and Other Large Cities. London: Churchill. BRITISH SOCIAL BIOLOGY COUNCIL 1955 Women of the Streets: A Sociological Study of the Common Prostitute. Edited by C. H. Rolph. London: Seeker & Warburg. BRYAN, JAMES H. 1965 Apprenticeships in Prostitution. SociaZ Problems 12:287-297. BRYAN, JAMES H. 1966 Occupational Ideologies and Individual Attitudes of Call Girls. Social Problems 13:441-450. COUSINS, SHEILA [pseud.] 1938 To Beg I Am Ashamed. New York: Vanguard. DAVIS, KINGSLEY 1961 Prostitution. Pages 262-288 in Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (editors), Contemporary Social Problems: An Introduction to the Sociology of Deviant Behavior and Social Disorganization. New York: Harcourt. FREEDMAN, MERVIN B. 1965 The Sexual Behavior of American College Women: An Empirical Study and an Historical Survey. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly of Behavior and Development 11, no. 1:33-48. GIBBENS, T. C. N. 1956 Juvenile Prostitution. Unpublished manuscript. -> Paper read before the Scientific Group for the Discussion of Delinquency Problems. GIBBENS, T. C. N.; and SILBERMAN, M. 1960 The Clients of Prostitutes. British Journal of Venereal Diseases 36, no. 2:113-117. JACKMAN, NORMAN H.; O'TOOLE, RICHARD; and GEIS, GILBERT 1963 The Self Image of the Prostitute. Sociological Quarterly 4, no. 2:150-161.
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JERSILD, JENS 1958 Amerikanerpiger. Copenhagen: Saertryk af Juristen. JERSILD, JENS 1959 Hvad unge b0r vide om homoseksualitet, prostitution, saedelighedsforbrydelser og k0nssygdomme. Copenhagen: Munksgaard. KEMP, TAGE 1936 Prostitution: An Investigation of Its Causes, Especially With Regard to Hereditary Factors. Translated from the Danish by Elsie-Marie Werner Kornerup. Copenhagen: Munksgaard. KINSEY, ALFRED C. et al. 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: Saunders. KINSEY, ALFRED C. et al. 1953 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: Saunders. KIRKENDALL, LESTER A. 1961 Premarital Intercourse and Interpersonal Relationchips. New York: Julian. MCMANUS, VIRGINIA 1960 Not for Love. New York: Putnam. MAURER, T^AVID W. 1939 Prostitutes and Criminal Argots. American Journal of Sociology 44:546-550. POMEROY, WARDELL 1965 Some Aspects of Prostitution. Journal of Sex Research 1, no. 3:177-187. SIMMEL, GEORG (1902-1917) 1950 The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Edited and translated by Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. Streetwalker. 1959 London: Bodley Head. -» Published anonymously. TERMAN, L. M. et al. 1938 Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness. New York: McGraw-Hill. WINICK, CHARLES 1962 Prostitutes' Clients' Perception of the Prostitutes and of Themselves. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 8:289-297. YOUNG, WAYLAND 1964 Eros Denied: Sex in Western Society. New York: Grove. ->• See especially Chapter 14, "Prostitution."
PROTECTIONISM See INTERNATIONAL TRADE CONTROLS. PROTECTORATES See TRUSTEESHIP. PROTESTANT ETHIC See CHRISTIANITY and the biographies of TAWNEY and WEBER, MAX. PROTESTANT POLITICAL THOUGHT Protestantism emerged in sixteenth-century Europe as a movement within the Christian church, seeking chiefly to depoliticize religious thought rather than to establish a new religious influence in the public order. The aim of Martin Luther's attempt to reform Catholicism was not to deny the responsibilities of Christians in politics but to free the gospel, the "good news" of the Scriptures about Jesus Christ, from the proprietorship of either the church or the state. The Lutheran reformation brought into existence a great number of sects— Baptist, Congregational, etc.—whose concern was chiefly to develop a voluntary community of be-
lievers whose passionate witness to the purity of the gospel's commandments would change the hopes of men in the political order. The Calvinist movement, seeking to overcome the excessive preoccupation of Lutheranism with the gospel and of sectarianism with the development of a free Christian community, directed its attention to the problem of reconstructing the political order. The historical development of the three major types of Protestant political thought—Lutheranism, sectarianism, and Calvinism—was shaped by the fact that they emerged out of the criticism of a system of medieval Catholic thought which affirmed that religious and political life are closely interdependent, that regnum and sacerdotium form complementary jurisdictions within the res publica Christiana. From the Reformation to the twentieth century, Protestant political thought has focused on the question of the differentiation of gospel, church, and public order and on their free and responsible interaction. Lutheran political thought The nature of the first great Protestant reformer's political thought can be sensed at once from Luther's statement addressed to Emperor Charles v in 1521 in response to an attempt to force in public court Luther's recognition of the supremacy of the pope on religious matters. Luther said, "Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason . . . I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted" ([1521] 1958, p. 112). The ground of Christian faith was the possession of neither church nor state. "The word of God," Luther noted, "which teaches full freedom, should not and must not be fettered" ([1520a] 1952, p. 345). Luther concluded that the righteousness talked about by St. Paul as the mark of the Christian is a relationship of God and man which is freely given to all men entirely at the initiative of God. The Christian responds to it with personal trust and gratitude. A man's sense of righteousness cannot be mediated or assumed as a responsibility by any priest or politician. Hence the Reformation slogan Solo fide. Luther's search for the "real" in religious experience drove him to oppose, at first, not the political order but the highly organized power structure of the Catholic church and the over-elaborated medieval theology and morality. In his attack on ecclesiasticism and scholasticism Luther hoped to recover what were for him simple and precious realities: the love of God for man and the world, revealed in Christ, and the freedom of the Christian man in obedience to the will of God. In Luther's words:
PROTESTANT POLITICAL THOUGHT "A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone" ([1520&] 1928, p. 6). Venturesome acts that substituted justice and mercy for force and threat in human relations were to be the grateful response of Christians to what God had done in Christ and continued to do through the Holy Spirit. [See the biography of LUTHER.] From these religious convictions, Luther elaborated ideas of considerable political significance. These ideas had to do with the limits of personal responsibility and freedom in public actions and with the inadmissibility of attempts by ecclesiastical or political authorities to use coercion to compel assent. For Luther, agreement so obtained is stripped of all spiritual value; only free adherence qualifies as faith and morality. Of even broader cultural significance has been the Lutheran conviction that the personal dimensions of conscience and commitment, of guilt and forgiveness, of family and kin affections, are a more basic or primary reality than political structures of office, status, and power. These convictions deeply influenced Luther's view of the church. When the church relies too heavily upon an elaborate system of laws, good works, and indulgences, it becomes like the political realm, relying upon controls and restraints rather than upon the persuasive power of the Word and the loving, spontaneous ministering to the needs of others. For Luther, the unity of the church was made possible by a religious reality—the spirit of Christ and the faith of believers; the unity of the political order rested on a natural or secular concept—the uses of reason for the achievement of order and peace. The Lutheran church was to be then, at least in its founder's hopes, a unique and simple fellowship of those people who believed they were called to do the will of God; it was not a rationally constituted society such as the town or nation. In such a fellowship all believers were priests in service to one another. The offices of the church were formed to meet specific human needs and, hence, were subject to periodic revision. The holder of such office had no authority but to preach the word and administer the sacraments in ways which make plain how God intervenes in the lives of men, transforming them by his creative power. This concept of the church as a historical community of persons known as Christians directed thought about human institutions toward the feelings, hopes, and commitments that people shared in them. But the elements of coercion, discipline,
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and rationality, which Luther eliminated from the church, reappeared in his conception of political order. The general conclusion of scholars viewing the historical development of Lutheran thought and organization (Wolin 1960, p. 148) is that Luther's tendencies to minimize the spiritual significance of political power and institutional policy encouraged in the Lutheran church support for a monopoly of all kinds of temporal power by the emerging national states and an uncritical acceptance of political authority in its more negative and repressive forms. Luther was a revolutionary spirit; his thought reflects the paradoxes and discontinuities of his own age. Because he saw the chief source of spiritual oppression in Roman ecclesiasticism, he sought to build up the powers of the princes against the emperor and the papacy. In this battle he began to evolve a theory of the two realms —political and religious, the former to be characterized by an official, secular, rational ethic of the state and the latter to be guided by the authentic Christian ethic of the Sermon on the Mount. Luther's more pietist and conservative followers found that in practice the gulf between duty and faith was difficult to bridge; opposition to injustice and tyranny was, therefore, postponed until such time as the state interfered with private and churchly matters of the spirit. Lutheran thought has generally been an integrating and conserving force for the established institutions of family, commerce, religion, and government. These are, in the Lutheran heritage, divinely ordained; they war constantly against the demonic powers in the world. Because they are divinely ordained, the Christian is to be obedient to them. Also, obedience to political rulers, in matters over which they properly have jurisdiction, is within the divine ordering of human affairs. Yet Luther did not assume that the established institutions should be the exclusive instruments for the accomplishment of God's will—what he was trying to guard against effectively was any effort to bring the natural institutions of life entirely under the judgment and control of the spiritual enterprise. In this respect he is to be distinguished from both ecclesiastical Christendom of medieval Catholic theory and the experiments in the holy commonwealth that were to spring up in the "free church" and Calvinist heritages. Although scholars have been able to find a place for a positive view of the state's welfare function within Luther's thought, it is clear he held no hope for the eventual triumph of Christian forces to the point where the government represented a pure Christendom. Neither the institutions of the church
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nor politics can, in the Lutheran tradition, become substitutes for the gospel, nor can they be entirely changed to fit the requirements of the gospel. This is the Protestant principle which, perhaps more than any other, has characterized the movement's political thought. Sectarian political thought The reformation which Luther began stimulated the formation of an enormous number of small groups of earnest Christians who developed what Ernst Troeltsch ([1912] 1931, p. 691) termed the sectarian ideas, implicit in the thought of the great reformers. To this heritage belong all the Baptist and Anabaptist, Congregational, and "free church" revolts against Protestant orthodoxy. This second type of Protestant political thought was termed "sectarian" because it was representative of groups that cut themselves off from the established religious institutions to give witness to doctrines interpreted in extreme terms. Some of the earliest sects (Baptist, Anabaptist, millenarian) retreated from attempts to reform or redeem the world and the churches, viewing them as incorrigibly corrupt and sinful. They therefore formed small voluntary communities committed to fulfilling the Sermon on the Mount and other scriptural imperatives. The extreme sects of the sixteenth century did not hope for the reconstruction of the political world but for its dissolution. Their members refused to use the courts in civil disputes, to serve in the army, or to associate in any way with the political order. In a few instances the sects turned to violence— for example, the followers of Thomas Miinzer joined briefly with the German peasants in violent revolt against the princes, arguing that the liberty of the Christian faith bore with it truly equal rights for all in the political order. Most of the sects which flowered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Congregationalists, Levellers, Methodists) were formed in the hope that voluntary communities of believers might influence the political order by an appeal to all men to discipline their self-interests, to be reasonable in public debate, and to cherish freedom once they experienced it in religion. For sectarian liberalism the possibility of regeneration and renewal of individual men through the power of the gospel and the fellowship of believers became the focus of concern, rather than the scope of self-interest and the persistence of national and institutional loyalties, which preoccupied the Lutherans. Nonetheless, the sects considered themselves as part of the Reformation and appealed to its principles of the priesthood of all believers, the freedom of Chris-
tian conscience, openness to the fresh blessings of the Holy Spirit, and the possibilities of brotherhood in the political order. Many scholars (Nichols 1951, p. 3; Bennett 1958, p. 147) have viewed this sectarian heritage as the seedbed of liberal, democratic politics, while noting that sectarian ideas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are not to be equated with Lockean politics or the individualism of nineteenthcentury American Protestantism. The principle of human equality was implied in the sectarian emphasis that all believers are priests capable of contributing to the interpretation of God's will and response to it. But this did not mean that all men are alike in standards and values. It meant that all men are alike in being children of God, that each has something incomparable and unique about him, a particular purpose to his work and life which God will make known. Democratic principles of government by consent and of constitutional safeguard for freedom of expression were formulated by Protestants out of their experiences in self-governing, autonomous congregations of Independents, Levellers, Quakers, etc., in the seventeenth century. These congregations developed and put into practice concepts which had been implicit in the Church's teachings from the beginning, such as the duty to follow one's conscience or inner light and to have one's acts open to critical discussion by the community. In these congregations the Scriptures were not left to private interpretation of each member or to the authority of the clergy. The will of God for society had to commend itself to the whole fellowship of believers. To discern God's will demanded a diversity of gifts and the liberty of men to agree and disagree without resort to violence. Thus, the freely negotiated contract was, in economic and political life, the characteristic institution of the liberal society. The liberal sectarian faith reached its greatest influence in American Protestantism of the nineteenth century. The optimistic belief of the movement that the rule of God could be established in society by voluntary action became pronounced in a nation which had a sense of new beginnings in a frontier land. The Methodist church, founded by John Wesley, with its stress upon change of heart and conversion of the individual as the key to social salvation, was the fastest growing denomination in nineteenth-century United States. In American Protestantism the underlying assumption of both religion and culture is that the religious convictions of individuals freely gathered in churches and acting in voluntary associations will
PROTESTANT POLITICAL THOUGHT permeate the cultural-political order by persuasion and example. Calvinist political thought The political problems which Luther and the sects of the Reformation bequeathed to John Calvin centered on a developing crisis in the concept of order and in the Western traditions of civility. Lutheran arid sectarian criticism of Roman Catholic Christianity had focused upon a demand to free the individual believer from a mass of institutional controls and traditional restraints. This liberation had encouraged the development of a conception of the religious community as a fellowship bound together by ties of faith, love, and the worshiped presence of Christ, but it had invited avoidance, indifference, even antagonism toward the harsher political realities. In this crisis of order, Calvin put forward a system of ideas which stemmed the flight from civility. Calvin provided Protestantism with a fully developed doctrinal and political system as an alternative to Roman Catholic thought and organization. While Luther spoke in anguish of the great dilemmas of faith—freedom and authority, anxiety and justification—Calvin belonged to the second generation of Protestants, concerned with systematic innovation in moral conduct and social organization. In his "Dedication" to the Institutes, Calvin made clear that he belonged to the Reformation, reflecting Luther's statement of the primary principle of Protestantism: "While we make use of their [the Church Fathers'] writings, we always remember that 'all things are ours'; to serve us, not to have dominion over us, and that 'we are Christ's alone,' and owe him universal obedience. He who neglects this distinction [from the papal tradition] will have nothing decided in religion.'"' But the whole thrust of Calvin's thought is that Christianity constitutes far more a faith of discipline and obedience than of justification. "And doubtless this is the priesthood of the Christian pastor, that is, to sacrifice men, as it were, to God, by bringing them to obey the gospel, and not, as the Papists have hitherto haughtily vaunted, by offering up Christ to reconcile men to God" ([1540] 1948, p. 527). In Calvinism and the reformed-church tradition in Protestantism, Christianity was neither a priestly communion with God nor a voluntary fellowship of love and freedom, but rather a social religion. Calvin's theory of the church was an elaboration of the principle that the Christian faith would be incomplete without an institutional structure to express religious convictions effectively in the society, possessing the power and control needed to
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insure the solidarity of the group. The Calvinists viewed the Lutheran church as too vulnerable to political interference and the sects too split by the internal disorders and confusions of egalitarian democracy. The Calvinist church polity aimed at self-sufficiency without divorce from political life, at active membership and strong leadership without papal and clerical domination. Ecclesiastical and civil government were to be more analogous than antithetical, different in objectives and spirit but not in the necessities of law, authority, and power. Calvin often spoke of the church as a commonwealth, a counterpolity to the state, which cohered fundamentally by virtue of a transcendent spirit working through the "saints," who had joined Christ to form a corpus mysticum, activated and disciplined enough to "take the earthly kingdom and transform it." [See the biography of CALVIN.] The greatest innovations in sixteenth-century politics (e.g., the English revolution led by Oliver Cromwell) stemmed from this theory of the church. The principal political idea of the revolution of the saints, as one historian of Puritanism has noted (Walzer 1965, p. 1), was that "specially designated and organized bands of men might play a creative part in the political world, destroying the established order and reconstructing society according to the Word of God or the plans of their fellows—this idea did not enter at all into the thought of Machiavelli, Luther or Bodin." The activism of the Calvinist saints—Genevan, Huguenot, Dutch, Scottish, Puritan—marked the transformation of politics into a calling or work that could over a lifetime express one's deepest religious and moral convictions. The Calvinists changed the emphasis of political thought from the king and prince, governing a traditional society of nonparticipating, inactive men, to a band of saints, seeking through independent political action to transform and construct a new, better world. The Calvinist theory provided the emerging bourgeois, public officials, and intellectuals with a view of the world in which their concern, efficiency, and ideas would be respectable and responsible. The medieval-feudal society, against which the saints revolted, could be reformed only from above, by changes in the hierarchy of popes and monarchs, or from outside, by monkish enthusiasts. Lesser men—magistrates, students, parish priests, merchants, etc.—were thought to be members of an organic, natural society with established patterns of hierarchy and deference. Not until the Calvinists did a political and theological system of thought develop which suggested that laity should express their deepest
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personal, moral, and religious convictions in free, methodical, rational association and work in the political order. What Calvinists said of the saint, other men would in time say of the citizen and his civic virtue. This kind of political organization and personally would have been impossible if Calvinism had not broken from both the Lutheran teaching that government was chiefly a mighty instrument of repression and from sectarian insistence that the political order must either conform to the law of love in Biblical Christianity or be forsaken. Calvin's thought was based on a realistic conception of the wickedness of men and their eternal need for restraint and expressed hopefulness in the possibilities of dedicated men bringing something of the divine command for a holy commonwealth into the political order. Calvinism had a conception of "the common grace" that enabled men to live together in civil society and that made it cautious of judging non-Christian secular governments as unworthy of the saints' loyalty and concern. Calvinist speculations were rooted in acknowledgment of the independent value of the political world; believer and nonbeliever alike needed civil order encouraging peace as well as piety, moderation as well as passionate commitment. But the civil order also needed, in the eyes of the saints, men who took as their standard the compassion and justice of the holy commonwealth, who sought to fashion a corporate community neither religious nor secular but a complex compound of both. Contemporary Protestant political thought Each type of Protestant political thought—Lutheran, sectarian, and Calvinist—has maintained a dynamic and vitality of its own to the present time, although some scholars dispute the persistence and strength of these types in the midst of pervasive processes of secularization and urbanization in the larger society and of movements toward ecumenical theology and professionalization of the ministry. Some (e.g., Herberg 1955) have seen strong tendencies in the American scene toward the integration of Protestantism into a culturalnational religion in the liberal sectarian tradition. Other, empirical studies (Clock & Stark 1965, p. 86) reveal significant differences between denominations originating in the three great traditions. Historians and theologians engaged in restudy of these traditions have not only evidenced a concern with understanding the distinctive insights of each phase of the Protestant movement but have also been engaged in a process of reinterpretation which reflects a heightened consciousness
of the useful insights in all of these traditions for clarifying the Protestant identity and action in the contemporary scene and for seeing aspects of a given religious tradition previously ignored (H. R. Niebuhr 1951). Intensive studies of social and religious interaction in political crises involving all the churches indicate that the varied traditions are not without influence in contemporary communities and are increasingly viewed by influential clergy and laity as possessing complementary or mutually significant values in the work of the whole church and in the formation of public policies (Underwood 1957). The emphasis of the Lutheran Reformation upon extricating the church from the world is seen now as a continuing need to free the gospel from the proprietorship of either church or state and to probe the heights and depths of personal faith and conscience in culture. The chief impact of neoReformation theologians such as Karl Earth has been to help Protestants view Christianity not simply as a human cultural phenomenon called religion but as the faithful response of men to Christ, revealed in the Scriptures as the living God, a being who acts in the totality of history and in a fashion transcending the wisdom of all his interpreters and the social forms of all his churches. In the fragmentary writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pastor executed in Germany for his participation in a plot to assassinate Hitler, are to be found perhaps the most radical formulations of the implications for Christians of Earth's fidelity to Christ as the final revelation of the word of God and as the paradigm by which men may try to shape their lives. Bonhoeffer saw himself as reflecting a historical movement, beginning about the thirteenth century, "towards the autonomy of man [which] has in our time reached a certain completion. Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis" ([1951] 1953, p. 145). Bonhoeffer was unhappy with all current "metaphysical and inward" formulations which theologians use as an explanation of what is happening in science, the arts, politics, and religion. Bonhoeffer particularly rejected those concepts which focused Christian hope upon salvation from "sin and death into a better world beyond the grave" (ibid., p. 154) and upon Christian acts as being "religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism (as a sinner, a penitent or a saint)." To be Christian, for Bonhoeffer, was "to be a man. It .is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world" (ibid,, p. 166).
PROTESTANT POLITICAL THOUGHT What such participation meant for political thought and action is not very clearly developed. Traditional Lutheran terms such as "orders" of religion and politics were rejected as implying too rigid and abstract a view of where the commandments of God were present. Bonhoeffer preferred the term "mandate" as a "concrete divine commission." The mandate could come to a man in an institution or office if these concepts were purged of their conservative overtones of rational-legal authority and if they made it possible for committed men to act as each new situation required. The contemporary restatements of the liberal sectarian tradition have noted the way in which voluntaristic, individualistic ideas of nineteenthcentury Protestantism were exaggerated and formalized in ideological rejection of the use of the state to balance economic interest for the sake of justice, to meet new welfare needs of people in urban industrial societies, and to provide basic liberties to neglected racial and ethnic minorities. The studies and assemblies of the World Council of Churches and other ecumenical bodies and interpretation of these studies by ethicists and theologians (e.g. Bennett 1958) have related the universal concerns of the historical liberal tradition to other traditions of a Protestantism no longer characterized by sects but by denominations representing members of a changing spectrum of social and religious backgrounds. The basic concern retained from tradition has been the acute awareness of the insufficiency of outward forms of order and justice as political goals. This tradition has kept alive the intuition that people may experience estrangement and personal disorganization in the midst of economic abundance and civil liberty; that the public resources are ultimately for the nourishment of communities of faith, vision, and love; and that law serves not as retribution for its own sake, but as a prologue to those redeeming acts of vicarious responsibility for public acts antecedent to the violation of law (Harding 1956, p. 67). Since the 1930s the major figure in the contemporary reformulation of Protestant political thought has been Reinhold Niebuhr. He criticizes conservative, pietistic theology as too pessimistic about the human situation to see the possibilities of justice and compassion in civil society. Those who express such pessimism are so afraid of disorder that they will permit public authorities to stifle all minority dissent for fear of anarchy. On the other hand, Niebuhr criticizes Utopian, liberal-democratic theory for its incapacity to see that the profound collective self-regard persists, even in the moral ideals advocated by economic, national, or religious
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groups; American illusions of omnipotence and moral concern for other nations have as much possibility, in his judgment, of shattering nuclear peace as the illusions of closed, dogmatic societies. Niebuhr's own Calvinistic realism is epitomized in his observation that "man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary" (1944, p. xi). Scholars who have attempted to foresee future developments in Protestant thought (Meyer I960; West 1958; Williamson 1964) have sensed the limits of the ability of political realism to affect the wellsprings of personal and cultural renewal or to touch the sources of faith and conversion. The search is for images and facts which reveal alternatives of concrete political action rather than for abstract, idealistic theological formulations. What do the historical principles of the faith mean to men who have the power and organization to create economic growth in new nations, to discover areas for mutual cooperation between nations with strong ideological differences, to use space and technology in cities, with aesthetic and moral purpose? Protestantism is not likely to be able to view itself in any nation in the future as the religious expression of the common aspirations of a culture. Efforts of Protestants to envision and realize new political possibilities and to encourage careers of public service may well reflect something of older Calvinist hopes, but these efforts must now commend themselves to non-Protestants as well as to heirs of a particular history. In this situation, Protestant thought is likely to pay greater attention to conditions of religious liberty and social creativity not dependent upon a people's being Christian or religious but rather upon their being human and politically responsible. Protestants can be expected to extend their study of the relations of non-Western religions to public life and to the ecumenical movements within the Christian church. KENNETH W. UNDERWOOD [See also CHRISTIANITY and the biographies of BODIN; CALVIN; and LUTHER. A guide to other relevant material may be found under RELIGION.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
EARTH, KARL (1935-1946) 1960 Community, State and Church: Three Essays. With an introduction by Will Herberg. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. -» First published in German. BENNETT, JOHN C. 1958 Christians and the State. New York: Scribner. BONHOEFFER, DIETRICH (1949)1955 Ethics. New York: Macmillan. -> First published in German.
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BONHOEFFER, DIETRICH (1951) 1953 Letters and Papers From Prison. London: Student Christian Movement. -> First published as Widerstand und Ergebung. An American edition was published in 1954 as Prisoner for God: Letters and Papers From Prison. CALVIN, JOHN (1536) 1960 Institutes of the Christian Religion. Edited by John McNeill. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. -» First published as Institutio religionis christianae. CALVIN, JOHN (1540) 1948 Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Romans. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans. ->• First published as Commentarii in epistolam Pauli ad Romanos. CLOCK, CHARLES Y.; and STARK, RODNEY 1965 Religion and Society in Tension. Chicago: Rand McNally. HARDING, ARTHUR L. (editor) 1956 Religion, Morality and Law. Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press. HERBERG, WILL 1955 Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. HOLL, KARL 1959 The Cultural Significance of the Reformation. New York: Meridian. LITTELL, FRANKLIN H. 1962 From State Church to Pluralism: A Protestant Interpretation of Religion in American History. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor. LUTHER, MARTIN (1520a) 1952 An Open Letter to Pope Leo X (1520). Volume 1, pages 331-347 in Martin Luther, Reformation Writings of Luther. Translated with introduction and notes from the definitive Weimar edition by Bertram Lee Woolf. London: Lutterworth. LUTHER, MARTIN (15206) 1928 Christian Liberty. Philadelphia: United Lutheran Publication House. LUTHER, MARTIN (1521) 1958 Luther at the Diet of Worms, 1521. Pages 105-131 in Martin Luther, Works. Volume 32: Career of the Reformer, Part 2. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press. MEYER, DONALD B. 1960 The Protestant Search for Political Realism: 1919-1941. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. NICHOLS, JAMES H. 1951 Democracy and the Churches. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. NIEBUHR, H. RICHARD 1951 Christ and Culture. New York: Harper. NIEBUHR, REINHOLD (1941) 1951 The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation. New York: Scribner. NIEBUHR, REINHOLD (1944)1960 The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defence. New York: Scribner. TROELTSCH, ERNST (1912) 1931 The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan. -» First published as Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen. A paperback edition was published in 1960 by Harper. UNDERWOOD, KENNETH W. 1957 Protestant and Catholic: Religious and Social Interaction in an Industrial Community. Boston: Beacon. WALZER, MICHAEL (1965) 1966 The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. WEST, CHARLES C. 1958 Communism and the Theologians: Study of an Encounter. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. WILLIAMSON, RENE DE VISME 1964 Independence and
Involvement: A Christian Reorientation in Political Science. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press. WOLIN, SHELDON S. 1960 Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought. Boston: Little.
PROUDHON, PIERRE JOSEPH Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), French socialist, was born in the city of Besancon. He belongs, with Fourier, Considerant, and Cabet, to that group of social reformers of the first half of the nineteenth century who came from Burgundy and Fr anche-Comte. Proudhon's father was a local brewer, and his family fits into a social category that was then widespread—artisans who owned a few patches of land and rose to the level of shopkeeping when their fortunes improved. But Proudhon's father was too honest to succeed; he sold his beer for no more than the malt, the hops, and his subsistence cost him, and after a very little time he went bankrupt. Crushed by burdensome mortgages, the family was destitute. Proudhon, a brilliant student, would come home from the lycee to find his parents having bread and water for supper. He was able to continue his studies only by becoming a printer's foreman and proofreader, and he absorbed all the material he handled. The knowledge he acquired in this fashion was extremely broad, but ill-organized. He was 29 before he passed the baccalaureate examination and received a scholarship from the Suard fund, awarded by the Academic de Besangon to poor, hard-working young men. Thanks to this scholarship, Proudhon was able to keep on with his studies and to begin to publish. This was a difficult period for him. After an unsuccessful attempt at being an independent printer, he worked for a small shipping firm in Lyons. The company sent him to Paris, where he met liberals, communists, and socialists, as well as German exiles who introduced him to the philosophy of Kant and Hegel. He played only a peripheral role in the revolution of 1848. After being defeated in the elections to the National Assembly, he was elected in the June supplementary elections, when he ran with Thiers, Victor Hugo, and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. He protested in the Assembly when the "national workshops" and "right to work" programs were discontinued. Primarily, he expounded his ideas in the press and published Le representant du peuple, a newspaper whose name was changed first to Le peuple and later to La voix du peuple.
PROUDHON, PIERRE JOSEPH In March 1849 he was sentenced to three years in prison for having published articles slandering the chief of state. While in prison, he married a Parisian working girl. His imprisonment was more like an enforced residence, for it did not prevent him from publishing. After further trials and convictions, he went into exile in Belgium. He became ill in 1856 and endured several years of poverty. When in 1862 his hostility to nationalist separatism provoked sharp criticism in Belgium, he was pardoned by the emperor and returned to France. He died in 1865, killed by the mental strain and hardship of his restless life. Differences from other socialists. Some of Proudhon's ideas departed sharply from those common among the socialists of his time. First of all, he did not accept the general socialist advocacy of free love and common-law marriage. Instead, Proudhon had an extremely conventional conception of the family; he extolled family happiness and advocated the strictest possible discipline within the family. He entirely rejected feminism and believed that women should confine themselves to performing household duties and raising children. Second, Proudhon differed from other socialists in that his thought had a classical cast. He was influenced by the Bible, the ancient classics, and the great writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was a typical French craftsman rather than a workingman, belonging to the petty bourgeoisie. Marx was being nasty when he called Proudhon petit bourgeois, but he was near the mark: this epithet indeed characterizes both Proudhon's position in society and his moral temperament. Like other socialists, Proudhon was an atheist, but he was a Christian atheist. He was a member of the Sincerite, Parfaite Union et Constante Amide lodge of the Masonic order in Besangon; his open profession of atheism concluded with this famous denunciation: "God is folly and cowardice; God is hypocrisy and falsehood; God is tyranny and misery; God is evil" (Oeuvres completes, vol. 2, p. 384 in the Riviere edition). However, what seemed to Proudhon's contemporaries to be a total and permanent breach with Christianity now appears to have been an attempt at dialogue. As Lubac put it, Proudhon did not permit the Christian to turn away from his worldly tasks but rather compelled him to meditate constantly, as did Proudhon himself, on eternal problems (1945). As Cassou put it (1939), Proudhon embodied all the restlessness and strength of the French artisan,
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with his impassioned and captious thirst for justice. Proudhon's writings are well described by the epigraph he himself gave them: Destruam et aedificabo. The destruction is anarchism; the new edifice, mutualism and federalism. Finally, Proudhon was the best writer among the socialists. He had a natural eloquence, powerful and caustic. Saint-Beuve was not wrong in regarding Proudhon as one of the great figures of nineteenth-century literature. Proudhon's anarchism. Proudhon condemned all governments and denounced the very existence of the state. Insofar as it is a system of order through power, the state derives its authority from the family. Appropriate as such authority is to the family, it becomes in the state an "artificial system, varying with different centuries and climates, yet alleged to be natural and necessary to humanity" (Oeuvres completes, vol. 1, p. 297 in the Riviere edition). This system is in fact intrinsically evil and incorrigible. It is vain to struggle against its abuses; such a struggle merely aggravates them. Proudhon had an especially lively antipathy toward democratic reformers because he felt that their faith in suffrage only serves to camouflage reality, to conceal the impossibility of making the state consonant with the people's wishes. Proudhon clearly perceived the void created by his condemnations. As reported in La voix du peuple on December 29, 1849, when he was asked, "What will you set up in place of the State?" he answered, "Nothing. Society is perpetual motion. . . . It contains its own spring, always wound, as well as its own balance wheel" (ibid., vol. 1, pp. 416-417). This "motion" derives from the economy, which takes precedence over politics. As Proudhon described it in De la capacite politique des classes ouvrieres, first published in 1865, a few months after his death, the relationship between the economy and politics is analogous to the physiological relationship between the functions of organic life and those of spiritual life. It is by virtue of the first, of the organic functions, that is, of economic life, that a society exists. However, Proudhon, unlike the liberals, did not expect that once men were free of the state, they would spontaneously create a new economic order by entering into mutual agreements. Mutualism had to be organized. Mutualism and federalism. Proudhon proposed a mutualist organization of the economy which would substitute an egalitarian liberalism, founded on free credit (granted by the "people's bank") and natural exchange of services, for the economic
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irresponsibility of unorganized individualism. Again in De la capacite politique, he asserted that society must be considered not as a hierarchy of functions but as a system in which free forces are in an equilibrium based on the enjoyment of equal rights in exchange for the discharge of equal obligations and the enjoyment of equal advantages in exen ange for the performance of equal services. Only mutualist institutions freely created in accordance with reason and experience will create order in the chaotic tangle of existing economic relationships. Fundamental economic rights, public rights, immediately follow from this conception, according to Proudhon. Since he rejected government as a source of guarantees, the problem is how to substitute mutual guarantees for those based on authority. Federalism, that is, mutualism transferred into the realm of politics, is the solution. Far from living in isolation, individuals will form middle-sized and sovereign groups based on territorial considerations, as well as larger economic units called agricultural-industrial communities based on the free exchange of services. Proudhon denned the federal contract with particular care in his Du principe federatif of 1863. Federation (from the Latin word foedus, or pact, contract, treaty, convention, alliance, etc.) is a covenant by which several groups of communities or states bind themselves reciprocally and equally for one or several purposes. Unlike the social contract, the federal contract involves only limited renunciation of individual liberty. In forming the pact, the contracting parties retain more personal and real rights than they surrender. Proudhon's political regime rules out any surrender or transfer of rights, which in his opinion is the consequence of the classical form of representative government. He asserted that it is impossible to delegate that which is most essential to human beings: the right to have one's say, to negotiate directly, individually, for oneself. To the extent that the Proudhonian concept tolerates any deputies, they would be like the proxies of private law. Proudhon condemned the notion in revolutionary public law that a deputy represents the abstract "nation" and nothing else. Each deputy is, first of all, the man of the district or profession that chose him as its representative— one of its citizens and its special trustee authorized to defend its particular interest. In order for suffrage to be direct, it is not enough that the voter directly give his vote to the man elected; it is also necessary that the deputy represent, no less directly, opinions, rights, interests, and business.
For a state, a society, is not solely a matter of will; it also consists of more material concerns. The final result of anarchist federalism is the dissolution of the state into multiple autonomous groups having their own administration. Under these circumstances, the principle of authority tends to disappear. The state (res publica} is placed on the immutable foundation of law, of corporate and individual local liberties. The government actually no longer exists. The community will be set up as an autonomous administration, for it is "in its essence, like man, like the family, like each individual and each intelligent collectivity, moral and free, a sovereign being" (Oeuvres completes, vol. 4, p. 265 in Riviere edition). It will issue decrees, pronounce decisions, and will even make its own laws. There is no middle course. The community must be sovereign or subordinate, all or nothing. Proudhon's influence. The evolution of states in the nineteenth century, moving toward centralization domestically and toward nationalist sovereignty in foreign affairs, hardly corresponded to Proudhon's expectations. Nor did political socialism develop along Proudhonian lines; not only were his long-term views on federal and anarchic organization ignored, but so were his short-term instructions for boycotting elections. On the other hand, over the long run, Proudhon has proved to be a prophet. He foresaw "a thousandyear purgatory" for mankind if federalism were rejected. He also foresaw the importance of labor unions, proclaiming that "workshops will replace the government." The substitution has not been complete, but the twentieth century has seen the development of great collective forces that have influenced every aspect of public life. The continuing interest in Proudhon's work vindicates his view, expressed in De la capacite politique, that ideas succeed only if people cling to them and turn them into institutions and customs which legislators can then turn into laws. MARCEL PRELOT [For the historical context of Proudhon's work, see ANARCHISM; SOCIALISM; and the biographies of MARX and SOREL.] WORKS BY PROUDHON
(1840) 1966 What Is Property? An Enquiry Into the Principle of Right and of Government. With a biographical essay by J. A. Langlois. New York: Fertig. -» First published as Qu'est-ce que la propriete1?
PSYCHIATRY: The Field Correspondence de P.-J. Proudhon, precedes d'une notice sur . . . Proudhon -par J. A. Langlois. 14 vols. Paris: Lacroix, 1875. -> Correspondence covers the years 1837-1865. Lettres inedites a Gustave Chaudey et a divers Comtois. Paris: Droz, 1911. Lettres au citoyen Holland: 5 octobre 1858-29 juillet 1862. With an introduction and notes by Jacques Bompard. Paris: Grasset, 1946. Garnets. Texte inedit et integral etabli sur les manuscrits autographes avec annotations et appareil critique de Pierre Haubtmann. 2 vols. Paris: Riviere, 1960-1961. -» Volume 1: 1843-1846. Volume 2: 1847-1848. Oeuvres completes. 26 vols. Paris: Lacroix, 1867-1870. Oeuvres completes. Nouv. ed. publiee avec des notes et des documents inedits sous la direction de MM. C. Bougie et H. Moysset. Vols. 1-17. Paris: Riviere, 19231952. -» To be published in 20 volumes. Translations of the extracts in the text were provided by the editors. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOUGLE, CELESTIN C. A. 1911 La sociologie de Proudhon. Paris: Colin. CASSOU, JEAN 1939 Quarante-huit. Paris: Gallimard. CUVIIXIER, ARMAND 1937 Proudhon. Paris: Editions Sociales Internationales. DOLLEANS, EDOUARD 1948 Proudhon. Paris: Gallimard. LUBAC, HENRI DE (1945) 1948 The Un-Marxian Socialist: A Study of Proudhon. London: Sheed & Ward. -» First published as Proudhon et le christianisme.
PSEPHOLOGY See ELECTIONS, article on THE FUNCTIONS OF ELECTIONS; VOTING.
PSEUDO-KINSHIP See ADOPTION; KINSHIP; PATERNALISM. PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE See DRUGS, article on DRUG ADDICTION: SOCIAL ASPECTS. PSYCHIATRY The major fields of psychiatry are discussed under this heading. Related material may be found under ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY; CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY; INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY; MENTAL DISORDERS; MENTAL DISORDERS, TREATMENT OF; MENTAL HEALTH; PSYCHOANALYSIS; PSYCHOLOGY, article on EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY; PSYCHOSOMATIC ILLNESS. A guide to articles on specific syndromes is provided under MENTAL DISORDERS. Also relevant are MAGIC; MEDICAL CARE; MEDICAL PERSONNEL. Major contributions to psychiatry are described in the biographies of FREUD; KRAEPELIN; MEYER. Also of relevance are the biographies of ABRAHAM; ADLER; ALEXANDER; BLEULER; CHAR-
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COT; FERENCZI; HORNEY; JONES; JUNG; KLEIN; PINEL; RANK; RAPAPORT; REICH; ROHEIM; RORSCHACH; RUSH; SULLIVAN. i. ii. HI. iv. V.
THE FIELD CHILD PSYCHIATRY SOCIAL PSYCHIATRY FORENSIC PSYCHIATRY THE RELIGIO-PSYCHIATRIC MOVEMENT
Roy R. Grinker, Sr. David M. Levy Alexander H. Leighton Winfred Overholser Samuel Z. Klausner
THE FIELD
For the last hundred years psychiatry has been considered a specialty of medicine usually defined as the medical practice or applied science of treating and preventing mental diseases, or disorders of the mind. Today, however, Masserman's definition (1946) is more appropriate; it considers psychiatry broadly as a science that deals with the varieties of human behavior, their determinants, methods of analyzing them, and the techniques for coordinating behavior with optimal personal and social goals. The disparity between these two definitions indicates that profound changes have taken place in psychiatry. It is presently a peculiar admixture of biology, psychology, and sociology. History In the late eighteenth century psychiatric patients were released from chains and removed from dungeons, where they had been treated like animals and had died prematurely. Not until about 1820 (Kraepelin 1917), however, were some patients considered curable by medical means and no longer considered to be animals with innate weakness and baseness, or voluntary pursuers of evil whose insanity was contagious to their keepers. About the same time, psychiatric textbooks appeared and medical students were given instruction in a wide variety of physical therapies. The subject of psychiatry became less a concern of philosophers and more a medical discipline (Schneck 1960). Although the strictly biological and medical approaches were pursued early, it was late in the nineteenth century before hypnosis, introspection, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis placed the emphasis on deeper levels of mentation rather than on behavior, and the focus centered on the psychology of the individual. It is worthy of comment that the psychologies and sociologies that took significant hold in psychiatry were those developed by psychiatrists themselves. Academic psychological and social sciences had little influence on the
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field and, in fact, were more stimulated by, and receptive to, psychiatric thinking than they were contributory. These sciences were also still in the early stages of development and concentrated on matters of little concern to the psychiatrists. Psychology was in the almost exclusive phase of "brass-instrument" studies of the mechanisms of behavior and animal experimentation. Anthropologists were describing customs of primitive populations, and culturalpersonality conjunctions were still vague. Neither psychology nor sociology could assist in the study of the mentally healthy or ill. Medical tradition, however, directed psychiatrists to reason from the abnormal to the normal. Psychopathology furnished insight into psychodynamics and into healthy structure and function. Recent scope. In the last several decades the direction of influence has shifted, at least enough to indicate that the commerce between psychiatry and the social sciences traverses in two directions. As dynamic psychiatry has moved from concentration on unconscious instinctual representations, drives, and id forces to concern with stress responses, coping devices and defenses, signal anxiety, and reality testing of modern ego psychology, it has attempted to incorporate the vast amount of information acquired by psychologists about ego functions. As psychiatrists have learned that the functions and structures of the individual in the process of development are derived from experiences with people, that the major stresses of life arise from disturbed or broken relations with people, and that therapeutic processes occur best in a social setting, social sciences have become important for the understanding of man and his problems. Therefore, these fields have recently fused in some areas into new hybrids, social psychology and social psychiatry (Rennie & Woodward 1948). In fact, the definition of psychology emanating from Harvard University (1947) differs little from the ideal definition of psychiatry—-a biopsychosocial discipline (Murphy 1947; Cameron 1963). What is currently included within the field of psychiatry actually ranges from biodynamics to existentialism. In fact, psychiatry seems to involve a study of all human behavior and is as broad as life and its social and cultural derivatives. Behavior as the central focus of psychiatric research is not elucidated by a fractionation of man as a totality isolated from his environment of things, people, and symbols (Goldstein 1934). Furthermore, it does not ignore the nervous, circulatory, and endocrine systems, the visceral and somatic organs, and their constituent cells and fluids. Unfortunately
there is no unified theory, so that controversy still exists between "reductionists," who hope to explain man's behavior exclusively on a physicochemical or cellular basis, and "extensionists" or "humanists," who focus entirely on society and culture. These are polarities leading to futile arguments. The biological or the social sciences alone cannot explain behavior, but psychiatry cannot progress without them (Grinker 1964). A point of view We should approach living human beings as if they existed in a total field of multiple transactions, thereby avoiding the dichotomies of nature-nurture, organic-functional, lower-higher, or reductionextension (Dewey & Bentley 1949). Furthermore, in dealing with multivariable problems, we can operationally behave as if we really believed in multicausality of both healthy and disordered function, within a total field whose constituents range from physicochemical to symbolic foci. We are then able to study each focus or system (for example, nervous, endocrine, cognitive, behavioral, and emotional) in terms of structure, function, integrative capacity, and transactions with one or more other systems. The specific or exclusive importance of one view or system of empirical events becomes minimized when we recognize that change in one system affects all others. However, one view or one technique has only limited usefulness, for although each system has considerable commonality in essence with all others, each also has its specific regulatory devices approachable only by special techniques (Grinker 1961). Multidisciplinary teams are essential for multisystems investigation at the present level of sophistication with respect to the large number of variables involved in human research (New York Academy of Medicine . . . 1957). If psychiatry is a part of human behavioral sciences, it is differentiated operationally by its focus on the individual in relation to some other person or persons, things or situations, even though we know he can be isolated only temporarily for investigation from other foci in his life, just as the physiologist isolates a single organ or organic system for investigation. In this temporary isolation the individual may be studied through the methods of observation, description, experimentation, and quantification in transaction with another focus by observers using the necessary techniques from a suitable frame of reference. Thus some parts—for example, endocrine processes, autonomic neurological activity, and muscle tension—may be studied at the same time as observable or reported behavior. In another
PSYCHIATRY: The Field example the behavior of the individual may be viewed in relation to the behavior of others. One focus or another may be utilized in the transactional analysis, and step by step the functional parts of man can be studied in relation to various behaviors until eventually the entire field may be covered. When physiology is considered in relation to emotion, the social group is absent; when the individual is viewed in his group, his component parts fade. On the other hand, the social scientist loses sight of the individual. To envisage the entire field requires a rapid shift of accommodation in mental imagery, in which it is necessary (but is rarely done) to state explicitly what is of concern. Theory in psychiatry Although it is well known that theory and investigatory methods interact by continuous feedback processes, in the field of psychiatry theoretical abstractions and hypotheses are rarely explicit but usually must be extracted from the operational procedures in use. Furthermore, because of the large number of foci or facets in the total field to which various disciplines hold proprietary rights, theory is not unified but is partial or fragmented. Psychoanalytic theory, because of its enormous influence on modern psychiatry and its vast scope, has been given high priority. Psychoanalysis and its derivations. Horace Kallen (1934), in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, stated that psychoanalysis had no quantities, meaning systems of measurement, and could never be a science. He stated that inferences were employed as agents in their own verification. Psychoanalysis was considered a faith and a dogma; psychoanalysts were judges of their own truth and of the criteria establishing its validity. Although Freud's psychoanalytic science and metapsychology were speculative and the methods of psychoanalysis may be unreliable, Freud established the principle that psychological processes should be studied by psychological methods. Even though the data may be difficult to verify, and historical anecdotes may lead to invalid inferences, Freud did develop a new paradigm suitable to man as an animal capable of symbolic transformation, which in essence was a scientific revolution and a generative idea. Unfortunately, Freud was incapable of systematic presentation, and psychoanalytic theory and its modifications are criss-crossed by shifts to the new and reaffirmations of the old, written in poetic style interspersed with metaphors and confused by circular reasoning. There is no use in attempting to formulate the totality of psychoanalytic theory. It is even difficult
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to extract precise declarative sentences suitable for the development of testable hypotheses, although the attempt has recently been made by Rapaport (1959). In general, it can be stated that psychoanalysis is not a philosophy and is not yet a science. Despite justifiable criticism, psychoanalysis has had a profound effect on all of the psychological and social sciences (Hendrick 1934). It avoids reductionism, yet it is based on a theory of instincts (life and death), is motivational, and focuses on the present personality structure in the light of the individual's past (structural). Psychoanalysis has a system of allocated mental functions: id, ego, and superego (topological). It deals with forces and conflicts (dynamic). Finally, it views the resultant personality structure in adaptational terms (economic). The several early deviants from Freud's classical psychoanalytic theories (Alfred Adler, Carl Gustav Jung, and Otto Rank) have had varying effects on psychiatry, psychology, and the social sciences (Munroe 1955). Adler's concept of "individual psychology" formed the basis for a special therapeutic approach, which has been so diluted that it is now hardly recognizable as a separate school. Nevertheless, the concept of the "will to power" was the precursor of Freud's later theory of the death instincts and their mastery through outwardly expressed aggression. Jung's notion of the "collective unconscious" became more of a mystique and less of a theoretical or operational approach in psychiatry. It has become aligned with existential psychiatry. Rank's concept of "birth trauma" led to a short-lived therapeutic procedure of establishing a patient-therapist relationship and setting a termination date well in adva^e, so that impending separation from the therapist might enable the patient to work through a new "birth trauma" under better conditions. [See PSYCHOLOGY, article on EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY; and the biographies of ADLER; JUNG; RANK.] The so-called Neo-Freudians (Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, etc.) form a heterogeneous group with many divergencies from classical psychoanalysis. The interpersonal or interactional theory of Sullivan gave a great impetus, including the establishment of a "school," to the treatment of schizophrenic psychoses. The Neo-Freudians attend more to the difficulties of present interpersonal processes (social) than to lengthy reconstructions of the past. [See the biographies of HORNEY; SULLIVAN.] Ascendancy of psychoanalysis—a critique. It is unfortunate that contemporary psychiatry has almost completely adopted the psychoanalytic or
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psychodynamic model. Psychodynamics is purported to be the basic science of psychiatry. It is frequently stated that the core process in psychiatry is a dyadic "depth" relationship in which diagnosis, prognosis, therapy, and research are processed, a technique that utilizes a participant-observer of uncertain reliability. This "dynamic" approach within a dyad has superseded and even resulted in a depreciation of the basic psychiatric techniques through which so much progress was made in the nineteenth, century. These are the methods of careful and controlled observations over time and accurate descriptions or behavior, including verbalizations but not limited to them. According to these basic techniques, observation of behavior rather than inferences about feelings is the keystone of psychiatric research. Behavior, in actuality, represents functions allocated to a hypothetical ego that niters perceptions on the one hand and actions on the other, expresses reportable motivations, affects, defenses, and compromises, employs symptoms and sublimations, and demonstrates integrative capacities and disintegrative trends. About any of these effects there need be few inferences or interpretations. As observational material, they can be coded and rated, repeated and replicated, and tracked through time. These basic living data can then be interpreted according to fruitful theory and placed in juxtaposition to any hypothesis. Information gained from "depth" interviews may, in addition, account more adequately for deviances and interindividual variability. The behaviors of the participant-observer and of the subject whose "internal behaviors" are being observed, as in psychoanalytic sessions, require better systems of recording and more adequate subsequent analysis. The acquisition and validation of behavioral data are the core operations of psychiatry as a science, but this does not deny the existence of inner variables expressed by verbal behavior. Animal study and quantification. As scientists, psychiatrists are interested mainly in the developmental, adaptive, and maladaptive processes that human beings experience, no matter how "pure" or "basic" their image of science may be. But the large number of variables and parameters involved in natural existence has inordinately complicated human research in increasing degrees as sophistication about the timing of responses and feedback processes among variables has developed. As a result, we are often compelled to approach human problems indirectly through animal experimentation. Mathematical and statistical overemphasis has
thereby become a danger modern psychiatry should avoid (Langer 1942). It did, however, succumb to a greater danger when the majority of psychiatrists became entrapped in the fascination of inferences elicited from dyadic observer-participant studies and became involved in psychodynamic stereotypes. There is still an area of scientific behaviorism that is properly the focus of psychiatry, requiring observations or "witness" and subsequent quantitative analysis. Advancement of psychological and psychiatric knowledge requires a combination of observation, description, depth interviews, and experimentation. There is no need for antagonism between the proponents of these complementary methods or between behaviorists, psychoanalysts, and phenomenologists (Wann 1964). Psychiatric classification One of the first great advances in the field of psychiatry, as in all sciences, was the classification of a chaotic descriptive group into nosological entities. These carried with them the implication of specific causes, a course, and final result of so-called diseases of the mind. Necessary though this classification was at the beginning of modern psychiatry, it has created many difficulties. Although the etiological factors in most of the classified entities are far from known, classifications led to stereotypes, especially in terms of malignancy and susceptibility to therapy. "Process" classification. Gradually over the years, psychiatrists tried to make a classification that was less rigid and medically oriented and, instead, more dynamic and concerned with processes. The current official classification is much better than the previously fashionable ones but still represents disorders of mental functioning in terms of disease stereotypes. The neophyte in the field considers each entity as a disease and develops a mental image of its course and prognosis that is far from valid. The most ambitious attempt to alter this classification has been made by Karl Menninger (Menninger et al. 1963), who has discussed mental disturbances in terms of coping with stress. Coping devices are sometimes successful but at other times are ineffective. One can conceive of the results as a series of dysfunctions in increasing order of disturbance. It is such a "process" type of classification that enables the psychologist and social scientist to make some kind of reasonable correlations with related variables within their fields. It is also this kind of "process" classification that enables us to speak of types of psychological treatment, no matter from which school they may stem, in terms of phases of dyscontrol and attempts at reinstitution
PSYCHIATRY: The Field of coping devices. For some time psychiatrists have been less interested in diagnostic labels and more concerned with the dynamic processes involving the individual which lead to his failure in adaptation; they have focused on the coping devices and the reasons for their lack of success, and in therapy they have sought to enable the individual to regain a more comfortable equilibrium. Etiology Dynamic approaches to the etiology of many degenerate diseases not caused by trauma or bacterial invasion deal with the unconscious conflicts that are not expressed directly through the somatic nervous system but that result in physiological disturbances in organs innervated by the autonomic nervous system. Among these are hypertension, peptic ulcer, rheumatoid arthritis, migraine, and colitis. A promising breakthrough occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, when a specific repressed emotional constellation was postulated for each of the so-called psychosomatic diseases: peptic ulcer was associated with passive dependency, hypertension with chronic repressed rage, etc. However, this practical application broke down because emotional specificity could not be confirmed. Actually, specificity is a complex and holistic problem because of a large number of variables, including genie, early experiential, social, and other factors. In fact, the mind—body problem is theoretically at the same stage of nonresolution as it was two thousand years ago. It may be that a revolutionary concept is required regarding processes that link or identify the mental with the physical. For lack of better concepts, we are thrown back to operational research, in which more knowledge regarding psychophysiological processes can be acquired. The result may not be an elucidation of disease processes but a better understanding of the kinds of information communicated between the mental and physical process; a higher level of abstraction may be necessary before these basic systems of communication can be understood. Fields of psychiatry Developmental study. While psychoanalytic psychiatry, which focuses on internal dynamics, has attempted to reconstruct the libidinal experiences and the vicissitudes of the instincts in reconstructions of childhood experiences, Piaget (1937) has attempted to observe, describe, and classify actual childhood behavior in the process of development. Psychoanalysis has not developed a learning theory (Rapaport 1959) and, therefore, leans heavily on vaguely expressed concepts of conditioning (Pavlov 1873-1935). Piaget has stimulated research on
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child development to the point that it is becoming an independent discipline. Its application to psychiatry is still nebulous. There have been studies of transactions between mothers and infants in natural homes, and adult—child transactions in foundling homes and hospitals have been studied. Engel and Reichsman (1956) have been able to observe in a child with a gastrostomy changes in behavior and gastric acidity on the approach and departure of friendly or strange adults. The field of child development will become basic to our understanding of normal and pathological personality development. [See DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY; PERSONALITY, article on PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT.] Concepts of normality. In the area of development, the absence of a substantive concept for definitions of normality presents considerable difficulty. The various concepts utilized in sociology, psychology, and psychiatry to define normality have been classified into four groups: normality as an average, normality as an ideal, normality as health, and normality as a process through stages of a lifetime. Biological psychiatry. The field of biological psychiatry has recently been revived many years after it was buried by the failure of neuropathology to link psychiatric syndromes with structural changes in the nerve cells of the brain. Constitutional differences have always been given lip service—for example, neurotic constitution, neurasthenia, Freud's varying strength of the instincts, body types, and body inferiority. But these were static concepts lacking explanatory vitality and evidences of correlations. More recently, correlations between increased gastric secretion of pepsinogen and later development of peptic ulcer opened up a vast area of functional rather than structural constitutional differences. Genetics. The development of scientific genetics with the breakthrough in the understanding of the genie codes transmitted by RNA revealed a wide range of genie differences. The suspicion has increased that schizophrenia is basically a genie enzymatic disorder, secondarily producing characteristic mental symptoms. The mental symptoms secondary to phenylketonuria have become the prototype of a constitutional psychiatry, just as syphilis of the brain was a prototype of a neuropathological psychiatry. [See MENTAL DISORDERS, articles on GENETIC ASPECTS and BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS.]
Neural mechanisms. Discovery of a reticular activating system and the connections of the limbic or visceral brain focused interest on the higher levels of emotional control previously considered to reside in the hypothalamus. A succession of in-
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vestigations revealed the role of the constituent parts of the visceral brain in emotional control and release. The new neuro an atomy and neurophysiology changed our concepts of brain function, extending them even to discoveries of sleep mechanisms and the functions of dreams. At the same t1-Tne, advances in steroid chemistry have enabled us to observe the relations between brain physiology and the endocrine systems that respond to or are antecedent to anxiety, panic, anger, depression, and emotional confusion. [See NERVOUS SYSTEM; see also Interdisciplinary Research . . . 1962.] Psychopharmacology. The field of psychopharmacolc^y constitutes a bridge between the biological and psychological approaches to healthy and disturbed behavior. Since the discovery of the tranquilizing and later the energizing drugs utilizable for the treatment of psychoses, the custodial state hospitals have been revitalized and chronic "untreatable" patients have been given appropriate attention, resulting in an increased rate of discharge and prolonged maintenance in the community of previously institutionalized psychotics (Uhr & Miller 1960). The primary gain, however, has been an added stimulus to the study of brain chemistry and endocrinological and metabolic factors involved in behavior of individuals in group living. The bridging function of psychopharmacology is in the process of intensive investigation. [See DRUGS, article on PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY.]
Model psychoses. Attempts have been made to utilize the effects of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD-25, as model psychoses. Similarly, the behavioral changes temporarily achieved by isolation and sensory deprivation resemble natural appearing disturbances. By far the most informative models appear in animal research dealing with prevention or early interruption of the symbiotic relationship of infant and mother. Prevention induces behavior similar to human schizophrenic "symbiotic" psychoses; interruption induces behavior resembling that of "borderline" patients, who, although not psychotic, have extremely attenuated affective relationships with human objects (Harlow & Zimmermann 1959). The Pavlovian theory of conditioned reflexes and their influence on behavior, emotions, and thinking has extended beyond the Soviet Union and provides another such model (Pavlov 1873-1935). Facilitation, extinction, reinforcement and conflict are terms that can be translated into the language of psychoanalysis. More recently, psychiatrists have been utilizing reinforcement techniques in an attempt to help human patients overcome their inhibitions and anxieties (Gantt 1958).
Social psychiatry. Social psychiatry has recently blossomed into prominence through the interest of sociologists (Parsons & Bales 1955) and anthropologists in health and mental illness. Since psychiatry, in general, is concerned with persons and their interactions and considers that a person is the resultant of physiological, psychological, and situational factors, social psychiatry is derived from fractionating the total field. Social psychiatry includes studies of the family, group, community, society, and culture. In general the field attempts to explore social systems and their effects on psychiatric processes—liow the social matrix contributes to the cause, course, and results of mental illness. It is also the study of the effects of mental illness on social systems of various sizes. Impressive diagnostic and therapeutic research on the family is being conducted. Emphasis is shifting from intrapsychic processes to a group-oriented approach. Both normal and disturbed families are being studied in the interpersonal rather than personal context, and families are being studied as systems rather than as conglomerations of individuals. Such research, however, is still utilizing a patchwork of systems theory, cybernetics, and information theory. Group studies have been conducted in therapeutic settings, but group therapy is a vague and poorly defined ubiquitous term applied to any process observable in groups. Only lately have the principles of small-group dynamics been applied. Community psychiatry. Community psychiatry is a relatively new venture that crystallized rather suddenly with both the increased cooperation between hospitals, clinics, and halfway houses and the merging of community aspects of prevention and rehabilitation (Bellak 1964). Communities are poorly defined as "clusters of people having a common destiny." Community psychiatry deals with a wide variety of relationships among community social agencies, resources, clinics, and hospitals, and studies a wide variety of administrative, therapeutic, and research personnel. However, it lacks both theory and operational methods. There is no specific discipline and certainly no community psychiatrist knowledgeable enough to encompass the whole sector, including a broad network of agencies. At present, community psychiatry is an organizational concept. Since psychiatric phenomena are social in that they arise from a social matrix, are precipitated, and flourish or decline under various social conditions (that is, have an epidemiology), and since therapy depends on social and cultural factors,
PSYCHIATRY: Child Psychiatry interest in contributions to etiology from the social sciences, although late and naive, is now flourishing. If we ever have anything to contribute to prevention, it will be through widespread social education at all levels. If therapeutic efforts are not to be limited to a few, there will have to be an increased interest in methods of understanding and eventually in treatment of family, group, and societies, based on our understanding of the individual but not a direct extension of it. For these reasons, the education of psychiatrists will require extensive broadening, if not to widen the extent of their functions, at least to facilitate the cooperation of psychiatry with psychology, sociology, and anthropology. ROY R. GRINKER, SR. BIBLIOGRAPHY
ALEXANDER, FRANZ G.; and SELESNICK, SHELDON T. 1966 The History of Psychiatry. New York: Harper. BELLAK, LEOPOLD (editor) 1964 Handbook of Community Psychiatry and Community Mental Health. New York: Grune. CAMERON, NORMAN A. 1963 Personality Development and Psychopathology: A Dynamic Approach. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. DEWEY, JOHN; and BENTLEY, ARTHUR F. 1949 Knowing and the Known. Boston: Beacon. ENGEL, GEORGE; and REICHSMAN, FRANZ 1956 Spontaneous and Experimentally Induced Depressions in an Infant With Gastric Fistula: A Contribution to the Problem of Depression. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 4:428-452. GANTT, WILLIAM H. 1958 Physiological Bases of Psychiatry. Springfield, 111.; Thomas. GOLDSTEIN, KURT (1934) 1939 The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived From Pathological Data in Man. New York: American Book. -> First published as Der Aufbau des Organismus. GRINKER, ROY R. SR. 1961 The Physiology of Emotions. Pages 3-25 in Symposium of the Kaiser Foundation Hospitals in Northern California, Third, San Francisco, 1959, The Physiology of Emotions. Edited by Alexander Simon, Charles C. Herbert, and Ruth Straus. Springfield, 111.: Thomas. GRINKER, ROY R. SR. 1964 Psychiatry Rides Madly in All Directions. Archives of General Psychiatry 10:228— 237. HARLOW, HARRY F.; and ZIMMERMANN, ROBERT R. 1959 Affectional Responses in the Infant Monkey. Science 130:421-432. HARVARD UNIVERSITY, COMMISSION TO ADVISE ON THE FUTURE OF PSYCHOLOGY AT HARVARD 1947 The Place of Psychology in an Ideal University. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. HENDRICK, IVES (1934) 1958 Facts and Theories of Psychoanalysis. 3d ed. New York: Knopf. INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH CONFERENCE, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, 1961 1962 Physiological Correlates of Psychological Disorder. Edited by Robert Roessler and Norman S. Greenfield. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. KALLEN, HORACE M. 1934 Psychoanalysis. Volume 12, pages 580—588 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.
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KRAEPELIN, EMIL (1917) 1962 One Hundred Years of Psychiatry. New York: Citadel Press. -» First published in German. LANGER, SUSANNE K. (1942) 1961 Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. New York: New American Library. MASSERMAN, JULES H. (1946) 1961 Principles of Dynamic Psychiatry. 2d ed. Philadelphia: Saunders. MENNINGER, KARL; MAYMAN, MARTIN; and PRUYSER, PAUL 1963 The Vital Balance: The Life Processes in Mental Health and Illness. New York: Viking. MUNROE, RUTH L. 1955 Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought. New York: Dryden. MURPHY, GARDNER 1947 Personality: A Biosocial Approach to Origins and Structure. New York: Harper. NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MEDICINE, COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC HEALTH 1957 Integrating the Approaches to Mental Disease. Edited by Harry D. Kruse. New York: Harper. PARSONS, TALCOTT; and BALES, ROBERT F. 1955 Family, Socialization and Interaction Process. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. PAVLOV, I. P. (1873-1935) 1957 Experimental Psychology and Other Essays. New York: Philosophical Library. -» First published in Russian. PIAGET, JEAN (1937) 1954 The Construction of Reality in the Child. New York: Basic Books. ->• First published in French. Also published by Routledge in 1955 as The Child's Construction of Reality. RAPAPORT, DAVID 1959 The Structure of Psychoanalytic Theory: A Systematizing Attempt. Pages 55—183 in S. Koch (editor), Psychology: A Study of a Science. Volume 3: Formulations of the Person and the Social Context. New York: McGraw-Hill. RENNIE, THOMAS A. C.; and WOODWARD, LUTHER E. 1948 Mental Health in Modern Society. New York: Commonwealth Fund. SCHNECK, JEROME M. 1960 A History of Psychiatry. Springfield, 111.: Thomas. UHR, LEONARD; and MILLER, JAMES G. (editors) 1960 Drugs and Behavior. New York: Wiley. -> A general reference book. WANN, T. W. (editor) 1964 Behavior and Phenomenology: Contrasting Bases for Modern Psychology. Univ. of Chicago Press. II CHILD PSYCHIATRY
Child psychiatry is a subspecialty of medicine, and, as in other subspecialties of medicine, its practitioners are trained in the "parent" specialty to which it belongs. To be officially certified in child psychiatry (in accordance with the policy of the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Child Psychiatry), the candidate, after receiving his M.D. and completing his general hospital internship, must have two years of training in adult psychiatry—all preliminary to training in child psychiatry. Furthermore, the teaching staff of the institution at which the candidate is trained in child psychiatry must include psychologists and psychiatric social workers who work in collaboration with the child psychiatrists on the staff. Special
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qualifying examinations—a recent requirement— are held yearly by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology; the first examinations were given in 1959. The history of this combined staff of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, a distinctly American contribution to the field of child psychiatry, will form the major portion of this discussion. Its development in the United States is intimately related to the mental-hygiene and the child guidance movements, both American innovations, and to the juvenile court. Although child psychiatry was bound to develop into a special field of its own, both in the United States and abroad, it would probably have done so at a much slower pace without the impetus of events in the United States, beginning in 1909 with the study and treatment of delinquents in Chicago by William Healy and with the emergence of the mental-hygiene movement. Early history Until the nineteenth century the presence of children, however few, in mental hospitals seemed to excite little interest on the part of physicians, to judge by the small number of articles on this subject. Benjamin Rush—probably the first American psychiatrist and certainly the first one to write a standard reference book on the subject, Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812)—made no mention of children (see also Whitehorn 1944). Rush's work was based largely on observations made over the years on psychotic patients who were confined to a separate section (opened in 1752) in the Pennsylvania Hospital. He described a few cases of psychoses in children that he attributed to disease of the brain. Hospitalization of the insane was started in the United States in 1751, and that is regarded as the beginning of psychiatry as a medical specialty in the United States. This was three to four decades before Rush or Philippe Pinel (of France) or Peter Frank (of Germany) lectured or wrote on "diseases of the mind." It is surprising that so many years were to elapse before child psychiatry evolved. In the first 45 years of publication of the American Journal of Insanity, 1844-1889, not one article that appeared had any reference to children. A review in 1883 of all the previous literature on mental illness in children contained 55 references (see Kanner 1961). The paucity of studies by psychiatrists of mental aberrations in children, a lack which lasted for so long a time, requires some explanation. Although lectures on mental disorders were first given to medical students in this country in 1791 by Rush
at the University of Pennsylvania, a regular course of study in psychiatry as part of the medical curriculum was not given in the United States until 1863, when one was offered by the Harvard Medical School. In general, mental hospitals were very large, and, according to Adolf Meyer, the psychiatrist's job "was then as it still is in many places an institutional and legal task" (1928). There was little opportunity for intensive studies. Children were not accepted in mental hospitals unless they were diagnosed as psychotic. There were few such cases in mental hospitals then, and there are still but few today. According to Malzberg (1959), in 1950 first admissions of children under 15 years of age to all mental hospitals in the United States accounted for only about one per cent of all such admissions. (Most of the children in special wards today are not psychotic.) Gillespie (1939) also found that out of 21,000 first admissions to a number of mental hospitals in different parts of the world, about one per cent were children diagnosed as psychotic. Nevertheless, the finding of such cases (largely schizophrenic and manic—depressive) led to a growing interest in the psychopathology of childhood, and although this interest was strongly influenced by an organic bias, at that time so firmly held by hospital psychiatrists, it advanced neurological research in child psychiatry in a valuable way. As Gillespie noted, the incidence of childhood psychoses is very likely larger than statistics show, since many possibly psychotic alterations of mood and behavior in children are regarded as normal by their parents. Besides, a child is less likely to cause as much trouble through psychotic behavior as an adult is, and hence the child is less likely to be referred to a hospital. He is also more likely, in the case of a dementia, to be regarded as retarded rather than psychotic. It should be added that the dominance of a purely organic, largely a neurological, point of view was aided by the severity of the pathology seen, whether in mental deficiency or in psychosis. [See MENTAL DISORDERS, article on EPIDEMIOLOGY.]
In the literature of medicine before the nineteenth century there are a number of case records and essays that present several ideas thought to be of much more recent origin. No doubt historical research will discover many more. A number of these are discussed by Alexander Walk (1964), among them a study of fear in dreams, a study of sleep disturbances (one by C. Rollins in the fifteenth century, the other by Thomas Phaer in the sixteenth century), a study of the psychotherapy of stuttering by "driving out" the emotion of fear
PSYCHIATRY: Child Psychiatry (written by Hieronymus Mercurialis in the sixteenth century), an essay on "the medical education of children" in which the problem of the jealousy of infants is discussed (written by Brouzet in 1754), and a day-to-day account of a childhood psychosis and an etiological classification of mental aberrations that includes, besides organic causes, psychological ones like "reproof in school" and any incident causing loss of temper (written by William Perfect in 1803). Starting in the mid-nineteenth century there was a spurt in publication (see Kanner 1948). Books were written on the psychiatry of childhood, and in the latter half of the nineteenth century numerous studies were published about child neurology, mental deficiency, child development, mental measurement, and education—all subjects relevant to child psychiatry. Remedial education Edouard Seguin, a French psychiatrist dealing primarily with problems of mental deficiency and education, had a significant influence upon child psychiatry. He studied with J. M. G. Itard, who originated the method of "sensory training" still utilized in the Montessori schools. Itard is best known for his book Wild Boy of Aveyron (1801), in which his method of "sensory training" was described fully in the discussion of his attempt to educate a boy, mute and apparently "wild," who was captured in the woods by a party of hunters. After escaping from a home, the young savage was placed in a hospital and in 1800 was transferred for scientific study to Itard, then a physician at the institution for deaf mutes in Paris. Seguin further developed the method of sensory training. Seguin also studied under the psychiatrist Felix Voisin at the Bicetre in Paris. Voisin was far advanced for his day. He worked out a method of "medical education" that he called orthophrenic treatment, which was to be adapted to four categories of children: feebleminded children, children with difficulties attributable to faulty education, children with character difficulties since early childhood, and children born of insane parents and hence considered to be predisposed to nervous maladies. He founded a private institution that closed after a decade, and he later become physician to the annex of the Bicetre in Paris dealing with feebleminded children. Seguin was on his staff there. Through the influence of Voisin and Seguin, doctors and teachers worked together in institutions for the feebleminded. In Austria, J. D. Georgen, physician and teacher, applied Voisin's method, under the name Heilpddagogik (see Walk 1964), to psychotic children
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and to a large variety of disturbed children, besides defectives. The development of "remedial training" remains the contribution of the field of education to child psychiatry in Austria and Germany. Through the invitation of Samuel G. Howe, who founded in Massachusetts the first experimental school for the feebleminded in the United States, Seguin came to America in 1848. There he introduced the method derived from Itard and Voisin (see Lowrey 1944). By 1880 there were 15 such institutions in the United States. Howe was also familiar with the methods used by the Swiss physician Jean-Louis Guggenbiihl in the training of cretin idiots. Pathological conceptions In 1867 Henry Maudsley published The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind. In a later edition he was the first, according to Alexander Walk, to include in a book on mental disease a chapter on the insanity that may occur in early life. In this chapter he noted the importance of the instincts and of childhood aggression and sexuality. Emminghaus' Die psychischen Storungen des Kindesalters (1887; "Psychic Disturbances of Childhood") includes psychological causes besides the usual pathological ones. It includes also methods of psychotherapy. Emminghaus urged a collaboration of psychiatry and pediatrics. Outpatient clinics The development of outpatient clinics was an important factor in the early development of child psychiatry (and also of neurology and general psychiatry). It meant expanding psychiatric service and including cases that were not extreme. The first outpatient clinic was established at the Philadelphia Hospital for Orthopedics in 1867 and included defective children among its patients. The first outpatient clinic at a mental hospital was opened in 1891, under the direction of Howe. The patients were mostly children. Howe's successor was Walter Fernald, a leader in the study of mental retardation. Fern aid's outpatient clinic accepted many children whose problems were not limited to mental retardation; indeed, many whose problems are typical of referrals to child guidance clinics today (Fernald 1920; Stevenson 1944; Abbot 1920). G. Stanley Hall G. Stanley Hall, an American psychologist, started the first journal of child psychology in 1891 (Pedagogical Seminary) and also the first society of child study, in 1894. Some studies made at this time, especially those of European origin (for ex-
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ample, those by Sully of England and Perez of France), including some biographical accounts of infants, remain of value today [see the biography of HALL; see also Hall 1907; Gesell 1930]. Thus, it is clear that child psychiatry began to develop long before child guidance came into being 1n the United States or elsewhere. However, the child guidance movement gave a great impetus to the development of child psychiatry, especially in the United States (Glueck 1930; Crutcher 1943; Healy 1915; Bunker 1944; Levy 1947; Lewis 1959; Stevenson & Smith 1934; Lowrey 1944; Kanner 1948). Healy and the child guidance movement The child guidance movement began with William Healy's Juvenile Psychopathic Institute (Healy & Dummer 1909; Healy & Bronner 1948). In his account of the early years of the movement, Healy states: . . . there was one central and often disastrous weakness in the proceedings [of the juvenile and municipal courts]: The individual before the court, given at most only a physical examination, was not in the least known with regard to his essential nature. Nor was anything known as to why he was a delinquent. Nevertheless, judgment was passed and the type of penalty or supposed treatment that a court can order was prescribed. How, these observers argued, can a judge or anyone else, laboring under such a handicap, possibly prescribe wisely for the individual who, if placed on probation, needs some special form of treatment or incentive to help him mend his ways; or should have some particular type of institutional training or segregation? In a neurological clinic I had long been finding that the symptoms of numerous young patients as given by relatives included complaints of conduct difficulties. Many of these—head injury cases, choreics, epileptics, or hysteria—were reported over-restless, aggressive disturbers of the peace at home or at school, truants, runaways, or involved in stealing or sexual misbehavior. Some were already on probation from the juvenile court and others were soon taken there charged with delinquencies that led them to be sent to the Parental School or to what was . . . [euphemistically] termed a training school. To me in that clinic it seemed that the handling of these young people largely by punitive measures, whether in the home, school, or court, was so far removed from common sense application of scientific knowledge to the treatment of human beings that it savored of the dark ages of man's dealing with his fellowmen. And on occasion I publicly said as much. . . . relatives would come to the detention home and from interviews with them we could ascertain many things that we needed to know—heredity, developmental histories, personality peculiarities, family interrelationships, and much else. Then, besides the possibilities of studying the youngsters themselves dur-
ing their period of detention, we could obtain facts from the school about their progress and conduct in that setting. . . . If resources for treatment were available, with better knowledge of them something better might be done to check delinquent behavior tendencies which, as everyone already knew, all too frequently led to criminal careers. . . . No such clinic existed. The only places I found where even psychological testing was added to a physical examination were Witmer's clinic for retarded children at the University of Pennsylvania, and Goddard's laboratory for mental measurement of the feebleminded at Vineland. Interestingly enough, the various theories offered in possible explanation of delinquency and crime were none of them based on actual study of cases. Some original methodological suggestions for us were made, particularly by Thorndike. As for any scientific studies of the bases of children's behavior tendencies, it was said that we in Chicago would have to blaze a new trail. . . . The first psychologist with me was Dr. Grace M. Fernald. We two and our secretary comprised the paid staff. At that time and until years later the psychiatric social worker did not exist, but in all fairness it must be stated that some of the social workers who helped us to study cases and even do some treatment with the families had developed appreciation of psychiatric implications. . . . Our social work, whatever it amounted to, was done then by certain workers from other agencies and by well-trained probation officers. Relatives came with surprising willingness for interviews with me; indeed some of the earliest requests for our services came from parents with a child in court, and even lawyers asked the judge to continue a case in order that the new clinic might find out what was the matter with their client's child that he should be behaving in a delinquent fashion. It was our early decision to confine our research to delinquents who had committed offenses repeatedly. Rightly or wrongly these seemed to offer the greatest challenge for treatment by the court or in any other way. First offenders might have committed casual offenses that had little relationship to their nature or needs, and little significance for their future conduct. We took such cases as we could within our working limits, cases referred by the judge or probation officers, by families, and occasionally a policeman would bring a boy to us. (Healy & Bronner 1948, pp. 4-6) In the rest of his account Healy showed how he disproved the theories of Lombroso and others that ascribed delinquency and crime to heredity (based on anatomical "stigmata of degeneracy") and to causes such as enlarged tonsils and adenoids; focal infections; uncorrected refractive errors; peripheral irritations—for example, tight foreskin, impacted teeth. Healy began to look down on all theories of organic "causes" of delinquencies (1915). In time he admitted overlooking some cases in which organic factors were paramount, as in epidemic encephalitis, in conditions causing partial asphyxiation, and (in one case) the path-
PSYCHIATRY: Child Psychiatry ological effects on the personality of severe burns in early childhood. [See the biography of LOMBROSO.] Healy had been well trained in neurology; he was an associate professor of nervous and mental diseases at the Chicago Polyclinic for 13 years. The physical examination was a routine procedure in his work with children. As time went on he paid less attention to neurological studies, being more absorbed with the social environment, the patient's "own story," psychological testing—to which he made important contributions (especially Healy's Picture Completion n)—and psychoanalysis. In time he recognized anew the importance of the neurological examination as neurology and neurophysiology became more and more relevant to child psychiatry. In Healy's early years, the important names in psychiatry were Adolf Meyer, Alfred Binet, and Sigmund Freud (Levy 1947; Whitehorn 1957; Kanner 1961). That is the order, I think, of their impact chronologically in the field later to be known as "child guidance." Through Meyer, psychiatry had become liberated from the purely symptomatic approach to the study of man. The patient was no longer a collection of symptoms. Meyer presented to psychiatry a conception of man as an integrated, purposeful human being of whom the psychiatrist had previously lost sight. Healy benefited from Meyer's restoration of man's place in psychiatry. [See the biography of MEYER.] When Healy started his work in Chicago, Alfred Binet had already opened up the new field of mental measurement through his studies of school children in the city of Paris (Pressey & Pressey 1922; Terman 1919). Methods of quantitatively estimating intellectual capacities were to develop into a new science. Of importance in relation to Meyer's concept was a further accentuation of the patient as the primary point of orientation. The determination of a child's intelligence, which came to mean his capacity for schooling, was based on the actual study of the child himself by means of a standardized procedure, rather than on pronouncements by authorities derived from clinical impressions. Healy started at a period when testing devices, to which he contributed greatly, were already appropriate tools of psychiatric study. The enormous influence of the tests of Binet and Simon and also Seguin's pedagogical ideas are clearly delineated in Benjamin Baker's bulletin "History of the Care of the Feeble-minded." [See INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCE TESTING; and the biography of BINET.] Freud's contribution was the energizing force in psychiatry. It marked the beginning of significant motivational studies. In Healy's early work their
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impact was revealed in his book Mental Conflicts and Misconduct (1917). In The Individual Delinquent (1915), the classic book in the field, Healy wrote that he found the following psychoanalytic tenets of value: (1) that conduct is unconsciously motivated; (2) that "much that is formative of character does not appear above the surface"; (3) that "experiences which come to the individual with a great deal of emotional context are likely to cause the greatest amount of reaction"; (4) that "experiences . . . related to sex life [caused the] 'strongest and subtlest reactions'"; and (5) that psychic traumata experienced most frequently in young children may be unknown to the parents (pp. 119-120). The particular traits of Healy's personality that gave shape to the new field were his receptivity and democratic nature (Levy 1947). He was receptive to knowledge from any source. He was free from the typical prejudices (so common in the psychiatrists of those days) against psychological tests and against anything that could be labeled Freudian. He was free also of the authoritarian attitude of the doctor that makes teamwork with co-workers in allied fields impossible. Actually, out of his alliance with the clinical psychologists and the social workers, a new group emerged. For the first time the psychiatrist, the psychologist, and the social worker worked together as an authentic unit, and problems of personal prestige were forgotten. Starting with Healy, psychiatrists who worked in the field of delinquency and crime became increasingly aware that they were in a new field, one in which social problems and social agencies were of primary concern. The Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago, the heir of Healy's Juvenile Psychopathic Institute, became part of a large state organization involving penal, correctional, and other institutions, all under Herman Adler, the state criminologist (Adler 1926). Karl Menninger was the first to interest Herman Adler and Franwood Williams, then director of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, in forming an association of the representatives of the neuropsychiatric or medical view of crime that would include the neuropsychiatrists primarily interested in what might be called medical criminology or disciplinary psychiatry or orthopsychics. Orthopsychiatry In January 1924 a committee of psychiatrists that was to become the American Orthopsychiatric Association was formed at the Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago (Lowrey 1948). Of the names suggested for this committee "Social Psychiatry" was favored and then dropped. This was due to the
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belief that sociologists and social workers would regard such a field as belonging to them. The word "orthopsychiatry" was also chosen in preference to "social psychiatry" since the latter term, it was thought, stresses the idea of disease which was regarded as incidental to the general problem. The other fields to which orthopsychiatry was closely related—clinical psychology, sociology, and social work—were thought of as sources of assistance. However, there were many clinics in which psychiatrists, social workers, and psychologists were then operating as equals. Furthermore, the original stress on delinquency and criminology gave way c~,er a period of time to an increased emphasis upon the relationship between abnormal behavior and broader patterns of social behavior. The first annual convention of the American Orthopsychiatric Association was held at the Institute for Juvenile Research on June 10, 1924. William Healy was elected president. It is interesting that of the nine papers presented at that meeting only two dealt specifically with crime and delinquency. The problem of the status of nonmedical people was an early issue. Those who held out for control by psychiatrists finally gave way. Amendments to the constitution of the society made provisions for other classes of members with voting privileges. The fifth annual meeting of the association was held in New York City. There were 540 members registered. They represented 112 organizations from outside the city. There were registrants from 20 states and 5 foreign countries. The journal of the society was first issued in 1930 under the editorship of Lawson G. Lowrey. The 1965 meeting had eight thousand registrants. Of these, twelve hundred were members. The mental-hygiene movement In 1909, the year in which Healy began his work in Chicago, the mental-hygiene movement began (Deutsch 1937; 1944). It followed the publication (1908) of Clifford Beers's book A Mind That Found Itself, an expose of the brutal experiences suffered by the author when he was a patient in three different mental hospitals. Beers was an unusual combination of writer, organizer, and crusader. Through his initiative, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene came into being. Its goal, improving the care of the insane, soon expanded into the general field of preventive psychiatry. Later, through the aid of the Commonwealth Fund, it furthered the development of child guidance clinics. These were modeled after Healy's Chicago Juvenile Psychopathic Institute and the Institute for Juvenile Research. A five-year demonstration of child guidance clinics started in 1922 in St. Louis. After each
year's demonstration it was hoped that the community would take over. In this sense no demonstration was ever more successful. By 1934 hundreds of child guidance clinics were established in the United States. Training After the first five years of the demonstration clinics it had become all too clear that a special national teaching institute was necessary to train personnel—psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric social workers—whose services could not be supplied in sufficient numbers by the clinics previously established. The Institute for Child Guidance was established in New York City in 1927 for the purpose of training and research (Lowrey & Smith 1933). In its six years of existence 50 psychiatrists and 289 psychiatric social workers went through a program of training there. The psychiatric social work students came chiefly from the Smith College School for Psychiatric Social Workers, started in 1918 as the first school of its kind, and the New York (now the Columbia) School of Social Work. Training of social workers in psychiatry began as an innovation of Adolf Meyer's, at the turn of the century. It was brought into prominence by Elmer Southard of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital (see Southard & Jarrett 1922). The initial idea for such a school came from Southard, who at first was concerned to find social workers to serve as aides to psychiatrists in war service. The aides were able to schedule appointments and take histories. They could visit homes and prepare reports on the families of patients and, in general, about the child's environment. While the psychiatrist worked directly with the patient—that is, the child—the social worker dealt with the mother and with other members of the child's family. In this role he acted presumably under supervision of the psychiatrists. He gave counsel, information, and insight. When such methods were ineffective, he utilized various forms of psychotherapy. The role of social worker as therapist, especially as therapist in private practice, remains today a controversial issue (Lowrey & Smith 1933; Levy 1937; Witmer 1946; Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry 1948). Child guidance and child psychiatry The differentiation of child guidance and child psychiatry was easily made at first by the fact that a guidance staff always included a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a social worker. Furthermore, child guidance clinics received their patients from juvenile courts and were never connected with hospitals. In contrast, child psychiatry was easily
PSYCHIATRY: Child Psychiatry demarcated as a medical specialty, in the same manner as adult psychiatry. Healy's work began as a search for psychopathology. Many of his case studies, however, were not in that field; they were examples not of psychosis or neurosis but of "maladjustment" as a result of the influence of the social environment, especially the child's family and his companions. This environment produced certain antisocial attitudes. As Kanner has rightly emphasized, the special American contribution to child psychiatry is the recognition and study of attitudes (Kanner 1932; Glueck 1930; MacCalman 1939). This was probably facilitated by the fact that patients who showed evidence of mental deficiency or any form of severe psychopathology were not accepted in many child guidance clinics. Even when the field expanded beyond delinquency to all forms of "behavior problems" it was thought wise to limit patients to the milder cases. The role of social agencies Child guidance clinics like Healy's Juvenile Psychopathic Institute had close relations with social agencies. According to Stevenson and Smith (1934), who were both closely involved with the development of the clinics, their functions were threefold: (1) to study and treat patients; (2) to stimulate the interest of other community agencies in prevention and treatment of behavior and personality disorders in children; and (3) to bring to the attention of the community the unmet needs of children. Put in this way, the psychiatrist who, according to the original plan, was always the director of the clinic was not only a practitioner but was also cast in the role of community planner and leader. Stevenson and Smith stated also that the clinics should attempt child guidance only at those points where other agencies were unable to meet the child's emotional needs. Presumably this involved a close relationship with other agencies and, as it turned out, the agency's being able to select for guidance those children regarded as beyond its competence. This at least sharpened the problem for the agency in regard to selection of cases most suitable for the kind of service appropriate to its special skills. There was always some kind of adaptation to local problems, to differences in the personnel of social agencies, to their standards, and to their willingness to utilize and cooperate with the available child guidance clinics; there was also a testing period in which the usefulness of the new relationship was tried out. Meanwhile, for various reasons, including economic ones, a number of social agencies took on the function of a psychiatric clinic without having
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a single psychiatrist as a permanent member of the staff. They utilized psychiatrists as lecturers or consultants who were useful in fulfilling their roles especially when a medical diagnosis was legally necessary for the admission of a child to a mental hospital. In some agencies the rule that the psychiatric social worker always be supervised in her case work by a psychiatrist was either withdrawn or complied with at the discretion of the worker. At times, psychiatrists also violated their function by making diagnoses without examining or even seeing the child, relying entirely on the psychiatric social worker's case record. Evaluation of child guidance clinics Hardcastle, a British psychiatrist who studied the child guidance clinics in the United States from 1930 to 1933 and had been a student at the Institute for Child Guidance, found the widest variations in the original model and in methods of therapy (Hardcastle 1933). Besides visiting a number of clinics he received replies to a questionnaire from 12 clinic directors. He found that the "offspring" of psychiatry had taken many new directions and that "each year psychologists and other non-medical workers are gradually wresting it from the field of psychiatry." The therapy was of all sorts, at one extreme psychoanalytic treatment of the child and each parent, at the other, purely didactic instruction. Of the criticisms of child guidance clinics the most frequent are (1) its growing distance from the hospital and medical clinic, and (2) its rigidity (Bowman 1944; Levy 1952; Markey 1963; Murphy 1941). As child guidance expanded it drew farther away from the hospital and into closer collaboration with many social agencies. Case referrals, as traced by Hardcastle for a representative clinic, were largely from the courts before 1920 (538 out of its first 600 cases); several years later the majority were from 31 other agencies (308 of its third list of 600 cases). Hospital settings Child psychiatry as developed in hospitals started, according to Karl M. Bowman, for many years director of psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, with the "dictum that a child is not to appear before a conference." Bowman, after describing both the advantages of hospital settings for training in child psychiatry (1944), particularly at Bellevue Hospital, and the bed wards available for children and adolescents, was especially critical of the "stereotyped" requirements of child guidance clinics. Psychiatrists at Bellevue, however
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competent in child psychiatry, were not permitted to serve in child guidance clinics because a fully trained psychiatric social worker was not a member of the Bellevue teaching staff. A number of referrals by psychiatrists in child guidance clinics had been made to psychiatrists in Bellevue in order to obtain a diagnosis. This is simply an illustration of the fact that the child guidance clinic dealt with a different variety of cases than those found in hospital wards. In the past, training for child guidance took place within the child guidance clinics. The more specifically psychiatric difficulties, for example, childhood schizophrenia, autism, dementia, severe emotional difficulties, severe retardation, anorexia nervosa, convulsive states, tics, and phobias, are relatively less commonly seen in a child guidance clinic. In the latter the more frequently seen cases are delinquency and other varieties of "behavior problems," family relationship problems (for example, maternal overprotection, maternal rejection, sibling rivalry), so-called rearing problems, including "the everyday problems of the everyday child," a special concern of Douglas Thorn's Habit Clinic (Thorn 1927). Leo Kanner, the first person to develop a fulltime psychiatric service in a department of pediatrics (at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1930), regarded "the cultivated estrangement from medicine" on the part of child guidance clinics and their "self-imposed limitation" in the selection of cases with favor because of "the great benefit derived from making certain types of children's behavior problems a matter of community concern" (Kanner 1932). He regarded as the contribution of child guidance to psychiatry the broadening of the range of inquiry to include, in addition to the study of the home and the school, all influences outside the child, including the significant people in his environment—generally "interpersonal relationships." A second basic contribution is "multidisciplinary" collaboration. This influence was strongly felt by Kanner in his own clinic, in which, however, the selection of cases was not restricted to any particular type of difficulty. Research Research in American child psychiatry may be traced in articles in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, which began in 1930. The contributors are mainly psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric social workers, and the contributions have become more allied to psychiatry than to child guidance and tend to resemble such European journals as the French Revue de neuropsychiatrie infantile; the Swiss Zeitschrift fur Kinderpsychi-
atrie (founded by M. Tramer in 1934 and now called Acta paedopsychiatrica); and the American Journal of Child Psychiatry, which was founded in 1962. The trend of research is seen generally in a refinement and extension of the earlier studies on the influence of infantile experience on later growth, and in the study of every possible influence on the patient of all his human contacts, in single and composite form, as in family and cultural constellations. Clinical studies of syndromes and disease entities still continue in the historical tradition of medicine, from severe pathology to the mild "everyday problem." In recent years there has been special interest in the biochemistry of behavior, brain physiology, neurology, drug therapy, family and group therapy, developmental psychology, projective tests, and the field of communication. There has also been an increase in the study of mental deficiency, childhood schizophrenia, residential treatment, and education therapy. [See DRUGS, article on PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY; MENTAL DISORDERS, article on BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS; MENTAL DISORDERS, TREATMENT OF, article OU SOMATIC TREATMENT; MENTAL RETARDATION; NERVOUS SYSTEM; SCHIZOPHRENIA.] Since about 1950 there has been an increasing number of child psychiatry clinics in hospitals and medical schools and an increasing collaboration with pediatrics and neurology. Child guidance clinics are becoming better grounded in psychiatry and psychodynamics. They remain, in keeping with their history and tradition, community-oriented, maintaining a special interest in problems of delinquency and school retardation, and, in general, in the psychiatric, psychological, and social aspects of community problems. The distribution of therapeutic functions among the members of the team remains a problem. DAVID M. LEVY [Directly related are the entries CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY; MENTAL DISORDERS, article on CHILDHOOD MENTAL DISORDERS;
MENTAL
DISORDERS,
TREATMENT OF;
MENTAL RETARDATION; SOCIAL WORK. Other relevant material may be found in DELINQUENCY, article on PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS; DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY; INFANCY; INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT; INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCE TESTING; LANGUAGE, article on SPEECH PATHOLOGY; PERSONALITY, article on PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT; PHOBIAS; READING DISABILITIES; and in the biographies of BINET; MEYER; PINEL; RUSH.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ABBOT, E. STANLEY 1920 Out-patient or Dispensary Clinics for Mental Cases. American Journal of In-
PSYCHIATRY: Child Psychiatry santy 77:217-225. -> A paper read at the 76th anmal meeting of the American Medico-psychological Asstciation. ADLER, IERMAN M. 1926 Program for Meeting Psychiatrii Needs in the State: Aims and Problems of the IllirDis Plan. Mental Hygiene 10:712-720. BEERS, CLIFFORD W. (1908) 1948 A Mind That Found Itsef. 7th ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. BOWMAIS KARL M. 1944 The Psychiatrist Looks at the Chifl Psychiatrist. American Journal of Psychiatry 10123-29. BUNKER,HENRY A. 1944 American Psychiatry as a Specialy. Pages 479-505 in American Psychiatric Associaton, One Hundred Years of American Psychiatry. Edifed by J. K. Hall. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. CRUTCHK, ROBERTA 1943 Child Psychiatry: A History of Is Development. Psychiatry 6:191-201. DEUTSCJ, ALBERT (1937) 1949 The Mentally III in Amfrica. 2d ed. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. -> fee especially pages 72-87, "Benjamin Rush: The FatJer of American Psychiatry." DEUTSCI, ALBERT 1944 The History of Mental Hygiene. Pagis 325-365 in American Psychiatric Association, One Hundred Years of American Psychiatry. Edited by ,. K. Hall. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. EMMINGIAUS, HERMANN 1887 Die psychischen Storuncfn des Kindesalters. Handbuch der Kinderkrankheitn, Nachtrag 2. Tubingen (Germany): Laupp. -» 1 systematic treatment with numerous references to tie literature. FERN ALE WALTER E. 1920 An Out-patient Clinic in Comection With a State Institution for the Feeblemirded. American Journal of Insanity 77:227-235. GESELL, ARNOLD 1930 Child Psychology. Volume 3, pagis 391-393 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Scienas. New York: Macmillan. GILLESPE, R. D. 1939 Psychoses in Children. Pages 66-79 in Child Guidance Council, A Survey of Child Psychiatry. Edited by Ronald G. Gordon. Oxford Univ. Pres. GLUECK, BERNARD 1930 Child Guidance. Volume 3, pags 393-395 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciencs. New York: Macmillan. GROUP i'OR THE ADVANCEMENT OF PSYCHIATRY 1948 The Psychiatric Social Worker in the Psychiatric HosJital. Report No. 2. New York: The Group. HALL, G STANLEY (1907) 1921 Aspects of Child Life and Education. New York: Appleton. HARDCAETLE, D. N. 1933 The Child Guidance Clinic in Amirica: Its Evolution and Future Development. British Journal of Medical Psychology 13:328-353. HEALY, WILLIAM 1915 The Individual Delinquent: A Tex-book of Diagnosis and Prognosis for All Concerted in Understanding Offenders. Boston: Little. HEALY, WILLIAM 1917 Mental Conflicts and Misconduc. Boston: Little. HEALY, VILLIAM; and BRONNER, AUGUSTA F. 1948 The Chid Guidance Clinic: Birth and Growth of an Idea; The Early Years. Pages 14-34 in Lawson G. Lowrey (edtor), Orthopsychiatry, 1923-1948: Retrospect and Propect. New York: American Orthopsychiatric Assocation. HEALY, WILLIAM; and DUMMER, E. S. 1909 Correspordence in 1909 Between Dr. William Healy and Mrs E. S. Dummer. Radcliffe College, unpublished maiuscript. ITARD, JSAN M. G. (1801) 1932 Wild Boy of Aveyron. Nev York: Century. ~» First published as De {'education d'un homme sauvage.
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KANNER, LEO 1932 Supplying the Psychiatric Needs of a Pediatric Clinic. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 2:400-410. KANNER, LEO 1948 Outline of the History of Child Psychiatry. Pages 163-176 in Victor Robinson Memorial Volume: Essays on History of Medicine, in Honor of Victor Robinson on His Sixtieth Birthday, August 16, 1946. Edited by Solomon R. Kagan. New York: Froben. KANNER, LEO 1961 American Contribution to the Development of Child Psychiatry. Psychiatric Quarterly 35, Supplement: 1-12. LEVY, DAVID M. 1937 Attitude Therapy. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 7:103-113. LEVY, DAVID M. 1947 New Fields of Psychiatry. New York: Norton. LEVY, DAVID M. 1952 Critical Evaluation of the Present State of Child Psychiatry. American Journal of Psychiatry 108:481-490. LEWIS, NOLAN D. C. 1959 American Psychiatry From Its Beginnings to World War II. Volume 1, pages 3-17 in American Handbook of Psychiatry. Edited by Silvano Arieti. New York: Basic Books. LOWREY, LAWSON G. 1944 Psychiatry for Children: A Brief History of Developments. American Journal of Psychiatry 101:375-388. LOWREY, LAWSON G. 1948 The Birth of Orthopsychiatry. Pages 190-208 in Lawson G. Lowrey (editor), Orthopsychiatry, 1923-1948: Retrospect and Prospect. New York: American Orthopsychiatric Association. LOWREY, LAWSON G.; and SMITH, GEDDES 1933 The Institute for Child Guidance, 1927-1933. New York: Commonwealth Fund. MACCALMAN, D. R. 1939 The General Management of Maladjustment in Children. Pages 257-268 in Child Guidance Council, A Survey of Child Psychiatry. Edited by Ronald G. Gordon. Oxford Univ. Press. MALZBERG, BENJAMIN 1959 Important Statistical Data About Mental Illness. Volume 1, pages 161-174 in American Handbook of Psychiatry. Edited by Silvano Arieti. New York: Basic Books. MARKEY, OSCAR B. 1963 Bridges or Fences? Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 2:370380. MAUDSLEY, HENRY 1867 The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind. New York: Appleton. -> The third edition, revised and enlarged, was published in two separate volumes, The Physiology of Mind in 1883 and The Pathology of the Mind in 1890. MEYER, ADOLF 1908 The Role of Mental Factors in Psychiatry. American Journal of Insanity 65:39-56. MEYER, ADOLF 1928 Thirty-five Years of Psychiatry in the United States and Our Present Outlook. American Journal of Psychiatry 8:1-31. MURPHY, BRADFORD J. 1941 What Is Child Guidance? American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 11:40-47. PRATT, CAROLYN 1963 Some Factors Affecting the Psychotherapeutic Function of the Orthopsychiatric Team. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 33:883-889. PRESSEY, SIDNEY L.; and PRESSEY, LUELLA C. (1922) 1931 Introduction to the Use of Standard Tests. Rev. ed. Yonkers, N.Y.: New World Book Co. -> See especially pages 145-165, "The Measurement of General Mental Ability." RUSH, BENJAMIN (1812) 1930 Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind. 4th ed. Philadelphia: Grigg. SEGUIN, EDOUARD 1846 Traitement moral, hygiene et education des idiots. Paris: Bailliere.
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SOUTHARD, ELMER E.; and JARRETT, MARY C. 1922 Kingdom of Evils. New York: Macmillan. STEVENSON, GEORGE S. 1944 The Development of Extramural Psychiatry in the United States. American Journal of Psychiatry 100, no. 6:147-150. STEVENSON, GEORGE S.; and SMITH, GEDDES 1934 Child Guidance Clinics: A Quarter Century of Development. New York: Commonwealth Fund. "TRUMAN, LEWIS M. 1919 The Intelligence of School Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. -> See especially pages 1-16, "Some Principles of Intelligence Testing." THOM, DOUGLAS A. 1927 Everyday Problems of the Everyday Child. New York: Appleton. VOISIN, FELIX 1826 Des causes morales et physiques des maladies mentales. Paris: Bailliere. WALK, ALEXANDER 1964 The Pre-history of Child Psychiatry. British Journal of Psychiatry 110:754-767. WHITEHORN, JOHN C. 1944 A Century of Psychiatric Research in America. Pages 167-193 in American Psychiatric Association, One Hundred Years of American Psychiatry. Edited by J. K. Hall. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. WHITEHORN, JOHN C. 1957 Psychiatric Education and Progress. Springfield, 111.: Thomas. -» See especially pages 16-19. WITMER, HELEN L. (editor) 1946 Psychiatric Interviews With Children. New York: Commonwealth Fund. Ill SOCIAL PSYCHIATRY
Although the phrase "social psychiatry" is recent, the topic is not. Man has suspected for a long time that he could derange himself by his style of living and that the emotions engendered by interpersonal relations could lead to illness, including organic illness. The expressions "You will drive yourself crazy" and "You make me sick" were probably first uttered in all earnestness and without hyperbole in some now extinct cave-man tongue. As a label, "social psychiatry" has not yet had sufficient clarity conferred upon it to permit exact definition. It is, however, becoming more and more commonly employed in referring to one, several, or all of a number of heterogeneous activities and orientations that have in common a focus on the interplay between social and cultural processes, on the one hand, and psychiatric disorders and mental health on the other. In this article I shall sketch first the total area of reference and then consider the main subareas to which some workers limit the label. These differences in usage reflect differences of trend, theory, action, and disciplinary view. A general definition Social psychiatry can be said to embody four major aspects: concern with people in numbers, concern with sociocultural systems, adaptation of social science knowledge, and transmission of psy-
chiatric knowledge to the social sciences (A. H. Leigh ton 1960). Concern with people in numbers. Social psychiatry focuses on problems of psychiatric disorder in populations. Questions are asked about frequency and distribution of people with disorders, about the causes of variation in these distributions, and about methods of control. This perspective contrasts somewhat with that of clinical psychiatry, which places much greater emphasis on the individual patient and the problems of his particular diagnosis and treatment. But like clinical psychiatry, and like the physiological and chemical approaches to psychiatric disorder, there is in social psychiatry an ultimate concern for understanding the cause and prevention of disorder in persons. The individual is the basic unit, and social psychiatry as a field does not imply values that underestimate the importance of the individual. Rather, the importance of the individual is magnified by the number who exist in a state of mental and emotional difficulty. By and large, those working in social psychiatry conceive of their primary responsibility as somewhat different from that of a practicing psychiatrist. There is less emphasis on a contractual type of understanding with particular individuals and more emphasis on an obligation to serve the welfare of a population or a subgroup within a population, such as a local community, an industry, a military unit, a school, or a family. The focus, however, remains on real people in real situations and not on an abstract entity such as the state. The importance attached to people in numbers does not mean individual psychotherapy is played down, but it adds a corollary set of considerations: the possibility and desirability of altering those circumstances which can be shown to be a recurrent source of psychological disturbance. Concern with sociocultural systems. Social psychiatry gives attention to understanding the patterns of values and sentiments, symbols of communication, interaction, work division, and social control through which human groups function. Just as the biological approach to disorder in human behavior leads to involvement with such matters as the functioning of the central nervous system and the structure of molecules, so here there is engagement with the functioning of various types of social systems. A social psychiatrist, for example, may find it important to know whether one culture as compared to another has a differential effect on the origin, precipitation, continuation, or relief of psychiatric disorders. He is thus led into questions of how culture is acquired
PSYCHIATRY: Social Psychiatry and how its molding, directing, containing, and changing influences operate. Equally pertinent are various situations of stress, such as those occurring regularly and continuously in the lower socioeconomic levels of a society or those occurring more briefly but with greater intensity in disasters. Adaptation of social science knowledge. As a consequence of its concern with sociocultural systems social psychiatry has an interest in the relevant discoveries and theories of the social or behavioral sciences for the purpose of applying them to the understanding and treatment of psychiatric disorders, to their prevention, and to the improvement of mental health generally. Finding himself confronted with social phenomena regardless of whether his approach is primarily action or primarily research, the social psychiatrist needs the facts and theories of anthropology, sociology, social psychology, ethology, political science, and economics. The range of relevant fact, theory, and technique in these disciplines is, of course, very wide. It stretches from survey studies that attempt to grasp relationships in natural ongoing situations by means of statistical correlations to small-group investigations conducted on an experimental basis. A considerable amount of sifting and interpretation is therefore necessary. At this point the reader may be inclined to ask who the people are who are engaged in social psychiatry. Are they the usual clinical team of psychiatrist, psychologist, and social worker with added training in the social sciences? Or are they social scientists working in the field of mental health? The answer is, of course, that they are both types. There are some interesting trends in the interrelationships of the disciplines, which will be discussed later. The link between social psychiatry and the social sciences is more complex than a simple matter of the former drawing on the latter for what it needs. Social psychiatry has a role to play in the interpretations of social science findings for other branches of psychiatry, particularly the clinical, so that this knowledge can become part of teaching and, where appropriate, practice. In this there is continuity with the broader problem of the relationship of social science to the whole field of medicine. Transmission of psychiatric knowledge. Conversely, social psychiatry is concerned with presenting the relevant discoveries and orientations of psychiatry to the social sciences so as to make contributions to theory and to improve understanding and actions directed toward human welfare. Psychiatry is able to make contributions to knowl-
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edge that go beyond the limits implied by its focus on individual health. Although this point of view has at times had wide acceptance, strong doubts about it have also been expressed. It seems worthwhile, therefore, to attempt to clarify the matter by stating a few core points. The first point is that by definition the psychiatrist is an authority on psychiatric disorders and through experience and training has concepts and techniques for distinguishing such disorders from generally disagreeable behaviors and feelings. Consequently, he should have something to offer wherever psychiatric phenomena are relevant to theory building and research in the social sciences. The second core point is that the psychiatrist has by virtue of his contact with patients a particular kind of access.to the understanding of human motivation, both conscious and unconscious. While the claim can be overemphasized, and while there are certainly dangers in going too far with "psychiatrizing" normal behavior, it is also important not to minimize this potential. Major contributions to behavioral theory and to the framing of experimental tests have emerged from this source in the past and can be expected to continue in the future. Third, the psychiatrist is oriented toward and experienced in dealing with human beings as whole entities. The demands of his work put before him both the opportunity and the obligation to see the individual as an ongoing integration of organic, psychological, and sociocultural processes. The possibility of expanding the application of psychiatry's insights has been for many people one of the attractions of social psychiatry. Rennie (1955) says that the field is concerned not only with the mentally ill but also with the problem of adjustment of all persons in society and with the factors that tend to damage or enhance their adaptive capacities. It assumes, he says, that most persons possess potentialities that have never been realized because of personal, emotional, or social interferences. Thus, social psychiatry attacks the whole social framework of contemporary living: it seeks to understand the dynamics of individuals seen in their total setting. Some restricted definitions Having presented, however sketchily, the largest area covered by "social psychiatry," we may consider next some of the more limited ways in which the label is employed. One of the earliest uses referred to psychiatric social work. Although this use is no longer current it was doubtless a part of what Southard had in mind when he spoke of
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"social psychiatry" in the second decade of the present century (Southard 1919). It seems likely that he was the first to use the words in English, and one must add that some of his remarks make it clear that he was implying sociology as well as social work. Most psychiatrists are apt to assume that social psychiatry is, despite its breadth and depth in subject matter, nothing other than a branch of psychiatry. It is often considered to be parallel to clinical psychiatry and what may be called "physiological psychiatry"—that is, the study of the organic processes underlying psychiatric disorders. As might be expected, this view is not shared by many social scientists. They prefer to regard the field as a branch of a discipline, such as sociology, that is concerned with deviance and the effects of deviance on social process. In this orientation, social psychiatry is seen as a component in or a parallel to studies of delinquency, the use of narcotics, prostitution, suicide, and so on. In anthropology it may be looked upon as a way of studying cultural influences with particular reference to the interplay of personality and culture and to crosscultural comparisons on certain topics of interest, such as curing roles and rituals or cultural integration. According to these views, then, "social psychiatry" is a name for a field that has autonomous status among the social sciences. Psychiatry is visualized as contributing some but by no means all of what is needed in terms of theory, method, and criteria for the study of the phenomena in question. In both research and action programs, the place of the psychiatrist is, in this framework, that of a specialist, one among several with technical skills to contribute. This brings us plainly to issues of interdisciplinary rivalry as well as to matters of concept, theory, and method. Since such questions as "Who is entitled to head programs?" and "Should there be chairs of social psychiatry outside medical schools?" are apt to be of real concern, it is likely that divergent orientations of this kind will be with us for some time. Community psychiatry. It has been advocated that "social psychiatry" be limited to describe research endeavors and that "community psychiatry" be used for enterprises concerned with action and the training of professionals for action (Bellak 1964; Goldston 1965). This division has been advocated in the hope of resolving some conflicts by using persons with clinical training to head mental health services and other activities aimed at prevention, while—depending on the nature of the
problem, the institutional setting, and the particulars of individual training and ability—social scientists, psychiatrists, or clinical psychologists are used to direct research. The usage outlined above has been vigorously attacked for drawing a line between action and research that is stultifying and unworkable. It is said that "community psychiatry" is merely a name for one of many areas of interest for the social psychiatrist. As such, however, the area embraces not only action and service but also teaching and research, in the manner customary for any subdivision of disciplinary subject matter. It is further pointed out that no reason exists for emphasizing the clinician as the director in community psychiatry action programs; on the contrary, social work, political science, or public administration may offer far better preparation and training for imaginative and effective development of the field. Whether it lasts or not, the use of "community psychiatry" for action programs and "social psychiatry" for epidemiology, cultural comparisons, and other types of basic research has at present some currency. [See MENTAL HEALTH.] British and French definitions. In Great Britain there is also a lack of uniformity regarding the meaning of "social psychiatry," but generally the term refers to social amelioration in the same sense as "social medicine" and is thus part of a broad philosophy regarding public responsibility for the handling of welfare problems. The emphasis is pragmatic, and action arises mainly from within the discipline of psychiatry. Research is, of course, performed, and social scientists have been drawn in, but the orientation is dominantly one of providing information that will help guide those programs concerned with such matters as rehabilitation, the employment of schizophrenics, and the analysis of "therapeutic communities." It may be concluded, therefore, that what is called "social psychiatry" in Britain has more in common with what is called "community psychiatry" in the United States than it has with the definitions of social psychiatry discussed above (Jones 1952; Rapoport et al. 1961). In France the term "socio-psychiatrie" appears to be used in a manner that approximates the more restricted definition of social psychiatry. The center of interest is research into the possibility that social factors play a major etiological role in the appearance of psychiatric disorder. Most of the French researchers are psychiatrists, but a great deal of work is nonetheless being conducted by social scientists in closely related areas (Bastide 1965; Encyclopedic Medico-Chirurgicale 1955).
PSYCHIATRY: Social Psychiatry An intervention framework. What has been said thus far is an attempt to summarize the present state of a complex emerging field, which has many crosscurrents and countercurrents. It depicts how things are rather than how a logical mind might arrange them. In the course of discussing these matters, R. N. Rapoport, an anthropologist with long experience in social psychiatry, has suggested (in an unpublished personal communication) the following: The most fruitful way to look at social psychiatry is as an intervention framework. The "iatry" suggests intervention, and social psychiatry is the professional practitioners' field that aims its intervention efforts at the level of social structure. Like individual clinical psychiatry and organic psychiatry, its aim is to heal ill individuals, to prevent others from becoming ill, and to assist all toward the realization of positive mental health. Clinical psychiatry seeks to do this [in] the direct one-to-one relationship [by] persuasion, transference interpretations, [and] interpersonal influence in the two-person situation. Organic psychiatry seeks to do this by altering biochemical substructures, etc. Social psychiatry is supported by the basic sciences of the social science spectrum (sociology, anthropology, social psychology, economics, history, political science). Clinical psychiatry is supported by the psychological sciences (the various approaches to psychology, from behaviorism through symbolic interactionism). Organic psychiatry is underpinned by the basic sciences of biology and the physical sciences directly geared to biology. When individual psychiatrists, of whatever persuasion, do research, they are participating in the basic science field that underpins their intervention specialty. One would call such individuals research social psychiatrists, or research clinical psychiatrists, or research organic psychiatrists to distinguish them from their colleagues who are mainly concerned with intervention as a focal professional activity. To the extent that the individual does not interest himself in interventions aimed at treating individuals, either as a professional practitioner or in terms of the goals in view for his research, . . . I would not think of him as a psychiatrist at all, but as a person who had psychiatric training but who was . . . something else—a biochemist, a sociologist, or a psychologist. The problem of commitment to a type of goal is crucial in defining a person's professional identity. Research As in medical research, the central targets in social psychiatry are treatment, prevention, and the discovery of causes. The topics are placed in that order because, contrary to what is sometimes supposed, successful methods for treatment and prevention have frequently been known long before the relevant causes were discovered—vaccina-
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tion for smallpox being a notable example. In fact, much research is not strictly causal in its orientation but rather is concerned with probing the efficacy of steps intended as corrective. Nevertheless, cause remains a central, although difficult, focus. This difficulty is manifest in the frequency with which research questions are posed that have answers already determined through built-in assumptions. It would seem that in psychodynamic issues, one man's theory is another man's fact. At the present stage of knowledge, therefore, much research effort must still be directed toward the primary task of observing, studying, and sorting phenomena in order to produce questions that can be answered with demonstrable public evidence and replicable procedures. As part of this process it is important for research workers to visualize the causes of psychiatric disorder not only in terms of multiple origins that range from the psychological to the organic but also in terms of factors that precipitate overt impairment and favor its perpetuation. From some points of view the critical question may be less "What are the psychodynamic roots of a neurosis?" and more "What are the factors which evoke certain patterns of feeling and behavior to such an extent that these are seriously disturbing to the person, to others, or to both?" Thinking along this line has led in recent years to the formulation of such concepts as the "social breakdown syndrome" (Gruenberg 1966), the "culture of poverty" (Lewis 1961), and "sentiment patterns characteristic of sociocultural disintegration" (Hughes et al. I960; D. Leighton et al. 1963). The social breakdown syndrome, in which withdrawal and hostility in patients are prominent features, is considered the result of social processes in large hospitals for chronic patients and to be superimposed on the schizophrenic, depressed, or senile condition or whatever it is that has led to hospitalization. The syndrome is regarded as serious because it is believed to compound disorder, prevent recovery, and cause severe deterioration. The culture of poverty and sentiments characteristic of sociocultural disintegration refer to very similar states of feeling and behavior in nonpatients living in deprived social systems of natural communities rather than in the back wards of hospitals. The congruence of these independently developed concepts is very striking, and it raises a number of important questions. For example, to what extent is the epidemiological finding of high prevalence of psychiatric disorder in low socioeconomic groups n manifestation of the social breakdown
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syndrome? And further, since large chronic mental hospitals draw disproportionately from low socioeconomic groups, to what extent is the presence of the social breakdown syndrome in these institutions due to many patients already having the syndrome at the time they enter? Looking at the matter from a different point of view, it may be asked whether one can transfer to communities what is learned experimentally in hospitals about the kinds of social processes that produce and prevent the social breakdown syndrome. This concern obviously marks a confluence point of the processes at work in both individual and societal functions. Confluence points of this kind are characteristic of research in social psychiatry. The range of the whole field has already been outlined, but it may be further illustrated by listing more specific topics, such as epidemiology; transcultural and crosscultural psychiatry; culture and personality; social processes in psychiatric hospitals and other related therapeutic institutions; mental health and morale in the armed services, industry, and other nontherapeutic organizations; small-group studies, particularly those concerned with group psychotherapy; the relationships of various social roles to mental health; family patterning and therapy of families as groups; experimental studies of mothers and young among animals and of animal populations considered as social systems. It is of course not possible to deal with all of these in the space of this article, but four may be selected as examples for discussion: epidemiology, transcultural and crosscultural psychiatry, social process in hospitals, and small-group studies. Epidemiology. Epidemiology is one of the main avenues by which social psychiatry has sought clarification of its questions (Lin & Standley 1962; Hoch & Zubin 1953; Hollingshead & Redlich 1958; Hughes et al. I960; Jaco I960; The Midtown Manhattan Study 1962-1963; D. Leighton et al. 1963; Rennie 1955). Mapping the distribution, frequency, and types of disorders is basic to the understanding of environmental influences. It is of interest, therefore, to find that virtually all studies show marked variation in disorder prevalence in relation to demographic and social characteristics such as age, sex, marital status, socioeconomic level, and degree of sociocultural disintegration. In other words, numbers of relationships have emerged that suggest targets for more crucial investigation aimed at distinguishing antecedents from consequents. To do this one must define and measure variation in the sociocultural systems in which these clusterings of psychiatric disorder occur. While
some workers have been concerned with socioeconomic class and others with states of "integration" or the functional cohesiveness of social systems, such efforts are just a beginning. What must come now is more emphasis on the adaptation and development of theories from social psychology, sociology, and anthropology bearing on small-group and large-group processes as these are relevant to mental health research in general and psychiatric epidemiology in particular. The necessity for method development, is of course, concomitant. By such steps it should be possible to narrow a gap that still exists in psychiatric epidemiology, despite much interdisciplinary cooperation, between those who think in terms of individuals and statistics about individuals and those who think in terms of social structure and function. I believe that without this linking emphasis, psychiatric epidemiology will bypass major opportunities for the advance of etiological understanding. The case-counting aspect of psychiatric epidemiology has a number of desiderata for development that may be summarized as: a more precise and standardized linking of terms with phenomena (Glueck et al. 1964; Hoch & Zubin 1953; D. Leighton et al. 1963; Ward et al. 1962); the establishment of comparable methods of keeping hospital and other relevant cumulative records; the expansion of case registries (Bahn 1962; 1965); the achievement of greater reliability and validity in the survey methods of making estimates of prevalence and incidence; and the speeding up of the steps involved in ratings and statistical analyses through the use of computers. [See MENTAL DISORDERS, article on EPIDEMIOLOGY; see also Dale 1964; Overall et al. 1964; Pearson et al. 1964; Swenson et al. 1965; Smith 1967.] Surveys. Because the survey technique is relatively new and has promise of being one of the major advances in the field, it deserves an additional word of comment. The method essentially consists of drawing a representative sample from a general population and conducting a systematic interview with each individual in the sample by means of a prepared schedule of questions. The results of the interviews are evaluated, usually by psychiatrists, and a score is assigned to every respondent. The aim is to estimate the true prevalence of psychiatric disorder in a chosen population independently of the amount of treatment provided and accepted. The survey procedure suffers at present from being both overvalued and undervalued. On the one hand, results are naively accepted without adequate understanding of the way in which they were obtained. On the other, they are naively rejected
PSYCHIATRY: Social Psychiatry as unpsychiatric, if not unscientific, and it is sometimes asserted that they have no known relationship to what a clinician means when he makes a diagnosis. In point of fact, considerable work has been done on reliability (in the sense of agreement between psychiatrists who conduct their ratings independently) and on validity (in the sense of agreement between survey and independent clinical judgment based on direct examination of individuals). While serving to highlight certain weaknesses and to point up priorities for advancement, such investigations support, on the whole, both the survey as an approach and most of the main findings obtained so far. [See INTERVIEWING; PSYCHOMETRICS; SURVEY ANALYSIS.] Transcultural and crosscultural psychiatry. An overlap of transcultural and crosscultural psychiatry with epidemiology exists but each subsumes independent spheres as well (Murphy & Leighton 1965). Examples of such overlap are the comparative analysis of the incidence of a clinical entity (e.g., schizophrenia) in two or more cultures and the attempt to probe deeply into cultural variation in underlying psychological processes through dream analysis, projective tests, and the productions of psychiatrically disordered persons. In the past there has been concern with culturally determined basic personality and the effect this might have on the generation of disorder (see, e.g., Holmberg 1950). There is a fairly large literature on syndromes such as piblokto, latah, koro, and susto, which have been thought to be peculiar to one or another cultural group. In most instances these disorders appear to be local variations of conditions such as hysteria or anxiety rather than fundamentally new types of illness that are otherwise unknown. An important area that is progressively receiving more and more attention is the comparative examination and analysis of treatment methods in various cultures. There are apparently no cultures that fail to recognize psychiatric disorders and none that do not provide some sort of treatment. [See CULTURE AND PERSONALITY.] Social process in hospitals. A third example of a research area views the psychiatric hospital as a societal system and is concerned with the relations between the way the system functions and the consequences for the patients' mental health (Caudill 1958; Stan ton & Schwartz 1954; Levinson & Gallagher 1964). The behavioral science techniques utilized include ethnographic description, participant observation, the recording of interactions, systematic interviews, sociometric mappings, and psychological tests. Although some of the most
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important investigations have been observational and comparative, experimentation has also been done through such methods as introducing an innovation in one part of a hospital while using other parts as controls. There have also been what might be called "trial studies" in which a new way of structuring an entire hospital is put into effect and the results studied by independent observers. Maxwell Jones's "therapeutic community" (1952) and Rapoport's analysis of it is a notable example [Rapoport et al. 1961; see also MENTAL DISORDERS, TREATMENT
OF,
article
OH
THE
THERAPEUTIC
COMMUNITY]. The most difficult technical problem in much of this research is that of measuring change in the dependent variable, namely the patient's mental health. Although the task of the hospital is the improvement of the patients' health, and practical decisions have to be made every day as to whether improvement has or has not occurred in specific patients, objective standards remain elusive and a handicap to rigorous hypothesis testing. This is of course a difficulty common to studies of all types of psychiatric therapy, including the evaluation of drug effects. Small-group research. Small-group studies constitute our final research illustration. As the term is commonly employed, "small group" refers to a recurrent gathering of individuals who are collectively trying to accomplish something. The number involved is generally between 5 and 15, such as might assemble around a table. Characteristically, the group has a longer life than the presence of any of its individual members. Groups of this kind are a world-wide phenomenon and of major importance in societal processes. The observational and theoretical reasons for maintaining that the small group can have an influence on psychiatric patients are numerous and complex, but a few may be selected for illustration. One is the fact that strong emotions are apt to be engendered among the members, emotions having to do with acceptance and admiration or rejection and scorn. It is much more difficult to be an isolated, indifferent, or preoccupied bystander in a small group than in a large one. Fear, anger, anxiety, depression, and euphoria commonly succeed each other during the meetings at various levels of intensity and are transacted through a variety of interpersonal dramas. There is thus potential for arousing strong motivation of some kind in the individual members. Another characteristic of small groups is that each is made up of a number of roles which provide opportunities and enjoin limitations and which are taught to every new member. When the
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new member is a patient and the group has objectives relevant to therapy, this process can possibly reduce the patient's symptoms and increase his social capacities. The small group has therefore molding as well as motivating potential. Numbers of industrial and other studies have shewn that the morale and productive ability of small groups is increased when the group as a whole has a measure of self-determination. Each member then has an opportunity of exerting some influence and experiencing a sense of worth and belonging—of being somebody who matters. The greater the cohesiveness of the group, the greater this effect is apt to be. When these forces are acting on a patient in a group of his peers, the effect can be one of mitigating depressive and inferiority feelings or of shearing away the idiosyncratic and asocial aspects of schizophrenic behavior. Other therapeutic properties of the small group include opportunity for catharsis, self-expression through dramatization, and the relinquishing of old defense patterns and the trying out of new ways of dealing with one's self and others in a relatively safe context. The sense of safety is perhaps more a feature of therapeutic groups than of other kinds because it is deliberately fostered, but it is also part of the sense of belonging and so is a component in the emotional climate of any cohesive group. [See COHESION, SOCIAL; GROUPS; MENTAL DISORDERS, TREATMENT OF, article on GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY.]
The critical question about all these various possibilities is, do they work? Can group forces be harnessed in the service of treatment? The answers to these questions have not yet been found, but one can safely predict that when they are they will not be in any simple form. It is probable that some kinds of group processes will be helpful with some kinds of disorders, while other combinations will turn out to make no difference or will be actively harmful. In the meantime we can say that there is an enormous amount of evidence pointing to the effectiveness of group processes and that the outlook is promising; however, no studies known to this author are as yet definitive. One study of exceptional interest has addressed itself to the possibility of forming autonomous problem-solving groups among hospital patients in order to see whether such groups have any positive effect on the patient's mental health (Fairweather 1964). The design for the experiment was a twoby-four analysis of variance, factorial type, with two treatment and four diagnostic categories. The two treatment groups were made up of two wards of male patients matched to an extraordinary de-
gree; their treatments differed only in that one ran according to traditional lines while the other had in addition the requirement that every patient join for two hours a day, five days a week, in a taskoriented, decision-making small group. The experiment, involving a total of 195 patients, lasted 27 weeks with a six-month follow-up and included an unusually large number and variety of observations designed to detect and measure results. Among the findings were the following: the patients who spent some of their time in small groups showed in their general behavior more physical activity than did those who experienced only the traditional ward program. More important, they showed greater social participation, more affability, and more eagerness to communicate with their peers in complex social relationships. As a whole, the ward containing the small groups displayed greater feeling of unity and social attraction among its members. Although the patients found the small-group ward taxing and many wished they were on a different one, many of them felt to a greater extent than did patients on the other ward that their treatment program had helped them. On the average, the small-group patients had 40 fewer days of hospitalization. In contrast to this, the sixmonth follow-up showed no statistically significant difference between the two wards in the percentage of patients returning again to the hospital. This suggests that while 40 fewer days of hospitalization is a gain in that it is not neutralized by early return, the problems of posthospital adjustment are not helped by the small-group treatment in its present form. This indicates the need for experimentation regarding the possibility of continuing this kind of small-group participation among patients after they leave the hospital. ALEXANDER H. LEIGHTON [Directly related are the entries MENTAL DISORDERS; MENTAL DISORDERS, TREATMENT OF. Other relevant material may be found in CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY; SCHIZOPHRENIA; SOCIAL WORK; and in the biography of SULLIVAN.] BIBLIOGRAPHY AMERICAN PUBLIC HEALTH ASSOCIATION, TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENT BOARD, PROGRAM AREA COMMITTEE ON MENTAL HEALTH 1962 Mental Disorders: A Guide to Control Methods. New York: The Association. BAHN, ANITA K. 1962 Psychiatric Case Register Conference: 1962. Public Health Reports 77:1071-1076. BAHN, ANITA K. 1965 Experience and Philosophy With Regard to Case Registers in Health and Welfare. Community Mental Health Journal 1:245-250. BASTIDE, ROGER 1965 Sociologie des maladies mentales. Paris: Flammarion. BELLAK, LEOPOLD (editor) 1964 Handbook of Community Psychiatry and Community Mental Health. New York: Grime & Stratton.
PSYCHIATRY: Forensic Psychiatry CALHOUN, JOHN B. 1962 Population Density and Social Pathology. Scientific American 206, no. 32:139-148. CAUDILL, WILLIAM 1958 The Psychiatric Hospital as a Small Society, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. DALE, P. W. 1964 Preliminaries to Programming a Computer for Psychiatric Diagnosis. Methods of Information in Medicine 3, no. 1:33-34. ENCYCLOPEDIE MEDICO-CHIRURGICALE 1955 Psychiatrie. Edited by Henry Ey. 3 vols. Paris: The Encyclopedic. -> See especially the subsection "Socio-psychiatrie." FAIRWEATHER, GEORGE 1964 Social Psychology in Treating Mental Illness: An Experimental Approach. New York: Wiley. GARDNER, ELMER A. et al. 1963 All Psychiatric Experience in a Community. Archives of General Psychiatry 9:369-378. GLUECK, B. C. et al. 1964 The Quantitative Assessment of Personality. Comprehensive Psychiatry 5:15-23. GOLDSTON, STEPHEN E. (editor) 1965 Concepts of Community Psychiatry: A Framework for Training. U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Public Health Service, Publication No. 1319. Washington: Government Printing Office. GREENBLATT, MILTON et al. (editors) 1957 The Patient and the Mental Hospital: Contributions of Research in the Science of Social Behavior. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. GRUENBERG, ERNEST (editor) 1966 Evaluating the Effectiveness of Mental Health Services. Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 44, no. 1, part 2. HOCH, PAUL H.; and ZUBIN, JOSEPH 1953 Current Problems in Psychiatric Diagnoses. New York: Grune. HOLLINGSHEAD, AUGUST
B.; and
REDLICH,
FREDRICK C.
1958 Social Class and Mental Illness: A Community Study. New York: Wiley. HOLMBERG, ALLAN R. 1950 Nomads of the Long Bow: The Siriono of Eastern Bolivia. Smithsonian Institution, Institute of Social Anthropology, Publications, No. 10. Washington: Government Printing Office. HUGHES, CHARLES et al. 1960 People of Cove and Woodlot: Communities From the Viewpoint of Social Psychiatry. The Stirling County Study of Psychiatric Disorder and Sociocultural Environment, Vol. 2. New York: Basic Books. JACO, E. GARTLY 1960 The Social Epidemiology of Mental Disorders: A Psychiatric Survey of Texas. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. JONES, MAXWELL et al. (1952) 1953 The Therapeutic Community: A New Treatment Method in Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books. -» First published as Social Psychiatry: A Study of Therapeutic Communities. LEIGHTON, ALEXANDER H. 1959 My Name Is Legion: Foundations for a Theory of Man in Relation to Culture. The Stirling County Study of Psychiatric Disorder and Sociocultural Environment, Vol. 1. New York: Basic Books. LEIGHTON, ALEXANDER H. 1960 An Introduction to Social Psychiatry. Springfield, 111.: Thomas. LEIGHTON, DOROTHEA et al. 1963 The Character of Danger. The Stirling County Study of Psychiatric Disorder and Sociocultural Environment, Vol. 3. New York: Basic Books. LEVINSON, DANIEL; and GALLAGHER, EUGENE 1964 Patienthood in a Psychiatric Hospital: An Analysis of Role, Personality, and Social Structure. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. LEWIS, OSCAR 1961 The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family. New York: Random House.
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LIN, TSUNG-YI; and STANDLEY, C. C. 1962 The Scope of Epidemiology in Psychiatry. Public Health Papers, No. 16. Geneva: World Health Organization. The Midtown Manhattan Study. 2 vols. 1962-1963 New York: McGraw-Hill. -» Volume 1: Mental Health in the Metropolis, by L. Srole et al. Volume 2: Life Stress and Mental Health, by S. T. Langner and S. T. Michael. Volume 2 was published by the Free Press. MURPHY, JANE M.; and LEIGHTON, ALEXANDER H. (editors) 1965 Approaches to Cross-cultural Psychiatry. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. OVERALL, J. E.; HOLLISTER, K.; and HOLLISTER, L. E. 1964 Computer Procedures for Psychiatric Classification. Journal of the American Medical Association 187:583-588. PEARSON, J. S. et al. 1964 Further Experience With the Automated Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., Proceedings of the Staff Meetings 39:823-829. RAPOPORT, ROBERT N. et al. 1961 Community as Doctor: New Perspectives on a Therapeutic Community. Springfield, 111.: Thomas. RENNIE, THOMAS A. C. 1955 Social Psychiatry: A Definition. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 1. no. 1:5-13. SOUTHARD, E. E. 1919 Cross-sections of Mental Hygiene, 1844, 1869, 1894. American Journal of Insanity 76: 91-111. STANTON, ALFRED H.; and SCHWARTZ, M. S. 1954 The Mental Hospital: A Study of Institutional Participation in Psychiatric Illness and Treatment. New York: Basic Books. SWENSON, WENDELL M. et al. 1965 A Totally Automated Psychological Test: Experience in a Medical Center. Journal of the American Medical Association 191:925-927. WARD, C. H. et al. 1962 The Psychiatric Nomenclature. Archives of General Psychiatry 7, no. 9:198-205. IV FORENSIC PSYCHIATRY
In Western civilization there has long been an interest in the mental state of persons coming before the courts. It is to this branch of psychiatry that we apply the adjective "forensic." The criteria for establishing mental states vary, depending on whether the immediate concern be testamentary capacity, compulsory hospitalization (commitment), the appointment of guardians, the validity of deeds or contracts, the relation of emotional states to various symptoms (tort law), annulment or divorce, credibility of witnesses, fitness for trial, or criminal responsibility. Furthermore, the criteria vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction; in France, for instance, an act is simply considered not to be a crime where there is a condition of mental disorder (demence}, whereas the Anglo-Saxon courts have presumed to set up definitions, of greater or lesser clarity, of the symptoms and types of mental disorder which will entitle the accused to a verdict of "not guilty by reason of insanity." It may be assumed that these "tests," set up at varying times, are far from being in line with
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modern psychiatric standards. After all, the law cannot be expected to lead; it must, rather, follow accepted standards. The chief difficulty is that the law changes in a very leisurely fashion. Both law and psychiatry are concerned with human behavior, but the viewpoints are in some respects far apart. To the psychiatrist, the patient is an individual, with problems largely of emotional origin, whereas the law deals with him as a willful offender against a code of generalized rules which apply to the average man. That is, the law assumes that the person possesses free will, whereas psychiatry recognizes the potency of the unconscious in the motivation of the individual. At the same time, the law does recognize some mitigating or nullifying factors, such as "heat of blood." The usual layman's concept of forensic psychiatry is that it deals with criminal cases—the defense of insanity, mental fitness for trial, and so forth. As a matter of fact, however, criminal actions occupy but a small proportion of the forensic psychiatrist's attention. For general purposes, we will be concerned primarily with civil rather than criminal law. Tort law. One type of civil action has to do with what one person has inflicted on another, either by negligence or by intent. For example, suits based on injury attributed to automobile accidents come in this category. Emotional shock is often alleged as the cause of various symptoms, and sometimes unduly generous verdicts are allowed by the courts, apparently on the erroneous theory that traumatic neurosis is incurable. There are many types of action that fall under this heading, such as malpractice suits against physicians, but many of these have not yet attracted much psychiatric interest. This is an area in which the law has been somewhat laggard in the extent to which it is guided by psychiatric concepts. It must be added, however, that many law schools are providing instruction in psychiatric concepts. The American Bar Association has worked in conjunction with the American Psychiatric Association; the American Law Institute gave much attention to this area in the recent formulation of its Model Penal Code (U.S. v. Currens, 290 F. 2nd 751, 1961). The American Bar Foundation has not only published a compendium of the laws relating to mental disorder and the law (American Bar Foundation 1961), but also is making extensive field studies of the actual operation of those laws. Further still, the law, by statute and decision, has materially extended the scope of the definition of mental disorder to include not only "insanity" in its old sense but psychoneurosis, sexual deviation, drug addic-
tion, alcoholism, and (on occasion) juvenile delinquency, psychopathic or sociopathic personality, mental defect, and mental disorder of degree, to different extents in the various jurisdictions. Wills. In most cases, the person who is the subject of litigation in the matter of a will is not available for examination. In the event that the validity of a will is disputed on psychiatric grounds, if the psychiatrist has known the testator and is not inhibited by a statute of privilege, he may testify on the basis of his own knowledge. Otherwise, he must answer a "hypothetical question" about the testator's mental state, on the assumption that some (or all) of the facts pertaining to the mental state of the testator testified to are true. A will may be disallowed if the testator is found generally incompetent mentally or the victim of "undue influence." If a delusion had an obvious influence on a provision of the will, it may be disallowed on that ground. The legal definition of a delusion contains elements, however, with which the psychiatrist can hardly agree; briefly, if any factual basis existed, then there is considered to be no delusion. Even the most florid delusion may have a kernel of factual basis. Contracts and deeds. The validity of a contract or deed may occasionally be questioned on the grounds that the contractor was mentally incompetent. In general, it may be said that the law requires somewhat more mental acuity for a valid contract or deed than is required in the making of a will (Overholser 1959). Very few cases of this sort arise. Annulment and divorce. There has long been provision for a judicial finding that a marriage is invalid if there existed in one of the partners an extreme mental disorder or defect, or a state of drunkenness, at the time the ceremony was performed. A number of states have provided for divorce on the ground of "incurable insanity" where one of the partners has spent a certain number of years of continuous confinement in a mental hospital. Guardianship. There are various reasons why a person is unable to act in his own behalf. In such a case the court may appoint a guardian or committee to act for him. This process has no necessary connection with compulsory institutionalization, although in some jurisdictions the two proceedings are as one, that is, the order of commitment is an automatic adjudication of incompetency. Hospitalization. Until very recently, nearly all admissions to psychiatric hospitals resulted from court order, after a finding (usually) that the patient is, by reason of mental disorder, "dangerous to himself or others." The order authorized his de-
PSYCHIATRY: Forensic Psychiatry tention until, in the opinion of the staff, he could safely be released (subject, of course, to court order). In general, release was a medical matter. More recently, with the advent of a therapeutic, rather than custodial, atmosphere, voluntary admissions are encouraged, and efforts are being made to make the process of admission as informal as it is in general hospitals. In fact, most general hospitals now provide psychiatric facilities. The advantages of this procedure are obvious as steps in removing the stigma of mental disorder which still prevails, although to a diminishing extent. The educational campaigns carried out by the National Association for Mental Health and by local mental health associations are bearing fruit. Much more might be said on the subject of mental hospitals, such as their use as receptacles for the so-called sexual psychopath or those offenders acquitted by reason of insanity, but space does not permit. Criminal law and procedure. So far we have considered actions between persons. In criminal actions, law deals with actions against society. The accused is prosecuted in the name of the state or county or country, as the case may be. Let us reiterate that although criminal cases for various reasons attract wide attention, they are far fewer in number than other types of legal action. The accused, too, is presumed to be innocent until proved guilty and has certain rights which the prosecution must respect. One of the elements of most crimes is what is known as criminal intent, or mens rea. Until 1843 only the most "furiously mad" were thought to be sufficiently deranged to meet the test of lunacy, or whatever it might be termed then. In that year, in the case of Daniel M'Naghten (M'Naghten's Case, 10 Cl. & Fin. 200, 1843), the judges of England attempted to lay down the criteria of insanity— basically the "right and wrong" test. The M'Naghten test is strictly a cognitive one, yet it is in force in most of the English and American courts today. It maintains that a person can be excused from liability in criminal proceedings only if he did not understand the nature of his act or that it was wrong. Shortly before (State v. Matthew Thompson, Wright's Ohio Rep. 617, 1834), an American court had recognized the importance of emotional factors and had enunciated the so-called irresistible impulse test, now recognized in about twenty states. In 1871 the New Hampshire Supreme Court threw out all tests, holding that "insanity" is a fact to be determined by the jury (State v. Jones, 50 N.H. 369, 1871). In 1954 (Durham v. United States, 214 F. 2nd 862, 1954) the District of Columbia followed suit in the famous Durham decision, the opinion stating
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that the question to be decided by the jury is whether the act is the product of mental disease or defect. Several variants have been proposed (McDonald v. United States, 284 F. 2nd 232, I960; Lynch v. Overholser, 369 U.S. 705, 1962), but the Durham decision still remains a pioneer. The evidence on mental status is given in an atmosphere where adversaries oppose each other— hardly a situation that appeals to a physician. Among other functions of the psychiatric expert is the determination whether witnesses are fit to testify. Courts, however, do not avail themselves of this opportunity very often and depend, rather, on the judge's psychiatric insight. Remedies—attempted and possible. It should not be thought that psychiatrists and lawyers are content with the status quo of definitions and procedures. Various groups have been at work on the problems, including the American Law Institute, the American Bar Foundation, and the American Psychiatric Association. Space, unfortunately, does not permit a discussion of the problem. For the long pull, however, there is some reason, despite the well-known hesitancy of the law to change, to be guardedly optimistic. WINFRED OVERHOLSER [See also LAW. Other relevant material may be found under CRIME; CRIMINAL LAW; CRIMINOLOGY; DELINQUENCY; INTERNMENT AND CUSTODY; MENTAL DISORDERS; PENOLOGY; PSYCHOPATHIC PERSONALITY.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
AMERICAN BAR FOUNDATION 1961 The Mentally Disabled and the Law: The Report on the Rights of the Mentally III. Edited by Frank T. Lindman and Donald M. Mclntyre. Univ. of Chicago Press. BECK, THEODORIC R.; and BECK, JOHN B. (1823) 1860 Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, llth ed., rev. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott. BIGGS, JOHN 1955 The Guilty Mind: Psychiatry and the Law of Homicide. New York: Harcourt. BROMBERG, WALTER 1948 Crime and the Mind: An Outline of Psychiatric Criminology. Philadelphia: Lippincott. BROMBERG, WALTER 1961 The Mold of Murder: A Psychiatric Study of Homicide. New York: Grune & Stratton. BUCKNILL, JOHN C.; and TUKE, DANIEL H. (1858) 1879 A Manual of Psychological Medicine, Containing the Lunacy Laws, the Nosology, Aetiology, Statistics, Description, Diagnosis, Pathology, and Treatment of Insanity, With an Appendix of Cases. 4th ed. London: Churchill. CHAILLE, STANFORD E. (1876)1949 Origin and Progress of Medical Jurisprudence: 1776-1876. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 40:397-444. CODRONCHI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA 1597 De vitiis vocis, libri duo; . . . . Cui accedit consilium de raucedine, ac methodus testificandi, in quibusuis casibus medicis oblatis, postquam formulae quaedam testationum pro-
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panantur. Frankfurt: Apud heredes Andreae Wecheli, Claudium, Marnium, & loannem Aubrium. GLUECK, BERNARD 1916 Studies in Forensic Psychiatry. Boston: Little. GLUECK, SHELDON 1925 Mental Disorder and the Criminal Law: A Study in Medico—Sociological Jurisprudence, With an Appendix of State Legislation and Interpretive Decisions. Boston: Little. GLUECK, SHELDON 1962 Law and Psychiatry: Cold War or Entente Cordiale? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. GUTTMACHER, MANFRED S. 1960 The Mind of the Murderer. New York: Farrar. GUTTMACHER, MANFRED S.; and WEIHOFEN, HENRY 1952 Psychiatry and the Law. New York: Norton. HOCH, PAUL H.; and ZUBIN, JOSEPH (editors) 1955 Psychiatry and the Law. New York: Grune & Stratton. HOFFBAUER, JOHAN C. (1808) 1823 Die Psychologie in ihren Haaptanwendungen auf die Rechtspfiege nach den allgemeinen Geschichtspunkten und Gesetzgebungen. 2d ed. Halle (Germany): Schimmelpfenning. KEEDY, EDWIN R. 1952 Irresistible Impulse as a Defense in Criminal Law. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 100:956-993. LIEBENSON, HAROLD A.; and WEPMAN, JOSEPH M. 1964 The Psychologist as a Witness. Mundelein, 111.: Callaghan. OPPENHEIMER, HEINRICH 1909 The Criminal Responsibility of Lunatics: A Study in Comparative Law. London: Sweet & Maxwell. OVERHOLSER, WiNFRED 1935 The Briggs Law of Massachusetts: A Review and an Appraisal. Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Laiv and Criminology 25:859-883. OVERHOLSER, WINFRED 1936 The Place of Psychiatry in the Criminal Law. Boston University Law Rev^e^u 16:322-344. OVERHOLSER, WINFRED 1951 Psychiatric Expert Testimony in Criminal Cases Since M'Naghten: A Review. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 42:283-299. OVERHOLSER, WINFRED 1953 The Psychiatrist and the Law. New York: Harcourt. OVERHOLSER, WINFRED 1956 The Urge to Punish: New Approaches to the Problem of Mental Irresponsibility for Crime. New York: Farrar. OVERHOLSER, WINFRED 1959 Major Principles of Forensic Psychiatry. Volume 2, pages 1887-1901 in American Handbook of Psychiatry. Edited by Silvano Arieti. New York: Basic Books. PRICHARD, J. C. (1835) 1837 Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind. Philadelphia: Haswell. RAY, ISAAC (1838) 1962 A Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity. Edited by Winfred Overholser. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press. WEIHOFEN, HENRY 1954 Mental Disorder as a Criminal Defense. Buffalo, N.Y.: Dennis. -> A revised and enlarged version of Weihofen's Insanity as a Defense in Criminal Law, 1933. WEIHOFEN, HENRY; and OVERHOLSER, WINFRED 1947 Mental Disorder Affecting the Degree of a Crime. Yale Law Journal 56:959-981. WHARTON, FRANCIS; and STILLE, MORETON (1855) 18821884 Wharton and Stille's Medical Jurisprudence. 4th ed., 3 vols. Philadelphia: Kay. -> See especially Volume 1: A Treatise on Mental Unsoundness, Embracing a General View of Psychological Law, by Francis Wharton.
WHITE, WILLIAM A. 1923 Insanity and the Criminal Law. New York: Macmillan. WHITE, WILLIAM A. 1933 Crimes and Criminals. New York: Farrar. ZACCHIA, PAOLO (1651) 1751 Quaestiones medicolegales. 3 vols. Venice (Italy): Simon Occhi. ZILBOORG, GREGORY 1941 A History of Medical Psychology. New York: Norton. ZILBOORG, GREGORY 1944 Legal Aspects of Psychiatry. Pages 507-584 in American Psychiatric Association, One Hundred Years of American Psychiatry. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. ZILBOORG, GREGORY 1954 The Psychology of the Criminal Act and Punishment. New York: Harcourt.
THE RELIGIO-PSYCHIATRIC MOVEMENT
Religio-psychiatry is a twentieth-century movement whose participants are concerned with the relation between religious and scientific approaches to mental, emotional, or spiritual healing. The participants are, by and large, clergymen and psychiatrists who, disenchanted with their respective institutional traditions of healing, introduce a form of healing which combines religious and psychiatric means to relieve emotional suffering, and the clients who seek help from these innovators. Some traditionalists in the ministry and in psychiatry, who attack the innovators and engage them in ideological debate, enter the action as antagonists. The movement is manifest in a literature which debates and publicizes the ideology; in professional associations through which its protagonists share ideas; in clinics for mental, emotional, and spiritual healing; and in training facilities for recruiting and socializing new participants. Historical background. Since classical times, science and religion have become institutionally differentiated. Science has come increasingly to shoulder primary responsibility for investigating and explaining natural events. Religion has retained a responsibility for guiding human attitudes toward those events. Mental and emotional healing, once the concern of what may be termed, anachronistically, religio-science, continues to concern religious pastors as well as scientific psychiatrists. Chemists, physicists, and biologists who specialized in applying the knowledge of their respective disciplines to the problem of healing prepared the ground for a medical specialty dealing with mental and emotional disorders. Psychiatric specialists appeared toward the close of the eighteenth century. Their scientifically influenced approach is characterized by differential diagnosis of the disease in terms of the malfunctioning of the organism, by the empirical discovery of propositions
PSYCHIATRY: The Religio-Psychiatric Movement relating therapeutic techniques to those malfunctions, and by the application of the indicated techniques in an effort to restore normal functioning (Zilboorg 1941). Pastoral responsibility for emotional healing has traditionally fallen to the same clergyman who has acted as priest, teacher, and prophet. Western religion has termed this the "cure of souls" because the emotional manifestations have been considered symptomatic of a fundamental derangement of life values and of a distortion in the relation between man and the transcendental. A few medieval and early modern Christian clergymen wrote penitentials as a way of enacting their roles as spiritual directors. A specialized ministry to those suffering mental and emotional distress awaited the twentieth century. Religious healing is concerned with rectifying the sufferer's distorted relation to nature, man, the cosmos, or the "ground of meaning," through the mediation of a personal relation with the pastor (McNeill 1951). Thus, pastoral and psychiatric roles have emerged side by side in Western society. They represent the applied specialization within the religious and scientific institutions, respectively, to meet the human exigency manifested by emotional distress. The religio-psychiatric movement is the product of an attempt by some pastors and psychiatrists to integrate their means and their goals. Emotional and spiritual problems. There is little agreement among participants about criteria for discriminating between emotional and spiritual problems and, consequently, about criteria for assigning a problem to a medical or a religious specialist. The same symptomatology supports either diagnosis. Some differentiate between illusory problems (a concern of psychiatry) and real problems (a concern of the ministry). The psychiatrist would thus be concerned with guilt feelings when there is no objective basis for the feeling, while real guilt—for example, following a transgression against a fellow man—would be a religious problem. Roman Catholic priests are cautioned to discriminate between "scrupulosity," a compulsive neurosis leading to detailed confessions of partly imagined misdeeds, and the appropriate confession of sin, a religious concern (Corcoran 1957). Despite the paucity of criteria for distinguishing emotional from spiritual problems, there is some anxiety among ministers that psychiatrists may reduce the religious concern of a patient to its psychological component and so render disservice to the patient and to the church. Conversely, psychiatrists, both in and out of the movement, fear
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that ministers may not recognize such phenomena as the hallucinatory elements in a religious experience. Research evidence for the effectiveness of psychiatric treatment is far from conclusive (Berelson & Steiner 1964). Systematic empirical evidence for the effectiveness of religious healing or of religio— psychiatric healing is almost totally lacking. Protagonists of the movement cite medical studies such as those of healing at Lourdes (West 1957); anthropological reports of healing in primitive societies through the intervention of charismatic "leeches" or healers (Rivers 1924); the power of religio-hypnotic phenomena such as voodoo healing and death (Metraux 1958); and an oral and written tradition of testimonials. Given both the difficulty in distinguishing emotional from spiritual problems and the limited evidence for the effectiveness of religio-psychiatric therapy, the growth and persistence of the religio— psychiatric movement must be understood in terms of other social, psychological, and cultural functions it may subserve. Conditions promoting the movement. Protagonists of the movement argue that religio-psychiatry responds to a demand for pastoral services where psychiatric personnel and facilities are limited. The geographical location of the movement, however, shows a simple ecological correlation. Religiopsychiatry arises in precisely those environments having the most psychiatric facilities. The religiopsychiatric movement is found in the urban centers of Western countries. Over two-thirds of its publications are in English, and most of these are published in the United States. France and Germany are secondary publication centers. The movement is centered in industrialized and scientifically oriented milieus (Klausner 1964a). Religio-psychiatiy is the product of the same cultural conditions that produced the mental health movement. This wing of the mental health movement has, however, its own particular characteristics. It seems to draw ministers and psychiatrists who are serious about both their religious and scientific commitments and who feel that these institutions impose conflicting behavioral demands. Ministers with advanced secular education (77 per cent of the ministerial authors hold doctorates) who serve denominations of higher socioeconomic status tend to have a greater affinity for scientific culture, which values empirically assessable achievements. These ministers are also committed to religion's stress upon purpose, meaning, and the attainment—through personal relationship—of nonempirical ends. They accept both of these cul-
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tural systems as relevant to the same social role, that of counselor to the emotionally distressed. Certain psychiatrists are exposed to this dual cultural demand. Some have been personally religious since their youth; others have come to religion through wartime experiences; and others— because they are members of, and receive referrals from, hierarchically structured churches, such as the Roman Catholic and Episcopal—are responsive to a demand for a more religiously oriented therapy. Growth of the movement. Klausner (1964